Rebuilding Trust in Yourself, and Others, While Healing from Trauma, with Joanne Cipressi - Ep. 107

Rebuilding trust; once it's broken it's one of the most difficult things to heal. Trust is one of those things that can take quite a bit of bending before it actually breaks. We give others opportunity after opportunity to save it. We can endlessly justify what someone in our life did to us, and how they didn't mean it, and how we shouldn't be so selfish and quick to judge for any number of reasons.  We even blame ourselves for all the seemingly bad things we've done, and figure "who are we cut someone off just because...".

Yes, rebuilding trust in others is very difficult, but healing the trust in ourselves can prove to be more problematic. We are our own worse critic, right?

How could we let this happen, what were we thinking, we should have seen this coming...the list goes on and on of the words we tell ourselves to justify the emotional beating we feel is necessary. Blaming ourselves is always easier than blaming someone else, because we can control us...we can't control others.

When your trust in a parent, sibling, or authority figure is broken when you're a child, the road to healing is indeed rough but certainly not impossible. When that trust is broken again, as an adult survivor who is traumatized, everything comes rushing back to take it's seemingly rightful place at the forefront of your very being. All that hard work you did to heal and work through these emotions, all the progress you made, can seem like a distant memory. You may very well be knocked down temporarily, knocked sideways, and stumble a bit but all that you've done is not undone...you have get back up, dust yourself off, and keep going.

My guest on this episode of the podcast, Joanne Cipressi, has done just that many times in her life and now works with survivors to help them heal and rebuild that trust.

As she outlines on her website: I have been a life coach for about 20 years. Between my upbringing, personal experiences, and my educational training, I have put together formulas for helping people retrain the way they think, feel and act so that they can achieve their goals. I have worked with people on so many different issues, problems and concerns over the past 20 years, that she truly understands what people need in so many areas of their life.

I have seen the transformation power that retraining the way you think and feel has. When you learn to make your mind and emotions work for you instead of against you, your life truly does transform. With deep care and love for people, I work from a place or understanding, compassion and intuitive guidance to move people to change.

Joanne is trained in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), Advanced Hypnosis, Age Regression Therapy, Timeline Therapy, Humanistic Neuro-Linguistic Psychology, Reiki-Master, and more.  Using her skills and training, along with her personal experience as a survivor of both childhood and adult sexual abuse, she is able to help her clients through some of their most difficult circumstances a, transforming the way they think and feel about themselves, and embrace the progress of achieving their goals.

During our chat, Joanne and I discuss:

• Some of her survivor story, which includes sexual abuse by her step father when she was a child, as well as a sexual assault as an adult.
• Rebuilding trust in yourself, and others. The challenges and rewards of doing so, and why it's so important and affects many aspects of our life.
• Overcoming thoughts of and a mindset of suicide after trauma.
• How and why she decided at 19, to become a coach and help others. A very interesting story which includes a conversation between two strangers that gave her the motivation she needed to make changes in her life. 
• How Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) has helped her find breakthroughs in her own life and for her