Stop Telling Your Old Story: How Self-Talk Heals Unworthiness | Kristine Jensen

In this episode, Wendy sits down with Kristine Jensen, a psychotherapist who spent 35+ years helping clients heal shame, while carrying a deep sense of unworthiness herself. After closing her practice and moving to the California coast, she finally became her own client. What she discovered: shame is foundational, not superficial. It's not embarrassment or guilt. It's a survival mechanism rooted in childhood, where you learned to collapse, comply, and hide in order to feel safe. And it shapes everything.

They explore:

• Shame vs. other emotions: the misunderstood feeling that keeps women small, quiet, and disempowered
• Self-soothing internal dialogue: the practice children with healthy self-esteem learn early, and what happens when you have to teach it to yourself as an adult
• Stop telling your old story: why repeatedly reliving trauma reinforces neural pathways, and how moving toward who you're becoming shifts everything

The work isn't about understanding what happened to you. It's about learning to talk to yourself the way you'd talk to someone you love. Building an internal vocabulary of self-encouragement. Getting tired of your old story so you can create a new one. This is how unworthiness heals.

Connect with Kristine:

kristine-jensen.com

Facebook: facebook.com/kristinebjensenauthor

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kristine-jensen-203a09129/

Get her book, Bruised Not Broken: amazon.com/Bruised-Not-Broken-Troubled-Childhood/dp/B0DZ2PZN37?tag=syty-20

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:08

Hi friends, this is Wendy Harrup, and welcome to the Say Yes to Yourself podcast. On the Say Yes to Yourself podcast, you'll hear stories from women just like us who are adding the practice of saying yes in their daily lives in big and small ways, and as a result are experiencing the truth that everybody wins when you say yes to yourself. Saying yes to yourself is a graceful unfolding, an intentional becoming of the very best version of you. It is my hope that in these conversations we are able to find our truth and be inspired and empowered to live our very best lives. I'm so excited to go on this journey with you, and I look forward to finding a bit of our own story in each other's. I certainly am. Um I have just arrived at the chateau with Amelia. We had an amazing time in preparation for this trip. And I there's something about getting in the car on the way to the airport that is just an exhale for me because I think, all right, whatever didn't get done didn't get done, and it'll still be here when I return. And in this case, it's gonna be three months, which oh my gosh, how fun is that? And it's just a really beautiful time that I use as a transition of I was here and now I'm going here, and it's been gorgeous. So we um flew into London and did a little Harry Potter goodness, um, which was super fun, and then came to France and have now spent a night at the chateau. It's so fun to see it through her eyes and just experience this. Oh my gosh, is this really happening? Through yet another person who is pinching me and letting me know that this is real. So I'm just delighted, I'm surprised, I'm basking, I'm filled with appreciation and gratitude for the details of this gorgeous life and how it's continuing to expand. And it's interesting, you know, um, a lot of people are asking me, how how did this happen? How are you doing this? How how this is insane. You've been saying it, but now it's here. And I have found myself answering this question with this. How did this happen? One yes after the other. And I know that that is in your heart as well. That's why you listen to this podcast, that's why you share it with your friends. I'm so grateful that that's what you do, and I'm so grateful that this is how we are living. It is beautiful, and I'm really not available for doing it any other way. So thank you for being here with me, and thank you for sharing the episodes that are meaningful to you. I trust that this will be one as well. Today we have Christine Jensen. She is a licensed psychotherapist in California and a certified clinical trauma professional with over four decades of experience. She's recognized for her expertise in childhood shame, and she is dedicated to empowering all individuals to heal their bruised hearts and embrace their innate dignity and worth. She is the author of Bruised, Not Broken, Healing the Shame of a Troubled Childhood. I am eager to share this insightful, expansive conversation with Christine Jensen. Christine, you are already, I already know this about you, so fun and so fabulous, and just full of grace and generosity. And I've loved our few minutes of chatting before I hit record and know that this is going to be a really beautiful but powerful conversation.

SPEAKER_00 4:57

Thank you for being here. Thank you. It's a it's absolutely my pleasure. I look forward to seeing what we're going to cook up today. I think it's going to be great.

SPEAKER_02 5:07

I think it's going to be great. Good. Yes. So I would love to start by knowing how you are saying yes to yourself in this season?

SPEAKER_00 5:16

Well, I am saying yes to myself in this season by not being retired and not doing what many of my dear friends are doing. And I decided, well, I retired once and that just didn't work out too well. I mean, I just, you know, I missed my professional self. I missed that part of myself. And I felt like I still had more to do and more to give and more to think about. And so I said yes to myself by focusing on writing a book. And then I had to figure out did I really want to go the next little step, which is talking to people like you, Wendy, and promoting the book and speaking to some professional groups and things like that, which I'm doing. And I said yes to that. And so here I am. But of course, I said yes to myself even before that, or I wouldn't have written the book, because the book was something that I did as a way of dealing with some issues that I had that had not taken care of themselves in the many years that I'd been a psychotherapist. And so I said yes to myself when I decided to sit down and really focus on what I called being my own client. And uh out of that came the material that I have for working with people who have those feelings that we all do, which is that I'm not quite good enough. And and uh am I really worth it, and can I really do it? And all those kinds of things. So it was kind of a series of yeses, and I I hope that series keeps going, quite frankly.

SPEAKER_02 6:55

I can't imagine it stopping. Thank you. So I love that trajectory, and I thank you for your generosity. I'm really interested to know how this process went for you because obviously we teach what we need to learn, and we know all the sayings about the plumber has leaky pipes, and here you are working with clients, and you know the tools, you know they work, and yet there can be this disconnect in this blind spot that we have in our own expansion, our own growth.

SPEAKER_00 7:38

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 7:38

Did you know that was going to be the process when you decided to write the book, or was it a graceful unfolding as you were writing this and thought, huh, I I've heard this before?

SPEAKER_00 7:52

Well, actually, I'd love to tell you that about that, because you and I were speaking before about where we live. And um I had had a very successful practice in Sacramento, and I had been a psychotherapist, I don't know, like maybe 35 years or something, and I was just really, really deeply tired. And so I closed my practice and I moved to the California coast. And once my professional life went away and I wasn't filling my head with my clients' stories anymore and trying to figure out how to work with them, my personal stuff just started coming more to the fore. And so I had always known that I had this really deep sense of unworthiness. And as much as I had worked with my clients over the years, and I think I'd been very helpful to them about it, there was something that just continued to linger inside of me, and I was very unhappy about it. And, you know, I've read books and I went to seminars and, you know, I affirmations, I mean, you name it, I did it. And things had gotten better. But I thought to myself, you know, I am just not going to keep going in the rest of my life, feeling this feeling that would come up at the most inopportune, awful times. And I used to focus on, oh, I need to hide this because I didn't want other people to know that I had this lingering feeling. But now I was beyond thinking about what other people thought about it. It was like, I don't like this feeling within myself, and I really have got to do some work on this. So I decided that I was going to sit down with myself in the morning, uh, not every morning, but in the morning. And I was going to have some coffee, look at the ocean, and have these little conversations with myself to see what was going on. And one morning I was sitting and having coffee, and this memory came to me. And it was a memory that I, from my childhood, from when I was like maybe 10 or 11 years old, it was a very familiar memory. I had gone over it many times. And I thought to myself, oh God, here we go again. And but it just came kind of rolling out like it does. And I I noticed that I was looking at it a little differently. I was instead of thinking who said what, who did what, then what happened, instead, I focused in on the moment of when I had felt so hurt and so upset and so angry. And I saw that underneath of that was this big, huge well of feeling that I hadn't really been in touch with. I'd been too focused on who said what and who did what.

SPEAKER_01 10:32

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 10:33

And this big well of feeling, when I looked at it, I thought, oh my God, that is shame. And one of the reasons that I knew that, or well, let me just say that the affirming data about why that was shame was because I watched what happened. I collapsed, I became compliant, I went along with the program, I acted as though nothing had happened, I just felt sick inside, but I didn't show it. I put on this face, the whole thing. And I thought, wow. Now, Brene Brown had written some books, so shame was in my sure, you know, lexicon here. But as a therapist, and I think this is true for many therapists, until fairly recently, there was not a lot of conversation in the therapeutic community, at least not the one that I was a part of, about shame. You know, it was about being ashamed or being embarrassed or whatever, but not the kind of shame that starts back in the very beginnings of our life as children. And so I thought, okay, I'm gonna learn everything I can about this. So I just read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read. And because I sort of start from the place of feeling inadequate, I I probably read for like maybe a year more than I needed to read. But as I read, I started learning more and more about it. And this is what I think is so great, and that is, and I know you know this, Wendy, and so do your listeners, the more you know about something, the more power you have to figure out what you're gonna do about it.

unknown 12:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:18

And so as I started identifying what shame is, how it starts, how it expresses itself, how it becomes a pattern, how it then becomes our personality. I also, and how we, you know, organize our lives so much around that feeling of not good enough and this terrible disempowerment, I also started seeing, okay, these are the things that I know will heal it. And they were things that I had been using with my clients over the years, but I never put it together. It was kind of, I would say, more, I don't want to say haphazard because that doesn't sound very good, but it was more, I don't know, I don't know what to say. It just wasn't as strategic as I was able to organize it.

SPEAKER_02 13:04

Well, because you're also on both sides of the equation.

SPEAKER_00 13:08

I am on both sides of the equation. Right.

SPEAKER_02 13:10

You when you were suggesting it to your clients as a tool, you were just on this side, but you were now looking at I'm feeling the issue, and I'm looking in my toolbox so I can really see that oh, this one's not gonna work, but this modality or thought system or reframing is going to work.

SPEAKER_00 13:37

Yes. You know, that's a very insightful thing to say because that is absolutely true. Except I want to add one more thing, and that is I would go into a little shame spiral when something came up that I resonated with my client. And one of the things that happens when we go into a shame spiral is we don't think very clearly. You know how there's that, those two voices, like, oh, they're saying this, and oh, I'm feeling this, and oh, I shouldn't be feeling this, and oh my god, what am I gonna say in response to that? And da-da-da. And so, you know, eventually I would manage to get into my professional self, but it was it was wearing that is so fascinating because I'm imagining you as you're telling the story of your younger self having this experience and the way that you in brilliant survival mode, you turned on all the people pleasing and did what you needed to do to feel safe in that moment.

SPEAKER_02 14:45

And of course, no one was mad at you, so no one encouraged you to feel your feelings or work through it or anything, so that becomes your default, and then as an adult in this situation professionally, you're hearing this, yes, and of course, you're just going to go to your default remedy for this sort of feeling, which is shut down everything that's happening in your personal experience and give 100% of your focus to the person in front of you, which obviously makes professional sense as well. Like all of it makes sense logically, but then of course, when you start writing this down or intentionally working through this, and then you're getting even more data as you read, just like, oh my gosh, you're just a little girl still trying to navigate this, but you have now a Ferrari to do it as far as all of the strategic information, but you're still a little girl who doesn't know how to drive it.

SPEAKER_00 16:02

Yes, yes, that's very nicely said, very nicely said. And I I want to add something in here that I that I discovered as I was exploring this that I think is such an important thing for people to know. And that is that I I just want to talk about shame because it's a very misunderstood emotion. You know, if I were to say to you, you know, Wendy, what do you think shame is? You want to go there for a minute, just uh just for the heck of it? Sure.

SPEAKER_02 16:31

Yeah, because when I think of it, my initial reaction when I was listening to your story about shame, I was filled with compassion for little Christine. Like it it feels like my response to the word shame goes outward. And I've done enough of this work to know that that is probably um a survival mechanism because I'm obviously I mean, I'm 58 years old, so I'm sure I've experienced some shame and I have 100% renamed it something else. So I don't know if I can even identify a definition of that because I have no feeling of personal connection to my own experience of it.

SPEAKER_00 17:38

Wow, that is so interesting because I can remember sitting with a group of colleagues. We had these um meetings that we would have once a week, and uh they're called consultation groups, and where therapists will sit together and they will talk about particular issues that have come up that they're kind of confounded with and would like some conversation to happen. And I remember one of my colleagues said something like, uh, you know, I met a woman the other day and her chief issue is has to do with shame. And I remember thinking, shame. I don't ever talk to any of my clients about shame. I don't even know what is what is that anyway. And I look back now and I see I didn't know what it was because I was full of it. Exactly. I hadn't named it.

SPEAKER_02 18:26

Yeah, so I'm so delighted to have this conversation because I'm one of those odd people that when I discover something, I'm like, ooh, that's shadowy. Let's get a flashlight in there. Like shadowy. I want to be better.

SPEAKER_00 18:40

So this is fascinating. I love it. Thank you. Let me tell you what I learned that was just so so important. And that is that, you know, we've all you talked about survival, right? So we've all heard about these survival strategies, and we know all of us know fight, flight, flee. And then there's another one that people don't talk about. Some people call it fawn, like F-A-W-N. I think that is really misnamed. What it really is is collapse, appease, and submit. Yeah. So when we l listen to to let's just say women who have been abused, and we think, why didn't you speak up? Why didn't you push away your offender? Why didn't you this? Why didn't you that? And the reason is because the subconscious mind has figured out that we're not and and think about a child, okay, a child raised in a hostile environment, or a child raised where there's emotional neglect or that the kid is just not seen or not recognized. And so the kid can't fight, the kid can't uh flee, the kid could freeze, right? But uh that doesn't generally work out so well because there has to be some interaction in order to continue to get the supplies that the kid needs. And so what does the kid do? The kid collapses, the energy system just closes down, which is why shame feels like the bottom of our stomach just drops out. And so then they go into collapse and then they appease and then they submit. And this is their effort to just maintain any modicum of connection that they can possibly manage with whomever it is that they feel like they need to be connected to. And sometimes they need to be connected to the offender so that the offender is hopefully less aggressive. Right.

SPEAKER_02 20:43

It resonates so much. And what I'm would love to hear, I'm obviously want to hear everything that you were already saying. And when that quote unquote offender is not violent, then the shame gets a double shame because you feel shame about feeling shame or being afraid or collapsing because that person is quote unquote nice and other people like them, but there's something about your dynamic that doesn't feel safe.

SPEAKER_00 21:24

Yes, yes. Well, you know, offenders don't just go around with a big sign of offender on them, and they just don't go around, generally speaking, offending everybody. That's right. And so, like you say, you know, you've got the very pleasant mom, you've got the very successful and outwardly pleasant father or whomever. And so, but then there's that private little relationship that kids have with their parent. And oftentimes, you know, it's unseen because uh the wounding is unseen. It's not like you have big bruises or something, although you might, but you know, oftentimes, many times, I think you don't. And so it's and it's even hard for the person who has been offended to even recognize how deeply hurt they are. But you know, the so then these these uh uh neural pathways get wired in, right? Collapse, submit, appease. Yes, and and women I think are are kind of reinforced anyway to be doing that. And so then it becomes a style of relating. Exactly. It becomes a style, a personality style. Now, there's many other ways, of course, that it can take, and we can get into that at some point, but that was really important for me to learn from two standpoints. First of all, I did not choose, no one chooses to go into the shame state. It is a survival net mechanism that the subconscious mind just like boom, you're in it, right? And then you realize it's helpful in some ways. For sure. I can please my mom, if I can have her be happy with me once in a blue moon, that's better than never at all. So we become helpful, we become overfunctioning, we we have a role reversal, we try and cheer whomever it is up, we try and solve the marital issues within our families, we do all those kinds of things, and then we go out into the world thinking, okay, this is what I do, this is where my worth comes, and we move forward, but not as expansively as we could. That's all right. We weren't dragging that stuff around, right?

SPEAKER_02 23:38

It influences the jobs we take, yes, it does how we marry, yes, it does, and then how we parent, and then we're doing it on both sides, and then yes, yes, absolutely. And then a pandemic happens, and then you have a giant wake-up call, and then you release everybody in your life to go live their highest and best while you do yours. Yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 24:05

That sounds like a personal story, yes, it does.

SPEAKER_02 24:07

I know exactly what you are speaking of. Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 24:11

Uh-huh. Yeah, it's fascinating. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So not everybody has epiphanies during the pandemic, of course, as you know, Wendy, and they continue to struggle along. And I know that a lot of what you talk about on this wonderful podcast is uh dreaming into our future or dreaming our future. And I can say some things about, you know, what I discovered is helpful to help people get over shame. But I want to just sort of jump ahead and say that I think that one of the most horrible things about living within a shame-focused inner world is that we don't dream a future as well as we could, because our nervous system and our personality style is still stuck, caught back in the let me just survive this sort of thing.

unknown 25:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:08

And so we're not living as big a life and we're not dreaming out there, you know. And the other thing, of course, is we're not self-focused. We're not in here going, how does Christine feel about this? We're in here going, how can Christine please the people around her that she feels like she still needs to please in order to feel acceptable? So there's a whole lot of, am I acceptable? Am I acceptable? Am I acceptable? It's not what does Christine want, or what does Wendy want, or what do your viewers want? And so I'm amazed sometimes when I would ask people, well, how would you like it to be? And they're like, hmm, I never really thought that much about it. Oh, I know, I know.

SPEAKER_02 25:55

But I know I I get it. Yeah. Because that used to be me. Um, well, that's not true. I've always dreamed of something better. I just didn't realize that I was allowed to have it.

SPEAKER_01 26:13

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 26:13

I knew I was allowed to dream it, but like that, that's where all the benefit just stopped in the visualization. Right. But the belief was never, the belief was never at the level of the desire.

SPEAKER_01 26:30

Right.

SPEAKER_02 26:31

Because I thought that, you know, I grew up in church. And so these are very easy to submit. If that if you're already, if you're already prone to this fawn, to this people pleasing, that is an organization that celebrates that.

SPEAKER_00 26:52

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 26:53

And reinforces, oh, you know, your reward is in heaven. And the more that it sucks now, in the name of Jesus, then the better the reward will be later. And, you know, I I have a different belief system around those ideas now. And so for me, the permission to dream that is not something I needed to really step into and step up into. It was the permission to have what I'm dreaming of. Yes. Oh, wait a minute. If these dreams are in me, these dreams are for me. What? Oh, right. Oh, okay. I'm these ideas are God given. Like we, I we're co-creating this together. What? Yes. Okay. So I feel like I got the the key to read the treasure map. And you know, some relationships and practices that couldn't tolerate my new understanding.

SPEAKER_00 28:06

Yes. And so that changed. Yep. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. You know, um, unworthiness. You that was sort of the context of what you were talking about. You had your dreams, but you didn't feel worthy of having them. Right. And so they just stayed out there. They were just your dreams until something shifted where you started feeling like I must be worthy of having these dreams or these experiences, or I wouldn't be having them. And that is a huge step, isn't it? That is a very huge step.

SPEAKER_02 28:42

Which is why I create all these opportunities for people to step into something dreamy that's already been done for them. Yes. You know, just to test the water.

SPEAKER_00 28:58

Yes, exactly. Exactly. So if you don't mind, I would like to go back and just speak to the people who haven't gotten there yet. Is that okay? Just for just for a minute. Absolutely. Okay. Because you and I are both familiar with uh some work that suggests that if you're feeling horribly disempowered, you're not going to immediately go to, oh, I feel worthy enough to have this, right? Yes. We we've got to work our way out of the hole, so to speak. Hole, H-O-L-E. Yes. And isn't it interesting that when you look at sort of the hierarchy of feelings, that we look at shame, and shame is like shame is really at the very bottom vibration of our feelings. I mean, it is like the lowest of the lowest, right? And the next one, interestingly enough, if we just get a little bit more empowered, it's anger.

unknown 29:58

Right.

SPEAKER_00 29:58

Now let's look at women's how we are socialized about anger, right? We are socialized that nice girls do not get angry, right? And aren't we also punished for having anger? Yes, we are. And so how are we ever supposed to get out of this disempowered state? That's right. We've got to get angry. We've got to, at some point around your uh experience of your religious upbringing, you must have said, enough of this crap. You know, I I'm not going along with this program. And I'm not saying that all religions are as uh demeaning or or as whatever you call it, that the one that you described, or your feelings about it, because they're not. But the idea of getting angry, and I remember people used to talk about getting angry with God, and I used to think, whoa, I'd be really careful if I was you. And and uh, but you know, anger is where we need to go if we're going to empower ourselves. Not that we stay there, we move up exactly. And so we go from where we are to where we can go next. That's right, right? Yes. And I want to suggest that there's a couple of things that we need to learn along the way that I think are really helpful. And I figured this out, I don't say I figured it out, but it came to me because I started looking at how how are children raised who are raised with healthy self-esteem. Because I always called my shame stuff poor self-esteem. So, how are children raised who have good self-esteem? And there's a number of ways, of course, they're told that they have worth, they're I love you, honey, you know, all kinds of things like that, wonderful things like that, that just are so amazing in terms of how it nurtures us. But the other thing is they're taught how to manage what we call their nervous regul nervous system regulation, just to use that word, which is like, what the hell does that mean? But but but but how they're taught to do that is they're taught to have self-soothing conversations with themselves, which is the opposite of how shame talks to us. Right. And so if our listeners, and and I'm I'm I'm one of them, if if you're raised and you don't have those kinds of self-soothing conversations, those self-encouraging conversations within your mind that you can draw on lickety split when you need them, then you are at a terrible disadvantage. And you know, Wendy, sometimes I would say to my clients when they would tell me something awful had happened, I would say, Well, what did you say to yourself? And they would repeat something to me that was very negative, and I realized they don't have that in them. And so interestingly enough, I would say it to them, I would give them something like, You're doing fine, you're getting there, that was okay, everybody makes mistakes. And then I realized I need to learn more of those myself. I purposely ran around finding those phrases and putting them into my emotional lexicon. I wanted them. Right. And I needed them, and so does everybody. So if your listeners are a little short on those, or they think that they can skip into, oh, I can feel really, really good without having these ways to calm themselves when things aren't going necessarily really, really good in that moment. They need self-soothing, they need to be able to forgive themselves for all their mistakes because God knows. Yes, God does know. God does know, and we know that being a human being is about a whole bunch of mistakes, right? That's how we learn. Yes. To use the language that you're familiar with, this is how we sort. That's right. Oh, I did that this way, I felt like this, that was not a good feeling. I don't want to keep going back there.

SPEAKER_01 34:07

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 34:08

These practices, this self-soothing dialogue that we have, monologue that we have with ourselves, that's that is what moves us through and up that emotional ladder to a better feeling thought. And it is, it's a new language. So it's clunky at first, and that's okay, but you're just going to keep going. But it does take, like you said, you had to add these practices and these words to your emotional lexicon. And you're a psychotherapist with decades of experience, so it doesn't matter who you were. These are practices that support who you're becoming.

SPEAKER_00 34:57

Yes, I like that. That's absolutely true. Yes. Can I name a couple of more practices? I want to know them all. You're so fun. Life is delicious to you, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 35:12

Isn't it? Yes. And I love all of this. And I know I'm not trying to make it about me. I just I'm loving the connecting of the dots. And I'm also hoping for the listener seeing it play out in somebody else's experience can sometimes make it easier to actually hear. Yes. Because we're not saying, yeah, but you don't understand. I have it really, really bad.

SPEAKER_00 35:41

Or yes, please tell me more. Okay. Well, let's talk about the one that you just mentioned right here. You know, one of the things that people do is uh, and I I honestly think that psychotherapy, perhaps the kind, you know, there's all different kinds of schools of psychotherapy, so you can't just lump it in.

SPEAKER_01 36:02

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 36:02

But the kind of psychotherapy that I was exposed to, and I think the one that's kind of in the popular cultural mindset is that we go back over our stories of the things that happened to us. Now, there is a value in doing that, but as someone says, once you get the message, hang up the phone. I love that. Yes. So we go back in to our stories because we want to see how we felt at that time. We want to see what we need in order to help ourselves with how we felt. Perhaps we see a lesson learned, perhaps we see that we need additional support, perhaps we see that, oh, that was then the people in my life now are much more affirming and supportive. And then at some point, we need to decide we're going to stop telling our stories. Now, I don't know if I doubt this is true for you, but it's certainly true for me. There would be stories that I would tell that were kind of litmus tests. It's like, you know, if you listen to this story, then I know that you really care about me. This is, I, you know, this is this is the truth of how it used to be. And I would also want to be affirmed, oh, Christine, you just really had it tough. And then I would want them to, you know, maybe have a little pity or something like that. Then I'd want them to, I'd want them to join me in really being angry at whoever it was that it offended me. That just gave me great satisfaction.

SPEAKER_02 37:37

Yes. And I wanted them to use a swear word about how bad they were because I never did that. Oh, oh my goodness. So enlightenment came with the potty mouth. Uh now, now I do use the words. But yes, I just like you. I mean, it was almost like we had scripts.

SPEAKER_00 37:58

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 37:59

Oh, yeah. And telling the story the same way. This is where you your eyebrows raise. This is where I'm gonna pause for you to say, Oh my gosh, are you kidding? They said that, and then I'm gonna keep going. Like, yes, I know, and then you just get so tired of your own damn story, yes.

SPEAKER_00 38:18

Thank heavens, yeah, because we need to get tired of our own damn story. Because if you think about it, two things are happening. We're reinforcing the neural pathways of that experience, we're viscerally reliving it. How healthy is that? And we're not spending our time thinking about our future and how we want things to be, right? So I say to people, and sometimes they don't like it, and when you're the therapist, you have to be really careful about your timing. Uh, but you know, I start inquiring in what I hope are supportive ways about whether people are ready to give up telling that story so that they can move into creating a different story.

SPEAKER_02 39:02

And that is the key. You're not just gonna lose all your material. It's not like you're not gonna have anything to say now when you talk to people, you get to tell a new story, and it doesn't even have to be um, you know, some twist on what already happened. Exactly. Let's talk about who you're becoming. It's yes, you know, a few months ago, um, at a say yes summit, we were talking about. I was working on my website and I was redoing some stuff, and it's like this the about page, it was such a slog because, like I said, I'm 58 years old. There's a lot of paragraphs on the about page, and I am completely disinterested in all of them. I don't want to talk about who I was and how I got here and how hard it was and how long it took, and blah blah blah. I want to talk about the woman I'm becoming. How interesting, right? Like, I don't even want to talk about me. I want to talk about you. I want it like, I'm so glad you're here. Let's create something together, and the champagne is chilling, and yay, let's do it. So excited. So I love that how once we feel safe enough, because safety is the key, I think, to all of this, to any personal development and to any dreams that you have, we manifest at the level of safety that we feel. And you know, so as we are rewriting these narratives and creating this safe space for ourselves and curating the community that supports these people that we're becoming and these new narratives that we're leaning into, it gets easier because mastery comes from repetition and what we focus on grows. And so there the story grows and expands as we grow and expand, and then someone fascinatingly who you haven't talked to for a while, will come into your experience, and the first thing that they'll ask you about is some story you used to tell because your vibration's where you last left it, and that's what that person is hanging on to. And then, like, oh yeah, I don't even think about that anymore. Let me think about this. And I want to know, like, where are you going? I don't really care where you've been. It's all from right now. This is all of our power is right now.

SPEAKER_00 41:54

Yes, yes, absolutely. You know, as I was writing the book, there was a point at which I was my own personal uh, let's just say, empowerment was so far ahead of where the book was that I that I I would just think, I do not want to write keep writing this book because I do not want to go back over this. Right. I don't want to remember my client's stories, I don't want to remember mine. I'm like, I'm moving on. Yes. And and so I I I actually just I had to make myself do it. Yeah, because I, you know, I just would say, okay, I'm doing this for somebody else, but I absolutely understand. I absolutely understand. So many of the conversations that that I had and still sometimes will find myself uh starting to tiptoe into are what we call problem-saturated stories. It's like they're just stories about our problems, and that's how we relate, you know, the old misery likes company kind of thing. But empowerment likes company too, doesn't it? Yeah, and doesn't it get bigger? It does, it does.

SPEAKER_02 43:04

I mean, I feel like I feel so expanded from this conversation. Great, it's so beautiful. So in the book, you're sharing it's beautiful, bruised, not broken, is such a gorgeous, gorgeous title. I want to understand I mean, I I feel like this conversation has given me such a beautiful picture of how writing the book impacted and expanded you.

SPEAKER_00 43:39

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 43:41

But if that were the only goal, you wouldn't ever need to publish it because you could just check that box. Right. What are you wanting the reader to experience through this beautiful work?

SPEAKER_00 43:56

Well, I want the the reader to experience first of All the hope that they do not have to live with this disempowering voice, shame speak. I call it shame speak. And within the book, I talk about inner critic, shame speak, and what are some exercises and things you can do about it? But what I want is I want people, no matter what their age, because you can see that I am significantly older than you, Wendy. And I don't want people to have to go decades and decades and decades with this feeling inside of themselves that they just think, you know, I've tried everything under the sun and it hasn't worked. So I guess this is just what I'm stuck with. And so I want people to have hope about that. And then the other thing is that the book really clearly lays out how we can understand shame and how we can understand that it was a survival system and that we needed it and it worked for us. And we can think what we want to think as we look back. But there is a certain amount of gratitude I think we should have that we were, you know, I don't want to say ingenious because that makes it sound like maybe we were cooking it up, but maybe we were cooking it up. I don't know. But there was an ingenious aspect to that. The problem is we got stuck in it. And now we need to figure out how to unstick. And so the healing part of the book is, I think, really pretty well laid out in terms of here's some steps, here are some exercises, here's some reflection questions, please write in your journal and I talk about that, so that people can use the book if they want to to augment their psychotherapy or their own inner journey or whatever. And then we get to the end of it, and there's a section on forgiveness. Now, when I thought about writing that, I was like, oh boy, because there is so much baggage around forgiveness. It's like, oh my goodness. And I I found some studies done by this man, he was a psychologist, who actually has some very good studies of people who have gone through a forgiveness process where he measures, he has a group of incest survivors. Oh, wow. I know, really. I mean, if you can move into forgiveness and you're an incest survivor, that is an example I want to model for sure. And so he did some pre- and post-tests, and he found that at the end of, I think it was almost a year of working on this forgiveness process that he lays out and that I also advocate in my book. At the end of that, these women were not depressed. They were not within the range of uh clinical depression. Their anger had subsided significantly. They reported much more feelings of hopefulness and and looking forward to their future and stuff. And so, anyway, I brought in the scientific, if you will, aspects of forgiveness and really pointed to that forgiveness is for ourselves, as you know. Right. Yeah. And so people who say they don't want to forgive so-and-so because it was just a horrible, horrible thing and nobody should ever be forgiven for that. It reminds me of this quote where someone said, that's like drinking poison and hoping that it will kill the other person.

SPEAKER_01 47:25

That's right.

SPEAKER_00 47:26

It just isn't gonna work that way. So we unburden ourselves from carrying this around and carrying that vibration of hate with us by going through this process of forgiveness. And we owe it to ourselves because then you see, we can get on with the other things. We don't need any more disempowered, crippled people. We need people, particularly, I love it, when it's women who step forward and they're empowered and they're thinking about their future, they're raising their children in a way that's healthy, they're hanging out with their friends and talking about what's possible and what the future might hold. And you know, the rest of it.

SPEAKER_02 48:08

Yes, it's a love fest.

SPEAKER_00 48:10

It's a love fest.

SPEAKER_02 48:12

It is because that it is this dismantling of a thought system based on fear, yes, lack of safety, right? And reboot of safety with one based in love, and that is expansive and full of possibility.

SPEAKER_00 48:30

Yes, yes, it's so beautiful.

SPEAKER_02 48:33

Yes, Christine. I adore you.

SPEAKER_00 48:37

Oh, thank you.

SPEAKER_02 48:38

I have loved this conversation and thank you. My wills are spinning of how I can collaborate with you and a couple of women that I have recently had on the podcast that are also a little bit older than me. And the wisdom and experience and vitality and youthfulness that comes from what you've unlocked through your work, you are not like you're aging backwards. That's what this does, right? Because it increases you, you're dropping all of the weight of what is not serving you.

SPEAKER_00 49:34

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 49:35

And the more that women can hear these stories, and the earlier they see these stories, yes, it is this this phrase divine feminine rising, yes, is as beautiful and scary to the current systems of power um as it sounds, but this is a tsunami of love, and you are on the leading edge of it, and I'm so grateful to know you to have had this beautiful conversation, and I cannot wait to see what's next.

SPEAKER_00 50:18

Oh, thank you, Wendy. I feel the same way, I feel the same way. You're an inspiration to me. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 50:26

That's because we're the vibrational match.

SPEAKER_00 50:29

Yes, we are.

SPEAKER_02 50:30

It's so fun.

SPEAKER_00 50:31

I'm very grateful for that. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 50:33

Thank you. Me too. Please tell everyone where they can find and follow you, how they can get the book, all the good things.

SPEAKER_00 50:42

Well, uh, you can follow me on LinkedIn and you can uh go to my website, Christine-Jensen. Christine with a K. And you can buy my book on Amazon. And if you don't like Amazon, you can send me a message and I'll make sure that you get an autographed book. So I'm continuing to evolve what I'm thinking. I'm putting it on blogs on my website. So that's another opportunity. And then who knows what you and I might cook up, Wendy. Oh, I've got some good ideas already.

SPEAKER_02 51:14

We will link everything down in the show notes. But thank you so much for your time. I have loved this conversation.

SPEAKER_00 51:21

Thank you so much for the opportunity. Take care.

SPEAKER_02 51:25

You too. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. As always, any links or notes mentioned can be found at PhineasRighthouse.com in the podcast section of our site or in the show notes below. And if you haven't connected with me personally, come find me on Instagram at PhineasWrighthouse and let me know you listened to this episode. I'd love to get to know you. Thank you for sharing this time with me. I know your days are full, and I'm really grateful that you chose to spend some of your precious time right here. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss any of these delightful conversations. I'll see you next week.