269. Breaking the Cycle: Jana Wilson on Overcoming Childhood Trauma and Finding Joy

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This is happiness solved with America's happiness coach, Sandee Sgarlata.

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Hello everyone, and thank you for joining me today. I'm so happy you're here. I'm Sandee Sgarlata. I was born in Virginia beach and raised in the Baltimore Annapolis area and had very humble and tragic beginnings and as a result, my life was a hot mess. Thankfully, 33 years ago I got my act together and since that time I have dedicated my life to serving others and raising awareness that no matter what you've been through, you can choose happiness and live the life of your dreams.

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Happiness solved is dedicated to giving you content that is empowering, motivational, inspirational, and of course, a dose of happiness. It's my way to give back to the world and share other people's stories. This thing called life can be challenging and my guests share their amazing stories, wisdom and life lessons that demonstrate anyone can choose happiness. You see, happiness is a choice and the choice is yours. Today's episode is amazing and I am so grateful for you.

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Thank you for listening and don't forget to leave a review and follow me on social media at coach Sandee Sgarlata. Enjoy the show.

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Jana Wilson I'm so excited to have this conversation with you and I know it's going to be a really amazing one because you have a book that was just released a couple months ago called Wise Little one. Learning to love and listen to my inner child. This is really powerful. And whatever you're comfortable sharing with the audience about your story, I'd love to hear that before we dive into the book. So can you give us a little.

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Bit of your backstory? Sure. Thank you. Sandy, it's an honor to be here. I'm really happy to be here with you today.

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And yeah, I grew up in the south, in central Florida, and I grew up, of course, to two very emotionally dysfunctional parents and endured a lot of trauma. And so know there's a test that we give to clients to really ascertain what level of trauma that they've had. It's called adverse childhood experiences. And there's ten questions and I score ten out of ten. So I went on a lifelong journey, really woke up at a young age, at twelve, I begin the book with this story.

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It was a mystical experience and I woke up and had this really profound experience at twelve years old, which really set me on a trajectory of personal development, spirituality, a lot of psychology and spirituality. It's what I teach now with my emotional healing system. And that led me to, I don't think anyone really fully when you go through the amount of trauma that I did heals, but we certainly integrate the experience, find the lessons. Right. And so I, around 40 years old, launched this business, began to start helping others heal their own trauma.

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So I've been doing this for almost 20 years. And, yeah, I also have had a. Lot of childhood trauma, and I think most everybody does. Right. I think it's pretty hard in today's world to make it to as an adult without any childhood trauma, although my husband is the exception.

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He's just, like, the most mellow. Like, it's perfect because I'm so high strung. I'm such a high performer, and he's just like. And it's interesting when we have conversations because he can't relate to so much of what I talk about because he hasn't experienced it. And that's really wonderful, but it's very unusual for somebody to make it.

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Now, this test that you're talking about, I don't recall ever hearing about that. Can you just talk a little bit about that? Because I'm curious for anybody out there that would like to look, and I know for me, too, I would love to just take a look at it as well. So can you just repeat that name? Ace.

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Ace. Ace test. Adverse childhood experiences. Okay, there's ten questions. But trauma, it's interesting because in working with people similar to your husband, I hear that a lot.

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Oh, I've had a childhood. My parents were great. Yet there's some kind of block, possibly, in life. And trauma really creates a psyche that's in survival. Right.

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Because something's happened. But we understand trauma now. And I don't really like to use this term, but it is helpful in kind of distinguishing, like, big t trauma and little t trauma, right. Because it negates the little t trauma, negates a person's experience. But I'll give you an example.

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Like a small trauma. A little t trauma would be a parent who doesn't see or hear the child. We hear these sayings like, children are to be seen and not heard. That creates a trauma for a child, a parent who lives vicariously, whether it's the sports dad or the stage mom, or that creates a trauma for a child. So there are different types of archetypes of childhood trauma.

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Okay. The big t's, of course, are physical, sexual, mental abuse, food deprivation. And the ace test is dealing with the big t traumas. So this trauma that you're talking about, is this on the spectrum of PTSD, I've always thought that it.

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Mean, of course, I was diagnosed with complex post traumatic stress disorder. I don't like to use the word disorder, Sandy. The reason why? Because it's saying something's wrong with someone. Exactly.

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No, I totally agree with you. Yeah. So I feel like it's an adaptation. Something happened and you had to adapt in survival to manage what happened. So I feel like it's a coping mechanism, really.

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And then once you bring the light of awareness to it, which is the foundation of emotional intelligence, which is self awareness, you can kind of dismantle it and work with it and get on your healing journey. But until you're able to take the labels off of I have a disorder, if I keep owning I have a disorder, I'm arguing for my limitations, right? Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Without question.

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And there's so many people that don't. Even recognize that they are the way. They are today because of that childhood trauma. How do you navigate working with people? Maybe they come to you and they.

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Just don't see it. How do you navigate when somebody is just completely oblivious to how the way they show up in the world is. Related to that childhood trauma? Well, in my private work, I'm very selective. So I do private intensives where people fly out to Santa Fe from all over the world.

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I have clients, and they spend a week to sometimes ten days here. And we're doing, my husband's a physician. I do a lot of hypnotherapy. And we take them through what we call the emotional healing system. And so if I'm working privately, it's an interview process.

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If someone isn't a little further along, they've done some therapy, they understand themselves. I wouldn't take them as a private client. Now, public events, group events, certainly people are coming from all points and know we. I really look at myself as an educator, Sandy, like I'm giving someone the information to educate them. If we go to traditional, top down therapy, which is what I call western medicine, we go see a psychologist, we begin a journey of psychotherapy for 50 minutes an hour.

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It's just touching the surface. We never get to root cause. You go to a psychiatrist? I'm working with a psychiatrist right now. He's like, it's just so crazy how everybody wants me to just prescribe, prescribe a pill, prescribe a pill.

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Did I answer your question? Yeah.

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I guess that people have to get. To a point where they're sick and. Tired of being sick and tired. Right. Because until they're ready to really make that shift and look at themselves, nothing's going to happen.

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Exactly. It takes a high level of self responsibility, because a victim, the victim more than likely are not going to seek help, right? Because they're too caught in the addiction of being the victim. And then of course, victims triangulate and there's got to be, it's the dysfunctional codependency, right, where you've probably heard of the Cartman drama triangle. Yeah.

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So you have the victim, the persecutor, the rescuer, the conscious model is the victim becomes a creator and they start taking responsibility. That, oh, there's one common denominator in my life and it happens to be me. And yes, in my past I may have been a victim. When I was a child, I certainly was a victim. I was molested as a child.

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I had a gun put to my head. I experienced some very extreme situations and experiences of trauma as a child. Now, once I began to had that near death experience, I call it. It was an out of body experience at twelve years old. And that woke me up.

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It was an awareness that my parents weren't my parents, that this life really wasn't the life that I thought it was. I was being told this and then I was back in my body. Then I was interesting. Wow. But it was such an awakening that by the time I was 1920, I was studying metaphysics.

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I was on my path. I was like a voracious learner. I was really like, okay, I want to correct what happened to me as a child. I don't want to repeat what my parents did. I had that awareness 40 something years ago.

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That's incredible, because I know for me, I did not have any sort of awareness. Literally, I was a competitive figure skater. And that was my escape. I would escape to the ice and do my thing. But then in my early twenty s, I ended up abusing cocaine.

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And it wasn't until I hit rock bottom there that then, that was 34 years ago. And I ended up on that trajectory. But I totally understand what you mean about being aware of things that were maybe done to you by your parents. And I realized that when my son. Was born and he was crying and.

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I couldn't get him to stop, and I had this rage come through me because I was beaten, beaten, beaten, beaten. And you know what? That's kind of what our parents, they. Were victims from their parents. It's generational.

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And so I made that decision. I put him in his crib, I walked out of the room and I looked at my now ex husband and I was like, I will never ever hit my child. Ever. And to this, he's 23 years old. And he knows.

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He used to joke when I would. I would be like, pushes on me. Like, oh, you hit me. And, you know, we would. We would make a joke about it, because he knows that I made that conscious decision that I am breaking this cycle that has been going on for generation upon generation upon generation in my family.

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And that's such a really good feeling. There's so many other patterns that need to be broken that probably weren't, but what can we do? Yeah. So there's four types of trauma. And you're speaking of intergenerational trauma.

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Right? The Bible says the sins of the father are passed down. So it's this idea how they discovered this was pretty fascinating. They took rats and they would spray rose water, and they would shock the rats. And as soon as they smelled the rose water, they got the shock.

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So then they stopped shocking them, and they only sprayed them, but they behaved as if they were being shocked. Now, about a year later, the same rats they impregnated and had babies when they had the babies of these rats that were in this study that were being shocked, the babies never experienced being shocked or the rose water, but as soon as they sprayed, the babies behaved. As if they had been shocked. Oh, my gosh. And that's when research started to show us, like, okay, this is kind of like in the dna or something.

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This is how we carry it on. Because when it's a trauma at that level, all of the different traumas attach to your dna. That totally makes sense. Completely. And then the other three traumas are precognitive and preconscious.

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So we know that if a mother is pregnant and say she's doing cocaine. Right. That it affects the fetus. Of course, the baby. Yeah.

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What about mothers that are clinically depressed? What about mothers that are being abused? Or even if they're not being hit, they're being verbally abused. That baby's getting a steady diet of cortisol. Right.

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Of all these adrenaline, noradrenaline, toxic chemicals to their little body. That's what was happening for me. So when my mom was pregnant with me in 1965, she was clinically depressed. My mom had mental illness. She was.

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Back then they called it manic depressive, but now we call it bipolar. And she also was clinically depressed. And when I went through hypnotherapy training, I discovered I wrapped the cord around my neck and turned and breached. So I was so sentient and conscious, I didn't want to be. Now, I knew, you know, Sandy, that I was breach and I had the cord wrapped.

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I just didn't know I did it. Wow. But it made perfect sense, right? And so the other types of trauma are, of course, developmental. So that's where most people think birth to seven years, right?

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Like those developmental years, children, the inner child is that birth to seven years. It is the part of us that look through the lens of emotion. And once we can get in touch with that aspect of ourself that's pure, innocent, that just wants to give its gifts to the world, believes anything's possible, right? But we lose that through our conditioning, right? And through these experiences that we have.

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And then the last trauma is collective trauma. So we saw that during the pandemic. We see that in war, when it's a collective, everybody's experiencing the trauma together. So what is the best way for. Somebody when they realize or they recognize that, yes, I've had all these traumas, or maybe wasn't even aware that things had happened when their mother was pregnant with them.

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Whatever the case may be, what is something that somebody can do to help tap into that trauma, to release it and maybe change the narrative so that. It'S not affecting them so much? Well, first they need to find somebody they feel safe with. Right? Safety is crucial in healing because we hold so much shame around our stories.

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For me, I was labeled white trash. We were poor, we were on welfare, we lived in a trailer. It was domestic violence. It had all the stigma and all the labels. And so finding my first therapist was through the church, through unity church.

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I found her, and I felt safe with her, so I could share all this stuff that I was really holding the beach ball down. And every time I looked away, it popped back up. But I was really trying to wear the mask of no one's going to know. I was the first to graduate in my family high school. I was first to go to college for sure.

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So I was breaking a lot of cycles, and I was really intent. It's interesting, our traumas can be our greatest gift because they drive us, right? To prove something. And so, answering your question, the first step is to find somebody you feel safe with, that you can share your story, that you don't feel judged, that you feel accepted. And then I made mention of it a moment ago that therapy always has a place, right?

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But it's not going to take you deep enough for me, being a hypnotherapist. Hypnotherapy changed my life because it helped me bypass my linear mind. And we're always in our head, especially in this day and age. So if we can bypass the intellect and get to the subconscious, memories are stored there. And I've heard a lot of people say, I don't remember, and I can't remember my childhood.

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And then they'll be amazed what gets unearthed. When they get in a relaxed state, they feel safe. And then they start to kind of mine for that gold of the memories. And sometimes they're benign. Sandy, I always think of this one client.

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She was in her early 40s. She came to me because she just said, I have no reason to be unhappy. I have a loving husband, children. I have everything I need. Why am I unhappy?

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So in the hypnotherapy, the first memory, she's five years old, she's at a lake, and they're on vacation. And she had never swam in a lake. And everybody was swimming, her cousins, her parents, everybody. And she didn't want to go in because why? She couldn't see the bottom of the water, the lake.

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And it scared her. And so she said no. Rather than respecting her feelings, her parents, knowing that she would be fine, thinking it wasn't a big deal, forced her into the water, kicking and screaming. And I said, I recognize in that moment, while she's under, you made that mean something. Because we are always interpreting and making things mean something.

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And she made it mean her feelings don't matter, right? Because if they did, they would have listened to her. Now my feelings don't matter. And then I said, what did you make it mean about the world? And she said, other people know better.

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So now here she is, 42. That belief that got created at five years old, I liken it to like a computer operating system. I said, imagine your operating system. You default no matter how many self help books you read, how many therapy sessions you go to, how many retreats, whatever you attend. It's like putting ice cream on poop.

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Eventually the ice cream melts, it fades the book information, and then you're left right back with a poop because you didn't get to the root cause of why do you feel your feelings don't matter? And so once she brought the light of awareness to it, when she went home, she was a people pleaser. She was passive aggressive. She was resentful a lot because she didn't speak up for herself and advocate. And so when she went home, she just slowly started taking baby steps of advocating for herself and speaking up and saying no.

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And of course, her relationships changed because we teach people how to treat us. And before she was teaching people, my feelings don't matter. Yeah. Wow, Jana, that's really incredible. All right, so let's dive into your book wise, little one.

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Love the title.

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What was the big reason and your why for getting this out? Because we all have to have that why? Yes.

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Number one, for my family, for posterity, for legacy. I broke a cycle, a very toxic cycle of addiction, of abuse, of mental illness and poverty. I really wanted to leave that to my grandchildren. I have a grandson, another one on the way. My daughter.

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I feel I raised. Was I perfect? No. We're wabby Sabi. We're perfectly imperfect humans.

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But I certainly raised her to be emotionally intelligent. I honored her. I valued her, which is what I didn't get. And she has grown into a magnificent mother and wife and really broke the cycle. And so the book was really an homage, like a tribute to look at what I did and look where I came from and who I am today as a thought leader, as a teacher.

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And it's a love story. It's really a love story of once I fell in love, truly with the precious little girl inside of me that deserved. It's never too late to have a happy childhood that deserved that childhood she did not get. Then that's when I really reconciled and extracted, I guess, the wisdom out of all that trauma and was able to, I always joke, like, make lemonade out of the lemons and create something beautiful. And so the book was 25 years in the making.

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I would just write stories from my childhood on my computer. I had a file. And timing. It was timing. I hadn't met my now present husband.

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We've been together eight years. So the book begins on the night before I meet him. And kind of being called by spirit to leave a retreat that I was at in California, a meditation retreat. And I fought it. And I fought it.

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And then finally, on day three of this week long meditation retreat, I listened because I thought, well, gosh, why do I meditate? To listen to that still, small voice. Right? My intuition. And I left, got on a plane the next day that I was not supposed to be on and sat next to him.

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Oh, my gosh, I love it.

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Yeah, no, that's great. I love that because I'm on my second marriage as well. And we had a very met wasn't supposed to meet, and we ended up meeting kind of thing. So that's beautiful. So go.

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So it's. And then the night before I leave this retreat, and it was at Esalen in California. And there's nude bathing there. Well, that was bringing up a lot of discomfort for me. I mean, I am a southern girl, but regardless, I was sexualized as a child, and so I was raped in college.

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So I've had a lot of experiences of trauma around sexuality and nudity. Right? And I thought, well, maybe my inner child's speaking to me and she's saying, leave. So I'm going to honor her because she doesn't feel safe in this environment or comfortable. And then when I did, something ignited in me.

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Like, I've been doing inner child work since the 90s with John Bradshaw, but this was different. This was like a bond, like a cohesiveness that I could just feel that part of myself that believes anything's possible. That sense of wonder and joy. Like, she was just praising me. It was almost know, I think there's a Hafez poem, and it says, by God, when you see the beauty of yourself, you'll fall down in awe.

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Wow, that just gave me chills. Yeah, it was like little Jana was just saying, like, you're amazing. Look at the life you've given us. And we're in Carmel, California, and it's gorgeous. Gorgeous.

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And she's just know, look where we came from. Food stamps and poverty and shame and being called trash to look at the life you've given me today. And I had this experience, again, a pretty mystical experience. As if little Jana was five years old, sitting across the table at this restaurant in Carmel. And she was just wanted to share something with me.

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And it was kind of like, you hear when people have near death experience, they see a flash of their life. It was kind of like Sandy. I went into her body and I was watching myself, and I was viewing my entire life that led me to this present moment in time. Wow. And I was like, I'm okay without a partner because I had been terrorizing myself.

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I'm 49 at that point. I'm like, am I going to meet somebody? I know I was right to leave that marriage, but I'm scared. And then it was like she showed me, like, you have so little faith, you were scared of what you've overcome everything. Exactly.

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Got this and that kind of internal affirmation and recognition of how powerful, what a badass I was. That's right. It just catapulted me to showing up on a plane the next day on a southwest flight connecting through to Vegas. And then, of course, you pick your seat. I turn the corner, there sits my husband now in bulkhead, and we make eye contact and the seat in the middle, because I was the last one to board was open, and I said, is this.

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Yeah. We both knew on our first date it was, oh, there you are. Yeah. That's how it was with my. Just.

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It was just instantaneous. Oh, my gosh, I love it. What you just shared about that experience. In Carmel when you were envisioning your. Five year old self.

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That is such a gift. And I want to just reiterate what you said, because I think as women so often we endure so much, and we need to start wearing it as a badge of honor, because we are freaking badasses. Yeah. If you've overcome anything. I mean, most women I know have overcome something.

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We've all overcome something. We are badasses, and we need to own that more. I know it took me. I mean, I used to own it, but it wasn't until about a year ago that I really realized I was. Like, I'm a badass.

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And I just started to own that. I was like, wow, look what I've done. Because I think that so often. And again, this is probably the world conditioning us. Oh, well, you don't talk about yourself.

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Right? You're conceited. If you talk about yourself, you're this, you're that. And we have all of those conditionings. So I love that you said that.

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And I wanted to just make sure that the audience really caught that, especially the female. The men, too, because men have ever come, but I think men are just because they're raised so differently that they just wear that. They kind of own things a little. Bit differently than women do. And it's not coming from ego.

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No, it's not. Yeah. It's a recognition that we are resilient and that we are capable.

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I liken it to the divine feminine. Yes. It's the part of us. And when I teach, like, reparenting, and my book is a prescriptive memoir, which is unusual. You don't see prescriptive memoirs.

00:29:31
Memoir is written like a novel. It's about a segment of time. Prescriptive memoir. Prescriptive is a word you probably know this as an author. And nonfiction, we talk about.

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It's prescriptive nonfiction because a self help book is a prescription to the reader on how to heal or do something. Right? Yes. Well, memoir is normally not that. So what sets wise little one apart from other memoirs is because it is prescriptive.

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I used eleven chapters where I put little boxes at the bottom of each chapter, where I talked about things like false belief and managing and regulating your stress and intergenerational trauma, so that as the reader is reading the Book, if something resonates for them. Like, I've heard from some readers where I talk about my father and how I was being conditioned to put his feelings above my own. If he wanted a hug or he wanted something from me and I didn't want to give it, that wasn't allowed. I had to. So it was creating this.

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So even though I went through a lot of trauma, a lot of how I described the experiences of conditioning people could relate to who hadn't experienced that level of trauma. And so I think that when we say that we're a badass, to distinguish that isn't coming from the ego, it's really a recognition that we have overcame. That's right. Yeah. It's amazing when you can stand in a place and I'm sure you'd agree with us in your life and look back and go, I wouldn't change anything.

00:31:22
That's right. Yeah, absolutely. And I know just recently we had, like, a girls night, and people were passing around little notes, just having, like, a fun game, and it was like, I got the question, what would you change? If you could change anything in your life, what would you change? And I was like, I wouldn't change a thing.

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And they're like, seriously? I'm like, no, wouldn't change a thing. And I love that because you have. To own it, because I know that everything has happened for me. Not to me.

00:31:49
Exactly. And you have to get to that point in your life. Tony Robbins quote. Was that a Tony Robbins quote in my book, too? It's one of the quotes I use that everything's happening for us not to.

00:32:01
Yeah, because Tony Robbins was definitely one of my first know, virtual mentors, if, you know, I took a lot of his courses, and I had his whole big CD collection of all, too. Right. But, Jana, this has been such an amazing conversation. Where can people find you and learn more about you? If they want to work with you?

00:32:27
Potentially, where can they just learn more about you? Do you have a website you can. Yeah. So emotional healing retreats. Emotional healing systems is the name of my business.

00:32:37
So I created a very comprehensive system that if someone followed. My husband and I are co authoring that book right now, so that will be a self help book. But emotionalhealingretreats.com, you can find the group retreats for 2024, where we'll be somewhere in the country. We do five day intensives and weekend retreats. And then here in Santa Fe, we have a healing center, 2600 square foot, three bedroom yoga studio where we invite people to work with us one on one.

00:33:11
So, yeah, we have both. So group and one on one. And then janellson.com is the book website, and of know listeners can find the book on Amazon and anywhere books are. Love it. I love it.

00:33:29
Any final words that you'd like to share with the audience before we finish up? Yeah, thank you for asking that, a lot of people, because we are really talking about self love and falling in love with self and relating with our emotions as that inner child, the wise little one, I think a lot of people don't understand what self love is. It's not just Calgon take me away in a bubble bath. Right. Although that's really wonderful.

00:33:55
It is. It's not always just a day at the spa getting your nails or whatever. So I've broken it down into six ways. We love ourselves so emotionally. And if you think about it, it's really the love languages when you give yourself the love.

00:34:11
But emotionally, do a tiny habit. When you're brushing your teeth in the morning, look at yourself in the mirror. Maybe get a picture of yourself as a little girl. I have mine everywhere, and I put them on my phone, on my picture of my little girl. I love it.

00:34:28
Find a picture of yourself around five years old, is usually really sweet and innocent and begin to relate with your emotions if you're anxious. I'm not anxious. My little girl is anxious. And so I can tend to those feelings. So emotional love is so important.

00:34:45
And of course, there's physical eating well, moving your body. Good parents don't allow their children to eat ice cream all day and watch tv. Right, right. And financially, keeping your financial health in order. That's the way we love ourselves.

00:35:01
We love ourselves through the mirror of relationship, making sure that you're in relationships with people who mirror back to you the love and the respect you give yourself. Because if you are in relationships where they're not doing that, it's an indication that internally you're not loving and respecting yourself. Right. Or you wouldn't be in that relationship. Right.

00:35:24
And organizationally, keeping things organized is another way we love ourselves. Children thrive in consistency and when they know bedtimes at this time. So keeping things very organized in your life and then spiritually, of course, spiritually connecting to spirit every day. I teach spiritual psychology, and it is the foundation because we can't do it alone. We need a connection to a higher power.

00:35:56
Whatever you want to call it. That connection is what sustains you know. You know what hits the. That's right. That's right.

00:36:06
Oh, my gosh. Jana, this has been such an amazing conversation. Her links will be in the show notes, so you can always check those out if you're driving and don't want you to look at your phone now. But, yeah, such an incredible conversation. Jana, thank you so much for being on today.

00:36:23
And thank you to all the listeners.

00:36:36
I certainly hope that you enjoyed today's interview. Thank you so much for joining me. And as always, I hope that you and your family are healthy and safe. And that your lives are filled with peace, joy and happiness. Take care, everyone.