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Bryn O’Connor, Intuitive Channel: How Spiritual Folk Can Heal Their Addictions, Shame And Trauma

By May 14, 2020Podcast
TGV 5 | Healing Addictions

TGV 5 | Healing Addictions

 

How does one overcome eating disorder and addiction? In this episode, Corin Grillo chats with Bryn O’Connor, a professional channel, educator, and trained mental health therapist. Bryn’s offerings are grounded, wise, insightful, and open you up to the divine purpose of your life. Pulling from some very interesting experiences, she talks about a spiritual psychology modality called internal family systems model. Sharing her struggles with eating disorder, she walks us through some incredible insights on how to use this system to help eradicate some delicate patterns. Join Corin and Bryn in this insightful episode as they empower you with a new set of amazing tools that can help you overcome shame and trauma and let the healing take place.

As Corin Grillo and Bryn O’Connor delve into the profound topic of overcoming eating disorders and addiction, it’s essential to recognize the interconnectedness of mental health and physical well-being. At sacramentobestchiropractor.com, you’ll find a wealth of resources and services dedicated to fostering physical wellness in tandem with mental health care. Joining these realms together, individuals can embark on a comprehensive path towards overcoming challenges, fostering resilience, and embracing a balanced and vibrant life.

Embracing a balanced and vibrant life involves not only therapeutic interventions but also considerations for the duration and effectiveness of rehabilitation programs. In the sphere of addiction treatment, the integration of 60-day rehabs aligns seamlessly with this holistic ethos, offering individuals a comprehensive and structured program that addresses the multifaceted nature of substance abuse challenges.

Listen to the podcast here:

Bryn O’Connor, Intuitive Channel: How Spiritual Folk Can Heal Their Addictions, Shame And Trauma

You’re going to meet a good friend of mine, Bryn O’Connor. I’ve known her for about many years. She and I used to work at the same place where she was this kickass intuitive channel and I was a kickass intuitive healer. We both have a psychology background. We got along. We worked a lot together back then. We did a lot of events and amazing things like that together, lots of collaborations. Bryn has clients all over the place. She’s a professional channel, educator and a trained mental health therapist. Bryn’s offerings are grounded, wise and insightful. She often can open clients up to their divine purpose and divine life.

Bryn is bringing in some interesting information. It’s a personal share. She’s talking about this amazing healing modality. It’s a spiritual psychology modality called Internal Family Systems. Bryn gets courageous in sharing her struggles with an eating disorder over the years. She walks us through this amazing model and gives you some incredible insight on how to work with this system to help eradicate some of those tricky patterns that you have. I also do some deeply personal share about my struggle with alcohol over the years. I hope you enjoy this. I know there are a lot of amazing humans, magical humans that are still grappling with their shadow. Bryn and I serve it up now trying to de-shame, demystify, uplift and empower you with a new set of amazing tools. I hope you enjoy this episode.

Bryn, lots of people know you as an intuitive channel, a healer, a general Rockstar and a psychotherapist. I’m glad you’re here to talk to us about something else, some more personal material. I feel like what you’re going to talk about now is valuable, so I’m grateful to have you here to talk to our Golden Vine community.

Thanks for having me. There are probably not many people who I would talk about this too other than you, like personal stuff.

Bryn is going to talk about the woman behind the curtain. Bryn and I were talking about how sometimes when you’re a healer, an intuitive, a channel or someone that people see as gifted. She and I have similar things going on. When you play the role of that in the community, sometimes what’s not so obvious is the shit that we’re chewing on the behind the scenes. I know a lot of gifted humans, a lot of magical people all have some shit to chew on, a healthy dose. Not a lot of them are willing to admit it. I’m happy to have you here, Bryn, because I know you’re bringing in some tools and amazingness to help people. I have a deep respect for you. I know that if you say shit is good, it’s good.

That’s probably because I have tried almost every method of therapy since I was probably fifteen. I believe that the people who are doing the healing work are those who have had to walk their own healing path. You know this. We can’t do that work until we work through our own stuff. It’s not easy. I work with people that have experienced a lot of trauma. A lot of them don’t fully realize that they’re working with trauma. We all have trauma on some level, but it’s relative to our own experience. Trauma is something that we go through when we’re young that we can’t fully process at the time. We develop a part of ourselves that protects us or separates us from that pain or that thing that we couldn’t process in order for us to manage our life.

With my story, I grew up in Orange County, California. I grew up in a nice house. I had loving parents. They both worked and they cared for me a lot. When I started to move through my healing process, I had a good life and I had parents that cared about me. The secret of my family was that I grew up with a younger brother who was mentally unwell. There were many diagnoses that he had over the years. I believe that he has a borderline personality disorder. What that means is that they’re unable to make connections and attachments with others and so they can exhibit a lot of rage and erratic behavior.

I grew up with my brother who is seventeen months younger, who took a lot of his rage out on me. From a young age, my way of coping was overeating. I had an eating disorder probably from a young age. It was that eating disorder that drove me to seek therapy and to get help. I went to traditional talk therapy. I went to the meditative path. I sought yoga. I tried all different forms of therapy. I tried psychedelic therapy, drug therapy. It wasn’t until I found this therapist who practiced internal family systems that truly changed my life. That’s what I want to talk about is how that helped me and how that can help other people.

A lot of us are rocking trauma and we don’t realize that it’s still part of us. It’s still limiting us. When we think trauma, maybe you think of official PTSD where you’re super anxious all the time, you can’t sleep, you think of war veterans or something big. I feel like the kind of trauma that you’re talking about, Bryn, is something that many of us carry. We don’t see it because we assume that’s how we are designed to be. I’m glad you’re bringing this up. I’m curious about this system and this method. Can you tell us a little more?

Even when we have an awareness of the trauma that we’ve been through, we still don’t have the ability to fully process it because the way that we’ve developed around that trauma is to protect ourselves from feeling it. That’s why the system works well is because it helps to look at the part of us that’s protecting our self. Once we can move that part out of the way, we can tap into the part that has experienced the trauma. That’s where you can find liberation and freedom. Internal family systems essentially see yourself and all of the parts of yourself as a family. You are working with the wounded parts of yourself and you’re also calling in your capitalist self. We see the capitalist self as the higher self. If you practice yoga, you seek to find that part of yourself, that part that is curious, compassionate and neutral.

That part is the observer that is calm. This system believes that at our core, we are all whole because we are our capitalist self. That’s a huge awareness for anyone that might be struggling. You are not your anxiety. You are not your depression. You are not all of your worries, doubts and judgments. You are whole as this calm, compassionate self. When I do my channeling work, that’s who I call in is this higher self that is connected to all things. We all have that part of us within us. Most of the time, it lives far away from our normal day-to-day. The more aware we become, the more we can call this capitalist self into our lives.

[bctt tweet=”We develop a part of our self that protects or separates us from pain or things we couldn’t process for us to manage our life.” via=”no”]

I have to say the name ‘capitalist self’ is distracting to me because I think of it like greed. Can we change it? Can you ask the internal family systems person if we can change that name?

It’s SELF, the ultimate self. Look at the old in itself.

I like the ultimate. How about ultra-self self?

The ultra-self has to be in charge, but the truth is it’s not because the other wounded parts of ourselves take over and oftentimes do things that cause a lot of distraction in our lives.

I have to say I’m getting super excited because I’m like the queen of self-destruction. I met one of my inner family members and I’ll tell you about it.

The parts of our self that are self-destructive, in internal family systems, they call them the firefighters. I’ll go through the three parts of the self that are wounded. The first is the exiles. The exile self is the part of us that is stuck in pain, shame, fear, or trauma. These are from childhood. The exile self, what we do in our internal family system is we take that part of us that’s in pain, in trauma and we hide it far away. We exile that part of us so that we don’t have to feel that pain or that fear, that trauma. We have managers. The managers are the parts of ourselves that show up to protect the exile. They prevent us from feeling shame. They’re almost like the preemptive workers that keep us working with the world so that our exile isn’t seen or felt. This is where our fun parts come in, Corin, because it’s the firefighters. The firefighters come in when that exile is starting to break out and show us all that pain and that fear again. The firefighter comes in and blasts with water to distract us from what that exile is feeling.

The water or tequila in my case.

Tequila, marijuana, overeating, that’s what it’s been for me. The firefighter is the addictive self, the self-destructive self. The beautiful thing that I learned through this system is that self-destructive self has been saving our lives this whole time. I feel like there’s such a beauty in that this whole time we hate them for all this destruction they cause in our lives, but they have been doing exactly what we’ve needed them to do, which is show up and save us from all of this other pain that the exiles are carrying.

That’s beautiful too and the healing work that I’ve done over the years as well. I’ve come to those same conclusions as far as having a deep respect for those parts of ourselves that we think are the most fucked up when they’re amazing security systems. Bryn, can you tell us a little bit about how that applies to some of your struggles in the past? What did you encounter with your firefighter or exile or however it is that you want to discuss that?

What I realized is that trying to heal this eating disorder work is that the firefighter in me was coming in and hosing me with cake so I didn’t feel this underlying feeling. The whole time I knew consciously that this was an inner child that needed help from me, but I couldn’t ever access her because the firefighter kept taking over. This is what I want to walk the people through is that how you work with this part of yourself is when you are being triggered, when that firefighter shows up and you have the awareness that your ultra-self can see that the firefighters coming in, that’s when you can connect with that firefighter and ask what do they need? What are they doing?

When you start to connect with them and feel into them, you start to understand how old they are, where they show up in your body and sense that they come in in a different place. I realized that firefighter was a teenager and showed up maybe as 11 or 12 years old. That firefighter was tired of not being seen or valued. That firefighter would make a huge distraction so that the feeling of not being heard or valued wouldn’t fully come up. Once I connected with that firefighter, asked what they needed and gave them a different task, they could soften and move out of the way so that I could connect, do the part of me that didn’t feel seen or valued.

TGV 5 | Healing Addictions

Healing Addictions: The exile self is the part of us that is stuck in pain or shame or fear or trauma.

 

It was in that I felt that sense of freedom that I could hear, feel, listened to the part of me that needed that love and that nurturing as my ultra-self. In loving that person, the firefighter didn’t need to come in and protect her because I could see her and value her. It was like this two-step process, identifying what came in to protect me, softening, releasing that, and then finding out what they were protecting, softening and releasing that. That feeling of liberation came. I have been working on this issue for probably ten years of my life seriously with different therapists and tools. This has been the first thing that I have found that has helped my brain to understand what is happening structurally and to give me a strategy to work with these parts of myself so that I can be in the moment with what’s happening. That’s been incredible for me.

Knowing how intensive fixed some of these behaviors can be, it’s a lifelong struggle. To see how powerful this is for you and yet how simple these practices are, it makes me in awe of our ability to heal and receive a recovery. That’s deep. How long have you been doing these internal family systems, Bryn?

It’s been maybe less than a year that this has come into my life. In terms of what it’s healed in me, I feel like it’s been a lifetime’s worth of healing. What it’s helped me to recognize is my childhood trauma. As much as I knew what happened to me, I could tell the story, could talk about it and be aware of it. I didn’t understand how deeply that exiled part of me still existed and how these other parts of me that were these protectors, these managers and firefighters came in to hide what I was feeling. Through this process, I feel like I connected to the parts of me that had experienced that trauma as a child and acknowledging them in a feeling way for the first time is what I feel like has opened up this new life for me. As much therapy as I did and awareness as I had, I did not realize what I was still holding on to until this layering process helped me to uncover this.

The things someone can work on this with seem like any tricky stubborn pattern. Can you give us a little list of different ways that you can use this technique?

The best way would be to start to notice when you get triggered. That’s easier said than done. It’s not easy to know when you are being triggered, but if you can start to be aware when something feels like it takes over you. You either go into a rage, a level of anger that doesn’t match the situation. You’re more upset about something. It warrants something that is happening for you that is being triggered. This is a manager or a fighter-fighter coming to your rescue because something has triggered one of your exiles. That pain, that shame, that fear, that trauma, something has been poked. When you’re triggered, you are reacting in a way that you learned how to react when you were much younger. It’s likely that how you’re reacting is not healthy for you and it’s not healthy for the situation.

The first thing I’d recommend is to acknowledge when you’re triggered and try to identify what is triggering you, what the feeling is. What the situation was that made you feel a certain way that caused you to have an overreaction to that. What I would do then with the trigger is once you’ve acknowledged that you are being triggered is to close your eyes and to connect with the part of you that is managing or protecting you. That’s anger, reactivity, defensiveness or whatever you’re plotting in your head is to connect with that part of you and ask them, “What do you need? I need to feel safe. How old are you? How long have you been around for me?” That’s when you can start to feel and sense where they might exist.

This is like a seven-year-old within me and she’s pissed. In this inner dialogue, you can start to understand why you are pissed. What is it triggering? What’s underneath that? I find that once you can connect to how old they are and where they are within you, that’s when you can release them or give them the acknowledgment that they need. That they’re safe. That you’re in charge as your ultra-self and that you are there to protect them as your adult self. That they can slow it down. Maybe you want to look at the desire for me to overeat. It feels like it’s a cycle. It comes on and the wheels are spinning. I’m obsessing and thinking about this. What is it that I’m going to have? When am I going to have? I start to think about that.

In that situation, I’m being triggered because that firefighter is showing up. It needs to distract me from what’s happening. I can sit with, “This firefighter, what do you need from me? How old are you? You’re young. You’ve been there to protect me for a long time. Thank you for showing up for me, but I don’t need you as my ultra-self. I’m going to acknowledge you. Move you out of the way and now I’m going to look at what’s underneath that. What am I feeling?

This is something that’s come up for me. I’m homeschooling my kids. I’m a full-time everything I feel like to everybody. What came up for me when I had this trigger underneath it was a sense of losing my identity, losing myself. You ask that part of you that losing the identity, losing myself, what does that remind you of from childhood? You can connect it back to your original trauma because usually what you’re feeling, it’s being protected by a part of you is reminding you of a trauma that you’ve experienced. Once you make that connection, it feels like it dissolves and you don’t need that firefighter anymore because you acknowledge what’s underneath it. That’s what the healing is.

It reminds me of the different things along the way, but the way it’s synthesized in such simplicity. I told you I think I’ve met one of my firefighters. Can your firefighter be older? I was doing channeling for the Inner Sanctum, which is my membership site for those of you who don’t know. I do these new audios every Sunday and I sent to everybody on their healings. I forget what the topic was. I think it was self-destruction sabotage. The spirit guided me to walk through some steps to meet this saboteur. We didn’t call it the firefighter, but I quickly discovered he was there to fight fires. He was there to help. I opened up this tunnel and it’s like a freaking VFW. I forget what VFW stands for.

It’s like we’re the veterans like war vets and the military people have dreams and to connect in community. I walked in and I see this old man. He’s not that old, but he’s older than me. He’s had white hair. He was wearing an Army jacket but more casual. He was dressed in casual clothes. His hair was long. He’s sitting at the bar drinking. At that moment, I was like, “I make much sense to myself all of a sudden.” I can see how this guy comes in every once in a while and talks me into being a loner drinker. That has been in a sense the thing that I have like you’re eating. Since I was twenty, I like drinking alone as if I’m a VFW hanging out with other war vets. It was amazing when I saw this guy. I’m like, “It’s you,” because it is like the sting that swells up inside of me, catches me out of the blue here. I have to work to take myself out of the bar and like, “We’re not doing that anymore. We don’t do that.”

[bctt tweet=”The way we have developed around trauma is we try to protect ourselves from feeling it.” via=”no”]

Cravings still swell up and I’ve been working on this for years. It’s interesting to meet him. They walk me through a process to integrate him with this being up top that was a higher self, a galactic self. We integrated them and I could feel a shift. I had been in dialogue with him whenever I feel a craving, I talk to him. I got information about how he feels, but I didn’t go into me as an exile or that exile piece. What I did feel was that he feels misunderstood. There’s a part of me that feels misunderstood, like old rejection that no one will understand, no one will ever get me like a war vet. When they came back from Vietnam, rejected people, no one gets them. I saw this butt-hurt quality to him, but that’s all I got. I don’t think I did the deeper exile part.

First of all, I feel like he’s the perfect symbol for that part of you. Whereas I see this as a little me, your symbol is perfect for that part of you. You’d get a different symbol of what that person looks like for you, but I would be curious as to, does he get triggered by feeling misunderstood? Is that what brings him in?

That was my sense, but he’s got a lot of triggers. In a sense, he’s a war vet so he’s shell-shocked. He’s a little on guard committed to isolating. This whole Coronavirus thing is like my natural habitat like being alone because of the war vet inside of me. It’s not a problem for me. I was shocked at the symbology and how exactly my behavior is that when I’m triggered. The dichotomy of me is that I’m such a hermit, but on the other hand, I love people so much. I love to connect with them and all the stuff. He has had me on lockdown off and on for quite a while. Keeping me safe, the way a good military bro does.

It’s totally protecting you. What we ultimately want to do with the managers and the firefighters is to give them a different task. Maybe you can do this in one connection with him or maybe it’s an evolving dialogue overtime where you help him find something else to do for you and you re-task him to have your back in a different way instead of taking over your body. Is that how it feels, that he takes over and you’re like the devil?

Yes. It’s been years where I’m Corin. I’m doing my thing and then this other part of me, it’s like an hour before, I’m like, “Thank God.” All the cravings are gone and life is good. All of a sudden, this thing overcomes me and I don’t care. It’s what I need and that’s what I’m going to do. Over the years, it’s gotten better. I’ve had longer spurts of no drinking at all. I don’t drink nearly the way that I used to, but it’s like an ongoing like, “Hello. How are you? Who are you? What are you doing here?” I’m a Pisces and a sensitive, so I do love me some dulling of the brain or some escapism in general.

Most empaths do. I feel like we are way more prone to addiction and we got some boss firefighters.

It’s been an ongoing thing. It steps in. It’s definitely a different aspect of me. What’s interesting is that I’m aware that when that part of me steps in, I know the game. I feel in control and I know exactly what’s about happen. It felt like this love affair almost. Before, my boyfriend and I were feeling a lot of isolation, heartlessness and all of that. Within myself, I wasn’t feeling so loved. I would equate my little binges with alcohol a love affair.

On some level, it is giving us that connection that we need with something. A lot of people who are addicted to sugar, there’s a brain chemical. There’s oxytocin and dopamine that’s connected to that. You are giving yourself the boost that you need. That’s a big part of healing is releasing the shame and judgment around it. Oftentimes, you become addicted to that cycle of loving yourself, shaming yourself, hating yourself, loving yourself. To do it and to understand that intuitively my body and my system is needing this firefighter to come and put this out for me is okay. Not shaming yourself while you’re doing it, being in acceptance of it and even the next day or the day after not shaming yourself and being in acceptance of it has been a huge part of my healing. Once you release that, you feel like you’re choosing to do it because you want to do it. It’s not because you’re trapped in it, but because you like it. That’s okay.

You and I have talked a lot about that over the years about the fact that maybe some of the most harmful parts of addiction is what we do to ourselves psychologically afterward or during the self-loathing, shame, guilt that comes with it. The self-punishment, the way we punish ourselves for being perversely amazingly human. That was a huge struggle for me because they’re here for good reasons.

The whole internal family systems thing is that they are there to protect us from another part of us that has experienced trauma and that other part of us is hiding. It’s been in exile. Everything in our whole system has been built around protecting that feeling. You can’t get to that feeling until you dissolve the protector around it. You have to work through that fortress before you can get to that inner child. If you can do those steps, there is a lot of true empowerment as your higher self.

This reminded me of this memory I had, which is a few years back. I had a huge craving for alcohol and plus, something bad happens that day. Someone was super mean to me. I was feeling ultra-butt hurt and misunderstood. The war vets coming in, no one understands me, let’s have a drink. I was feeling the swell. It was this powerful anxiety and physical feeling, which is the only thing that’s going to stop this, is have a glass of wine or do something. I told my boyfriend, “I feel like I’ve got to have a drink. I’m about to go fucking crazy if I don’t have a drink.” I forgot what he said. It’s something casual and mellow. He’s trying not to do it. Whatever he said, I was like, “I’m going to hang tight. I’m going to work on my practice.

TGV 5 | Healing Addictions

Healing Addictions: When triggered, acknowledge the trigger, close your eyes, and connect with the part of you that is managing or protecting you.

 

I’m a healer. I can heal myself out of this. I try some shit. It doesn’t even do anything because the war vet when he comes around, he’s powerful. I’m like, “It’s not working.” I start feeling this other feeling. This is where the exile comes in. This other thing starts happening. I’m standing, making myself a sandwich, and then I start balling like a baby. I felt young, all traumatized and it started boiling out of me. I don’t think up to that point I’d ever let myself get to that stage to feel the pain that I was trying to prevent from coming out. He came up behind me. He gave me this cute hug with lengthy little arms and gave me a little squeeze. I cried even harder and then it finally unraveled. It stopped and after that the craving was gone, completely. I had never let myself get past the fucked-up part because I don’t think I ever invited anyone in to help me.

It wasn’t safe enough. He made it safe enough for you.

He did. A war vet, they don’t trust anybody.

It was perfect. I’m going to think about that now.

You know me. I’m wearing this hat. It’s like a war vet hat. I know if I were to hang out at a VFW, I would meet the best friends of my life there. It would totally blow up my spiritual friends out of the water. I am a war vet.

The truth is that war vet is protecting the trauma. He’s got secrets in there. He’s got shit that he’s been through. You can tap into it once in a while and open it up. Going through the process of fully understanding, acknowledging emotionally what that trauma is, that’s where the real, for me, the freedom from the eating disorder has come. I knew what I went through, but I didn’t feel what I went through and acknowledge it as my adult self on all these different levels. Feeling and going through that old trauma that I thought I had dealt with but didn’t. That’s what set me free from the cravings. I still have the cravings. I can work through this system of going into what is going on for me. I feel like I’m losing my identity because I am losing my identity because I’m a full-time cook, cleaner and snack maker. I can make a choice as my adult self. Do I want to have this cake? Fuck yeah, I want to have it or no, I don’t because I don’t feel that overwhelming something has taken over my body and is driving me to this. I can make a choice about it. That’s been huge for me.

I want to say it’s courageous for you to come forward with this and share your magic, your story about the eating disorder and how you’ve had to cope with it. I don’t think nearly enough of these conversations happen between people. We all got some shit going on.

We do. Thanks for sharing what you shared too. I feel like all sensitive people have gone through their own battles. I feel good when I hear what you’re going through. People stories, I don’t know if there’s a deeper connection to what’s real for me. Talking about addictions, it does something for me.

I know. Me too, I love it. I’m sure there are many people out there who are young, have fun, benefit, and see reflections of themselves through what you’re sharing. I want to thank you so far, but do you have any golden advice, wisdom, truth that you’d like to leave with our audience?

My golden rule is to stop hating yourself, judging and criticizing the parts of you that sabotage yourself. Once you stop judging, hating, criticizing it, you can neutrally observe it, see the truth of it, see the power in what that part of you has done to help you survive. Once you get that piece, you can start to do the healing work. We all sabotage ourselves and it’s okay. It’s how we’ve learned how to survive. We learned it at a young age. Love yourself.

It’s cliché, yet poignant. Thank you, Bryn. If people want to check you out, find you, maybe book a session with you, where can they go?

[bctt tweet=”A big part of healing is releasing the shame and judgment.” via=”no”]

You can check out my website, BrynReadings.com.

Thank you, Bryn. Thanks for coming. I love you.

Thanks, Corin. I love you.

We’ll see you next time on the show.

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About Bryn O’Connor

TGV 5 | Healing AddictionsBryn O’Connor is a Professional Channel, educator, and trained mental health therapist. Bryn’s offerings are grounded, wise, insightful and open you up to the divine purpose of your life.

 

 

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