[00:00:00] Hello, my friends, welcome to another episode of Shining Through. From my heart to yours, I have to be honest, today is a very heavy day for me. I was thinking about what I wanted to talk about right before I pushed record and it brought a little bit of tears to my eyes. So I'm already starting in a very raw place, but I just couldn't help but get on here and share with you what is on my heart in this moment of vulnerability. And so I'm going to jump right in knowing that that is where we're at today.
[00:00:31] I just got home from a long stay in a hospital with my son. He has been struggling with his digestive tract. We've done a lot of testing. We think that he probably has a double virus that he just couldn't get over on his own that ended up in diarrhea and vomiting for over 10 days. And his sweet little four year old body has really been suffering and it's breaking my mama heart. But we went to the ER yesterday morning because I was worried about stages of dehydration, which I was grateful I went because he was already starting down that path.
[00:01:07] And although this is my child who has been in the hospital more than any of my other sons for injuries, it's been years since I've taken this child to the hospital for illness. But I couldn't help but flash back to moments when he was younger and he had a lot of digestive struggles. He couldn't process anything that was from an animal when he was a baby and his stomach would distend and balloon and just get so tight and big. And we didn't know why. And it took months of tests and stool samples and blood samples. And they wanted to do a GI scope when he was three months old. But by God's good grace, we didn't have to do that. And we found the solution to help him find health and healing to the point where he hasn't had issues at that level for over three years now.
[00:01:55] Well, taking him back to this emergency room and have watching them put an IV in his hand and give him fluids and ask him questions when he wasn't even really responsive or being able to talk through it because he was just so tired and worn down exploded my mom heart.
[00:02:13] And I'm sure that you have experienced something in your life where you've watched someone that you love suffer where you couldn't really do anything to help them.
[00:02:24] And I am so immensely grateful for the people in this world who have education, understanding, and tools that I don't have to be able to help the people that I love.
[00:02:36] There's one of those tools that I want to share with you today that I was able to use unexpectedly while I was in my hospital stay.
[00:02:44] Recently, I've been reading two different books. One, the Whole Brain Child. It's an amazing parenting book that helps you understand the different parts of the brain of a child so that you can parent better. I've read it multiple times and I love it.
[00:02:58] Another book that I just barely finished is called What Happened to You. It's an amazing book by Oprah Winfrey and a renowned brain development and trauma expert, Dr. Bruce Perry.
[00:03:09] And in this book, they dive into the effects of trauma on your brain and how trauma of your past can affect your everyday present life. One of the things that both of these books mentioned recently in my reading is the difference between explicit and implicit memories.
[00:03:27] Now I've learned a lot about these things in the past, but I had forgotten about this powerful tool of understanding the difference. There were chapters in each of these books that went into depth on this subject. So I'm obviously not going to do the full measure of its worth here, but the basic understanding is that an implicit memory is information that is coded in your body unconsciously and an explicit memory is the type of information that you have to consciously work to remember and you can think of the details of the moment.
[00:04:01] *So I like to think of implicit as the things that your body remembers and explicit as the things that your brain remembers. *
[00:04:10] Like the moments with my son when he was a baby struggling with those digestive issues. I can mentally think about what happened, how old he was, what hospitals we went to, how many times in the night he would wake up. Those are the explicit memories. But there was a moment this weekend where we were worried about my son's breathing and I picked up a pulse oximeter that we put on his finger to read his oxygen level and his heart rate. And when I picked that up and touched it, I felt this sinking dread in my stomach. And it wasn't even that I was worried in that moment that he really was losing air. They were just trying to eliminate the different issues he may be struggling with, but touching that tool gave me an emotional memory experience that I wasn't even conscious of what was happening.
[00:05:01] This implicit memory was a trigger for me. And I was grateful in that moment to have this knowledge of the two different types of memory to help me know what to do with them.
[00:05:13] Because, my friend, I know you've experienced this before where you have had an unwanted moment where you're just flooded with emotional triggers. You may not know what is even going on. You have a smell or something visual that flashes by and you just all of the sudden feel defensive or emotional or flooded.
[00:05:34] So many moments this past weekend had those triggers for me.
[00:05:39] And as I was able to stop and recognize some of those moments, it gave me power to move through them. The moment when they hooked my son up for an IV in his hand, and it reminded me of the IVs my stepdad used to go through when he did dialysis or the infant crib that went down the hallway that had the heat warmer over it, flooding my body with emotion of when my third son was in the NICU as a baby. Or the ultrasound on my son's stomach, trying to figure out what's going on, reminding me of my recent ultrasound that told me I had had a miscarriage.
[00:06:17] Or honestly, the most emotional and tangible for me was when my son kept throwing up and I kept having these flashes of my own dear aunt holding my sweet cousin Celeste as she vomited over and over again while dealing with cancer.
[00:06:35] These memories, these emotions flooded me all weekend. And it could have been an experience where I just floundered and got lost in that emotion. And let's be real, my friends, there were moments where I had to go in the corner and just let myself cry for a second and hold space to feel. That's important too, to see where you're at and feel it in that moment. But I was also able to lean on some of the understanding and the tools that I had been taught recently of how to bring an implicit memory forward and make it explicit so that you can ride the wave and rewrite the neural pathways.
[00:07:14] There's an example in the book, the whole brain child that outlines how this process can work. They tell the story of a boy and his father where they were going to start working on their pinewood derby and the boy stopped and immediately said, "Dad, I don't want to do this." as soon as he pulled out the carving tools. Now this is very uncharacteristic of this son. And when the dad asked him, "Why don't you want to do it?" He said, "I don't know, dad, I'm just too busy. And there are other things going on. I just don't know if I want to do it this year." And after pondering and probing, the father remembered that one of the last time a son had used a knife was when he had taken his pocket knife without asking and shared it with a friend, and they were whittling in the park and his friend accidentally got hurt by that pocket knife. Even though it wasn't a severe wound, this father's son had taken it personally and felt so bad that his friend got hurt with his own pocket knife. When that dad brought up that memory and said he thought they were connected, the son said, "No, I don't even think about that. I just don't really want to do it."
[00:08:23] Gratefully, the dad knew about the difference between implicit and explicit memories. And he taught his son that sometimes a memory is kind of stuck and we are remembering it without even knowing that we're remembering it. And it gave him a moment to rewind and look at that situation to see if they can rewrite some of those pathways in his brain. The son was resistant a little bit at the beginning, but when he opened up to this, it gave him power to change his perception.
[00:08:55] Now again, I don't have time to tell you the whole story and how it went down. You can go read the book if you want. But the narrative shows how the father was able to walk the son through the different phases of what happened to include the whole story instead of just the memory of the knife. When we think about the before, during, and after of any traumatic experience, it helps zoom us out and bring cognitive understanding to the situation.
[00:09:30] This is why therapy can be so healing when you go and tell your stories.
[00:09:35] *If you have never surfaced struggles from your past they are keeping implicit memories stuck so that you don't even know that they are affecting you.*
[00:09:46] The simple act of recalling those memories can help wiggle that hold that your brain has on defending you from those things. You see, your brain just wants to keep you alive and keep you safe. And if a knife hurts someone in the past, it's going to make you feel afraid of that knife.
[00:10:07] Or my experience with the pulse oximeter with my son, the simple act of picking that up flooded me with the desire to protect myself because of the emotional experiences I had had when my son was a baby.
[00:10:23] When I felt that flooding, I paused and I said, "This is an emotional flood. What is going on here?" And then I recalled the situations that I had had when my son was a child, brought them to the forefront of my mind and thought about them in a holistic view —rehearsing what happened before, during, and after, especially the after part. My son was healed. He was better. He was not in a place where we were constantly having to check his oxygen anymore. (Which by the way, was only low because he was holding his breath in response to his pain... he never actually was struggling with oxygen.)
[00:11:10] And I know that now. So taking a moment to remind my brain what is true, why we are safe now, and what we can let go of gave me more peace in the moment and protection from triggers that might come up in the future.
[00:11:28] And that's not the only time that I was able to use this tool over the weekend. I used it many times on the other triggers that come up naturally when you're in a hospital environment. And I also had compassion for myself and when I got home I went in my closet and just had a good cry.
[00:11:47] This is not a tool to erase any trigger, but an invitation to think about what may be subconsciously happening that you can bring to the forefront of your memory and gain more power to move forward in new ways, shifting from reacting and resisting to riding out the wave of emotion and redirecting somewhere that is useful to you.
[00:12:15] *Your brain is an amazing tool that God has given you both to protect you and to process and heal and move forward. *
[00:12:24] There are so many professionals that know how to help us in ways that we don't know how to help ourselves. I am so grateful for the ones that helped my son this weekend. And I know that if you are struggling with intense emotional triggers, there are people out there that know how to help you release that hold on you and rewrite your narrative.
[00:12:47] You don't have to stay in that place. Please consider if this is something you struggle with, reaching out and finding the support that you deserve to have. Maybe it's reading these two books that I suggested. Maybe it's getting a life coach or a therapist. Maybe it's just getting on your knees and praying with your heart, asking for God to help you release some of the emotion that is stuck in you.
[00:13:12] Gratefully, my son is now home from the hospital and we are both feeling more stable. And I'm not going to lie, it took energy emotionally to ride out those waves, but I am so grateful for the tools that helped me recognize my triggers and respond to them in ways that created more peace, more space, and more ability for me to be present with my son this weekend, moving forward on my own healing journey one simple step at a time.
[00:13:44] *What's your next step? I challenge you to be brave enough to take it. *
[00:13:49] You deserve to heal, my friend, because when you do, it's easier for you to see that bright light that is already in you.
[00:13:59] Keep shining, my friend, and have a blessed day. Have you heard the exciting news? We are now doing group coaching where Christian women come together one hour a week. We do a little mini session and then we dive in deep and see how we can transform your life. It's only $20 a month. You can cancel it anytime, but it's only open for enrollment for a short period of time.
[00:14:25] So go to www.thelightcoach.com/join and come hang out with us. I can't wait to see you there.
