Rewrite Your Story, Reclaim Your Identity: Simple & Deep Coaching Preview

Rewrite Your Story, Reclaim Your Identity: Simple & Deep™ Coaching Preview

Is your past still dictating your present? Join me, Wysteria Edwards BA, Ed.M, on a transformative journey as we uncover how your childhood experiences profoundly shape your current life. Drawing from the insights of Dr. Dan Allender, we explore how revisiting these formative moments can be the key to healing, growth, and reclaiming your true identity.

In this Simple & Deep™ Coaching preview, you’ll learn the significance of understanding insecure attachment, how having an empathetic witness fosters brain integration, and why intentionally revisiting your story can create new neural pathways. Together, we will explore how to transform past trauma—whether from abuse, neglect, or other hardships—into resilience and strength, all without the need for confrontation.  

This is about blessing the parts of yourself that have endured, finding faith, hope, and love within, and empowering yourself to write a new chapter of your life. Let this be your guide in engaging with your story, so you can move forward with intention, purpose, and deep healing.

Chapters

• 0:00 Understanding Your Story and Attachment
• 15:10 Uncovering Your True Identity

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello, my name is Wisteria Edwards and I am the owner of a company called Simple and Deep, which we are committed to helping you understand insecure attachment, engage your stories and live with intention. I also am a social and emotional coach for children and have been an educator for 25 years kindergarten through 12th grade in different capacities. But my real love is primary and that's where I've been doing all of my active research, as well as publishing a book called Waiting for Mr Rogers Teaching with Attachment, Attunement and Intention. And it's not just for educators per se, it's actually for the child that you were and the children that you have in your life now, using the personal papers of American icon Fred McFeely Rogers or Mr Rogers. So I would love for you to take a look at that.

Speaker 1: 0:48

But today we're going to be talking about you are a story, not that you just have a story, but you are a story. I'm going to start with one of my favorite quotes from Dr Dan Allender, who runs the Allender Center in Seattle, which I'm privileged to be training with currently, and we're going to start with this quote If we don't tell our stories, our stories will tell us. Our stories impact us, either unconsciously or consciously. It's up to us to decide whether we'll be passive recipients or active agents, co-authors in the shaping of our lives. So, as I say that to you, you are a story. What comes to your mind, what things do you think about? And most of the time, we don't really try to connect it to who we were as children, to who we are now. The thing is, as I was getting ready to do this for you, I was thinking even if you are a grown adult, the child that you were is still very much alive within you. All of those hopes, dreams, shatterings and moments where you found solace or you found ways to avoid more pain are blessed. They matter and they still matter. So, as we go through this process, resist the urge to be like, oh well, it's in the past because it's not, it's playing out. We are seeking different ideas and patterns because we want to make sense of the world, and I would go as far as to say it affects our relationship with God, the universe, whom you were created to be like, to embody and to change the world through love and through showing others what you have overcome and what is possible, but also to enjoy the life that you have right now, and oftentimes we are absolutely stuck because we refuse to actually look back so that we can heal and move forward.

Speaker 1: 2:57

I am passionate about brain integration, creating new neural pathways, because we have a brain that has plasticity. That means that we can change through different modes of understanding that, as we have experience. It actually will retrain our brain, but this is an intentional process and it's not for someone that's going to give up. It's not something overnight, but as we learn how to tell ourselves the truth about situations and be an empathetic witness for the moments where we were harmed as children, then we can move forward. So what is traumatic to a young child? It can be definitely subjective, but I want to give you a clue.

Speaker 1: 3:37

The stories that haunt you are moments where you are left alone without an empathetic witness. Perhaps someone came and talked to you about it, but you didn't get enough. As I've taught kindergarten for over 12 years, that was the biggest thing. Most of the time people would say, oh yeah, we talked about it. But sometimes children need to talk about it again and again and again. That bad things do happen sometimes, but not always, and so that is where we want to take that stance. With trauma, we're going to talk a little bit about that, but overall it's really just children not knowing how to make sense of something that they don't understand or is too big for them to absorb.

Speaker 1: 4:20

When my children were going through something like COVID, my students I would say you know what COVID? It's an adult problem and you have adults in your life that love you and will take care of you. Who are those people and can you allow yourself to trust those people? So oftentimes, when we are traumatized, we are lost. We've lost three things faith, hope or love. Now that obviously ties to some of the scripture in the Bible, but what I'd like to go is a little further.

Speaker 1: 4:49

Faith is the absence of security of that knowing trust. Now you know that you're hungry, but you feel it in your body in different somatic ways. So I want you to think about having secure attachment is that feeling of being deeply known and sought out by the people who love us and trusting that they are going to meet our needs so we aren't afraid of things that come at us. And if we do have things that come at us that are scary or we don't understand, we have someone there to help us. Now, children get secure attachment if they get the right things that they need 50% of the time. So that tells you, if we have insecure attachment and it's one of three types then someone failed us and that's kind of the key. And it doesn't mean that we don't love our parents or value what they brought to us or understand their limitations, but that's here, and your child's body was egocentric and absolutely based in your body. So I want you to give yourself a lot of kindness as we have this conversation and then be open, give yourself space to possibly have the imagination that there might be some things that need to have some repair.

Speaker 1: 6:09

So absence of faith is trust. Then we have hope. Hope is the containment being able to come into a situation. Hold what it is. It's very sad. I know that it was scary. We empathize Doesn't mean we sympathize where we have to feel it for that person, but what we do is we empathize with a child. So if someone were able to come alongside you and say, oh no, it hurts so bad that grandma passed away, that she died, and she didn't just go to sleep and not wake up because that could scare children, but we tell them the truth and then we sit with it, even though it's uncomfortable.

Speaker 1: 6:44

So attunement is the process of coming in and opening our hearts up to possible pain of other people and our own. Because when we hear people's stories or we do life with them, because when we hear people's stories or we do life with them, it's going to get messy, it's going to get kind of hard right. And if we're working with children and ourselves, we have to give ourselves the freedom and the grace and the understanding that we won't always have the answers. But oftentimes adults will choose to either lie to make it easier, they will embellish something a little bit too much, which causes a lot of uncertainty for children, or they completely avoid it, or they explain it once and then they get annoyed that a child needs more explanation, more reassurance. So it's like being in a container that you know you're safe within that space, that that person is holding your emotions, and I often think of attunement or containment.

Speaker 1: 7:44

Hope is that you believe that even though this is hard right now, it's going to get better. It's not always going to be so hard. At some point we won't feel like crying all the time. Another time you won't be so scared when you have this happen because we believe that something good is coming. So where is your capacity to believe that good is on its way? If that is not something that comes up for you easily, that's a sign that we need to heal something within us. And the last part we have faith, hope, and then we have love. And love is not just this gooey, lovely, happy feeling inside, but love repairs when things are ruptured or disrupted.

Speaker 1: 8:30

And the hardest thing that I have seen in my own life is that adults have a lot of difficulty admitting to children that they were wrong. And I have countless things that have come up, because when we're with children, we automatically are transported back to our own childhoods. So if you have people that have wronged you and you have never received a definite, real apology, a repair and it's not just an I'm sorry, but it's. I wronged you and because I hurt you, it hurts me too. And here's what I want to do to repair this, because when we are hurt, it's not easily repaired. It takes time, it takes effort. We have to have it proven to us through experience and then we're back at the beginning of faith. So if we've had our trust broken, then we have to repair that.

Speaker 1: 9:22

So if we think about attachment as a whole thing. It's really broken trust and it's also what we did or have to do to hold on to love and that love might be something that never repairs. And if we were broken in childhood with our trust, then that is our first heartbreak, because attachment is truly the bond between an infant and their caregiver, where they have their needs met. So if the mother is meeting the needs a reciprocal process, right the baby cries, saying that they're either hungry or they need a diaper change, or they need to be burped or they just want to be held and soothed, then the mom is coming to meet their needs quickly. The next thing that happens if they are insecure is we can have three different responses. One the mother meets the needs, only to meet the needs, and that is it. There's not a lot of cooing at the baby, interacting with the baby, that sort of thing, and that baby will grow up to be avoidantly attached, knowing that their emotions are not the important part. It's just facts, facts, facts and details, details, details and actions, actions, actions.

Speaker 1: 10:33

So as we grow up, we find ourselves becoming perfectionists and really relying on how we show up as far as at our job and making sure that our expectations are met, and having checklists and having all these things in order, because we are avoiding feeling it and I know that might be like, oh, but it makes sense and that's what I always talk about in my trainings and my coaching it makes sense. If you knew that you could not bring your heartache, you would stop bringing it. The next one is the baby has a need, but the mother has a ton of emotional pain, usually from childhood, that they haven't processed or worked on, and they are absolutely obsessed with everybody else. So this often is codependency. This is also abuse or neglect, sexual abuse that has not been dealt with. In my own case with my mother, there were things that she needed to work through that were being triggered by her having an infant, and so she was either smothering with love or distracted, and so that is the duality that an anxiously attached child or baby ends up having. Is that sometimes you meet my needs and other times you don't.

Speaker 1: 11:45

So as we grow older, we become the ones that talk the most. We hold the floor, longer. We try to always be checking in with people to make sure that we are secure. Are we okay? Any slight change of energy or attention or engagement with that person, we start to panic. We see the bubbles at the bottom of the iPhone talking to us or like that they're reading our message and then they just disappear and we're like we become hypervigilant. Now, a child that is avoidantly attached will often go hypo, which means that they're going to have less reactivity to the things around them to prove to their body and keep them emotionally safe. So they're going to have a lot less expression. They're going to be really hard to read. So that is going to be a clear indicator oftentimes that someone has some insecurity.

Speaker 1: 12:35

The last one would be, unfortunately, if a child is in a situation where they feel terrified or their primary caregiver, they are witnessing that they are being terrorized or terrified. This would be very common in domestic violence situations or a child that grows up in an abject poverty, where there's extreme neglect, where there is incarceration, where there is gang or drug violence around them, where they're startling very easily that sort of thing. There's just no peace and what happens is that it's just inclusive to the baby's brain because they don't know how to make sense of it. So as they learn how to regulate their emotions, they'll basically jump this river, if we think of the emotional regulation as a river, and we think about if we're canoeing down the river and then the canoe flips, if a child does not have someone to help them, come up, be regulated and say, we're going to be okay, I've got this, I'm the wise adult, I've got you. Then they're going to go to one side of the river or the other. They're going to go to chaos, oh my gosh, and they might start crying, tantruming, throwing a fit ball, you know, like total chaos. Or they'll go to the other side of the river, which is rigidity.

Speaker 1: 13:48

So if a child is terrorized, what they do is they jump back and forth because they really don't know who to become, to stay safe, because things don't make sense. And so love, faith, hope, containment, attunement, intentionality, people saying they're sorry, we don't know what to do with it, because the brain of a child that's disorganized goes right there. So I'm telling you all of these things because that is part of your story. That is where your story began, and what we don't heal is going to be revealed later in life. It's going to be revealed in all of your interpersonal relationships, but especially with your partners and your children. Then, if you are working with people most of the time we are it's going to show up there too. It's going to show up in how you deal with stress. It's going to show up in how comfortable you are in labeling emotions in your body. It's going to show up in how you feel when there's ambiguity, when things are different, when things are hard, when things are uncertain, when you don't know which step to take next. It's going to show up in would you rather hang out by yourself all the time or with people? It's going to show up in all of the ways that we try to label it when we get bigger.

Speaker 1: 15:10

This is your personality, this is this. This is that. It really starts very simply with the story of how you were received. Each child comes into this world simply looking for someone who is looking for them. I've learned how to do this. I learned how to heal it, but that was after many, many years of behavioral addictions, tethering to the wrong people, being completely drawn to narcissistic people, and I realized it made sense, those same words. It made sense, and so my hope and my prayer for you is that, if any of this has kind of made you go, and so my hope and my prayer for you is that if any of this has kind of made you go, hmm, I am here for you. This is what I do.

Speaker 1: 15:51

Well, I'm still learning, but we work on story. We look at who you are, what has made you who you are, and we look at stories that we need to name, because some of us need to just say that was abuse or that was neglect, or that just wasn't okay, and sometimes we don't have to go to that person to tell them that, we just need to say it to ourselves and acknowledge it. So we name them, we ponder, we articulate it with our mouth, we write it out, and then we learn to bless the parts of us that survived it, not saying, oh, I'm so glad I was abused. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying I blessed the part of me that was so smart at whatever age it was six years old to know that I had to do X, y, z to keep myself safe. I bless the part of me that thought that I could protect a younger sibling from an abuser.

Speaker 1: 16:47

I blessed the part of me that tried to tell the truth and people told me I was wrong. That is where we bless our story and then what we do is we use that information to see, because in those broken places, that is where your power is, that is where your calling is, that is where that purpose that you are craving it's inside there and I know it's scary, but I promised that there is freedom on the other side. If you're interested in this, join me. I would love to lead you. Thank you.