Wendi Friesen has worked with many people on working through their trauma through hypnotherapy.
There are many ways to work through trauma and hypnotherapy is not always the answer for you. But, sometimes it is just what you need.
Finding a highly trained and experienced therapist is the key to success. She gave us some advice on finding the best fit for you.
You can find her at her website Wendi.com
She has recordings to help with things like bedwetting and sleep struggles for kids at her shop.
Her Youtube channel has a lot of resources as well!
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Transcript
foster care nation listen up we have some exciting news to share we’re going to offer up our first ever webinar if you’ve ever been curious about what it takes to be a foster parent and help kids in hard places join us on february 18th at 5 pm central for our free no obligation webinar we’re going to share our hard earned knowledge and experience with anyone who has ever wondered about helping kids from hard places if you’re interested go to fostercarenation.com and sign up for our newsletter this is where you can get the details and the links to join us so that you’ll be able to ask any questions you have in the question and answer section now i know what you’re thinking webinar free no obligation webinar it sounds like there’s a sales pitch at the end i’ve listened to a lot of webinars guys i know what you’re thinking i don’t have anything to sell you i don’t have anything to sell you i promise i don’t have anything to sell you today but what we are going to do is try and support you and help you join us in our mission to help kids and if that’s what you’re interested in come see us i promise you we’re not selling anything today we’re just going to offer up our experience our knowledge and trying to help some people who are interested in helping kids as you can tell in the background i have some kids they’re here they’re noisy and i’m not even going to try and quiet them down at this time because i’m not going to get that done they’re wound up out there but you know what they’re happy and that’s what we’re looking for we’re just trying to provide a safe place for kids trying to help them through some of their traumas some of their things and make this world a better place and if you want to join us on that mission we welcome you to show up february 18th at 5 pm central like i said fostercarenation.com sign up for the newsletter and that’s where you’ll have all the information come out thank you so much
foster care nation listen up this is foster care and on parallel
strength for the powerless courage for the fearful hope and healing for wounded hearts
hello and welcome back to foster care and unparalleled journey but jason and amanda today we have wendy friesen with us is it freezing right oh man it was a good guess i should have asked that ahead of time that was the one question i was trying to remember i think is i’m terrible with last names so wendy friesen and wendy you have a really interesting world that you work in um and live in because as we were just discussing wendy’s was toughing it out right now she’s got a hard time in the world of hawaii over there staring at the ocean and enjoying temperate climates while we’re over here we can’t decide what season we have in here in the middle of the us so we’re dealing with summer what three days a week and winter three days a week and the fourth day is like a wild card so we’re a little bit jealous of you over there yeah well it’s been pretty nice i’ve only been here about two and a half months i sold all my stuff from colorado and finally decided i’m moving to hawaii so i’m on the big island which is nice because my brother lives here he’s lived here for about 15 years and i’m just i’m loving it i feel great that’s awesome well tell us a little bit about yourself well one of the things that is now the big part of my life is being a hypnotherapist and when i started doing that in 1994 i went to a school for it in sacramento and i had no idea really what it was or what i was getting into and as i started seeing clients even when i was so new at it and i was so scared because i didn’t know what the hell what the heck i was doing um and people got better from major issues in their life like really difficult things that doctors couldn’t solve and you know going to counseling couldn’t solve and i was really intrigued so in the last um 25 years i have i rose very fast to be one of the leaders in hypnotherapy because i’m very creative and innovative and i like to solve difficult problems so that’s a lot of what i would do with my clients and i started working with with children very regularly and that has been very rewarding
hypnotherapy is one of those things that if you talk to people some people will tell you it’s amazing and some people tell you it’s just it’s just this thing out there it doesn’t it doesn’t really do anything um i mean i’ve always been curious about it how does it work how does it how does that work and help people i guess is the big thing yeah and it’s i would say it’s still a mystery to me in a lot of ways because really good hypnotherapists are doing things that are actually miracles that would not be expected or that the medical community wouldn’t say that is possible or even the you know counseling or psychiatry what we want to do first is create something that is the positive outcome that you do want so if someone has migraines and they can’t get rid of their migraines and they’ve tried everything and then you become kind of immune to the medication that you inject yourself with we want to change the way the subconscious is triggering the body to produce a migraine and we want to find out what is causing that which something emotional or memory or some unresolved conflict and then when you find that and release it which you can’t do by talking about it because if the person knew what was causing it they probably wouldn’t have the migraines but when you’re in trance and you’re relaxed and i ask your inner mind to go to the cause of that problem or the first time that you notice that happen and then the person just lies there very relaxed and describes to me what they’re experiencing and then generally it’s gone that is crazy
but i mean amazing at the same time yeah and so many things that we just wouldn’t expect and you know when we talk about kids um i just started working with some children the first one was from russia and he had been adopted by a family in america and i started working with him and i just i had no idea what direction it would go because he came over not knowing any english and his story is just heartbreaking um but the work that we did together was totally amazing these kids the changes they make so quickly like there was a i had a workshop that i was um hosting and during the break a woman came up to me and said my two daughters or they were monsters at school they were in like second grade and third grade says each of their teachers says they just they disrupt the class and they’re always causing problems and they’re just yelling they won’t listen to anybody at all and she says at home our house is a battleground it’s just fighting all the time so she says i got them the sleepy kids um hypnosis sessions that you have and they listen to them their bedtime stories they listen to them at night and a few days after i did that that one of the teachers said what did you do to your daughter because i said she’s being really nice and helping the other kids and she’s happy in class and she’s participating what on earth did you do and the same with the other daughter they just transformed this horrible behavior that they had and i can’t imagine how that could happen that quickly so then she says at home now they want to help cook dinner they set the table they enjoy doing the dishes and they’re kind to each other and helpful and this happens because of a bedtime story wow we might could do some of that i was going to say we need that bedtime story we’re going to have to look that up what other kinds of stories or programs do you offer well i have a lot of things for kids especially with eating issues if kids are picky eaters if they only will eat one food or if they’re overeating and they’re eating a lot of candy or sugar or they don’t move around and get any exercise and each one is a different story that specifically for that like one of the stories for um kids who don’t like to eat vegetables in particular it’s called pickle island and they there’s the kids are stranded on an island we don’t know why but there’s just a bunch of kids stranded and this big container washes up and all it has is seeds in it for vegetables so the kids grow all these vegetables and they sit down and i have them tasting all these vegetables it tastes so good that they grew and that came out of the ground and how happy they are that they’re eating these delicious vegetables and when they’re doing that their brain is opening up and expanding the area that does like eating really healthy nutritious foods and kids suddenly want to eat vegetables and they aren’t so interested in sugar and such and then at the end of the stories they’re they’re meant to be listened to when they’re going to take a nap or go to sleep but there’s a lot of suggestions that i put in there and suggestions for like on the one with the sleepy kids with the wizard story there’s suggestions that you really do like being kind and you like helping others and you really enjoy your family and you know just things like that that are repeated very softly that’s really interesting well as you well know we we talk a lot about foster kids and kids in adoption and unfortunately these systems have to exist but we know that most kids who come into this system do not come in for any really good reasons yeah even even if it’s a fairly minor reason that they end up in the place that they’re at or a child who comes in as an infant there’s always some level of trauma even if it’s just the loss of a first family but oftentimes it’s not and we hear stories about neglect and abuse we hear stories about abandonment we hear stories about sexual abuse and physical and mental and all the way across the board yeah so have you worked with any of these kids who’ve been through some of those so how can you help these kids get over that it is yeah it is difficult because a lot of times kids don’t really want to talk about that they’re too embarrassed or ashamed or they think it’s their fault but when you’re young and you think it’s your fault and you’re a bad person you grow up with that and all your life you have these beliefs even as an adult that something’s wrong with you it was your fault and you caused it so um stephen when he came over here and his parents brought him to me for some therapy he was about seven um he hadn’t told anybody what happened why he was in foster care or why he was abandoned or anything and he told me he decided to trust me and this was just a huge step for him to trust me because he didn’t trust anybody but his mom went in the grocery store said you wait out here and she never came back and then the police came and picked him up and here’s a five-year-old being taken to places to be housed and uh through the system and everything so in russia in the foster care at least for the boys the the men who are in charge make the boys fight each other and the one who wins gets chocolate but the men who work there are placing bets on the kids so they’re they get to gamble and this is what they endure and the kids had to fight each other so that you know they would possibly win and get some chocolate the stories that he told me of what went on in the foster care there were just horrific it was awful but he told somebody at least he was willing to get that out of there so he wasn’t living with that secret himself we did a lot of work together on releasing the things in his past he had to re-enter that memory and be the child that now he was like seven when he was with me but um be that child standing outside the grocery store waiting for his mother and go through all of that so we could have that memory kind of contained as a an event in his life then change the way he holds that and helping him learn something from that and also you know knowing that it wasn’t his fault he wasn’t left there because there was anything wrong or did anything bad it was because his mother was really really sad and she just didn’t know what else to do you know so now we restore a little bit of his self-esteem and the belief and identity of him not being someone that was thrown away but it was tough when when i found out that he had the mom and dad told me well they the orphanage said that he has a younger brother and then they told us that he has a younger sister and in a lot of cases that’s not true they just want you to take more kids so they ended up with three kids the parents are both attorneys and they’re not very nice people they’re very very stern and their only way to try and raise these children is by more and more discipline so for stephen when he came to see me you know there was no discipline there was total acceptance and love and understanding and compassion and his life really started changing wow that’s the story about the russian orphanage is interesting unfortunately we had to reschedule but right after this we were going to speak with i don’t know if you’re familiar with oleg lu lohide is his name he has a tedx talk and he’s uh he’s from russian russia and the the foster care system there and i’ve heard some of his ted talk and some of his speaking and i think he has some similar stories so it’s interesting that you mentioned that as you know it sounds like it’s a very very systemic problem in that system and who knows you know what level of sexual abuse was going on there as well he didn’t stephen never talked about that but i assumed that there was some of that as well unfortunately you’re probably very right yeah so one of the things i did with him um since with kids you know it’s a little different working with them we did a lot of like physical things so i had this roll of butcher paper and i rolled it out across my office so there’s about oh 12 feet or so of butcher paper and we i had him draw this timeline of his life like a little path and it went all the way until he was 20 years old and then we would in the early parts of it it was just black we’d just draw black and just you know do that and get all that anger and how he does deserve to be so angry and it shouldn’t have happened but you know and then acceptance and that and then events in his future that he put in and he would draw things that represented these accomplishments and these events and then he was giving going to be giving a concert because he’s going to be a pianist and he’s giving a concert to a whole bunch of people when he’s 20 years old and so he’s got this whole goal of being this pianist and somehow that just really drives him so he’s able to see and feel this entire life that he’s creating that he has some control over and then i would have him close his eyes and relax and i would take him on a visual journey in his mind of accomplishing these things and having them already happen and what it feels like to feel so proud of the goals he said and the things he’s doing that sounds a lot like a program i heard someone else talking about a psychologist on youtube talking about i think it’s called as a future authoring program and learning to teach a child how to how to write their future more or less so that they can back into it in their own mind and begin to create that is is that kind of a similar uh pathway yeah it is and i do it with adults as well and with adults they get to go back on their timeline to times that were difficult or times that you know knocked them down or made them feel like unworthy or whatever their issues are so we go and resolve those and when you get these difficult memories out of that subconscious mind holding it we get the emotion out and it no longer has this power over you we change the identity of that memory and meaning that instead of you if you had always been told that you’re useless worthless or you you know you always just screw everything up nobody wants to listen to you whatever the thing was and what went with that identity we changed that so that now you’re operating from some memories that have a different sense of purpose or meaning for you and then doing the future timeline with adults or children is really really valuable so stephen he was doing so good he came to see me for a year but his parents were just not very nice and it was oh it’s heartbreaking that you know i was the only thing in his life that was positive so they wouldn’t let him have a piano i said get him a piano please give him a piano he just has this drive to be a pianist and they wouldn’t do it and then um sometimes they brought the other two children in as well so i worked with all three of them and at one point we had a big metal kind of a plate we went outside of my office and i had them write down or draw some things that they’re really angry about and when we talked about them worked on them and then we burned them
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so burning them kids like fire but it gave them something that just felt like okay now you can let all that go because that’s not what your life is about and that’s not who you are anymore and it just symbolically really helped them and they like fire that’s really interesting the the way that you you’re reaching into a kid’s mind to be able to help them work through past traumas and things like that and even plan out to the future one of the things that we’ve talked to quite a few different adults who have gone through the foster system or you were adopted or maybe weren’t even in the system but who’ve been through lots of trauma in their past how does this work when you’re dealing with the adults who have old old trauma that’s been buried under layers and layers and layers that they’ve learned to hide is this an effective way to handle that well it is and to release the what’s happening with that trauma and the way the mind is holding that trauma and everything that goes along with it it makes you do things in your life in your adult life in ways that you feel like you shouldn’t or you shouldn’t be so weak or you shouldn’t be so scared or you shouldn’t have these phobias whatever it is but so much of it stems from those traumatic memories so a very difficult one was a client that he was an adult about 25 years old but when he was eight or so his father shot everyone in his family including him and i know and he did not die everyone else did but he was just he went through the memory we have to go back into that memory and just experience it as an observer because we’ve got to get the the fear that’s stuck in it or the you know whatever that trauma is that’s held in your body we’ve got to get that released so he’s observing the experience which is just super hard you know for me to lead him through because we don’t want to create more trauma but by doing that he could then go and rescue that younger child and make sure that that child is safe now in that memory now is stored the emotions of feeling safe and loved and you’re okay and a horrible thing happened but now you’re safe so now that’s the emotion that that memory holds well i have to ask this because i’m a guy and when i need to get something done i go to youtube or a podcast and figure out how do i do this and then i don’t turn off the right circuit breaker and and i end up hitting myself with 220 volts of electricity true story once so you mentioned this but this does not sound like it’s a safe thing to just do by yourself necessarily or with your friend who you’re talking to is this the sort of thing that you can you can handle without some kind of professional help well it depends on the level of trauma in the memories you do want to have a really well-trained hypnotherapist there that knows how to do what we call regression to cause and a lot of times there’s memories that you might not know consciously were there and they’re not made up it’s just that your brain kind of blocked them off and when they do come up you want someone there that’s going to be right there and can actually put their hand on your chest and say okay just take a breath and notice that young girl right there and what she’s doing what she’s feeling and something that just keeps them in that memory and then we heal it because we have them embrace that younger girl and make sure she’s safe and we have ways to test to make sure that we’ve really resolved it but if you if you did it with like um you know if there’s a hypnotherapy session on youtube or something else that’s for trauma or for old memories it’s not a safe way to do it because there’s things that come up that you’ve got to have someone there that knows how to just go into it safely there is a one of my programs that i have on the past timeline that is recorded you go into some past memories but you do it from a disassociated viewpoint so you’re floating over this timeline of your past and i said whenever you see any area that’s dark or it feels like there’s some emotion i want you to go down and just look at it and just observe what’s happening and go all around that memory and notice what’s happening and so now they’re not in it but they can still release and resolve the issues of that memory from a disassociated viewpoint okay okay yeah because i was i’m sitting here thinking to myself if we can do this like just by ourselves that’d be super helpful but it doesn’t sound like a diy project yeah no it sounds like if you did it yourself you could really open up the doors to create more trauma yeah yeah you can but we do it all the time like there’s things that trigger our memories there’s the church we do things that trigger our memories um all the time and things are being triggered we don’t we don’t know why and we don’t understand why we feel really bad sometimes or why we screw up a relationship or why we treat people a certain way and so much of it is because the triggers that are going back to those emotions in that memory well as a parent that has lots of children with lots of trauma what would i look for to know that your services would be something that i would need
well it depends on how what kind of behavioral issues you’re having um it’s just almost anything that you’re experiencing with your kids and difficulties they’re having can be helped and i’ll give you a few examples the a girl in second grade that she was brought to me because her mom said she has a math phobia and her mom told me do not say the word math because she will fall apart she will just be bawling and crying and don’t even say the word so this poor girl has lived with this for a good year and it’s just horrible her parents have tried everything to make her feel better about doing math so what i did is i had her get relaxed and told her a little bit of a story and said now i want to want you to go back to where you learned to be afraid of the numbers and addition and subtraction so she goes back to just i guess it was earlier in that year and i think it was in second grade early second grade and she says the bell just rang and everybody’s getting up to go get their coat so we can go outside and i’m going up to the front of the room to get mine i said what happens next and she says there’s three boys that are standing with me and they’re laughing at me and teasing me i said what are they saying says they said you’re so stupid you can’t even add one plus one plus one and she said i’m not stupid but they kept saying you can’t even add one plus one plus one and that became the trauma that moment all these kids that are coming up up to the place to get their coats she’s feeling overwhelmed and now she’s feeling stupid and they’re ganging up on her so what we did is we had her go into that body of that girl standing there and i said okay you know nice and loud you tell those boys that you are not stupid you know how to do math and you are a brilliant girl and then i said what how are you going to leave this room and she got a pegasus i think it was a pegasus unicorn and she wrote it and she flew out of there so now in this memory she’s having this sense of freedom and that she can go somewhere else and think a different way and she did that that was it she never had a fear of math anymore she could do math just fine and she has a heck of a way to leave a room now too and her parents every day dealt with her in tears for months and months and um another uh person that had his son listen to my sleepy kids story was this one with this wizard and it kind of can solve a lot of problems because the wizard takes you to a place to show you how you’re going to um overcome whatever it is but anyway so this his son wouldn’t go to kindergarten they’d go to the door and the son would just cry and he was so upset every day and they tried really hard to get him to go in couldn’t do it he listens to my story and he goes to kindergarten and says bye dad bye bye-bye i’m going in and he goes in kindergarten and then the dad says he is helping other kids who are afraid of kindergarten he’s helping them i have one important question where were you 14 years ago because that particular story that particular son is 19 now and and i know that story very personally oh yes yeah yeah and it is it is so miraculous what happens with this story about the wizard um the the two girls i told you about that were just fighting all the time and then you know miraculously they’re helping out around the house and um kids who can’t go to sleep at night they listen to this story and parents say they just won’t go to sleep without the wizard story they have to do that and there’s these little magic stones that the wizard puts in their hands and some of the parents have gone and found the stones in that color so the child actually has them for real but yeah it’s it’s just miraculous i didn’t know that it was going to have this effect um i just wanted to help parents get their kids to sleep
without benadryl yeah yeah and it boy it does the job but also there’s things like kids who are having trouble spelling they’re frustrated in school because their brain didn’t learn how to spell properly how to use the proper areas of the brain to do that so we build a machine in their brain that is going to help them spell and the word goes in and they hear it and the machine makes the letters come out in their imagination um like maybe they’re green and they’re purple or we we look at what color they are maybe they’re striped but then i say okay tell me what you see and they say um it is b-o-t-t-l-e right so we use a bunch of different words and here’s an interesting thing this african-american girl who was having trouble spelling um i put some words in they would come out and they were all spelled correctly when they came out but i put the word africa in there and when it came out she said it was says i don’t know this doesn’t seem right it’s a-f-r-i-c-k-a but that doesn’t seem right i said well what do the letters look like and she said well the k is a different color i said huh we’ll take the k out and she said oh now it’s right a-f-r-i-c-a and they’re all the same color so her your mind my mind her mind we have these ways to know more than we can know consciously her brain knew that the k is technically part of africa when the c is not there but for purposes of spelling but that needed to be taken out to make it correct so now kids can spell just like that they can spell because when they look at words and when they read i’m asking that machine to store this spelling of the word in the correct way works for adults too have trouble spelling well i have a few email correspondence that i’d like to introduce you to because some of my emails that i get to read on a regular basis i need that machine to figure out what they were saying did you interpret it yeah so i make a math machine as well and this helps kids tremendously it multiplies and divides it adds and subtracts and what they have to have the skills in their brain basically but not they don’t need a lot we just need to turn it over to the subconscious then i did the same process for some men in san francisco that they trade they used to trade options in the pits you know where they scream and yell and the broker comes in and they have to do this math calculation very quickly they look at the two monitors and there’s unlike fractions so one is 3 and 1 16 and the other one is eight and um three quarters so they have to get the difference very fast and it takes time and then they lose money if they’re not quick enough so in their office i did hypnosis with all of them and had a machine built in their brain that instantly got the difference between those unlike fractions then we tested it out and every single test we did was exactly correct it was amazing and now they could just like have this field like a you know the two fields that took the two numbers and then the one that had the answer and trust that it’s correct that’s amazing i do have this question because i’ve dealt with a lot of kids and i’ve tried to help a lot of kids through a lot of different things with varying degrees of success over time it gets better it’s gotten better over the years as i’ve gotten a little bit smarter and had more experience but one of the things that i notice it seems like desire is a necessity in this
i know well in my experience what i’ve done obviously what i’ve done i tell people all the time i am a part-time completely untrained and uneducated psychiatrist so so that’s why i’m saying for me it seems like i always i have to find somebody who’s willing first and i have to kind of work on that willingness to to change first is is what you’re talking about is this something that somebody has to want to change because when you’re dealing with kids who’ve come to the foster system oftentimes they’ve dealt with enough trauma that they don’t realize that the trauma is there and that it’s affecting them their worldview is different than than mine is this is my life and this is how i feel safe and i don’t want to change it because if i change it i lose the thing that makes me feel safe so how do we help kids who don’t want that change because it it scares them even though it might really help them right because they don’t know what it’s going to feel like and if it’s unknown it creates even more fear and uncertainty they do need something that they can depend on that does feel the same so going into the future in their imagination they are going to experience something let’s say it’s just a few months in the future six months in the future and they’re going to experience thing themselves being um maybe playing a sport and they’re doing really well and people are proud of them and it feels good and it feels like all that stuff in the past all that sadness or worry or fear it’s just gone now it’s just you’ve let it go and you’re doing something that makes you really happy now we’re creating this feeling and this experience in their mind but it is held as a real memory that we say that the subconscious doesn’t know the difference between a real and an imagined event so when a child is imagining it vividly the subconscious is accepting that it is a real memory there’s a lot of opinions about that but that’s one of the theories so if that’s the case this child is playing baseball people are having fun part of a team feeling like he or she is really important and doing something they love their now their mind holds that as a real memory and so now the fear of going out and being a different person or taking a chance or putting themselves out there is is less for instance if a child is just really afraid to participate in class maybe i take them to a time of few months in the future where they’re getting up in front of the class and they’re giving a presentation and it’s fun because they created this thing and the kids are all just really liking it and the teacher’s really proud now you have this memory that oh it’s okay for me to get up and participate in class or to talk to the kids and you know just attaching positive emotions and for parents i think one of the most difficult things is that everything you’re saying to your child is going in and it’s like a hypnotic suggestion if you say why do you always screw this up it’s just you’re making it really difficult on me why are you why do you make these mistakes you know you’re just reinforcing in that child’s mind that they do make mistakes or why can’t you just do your math homework it’s not that hard why don’t you get it now what you’ve done is you’ve implanted more suggestions about why don’t you get it why why do you think it’s so hard so we want to change the words that we use and we want to make them into something positive and say you know it’ll get easier for you your brain is learning how to do this and every time you practice with your math it’s going to get easier and i’m here to help you now you’ve implanted a suggestion that it will get easier like with kids in sports that are having problems there was a boy i worked with and for some reason i don’t know if it was his dad or his coach but the boys on playing third base and he would drop the ball when it was thrown to him and they kept telling him why do you always drop the ball you got to quit dropping the ball you’re just you’re causing all these you know problems and we’re losing games whatever so his whole entire auditory message when he was getting ready to have a ball thrown to him at third base was that you’re going to drop the ball you’re going to drop the ball and he said i can hear it i can hear it now we do this in slow motion and he’s just hearing all these words that you’re going to drop the ball so what we did is we just changed it to no you got this and now here comes the ball the pitcher is throwing it right to you and when your glove is up it sticks in your glove and it stays there now you throw it perfectly right to the person that you need to throw it to you just change the words so watch the words that you’re saying with your kids if they don’t eat their vegetables say why don’t you eat vegetables what is wrong with you they taste good you’re always giving me such a problem with eating vegetables and then buy pickle island and have them listen to that
the words the words we use they’re so powerful implanting suggestions you know and even when you explain the story of pickle island it kind of implies something to me that maybe just maybe you don’t have an overnight success option here for us that this is something that we need to work on over time and allow it to grow and not expect it to be a miracle solution every time yeah it does take some time in a lot of cases if you’re a hypnotherapist things happen like just you know instantly in each session so if you do take your child to a hypnotherapist you’ll get some pretty big issues resolved very quickly or like i have so many recordings for kids that um like if your child wets the bed you have the child listen to the story in the evening when they’re going to sleep and to stop bedwetting and instead of all the shame and embarrassment and all the fear and i imagine so many foster kids must have that problem from all the emotional trauma oh yes yeah and all they’re operating on is you know the shame and embarrassment and limitations in their life so they can listen to a recording and sometimes have an instant like miraculous change where they don’t wet the bed anymore or it might take a few days for the brain to rearrange the way it’s controlling how it decides to pee or to hold it in so instead of talking about wetting the bed or not wetting the bed there’s wording that you’ll stay dry all night and that little place in your body that knows how to stay closed tight all night your brain knows exactly how to do that we give the brain a little helper that’s going to monitor it at night while they’re sleeping and help it stay closed tight all night and it’s just amazing it actually works really quickly but i was working with a little boy named grant who was seven and he had never had a dry night in his whole life and um he’s just he’s so sad about wetting the bed every night so we did this thing and had him imagine you know that that place in his body was going to stay closed tight all night then i had him go swim with a dolphin and look at the baby dolphins blow hole and this baby dolphin is learning how to keep the blow hole closed tight so no water goes in or out and he helped this baby dolphin learn how to keep that closed tight and that was part of what was then affecting his brain and his body to make that connection um but the after our second session he asked his mom to call me on the phone and then he got on the phone with me and he said wendy this is the best day of my life first time he had been dry and he continued never to wet the bed oh my gosh that’s amazing that’s it this sounds a whole like like it involves um some amount of nlp and for the listeners neuro-linguistic programming i believe is what that stands for and it has a lot to do with learning how to use the correct words or yeah i i hate using right and wrong sometimes for labels but the words that are more effective yeah yeah and i we’re not trained you know most of us are not trained well i am most people are not trained in how to do that so if i was talking to you about um a problem that you’ve had with well maybe you have a fear of driving or something say well you know there are some people who get over their fear of driving just because they look at it differently and they start to feel like it’s a relaxing thing to do when they drive and other people they let go of their fear of driving because they just suddenly relax when they’re in the car and even just having their hands on the steering wheel just relaxes them so what i said is that some people experience it this way some people experience it this way but for you you might find that the next time you get in your car that your mind has made some changes and it just feels more comfortable than it ever has so now i’m suggesting that that’s how it’s going to be for you so we say some people do this some people feel it this way and for you you might feel it this way these are gentle nlp language hypnosis you know suggestions and i might say like um i wonder if you will notice how good it feels to be a comfortable driver that you just really started liking driving and notice how good that feels and what is the first thing you notice now what i’m doing is putting presuppositions in there so i’m presupposing that you already are comfortable driving by wording it like that but what is the first thing you notice when you’re in the car feeling really comfortable and you realize that all those things you used to feel are in the past so i didn’t say the word fear and i didn’t have anything that mentioned any tension just those things you used to feel that those are in the past so asking you to find out what is like if i say what is the first thing you notice when you’re sitting in your car and you’re comfortable and and feeling good i’m presupposing that you are feeling good your brain is doing a search to find all of those things that match up with what i said and for kids as well this can work not for driving though we don’t let them drive yet oh you just made my little one sad he drives trucks around all day fortunately for me right now the bulldozer is still plastic well i want to switch gears to something a little bit more intense because we’ve had a couple different interviews that we have we’ve recorded now and i think one of them is out i don’t think the other one has come out yet it’s two different two different stories about rad and for people who are not familiar with rad it’s reactive attachment disorder and that’s a big one i’m just going to assume you know a little bit about that um give me a quick quick little explanation on it usually it’s children who who did not have the ability to create attachment at by an appropriate age and then the results are usually later on down the road really really traumatic and can lead you know out to some well one of the episodes that we recently aired was with um cheryl rujo and she talked about this girl that had come into her home at about eight years old and inside of oh i’m gonna say six months to a year had uh had progressed as far as trying to burn the house down and had tried to she had live plucked a couple of the chickens that they had outside attempted to kill their animals then she tried to kill her sister tried to shove her into the fireplace attempted to drown her it was it was really significant to the point where she did everything that she could think of she rushed out to every place she could reach out to they had exhausted their time their mental emotional energy and all the wealth that they could they could throw at it first for help um from professionals and was never able to really get to a place where they could help this girl heal from that problem yeah now some some of those kids do have much better stories and there there’s a story coming out soon here in a few weeks uh gina hearman i believe it is and and she had a little boy who was adopted from bolivia i believe bulgaria it was somewhere over there and he had he’d come over and he was he was diagnosed with rad as well and it took a lot of time and a lot of work and they did eventually break through it but is is hypnotherapy the sort of thing that that could be a real change game changer for some of these kids who’ve experienced and it’s usually because of some really significant trauma from a caregiver from a primary caregiver at a young age and in foster care we see that way too often yeah and i think for stephen being you know in the foster care in russia and all the abuse um for him i think it was reclaiming that younger self and for him to go back and look at that situation and rescue his younger self we do it with adults as well taking them back to even as early as a baby that’s a few months old and when you say that you know a lack of attachment um we are now going to create that attachment in their mind and their soul and the cells in their body as they rescue that baby
hey there foster care nation if you’d like to find yourself in a group with like-minded people head over to facebook and you can find us at facebook.com groups foster care uj we’ve got a group over there where we talk about foster care we talk about adoption and we talk about all the things related if your podcast player allows it you can also reach down and hit that subscribe button so you get notified every week when we put up uploads every tuesday a new episode comes out we’d love to see you next week now back to the show and you you reclaim that baby and the way that you want to be connected to it and then it stays with you and it’s a very powerful experience sometimes you rescue your inner child at different ages but i think that in what you’re saying about rad that this is a key element that helps you replace the fear the loneliness the rejection with something that is okay now this child is safe or this baby is safe and i’m in charge of it and i’m going to keep that baby loved and accepted that could help with the um attack detachment disorder it could i i know it helps adults for sure but i haven’t done it with kids to have them go and like reclaim that baby that is you know really um in that situation but i i suspect that it would work wonders because it all for adults it does it’s just miraculous what happens when they get that child and all the memories that they’ve held of feeling rejected or in danger or in fear and when they do that and they claim that child and bring it back into their heart and soul then that child in your memory is now safe so now you’re operating from a place where that child is safe rather than all those memories of fear and rejection and um and the detachment from the parents and birth parents now i mentioned before my my uh lack of a degree in and training in psychology so i have a little bit of a theory here that that i’ll run past you because we’ve we’ve had lots of kids who come to our house of varying ages a lot of young ones we we primarily take care of younger kids and i noticed something over time that every time there’s a baby with us even to include um now occasional a couple days a week our godson will come over and spend the evening with us and when we have a baby in the house i have seen more than one 14 15 16 year old boy who can be a pain in the butt when they want to be um who have a hard time regulating emotions suddenly kind of melt into just this amazing little caregiver who will come over i want to hold the baby dad at one point i had cj and austin were probably what about 13 14 15 years old and they would come home from school and they would argue over here who gets to hold the baby and i look at him first and i watch it and it’s almost and here’s my theory is that somehow another it’s you know mentally you’re caring for the smaller version of you and i think i see that even in adults you know you walk into a room with a baby and watch people just you know melt and and they everybody wants to hold the baby and talk to the baby and they and they get so sweet and kind and and hardened people that you work with sometimes that you’re like no this guy’s an a-hole i’d never let him near him but you know but you watch him just change and it’s amazing the power of an infant in that way and i kind of wonder if it’s if it’s not some of that yeah yeah because the thing that i’m having um people do going back to when they’re rescuing their younger self is they are holding that and looking in the eyes of that child or that baby and just opening themselves up to the vulnerability of having that baby and and then giving it all that love so you’re right when you’re holding you know someone else’s baby it’s still you transferring that feeling of your childhood and maybe healing some of it
yeah that’s just one of those theories i’ve come up with seeing how how babies tend to make make people act differently and well they just make them better humans and real quick though before anybody gets me wrong if you’re having trouble in a marriage i’m not saying have a baby and it’ll make it all better
because then they cry and scream and wake up in the middle of the night and they start to get teeth and they throw fits and they do all those sorts of things that babies do but it’s it’s those moments that i see a difference that i become a different person i notice it in myself yeah right yeah and it’s it’s worth doing therapy that is rescuing your own inner child because the feeling you get from holding that baby it’s like times a thousand when you’re doing it with yourself and connecting with that inner child those memories that we have from all those moments in childhood we don’t have to go into each one of them and work on them we want to look at a few that are the most impactful in a negative way that created whatever the pain is you have but then go into a point where that child if it’s five years old or six months old or even a newborn that you’re keeping it safe and giving it that love and changing the way that memory is held and it is really miraculous when that happens and and you’re right you know that feeling of holding a baby is creating some of that but we just need the the verbiage to go with it that says as you hold this baby you notice how it feels almost like you’re holding your own self and keeping your own inner child safe and loved and cared for and that is just so healing to have that belief and to come from that place of love
yeah that that’s an amazing help that we’ve found with with kids is just seeing seeing a little one actually transform what could have been 20 minutes ago a war zone in our home because i mean i’m going to be honest here we’ve been doing foster care for for what 10 years now 12 years something like that 12. and people look oh god bless you you’re amazing people know we’re just we’re just learning to be patient people and and our house is a war zone just like every other house some days especially through those difficult years because we have lots of trauma um i do want to ask you this because as you talk about all this it sounds really really really helpful but do you do this can you do any of this work through zoom or is this or or some other platform or does it all need to be done in person with the therapists that you can can physically walk in and spend time with yeah if there’s trauma involved you really want to do it in person and you want to make sure that your hypnotherapist is very well trained that they have a lot of experience and most of them are people who do hypnotherapy i find that they’re passionate about it and they just immerse themselves in it and get all the training they can and then get more training and just you know more with um the brilliant minds who are innovating hypnotherapy on zoom my issues are that if somehow we lost the connection what if i have you know this woman has gone back to her childhood at you know this one-year-old self and and here she’s crying and sobbing because she’s finally able to let that go and reclaim that child but what if the connection goes bad or what if the sound glitch glitches a little or yeah oh it would be a really difficult moment to just have this thing that’s wide open and we haven’t resolved it and that’s one of the things i worry about so we don’t take everybody back to these traumatic events but if it is going to involve trauma sometimes people just they go right back into it without even being asked we’re not asking them to go back to a time when they felt you know afraid or worthless or anything sometimes it just happens now like an interesting example is a woman who she was in my office and she had migraines every thursday horrific ones and they’d tried everything so i asked her to go back to the first time her mind learned to feel that way and she’s in my chair and all of a sudden she can’t breathe and she’s going
and her head’s shaking back and forth and she’s not breathing and she looks like she’s choking or something and i’m like whoa so i said when i count to three and i touch your shoulder you will stay right there be able to breathe easily and gently one two three and touched her shoulder and she went
and started breathing and i said stay right there in that moment but breathe easily and tell me what’s happening now if this had happened on zoom it would have been a little bit more difficult and a little more uncertainty for like oh how do i get her to breathe um so she says my husband is strangling me his hands are around my neck and he’s strangling me and i can’t breathe he’s trying to kill me this is what was happening and her brain recreated it and so then of course you know she was breathing and she could work through that and i said what day of the week is it when he’s doing this and she said it’s thursday so that’s why she had migraines every thursday for years and then she didn’t have them anymore when we worked through that but the point is on zoom with kids or adults ah boy if you lose that connection you know might be in a really tough spot to do that you could create more trauma that way and as much as i’d like to be able to take a kid over to your place to to talk about these things um i’ll go to hawaii no
i tried she’s gonna show up with a whole tassel full of kids um no but i mean so obviously this is not an option for everybody to take a take a flight over to hawaii so if you’re gonna go look for somebody who can do this sort of work what do you look for and what kind of questions he asked to make sure you’ve got somebody who’s not you know um well real quick when i was in the army i’d injured my back and i had a had a an officer tell me that i needed surgery right away looking at him i could tell one important thing he was within five years of my own age and i was a young guy and i’m like no i could tell pretty quick he did not have the experience that i wanted from for a surgeon who’s gonna cut on my back but so what you know how do you know who you’re dealing with because people can tell you all the time they’re good and we’re awesome we do amazing things how do you know who you’re dealing with and how do you find somebody who’s going to help through real traumatic stuff yeah i’m so glad you asked this question and we can get this out there um there are some really horrible hypnotherapists i just watched a training from a guy in england that he’s very well known and he’s been in this doing this for a long time and he was doing a training and he had a veteran sitting in a chair and had that veteran go and experience something difficult and then for 30 minutes all he did was say let it go let it go let it go over and over and over and it was like no no no no no you’re not oh you’re not helping and it was horrible and people are seeing that training thinking that’s how you deal with trauma and it’s not so you want to look at their experience where they got trained um how many years they’ve been doing it do they have any trauma training and you know where did they get that training because it is a very important piece of your training is to know how to deal with trauma because it comes up i have a golfer and i’m working with a golfer what could go wrong and all of a sudden he goes into some big memory when he was five years old just out of the blue you’ve got to know how to deal with it so there are hypnotherapy organizations that will let you become a certified hypnotherapist online for 29 they’ll give you a certificate you supposedly take this training but there’s no oversight there’s no practice and it’s just it’s horrible that people could be called that so look at the history of all the trainings they’ve had what conferences that they show on their bio that they’ve been a teacher or a trainer and you know once you go to your first session with that person you’re gonna have a pretty good idea of whether you feel like you can place your confidence in them because yeah the bad ones stick out pretty quickly but yeah you gotta you gotta look into their background like if you look into mine you know 25 years and i have been flown all over the world to do hypnotherapy with some pretty amazing people including the russian mafia i didn’t know i was in cyprus but it went fine um but you you have all these different experiences and i’ve been to so many trainings and i’ve been a trainer at all these different conferences and you got to just look at the wealth of training a person has had and you know if you don’t feel right about it after the first session don’t keep going back to that one find the one that you say okay this person can help me yeah i that’s one thing i always like to do is that trusting your gut thing because i used to kind of wonder what that really was but the little bit of education i found about it you know the the the way that the brain works the way that that we’re you know our first language is body language right a baby learns to hold his hands a certain way when he wants you to pick him up or to give you a bottle and and you learn all that stuff as a baby and then we forget that we know that language and we speak it all day every day the other way to find a good one is there are several organizations that are really good organizations for hypnotherapy um like there’s one in london that if you were living there and you wanted to find a therapist you would contact that organization and ask who they would recommend because they know who’s been trained in different things in the u.s there’s three or four really good organizations that you can go to and they’ll refer you it’s just it’s an unregulated industry it’s not really industry but it’s unregulated it’s unfortunate that there isn’t a higher like across the board standard not that we want the government to get into regulating hypnotherapy but but it is something that anyone can call themselves a hypnotherapist but the government is so good at regulating all of our lives oh yeah in so many ways yeah we won’t dive off into that or or i might need therapy by the end
foster yeah with all your foster kids and you know what red tape you go through with the government wow yes yeah so we and and i’ve said it before and i’ll say it again we’re really fortunate where we’re at we’ve had really good workers we’ve had really good people who who are really interested in helping kids in our area but i’ve heard some horror stories some real horror stories so it’s it’s a real challenge for a lot of people to deal with with some of that those labels levels of regulation that people have to deal with and sometimes getting the kids the help they need is a real challenge as well because if i think a kid needs a certain type of therapy then i mention it to us to a worker and they have to clear it to a supervisor and use it they have to go to court and they’ll talk to the judge and the judge has to believe them so now we’re you know four degrees of separation later to get somebody to believe that that what you’re saying look i’ve had 20 something kids in my house at this point i know what i’m looking at when i’m seeing it but the judge is hearing what the supervisor said about what the worker said about what i told them that i saw or i heard a story from a child care worker somewhere and and it gets lost in translation and kids don’t get the help they need a lot of times and that’s that’s a lot of our struggle well that can take three to four months to even get that type of clearance wow wow yeah oh yeah and your hearts just must break for them you wanting to help them so much and be so selfless to take all these kids into your house that desperately need help and ah i can’t imagine how difficult that would be when you throw in the court and all the things you were just mentioning well you know for the kids of certain ages there are parents who have them listen to my regular hypnosis sessions that are made for they’re made for adults but you know at some age you just use adult ones um with them and there’s so many things that your kids could get help with just from the recordings like even just self-esteem or self-love letting go having forgiveness and the things that we can do in a process with a recorded program then that has a pretty big impact if you’re if a child is actually experiencing this forgiveness for what has happened in the past and understanding what forgiveness means and then getting to see their future self just those two pieces are potentially a huge life change for them and maybe get rid of some of the anger and the frustration and not have to be so reactive there’s a kindergarten teacher that used to play my cds for her kindergarteners when it was nap time and she played the adult cds because i didn’t have kids stuff then she said this is so great because the kids are like so happy and they love the stories and they love the processes and everything so you know you just you try it and see what happens well yeah because i understand that a lot of kids when they go through that trauma their their child brain to some extent becomes usurped by their teenage brain long before their bodies are teenagers yeah when these kids have to deal with that trauma have to become the the adult in the room oftentimes and deal with that so you’re dealing with a kid who’s on a different level than your average kindergartner may be for sure yeah they’ve experienced a lot of things that no kindergarteners should ever go through and their brain doesn’t know how to manage that or what to do with that but we can compartmentalize it in a way with the hypnosis if i have a child looking at whatever that emotional thing is and looking at it from a distance and maybe encapsulating it in a bubble and just then understanding that as it gets smaller and smaller that they they understand that it wasn’t because they were bad and it wasn’t because you did something wrong it was just a very very sad thing that happened to you and it gets smaller and smaller and smaller and then let’s replace it with that child no matter what age they are embracing that younger self and creating the love and acceptance and the belief that yeah it wasn’t my fault it was just something bad that happened but now things are changing yeah yeah and um boy i just i think that with the miracles that i’ve seen in the child’s stories that i have that those might help some of those young children it might give them something that it changes that perspective and it opens their mind to some different images and emotions and sensations and they could have a big effect absolutely so you have these products out there available for people how would they find them if you go to wendy.com and wendy’s with an i so it’s w-e-n-d-i dot com i have all kinds of programs that are set up in a format so that you can just go through them and it tells you what to do each day tells you which ones to listen to um some of the programs have some program or a session you listen to in the morning when you first wake up you stay in bed and just put it on because you’re already kind of in hypnosis and then there will be a therapy session during the day and it might say write down what you noticed about that time in your life and write down the emotions or something like that and then you might do a session the next day that’s going into the future or it’s accomplishing something or experiencing yourself not having a certain fear in your life and it’s reinforcing that you no longer have that fear that was something in the past and now when you get up on stage you love speaking to an audience and you’re brave and creative and it’s fun but that’s um yeah that’s the best way is go to wendy.com and if you don’t know what you should be choosing because i’ve got hundreds of programs that i’ve made over the years just send me an email you can just there’s a link there that you can email me and i’ll give you some ideas on what you could do and if it’s for your kids i’ve got all these kids programs that help young kids um with all kinds of things like i said bedwetting and food issues and anger and difficulties and like that one woman that stopped me at my workshop and she said her children her two children are happy and they play together and they’re not fighting and they help around the house and i’m like wow how about that it’s a miracle but anyway it could happen for your kids as well well if you ever want to come to the st louis area i have a place you could stay and maybe um do that for for our tassel of kids because i’m certain every one of them would benefit from some of that they because right now the the kids we have in our house have all experienced some level of trauma and most of it’s higher level even even our little ones who for the most part have had their trauma ex was experienced before they’re gonna remember yeah yeah you know within the first year of life and for for one and the other one was all really in utero and and you know the first couple days but but it’s there you know he was he was born addicted to methamphetamines and so he’s got some some stuff there and i look at him and i watch him and i go man this kid’s going to need help as we move forward well the brain still remembers yeah yeah and even though those memories are let’s say as an infant or a birth trauma or something it still has this impact it is cemented into your brain because it is the most traumatic thing you felt you know in your life probably and i did i worked with a woman that went back to her birth oh she was the one that she fainted every time she went to the doctor she was about 20 years old and every time she went into a doctor’s office she just collapsed and fainted every time she can’t ever remember not fainting so i had her go back to the cause of the problem and she went back to when she was a newborn and she described her entire birth experience to me and she said i can feel that they’re taking me away and everything feels like i’m just limp and she’s feeling the visceral feeling in her body now that she was feeling as that newborn and and now it’s just feels like everything’s going like dark and i can’t i can’t feel anymore or something so maybe she was going unconscious but they took her and then they’re poking and prodding and doing all this and this is her birth experiences being poked and prodded she described to me who she saw in that room when they were working on her and then and in the birth during the birth she described who was in the room now her mother has never talked to her about her birth but she went back and talked to her mother and said this is what i saw during my birth she described the doctor and another person in there and she even told me some things they said and told her mother and the whole experience was exactly what happened during her birth wow she could recall this and she never fainted again after that that’s good for the head injury side of it oh yeah i mean she’s got a memory it well we all have access to that information because however our brain stores this information um you know who knows there’s so many theories but we have access to it when someone can guide you to go back and revivify that event and we can get those memories to come out and i find that very interesting because there’s a lot of my own childhood that i do not remember and for the most part i had a pretty decent childhood you know my mom was mean once or twice and my dad yelled at me once or twice right and i probably deserved every bit of it i’m not gonna lie but when i look at back across my childhood my memories are pretty scarce but there’s been moments where i’ll be at a family function and my sister will say hey remember that time and she’ll start telling a story a story i have no idea what she’s talking about until she gets into the story and i go holy cow like the whole thing comes in and it’s clear and i remember it it happened i had this memory but i had no ability to access it before she brought it up and began to describe it to me and i there’s a lot of my childhood that i think is in that place and i don’t i don’t understand that a bit but it it speaks to what you’re saying that it’s it’s there and it’s accessible you just need a way to access it yeah so it’s the neural pathways that carry the information to the area that that memory is stored now it doesn’t necessarily mean that memory is stored in just this one little chunk of your brain but maybe it’s stored in many different ways and if i had you go back to the time when you felt x y z always take some time and getting your brain to light up some of the things that were parts of those memories something might come up that you totally had not even remembered but you might say huh yeah i’m i’m on a train and i’m not sure where i’m going and my mom is here but i’m riding a train oh oh we’re in canada and then pieces of this memory are triggered by the different emotional things or some visuals that start popping up and then the memories do open up and in most cases i found that when people go check and ask their parents or their family about these memories they are accurate there might be some pieces of it that aren’t quite accurate but it’s a matter of getting your neural pathways to start reaching to all the places where those memories are stored that’s amazing you know one of our own family history stories of my own family and i will go ahead and say if you know me personally in my family the veracity this story is is true according to the teller but i i was my grandmother my maternal grandmother had some some issues some mental health issues and um and supposedly my grandpa went to the library and got a book on on hypnosis and supposedly worked for years trying to help her get through that now i don’t know if that’s true or not but you know this would have been something that would have happened in the mid 50s early 60s and again it’s just a testament to guys and and our ability and desire to go figure out how we can fix it and go fix things but you know it’s it’s those things that man we we all need help through some of these things in our life and i think that especially as guys we’re less likely to want to reach out for that and as foster parents and foster dads oftentimes we’re less likely to be the one to reach out and say hey let’s find some help for this kid instead i’ve got the solution come here boy you know that kind of mentality that’s anything punishment more punishment they don’t need more threats and and that that’s the thing that that has has been difficult for me i grew up in that world right that’s just the way my parents were raised and their parents and so on and and that was what i thought parenting really was you know if you do this then i’ll do that i’ll make your life difficult to the point that you want to do what i ask you to do and it seems like it’s a viable parenting model but when you’re dealing especially with kids who have difficult trauma in their background it’s not as effective
there aren’t any rewards that are going to motivate them because they’re coming from a place of anger and rage and all the trauma so there’s something we do called parts therapy that is kind of an nlp process but it would work with kids of many ages and then so if there’s a child that’s really angry about something um you can say hey well let’s you know let’s sit down take a look at what’s happening here you know if um if you could get them to just close their eyes and take a few breaths and say there’s a part of you that wants to be angry and we want to know that that part is still loved and that part deserves to be heard so can you find that part of you like is it in your shoulders or your chest or your belly where do you notice that part of you that just needs to be angry and then maybe they say oh it’s in my chest and say what color is it and some red and how big is it what does it look like it’s like it’s it’s all across my chest or whatever so we want them to get in touch with that very slowly and what we’re doing is getting the the things that they need to be angry about to be connected to it being a part of them and you know and it’s just a symbol that we’re creating but now we’re going to talk to that part so you ask we know that that part needs to be angry that there’s a purpose for it to be angry but could you just ask that part just silently go to that part and ask it what do you really want and just let that part tell you what it really wants and then maybe um the child will say well the part just it just wants to break everything it wants to just destroy everything say okay we’ll just say thank you to that part for that information and even deeper is there something that that part wants and maybe the child says who wants everybody to quit being mean to me say yeah that’s so true isn’t it so tell that part thank you and even deeper what does that part want and maybe you know now the child just says that part really wants to be able to feel loved and it just doesn’t feel loved or something so now you’ve gotten down past the part has to be angry the part is feeling this the part actually wants to be loved but then you can ask that part is there another way that that part can get the love that it wants without being angry and without breaking anything or needing to hurt other people is there a way that that part could get that love so i want you to let that part answer so just ask it is there another way that you could get what you need and the amazing answers that come up in parts therapy are just they’re so brilliant and it transforms how that reactive anger was happening and i think for kids especially if they were able to have someone lead them through the parts therapy they could come up with some different solutions for what they need and then let’s say you know the child asks the part what is another way that you could do that or get what you need and get that love and maybe that part just kind of starts having a vision of the child laughing and being happy and helping mom fold laundry or doing things that make it feel loved being connected and say wow let’s find another way what’s another way that that part feels really loved and so the child is building all of these different connections to the things that make him or her feel loved where before when they were feeling rejected or that they weren’t lovable or they weren’t worthy of it they just had an anger response that’s the only response they could have because they’re pissed off and it’s not because you’re not loving them now it’s just that they can’t receive it they just don’t know how to make it happen so this could be really really good for the foster kids to just you know work on that part that needs to be angry and acknowledging that it needs to be angry we understand that now let’s find out what’s deeper and deeper and deeper so you know so we talked to you know foster parents adoptive parents or maybe even um some hopeful foster parents out there who are people interested in becoming foster parents what’s the one or two things that you would advise people when they’re walking into this because we’re not getting neurotypical kids walking into our house all the time we’re not getting kids who’ve who have sunshine and roses in their background they’re gonna have some trauma walk into their house so what are some what what advice would you give them one or two things that that would help them be able to connect with kids and keep them keep that relationship open yeah and we we just have to look at um as a parent your own stuff that’s reactive and the things that you’re battling with from your childhood because those things are going to get triggered if you haven’t released them or resolved them um yeah that’s a difficult one because each each situation is going to be so different but i know like working with stephen all that time first thing when you’re asking that question is like don’t be
his parents were kind of [ _ ] they were very stern and very mean like when she would drop stephen off the other two kids were in the car and open the windows and they want to say hi to wendy because they really like the stuff we’ve done together and the mom said no no no no keep the window closed you can’t do that why not don’t be an [ _ ] um and i’m sure that foster parents mostly are kind but these were two attorneys that worked 60 hours a week and got three russian kids who had all this trauma and stephen did great because he came to see me for like a year and he was doing awesome but if you’re as a parent if you have issues that trigger you and trigger your childhood or your unworthiness or your need to be loved and maybe you’re getting foster kids because you’re trying to heal some of that with yourself it’s probably not going to happen the way that you want it to unless you get your own issues resolved first so people who are going to be foster parents let’s clean up your inner child work let’s get any of your trauma dealt with so that you’re not reacting from that because that you know that’s a big one with kids to not let it transfer to your own issues so look at the things in your past and really get to a point where you resolve them work on forgiveness in your family atmosphere that you had growing up or even currently with a marriage that’s gone bad or someone who did you wrong look at getting that forgiveness done the forgiveness doesn’t make what happened right it doesn’t mean it was okay it means that you’re no longer holding anger about that event and you’re willing to release it and understand what happened that made that particular event so impactful so the forgiveness is really important and just so people know it doesn’t mean that that made the other person right or made the situation right but it’s it’s making it so you’re no longer reacting out of that event or that emotion absolutely i i love the idea of understanding the difference between forgiveness and forgive and forget because that second one i think is an unwise idea usually yeah yeah we neutralize the memories so if we go into forgiveness and i’m angry at my mother because when i was young i just felt so um rejected or scared or maybe because spanking was like a big deal when i was a kid with a belt
so a lot of my anger of feeling like so helpless to being spanked like that um you know but it’s then i take the person as an adult i take you and put you into the mind and the vision of that person so in this case i would go into the mind of my father and looking through his eyes and feeling what he feels and he he was a preacher all of his adult life and he had a church and the word of god was what taught him and his family when he grew up that taught him that you spank your children that that’s how you raise your children spare the rod spoil the child how many times should i hear that one yeah so then i can forgive him because that’s the only way he knew that’s the only thing he believed that was the right thing to do in god’s eyes was to spank your children now i can forgive that because he didn’t know any different it wasn’t his fault it was what he was taught he could have made different decisions but this one was one that he felt was the way he had to raise children you know i think that was one of the things that allowed me to really connect with my own father is when i got to the point to realize that that he was just a guy like me kind of lost and kind of stumbling through a path without a book that told him all the you know all the secret answers he was just trying to find his way through it just like i am and really oh i want that to reach out to everyone listening you know what you just said is so valuable you know my dad and i always had a good relationship but when i got to that point it was it was just a game changer for me that i was understanding who he was and in that moment you know i had a conversation actually recently with my oldest son and we were talking through some of the things that who you know what he did as a kid and how we we dealt with it and how we deal with things differently now and all that and i had to remind him because he’s 22 now and i had to remind him dude i was your age and i was handed a kid what do you think you would do you know and honestly he’d do a whole lot better because he was raised in a house with a lot of kids and he was in our home while we were when we started fostering and so he seemed a lot more than i ever had but he goes yeah yeah i get that i get that you know so he can make that connection a little earlier in life and maybe release some of that stuff as well but it’s that was really powerful wow yeah and to be able to feel it from inside of the other person’s experience it softens us and gives us compassion to feel what they feel and in doing the forgiveness work i just love to have the person go inside of that the other person’s mind and body and even if it’s a kind of a horrible person like maybe it’s not a parent but it’s someone who did something really horrible when they go into that person you can feel what they feel and he says you know oh just so much anger there’s so much anger and they say you know this this person just wasn’t raised with love or with compassion or understanding or wisdom and now this person is just an angry angry person and maybe this isn’t how they want to feel but it’s the only way they know how and so then you have the person come back out of that body and mind and be face to face looking at that person and say when you look in those eyes you understand that this isn’t the man that he wanted to be but he doesn’t know any other way because he had a lot of pain in his life and he wasn’t brought up being loved and accepted and so we have that compassion from inside and then you’re looking at that person and you just can’t help but let it go and forgive and and feel that compassion that you know this person is an [ __ ] because of some things in their life and maybe they didn’t want to have it that way but it’s the way it turned out yeah and it seems like the only only thing we have to change it is to to create that compassion and and maybe change the next generation everyone’s fighting their battles but when you do the hypnotherapy to get your oh your issues dealt with it is such a different world out there i did it i went to a group thing um it was four days to start with and it was all day and sometimes you’d be there till midnight or past midnight and it was brilliant um they took us through all this inner child stuff they they didn’t call it hypnosis but it was you know we’re in trance all the time doing stuff and reclaiming that inner child and i can remember that moment even though it was over 25 years ago holding my younger self and just flying away with her and it’s still so impactful for me to have that vision and that feeling and that emotion um it was it was extraordinary and that’s one way to do it you know if you want to immerse yourself in one of those groups but um otherwise find a really good hypnotherapist well it sounds like i appreciate your your advice here because as foster parents as adoptive parents we we oftentimes walk into this with no clue what we’re walking into and if we can walk into it and have some that that inner child work done first it’s just going to make us better able to help kids who need some of that same stuff and if we can help them when they’re five six seven eight years old think of the difference that makes in their life as they get older huge yeah and and notice the way that you communicate you know you became a foster parent because you want to help these kids and love them it’s all going to be you know roses and lollipops but look at your communication style in your life do you interrupt people or do you try to fix things rather than asking them more questions do you battle a little bit make other people wrong those communication styles are going to be really difficult for a foster child because i don’t know with anyone because they’re just going to create more resistance and do you when when there’s a problem going on do you ask more questions and then just really listen and keep asking more questions and allowing that child to really be heard and understood and say wow that must feel really difficult for you and yeah i just i can’t imagine how hard that is for you but instead there’s people like the two parents of stephen you know that they’re just really combative you can’t have a decent conversation and they’re just like making you wrong about everything but that’s their job their lawyers that’s exactly what i was thinking they’re lawyers that’s what they’re trained to do they spend a lot of money to get good at that yeah so be aware of your style of communication going into being a foster parent and maybe do a little bit of work on how you communicate um and if you notice you’re a person who interrupts a lot then you might want to stop and take a breath and listen
that’s simple and very impactful i found because i was and i’m about getting better and always on that journey but i appreciate you coming on here today great style your communication style is great you’re just wonderful to talk to yeah well depends sometimes sometimes when you’re 14 and tell me i’m stupid i’m not as good at it we all have our struggles but i appreciate you coming on and sharing your knowledge and wisdom and then letting people know that there’s different ways to approach these difficult situations because we we don’t always know that well we never know that when we walk in you know whether it’s a foster kid or even your own biological kid they hand you that kid and no instructions and then they send you out of the hospital and you get to go make all the mistakes like i did and if you can find somebody like wendy who can keep you from making some of those mistakes out of the gate that will just that that benefit is it’s an investment and it just increases you know when an algorithm over time and you look down later and go wow that that was really helpful so so yeah thank you for showing up today and and giving your wisdom out to the people who who are looking for it yeah very grateful that you had me on so that we could spread the word and help people because i know some of the things i’ve talked about are really hitting home for people and they’re feeling like oh okay that that’s something i can do so yeah thank you thank you thank you quick after show note after finishing up the recording with wendy she told me about her son sean who she lost to an addiction this part of her life she is dedicated to helping parents and families get through their struggles whether it be addictions or otherwise this message is known in her mind as shawn’s gift to the world
thank you for coming and listen to wendy today i hope you have gained some knowledge and wisdom that you can bring into your life and to your family be sure to come back next week we put up new shows every tuesday if you would like to share your story as a guest you can reach us at foster care uj gmail.com you can connect with other like-minded people at facebook.com groups foster care uj don’t forget we have a patreon where you can support our mission at patreon.com foster care nation and as always thank you for listening
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