Episode 70: Rebecca Chandler - Healing from Sexual Childhood Trauma

0:07 Welcome to today's show, everyone. You know, I love sharing stories of healing. The healing journey is different for everyone, yet I believe that we're drawn closer together when we're able to listen without judgment to what somebody else is brave enough to reveal about themselves. And there are also lights that go off when something is mentioned that may be helpful along the way way of your own healing process. Now for those of you who are listening that are still on a journey of healing from trauma, particularly sexual abuse, this episode comes with a trigger warning, so feel free to skip past any parts that might be a bit distressing to you. We completely understand. So what sort of life does a girl from a small town in the Southern California mountains live after surviving years of childhood abuse?

0:57 Well, it's a rich, complicated and expected one. After circling the sun for 53 years and living in LA, DC, New York, Egypt, Kenya, Dubai and Singapore, my guest today, Rebecca Chandler, has amassed a powerful story marked by personal growth and resilience. Despite being diagnosed with trauma, complex PTSD, and multiple personality disorder, Rebecca mentioned to see the world establish a career as a global film and TV producer and also write a few new books. Her journey from hurt to healing and fullness and how she did it is one that I think is worth hearing about, so I'd like to welcome Rebecca to the show. Good morning.

1:41 Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Rebecca, for being here. And can I just say, I am so, so appreciative of your bravery. I honor what you've been through. Gosh, you've been ruined. Yeah, I'm back again. Yeah, I know that sometimes it's hard to talk about the painful experiences, but and speaking to you ahead of time, I know that you're OK with talking about your childhood and the things that have happened. So I'd like you to share as much as you want to about your childhood and the things that have happened. Thank you so much. Yeah. I grew up in Southern California mountains, a very small community, still a small community, and I loved life. I remember quite a ways back to about the age of three when I have really tangible memories. So I have a really long memory and I loved life. We lived in the woods.

2:28 We didn't have. We were. Poor really didn't have a lot of money, but I had two siblings and we lived in the woods and it was our playground and there was a lake nearby and so life made sense for the most part. My mom had a few struggles with her mental health, but as a little kid it didn't really manifest necessarily in any kind of exaggerated way. And my dad was a fireman. We had a kind of a typical blue collar existence up in this small community. And then, at the age of 5I began to be sexually assaulted. By my mother's father. And that's when life just well started to fall apart obviously. But more than that, that's when my mental health took a shift and I stopped being Rebecca Chandler, the plucky 5 year old who loved to swim and play in the woods.

3:16 To the traumatized version of Rebecca Chandler. And that's when I started to live, I think not as my authentic self, but as a traumatized version of myself. Now, how long had this going on, and did you tell anybody about it? Did you know to say anything or was there an encouragement to keep quiet about it? So the abuse started when I was 5 and it ended when I was 13. And over those years I never told anyone about it. My grandfather was a powerful figure inside the family. And keep in mind the time. I think just culturally, this was not a conversation that was easy in families. At the time, the word trauma didn't really exist and sexual abuse. Was just starting to be discussed a little bit on the news.

4:03 You'd hear some horrific story or something, but it wasn't like kids were given the option to share their feelings, go through some of the processes that are, I think people take for granted now. So I was silent. I was absolutely silent and I think just afraid of what it would mean to say something bad about my grandpa and then my parents divorced when I was 6. So in addition to abuse, the house was just split in two. So. There was a lot of unfortunate stuff happening in the house, and I kind of fell through the cracks. That's how I felt. I'm so sorry. Thank you. It's complicated because my grandpa could be. He was a guy that took us to Disneyland. Yeah.

4:44 And, you know, was fun. And then at the same time, he would rape me after having fun. So it's difficult to really describe what that does to you, except that I didn't want to get the person who was nice to me in trouble. I mean, that's a. Felt like, yeah, version of what I was feeling, I think cuz I just didn't want to get anybody in trouble. Now was it ever revealed if your mother was sexually abused or your sister? Was this something that you were singled out about or do you know? Still not know the only. When I told my mother, so I got through high school and I, you know, had these voices in my head and all that stuff was going on. And when I was 20, I put myself into therapy because I came to a moment where I thought if I don't get help, I won't, I won't be around want to say it that way, so. One of the parts of therapy that I went through was to tell my family, and in telling my mom, she revealed to me that she knew her father was a sexual predator. And so in that moment in that conversation, which was pretty much the first and last time I was ever felt like I could talk about it, I think I permanently detached from my mother. I just felt the betrayal was just too deep to ever really mend and the rest of my family.

5:56 My father knew nothing about it and I think he was just. Mortified. And unfortunately though, he never stepped up into his role and said, how do I help, you know? And my mom certainly didn't. And then my siblings, they were sad, but I really felt like when my immediate family was told, it was kind of blip on the radar. It was a really hurtful, disappointing time to not feel like people were rallying behind my story and instead it really turned out to be that people chose to align themselves with my grandmother. My grandfather had passed away at that point and. Almost. It felt like they chose sides and they, for me, they chose the wrong side. Yeah. So families are complicated, for sure.

6:37 And so your grandfather was still married to your grandmother and was behaving in this way. And your mother would let him take you to Disneyland or spend time with you knowing that he was a sexual predator. And so I can imagine that feeling of betrayal and feeling like, Oh my gosh, how is this possible? How could you even let this happen? Yeah, I think it's. I mean it's a fun like, you know, people like to say well, kids don't come with instructions and it's like well, but there are fundamentals that kids have to be able to rely upon their parents for as adults for. And one of them is protection. If you can't manage to protect your child, I think in my opinion just fundamentally failed.

7:19 You know, it's one thing for an accident to happen or something to happen that you couldn't foreseen, you couldn't see it was coming. But to know that someone so close to you is a sexual predator and to. Encourage us as kids to go spend weeks at their house in the summer or on the weekend. That's something different. Yeah. Right. And I'm curious, like how you would feel knowing that you had to spend time with your grandfather because it's like, what what choice did you have? You're going there? I mean, did you look forward to it or, you know, did it feel icky? How was the relationship, aside from feeling like, well, I can't say anything? I think it's so complicated, such a great question because the option was so when my mom and dad split my.

7:59 My dad got custody of the kids and we lived with my dad and stepmom, and every single weekend my mom and stepdad would pick us up. And my stepdad was an amazing, wonderful human being. And so the negotiation with myself had to be I don't want to stay at home because my stepmom was an horrible person, truly horrible human being. I'm sorry. And I want to spend time with my mom. Oh, because I still all those constructs about loving your mom and having to love your mom. All that stuff feeds into how you felt about her, regardless of what she did or didn't do for me. Sure. And then so I don't want to be at home. I want to be with my mom and my stepdad. And it felt like, well, if I go to my grandparents house and if I'm sexually assaulted again in some way, that is what it is. And I think at that kind of young age where you just feel like, well, that's just how things are And I was just so. Keep in mind, so from a very early age I started to dissociate and create these personalities. So I would just kind of leave myself and not be present right when I went to my grandparents house and I can put on, I could pretend to be happy, I could pretend to be anything you wanted.

9:05 Yeah, because I wasn't even in the room with you. I was dissociating and I just went along with things, you know, so you and your siblings would be over at your grandparents house altogether. And yet this was still happening. Oh yeah, them kind of in the house or around. Yeah, there was one assault when I was 7. My grandparents lived in a trailer at one point because they were building a home, and so it was a very small trailer, not like the sexy ones today. And he was sexually assaulting me. My brother was asleep in the bunk that folded down over the master bed, and then my grandmother and my sister were asleep in the bunk that folded down over the couch. And so I think that people think that this stuff happens when there's nobody else around. No one could ever.

9:49 Know. And it's like, in fact, I was sexually assaulted pretty much in fully exposed to lots of people who were asleep and they didn't hear and they didn't know. So it's not a matter of if that person's never alone with someone, nothing bad can happen. You don't have to be alone to be assaulted. You can be assaulted, right, In a crowded room, yeah. And you didn't know any better to like, yell out and say I don't like this or. Anything. I I mean fear. You shut down. You turned off. I just turned off. Yeah. And I didn't have the ability to shout or scream or because I just was turned off. Yeah. So that whole notion of did you say no and all that stuff, it's like that's not a trauma response necessarily. Exactly.

10:33 Exactly. And the reason why I'm bringing this up, I'm so grateful for you being able to share this is that for anybody listening who has gone through the same thing, there is no judgment here. It's not like you should have done this or you should have done that. There's nothing like, especially when you're a child and these are people that is your family, that you love and that it's just such a complicated mix of emotions and what you should do and shouldn't do. And so there is absolutely no judgment here. There is no feeling like you were in the wrong in any way. I mean, you were a child and this was happening to you. And it's just almost to reveal the fact that this is something that is more common than people realize. Yeah, of it.

11:17 Because before, who would have ever been brave enough to talk about this? It's exactly It's so filled with shame and so ruled and cloaked in secrecy. So thank you for revealing what you are about your your story, and for the fact that your mom knew that he was a sexual predator. Who's to say whether or not his wife, your grandmother, knew? I don't know if that was ever revealed. After you. She knew she my grand, my grandmother facilitated some of the assaults, OK? She knew who she married. He had a daughter out of wedlock that then. Came to a front when I was, I think I was a teenager. He had all kinds of sexual perversions that there's no possible way that you didn't see or notice him being sexually aggressive around me, around others where he would pinch and grab their ass or like this is someone you're not just a pedophile for one person. You're not just a sexual predator for one person. You're always a sexual predator.

12:15 It's just you either get one victim or 100 or whatever it is, but. So his sexual appetites weren't limited to me. So yeah, so now this happened until you were thirteen. Was it that he passed that at the age of 13? Or was it just like he just stopped or you'd be moved? On no. So I got my period when I was 11 and that made things quote complicated. So and I was terrified I was gonna get pregnant at age 11. Absolutely terrified. And then at 13 one night I didn't see a way out. I didn't see a way through. I thought that my. Period coming when it did slow things down in terms of there were fewer assaults because he was genuinely concerned about me getting pregnant. But there was one night I was sitting in my grandparents kitchen and my brother and my grandmother had gone to sleep and my grandpa was telling stories. He was a great storyteller.

13:07 I was genuinely enjoying our time and I hadn't been sexually assaulted for quite some time and I thought, oh, but this is the new normal. Like we could have a nice conversation and then it's over. And as I got up, he lunged at me from. His chair. And he pulled me back onto him so that I was on his lap and I couldn't see him. He was behind me and he started groping me and grabbing at my breasts. And then he whispered into my year, let's go to the trailer. It won't hurt none. And which is the title of my book. And in that moment, all of the rage and all of the energy that I needed to confront, fight off and end it finally manifested. And I jumped off.

13:49 Off of him, turned around and I slammed the full force of my body against his and pushed him back against the wall. And I threatened his life. And I said if you ever touch me again, I'll I'll kill you. And that was it. That was the end of it. All righty. OK. Yeah. He was alive for another. I want to say four or five years after that on it, OK, thank you. So then you go through the rest of your teams. I don't know what it must have been like trying to date, or if you ever did, or if that was just like no, I'm not interested in the very least. I did. I was a disaster. I mean I was had multiple personality disorder, I had 4 personalities and I was a straight, a overachieving, sports enthusiast, student, government person.

14:32 So I was. I pushed myself into that kind of overachiever, hyper, resilient person that a lot of. Must become. And I did manage to have, I think, a couple of boyfriends, but I was so confused and broken and hurt that sex was easy. Sex was really easy, and I enjoyed sex. I could distinguish between the two, between sex and violence, but I never understood. I was rarely present enough to form an actual attachment that was healthy. And boundaries certainly didn't exist, clearly, yeah, for sure. And so then you finally, when you were around 20, decided to go to therapy, get some help, tell us about what that must have been like. So I started therapy in 1990 when I was 20, and at the time, trauma still was not a conversation, and a lot of people who were dealing with complex PTSD and severe trauma were misdiagnosed as bipolar, and I was one of those people.

15:26 So I got pushed into the bipolar category and unfortunately I never felt confident enough to openly discuss my personalities and my therapist at the time, who I thought was brilliant and I. Still think he was brilliant. He didn't really delve into it either, and it wasn't part of the general conversation yet. So there was lots of factors leading to the fact that I wasn't properly diagnosed until my 40s. So I went through life thinking I was bipolar and at one point taking so much medication for that. None of it really resolved anything. So I thought talk therapy was absolutely helpful and useful and I think everyone should enjoy a round of talk therapy. But I think that talk therapy tends to be very event based. So you can talk about your abuse and you can talk about what happened for me, what talk therapy never did. And This is why I pursued other forms of healing. Later is it never actually resolves the traumatized energy that's in your body.

16:25 Yeah. And talk therapy can't do that. So. And it's not designed to do that. So 20, I started my healing journey and it's still in a healing journey. 53 And yeah, so sure, for sure. And so you had done talk therapy for a while and then at what point did you start looking for other avenues of healing? I didn't. Know there were other avenues until I got. Got into my 40s and part of that's because I put my head down and I drilled into my career and I was so busy working 80 hours a week, like craziness, right? So that was part of it. And then in my 40s I was living in Kenya going through some things and I started to speak to a friend of mine who is an empath.

17:09 And through talking to her I discovered somatic healing. And it was a completely life changing turn when I discovered that form of healing and. Because I went into somatic work, I also discovered EMDR, family, Celestial healing, all different kinds of healing modalities that I never knew existed. Yeah, I think back then, PTSD was something that was reserved for veterans. It was something that people that went through war or something really, really devastating like that. I mean, that was what that diagnosis at that time was reserved for. And yeah, I think that bipolar or multiple personality disorder was a little bit less talked about, but was around. Now that we've uncovered layers of what's going on neurologically and understanding the nuance, saying, you know, think about autism.

17:58 I think about the fact that there were probably so many autistic people. Yeah. But, like, who was to even know what that was called back? Yeah, back in the day. And now there's a spectrum. And just like the spectrum of autism, there's a spectrum of other types of neurological pathologies and ways that they present. And I'm sure that we're not done findings, all of them. Yeah. I believe that it's the more that we get into the individual and understand, you know, what they're feeling, then the more is going to be revealed. It is when you're able to use other modalities to release and to discover and to explore these other parts of yourself that were just so misunderstood or not embraced because they were seen as something that might have been like voodoo magic before.

18:48 It's true what I think. What's interesting to me is that you know your mind and your body. My mind and body were not In Sync. They weren't working together. My body can only record information in one way, so my flesh will only remember things exactly as they occurred. It has no capacity to negotiate with itself what it has just experienced. So when I'm sexually assaulted, my body just says I'm being violated, I'm being assaulted. This is horrible, painful, bad. That's all your body is allowed to do. It doesn't have the. Mechanism to do anything else. The mind, however, receives that information from your body and says, huh, what am I going to do with this? Am I going to remember it, repress it, change it, break off a piece of this person's mind like it did for me, and dissociate on an exceptional level?

19:38 How am I going to protect the total person? Because the body is sending me signals that I don't. I need to do something with them. So I think what's interesting for me is that last year I it's one of my somatic. Sessions. It's a deep visual meditation, somatic work. And I was sitting next to my body and my mind and I was talking to both of them and saying there's a disconnect between the two of you and it's creating friction. And that for me was looking like disease and some major health issues. And it was like my body's saying, look, I can only remember this trauma and this way, which is the only way that I can process this. And so I had to look at my mind and say you have to stop trying to. To protect me, you have to stop trying to create a fictional narrative around these events that were so horrific. You want to protect me from them. I can handle it now, and it's almost like my mind said, OK, but it's going to be really bad.

20:35 It's OK. I don't need these multiple personalities anymore. I don't need these layers of protection anymore. I can handle it now. Once I gave my mind permission to actually open up the box and remember it, and then my body, it's almost like my mind. We're like, OK, now we're together now we can heal as one person. We have one narrative together. We have one story to tell. It's not my body. Remembering this and my mind saying that didn't happen, that didn't wasn't as bad as it was. And I think getting that alignment back together between the two was absolutely essential to healing. Your mind wants to protect you, understand why. But at some point the systems it creates to protect you are no longer valuable.

21:18 Right. It's exhausting, Exhausted. You know, keeping up, like however many personalities that you have the code. Oh yeah, switching between and being somebody and putting on a front. It's exhausting. It's got energy. It does And it's. Keep in mind that I had four personalities, 567 and 13, and they're named according to their age. 5 was my fear, six was my shame, seven was my sadness, 13 was my anger. So for every single decision I made, it could be as simple as wanting to eat ice cream. I heard from at least one or two, if not all four. Plus, I had my present self trying to just live and make a decision. And that's a lot of noise inside your head. On top of complicated things, shame, depression, compulsive disorders, I was compulsive eater and a compulsive spender. So it's you've got all these layers going on. Your mind has tried to protect you but it's created all these other entities energies or everyone I call them. It's a lot of work like you said just to get through a day yeah and not come a completely apart by these energies and entities that are all have an opinion and they all want to be prioritized and I would be taken over by a 13. My anger all the time.

22:38 So I was constantly angry and if my present self said why am I I don't need to be this angry about this Thirteen. We're just rage forward and say no, this is we're angry and it's just a lot. It's exhausting. Yeah, and yet you managed to have a 30 year career like producing film, TV, doing all this if you were traveling and living in various places in the world. I'm curious like how did you get into what you're doing? And then how do you think that you were able to manage? Like, did these multiple personnels come out in your workplace as well? Like, Oh, yeah, Oh yeah. Imagine it would be hard not to impossible done.

23:20 So I started in advertising when I was 20 as a secretary in commercial production which is the department responsible for producing the commercials, right? And I worked my way up through the various layers of different agencies and what my hyper resilience and kind of hyper vigilance self that all turned into a great producer because producers have to be able to assess the situation immediately, keep people safe on set at all times, look down the road and project how things are going to happen and how things are going to get done. We're the master taskers, right? We survivors are. In my case, I wanted to control environments and that's what producers do, we control environments. So I was really good at it and because I was hyper resilient, anything that would go wrong on a film set or and lots of things go wrong all day long every day on a film set. I was masterful at taking care of the moment because that's what survivors do.

24:19 We sit Survivor mode and try to control the situation around us once we're done actually surviving our trauma. So yeah, I was really good at it. I got to see the world and I was very fortunate to have been able to take that trauma and turn it into a career that was as broad and as creative and as amazing it has been. Unfortunately, yeah, My personalities did come through. And normally it was. 1313 was the most pernicious, complicated personality for me to try to manage. And in moments where she was completely irresponsible with her anger and I couldn't control it, I hated her and I hated myself for my anger. And then at times when I felt like I couldn't handle a situation, I would call out and say, hey, 13, I need you right now.

25:08 And she would just come pushing forward, like, where are we? What's going on? What do I need to control? And it took me a long time to figure out that I didn't need 13 to handle anything. I was very capable. We had a love, hate relationship for decades. I'll say it that way. And I'm glad she's gone because I don't need her anymore. But yeah, it came out inappropriately. I got threatened with being fired at one point in my career because my mouth was never not saying something and I was always I was always the person with I have the perfect opinion and I know exactly how to fix everything and you better listen to me. I was very brash all the time, really brash, and it was not nice. Wow, wow.

25:53 Now I want to circle back because I know when you did the talk therapy, you did some somatic healing. I'm not familiar with EMDR. I'm curious if you could describe that. Yeah, I'm not going to be able to give you a definition of it for sure, but I describe it. EMDR is based on the premise that you can rewire for me. This is my definition of you can rewire your brain. So my I traumatized my my mind. The wiring was confused and in order to retrain the in my mind you have to go through a series of exercises and with EMDR you can do that with lights flashing or you can do it with like a ping pong ball bouncing back and forth on the screen. And you come up with a premise of I am ugly, I feel ugly, I'm overweight, I'm attractive.

26:41 Those are all kind of self hating thoughts that came very easily to me. And then you come up with a sentence of I love myself, I'm beautiful and I will be healthy. So there's the two sides of your mind that are at play and an EMDR work. The first session you sit through, you read that negative thought out loud. And in my session, and I did it online and I didn't go through with a therapist because I couldn't find one at the time. That negative thought pattern, you look at the screen and this ball starts bouncing back and forth. And as you read that negative thought, the ball is bouncing back and forth. And then when you shift over to reading the positive thought, the balls bouncing back and forth at a different rate, and through that repetitive motion of your eyes, following the rapid eye movement, following it back and forth, you're actually rewiring the messaging in your minds. Wow.

27:35 It sounds a little bit like a cross between hypnosis as well as like maybe neurolinguistic programming where you're saying something and it's helping. Yeah, fire even in some cases energetically, like with ACCU points. Some people will do that while they're touching certain parts of their back. Tapping is the same thing. It's the same idea as tapping, right? And you'll see people tapping like this, and it's because they're calming their system down. They're telling their mind. You don't need to have a response to this moment, and that's for me. The EMDR is the exact same thing. It's just telling your mind we're gonna think about this differently now. Wow. Wow. Yeah, and then you also went through some past life work, which I did gone through too.

28:19 And I know Buddy believes in past lives or past life work, but I'm curious what came up with that for you? Oh, I love that you've done this. You're the first person to ask about this, and I love it. Yes, yes, I about it. I didn't ever pursue it. And I was in a session with my healer in Kenya. That's my word for her. She would never say she was a healer. And all of a sudden, and I was exploring just it was early sessions with her and we were connecting energetically. You know, she's an empath. And it was. So it's just a beautiful series of sessions ahead with her. And all of a sudden I saw myself walking down a street in London somewhere in the 1800s.

29:02 And I said, there's a woman, she's walking. Wait a minute, it's me. I'm walking. And then as through a series of rapid scene changes, and I don't know what your experience was, I discovered that I was married to a violent alcoholic. I had a child and he ended my life prematurely, and I never knew that existence. And I thought that that was so powerful to know that I'd had a child because I did not have a child in this life. And then when I got to explore that further, I discovered another life which I was married to. A wonderful kind of burly guy, didn't have a lot of money, but we lived out of like a covered wagon in Europe and we lived in a forest. We had three children.

29:46 We were exceptionally happy, happy, just incredibly happy. And then the life before that, I was a ship's captain in Asia. I was Asian and I was a warrior and I saw her standing on the bow of a ship and she was in full command of that ship and every person on that crew was absolutely knew who was in charge. And then the life before that was really interesting. I was a temple leader and this is an ancient Times Now and I had a lot of power and people would come to see me for healing and for different things at this huge temple in the desert. And I think the most important thing for me and all of that because probably sounds a little strange to some people, is the fact that I sat in one of my meditations. I sat around a bonfire with my Victorian era self, the gypsy era self and this warrior person. And we had an incredible night together where we talked and we left.

30:45 And I discovered, but the warrior person, she wouldn't relax. I'm like, you know, you could probably relax. We're we're good here. And she's like, OK, yeah, I'll relax. And then it was nice to see myself with children. I felt good about the fact that I had children in another life and the Victoria era version of myself. She learned how to laugh again. And she got reconciled with her child, which was a big deal. So I thought it was so powerful. I don't know what you thought, but I just thought it was healing. It was wonderful. Yeah, I won't go into my story because this is about you, but. I think that the gist of it is just recognizing that energies can carry forward and they can have a place in what your experience is. There can be lessons and certain things that are unresolved that may also carry forward into your current existence. And then there are also in some cases people will believe that you have maybe 10 or 12 human experiences and then you kind of graduate and then you become the ether and you become in the. Or the soul form and you've done everything that you've gotten to the highest level and that is it. And so the question always becomes, OK, where do you think that you are on that path of enlightenment relation versus where you were before?

32:00 Maybe you're at 10 now my sister. Maybe you learned. Maybe you've gone so much and you've learned the full cycle of healing and and you've come to a place where you're OK and maybe this is the journey of self love that you've come to. And finally, recognizing that you are whole, just as you are even just. Fight everything that has occurred. And so, you know, there are ways to look at it like that, I suppose, depending on what. Yeah. What your beliefs are. Yeah. And I think it's. I know that I have two more cycles left in me. I'm very clear about that. OK Yeah. I don't know what they'll look like. It'll be interesting. But I so I'm not a 10. But what's interesting now is like this year for me is the year of learning about trust and studying my trust. The foundational elements of trust, for me, they normally develop between the ages of like five to seven, and obviously my understanding of trust didn't ever develop. This is my life to get trust figured out, I think, and I'll take it forward into whatever is next. That's wonderful.

33:00 And now the brilliant thing is that you've been able to synergize all of this and come up with a set of books that you've written, And the first one is it won't hurt none. A story of courage, healing, and a return to wholeness. And that talks about, I believe, your struggle with this associative identity. Disorder and complex PTSD, Yeah. And it's. Yeah, it starts off when I'm 47 and I go through some medical trauma. Very unexpectedly, that medical trauma ignited all of my underlying trauma that I thought that I had dealt with. I didn't think I had to go back to it, and I did. And I think the most important part of that journey for me was being able to heal through the somatic process, largely to heal to the point where I no longer have multiple personalities.

33:46 So I was able to get to them, integrate them, and release them, which is the most important thing that I could have done. And my complex PTSD has waned quite a bit. I think when you do a lot of healing, it starts to just lower the temperature on everything. I still struggle with some of my compulsive disorders, but they're getting better. That first book is my story ending in hope, and really the book I tried to tell the story, not about what happened to me so much. Certainly there are moments in the book where there are some details. For me, it was more important to show people, to tell people. This is what trauma looks like in your life when you have difficulty at work and when you don't have good relationships and when you're in a state of flight and I start moving all over the world.

34:33 This is what trauma looks like. And that, to me, was the most important part of the book, was just to give people a way to see what trauma looks like, you know, in an everyday life. Yeah, and then you also were able to put out a companion journal called Hurt No More, Grow a foundation for Healing. It's a stepbystep guide to help others process trauma and find their own path of healing. Yeah, And I wrote that with my friend Aparna Rama Krishnan, who's has a master's in social work. And I really, at the end of my memoir, I thought, you know what? If anyone reads this, I need to leave a tool behind. So it's one thing to tell your story. For me, it was like, OK, but then what next? So I reached out to her and I said, I want to write a second book. It's a journal and I just want to provide some really preliminary steps that if you have trauma and if you want to get started in your healing journey, here's 10 steps you can take to do that.

35:23 And then at the end of that journal, there's a lot of helpful guides. I think that she developed and she did an amazing job about how to tell your family, how to tell your bed partner, how to tell your kids, should you tell your kids how to find a good doctor. So that was the intention with that is to be a tool for others to hopefully find their way and put their first step forward. Thank you Rebecca, for sharing your story, for writing a book, and then also being so willing to help others also get through their traumas. And I think one big take away is, is that this healing journey is not like, oh, I'm cured. I'm much tada. I've done it and that's the end of that. I don't feel any ties to any of my hurt or pain.

36:05 That's a falsehood. Healing is a lifelong journey, and being OK with yourself can ebb and flow. Week to week, daytoday. Minute to minute. Sometimes, yeah. And looking to the support of others like what we're doing on this podcast or what Rebecca's doing through her sharing of stories and finding a community like the human beauty movement to be able to be OK and safe and feeling like you can share, you can express and you can be yourself. And that's really what my whole life purpose is, is for people to feel OK with themselves. It's continuing to be a journey for myself as well and so I want to be able to. Be that vessel for other people to find that journey back to self love and to really know how special and valuable and wonderful and beautiful that they are deep down inside. And together we can get through anything. So, yeah, yeah.

36:56 Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank. You today, I really appreciate speaking with you. I had a wonderful time. Thank you so much for all that you're doing because I think that everyone has a gift to give in this conversation and you certainly you've offered your gift and I really appreciate it. It's. My honor. Thank you. Thank you for listening to the Human Beauty Movement podcast. Be sure to follow, rate and review us wherever you stream podcasts. The Human Beauty Movement is a community based platform that cultivates the beauty of humankind. Check out our workshops, find us on social media, and share our inspiration with all the beautiful humans in your life. Learn more at the Human beautymovement.com Thank you so much for being a beautiful human.