Episode 242: On this week's episode of Real Health Radio, I'm speaking with Denise Bossarte. We talk about her book, Thriving After Sexual Abuse: Break Your Bondage To The Past And Live A Life You Love. As part of the conversation, we cover many of the activities and practices Denise has done as part of her healing journey.
Denise Bossarte is an award-winning poet, writer, photographer, and artist. Denise is a certified meditation facilitator and contemplative arts teacher. She is an information technology (IT) professional working for a large urban school district. Denise holds a BA in chemistry, an MS in computer science, and a PhD in developmental neuroscience. And she is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse.
Denise spent her adulthood healing herself from the traumatic impact the sexual abuse had on her life. She is not a mental health professional. She is a Thriver who has travelled a healing journey and is able to share a personal, guided experience for readers to find and engage in their own journey to healing, to becoming Thrivers. Thriving is the recipient of multiple awards for excellence.
Whether writing on overcoming trauma in her nonfiction work or recasting her real-life experiences into award-winning dark urban fantasy in four novels—Glamorous, Beginnings, Return, and Readings—Denise tackles the dark side of things with courage, fearlessness, and compassion. Her self-published book Glamorous was a bronze medalist in 2019’s The Wishing Shelf Book Awards in Adult Fiction, and her success with Glamorous earned her membership into the Horror Writers Association and the International Thriller Writers. Denise is also a member of the Nonfiction Authors Association and the Texas Association of Authors.
Denise lives in Texas with her husband, Randy, and literary cat, Sapphira.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 242 of Real Health Radio. You can find the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode at www.seven-health.com/242.
Before we get started, I want to just mention that I reopened my practice to new clients last week. I specialise in helping clients overcome eating disorders, disordered eating, chronic dieting, body dissatisfaction and poor body image, exercise compulsion and overexercise, and also helping clients to regain their period. If you want help in any of these areas or you simply want to improve your relationship with food and body and exercise, then please get in contact. You can head to www.seven-health.com/help, and you can read about how I work with clients and apply for a free initial chat. The address, again, is www.seven-health.com/help, and I’ll also include it in the show notes.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. I’m a nutritionist that specialises in recovery from disordered eating and eating disorders, or really just helping anyone who has a messy relationship with food and body and exercise.
Today on the show, it’s a guest interview, and my guest today is Denise Bossarte. Denise is an award-winning poet, writer, photographer, and artist. She is a certified meditation facilitator and a contemplative art teacher. She is an information technology professional working for a large urban school district. Denise holds a BA in chemistry, an MS in computer science, and a PhD in developmental neuroscience. She is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse.
Denise spent her adulthood healing herself from the traumatic impact the sexual abuse had had on her life, and she is not a mental health professional; she is a thriver who has travelled a healing journey and is able to share a personal guided experience for readers to find and engage in their own journey to healing and becoming a thriver. Whether writing on overcoming trauma in her nonfiction work or recasting her real-life experiences into award-winning dark urban fantasies that she’s done in four novels (Glamorous, Beginnings, Return, and Readings), Denise attacks the dark side of things with courage, fearlessness, and compassion.
Denise reached out to me last year. She had found me because of the interview I had done with Beverly Engel. That’s Episode 227. Denise had written a book about all the things she’d done to heal from her childhood sexual abuse, and she wanted to send me a copy of the book. I read the book and thought it was fantastic, so I invited her onto the podcast to discuss it.
While there are many aspects of this conversation that are specific to recovering from sexual abuse, much of it, or even most of it, is fairly universal, or at least can be applied to healing from many things, whether that be an eating disorder or dealing with lifelong body insecurities or dealing with addiction or trauma of all kinds. Or even if you feel like you are a fairly well-adjusted human being and haven’t experienced your fair share of knocks, there are still plenty of ideas here that can make your experience of life even better. So if the thought is “I haven’t dealt with sexual abuse, so this episode isn’t going to be relevant to me”, that is incorrect. You will still get a lot out of this.
Now, obviously this episode comes with a trigger warning, as there are many sensitive topics that we cover – sexual abuse and incest and suicidal ideation. If these are topics you have difficulty listening to, then please look after yourself. But despite these dark parts, this is a hugely positive and uplifting episode, and it’s incredible to hear the transformation that Denise was able to make and that these kinds of transformations are possible.
As part of the intro with Denise, I talk about what we’re going to cover during the conversation, so I won’t mention it a second time. You’ll hear it in a moment.
One thing that does get mentioned a number of times in the conversation is Larry Nassar. Nassar was the U.S. gymnastics physician who sexually abused gymnasts over a number of decades. There is a podcast called Believed, put together by NPR, all about the case that is obviously horrible and gut-wrenching to listen to, but is also an incredible deep dive into the case and what happened. If you know nothing about it and it’s something you want to know more about, then you can check out that podcast. It’s called Believed.
I will be back at the end with a recommendation, but for now, let’s get on with the show. Here is my conversation with Denise Bossarte.
Hey, Denise. Welcome to Real Health Radio. Thanks for chatting with me today.
Denise Bossarte: Great to be here, Chris. Thanks for having me.
Chris Sandel: I’m really excited to be speaking with you. We’re going to talk a lot about your book, which is Thriving After Sexual Abuse: Break Your Bondage to the Past and Live a Life You Love. It’s a really fantastic book and one I would highly recommend listeners check out. It covers the activities that aided you in your healing journey, so it’s part memoir or your story, and it’s also a very practical book with lots of ideas and questions and resources that others can turn to. Today is us just going through your journey and many of the areas covered in the book.
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Just to start with, how long had you wanted to write this book? Was this a long time coming, or was it more a recent thing and you then started as soon as it became apparent that this was something you wanted to do?
Denise Bossarte: It was a long time coming. [laughs] I started my serious healing journey work when we were living in Florida. I was out of school, a career person, and I had started doing some yoga. Doing that yoga work really opened up a lot of things for me to understand my body and the memories my body was holding on to, and those started coming up and releasing. To deal with what was coming up, I started writing poetry about my abuse. It was anything from the memories of what I had as a child up through what I was going through then, and it continued into being able to write about my healing journey.
At that time, which was many years ago, I was just happy to get those stories out. My husband, when he read them, he was like, “This would be really helpful for people if you would share this.” And back then, there was no such thing as self-publishing, and I was like, “No, there’s no way I could get anybody interested in poetry about abuse. Come on.” I thought it would be helpful; I just couldn’t imagine how that would happen.
Many, many years forward, it came to a point where my husband, over the years, would say, “You really should share your ideas about what you’re going through and what you’ve been able to do.” For me, at the time, the only thing I really thought of was a memoir. As a survivor of trauma, my brain had been affected that I didn’t really have a way to connect the abuse events into my timeline of my regular life. That’s something that happens when you dissociate those memories. So I didn’t have a way to sit down and write ‘my story’ about my life and what had happened. I pushed it aside again.
And then the story of Dr Larry Nassar, the US Olympic gymnast doctor, came out and how he abused all these women, and that cracked my heart open. I thought, man, somebody should do something to help these people, these lovely ladies that have been abused by this one man. And that’s when I started to think, I don’t have a way to write a memoir, but I could write about what I’ve done to help myself, to help my healing happen, and maybe I could share that out. Maybe that’s the story that needs to be told, the book that needs to be written, the book I wish I had had when I started my healing journey.
So it was a long time building with this concept of somehow, maybe my story could be helpful, and then this drive that came into me when I heard about this story, and that made me want to do something.
Chris Sandel: Did the Larry Nassar case re-traumatise you, in a sense, and it was very difficult for you to read about that case? Or – it sounds weird for me to say this, but was it kind of positive in the sense of that lit something in you and it’s like “Right, I need to do something”?
Denise Bossarte: It was a little bit of both, to be honest. It’s always painful to hear when other people have been hurt, and especially a situation like that where he impacted so many girls and women, and it was an institutionalised effort to hide it. There’s layers in there that made it much more painful to see and hear about. But it was mostly, like you said, it lit a fire in me to say “I’ve got something I can share, and I think I know how to pull it together and write it. I’m just hoping it’ll get in the hands of the right people and it can help them.”
Chris Sandel: Nice. You touched on your poetry there as well. You’ve included a lot of that in the book as well, towards the end, and it is just both beautiful and heartbreaking to read. I can imagine from reading that how, at the time, it may’ve been very cathartic to write it, but also how you could just be falling to pieces writing those things.
Denise Bossarte: It was interesting because I had the support of this yoga practice that was so critical. It was one of the foundational pieces towards my healing. I would go to the beach and in the morning would be writing beach poems – light, happy, fun beach poems – and then to balance that and counter that in the evenings, it would come out of me, all of these stories about my abuse.
So it was really interesting that I had a natural balance happening during that experience. I’d be writing really nurturing, supportive poetry that I actually published in another book of beach poems, and then this counter with this catharsis. Somehow your mind does some amazing things to help you when you’re not even sure how to help yourself. Sometimes your mind can do some great things for you.
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Chris Sandel: You also touched on something there which is a facet of so many people who suffer sexual abuse or abuse of many different kinds at a young age: memories get blocked out or hidden or there’s this traumatic amnesia. What was your experience with this? When did you start to remember parts of what happened to you?
Denise Bossarte: It was something that I think my mind hid from me my entire childhood. I don’t remember when my abuse started. It was with my maternal grandfather. But I just remember how tall I was compared to the adults, and I was a pretty small person, so I think I was pretty young when it started, and it didn’t stop until he died when I was a freshman in high school.
During that time, I didn’t really remember the events, as these events would happen intermittently, often during the summer when we would be dropped off to spend summer vacation at my grandparents’. In between those times when I was exposed to the abuse, it was pushed back for me. A little bit escaped, because I had this reoccurring nightmare of a monster coming out of a dark hole of the wall in my room to come get me, so my brain was aware of it to some extent and expressing that. But mostly I just locked it down.
But as soon as he died, when I was in high school, it was like the lid came off. All of a sudden I had body memories, I had flashbacks, I had everything coming up. And you can imagine – you’re a teenager and you’ve got all this other stuff going on with hormones and fitting in with your peers, and there was this thing that came up. I had always felt different. I had always felt ashamed and different, but I was too young to understand why or how. Then all of this came up and it’s like, oh my gosh, my brain told me, “You have a reason to be feeling this way.”
But it didn’t make me feel better. It made me feel worse, because now, instead of feeling like I maybe wasn’t like everybody else, I knew I wasn’t. And I felt like I knew I should be ashamed.
Chris Sandel: When those memories first started to surface, were you accepting them in terms of “This is actually what happened”? Or were you like, “What is this thing? I don’t quite understand it”?
Denise Bossarte: It felt like it resonated with all these weird feelings I had had. It sort of clicked. It made sense – why I was terrified of him, why I never wanted to be around him. I was never trying to be alone with him. I’d try to find any excuse not to be around him. I just felt icky. Usually you’re like, “Grandpa!”, run and hugs and loves. This was like, “Keep the man as far away from me as possible. Don’t let me sit by him at the Christmas dinner table.”
I had all of these feelings, and when I remembered, they just made sense. But they didn’t help me heal in any sense other than recognising, okay, now I understand why I felt this way, but I didn’t know what to do with that.
Chris Sandel: You talk as well in the book about at a point, as a teenager, really changing and shifting. Was this at that point when your grandfather was passing away or had passed away and all of these memories had come back? Or that change in you as a teenager had started to occur earlier than that?
Denise Bossarte: I think the change actually happened when the abuse started, because I was a really demonstrative, loving, energetic, creative kid, and that personality shift happened when I was young. Looking back, I think that’s when the abuse started. I actually have an older cousin who was also abused by my grandfather, and she’s 10 years older than I am. She and I had conversations about the experience – she was my first person to confide in and to help me.
She said that she saw the personality change when I was little and thought to herself, “He got to her, too.” She recognised it, but bless her heart, she was in, what, junior high, high school? There’s no way she could’ve done anything to help me at that point. She was still dealing with her own issues. But she recognised that this dramatic shift happened and that that was due to the abuse happening.
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Chris Sandel: So when did you start your healing journey of sorts? At what age did you think, “Right, this is something that I want to deal with”? Maybe you didn’t fully understand what ‘dealing with’ would look like, but when did there become this idea of “This is something I want to deal with and come to terms with and heal from”?
Denise Bossarte: It wasn’t until I was actually in college. I was overwhelmed with everything in high school; I didn’t feel like I could tell anybody, I didn’t feel like anyone would believe me. In high school I just immersed myself in activities, taking honours classes. I was in band, I was in basketball. I did everything that every minute of the day would keep me occupied so it would never have a chance to come to the forefront of my mind. So that’s how I dealt with it, was to contain it.
When I got to college, I started dating a graduate student who was in AA, so he talked to me about AA and the process of getting support for what he was dealing with and really encouraged me to go and find a counsellor through the counselling department at my school. With his encouragement, with his example, and with the ability to be mature enough and independent enough that I could do that without feeling like everybody was going to find out – it’s college now, it’s a big place, so I just decided, “I’m going to try this. I want things to change. I don’t want to be miserable. I don’t want to hate myself and my body. There’s got to be something better.”
So that’s when I started to reach out for the first time and try to get some help through therapy.
Chris Sandel: What were your experiences like with reaching out and finding a therapist? How did that go for you?
Denise Bossarte: It was a little bumpy ride at first. [laughs] The first therapist I got connected with, I did not gel with her at all, I did not click with her. I was dating two guys at the same time, unbeknownst to either of them. Not a good thing to do, not a good place to be, for myself or them. But that’s where I was at that time, and she was very judgmental about it. Rather than saying, “How is this working for you? How is this making you feel?”, she came across as being very judgmental about it. I didn’t need someone to judge me. I was already judging myself for a whole lot of reasons, and I didn’t need that.
Luckily, there was another counsellor there that I could talk to, and I really connected with her. She’s the one that actually got me connected with a women’s group of survivors. That was the first time that I talked to someone who was a perfect stranger and a group of women who had gone through something similar to me, whether it was sexual abuse or rape or assault. There were people who had had the same experiences, were going through the same things.
And some of those women were further along their healing journey, and I could actually get some hope that “Look, there’s someone that’s gone through what I have gone through, and look where they are. I want to be where they are. I want what they have.” So it was very inspiring to have a therapist who I could work with individually, but also have this group of women that I could go to and really be feeling fully accepted, that no matter what had happened to me, they understood and fully accepted it.
I also joined Survivors of Incest Anonymous, which is the 12-step programme equivalent to AA, and that was another amazing part of my journey because it was mixed group, all ages, men and women. It was the first time I could ever imagine a man being abused, because there were men there who had been abused by their mothers, had been sexually assaulted by members of their family. To see that and realise that it wasn’t just men perpetrating onto women, but all kinds of people on both sides had that experience – that was also very healing.
Chris Sandel: Healing because – I imagine it’s for lots of different reasons, but one of the big ones being “I don’t feel so alone with this anymore, I’m seeing that this affects lots of different people”, and also some of the shame with it starts to fall away by being able to take what has been kept secret for so long and being able to speak about what happened or how you’d been affected and have other people in a room be able to hear you and hold that space for you and nod along because that’s been their experience as well?
Denise Bossarte: Yeah, just the validation. Just acknowledgment, validation. I was so afraid of being rejected. When you feel that unlovable and full of shame, the last thing you want to do is set yourself up to be rejected because of the things that have happened to you – which, as a child, you convince yourself that you caused. That’s just where kids’ brains go because they have to find a way to manage a situation that they really have no control over. So they develop a sense that that’s their fault, even though it is absolutely not their fault. That’s just where a small child’s brain goes.
To have all these people, men and women of all ages, talk about the challenges they had, talk about things that they could do to help themselves – there was never a question that it had happened. And with Survivors of Incest Anonymous, what’s really amazing is they basically say in their description of their group, it only has to have happened one time. I always thought, “Well, I only have ‘a few’ memories, so that must mean it wasn’t a big deal, and why am I so upset about it?”
But hearing that and having people talk about it made me feel like, okay, yeah, this is legitimate. This is real, and these people see me, and they’re not despising me. They aren’t ashamed of me. They welcome me, and they accept my story and they accept where I am in my healing process, and they’re going to encourage me in any way that I need to help support me in my healing process.
Chris Sandel: I can understand how even if it happened just the one time, how devastating that can be and how much of an impact that would have. And also, as we talked about early on, because of how much memories are suppressed, you really don’t know if it was the one time or if it was multiple times. So if there’s this feeling of “I can only remember one time so that doesn’t legitimise this as something that could’ve impacted upon me to this degree”, that’s just not true.
Denise Bossarte: That’s the big thrill of trust that is so key to the experience. In my situation, that really was what I felt was taken from me. My childhood was taken from me. My sense of trust was taken from me. You’re a young child, your brain is developing, you’re learning to experience the world and understand what the world’s about.
What I was taught was, the world’s a scary place and it can hurt you, and in fact, the people who love you can absolutely destroy you. And that’s where I lived. That was my worldview growing up. That’s where the hypervigilance and the fear and the shame and all of that came through, because the message I received is “You’re unlovable, you’re worthless, you deserve what’s happening to you, and no-one’s going to come and help you.”
Now, my grandfather didn’t sit there and tell me these things, but his actions and how he went about them and how I felt when they were happening – it was obvious to my intuitive emotional self that that was what was going on, and to have that be what you learn about the world – I mean, I hear other people’s experiences of their childhoods and I sit there and I’m amazed. I have no way of understanding what that’s like. You have love and trust and people supporting you, and I had this vacuum. In fact, it was like a reverse vacuum, sucking you away from all the good stuff that you should be having as a kid, and that safety and that feeling of loving support.
So that was part of it, getting over the shame through a number of things that I worked through, learning to love myself and support myself, and learning that I could feel lovable just because of who I was, regardless of anything that might’ve happened to me – getting to the place where I felt I could trust people and be safe around people, particularly when I wanted to be in emotionally or physically intimate situations. That trust is a big thing for people who have gone through this type of abuse.
Chris Sandel: Totally. I remember in the book you talked about fearing happiness because it had become connected with the inevitable pain that would then follow, and to live in that way, to fear happiness or to fear joy, that really completely taints your ability to have a good life and to experience the better aspects of life.
Denise Bossarte: Yeah. I think part of it, too, was just afraid to happen up to feel, because if you open up to joy, you open up to other things. The joy felt like it was in such limited supply; it was swamped and overwhelmed with all these negative emotions, so it was almost like, “Joy’s sliding by in front of me; I don’t want to connect with it, I don’t want to spend too much time on the good things because that opens me up to feel all the negative stuff. It’ll just overwhelm me.”
Chris Sandel: Yeah. I think you followed that up in the book with saying it felt safer to be numb than to feel the mix of emotions.
Denise Bossarte: Mm-hm.
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Chris Sandel: I know also you’ve done a PhD in developmental neuroscience. What is your area of interest with this? Was this connected to exploring abuse and how it affects the brain and function and development and that side of things? Or no, not connected at all?
Denise Bossarte: Initially it wasn’t. Initially I was really trying to understand how to heal myself and my emotional self and my body self, but then as I started learning more about trauma and realising that what I had experienced was trauma – for a long time, it wasn’t connected out in the world that children who survived sexual abuse were trauma victims just like people who’d come back from war, in the same way – and feeling that I could learn about trauma and inform my healing journey, reading that, starting to understand how the brain processes memory, how the brain deals with traumatic experiences and triggers.
So I initially started in a different place, but then when I learned that there could be so much to the ability of the brain to deal with trauma and then how to heal itself with some work on my end, that really drew me in and really excited me based on my past of working in neurobiology. And really appreciating that we’ve learned so much about neuroplasticity and how we can actually change the physical structure of our brains. That’s really encouraging. It’s very encouraging to people who have had a variety of traumatic experiences that your brain can heal, literally physically heal, and also develop in a way that’s going to take you into a place where you develop patterns that are positive rather than negative, behaviours that are supportive and healing and having self-care rather than going in a direction that is negative.
So it was something that eventually merged together over time as I learned more and more about my experience and healing from my experience, and it was a ray of hope, like I said, that there was a chance that I could actually do the work myself – and with the support of a therapist and other modalities – to heal my brain and move forward.
Chris Sandel: Nice. That’s so great that you got to then, in a sense, see that in advance. You’re doing this research and it became an area of interest where suddenly you’re like, “Okay, I can see what is possible here.” I can see how beneficial that would be.
And also just how much we’ve advanced in that area and so much of the research around trauma. I remember when they were first looking at the ACE study, and there was some completely misguided belief that incest happened in like 1 in 1,000,000 or 1 in 2,000,000 people, whereas that number is so far off what they actually found to be true. And I would say whatever they have found statistically to be true or based on questionnaires, it’s undoubtedly got to be higher because of the shame of people not wanting to admit it or the suppressed memories that mean that people don’t even remember it.
It feels like over the last decade or couple of decades, we’ve made a lot of headway in starting to understand trauma in all its different guises.
Denise Bossarte: And even in areas of practices that I used in my healing. Like I mentioned yoga several times, and meditation. There are people who are working with trauma-informed yoga and meditation because these modalities are awesome for healing, but for trauma victims, it can be very challenging to work with these.
All of these body memories came up, and there were certain poses I was asked to do in class, I’m like, “Whoa, um, no, I don’t feel safe in this pose. It’s terribly triggering.” But luckily I was able to communicate to my teacher and we worked around how to do some alternative things until I felt safe and could move into those spaces. But that’s amazing to me that we’ve progressed enough that these very helpful, very healing modalities of yoga and meditation can also be done safely and with guidance from people who understand how to make those things work for people with trauma without re-traumatising them.
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Chris Sandel: I think what will be useful, then, is to go through your healing journey and touch on various things you’ve done that have been helpful. I know we have already mentioned about therapy and finding a therapist and the group therapy piece. What else would you add here? What else would you have for other people who are just starting out, who are either looking for a therapist or looking for a group therapy situation? What advice would you have?
Denise Bossarte: I think it’s good to understand where you’re trying to go, what you’re trying to do. I just want people to know that going into therapy does not mean you’re going to have to go back and rehash and relive everything you’ve gone through. That’s not the real purpose of therapy. I know that’s a misconception people have, “I don’t want to go to therapy because they’re going to make me go through everything again.” That’s not what the goal is.
The goal, in my mind, with a therapist – particularly if you find a trauma-informed therapist, a therapist who’s worked with trauma, understands the approach to use – they’re going to help you look at what you’re doing now in the context and understanding of trauma and what it leads to. But they’re going to point you to the future. That’s the goal: to not sit in the past and rehash it. There’s an acknowledgment. There has to be an acknowledgment that the abuse happened, and then the goal is to say, what do we do from here? What are the behaviours that aren’t working? What are the behaviours that are not letting you live your full authentic self life? Let’s work to shift those things. Let’s build some resilience, give you some tools to help you move forward.
I recommend people first thing try to find a therapist. There are a number of different online platforms now where you can find a therapist that could be trauma-trained so that you don’t necessarily have to rely on the resources that are local to you. You can go through one of these websites and work with someone that’s very specifically trained. That gives you the flexibility to go through maybe what I did to find the perfect person for you. Don’t be afraid that the first person you connect with doesn’t seem to be the person that’s going to work for you; don’t be afraid to keep looking till you find the person that’s going to really help you.
So find someone who has experience in trauma and find someone you can work with, and then if they know of some groups, then that’s something I would encourage you to do at your own time, as you feel you’re ready to start working with a group. As I mentioned, I worked with two different groups, and it was unbelievably healing and helpful to get in a group, whether it’s a same-sex group or a mixed-sex group, whatever you’re comfortable dealing with.
I think those are the first two steps to really lay a foundation, and also to be resources as you try some of the other things I did for my healing journey. That’s a foundational piece you can come back to, because as you do some of these things, you’re going to have challenges. Things are going to come up. You’re going to be challenged by some of the work you’re doing, and you want someone you can go and touch base with and get some support.
Chris Sandel: With the therapists that you’ve worked with over the years, were there particular styles of therapy that you found to be particularly beneficial? Whether that’s “I did EMDR” or “I did acceptance and commitment therapy or CBT” – if there were any that stand out of “this was really helpful”, what were they for you?
Denise Bossarte: I guess at the time – I began my work a long time ago, so when I first started, I don’t remember that they really focused on a particular area. There’s so much more available now. I’ve learned about family systems, and I find that very helpful. I think each person really needs to discover for themselves what can and cannot work for them. It’s an individual journey, and I think that everyone needs to see what’s going to work best for them.
I think that anyone who is going to be able to work with you as a whole person – not just your mind, not just your emotions, not just your body, but an integrative approach, however that might manifest in these different modalities of therapy – someone who recognises that my body is impacted, my emotions are impacted, my mind is impacted – that, to me, would be someone that would work the best for me. And someone who is trying to help me be reflective, someone who’s trying to help me self-evaluate. Not in a judgmental way, but just exploring and saying, “Is this really working for me?” and giving me the tools that I might not be aware of that I can use to help me move forward.
It does get a little confusing because there are so many names and acronyms and things, but to me, I think it is the relationship with the therapist and if they’re providing you things that appear to be working for you. It’s an exploration to find what is going to work for you. Just keep looking for something that’s going to work. It’s going to be hard work, and it may be uncomfortable, so you don’t want to be running from one person to the next. But I think if you have a trust and form a relationship with the therapist, and they can bring tools to help you and you see change happening, that’s what’s going to be the best outcome.
Chris Sandel: Definitely, and I do think the therapeutic relationship that you have with your therapist is the most important thing. You’re going to be opening up about things, you’re going to be exploring tough parts of your life and the way that you think and emotions and all of these things, so you want to have someone that you trust and feel safe with and have these strong bond with. So yeah, I think that is hugely important.
One of the books I’ll sometimes recommend to clients is Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score. I quite like it because in the second half of the book, he touches on a number of different types of therapy that can be useful, so clients can then have a read-through of that and say, “Internal Family Systems, that sounds really useful to me” or “EMDR sounds like something I’d like to explore” or “Trauma-informed yoga sounds like something I’d want to explore.” It gives you a bit of a buffet of all the things that are available.
But the caveat I always add is that it’s a pretty full-on book, and the first half of it –
Denise Bossarte: [laughs] It is. I’ve read it, and I absolutely agree that it’s an amazing resource. It is deep into the neurobiology and the approach from a psychologist’s perspective, but you don’t have to understand all of it in the initial phases to get to the parts that you’re saying are really going to touch people and say “Oh wow, that really makes a lot of sense to me when I read that.” That’s the resonance you want, when you can relate to something just by hearing about it or reading about it and say, “Hey, something about that – I don’t even have to define what it is, but I really think that’s going to be something that makes sense to me in some way, so let me see if I can pursue that.”
Chris Sandel: Exactly. You can basically flip to the second section of the book and start there. Because I also think there’s a lot of details of different people’s stories of trauma in the first half of the book that I could also imagine could be quite difficult reading for someone. If they’re not ready to be going through that content, they can start with the second half of the book, which is going to be much more specific of different modalities that could be helpful.
Denise Bossarte: Mm-hm.
00:37:37
Chris Sandel: You also mentioned there were many self-help books that were helpful for you and some that jump-started your healing journey and then helped continue it on. I think you talked about creating your own healing works library. Maybe just share some of the books that were most useful for you.
Denise Bossarte: I think the first book I found – and I believe my cousin helped me discover this – was The Courage to Heal, which was a real eye-opener for me because here on the page, like you said, were people’s stories about what they were going through. There were things they recommended doing and approaches, and it really was the first time that I in any way understood that there were other people like me. And all their stories were slightly different, but you got the idea that these were people who had gone through these horrible experiences and they were working their way towards healing for themselves.
So that I think is a wonderful book. Again, you have to be ready for reading about some other people’s stories, but I think it’s a real powerful book for people to understand how this could be done and recognise that there’s healing in being able to witness other people’s stories that are similar to yours. So that was one that I was fortunate enough to find very early on.
Then Beverly Engel, who wrote the forward to my book, has a number of different books, but her book about shame – I wish I had found that many, many years ago, because it is so powerful. She’s a survivor and she’s a therapist, and she writes about the different ways that you can work toward self-care and self-healing, self-compassion, and really has suggestions for you and is so empathetic and so gentle in her writing. You just feel so supported and carried along by her as you go through the book. So that was one that I found very powerful recently.
And then Brené Brown’s work, although it has nothing to do directly with abuse per se, but it’s about courage and being vulnerable and working through shame. I really enjoyed reading her books because you don’t have to go to resources that are specific for trauma survivors. You can go to resources that are meant for other people that develop resilience for you.
The Dance of Anger was another powerful book, because boy, I did have a lot of anger once I started remembering.
This is something where I think working in groups who can recommend books to you or working with a therapist is also helpful. But when I heard about a book that sounded like it would be interesting, I would pick it up. You just take what you can from the book. You don’t have to resonate with everything in a book.
But for me, if I could find one or two things out of a book that maybe I put a sticky on my mirror just to remind me of those things that the book was suggesting or bringing up, that would be something that would be powerful for me.
And now we’ve got so many resources online. If you go and search a book platform, they’ll make recommendations based on what you’ve read before. So that’s helpful. You can use that as a resource.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. I know you talked in the book about creating affirmation cards based on quotes from a book and using that, as you said there, like a sticky to just remind you of what you’ve read and keep it front of mind. I’ve had Beverly Engel on the podcast before; I think her book It Wasn’t Your Fault is an incredible book and an incredible resource.
I’m also a big fan of Brené Brown’s work. As you say, it’s much more bigger picture and more universal in terms of what she’s talking about than just trauma or just abuse, but I think she’s got a wonderful way of writing and of also speaking.
There’s a seminar she’s done called ‘The Power of Vulnerability’ that is on Audible, and it was between her writing The Gifts of Imperfection, which she’s finished and had released, and just before Daring Greatly came out. It’s a 6.5-hour seminar, and I’ve recommended that countless times to clients. I think I’ve listened to it four or five times in total myself, and it’s a really incredible resource. I think basically any human being who listens to that, irrespective of what your backstory is or life experience is, you’ll get a lot out of it.
Denise Bossarte: That’s been my way of working through my healing journey: exploration. I wanted more than just necessarily a therapist who could talk to me about things and help me in that way. I always felt that there were other things I could pull in and continue my growth and my healing, like the yoga to build my relationship with my body, and meditation to build my relationship with my mind.
All of these things that I was doing, I was just exploring. I didn’t start off – the book, it’s kind of like a little blueprint to help you and guide you and ask you questions, but I just was exploring, trying to figure out, what works for me? What lights me up? What gives me joy? What makes me feel like I’m more fully myself and doesn’t push me into that space of fear and shame, but brings me out of it?
That’s what I really encourage people in my book. My book’s not the 12-step programme to healing. It’s just, “Hey, here’s some stuff that worked for me. This is why. Can you explore this? What else can you take beyond this into spaces that you enjoy doing things that might be healing for you?” Because again, everyone has a different story, everyone has different things that they resonate with, and my idea about my healing journey was not just a one-stop shop, take a pill and you’re done kind of thing. Medication can be helpful. Therapy can be helpful. Yoga, meditation, art, all of these things, being in nature, whatever it is.
You don’t have to just do one thing or expect one thing to solve the problem. Sometimes you need to support yourself in multiple ways that work for you, and sometimes in your life one thing’s going to be really helpful, and at a different point in your life, another thing might come up that’s going to be really helpful. Allow ourselves the fluidity and the dynamicness of our lives to be able to say, “I can pull in the things that I need at this time, and maybe challenge myself to explore another aspect that I wasn’t able to do in the past, but now I’m ready. Now I’m resilient enough, I can move into this space and I can work through my fear and I can explore this space here.”
I love taking classes and trying something new because I never know what is going to resonate for me, and not being afraid of failing, not being afraid of doing it perfect, but just say, “I’m going to try it.” Because if I open up to all these experiences, I never know when I’m going to find something that’s going to absolutely light me up, and I want it to be a part of my life going forward.
00:44:54
Chris Sandel: Thank you for saying that, because I think sometimes you read a book – your book is 200, 300 odd pages, and that’s, I don’t know, 20 years condensed into all those pages. So I think you can read that and think, “Wow, I’ve got to keep doing this thing and then this thing and then this thing and then this thing”, and sometimes it might even feel too simplistic. Like, “Oh, you mean I just do these things and everything is solved?” You really miss out the fact that, as I said, you’ve concentrated 20 years or 30 years into the space of a couple hundred pages. In that book form, it can feel much more straight forward or simple when in reality, your experience was anything but that.
And that’s often the case when working with clients, when they talk about reading other people’s recovery stories online or hearing other people on podcasts talking about their recovery. It’s like, they’re condensing a lot of things that have happened over many, many years into a 20-minute conversation or a couple hundred word blog post. So I think it’s useful to hear that there are many ups and downs with this. There are things you start and then they don’t actually work, and then you come back to them five years later and you’re like, “Oh, now I get this thing.” But yeah, it’s not just this linear, straight forward process.
Denise Bossarte: I think it can be overwhelming for people to say “What do I do?” For me, the thing is, get a therapist if at all possible. That’s your foundational piece and going to support you through all the other work you’re going to be doing. And then my book might be helpful, Courage to Heal, It Wasn’t Your Fault. Whatever you can start with. But maybe pick one thing you want to try. We often try too hard to overcome, to compensate for what happened to us in our trauma, and push too hard, too fast, too strong, because we’re really oftentimes desperate to get away from what’s happening to us.
Here’s a chance for self-compassion. Here’s a chance to be gentle with yourself and say, “Okay, let me explore some of the possibilities by just reading about them, informing myself about what might be possible, and then I’m going to be gentle and pick one thing to work with and explore and see where that takes me. And if I feel ready enough, I can do more.”
Don’t set yourself up for failure by thinking you have to make a checklist of all the things you’ve got to do and schedule them and fit them in and figure out how you’re going to push your way to healing. This is a chance for people, for maybe the first time in a very long time, to say, “I can be good to myself, kind to myself, and set the bar a little lower for where I need to go and say, I’m going to take one step forward.’ I’m not going to jump on the Boston Marathon and run. I’m going to take my one step forward and then the next, and then we’ll slowly go forward and see where it leads me.”
And people have to know it’s not got on the Autobahn, drive 200 miles an hour, and get to destination healing. It’s going to be some days you feel like one step forward, two steps back. But I don’t like to think of it in those linear terms. I like to think of it more as a spiral, that you’re growing, you’re learning, you’re healing, you’re building resilience, you’re coming to understand your strengths. And as things come back around again that you’ve experienced in the past, you’re better able to deal with them. You have more capability than where you were in the past.
You don’t have to feel like you’re losing in this game of healing. It’s not something that you have to keep tally on for yourself and criticise yourself. Just keep going forward and exploring what’s available – and being honest with yourself, which is critical, but also being gentle with yourself and being kind to yourself.
I read a meme recently that said you will talk to yourself more than you’ll talk to any other person ever, so be nice. [laughs] Be nice to yourself, and also just be gentle and go where you can, and be understanding about what your life is challenging you with – but make whatever tiny, one-step effort you can towards the direction you want to go in, and that will be the start to keep you going.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. It reminds me of something – I can’t remember where I heard this before, but it’s like, people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in five. I think that that is really true. And with a lot of this work, one of the things I talk about often with clients is it’s kind of like compound interest. In the beginning, it doesn’t feel like it’s making much of an inroad, and then with time, it starts to really pay off. You can then start to notice some much bigger shifts as you get further along because you’ve learnt so much more, you understand so much more. When you come with a new concept, it fits into all of this knowledge you already have. But when you’re starting out, you don’t have any of those things.
Denise Bossarte: Yeah, that’s a good point. Starting out, too, you are just trying to understand things. You’ve got to go through the acknowledgment phase and maybe a grieving phase and learning to see what’s really going on. Because we’ve hidden so much from ourselves to protect ourselves. There’s a lot of behaviour patterns we developed in response to the trauma that served us at the time. That was the best we knew at the time to do. But unfortunately, those behaviours have continued into our current life, and now they may not serve us, and in fact, they may be very detrimental to the type of life we want to have, the type of relationships we want to have.
So it’s a slow peeling of the onion to slowly discover what you’re actually doing to be able to recognise that, to be able to say, even if it’s “Oh my gosh, last week I did X, Y and Z. I can kind of understand where that’s coming from and why I did that, but I don’t want to keep doing that”, and then over time it gets closer and closer and closer to the events that are happening to the point you’re in the moment and you say, “Hey, I have a choice to react differently, to think differently, to do differently.”
It takes some time to compress that understanding and self-evaluation to the point that you can be present with it, and then you can step more into shifting away from it. So it is a process; it is a journey. It’s a healing journey, and that’s where we need to be gentle with ourselves. But like you said, it takes some time to remove all the clouds that we’ve been hiding behind to get some clarity and some sunshine to come in so that we can start seeing things clearly and say, “Aha! Now I can make those steps a little quicker and more some advancements a little quicker, bring in more things, because now I’m at a point that it can accelerate a little bit.”
That’s what happened to me. And you’ll reach plateaus every so often – make some progress, reach a plateau, and it feels a little frustrating. But that’s your mind, body, and emotions processing. And then you’ll hit another growth spurt. It’s something that you just have to have faith in yourself and have that support that can remind you of how wonderful you’ve been doing and what changes have been happening for you.
That’s why keeping a journal is great. I think keeping a journal is fantastic to write down where you are and what you’re going through, and then you can look back over time. When you think, “I have done nothing, I’ve made no progress”, you can look back and you can read and go, “Wow. Oh my gosh, I have come so far.” [laughs]
Chris Sandel: Yes, that is definitely an experience I have a lot with clients, where they can feel like “Things haven’t changed”, and then we’re able to look back and it’s like, “Oh, things have really changed.”
I’m a big one that your current state has a huge impact on your memories and how you feel about what’s happened, so yeah, if someone’s currently in a funk, it can feel like nothing’s changed. But then on another day when they’re feeling better, they have much more perspective and much more perception that things have really shifted.
Denise Bossarte: Yeah, so it’s good in your journal to write about the challenges, but also write about the successes so that you can come back to that and you can see both. “Oh, I overcame that challenge, and I’m in a place where that’s not as much of a challenge now.” And then you can also look back and say, “Look at all these things that I did”, no matter how small they were. Something you were grateful for at the time or something that happened that you realised you were growing and changing. All of those things are important to document for ourselves.
I love what you said, that depending on where you are currently, it casts a light on the past in a different way, and we need to give ourselves those moments when we’re looking back to say, “Hey, this is the real situation at the time, and I can ground myself in what was really going on versus what I may try to remember based on where I’m coming from at this current moment.”
00:54:05
Chris Sandel: There’s a whole section in the book about embracing joy, and I know we’ve touched on a little bit of this already, but one of the things you talked about was joy in exercise or movement and using this as a way to get back into your body and to start really appreciating your body. Can you talk a little about this and how you used exercise or movement?
Denise Bossarte: For me it started with the yoga. I really had developed a dislike or even hatred of my body when I was in high school after I remembered what had happened to me. I basically tried to become as androgynous as possible. Kept my hair short, wore baggy clothing. As desperately as I wanted someone to recognise me and be attracted to me – you want to go out and have dates and get to know boys – it was terrifying to think that someone would be attracted to me, because the only thing I really understood, at a deep body level, was the abuse.
So I hated my body. I treated it like a machine. Feed it, push it to the limit, use it, don’t care about it. It was there to serve my brain, basically. But then when I started doing yoga, that’s when I really started slowing down and being present in my body. I had become so dissociated because that’s what I had to do when I was in the abuse in the moment, but also dissociated because of my disgust for my own body and shame of it, that I was never really physically present in it.
I was learning that and learning to feel safe in my body, learning to feel I was in control of my body, that it was a safe place to inhabit, that it was strong and flexible, and enjoying the feeling of that strength and flexibility and that trust in my body. Yoga is what helped me develop that.
Then going for walks or riding a bike or rollerblading, getting out and moving. And all those endorphins coming around and all the brain chemistry that happens when you’re exercising and getting oxygen in your body – all those things kicked in, and just to feel that I could feel good in my body, for myself, not for anyone that was going to be looking at me, but just feeling good in my body and exploring that and enjoying the feeling, like you said, of moving and being out in the world in that way – it was something that I could do in a class, I could do by myself, if I wanted to walk or bike or whatever. It was just feeling that I could be safe and present and be joyful without anything negative happening because this was just me living and being present in my body.
Chris Sandel: Nice. I also remember you talked about – it was some kind of team sport. I can’t remember if it was basketball or volleyball or whatever it was, but being part of the team and seeing how capable you were in your body, but also seeing that people were enjoying you being part of that team, and it had nothing to do with how you looked or the shape of your body or anything along those lines. It was just down to that they enjoyed you being there and scoring goals or whatever it was.
Denise Bossarte: Yeah, it was ultimate frisbee and a team of women. It was exactly that. It was just being strong and capable. There’s something about being on a team, at least for me, where you have a goal and you’re challenged, and you’ve got to rise up together to meet this challenge and succeed, but it does include your individual contribution to the whole. That took away the focus of feeling self-conscious, and just having that support of people and doing something that was fun. There’s a lot of fun when you’re doing team sports, and I think that was part of it, too. There was a light-hearted fun, and then there was this serious focus on competitiveness.
This combination really helped me feel good about myself, and like you said, it wasn’t about anything other than “Can I contribute to the team with my skills?” That’s all that was required, so it eliminated a lot of other baggage that a lot of times my brain would want to bring to circumstances or relationships, because it wasn’t about anything other than “Let’s go have fun and be the best that we can be.”
00:58:28
Chris Sandel: With the yoga, I know you mentioned before that there were certain poses that would be quite triggering for you. How was that for you when you brought that up to the yoga teacher?
Denise Bossarte: It was really terrifying to think that I would have to say something to someone. He was still kind of a stranger at that time. But I wanted to do the yoga. I really wanted to do it because I was already feeling that it was going to be helpful. So I just said, “I need to talk to him. I don’t want to feel like I’m going to stand out because he’s got to talk to me individually and point me to do something, but I’ve got to figure out some way to make this work.”
You talked about statistics before, about how frequently this type of thing happens. On talking to him, his sister had been abused by his father, so he really understood right away what might be going on. He was really supportive and understanding and accepting, and he said, “You don’t have to do all the poses we are going to do.” He and I talked about the ones in particular that were challenging and he said, “Do this instead. I won’t call it out in the class, but we’ve talked about it; you know what to do. It’s no big deal. No-one’s going to care.”
We also talked about adjustment in the type of yoga that I have been doing for years, Iyengar. There’s a lot of intentional adjustment by the teacher to help the student get into the pose properly. It’s all part of the practice. I let him know that I was not comfortable with that, and he goes, “That’s okay. I’ll just not come adjust you. If you ever feel like you are okay with it, you can let me know. But I’ll just do other students and I will not call you out.”
It was really important for me not to stick out. I felt like I was always afraid of being different and people knowing and people seeing me as different with all this shame and everything going on. So that was really important for me not to stand out because there was something ‘wrong’ with me and I couldn’t do what everyone else was doing in some way. He totally took that away, and he was very supportive. So I was very, very grateful that I had someone like that who understood and that I did go forward, because otherwise I could’ve been forcing myself to do things that were re-traumatising. Instead, he shifted it and helped me get to a place I felt very safe, and eventually I was able to do those poses because I felt comfortable in my body and in the environment I was in.
But it took wanting something enough for myself that I was willing to step to the edge of my comfort zone and maybe a little beyond to talk to him. But the response was amazing, and I’m really grateful for him for doing that because I’ve been doing yoga for over 20 years now, and it’s still an integral part of what I do and how I keep my body feeling good.
Chris Sandel: Nice. When I read that in the book, I was so grateful that you had that experience, that you did speak up and that he responded in the way that he did, and that’s now allowed you, as you said, to have this yoga practice for so many decades.
One of the other things you recommend as part of yoga in the book, and what I want to second, is finding something that is gentle. This is important a lot as well because often the people who are listening to this podcast are recovering from an eating disorder or disordered eating, and there is this relationship with exercise that can be about really pushing the limits and can be about using energy and calories and all these different things, and this is just the opposite of what this is about. This is very much about coming back into one’s body, about being present.
So I just want to mention that and say that this isn’t about finding some intense yoga practice or going and doing hot yoga or anything along those lines. It’s about something that is using movement in a specific way that then brings you back in connection with oneself.
Denise Bossarte: That’s beautifully said, Chris. Thank you for that. There’s a lot of different types of yoga. You mentioned hot yoga, or more aerobic Ashtanga yoga. I went with a practice of Iyengar yoga because it resonated with me. It’s really based a lot on restorative poses and using props to help you get into poses when your body’s not quite ready to go there. So instead of pushing yourself into something or pushing your body, it was “How can I support my body to get into positions that will be nurturing and restorative for it?”
There is a tendency to always try to push things a little too hard on ourselves, and this was an act of self-care and self-compassion for myself to say, “This type of yoga is not going to take me to the edge. It’s going to do the opposite, to help me slow down” – whether it’s called gentle yoga or restorative yoga. Even chair yoga. If you need to start in a place and you’re just not ready to do anything like that, there’s lots of stuff on YouTube, there’s videos you can purchase, there’s classes you can go to. You can do things that are helpful for you without really feeling like you have to be some 110-pound 20-year-old you see in a yoga class. [laughs] You find what works for you.
Chris Sandel: Definitely.
01:03:58
You also talked about other types of body work – things like massage or reiki or acupuncture. How did you use these? Was this a fairly regular thing? Was this intermittent? How was it for you?
Denise Bossarte: The massage I think has been – it was pretty regular until Covid came along. But for me, massage was another way to have self-care and self-compassion for myself. I kept, still do, keep a lot of stress in my body, a lot of pain in my body, a lot of memories in my body.
So to do work with a massage therapist who – again, not going for the intense Swedish massage, but the gentle massage to help me relax all of that tension and stress that I contained in my body that I couldn’t release through other means, and just have someone that could help me be comfortable with touch and sensitivity on my body in a professional way – that was important to me because I saw it as a treat to myself to help relax and help get out the aches and pains and be able to be comfortable with my body being gentle with it. It was another practice for me of being gentle with my body and really feeling good after you have that experience.
That’s something I hope to continue again when Covid settles down, but that was important, to know that instead of pushing myself to the edge, I would do something that would be really self-nurturing.
Now, the acupuncture, for me it was dealing with low energy and blockage of energy flow. I felt it was very helpful to be supportive of emotional and energetic levels, because there’s a lot of work we do in our minds as trauma survivors to constantly be hypervigilant and waiting for the next bad thing to happen. All the energy we put into protecting ourselves, even if it’s subconscious, that’s really draining. Really draining emotionally and even physically. So the things like qi gong or acupuncture were a way that I was wanting to explore to see if I could have another way to build up my resilience and my energy reserves so that I could do the work I wanted to do.
Chris Sandel: Nice. I second what you said there about the massage. I think there is something healing with just getting yourself a massage. You’re doing something that is so nice for your body. And even if I compare it to something like yoga, you can enjoy yoga and yoga can be restorative, but there’s something very different when you’re getting a massage and how relaxing that can be.
Once you get over the aspects of “I’m being touched by someone else” and whatever that brings up for you, there’s something very pampering about getting a massage. And if you’ve come from a place where there has been so much self-hatred or self-loathing or that kind of thing, to then be getting regular massages is really sending a pretty clear message in the other direction.
Denise Bossarte: Yeah, for me it was important to find a same-sex person. I was not able or willing to go to a male. That just was not going to work for me. It did not feel safe. But being with a woman felt safe. Same thing when I went to find a therapist. I would not have felt safe with a man at that time, and I definitely went and sought out someone who was not the same sex as my perpetrator.
With the yoga, I would’ve preferred a female teacher from the beginning, but it wasn’t available at the studio where I was at. It turned out to be a wonderful experience because I had this experience with my male teacher that helped me not only get myself comfortable with doing the yoga, but having that relationship and that acknowledgment and affirmation about my experience was healing in itself. Just that experience of working with a man and having that belief by him and that support by him was very healing.
I think people can make the choice. Whatever you’re comfortable with. And being okay with having limits to what you can do when you’re exploring these new areas. If you can do something but there’s a certain limit – like for me, it was “I don’t want a male masseuse, I want a female” – don’t stop from doing something because you think it has to be a certain way. Look at what you want to try and say, “How can I make it safe for me to do this?” so that you can find a way to step into that that you’re going to be comfortable and that you don’t have to push yourself beyond what you’re comfortable with, but you can have that exploration in a safe way.
01:09:03
Chris Sandel: Then meditation. Meditation was something you said you’ve created quite a practice around. How did that get started for you, and how has that evolved over time?
Denise Bossarte: I first started with guided meditations that I could purchase online or from different meditation instructors’ websites, because I could not be still enough in my body or in my mind, or be comfortable with what my mind would show up doing when I tried to sit still and listen to my breath or follow my breath. So for me, initially, the way I could actually relax and get some of the benefit was through the guided meditation practices.
That’s where I started, by myself with these recordings, to the point where I could start feeling that I could relax and feel safe in my own mind space. I had my grandfather’s voice telling me all these negative things about myself. I had turned into a perfectionist to overcome that. So I had this perfectionist voice in my head, driving me constantly, with no way of ever being successful, because how can you ever be perfect? I didn’t want to live in my own head very often. I kept very busy to avoid hearing those things.
So guided meditations gave me the first step into a place where I could do this on my own, in my own place and time, and have someone work with me and keep me in a safe place so that I could settle. Once I started getting to the point where my mind could feel safe to be in and be quiet, I really wanted to have that interaction in person and have some guidance from someone who was an expert. At the time I started, I was living in Atlanta, and I found a Buddhist meditation centre there where I went and got personal training. They train you in meditation. They have group meditation sessions, so you can go and sit with people. They had classes and events.
I really learned the process from that experience of how to work with my mind. It was a breath-based meditation, a compassionate meditation. That slowly taught me how I could be okay to be in my own head, and then also start to recognise when I had things come up.
We talked earlier about peeling the onion, clearing the clouds, figuring out what’s really going on. The meditation was really important for me to be able to see things clearly – not with judgment, not with hatred, not with reflexivity and responsiveness to what had happened to me in the past, but to start to sit and say, “Okay, what’s going on in my head? What’s really happening? Why did I say that? Why did I do that? Why did I feel that way?”, very gently, and say, “How did that arise? How did that happen? Can I be more aware of what’s happening and how I’m showing up in the world and reacting to the world? And if I can be more aware, maybe I can start to peel away some of these things that I don’t want to do or I don’t want to tell myself.”
So it built an ability to feel safe in my head. It built an ability to really understand what was happening in my mind and just make that separation between what I might be feeling or thinking and what I would do with that. “Can I let that go? Do I need to respond to this?” and have some discernment and have some ability to work with what was there rather than reacting to it.
Chris Sandel: I wonder what meditation was like when you first started, in terms of – these days, there’s a million meditation apps; meditation is very much thought of as something that is a thing that a lot of people do. It’s not that obscure. But when you were starting this, how left field was the idea of meditation?
Denise Bossarte: It was a little bit on the edge, obviously. But since I had been doing yoga, I was in that new age space. Yoga had at that point in time transitioned to being fairly mainstream. Not as much as it is now, but it was fairly mainstream, and it wasn’t like “Boy, you’re a really hippie ’60s person if you do that.” It was accepted that it was something people do. And yoga led me into meditation because yoga was really developed as a way to prepare your body to do meditation. That’s really how it’s evolved over time.
So I was exposed to meditation and things in yoga, and it just seemed a natural progression to work with my mind. By the time I got to the centre, it was an environment that felt comfortable and it didn’t feel really odd. They were very open. We had people who were Christian and Jewish and all kinds of different religions that would come because the meditation practice is working with your mind, and people were coming there that wanted to work with their mind and maybe had other spiritual practices beyond that, but they recognised the benefit of working with their mind.
It felt like I found my peeps. [laughs] These were my people that were interested in doing this. So it didn’t feel especially strange. Now, like you said, you’ve got all these apps and everybody’s doing it. It wasn’t on the periphery, but it wasn’t way out there. And I’ve always felt like I’m going to do what I’m going to do no matter what. I was always aware of part of me was concerned about what other people thought, but there was this drive I have always had that says, “You know what? I want this. I want to go for this. I want to try this, I want to experience this, and to heck with what other people think. This is for me, and if it works for me, then that’s what I’m going to do.” So that’s where I took it.
I was fortunate in some ways because I had done so many years of yoga – and yoga’s not just working with your body; it’s working with your mind as well – that I had gotten a jump start on the meditation through doing the yoga. So I skipped a little bit of some of the challenges that come up when people first start doing meditation. But I still had to go through a lot of the experience of having to get to a point where I could be a little quiet with my mind.
But I’m just fabulously grateful for everything that’s available to people, that in just one app, you can find all these different ways of doing meditation. You can find the guided meditations, you can find people just working with their breath. There’s all kinds of things you can explore to help you figure out what’s going to work for you.
And a lot of people maybe have the misconception with meditation that it has to be something you do for long periods of time. Well, one or two minutes a day, if you really are concentrated on being quiet and following your breath, or doing whatever that practice is, that’s going to be helpful. You talk about compounded interest; it’s giving your brain a little bit of time every day, whatever that is. If it’s just being quiet on your drive in to work and focusing, driving meditation or walking meditation or seated meditation, whatever it is, if you can just give yourself that gift of a few minutes, eventually you’re going to love that experience so much, it’ll grow to a bigger time.
So that’s something important for your listeners to know. It doesn’t have to be this marathon session. Just a few minutes of your day in a quiet space, working with one of these types of meditation, and just making that something consistently that you gift yourself, that’s going to build up for you over time.
Chris Sandel: I completely agree with that. I’ve had various attempts at different meditations and different meditation apps, and what I find now more than anything is, as you describe, something that is very short where maybe I’m out walking the dog in the morning and I’m like, I’m going to have five minutes where I’m just going to be very much in the present. I’m going to look around and see the clouds and the trees and everything, but I’m not going to be running away with my thoughts about what I need to get done today, that email I need to write. If that comes up, it’s like, “not now”. I’m just coming back to the present moment.
Or when I’m hanging out with my son, just being very much about being in the moment, and if I notice that my thoughts start to drift away from that, it’s bringing myself back. I think I’ve become much more about meditation in the real world as opposed to meditation removed, sitting on a mat for long stretches of time.
Denise Bossarte: That’s what we talk about. The goal of meditation is not to be the perfect meditation practitioner on your cushion; it’s to develop your mind in a way you can take that mind space with you as you go out into the world. Like you said, present when you’re with your son, present when you’re walking with the dog. It’s being able to settle and not be pulled into the past or future.
And sometimes it’s not going to be possible, depending on what’s happening. But often what we can do is simply say, “What am I seeing? What are five things that I see? What am I smelling? What am I tasting? What am I feeling on my body?” If it’s my clothes or I’m on a seat. Just being in your body and exploring your senses rather than letting your thoughts run. Sometimes that’s all you need to do so you can settle down and be present and give that little space or a bit of time where you’re focused on being here and not somewhere else.
So you don’t even necessarily need an app. You can just say, “Let me focus on my senses” and that could get you in a space where you can settle.
01:18:43
Chris Sandel: I’m also very conscious of doing it even when it feels like the thoughts I’m having are happy thoughts. So even if I’m daydreaming about a holiday I’m going to go on or a renovation I’d like to do to the house or whatever it may be and it feels like these are very happy thoughts that I’m having, I also want to be able to be like “No, this is still a good time for me to practice how to come back to the present moment”, because I feel like I don’t want to be only trying to do this when everything’s gone to pot or where everything feels like a real struggle. I want to be able to know how to do this whatever time of day.
Denise Bossarte: That’s awesome. I like how you said that. I know myself, being a survivor, sometimes these fantasy worlds are a great place to be because it’s so painful to be where you are now emotionally. So that can be a real challenge. That’s why I say these small moments, dipping in, dipping in, just little moments throughout the day can be helpful in exploring that.
You don’t have to force yourself to try to do it through a long period of time, through incredibly painful moments, but if you can dip into it and just explore it for a little bit and take a few deep breaths, try to be present, and then let it go – because these practices of being present in your body, like the five senses practice or doing the box breathing where you breathe in for 4, hold for 4, breathe out for 4 and hold for 4 – those are the kind of things that actually are encouraged when you’re trying to deal with an anxiety moment or when you’ve been triggered to get you in your body, because the anxiety and the triggering is taking you to a place of fear and taking you to the future, where it’s unknown and you’re afraid of the outcome and your ability to handle it.
But if we can get in our bodies and get to the space where we’re present and grounded and here, then we connect with our resilience and our strength and we can step into the next space.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. The box breathing is something that I got into more recently and has been phenomenal. Before we hit record, I was telling you I had a pretty difficult end to last year; my wife was injured in a horse accident and we had a pretty dark couple of months dealing with everything, and I found that whenever I was having high amounts of anxiety or things were really feeling difficult, if I could do some box breathing, even for three minutes, five minutes, it wouldn’t take everything away, but it would make a significant shift in me. And a shift bigger than I would’ve imagined before doing the box breathing.
I do think that sometimes when you’re in those moments, it can feel like, “This thing’s not going to make a difference. This is too big, it’s too overwhelming, it’s too hard; something like this is not going to make a difference.” And actually what I found more recently is doing some box breathing does make more of a difference than I would’ve anticipated. Or having a five-minute conversation with my wife about something I’m struggling with makes more of a difference than I would’ve imagined before doing that.
Denise Bossarte: Yeah. Sometimes people hear something and go, “That’s too easy. That’s too simple. What I’m trying to deal with is too big, it’s too complicated.” Sometimes the best solutions are the simple solutions, and the best solution is what solution you use. Some of these solutions are simple, but that’s where their power is, because they’re easy to remember to do more frequently than some other techniques. They’re easy to remember to do and they’re easy to do in the moment when your resources are so stretched thin that you wouldn’t be able to mentally handle doing something that would be more complicated.
So the simplicity is the beauty and grace of these practices to do the box breathing, to say, “I have five senses; let me check in with my five senses, let me come in.” That’s how they have their power, the simplicity of what they offer you.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. And even if it only reduces it by 50%, you’re 50% better off, and then it allows you to do the next thing afterwards, which is, “Cool, I now do need to go and do that thing, to make food or to clean up the house” or whatever it may be. But it just changes the state that you’re in that then allows you to move forward.
Denise Bossarte: It gives you the sense of possibility. It diminishes the overwhelm enough where you can say, “I may not have the solution to everything that’s going on, or this big thing, but I at least can see far enough down the road of what the next step is. And when I get there, I’ll be able to do the next step.”
For me, overwhelm is a big issue, whether it’s personal life or work life or how everything comes together, and when I get in that place of overwhelm, I say, “Okay, break it down. What is the next step you can take towards wherever you need to go to get out of this space and move forward?” You just have to do one thing. You don’t have to solve the big problem. We kind of get in this all-or-none thinking, and for me it’s, “What can I do right now? What practice can I do right now to breathe?” and to tell myself, “You can figure this out. You’ve done this before. You’ve figured these things out. You’re going to figure it out. But what is the first step you can take to deal with the situation now? The rest of it you’ll figure out as it comes.” So I don’t have to solve the entire problem. I just need to get centred and figure out, what should I do now as the first next step?
01:24:18
Chris Sandel: You talk also in the book about contemplation practices. Did this come out of the meditation that you were learning?
Denise Bossarte: It came out in the sense that I was given the opportunity to experience it when I was at the meditation centre. Some of what they do at the meditation centre is contemplative practices, and often they’re art practices, like ikebana, which is flower arranging, tea ceremony, various things. What I got connected with was contemplative photography. It was a contemplative practices about connecting directly in the moment with what you’re experiencing and what you’re perceiving visually and just using your camera to capture it.
It really is about slowing down and releasing any agenda or judgment about what you’re experiencing and what you’re seeing, just accepting it for what it is and really connecting with your experience visually and appreciating what’s showing up. Then we use a camera to capture that and share that.
For me, I had had a love of photography from earlier in my life and was a real visually-based person. This practice, instead of turning inward with meditation where you’re exploring your own mind, this was flipping it around and exploring outward, but from that same sort of centred, calm, open, aware space that “My mind isn’t controlling the situation; my mind is simply there to receive what is happening and what I’m experiencing.” It opened up so much of the beauty of the world; to be able to slow down and see it in this new way brought a richness to my life that I absolutely loved.
I loved the experience so much that I actually was certified to train it, and now I teach other people who to have this experience, which is wonderful to be able to do. But it was a complement to the meditation, and in a way that was very enriching because it was doing something with a camera that I loved, opening myself up to the beauty of the world, and really allowing myself to appreciate the beauty and let that in. It was kind of like shining a light in and helping bring more beauty into my life in a way that was very nurturing.
Chris Sandel: I also know you talked about creative expression, and for a child of abuse, they’re often forced to grow up quickly, even to the point of denying their childhood themselves, and then doing art or creative activities can help to reconnect to that child-self.
Denise Bossarte: Absolutely. That’s one of the sad things, looking back, to see what had happened to me as a kid. I wrote poetry even when I was young, and short stories, and was real creative. I wasn’t always a very good artist – what I thought an artist should be – but it was something that was so expressive. And that got completely shut down.
To be able to tap into that and to be playful, to feel safe enough to be playful and explore, maybe make some mistakes, maybe make something that doesn’t match what my expectation was, but the process was what was fun – that was incredibly healing for me through the contemplative arts and the photography and just taking classes. “Hey, I want to take a pottery class. Hey, I want to try watercolour. Hey, I want to do something in this space.”
Being able to be open, to have fun doing it and be playful, and again, let that child come out and have that childlike experience – I don’t think anybody who’s an adult gives themselves that opportunity enough, not just trauma survivors. But for us in particular, it’s telling that child, “It’s safe to be where you are and who you are and be expressive and playful and explore. It’s okay. I’m here. I can protect you, and we can do this together, and you can have fun and enjoy and you don’t have to be worried about any negative consequences. This is just for us.”
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I’ve recommended Liz Gilbert’s Big Magic to clients often because I think it’s a great book. She’s got a fantastic TED Talk that it feels like the book was based upon. There’s a book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which I really love. So yeah, I’m in agreement with you that no matter who you are as an adult, most of the time we are not spending enough time with play and with creative expression. Those things feel like something that you do when you’re a kid, and “I’m a serious adult and I don’t have time for this”, and they are just so important for us all throughout life. It’s not just a kid thing.
Denise Bossarte: Yeah, there’s this whole study area now about play and how important it is. I think also these expressive arts tap into a side of our brain that we don’t normally live in when we’re a trauma survivor. The analytical overthinking brain, overanalysing brain is highly active and responsive. We’ve got the emotional fear-based brain driving things. Instead, if we can tap into this other side of our body where we’re not engaging the analytical part of the brain and we’re able to open up to other emotional experiences beyond fear, it gives us a way to really expand into being a full person and being able to not over-criticise or over-judge ourselves, but be able to settle into a place where we can be a whole person and have fun and have seriousness.
We want both sides of the coin. Being a full human doesn’t mean only being joyful and getting rid of negativity. That’s something we have to learn as trauma survivors on our healing journey: being human means that sometimes we’re going to have grief and fear and sadness, and there might be a little bit of shame there.
But those don’t have to be the driving overwhelming emotions that dictate how we’re living our lives. They’re just one part of the full spectrum of experience that we want to be able to have as a human being because that’s what we’re here for, that’s how we relate to other people and can have compassion and empathy and sympathy for other people and ourselves. We want to be able to have the full range, but not get stuck on one end like we have been as survivors. We want to shift from that to have the full spectrum.
Chris Sandel: Definitely.
01:30:45
There are more things in the book as part of your healing journey in terms of modalities, but I think I want to move on and spend a bit of time talking about the section in the book which is ‘Figuring It Out and Moving Forward’. This is about asking difficult questions to help move beyond the effect of the abuse. You talk about asking the question “Who knew?” Can you talk a little bit about this?
Denise Bossarte: For me it was important to figure that piece out, because I felt like I wasn’t protected as a child. This happened to me; where were the people that were supposed to help me? Who knew and could have helped when it was happening? I knew that my cousin knew. She had revealed that to me, and for a long time I struggled with that because I was in some ways resentful that she didn’t say anything to help me, to make it stop. But in hindsight, as I got older and looked back, I thought, “Oh my gosh, Denise, look where you were in high school. Could you have done anything in that situation?” So I knew that she knew.
But I was wanting to understand for myself – did my parents know? Did my grandmother know? Who knew about what was going on and could’ve maybe stepped in? There were opportunities when I was in school – when he died, I was always a straight ‘A’ student, and my grades started sliding. There was one teacher in particular I’ll always remember, a history teacher, who berated me in front of the class that I was being lazy and I needed to get my grades up, and why wasn’t I putting full effort into it? There was this missed opportunity. If she had brought me aside and said, “What’s going on? I know you’re a straight A student. There’s obviously something happening. What’s going on?”, there could’ve been a wonderful opportunity for someone to step in and provide some healing.
So there was a need for myself to understand, who knew what, when? Because I needed to figure out more of a timeline of what was happening, more of an understanding of the family dynamics, to see why it might’ve happened. I was learning that it wasn’t my fault, but I needed more information for myself to step into that space of “it wasn’t your fault.”
Then, of course, part of that was going to be, “If these people possibly could’ve known, do I need to talk to them about it? Do I want to have conversations about it? Do I want to keep them out of my life because they didn’t step up and support me when that happened?” Figuring out who might’ve known and then deciding, from here, what more do I need to know from them and what kind of relationship do I want to have with them if they did know? I had some decisions to make. I had decisions to make about what to do with this information, and in particular, what I would do with these people in my life.
For me, my grandfather died when I was young, obviously, so I didn’t have to deal with him on an ongoing basis, but I still had to make a decision about the relationships I had in my life and the people that were there when the abuse happened and what I wanted to do in relation to those people going forward.
Chris Sandel: I remember – we started this conversation talking about the Larry Nassar case, or mentioned it in passing, and you said that that had actually helped you, because in that situation with Larry Nassar, there were parents in the room when the abuse was going on. And he was shielding that by putting his body in the way so that they were unable to see it.
I guess, as you talk about, there’s a sense of, here’s a situation where a parent is literally feet from the abuse occurring and yet they were unable to see what was going on. So for you, where you were being dropped off with your grandfather for the summer and your parents were away, that’s a whole different situation, and it gave you a change in your perspective.
Denise Bossarte: Yeah, it was a way to let go of any lingering resentment. Earlier than that recognition, I had made a decision to keep my parents in my life and my family in my life. Even my grandmother. I didn’t really talk too much about the abuse with them. I never mentioned the abuse to my grandmother, but I saw how she blossomed and changed after my grandfather died, and I got to know her better, and she was a wonderful woman.
For me, it was, I don’t want to live in the past and keep focused on what happened in the past, because that gave my grandfather the power over my life. I was a survivor in response to what happened to me, and I really wanted to shift away from that into thriving. Does it excuse any lack of action by the people who might’ve done something? No, it doesn’t excuse it. But I wanted to move beyond that. Again, I want to look forward. I want to see, is this a person that, outside of anything in the past that happened, I would want in my life now as they are? Yes. She was a beautiful woman, and I was really nurtured by the fact that she was in my life as an adult. Same thing with my parents. They’re two of my best friends. We talk all the time. I would’ve missed out on all of those experiences going forward as an adult in that relationship if I had held on to resentment.
But that’s each person’s individual choice. My choice was what I made. It may not be the choice that you make as a survivor with all of the people in your life that might’ve known or did know, or with any of them. It’s your choice, and I can’t emphasize that more strongly. All of these things are your choice.
Do you confront your abuser? I have a whole section on that. I did not confront my abuser. I didn’t have to deal with it. But I talk to folks in my book about how you want to think about that. Talk to your therapist, if it’s the right thing. What are you expecting to get out of this situation by confronting?
But everyone needs to think about it and make a decision that makes the best sense for you, and not just do it unthoughtfully or in reaction. It may take some processing and it may take a lot of thought, but make the choice for yourself and acknowledge that “I am doing this with this relationship because I want what’s good out of it” or “I am going to stop this relationship because it doesn’t serve me. It’s negative and toxic, and I’m going to end the relationship.”
But everyone needs to evaluate that. Clear thinking over time, and then you make your choice. Don’t let other people tell you what you should do or how you should live your life in relationship with these people that were involved in some way or knew in some way or not. That’s the choice that we each get to make for ourselves, because now we’re in control of our lives and those relationships.
01:37:38
Chris Sandel: You talk a lot in the book about forgiveness, and obviously forgiveness can mean different things for different people. One, what do you mean when you use the term ‘forgiveness’? And also, what things have you either read or listened to or what helped to inform that perspective on forgiveness?
Denise Bossarte: That’s a trigger word. [laughs] A really tough word for a lot of survivors. Let me be clear: forgiveness doesn’t mean you have to forgive the abuser for what they did to you. No, that’s not what I’m talking about. They did something absolutely horrible that they should never have done, and there is no excuse for that for them. So forgiveness for me is not towards the abuser.
Forgiveness for me was really mainly about forgiving myself – letting go of the shame and the blame and the self-hatred that I carried for so long about that I was responsible, that I drew that, that I brought that on myself, that I deserved that in any way. I forgave myself for being the type of person that he wanted to control and that he decided he could get away with hurting. I forgave myself for being a child and having no resources or strength or power or capability of defending myself in that situation. I forgave myself for being human. I forgave myself for the things that I did behaviourally after that in response to the horrible things that happened to me. I forgave myself for not being the person that could heal before I started my healing.
I forgave myself for being human and just said, “You did the best you could. You couldn’t do anything at the beginning. You did the best you could for a while, and now you know where you can go to really heal and be the person you want to be, and you have the power to do that.”
Now, I don’t know if forgiving my parents for making mistakes, for not being there when they should – they did the best they could at the time. My God, 20 years ago, what did we know about this kind of thing? What did we understand? What resources were available for them to understand? We can think of it in our present moment understanding on what they should’ve, could’ve, would’ve done, but that happened years ago. So it was different then. And I feel sorry for them because they carry the burden of knowing that they failed in that place, and that’s a burden that haunts them, but that doesn’t keep us from having a relationship moving forward.
So forgiveness is really about inward-focusing to yourself and saying, “It’s okay. You did the best you could, and now we’re going to see where we can go from here.”
Chris Sandel: Definitely. This is one of the aspects of what I liked about Beverly Engel’s book It Wasn’t Your Fault. There’s so many different parts that allow or help someone get to that place of self-forgiveness and looking at all the different distortions that can start to happen because of the abuse that mean that you do feel like “I should’ve done something differently”, whether that’s “I should’ve done something differently at the time of the abuse” or “I should’ve done something differently with my life since the abuse.” So I think both your book and also hers is a really good resource for helping someone start to move towards that place.
Denise Bossarte: You can just tell yourself, “I can always start now. I’m starting here. I’m starting now.” It’s never too late to be able to live a life of joy and freedom from the things that have really been keeping you from thriving. You can start now, and I really encourage anyone – when I wrote my book, it was for all ages, men and women. I hope it finds people who are younger simply because they can start their healing earlier and they can live more years of being free and being their full selves.
But it’s really any time, anyone can do that healing, because now’s the right time for them. So don’t feel like it’s too late, ever, ever, ever. Start now with that first step.
01:41:53
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I also like the way that in the end of the book, you also acknowledge that after all the work you’ve done, things will still shake you up. This isn’t that you do it and then it’s completed or you do it and you lose your human side. We are all humans, we all have times of struggle, we all have things that trigger us, even for someone who hasn’t had abuse – will trigger you to be that four-year-old again, or that seven-year-old again, or take us back to times when we were younger or trigger something in us that we don’t even know what it was, but there is something there.
So I think that was really helpful for you to say, that despite the fact that you’ve been doing this for so long, this is something that is ongoing.
Denise Bossarte: And I don’t want that to be something people go, “Why should I even start?” [laughs] To me, it’s like, being a human means that you always are going to have things come up that challenge you, that push you, that lead you to a place where you need to grow and explore. That to me is what a human being is. We’re constantly growing and exploring, and if we offer that to ourselves, we continue to expand ourselves in all ways – mentally, physically, emotionally.
For survivors, it’s like you have this really big hill to climb and get over before you enter the land of normal human being where there’s ups and downs. We’ve got to get over this huge hill. We have all this extra stuff we’ve got to go through, but even after you get over that, okay, the dog comes in and goes to the bathroom in the house, your car gets a flat tire, there’s a problem at work.
There’s always going to be something challenging you. But what we’re hoping for is that we get to a place where we get the resilience and the skills where these things don’t send us into a head spin and not being able to get out of bed for four weeks. It’s something that we say, “Okay, yes, I’m touched by this, it’s impacted me, I’m angry, I’m upset, I’m frustrated”, but then we can say, “I’m feeling angry, I’m feeling upset, I’m feeling frustrated”, and then you can get to the point of saying “This is a really frustrating situation, and I recognise that”, and then you can move beyond it.
So we’re building the ability, the capability, the resilience where these things that used to take over our lives and tap into all those triggering emotions and mental experiences – now we’re saying, “Yes, I am feeling this, but I have a choice on how I’m going to react, and I can let this emotion come through and I can move on from that and acknowledge it and say, yep, this is a really frustrating situation, but I’m not going to let it take over. Let me see what I can do with it.”
Or I see something that triggers me and takes me back to that moment of abuse; it’s like, okay, but I’m not that person. I’m not that small child. My grandfather is not here to hurt me anymore. Yes, that’s a memory that’s always going to be there in me and sometimes things are going to bring that forward, but I’m not there anymore. I’m here, and that’s a part of my life as much as any memory of going to the local swimming pool or eating ice cream in the summer with my friends. That can be tapped into sometimes.
Those are all experiences I’ve had that have led me to be who I am, so I acknowledge and welcome them. But at the same time, I say, I’m not going to let things take over when I do have those things happen; I’m just going to use the tools I have and the resilience and strength I have to move forward into being in that space I want to live in.
Chris Sandel: Denise, thank you so much for this conversation and for your wonderful book. Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you wanted to chat about today?
Denise Bossarte: I think we’ve covered quite a bit. [laughs] Again, people may say, “We hear this all the time”, but I’m just going to repeat it again: It was not your fault. You deserve to be loved. You deserve the life you want to live. And you deserve to find ways that work for you to heal. Give that gift to yourself.
Chris Sandel: Thank you so much for doing what you do, for writing the book, and for delivering that message to others, because I think it will be very healing.
Denise Bossarte: Thank you, Chris. I appreciate the time.
Chris Sandel: So that was my conversation with Denise. If you have experienced sexual abuse, then I highly recommend checking out her book, Thriving After Sexual Abuse, and for everyone else, I hope that you were still able to take a lot from this conversation about the possibilities for change and transformation and the healing powers of many different types of modalities and practices.
01:46:38
I want to make a recommendation of something to check out. It’s a TV special called In & Of Itself by Derek DelGaudio. I’m on Tim Ferriss’s mailing list, his 5-Bullet Friday email list, and it was one of the things that he included on that list. I clicked on it, I watched the trailer and was instantly intrigued and started to search out how to watch the full show.
DelGaudio is a magician and a performance artist, and it’s this combination of one-man show, magic, storytelling, and it really is just this thing of stunning beauty. I actually don’t know how to describe everything that happens, and I also don’t want to say too much about it because I think the less you know about it, the better. I don’t think there’s any harm in watching the trailer, and that’s not going to ruin anything; it’ll give you a bit of a sense of what it’s about. So I will link to that in the show notes, but you can also just Google In & Of Itself and it will come up.
But what I will say is that it’s been a couple of weeks since I watched it and my mind still keeps coming back to it. I have no idea how he does what he does, and he just has this real craft for bringing the whole narrative together. The fact that David Blaine and Bill Gates are in the audience in this fairly small theatre as part of the show is probably a fair indication of his talent.
It was also interesting when I was looking up info about DelGaudio after watching the show; I found that he was consulted for the film The Prestige. The Prestige is one of my favourite films of all time and probably my favourite Christohper Nolan film. If you haven’t watched it, then I highly recommend you do. But it was just interesting finding out this fact because it made a lot of sense that he would be somewhat connected to that film.
In & Of Itself was released on Hulu, so wherever you are in the world and can get access to Hulu, that’s how you can see it. In the UK, I signed up to Disney+ simply to watch it. That was the only way I could access it, and it was definitely worth the 7.99 for the month of Disney+ to be able to see it. It’s called In & Of Itself; it’s incredible, and you need to see it.
So that is it for this week’s episode. As I mentioned at the top, I’ve reopened my practice again to new clients. If you want help with an eating disorder or disordered eating, chronic dieting, poor body image, exercise compulsion, getting your period back, or really any of the topics that I cover as part of this show, then please reach out. You can head to www.seven-health.com/help for more information.
I’ll be back next week with another episode. Take care, and I’ll catch you then.
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[…] conversation with Chris on the Real Health Radio podcast! We chat about my book, “Thriving After Sexual Abuse” and cover many of the activities […]