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Hi, thank you for tuning in to the Empowered Relationship Podcast, your relationship guide. I’m your host, Dr. Jessica Higgins, licensed psychologist and relationship coach. Today’s episode is 250, “How to use the blueprint of pain for healing and growth”, an interview with Lindsey Ellison.

Before we get started, I wanna take a moment and center with you, and as we are just beginning in the year of 2021, some of us perhaps have reflect on 2020, and have made some intentions and goals perhaps for 2021. If your intentions or goals include improving the quality of your relationship, perhaps improving sexual intimacy and the experience that you feel with your significant other around sex and love-making, or perhaps you wanna deal with conflict in a way that you feel more emotionally balanced; perhaps you wanna have more fun and play in your dynamic, in your life together, and not be so serious… Whatever perhaps you’re focusing on or holding in mind as you tune into these episodes, I just wanna invite you that you are in great company. We are all on this journey, myself included, and relationship – the long-term terrain of lasting relationship has ups, downs, and can sometimes be surprising what will get evoked for us. And at the same time, if we use that as information to work with, it can be our curriculum for developing ourselves, and developing our relationship.

All the while, the goal is to expand our capacity for more love, more connection, more security, more happiness in relationship. Because when we feel secure, solid, happy, fulfilled in our romantic partnership, usually it allows us to expand and give and use our gifts in greater ways, whether or not it’s with children, our profession, or in our community… And we can show up if we are not stressed in the area of relationship, or feeling secure and solid, and it continues to generate — there’s almost this synergy that happens. Again, it’s not 1+1=2, it’s 1+1=so much more.

So I just wanna invite you to consider that this is a worthy goal, it is a worthy investment of your energy, your time, your effort, to strengthen the quality of your connection, to strengthen your emotional bond with your significant other, and that you feel healthy in that partnership, because it will pay great dividends.

And my goal for you is that the episode on the Empowered Relationship Podcast assist you in that journey, help you feel better prepared, more well-equipped in navigating perhaps the terrain that might  feel tricky or difficult to deal with… And really looking at all of these challenges can be opportunities if we so choose to work with them in that way. If you would like access to today’s show notes, you can visit DrJessicaHiggins.com, click on Podcast, and there you’ll find all of the episodes. Again, today’s episode is 250, “How to use the blueprint of pain for healing and growth”, an interview with Lindsey Ellison.

You’ll also find on the website, if you look in the top navigation bar, there’s a tab titled Courses. And I wanna bring your attention to a course, “Hold me tight.” You might recognize that title, as I’ve talked a lot about Dr. Susan Johnson, and her book, titled “Hold me tight.” Well, I wanna invite you to consider taking her online “Hold Me Tight” course, to develop more security and really looking at the problematic demon dialogues, as she calls it, the dances that are creating disconnect, and being able to look at how to create more connection, really in service of feeling more secure and safe  with your significant other. This is something you can take with your significant other; again, it’s online, and you can find that, again, on the Courses page, and it’s the “Hold Me Tight” course. You just click on that and you’re gonna go to her platform, and then you can look at all the information, and register there.

Now, I bring this up because at least as I’m recording this – this is January 2021 –  and as we start to approach mid-January, many of us start to contemplate Valentine’s Day. Now, whether or not you subscribe to Valentine’s Day as a holiday – and some people criticize it as being more of a hallmark holiday, consumer holiday, when perhaps some of you might think “I wanna be contributing and showing love and gestures of affection throughout the year, not just one day of the year.” And still, many of us, if we’re particularly in the United States, we’ll see a lot of advertisement and commercials that are bringing our attention to love and partnership. So it is common for it to be in our psyche and in our awareness.

So perhaps as you are thinking about relationship a little bit more, as we approach Valentine’s Day, I want you to consider that this is a course that could really help you build that solid foundation, even if you’ve been together for a number of years or some length of time and you feel like that foundation should have already been built, that you can always go back and reinforce or re-establish a foundation. Attending to the safety and the security of the bond is one of the best ways to solidify that foundation, and I believe in her work wholeheartedly. I’ve taken several trainings with her, and I definitely recommend her wholeheartedly. Again, you can find this at my website, DrJessicaHiggins.com, click on Courses and you can find the Hold Me Tight course. I’ll also put a link on today’s show notes. Again, you can find that on the website as well, under Podcasts.

Let’s get started on today’s interview.

Dr. Jessica Higgins: Lindsey Ellison is a relationship coach and founder of Start Over Coaching, Inc., a coaching practice dedicated to helping people navigate their divorce or break up. Lindsey also specializes in helping people break free from narcissistic abuse, and is the author of the best-selling book, MAGIC Words: How to Get What You Want from a Narcissist. You can find Lindsey on her popular podcast, Unbreakable You: Breakup Without Being Broken. Or on her website, LindseyEllison.com.

Lindsey, thank you for joining us today.

Lindsey Ellison: Oh, thanks so much for having me. It’s really good to be here.

Dr. Jessica Higgins: Yes, and I know that you talk about many things, you have a book around narcissism, and a framework, and really supporting people in communication… And also, you’re talking with us today about pain… Can you give us a little bit of a background – what got you interested in supporting people in this way?

Lindsey Ellison: Yes. Well, I’ve been in the coaching field for almost eight years now, and my original work really was around divorce and breaking up, and I’d say over the past year or so I’ve been expanding that. I got into coaching, dealing with narcissism myself, and having a lot of research, and doing a lot of research on my own, which garnered a lot of new information and insights that I started sharing on the web, and then it turned into coaching, and then I have a book that’s quite popular… But as of late, I have really broadened my stroke of interest and what I talk about, which is really the concept of pain, which I narrate as the blueprint of pain… Because I think that everyone who comes to me, or anyone who is in that self-help space, who is looking for coaching, looking for therapy, we have a pain point. And I have been really interested as to where that comes from, what’s the blueprint, what is the source. And I feel as though, from a personal perspective, we often treat something that is not the source, which I call the drug. We are treating the drug, but we’re actually more addicted to the pain itself, and the outcome of what those drugs produce. I know that sounds a little confusing, but it’s something that I feel as though drugs can be a lot of different things, and when we go into something that we habitually seek in order to make the pain go away. That’s the way I look at it as a drug. So it could be love, dating, relationships, control, sex, alcohol, gambling, working, sabotage, over-worrying and hyper-vigilance, let’s say. Those are all things that we tend to treat and we’re trying to figure out. What I think is often overlooked is what happens when we’re taking the drug, and why are we doing it. What is the source of the pain, and what is the blueprint.

So that’s basically what I’ve been really researching, and I actually had a pretty interesting — what do you call it…? A huge setback, actually earlier this year, that really rocked my world, and I was really surprised that I went through it… But I basically had an absolute breakdown. And I couldn’t believe why, and I couldn’t believe where it came from. And that’s really where I’m like “Where is the blueprint? Where is that coming from?”

What happened was with everything else that everyone has gone through this year with Covid, my husband lost his job, my husband was kind of falling apart… My kids, who – I have a senior in high school and a freshman in high school, and I’ve got a kid who’s not graduating or doing any physical stuff that he likes to do as a senior; no prom, nothing. And I realized — now, I learned this later, but what I was going through was a codependency relapse. I had no idea that I was going through it, but that’s what it was. And I had always been very open about being a recovering codependent (and I’ve put that in air quotes), but I kind of thought I got over it, and I had grown from it. And I’ve been a coach, and I’m successful, and I do all this stuff, and then suddenly I’m doing things that I didn’t realize that was the beginning of a relapse, which was my identity was starting to blend into everybody else’s. So when my kids don’t have school, I’m losing it. When my husband doesn’t have a job, I’m feeling his pain. And my swim lanes were broken through. And it was just too much at once. And then with Covid happening and us being isolated, my whole personal life — I can’t go to the gym, I can’t work out, I can’t do all this other stuff… It just crumbled, and I actually had an absolute meltdown.

So I decided to take two months off this summer, which was absolutely terrifying, because I don’t ever take care of myself… And I went to treatment. I went to treatment for six weeks, and it was the most amazing experience of my life, which – I’m happy to share with you in what I learned. But that’s really where this whole blueprint of pain came from, because I learned so much that codependency is really an addiction that we have to manage every day; just like a diabetic will take insulin to manage their disease, we have to manage our codependency. If we don’t, things like Covid in our world  will just knock us down, and we’ll have a massive relapse.

Dr. Jessica Higgins: Yes… Thank you for sharing your personal experience and being able to name some of the elements that you’re working with, and this blueprint, helping people identify perhaps that deeper layer. I think people who listen to this show more consistently have heard me talk about perhaps our tendencies, or patterns; sometimes we do what we know – we grew up in a certain environment, and we had to navigate that, and it made sense at the time, right? And perhaps we continue to play those patterns, and those maybe defense mechanisms or coping strategies to get what we need and what we want within that framework. But then when we get into adulthood, perhaps it doesn’t serve us anymore, and we’re not even always conscious to what’s fueling that, or where that comes from, and those deeper needs that maybe didn’t get me or didn’t get seen in those earlier years.

So it sounds like you’re really helping people look at what are the ways in which you seek relied. I’ve had several guests recently on this show talk about food, or sex, like you’re referring to, and how we perhaps are seeking relief… And then you’re talking about codependency, which is so important, because in the topic of relationship it’s easy to wanna get relief outside of ourselves, or control, or be overly identified with something outside of ourselves to alleviate or reassure ourselves and validate. Is that what you’re talking about?

Lindsey Ellison: Yeah. It’s actually very much similar. I have this diagram that I’ve created, and I’m gonna be putting it on my website eventually; I haven’t done it yet. But I have this thing where I mapped it out – I call it the House of Pain, and it’s really in line with what you were just talking about. I have this algorithm that I’ve created: Trauma + Fear + Drugs = Addiction.

We’ve got the wounded child that we’re dealing with, which comes from trauma, and trauma is also things that I think a lot of people don’t recognize as trauma. I’ve learned that trauma is anything less than nurturing, and we remember it in a different way, we store it in a different part of our brain.

So we’ve got big T’s and little t’s. My big T was my mother died in a car accident when I was with her. I always thought I dealt with that. I was six years old… Yeah, big trauma. But really, what I learned was all the little t’s added up into a big T, which was my father never recovered from losing his wife at 34 years old. And he neglected me and abandoned me, and he was largely unavailable. He met my education needs, and put a hot roof over my house, and I lived comfortably. And I kind of walked away into my adult life thinking “Well, that’s just the way it went.” I hadn’t realized that I had a lot of wounds there, that I had been repressing and minimizing and denying, and caring on his behalf and my father’s behalf. So therefore trauma – that leads into the fear. Fear comes from “I don’t wanna be traumatized again.” So fear of abandonment, or fear of relational death, which I call the feeling of when someone needs you, it feels like death; so we call it relational death.

We have a threat of survival. We are overly vulnerable or we have some boundary issues. And so between trauma and fear, that really makes up the wounded child. So as we go into our adult life, the wounded child having not really worked on those wounds becomes what I call the adapted adult child. And that’s really what was happening to me. And we all are adults in many ways, and I’d say a good chunk of our lives we are very responsible and we act as a functional adult, where we handle things, we can problem-solve, and things like that. But the adapted adult child is the one who is using those drugs in that list that I gave you in order to maintain the fear and trauma; just to maintain it. Make it kind of not really creep up on you. And when you add those things together, the trauma, fear and the drugs that you’re maintaining, that’s the addiction. We are actually addicted to pain, and we don’t even recognize it.

So I think what’s happening over the years is that I was in a state of chaos. I was in up and down depression. Intensity was my friend. I only knew really good and really bad. I really only understood dysfunction, because that’s what my childhood was like – always in dysfunction. So all of those things wrapped together — and oh, my perfectionism… Oh, my gosh.  That comes into play so much  with my childhood, because I tried so hard to be perfect to get his attention, and that carried over into my adult life. And then what happened is that everything started to add up with the Covid, and my husband losing his job, and my kids in the school… Oh, and all of my speaking engagements were canceled, half my income was cut in half… I just couldn’t handle it; the bell broke. My addiction started to become alcohol, and I started to drink a lot every single day. Not like morning till night, or anything like that, but more than I normally do… And I just fell in a state of depression, absolutely frozen, and I had no idea what to do. I would go outside — I canceled all of my client appointments for the month, because I had no idea how to coach anyone when I was going through hell… And I was so, so ashamed for me, Lindsey, the one who has the podcast, and the website, and the awesome book, and all of that… I was so ashamed to tell anybody that I was in need of help. And with that, I absolutely had a breakdown where I didn’t have a choice… So I just got into a true relapse [unintelligible 00:19:48.05] It was that fight, flight or freeze state – I was in that massive freeze. I couldn’t even think anymore. It was really scary, and I was starting to think of taking my life.

When I finally went to treatment, to this place in Arizona that was fabulous – best place I’ve ever experienced – I thought that my career was over. I thought that when my clients find out, when my readers find out, my listeners find out, I’m gonna get trashed, or they’re gonna want all their money back, or “They’re gonna catch me that I’m a fraud.” And man, I think of that girl, just maybe 3-4 months ago – or woman, I guess – that was so deeply hurting, and this pressure that I’d put on myself, of having to be so freaking perfect, that I was living in a state of chaos and depression, and I didn’t even know how to ask for help, because I didn’t even know I was living in it. So how do you know to ask for help when you don’t even know “This is not normal.” So that is the addiction. And what an addiction is – I always like to bring it back to simplicity – addiction is thriving on something that’s not good for us. And we use drugs to maintain the addiction.

For some reason, I think my codependency was when things were falling apart, I did not have my husband as the go-to person, as a co-dependent person will typically rely on someone to protect them and save them and rescue them… He wasn’t there to rescue me anymore. And I had to rescue me, and I didn’t know how to do that; I didn’t know I was supposed to do that. And what I realized through a lot of deep trauma work was I was experiencing relational death, which is as though I’m being abandoned all over again, and who’s gonna take care of me.

When we get into that trauma state, we don’t know we’re doing it. I had been minimizing my pain and minimizing and denying it for so long, thinking that I’m a “survivor.” Yeah, that’s all I’ve been doing, is surviving. I’ve just been living and surviving. And luckily, out of my surviving, I seem to have managed to do well professionally… But behind the scenes, I was miserable. I was so, so, so unhappy, and I just thought “If everyone knew, what are they really gonna think of me?” So now I’m just kind of in this new place of just coming out and being completely honest to the world about “This is the blueprint. This is how I got here.” I wanted to share this knowledge, because I don’t want anyone to have to go away for six weeks and spend thousands of dollars on treatment when this is something that I have finally connected all the dots and put all the pieces together.

Dr. Jessica Higgins: And what did you learn around the deeper need, from that trauma and that fear, that there is something you were needing, but like you were saying, early childhood didn’t have your dad and his availability to be really emotionally present with you, and responsive? How did you access — because you were saying “I was repressing it, I wasn’t conscious of it…” I know you went to treatment, but what did you uncover in that process of deeper understanding of you?

Lindsey Ellison: That’s a great question. So many things… On a larger scale, what I uncovered was this wounded child – I had to kind of [unintelligible 00:23:31.19] back to an inner child. Because we all have an inner child, and she/he is there for a healthy reason. The inner child is what makes us sensitive, and what allows us to play, and have fun, and be silly. And I had just this wounded, hurting child that I think has been so ignored for so long. It was almost as if she started to just take over my life. And the wounded child ultimately grew up into that adapted adult child. And what I realized, in order to get out of the wounded child state and go into the inner child state, which complements the adapted adult child state to the functional adult state, I had to learn to parent myself. I had to learn to give myself everything I need(ed) now. Because you can’t change your past; you can’t change it. But I learned and broke down all these pieces of my life where I really had to map out my timeline and identify all those little t’s… Which by the way, takes a couple of weeks to pull up. I didn’t even know half that stuff was trauma, I just thought it was a memory. [laughs]

So what I did is I learned from the trauma and I mapped it out, the big T’s and the little t’s, and then I created a narrative of what’s called my “I am not’s. I am not good enough, I am not pretty enough, I am not rich enough, I am not smart enough, I am not thin enough”, whatever the I am not’s are… And I realized that is just a little girl needing love and needing nurturing. And I have got to talk to her every single day, and I learned a way of doing that, and I learned a coping mechanism that I literally have to employ every day, and I will never give up on her again. That’s what caused the relapse. This is when you give up on your child.

So it’s just like, in order to maintain your health, you eat well every day. And if you keep eating cake and bad food for weeks, you’re gonna start to see it.  Your body reacts to it. Same thing with exercise. If you don’t exercise and take care of yourself every day in some way, you’re gonna lose muscle and gain fat. It’s the same thing with our spirit and our hearts. We have to manage that child every day, because we all have trauma. I don’t know a human being who doesn’t. And we have to manage that pain, and we have to accept it, we have to embrace it, and we have to have a relationship with our past.

So that’s how I understood “Okay, this is my trauma. Now I know what my fears are. So now I’m really aware of what triggers me.” So just like if I’m giving up cake for a month, and I’m trying to lose ten pounds, I’m not gonna walk into a bakery for a while, because that’s a trigger. Why would I do that to myself? That would be mean. That’s not taking care of me. So if I know what triggers me relationally, and I know that if my husband lost his job, I know that I’m going to have to treat myself and let my inner child know “Hey, I’ve got this. I’m gonna take care of you”, and I know that paying the bills triggers me. So I have to prepare for that.

When you know what triggers you, I am no longer beating myself up, of like “You’re so stupid. These are your bills. You’re in your mid-40’s. Really? Are you afraid of bills?” That’s the voice that I would say. And then I don’t judge it or question it, and I just acknowledge it as just a scar; it’s a wound that I have to work on every day and give it attention and nurturing. And therefore, between that trauma and the fear that I’ve now started to nurture, I then am now intact with my spirit. So I’m no longer using drugs, or I’m trying not to; it doesn’t mean I don’t. But my goal is not to use those drugs to manage that fear and trauma. I use my higher power, I use my self-love. And I have to do that every day in order to nurture it.

Dr. Jessica Higgins: Yes, I love that you’re talking about the practice of health and wellness, but also referencing perhaps the reparenting, that there’s a real experience perhaps that you didn’t get, or if we look at our own history, that we all can identify areas perhaps that we didn’t have the attunement, or like you said, neglect… I don’t know if you would even say neglect, but there was an absence of responding given your dad, and the grief he was in, and being unavailable to you.

So when we look at our own history and what we didn’t get, it’s perhaps sometimes that module or that training or that installation that we didn’t get, so we have to kind of really work at implementing it and integrating it… Because like you’re saying, it was a process to really get in touch with and really understand and get access to the deeper layer, but then being able to be so committed to supporting the development of that part.

Lindsey Ellison: Right. I also learned, too — I had to say the a-word, which was abuse. I hated that word, because I’ve never been hit, once. My parents aren’t alcoholics. When I say parents – my dad remarried. So the word “abuse” was a very hard thing, because naturally, I just wanna defend my father. “Well, he did the best he could with what he had.” But I had to separate how I felt about my father and what was good for him, versus what was really good for me and what wasn’t good for me.

Dr. Jessica Higgins: Yes…

Lindsey Ellison: And I learned there’s various types of abuse. There’s obviously physical, there’s sexual… But there’s what’s called emotional, there’s financial, there’s spiritual, and intellectual. And in my abuse categories, it was intellectual and spiritual. And spiritual has nothing to do with religion, it’s your spirit. It’s your parent not nurturing your spirit. And I was a very spirited, very creative little girl, and the constant narrative and the things that I was told over and over again was “Lindsey, stop trying to be in the spotlight all the time. You’re annoying, you’re in the way…” and that was kind of “I’m not worthy of being seen.” That was my “I am not.” And I had to mute myself and diminish myself and hide myself. And that was the other thing. A lot of us are told “You are to be seen and not heard”, and I always hate that saying, because that to me means you’re actually not to be seen and not to be heard. You’re gonna be ignored and invisible.

So over time, I really felt invisible, which is a form of spiritual and intellectual abuse. Is it their fault? No. This is not about blaming mom and dad. This is just recognizing what we didn’t get as children, and then giving it to us now as adults.

Dr. Jessica Higgins: I appreciate you highlighting this, because I think a lot of people sometimes are afraid of the word trauma, and I like that you’re distinguishing what we know about the little t’s and the big T’s, and that even areas that we might not have thought of, in ways that we weren’t seen and we weren’t met, can be traumatizing. It doesn’t have to be this big thing that you don’t identify with, but there’s the emotional, there’s the spiritual… Like you’re saying, these different areas, and really being able to go back and reclaim and reconnect. Because as you’re saying, it’s influencing us. It’s already fueling the way that we behave, and if we’re over-functioning or we’re over-controlling, or we’re getting relief in these ways of addiction behaviors, it’s impacting us grossly. So if we can go back to the origin and really reconnect – and then what you’re saying is really live in this intentional partnership and relationship, and honoring that… And then there’s a whole new way of expressing, perhaps.

Lindsey Ellison: Yes. And while you’re speaking, I just wanted to highlight what a little t was for me that actually impacted my life more than anything, and I think a lot of people could relate to this in some way… When I was in high school, I wanted to play ice hockey. I lived in New York; my family is not from not New York, they’re all from Florida, so I really wanted to play ice hockey, which I guess my dad didn’t really understand. Well, practices were three times a week at 6 o’clock in the morning, and I was two towns over from school. And it was “Well, if you wanna do it, you’re gonna have to get yourself there.” And I didn’t drive yet.

And I just thought “Well, that makes sense. That means he’ll pay for it, because hockey is expensive.” And I would wake myself up — I’m 14-15 years old,  I would wake myself up at 4 o’clock in the morning, I remember we had a wet washcloth that I would put over my face to get me out of bed… [laughter] I would go downstairs, make myself an egg sandwich, finish my homework if I didn’t finish it the night before, then I’d walk out, I’d walk a mile and a half to the train station, in the freezing cold at night, in the dark, and then I’d get to the train station and I’d have to do another long walk from the train station to school. And I never thought that that was not okay. Now that I have kids, I would have never let them — I would just say “No, babe. I’m gonna take you to hockey. It’s okay. That’s what parents do.”

And how that has affected my life – and  this is a great example… Imagine that little t times ten, over and over… I never had help. And now I don’t know how to ask for help. That’s one of my biggest issues, which is how I probably ended up in that meltdown. Because I thought “I have to take care of this myself, because no one will help me, and I’m all alone.” And that is classic co-dependent thinking. But that is where it comes from, these little t’s. And I will sit and cook dinner, and I will have five things going on, and I’m doing laundry, and everyone is watching TV – I never say “Hey, can someone help me chop the carrots?” I’m starting to now. But it’s those little things that add  up over time, that I think is what ends up bursting the dam if we’re not managing it.

Dr. Jessica Higgins: Yes, because what you’re saying is perhaps “I’m feeling overwhelmed, I’m feeling alone, I’m carrying all this alone”, and it’s, again, triggering maybe that trauma and that fear… But then maybe you wanna have an extra drink after dinner, without having–

Lindsey Ellison: Yeah. Because I’ve earned it. That’s my thinking. [laughs]

Dr. Jessica Higgins: Yeah. Can you help people that are listening — because you said something a while back that I just think is so important, around the repression and the   unconscious. Because as you were talking about being in this breakdown, but breakthrough state, and getting support, that you were in an emotional space that perhaps it was easily accessed, because it was already alive and up for you, so the channel for it was really present… And then you can kind of recall and do the history of all the little t’s and the big T’s. But for people that are perhaps living in the survival, and it’s “working” and some of this is unconscious or subconscious to them, what do you recommend around that?

Lindsey Ellison: Well, if you are experiencing dysfunction in your life, that dysfunction is coming from your past. And I learned an awesome phrase that I’ve stolen, which is called “If it’s hysterical, it’s historical.” That means if it’s not manageable and we’re kind of hysterical – it doesn’t mean hysteria, or that we’re crying hysterically, but it’s when we’re derailed. And it’s kind of like when stuff happens throughout our day, we problem-solve all the time. We don’t realize how many times we’re problem-solving. Our kids might come up to us and we’re helping them solve a problem, or at work we’re solving problems… And we’re not losing our minds, we’re not becoming derailed, because we’re functioning as adults.

But when we’re got things like someone broke up with us, someone who’s never been healthy for us and has broken up with us, and we can’t get over it, and if we’re hysterical over it, and it’s derailing where we cannot think – that’s where you have to look at your past. Or if you are hyper-vigilant about everything and you’re constantly worried and constantly stressed and it’s starting to annoy everyone around you, that’s historical. Something is going on there. Of course, that’s where coaching and people like us can  come in and help; that’s really how I adopted my old blueprint coaching program, because of the very steps that I take my clients through. But the very first thing if you wanna do this on your own I call your timeline; look at your timeline and map out — I instruct my clients to do this on a  table within a Word document or Excel spreadsheet. I like tables… And start looking at your life from 0 to 17. What do you remember? It takes a while. Allow yourself a couple of weeks to work on that.

Of course, we remember our big T’s, so we’re gonna put that down… But things that hurt, things that stick with you. I have a client who – I got this out of her; she didn’t realize this, but one of her classmates in the sixth grade vomited on her. It was very traumatic for her, and she is terrified of vomit since that experience. We need to look at why that was. Well, it’s turned out that her mother is a massive alcoholic, and is always vomiting in front of her. But she always related it to this child vomiting on her in the sixth grade, but that was a big thing.

If you’ve ever done a puzzle – I’m sure many of us have during Covid, but… You dump all the pieces out and then you start putting them together. And that’s really what the timeline starts to do – you’re starting to put all the pieces together and just say “Okay, what’s been going on in my life?” High school was traumatic for me. Eighth grade was traumatic for me. I had a retainer and head gear and all this stuff; I remember kids making fun of me. So you start putting that list together and then step back, and “What’s the picture?” Just like the puzzle – you put some pieces together; what’s the picture telling you, and how do you extract your “I am nots”? That’s your first step, “What are your I am nots?”, because those I am nots is from a little girl or a little boy telling you that you suck. But you don’t. You’re in fact quite awesome, and you were born awesome, and you were born the  most amazing miracle in this world. Just you. There’s no one else like you but you. And we never, ever celebrate those things because we’re so caught up in the I am nots of the world.

So once we start looking at the I am nots, then understand “What are our triggers? What is triggering those I am nots? How does that work?” I know for me if you were to — I don’t know, I remember one of my friends commenting to me, and she said she didn’t like the earrings that I was wearing. And I never asked her. I never asked her what she thought. She’s like “I really don’t like those earrings on you.” And I remember my feelings being really hurt.

I now know my I am nots, which is “I’m not worthy of wearing nice things. I’m not worthy of being complemented by people…” So that’s a trigger, and I know that that is my little girl, my wounded child saying “Hey, that hurts”, because as a functional adult, I know that this person who said that did not mean it personally. She didn’t mean it to ruin me. And even if she did, that’s still her problem. It has nothing to do with me. That’s the functional adult rationalizing it.

But I now know my triggers. So then I would say to her, “When you say that, the story I’m making up about that is that I’m not good enough. So I request that if you don’t like something that I’m wearing, that you just keep it to yourself. That’d be really great. Thanks.” Now I’m managing myself, I’m parenting myself through that. Does that make sense?

Dr. Jessica Higgins: Yes, yes… It sounds like what you’re describing with doing the history and the recounting and reconnecting with the big T’s and the little t’s, and then the I am nots, it’s giving real direct information to that inner experience that perhaps we’re not always conscious of, with the fear and the trauma… And then we can directly work with it to support it, as you would as a loving adult parenting a child. Is that what I’m hearing?

Lindsey Ellison: Absolutely. And I think it sounds silly sometimes for us to have to parent ourselves. I think a lot of us, we just balk at that notion… But having gone through a lot of treatment, it really works. Does it take time? It does. But over time, it’s like you’re putting all those pieces together and  now you’re whole. And you have to manage yourself ultimately. Yeah, you’re gonna fall off the wagon sometimes, and you’re gonna have triggers, and you’re gonna have some bad days…

I had a bad day a couple days ago. I’m like “Where is this pain coming from?” And I had to parent myself through that. And I realized, one of my triggers is all or nothing thinking. That’s the perfectionism in me. That’s the codependency. That’s the adult child talking to me, saying “If I don’t get this all done today, I’m a failure.”

Getting little things done is how I’m supposed to be doing it, right? So managing ourselves in the parenting aspect of it is literally talking to myself — I have to write notes to myself in my journal, and talking myself through… “Hey! You’re getting things done. You’re good.” It doesn’t have to be all or nothing today, Lindsey. Look how much you’ve done.” Just like you would talk to your kid, “Well, what have you done today? Oh my gosh, why aren’t we celebrating that?”

Dr. Jessica Higgins: Yeah, and there’s an element — I often am looking at things from an attachment lens, and relationship, and the theory with John Bowlby, and that’s back in the early 1900’s, with his development of the theory that we are wired up for connection and relationship and that sense of attunement. And when we look at our early years, that’s very informative as our imprint of relationship. But what you’re describing is really helping us up-level and heal and really build more of a secure attachment in this frame… But that really we need this connection from cradle to grave.

So often we think as adults we’re not needing this, so in some ways, Lindsey, when you’re describing, it’s like going back and giving an experience of relationship that you didn’t get. And that inner system, the spirit, the emotion, the nervous system, and feeling held in places that you weren’t, and being able to help restructure that in these places that we’ve known trauma and we’ve known fear, and reinstalling a different way of feeling related to in these moments, that then  I’m sure impacts your relationships with your husband and your children, and your clients too, and everyone.

Lindsey Ellison: Right. What I’d say is that this relationship that we have, the one I’m talking about, kind of the affection, the inner child, and the functional adult – I like to call that the house of peace, versus the house of pain. And when we’re living in that and we’re managing that – and only us as adults are gonna manage that. No one can do that for us. Sorry, nobody can. We end up attracting better situations. We end up attracting healthier people into our lives. If we don’t, I’d kind of love to — if I had a diagram, I would draw a triangle, and the top of the triangle is what I call the triune; in all aspects of life, and in many religions, there is a triune. There’s through nature and through religion, Father, Son and Holy Spirit etc. I think our triune should be the inner child, the functional adult and our spirit.

But at the top of that triune, the top of the triangle is typically the drugs part. And that’s how we’re functioning. That’s what I call the blueprint of pain. And that parenting and all of that stuff that we have to do – yeah, we’re still gonna have attachments to others, and I take care of myself, so I’m still having an attachment to my husband; I’m still having a relationship with him. But instead of — here’s one of the biggest symptoms of my issues… What I would do is often I’d be very controlling; and I had no idea I was being controlling. Which meant “Hey, how many resumes have you sent out today?” Because he doesn’t have a job. And I haven’t done this, I’m just giving you an example of something I would do. And me trying to control him. What is the root of that? it’s because I’m giving my power to him to maintain my safety. It’s scaring me, and I don’t trust him that he can handle this on his own, without me in control of it. That’s where that comes from.

So I’m still having a relationship with him, but the difference is “Hey, when I see you sitting around all day, what I’m making up about that is is that you aren’t taking this seriously, and I am going to be left alone, having to manage this problem. So I’m asking that if you could just communicate with me…”, fill in the blank; whatever that is.

So I’m taking care of my needs, and I’m communicating them, and I’m still having a healthy relationship because of it. And by doing it, I’m not controlling him, nor pushing him away.

Dr. Jessica Higgins: Yes, and I would just say that, in my experience, being able to communicate, maybe that softer underbelly, allows him to know where your juice lies, where your emotion or what’s important to you and what’s meaningful and significant. So it’s less about need to change him, or he’s not good enough, but that “I feel scared” or “I’m trying to feel more secure in this, and that was one idea, or that’s the story I made about it… But I’m scared.” So that he can know you. You’re standing on your own two feet, and you’re in service and support of that inner child, like we’re talking… And there’s the revealing, that he can actually be attuned to you, and that possibly there is a way that you guys can work together that is in deep relationship, but that you are on your own two feet, but the revealing and that vulnerability I think allows people to see us more directly, and then also potentially help or show up if it feels appropriate.

Lindsey Ellison: Absolutely. And if we aren’t managing our feelings — here’s a good example, too. When I got back from treatment, I had a very long list of triggers. I was very aware of that now. And these are triggers that I know three months ago would have denied and repressed, because I thought that was stupid. I thought there was something wrong with me. Like, why would I be triggered by loud noise?

Funny enough — I didn’t realize this, but here’s another great example… Football. When my husband watches football, that’s a trigger for me. I didn’t even know that until I started listing out all my little traumas… Because having football on, and the sound — I like football, but having football on meant that’s when my parents [unintelligible 00:47:17.11] and they invite friends over, and I’m not important. And when I started to make this little list of triggers, I shared this with the one that I love, and I say “Hey, this is what I’ve learned. I know this is a little funny, but when you watch football, if you’re not asking me to be part of this – I know this is crazy, but I feel left out. And that’s like my inner child, but I have to manage that. I know that sounds silly, and we could just kind of laugh about it, but I’m not repressing her and ignoring her. She’s still there, and it will never go away.”

I think that’s the biggest takeaway that I’ve learned, and that I really wanna pass on to others – those little triggers that we have, if we repress them and judge them and deny them, they will just come back, creeping up on us. Just think of them as ticks. We have to just love that part about ourselves, because things happen in our childhood, and I can’t undo that. I can’t undo that, and I think a lot of us try to undo it, or we forget about it, or we do what I did, going into this perfectionism, like “Nothing like that would ever bother me. That’s silly.” And then I would — oh, this is great; I’m sure a lot of people know this… We do this lovely thing called “Passive aggression.” I would be in the kitchen, slamming cabinets, while he’s watching TV. And he’ll say “Hey, do you need help?” “No. I’m fine.” [laughs] And I’m angry, and I don’t know why. And I want his attention, but I feel stupid for asking it. That’s where it all comes from, and that’s really why I called this and I’ve created this whole structure around the blueprint of pain… Because that’s where it comes from. If we wonder why we’re in pain, this is it. It’s from our past. It’s hysterical, it’s historical. It’s okay, let’s manage those things, and accept them, and parent ourselves through that. Probably for the rest of my life I’ll be doing this, and that’s okay now. I’m okay with that.

Dr. Jessica Higgins: And there’s a process, and an integration, and a growth… And yes, the wounds potentially are gonna be there, but the way that we’re in relationship with it will grow, I imagine.

Lindsey Ellison: Yeah. This is a fun little thing to do – and this  might sound weird for your listeners, but I have a photo… When I got home, I went through all of my photo albums and found really cute pictures of me when I was 6-7 years old, when all of that big trauma happened… And I have one photo of me in the first grade, with my berets and my school uniform, and I have it taped to my monitor on my computer. And I look at her every day, to remind me “That’s the little girl that has been wounded, and I have to nurture her.”

So that might be really helpful and silly, but just get a picture of yourself and saying “Look how cute she was. She was so happy back then. Go take care of her, especially if she’s been hurt.”

Dr. Jessica Higgins: No kidding. Lindsey, thank you for sharing your story, and also your wisdom and insight, and your blueprint with us around pain. It’s so helpful to have that really clearly synthesized, and really looking  at our addictions, our fear and our trauma, and how that really supports our addiction to pain, as you’re describing…

Lindsey Ellison: Yes. Thank you for having me, I appreciate it.

Dr. Jessica Higgins: Yeah, and how can people get in touch with what you’re offering and what you’re up to?

Lindsey Ellison: Yeah, so my website is LindseyEllison.com. I offer coaching programs; you can get in touch with me through my website about that. You can contact me through my site. And then I also have a best-selling book on Amazon, which is all things narcissism. So if you have a narcissist in your life, it’s called “Magic Words: How to get what you want from a narcissist.” Which is basically an acronymed strategy for how to outsmart the narcissist in your life, especially if you have to co-parent, or you can’t really cut them off, like a parent, or something…  And then I’m also on Instagram as well, @lindsey_ellison.

Dr. Jessica Higgins: Wonderful. And it sounds like you have articles, and you have a podcast…

Lindsey Ellison: Right, my podcast. Thank you for reminding me. Yes, my podcast is “Unbreakable You: How to break up without being broken.” It’s all things dealing with breakups and pain. As I said, I’m doing a  broader stroke approach, so I’ll probably be changing that  over time… But definitely follow me — I’m on all things, iTunes, Stitcher, all those things. I think that’s it.

Dr. Jessica Higgins: Wonderful. I’ll make sure to have all of those links on today’s show notes, so people can get in touch with you about your coaching work, perhaps purchase your book, listen to your podcast, and even just get more acquainted with what you’re sharing with people on Instagram. So thank you for what you’re doing in the world. It’s a gift to have this time with you.

Lindsey Ellison: I appreciate it, and thanks everyone for listening.

I hope you have enjoyed today’s interview, again, with Lindsey Ellison. I appreciated her candor and her willingness to share her personal story, and also what she’s learned in the process… Again, life upset can be such a great teacher. I also wanna encourage you to check out the “Hold me tight” course with Dr. Susan Johnson, which can be found on my website, DrJessicaHiggins.com Click on Podcast, and there you’ll find “Hold me tight”, the course, and from there you’ll have access to all of that information and be able to register.

You’ll also find today’s show notes under Podcast. Today’s episode, again, is 250, “How to use the blueprint of pain for healing and growth”, an interview with Lindsey Ellison.

Thank you for listening, and until next time, I hope you take great care.

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