Arma recovery is one of those phrases that sounds like it has a clear ending point. Like recovery means you get to a place where it no longer affects you, where you have crossed the finish line and uh what happened is simply in the past. But anyone who has lived through something and worked to heal from it knows it's more complicated than that. Recovery is not a destination, it's a direction. And learning to move in that direction with honesty, with support, and without shame is some of the most important work that a person can do. And today's guest has spent her career helping people find that direction. And she's put a great deal of what she's learned into the into a book. So hey dear listeners, welcome back to another powerful episode of Healthy Mind Healthy Life, where we talk honestly about mental well-being not as a luxury, but as the foundation. Everything else is picked up. I'm your host, Avik, and I'm genuinely glad that all of you are here today. And my guest today is a licensed clinical social worker with deep expertise in trauma recovery and the author of a book that brings the insight from a practice into the hands of people who need it. So please welcome my guest, Donna Donna Hugh. So welcome to the show.

Oh, thank you. I'm very happy to be here.

Amazing. Thank you so much for joining us, uh, Donna. And uh before we get into the work and the book, I want to ask you something about um what drew you to this space? Like trauma recovery is not an easy place to spend a career, it takes definitely a particular kind of presence and particular kind of patience. So, what brought you uh here and uh what has kept you in it?

Well, I started out in a different career in computer science, and then I was a stay-at-home mom for 20 years, and during that time I um remembered my own childhood traumas um from the age of 43 to 45. I had been in therapy for about a decade on and off prior to that. And um, thank goodness I was at home because it was um the most intense thing I could ever imagine experiencing. Dropped to the floor flashbacks, uh, remembering things that had been literally locked away like an amnesia. Um, I started studying trauma while I was a stay-at-home mom and was fascinated by it. And then when my own trauma started coming up, I became even more interested and decided that I wanted to help other survivors. Uh, at this point, I've been working on myself uh personally for 35 years, and my book is uh an explanation of well, it's memoir and self-help, but it's showing the reader exactly what I did to heal. What did I say to my child self? How did I take care of my younger parts? What types of therapies did I use? Has a lot of psychoeducation, but the goal is from one survivor to another to try to instill hope, to help other survivors know that they are not insane, um, that complex trauma, in my opinion, is not a mental disorder. It is a wound and a soul wound, which can be healed. And so I embarked on getting my clinical social work degree, went through all the processes you have to go through, and started my practice at 50 years old. And I've been doing my practice for um about 12 years, and I'm very passionate about it because I know from firsthand experience that it is possible to heal from such horrific um assaults and an attempted murder at one point when I was very little, uh, that you can do it. It's it seemed so impossible to me when I started to remember. And my therapist kept saying, hang in there, Donna, just keep going, keep working on yourself. And in six months, you're gonna look back and say, Wow, I'm not doing something as much as I used to. And after all this work, it's been 15 years since I've had a horrible trauma nightmare. Um, there's a lot of symptoms that are completely gone, but there's a lot that are still here, but they're manageable. I've learned they're they're much lower level, and if you stay connected to yourself and build toolboxes to help yourself through difficult moments, you can come to the other side of it.

Yeah, extremely true. And um, and um, I'd love to ask about um I would say a very important word like misconception, right? So uh um I have to start with something that I think keeps a lot of people from beginning their own recovery, or uh I would say from recognizing that what they are carrying is actually trauma. So there are so many misconceptions about what trauma is and who happens to, I mean who it happens to. So what's the one you find yourself gently correcting uh most often, like uh the belief or the assumption that quietly does the most damage?

Uh uh because um trauma tends to carry a lot of guilt and shame. And especially for children, because they are egocentric, which means everything happening around them they believe is connected to them. So when bad things keep happening, they're saying to themselves, hey, this is me. It's gotta be my fault because I'm the common denominator here. And so that creates a feeling of being defective, and that is the seat of shame. The shame feeds a uh a self-blaming. So that's excuse me, the self-blame feeds the shame, and the shame feels a deep self-hatred, which some many people aren't even aware is there until they're really doing deep work with themselves and they uncover it. So that deep-seated shame creates a template for the world and for how the person sees themselves in that world. So they tend to blame themselves for a lot of things, they tend to have a brutal inner critic, as I used to. And they also tend to um many uh trauma survivors will at least go through a period of self-entitlement, I did, where I felt the whole world uh owed me for what happened, and all that did was create a self-sabotaging uh belief system. No, I didn't choose uh the abuse, but I am an adult now and I am responsible for my healing. Nobody can do it for me, and nobody really owes me. I I owe myself uh love and reassurance and patience and taking care of myself and healing. So there's this long journey of helping survivors uh replace the self-blame, shame, um, self-hatred cycle with loving kindness and understanding, and instead of uh being verbally abusive with themselves internally showing up like I used to make a mistake, I would say an awful thing to myself. Now I make a mistake and I say, it's okay, Donna. Everybody makes mistakes, it's all right. What can what can I learn from this? This is an opportunity for growth. Wow, what a difference from what our the reaction used to be. But it's we don't get anything we want out of the harshness. All it does is make us feel worse and act out more and weaken us. However, if we can slowly learn how to be a loving, kind presence with ourselves, we can strengthen ourselves and we can uh really stand in our power and thrive.

Wow.

So um definitely and uh the recovery itself, um what does that word actually mean in your experience of uh working with people? Like because I think a lot of people either don't believe it's possible for them, or they have an unrealistic picture of what it looks like when it's working. So what is recovery honestly?

Well, first of all, the person has to remember um to recover and they need to um reduce or stop their numbing behaviors. Uh most trauma survivors, especially complex trauma survivors, will have something going on with food. Um, and they also are high at high risk for substances. I started using substances at nine years old and but really hid it, and nobody could tell, you know, that there was something going on because I was a people pleaser, like many survivors are, and had to learn how to set boundaries and not do that. So the numbing behaviors need to quiet down so that you can actually feel the emotions that have been stored in your body and they're manifesting and compounding over the years into more symptoms, uh, emotional symptoms, illness, all kinds of pain, different things like that. So learning um something happened and I need to address it and I need to feel it, because we have to feel it to heal it. But we need to, most of us need help with doing that. We need a container of help, uh, loved ones that are around us, professional help, um, educating ourselves through reading, and then learning how to allow the emotions to come up and not be terrified of them, like I was. I was afraid that my um devastation, it's that's the best word I could say, that would rise up, would kill me. And my fear mind kept me stuck in that for many, many years until I learned I'm not gonna die, I'm not going to go insane, I'm going to my mind is gonna give me um a lot, but it's gonna not give me too much that I that I'll literally fall apart. And I went to the edge many times in that two-year crisis phase, and then my mind would give me a break, and then I would it would gear up again. But once I accepted that these emotions needed to be witnessed, which is why I call my book Witness Awakening, I needed to witness my pain and everything that came with it as a loving witness in order to awaken to my healing and strength. And giving yourself a lot of time with this, it's a long process. Um, it's you take steps forward. Uh, sometimes you need to take breaks. Sometimes we take steps back, and it's okay, take a step back. I would get so upset with the back steps. All they really were was something was coming up, and I needed to embrace it, feel it, be with it, allow it, and then um I would take an even bigger step forward. So actually, the steps back were preparation for increased healing coming in the near future. So I learned to not judge them, fear them, attack them, right? Um so that process of learning to accept what what our inner experiences engage with it um is really important to the healing process.

Interesting. Yeah. And um recovery is not the eraser of uh what happened. It's a change in the relationship to it. The memory uh doesn't disappear, but the weight of it, the way it intrudes into the present, it begins to shift. That's a much more honest and ultimately more hopeful picture than the all or nothing version that most people carry. Right? So the root causes, if we talk about um when someone comes to you carrying trauma, whether it's something that happened recently or something they have been uh living with for decades, what do you see underneath the surface? Like not just the event itself, but the patterns that grew up around it.

So when we start out, I do a lot of foundational work to learn about them, you know, what what was it like for them growing up in their house? You know, were they did they feel safe? Was it an emotionally safe space? Because a lot of those early experiences create a belief system that is like Oz behind a screen running the show. Like you don't really realize they're there. Um, and their early experiences, I I don't know if you're familiar with internal family systems. It's a type of therapy that talks about we have many parts of self, and they tend to be younger parts. And so these younger parts many times are running the show when you're an adult and you don't know it. You you don't understand like why I behave that that way back then. That seemed kind of young. Didn't realize little Donna was on the surface because she was scared. So as I learned about the client's childhood, I get an idea of what they're dealing with under the surface. I look at their boundary system. Um, you know, how do they do with being their own gatekeeper, taking care of themselves, not letting others take advantage of them? Are they engaging in codependent behaviors? Different aspects like that. And then I deeply listen to what their experience of their trauma was like and how they interpret it, because that's their reality. Um, and then as we move through their healing, we start working on adjusting those beliefs to be based more in fact rather than in the young child mind's irrational way of looking at the world. It's very tends to be very black and white, catastrophic. That's one of the ways I know when their child self is on the surface. And then we can help that child's self feel uh taken care of so that they'll step away and let the person be in their adult self.

Yeah.

Okay, good. And we we we really work on um the core work is on the relationship between the client and themselves. When that can shift into a loving space, that changes the whole process and makes it more graceful, it makes their healing more manageable, less intense. And when we're in a loving relationship with ourselves, if someone believes, has a spiritual belief system, believes in a higher power, now they're mirroring that relationship with their higher power in them, and they're more in the in a loving, strong uh flow rather than weakening themselves.

Yeah, yeah. So um, okay, that that's uh very interesting. And um one more thing is like uh healing from trauma is rarely linear, and people who are in the middle of it often experience setbacks that feel like going all the way back to the beginning. Um so uh for someone who has been in recovery for a long time, who has done significant work and made real progress, what does ongoing healing look like? I mean, is there a point at which the active work becomes something quieter and more integrated into the just living?

Well, first of all, the big steps back uh tend to be their being, their self, letting them know they're ready to do some deeper work or to do more deeper work. It's just a um a message. It's like our being uh communicates with us through symptoms, uh flashbacks, and through steps back, which tend to be with the symptoms and the flashbacks. So the when that happens, I really reassure my clients that you there they are not starting over. Whatever healing work has been accomplished, it is with them forever. It does not go away. But we do need, as survivors, we do need to stay active in our self-care and our inner work, in our especially inner dialoguing with self in a in a loving way. So further on into the healing work, if someone isn't having a major step back, the work tends to be focused on, you know, are you sleeping enough? How's your nutrition? Are you socializing? Exercise is critical. And there's specific types of exercise that are especially important for trauma survivors. The more intense um release type of uh like running, kickboxing, um interval training helps with some of the release and feeling empowered and strong. And then the calming exercises like qigang uh and yoga. I have been practicing kundalini yoga for many, many years. I prefer kundalini yoga because of all the breath work. And just doing breath work for like an hour, uh, if you go to like a class or something, can release trauma on its own. And then if you have a toolbox because you've been working with yourself or a professional if you're new at it, then you know what to do when this starts coming up. You know that you need to be present with it, you need to allow it and accept it, kind of surrender to it. Soon as that surrendering and acceptance comes in, things tend to soften and be more manageable. And you'll hear me repeat that because it's a really important message in the healing work. So at this point, 35 years in, I very rarely get triggered. If I do, it's quite minor. I don't, with my clients, um, I can hold a strong space for them because I have done so much inner work. And I hold hope for them because even when they can't, I know it's possible, and that at some point they will be able to hold on to it and keep it for themselves, which is such a beautiful gift. I know that they've made a lot of progress when their peace, their level of peace is increasing. They're staying in their adult self more frequently, if not most of the time. And a lot of their major symptoms are either barely noticeable or or completely gone, like some of mine have been for some time now, which doesn't mean they can't resurface at some point, but I can meet them with strength and in and toolboxes to cope with them.

Exactly. Exactly true. Yeah. And um also, like um, this is for the person who is listening, right. Now, who has never told anyone that uh they have been through, who has carried it entirely alone, who is not sure that they deserve to call it trauma, and who doesn't know if healing is something that's available to them. So, what do you want them to hear right now?

Well, I want them to know that many trauma survivors uh minimize, if not all, what happened to them in some way. It's a way our minds protect ourselves, but it also can work against our going for help. So if there's any question, then please seek out a practitioner that is trauma-informed and talk to them about it. They can also read a book I called my healing bible called The Courage to Heal. It's it is geared towards female survivors of sexual trauma, but there are so many parallels in trauma survivors, regardless of the context of their trauma or their gender. Um, that's why in my book I purposely address male survivors because I feel that they get overlooked way too much. There are a lot of male survivors. And so the I'm losing track of the question you asked me. Would you mind reminding me?

And uh, what do you want to uh tell them like?

Oh, yes, to get help, get professional help, thank you. To get professional help, uh to help them understand what happened to them, to give themselves some psychoeduc by reading uh about trauma. Trauma is stored in the body, the body plays a central role. So they could read um The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Vanderkock or Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine, which really talks about um different aspects of how we experience it in our daily life. And as they realize, okay, something really significant, I've been through something significant, and I really need to work through this because it doesn't just go away. And um the the just the act of telling is huge in healing, and it was for me too. That was part of the cathartic healing I experienced through writing my story in my book. But when I first told a therapist and in my journals, I started to realize that um I wasn't alone with it, that it was real, it actually happened, and it has happened to many other people, and that there really is a way to heal through this, that it's not a life sentence that I am stuck with for the rest of my life.

Exactly. And um, if you have to uh share one advice, what that will be find a way to learn how to work with yourself in a loving way, speaking to yourself in a loving, patient way.

And try to, and if I can add one more, um, work on being present. Like if you read The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle or Um The Untethered Soul by Singer, that when we are fully present, we are at our most peaceful state because we're not in our fear mind going forward or back. So the loving, being loving with self, understanding rather than harsh, and learning how to be present, and if they can get help too.

So uh, if the listeners want to connect with you, what would be the best medium to connect?

So I I have a website, um, it's after the title of my book, Witness Awakening at gmail.com. And I'm going to send you uh Vic a uh link for psychology today. It shows my profile and people can contact me through there. I can only treat because of the licensure laws in New Jersey, people that live in New Jersey for now. Um, and then I also will give you a link for my book on Amazon. The author on the book is Marie McCarthy. I used a pseudo name because my children were young when I wrote it, and I just didn't want them to be affected. And those are the three ways to contact me or my or get my book. Amazing.

But do all this, what I'll do is I'll put all the links and the details into the show notes for easy reference. And with this, that's the wrap for today's episode of the mind healthy life. And if this conversation started something in you, a recognition, a quiet hope, something you have been carrying that finally has a name. Please be gentle with yourself today. That's not nothing, that's the beginning of something. So uh as I said, Donna's book uh and her details uh will be in the show notes. And if someone in your life needs to hear this conversation, please share with them carefully and with care. So I'm your host Avik and this is Healthy Man, Healthy Life. Eating is not a luxury, it's your right. So take good care of yourself and see you next time. Thank you so much.