So I would love you to share what trauma like, shelly experience you faced while growing up

well as i said i did grow up in poverty and poverty does meet the criteria for being a traumatic uh condition your needs are not going to get met uh you it will fragment your sense of self and you won't be able to fully develop your personality you will be stunted by the poverty.

So besides growing up in poverty, as I said, there was active addiction in my household.

So that is always a crazy circumstance because you never know when things are going to go sideways.

As we know, if you've ever been around somebody who's had a hard time controlling their alcohol, They can get very emotional, very angry, or very sad.

So it was a very chaotic home that I grew up in, never knowing if the bills were gonna be paid, if the lights were gonna stay on, if there was gonna be money for food.

And part of the reason why I do this work is because I don't want anybody else to ever live that way.

So if everything I have gone through in the past, if my decisions i've made i am able to overcome them in one way or the other i'm able to stand strong it's going to actually improve 18 or two in me with intentionality of course so what doesn't kill me will make me stronger okay so susan i'm a bit curious about your work on sobriety and you might mention that you have been seven years sober so can you like share with us um some healing messages on sobriety that you feel like everybody who wants to recover needs to know, and also share with us your sobriety journey as well.

So what does self-sabotage actually look like in everyday life?

So self-sabotage are those destructive patterns in your life that continue to show up that you're not addressing.

For myself, part of my story was living in poverty as a child.

That was part of my childhood trauma because poverty is actually a traumatic experience.

It does meet the criteria.

So because of that, I had financial trauma and it led to a lot of money problems.

Because when you have financial trauma, money feels like an ice cube in your hand, like you have to spend it immediately.

How are trauma recovery and emotional intelligence connected? So can you give us the relationship between them?

Well,

I would say about two and a half years into sobriety, I had what I call a people pleasing rock bottom.

I was still continuing all of the dysfunctional and toxic behaviors.

from active addiction, I was carrying them into sobriety because as you mentioned, even though intellectually I knew I shouldn't be doing these things, I was still repeating these things because they were very ingrained in my brain and my nervous system.

But I had this people-pleasing rock bottom where I had overcommitted to too many things and both time-wise and financially, and it just led to everything blowing up.

And I realized I might have put down the substance, but I haven't done the inner work to stop the self-sabotage because saying yes when you want to say no is ultimately self-sabotage that's going to lead to some anger and resentment.

And anybody in recovery knows that you...

What are some of the challenges people should expect when they begin doing deep inner work?

So how can experiences from early childhood influence addictive behaviors in adults?

Well, childhood trauma can manifest itself as active addiction as adults, because if you have a lot of adversity as a child, it sort of locks your nervous system in a chronic state of fight, flight, fawn, freeze.

And what that does is it gets you seeking relief for your dysregulated nervous system.

So really, when you first start drinking or pick up a drug, you are actually just seeking relief for your overstressed nervous system.

Another way that childhood trauma can affect you as an adult is you can end up going into a people pleasing response, which is very common for childhood trauma survivors.

And what this does is It blocks your authentic self because you're saying yes to avoid rejection.

You're saying yes to avoid pain.

So now, since we're still talking about trauma and the effects of trauma, now let's talk about your own journey of So, can you share with us a particular moment when you realized that getting sober is very, very important and it must be done for yourself?

Right.

Yeah.

The, the lesson repeats until it's learned, right? Because once you learn the lesson and you break the cycle, it stops repeating, but that only happens, like you said, with the inner work and getting reconnected with yourself.

And when you do get reconnected with yourself, that's a great time to explore your gifts.

You know, there's this whole sort of trauma culture now, uh, where I think, especially with the younger generations, there are little overly focused on adversity.

And it's just, you need to make sure you also recognize your generational gifts.

Like your generational wounds might've been growing up with the impression that kids are seen or not heard, or we don't talk about hard stuff or whatever the dysfunctional patterns that exist in your family.

So I find that that is a big thing.