Listen:

In this episode, we discuss:

• Why Liz Mullinar built a center for survivors of child abuse
• How trauma impacts our brain/nervous system
• Why we need to feel safe in order to heal
• The different levels of trauma
• How trauma affects our behavior and our emotions
• Disconnecting with our inner child & switching into left vs. right brain activity
• How our brain physically changes from a trauma
• How our triggers can help us heal
• The link between depression, anxiety, and childhood trauma
• Steps towards healing childhood trauma

Additional Resources:

Liz Mullinar’s BOOK: Heal for Life

COURSE: Collapsing Timelines

This 20-minute guided experience helps to catapult you forward by healing the past, releasing old energy that was keeping you stuck AF, and finally letting go of limiting beliefs.

FREE QUIZ: Inner Healer Archetype Quiz

Inside of all of us resides our inner healer. The part of you that always knows the answer. The part of you that is aligned with wellness. Too often, we block that voice out and let our head take over. Take this quiz to discover your inner healer archetype and how you can cultivate more self-healing.

Episode transcript:

Sarah Small:  Welcome to the Uncensored Empath, a place for us to discuss highly sensitive energy, illness, healing, and transformation. My name is Sarah Small and I’m a life and success coach for empaths, who wants to create a thriving body, business and life. Think of this podcast as your no BS guide to navigating life, health, and entrepreneurship. You’ll get straight to the point, totally holistic tips from me, in real-time. As I navigate this healing and growth journey right beside you. This is a Soul Fire production.

Welcome to today’s episode. It’s very, very few instances when I am lost for words. And just the impact of the information shared on today’s interview, has me feeling a little speechless. There’s so much yet to understand and discover around trauma. But Liz Mullinar, my guest today, has been studying this for 20 years. So she is such a wealth of knowledge and my mind is just a little bit blown, on how much there is to understand about this. But also, how much impact she’s had on so many people’s lives, who have struggled with trauma, or are a trauma survivor. Liz herself is a trauma survivor. She’s also a trauma counselor and she has been globally recognized as a trauma recovery expert. Again, 20 years ago she pioneered Australia’s first trauma recovery program. Isn’t it kind of crazy to think just 20 years ago, the first trauma recovery program was being developed? Yet, I think mankind, humans, have suffered from and experienced trauma for many, many, many years.

Her program is called ‘Heal for Life’, and she now has a book out called, ‘Heal for Life’ as well. And it’s been independently evaluated, the program, to achieve significant long-term benefits to mental health, emotional and social functioning, pain and vitality. They have helped over 8,500 adults and children heal from childhood trauma more specifically. So Liz is going to be sharing with us practical improvement strategies, as well as, tools for healing trauma in today’s episode. Which she then expands upon in her book, ‘Heal for Life: How to Heal Yourself from the Pain of Childhood Trauma’. And it’s just mind-blowing, friends, how trauma impacts the brain, the nervous system, our behaviors. There are many types of trauma. And when we look at the statistics that I’ll share at the beginning here. It really just opens our eyes up to the way that our mental health system works. And where there are some cracks and broken parts, and where there’s just, I’ll say room for improvement. There’s definitely room for improvement in the way that we diagnose and treat mental health issues across the globe. And the Heal for Life centers are in Australia, the UK, and the Philippines. While there’s not one here in the U.S., there are still ways to get support.

You guys know this is something that is really close to my heart, having experienced trauma myself. But also, family members who have experienced immense trauma. And, I just don’t want to shy away from these hard conversations. I don’t want to shy away from talking about hard things, because, it is more important to me than ever, to shine a light on the darkness so that we can start to heal. And we can overcome, and remember how freaking resilient we are as human beings. So let’s hear what Liz has to say.

Sarah Small:  All right, Liz, I am so excited to have you on the show today. Welcome.

Liz Mullinar:  Thank you.

Why Liz built a center for survivors of child abuse

Sarah Small:  I was just telling you before I hit record, that I listened to your Tedx Talk and, there are some statistics inside of that conversation that are just so crazy to me. I ended up actually writing a post about it on my social media. Everyone I know needs to go listen to this TEDx Talk. I’m just going to repeat a few of those stats, so people can become aware. Then I want to talk about it.

“So 82 to 86% of people who have suffered from bipolar disorder have suffered from childhood trauma. 90% of people who have suffered from borderline personality disorder have suffered from childhood trauma. 80% of people have suffered from depression have suffered from childhood trauma. And 69.9% of psychiatric patients have suffered from childhood trauma.”

This is an astronomical amount or high percentage. And I know that you were inspired to do this work through your own life experience. Liz, can you start by talking to us about what your experience has been, that inspired this work? And why are these numbers so high in relation to childhood trauma?

Liz Mullinar:  Well, in the early 1990s I started discovering, and recognizing, remembering my own childhood abuse. I was then, a very successful woman in the film and television area. Considered one of those 10 most powerful women in the Australian television at the time. So I was very able, to look around. I was probably, one of the first people in Australia to say, I’m a survivor of child sexual abuse. And I got an extraordinary response. Thousands of people wrote to me and said, me too. And what I found extraordinary was I couldn’t find anyone. I couldn’t find the support I expected to automatically be able to find. It was as if there were no organizations. There were no real specialists. It was kind of ignored. So I realized that it was kind of up to me. So I decided to start an organization. A national organization, to bring together all survivors of child abuse. And I did that and, we quickly had over 50 groups all over Australia. And one of the things I also learned was how reluctant survivors are, to acknowledge, to connect. How frightened they all are. So that was a huge learning experience

And then, in my own journey of healing, and I kept finding, although I had a wonderful psychologist. Because she wasn’t a survivor, she didn’t really quite understand trauma. And I say, no, no, you’re not doing, that doesn’t feel right to me. That’s not working. And then I found other survivors who were saying the same thing that, they don’t get us. So I thought, I think what we need to do is have our own place to heal. So I sold off my business, and my husband had sold up our house and everything. And we built a center for survivors of child abuse. And that happened over 20 years ago. And the idea was that us, as survivors, would employ health professionals who were survivors. And we would jointly, work out together, what we needed to do in order to heal. And the one thing we knew then, and which is an absolute, absolute, necessity, is that, in order to heal, we have to feel safe. So the center that we created, had to feel totally safe. And just like anyone listening who wants to heal, in your own home environment, you’ve got to feel safe. So we could talk about that. But anyway, discovering exactly how you really establish emotional safety, took a little while. And then, we devised a program. And that started, and that was over 20 years ago. And eight and a half thousand people have been to the center. We have centers in the Philippines, and England, as well as Australia. And it’s always run by survivors, for survivors. Because I think, we know, what we need to do in order to heal. And I know what I needed. And so I can come from intuition even now, if I’m trying to think how to help someone. I can come from my knowledge, as well as, all I’ve learned over the 20 years of, getting a Master’s of Counseling. And started really studying the brain. And just to add, what I also found is, what we as survivors intuitively knew, over 25 years ago, what now neuroscientists are totally acknowledging. So what we knew, is what we needed in order to heal. I can now, tell people the scientific reason why what we do works. So, I can’t remember the question, but hopefully, that would be the answer that you were looking for because I can’t remember the question.

Why we need to feel safe in order to heal & How trauma impacts our brain/nervous system

Sarah Small:  Oh, that’s great. Thank you. And you said, we could dive more into why do we need to feel safe in order to heal. And I want to unpack that a little bit and understand that better. Because I think so many of us try to heal when we’re in survival mode, and when we’re in a stress state. So how does trauma impact our brain and our nervous system? And why do I need to feel safe to be able to heal?

Liz Mullinar:  Okay. So trauma impacts our brain because our brains are geared for survival. Each of our brains, nature, Darwin’s theory, whatever, is about survival. So anytime, anything happens that is more emotion than we can deal with, which overwhelms our ability to adapt and that age-appropriate way, we feel is life-threatening. The brain goes into extraordinary action. Stress hormones are already released, and I’ll explain in a moment what that means. But at this moment of overwhelming emotion, the Vegas system cuts in, and we go into a freeze. And when that happens, three vital parts of the brain are cut off. And I’m saying this very simplistic by the way. But I think simplicity is the way we can understand it. So cutoff, is Brooker’s area, that speechless terror. Those moments when you literally cannot find your voice. So finding our voice, figuratively, and actually, is a key to healing.

The prefrontal cortex has cut off. And that gives us the ability to be aware of other people. Reason, logic, incredibly important part of the brain. And also, on the left side of our brain, because we have two sides to our brain, the hippocampus is cut off. Why is that important? Because that is our conscious memory. So these moments of trauma, which are not all the time, we’re being abused. Only moments when we think we’re going to die. At these moments of high trauma, we do not remember. So that gets locked in the brain. And when that occurs, also locked into the brain, through the senses, through anything that our brain might connect to that event. Whenever that occurs, again, we will be, what we call triggered. So, if I smelled mothballs while I was being raped. Whenever I smelled mothballs from that moment on, I would go into a triggered reaction. What is a triggered reaction? It’s this fight, flight, freeze response. But importantly, it also impacts those three parts of the brain. So when we’re triggered, we don’t know what we’re sort of saying or doing. We don’t realize the effect it’s having on anyone else. And in order to de-trigger ourselves, we have to say, how we are feeling, and that deactivates the brain.

So understanding that then gets us to understand why it has such an impact. And whenever we don’t feel safe, we release stress hormones, which is the beginning of that reaction. So with the stress hormones, we are not able to access our trauma. We feel uneasy. I can go through the whole thing that stress hormones do. I mean they stop our digestive system. They stop our immune system, they stop those three parts of the brain. They have us on edge. We can’t study. That’s why we all do so badly at school, a lot of us do very badly at school, but if we don’t feel safe, we can’t heal. And a lot of us stay because we don’t really realize that we are in an unsafe environment. So we isolate ourselves, and we do everything that actually doesn’t help us to heal.

The different levels of trauma

Sarah Small:  Can you talk about the different types of trauma? Because I think when we hear that word trauma, many of our minds go into these very catastrophic events. Or like deep tragedies that maybe people have experienced, or we know of people who have experienced those things in their life. And then we think of our own life, and if there haven’t been those deeply catastrophic things, we think, Oh well I’ve never experienced trauma. And I’d love for you to come and debunk that for us today. And explain what are the types of trauma, what can that look like?

Liz Mullinar:  Well, for a child, for a baby who loses its mother at birth, that is trauma. Because the amygdala, the part of the brain that sets off this reaction, is the first part of our brain to form. A two-year-old who loses its mother by death or divorce, that’s life-threatening to a child. I cannot tell you how many people who’ve come with things like spider or snake, huge fears. And that’s because when they were very tiny, usually under the age of one, their mother, or father, or someone has had a big reaction to a snake, or spider, in front of them. And that activates this process. The biggest impact on the developing brain is, not having any emotional input at all. So I don’t know if listeners remember when the Romanian orphans were collected, but the brain grows in the external stimulus.

So if there’s no external stimulus, if your mother is on drugs for the first six months of your life, then that is the most enormous trauma. So trauma is not sexual abuse, solely. It’s not massive fires or massive floods. Those are the obvious. It’s the emotional impact on a little child, of things that are outside the child’s control. Anything relating to your natural mother, or your father, in those first two years of life, is life-threatening. Because nature makes it as humans, we are totally dependent on our parents in the first years of life. So if something happens to either of them, it is a trauma. And people go, Oh, nothing happened to me. Oh yeah, my mom died when I was three and I say, that’s enough. You have an extraordinary impact.

How trauma affects our behavior and our emotions

Sarah Small:  How does then, trauma, regardless of what flavor of trauma we may have experienced in our life? How does it affect our behavior and our emotions as we continue to live our life?

Liz Mullinar:  Okay, so behaviorally, I’ll talk first. Behaviorally, I think the biggest impact are these triggers. Because it means we can suddenly turn to anger. It means we can suddenly withdraw. It means I suddenly disassociate, and not listen. So I think firstly, that is very much when we talk about behavioral impacts. That’s very much minimized. Very much minimized. The mind is blank. It’s Saturday morning here in Australia, and my mind has gone blank on other emotions, but I’ll come back to that. It actually means, we’re operating on high alert. We’re operating from a reaction. We are all the time waiting to see what other people think of us. And one of the impacts, which is deep inside, is that when trauma occurs, we are totally powerless. So we have a feeling of powerlessness, and that often a feeling of worthlessness. I feel worthless, I used to feel, I don’t now, much. I used to feel worthless and powerless because no one helped me when I was being abused as a child. Now, no one knew it was happening. And, in the 1940s nobody knew about child abuse. So I’m not blaming anyone in any of that, but for my little self, inside, nobody cared. Nobody listened. I didn’t matter. So that has a real impact on my sense of self. And interestingly, the hippocampus, which I was telling you about before, which is what is cut off, in the moments of high trauma. And is impacted by trauma. It’s impacted by stress hormones. That also gives us all sense of self. So our sense of self is deeply impacted when we suffer from trauma. We also don’t have good connections around our brains. That sense of being worthwhile. So that gives us all sorts, we don’t trust. So we don’t have easy, have good relationships. I could go on. Ask me another question instead.

Disconnecting with our inner child & switching into left vs. right brain activity

Sarah Small:  Yes. So trauma obviously affects us in many ways, behaviorally and emotionally. And you said that little self, inside of you. And I think you’re referring to what many of us call the inner child. And how is the inner child then, that is still part of each of us today, even in adulthood, part of our being. How does that part of the healing, how does that come into the healing process?

Liz Mullinar:  Okay. So what if one wants to call it, my inner self, my emotional self. Could call it my right brain, because that’s really what it is. It really is the part of myself that I had suppressed or forgotten. And for me, it’s the true essence of me. And it’s also sort of the little girl I was born to be, before I suffered from abuse. So she leads me. And of course, in order to cope in life, like so many of us, I really switched into left-brain activity. So left-brain activity is being very logical, very sensible not feeling emotions cause they’re very dangerous. So I’m not going to feel emotions. Thank you very much. I’m just going to get on with life, be successful, do things. I’m going to be really active. I’m going to be a workaholic. So I do all those things to hide my little inner self. So, I stopped being my true self, my authentic self. Which for me, can be described as this inner child.

How our brain physically changes from a trauma

Sarah Small:  Everything you just said describes me. And for so long I just was living in a state of being fine. And, out of fear of experiencing the wide range of emotions, and like what that meant. Or not knowing how to navigate those emotions, and also throwing myself into more the left brain, logical. Let’s do one step, one, two, three, four, five to get to the end destination. Work really hard and be successful. And so much of my inner child and my right brain, that creative side that I love, now, I turned off for so many years. I think because of limiting beliefs and childhood trauma, it makes a lot of sense to me. And I think a lot of listeners have experienced some type of trauma in their life. And I’m sure they’re asking themselves this question of okay, cool, it sounds like you’ve healed. But what about me? So can we, can anyone, overcome trauma more permanently?

Liz Mullinar:  Well, from the very beginning, I absolutely knew I was going to heal. Maybe that was arrogance, but I kind of knew, I wasn’t going to stay the way I was. I was going to go back to the person who was I was before, or better. So I always knew that. But it was actually only after, I started healing, that neuroscientists started discovering that the brain was plastic. What does that mean? It means that our brain is made out of 80 billion of what are called neurons. And they connect together, and they can reconnect. So our brain can change completely. Now social welfare services, society, life, has not really embraced that yet. So people say, Oh, you’ve got bipolar disorder. Oh, that you, you’ve had suffered from trauma. Oh, you’re never going to be okay. This is a life sentence. Trauma is not a life sentence.

No mental illness in my belief is a life sentence. Our brain is plastic. We can heal from anything. But in particular, we can heal from the way we feel about ourselves. We can heal in our attitude to life. We can heal. It’s just we have to repair our brains, and not our lungs, or our heart, or our stomach. And people label this mental illness. I don’t know why it isn’t a physical illness, just like any other physical illness. My brain, if you did a scan of it before, I started healing, would look different, to how it would look now. It would look dysfunctional. And, I see in the future, going, and a doctor doing a brain scan and saying, Oh, I can see this part of your brain doesn’t connect up. Oh, your corpus callosum is really thin. Oh, your hippocampus is damaged, and, Oh, you’ve suffered from child abuse. But let’s start doing action. Let’s change the way your brain is linking up at this moment. So healing is absolutely possible, but we can only heal through the emotional right brain. That means we can only heal, I believe. Well, neuroscientist, agree with me, fortunately. By releasing the emotions that were suppressed at the time of the trauma. Which we’re holding on all throughout our body, and our brain, and so many more ways and science yet really has identified. It’s releasing that fear that activated this reaction I was talking about. That is what I have discovered, and I know that I know, is the only way through in my opinion. I know, and that’s why I kind of listen with lots of other survivors. We all listen and learn from each other and discovered we all found that this was the way.

So it’s not that it’s a unique or different way. It’s putting together what we all knew, and discovering, yeah, if we release the fear, we heal. But we don’t want to release the fear, cause we’re all terrified of releasing the fear. So we’ll do absolutely anything to avoid getting to the fear. We’ll become alcoholics. Drug addicts. We’ll become workaholics. We don’t want to go there. Cause that’s nature helping us, protect ourselves. So you and I wouldn’t have wanted, neither of us wanted to go there. We would much rather, be successful and do other things. Because to acknowledge that hurting part of ourselves, would be to acknowledge vulnerability, and that doesn’t feel very safe. And that’s the courage, that healing from child abuse needs. That’s courage. That’s why we need help from everybody encouraging us to say, yep, you can change. Yep, you can heal. And sadly, at the moment we don’t get enough of that. That’s why I’m talking to you, to say to everyone you can heal.

Sarah Small:  I’m so glad that you brought awareness and attention to that, and just that it is possible. Even if it is scary and it’s going to be scary. Because your nervous system is doing anything, and everything to protect you.

Liz Mullinar:  Absolutely.

How our triggers can help us heal

Sarah Small:  That first step is always going to be a little bit scary, to start that path towards healing. Towards releasing the fear. Towards starting to heal some of the emotions that had been suppressed or repressed for potentially decades.

Liz Mullinar:  Absolutely. That is exactly right. So people will do… I’m lucky because originally, I started uncovering my stuff through getting sick. And still if I’m triggered, the new memory wants to come up, I will get physically sick. So I’ll usually be physically sick for about five days, and then I’ll think, Oh, is this a memory? Oh, that’s a bit easier, my triggering. But that’s why triggers are treasures, cause they can help us unpack our childhood. And our brain is wonderful. Gosh, it’s amazing. If we don’t deal with it, we get nightmares, we don’t sleep, and we have panic attacks, we have anxiety attacks. All these ways, our brain is saying, Hey, Hey, come on, heal. It’s the pain that you feel physically, we feel mentally, if we don’t get onto our healing journey. Anyone listening suffers from anxiety attacks, or panic attacks, you can heal by acknowledging the fear.

Sarah Small:  Literally writing this down right now, that, ‘triggers are treasures’. That is such a powerful stance to take, on when something, gives us that little ‘zoot’. That like, Ooh, that didn’t feel good. Ooh, that bothers me. Ooh, that doesn’t feel so good inside my system. Or I want to run away from that. Or my immediate reaction is to retreat, and repress, and run away. Oh, well, there’s something deeper going on there that could, if you wish, and if you want to go on that journey, help you unpack what’s underneath it. And fully understand it, so that you can process it and heal it in a way that is, like you said, in a safe environment. That allows them to then, not have to experience that trigger anymore because it’s fully released and understood in the body.

Liz Mullinar:  Exactly. You have said it perfectly. No wonder you do podcasts.

The link between depression, anxiety, and childhood trauma

Sarah Small:  And so those statistics that I started with, I want to loop back to those. Because it’s kind of undeniable in my opinion of, if there are this many people with these specific mental health diagnoses, that have also overlapping, these suffered from childhood trauma. There’s something there. So what is the link between depression, anxiety, and childhood trauma that you’ve seen in your work?

Liz Mullinar:  Well, I just said, about anxiety. Anxiety is, I’m saying this in very simple terms, my language. Anxiety is simply, me refusing to feel the fear. I’ve read it endlessly, from many researchers that depression is the suppression of anger and fear. And anger is how we cover our fear. With mental illness, what really upsets me is, nobody has, they keep researching genes, or epigenetics, or reasons why we get different mental illnesses. Instead of saying, Hey, we’ve got this staggering statistic, let’s look at that. Now yesterday, I was working with someone who was a guest, and she’s been diagnosed with a mass of things, including schizophrenia. And I said to her, Oh, and what your voices tell you? And she said, Oh, she said, the moment they are telling me I’m a slut and just shut up.

And I said, Oh, I said, no. Who in your childhood, called you a slut? Because you don’t look like a slut to me. And she said, Oh, my father always called me… I’m trying to change the story, obviously. And my father called me a slut. And I said, well, do you think maybe, it’s your inner self trying to say, address this lie? Because you are not a slut. So there are voices. There’s a wonderful organization called Hearing Voices, a worldwide organization, which just says, hearing voices is a natural, normal thing that happens if you suffered from childhood trauma. Our brain is amazing in what it does, to try and make the unacceptable acceptable. And for me, mental illness is the same. And I’m not saying all mental illness, I’m not saying, you can be born with your brain wired incorrectly, and it can’t be wired correctly.

I’m just saying that those are the statistics. So why aren’t we addressing childhood trauma, when anyone presents with mental illness as a starting point? Because everybody who comes to Heal for Life, for healing, as pretty well most of them have been… pretty well, all of them have been diagnosed with some mental illness. Even if it’s PTSD. And they go on this journey of medications, and CBT, and just not being told, yep, you can heal. Yep. You just got to get on with it, and so I think that’s really unhelpful. Some people may choose medication, that’s fine. It’s a choice. If you have cancer, you have a choice to heal, or not heal. With childhood trauma, no one tells you you’ve got a choice. This is what you have to do in order to heal, or you can not heal. I’m not saying everybody has to heal it. If people want to stay with their symptoms, it’s a life choice.

Sarah Small:  Yeah. I think you’re so spot on though, that the majority of people who seek out help and do want to change are often only given one option, which is medication, or maybe medication coupled with talk therapy. But that talk therapy may never, ever, get to the questions that you’re talking about. Which go back to, what was your childhood like? Who called you a slut when you were younger? Asking questions like that, that allow them to uncover, that it may not just be the diagnosis that was originally given to them as a label. But, the root underneath it could be much further from their past, and much deeper ingrained in their programming and their system. And until you get to that point, then it’s really hard for people to see results. And I think that’s why so many people are like, Oh, well, is this medication helping? Well, I don’t know. They don’t know, right? Because it’s never getting to the root of the problem. And you have so many tools and resources that you’ve created with Heal for Life. So I’d love to hear what are some of the steps towards, within an approach that you take, towards healing that childhood trauma, that are alternative to what at least most people in the U.S. where I live, are getting more of this blanket answer of, here’s antidepressants, and here’s the medication to help you sleep at night. Now, see you next year.

Liz Mullinar:  Well, the first thing I want to say is, the reason I’m talking to you today is because, after 20 years I thought everything I know I’m going to put down in a book. Because I really want all survivors to be helped. That’s my driving, driving force. So I’ve put down in the book everything that I’ve learned over 20 years, that each of us needs to do in order to heal, in my opinion. And I thought if I put it all down and make it available to anyone. Then, I’ve kind of, that’s my life work. But, the first thing I think in order to heal, we have to understand what it is to feel safe. And then we have to choose to create a safe place for ourselves. So I think that’s the first thing. I think the second thing is to recognize not to be frightened of our emotions, not to run away from fear, but to recognize that fear is driving our lives.

And to be prepared to say, when we are triggered, and when we feel anxious, when we have a panic attack, when we have a nightmare. Say out loud, you have to say it out loud. And listen, everyone, because this is probably the best tool you’re going to get. If you say out loud and look in a mirror or at somebody, because the optical neurons are very strong. If you say, I feel frightened, or I feel scared and you acknowledge the fear, it’s like it takes the accelerator off your right brain. And, cause your left brain is now engaged, because in speaking you’re engaging your left brain. And immediately, because you’ve acknowledged the fear, it listens. And, to then recognize what other emotions don’t I allow myself to feel? I never allow myself to feel anger. Why not? Because either my dad was always angry, or my mum was always angry, or I was told never to be angry.

So it’s starting to say, okay, I want to feel all of the emotions. So it starting to allow oneself to feel emotions. Those are probably the first two steps. I think along with that is loving myself. Because many of us don’t love ourselves, because we actually hate being a child. Because he or she is the problem. And we don’t like ourselves cause inside we don’t really feel very good about ourselves. Actually, we don’t think we’re any good. Cause that may be a childhood message or a belief. So, even just to get the courage to look in the mirror. Some of you won’t even be able to look in the mirror. But to look in the mirror and say, I love me. I’m pretty bloody terrific. It’s starting those first steps. And then, of course, getting a good therapist or getting with other survivors and starting to heal.

It’s saying I want to heal. And then finding wherever you live, if you can’t come to Heal for Life. I mean obviously our program is fantastic, but lots of people can’t. But there were lots of wonderful trauma therapists. Any therapist who works with the so-called ‘inner child’, is going to do the sort of work that we want. A real problem we have in Australia is now, that a sort of backlash movement, stopped psychologists working with the inner child. So the very thing that’s going to help us, they try not to let us go to. And I think that’s out of the fear of psychologists and organizations. Because to let someone release their fears in a room, seems a very scary thing to do. But it isn’t. Only at the moment, to release fear. And, all the horror of the therapeutic world has to become less frightened of people letting go of their fear. Because people are quite into fear.

Sarah Small:  Absolutely.

Liz Mullinar:  That’s why therapists who’ve experienced trauma, and done their own healing, and released their own fear, in my opinion, are the best therapists. Because they know it’s safe to feel our feelings, and they know the difference. There’s a wonderful test online, Gottman’s Emotional Test, which if anyone’s listening really helps you look and find out which of the emotions you avoid. And that’s a good starting point too.

Sarah Small:  I need to take that test, I’m sure.

Liz Mullinar:  I did it. I took it and discovered I’d always avoided anger. And I thought, yes, that’s quite true, I have.

Sarah Small:  That would be my guess about myself too.

Liz Mullinar:  Yes. I remember the first time I felt anger. I was about 10 years into my healing and I was at the center and there was a guy working on the roof. And just, after he left, one of the young women there said, he’d said something very sexually inappropriate to her. And I was furious. And I got in my car and I drove down after him and I stopped him. And I said to him, what do you….? And I was really angry with him. And inside I was laughing, cause I was going, Oh my goodness, I’m being angry for the first time in my life. So, while I was really telling him what I thought of him. Which is my default girl, letting go of her anger, and sexually inappropriate. A part of me was just laughing because finally, I was free to express anger.

Sarah Small:  Wow.

Liz Mullinar:  We have anger pits, at Heal for Life. We have places where people can break China. We have mattresses tied around trees.

Sarah Small:  Really?

Liz Mullinar:  They sort of act out there. They scream out their anger. They release their anger, and it’s amazing. And it’s so quick when you release it.

Steps towards healing childhood trauma

Sarah Small:  That sounds fantastic. I was just talking to my sister this week about, how we both struggle to express anger. And it’s because of the experiences we had in our childhood. And conditions and beliefs we kind of put on ourselves. And how you almost have to practice being angry, cause it’s so foreign to you after pushing that down and repressing that emotion for so long. I was asking her, what do you think it would look like, for you to be angry? What would you say? Would you yell? Would you cry? What would anger look like in your body? And she’s like, I don’t know. And I am, I don’t know either. This is something that you almost have to relearn. And really just embrace yourself, and practicing that emotion cause you’ve been pushing it away for so long.

Liz Mullinar:  Well that’s absolutely true. And releasing anger doesn’t need to be… I mean you have to be physical to release emotions. So emotions are ‘e’-motions. So, you have to use something. So I’m picking up a pillow and I could just throw it beside me and say I’m so angry, and that will release the emotion. But if you do something physically with it, it is really important. It’s the physicality that releases the emotion. So try throwing some pillows around your apartment, and saying that. And culturally, a lot of people aren’t allowed to feel emotions. And I used to think that, cause I used to be in the film industry., And I used to coach people of Asian backgrounds because they found it very difficult to express and show emotions. And so, I kind of accepted that culturally, the brains of Asian people were different to Caucasians, white people. And then I was in the Philippines running ‘Healing Week’ in the Philippines, with the new team in the Philippines. So I was taking the first week. And they said to me, Oh Liz, in the Philippines we don’t express our emotions, et cetera, et cetera. And I said, that’s fine. I’ll just follow, or go with the flow. Doesn’t matter. And they got some China and they said, Whoa, we’ve got you China for an anger pit. But no, Filipino is going to be breaking plates. I said, That’s fine. People will do what is right for them. No worries. We did the first session in the morning, which is connecting into your right brain, which is your emotional brain. I have never seen such an explosion of emotion in my life.

There wasn’t a piece of China left. The actress had been bashed. People had bashed, punched punching bags, screamed, yelled. And my dear Filipino friends said, Oh, it’s not, it’s cultural. It’s not innately in us. So the suppression of all these emotions is as necessary. Whatever, your background culturally or ethnically, we all, emotions are now known as the same for all of us. It’s really important for all of us, that we do discover how to express our emotions. But it’s physically. See walking, helps connect us with our emotions because it connects the cerebellum. And there’s still a lot of research on the cerebellum, as to what impact that has. And so there are lots of ways, but you connect your emotions through creativity as well. Through the right brain.

Sarah Small:  Wow, this is so fascinating and I’m sure this is only scratching the surface at understanding the neuroscience behind trauma. But also the pathway in which we can heal that childhood trauma more specifically. And realize that underneath some of the diagnoses that many of us, some of us may have been given in our life, that there’s just more to discover. And more to be open to and to explore as a pathway to healing. So I just want to say thank you so much and I also want to ask you, What is the mental health healing landscape that you dream of, for the future? If, in the future, how would you love to see us start to treat mental health, versus how we treat it or how we’ve been treating it up until now?

Liz Mullinar:  I think we should drop would mental health. I think it is physical health. I think we should just make it exactly the same as any other illness. In other words, working towards how we heal people, not how we medicate people. It’s totally different. As management comes into the word with mental health, we don’t need to be managed. We need to heal. So for me, the future would be when anyone who had any sort of an emotional issue, the person would say, what happened in your childhood? Or does this remind you of something in your childhood? And in every doctor’s waiting room, the questions, it would say, have you suffered from any form of childhood trauma? And it wouldn’t be a question. Some people might not choose to answer it, that’s fine, but at least we’d be asked. At least it’d be acknowledged. And it wouldn’t be, it’s not a blame environment.

I would love the mental health environment not to be. By that, I mean there’s too much blame of the people who did it to us. And we’re taking the emphasis off healing myself. If I had cancer, or if I had flu, or Coronavirus and I looked, Who gave this to me? And put all my energy into I’m going to get that person. How dare they give this to me? Well, I’m taking the energy away from myself. And for me, stuff happens. So it doesn’t really matter, what matters is healing myself. Cause I matter. Then, I might choose to help other people by saying, who gave me the Coronavirus, because whoever gave it to me, has got to be put in isolation. Or that something’s got to happen to them and they’ve got to be helped. But, our current way of the blame game that goes around child toward trauma, I also don’t think is helping us to heal.

Sarah Small:  In your book, you talk about trauma-informed, self-healing. And I think that really encompasses what you just said is that we are our own greatest healers. And we have this self-healing ability. But if we’re focusing all of our energy on finding a person, or a thing, or an event in our life to blame, then we’re not self-healing. That energy is going outward versus inward, towards what could be really supportive in healing ourselves. So again, thank you so much Liz. Where can people get your book and learn more about all the services that you have to offer?

Liz Mullinar:  They can get the book, go on Amazon, they can get the book. They can just Google Heal for Life. Heal for Life will give them, we have a Facebook page, please join our Facebook page. We have Instagram. The book is called, ‘Heal for Life’ because you’ll be healed permanently. And my name again is Liz Mullinar. Which is spelled M-U-double L-I N-A-R. Also Googling me will enable you to find the book.

Sarah Small:  Thank you so much for sharing all of your knowledge and wisdom with us today. I’m sure the listeners have some takeaways to now go home and digest, and then integrate into their life. Thanks again.

Liz Mullinar:  Thank you. Bye.

Sarah Small:  My golly. I hope that that opened up your eyes to, just simply the way in which we raise awareness of things like suicide, depression, or any mental health issues, or things we’ve labeled as mental health issues. And it’s important to know whether the awareness is around more medications, and drugs, and money to big pharmaceutical companies. Or if it’s to create space for true healing and support. Because, while I don’t deny that there is definitely a place for conventional medicine and medication. Unless the underlying cause of these mental health issues is addressed, the problem most simply is perpetuated. And what you, I hope, took away from today, is that the underlying cause of many of these issues may be, childhood trauma. And, oftentimes, that childhood trauma is defined or thought of as these big capital ‘T’ abuses in a child’s life. But childhood trauma can also be on a smaller scale, of simply being held to super high expectations even. And so I think it’s also important for us to, redefine the way that we look at that word trauma. And realize there is a whole spectrum of different traumas that we can experience. And that each child, each human being interprets these things in completely different ways. We were talking about siblings, and even in one family. One sibling may interpret it and process it in a completely different way than another sibling.

So, I just want to share with you, my dream for the future. I dream, of a mental health healing landscape where, patients are asked questions about their childhood, before being given as Xanax. Where individuals receive an hour of undisturbed connection to another human before they’re rushed out of an office. Where clients are presented with tools for rewiring their subconscious, instead of numbing themselves out. Where patients are sent to a functional diagnostic nutritionist, before being put on an antidepressant, immediately. Where individuals feel seen, heard, and understood enough, to share their deepest truth. And where clients are empowered to believe they can heal. And their diagnosis is not a life sentence. 10 years from now, I hope for better access to tools like inner child healing, hypnosis, subconscious reprogramming, timeline therapy, emotional freedom technique, EMDR, which is based on neural linguistic programming, nutritional therapy, and functional medicine. That does not create a dependency on something that perpetuates the problem, but instead gets to the root cause of the symptoms.

Mental health challenges, like anxiety and depression, will be seen as symptoms, not diagnoses. That is my true hope, my dream, and what I hope for the future of a mental health healing landscape. And I’d love to hear from you. What are your deepest hopes, dreams, and desires for the future of our mental health healing landscape? What do you hope to see in the future? I’d love to hear from you.

Thank you so much for tuning in today’s episode. It was a really special one for me, and it’s something that deeply touches my heart. And I want tools like hypnosis, to become more readily available to the entire freakin’ planet. So, as you’ve heard me talk about, I have a free guided hypnosis to support cellular healing, that I’d love to offer to you for free. Simply go over to iTunes and share your honest feedback on this episode, in the Uncensored Empath podcast as a whole. And make sure to screenshot your review. Then, email it over to sarah@autoimmunetribe.com. And in return, I will email you, your free guided hypnosis. This is an opportunity to heal your relationship with your body and tap back into its innate healing abilities. You are so freaking powerful, and so freaking deserving of this. Thank you so much in advance for your support, and I can’t wait to talk to you next time.

 

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