Lawrence Doochin is an author, entrepreneur, and devoted husband and father. A survivor of harrowing childhood sexual abuse, he traveled a long journey of emotional and spiritual healing and developed an in-depth understanding of how our beliefs create our reality. In the business world, he has worked for or been associated with enterprises from small startups to multinational corporations. He is the co-founder of HUSO sound therapy, which delivers powerful healing benefits to individuals and professionals worldwide.
In everything Lawrence does, he strives to serve a higher good. In his new book called: A Book on Fear: Feeling Safe in a Challenging World, he maps out a heartfelt method for overcoming fears and bad memories. Drawing on his own healing journey as well as psychology, science, and spiritual approaches, he offers the steps to reconnect with our hearts.
How We Can Accept and Embrace Change in Our Lives
EMAIL: larrydoochin@gmail.com
WEBSITE: www.lawrencedoochin.com
______________________________________
Connect with Marci
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· Permission to Heal on YouTube.
· Permission to Land (memoir) - Hardcover, Paperback, eBook, audiobook
- Permission to Land: Personal Transformation Through Writing
Permission to Heal Bookshop - Buy books from the episodes & support independent bookstores.
Permission to Heal is a passion of mine. I need your help to bring more inspirational episodes to the world; please consider becoming a patron through PATREON. This is where your PATREON subscription comes in. You get perks & the contentment knowing you are helping get PTH out to the people who need it.
Lawrence Doochin is an author, entrepreneur, and devoted husband and father. A survivor of harrowing childhood sexual abuse, he traveled a long journey of emotional and spiritual healing and developed an in-depth understanding of how our beliefs create our reality. In the business world, he has worked for or been associated with enterprises from small startups to multinational corporations. He is the co-founder of HUSO sound therapy, which delivers powerful healing benefits to individuals and professionals worldwide.
In everything Lawrence does, he strives to serve a higher good. In his new book called: A Book on Fear: Feeling Safe in a Challenging World, he maps out a heartfelt method for overcoming fears and bad memories. Drawing on his own healing journey as well as psychology, science, and spiritual approaches, he offers the steps to reconnect with our hearts.
How We Can Accept and Embrace Change in Our Lives
EMAIL: larrydoochin@gmail.com
WEBSITE: www.lawrencedoochin.com
______________________________________
Connect with Marci
· Website, Patreon, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Facebook Group.
· Permission to Heal on YouTube.
· Permission to Land (memoir) - Hardcover, Paperback, eBook, audiobook
- Permission to Land: Personal Transformation Through Writing
Permission to Heal Bookshop - Buy books from the episodes & support independent bookstores.
Permission to Heal is a passion of mine. I need your help to bring more inspirational episodes to the world; please consider becoming a patron through PATREON. This is where your PATREON subscription comes in. You get perks & the contentment knowing you are helping get PTH out to the people who need it.
Hello everyone. And welcome to permission to heal. I am Marci Brockman, and I am thrilled that you're here for this episode. We have Larry . He is an author, entrepreneur and devoted husband and father, a survivor of harrowing childhood sexual abuse. He traveled a long journey of emotional and spiritual healing and developed an in-depth understanding of how our beliefs create our reality.
In the business world he has worked for, or been associated with enterprises from small startups to multinational corporations. He is the founder of whoso sound therapy, which delivers powerful healing benefits to individuals and professionals worldwide in everything Lawrence does. He strives to serve a higher, good in his new book called a book on fear, feeling safe in a challenging world.
He maps out a heartfelt method for overcoming fears and bad memories. Drawing on his own healing journey, as well as psychology science and spiritual approaches. He offers the steps to reconnect with our hearts. Welcome Lawrence. Lovely to meet you. It's nice to meet you, Marcy. Thanks for having me on pleasure.
My pleasure. I think it was a, your publicist who found me somehow. Yes. That's what we're so organic, how these things happen. It's just suddenly your name's in my inbox. And then, she sent me a copy of your book, which I loved. I poured through that and, you know, you see a post-it notes in it cause I was so excited to remember stuff. So we're going to get into it, before we do so I usually my little format here is to do these little six quick questions and let us get to know you a little bit on, On a personal level. So what six words would you use to describe yourself? I'd say grateful and spiritual open-hearted, uh, servant persistent, , logical.
That's a good list. Buried list. Interesting. And having read your book. I think that makes sense. Number two, what is your favorite way to spend a day? Definitely being in nature, being out in the, in the. Outside in the woods, ideally some, somewhere like that, do you live near the woods? I actually do live, we, we back up to like a national park.
No trace way. Uh, and there's a path that basically I can get to within about 10, 15 minute walk that's in the middle of the woods. So that's nice. Nice, nice year, years ago when my children were little, our house, our backyard ended and then the woods began and there was like a little chain link fence between where the gate and my kids.
They were like five and eight when exploring, not realizing how soon it was going to get dark and they got lost. Oh, wow. We had no idea where they were for like an hour they were missing and the whole neighborhood was combing the area, looking for them. Oh, that was terrible. Scary. It's terrifying for me, terrifying for them.
What made me think of that? When you said that I have no idea triggered anyway.
What was your favorite childhood memory?
I think some of the vacations we took before my parents got divorced, like one were in Jamaica and I was, we're staying at a house and we had a cook and, uh, basically the, the daughter of the cook I played with and just, just some sweet things like that. That's nice. We, yeah, we took a couple of family trips to Jamaica.
It's a beautiful place. What is your favorite meal? A favorite meal is something that's basically organic. Um, I mean, it can be, uh, definitely some kind of meat and vegetables, so I'm not too picky, but, uh, chicken or I do eat beef and then some kind of vegetables that are fresh and organic. Yeah. So that's really basic.
You're wide open there. I'm pretty wide open on that. Yeah. Wow. Normally people have like a very specific thing. I can never decide, speak. , everybody's different. Yeah. What, one piece of advice would you like to give your younger self? Let's say be easier on yourself. Be, uh, not so hard on yourself. Have more compassion on yourself.
You think you were hard on yourself growing up? I was hard on myself, not, not growing up so much, but basically like when I got into my, when I got into my healing process and I was very hard on myself, a lot of high expectations. Okay. All right. Maybe we'll get into that because that's intriguing me high expectations.
I have to remember that. Okay. Um, what's one thing you would most like to change about the world? Well, I would like to change the, uh, the blame that is, uh, everywhere and have people live more in recognition of their unity and gratitude for, uh, for who they are and recognize who they are as divine beings.
What do you mean by that? Well, basically we obviously, the parents of the world is not been too good recently. It's been very polarized. And so I think if people can recognize, and that's how a lot of what's in the book, we talk about. Recognizing those patterns, which create fear in us and don't serve us.
And if we can recognize those and release those, then we can, we'll come more into recognition of our divinity. And then we'll see more from a unity standpoint versus a separation standpoint, more from a standpoint of, uh, of we versus us and them. Yeah, I think I know what you mean. Um, when I was younger, like in the seventies, when I was a kid, seventies and eighties, when I was a kid, it seemed to be that there was much more of a sense of community in neighborhoods.
And that people were not, we're sort of we're friends and friendly and sort of involved in each other's lives. And the kids were all of a certain age, give or take. And, and now, like I've been living in this house for 12 years and I only know like one neighbor to the direct west of me and we don't, nobody knows anybody else.
There's like no sense of community beyond the structure imposed by the school district. Yeah. Yeah. That's definitely, that's definitely part of it. Yeah. It is sad. It's definitely part of it. But also I'm talking about, wow. The polarization that's happening within politics or religion or other things like that.
Yeah. Yeah. We're, we're much more quick to blame the other and not have interest or compassion or empathy for things that don't involve us. Yeah. Yeah, I see that a lot. It's it's kind of, it's extremely sad. Okay. So you just wrote this book in 2020 called the book on fear, feeling safe in a challenging world, which is available on Amazon.
You want to tell us about your book? Sure. It's a book that, uh, that actually brings us to a more of a tree top perspective in terms of understanding how our fear, what our fears are, how they, you know, how they were created, what beliefs are supporting them, what conditioning supported, those created those beliefs.
Um, and then using a lot of information from basically psychology spirituality philosophy. Uh, quantum physics to help us see from a different, more of a tree, top perspective, versus having our head kind of buried into the trunk of the tree at the bottom. Okay. So we're, we're on top of it, looking down to get an overview top of looking down and also looking more at the forest so we can see just, you know, we're taking our, our perspective to a much higher level.
Okay, so, so what are you talking about in the book on fear you in the beginning? Um, talk about the fact that you were an expert on fear that most people who write non-fiction books are experts in something. So what makes you an expert in fear? Because I have gone through tremendous amount of emotional healing process, also spiritual, what I call spiritual healing process and is part of that, you know, the motion healing process was a coming back from or healing from sexual sexual abuse by my mother, which happened during puberty, which was, I came out of that experience with a lot of fear, a lot of guilt shame.
Anger. Um, and then once I entered into thank you and wants to enter into an emotional healing process. Uh, there's just a lot of. Beliefs and a lot of, uh, things that I had to release that created a lot of fear in me and, uh, was able to, and so I really became, uh, understood at a deep level how far fear is created by our beliefs and what we need to do to try and get out of that.
And when you see all this, like polarization in the world, it's coming from fear. So I can see, I can. I can see all of the patterns that are happening. And, and basically what I hope the book does is that it helps people to, um, begin to question. You know, why are the relationships, why did they interact with life and the way they do, because so many people are interacting in a unhealthy or dysfunctional way.
And I think a lot of people recognize that. Um, and then basically, uh, to say, you know, I want to change that now, how do I change that? So I give them a lot of the tools in the book to be able to see where it's coming from and how they need to change that. Like tools, like what, like if somebody was to say, okay, so I I'm feeling afraid.
Like I grew up and my mom was, narcissistic. She was an undiagnosed bipolar. She was a drug addict. Got more intense as she was got older. So she was an opiate opioid, which completely changed , the whole, like. Topography of her personality. And I grew up like being really afraid of her explosiveness and her explosive temper and her explosive bitterness.
The that's like the, the, the, the, the sharp edges of the negative side of the bipolarity. When I was a kid, I used to call her Cruella Deville when she was in those days. Stages, because I didn't know what other language there was. And when she was on the high manic mania portion of the bipolarity, she was mary Poppins, you know, but speaks far more often was on the chlorella Deville side. Far more often was unpredictable and volatile and selfish and dismissive of me and critical. And I, I not only grew up as like a chronic people pleaser because I, I took it upon myself to, to try to make her happy. Like I couldn't, I couldn't think of anything else to do, except to try to.
Minimize or mitigate the sharp edges of their Corella Deville side in hopes because, you know, what did I know as a kid in, in hopes of trying to swing the pendulum into the happier direction. And, and I grew up like really afraid of, I wasn't sure what, and it wasn't until I was an adult. A young adult, but an adult in therapy that I figured out that really the bulk of my fear came from a fear of abandonment and.
Isolation and a fear that I really was unworthy of love. So what kinds of tools does just the, your book or the Huso sound therapy offer somebody who's feeling that way? So, you know, you've obviously come a long way because you have a great recognition of how you, the conditioning you went through, um, you know, and, and what it created in you.
And then you can choose to, you know, release that. So the first thing, but for a lot of people that they are, they don't understand what they're exactly what their fears are. And in order to solve a problem, you first have to understand what you're doing. You know what that problem is. So thought people may have, they may understand that they have a fear over it.
Dying in a pandemic or losing their job or not having any significant other, but certainly there's a lot of fears that run underneath the surface, kind of like a virus of the computer and effect the operation of us. And we're not aware of a lot of us here. So like many people probably have a fear of abandonment.
You know, they have a fear of, uh, of not meeting other's expectations or their own expectations. They may have a fear of, of not being successful. You know, somebody who on the surface may know that they have a fear of not having a significant other may have a fear that they're not loved and underlying fear that they're not lovable or worth it, you know, a beliefs of that.
So, and then there's, there's certainly this. Make less than appropriate decisions with regard to their romantic life. Like they might settle for things or, you know, not put themselves in certain situations that that may be, that might work out to be fruitful because they're afraid of what's going to happen.
Absolutely. I mean, th these, these are like computer viruses that these beliefs they run and they, and they affect us. And so they create a lot of dysfunction in our life. Um, the, the only, the other fear I was going to mentioned that obviously we all hold, especially as we age, is what's going to happen at death.
You know what our belief system is around some kind of a God or higher power or whatever that is. And so, and, and so we've been, uh, You know, conditioned we've been conditioned in childhood who became conditioned society to society. There's a chapter on societal condition with conditioned by religion.
We've been conditioned in the workplace and, you know, the, the, the way that we see our conditioning is to watch our emotions and reactions. And so. And this is, this is called basically mindfulness, which everybody is where that term, but Carl Young who's the father of analytical psychology said that projection is one of the most common phenomenon.
So we're using not angry for the reasons we think, you know, behind anger is, fear. Could be guilt sadness, you know, judgment. So we're, we're used to projecting. We're like when we judge others, it's a projection of our self judgment. When we're blaming others is a projection of our guilt. And if we can start to witness our emotions or reactions, pull those projections back in and then, and then see what beliefs are supporting those, , supporting that.
And then we can tie those back to the conditioning, you know, that happened. Like we can say, oh, maybe. I understand that, that my, my mom was like this, so I have a fear of abandonment and that's why I clean to me. No people, I clean two men in a, in relationships instead, you know? So we start to shine the light of awareness on all of these things we can begin to heal.
We can choose. And then there's some, some other status of that's the first step. Yeah. And how, how does a person, I mean, I'm sure it's very idiosyncratic as as many people as there are, who feel these things are probably very different ways of, of getting yourself to that point of figuring out what the base is.
The basis is of the fear. I mean, w w we have multiple multi-layered fears, so we hold some fears, individually. That are unique to us and we have collective fears, that we, you know, so like the fear of death is the collective fear that a large majority of people.
Well, right now there's a collective fear over, you know, Ben over, over basically the pandemic. So there's a lot of collective fears we hold. Um, and w you know, fierce multi-layer. So we have to start to kind of peel back the layers of the onion to see, um, What, what those fears are. And then, you know, then we can say, I don't choose this anymore.
And once we basically say to the universe, I want to heal this and I don't choose this anymore. The universe really kicks into action to assist us with whatever means there are to do that. So for instance, somebody may. You know, go see a therapist or they may have read a certain book that helps them, or they may have conversations with a friend there's, you know, all of our fears are stored.
There's there are fears of both energetic and they're psychological and they're cellular. So they're stored in the body. And so the way that we. So the way that we bring out of all our, all of our trauma and fears in our body is to practice, things that basically place us in the now and also places in the body.
So that can be things like, you know, being in nature, meditation, yoga, dance, or painting, you know, whatever, whatever it is that puts us in the, into our body and, and into the now. So I do have as a little bit segue talking about the, now I do have a chapter. Speaking about quantum physics, actually a couple of chapters.
And so the, basically science has proven that time is not fixed. It's not linear. So how we see time through an ego lens is not real. The, basically the only the present moment exists, what happens is a lot of people, basically they live in the past or they live in the future, mostly in the future.
And so we, we worry about things that, that are likely not to happen, but we're creating fear. , you know, that's unnecessary and if we can pull our attention back to the moment and be in that moment, everything is okay. And there's not fear there totally makes sense. Absolutely makes sense. I know that , throughout my life, without knowing what I was doing, I was actually intuitively doing that.
And that's where my I've been keeping journals since 1983. And. That became my way of processing. What was going on, trying to make sense out of the things that I didn't know how to make sense out of. And I poured out everything that was in my head and everything that was in my heart, out onto the paper.
And sometimes I would even. Like somehow like bypassed my cognitive brain and it went straight from my amygdala probably to the paper, you know? And then I'd go back and read what I wrote. And it was almost like it had been written by somebody else, you know? Oh my God, that's really what's going on. You know, was really kind of weird, but, but it allowed me to.
To really process what was, what was happening. And then years later after my divorce, I mean, I was still writing this whole time, but I started, I picked up a paint brush and I started painting again for the first time since college and discovered that I'm actually an artist and a visual artist, not just a, a textual artist, you know, and, and painting for me became very meditative.
And I didn't really know this going in. I just started painting. But what I found was that I was really in the moment that I was patient in a way that I wasn't ever before. Because if you rush a painting, you ruin it. If you try to do too much, the paint, the colors, get all muddy, you have to do it in stages.
You have to do it slowly. You have to let the underlayers dry, , before you continue, can continue. And it taught me to sort of step back and to stop projecting into the future. And it really was a, a magical leap to, apply that as a metaphor for other things. And, it was really very organic and beautiful. It reminded me kind of what you were talking about in your chapter energetics and unity, where you're talking about manifesting what you wanted. Like you said, that feeling the fear or ruminating in the fear as a choice and that you don't have to always think into the future or ruminate over the past, but to be in the now.
I was hoping you could talk a little more about that because it's very intriguing to me. You hear it all over in lots of different ways. Like people will say the secret, which is basically the same thing it's manifesting and energy. And, what you call universal law one oh one. Well, first off, I want to say congratulate, you know, what you just described about, especially with the journal writing is really powerful.
That's a really powerful way of releasing things. So, you know, some people may not need to see a therapist or, you know, there's just different ways. And like, I know my son is a big journaler and he, and that helps him to get a lot of stuff out. And then what you're talking is interesting, cause you're talking about. The painting process is so much like the emotional healing and spiritual healing process because it's in layers and you have to wait on it and you have to wait for the next thing to come into place and God, and the universe know the perfect path for you.
And, and all you have to do is trust and be carried along with it. But, you know, in talking about. The now, , the now is, is just, is a very powerful place to be. That's actually our natural state, but we're so distracted in this, especially in Western society. , and a lot of people, and I talk about this in the book.
A lot of people just don't want to be still. They're afraid of what's. What's what they're going to find when they're still, so they're always busying themselves. With, you know, looking at something on their phone or the internet, or, or doing sit with themselves and just sit still and listen to their inner heart.
And there are the whispers of their heart. They can't do it. They're they're afraid of doing it. And so they don't do it. So, but that's how that is. That's the greatest journey you can ever take to know thyself, you know, Socrates, Jesus, and a lot of wise people basically said no that's self, which means to be still and know that I'm God, it's all the same thing.
And, and that's how you can then begin to discover your, all your hidden beliefs and fears and everything. And then. You know, once you start to, to release all those things and say those things don't serve me anymore. It's the most, you know, joyful and peaceful way. It's just an amazing process. Yeah. And then you just let it go.
And then suddenly all that cacophony in your head, in your head. It's just calm. It just quiets down. Most people are, are very much in there completely in their ego. Thinking, but we have a much higher level of thinking this within us, that comes from our heart and comes from our intuition and our gut and a stored in the body.
And that's where the divine resides. And if we, once we start to be still, the ego mind will start to, to calm down some. And then you're going to start to have some of these. Higher thoughts, that come from that higher come from that higher space that you can then access. And that's where you want to make your decisions from.
Yeah. Cause they're, they're grounded in what actually is and not projections of your fear or your concern worry or over concerns about, about what might happen. Exactly. Right. Yeah. I love the phenomenon of. Freeing my brain up when I'm, when I'm meditating sitting still and quiet and listening inward or painting, which for me is almost the same thing.
And suddenly things that were confusing or cloudy, or just mired in a whole lot of other, you know, icky stuff, you know, just too sticky to be clear, suddenly become clear and a new path to thinking about something just opens up like, oh my God, that was just obvious all along.
But it wasn't, you know, That's just very, it's very beautiful. I mean, the process, it never, I never tire the processes very holy and beautiful process. We just, most of us just fight it. I mean, we just fight it and we don't, you know, we don't realize how beautiful it is and how amazing this world is to be, you know, in communion with others, with nature and to see the unity of all things and to be in that flow that you just mentioned.
Cause it's right there for us and that's our natural state. Why do you think everybody gets so bogged down with everything else? Well, I think it's the nature of society, that, you know, we're, we're now technological very technological society and there's nothing wrong with technology. It's nothing, there's nothing good or bad about anything in the universe.
It's how it's used. Unfortunately, technology. And I do have a chapter in the book later in the book about technology and about some of the, some of the. Some of the bad things about technology. And so, but we just, you know, there's, there's, there's a part of society that thinks technology is, is the savior of everything.
And that's just not true. I mean, technology is here to be an, a tool to be an aid for us, but it's not here to be a savior. So the, you know, the indigenous. Tribes a lift for a very long time before the industrial age, in terms of having a basically inexperience here on earth, it was just incredible. And having the experience of the creator and having, , having immense joy, having community.
And we tend to think that there's all this stuff that we need to buy. Like. New iPhone or all, you know, new house and we have to earn all this money. So we've been conditioned by. Western society to say that we should achieve the American dream and have all this stuff. And that's just like, I use the example in the book about the durable on the wheel, just churning and churning and not having a destination.
We don't even know where that destination. No, nobody could even say what that destination is when they reached a destination or while they're going to that destination, you just have all these corporations wanting to increase their bottom line. And so they instill in us all these fears. That we are, we have all these deficits that we're not enough that we need justice, this sexy car, and you'll get everything you want.
You need this lipstick and you'll get the man of your dreams. You need, you know, whatever it is from the littlest little thing to a huge expense. But you're constantly telling us and trying to instill fear so that we purchase things. That's very well put. And I just, basically, when I put it in the book, basically we are, you know, we're being told we're not good enough as is.
And so that, you know, the, the message, the message from the message from the, the angelic realm, the message from God, the message from universe is we are good enough as is okay. It's like, we're the word? Yeah, we're, we're the ones judging ourselves is not good enough. And we are, you know, we're basically, and I use this example in the book who were perfect as is, it depends, you know, we have a very weird definition of perfection, but we're basically spirit expressing in a human body having a human experience.
And we're here to, to, to learn, evolve and grow and help others do the same. And so, you know, in the that's, that's, that's holiness right there. So. That's the whole nature of this podcast to learn, evolve and grow permission to heal. You know, we have to give ourselves permission to take the time and the space that we need to find peace and love within ourselves and share it out with the world.
Yeah. , mean I'm an English teacher, so I do that all the time. Yeah, you're doing that. I mean, you're doing that with the podcast, so, and I'm trying to do that with the book. And so people are being called to do that. You know, people, especially people who are willing to, to face their fears, to face their traumas, to heal from that stuff.
You know, that's, those are the ones that are bringing the light. Because they, because the lights in, all of us, it's just covered up with a bunch of, for most people's cover up to the bunch of cracks trauma and unprocessed fears. And yeah, the sun is there. It's just covered up with clouds with, for most people.
But when we start to pull that aside and then that's the beauty, that's the holiness, the light that's within. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's it's the, the whole intention that I had, I, wrote my memoir based on my experience with my mom and, , my search for closure after she died seven years ago. And I went back to my journals and I used all of my writing.
I read everything from 1983 on forward and used. The words of the 15, 16, 17 year old version of me as primary source documents when trying to make sense out of my life, taking a long view back. So we're not looking at the 52 year olds memory of what happened in 1984, but what did the 16 year old think about this in 1984?
And, and how does that make sense? Like I was trying to figure out. Why I behaved certain ways why, what patterns I could come up with with my own behavior and how to heal myself and forgive myself for the, for, for being human, really, but for making quote unquote mistakes along the way that were triggered by these fears that I received from or developed in, in, in.
In response to my mom's and my dad's and the world's treating of me or, or, or behavior. And it was hard. My husband will tell you it was a Rocky six months when I was writing the first draft. Yeah. Yeah, I bet. Well, but crew, but kudos to you because it's a, it's a hard process and a lot of people aren't willing to go through that.
Right. You know? But, the thing that I say to people is, look, you're literally in a prison cell of your own making you want to you're your own jailer. Do you want to, you know, do you want to open it up and walk out and, And so there's, there's a lot of light on the opposite side of that jail cell.
Absolutely. And I absolutely wanted to make sure, at least for my own family, that. I did whatever I could to end the intergenerational poverty of mental illness and addiction. I wanted my children to grow up as unaffected by this as possible. And the, the, the moment that I hit bottom, so to speak with this with my mom was this one fight we had in 2011 that I talk about extensively in my book.
It's in the beginning chapter and it was the moment. One pinpointed moment where I stopped being the scared due to fall. Forever. Sublimating her own feelings. People pleasing supplicating at the queen, so to speak daughter and like a light switch. Larry, I became the lioness queen mama defending her dad and her Cubs.
And it was, it was literally like that, just like a snap of a fingers. And it changed everything for me on a dime and. And ended that previous dysfunction and put me on a new path. And, and, it was, it, it was the crystal clear moment. I mean, a moment of crystal clear clarity that I had never had before.
I was just mired in all of this mud and I couldn't see my way out of it, you know, and then suddenly it was there and I just had to act on it. I had to choose to act on it. I mean, that's amazing, you know, it's like, you can just see this tremendous growth and, you know, and you're you and, and everybody around you, especially your kids are so much better.
Absolutely. Absolutely. I just ended the whole thing there and, and. And they were great, you know, and then about a year and a half later, I mean, I was fine. The kids were fine. I was in therapy. I got the kids in therapy, everything we had to work through all of this stuff. And, and I didn't talk to my mother again ever.
And then she died a year and a half later and I was really sort of tasked at that point with figuring out how to forgive her because I was the only one who. Nobody would deliver a eulogy. And I, even though I was the only child and I had all of this baggage and 40, some odd years of, you know, stuff to shovel through, I had to figure out how to eulogize her.
And I couldn't just say nothing. You know, like I had enough respect for my family and enough respect for her friends and our extended cousins and so on and respect for her because I know that she was never malicious. You know, I realized that always I knew she wasn't doing any of the things that she did once I was past childhood.
And I was a teenager, at least I knew she wasn't doing any of the things that she did out of malice. She just didn't have the tools. To do it better. She didn't have the tools to live her life better and she had her own issues and I won't even bore any of you with what I think they were because it's just projection.
Anyway, I have no way of determining that. But the hardest thing was forgiveness. It took me a long time. To come to a place where I was magnanimous enough to realize her humanity and frailty and just let that go. How, how do you help people or what do you suggest to people who are looking for fruit to either forgive themselves or forgive others for, or wrongdoing?
I mean, there's a chapter in the book on forgiveness. So now I'm looking at it now is, forgiveness is something that, you know, you, would say, first off, you have to look back and you have to say that, you shouldn't have any. You know, like, I, I should not have any regrets or, or feeling any type of guilt for what happened to me when I was 12 or 13.
Okay. And the same for you. We were children. We did the best we could. You know, I think we can, we with forgiveness, we can look and say, if, if the situation had been reversed, who would we want. Would we want forgiveness, from the person. And I think in most cases we would, the example I used in the talk around the book is like, when we don't forgive somebody, it's actually harder on us and it is on them because we think we're not into it.
Yeah, because we think that we're punishing them, but somehow not forgiving them. And that's, you know, we're punishing ourselves because forgiveness opens our heart and lets us be free of that energetic connection that was created by whatever they did. You know, so that's certainly with somebody else with ourselves again.
We've all. I don't think there's anybody walking the earth. Who's if they're, if they're honest, they're not going to, they're going to say, I made mistakes. Okay. We've all made mistakes. We've all done things that we wish we would've done differently, but I was talking to somebody this morning and I was saying.
There's things when I was younger, you know, I wish I would've done differently, but I didn't, I wasn't at the place I'm at now to be able to have the information or be helpful to have the consciousness, to be able to do those things differently. So I look back on that and like, you know, that's why I don't have any guilt or anything I did, or, you know, there's things I would, if I could do them differently, I would choose to do them differently, but I'm not going to.
I'm not going to, bash myself in. So that's been a big change in me the last couple of years in terms of just being, having forgiveness. You know, if I do something that's a little bit discu my wife or something, I don't pay, you know, I'm not present or whatever it is, or I raise my voice. I'll just say, I'm sorry.
You know? And so, just saying, you're sorry is a very powerful thing because it's acknowledging like, Hey, I did this, I'm sorry. I'm going to try and do it better the next time. Forgiveness is a process. Absolutely. And it's ongoing, it's ongoing. I was having a conversation with my husband a couple of weeks ago.
I didn't really remember exactly what it was, but, I was asking him a question about why he did a certain thing. And then he said, That it was in, he, he changed his behavior because the last time I really wish I remembered more clearly what it was, but I remember him saying the last time he did X, Y, and Z, I had such a negative reaction to it that he changed his behavior and started doing it a different way.
And I didn't really even remember having gotten so upset. First of all, my memory is like Swiss cheese, you know, the lots of little unpredictable holes in it. Oh God. But I think that my reaction towards whatever it was that he did was triggered by an old wound that when I'm being my best elevated self.
It wouldn't bother me, but somehow it triggered something old from my first marriage or from my childhood or something. And it was that younger me that lashed out and was hurt. Yeah. And it wasn't until we had this conversation and it was just a couple of weeks ago that that w that one residual piece kinda got healed and scabbed over.
Yeah. And I think that that happens unpredictably throughout our lifetimes. I don't, I don't think that anyone is done with this process. I think like you could reach a plateau and think, all right, I've done enough for now that I can live in a better way and see more light and so on, but stuff's going to get triggered.
Do you agree? Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, unless you're like Jesus or Buddha or something like that, for the vast majority of people, it is for them, you know, process, but it was more like they moved out of the emotional, I don't know what type of emotional healing they did, but they were more of a spiritual, uh, process.
So for me, it's a, it's both an emotional and a spiritual journey. And you do basically what happens is it's kind of like a spiral. And so, you know, the, what seems to me is that you, uh, you know, you work on something and you're moving to higher level, but you kind of spiral back down a little bit because you're picking up threads.
You know, sometimes they're big threads cause you haven't worked enough on it. Sometimes they're little threads and you know, you move up to a little bit higher level. So the spirals kind of keep going up, but it's. In the sense, and it's not really linear as I'm describing it, but, but you're also spiraling back down.
It's very interesting. I'm interrupting you for one second that you're talking about a spiral because when I imagine things like this, I imagine it like a double helix, like DNA and it's definitely like two interconnected spirals. I've never heard somebody describe it like that. Except myself. That's very interesting.
Wow. Yeah, but, but it is, it is a process. And so, you know what we've asked for most of the, if, if we're lucky we come to a point, if we're fortunate, we come to a point where we understand. Kind of while we're here, what we've asked for at a spirit level and what's being in then, you know, and what's being triggered and why it's being triggered so that we can release, you know, certain things and move to higher level of consciousness.
I'll obviously a lot of people are asleep and they're not at that level. Some people are in the middle level. Some people are more advanced level in terms of understanding, you know, what their, what their core issues are. And. How that gets triggered. And so the universe is, is just assisting us in what we've asked for, which is to learn, evolve, and grow and move to a higher consciousness.
And so in order to do that, we're not being punished when we feel like crap. Again, we're basically just having something come up so that we can, you know, maybe let it go for the, for good. Yeah, yeah. Stuff just bubbles up and you have to choose to deal with it or not. Hopefully we choose to deal with it and then we can work towards resolving it or forgiving ourselves or someone.
Do you think the courageous path? Yeah. The, the courageous, the warrior path, people deal with it. And there's a large number of people who just choose to medicate it with, you know, drugs and alcohol, food, porn, whatever, internet, whatever it is, you know, there's a lot people just trying to stuff it and oh yeah, I'm an emotional leader.
I'm like a third generation emotional leader. We take this stuff seriously. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The pandemic was crazy for that. Cause there was a lot of helplessness can't control anything except social distancing and masking and staying home and, you know, cleaning the do groceries and all this other stuff that they had us doing over the period of time over the year, you know?
But beyond that, you know, it was just, well, what's going to happen, you know, very bizarre. Just got my vaccination a week ago, Wednesday. Um, so this Wednesday night, two weeks, and that little finally take effectiveness. So it was the one dose Johnson and Johnson. So I don't have to get a second, a second dose.
So, I feel a little better take some proactive control. So, so going back to forgiveness, I mean, you had a pretty dramatic, tumultuous childhood. As you sort of talked about, , with, with abuse, how, how do you survive that kind of horrific abuse and find forgiveness? How do you, how do you get at that?
That seems like Herculean to me. Well, I mean, it also seems, , a little bit Herculean to me in terms of what you went through. So I hear other people's experiences and I don't like try and compare. It just seems like, okay, that person was really traumatized or this person he knows really traumatized.
And so for me, and I actually, I think I write something in the book about this, like, Every time. If I've got something in there, like non forgiveness is like a poison and Southern me, I don't know. I just, it doesn't feel good to me. I don't want it to be there. So it took me, it was a process. I mean, I didn't see my mom for, I mean, she's passed away for like 15 years, but I didn't see her.
When I was going through this, I didn't see her for like a year or something like that. And then she wasn't in a place where I could really talk to her about it. And it just comes down to a choice of what it is you want. Do you want to, to just be free of something or do you want them to turning steam trauma over and over?
Okay. You have to turn the trauma over and. Over and over a little bit to kind of get the roots out and to kind of bring it up. So you understand how it's, how it's affected you. But I think a lot of people stay and discuss this in the book as well. A lot of people stay in victim mode and so they want to be known, like, I don't want to be known as a sexual abuse victim.
Okay. I mean, that's in the bio because publicists put it there or whatever, but I guess that's sensationalism or whatever, the fact that you were. That you're an expert on what you're an expert on that you can't sort of become an expert without, without context. Yeah, but I don't want to be known. I mean, I want to be known as, , a kind individual who loves God, loves his families, tries to be a service.
Right. You know? And what happened to me is listening to experience that that occurred. It's not my identity. It's not who I am. Healing can occur. Yeah. Yeah. So these are just, and actually, you know, I believe in, we are divine beings where we're an in loss scientists talk about multidimensional realities.
I believe we're live we're multi-dimensional beings. And so we come to the surface experience for a certain reason as we've discussed. And so we. We choose the, the experiences that we are likely to have. I mean, it wasn't necessarily necessarily true that mom, my mom was going to abuse me, although she was abused.
So it was probably likely, and I probably chose that with the purpose of working out certain things that I needed, a spirit level two to B to two, two, I have the path that I want to have on this life. Yeah. So it's, it's living with intentionality. It's choosing the path that you want and choosing your own sanity and your own.
Choosing your own Saturday and your own health, mental health, and physical health over that of something else. Yeah. You know, once I started, uh, the healing process, uh, that, and, uh, I saw the, the joy and peace and non depression and non anger that was possible. I'm like, okay, I want this really bad.
And I'm going to do whatever it takes to get there. Yeah. Yeah. I have a close friend of mine who had a childhood, um, that you could describe as similar to yours. And she had a very hard time. For very many years finding peace in her own life because she kept ruminating on the victimhood thing and the anger toward her parent.
And, it took a very long time of therapy and mindfulness and, and success in her own life. I think she had to sort of prove to herself that she could. Be quote, unquote, normal that she could be healthy and have relationships and set goals for herself and actually fulfill them. And she could see herself as you know, self-actualized in a way before she could finally let go of the anger and you know, I'm not her.
So I don't know if she has completely, but I, all I can tell is from the outside, she looks pretty darn healthy right now when a few years ago did not. You know. Yeah. And I'm, I'm thrilled that she's been able to. Worked through a lot of that. To me, you, you actually talked about that Robert Frost frost quote, the best way out is always through from, that poem of his, I always forget the title of the poem, but the only way out is through is, has become sort of a mantra for me.
I hadn't actually tattooed on my arm. Oh, that's cool. My daughter did too. You know, like we just have this, this thing, we talk about it all the time. You can't leave the problem to fester and throw it in the corner of your room and bury it with laundry is our crazy metaphor. You know, eventually it's gonna, come out and rear its ugly head in an unpredicted way.
So let's write, this comes from my life. Purposeful unlearning of my childhood stuff with my mom. So we deal with it right now while it's fresh, we don't let it scab over. We don't hide it under the laundry. The only way out is through, if we're going to have a fight or we're going to be distant, we're going to disagree.
We're doing with it now. Yeah, maybe you need to take a half an hour and calm down so that we get out of that cortisol fueled panic, but then we're going to talk about it. Right. And right. And it works. I mean, it's pain in the ass, but it works. And you've written other books too.
You have two others, three others. Yeah. Th they're basically they're, it's been awhile on those books. This one, I'd say definitely somebody is interested in anything. I'm riding start with this one, and then you can see the other books like on Amazon, because this book is for me is like, was just what I call energetically much more tied and extremely well edited and just a lot more.
It was a very powerful book. You could see a lot of your heart and soul was in here. What's in here. That's awesome. Thank you. And, and you and I both wrote articles for thrive global. I just had a couple of things published. That was also interesting how we can accept and embrace change in our lives, which is always a good thing to have.
Very cool. Thank you so much for being here. Larry. This was wonderful. Thank you for having me on Marcy. I enjoyed it. I'm sorry. Well, this was a great conversation. , I am going to link into the show notes, the links to buy your book and your website and how people can get in contact with you. If they have questions or.
Whatever , and that'll all be in the show notes. So if you're looking at this on your phone or your computer or your tablet, if you just scroll down on the page, you'll see all the show notes there. If you're on the website, I'll obviously you'll see it. , so thank you for being here for permission to heal.
And I hope you have a wonderful day. You too, Marcy. Take care.