How Adding Routine To Your Day Is Key In Your Healing Journey
Let’s get started with introducing yourself and sharing a little bit of your story and what brought you to Health Thrive Dream.
Sure, I am a trauma survivor and a trauma recovery coach. I grew up in a dysfunctional family where there was domestic violence, childhood abuse and poverty. I knew as a young child and as a young woman that I didn't want my future to have the same kind of atmosphere or condition, I knew I didn't like the way I felt growing up in that situation, it was a horrible experience.
I had my first suicide attempt when I was about 12, and then before 14, I had to run away from home. After that, my life changed for the better. I buckled down at school and worked towards getting a full scholarship to the University of Maine.
Since then, I mean, there's been a few bumps, of course, nobody has a perfect life, right? I've had some hard relationships and so forth, but right now things are going super well, and I'm really excited about that.
Health Thrive Dream is a company that I launched with my daughters, I have two young daughters, and we just wanted to do something to show women, especially moms and daughters, that we understand that there's a lot of oppression and a lot of trauma going on out there.
There's trauma for boys and men as well, but it's more prevalent with females. We wanted to do something to show our support, and we offer products that are healing, and inspirational. We also offer coaching. I'm a full-time mental health therapist, therefore, the coaching I do is more around not a little less therapy and a lot.
Learning how to be accountable for the new way you want to live your new lifestyle, your new habits, and the changes that you want to make. I think that's it in a nutshell.
Awesome! So, when did your healing journey really begin? Was it after the age of 14 or was it when you became a mom?
That's such a good question. I hadn't really thought about it like that before. So I really didn't have any kind of counselling as a teenager. I did do something on a spiritual level. I started working with a mentor, her name was Van. She has since passed away, God bless her soul. She helped me with things like my first communion.
This was in New Brunswick. I don't know if you're a member of that, but I grew up and spent a lot of my childhood in New Brunswick. Van was very special. She helped me prepare for this religious experience called the first communion, which is a Catholic tradition.
One of the things she did was ask me about my story one time, and she was super sweet and very encouraging, reminding me that despite everything that I've gone through, God loved me, and she just made that very clear. She gave me my own personal Bible and wrote that in. So, I feel like that was pretty healing.
I also think the friendships I had throughout high school were a super positive experience. It was very healing. I lived with my aunt and uncle who had stability, you know, they were middle class, So we always had food. We had nutritious food to eat and not worry about whether the bills were going to be paid.
They took care of their family so, it just felt more secure and I had security. Getting your basic needs met is also very healing. And then when I had counselling maybe for the first time in college, I got to experience what it was like to actually just share my story and get encouragement and validation.
But the first really good therapist I had that started working on the family trauma was indeed right after my daughter was born. Really, I hadn't thought of that before, and it wasn't the being a mom part piece. I think it was a combination of being in an unhealthy marriage at that time too.
It wasn't only not getting a solid family of origin to help me with this transition to being a mom, but also not having a supportive person, or partner, the two together were like….a terrible thing to experience. I had a really great therapist who taught and told me about Dan Segel's book Parenting from the Inside Out.
I learned how to re-parent myself and learn to really evaluate what would be important to me in my Mom-Journey, that was truly healing for sure.
So, what are the biggest action steps you took on your healing journey, that made the biggest impact and benefitted you the most?
Right, here are a few of them:
Journaling.
I've always journaled throughout my lifetime, in the Parenting from the Inside Out book, there are journaling prompts and I did every single one of them I never stopped writing and it was super releasing to talk a lot about it. Another big one was:
Therapy.
The exposure therapy of writing and then speaking. Then, the emotional intensity started to come down. And after that, I think my most pivotal point was when I became a therapist for the United States military. It was shortly after I had my first daughter. She was maybe two or three at the time, so not that long afterwards.
One of the psychiatrists there told me, he said we really need cognitive behavioural therapy for our military and their dependents. There's a lot of depression, anxiety and anger. Is that something you can offer? And I said, well, I know about cognitive behavioural therapy, but I will do everything I can to offer those services to the population.
So I started studying group curriculums and I ended up teaching C B T to military and their dependents or, you know, their spouses for over 17 years. When I was first doing the teaching, I did all the homework myself, and that was life-changing. Mm-hmm. I learned the importance of identifying what our triggers are, how we think about those trigger and how that impacts how we feel. It was a lot of light bulbs because, for the first time, I understood that I had control over what I thought about and how that directly impacted my emotional health. That was very killing too! Yeah, that's huge!
Connecting that dot
We can connect the dots by first of all getting to know ourselves on the level that we can recognize and know what is triggering. This on its own is huge because not a lot of people realize what triggers them. They just know that something sets them off and, it's like a domino effect. Finally,
knowing that you have control
It is important to know that you have control, you're not powerless in the situation of what you think can control you and you can control how you think about something. That's really super huge!
So what is one action step that you would recommend for a mama who's listening today and who knows that she needs something to change, she cannot continue in the tug-of-war that she's in, but she's not quite sure where to start.
Great question! I think if you're in a place where you're not sure where to start, a powerful action step that could help you is “Taking a concrete action step.”
This is to think about your life as having bookends. So the bookends are a morning routine and an evening before bed routine. Just starting there, you can even Google what are the top healthiest morning routines for new moms. What are the healthiest evening routines for moms? Once you start doing that, then you can worry about the rest of your day after, because this will set you up for success.
You know, it may not be that easy, okay, let's say your child wakes up at seven. Hopefully, it's not five or six. Let's say a seven, it might mean that you sacrifice some sleep, in the beginning, to get up before the baby, maybe 45 minutes or so where you are doing some meditation, some guided meditation that tells you exactly what to do.
It maybe moving your body for a little bit, walking around the block, It doesn't have to be a marathon. So moving your body, doing something like meditation, and maybe a little Bible study if you're spiritual, it could be any kind of spiritual text, to help ground you.
Another thing that I heard is perfect to start the day with which I tend to do towards bedtime is reading something that you're really passionate about. So if you know you love quilting, read about quilting, if you know that you want to be a leader at your church one day read about leadership skills, just something that helps you feel like you're working towards one of your passions. And then the bedtime routine. I know I'm supposed to say one thing. So my cheat was saying bookends. That's one thing. So the evening routine is thinking about how to quiet your life down in your baby, quieting down for the nighttime ritual, you know, like soothing activities, soothing music, turning off the TV as early as possible and not spending your whole evening watching TV because it stimulates the brain turning down the lights, using soft music, aromatherapy, journaling out any thoughts and feelings you have, doing something very quiet and centering breaths. If you work on your bookends, it's really going to make a difference in how your day goes and how your day ends.
Yeah, that's amazing! Thank you so much for sharing those tips. If our listeners want to connect with you further, how can they do that?
The easiest way is to go karenrobinson360.com which has all my websites, my social media, and my booking calendar. We also have an online membership. It's virtual for women who are trauma survivors. We specialize in working with moms and also career mothers. It's an accountability group or a support group and it's just there to help keep you on track with whatever goals you want to set in your life to heal.
