A New Approach to Hope and Healing for a Nation in Crisis

KATHLEEN: Hello everyone and welcome to the journey of an awakening spirit. This is Kathleen Flanagan, your host and we're streaming on the bold Brave TV Network. The purpose of the show is to help you realize that you are not alone and that you are in control of your life.

KATHLEEN: It doesn't matter where you came from or what your circumstances are. We've all experienced pain, suffering, hurt, abandonment, loneliness, and hopelessness. The show is to hear is here to help you turn those dark moments around and create a whole new year. Despite your success, you have felt lonely, angry, frustrated, or even suicidal.

KATHLEEN: Do you long to be supported? Recognized and respect for who you are not? Just for the awards and accolades on your walls. You don't want to be known, identified or remembered in a way that feels fraudulent because you achieve things out of obligation and not passion.

KATHLEEN: Do you find yourself sitting quietly at lunch listening to your lights, listening to what lights you up? Only to feel shame, fear, frustration, and resentment, your inner turmoil and limiting beliefs surface, making you feel not good enough and afraid of doing something different.

KATHLEEN: You've read the books, attended the seminars and practiced, practiced new concepts and principles. Yet you still find yourself in the same rut, the lies you tell yourself, perpetuate a cycle of disappointment. You say you'll change, but your self-limiting beliefs keep running the show, creating a self fulfilling prophecy.

KATHLEEN: As a certified coach, I empower you to become your authentic self, my soul journey program aligns you with your true self and guides you to find your soul vision, helping you discover your purpose in life. I provide tools to step you into your true magnificence and remember who you are.

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KATHLEEN: Each week. We start the show with the sound of tuning forks, bringing in love, happiness and balance to set the tone for the show and bring out the best in both myself and my guest. Let's begin.

KATHLEEN: Phyllis Leavitt graduated from Anna Coke University with a master's degree in Psychology and counseling. In 1989 she co directed a sexual abuse treatment program called Parents United in Santa Fe, New Mexico until 1991 and then went on into private practice full time as a psychotherapist.

KATHLEEN: She treated children, families, couples and individual adults for 34 years and have worked extensively with abuse and dysfunctional family dynamics, their aftermath and some of the most important elements for healing. She has published two books, a Light in the Darkness and into the fire.

KATHLEEN: As a podcast guest. She would like to talk about her latest book America In Therapy, a new approach to hope and healing for a nation in crisis. She lives with her husband in Taos New Mexico and is retired from psychotherapy psychotherapy practice, focusing on writing and speaking. Welcome, Phyllis.

PHYLLIS: Well, thank you so much, Kathleen for having me here with you today.

KATHLEEN: Oh, you're so welcome. I wanna start the show that a little bit about your journey of becoming an awakening spirit because I did read your book and, oh my God, it's just that good. So, I want people to know a little bit more about you before we dive into your book.

PHYLLIS: Well, thank you so much. And I really appreciate that because I've definitely been on a journey and as a child just to sort of put it all out there. I, early on I had abuse in my childhood that I completely buried. I was very young. I think it was probably preverbal. I just buried it.

PHYLLIS: And as we, most of us know in the field of psychology, the effects of being harmed by other people don't go away, they can just get buried and go underground because we're just doing the best we can to survive. But how that manifested for me was, it was as if I just always felt like there was something wrong with me. I didn't fit in. I didn't belong, I wasn't like anybody else and I didn't know why.

PHYLLIS: So I was very much a mystery to myself. And I grew up in a time where people didn't talk about feelings, nobody talked about emotions or psychology was not even a topic, there was no language for what I was experiencing. And so as a result of that, I just felt like there was something intrinsically wrong with me and I didn't know if it could be fixed.

PHYLLIS: But, it became sort of my lifelong longing to just to find some kind of truth. But even more than that, to find a connection to, I would say very simply a connection to love, which I was not feeling and didn't know if it was possible actually for me.

PHYLLIS: I just became a really good student. I studied and I got A's and that was my way of feeling like I had value. Unfortunately, I loved that. I loved learning. I loved reading. I loved writing. I started writing poetry when I was 13, I believe. And the very first poem I wrote, I had that connection.

PHYLLIS: I had this magical connection to my deepest self, I would almost say divine love because it lit up my whole being. And so writing becamema place that I turned to find that connection and sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. Most of the time it didn't. But I kept trying.

PHYLLIS: Anyway, long story short, I joined a spiritual group when I was in my twenties and I got married, I had three children and everything kind of came crashing down. I was in a very dysfunctional relationship.

PHYLLIS: I was very, very depressed and I started to remember what happened to me and for the first time in my, and so I wanna say this because it really was an important part of my journey. I had this very profound realization at one point in the very beginning of that journey.

PHYLLIS: And so I had been in a spiritual group, I was doing a spiritual practice. I definitely had some experiences of deep connection and awakening. And they were always followed by sort of a plunge into darkness. And the way that I interpreted that was the light was lighting up the darkness that I needed to heal. And I kind of knew that.

PHYLLIS: And so I had this moment where I realized that I felt so unloved by people that I was trying to get God to love me. And when I had that realization, I knew that I had to heal something in my own heart and that I really wanted to be loved by people. And God can't be a substitute spirit and all those things are freaking amazing and beautiful.

PHYLLIS: But there was healing to do in my ordinary life. And that was when I went to therapy for the first time and was the first time I realized that your early conditioning has everything to do with how you feel about yourself, your coping mechanisms, the beliefs you have about who you are, who you can become about relationship about women, about men, about it all.

PHYLLIS: And it was a journey, I feel like I really went into the underworld and I felt was scary. It was I always say it this way, it was scary. But the quest for the truth about who I really was and what had happened to me was so such a driving force that nothing could have stopped me.

PHYLLIS: I would share that in that process, I really did contact my most essential self. I called it my soul because that's how that was the language that came to me.

PHYLLIS: And, then my first two books, a light in the darkness and into the fire are all about that journey. And the contact I made with a great deal of divine wisdom and guidance and deep understanding of my journey really through lifetime is what came to me.

PHYLLIS: And so that was profound and then, I had a private practice.

PHYLLIS: And I worked with hundreds of people and children and families and couples and individual adults. And I started to have quite a long time ago, I started to have this realization that the family dynamics that I was working with that are that either, are healthy and really help us embrace our true worth and self and our gifts.

PHYLLIS: And our imperfect ability to relate well with others that unhealthy family dynamics and abuse and neglect. Not are, are not only happening widespread in America because I saw so much of it in my practice, but that we live in larger and larger family systems.

PHYLLIS: A school is a family system, a community is a family system. A place of business is a family system, a house of worship is that operates on a family system dynamic for better or for worse. And so does the government.

PHYLLIS: And so I took that lens of family systems and I looked at our country through that lens to identify what I think isn't working and causing so much divisiveness and violence today and what the whole field of psychology has to offer that could really help us heal as a country as well as as individuals and in our homes and in communities. So that's kind of my story in a nutshell.

KATHLEEN: Ok. So we have four minutes before we take a commercial break. So what I wanna do is just talk a little bit about what you, when you went into that deep dark place in the recess of your soul to find where you came from.

KATHLEEN: Because when I wrote Dancing Souls, it was the same thing.

KATHLEEN: It was a trilogy of that journey of going into the deepest recesses of myself because I like you have been abused on so many levels in my life and it's just recently and I mean, seriously this recently finding my voice almost to the point that it's like this week that there's like this whole new part of me that's opened up in a way that I didn't when I thought I shared it.

KATHLEEN: But I'm finding I never went really deep into some of the deepest fears and feelings that I've had.

KATHLEEN: Like, there's this whole new thing that's happening and I just wanted to like, get some of insight because it sounds like as we heal through our process and we start opening up and feeling safe and secure and love and all the things that we do that there's like a whole new layer that seems to come, the more we open and share and come out with the world.

KATHLEEN: And I'm wondering if that's something that you felt and feel based on how you wrote your book?

PHYLLIS: 0h 100%. I mean, before I did any of that deep inner exploration, I couldn't talk about feelings. It felt like my throat was closed. It felt like there was an injunction against it was sort of like my whole psyche would just lock down even though I would have something to say and something I wanted to say, it just couldn't come out.

PHYLLIS: And really when I was in some of that therapy, I actually did a lot of screaming and I think that opened my throat up. It was scary because it sort of came out of my body without my conscious decision for that to happen.

PHYLLIS: But I think it started and my body would shake and my teeth would chatter. And I began to know that when that would happen for me, that I was at the truth that my body was releasing something that it had stored for so long and had kept such a lid on in order to protect me from the pain that was in there.

PHYLLIS: And then I was releasing it and I understood that you sort of like there's an intuitive sense, I think sometimes of what's actually going on, even though nobody explained that to me, I just knew that.

PHYLLIS: And I'm sorry, I lost the thread of what your original question was.

KATHLEEN: Oh, no, that was it about just that as you continued, your healing process is basically what it was, is as you continued your healing process. Is that what led you to write the book that you wrote?

PHYLLIS: Are you talking about my most present book or the first one? Present one? Yes. Oh, absolutely. I mean, absolutely. So what happened in my healing process is I really did make like incredible, very auditory contact with my highest self and I would hear messages I would write them down.

PHYLLIS: And that's what my first two books are largely about. And they're also highly autobiographical about what was going on in my life at the time.

KATHLEEN: Ok. Can we take go ahead and take a quick commercial break and then we'll continue on with this because I know we're gonna go down a really great rabbit hole.

PHYLLIS: Oh yay.

KATHLEEN: Welcome back everyone to the journey of an awakening spirit. This is Kathleen Flanagan, your host and we're streaming on the Bold Brave Network and I have Phyllis leave in the room with us today and we are talking about basically childhood traumas, what that's done to us, how we, we had to learn to find our voice, what we went through on healing and Phyllis is going to go down and talk about that a little bit more.

KATHLEEN: And then how that moved into her book that she wrote about America because I believe that her book, I don't know how we as a nation can do this other than we do our own healing. But it gives us a sign that there's a way that America can heal.

KATHLEEN: And I really want to dive into the correlation of us individually in our healing process and what Phyllis went through and how maybe we can take that into helping our country and it's not just our country, it's all countries, it's the world. So Phyllis, I'm gonna turn it back over to you to pick up where we left off before the commercial break.

PHYLLIS: Well, what I would want to share is that one of the greatest gifts of the psychotherapy that I did myself and that I learned how to do as a practitioner myself with so many hundreds of clients over the years is that we plumb the depth of our early conditioning.

PHYLLIS: What happened to us that set us up to believe and feel and behave the ways that we do and all of that can be applied to a nation. A nation also has a history.

PHYLLIS: The people in that came here had a history that they brought with them, they brought their unhealed wounds, they passed them down and they formed part of the way that we behave as a nation, the policies, we've endorsed the kind of pursuits that we've gone after and all that.

PHYLLIS: So for me going down in a safe place, a safe person and beginning to really remember the traumas that happened to me and release the pain from my heart and from my body.

PHYLLIS: And release some of the incorrect thinking that was associated with that, the negative beliefs in particular that I adopted about myself and other people opened up something that was buried even underneath that, which was the connection to my true self, my essential self.

PHYLLIS: And so I see our spiritual pursuits and the pursuit of mental health and wellness and healing as intricately related to one another. And I've seen that happen for many clients that as they peel back the layers of the faulty conditioning they received, they were able to contact something very deep, very essential.

PHYLLIS: And what I will say is in my experience that deep essential self is always more loving. It's more patient. It's always more tolerant, not perfect because we're still human.

PHYLLIS: But, it opens up a source of love that I know that I wasn't able to access before I did some of that healing work. And I could feel that I could feel my, the ways that I was cut off from love and belonging and cut off from giving the love that I knew I was capable of giving.

PHYLLIS: So that's just kind of what I wanted to say about that. And then, as years passed, I did a lot of this kind of writing and getting guidance and sharing that with a number of other people and then writing my first two books.

PHYLLIS: It was actually a very specific moment when I was in my own kind of made up way that I meditated with a lot of breathing.

PHYLLIS: I did a lot of work with my chakras which I had learned from my own inner guidance of how to work with the chakras. And it was in a moment of that kind of meditation that I heard a direct guidance saying to write this book.

PHYLLIS: And it was so powerful, the message came in such a way that was so powerful that I knew that I was going to write it. And I began with, yeah, go ahead.

KATHLEEN: No. What I wanna say is, and I think this is part of what you were saying when that message came in because how you open the book with the Statue of Liberty in your office was beautiful because I want people to have that experience of what that because what that did, it moved me because you think that she's an inanimate object, but she's not, it's Lady Liberty.

KATHLEEN: She's real, she's a real angel and she's here to protect and guide us. And when you brought her into the therapy room where she came to you and how that unfolded was so beautifully orchestrated. I want you to share with people about how that came about and how the book formed around it because it was so beautifully done.

KATHLEEN: And I think that's what touched my heart the most was Lady Liberty was asking you for help. And when an angel asked us for help, there's a reason behind it. So I would love for you to go a little bit deeper into that part of how this started for you as well.

PHYLLIS: Yeah. Well, one of the things that I want to say about the whole book and this part really is part of that is that I really wanted what I wrote not to be an academic book. I wasn't writing for psychotherapist. I wasn't writing for the healing community alone. I mean, certainly I love it. If anyone who is a psychotherapist reads the book, but I was really writing it for the man on the street.

PHYLLIS: People who don't necessarily have any training in psychology, don't know about psychology, don't know anything about family dynamics or interests, psychic, the workings of our psyche inside. So I wanted the book to be very personal and one of the ways that I and I was working with a wonderful developmental editor, let me say, I'm not gonna take all the credit for the fact that Lady Liberty is in the book.

PHYLLIS: Because it came out of actually one of our coaching sessions that I wanted the book to be really personal. And I felt like Lady Liberty is such a powerful symbol of freedom and welcoming and, she stands at the harbor, right? And and I think we have lost touch with her just as we've lost touch with ourselves, so many of us.

PHYLLIS: And just as I think our country has lost touch with what it means to be a nation among nations in a world where we need each other so desperately. And so she became a symbol for me of America and a person, in therapy. And she seemed like the perfect symbol of that. And so I just talked to her periodically throughout the book.

PHYLLIS: And, I end with a conversation with her that actually when I read the end of my book, I still cried. So that's really how that came about. And I'm very grateful for the collaboration of my mind and my editor's mind because it really, it just produced this gem and it speaks to, it really speaks to, we don't do this alone.

PHYLLIS: You know, we're better in collaboration with other people. We don't know at all. I don't have all the answers. I'm just offering the ones that have come to me through the work that I've done.

KATHLEEN: I agree with what you said because you really did bring you into the picture. I mean, you really did open your heart. You did expose some very gut wrenching experiences in your healing process that I truly identified because I went through that too. I went through the screams, I went through the anguish. I went through, just that moving through that self loathing and why me and why am I here?

KATHLEEN: And this isn't what God wanted and why do I feel worthless and full of shame? And, I didn't even do anything, you know, what I mean, I was born and I'm like, I don't understand but, that's some very, very, very hard work. And I met this woman in Cabo a couple of weeks ago and she came up to me and she asked me, well, what's your trauma?

KATHLEEN: All right. If you knew who the woman was, it would make perfect sense. And so I told her, and then she sat there and told me what her trauma was, which was, well, you would never know that because she's so shut down and closed and isolated. But she has these big dreams, right?

KATHLEEN: Very big dreams. And so we did this particular exercise in the seminar and we were in a meditation, then we came out because they told us what they wanted to see their vision in three years, right?

KATHLEEN: And we go in this meditation, we come out now I just had this major breakthrough birthing releasing in my own personal where I went back to first cause so I'm an emotional mess at this point. I'm just like a wide open person and everybody says all their happy, happy, feel good shit to her.

KATHLEEN: And I just looked at her and I said, if you want this book to be a success that you want it to be, then you need to come from your heart and get out of your head. I didn't say that, ok, I didn't say that. That was channeled in and I proceeded to tell her. So that's why she asked me what my trauma was.

KATHLEEN: And so when she told me what her trauma was, I said, well, you have to do it. She says, well, I'm a trained therapist and I'm thinking, oh, I have somebody for you to meet. I thought you immediately because you're making a difference because you've allowed people to come to you. She doesn't want people to come into her.

KATHLEEN: She wants to stay in her head. You're never going to make the change without that. So I commend you as a trained therapist that you're supposed to keep your stuff inside and bottled up and be about your clients.

KATHLEEN: You still shared that as you're going through your clients, what your internal stuff was that came up for you during that process, which I know had to be incredibly hard to be dealing with somebody's having this fit of rage, of release of intense abuse coming out and here you are having to keep your walls up as you're going. Oh my God, this is me. You know what I mean?

PHYLLIS: So, you know.

KATHLEEN: I would love for you to address that a little bit more too because I mean, you wanna help them but you have to help yourself at the same time. And so, I don't know how to say this, but I mean, based on what she said and what you did and how you brought 100% of you to your work was so inspirational, especially coming from the field that you do.

PHYLLIS: Well, I really appreciate that. Thank you so much for saying that and I will share that in the beginning. It was extremely difficult and I really had to consciously put some kind of safe container around my own inner world when I worked with clients and I just learned how to do that the very best that I could.

PHYLLIS: So that was not easy. And it's probably not optimal but it just was the way that it was at that time. But there was a true gift in it. There was really a gift in it that has never left me. And that is that I know what that darkness is like. It's not a theory to me. It's not something I read about in a book.

PHYLLIS: I know what it's like to feel trapped in your own inner darkness and really wonder if you could ever get out. And when I first went to therapy, I really didn't think I could, obviously, some part of me had hope or I wouldn't have gone for help, but it wasn't so conscious. I really felt like I'm going to be the one person who doesn't make it and it feels that way.

PHYLLIS: It's so overwhelming. And so the gift was that I get it. And so I felt like it made it very accessible for me to go into that darkness with other people, not feel afraid of it and totally know and trust that they could come through the other side because I did and the more I emerged, and again, like you said, healing is a lifelong journey and I will always be on that journey.

PHYLLIS: And it's a beautiful journey, but I definitely emerged from the worst of the darkness and it gave me so much compassion and it gave me so much patience because I think a lot of people feel like they and I felt this way, I felt like I need to hurry up.

PHYLLIS: The therapist is going to get impatient that I'm not making progress faster. Or why is she going back into that tearful place? Again, I needed all that time. I needed all that patience and, and it made me more patient and loving and, compassionate with other people.

PHYLLIS: Because I've been there and I think that's part of the gift that we really need individually and as a society and really as a human race that there is more and more of us who understand the depth of what trauma does to people so that we can actually be there while they make their own emergent journey.

PHYLLIS: And the more people who do that, then the more people are available to have that kind of compassion and understanding and not judging the process. I mean, I was the judge of my process nobody else was, does that make sense? So that it was really a gift in all of that?

KATHLEEN: Yeah.

KATHLEEN: No, I get that because I think about, the grieving process when a loved one passes parent, whatever, spouse and people have a tough time handling the grieving process and I know that I've talked to people where, when their parent passed years and years later from a friend of theirs and they're like, get over, it just need to deal with it and then all of a sudden their dad dies or their mom dies and then they come back years and years later.

KATHLEEN: I'm so sorry because until you have that experience. But what can we do as a society that gets people to start becoming compassionate again? Just because they're a fellow human being? You're hurting? I'm hurting. When do we start taking that and, becoming something better and just holding space for people?

KATHLEEN: So, what if we're uncomfortable with it? That's the one thing when I was younger. If friends of mine, parents or husbands or whatever died, I held space. I didn't know what I was doing back then. I had no clue what I was doing.

KATHLEEN: I would just be with them and then when my mother died and people were just being with me, it's like, oh my God, I so get what I did and why I did it, I didn't understand it, but it's, you don't need to speak. You just need to feel like you're not alone and in that kind of desperate anguishing pain, and then what did somebody say? This is an opportunity for you to break your heart open more?

KATHLEEN: You know, like let's spin something positive about this tragedy that happened to us. You know what I mean? So, I mean, if you want to talk about that or how, what you think we can do with our government or how we as an individual can make that move, move into getting our governments to start doing something more than this hatred.

KATHLEEN: I mean, I'm sorry, this thing with Trump the other day that just was a real mind screw because it's like my God, we can't even do a presidential election with somebody being killed and not to go political. But I know that 20 year old kid is not the one who killed president or attempted to assassinate Trump.

KATHLEEN: I already know that I know that, they can't even correlate anything with him. And then why was he only 400 ft away? And our government did nothing to stop that back then because they could see it. So, you know, there's this whole thing of why is our government allowing this? So their agenda comes up.

PHYLLIS: Well, in my book, what I'm really trying to do is trace some of these, the severity of, like I would say that's the tip of the iceberg, right? The mass shooters are the tip of the iceberg. The rapists are the tip of the iceberg. The people who do terrible acts of extortion and greed and, suppressing and discrimination and all of those things that we see every day on social media.

PHYLLIS: They are the tip of the iceberg of what I'm calling massive family, mental unwellness and dysfunction in the family of America. And I think there are several really big points that I make in my book, which if you, I know you read it. So you're aware of them that I don't think are common knowledge.

PHYLLIS: And I think one of them is this that the people who are the most symptomatic, whether it's in a family and it's the kid who is setting the house on fire or running after their siblings with a knife or they won't go to bed at night or they cry all the time or they wet the bed or they are failing in school or they get into drugs, young, the kids in a family who are the most symptomatic and it could be a spouse also, are calling for help for the dysfunction and the pain that's not being addressed in the family system.

PHYLLIS: They're the symptom bearers for family pain. And we have to know that the most acting out among us are the symptom bearers for the pain in the family of America and really the pain of the human family. And what's unfortunate. And what is such a great cause for alarm is that some of those people are holding office, they're in positions of power and they can act out their unhealed wounds on masses of people.

PHYLLIS: And, one of the things that I spend some time on in my book is what are the dynamics of an abusive or neglectful family? And so I'll just say a couple of them briefly here so that you can see the correlation between the individual family and the individual and the macrocosm of a nation. And really, it's all over the world, but I talk about America because that's the country I'm familiar with.

PHYLLIS: And that is that people who are in positions of power, like an adult in a family who has power, especially over their children and sometimes over their spouse, if they are themselves suffering from the unhealed wounds of family dysfunction and abuse, and they have identified with the aggressor and become like the people who hurt them because part of what we do is repeat what we know some people become like the aggressor and some people become passive and are easily manipulated and hurt again.

PHYLLIS: If you have a parent who has identified with the aggressor and becomes abusive, they justify what they do. That's hurtful. I hit her because she failed in school. I molested her because she wore that short skirt. She asked for it. I beat him because he didn't come home on time. You know, there's always a reason and abusive governments do the same thing.

PHYLLIS: We discriminate against those people because they are inferior because they are lazy because they are entitled because they have a different color skin because they have a turban, whatever it is, we target certain people and we tend, whether we're, it's one person or government or community, we tend to target the most vulnerable.

PHYLLIS: The people who are either the most vulnerable and have the least ability to fight back effectively or we target the people that we really think are a threat to our holding the position of power. So abusive people and abusive governments silence those who try to tell the truth, try to get help, try to change the system to a more humane one. And these are all psychologically understandable.

PHYLLIS: But let me just say I go into great detail about what some of these dynamics are and they're scary and they're widespread. But I don't do that to point fingers of blame at anyone because the world of psychology is not about blame. It's about healing, it's about healing our wounds and it's about healing our relationship with ourselves and with other people.

PHYLLIS: And if we stay focused on blame and hatred and hating the haters or however we say it, we've missed the boat because then we're just perpetuating the same dynamics that generated divisiveness and violence in the first place. So the purpose is more like a diagnosis. It's like you go to a doctor and let's just say you went to a doctor and the doctor says you have cirrhosis of the liver.

PHYLLIS: You don't have a bad liver, your liver was fine. But you now have cirrhosis of the liver because of your drinking and your liver has become symptomatic to tell you that you are not taking care of your body and you have to stop drinking.

PHYLLIS: And the most symptomatic people among us, whether they are in a family or a school or a business or a corporation or a government, the most symptomatic are telling us that there's something in the family system of whether it's large or small that is causing mental unwellness is causing people to become violent, is causing people to become discriminatory or hateful or withholding or addicted.

PHYLLIS: And, that I don't think is common knowledge at all. I think we're still hearing the rhetoric that says there's just bad people out there and we have to go get them and get rid of them. And psychologically, we know that's not the truth.

PHYLLIS: There's no baby that's born a bad person. There's no baby that's born a rapist or a murderer. Something happens to that beautiful innocent child that sets them up to be completely maladaptive in a social world.

KATHLEEN: So let's take this to the bullying because, that's a big thing that goes on, on, on social media, on TV, all sorts of things. I mean, they promote all of this. And so let's talk about that because there's one other I want to talk about too, but I'll bring that up in a minute. But what do you think about?

KATHLEEN: I mean, I think our government is a bully on many levels. I've always thought that because we seem to bully everybody and now we're kind of being is coming back at us now, which would make sense because we're mistreating as far as I'm concerned, other people in the world.

KATHLEEN: So why shouldn't we be mistreated? So let's address bullying because I know that would be one of those symptomatic things. So I would say that the bully is something that happened, if a father beat on him because he wasn't standing up, I'm assuming. But I want your expertise in what creates the bullies out there.

PHYLLIS: Yeah, I think it's hurt. I think it's some kind of. So, one of the things that I always say because it was one of my big succinct lessons from being a human being in recovering myself and, working with so many people who have been hurt.

PHYLLIS: Is that the best food for human beings is love and belonging and safety and feeling valuable and a commitment to resolve conflict without violence. And when people are fed that kind of healthy emotional food, they don't become bullies, they don't.

PHYLLIS: Bullying is a product of some kind of mistreatment at human hands and it can be, it's not necessarily one thing. It could be that there is an overtly abusive parent that beat a kid or sexually abuse them or just said horrible things to them like you were never born or I'm gonna send you back where you came from or you're not worth anything and no one's ever gonna love you.

PHYLLIS: And believe me, people hear these things all the time. This is not like an anomaly. This happens a lot. And I've heard hundreds of stories like this.

PHYLLIS: So some kind of messaging whether it's behavioral or emotional or mental or all of them together from people, especially people we depend on which is often our parents or siblings or close family and community.

PHYLLIS: If, children receive terrible messages about who they are and their value, they tend to be angry and hurt and some children become passive as a result of that because they've learned that fighting back does no good. They don't escape anything or maybe it even brings more abuse on them. And some children identify as I said earlier with the aggressor.

PHYLLIS: And they become like the aggressor and they look for someone to pick on and, it's a dysfunctional way, but it's an understandable psychological way of trying to discharge their own pain by getting somebody else to feel it instead of themselves and they don't know they are doing that, it's all unconscious for the most part.

PHYLLIS: And then if you have someone who is identified with the aggressor and who gets in a position of power, whether it's in a church or a business or a school or a community activity or even a friend group or a government, then there's a likelihood that they act out those same unconscious impulses on the people that they have power over and we see this and it's extremely dangerous.

PHYLLIS: And so I think when we look at the number of people, not just in America, but all over the world who do get into positions of power and then kind of enroll the people who are akin to wanting that kind of power.

PHYLLIS: Then you see this mass mistreatment of whole segments of the human population.

PHYLLIS: And one of the reasons why I think this information psychologically is so invaluable and so urgently needed today is because 100 years ago, somebody could come up and shoot you or, today we could destroy life as we know it with the weapons of mass destruction that we've created.

PHYLLIS: If they are in the hands of people who have that much rage and that much mental unwellness that they're willing to kill untold numbers of people to satisfy their own need for power or wealth or whatever it is they're after.

PHYLLIS: And we're actually seeing that, my husband and I were watching a documentary last night and there was a little clip in the documentary of a video that was taken of Nixon talking to Kissinger and talking about, did Kissinger have the wherewithal the balls or whatever to use nuclear weapons?

PHYLLIS: Because he was thinking about doing it and he talked about how many people would kill as if it meant nothing.

PHYLLIS: It's horrifying.

KATHLEEN: Well, he was evil. That's all I have to say about him. He was a very, very, very evil man and I mean, I go down my own set of beliefs on all of that kind of stuff anyways. So our time is starting to run out.

KATHLEEN: So what do you think that we could do when we come up with someone like a bully or what is something that we could do that's productive that might help them is it just to show them love and compassion even though they're in the middle of an abusive tantrum. And what can we do?

KATHLEEN: So we feel powerful and then to help them because they're not going to get the help on their own unless something unfortunately tragically may happen to them to do that because I don't think that 20 year old kid deserved to die. That I don't think he attempted that. It's come on, we gotta stop with this killing our youth.

PHYLLIS: Well, again, I just want to reiterate that the whole reason why I share anything that I share is not to blame or hate anyone because that just gets us more blame and hate. It really is to talk about the need for healing and use the tools that the best psychology has to offer to help us heal.

PHYLLIS: So, as you said earlier, we begin with ourselves, whatever you know, we can do to heal our own wounds, recover our own essential self that is essentially good, essentially loving, essentially patient and kind and co-operative but powerful. Our essential self can also have a powerful voice.

PHYLLIS: I wanted my book to be a powerful voice of speaking truth to power, with love, with care with saying, there's a good reason why you have the symptoms that you have if you're the aggressor as well as the person we identify as the victim. There is a good and understandable reason why you have the symptoms that you have and the cycle of abuse can be broken by many things.

PHYLLIS: But we start with ourselves, like you said, heal our own wounds. But there are many people who are not invested in that. You know, today, there are many people for whom that still seems like a weakness or they just don't have any access to their own vulnerability.

PHYLLIS: So, one of the things I say is talk to the people that you think can hear, start with the people that if you really want to spread the word of love and peace and safety and kindness and compassion for human beings. And a word of really like, let's really try to get along here because that's what we all want in our own lives.

PHYLLIS: Then start with the people that you think can hear, but listen to them, listen to their pain, listen to what they really want, listen to maybe their story about why they have the anger that they have or the beliefs that they have. And maybe all you do is listen.

PHYLLIS: What I have found is that the more I have worked on myself and I'm not perfect at this and I don't know anybody who is, this is a training, I'll be doing my entire life. But the more that I've worked on my own healing. The more I can tolerate just hearing something that I don't agree with or that is even upsetting to me.

PHYLLIS: For the purpose of like, often people who are very aggressive and are out to rile other people up and get them angry and get them into a fight. They want to fight, that's unconsciously, they're driven to provoke other people into acting out so they can try to dominate them.

PHYLLIS: And if you don't react from that place of defensiveness or offensiveness, often it just deescalates the argument all by itself because there's no hook, you didn't grab the bait and they're just kind of left having to reflect on themselves if they can.

PHYLLIS: But, I'll just say real quickly, my book was designed to share so many, so much of the knowledge that I have received so that people could begin to be educated. I think education changed my life.

PHYLLIS: And so, I think I'm one voice among many, many, many voices of trying to wake us up to what the roots are of what's really happening and not just react to the surface level.

KATHLEEN: So how can people get a hold of you Phyllis?

PHYLLIS: Yeah. The best place to get a hold of me is my website www dot Phyllis Leavitt.com.

PHYLLIS: I'm on all the social media, Facebook, linkedin. I have lots of videos on YouTube. I have blogs and articles on sub stack.

PHYLLIS: And, also if you go to my website, I offer a free PDF, if you sign up for it a free PDF on the basic elements of resolving and repairing a relationship after there's been conflict or while there's conflict. And, that's really the nuts and bolts of how we can begin to apply some of this in our own lives.

KATHLEEN: Well, thank you so much, Phyllis. This was very educational and it's a sign that we do have control and power and that there is even in the psychology world that there are ways that we can take control. And like you said, if it's just talking to somebody or not reacting to somebody who's trying to trigger your buttons because that's a hard thing for most of us to do.

KATHLEEN: But if we can stand in that place of power, that's the best and most effective way because I've seen it, I've done it myself.

KATHLEEN: I've seen it with other people and I think that's the main thing is we really do have to dial in on who we are, how we think, how we feel, be in empowerment with ourselves, heal whatever we can possibly heal. And you're never, ever, ever powerless by doing that. You are. That is the greatest strength you have is to ask for help because it's the only way out of the muck.

KATHLEEN: Yeah. And I just want to thank you so much for this amazing insight. And I do highly recommend everybody to read her book. There is so much insight given inside of her book as far as what you can possibly do. There's hope that you're not alone.

KATHLEEN: You see so many different walks of life coming through her in her book that it doesn't matter what the level is either and it didn't matter what the age was, it was the same thing, it was hurt, they were suffering, they were in pain and she provided tools to help them get out of that and become healthy, whole human beings and we all have that power.

KATHLEEN: So again, thank you Phyllis so much for being here and I really do appreciate it.

PHYLLIS: Thank you. And I just want to say the title of the book is America in Therapy. So, thank you and thank you for having me and thank you for all your, your great words of wisdom.

KATHLEEN: Thank you. You're welcome. So, if you found any value in our show today, I would really appreciate it if you would send the link on to your friends and family. And if you like the show, please subscribe and like the show and then that way you can be notified of up and coming episodes that are coming in.

KATHLEEN: If you're struggling with anything that we talked about and would like to know, get more information on how I can support you into becoming your authentic self or go through healing because I have a lot of tools in my tool belt as well as Phyllis. I am sure she is more than willing to speak with you as well on what she can do and what I can do.

KATHLEEN: Reach out to me at Brave TV, at Kathleen M Flanagan. Com. My books, Dancing Souls, The Call The Dark Night of the Soul and Awakened are on amazon.com, as well as Kathleen M Flanagan dot com. And please visit my website at Kathleen M Flanagan for the list of services that I do offer.

KATHLEEN: And there is a free three minute destress meditation that is absolutely free to you to download and don't forget about awakening spirit using the coupon code Brave TV for a 40% discount as well as grandma's natural remedies.net for the 20% discount by entering Brave TV. And I will see all of you next week at 4 p. m. Eastern Standard Time and from my heart to yours. I hope you have a fabulous week.