Lessons from Trauma Work with Sarah Brassard

What is trauma, how does it impact us, and what’s the best way to recover from trauma? All this and more will be revealed on this episode with guest Sarah Brassard. She is a spiritual teacher, trauma worker, life coach, and author. Furthermore, Sarah is an expert in the area of trauma and helps women grow through hardship to create a life of peace, balance, and happiness. Sarah shares her own personal path toward becoming a coach who helps clients cultivate inner focus, healing, and transformation. She also shares why we naturally deny our trauma, how to start facing your trauma, and practices that can help you in your recovery journey. On this episode of the Live. Love. Engage. podcast: The experience Sarah went through as a teen that changed her life. The physical way her body reacted to trauma and suffering. Why Sarah decided to seek out therapy. A commonly held belief about trauma and why it’s wrong. The main ways Sarah helps her clients with trauma. The role consistency plays in healing. Why Sarah says we leave, energetically, for a reason. The path that Sarah took to get to this stage in her career. Why it’s perfectly natural to not know you have trauma. What happens when you start to feel empowered in your healing journey. The workshop Sarah went to recently and what she learned. Personal practices you can implement to support your trauma recovery. How to reach out and start your healing journey. Connect with ​​Sarah Sarah’s website: https://sarahbrassard.com/ Quick Links: Join the Live. Love. Engage. Community Intuitive Business Coaching The Live. Love. Engage. Book Support the Podcast with BuyMeACoffee.com Enjoying what you're hearing on Live. Love. Engage.? Subscribe on Goodpods or your favorite podcast platform, and click here to leave a 5 STAR Review. You can also watch the conversation on YouTube. TRANSCRIPT You're listening to the live love engage podcast. On today's show, we're gonna be talking about trauma, understanding it, seeing how it impacts us and how we can heal from it. Stay tuned. I am Gloria Grace Rand, founder of the love method and author of the number one, Amazon Best seller Live. Love. Engage. how to stop doubting yourself and start being yourself. In this podcast, we share practical advice from a spiritual perspective on how to live fully love, deeply and engage authentically. So you can create a life and business with more impact, influence, and income. Welcome to live love, engage. Namaste, and welcome. I am so delighted to be with you again, for another addition of live love engage, and I've got a wonderful guest with us today and, she's gonna, she has a wealth of experience. Let's just say that regarding the issue of trauma. And, but first I want to welcome Sarah Brassard to live, love, engage. Thank you, Gloria. Pleasure to be with you today. Oh well, I'm, I'm so looking… I had been, so looking forward to this discussion and, you know, I'll tell all over listeners and viewers, why in a moment, but, let me tell them all about you. So she is the author of, “Inside a guide to the resources within.” She is also a 30 plus year spiritual teacher, trauma worker and life coach. And Sarah runs an online community, mastermind group and group coaching to help women heal and grow through hardships. And she also hosts the annual Trauma Recovery Summit, which is actually how we connected because I am proud to be one of the speakers on the summit this year, which is coming up Very soon. And, and we'll talk more about that in a little bit. but first I, I love to always start in asking our guests to share a little bit about their story and really what got you interested in being specifically a, a trauma worker and I guess, and a coach, someone who helps people through, through trauma. Yeah, I, I think I answer this differently every time I'm asked this question, because there's so many different facets too, is it, to trauma and to what we experience in understanding that we have actually been traumatized. For me, it was this propensity towards wanting to make everything on the outside of my life look pristine. Polished up. I didn't want anyone to know about this tremendous abandonment that I had suffered as a young person. And, what that was like from, for my life was that my mom left our family. Life was pretty put together prior to that. And she left when I was 13 and then shortly thereafter, my father passed away. And so what becomes just your life? you know, this is just my life. I'm a 13-year-old and I have brothers and sisters and we're all coping in various ways. And I would say that I didn't even know what that word meant when I was young. I only knew that it was this way before and this way after, and subsequently I, as I said, I just, I, I tried my best to put everything together, but after years and years of living outside, as I like to say, because my book is called inside a guide to the resources within. I realized that living outside of your life like that, it, it wears you down at all levels at a physical, at an emotional, at a mental and spiritual level, and it's not sustainable. And. So ultimately it was my body that broke down and that was through, you know, bronchial pneumonia that had me in bed for weeks and skin conditions that, you know, just used to just drive me crazy. And ultimately it was this, innate understanding that there had to be something better than this, that, that really I wasn't going to be able to live the rest of my life with this level of suffering. My goodness. Well, first, I'm sorry for, sorry for the losses that you experienced and. Thank you. And so much I wanna wanna go to here. I was gonna ask, you know, how did this trauma materialize in your life? And, and so you said you were experiencing some physical issues with that. So when that happened, what did you, what did you wind up doing to be able to, you know, as you say, kind of put your life back together and, and how did you really decide that you needed to look inside rather than outside? Great question. Great question. Well, there was this, this scene that runs through my, my mind over and over again. And it was at Christmas. And like I said, I put everything together in a really pristine way and I was good at it. So I sort of remember that as sort of this Martha Stewart Christmas, if you will, you know, children were dressed a certain way. The house was all decorated and I was cooking a soup or something over by the stove and my beloved sister-in-law, big smile on my face, you know, came over and she looked at me and she said, “Sarah, Why are you so unhappy? I'm so concerned about you.” Oh, wow. And it was like something, somebody just cracked me open and there was a tremendous amount of vulnerability as we all would feel. Right. If somebody had actually pointed this out to us without our asking them to. Yeah. But because it was such a level of trust there, it really woke me up. It was like, whoa, you know, they can see this. People can see this. And so, I put myself in therapy almost immediately. I found a cognitive behavioral therapist that I worked with for, for many years. And it a trusted part of my healing team. And it guided me to, you know, what I do now, you know, my first thing, my, the, the, the first certification I got was in massage therapy, where I went and did a two year program that worked with cadavers. I mean, it was an in depth program that really taught me the connection between the physical body, the emotional body, the mental body, and ultimately the spiritual body. So, I, I think. You know, if, if I could say anything to anybody it's, it's, you know, boy, trust your instincts. Boy, listen, if you can. I, I know it's hard to listen when you're in tremendously vulnerable places, but, if you can even listen to a whisper of that inner knowledge and allow it to take you down a path of learning, you know, there's a lot there. Yeah. You talked about, or, or when I was doing some research about the fact that trauma isn't necessarily a big event, or because there's, there's like, is there a range of experiences and maybe you can describe what, what. What some of that would look like? Sure, sure. The way that I've seen that is as I hear psychologists and other researchers talk about capital T trauma or small T or Hard and soft trauma or whatever you wanna say there. I distinguish it by saying, you know, hard trauma is, you know, that event, that life was this way for this moment. And the next moment it's a car crash. It's a, you know, it, it, it's a, it's a rape. It's, it's a murder. It's something that has completely changed your course of life. Whereas soft trauma and I think it could be not to take anybody's value from, from their experience. But, soft trauma for me, feels a, a wee bit more complicated because it's more inbred in the culture of, of your life. Maybe it's, you know, a, a chronically abusive parent or, or whatever it might be like in my case, I, I say that one day. It was this way, the next, it was another way. That's not actually true. You know, there was a lot leading up to that that I didn't wanna see. I just didn't wanna see. It hurt too much to think that that could actually be the reality of my life, but I, and I think there's a lot in between too, but I think that's sort of a nice little way to frame things sometimes where you think, gosh, what, what right Do I have to this experience? Or. Feeling a certain way. One of the most interesting things I've heard lately is somebody say trauma is not a fi, a fact-finding process. And I like that. It's not a gathering of facts. Like if you have an imprint, I truly believe, you know, especially when you're dealing with siblings, like I'm one of five. I would go to one of my, my Sibs and say, do you remember this? Gosh, it hurt a lot. And they'd say, yeah,...