In this pilot episode of the Holistic Trauma Healing Podcast, I introduce myself and share why I believe approaching trauma from a holistic perspective is the only way to truly heal. I briefly share some of my childhood trauma — which includes fundamentalist Christianity, a narcissistic, abusive stepfather, and divorce. Mainly, this episode focuses on trauma that happened in late 2018/early 2019 that culminated with mental illness and chronic physical pain and climaxed in March 2019 with a suicide attempt. I’ve “been there and done that” when it comes to mental health challenges, anxiety, EMDR, and chronic pain and illness — trying to hold it all together for myself and my family while trauma was desperately trying to be observed, felt, and healed. Since that suicide attempt, I have spent every day climbing out of the pit I was in — which is not and cannot be a linear process. Healing trauma requires a “whole person” approach — what the Universe downloaded into my awareness as Holistic Trauma Healing and the Trauma-Healing Web. Both are explained in this episode.
[INTRO MUSIC] Hello there. Welcome to the pilot episode of the Holistic Trauma Healing Podcast! I’m so thankful that you are here to join me. And if you landed on a podcast called Holistic Trauma Healing, I can put money on the fact that you probably have some trauma in your life that you are trying to deal with, and kudos to you for dealing with it in a healthy and productive way. So, I want to share a little bit about who I am first. My name is Lindsey Lockett. I’ve been in the online space for about 10 years and most people know me by my married name, which is Lindsey Dietz. But part of my trauma healing story is actually going back to my birth name, which is Lindsey Lockett. And I will share more about that in the future. In the online space, I have been a health food blogger and food photographer. My website for real food recipes and holistic living tips is called All The Nourishing Things.com. And I have been running that website full-time for the last five years. So, I’m very familiar with, nourishing foods, healing diets, supplements, protocols, natural and functional practitioners, et cetera, et cetera. That has been my bread and butter for the last 10 years, even before I started my website. I am a certified health coach. There’s probably not a diet or a healing protocol or a supplement that I haven’t heard of or tried. I’ve spent a lot of years trying to find health in food and bottles of supplements and in different healing protocols. For good reason, I have had a lot of trauma in my life, and I had no clue how trauma manifests as physical health symptoms. Now that I look back on my life, I can see specific instances where I went through a trauma or an extended period of stress, and when it was over, something about my physical health changed. And that is a huge part of my journey is just that awareness of how going through a trauma altered my physical health. I wouldn’t say that I went about healing it in the right way. I did the best that I could with the information that I had at the time. To go even further back, I have a lot of childhood trauma. I am a child of divorce. I was raised in a broken home. I had a narcissistic, physically and emotionally abusive stepfather. I was raised in the Southern Baptist Church, which is a denomination in evangelical or fundamentalist Christianity. And so I have massive amounts of religious trauma and brainwashing that I have spent the last six years working through as I’ve deconstructed Christianity and reconstructed my own spirituality. I have the physical health issues that I touched on earlier. Mostly, that has been anxiety, although I didn’t have the word “anxiety” in my vocabulary until 2017 when I started EMDR therapy. I have a lot of adverse childhood experiences that I could share with you and maybe I will in the future, but for now, for this introductory episode, I just, I don’t want to go into all the nitty-gritty details of my traumas. The purpose of this podcast is not to share all the bad things that happened to me because, although bad things certainly did happen to me, and the trauma that is in my life is not something that I chose and no one chooses it, I know that it is my responsibility to heal it. So I didn’t choose it, but it is my job to heal it. And that is why I’m here today. I’m still on my own trauma-healing journey, and I’ve learned just enough, I think, to start a podcast and talk about healing trauma holistically. So, I really want to start my story off with you in 2018. 2018 is the infamous year in our family’s history. It will always be known as the worst year ever. was basically one of those years that if something could go wrong, it did go wrong. Murphy’s Law was at play pretty much every minute of 2018. At one point, all three of the cars that we have were not working or had something wrong with them that disabled us from going where we needed to go. We had a family member who was dying and living 1200 miles away and we had to figure out how to get back to see her before she passed. We had a chimney fire in our home in the late winter of 2018 that caused, not damage to the inside of our home, but it was an expensive fix because we had to replace the flue inside of our chimney. We were experiencing challenges in our marriage. And that is primarily what made 2018 so traumatic and difficult for me. Having grown up with the instability of the parents that I had, with a narcissistic, abusive stepfather and a disempowered, codependent mother, my childhood was very unstable. For the majority of my childhood, I thought that I had found stability in religion, in Christianity, in God. I thought that if I would accept Jesus into my heart, if I read the Bible enough and prayed enough and was involved in the church that that would create stability for me. And in some ways it did, I think. Whenever I met my husband, who he’s now, my husband, I was 18 and we got married when I was 19 and had our first baby when I was 20. And my husband, David is the most stable thing that has ever existed in my life. He did not have the complex trauma in childhood that I had. So meeting him was like learning a whole new existence was possible. He was so very stable and safe and strong for me. Although that’s not bad. It’s not bad to find security and safety and stability in your relationships. And of course, in a partnership like a marriage, you want that. But the problem was that I found so much stability, safety, and security inside my relationship with my husband, that I didn’t have any of my own stability, safety, and security. And so when my husband began going through an adjustment disorder that lasted for about six months in 2018, suddenly the most stable thing in my life became the most unstable thing in my life. I tried to hold it together. I held it together for my kids. I tried to protect and hide my kids from the issues that my husband and I were experiencing. I held it together in front of the internet, and I continued to publish recipes on my website, All The Nourishing Things. I continued to be involved on social media and doing Instagram stories. I continued to have a social life, although my best friends, those in my closest circle did know what was going on, and they were a support for me. But I “held it together”. I thought I was holding it together. And then my husband went to therapy and he got help at therapy and turned himself around, experienced massive shifts and transformations that were so positive, experienced ego death, became highly conscious, started to exist in his Higher Self, more than he existed in his ego. Meanwhile, I was still in the whiplash of trying to hold it all together. And he had gotten healing and had gotten better. And my difficult road was just beginning because I had so much to process. It was like when he finally got his shit back together, it took about six months. But by the fall of 2018, my husband had his shit back together and we had recommitted to our relationship. We were moving forward and all the best and healthiest ways possible. But at the end of October 2018, I got sick. I deeply and intuitively knew that this sickness was directly related to the trauma that I had experienced in the previous months of 2018. And even though I knew that — at least I had that awareness — that was not enough to get me through that illness, which ended up lasting several months. Specifically I got a urinary tract infection, and when the urinary tract infection was gone, I was still having a lot of pain and spasms in my urethra which caused me to believe that the urinary tract infection was not actually healed. So I kept going back to the doctor and they kept culturing my urine, and it kept coming back with no bacteria in it. But I still had the symptoms of a UTI: the urinary frequency, the pain, the burning, the spasming. And then I was laying in bed a lot because I noticed that laying down helped the spasming to stop. So I spent a lot of time in bed and as I was spending time in bed, I began having other pelvic pain. And it was unlike any pelvic pain I’d ever had before. It wasn’t like menstrual cramps. It wasn’t like ovarian cysts. It was nothing like that. It was a very unique sort of pain and it would be worse whenever I was standing up or walking around or moving around or sitting in a car and it would be better whenever I was lying down. So I spent the last two months of 2018 and the first couple of months of 2019 in bed, because that’s what made me physically feel better. [This was later diagnosed as pelvic congestion syndrome.] Unfortunately, I wasn’t only dealing with physical illness and pain; I was also dealing with extreme, debilitating anxiety. And I was having panic attacks on a daily basis, sometimes multiple times a day. My heart was constantly racing and palpitating. The cyclical thoughts that I was having were completely consumed with fear and worry and projecting into the future and all of these questions of “What if, what if this pain doesn’t stop? What if there’s something really wrong with me? What if I have cancer? What if, what if, what if?” And it was just a really, really dark time in my life. And then I started not sleeping. And the insomnia was one of the worst things I’ve ever dealt with in my life. I actually felt like I had completely lost touch with who I was and with reality, and I was afraid to go to bed because I knew I would wake up at one o’clock in the morning, gasping for air and my heart pounding. So I would, I would go to sleep and I would sleep for about three hours. And then without any warning, without any you know, kind of waking up and then the worry setting in, I was literally waking up in a panic attack. Like, it was like I was asleep and then I was awake and in a panic attack. And I became afraid to go to bed at night because I knew that this was how it was going to wake up at one o’clock every morning. And then I never went back to sleep after that. And so I was going on about three hours of sleep every day. I lost a tremendous amount of weight in a very short period of time. I felt like I was literally wasting away, like I was shriveling up and dying. I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t cook. I couldn’t work. My brain was just stuck. The brain fog was so bad. I always tell people like the brain fog of insomnia feels like your brain is a herd of turtles, trying to stampede through peanut butter. That’s really what it felt like. I began to think about suicide probably in January of 2019. I spent a lot of time in bed. I was isolating myself from my kids because I thought that I was protecting them from my emotional and mental instability. And so I shut myself off. I would go in my room and shut my door and I quit hanging out with friends. And I did my best to try to be there for my kids, but it was really impossible for me. And my husband was so worried about me. He was willing to do whatever it took to help me get better. He had the knowledge and awareness that I was living in fear. That trauma had caused me to expect the worst and believe the worst. That it had caused me to catastrophize and to live in a constant state of fear, worry and projecting into the future. I unfortunately at that point did not have that awareness. And as I began to think about ways to commit suicide, I just began to spiral further and further and further down this deep, dark hole of disparity and really of nothingness. I just, I wasn’t unhappy with my life. I knew that everything that was wrong was on the inside of me. And I felt like a prisoner in my own mind. On March 7th, 2019, I actually did attempt suicide. It was very cold that winter, I live in Minnesota, and I decided to go outside with minimal clothing and my snow boots and try to get lost in the woods and hopefully freeze to death. I wasn’t considering that the snow was over waist deep that year, and it was not possible for me to get through the snow without sinking into it and having to basically stampede through it like a herd of turtles going through peanut butter. So my husband caught me, brought me inside. And a couple of days later, I checked myself in to the psychiatric ward of a hospital where I stayed for five days while I got the medication that I so desperately needed and began to at least for that time medicate, myself so that I could get some sleep and help for anxiety. And then I began the very, very long, arduous process of rebuilding my life and digging myself out of that hole. The reason that I share that story with you is because of everything that had happened to me in childhood, of all the counseling sessions that I had been to, I had been doing EMDR therapy for two years up to that point, there was so much about my life that was completely subconscious. I had no awareness whatsoever of the way that trauma had cumulatively built up in my life to the point that it had affected every aspect of my existence. My thoughts we re dominated by trauma. My emotions were dominated by trauma. My physical body was dominated by trauma. My spirituality was dominated by trauma. And as I learned, my ancestral lineage was also dominated by trauma. These five aspects — mental, emotional, physical, spiritual, and ancestral — are the things that I have had to piece by piece, put back together in order to holistically heal trauma. Going to therapy wasn’t enough. Taking medication wasn’t enough. Spending time in nature wasn’t enough. Reading self-help books wasn’t enough. Not that any of those things are bad. All of those things are necessary tools in my toolbox. But on their own, they weren’t enough. And I didn’t just want to dig myself out of the hole of anxiety and insomnia and the physical, chronic pain that I was experiencing. It became very apparent to me that every thing about who I was, the way that I interacted with people, my communication, my relationship with my husband and my children, my relationships with my parents, the way that I thought about myself, the way that I thought about the world, the mindsets that I had, the beliefs that I had — all of it had to go under a microscope. Because if any of it continued in the way that it had up to that point in my life, I would find myself right back in that dark, scary place. And that just wasn’t an option for me. It couldn’t be an option. Not because I have a husband, not because I have kids to take care of, not because it would wreck my community or my home or my family to take my own life or to live with that level of debilitating anxiety. But because I didn’t want to be that person anymore. I wanted to heal, not just my physical body, not just my mental illness. I wanted to heal as a whole person. That meant I had to heal my emotions, my thoughts, my physical body, my spiritual body, and my ancestral lineage. And through the process of the last couple of years of going on this journey of healing of learning more and more — I learn new stuff every single day, I come across new podcasts, new Instagram accounts, new blogs, new books all the time. And I just have been sucking it all in with a straw. I can’t get enough because where I’m at today and the day I’m recording, this is October 9th, 2020. Where I am today versus where I was 18 months ago is like night and day. I’m not even the same person. And it’s not because I found some diet to fix me. It’s not because I started a crazy supplement protocol to fix me. It’s because I dug deep. And I said, Nothing is more important than becoming who I was before the world and trauma told me who to be. Any negativity that I feel, any scarcity, any fear, any discontent, any anger or frustration, I want to put it all under the microscope and I want to be curious about it. And instead of reacting to it, I want to observe it and I want to hold space for it. And I want to nurture that little girl inside of me. Who’s been in there all along and she’s been afraid and alone. And has felt neglected and abused, and she’s just looking for some love. She’s been looking for love in people, in diets, in supplement protocols, in medications, in codependent relationships and behaviors, in the public sphere of being online and having an audience. And really she just needs to find herself. That’s how Holistic Trauma Healing was born for me. So I hope in the course of this podcast to share more about my own journey. But also that the individual aspects of holistic trauma healing that, for me, form not a line; it’s not like you start here and you end here and here’s ABC and D that you do in between. It’s more of a web. When I picture healing trauma, I picture a spider’s web. A spider’s web, a typical spider’s web, the kind that looks like a circle and the spider sits in the middle of it, it has anchor points. Those are those vertical webs that go out from the center of where the spider sits and they anchor onto something — a fence, the side of a building, a tree, whatever. Once the spider has her anchor points, then she begins to weave in a circle and connect one anchor point to the next, to the next, to the next, until she has this big, beautiful web that she then sits and waits for her nourishment to come along. That’s not a linear process. That’s a cyclical process. And if a bug comes along and gets caught in her web, she goes and she catches it and she has her meal. But if that bug messed up her web, she doesn’t take the whole web down and start over. She just repairs that part of her web. And then she goes back to living her life. And for me, that is what Holistic Trauma Healing is. It’s when we have the awareness that trauma affects us as whole people. It doesn’t just affect our mental health. It doesn’t just affect our spiritual health. It affects us as whole beings. And the only way to heal it is holistically. Wholly. We can’t avoid trauma. Crises are going to happen. It’s just part of the human experience to go through hard things. But, when those things come along and they get caught in our web, it doesn’t have to take down the whole web. It doesn’t have to take down our whole lives. Doesn’t have to dismantle everything that we have built up. It can just mess up one part of it. And then we go and we fix that one part because we have the awareness of the whole picture. So I’m going to talk more about the Trauma Healing Web in future episodes. I’m going to share individual instances of trauma from my own life and how I’ve connected those to physical health issues. I’m going to be talking about ancestral trauma. I’m going to be sharing resources, my favorite books and podcasts and people who I feel, help to complete all the different parts of the Trauma Healing Web. I kind of see myself as a sort of curator of Holistic Trauma Healing resources. My goal is to spread a feast before you and let you choose and pick from all the different things to see what works for you to holistically heal your own trauma. So that is who I am. That’s what Holistic Trauma Healing is about. More than anything I just want to be a place of encouragement and hope and also accountability because this journey of holistic trauma healing is definitely not easy. It’s not for you if you want to stay safe and stuck. This journey is about getting outside of the box. It’s about seeing and thinking of yourself in an entirely new way. And it does get harder before it gets easier. So I want to be totally transparent about that. But i’m about two years into this and I can promise you that it is 1000% worth it. [OUTRO MUSIC] Thank you so much for joining me on this pilot episode of Holistic Trauma Healing. You can find me on my website at lindseylockett.com and you can subscribe to this podcast so that you get all future episodes at LindseyLockett.com/podcast.
We didn’t choose what happened to us, but we do get to choose what we do with it.