You Were Never Broken: The Journey Back to Yourself

Hey, one more thing before you go. What if the key to healing isn't about fixing what's broken, but instead rediscovering the truth of who you are?How do we move beyond suffering and sip into self, trust, agency and inner liberation? We're going to answer these questions and more with our next guest. I'm your host, Michael Hurst. Welcome to one more thing before you go.Today we're joined by Julian Bermudez. He's a transformational guide who helps people break free from old patterns and reconnect with our authentic selves.That's what we all want to do through self inquiry, reflection, stillness and psychedelic integration, which we'll get into a little deeper. Julian's work invites people to rebuild their inner relationships with honesty, gentleness and joy. Julian's approach isn't about quick fixes.It's about deep, lasting transformation. He believes that healing is a journey of awareness, choice and liberation. And we all have a choice.And he's here to share how you two can step into a more empowered, connected version of yourself. If you've ever felt stuck, disconnected, or unsure of how to move forward, this conversation will challenge, inspire, and open new doors for you.Welcome to the show, Julian.

Michael, thank you for having me.

So thank you very much for coming on here and sharing your wisdom, your experience and what we can do to help improve our lives and more natural and holistic approach. I appreciate that.

Thank you. I'm very happy to be here.

I always like to start at the beginning. Where'd you grow up? Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Yeah. Well, in a nutshell, I grew up in Detroit, Michigan. And my parents were. My dad was 19, my mom was 21.And they were of very different cultures and ethnicities. My dad was Mexican, Puerto Rican. His parents immigrated here and my mom was German. Her mother moved here after the second World War.So I grew up in this very racially motivated and segregated area.And my parents, being as young as they were and not really liking each other very much, they bounced me back and forth for the first, I don't know, 13 years of my life. And as I modeled one parent, as children do, since my parents didn't like each other, they also didn't like me. I became a mirror for that pain.And so I never had anybody to protect me. I never had a safe place and the doors for abuse were wide open.So I internalized a lot of this pain as being these beliefs of, I'm defective, there's something wrong with me, I'm not worthy, I'M not good enough of love or safety or protection. And this left me with tremendous pain all throughout my life.And in my early 20s, I really sought to try to transform that, to try to figure out how I could live life in a more meaningful way that allowed me to not just feel safe, but actually enjoy life. And so I went back to university, or I went to university more like, and started studying addiction psychology and clinical psychology.And through my own self study and finding some teachers, I found this mode of therapy.And the more and more I applied it to myself and the more I was able to transform my own pain, the more and more I was able to help other people do the same. And that's how I got here today.

You know, that. What a. What a journey.I know that, you know, we all grew up in different family environments and you know, I understand the environment that you grew up in.You know, I grew up with a very dysfunctional family myself, but my parents were alcoholics and when they did get divorced, one hated the other and the other one hated the other.Alternated depending upon what day it was of the week and you know, being switched between my father and my mother, and my father, my mother and my father, a couple of foster homes in between. I understand that journey from, from that perspective to a point.You know, obviously we all, we all walk the same pathway, but sometimes we, we go off that little pathway on different shoots of our own. So it is that what inspired you obviously, to dedicate your life to helping others and transform that kind of suffering and self trust.Your, your delving into the psychological aspect of it. Were you introduced into what you do today within the academic arena, or am I to understand that?

Yeah, the university I was going to didn't have very many answers for what I was looking for in terms of addictions. Everything was. It's a complex mechanism of environment and genetics.And at the very worst, it was people are making a choice and deserve to be punished. So there wasn't exactly a lot of answers for how to understand trauma or addictions and to transform or heal these things.So I started looking for teachers through my own. And I found some medical specialists who were in this field of addictions.And through that I found a tremendous amount of literature, medical literature, and I reviewed all of it over the course of about seven years.

Did you graduate, did you get a degree? Or did you delve off into a different direction once you left there with the new information that you have?

Yeah, I finished the undergraduate and then eventually I went and grabbed a master's as well.

So how does I know that you did a lot of self inquiry, you know, I'm sure in reflection in regard to, to your life and where you were and how you can apply what you've learned in the new things that you have learned into what you do today. Does that play a significant role in breaking free from old patterns? Did it help you?

Oh, absolutely. Through this process, of course I was trying to transform my own pain and heal it and also trying to build the skills to help other people.And so the more and more I was able to do it for myself, the more and more people came to see me to do the exact same thing.And you know, it's very important to notice or to mention that these patterns, as far as I've experienced these, the ways that we've adapted to pain or to trauma, they don't exactly go away. It's not like we ever fully exile them or, or cure ourselves of these.Rather, the healing comes where we can become very aware of these pattern, where we can recognize and identify when they're activated and we can use that awareness to make choices and to take responsibility and cultivate agency for what we do with our emotions, our beliefs about ourselves, our perceptions and our behaviors.So it's a constant exercise or practice of recognizing and identifying when something's active inside of me, whether it's an old pattern, an adaptation to pain, or a behavior perception that I've learned through my childhood and making choices on what we do with that. So that's the big part of the practice that we do.

So if I can ask you this, at least part of your personal transformation and your personal journey in itself. I know that you had talked about, you went into college, into university in order to learn about addiction patterns and so forth.And we all know that addiction could be many things, not just drugs or alcohol.It can be anything from eating and, you know, addiction to eating, addiction to sex, addiction to, you know, so many other aspects of addiction that kind of infiltrate our, our personal lives, our professional lives, our ability to function within society in a way that we kind of, we kind of fit in. How did you. I know. Let's talk a little bit about how you take those kind of things, those kind of incidences, those kind of experiences.And let's talk about what, what. Let me try it this way. Sorry, I've got like 12 million things running through my head now. I know that you use a psychedelic integration.So coming from my previous profession that we just spoke about as a retired police sergeant, actually the majority of the psychedelic integrations that I had any exposure to were from a different side of that. You know, between psilocybin and mushrooms and LSD and things like this. How did you make the crossover?I mean, I know that you had the integration from your academic side.How did you make the connection between all of those traumas that I just mentioned and being able to work with people utilizing those from a medical perspective or holistic perspective? That's a long question, isn't it?

Let's start with the addiction. So I would define the addiction as any behavior that has short term relief.So there's a craving of it and an inability to give it up, and it has long term consequences. So there's relapse, there's a lot of harm that comes from continuing this. So like you said, it could be to anything.It could be to substances, of course, and it could also be to things like behaviors like sex, gambling, high adrenaline, high dangerous experiences, relationships, food, anything that provides a short term relief and then has long term harm. So when I work with somebody who's working through addictions, the things that go wrong with the addictions are apparent. They'll tell me right away.They'll say, I lost my health, I lost my family, I lost my job, I lost all my relationships, I lost everything that I had. So the question becomes what?Well, what worked so well for it that despite all of those negative things, it was a behavior or a pattern that was continued. And very frequently what I hear is it provided a short term relief from pain.So it was a distraction or an escape from being present and feeling pain that's always here. So the question becomes not why the addiction, but why the pain causing the addiction.And what we find is that when we go through trauma, which I would define as bad things happening that shouldn't happen. And it could also be good things that are supposed to happen that don't happen.It's not so much about the things that happen to us, it's about what happens inside of us as a result to what happens. So especially when we're children, when we're developing and we go through trauma, we adapt to it in the only ways that are available to us.The most common ways of adapting to pain and to trauma at an early age is that we go away or we disconnect, we go away mentally. So there's only a few things that we can do. If we're going through pain as a child. We can set boundaries.But if it's our parents or our caregivers who are the ones who are causing the pain. Very frequently, we can't set boundaries.Either we don't know that that's an option, or setting the boundaries would make things worse or more dangerous for us. So the second option is we can go away physically.But again, if this is happening as children, when we're completely dependent on the relationship with our parents to survive, we can't just pack up and move away. So the third option comes in, which is a survival mechanism.It's an adaptation to the pain, which is we check out, we go away mentally, we disconnect from all the pain that we're feeling. So the way that we disconnect is we distract ourselves. We do things to go away.We might make ourselves very small and agreeable, and people please and always try and make others happy, or we might try and go and be good enough, and we do all the tasks and all the activities to get the recognition, to get the vet, be the respect or the value to be safe and cherished or valued from our parents or our community, or we find things that disconnect us and distract us and occupy us from that. So in that sense, the addiction is an adaptation to this early pain.And the pain is not knowing what to do with what we're experiencing, Whether it's our emotions or the feelings that we're having from the things that are happening to us. So what we want to do to heal the addiction is to start to reconnect with the feelings, the pain that we have there.We want to build the skills, the tools to navigate pain, to identify it, recognize it, to accept that it's here, and then to process it, to express it and comfort and soothe it. And that's where a psychedelic experience is very powerful, Because a psychedelic experience is one that connects you deeply to yourself.So if we can start to build the foundations of not running away from the pain anymore, not avoiding it or distracting from it, but actually turning into it and wanting to engage with it and wanting to comfort it and soothe it and process it. That's where the psychedelic experience is very powerful.

Mainstream therapy sessions in regard to anybody involved in, at least in trauma, not just addiction, but even trauma, post trauma, PTSD, or any kind of traumatic incident that took place in their life. You know, I have found that, you know, you. I suffer from ptsd. I mentioned that to you and I before it start. Before we started this conversation.So from a PTSD perspective, it was difficult for me to have conversations with people because the opportunity. The opportunity to talk about it, sometimes it was like it was good to a perspective.But the majority of the therapist or the individual that I was speaking with, once I got to a certain point within my old career or certain things that I was having PTSD about that I wanted to work through, by the time I got to those, they're going, I'm not the right person for you.So after about three or four, three or four chances of trying to talk to somebody, that once I started talking about the suicides or the assault or the murders or the domestic violence and et cetera, et cetera, which, some of which ended up reverting my own, brought up memories of my own past. Again, I kind of gave up because of that kind of standard therapy. They were textbook therapies. And I've said textbook. I'm doing this.Like you can see the textbook. There were textbook therapies. And in. In doing so, again, I gave up. So obviously, this differs from that type of approach you.This is more of a holistic, naturopathic approach, if I can say that.Correct me if I'm wrong, but a more holistic, naturopathic opportunity for us to give us better introspect, instead of just a therapist saying, did you like your mother? Did you like your father? Tell me what happened and leave it at that.

Right? Yeah. What you're talking about, Michael, is unfortunately very common.You know, whether it's working with, like, a psychiatrist or a family physician, the doctors, for the most part, they don't have the time or the capacity or the training to really work with all these pains that we carry around. And so then we start working with a therapist.And for the most part, the therapy isn't well suited or well designed to really go into these very difficult, painful areas. And once we start talking about how impactful they were and how present they are with us today.So the pain from the past showing up here, most therapists say, I'm not touching that and I'm not the right person for you, like you were saying. So my approach is very different because, well, I understand a lot of that. I've gone through it all myself. I've seen all of those myself.I've been there myself. I know what this is like.So when somebody comes to work with me, because they're going through it themselves, is we can have common ground and common understanding here. And so I go straight for the core of what's bringing people in.So if you come to me and you tell me that you're going through PTSD and you've seen suicides and murders and all of these things, I'M not going to do you any favors by going around in circles, talking about, you know, the things that are happening this week or last week and talking about the current relationships that you have. What I do is I go straight for the core of what's bringing you in.So if you say you've got all this big pain and all these things that are present, we're going to go straight for it, and we're going to try to understand the pattern of it. Not so much about what happened, but how did it affect you internally and, you know, just from a little bit.Well, almost every person that I worked with, which I've worked with, I've had the privilege of working with lots of cops, retired police officers, EMTs, paramedics. And they all say something very similar to what you said, is this was highly traumatic, and I have a lot of PTSD from this.But they also tell me something very similar to what you told me, Michael, which is this wasn't where it started. It usually goes back much further. The patterns of how we deal with pain and the types of pain that we go through usually start very early in life.And that's what I want to try and figure out is how did we navigate pain at a very early age? How did we learn to express or recognize, identify, process our emotions? Who do we talk to about it?What are our support methods for navigating very difficult, painful times? And those are the things that I want to try and figure out right away.And once we can figure that out, then we can start to make choices on what we're going to do with those things moving forward.

So let's understand what psychedelic integration is. What is. What are psychedelics and how are they incorporated into this kind of a regime? Regimen.

Yeah. Well, let me define psychedelic first, and then I'll explain how we do it. So the word psychedelic is broken into two parts. You have psyche and delic.Psyche we hear all the time psychology. Psyche is referred to all the immaterial aspects of who we are. So we have our minds, our thinking patterns, our perceptions.We have our emotions, all of the. The feelings that are inside of our body that are associated with our emotions.A lot of the times, the psyche is synonymous with something like the soul. So it's something along the lines of our spirituality. So we have psyche and then we have delic. Delic is a root for emerging or manifesting.So we have our soul or all these immaterial aspects of who we are manifesting or emerging. So when we have a psychedelic experience, it's one where we connect very deeply to ourselves.And this is something that is almost across the board, homogeneously described as the experience. I felt very connected to myself, to others, to the world, the universe, whatever it is.This is something people describe of having a psychedelic experience. It's perhaps the hallmark of a psychedelic experience's deep connection.A psychedelic experience doesn't have to use a psychedelic substance like you mentioned, like psilocybin mushrooms, lsd, Ayahuasca, dmt, all of those. You don't have to use an external substance.Our bodies actually produce a psychedelic substance, dmt, which is the primary component, while one of the two primary components of something like ayahuasca, so we can tap into our body's natural ability to have this psychedelic experience.And this has been something, whether using a substance or getting there through other means, that every single human culture all throughout history has respected and held almost sacred, or you could you say sacred in their culture and society. And there's always been forces that have tried to suppress it or take it away.So you can get to this exact same space through self inquiry, through reflection, through meditation, through sensory deprivation.You can go into caves, very claustrophobic and sensory depriving, and then have these incredible psychedelic experiences and paint some of the most glorified beautiful arts that we've ever seen in history. You can go into nature for 40 days and 40 nights in isolation and hear the voice of God.You can meditate and fast, you can do a Sundance and push your body to the brink of dehydration and exhaustion. And throughout this you'll have a psychedelic experience.So our goal in the therapy is to start to induce that psychedelic experience where you connect very deeply to yourself through means like inquiry, self reflection, and then building a practice, you can call it a meditation practice, where you connect very deeply with what you're experiencing internally.

I think that's a great explanation of some misconceptions they have about psychedelics. Because obviously when you grew up in an environment, you know, I grew up in the 60s and the 70s and was hippies, my sister was a hippie, you know.But at the time, obviously we called hippies and the use of psilocybin, the mushrooms, magic mushrooms, and the use of LSDs and the use of psychedelics. It was something that they used on, on a consistent basis.And obviously they would have to say that they seemed a lot happier than a lot of us they were doing today.I do and I, and I have seen that they're starting to do some studies in regard to soldiers and people coming back from combat, as well as police officers and firefighters and EMTs that you mentioned earlier to where they're starting to show that this type of methodology has been able to make some positive impact within their lives. Do you feel that we as a society have an opportunity for that to kind of get a little larger scale?I know they were having trouble here in Arizona with getting it approved, for trying to get it done in a positive way.

Yeah, yeah. The 60s were an interesting time because it was so widespread.And, you know, the analogy is oftentimes the blind leading the blind, there was just so much use. It was unstructured. There was no real knowledge or generational wisdom handed down in the terms of how to use this in. In a healthy, constructive way.So we had, you know, this pendulum swing of, you know, psychedelics being oppressed or suppressed in our society and then swinging fully to the other side. And right now, it seems like we're kind of in the middle where. Yes, we're seeing so much research throughout the 60s, the 50s, 60s, still today.There's been so much research that has been done. Some of it has been really therapeutic and incredible, showing these wonderful results that you're talking about.And some of it has been used in perhaps sinister. Sinister ways as well.So right now, yes, we're seeing with the Internet, just like how you and I are talking, information becoming so accessible, and there are so many authorities, whether they're health authorities, medical authorities, government authorities, that are really starting to see the therapeutic benefits of this. This model, of this approach. And so, like here in Oregon, they have numerous legislation and policies that are passing and ever changing.Colorado has it. I just saw yesterday, I think it was that Texas was passing some new legislation.

Even Texas. Wow.

Yeah. Yeah.It's hard to keep track of all the states that are doing it right now, but from what I see, it seems like about maybe 20 states right now have active legislation passing in some regard or another. So we have this wonderful opportunity right now, if it's done correctly.

Well, and I think that, you know, the misconceptions about it in the first place, it built from the 60s and the 70s and widespread youth contributed to the apprehension of them passing and changing things. But I'm happy to hear that they're. They're kind of expanding that in that many states. I didn't realize that.I was sad to hear that they shut the thing down here, and it was. They had veterans that they were dealing with, and it really.My wife and I were really upset that they didn't pass that it, I think it would have benefited so many other people, so many more people. We, as individuals, in utilizing this methodology, how can we, can it help us rebuild our inner relationship with honesty and gentleness and joy?Because I think especially with the chaos in today's world, the chaos in today's society, we've kind of lost our relationship with honesty and gentleness and joy.

Yeah. Yeah, you're absolutely right about that.When, when I work with people, every single person that I've ever worked with, and myself included, has a very harsh way of relating to themselves. They're very critical, judgmental, evaluating everything that they do.It's very difficult to navigate living life when we have this type of relationship to ourselves. And we always learn this somewhere in our lives, usually from our, from our early relationships with our parents.So if we were going through trauma as children, very frequently, we're continuing that exact same pattern with the way that we treat ourselves. So this disconnection that I was talking about, this adaptation, this survival mechanism, this defense mechanism to that pain is just ever present.And when we're so harsh and critical to ourselves, the reaction is we want to disconnect from ourselves.Like if you and I were being very harsh and critical to each other, chances are we probably wouldn't keep having a conversation, we would want to disconnect. So it's, it's, it's a built in mechanism to, to save us from our own relationship to ourselves.So, yeah, when we start doing this therapy, the first things that I want to try and figure out are what is the relationship that we have to ourselves? When I'm working with somebody, what is the relationship that you have to yourself or that they have to themselves? How do they treat themselves?What do they do with their emotions? How do they express or process or soothe their emotions?Or do they suppress them or depress them and bottle them up and stuff them down, as is very commonly found?And once we can start to understand those things, then we can start to cultivate a practice where we go intentionally into that space, into those emotions, into those feelings, or into that belief and start to comfort it and soothe it.

Is that fortunate that we, this society, has gone to this point? I mean, obviously we have so much depression. Let me ask you this question in lieu of that.Can this type of methodology not only help people with trauma and people with, with PTSD or something along that line, can it also, in an addiction, can also help people with maybe depression and anxiety and those type of mental illnesses? They call them mental illnesses. I Don't like calling them that way, but mental maladies, I guess.

Sure, sure. Well, when I talk to people about what is depression or what is anxiety, what I find is that these are adaptations to trauma in itself.So you take anxiety, for instance. It's this constant overwhelming fear that's always present that something terrible is going to happen.And it's not even about something that's happening, it's just ever present, it's always there. It's not about anything specific. And I can pinpoint in people's lives where this develops almost within five or ten minutes of talking to them.For example, we have these emotional circuits that are built into us that are, they help us develop and they help us thrive in our lives. So parents, for instance, have an emotional circuit that facilitates connection with their child.Because as humans, we're the most undeveloped, immature, dependent species that we can find in nature. A human takes three or four years to learn how to walk and run to where a horse learns how to run on this first day of life.So our parents, as parents, we have to nurture children for a very long period of time. And so we have these built in mechanisms that facilitate a bond with our children so that way we can nurture them as they develop.And as children, we have built in mechanisms that go off when we don't get the nurturing that we need. So for instance, we can see this in animals.If a baby bird falls out of its nest, it has an emotional circuit that goes off and it feels panic and it cries out and it cries and cries until the mom comes and picks it back up and puts it in the nest and comforts it and then that emotional circuit resolves.But what happens if our parents are too stressed when we're children or they're too busy with life to comfort us and nurture us in the way that we need? Or perhaps they're really well meaning, really caring parents. So they listen to the experts.The medical advice that says when your baby's crying, don't hold them, let them learn how to self soothe, let them learn how to cry it out. They need to learn how to be independent.So in other words, this emotional circuit of panic that is designed to bring the parents back to comforting you is always activated and that becomes the baseline for that emotional circuit. It's always activated and it never got the chance to comfort or resolve. So then later in life we call that anxiety.When I ask somebody what what depression means for them, they'll tell me very clearly what they're doing. The word depression the literal meaning of it means to bury something. So if we depress our power lines, we've buried them underground.The second part of the definition is to take away energy.So if we're burying something, like we're trying to hold a beach ball underwater, we're using tremendous amount of energy to hold it under, and the beach ball just comes bursting back up. So when I'm working with somebody with depression, what is it that you're holding under?Very commonly, it's our emotions, it's our boundaries, it's our expression. So at some point in our lives, we learned that emotions were bad and that we needed to depress them and suppress them.And we use a tremendous amount of energy to keep these emotions suppressed. This again goes back to very early childhood trauma.At some point, if I would have expressed my emotions, if I would have expressed my anger, my fear, or my pain for not getting my needs met, it would have made my situation even worse.Or maybe my parents were following common culture where they were taught that if your child expresses anger, which is a healthy human emotion that is designed to express when your needs aren't being met or a threat is present. So if the child expresses anger, they need to be exiled and disconnected until they can regulate that emotion and then they can come back.In other words, they're going to be threatened with the thing that's most important to them, the attachment, the connection. So the child learns emotions are bad. I need to suppress my emotions to maintain my connections.So whether it's addictions or, I'm sorry, anxiety or depression, all of these are adaptations to trauma. They help us. At some point, they might even save us, but now they're causing us tremendous harm.So this approach of really getting curious about these patterns that we have and trying to recognize, identify them and inquiring, why are they here? What is the purpose that they serve? I can see how it hurts me or how it affects me, but what wisdom is here?What, what's this pattern of addiction or anxiety or depression trying to teach me? If we can start to figure out what the teaching is, then we can start to meet the needs of that anxiety or that depression in more constructive ways.

That's brilliant, actually. That's brilliant. How do you guide somebody back through that process to recognize stillness and self awareness?Because we both recognize that the world is in chaos at the moment. Our communities are in chaos. How do, how do you get people back to that?

Yeah, there's so much chaos. The, the, the, the society that we live in is created by humans. We make our society.So all of the turmoil, all the chaos that's in the world, it's an external expression of our internal states, of what we're experiencing inside of us. Very frequently, people are desperately looking for a way to navigate this internal stress, this internal turmoil.So people come to me and when they're.When they're ready to start working with me, and they understand that we're going to go straight for the core of their pain and we're going to try to build a relationship with it. Most times they're completely ready.And granted, there'll be various defense mechanisms that will come up that'll try to keep them away from that pain. But if they're convicted to wanting to go into this space, it's very easy to help them turn back into it.So I just ask lots of questions of what are you experiencing? What are you feeling? Very frequently, those repressed emotions, those repressed feelings, they're right underneath the surface.In fact, they're almost. People are almost always feeling them, and they go through extreme lengths to try to disconnect from them.So it's not very difficult to reconnect with it. Within, you know, five minutes, I can help somebody reconnect with those feelings.The problem is, is that most times we don't know what to do with those feelings, so they overwhelm us, and it's something that we want to try to avoid.So once we can start to identify them, what we need to do is build a practice to figure out what do we do with these emotions or with this pain that I'm carrying around? And that's something that's fairly simple as well. The question that I usually ask is the line of questioning as well. How often do you feel this.This feeling or this emotion? Is it here now? Is it here every single day? Is it throughout the day? Is it once a week? Is it once a year?Or the next thing is, when do you first remember feeling this? Right. If we're noticing this depression and this anxiety, where can you remember first feeling this?And very frequently it goes back to early in life, in which case we look at what was happening then.And then the question is, what did I need when I first started feeling this emotion or this pain or this pattern of adapting to these pains that I'm feeling? And very frequently it's something very similar. I needed somebody to be with me.I needed somebody to be present with me, to see me, to listen to me, to understand what I'm going through, to validate and reaffirm. Of course, you're feeling those emotions. Of course you're angry, of course you're in pain, of course you're scared.Your needs aren't being met, your parents aren't available, your parents are stressed, your parents are causing you, you pain, harm, whatever it is. And then we needed some sort of comfort, some sort of physical comfort to begin to feel safe with these emotions.And then we need to be taught what can we do with these emotions? How do we express them, how do we ask for help? How do I say I'm in pain right now and I really need some support?And then we need somebody to do that for us and do it consistently. So the practice that we build, Michael is very simple. It's just to be the parent that we didn't have.So we turn our attention into that feeling of pain. And then we're going to be the people who are going to be present with it. We're going to listen to it, we're going to try to understand it.We're going to say, of course I feel this way, of course it's here. This makes perfect sense. It's trying to teach me something. And then I'm going to do all the things that it needs to me to do in constructive ways.In other words, I'm going to be the person that I didn't have when I first started feeling this pain. So in short, that's, that's what we try to do, is we try to constantly turn our attention to that pain and comfort it.

And I find that it's eye opening to me too, because it allowed me, at least from our conversation, it's allowed me to see that there are options that, that we have some way to overcome, or not necessarily overcome, but have a better understanding of where we need to go, how we need to find the answers, to start having a deep personal transformation within ourselves and maybe understand ourselves a little more.Because I think that a lot of, and I know that I'm sure you've heard of this, I was introduced to this term a couple years ago, intergenerational trauma and how that follows us through.And I think we all have the opportunity to even stop the intergenerational trauma at some point once we recognize it and say, I'm not going to let my kids suffer that, you know, from here forward.But if somebody, if somebody feels stuck in old patterns and things like that, what this conversation kind of showcased, what's the first thing you recommend they do to kind of shift their mindset, to start going towards a deep personal transformation or Seeking out how, how to do something like your methodology.

Yeah, you're mentioning something very important here. When I asked somebody when they were going through their pain, who did they talk to about it? Very frequently the answer is nobody.When I'm working with retired police officers like yourself or emt, paramedics, who did you go to for support when you were feeling this pain? And very frequently it's nobody. I dealt with it myself.When we go back to the childhood when we were first experiencing this pain, when I was being bounced around, or you were bouncing between your parents or an adoption, who do we talk to about it? I didn't talk to anybody about it. I was totally alone with it. This isolation is the biggest trauma right here, the disconnection.And we disconnect from ourselves. We're disconnected from each other, we're disconnected from the world around us.We're disconnected from what we do, meaning that what we do doesn't represent who we are.So if we're stuck in that pattern, the first thing that we need to do is to try to find somebody to go to help us go through it, because we don't need to go through it alone.And my ancestral culture and most native cultures, if somebody was going through terrible pain, the community would come together and they would circle around that person and they would have a ceremony for this person or several ceremonies for this person. They would sing, they would chant, they would drum, they would encircle and encompass this person with presence and compassion.In other words, they would try to transcend that isolation. And this is exactly what we need to start doing. We don't have to go through this alone.So if you're stuck in those same patterns and you're building the awareness to identify this exact same thing is coming around, you don't have to go through it alone. The first step is to reach out and find somebody who can help you go through it.It's a lot like putting together like a 10,000 piece puzzle, except you're staring right at it, you know, a couple inches over the puzzle, you can't see the whole thing. And when these patterns are activated, they're very elusive. And a lot of the times they feel like the only way.And we'll justify and rationalize it with our minds of this is right, this is how it's supposed to be. So we really got to have somebody to be there with us to help us see these patterns and identify them when we're in them them.And then of course, figuring out what we can do differently and how we can make different choices.

I agree with you. I agree with you. You have to reach out and understand that there are opportunities for us to be able to get some help.We just have to ask for it and sometimes that's difficult. So I know that you have some opportunities for people to reach out and to help them. How did somebody get in touch with you and what do you have?What do you have to offer those individuals that are seeking help?

Yeah, my website's the easiest way to get a hold of me.Psychedelic hyphen integration.net on the website we have lots of small short articles talking about these various patterns themselves, whether it's the intergenerational trauma, the estrangement from parents, the disconnection between generations, our emotional circuits, and all the different patterns that we have of adapting to pain. You can contact me directly through the website. You can schedule a free consultation. So there's lots of resources on the website.Our Instagram is also another place too, if you want to follow us, which is just instagram.com psycheintegration those are two fantastic ways to stay in touch.

I'll make sure that all those are in the show notes on the webpage just specifically dedicated to this episode. So make it an easy way for people to get in touch with you and get a hold of you because the first step is to take the step.I think Julian has been absolutely eye opening and thank you very much for coming on the program. And I think what you are doing to help those individuals that are kind of lost in seeking and looking and.And want to transform themselves into a better person, they have an opportunity to do that with you. So thank you.

Thank you for having me, Michael. Very happy to be here with you.

This is one more thing before you go. I could talk to you for another hour, but so we'll have. You have to come back on is what it is.We'll have to continue the conversation, but for now, it is one more thing before you go. So before we go, do you have any words of wisdom?

You mentioned something earlier that I thought was very important, which is this intergenerational trauma, which is when we start to identify the pain and the pattern that we carry.A lot of the times it came from our parents and so a lot of the times we want to blame our parents and blame is not constructive for any outcome that we're trying to achieve here because that same pain is inside of us.

So.

So when we look at what kind of person does what our parents did to us, the answer is somebody who's in terrible pain themselves. And when we look at where did our parents learn it? Well, they learned it from their parents and their parents learned it from their parents.So this pain goes through the generations. And you said we have a wonderful opportunity to transform or change that pain.And I actually look at it as more we have an obligation or a responsibility to transform that because it's not that we intentionally want to traumatize our children. It's that the pain passes through us to our children unconsciously, inadvertently.We don't mean to traumatize our children, but these pains are just so deeply entrenched, these patterns are so deeply ingrained in us that the pain just flows through us.So I think that it's really in our current day and age, it's our responsibility to start to take accountability and to cultivate agency and choice for what we do with these patterns. And I'm very happy to be in a place where I can help people do that.

Brilliant words of wisdom. Brilliant words of wisdom. Everything that you said. Absolutely.Well, I'll make sure that all your contact information is going to be in the website so that they can easily find you. Thank you again for coming on the show. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and your experiences. I'm grateful for that.

Very happy to be here. Thank you for having me, Michael.

Yep. And for everyone else, this is a wrap for today's episode. I hope you found it inspirational, motivation and a new perspective to take with you.If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to like subscribe and follow us. It really helps us continue bringing you incredible stories, stories and insights like this one.And if you want to watch this episode, head over to YouTube and catch the full video version. We'd love to hear from you as well. If you have a question, show ideas, or think you'd make a great guest, reach out and let's connect.This show thrives because of this amazing community and I appreciate each and every one of you for being part of it. And until next time, have a great day and even better week. And remember, keep exploring, learning and growing.Thank you for tuning in to One More Thing before you go. Thanks for listening to this episode of One More Thing before you Go.

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