Is this a true story?

Yes. Stacey Uhrig is a real person who shared their own story in their own words. Kintsugi Heroes is a not-for-profit that shares first-person stories of overcoming adversity, told with the person's consent.

What organisation produced this?

Kintsugi Heroes, a registered Australian not-for-profit. Every story is shared with the hero's own consent and reviewed under Kintsugi Heroes' trauma-informed content standard before it goes public.

What did Stacey Uhrig learn from this experience?

Complex PTSD from prolonged childhood trauma changes not just how you see yourself, but how you interact with other people and the entire world around you, often through a lens you don't even know you're wearing.

What would Stacey Uhrig want listeners to know?

Core beliefs formed in childhood to help you survive stay buried in the subconscious and keep running your life decades later; accessing and reframing them at that level is what allows real change to stick.

What helped Stacey Uhrig most along the way?

Hypervigilance and the trauma responses of fight, flight, freeze, and fawn are brilliant adaptations that kept you safe at the time, but staying locked in one of them long-term leads to burnout, nervous collapse, or autoimmune conditions.

What would Stacey Uhrig tell someone going through something similar?

Peace doesn't mean never having anxiety again; it means the frequency, intensity, and duration of your nervous system's reaction decrease and start matching the actual situation instead of a perceived threat from childhood.

What topics does this episode cover?

This conversation includes a day in stacey's practice, the divorce in 1983, swinging from home to home with no anchor, twenty years of hypervigilance, four ways the body responds to threat and the fighter, not the pleaser.

Unmasking Trauma and How Rapid Transformational Therapy Helps with Stacey Uhrig | Kintsugi Heroes

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Unmasking Trauma and How Rapid Transformational Therapy Helps with Stacey Uhrig | Kintsugi Heroes | Kintsugi Heroes Stories

Overview

Stacey spent twenty years in a state of high alert. After her parents divorced in 1983 and both quickly remarried, she moved between two households where she felt unwanted, treated more as baggage than as part of the family. From age eleven onwards, her nervous system stayed on constant watch, never knowing what mood or reaction would come through the door. She became a fighter, speaking up about the chaos around her, and got shamed for it. Meanwhile, anxiety made it impossible to concentrate at school or sleep. By her early thirties, after nearly two decades of talk therapy, she still carried tremendous panic and anxiety. Therapists told her there was nothing more they could do.

Everything shifted when Stacey found a clinical hypnotherapist trained in inner child work at the subconscious level. For the first time, she was able to access and reframe the core beliefs that had been running her life since childhood. She discovered her deepest wounds: the belief that it was her job to protect everyone, and the conviction that she could only rely on herself because no one else was there. She trained in Rapid Transformational Therapy, a modality that works with the subconscious to help people see and change the old survival strategies that no longer serve them.

Today, Stacey works as a trauma specialist helping others recognize that they are not broken. They are running an outdated playbook created to survive something unsuitable. Peace, for her, is not the absence of anxiety but a decrease in how often it shows up, how long it stays, and how intense it feels. Her nervous system now responds to what is actually happening, not to threats from decades ago.

Chapters

0:00
A day in Stacey's practice
She describes working with three clients today, people stuck in life because they navigate the world through unhealed wounds.
4:19
The divorce in 1983
Stacey pinpoints where her trauma began: her parents' divorce, followed immediately by both remarrying and the family fragmenting.
7:24
Swinging from home to home with no anchor
She felt unwanted in both households, treated as baggage rather than bonus family, forcing her to abandon parts of herself to fit in.
9:14
Twenty years of hypervigilance
The unpredictability of her stepparents' moods kept her nervous system on high alert from age 11 onwards, never knowing what would come through the door.
9:55
Four ways the body responds to threat
Stacey explains fight, flight, freeze, and fawn as adaptive responses rooted in the amygdala, and how each one showed up differently in her own system.
21:07
The fighter, not the pleaser
Instead of withdrawing, Stacey spoke up about the chaos, got shamed for it, and was labelled difficult, a pot-stirrer, and an exaggerator.
24:10
Anxiety so thick she couldn't learn
Her mind couldn't focus at school despite being bright, and she couldn't sleep or eat; nobody connected the dots between her emotional state and her collapse.
26:24
The first nervous breakdown
After 15 years of sustained hypervigilance, her body gave out; she moved into a numb, frozen state where she couldn't get out of bed or function at work.
31:00
Twenty years of talk therapy that didn't shift the core
Despite starting therapy at 15, by her early 30s she was still walking with tremendous anxiety and panic, told by therapists there was nothing more they could do.
33:51
Finding the clinical hypnotherapist
After a second breakdown in her early 40s, she found a hypnotherapist who did inner child work at the subconscious level, which finally reached what talk therapy couldn't.
36:29
Peace is not the absence of storms
Stacey describes freedom as a decrease in how often anxiety shows up, how long it stays, and how intense it gets, with reactions now matching reality rather than perceived threat.
37:24
You're not broken, just running an old playbook
She closes with her core message: the coping strategies that saved her as a child are maladaptive now, and recognizing that is where healing begins.

1 of 7

The divorce in 1983

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 04:19

Yeah, you know, I'm blessed to be able to say I actually really can remember it. You know, it's like I know when it was. It's no mystery for me. Where, because for a lot of people it is a mystery. They can't really pinpoint the stuck point, right? Or when it started. Um, I think when it really started for me was when my parents got a divorce. And it took me a really long time to figure that out because even though my parents got divorced in the '80s and it wasn't common, divorce wasn't as common as it is now. It was never really addressed as this major incident. And really, I don't think the actual divorce itself was an issue, but did create scenarios where my father was not as present as he had been. But in retrospect, my father wasn't really present when he was home anyway, which was part of what led to the divorce. Right. But I grew up in a household that I would never say was marked by drama or chaos. I believe my own interpretation is that my household was very, very calm, very, very peaceful. I think for my mother, it was very frustrating because I think she felt she was single parenting. From my perspective, what I felt was love and security and comfort and safety and, um, a place where I could just be myself. Where the, where the adversity came in was my parents very, very quickly both remarried. So it was 1983. I'll paint you the picture. 1983, they get divorced in August. My dad is remarried by November. My mother's remarried by January, and she's telling me in February she's having a baby in June. So, and in the middle of that, we moved and we moved from our childhood home because my mother was getting remarried and we were moving to a new town and a new home. And so again, the adversity there was, yes, this was a lot of things happening at one time, but really what I was able to pinpoint and put language to was that what I see often in my friends who end up getting a divorce and becoming a stepparent, they really feel it's a bonus to be able to grow their family. And I hear this term a lot. Oh, I'm a bonus parent. This is my bonus child. What I've been able to recognize is part of the trauma, part of the unhealed wound for me was that we were definitely not seen as the bonus in either situation. And we really were the burden and the baggage. It wasn't as though each person that my parent was marrying was interested in the whole package. They were really just interested in the parent and we were kind of just, I guess we'll have to take them too kind of thing. You could feel it.

Four ways the body responds to threat

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 09:55

Absolutely. So, you know, these are very adaptive responses to threat, right? And it's typically an adaptation of threat of our security or safety, right? So security thinking, am I enough? Do I belong? Do I, um, am I okay as far as connection? And then safety could be You know, that in addition to perhaps any kind of harm that you could be enduring, right? And so our brain, I have a little brain model here. I'll pull it down.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 10:28

Uh, awesome.

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 10:30

Our brain, um, has a little tiny piece in the middle called the amygdala. And the amygdala, I always see it as like the DEF CON, uh, alarm center. It's like the command center of your reaction under threat of stress in your mind and in your brain. And when that gets engaged, there are kind of 4 main responses that we pull from. The first one is fight. I think that that's very self-explanatory. It can show up as edginess or obstinance or rage or anger, or, you know, behaviors that we see in children that We don't like to see volatility. You know, it can be very physical. It can be very verbal. Flee is literally just getting up and walking away from the situation. You know, under stress, can't say a word and just gets up and walks away.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 11:28

And escape at any cost.

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 11:30

Escape.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 11:31

Absolutely. Walking out of relationships, walking out of situations, changing things.

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 11:36

And you hear people say it, I'm out of here.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 11:39

Yeah.

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 11:39

I can't handle this.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 11:40

Yeah. Yeah. That, yeah.

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 11:41

We hear it all the time. Right. The third is that freeze and freeze is always very interesting for me because freeze in the therapy world can be seen as dissociation. Right. And, and you know it when you see it, you literally are like, are you even there? You know, the person literally just becomes absent. The overwhelming sense of whatever the emotion is in that threat. And again, that threat can be just, am I enough? Um, can cause the person to really just almost leave their body. Uh, what I have found, this is just my own personal experience working with my clientele, my clients who got really, really keen at that freeze response and really, really expert at that disassociation. Tended to have these adverse experiences and these traumatic events pre-verbal or very, very young, where the event created a scenario where it was so scary and so intense, the emotion, and they were too young to be able to fight, and they were too young to be able to get up and walk out, and they were too young to be able to talk themselves out of it. And so their only option was, I just got to leave my body. I just have to get, I just have to disconnect. Right. And so we hear this, we get paralyzed with fear. We hear that term all the time, or I just checked out. And then appease here. I often call it FAWN, right? Fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. But you're right. Freeze and appease. Is, I see that you can get it in men as well. I see it really common in women. It's like, what do I need to do to secure my safety here? Do I need to make you happy? What can I do to make you happy? This looks like people pleasing. This looks like, um, lack of boundaries, right? No boundary setting. This looks like I will deprioritize myself and put all of my needs on the back burner to meet your needs. In order to maintain my security and my safety with connection or anything else. And all of that looks like this deep need for validation. And also, I would say, becomes the, you know, catalyst for perfectionism, right? So you have those, and in women, I really, I end up going all the way over to the burnout stage. Because they're doing this, it becomes such a part of their being. They work in life in every scenario through that appease phase, just like I was in a hypervigilance fight phase for 20 years, that it will lead to burnout. Wow.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 14:32

There's so much in it, isn't there? And I didn't realize what state I was, was my default until my husband had an accident. Was, was just a minor accident where he was feeding the dog and the massive dog can, he, he, he went to drop it and it came down on top of his fingers and almost cut a couple of his fingers off. But he's asking me to get the tea towel and, and I'm just like running around flapping and I'm like, I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do. And I got this dirty tea towel and chucked it at him and he's like, not that. And I ran across the road and I said to the neighbor, help, help, you know? And she came over and she's asking me to do something and I literally I literally couldn't think and I couldn't move. And it wasn't until that point that I thought, oh, this is freeze. I've been operating on freeze mode my whole life. Every time something gets difficult or every time something's traumatic, you know, and, uh, yeah, it takes a lot of work to actually work this all out. And no doubt. Yeah. Um, I love that we're talking about this today. I was just at the opening for the National Trauma Center of Australia. A couple of weeks ago, and we've never had anything like this before. And it's a world-class trauma center here, right near where I live. It's such a massive topic. And I think the message that, that would be good for us to get out today too, is that trauma and PTSD is often associated with veterans and people that are first responders. But there's so many more reasons why people experience trauma and post-traumatic stress.

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 16:19

Absolutely. And, you know, here in the States, we talk a lot about complex PTSD, and people often want to know what the difference is. And the best way that I can explain it is, at least from my seat, is I always see PTSD as maybe a handful or maybe one acute, very traumatic event. Whereas complex PTSD or developmental trauma is basically you have a prolonged chronic series of stressful events and traumatic events all happening during your developmental years because it becomes complex because it actually changes the way that you see yourself.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 17:01

Yeah.

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 17:02

Right? It's that self-actualization. It's that self-esteem of Do I matter? Am I enough? Am I significant? Do I belong? And that ends up then changing the way you see not just yourself, but it really, uh, interferes with how you interact with other people and the entire world around you. It creates an entire lens that you're wearing that you don't even know you're wearing.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 17:27

Yeah. And it's, it runs off these false self-defeating beliefs, these core beliefs that we form based on the events that we go through when we're children.

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 17:37

100%.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 17:38

Yeah. Um, and, and they end up defeating us as we get older.

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 17:43

They do. And that's why somebody would essentially come and work with me. And one of the unique modalities that I've decided to become trained in and that I'm a practitioner of, of something known as Rapid Transformational Therapy. And one of the reasons why I made the decision to go through that rigorous training was because it really was, from my point of view, a great way for me to get to that core belief. Because our core beliefs are rooted in our subconscious. So I knew I needed some sort of hypnotherapy model, something done under hypnosis so I could access the subconscious and allow the client to see from their own words and from their own experiences, the core beliefs that they needed to as an adaptation to create in order to survive what felt like a very unsurvivable thing at the moment, but that they're still living from that seat.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 18:41

Yeah.

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 18:43

40, 50 years later. And when they can see it, and then I can help them reframe it at the subconscious level, it sticks at the subconscious level and it really allows them to now start to make these micro shifts from a new core belief. That I am enough, or I do matter, you know, or my needs are important.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 19:05

I am safe.

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 19:07

That I am safe and safety is available to me. When they can start to live their life through that, see, and from that lens of core belief, then all of their thoughts change based on that core belief, and then their actions change and their behaviors change, and they end up finding themselves less triggered and leaving more of a peaceful life.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 19:29

Wow. Yeah, that's, that's, um, very wise words there. And it is, it, it's difficult for people that have been through adverse childhood trauma, uh, because there are so many triggers moving into adult life. And, and I myself have many, many triggers, but I think the wonderful thing for anybody listening is that there is hope. Because once you do this work and reach out for help, work out what your triggers are, have an action plan, change your core beliefs, get some new perceptions that are gonna be life-giving, um, there's great hope to recover from trauma. And absolutely, you and myself are, are living proof of that. So Stacy, as a young person then coming out of that very, very difficult situation with your parents and the, the family dynamics. Uh, I've worked in schools for a lot of years and I've worked with many young people that are in that similar situations. You know, overnight their whole world changes. Parents break up, they're chucked into a new family and they don't get on with the new family. They've got siblings all of a sudden, they're living in a house with strangers and their whole world's just catapulted into darkness. Those kids that I worked out with started acting up, playing out, um, turning to substances, self-harm. So how did things play out for you? Because I know you mentioned before that you became a pleaser.

The fighter, not the pleaser

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 21:07

I didn't actually become the pleaser. I became the fighter.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 21:10

The fighter. Okay. Yeah.

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 21:11

So I would say my sibling became a pleaser.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 21:14

Oh, yes.

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 21:15

Well, I was the fighter and, you know, I got shamed for that because I was told I was difficult. I was told that, um, I had a mouth on me, meaning I cursed a lot. And I think there was probably, you know, I, in retrospect, I was a heavy cursor growing up. And I think it was because I didn't feel heard when I was trying to express myself and saying, this is not okay. And I don't feel safe. And what is going on and, and how did this happen? And I didn't feel like it was being addressed because everything was still so negative and so chaotic. I really started leaning on, how can I get your attention? Yeah. And cursing really got that attention. So I got really shamed and blamed for that behavior, right? I was seen as, um, the town crier because I was going around to anybody that would listen to say, we have a problem here. I was told I was an exaggerator. I was told I was a pot stirrer, you know, and I, I heard all these things growing up. And what was interesting is I didn't go into these big T behaviors, right? I never got into, I used substances, but I never was addicted to substances. Um, I wasn't promiscuous. I never tried to run away. I wasn't having disciplinary issues. So I think everybody thought I was fine. But even if those things had happened, I don't think anybody would have been connecting the dots, honestly, in the '80s. No way. They just wouldn't have been. But I had all of these things that were being said about me, and then that made me feel further disconnected from my family of origin. Because I'm like, you're creating this and now you're blaming me for reacting, but I didn't ask for this and I have no control over being in this environment. The way it negatively impacted me long-term was because I couldn't predict who and what I was going to be coming up against every single day, every single day from age 11 until say age 19, uh, I carried deep hypervigilance in my system.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 23:38

And it was a protection.

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 23:40

Absolutely. But I didn't know that at the time. I walked with tremendous anxiety. I was having such a difficult time sleeping. I couldn't eat. I was so incredibly thin. Um, I couldn't do well in school. My mind I couldn't focus, you know, I, I couldn't, um, give attention to the things that I needed to be able to give attention to. I'm very bright, but I was not a good student at that time.

Anxiety so thick she couldn't learn

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 24:10

Um, it's something that we have, well, peop— people that aren't working in this field don't realize, but if children are suffering emotionally, they can't learn.

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 24:21

That's right. And I, I knew enough to be able to say to my mom, she would say, what's going on with this grade? And I said to her, I'm so stressed out. I can't even think. I was able to say that. And I have a memory of saying that to her. But the reality is, is that nobody was picking up the breadcrumbs. And I would say that this went on until my early 30s. And so this is now 15 years of me being in this hypervigilant state. And if we know anything about, you know, our, our, our nervous system and our autonomic nervous system and the vagus nerve and all of these different modalities, polyvagal theory, what have you, I was in this hypervigilance. I must, and I can try to fix this and try to feel better for so long that at some point my body just said, you're not, it's not sustainable. You're not going to outrun this. And I just started to flop. And I had, I went from complete anxiety to now what people would label as a depressive state. The confusion for me was that I didn't feel sad. I just couldn't function. So, you know, I kept saying to my husband, I know this feels like depression because I don't want to get out of bed. I can't focus. I can't, when I get to work, something very easy and normal, like responding to an email, I, I can't even do that. I'm paralyzed. I've now gone from this fight and flight stage to now this freeze stage, right? Because I've been in that for so long, it wasn't sustainable for my nervous system. You could almost call it like a nervous breakdown because I just completely broke down. And I remember saying to my dad during that time, I'm not depressed because I'm not sad. There's nothing in my life to be sad about. I have so much gratitude. I don't feel any of it. I feel nothing.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 26:23

Yeah.

The first nervous breakdown

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 26:24

I'm completely numb. And I said to him, you know, I have a really great support system and I recognize that, but I can totally understand why somebody would do anything not to feel this way. Okay. Yeah, that was a very scary moment for me. That was 20 years ago. So I've been through the whole cycle of how these wounds that we endure as children when they're unhealed in the moment and unresolved can have a long-term negative impact on what I'll call our mental health and our state of our wellbeing.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 26:58

And I totally agree. Nearly every middle-aged client that comes to me, it's always as a result of unresolved childhood trauma.

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 27:07

Yeah. And it's funny because on my website, I talk about that pretty clearly and, you know, I call it the elephant in the room and I say on my website, listen, if you're going to work with me, we're going to go there. And if you think that that's too much too fast, then you're not ready to do the work with me because I can almost guarantee you that it started before you were 15 years old. Or before you were 11 or 10, like there's something in there that you learn to adapt in a certain way that's not working for you anymore.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 27:39

Stacy, before we get on to how you actually healed, I just want to ask you, looking back now, because at the time we don't realize what our self-defeating beliefs are. We all have, you know, probably around 2 or 3 big ones where Every time they're triggered, the old tapes start playing and we run into that old behavior. Looking back now, can you identify what the self-defeating beliefs that you ran off your entire life were?

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 28:09

Yeah, I think one was, it's my job to protect everyone.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 28:13

Okay.

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 28:14

That's a really tough thing to do. Wow. Okay. That's a really big, hard one to do. And I found myself two summers ago in deep breaking mode. Of that one just 2 summers ago, you know, 50 years old, right? Because I didn't realize I was still carrying that piece and it was starting to interfere with my life. So I think it was, it's my job to be the person that everybody can rely on for protection and to get people to do the right thing. You know, I can feel it. I was wearing that and I had to put that cape down. And I think honestly, the other really big core belief, and it's funny because I've actually never really put this into words until you've asked me this, is that I don't have anybody I can rely on that's in a, that's older than me. I mean, I had one or two people, but it wasn't my parents. I went from being able to rely on them very young to not being able to rely on them overnight. Because they weren't making decisions that were in my best interest. I became hyper independent, hyper independent, which if anybody works with trauma knows it's very much a trauma response. And it comes from this idea of I can only rely on me.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 29:37

Yeah. And when, and when we peel that away with clients, what sits at the base of that is I'm alone.

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 29:44

And that was my trauma. Yeah. There's no question about that. And for me, that's, there's no question. Yeah. Yeah.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 29:50

Thank you for sharing that. And, and I wanted to, I wanted to talk about that because I do a lot of work in this area and when people can get hold of this stuff and actually understand, then that, that knowledge is the start of healing, isn't it?

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 30:08

Uh, 100%. Yep.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 30:11

So how, so, so you had this massive breakdown. It almost sounds all also like chronic fatigue syndrome if you were to go to a doctor and be diagnosed.

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 30:21

Listen, I've been diagnosed already with two autoimmune conditions. That does not surprise me.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 30:26

Yeah. Yeah.

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 30:27

You're in that zone, you know.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 30:30

So you've talked about the physical and behavioral signs of that depression, and I think it's really important that you. Talked about the fact that you didn't feel sad because feeling sad is, doesn't necessarily mean you do or don't have something going on. It's looking at the overall picture of what's happening. So after that, what actually was the pivotal moment that led you to get help, uh, or find the right help?

Twenty years of talk therapy that didn't shift the core

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 31:00

The right— that's the key, right? So like I had mentioned, I'd been in therapy starting in 1986. So I was 15 years old at that time until I was in my early 30s. And at the end of that 20-year journey, I was frustrated because I was still walking with tremendous anxiety and panic or that fight or flight in my system. But I was being told by therapists, I don't really know why you're here because I had done so much work. I was telling them everything. I, in the sense that I was, I knew it, I knew it all. I had a good understanding of my system and what was happening for me emotionally. I knew my story. I had done so much work up to this point. They basically were like, there's nothing really I can do for you, was basically the message.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 31:51

Yeah, that confidence facade as well, because you'd been used to the spider and covering everything up and fixing everything.

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 31:57

100%. I masked very well.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 32:00

Yeah.

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 32:00

And so. That felt me leaving very powerless and helpless and hopeless with no agency. Right. And a lot of what I was hearing was, listen, you come from a long line of people with anxiety and depression. It's no wonder that you have it. It's kind of your birthright. Here's some Zoloft and off you go. And, you know, the reality is, is that the Zoloft did feel better. It did give me a, it didn't, it did help me grow my window of tolerance in the sense that it, it allowed my nervous system to take a breath.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 32:36

And some people very much do need medication.

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 32:40

And I did, I, it expanded the, my capacity to breathe. I wasn't even breathing. And when you can do these things and you can rest your nervous system and you can rest and digest and get into that space. You have more capacity to sit back and look at everything. The thing is, is that for me in particular, because I wasn't getting to the core, it was like putting a bandaid on a bullet wound. So at some point that medication stopped working for me. After that, what I'm gonna call first nervous breakdown, I had a second one about 10 years later in my early 40s, and it was very situational to the sense that there was something really, really big happening in my life. And part of it was a natural response to the event, but mine was a very exaggerated response to the event, right? Because this was touching on everything, my safety, my security, where I stand in my family, um, having a parent, having a parent abandon me, feeling betrayed, all these wounds just got nailed with this one huge event. And my nervous system just absolutely collapsed. My problem was at that time I walked with such a deep gratitude practice. So I was very confused because in my mind I understood it all, but my body was not connected to my mind. It was completely disconnected. So I was having 2, 3 week-long panic attacks where I couldn't get a breath and it would last and last and last. Which if anybody's ever experienced that is very debilitating. So I decided not to go back to a therapist and I found, um, a clinical hypnotherapist who wasn't a therapist, but trained in hypnosis and was much more of, more of a spiritual coach and a spiritual guide. And it was life-changing for me because it was the first time I ever got to do inner child work at the subconscious level. And it allowed me to see and heal parts of me that, that were this elevated anxiety in my system. And that began the journey for me of doing very, very kind of different work. So I got very, very curious about all of this. I started diving very heavy into Brené Brown's work. The work of Don Miguel Ruiz and those two books and those two authors really exposed me to a whole other area of healing I didn't know I needed and I didn't know existed.

You're not broken, just running an old playbook

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 37:24

You know, I have a saying on my website when you first get to it that says, you are not broken. And I feel so strongly about it because that's a language that a lot of people use. I'm so broken. Nothing will work for me. I'm unfixable. And I'm always so empowered. I'm always so passionate about telling people to be careful about the language that they use on themselves, right? This is the Four— First Agreement of be impeccable with your word from The Four Agreements, even with yourself. When we tell ourselves that we're broken, when we tell ourselves that we're so damaged, we can't be fixed, or that we need to be fixed even.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 38:03

Yeah.

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 38:03

Um, it sends a message to yourself of not having any agency over your life. And what I'll say to everybody is you're not broken. You're just still running your life through the playbook of adaptation that you had to create at a certain time, that it's just not relevant anymore. And if you can find the right person to work with to recognize, how did I learn to cope? That was brilliant at the time that's maladaptive now. And if I can recognize that, who can help me look at those behaviors, put them to rest, thank them for all the work that they did for us and give us a new set of behaviors that we want to walk into this next chapter of life with.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 38:50

Thank you. Very powerful words. And you are just a true testament of hope to anybody out there that's, uh, has experienced trauma, um, is going through trauma, and wonders if they're ever going to get through trauma. So thank you so much for sharing with us today.

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 39:10

Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 39:16

We hope you've enjoyed this episode of Katsugi Heroes. Please like and share share the show to your friends so we can get this out to even more people.

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 39:24

If you have a story you'd like to share with us, please reach out using the contact details below.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 39:30

And join us next week for our next hero's story. Until then, keep being you, and remember that we are all heroes in our own unique way.

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 39:44

Only when it's broken Only when it's broken. When it hits you in the middle of the night and the truth burns so bright. Only when it's broken. Only when it's broken. Take pride in those cries.

Kerrie Atherton (Host) · 40:12

'Cause it's only for tonight and then you rise.

Stacey Uhrig (Guest) · 40:18

Only when you're broken. Only when you're broken. Only when you're broken.

Unmasking Trauma and How Rapid Transformational Therapy Helps with Stacey Uhrig | Kintsugi Heroes

Overview

Chapters

A day in Stacey's practice

The divorce in 1983

Swinging from home to home with no anchor

Twenty years of hypervigilance

Four ways the body responds to threat

The fighter, not the pleaser

Anxiety so thick she couldn't learn

The first nervous breakdown

Twenty years of talk therapy that didn't shift the core

Finding the clinical hypnotherapist

Peace is not the absence of storms

You're not broken, just running an old playbook

In Stacey Uhrig's words

Stacey Uhrig, today

Common questions

Is this a true story?

What organisation produced this?

What did Stacey Uhrig learn from this experience?

What would Stacey Uhrig want listeners to know?

What helped Stacey Uhrig most along the way?

What would Stacey Uhrig tell someone going through something similar?

Transcript

A day in Stacey's practice

Support

After Africa with Michael Stewart (Part 2 of 2)

Sergeant Pepper and the Art of Helping

Forty Years of Trauma and Travel to Escape His Father with Endre Hoffmann

What topics does this episode cover?

The divorce in 1983

Swinging from home to home with no anchor

Twenty years of hypervigilance

Four ways the body responds to threat

The fighter, not the pleaser

Anxiety so thick she couldn't learn

The first nervous breakdown

Twenty years of talk therapy that didn't shift the core

Finding the clinical hypnotherapist

Peace is not the absence of storms

You're not broken, just running an old playbook