#59: Bravery to Feel Deeply with Coach Julia Claire Friedman

Julia Friedman is a beacon for trauma recovery, healing, and empowerment. She helps others reconnect with their own inner child, provides a safe space to feel and process old wounds, and come out on the other side possibly feeling lighter and more playful than ever before. On this week’s episode, she talks with Lisa about her own traumas from childhood, including growing up in a cult. She shares the symptoms that arose from repressed memories, and what finally helped her to move past the grief and shame and into a path of helping others all over the world. Julia now has over 10 years of experience working with children, several years of experience coaching and counseling adults, and blends leadership work, somatic therapy, the Teal Swan Completion Process, and more to achieve life-changing results.

Highlights:

Julia grew up in an Eastern cult, and although she felt like something was deeply off in her gut, she was made to doubt and second guess herself. After a time, however, some very negative things came out about the group, and that severely impacted and informed her sense of spirituality.
Fracturing and dissociation happen with trauma and repressed memories. For Julia, the unconscious self-destructive behaviors of bulimia and addiction led to her seek out the underlying trauma.
When we make ourselves vulnerable, we give others permission to open up and share their story, no matter how different their experience is from ours.
Julia opens up about her eating disorder and drug abuse and the turning point when she began to commit to her recovery through the 12-Step Community.
The Gift of Desperation moves us towards true healing and making a shift towards profound healing. Kindness and compassion from others on the other side was a lifeline during dark points.
A major part of healing for Julia was when she could fully feel that spirituality was inside of her, and not contingent upon others or a certain modality. Yoga was a huge gateway into getting her back in her body, grounding her, and unlocking repressed memories.
Play, childhood, and creativity is an organic part of all of us, yet it can be just as vulnerable to express this as pain or shame.
Julia feels it is vastly underestimated and misunderstood how much our childhood affects our attachment style later in romantic relationships.
Over the past years, the therapy field is opening up and expanding towards a fusion of many processes including somatic integrating, inner child work, mirroring, and with traditional psychotherapy.
The Teal Swan Completion Process is a soul-retrieval process and one that really helped Julia so profoundly that she integrates it her with clients.

Quotes:

“The body is infinitely wise, and our consciousness is always moving towards integration. It has its own memory, intelligence, and needs when it comes to healing.”

“Having freedom to expose things helps me to integrate those lost parts of myself…and is a permission I like to give others.”

“There are things that I have survived that I feel are miraculous.”

“I resonate with a leader who is also PART of the group.”

“There is a purity we all have that is untouched, no matter what we’ve gone through.”

“The Mentioned in This Episode: