Once you’ve listened, we’d love to hear your thoughts – scroll all the way down to the comments and let us know your biggest takeaway from today’s conversation.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
How LaDonna’s personal journey working through her deepest wounds helped her become a fearless, open-hearted healer and therapist who empowers others to do the same
What it takes to find emotional freedom despite hurtful experiences
How to deal with difficult emotions, including anger and grief
Why self-care is essential to live a life of less pain, burden and sorrow
Meet LaDonna Silva
Today we’re joined by our dear friend and colleague, LaDonna Silva — a licensed psychotherapist in the South Bay area of California, working in private practice with individuals, couples, families. LaDonna also runs groups. Her specialties include working with trauma, grief, relationships and the LGBTQI+ community. Ladonna runs consultation groups, has taught at several local universities and loves teaching and presenting. She studied at the Process Therapy Institute for many years and trained in the Internal Family Systems model. She's passionate about the healing process and supporting others in finding their internal freedom.
LaDonna’s Journey to Healing
LaDonna’s personal journey began at the young age of 20, beginning therapy after a family secret of sexual abuse had been revealed. Marcia, the therapist, held space for LaDonna to process the pain of the childhood trauma and the secret that had been revealed within her family system.
LaDonna found her voice, liberated the secrecy in her body and life, and was invited by Marcia to be angry — an expression suppressed in her family system.
Working with a powerful licensed therapist, LaDonna learned to let go of the hurtful parts of her experience while treasuring the gifts.
Many years later, LaDonna returned to school to finish her Master’s degree in Psychology and then a Master’s degree that included somatic psychology, which resonated because so much of her own trauma was rooted in her body, as well as transpersonal psychology. She knew that she was going to go beyond the cognitive and wanted to include the body and the spiritual realm into her work.
LaDonna believes that spaciousness with loving welcome of everything is the essence of her work as a therapist today.
Healing Our Inner Wounds
Loving acceptance is a big part of what she hopes to help others achieve — the loving acceptance she’s found within her life of even the people who’ve hurt her has brought her a tremendous amount of peace.
Letting go isn’t just about letting go. It’s about extracting the essence of the good parts and then making peace with the parts that have hurt us.
The idea is to learn to live whole within yourself while finding the gifts that the wounds have brought.
LaDonna believes that it’s not only what happens to us but what we did with those things.
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Dealing with Difficult Emotions
Emotions that aren’t socially accepted can be challenging to deal with.
From LaDonna’s personal experience, she grew through learning to work through the anger she felt towards her mother, especially at a time when her mother was lost and vulnerable.
The lesson is to care for your own system while caring for others.
As LaDonna beautifully shares: “When we’re not including ourselves in the formula of care, we resent.”
Anger can be a protection, and is valid and real. It’s important to therefore make friends with anger as a protection from guilt and powerlessness.
The idea is if you’re feeling angry, can you share your experience and stay open to the response from the individual you’re dealing with without walking away feeling bad about yourself.
Anger is fuel and when channeled properly, can help bring inner peace through clear expression. When experienced resourcefully, anger can be one of our many healthy emotions.
Anger isn’t always a protection; it’s often an experience.
In most societies today, the expression of anger from men is more acceptable than women, and this can present its own challenges.
The most important thing to question is, what relationship do you have to your emotions? This awareness can be a gift to help you find emotional freedom. This also speaks very much to how we relate to grief.
The Importance of Grief
The greatest grief can come through losing a loved one. Many cultures have rituals and respect for grief, but in other cultures like ours there is often an avoidance or a lack of reverance for this emotion.
Loss of the innocence of a child, loss of innocence to our sexuality, loss of safety — the themes of grief often intermingle with these losses. And our culture doesn’t know how to slow down and be with the emotion of grief.
One of the most important ways we can honor our grief is to slow down.
Grief groups are also very important, as is ritual and making time to process our grief.
It’s essential to honor the grief.
In Chinese Medicine, the root of all diseases is emotional.
It’s all about opening the heart and working through the layers that are preventing us from opening our hearts. And it begins with learning self love and to first love ourselves.
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The Importance of Self-Care to Heal Our Inner Wounds
Self care brings self love.
In Chinese Medicine, the Earth element is about care, which begins with ourselves because if we don’t give it to ourselves, we have nothing to give to others.
A person who has an imbalance in their Earth element either meddles too much in other’s lives because they can’t pay attention to their own, or has nothing to give.
Cultivating self-care is something that allows us to naturally give to others when we do enough of it.
Many think of self-care as selfish and have reasons like lack of time or lack of deserving it to avoid self-care, but it is essential nonetheless.
Integrating therapeutic work to help you cultivate this self-care and to heal is a supportive way to move through the journey, and to recognize that we’re all in this together.
Click here to download a transcript of this episode to learn more.
Let us know what you think! We’d love to hear your thoughts and comments on our discussion and conversation on emotional freedom with LaDonna. Scroll all the way down to the comments section below to share
Resources Mentioned This Episode
To contact LaDonna Silva, LMFT, visit her website here.
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