Episode 43 - Emily Cleghorn
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Welcome to Permission to be Human, the podcast. I'm your host Mel Findlater, mother, coach, and curator of Permission to be Human, the company and community. If you're a mom, know a mom, or want to be a mom, and you crave getting out in the world to make a difference, then you're in the right place. This is a space for moms like you to connect with yourself, your purpose, and your big audacious dreams.
Because when you feel your best, you can better you, your family, and the wider world. Let's do this.
/ Hey everyone. We have Emily Cleghorn with us today, and she's a really interesting coach who specializes in trauma and motherhood. And it's a really interesting conversation we have today about. Her story and how we as moms who perhaps have had trauma in our [00:01:00] lives at various points. I get triggered. And are still healing.
And how do we manage through motherhood with that? I want to give a quick trigger warning here, because Emily does talk a little bit about the childhood abuse that she had. So if that is something that is going to make you feel unsafe, or you're not in the right space for this right now, then please listen to it later if appropriate.
And it's definitely not one for your kids to listen to. So keep that in mind.
Emily Cleghorn. is anward winning trauma recovery coach, author, podcaster, and inspirational speaker on a mission. To support trauma, surviving mamas to navigate triggers and tantrums. As they heal their childhood trauma in the midst of parenting. It's not an easy thing. So having someone like Emily behind you is definitely. Necessary.
And I really like how Emily shared her story in this episode. About how her big audacious [00:02:00] dream came from. The challenges in her life and seen that other people needed support, just like she did. You can check out. Emily at home.mendedmamalife.ca. And on Instagram, Emily.Cleghorn.coach. So please do go check her out.
She has her own podcast to Mama Untriggered it is really, really interesting. And you'll actually find me on there very soon as well. So listen up. .
Mel: Okay, we have Emily Cleghorn with us today. Hi, Emily. Thank you for coming on the
Emily: podcast. Yeah. Thanks for having me It's so awesome to have
Mel: you here. We met quite a while ago, but it's been kind of just, we've been in our online spaces together in a variety of ways. And I've always been curious about your, your work around trauma, especially with mothers and, , I [00:03:00] think it's so important.
So I'm excited to share your story, but also the, any tips you have around that for our
Emily: crew today. Yeah, I'm excited to be here and to share a little bit of my story. How my overcoming can also be. you're overcoming. Yeah,
Mel: amazing. I know what that means and I'm excited to dive in to help other people see what that means.
So tell us a little bit about who you are. Who's, who's
Emily: Emily? Well, I am the mom of two beautiful babies. I've married, married to my best friend. And I am a podcaster, an author a coach, [00:04:00] a former public school teacher. So, you know, I'm, I'm a lot of things. I'm a farmsteader as well.
I have a herd of goats some rabbits and chickens and ducks. And, uh, you know, living, living the country life. Brilliant.
Mel: I love it. My I didn't know about the farmstead part. My, my son would like love that. He's obsessed with chickens right now.
Emily: Everything's chicken,
Mel: chicken. And we were just in Hawaii actually.
And there's like random, there's chickens that just walk around in Hawaii. And it was like his dream.
Emily: It was great. Yeah, it's all good until you find a grouchy rooster and Yeah, totally.
Yeah, we learned to give
Mel: them space because there was a lot of roosters there too. That's oh, that's awesome. So, I mean, those are a lot of, uh, your interests and your titles and your labels. [00:05:00] I kind of, I wonder what the next level of Emily is.
Emily: So, I, I am a trauma survivor and I'm really, really passionate about helping other mamas, new mamas, to navigate through the trauma freight train.
That tends to hit us. Motherhood is, can be, very triggering for a lot of people, especially trauma survivors, and it's, it's an area of our lives that our society puts a lot of pressure on us, and there is It's not necessarily spoken pressure either. There's a level of unspoken pressure that exists around motherhood.
And a lot of people, [00:06:00] myself included, don't understand how their previous traumas, so for me it was childhood trauma, Can impact how they show up in motherhood and how the transition from I'm me to, I'm so-and-so's mom, and it can be really complicated and complex and surprising 'cause it's surprised the pants off of me.
So. Yeah. Yeah. I
Mel: know a lot of people would agree, I think every mother, it's, it's, it's such a big transition in our lives and our history, whether that has big T traumas or not in it is, uh, has made an impact on who we are right now.
Emily: Yeah. Yeah. [00:07:00] Yeah. Especially if you grew up in an environment where you weren't taught how to navigate your emotions.
Yeah. And your nervous system has been trained to live in a fight or flight response and you don't know how to feel calm. Because if you aren't taught as a child how to feel calm, and there's no example of that, then when you're transitioning into motherhood, how, how on earth are you supposed to feel calm if you don't, if you never learned as a child, right?
So, it's It's an education, of, it's a journey of teaching yourself how to feel calm. And there's, there's a lot of choice in [00:08:00] there and acknowledging and awareness. There's, it's, there's a lot.
Mel: Yeah, for sure. There's so much. And I really want to, in a little bit, I would love to hear more about what we can do with that.
But first I'm really curious of. Of, of your story, of how did you get to this point where this is what you want to do in the world? This is the difference that you want to make. How do you, how did you
Emily: get there? Alright, so I was raised just a little bit of my backstory. I was raised by my paternal grandparents.
My biological parents were in and out of my life. When I was six years old, my dad married a woman who had a son of her own. And at that point in my life, I was really close with my [00:09:00] dad. So I wanted to go live with my daddy. And my gram, my grandparents said, yeah, sure. Go live with your dad. That's where you're supposed to be.
And it didn't take very long before I realized that it was the biggest mistake of my life. I lived with my dad and my step mom and my step brother for about 18 months. And in that timeframe, I was abused physically, sexually, mentally, emotionally you know, all the ways. And I, I, as a little girl, I was waiting for somebody to rescue me and nobody was coming to rescue me.
And so on weekends, I was sent off to spend the weekend with another family member because my mother couldn't handle the sight of me. And so one, [00:10:00] one Sunday. Evening, my biological mom said, KM, it's time to get ready to go back home. And something inside of my little seven year old body snapped and I said, I'm not going back.
So I got my stuff packed up and I hid under my sister's desk and put my bag in front of me so nobody could find me. And that was the end of the deepest part of. My, my trauma, the abuse had, was, has stopped and I went back to live with my paternal grandparents, and I, I, I didn't have any coping skills, and so, much of my late elementary years, uh, my teen years, my [00:11:00] early, my twenties were, were quite challenging.
I dealt with anxiety, depression feeling like I was the kid that nobody wanted and I was unlovable. I truly believed that I was a waste of space and that I was just born to be somebody's punching bag. And I know now that none of those things are true, and, but at that point, I had just accepted that my life was going to be hard, that I was, I was doomed with this black cloud hanging over my head, and no matter where I went or what I did, that black cloud Would persist and I needed to do everything I could to hide that black cloud because that black, that black cloud meant that [00:12:00] I was broken and unlovable.
And if, if people saw the truth of that black cloud that. They would, they would leave me like my parents did. And so I managed, I managed the black cloud. I'm, I went to university, got my teaching degree, my education degree, and moved across Canada. So I grew up in Nova Scotia, and I moved across Canada as far away from home as I could.
Started, got a teaching job and met the man that is now my husband. And I wasn't sure if I wanted kids because I didn't want to be responsible for hurting another human the way that I [00:13:00] had experienced. growing up in my family of origin. So, but he really wanted kids. So, we compromised. I was like, okay, we can have one and then we're done.
And so, I was unaware at that point that all of my trauma was just waiting to come knocking on my door. And so I became a mom in September of 2018, and it was not, it was, Maybe five days later, when I was side railed by what I call the trauma freight train, and all of my trauma came flooding forward, and I was looking at my sweet little baby daughter, who looked exactly like baby Emily triggering Holy [00:14:00] cow.
And I was looking at her thinking, I do not want to be responsible for causing this sweet, innocent little baby the same grief That I have experienced in my life and I, I loved her more than anything, but everything inside of me was telling me to get the heck out of there because it was unsafe. It wasn't unsafe, but in my body it was because of my experience with maternal figures.
So, I knew that if I listened to that voice and ran away, I was going to be repeating [00:15:00] the cycle. I would have hurt my daughter, I would have hurt my husband, and I wouldn't have been able to live with myself. So the, the other option that I had was to stay and figure it out. And those days, those months that followed.
I suffered in silence for a lot of it because I thought that the way that I was feeling was made me a bad, a bad mom made me a bad person because I, I hated being a mom, not because I didn't love my daughter, but because of what a mother represents. in my brain. And I didn't want to tell my husband because I thought he would, he would judge me and it would cause tension.
And like, [00:16:00] I was a hot mess until one day we were driving home from buying groceries or something. And he's like, what is going on with you? Like, why are you crying so much? I was like, I hate being a mother. He's like, well, okay, how do we fix this? We've got this, got this baby in the backseat. Like, what do we, what do we do?
I was, I've got to figure it out. So that was, that was the beginning. And I'm in those dark days, I made a promise to myself and to God. I said, God, if you help me get through this, I will reach my hand back into the fire and pull out other mamas who are struggling with this with the similar feelings that I'm having because I know I'm not special enough to be the only one that has experienced this.
And so little by [00:17:00] little, I came out of the darkness. clarity started to come about. And I began working through the mountain of issues that I was facing. The first was acknowledging that my daughter is not me, and I am not my mother. I am my own person. I have the autonomy to make my own choices.
Make my own motherhood and parent my daughter in the way that she needs me to parent her and to believe that I could, to believe in myself, that I could, you know, [00:18:00] overcome this massive obstacle and be the mom for my daughter that she needed, that she deserved. And it's. It's evolved from there in 2020, just shortly before everything was locked down, my son was born, and that was another level of healing, because my sexual trauma was at the hands of my stepbrother.
So there was a lot of issues that I was unaware of. that my son kind of brought to the surface. And it's just, it's interesting to see how my kids have helped my healing journey. I don't know that I would be in the same [00:19:00] place without them. So I say that my daughter saved my life because she did. She woke me up.
She served as my wake up call. Like, hello, Emily, wake up. Yeah.
Just, I just
Mel: want to breathe. I just want to leave that in the space there for a second, actually. I think what's coming to my mind is like, wow. And I
And this, this, this kind of realization and recognizing that everybody, everybody's human journey that along our mothering journey is so very different. And that. Yours has had some horrific past, which doesn't define having to [00:20:00] have a horrific future, right? Absolutely. And the strength that I can hear in what you're saying is palpable.
And in your knowledge now of, I got this, and I'm going to make this difference in my kid's life and my life. My family's life, but also in the lives of those who may have gone through something similar. And the question that comes to my mind is, in those dark days, as you call them, in the first days of motherhood, when you were kind of, You know, that train came through and you're, you're like, whoa, like thinking all these things that are terrifying you.
I'm curious of
what it was or who it was that really helped you to get through that. Because when, when trauma happens, which [00:21:00] essentially you were reliving a trauma in your mind then, right? Your body's in its fight and flight response. You're not necessarily capable of thinking in that moment at least not logically.
So I'm curious of like, how did you get yourself out of that state enough to be able to make a decision to stay and to, to move
Emily: on?
I was really,
what's the word? I was focused on finding. the support that I knew I needed. So at that time I lived in Northern Alberta where services are limited, [00:22:00] limited. I lived, I lived in the part of Alberta where you have to drive four hours to get to Walmart. So I, I was scouring the internet as much as I could to find the support that I needed.
I became so focused on finding that support or finding a community somewhere of moms that I could rely on for support because many, many days in that fourth trimester, not every day, but a lot of days. [00:23:00] I, it was all I could do to put one foot in front of the other. It was, okay, let's, let's deal with our morning.
Okay, let's deal with our afternoon. Let's deal with our evening. Let's deal with our nighttime. And I was really blessed to have a husband who was supportive. He was supportive. He wasn't able to get up with our daughter at night because I was breastfeeding, but he, he would take her and he would help with what he could help with and he would try and give me space.
And we did a lot of research at that point. We were diving into the world of. Natural supplements and essential oils and how [00:24:00] those things work in the body and how they can help. And so I became so thirsty for knowledge and that's what I focused on.
Yeah. Educate, educating myself, finding the support that I needed. And I was. I was lucky to be connected with, a really great group of women who were knowledgeable in, like, the essential oils stuff, and motherhood, and all of that stuff, so yeah, I was, I was really lucky in, in that sense. However, there were days where it just felt so, Isolating, like I was [00:25:00] the only one dealing with this massive
pile of emotion and so that was challenging. Yeah.
Mel: So, I mean, what I hear there is this, what moved you forward is the desire to find community and other people and to know that you're not alone in motherhood and in these thoughts around motherhood and Also the education, which is similar to that in some ways of knowing that there's, this is a thing, right?
It's not, it's not just you, it's a thing, right? Postpartum depression is a thing. And trauma is a thing. And you know, all the education of like, so what do I do about that? Or what are my options [00:26:00] and my choices? Yeah.
Emily: Yeah. Yeah. And it's not, it's not something that is uncommon. It's something that many women face, and our society has, is, it's getting better, but we still have a long way to go with offering mothers the postpartum support that they really truly need.
Yeah. And I'm, I'm curious, what would
Mel: that, like, what is the ideal support in that situation? What do you wish had happened
or
Emily: been available for you?
I, I would, reflecting on it now, I think [00:27:00] postpartum therapy, like having a, a, a therapist that specializes in postpartum mental health and the issues that come up around postpartum Transitioning into motherhood. Would be invaluable like that would change the game for so many mothers, not just, not just me.
And to, and,
Mel: and to take away that stigma of one, what a therapist is, and two, you know, struggling in
Emily: motherhood. Yeah. I also think that a component to. A therapy component to, to prenatal healthcare would also be huge because a lot of the, [00:28:00] the emotions and feelings that we face in postpartum from the trauma train coming up or whatever can be prepared for in prenatal care.
Or even family planning that could, you know, alleviate some of the pressure in postpartum and leave you feeling more, leave you feeling more prepared. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And kind of
Mel: might raise some flakes so that people can realize that they're more prone to this. So if you've had trauma in your past, I imagine there's probably research done showing that you're more likely to have postpartum depressive thoughts.
And, you know, like. If we had a system that, uh, supported people during pregnancy to notice their past and to say, okay, well, these things might come up. What are you going to do about it? What's available to [00:29:00] you? Preemptively,
Emily: right? Yeah. Yeah. Wow.
Mel: Okay. Well we could just go and change the whole, you know, healthcare system and
by the end of this hour. .
Emily: Yeah.
Mel: If only, right. But I think a big part of like, I love that you're coming on here and both and in your work, you're sharing this story because as hard as it is. for me and I'm sure our listeners to hear it. Like I'm a, I have very high sense of empathy, so I'm, you know, like I can, I can feel it in my heart when you were speaking, right?
Emily: It's so important to hear because There are so many people
Mel: like you, there are so many people with their own version of that story. And whether it's big T trauma, which [00:30:00] is what I would call like the abuse kind of side of things, or whether it's smaller T's that have happened throughout life, but you, you, motherhood can be so triggering.
Yeah. Every day.
Emily: Yeah.
Mel: Yeah, and it's, uh, it's so hard and it's so challenging and it's so rewarding because it's growth. Like, we're forced into the growth.
Emily: There's no choice. It's, it's forced growth. Yeah. There
Mel: is choice. There's
Emily: choices all along. There is choice. There is choice. You can choose, you can choose to continue the cycle.
Yeah. That is a choice that you can make. Or you can choose to face. The hard things that nobody else in your family line has, has made the choice to face, and you can say enough is enough, and it [00:31:00] stops here. Both of those choices are valid. They're both valid.
Totally.
Mel: And those are choices, and we make little choices every single day in relation to that. If we've committed to the one, you know, to the, the growth side of that, then every day we make a small choice. A gazillion small choices towards that yeah, and what, what's coming to my mind. So I'm literally like going through choices that I've made today in my mind as I spoke that, right?
So like the frustration that I had in the morning at my child who like does not get dressed very quickly because getting to school on time doesn't matter to her. It matters to me, and it matters to her dad, who's had an [00:32:00] appointment afterward and had to drop her off. And then, the choice afterwards that I made to notice it, want to change that next time, and not spend the rest of the day feeling guilty about it.
Yeah. And to instead be like, okay, what, what could I do differently? That's my trigger. How do I change that? How do I notice it? How do I, right? So our choices in terms of our actions, but also in terms of how we feel about the things that we're going to naturally do because of our behavior. Who we are in our past and our traumas and our what, right?
Like we make those choices. Yeah.
So what do we do with this then? Like, what are you doing with this for yourself and for others?
Emily: So over the last five and a [00:33:00] half years, I have been navigating my healing journey. And I have curated what I call the mended mama method. And inside of the MendedMama method, there are four pillars.
Alright, so, first we have developing a trigger toolbox, because, as we've said, MamaHood is Triggering. And the first part of healing is learning how to calm your nervous system. Because if your nervous system is not calm, then you can't heal. So, acknowledging what your triggers are, Acknowledging the source of them, like where they're coming from developing a connection [00:34:00] within because oftentimes as trauma survivors, we are not connected within because it, it feels unsafe because you don't know if somebody's coming around the corner and you're going to need to protect yourself.
You need to be hypervigilant as. A trauma survivor growing up in some of those situations, so developing a connection within and a lot of people feel like that's really selfish, but it's not because it's not. As a mama, your child or children are looking to you to model calm, to model how to work through certain emotions, how to work through sadness, how to work through anger, how to, [00:35:00] how to feel joy.
You don't know if, if you aren't connected within and you're screaming and yelling and going on every time a loud noise happens because a loud noise can be triggering, then your kids are going to adopt that. And every time a loud noise happens, you're going to start screaming and yelling and going on and they're going to start screaming and yelling and going on.
And the energy is just. It's going, it's going to elevate. So and then developing communication skills and reflecting on, on your trigger like you were saying. So I felt this because of this. I handled it in this way. Next time. I could do [00:36:00] this. And that is a practice that I have, I verbally go through with my kids, now that they're a little bit older.
And I, I will say to them, if, if my trigger gets the best of me and I end up yelling or shouting or whatever, I will say, you know what guys, mommy didn't handle that situation very well. My nervous system kind of fritzed and I shouldn't have yelled. I'm sorry. that I yelled, will you forgive me? Now, how could we handle that?
How could mommy handle that different? And so it's modeling, acknowledging when you hurt somebody else, because our actions do hurt our kids. They're little humans. They feel just like we do. [00:37:00] And they, they get that exchange. And while I am healing, they, we're learning at the same time. And then the second pillar, I help my clients cast a vision.
So we know, oftentimes as trauma survivors, we know what we don't want. We don't want to be like our parents or whoever was, whoever caused our trauma. We don't want to live that lifestyle. So as oftentimes, it's hard for trauma survivors to dream beyond what they don't want. They know what they don't want.
They don't know anything else. So it's hard to come up with something you're unfamiliar with, right? So okay, so what's the opposite of a parent who is absent? What's the [00:38:00] opposite of a parent who yells and belittles and, you know, all of those types of behaviors? And then focus on creating that opposite. So what are some steps that you could take to become a more calm parent?
What are some steps that you could take to become a more attentive parent, a more present parent, casting the vision of what they, what they do want and making little tiny micro steps that are easy to achieve and attainable because so often we have this, this, this We can have this grandiose vision of what we want, and then we don't know how to take action on it.
And it's, it's great to have [00:39:00] a dream, but if you really want it, and you
And then I help my clients through the stepping stones and I outline, I outline those in my book rising from the ashes. And then we work on improved relationship connections. So much of the work that I do with Mamas is very mama focused at first, and then once you are calm, once you're good, then we focus on turning externally and your relationship with your spouse and your kids.
And if you are definitely is still in your life, how your relationship is with them. Because we can't, we can't control other people. It doesn't mean that [00:40:00] their actions that they took to cause harm are okay, it doesn't make them, it doesn't validate them or justify them, but we can control us. We can control how we react and how we interact with them if we choose to, if it's safe to.
So that is, that is the broad stroke of what I do. Yeah.
Mel: Yeah, that's great. I think what really comes to mind is everything you're describing is, is the title of this podcast, right? It is Permission to be Human. Yeah. You know, it's permission to dream. Yep. But it's also permission to make mistakes and then [00:41:00] this kind of process to growth through mistakes, because that is how we go, right.
So, you know, after school I will talk to my kid and I will say, just similar to what you said. Right? Be like, look, like worry was in the room with me this morning. I really, you know, it took me over and I didn't know how else to react. And then what can we, what can we do with this? Like what could I do next time?
And I think it's a really interesting kind of concept to have our children in this kind of collaborative experience. instead of authority to, you know, underling. And if that's the, if that's the parent we're choosing to try to be, then it's in those moments that we actually show [00:42:00] it. So we actually, mistakes are great then.
If we can follow through afterwards with talking about it, it's really stinking hard to do.
Emily: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, when, when I was in the classroom full time, I would tell my students, you know, mistakes are okay. It's okay to not get 100 percent on your assignment. Those mistakes are learning opportunities.
Like, if, if you, if you, if you get it all right, then where, where in there are you going to learn how to be better?
So mistakes are learning opportunities, they're not failures. They're learning opportunities. Yeah. And
Mel: if our kids see us never make mistakes, then when they make a
Emily: mistake.
Mel: It's the end of the world. Yeah. [00:43:00] Right? I'm thinking of an example of like, so, my son, I signed him up for t ball and I know he'll love it and I know he'll be very good at it.
And he has, like me, we both have very, we have natural born talent in sport. We're capable of doing something without trying that hard. Not necessarily to the great extent, but to the like, we can be good at stuff. Right, but what that means is he watches me say play soccer or do whatever and he just thinks I already Like he didn't watch the journey to get there.
He just thinks like that's how yeah I've always been able to do it and I never make mistake. So he's like, I don't want to play I'm like, oh, but then the next question literally five seconds later is how do you hold the bat? Is it like this and he's swinging it but he's doing it in a like anxious like Yeah.
What if I could do it the wrong way? Everybody's watching. Right? And I've been, like, reflecting on this today, [00:44:00] because this was just last night, I'm like, okay, how do I show him that, like, what can I do that's wrong? It's not perfect at first. It's not perfect. And just show him that actually, like, that was really hard and I had to figure it out and eventually I got good at it.
Yeah. So I might have to try a new something. Just. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Just to show them that, but anyways, I'm sidetracking a bit, but I think this it what the theme that comes out of that is, is our relationship to ourselves, which is where you really honed in on first, and then our relationship to others,
Emily: right?
Yeah.
Mel: Yeah, and the way that you do that sounds, sounds wonderful. It's really interesting the lady I just interviewed, she'll be out in a couple of weeks time on the podcast, probably just before you. Caitlin, uh, has a similar, she had, talks about a first aid kit. Mental health first aid kit. I think you'd get on very well.
[00:45:00] Cause she describes very similar approach to things and that's because that's what works. We got to go inward first, we got to look at ourselves and then we can look outwards at other people.
Emily: Yeah. Yeah. How can you, how can you teach your kids something you don't know? Right? How can you support your kids from an empty cup?
You gotta fill yourself up first. It's like when you're on an airplane, and they say if the airplane crashes, you have to put on your oxygen mask first. Well, it's the same kind of deal. Like if you go and put your kid's oxygen mask on first and that plane goes down, you're gonna be in the middle of the aisle and everybody's gonna be walking over top of ya.
And
Mel: I am guessing if that situation was to ever happen, my instinct would not be to put my first, mine
Emily: on first. [00:46:00] No. Right? No, it wouldn't.
Mel: And so we have to, we have to notice that and decide to put our own on first. Right? Yeah. Because it gives us the air we need
Emily: to make a better decision
Mel: to help our
Emily: kids.
Mm hmm.
Mel: Yeah.
Emily: Okay. So,
Mel: as we start to wind up our conversation, what would you say are, you know, people are listening to this, probably some that have had, well, we've all had histories and we've all had pasts and we've Some may have had the small T traumas, some may have had some of the big T traumas. What would you say to the people listening in that would
I'm rephrasing my question here, I'm just [00:47:00] going to say this out loud, because normally my question is, what do you say to the moms who have big audacious dreams or want to have them? And I think for
Emily: you, Maybe the question
Mel: is the same, but it's, it's like the level before, because we can't dream until we've, we sort ourselves out, right?
So my question is, what is my question? What's your big, what's your top tip to mums who are listening, who perhaps have gone through some trauma, and are feeling traumatized by motherhood? Mm hmm. In order to move forward and start to flourish in their own life for themselves and their family.
Emily: Okay. So this is an analogy that I often use. You don't take your car to McDonald's to get an oil [00:48:00] change. So
be careful with the community that you surround yourself with. As you begin to heal, community is crucial in healing. I mean, you can do it alone. I don't recommend it because it's hard. Healing trauma is not easy. Mamahood is, is not easy. So find yourself a community of mamas who have decided to heal their trauma who can support you on your journey.[00:49:00]
Yeah. That support is going to be the make or break decision that you have, because if you have that community, then on those days where you feel like throwing in the towel and Not seeing the healing journey through, you've got a baseball team behind you holding you up when you can't hold yourself up.
And I think everybody faces moments like that in motherhood where, you know, your kid's going through a developmental leap or a phase and it's just hard. Life gets hard. And having that community is huge. So find yourself a community, whether it's [00:50:00] girlfriends locally that you can connect with, or a book club for moms, or A Facebook group, be careful with Facebook groups because not all are healing focused.
Some are just there to commiserate with each other. You know, community comes in so many different forms. And it's huge. We were designed to be in community.
Mel: Agreed. I love that. I couldn't have said it better myself. That being the top of my value list is that, that we're not meant to do this alone. No, we're not. And, and this means literally being human. Yeah. And certainly not being a mother. So yes, go find that community. [00:51:00] And am I right in thinking you have a community people could join if they're looking for that safe place to
Emily: Yeah, I do.
So my community is not on social media. It is off of social media for safety purposes. And so you can find that on my website or in the description of any of my podcast episodes. So I host the Mommahood After Trauma podcast, and the link to the community is in all of the show notes. So.
Brilliant. And what's the community called? It's the Mommahood After Trauma Insider Circle. Brilliant.
Mel: Thank you, thank you for being real, for showing up as your whole self and sharing that with a group of strangers [00:52:00] because so much of this is not talked about and it is only through having these conversations that people will start to feel. Less alone and be able to then step out and find that community that they need to, to grow past it
Emily: and through it.
Well, yeah. Thank you for, for allowing me to share. I am committed to having those conversations that nobody else wants to have. So, thank you for giving me that space.
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That is it, folks. This has been Mel Findlater on Permission to Be Human, the podcast, and I am so glad that you have joined us here today and hope that you have taken away some tidbits that will help you go away, connect with your big audacious dream, and make that massive impact in the world that you are dying to make.
If you liked today's episode, please, please, please Like it, [00:53:00] share it. Think of one person. Think of one person that you think would also like it and send it on over to them. Let's get this out there and more moms feeling like themselves. Inspired, Dreaming big and out there. Please do head on over to find me on Facebook with permission to be human or Instagram or you can even Off me an email and say hello.
Have permission to be human always at gmail. com say hello and let me know that you listened. What did you like about it? I would love to hear if you didn't like it. I don't really want to know. Just kidding. You can share that if you want. I would love to know, however, who you are. Let's connect. Let's find out what you want more of.
I want to hear from you and I want to make it what would be useful to you. As always, [00:54:00] remember that you have permission to dream big, permission to feel big, and permission to be you. You have complete and full permission to be human. For real, you do.
