Becky Aste has made me look at marriage from the perspective of trauma.

This month I will complete 22 years of marriage. I am fascinated by marriage.

I have looked at communication in marriage, and have interviewed authors, psychotherapists, pastors, and people in general about marriage.

Four Columns believes in having a holistic approach to marriage.

Becky Aste is a trauma-informed marriage coach, CEO of I Do Breakthrough, and the host of Your Breakthrough Blueprint Podcast. Her podcast is ranked in the top 10% of podcasts globally.

A friend of mine was being interviewed on her podcast and she posted it on Facebook. I listened to it and was mesmerized. I listened to a couple of her podcasts and I was like Becky is on to something. I reached out to her and she answered right away. She sent me the answers to the interview in less than a week.

This interview has made me look at my own traumas and how it has changed me. Go on Becky Aste’s podcast and listen to it. It will change you.

I have never heard of a trauma-informed marriage coach. Walk me through what it means.

I’m a marriage coach who has been through unique training to know how to understand and recognize the role of trauma in my clients’ healing journey – particularly how our bodies keep the score of the trauma we’ve survived and how to go into the body to move trauma OUT.

Talk to me about what trauma is and how it impacts us in our daily lives.

Trauma is anything that overwhelms our nervous systems’ ability to cope. Life-threatening events like an accident, house fires, assaults, wars, etc. are commonly referred to as “Big T traumas”. Think “Too big, too fast, too soon”. Experiences that threaten our core sense of love, belonging, and safety like infidelity, emotional neglect, and psychological or emotional abuse are often referred to as “Little t traumas”. Think “Death by a thousand paper cuts” or “The challenges suffered in silence”.

We all have physical, emotional, mental and psychological wounds. Help me understand why we need to be intentional in dealing with these wounds to lead an authentic, abundant, and empowered life.

Yes, unfortunately, none of us make it out of this life unscathed whether that be physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, or psychological wounds. Our body remembers and stores these wounds in the subconscious blueprint of our nervous system to protect us from any similar, harmful situations in the future. This is where we see our fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses- our body signaling there is potential danger. This is the fantastic wisdom of our body – there to protect us. The problem arises when we get caught in these responses and can’t move back into a regulated state of homeostasis even after the danger has passed. Our system either gets stuck “On” (As seen in hyper-achieving, anxiety, and restlessness) or shut “off”. (Depression, adrenal fatigue, isolation). When we get stuck in this survival response, it can lead to blocks in our core relationships, interfere with our work & diminish our ability to live a life of joy, meaning, connection, and pleasure.

You talk a lot about somatic mindfulness on social media. I am aware of mindfulness but where does somatic play a role?

The word “Somatic” simply means pertaining to the body, especially in contrast to the mind. Mindfulness means living in the present moment. Essentially, it means being (intentionally) more aware and awake to each moment and being fully engaged in what is happening in one’s surroundings – with acceptance and without judgment. Somatic mindfulness creates a mind-body integration where it has been lacking. It allows us to use our somatic responses as one source of information without letting them run the show. This kind of therapeutic work softens and reduces the hyper-vigilant threat response and hyper-arousal in the nervous system.

You should be ashamed of yourself. You are guilty of sin. You are guilty of this and that. Our religious, and educational landscape thrives on making us guilty. I want a way out. Help me.

Exactly. On a global scale, the human race is unconsciously breathing in the silent but deadly toxic fumes of shame and breathing it out on everyone around us. I truly believe the single source of all human suffering is a severed sense of love and belonging – exactly where shame makes its entrance as we are all doing our best to cope with our collective human suffering and then turning to self-blame for those coping cocktails of choice. The answer is radical self-compassion and self-acceptance. Learning to dissolve shame at the smallest.

I have traveled all over the world, and am open and curious. Do I have an advantage over someone who is close-minded and legalistic?

Curiosity is everything. It gives space to breathe again which gives space to live. Which is what healing is all about – learning to live again after surviving for so long. The foundational piece of the client journey I take any woman on is releasing the constricting energy of “muscling through it” and inviting her into the paradigm of a “Curious Explorer”. Instead of drawing black-and-white conclusions and making meaning of everything… she’s invited to look at life, self, and triggers through the lens of “Hmm, how interesting.” Those we may deem as “Closed-minded” and “Legalistic” I think can also be viewed as caught in their own survival patterns, caught in their own fear. Fear of making a mistake. Fear of dishonoring God. Fear of losing love and belonging if they don’t follow the rules …

Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce. Out of the remaining fifty percent, only two percent are emotionally connected. These stats are alarming. What is going on?

The mainstream modalities for healing a marriage are: “Go see a therapist. Go to couples counseling. Read this book. Listen to this podcast. Check out this Instagram page. Read this article…” and the list goes on. None of these are bad, but when you understand how our nervous system works it’s a real eye-opener into why all of these fall short, leaving couples emotionally disconnected at best- or worst-case scenario, divorced when they both actually wanted the marriage to work but didn’t know how to repair. If there’s nothing else people remember from this entire article I want them to remember this: We all have a giant nerve running from the base of our skull to the bottom of our spine known as the “Vagus Nerve”. Think of it like the super highway of information sending chemical messages from our brain to our body, body to our brain. Get this … only 20% of these messages travel from our brain to our body. But 80% travel from our BODY to our brain. All that to say, all the most popular avenues we’ve taken for decades to save our marriages have only been tapping into that 20%. So, it’s no wonder we all feel like salmon swimming upstream and the divorce rate just keeps skyrocketing. When we learn to work WITH the 80%, get INTO the body to move trauma OUT – this is where we see miracles happen. I get to witness it every single day in my community, women not only recovering but redesigning the marriage of their dreams after the brink of divorce, after betrayal, after abuse, abandonment, separation, etc.

Betrayal…….in friendships, relationships, business, and marriages can have a devastating impact on us. You talk about healing our nervous system. Help me understand this process.

Betrayal’s impacts on the nervous system can be absolutely devastating. Symptoms such as flashbacks, nightmares and impaired sleeping, depression, anxiety, brain fog, dropping things, distrust, dissociation, are common. Betrayed partners often feel as if their reality has been shaken to its core. Repairing the nervous system is absolutely key here – for that person to learn how to move back into regulation, safety, and self-trust. Releasing stuck energy and learning to “ground” can serve as the most helpful initial baby steps in this process of repair. Releasing stuck energy can look like shaking (I know sounds crazy, but it’s actually very natural – we’re just conditioned not to do it. Animals, after facing something life-threatening or scary will literally shake as a way to release cortisol, adrenaline, and trauma from the body.) Another release is what I like to call “Sacred Rage”. When you’ve been betrayed you might feel like you want to scream at the top of your lungs, hurt the one who betrayed you, punch that person in the face, etc. – these can be terrifying feelings to feel but there is a healthy way to release all of this instead of locking it inside. Some clients have created a safe, private space to take a baseball bat or gold club and just whacked the crap out of some intimate objects, punch a pillow or lock themselves in their car while they blast some music and scream at the top of their lungs. Grounding techniques- you can google that and find a million but it’s everything from walking barefoot on the earth to cold plunges to breathing techniques to tapping into your 5 senses. These grounding tools help move you from that activated fight/flight/freeze response back into safety and rest.

I want to know what it means to approach every area of our lives through abundance.

The first thing that comes to mind is going to sound cliche but it’s learning to practice authentic gratitude for whatever little you do have right here, right now. To live in abundance requires healing and rewiring from this scarcity of programming. Whether that is with money, marriage, time, health, etc. – but I’ll just use money as an example here. I tell my son all the time “Ollie, you want to know the trick to having more money? Be super grateful for the money that you have and more will come.” I never used to think like this. Money felt scarce my whole life. I knew how to make money but didn’t know how to keep it. I avoided the numbers in my bank account. I complained we didn’t have enough. I laughed and identified as broke. Then I went through a major money-healing journey where I rewired my nervous system from hustling out of hunger to receiving more and more with gratitude, learning how to steward it with integrity, and repairing intimacy in my own energetic relationship with money just like one would do in a marriage. It was one of the most downloaded podcast episodes I’ve done if you want to hear the full story here.

Identity and body posture. Come on Becky. Seriously. You have got me all self-conscious.

Ha! Body posture can tell us SO much about how we really view ourselves and how the world around us perceives us. Of course, with exceptions for those with debilitating health conditions that come from a purely physical root or circumstance. But in general, how we carry ourselves, how we sit, how we stand, how we walk – all of this comes from years of experiences molding the way our body holds us. For example, if we’re shrunken and concave in our body posture – we learned this from somewhere as a safer way to exist in the world. To not show too much of ourselves or our bodies because that could lead to pain. So, our body will wisely and instinctually curl inward to protect us from more pain. The signals this can send out to others, though – maybe that we are self-centered, unapproachable, lack confidence, etc. It can create barriers to reaching where we ultimately would love to be in our relationships, careers, parenting, social connections, etc.

Becky talk to me about one or two most challenging things you have been through in your life and how you overcame it.

The first was losing my Dad suddenly to a heart attack when he was only 57 years old – the day before my 18th birthday and my first week at college away from home. How I survived was two parts: One was diving head first into the church I was invited out to and finding comfort, meaning, and purpose in my faith through my world turning upside down. The second was through hyper-achieving. The last thing I remember my mom saying to me after telling me Daddy had died was, “But Becky you can’t quit school. You have to keep going. You have to make your Daddy proud”. So, cue the next 15 years of seeking perfection / high achievement in school, in harsh fitness regimens, in my career, etc. It helped me survive for a while but it eventually led to a nervous system collapse / psychological break because I was constantly running – I didn’t know how to feel safe unless I was doing, accomplishing, producing. Somatic work saved my life and finally, after 15 years of losing my Dad, taught me how to be still and to feel safe in that stillness. To actually embody satisfaction and self-worth outside of what I was producing / not producing. The second most challenging thing I’ve experienced in my life was infidelity. Having already taken an early blow with the abandonment of my father – this previous relationship I was in was with someone I trusted, who I loved, and who I thought loved me. This person struggled with a pornography addiction and it slowly but surely escalated to physical betrayal. When that line was crossed, I was gutted, distraught, fragmented, all the things. At first, I tried to survive this like I did everything else, through hyper-achieving. I tried therapy, books, podcasts, etc. – nothing ever fully healed this wound until I stumbled upon somatic work. It was the missing puzzle piece that took decades of latent information and brought it to life in my body, in my nervous system, and in my life.

The post Becky Aste: Trauma-Informed Marriage Coach appeared first on Four Columns of a Balanced Life.

Emotional wounds are not the same as physical wounds.

My body is scarred with physical wounds. I played squash for 15 years. Every muscle, ligament, and bone was torn or sprained at some point. The family doctor and the physiotherapist told me to give it up and focus on swimming and walking. I have cuts, bruises, and gashes all over my body from years of being a boxer, playing soccer, and playing pranks. All the physical wounds have healed.

Emotional wounds, on the other hand, are a whole different story.

Emotional wounds can result from watching a crime, bankruptcy, unwanted pregnancy, divorce, car accident, emotional, spiritual, mental, and physical abuse, death of a loved one, or any traumatic situation.  The symptoms are a change in personality, lack of joy, lack of interest in life, loneliness, anger, resentment, bitterness, depression, and anxiety.

You have to become intentional in healing these wounds by assessing them, cleaning them, stitching them, bandaging them and taking care of them, and being aware of trigger points.

I am super excited to present Lesa Henderson to my readers.

Lesa Henderson is a dynamic, candid, inspirational speaker, minister, author, and filmmaker.

Her transparency and straightforward approach coupled with prophetic insight place her in great demand for conferences and churches.

Her passion for Christ and desire to see wounded women restored and healed through the power and love of God comes across in her books, blogs, sermons, and teaching. It has also led her to minister healing for soul wounds & emotional trauma of women in prison, as well as to lead Women Warriors of God Conferences around the nation; where she and the Warrior’s team are seeing countless women set free both physically and emotionally.

Lesa and her husband, Ken are revivalists who pastor Salt Life Church on Merritt Island, FL, where they also lead Cornerstone Global Ministries & Media and are the founders of Cornerstone School of Supernatural Ministry.

Lesa, a pleasure to have you. There is so much I want to ask you. Let’s start by talking about Christmas. I am a big fan of focusing on His Presence rather than presents. How is Christmas relevant to us in the 21st Century? 

I’m a big fan of focusing on that as well.  We live in such a commercialized, material world that it’s easy to lose that focus and get caught up in the shopping, spending madness.  This year we are celebrating Hannukah as well as Christmas, each night we light a candle we focus on inviting Christ – the light of the world to be a light in our home and lives.   Whatever you celebrate, it’s relevant when you make the focus be on Christ.  Especially now in this economy and the times we are living in.  It’s actually more relevant than ever I believe as we approach His soon return.

The world is hurting. COVID 19 has exacerbated the situation. You talk about giving your hurts, pains, and brokenness to God. Walk me through this process? Should I just read my Bible, trust God and pray about it? 

Yes.  It is that simple.  And yet as simple as this is – we struggle doing it.  Or at least I do.  It’s much easier for me to worry, fret and lose sleep over the hurts and pains.   But God really does want us to bring them to Him.  And reading the Word is one of the key steps in the process for me.  It reminds me of the truth – His Word is truth.  It helps me to overcome the fear and lies I am believing.  It reminds me of His faithfulness.  In my prayer time, I’m very honest with God – He knows anyway, so for example I may say, “Father I’m feeling right now like you don’t hear me or care about ________,  but I know that’s not true.  Your word says ______, Help me to stand on that and trust you.  Help my unbelief and rest in your promise and faithfulness.”  I may have to do this repetitively until I find peace or the problem is solved.

As I get older, I am learning to embrace pain, suffering, and disappointment. It is hard but important. As I read your blog and book, listen to your sermons and teaching, your DNA is all about helping wounded women through the love of God. Where do the wounds come from and how does His love restore women?

Wounds come from many areas, childhood traumas, broken relationships, marriage, even church.  But what I’ve found through ministering to thousands of women is that almost all wounds begin in our childhood.  The enemy starts early with his attack on us and he knows if he can plant lies in our mind about who we are (our identity) or about what we believe about our heavenly father we will carry those lies with us into relationships and they will hinder our walk with God.  But the Love of God is so powerful.  When we have a full revelation of the Father’s love for us, of how much He really is a good, good father it changes us.  It heals us.  I do a teaching on how daddy wounds from our childhood affect our relationship with God and the ability to believe how deeply He loves us and accept that love.

Give my female audience practical tips on motherhood and being a wife?

First, know or learn your worth as a daughter of the king. This will translate to how you treat your children and husband and how you expect to be treated.  Keep your relationship with God first, your husband next, and then your children.  Give yourself grace. You’re not perfect and you’re not going to be. When you make mistakes with your children ( and you will) admit it to them and ask their forgiveness.  This will not make you look small in their eyes – the contrary is true.  Honor your husband.  Honor and respect are very important to men.  Don’t take yourself so seriously.  Time spent with your husband and kids is far more important than the things you buy them or how clean your house is. I could go on and on…not from a seat of expertise but from one of failures and wisdom gained.

My daughter will be turning 18 very soon. She comes to you for dating advice. Help me understand what you will tell her and why? And please include dating advice for women in their 20’s, 30’s and 40’s?

I would tell your daughter something I said earlier, “Know or discover your worth as a daughter of the King.  Don’t date anyone who doesn’t also see that and treat you accordingly.”  Don’t go looking for a date but let God bring Him to you.   And here’s something I recommend to all women dating – get inner healing (healing for soul wounds or childhood trauma).  This will help you make better decisions on who to date and will help prevent you from dating or marrying the same mistake in different skin over and over again.  Let the Holy Spirit lead you.

You were the producer, executive producer, and director of Hope Has A Name. What is it about? Why should we watch it? And please give my audience hope for 2022?

Hope Has A Name is an award-winning documentary about women around the world bringing extraordinary hope in unlikely places.  They are hidden heroes, not doing what they do not for a platform or platitudes but simply to bring hope to the hopeless through the love of God.  There are some pretty amazing women including Heidi Baker featured in the film.  And we are honored to have the endorsement of Lisa Bevere. Watch it and it will encourage you to stop making excuses and do something! It’s available on Amazon Prime and Tubi and many other outlets.

The Hope for 2022 is Jesus.  His name is the hope of the nations.  Jesus Is King.  He is still on the throne and heaven has not been taken over by Hell.  Our trust and confidence must remain in Him.  No matter what is yet to come, He will take us through. He is a sure foundation.

Help me understand the premise of your book Someone To Trust. Is there really such a thing as romance? Or it was created in the liberal halls of Hollywood with unrealistic expectations?

Someone To Trust is a Christian Contemporary romance based around finding love and forgiveness after betrayal.  The Heroine, Megan has been betrayed twice in her life, by the men she loved.  She has been presented the opportunity to love again, but she first has to get past her mistrust of men, find forgiveness for them and herself.  And,  most importantly accept the love and grace of her Heavenly father offers.  Someone To Trust is now available both in print and Kindle Unlimited.

I want to ask you about how do you balance being an author, filmmaker, wife, mother, speaking at conferences, and taking care of the women in your congregation?

Hah!  Good question,  when I figure that out, I’ll get back to you.  Just kidding, sort of.  It’s often a juggling event and I often end up dropping the ball.  I have to really pray and seek guidance as to what my focus needs to be on the most in the season.  It is also about stopping for the one.  The one in front of you, I try to practice that.  This enables me to help the women in my congregation who are needing my attention.   Two things that help me balance is keeping my relationship and personal time with God a priority!  If that is comprised, everything else is and I’m a mess.  The second is keeping my family a priority above all the other endeavors.  His grace is truly sufficient and I find His strength really is made perfect in my weakness.

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