Quick exercise before diving into this episode. Scan your body. Notice any area of tension, stress, pain, or discomfort. Focus on that. Give that feeling a color and then give it words. What does it say? Is it saying “I want to break free”, “I want to get away”, “I want to burst”, or “I feel so weighed down”? Or do you find it hard to articulate how you feel?

One of the ways to determine unresolved trauma is by identifying this very subtle symptom – having difficulty with articulation. Do you have unresolved traumas?

In this episode, Heather brings in licensed psychotherapist and certified coach, Amy Van Slambrook. She helps high-impact, mission-minded women and couple CEOs, entrepreneurs, and leaders to reclaim and elevate into the most aligned and powerful version of themselves in their business, relationship, and life by doing deep healing and transformation in the soul, mind, and body levels. With 30 years of professional experience in psychotherapy, coaching, executive leadership, genetic and psychological research, functional medicine, and entrepreneurship, as well as her own 35-year personal journey of trauma healing and personal development, Amy brings vast experience to her work in post-traumatic growth and holistic wellness and empowerment. She is a sought-after speaker, podcast guest, and published author. Amy builds her life and works on a strong foundation of faith.

In this episode, Amy talks about the ways past trauma show up and how it affects the person’s ability to manifest the life they envision, the signs of trauma, the hidden ways it sabotages a person’s relationships and work, and the steps to better communicate what it is that a person truly feels, wants, and wishes. She also shares how she overcame her trauma, miracle stories, and the wins she has gone through.

 Listen ‘til the end of the episode to know about Amy’s new offering for CEO women as well as her free consultation call.

Soul Stirring Quotes:

“Nobody’s childhood is perfect by any means and I believe that those wounds actually create the greatest strengths in our lives.”

“Whatever we find is not going to be bigger than us and so let’s go forward and let’s count on yourself to be there for yourself.”

“If I could just sit the version of me now with my four-year-old self and hold her hand and tell myself, at least you’re not alone. I can’t change what happened. We have to accept it.”

“It happened, but you know what, you’re not alone and you never were.”

“There’s so much power in what you said in just being willing to be with yourself. ”

“You are often married to your absolute dream partner. It’s just that your wounds are speaking to each other more than your heart.”

“No matter how much we achieve financially, the issue of scarcity is often what’s behind all of these things and the feeling as if you are constantly running in fight or flight.”

Welcome to the everyday intuitive podcast. I’m your host, Heather Alice Shea intuitive life coach trainer status quo, shaker and founder of atmana coaching academy. Listen in each week to break up with your comfort zone claim your self confidence and radically embrace your role as an intuitive healer mentor and sought after coach let’s get within and get after it.

In today’s show, I bring in Amy Vince slam Brook, and she, and I just had a lovely conversation about trauma and how it affects our ability to manifest the life that we truly want to live. And also how it impacts our relationships. That mean the most to us. So I’m gonna tell you a little bit about Amy and then you’re gonna get to.

Amy is a licensed psychotherapist and a certified coach. She helps high impact, mission minded, women, and couple CEOs, entrepreneurs, and leaders to reclaim and elevate into the most aligned and powerful version of themselves in their business. Relationships in life. And she does this through doing deep healing, transformative work at the soul mind and body levels.

She has 30 years of experience, uh, as a professional in psychotherapy. Coaching executive leadership and also genetic and psychological research also in functional medicine and entrepreneurship. And she, on this episode shares some really, really, uh, deep, personal experiences that she has had in healing, her own trauma.

I really loved my conversation with Amy. So without further ado, I bring you Amy Vince Lamber. Amy. Thank you so much for being on the show today. You and I met in our, we have the same business coach and it has just been a pleasure ever since I met you in Kelly’s group, it has been kind of kismet getting to know you getting to know your work.

And so it’s a privilege to have you on the show today, sharing your wisdom. Oh, it is so good to be here, Heather. I felt immediately that soul to soul connection with you as well. So I cannot wait for our discussion. Awesome. Okay. So to our beautiful listen. I’m gonna make a commitment to you. I’m not gonna nerd out on all things.

Therapy. Amy is also a psychotherapist and a coach. So I’ve got some delicious questions to ask you Amy about, and we’ll kind of tee it up with your background as a therapist, and then we’ll go into your world the amazing work that you’re doing as a coach. I really love bringing therapists on to talk about concepts that we hear a lot in the personal development world, in the, you know, world of online coaching and entrepreneurship.

And one of the topics that’s really hot right now is the topic of trauma. There is so much, and I’m so glad that it’s a conversation that people are having. And there’s a lot of strategies and advice that people are hearing in the online space today about trauma, what it is and how to heal it. And from my perspective, Some of this information is at best inaccurate and at worst downright dangerous.

And. Coming from your perspective, I’d like to start there and ask you from your qualified perspective, what are some of the main ways that you are seeing true trauma show up in the lives of the women that you serve? And how is that affecting our ability to really manifest the life that we envision? Oh, absolutely.

And I couldn’t agree with you more, Heather. I mean, I’m so glad that we’re getting some visibility for lack of a better word to trauma and what it is because of course you, and I know how it fundamentally inhibits our ability to create the beautiful life we know we’re called to live, you know, and. Some things that I think are grossly, both misstated, but also misunderstood is that sort of everything can qualify as trauma.

It isn’t that there aren’t valid emotional wounds and there are, and there are little tea traumas, and those are things that really interrupt our emotional experience and they hurt us and they cause us to maybe mistrust or doubt. The safety of the people that we trust around us. And then there are big T traumas and those are drastically different.

You know, those shake us to our core. They disrupt those early developmental tasks that we attribute like trust versus mistrust and identity. Paula Eric Erickson. Gotta just throw it out. Okay. We just nerd point number one. . That’s right. You learn more about that? Yeah. Google wanna drill down yeah, because Erickson was so wise in teaching what we need to go through and achieve in order to create that kind of emotional stability.

And nobody’s childhood is perfect by any means. And I believe that those wounds actually create the greatest strengths in our lives. Once we have a chance to navigate it, but I’m seeing people kind of, um, dilute. What is true trauma by kind of lumping everything in. We all often wanna get on the bandwagon of, well, I have trauma, I have trauma and it isn’t that I invalidate anybody’s experience because I truly believe it is relative.

Trauma for some people might not seem like a trauma to someone else, whatever your pain is, is completely valid. It often comes up though, as looking around and seeing an incongruence between who, you know, you are. And the life that you’ve created, it can often materialize. If you are creating this kind of great success business wise and behind the scenes, your personal relationships are nowhere near in the same place.

You also may attract really toxic relationships, both personally and in your business. If you have difficulty setting boundaries, all of those things are evidence that there is an inner child wound often, or a traumatic wound that gets to be healed. One really subtle sign, Heather, and, and I’m sure you can appreciate this is that often I find one of the, one of the.

Hallmark symbols of somebody who still has unresolved trauma is they have difficulty with articulation. And what we’ve found is that the blood flow is cut off to the language center of the brain at the moment of trauma and it’s forever inhibited. That’s why, if you talk to a lot of women who are victims of assault, Right after the event, they often won’t have words and it’s literally because they don’t have blood flow to that region of the brain.

Well, I often find that people and women especially have difficulty expressing. I said, is it kind of like you have duct tape over your mouth and you know, you wanna say something you. You don’t even know what the words are for what you’re feeling or wanting to say, but you just feel it rising up in you and absolutely.

Yes. And I went through that as well. You know, mine materialized most acutely as an eating disorder and I almost died when I was 26. And at that moment that I realized I weighed what I did when I was nine, God nudged me. Oh my goodness. Amy, to wow. Reclaim my desire to live because I thought I’m 26, 5 30 in the morning, ready to do my run and realized that that was the truth of my life.

And my therapist very skillfully helped acquaint me. With the concept of trauma. And I realized it was the common denominator in so many of the things that had been incongruent in my own life. Wow, thank you for sharing that with us. And I can only imagine what that moment was like for you. And I know if you’re listening to this, you’re probably sitting there nodding your head, thinking of that moment in your life.

I had a similar one, um, in 2012 when I realized, oh my goodness, I’m slowly killing myself. It’s a slow suicide of sorts. So I love how you said reclaimed through your reconnection with God, the will to live. And how beautiful is it that you. Now, spend your time helping other people do the same thing, but you touched on something.

It was actually one of my questions. I wanted to ask you about the duct tape over the mouth and how we lose our ability. To articulate what we really want, what we really desire, what we really feel, what we really know, what we would really like to ask for or to claim. And so from your we, and we see a lot of that in the space, speak your truth.

You know, it doesn’t matter if people don’t approve of you, you know, So trauma is really what’s affecting women in that way as well. Right. We see such a movement, so many people are talking about it and it really does affect us. So could you speak to, what are some of the signs, maybe that a person and I’d love to touch on relationships, right?

How you said there’s this. Really severe contrast between like one area of your life is firing on all cylinders. And then the other is a complete mess. I think we really do see that with ambitious successful women that dichotomy in relationships. So can you maybe speak to, oh, how a. A person could go about retraining their mind to start speaking their truth.

What are some steps that we can actually take beyond the platitude of just who cares? What people think, speak your truth. Right. Right. Exactly. Well, for me, of course, it’s a deep process. It is important to connect to those words. And one way you can do that is literally through writing because. Allows your brain to literally reconnect to articulation.

If you have a chance to write out your truth, if you find yourself hearing somebody and thinking, oh, that’s exactly what I would say. She put it so well, have a chance, take a chance and write that down. And then maybe re-craft how you would say it differently. If you are in a relationship and you’re finding it hard to actually find the words go right before that moment, when you felt kind of muted.

What was your inner dialogue? What were you saying to yourself and even go into your body? I do a lot of somatic work, Heather, and it is such an incredible teacher. It is probably one of the most powerful things that, that our listeners can do today. If you can take as little as 15 minutes to scan your body and notice any areas of tension or stress.

Pain discomfort. And you focus in on that and you’re all intuitive. So I know you’re used to doing this. You focus in on that and you give it a color mm-hmm and then you give that feeling words. And often it’ll say things like, oh, I wanna break free. Or I just wanna run, or I just wanna burst or I feel so weighted down.

And that’s where the thread starts for what you’re wanting to say. And when you acknowledge that and say, okay, how can I express that? Or how can I meet that need right now that physical action starts to move the verbal, the verbal articulation. And. Then you can look back again and say, okay, and what color is it now?

And it usually will have resolved. It’ll go from like black to sunny, yellow, you know, mm-hmm or red to a nice blush pink. It, it calms it. And it also helps you connect in more. The deeper work that I do is really about going into an inner childhood wound mm-hmm and starting to give that part of you words because often.

And well, in every case with every client, that is the core message in almost every hiccup in their relationships, both in work mm-hmm and in their personal lives. And those signs, I, I lived them out. And I will use myself as a case study that I was in relationships with unavailable men, with men who would be distant, some emotionally abusive and some just really, really unhealthy.

You know, putting me in situations where I compromised my values and I compromised what I knew I needed. And I settled for crumbs because that felt like a feast compared to what I was used to. And that was a real sign for me. I thought, why is this happening? I didn’t have that example in my parents’ home.

I didn’t really get that message from anyone else. And I thought, well, I’m the common denominator. Right. So what is it going on inside of me that feels comfortable there. And that was when we kind of dug into those things. So it was really understanding that I was trying to resolve my childhood wound by repeating that wounding behavior.

And by the relationship mm-hmm, . Hoping they would respond differently. And of course that never is the case until we start to turn it into ourselves and love ourselves in the way we need that love to be given by others. Mm-hmm one of the things that popped up for me as you were speaking was, and I hear this a lot with our clients too, and not honor.

I think that people are afraid. To let that part of themselves the way I kind of see it in my mind is like to shine light on it. Yeah. To let it see the light of day to give it voice, to let it say, yes, this is what I need. What would you say to someone who just listen to what you described? And they’re like, yes.

I would love to try that technique you just mentioned, but I’m afraid. What would you say to that person? Well, first of all, I think it’s important to have compassion for that. Just like you would, if a child said, well, I’m scared to go outside, or I’m scared to go into that space. It’s because it feels bigger than us.

And the first. Just caution I wanna give is if you start to go in and you start to have a lot of trauma come up in terms of the memories, that’s something you want to have a qualified professional with you in that journey, because it isn’t safe to do all that processing by yourself. And that is one.

Thing that really frustrates me online, this whole self-healing movement. I think there’s a lot we can do by ourselves. And there’s a lot that we need professionals for. I wouldn’t perform a cardiac bypass on myself. I certainly wouldn’t tease out some of the most traumatic memories I’ve had by myself either.

And so seeking a qualified therapist or coach is absolutely paramount, but I think it’s also reminding yourself if you’re just trying to kind of work through that exercise at home, it’s reminding yourself. That’s understandable. Mm-hmm , you’ve never gone to that territory before. And so it’s okay. and be there for yourself say, and I’m not gonna leave.

And whatever we find is not gonna be bigger than us. And so let’s go forward and let’s count on yourself to be there for yourself. Mm-hmm , you’re not, if you self abandon in the moment of self introspection, that’s something I run into a lot with very high level CEO, women . Um, but it’s saying, you know what?

Either gonna be stuck with what you have, or you’re gonna take a step and start to really look inward at yourself and you are never gonna lose you in the process. mm-hmm yeah, it’s interesting that we’re saying all of this, because I think to some extent, many of us don’t believe that we can put ourselves back together.

Oh my goodness. I’m gonna fall apart. And then what does that mean? Mm-hmm what does that mean for my kids? What does it mean for the people who depend on me? What if I really do discover that I need to get that divorce that I’ve been lowkey thinking about for the last five years? What am I going to find when I actually take.

The veil down mm-hmm and really look at the big tea trauma that comes up. But I love what you’re saying about how you don’t self abandon. I’ll share a quick personal story. So when I was in my twenties, I found a therapist for the first time and really began to work through my own childhood sexual abuse.

I was sexually abused by a family friend from the age of like four to. You know, late, almost six. Right. And I kind of repressed the memories. They came back to me when I was like 17 years old and it was wild how all that happened. But in my twenties, I decided to find a therapist and we started working through it.

But one of the strategies that I taught myself that I kind of discovered by myself was to go in my mind whenever the memory would hit me. I mean, it would just, you just have a flashback memories, right? That’s PTSD. Yep. So I would just be like randomly living my life. And then all of a sudden this memory of this event would come back.

And what I decided to do in that moment was the version of me that I was then in my twenties would walk over to my four year old self. And at first I would try to make the memory stop and I realized that didn’t work. But what I did do, what I managed to figure out was if I could just sit the version of me now with my four year old self and hold her hand and tell myself, at least you’re not alone, I can’t change what happened.

We have to accept it. It happened, but you know what, you’re not alone and you never were. And so it’s almost like a time bender. Like I realized, like the I’m like, wow. And you know what? I really was there with myself back then when that happened. And maybe that’s how I found cuz I ended up telling my parents about it.

I went and told on that guy. I, I remember sitting on my bed, hugging a white Teddy bear on this like broad iron day bed. And I remember consciously making the decision to tell my parents. And there was a voice in my head that said he, my nickname was Hessey that said, Hessey he won’t stop. If you don’t tell.

He won’t stop. And I made a decision to tell my parents in that moment. And I know I don’t, it sounds kind of wild, but I actually feel like it was my older self telling my younger self, right. As I was doing this in her work. So I just offered that to say that I think that, that there’s so much power in what you said and just being willing.

To be with yourself. Maybe we don’t even need to have the answer. Maybe all we need to do is just start there. Right. And then know that the healing and all of that comes as we do that. So from your perspective, what are some of the things that happen? What have you I’d love to look at miracles now? What are some, give us some of like the most incredible.

Aha moments of how women’s lives have transformed through working with you as you are walking them through upleveling their relationships, their own relationship to self, and also how they perform as a high functioning CEO. Tell me some of your biggest wins. Oh, and thank you for sharing your story. Cuz I have a very similar journey, which we’ll save for another conversation, but yeah, it’s through what Heather and I have worked through a therapist that we’re able to see what I’m about to describe, you know, I didn’t rush.

And it was hard and it was painful, but I learned that I never left myself. And as I am teaching these powerful women, the same principles, the most amazing things happen. One that first comes to mind, a couple had come to me and they were like, look, you are just our last check before we’re signing. These divorce papers were done.

She had moved on to a different relationship. That was. We’re over. We just wanna know that we’ve done this for whatever good it is. And. They emailed me last year and I still get tears in my eyes. And they said, you know, Amy, we just celebrated our 10 year anniversary. Oh my gosh. And we’d never been more in love.

We never knew it could be like this. And they. Just through our work and through their surrender and willingness to go to these places, they just realized, I said, you are often married to your absolute dream partner. It’s just that the, your wounds are speaking to each other more than your heart. And so, as I’ve worked with couples, I worked with a billionaire who was coming in with his wife and it had been several marriages for each of them and they did not want this one to fail.

And they were new into their relationship. But in our work I was able to, and this is the intuitive part for me that I know you’ll appreciate, you know, God takes me into those moments. The moment that her husband. Had suffered in childhood. And I could describe things to him that he had no idea how I knew about, and it was paying attention to that intuition that allowed him to finally release his grip and for them to start to see each other as the innocent loving beings that they are to each other and how much they did.

The best for the other person and how the pattern got to stop with the two of them. And I just talked with a couple of other clients, one woman who was ready to shut her business down was totally ready to pivot and had been in this industry for a long time. And she said, Nope, that season is over. I am done and was about to end this relationship.

And I just need to work through, you know, tying up these loose ends and. Said, oh my gosh, Amy, I’ve totally reinvented this business. It is taken on a new life. I have a whole new staff because we had worked through why she had the unhealthy staff. She is so excited about her relationship. And I’ve seen that in a woman who had a, you know, multiple seven figure business who finally felt healing in our body.

She felt reconnected in her marriage. She hired a team that was supporting her rather than draining her. And to me, those are miracles because you know, no matter how much we achieve financially, the issue of scarcity is often what’s behind all of these things and the feeling as if you are constantly running in fight or.

It doesn’t go away. If you have seven figures coming into your business, it’s all about your heart work. And that’s a pervasive, foundational wound that you can’t resolve. With a weekend seminar and I, yeah. Thank you. Thank you for that. you’ll feel really good. And you’ll have a lot of dopamine and a lot of the really feel good hormones causing through your body, but it leads to the equivalent of a sugar crash.

You know, you just are ending up feeling empty and like you somehow didn’t apply it correctly. So those have been just. Amazing miracles that come to mind and in my own healing too. Mm-hmm . Yeah. And I thank you so much for sharing it. I think it’s important to remember that we can succeed at this. Yes. If we are using, and if we are going to the places that we need to go and that we are getting the right kind of support, identifying little tea, big tea, and then being brave and going there.

I think I know in my own life, Healing is like peeling back an onion, right? And sometimes when you hit that like 27th onion layer, you’re like why for the love of God, God, I have worked on this so many times. It’s so important to realize like, you really will get there. If you’re going to that place within yourself, that you need to go to experience, not change, but transformation.

You know, I say this all the time, a caterpillar is not a butterfly with. It’s a completely different thing. And what I’m hearing you say is that your superpower, uh, is helping people truly transform in a way that they don’t backslide from right. They’re returning to themselves. And I also just want kudos and highlight for our listeners.

If you are an intuitive coach or a therapist who’s wants to use intuition, you heard it from Amy that using your intuition is, is without question one of the most powerful tools that you can use. In your practice to help people really identify what is where they need to go in the place that they know that may be they’re hurting the most.

And yes, you do need proper training to do that too. Yes. Just like any other skill. So, absolutely. So, so tell us what’s next for you, Amy? What do, what have you got cooking that our listeners, uh, could know about? Oh, well, I am really excited because one of the visions that God gave me. Back when I was like nine, was that I would be a speaker on stages.

And so I’m really starting to branch into speaking and loving that and doing some media work and really helping people gain clarity and understanding of exactly what we’re talking about today. You know, what trauma really is and how we can utilize the proper strategies to heal from it. And. Loving that.

Absolutely. I just, um, created a new private one-on-one offering for CEO women. That is a beautiful, what I call sanctuary for very high level women who are needing a space to heal. You know, they’re realizing that disparity, but. Creating a container where we can have those high level conversations. And so that’s something that I’m really excited about because it is departure from any work as a quote unquote therapist and, and using it as a therapist, coach, or the coach, as they say love it.

That’s great. I mean, I can appreciate that. And so I am really excited about that and I am creating for a different, a. With a really, really great friend of mine, a beautiful collaboration, blending, integrative health and medicine with the work that I do so that we have a container that addresses things holistically for faith filled CEO, women entrepreneurs.

So I am, that’s a wonderful. Yeah, I love it. It’s almost like, um, you’re giving women it. Um, what was coming up for me is like, yeah, you know what? Ambitious, successful CEO women, you don’t get to hide behind your external achievements anymore. Go do the, go do the inner work. so, and I, and you also have a free consult call.

Don’t you Amy, a connect call. I do. Yeah, I do. Okay. And I would love to welcome anyone to book a free consult call with me because I would love nothing more than to be able to just have that space together. You know, don’t really be afraid that maybe you don’t know everything you wanna talk about in that call because as I’m sure Heather appreciates.

Our intuition will guide, and it becomes a really sacred time, even if it’s just a 30 minute call. And so I would just love to create that space for any of your listeners. Please don’t hesitate to reach out. Awesome. And we will have a link to for listeners. If you want to book, we’ll have a link in the show notes.

So just click the description and you will have it right there. At your hot little hand, you can, uh, connect with Amy and also check show notes for her social media links as well. Amy, you’re a treasure. I’m gonna have you back on to continue to talk about some of the things that we touched on here today to dive deeper into these beautiful little diamonds.

Thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you. I love you so much, Heather. So thank you for this opportunity. I love you too. . That is a wrap for today’s show. Thank you from the bottom of my feels for showing up today in your power and in your willingness to let your intuitive self lead. And if you are still working your way to your first 50 to 100 K in your coaching practice, I have two incredible free resources to help you fast pass.

This process, the first is to join our free and fun Facebook group. The atmana intuitive coach collective, where myself and our atmana instructors do free trainings every week to help you turn your obstacles into opportunities with each and every step you take so that you can begin to achieve success on your own terms, and finally make the money that you know, you deserve.

So, if you’re interested in joining our group, just pop onto Facebook and you can search bar atmana intuitive coach collective, and we will pop up or you can check our show notes for a link. And the second resource is a V I P ticket to our next upcoming five day workshop experience. Live your purpose, launch your practice, where you are going to.

Four keys to claiming your intuitive confidence calling in clients with authenticity and integrity. And then you’re gonna create your very first or one of many signature programs that help you sell your services with ease and grace. That also helps you go high ticket. So head on over to Heatheraliceshea.com/intuitive coach launch to get your V I P ticket, or you can check the show notes where you can get your hot little hands on a link to both the Facebook group and the five day workshop until next time I see you.

I love you together. We rise.