Conversations on Healing

Introduction Welcome to the Conversations on Healing podcast, where host Shay Beider speaks with renowned healthcare leaders, practitioners, and thought leaders to explore the world of wellness, the incredible powers of self-care, and what it truly means to heal today. Join us on this journey to become more whole healed and connected.

Shay Beider Hello everyone, and welcome to the Conversations on Healing podcast. My name is Shay Beider, and I’m so honored to introduce acclaimed grief educator and bestselling author Christina Rasmussen. Her work on grief has been reflected in her books: “Second Firsts”, “Where Did You Go?”, and her most recent release, “Invisible Loss”. Destined to teach in this field, Christina earned her master’s degree in guidance and counseling from the University of Durham before experiencing a sudden loss that shifted the course of her entire life. Navigating a personal path for healing, Christina describes getting out of a mental state she calls the “waiting room”, which is a mindset of procrastination and life lived in limbo or in waiting mode. Through working with thousands of people, Christina has shared her mission to guide others on their journey of loss with compassion, grace, and validation. In today’s episode, we explore her newest book, “Invisible Loss”, and talk about the life reentry model that she developed.

Invisible losses are the more subtle but powerful losses that can reshape the entire course of our life. Christina’s work touches on different aspects of our persona, including what she calls the survivor self, the watcher, and the thriver. The life reentry model she designed helps you to reclaim your original self through a series of small, very low risk steps, while also acknowledging the pull that invisible losses can create to put you back in the waiting room. By applying the sequential steps outlined in Christina’s book, listeners can gain greater awareness of how to thrive in their daily lives. I am so looking forward to sharing this practice and diving deeper together into the ways that you can heal the invisible losses in your life. So let’s get the conversation started.

Well, Christina, I’m delighted to welcome you to the Conversations on Healing Podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Christina Rasmussen Thank you so much for having me, and I am so looking forward to this conversation.

Shay Good. I want to start by reading one of my favorite little quotes from your recent book, titled “Invisible Loss- Recognizing and Healing the Unacknowledged Heartbreak of Everyday Grief”, that we’re going to be talking about quite a bit today. And so this quote, I think, is just so lovely. And here’s what you have written; this is on page 102: “Moving from a life made to protect you, to a life created to fulfill you, is a courageous act”. And I think so much of our conversation today, even though we’re going to be talking about this idea of invisible loss and then what you can do about it, how you kind of reclaim what you will define as an original self- and that’ll be part of the meat of our conversation. So much of what it really is getting to is the courage it takes to create a fulfilling life and not just to be scrambling to survive day to day. So I wanted to start there because I was inspired when I read that particular quote, and I thought what might be a great beginning to this conversation, because your book is entitled “Invisible Loss”, to just explain to our listeners what is an invisible loss?

Christina I want to start by saying that every person on this planet has experienced an invisible loss, if not many. There is no human being that I’ve ever met or will ever meet, and of course we can never be a hundred percent certain that will not have experienced a moment of impact- a minute, a second of something that completely felt like it derailed them; it impacted them. And very often, those moments of impact, when they happen, we are surprised by them because what we experienced is not a traditional tragedy or a conventional loss- a loss that we have been taught to express or acknowledge or validate. It is a moment so invisible, so completely hidden that we feel confused. We feel as if, Shay, we feel like we shouldn’t have reacted like this internally; we shouldn’t have been upset about something. I encountered this type of loss early in my classroom when I taught my many, many, many years of life reentry curriculum.

When I discovered this type of loss, at first it had no label; it had no words. Nobody would come and say, “Oh, I’m feeling this invisible loss. I wonder what it is”. We couldn’t even understand that something was happening to us. And when we experienced a tragedy, those losses- actually, those invisible losses- are completely overshadowed, and we don’t actually consider them as important or impactful. When we don’t have a tragedy that we’ve experienced, when our life appears from the outside as if it’s as it should be, imagine if your life just looks good from the outside, but inside you don’t feel that goodness. You don’t feel that contentment that everyone thinks that you’re feeling, but you don’t know why you’re not feeling that. Or, and I want to add a third thing, you may feel okay; you might be feeling as if everything is fine and everything as it should be because maybe you’ve never experienced a moment of thriving. You’ve never felt fulfilled; you’ve always survived or got through or did well enough, and that has always been good enough. Especially then, we don’t even know that we have those invisible losses. We have been told to be grateful for what we do have and so many people who have so much less than us, and we kind of dare not to complain. We don’t complain; we keep quiet, and the more quiet we keep, the more hidden and invisible those losses become. And we never find our way out of what I call- and we’ll talk about that too in more detail- the waiting room, where we feel stuck in between places, and we’ll explore that too. So I know that was a bit long, but I just wanted to cover every different aspect that the brain may be asking, as I am giving a simplified version of what normal loss is.

Shay Yeah. Well, and what I think is so fascinating about your personal story, Christina, is you experienced a big loss. You had your husband passed very quickly from a stage four cancer. You had two young children, and there you were. And that is the kind of loss that our society recognizes, right? That’s not what you’re referring to by invisible loss. Those are the divorces, the deaths, the- you know- the catastrophes that are very sort of notable in our world and that generally will rally some support around us. But what’s fascinating is, as you continued forward in your life and your work, and you worked with a number of people who similarly had had big losses- very notable losses- you then came to identify that there was this other form of loss and grief that was getting missed. And really, that’s what this entire book is pointing to: that there’s this whole other form of loss and grief that we’re missing, and that it actually matters. And what’s so fascinating to me about it is, like you’re saying, it is subtle. And in my own experience of working with it since I’ve read the book, I also feel it’s almost like it’s slightly dissociative. It’s like these little moments where you kind of- something didn’t feel good; it hurt. There’s a little bit of a sense of loss or grief. And then, in my own experience, there’s a little shutting out, a little slight kind of almost dissociative response where I disconnect. And what we’ll talk about is that you actually have not only developed a model, which you call the life reentry model, to help people to recover from those invisible losses, but that part of that model is actually getting back to something that you call the original self. Which in the book you define as the self, like who we are in the absence of external influence. And so I’m curious about a couple things there. First, I want to understand: where do you think that original self comes from, or how is that formulated in each one of us?

Christina We are born with that original self. Everyone is born with a version of themselves that they are here to express. But as soon as we are born and we start having experiences, and we’re growing in a family unit, we are basically being impacted and influenced by our parents, by our friends, by our life circumstances. And we shift that personality to adjust, to kind of fit in, to integrate, to survive moments of impact, to get through hard things that nobody’s talking about. And we become someone different. Sometimes we become someone entirely different, depending on what type of moments of impact we experienced, what types of invisible losses we had to go through. Other times, we become a slightly different version of ourselves. So it’s still us, but kind of muted, subdued. And the quote that you read in the beginning, Shay, actually fits in here really well. And we create a life based on survival versus fulfillment of that original self. That original self actually never gets to evolve, never get to grow into whoever this original self was here to become. We kind of leave that part of us behind, and we become the sum of three different parts. And we will talk about those parts: the survivor part, the watcher part, and the thriver part. And we walk around with those three parts surviving our life.

Shay Do you want to about those three parts now? Just because I think they are so elemental to your work.

Christina Yes. One of the many times that I’ve stumbled upon the survivor self was in my private practice. In the beginning, I kept hearing all of my clients-at the time, we’re going back 14 years now; I have done this for a really long time. I kept hearing, “I’m surviving, I’m surviving”. And Shay, I’m sure you hear this all the time in your work: “I’m surviving, I’m surviving, but I know it’s not me; but I’m just surviving”. And it hit me one day, and I remember that first time I actually addressed that part as the survivor self with a client. I said, “This is your survivor self, it’s not you”. And he just went quiet. He just thought, “What do you mean by that?”. And then I started explaining the survivor self is the part of us that came along to protect us from pain, from more sorrow, from more invisible losses, from more moments of impact.
It came to kind of help us, and it is a good part in our life. I want to say that our natural setting is to survive. And so no matter what we do, we can never really- I want to use a strong phrase- get rid of the survivor self. And I have tried to do that for many years, and it’s not possible. But what we can do is kind of drop the volume and kind of maybe sometimes put it to sleep, get it to be quiet, send it away, be aware of that survivor voice that is here to protect us. And it’s here to keep us safe to kind of say, “Okay, this is my survivor self trying to keep me safe when I’m trying to make this decision”. So we train ourselves to kind of subdue the survivor self. That’s one part. And trust me, we’ll talk a lot about that part.

There’s a lot to say. The second part, and if I was to give percentages to these three parts, unfortunately, without going through the life reentry process, without doing work of different types- it doesn’t have to be life reentry- whatever work you’re doing with your therapist, with your support group, with however you’ve chosen to do the work, that survivor self actually starts out out without any work at about 80%. It’s very loud. Most people wake up every morning trying to survive their day as a default. It’s your immediate response, “Oh my gosh, I have to do this today. I have to go get this done”. And I mean, doesn’t that sound so familiar for so many people? So that’s say it’s 80%; there’s a 15% part of us. Again, this is in the beginning of this work that watch yourself. I call it the watcher because it’s the witness behind your eyes.

It is the part of you that has been with you all along and has witnessed all your moments- good or bad, all your invisible losses, all of the experiences that you had. It knows you so well and actually has so much wisdom that we never tap into, or rarely tap into that wisdom, because the survivor self says, “You don’t know this. You won’t make the right decision. This is not for you.” So we don’t even access that part. That part is actually my favorite part. It’s the reflective part. It is the knowing part. It is the timeless, wise part of being human. And if I was to look at this spiritually, it would be the soul. It lives outside of time and space, and it’s always here. And that’s a 15%. And there’s a 5% third self that I call the thriver. The way to kind of- and I smile for those who only listen and can’t see us- I’m smiling when I’m saying this because the thriver self is that kid, that kid inside all of you who feels like they can do anything.

They can go skiing, they can jump out of airplanes, they can laugh and dance and be happy and try new adventures and be fearless. And in that basic beginning, before you do any of the work, as you’re just surviving your life, you only have access to that self- 5%. It’s so fleeting. It’s so hard to actually find unless you do the work. Some people, when you meet them- so when I meet someone, I can tell pretty much which part of them is stronger. I actually always look at people like that. They have a strong watcher self. Here’s their survivor self, and look at their thriver self. I’m jealous; I want to be like that. I want to remember that part of me. So in this process, we actually do exercises to reconnect you with that thriver self and the watch self and to have more access to it, especially when you’re going through a hard time. Because that is when that survivor 80% influence goes to a hundred percent and shuts down the other two parts completely because you’re in severe survival mode. And that’s okay. I want to add this part: There’s nothing wrong with survival. It’s part of our language. “Breast cancer survivor”, “survive this.” I have survived the death of my husband; I’ve survived so many different things. You listener, you have survived so many difficult moments of your life, and we are grateful for that survivor self that got us through. But the survivor self stays too long…
And it keeps us in that survival mode, and it keeps us in that waiting room place, which I want to say is the place we go to survive. And we actually end up building our whole life in that place of survival. So the conversation we are having today is about helping you see where those waiting rooms are in your life, see which parts of your life you are surviving, and how to take that first step out and hopefully go through the process and discover your invisible losses. That’s kind of where the beginning of putting you in that survival mode, actually without you knowing about it. We live in a world where our society, our culture, they tell us what is loss and what isn’t. They tell us that when you lose a child, when you lose a spouse, when you go through a really hard divorce, when you lose a job- these are really hard losses and they are very hard. But what invisible losses is something- it’s a different type of grief. We are actually grieving our original self and we don’t even know it.

Shay And what I think is beautiful is I did my own process in working with the book because the way the book is written, it’s very instrumental in that sense that you can review it and actually do the life reentry model, which is what I want to talk to you about next. But one of the things I noticed that was very clear to me is how this plays out in lineages. So I could see in my own story the way my grandmother’s survival self, what kicked that up into high gear because of her life circumstances and experiences. I saw it in my mother; I saw it in myself. I saw the inherited sort of legacy of what you learn and receive just to be able to get through life so that you will survive. And as you said, it’s not something to abandon or banish because as you said, you can’t, right?

This is a fundamental part of who we are that helps us to get through hard things, but being able to tune that up or down and to work with it is really a critical skill. So I think what would be great is to talk about the life reentry model because developed these steps. You can kind of look at it four or five steps, depending on how you want to bucket it. So I thought maybe you could walk people through the steps and then share a little bit about the process that they could engage in as well.

Christina When everyone goes through the book, I let everyone know it’s going to feel more concrete than this conversation. Whenever your brain- I’m preparing the brain- whenever the brain, your brain is saying, “Oh, I’m not so sure what that means. I wonder how I would go about that.” Trust me when I say this to you: the book is written in a way that will literally explain everything. It will take you step by step. And whenever I do these interviews, I try to create an organic way of talking about it as if you’re in a classroom with me, as if we are in a conversation and I’m in conversation with you Shay. And I hope we can go back and forth like that too, to give examples of how this looks like. Ultimately, I’m going to start by saying that the end result of this practice, however kind of lengthy it feels when you first hear this conversation, I don’t want it to be that practice- the stacking practice, which we will talk about.
It’s going to be very few minutes a day. It’s going to be just a little bit of your time- almost like maybe longer than brushing your teeth- but something that I want you to feel like it’s just like right now. I meditate; I do TM meditation. I do it twice a day: 20 minutes in the morning, 20 minutes in the evening, and I say to myself, “I’m going to treat this as important as brushing my teeth, showering, eating.” It’s that significant. My own life practice now is very, very subtle and it happens in my mind a lot. But when I’m going through something- a transition, a period of time where a lot of things are changing- and I’m not sure which voice is talking to me sometimes, because the more advanced you get, the more advanced your survivor self gets.

And it’s actually very, the survivor self is the most intelligent part of you. The watcher self is the wisest part, but the survivor self knows how to navigate and how to kind of keep you safe. Imagine it’s a prehistoric part of us. This is how we’re made to survive the jungle, to survive the bear, right? So our brain is wired for that survival, and it’s intelligent. So when you’ll find yourself in places in your life where you really want to get out of that waiting room, then you slow it down, you take a little more time to do the practice. So now that I’ve said that, I want to start by one of the very first steps that the book starts with. I ask everyone in the book to share their story the way as it is- that story as it is now, without the work, without doing anything. In the classroom, I would ask everyone when they came in, “Tell me about you, tell me about whatever it is…”
I wouldn’t even actually frame it too much because it’s almost like a shot- a look at that inner world, and a look at that survivor self and look at what is fear-based. Actually, I could look at someone’s story. If you were to introduce yourself to me and you talk for about five minutes, I would learn so many things about you. And it wouldn’t actually just be factual; it would be about which part of your life you’re still surviving, which part of your life you feel stuck in, but you’re not even aware of it. So you start this journey by just writing down that baseline story.

Shay And I love that one of the methods you talk about for doing that in the book is very stream-of-consciousness style, where you’re just allowing yourself to just go- not try to think or edit, but just allow. And what I think is so powerful about that technique and approach is it lets subtle things that might be slightly at the subconscious level start to come through so that then the next steps are a process of working with that and reviewing it. And you even discuss it as a cleansing process, which is a second step.

Christina And we’ll talk about the cleansing process. I always say to people, if there was one thing you keep from this work- let’s say all of us, we learned something, we do something for a while, and then we kind of drop it, leave it behind. I hope you don’t. But if you did and there was one thing that you take with you, it would be that. So writing original- your kind of story as it is, tracking, trying to find your invisible losses, trying to track them down. I call it the tracker in the book. I’m asking you to locate two different types of invisible losses: one that is primary and early, and the other one that’s happening right now. And most of the time nearly a hundred percent of the time, those two things are connected. It’s almost like if you could see it visually, there’s these dots that, when that first moment of impact happened, you survived.

It changed; you shifted. You went in and out of the waiting room, and you actually created relationships, events, jobs, communities to keep you protected from that first moment of impact- that first primary invisible loss. And as you get closer to your present moment, to where you are now, you can then look at your life from that place and see how you’re surviving it as well and find that invisible loss. So there are exercises in the beginning of the book. It’s the awareness phase, where we become aware of what it is that we are grieving. And I always get goosebumps when I say this, and I feel both grateful and sad at the same time because there’s so many people who are grieving without even knowing that they are. And they’re confused, and they say to their friend, to their therapist, to their spouse, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know why I am feeling like this.” And the reason why I’ve done this work, and I wrote this book, is to free everyone from that confusion, to say, “I understand now why”. And just because nobody acknowledged or validated that moment of impact that resulted to that invisible loss, nobody has said that It’s a valid feeling- that it’s okay to feel sad about this. I never recovered from this; I actually altered my identity. I shifted myself to fit in better so I don’t have to feel that ever again.

So I feel I have a dual form of emotion: and I feel grateful that we can talk about it, but also feel sad for everyone- for so many people who are experiencing this form of loss. And there’s a lot, lot of people, and they don’t even know. And I want to add one thing: I used to have someone early in my classes who would say, “I don’t have a survivor self. I don’t have a survivor self”. And I’ll never forget it because at first I was conflicted. Do I tell them that they really do? Do I let them believe that they don’t? But their survivor self was so strong, it had convinced them that they were thriving. And this person had gone through catastrophic events in their life- I mean, it was a lot, but no, no, no. And he was angry about it too: “I do not have a survivor self.” So the survivor self will actually try to convince you that you should be grateful for- especially when you’re writing that baseline story- should be grateful for what you have, that there’s nothing really wrong with your life, and the things that are wrong or tragic, you can’t change them anyway.

Shay Right, and one of the parts of the life reentry model that you talk about is spotting those survivor patterns of thinking, because like you said, they can be subtle. It’s intelligent. This is a part of us that knows how to hide and be a little sneaky. And then once you do identify those patterns, basically going through this reframing process. So I thought maybe if you would share a little bit of what that’s like: you identify those patterns and then how the reframe works.

Christina Yes. And now we entered the stacking practice. And the stacking practice is made of the steps. The way the book is written, I always tell people to spend at least a week in each step and to allow for that to be understood. In the beginning, you may not know exactly what it’s all about. What is your pattern? We’ll talk about that, whether you’re doing your cleanse, right? I’ve had so many people tell me, “Do you think I’m doing it right? Am I doing the cleanse right?”. So I want to start by saying you will never, there’s many cleanse examples in the book- maybe too many. I believe it’s maybe chapter four; I’m not sure exactly, but there’s pages and pages of cleanses. So please look at those. But even if you read them twice, your survivor self will actually question and cleanse. So the first step is to cleanse, and that’s the unfiltered kind of truth.

I want to say “truth serum”. But imagine if you were to be really honest with yourself every single morning you wake up, and you’re going to, you’re going to be honest with how you’re feeling- however bad it sounds or wrong or shameful- because you’ve been trained to feel shame and guilt and wants you to write it down. And some people like to share it with someone they trusts, but it’s very rare that we can find someone who we really feel that we can be truly honest with. If you have that someone, please do talk to them. But write your first cleanse out and try to just write whatever’s in your mind. For example, I’m just going to do a really quick example. If I was to do a cleanse right this moment, as I’m sitting here, I would write, “I’m aware that I’m explaining something that I want people to really understand. I’m worried that the main point will be missed. I’m trying to make sure that I am bringing up every single part”. And then my survivor self is also saying, “You probably are forgetting things”. I’ve done this work for 14 years. I am life reentry. And did you hear what just happened? Because my watcher self- I have actually trained myself to reframe it happened. I wasn’t actually planning it.

Shay Very quickly you started to reframe it.

Christina You see that? You just witnessed my neural pathways, right? You just witnessed. I’m so glad it happened like that because people don’t believe me that I do this work for myself .

And Shay, so I cleansed. You can hear my fear pattern in there saying, “Are you sure you’re doing a good job?” That’s my survivor self. My survivor self questions me; It would even question me saying my name right. It questions everything: “Are you sure? Are you ready for this? However many times you do it, maybe you need to just explain it again”. And then my watch shelf just walked in really quickly. I mean, I didn’t even have chance to go further down and says, “You have done this for so long, you know this inside out”. Actually, these interviews bring the work out even more than the book because it allows you, the creator, to come in and really share these subtle things that we couldn’t even put in the book. So we write the cleanse as the first stack. The second stack is the pattern finding. You have to find that pattern.

My pattern was doubting my skills and abilities. And then the reframes, the third stack that comes in and says, which comes from the watch yourself and says, “You know this better than anyone else”. And then the plugin comes, which is, let’s say if we were to use this as an example, would be relax even more and give it the best you can give it and be yourself at a hundred percent. And because I’ve done this for so long, now, my original self comes in the moment. A plugin is a low risk action step that is stemming from that reframe, that comes from that recognition of pattern that comes from that cleanse. And it’s part of the stack and action that derives from these steps will lead you in the right direction, but kind of blind action will actually take you to another waiting room because you are possibly choosing a step out of survival.

So we need to be very mindful to choose steps out of a thriver self. So in that moment in time, I don’t even go in my thriver self, I go in my original self because I have evolved in this so much. You would go into your thriver self and maybe say something funny or show up in a more happy, happy place, right? Even if you are creating something serious and important, significant. The thriver self is always here to have fun. My original self showed up because I have gone through the integration phase, which is the last phase of the book and the process and the original self kind of brought all this together immediately and kind of showed up as me, as the version of me that is really present here and enjoying this experience very much. But I want to say, I hope you saw how the survivor self will come in, even to me that I’ve trained my brain, it will come in and say, “You sure you’re clear here? Do you have clarity? Should you say this again?”. And that comes from an invisible loss. And I’ll share this with you as well. So you can see all the dots just landing, boom, boom, boom, boom, like this.
My moments of impact and invisible loss come from when I was very young. I was raised in a strict environment, especially when it came to education. I had to be perfect. I had to do everything perfectly right. My teachers at school were very strict. Actually at the time, they had a ruler and they would go around, and I grew up in Greece, so I don’t know, maybe things were different here, in the U.S., but I was afraid. I was so scared of being ashamed infront of the whole classroom. And I mean putting me on stage and putting me, no matter how many times I’ve been on stage, my survivor self actually gets very loud because it’s trying to protect me from those moments of impact and my primary invisible loss all the way to here. But now I’ve trained myself into this stacking process and I’m intact right now.

And it happened really quickly. So the more you do this process, the quicker you’ll be able to get to the reframe. And I want to just say one last thing here. If your first few cleanses, it takes you time to find that pattern, or it takes you time to find the reframe that feels right… the reframe might feel fake to begin with. You may not believe the reframe. You may not believe that you can do this, that you’re going to be okay. I want you to think it anyway. And I want your plugin, which is the action step at a low risk, to stem from that unnatural reframe.

Shay And one of the things you discuss in the book, Christina, is how important that low-risk action step that you call the “plugin” is because if you make it too high risk, then you’ll just quickly hop back in to what you define as the waiting room. And I wanted to just share the definition that you’ve written in the book for the waiting room, so we can talk about that a little bit more too. You define it as a mindset of procrastination and life lived in waiting mode or in limbo. So, yeah, let’s dive a little bit more into that relationship between the waiting room, what that is, and then how you take these small low risk steps to get out of there. Because if you take some giant leap, you’ll just hop right back into that waiting room. It feels too scary.

Christina Yes, and I’m so glad you asked me this because I could do a whole podcast on the choice of plugin and the significance of the low risk. Okay, I’m very passionate about this. I want to start by saying anyone who tells you to jump and the net will appear- I’m not saying don’t do it. All I’m saying is it may not be right for you. And I understand there’s so many coaches and inspirational leaders out there say, “Go live the life of your dreams,” and trust me, I want this life for you, but you have a better chance at finding this life if you step out- and we’ll talk about the waiting room, the types of waiting rooms that exist- if you step out of the waiting room with the lowest risk possible. I want this first action, which you will connect to the reframe, very important here, to be feeling as if it’s rewarding.

You feel safe, you feel calm, you feel in charge. You feel like, “This felt great.” Okay, now I’m going to go back in the waiting room, and I’m excited at this. I bought this. I don’t know if I’m going to go on that first date. And I’m simplifying this very much so I don’t know if I’m going to go on that date with that guy, or I’m going to ask for that promotion, or I’m going to have a conversation with my mother about something that has been bugging me for years. But before I even consider that or think that- because the moment you say, “I should have a conversation with my mother about this”, the survival self is going to show up and it’s going to lock the doors, metaphorically speaking, and keep you in that waiting room and keep you in that survival mode.

So before you have that conversation, maybe a plugin would be writing down what you should say or telling someone else why you want to say this to your mom. Maybe telling your spouse, telling your best friend, you know, figuring things out for yourself first. There’s so many different plugins for people, and when people actually answer that question, their variety of plugins that are 5% lower risk is phenomenal because the brain- the survivor self- says, “You can’t tell her that; you know she’s going to react really badly, and she’s not even going to come for Thanksgiving”. You can’t tell. So it’s catastrophizing the future. It will always catastrophize the future. It will always do that. To stop the survivor self from doing that, your step out of the waiting room will have to be, first of all, in the right direction, and second of all, easy. Easy. I want this to be easy.

Now, the waiting room, when you experienced the moment of impact, an invisible loss, a tragedy- whatever that was for you- in order to survive, you went to a place to breathe, to recover, to tend to your feelings, to feel better, to stand on your feet again. I call that place the waiting room, but that place is between the life and the self that you left behind and the life you could have. It’s in a place in between. So we think of things in a very linear way. We say, “Okay, moment of impact. Something bad happened to me. I fell down emotionally. I’ve struggled to survive this, but now one day I’m going to get up and I’m going to start a new again. I’m going to start a new beginning. I’m going to start again”. And we actually don’t even see that waiting room being in between.

And sometimes that new beginning is actually in the waiting room and people think that’s their new life. That’s the new chapter, but it doesn’t feel good, and it’s not great because you’re still surviving. You’re still in survival mode. I want everyone to know that even- I love it when people say, “I’m going to start again. I’m going to begin again”. That’s when they start a life reentry practice. That’s when they start the process, because that first step is still not going to be in the new chapter. The new chapter, actually, the new beginning doesn’t even get here until you’ve done the practice, because that original self, the real, you won’t come knocking on your door until you go through this process. You’ll be making decisions in your new chapter based on your survival self. You’ll be entering a new waiting room, especially- and I can’t say this enough- especially if you’re still in survival mode.

Shay As I’ve been working with the practices you’ve defined it in your book, one of the kind of quick things that I discovered for myself that I could do is just in my day-to-day to pay attention. Just ask the question multiple times throughout the day: “Am I in survivor right now or am I in thriver?” Just a quick shift of like, “Where am I? Am I feeling fulfilled? Am I thriving? Am I feeling fulfilled, or am I just hanging on gripping like a tiger?”

Christina And Shay, I can see- can I just say something quickly when I see you…

By the way, I saw your three selves literally just show up here immediately, ending with the thriver self. The moment you started explaining this, it’s almost like you just bloomed. There was a blooming process. And I love how you’re just asking yourself that question because you’re busy. We are living our life, right? And something’s happening and having that awareness, which is the watcher self, to say, “Let’s question this moment. Let’s question this moment,” because the survivor self has already taken over the script and is basically telling you, “Don’t go over there. Don’t talk to this guy. Don’t write that email. Don’t share how you really feel in this meeting.” Actually, not only that, just tell them you agree, laugh at the joke that you don’t find funny. Clap when you don’t think is right. There’s so many different ways we’re surviving in a subtle way that actually we do it every day.

Then it becomes us, or we are convinced by the survivor self that it becomes us. So if you’re sitting in a meeting, you’re sitting somewhere, something’s happening, and you just literally just even your body just sit back and say, “Who is this talking from me right now inside my head?” And it sounds comical or it sounds silly, but I am telling you it’s not. It’s not your fault. This is happening for you. And we need to take charge of our day-to-day narrative, our inner narrative that is taking place inside our minds. You may find similar types of work in other books. Whatever language works for you, whatever makes sense to you, grab it. Understand that what’s happening inside your mind is in a default setting, and what you’re doing is going into manual gear for a while, and that’s going to be hard because you’re automatic is for that survival mode to take place for that survival behavior.

So not only are we thinking in survival mode, we are acting from that. So the stack that is actually taking place- and I actually have not said this way in the book- so instead of the stack that we do to reframe and to plug in from there, the opposite stack is taking place automatically. You are stacking from that survival mode. You’re plugging in survival. You’re choosing things to do that actually enhance your survival experience and puts you in that waiting room. And then just one more thing here to say is that the waiting room may be actually very comfortable place. It may not feel like a waiting room because you’re so used to living in that way and behaving in that way and feeling the way you’re feeling. You may be in a relationship, in a marriage, in a job that pays the bills with a partner that’s good for you and your kids, but you are not, I mean, you’re not feeling alive.

Shay Right, yeah. And you actually talk about, there’s a time where you discuss how sometimes people can feel like their life is so good, it’s so perfect. Even some of it can come from, “Oh, I haven’t had any big huge losses. I’m lucky. I’ve had a charmed life.” So there’s nothing to really delve into here, but how that can actually be sneaky in nature because maybe on the outside things look perfect, but internally there can still be these invisible losses that have accumulated that if you choose to really unpack and reveal essentially that side of yourself, you can much more deeply understand what you’ve compromised and given up. And even though it’s subtle and it takes some effort to direct your attention to something that you kind of want to resist, like, “No, no, no, I have a good life. Everything’s great.” If you actually do redirect your attention and allow yourself to focus in on some of those pains through those invisible losses, then there’s that opportunity to recover that original self with a lot more fullness of experience, which can bring a lot more joy in the every day, which is worth it.

Christina And I want to say this to everyone who’s listening. There is this place that is so magnificent. I got to tell you, it’s a real place to thrive, and it’s a real place to feel like yourself living your version of your life exactly the way it’s supposed to be. I could cry with joy. I could cry with feelings that I have no words. And all I want you to know is that it may take a little bit of time to get there, but I want you to remember this place of happiness and joy and contentment and being really… waking up every day and saying, “I can’t wait for this day.” Actually, this version of your life exists. I promise you that. Yes, there’s so many obstacles. There’s all this stacking you have to do. You have fight your survival self every day. You have to go out and plug in to unknown territories slowly, and it may take- you know it took me, my latest life reentry experience took me four years, three years. I say four. I don’t know why, it’s exactly three years. It’s three years and nearly four months- very specific as to my first plugin. That’s how specific I got. And the waiting room I was in took me a long time to actually discover, because it looked like success. It looked like the life everyone else wanted to have. It looked like sometimes you’ve made dreams come true that were right for you in the past, but those dreams are no longer right for you. And actually, we stay with the outdated dreams. That is also the waiting room.

That is also the place where you are stuck in between the life you used to have and the life that you could have. And then millions of people die in that waiting room without knowing that’s where they’re at. I want you to know that the very first step is to find out where you are. “Where am I? What is this? Is this the way I want my life to be? Or is this the way I think my life should be, or the way that it looks good?” And actually, there’s a divergent phase, this rebellious act that you will discover within yourself. Once you start going down that path and you are in your practice and you’re doing, and you’re plugging in with higher risk, your plugins are growing 10% risk, 20% risk. You get stronger. Neuropathways are changing and becoming different, making different connections, then the people around you will start to react, maybe in a survivor collective voice, as to why you shouldn’t be doing the things you’re doing.

Because all of a sudden, you look different to them. You appear like someone else. You may even hurt some people in the process. But the biggest lesson that I’ve had for myself has been that self-love and self-mastery is the only reason why we’re here: is to learn how to love ourselves and find our way to our own adventure and our own fulfilled life. When you do that, not only your soul is happy, but everyone around you ultimately will be impacted by the way you live your life. And they will in turn, check in with their survivor self and start to create a life reentry path ahead and find the steps towards the life they’re supposed to be living. It’s hidden. It’s subtle, and why most of us don’t find it. And by when we do it feels like, feels incredible.

Shay I’m also interested, Christine, in the relationship that you’ve discovered between losses- whether they’re visible or invisible losses- but important, significant losses in our lives. And then how that can actually compel you in a way to want to move past that and reclaim in a sense that original self? And find joy to thrive in areas where you might have actually suffered very significantly? And the reason I’m asking this, I felt this very much in my own life. I experienced a lot of really significant traumas. And what I saw my system did as I went through a healing process over many, many, many years, was there were certain things that I just said, “I refuse to allow that part of me to be kept small by that wound.”

Christina That’s your watch yourself, right?

Shay Yeah, right? I could see it.

And then I made this decision of: I am reclaiming the authentic part of me that wants to live fully in that way and have joy, and not be afraid, and not be limited, and not be stuck. And so I just owned it with kind of like a fierce energy behind it- but a positive fierce energy. And so I’m very curious about- I’ve seen it in my own life and I’ve seen it in a very clear way- but how people have had big losses, sometimes it can give you a zest for living more richly. And because you’ve worked with grief and so many people over so many years, I’m curious what you understand about the relationship.

Christina Yeah, I’ve seen this, and I’ve seen a natural form of life reentry that takes place. So here’s what I discovered as well, and this is not in the book, but I mean this has been this discovery. I could see from the early couple of years there were some people who were able to do this because they have a higher level of thriver self. There’s some people who naturally would do what you just did: “Oh my gosh, this happened to me, and then I can’t. My life has to change.” It’s a big wake up call. It’s huge. You’re being reborn when a tragedy happens. And I have seen it, and I’ve seen two things happen in that version. Some people actually get through it. They do find their way to their second chapter. They’re able to reclaim themselves and live in that fierce way, and they continued like that.

There’s a second group of people that happens, and it’s short lived. And actually that’s what I kept seeing happening. That’s when I started asking myself the question: “What is it that’s bringing these people back? What is bringing them back?” And people always say, grief lasts forever. And they’re like, maybe grief does last forever. Tragic grief in the mourning kind of way. So I kept seeing people coming back from their adventures and being stuck, and that second group was bigger than the first group. That second group was being influenced by those invisible losses in bigger ways. It is absolutely a way into living a full life after tragedy, especially if your brain is connecting in that thriver like way- especially if your brain, even unbeknownst to you, is able to fight the survivor self. Life reentry is a very natural practice that actually we disconnect from when we’re in survival, when we are in a survival self.

So it’s important to reconnect to that. And when people- so many people over the years- said, “Oh, actually, I’ve done this. I’ve been doing this. I just didn’t have the words for it. I didn’t have the language to see it. The labels really helped me.” And the most important thing to know is that this practice actually already exists within you, but for a lot of us, it’s completely muted or it needs to be reactivated as the years go by. When I experienced my tragic loss and I reentered and changed my life and did so many things, I did find myself a few years down the road inside the waiting room again, even though I was fierce and I was- and I mean I’m very optimistic, enthusiastic person about life. I have a crazy thriver self, but I also have a very strong survivor self. Very, very strong survivor self. And those two forces always kind of went head to head, but sometimes I’m too thriver like, I’m too optimistic. Now you can hear my survivor self actually saying, “You’re too thriver like, too optimistic.” Did you hear that?

Shay Yeah, yeah.

Christina Didn’t I just catch it, right? It’s there. So this will become automatic for all of you as well. So I battled those two parts of me the most. My wise self is there, and the more I connect to the original self, that’s when that steps in even more. But unless I do that, those two parts of me will battle each other out. So has there been anything in your life in the last year that you actually felt like you struggled with more than before? That’s been more difficult than it used to be. Something that- the way I can smell the waiting room or I can see it- or slowly you start to have less patience about something, or that you’re not looking forward to something as much as you used to. It’s a subtle change, by the way, when it starts to show up. Has there been anything like that in your life in the last year?

Shay Yeah, I think there’ve been some very big shifts in my life in the last year. And one of the shifts was that I could feel that there was a relationship redefinition that had to happen. And I am still working through that, but I made the shift.

Christina And would you say, if I was to ask you from zero to ten, zero being the redefinition experiences, not even felt, and ten you have redefined and changed that relationship exactly as it should be, where would you say you are in the journey?

Shay I have like maybe an eight.

Christina Oh, wow. So you are really in the end of the…

Shay I mean, I am fully in it, and I don’t ultimately yet know exactly how it will play out, but I feel very confident that all of the steps I’ve made up to now for my own soul have been in right alignment. And I’m clear I can’t control the outcome. I don’t even know exactly yet what the outcome will be because it’s really beyond my vision. But I have a clarity of- I’ve so far, the steps that I’ve taken feel very much in right alignment with my soul.

Christina I love that. And it sounds like the path has been definitely influenced by the watcher self. And the question I would ask would be, and without you having to give a full detailed response, if you did know how you would want things to be completed, what would that look like?

Shay Yeah, I definitely have a sense of it. Which is, I would want a playful, happy, interactive relationship with this person, that we’ve transformed our relationship and we’re not quite there yet.

Christina And that’s when you said, and just want to show you something you said: “I don’t know quite yet how that’s going to look like.”
And the question then came in and said, but if you did know, how would that look like? You actually have the answer to that. But then maybe, maybe, and I always gently propose something like this, maybe the survivor self is telling you you don’t actually know what it is you want exactly because you may not feel completely in control of how that looks like. But if you felt in control, and if the way this was at a 10- complete- and you are out of the waiting room, you actually probably certainly know exactly how you would want this to look like.

Shay Thank you. That was actually very helpful to me. Learned something right now.

Christina And did you see how your nonverbal behavior changed? Your “Yes, but I do know,” and that’s what happens with the survival self. It’s like, “You don’t know, probably we don’t know. We are still here.” And maybe- and again, very maybe- it’s not quite an eight; maybe it’s a six and a half or a seven because of that. But now that could boost it up because then the plugin that will come from that reframe- that the watch, pretend I am an internal dialogue that watch yourself- and I used to do this in my classroom until people were able to just complete this stacking process like that. And if you were able to plug in from that reframe we just did, which is actually you do know how you want this to be. Exactly. And you plug in from that knowing place, there it is.

That will sift you closer to 10 because you are now acting from that knowing of how you want it exactly to be. And what I’m seeing from you, it has a freedom to it. It has a thriver like feeling to it. You have certainty. But of course, when this conversation ends, couple of hours later or even sooner, the survivor is going to come back to this conversation and say, “Well, even though you felt that there, and you know this, and what about this and what about that?” So be mindful when that happens. That’s just natural. It’s just how the brain, how this works every time

Shay How we’re wired to protect ourselves.

Christina Yes, to not make, to actually to resist the plugin from that place.

Shay Yeah. Well, and that’s why the identification of the plugin is something that’s relatively low risk, is so beneficial because if I think of a simple small action that I can take that’s low risk, but that’s moving in that positive direction, I’m much more likely to do that because it doesn’t feel, like you said, that huge leap. And so that’s where I would begin. I would begin with that once also.

Christina And Shay, the reframe of knowing what you want this to look like is actually really important as well because when you keep reframing that, “But I do know, and here’s exactly how I want this to look like, and this is the way I want to feel.” That’s part of that stacking process that has to be- and I breathe when I say this- it has to be from that watcher knowing place. And then the thriver has to take the baton and go with that low-risk plug in. But when you come back to the stack the next day, again, the cleanse- here’s the pattern of fear, the survivor self. Here’s my reframe. To get that reframe stronger and stronger, and to be mindful as to when the survivor self is going to try and steal that from you. It’s a game. I mean, it’s-

Shay Right. It’s a game. You have to be so observant. That’s where the watcher is so helpful in all of it. Yeah, I would imagine because you’ve worked with so many clients doing this work that it’s taught you a lot about what healing is, like what the process- because this is, in a sense, a form of healing in a larger umbrella context of how we reclaim, in your words, that original self. So what has this work with so many people over so many years helped you to understand about a healing process?

Christina That’s such a good question. I think the experience that I’ve gained from this is that healing exists in two different places. Healing takes place when are taking action and when we are processing, when we are acknowledging, when we’re validating, when we are doing the work. That’s actually phase one of healing. Actually, I’ve never said it like this before. This question is great, but the healing is not going to be complete if we don’t actually find ourselves in that place of peace, fulfillment, and joy to be inside our life- that actually you wake up every morning and you want to be present. You’re not trying to escape your life. The second phase of healing happens when we finally reach this place of peace in our life and to experience- the words fail me when I try to explain this place. It brings tears, because you wish you had gotten here before.

You want everyone to know about it. Guys, it’s a real place. It feels amazing. You start to look at the rest of your life and you say, “Okay, when something doesn’t feel like this, it’s also needs to go.” I believe we’re here to get to that second phase of healing, that second place of healing, because once we’re there, then it feels more complete. Then we can- this is the first time I’ve ever found this place, and for the first time, I don’t need to plan the future. I actually don’t want to because this place is great, and everything from the outside looks exactly the same, but how you live your life on the inside is very different. And that doesn’t happen easily. That’s the first phase of healing, and the second phase is when you’re in it, when you’re actually living that life. Maybe the best way to say it is that you are in an automatic plugin at a hundred percent that doesn’t feel like a plugin. It feels like life.

Shay That’s beautiful. That’s nicely said, and I love that ultimately, what that’s leading to is a state of being. Really what you’re describing, it’s an inner state of being.

Christina Yeah. It’s amazing, Shay. It’s like, I can’t tell you- and it impacts others. I had a meeting yesterday, and I did something and said something, and then I got emails from the people in the meeting saying, “You have no idea how at peace I felt after,” and it was messages that were arriving at the same time. And I think almost like the universe saying it has a- what’s the word? Combined? Compound?. There’s like a-

Shay Like a compounding effect.

Christina Yes. A effect to other people, so it’s almost like if you could see how healing looks like as energy. It’s helping other people without you even having to do much or convince anyone. You’re just expressing that being. You’re just-very beautifully said, Shay- being, you’re just being.

Shay Well, lovely, lovely, lovely. We could talk about this all day. I do want to reinforce what your comment earlier in the conversation that the book is written in a way that’s very structural, very easy to use, really as a workbook in that you follow along in the practices. You’ve given, as you mentioned to a number of case studies so that people can understand, “Oh, this is what that looks like. Am I doing that? What’s my version of that?” so they can kind of wrestle with it a little bit themselves. Because I think what we’re delving into in our dialogue today is kind of a deeper understanding of something that you’ve frame very sequentially in the book, and through the life reentry model that our listeners can absolutely work through independently or with loved ones, as you said, with trusted loved ones. Is there anything we didn’t get a chance to address in our conversation that you feel like, “Oh, I want to make sure I have an opportunity to share that as well!

Christina Actually, I want to take this opportunity and say, thank you for being so prepared. This has made such a difference in this conversation and it allowed the listener to actually- that’s how we got to go deeper- and we got to give the listener something that the book will not be able to give because it’s kind of focusing on the structure and making sure that all the steps are taken. And I hope maybe when people go through the process, they come back and listen to this afterwards again…

Shay I was thinking that! It would be good after they do the book!

Christina And they’ll say, “Oh, that’s right. That’s right.” Yes, because the first time someone listens to this conversation without having gone through the practice, it’s great. It will prepare your brain to go through the book, but the second time it will connect all the dots in ways that you couldn’t do before because you actually experience the book comes to life. The book is about you living your life; it’s expressed in your life. So it’s incredible to see it come to life. If I could see the person who was listening and I could see your life, even in the way you speak to me, the words you would use from the beginning, middle to the end, I could actually see where in your reentry process you’re at because the language, the way you’re speaking, the way you’re moving, the way you say the words used to say change completely. It’s an incredible thing to witness.

Shay How beautiful. Well, in response to your comment, I want to share the way I’ve always seen this podcast, is that the people we’re selecting to interview, it’s a privilege for me to interview you.

Christina And an honor for me as well.

Shay And so I prepare because it’s an honor, and I really want to have the richest and fullest conversation that we can have in this moment.

Christina And I can’t thank you enough for this because as you can imagine, when someone’s not prepared for this book, we can’t talk about it.

Shay Right, because it’s deep work.

Christina Because I’m alone trying to explain, and there’s nobody actually having a conversation with, because how do I explain this? The other person has to be able to follow along, and so thank you for this. Thank you for this incredible conversation. I feel like we’ve met before a million times.

Shay Maybe we have.

Christina And maybe we have, and I can’t wait to share this with my community and with everyone I know. So thank you so much for inviting me to your podcast, Shay.