From Crisis to Compassion; Reclaim your parenting story with special guest Sally Betters

we did it. We hit number one international bestseller with our second no problem parenting book, resources and stories that create confidence and connection. Make sure you head into the show notes and grab your Kindle or paperback version today. Hey guys, I'm Jackie Finnaman. I'm a parenting strategist and coach. And after 30 years and with more than 50,000 hours of experience working with kids and families, I promise you there is a solution for your parenting challenges.

The key to this parenting gig is to guide and lead your kids with less fear and more confidence. You don't have to know everything to be the expert of your child. So let's get to the root of what is going on in your home with you and your kiddos. And then we're going to prepare for the worst and change the conversation.

Kick fear, worry, and guilt to the curb. You are exactly the parent your child needs and wants, and you are more capable than you sometimes give yourself credit for. I launched the No Problem Parenting Podcast to reach more parents and share the Cliff Notes version on how to solve a variety of parenting problems in the moment as they are happening in your home. Problems are a part of life and they're meant to be dealt with and overcome. So I teach parents how to turn any problem into a no problem. In this podcast, you're going to find down to earth, practical, fun, no nonsense, and sometimes best backwards tips and ideas for how to navigate this thing we call parenting. You're going to learn about resources on a variety of parenting topics and increase your rockstar parenting moments. Since starting the podcast in April of 2021, we have over 150 episodes, more than 140 guests. So go back and look through the episodes and find the topics that resonate with you. And if you want to fast track to my solo episodes,

you can head on over to noproblemeparents.com, click on the podcast tab, and you'll see the 15 episodes or so that I've done just with my favorite techniques and talking about no problem parenting, attachment disorders, remembering the pause, making it right technique, some of my favorites. So you can head on over to noproblemparents.com and find it there. And you can subscribe to our emails as well. As always, please follow reviews, subscribe to this podcast. We are already a top 2% podcast. The more followers and subscribers and listens that we get, the higher up we rank and the more parents that we're able to reach. All right, for now, let's get into today's topic and meet our next guest. Digital Audio Health by Cymotrax. All right, welcome back. No problem, parents. Today, my guest is here on a mission to help women who have been involved in sex trafficking, who have experienced trauma, domestic violence. Sally Betters is here with me today. She is a compelling author, inspiring speaker, and a certified trauma, grief, and story work coach. She wrote her first book on childhood trauma called From Crisis to Compassion in 2018,

and since then she has written 13 children's character building books. Sally has been facilitating groups of women who've been sexually abused through wounded heart classes based on Dr. Dan Allender's book and workbook for the last four years. Her passion to do whatever she can to eliminate child sex trafficking motivates her to donate the proceeds of her books, her coaching, and speaking to an organization that is fighting this horrific evil in several countries. We're going to have links in the show notes for all of you to check that out. Today, we're going to talk about how we parent is a direct reflection of our own story, and we cannot take our kids any further than we are willing to go ourselves. I am so honored and excited to have you on the show today.

Welcome, Sally. Thank you. It is my joy to be here. I just want to get right into it. And I want to ask this question that some people might be wondering after that introduction.

What do you mean about us parenting from our own story? Oh, boy. Well, I definitely can speak from experience. I have two wonderful sons and four adult children through a blended marriage.

and I've seen over and over that we are constantly living out our stories for good and for bad from either the trauma or abuse or neglect that we faced as a child if it's not dealt with and handled with care and tended to by those who are loving around us that it does come out in different ways as we become adults and I was also a single mom for a season and definitely felt the overwhelm of that. And a lot of my insecurities and poor coping mechanisms came out during that time of seeking other things for comfort to try and check out that life was just hard and the pressure just never seemed to let up. So I totally relate to moms and single moms, married, divorced. I've been all of those and also been in a wonderful marriage where there is support and kindness and having a spouse who's willing to listen to your stories and to see what triggers you. So I feel like parenting is really an opportunity to see our wounding as well as grow and mature and be that representative for our children. When you talk about parenting from your own story, the good, the bad, the indifferent, when we're living our story, when we're in our story. We don't always see the effects, the negative effects maybe that we're having.

And so how do we even start identifying that? Yeah, such good questions. First of all, we have to look back and we have to ask ourselves some questions of, do I have stories of harm? Do I have memories that were really difficult for me that I didn't know how to process? And I just stuff them. Having parents that weren't unavailable maybe, or siblings or step-siblings that were cruel and that left scars, emotional scars from name calling or comparison. A parent having a favorite in the family that wasn't us and how that impacted our relationships with others.

When we start looking back at our stories, and one of the beautiful things in story work is we get to write it out, just a page or so to share with someone who's trained. And in that process, we get to have another set of eyes on our story of the things that we minimized. So I have a learning disability that doesn't go away and it's dyslexia. And so many times I was criticized for being a slow reader, not just by my siblings, but with my classmates and teachers, because there was not an awareness of it at the time.

And so those things tend to leave marks and scars that I just can't do this. I'm just not good enough. And we see the other end of the spectrum as adults. We see that we can do things.

We can write books and speak and coach. But yet it still pops up its ugly head at times where we feel we do start to compare ourselves to others and feel like, oh, I can't do that. and it's because of that mindset of those tapes that keep playing from our childhood and there are other areas of harm and it's important to note that trauma um stays in our body and actually 70 percent of trauma is housed in our bodies and 30 percent in our minds and so our body keeps score oh i love i was thinking that as you were talking the book is behind me on my on my shelf the body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. I don't know if that's what you're referencing.

Oh, definitely. And I'm a living example of that. I've been paying a lot of money to my dentist recently because I've struggled with TMJ all my life. And it was because of secrets I held as a young girl from sexual abuse. And I was told that never to tell. And so I started clenching my teeth about four or five years old and it never went away. And I never knew how to stop it, even though I would pray and say, you know, please help me. I can't keep grinding my teeth.

And yet as now an aging adult, those fractures are showing up physically in broken crowns and fillings and having to have those replaced because there's story work that was never done. and the trauma of it. I just kept holding in. And so others may be out there relating to migraines or backaches or other issues of where they hold onto their trauma.

So these are very real things. And it shows up very much physically. You know, you reminded me of my good friend, Mirelda Rodriguez. She's been on the podcast as well, but she does grief massage because we do, We harbor grief, we harbor trauma, regret, fear, all of that stuff in our bodies.

And so she has a practice that helps us to release that through grief massage. Tell us a little bit more about story work and how you even begin to write that story. You know, you start simply. You just ask yourself, what is it that comes to mind?

and what memories are there that I can't escape or that are triggered by movies, especially nowadays when movies are so violent and they reveal sexual abuse, domestic violence in just regular programming, not just even movies, but daytime soap operas or a series on Netflix. You see, there's a lot of abuse that happens even between men that can trigger things of how we've been treated or things that we've experienced that we've hidden because we minimized it.

Maybe it was even being at a party in college where somebody who was drunk groped you and you just attributed to the fact that they were just drunk. But it's still, it leaves scars that are frightening when you are walking through a parking lot or you are at a party again with people you're not familiar with. And so these things don't go away until we recognize them. You first have to recognize it, accept it, and then move in the direction to start getting help.

And it's not therapeutic help because what I do is not therapy, but it is life coaching. And life coaching is different from therapy in that therapy looks back a lot in the past where life coaching looks at the present and moves forward. So that's an important distinction for people to say, well, are you a therapist? No, I'm not. I'm a certified life coach.

Well, and when we think of our own parents, you know, we start to see examples of parenting from their stories. You know, where do we kind of begin to that process of sorting out our own stories so that we can, you know, go further in emotional intelligence than our than our parents did? And again, we don't know what we don't know. So this isn't to place blame or shame on our parents.

But, you know, just really kind of figuring out how we can how we can do it different. Yes. And your question is very interesting and I appreciate it because many times I hear people say, oh, I had a great family and my parents made mistakes, but they didn't know better and they didn't have the education. And all those things are true, but it doesn't negate the fact that we need to name truth.

And just like there have been many leaders in our country who've done wonderful things, but have also made atrocious mistakes. We see the good and the bad. Also biblical leaders who did amazing things and yet made horrific mistakes. We see David in the Bible, who was a brave shepherd warrior and who killed Goliath and moved in many areas of strength and yet was tempted by lust and had an affair with Bathsheba, had her husband killed and tried to suppress that and was eventually confronted and was able to share what he had done. So we don't disregard all the good because people do make mistakes.

So that's the kind of the tender area for many people is they don't want to acknowledge the fact that, yeah, maybe their parent did have an anger problem and screamed at them a lot, Or maybe their parents were physically abused themselves and didn't hesitate to slap them or push them around when they were frustrated. Doesn't mean their parents didn't have other qualities that were good, but we have to acknowledge what did happen.

And in our parenting, when we are triggered, when we've provided something to our child for the third time and they throw it on the floor and say, no, this isn't what I want. Do we see red and just want to, you know, want to spank them or slap them or do something that we really don't want to do? Because that's not the appropriate response. So what is there in us that is being triggered in those moments?

And are we taking the time to take care of ourselves? um recently dr sandra dalton smith wrote a wonderful book uh called sacred rest a recovery for life and renew your energy and restore your sanity and there are seven types of rest that we can engage in to to take off the shield of stress that moms wear every day from a litany of things that they're doing uh for their children their husbands themselves and then a job if they're working full time, plus managing a household and cooking and cleaning. It's an ongoing list, as we know. But there's physical rest. We know that's both active and passive physical rest.

There's mental rest, where we can pause and take deep breaths of breathing. There's a certain type of breathing we can do to relax our bodies. Spiritual rest, where we know there's a greater purpose than our day-to-day, whether we find that through prayer, church, or community engagement. There's emotional rest where we share with safe people in a healthy community.

There's sensory rest where we reduce outside stimulation. And lots of times that's our electronics, our phones and iPads and TV going on, those things that can be minimized. And there's just two more there's social rest where we surround ourselves with life-giving people and then creative rest which is where we bring beauty in any form whether you're making handcrafts writing books like you do Jackie like I do writing poetry whatever it is that you're using your creative gifting because we've all been gifted with gifts and they're ways to not just keep doing, but being. That's so interesting. The podcast guest that I just interviewed right before you today sparked that thought in my mind as well, that we are not human doings,

we are human beings. And so often we get caught up in all of the to-dos of the day or the week or the month, especially as parents. And we're going through the motions and we're getting all done the best we can and we're forgetting to pause and really pay attention to our own needs in all of those different areas. So who are you supporting? Who comes to you?

You know, how does somebody know that they should reach out to you? Yes. I believe it's because these thoughts, memories, triggers aren't going away and they're realizing that their decision-making has been impacted by them, whether it's a choice in a mate, whether it's a way they parent, whether it's their own personal relationships, if they're desiring more and they don't know how to get there and they just want to begin somewhere by starting to talk about their life and have a safe, objective place to come to, I think this would be a great start that they can contact me via my website. And as you mentioned in the introduction, I do have a passion to do whatever I can to stop child sex trafficking. And my husband and I started praying about this 15 years ago. And five years ago, I wrote my first book on childhood trauma called From Crisis to Compassion, and then went from there with an online course and a work book and then did the children's character building books. And there is another place that's very innocuous to start. And that's just going online on Amazon and looking up Sally Better's author's page. And you can buy one of my children's books, Summer 499. And they're just sweet little books. They're good, healthy stories. And in the back, there's the questions that the parents can ask the child. And it's an interesting perspective because by asking your child the questions, it's really not you, it's the author asking. So the child doesn't clam up as easily.

And a quick example is my first book in the Sarah series of Sarah's Amazing Animal Adventures. She is an only child and she's lonely and she's desiring a little dog so badly. And her parents finally give her this gift for Christmas when she's old enough to bear the responsibility. And at the end of the book, one of the first questions is, have you ever been lonely?

like Sarah was. Well, that's not a common question that we ask our children. So for a parent to ask their child that question, they are asking it from the author's perspective. And the child is more ready to engage and say, yeah, you know what, I have been lonely. And, you know, I didn't know how to put to do. I want friends, but I just don't have friends or whatever it is. And it starts a conversation that the parent realizes, wow, I never knew that. And I'm, I'm relaying this because I've had parents come to me and say, thank you for putting those questions in the back of the books.

Yeah, that's so powerful. And, and you're right. Sometimes if we come right out and say it, our kids may not, they may respond the way they think we want them to respond. They may protect us with their response because they don't want us to feel bad or to get mad or to be sad for them.

And so I love that as they're looking at the pages of the book, you're asking the questions and it doesn't seem as vulnerable or as personable to have to share with the parents. So that's really brilliant. It gives me goosebumps to think about a parent reading that to their child and a child opening up where they otherwise might not have done that. So your book from crisis to compassion, your children's books, you know, you're really helping any parent who is feeling like exactly like you said, like, I'm just not where I want to be. I'm not who I want to be.

I feel stuck. I don't even know how to, to get out of this, maybe the shame or the guilt that I'm feeling. I don't even know necessarily where it came from because I hear this a lot too. I had a good childhood. I hear that from people. I had a good childhood and X, Y, and Z happened on a regular basis. And maybe you're just really resilient and maybe you just are a very compassionate person. And so, you know, you've, you've dealt with and overcome a lot of the traumas or experiences you've grown up with, and it's okay to name those and to identify those and to heal those wounds. Right. Yes. So good. And that is so true because we don't know oftentimes why we do the things we do, why we're people pleasers, why we are rescuing others, why we're codependent, why it is that we can't allow other people to hurt and feel their pain, that we always want to fix it for them. And when we trace back, we realize that we've been doing that for a long time because we don't really want to face the pain ourselves. And that's something I see quite often that many people don't want to face other people's pain and even allow them to sit in their grief.

And it's, you know, it's grief that's common. Somebody's spouse passes, we give them condolences for the first few days, and then we forget about it. And we move on because we don't want to deal with their pain, because it's going to trigger a loss in our life. And so we most of us live that way. We live isolated and insulated from other people's lives. And then we don't have the deep relationships we desire. And so this is a loaded question. I think many people can relate to exactly what you just said. We have such sympathy, for example, when somebody loses a loved one, or when we've learned of a hardship that they're going through, a devastation, a sickness, whatever it is, what can we do to open up that conversation? What are some things that we can do to make that not feel awkward? Yes. I love this because grief is such a huge, huge issue in our culture. And it's one that's the most avoided. And I just read something that said grief is such a hallmark of good mental health. And when we grieve is where we're able to let go of the things we're holding on to and remember and glean back the great memories and what we've learned from that relationship, good or bad. But when somebody is in grief, we don't need to have the answers because they don't need answers. They need presence. They need somebody to just call and say,

How are you doing today? And if they say, fine, everything's fine. Then we can just say, you know, I'd love to bring you dinner. What night's best Tuesday or Thursday and just be proactive and let them pick. Because when we ask or say things like I'm here for you, just call me. They're never going to, they're never going to call. Yeah. I've experienced that as well. And you see it all over social media, like, Oh yeah, you got this. I'm there. Yeah. Praying, you know, nobody puts it into action. Very few, I'm not nobody, but very few people will really put it into action and say, can I take your kids to the park this weekend and give you a day to relax? You know, can we bring a meal over and play bingo or a game or something and just give you a sense of family,

of community, that you're not alone. Whether it's a woman whose husband has passed, whether it's a mom whose child has just gone on to college and she's an empty nester now and she's trying to redefine her life. Wherever it is, people are grieving everywhere. We don't have to turn on the news to see it, but we have to be willing and open. But the first part is if we haven't dealt with our own story and our own pain, we're less willing to step into somebody else's.

absolutely and i know i've done this with friends and friends have done this with me over over the years or sometimes it's just to be just to be just to be present to to sit with the the person who's experiencing the grief so that they don't have to do it alone and that can feel so uncomfortable um and it's exactly why you said because we probably have some unresolved grief or trauma going on in our in our own life and we don't want to have to face it either yeah yeah so interesting sally the other thing i love about your website sallybetters.com is that you know people can get your books there they can sign up for your course but really one of the first steps for somebody who might be in an unhealthy relationship or you know maybe they don't know for sure if they're involved in an unhealthy relationship or if their relationship is healthy, they can take a quiz. It's absolutely free. We're going to have a link in the show notes for that as well. You have an assessment quiz that's going to help determine if you're in an abusive relationship. Sometimes we think abusive relationships are those where you're getting smacked around. That's the obvious one. There's more than the physical abuse. And so the questions that you ask are going to reveal some patterns of abuse and bring awareness to characteristics that can develop into, you know, danger for you and your kids. So tell us a little bit more about

why you developed that assessment and what parents can learn from that. Well, in writing my book, I saw that there are a lot of women, professional women, very capable women, mothers who do an outstanding job every day, who have been in relationships or are currently where the lines have been crossed because they don't have boundaries and they don't know what abuse looks like. And sometimes we need to see it. We need to see, just like we do if we have a medical condition, we jump on WebMD and we put in the symptoms and say, what's this about? And it tells us these are the symptoms for this disease. And then we know, okay, I need to make a doctor's appointment. Well, if we don't know the symptoms to an abusive relationship, many times we can get sucked in. And then our boundaries start to slide because we think, oh, he's so kind. He brought my kids gifts, but boy, he's so controlling. He's moving this relationship very quickly.

And he doesn't want me to see my friends or family anymore, but he's really good to me. And he paid my electric bill. And so we go back and forth with, well, there's good things about him, but he says he doesn't like my parents or he doesn't like my sister because she wants to know how I'm doing and doesn't want me to talk to anybody on the phone. And so you start seeing some red flags that many times we overlook because there's good things there too. And we need them.

It's if we're struggling financially, emotionally, and if we're dry because we don't have healthy people in our lives. And so those things start to, or boundaries start to slide and more and more things start becoming evident. Then he starts hitting your children without asking or asking about discipline and what you prefer for discipline. Or he starts doing things where he's restricting your money access or places you can go. And you start seeing the encroachment that grows and grows. And the thing is with abusive relationships is they are cyclical.

I've worked in a domestic shelter. That was my first job out of college in Los Angeles. And I actually witnessed a young boy slapping his mother and his sister because he had seen that done in his home. So we see the cycle of abuse. But we also see that once the abuse starts, there's a um you know fight flight or freeze of how we're going to respond and many of us freeze and we get scared and we don't know what to do so we just don't say anything and i hope it's going to go away and so you can start seeing the escalation of this um and it's it's very sad there's a lot of things that are combined with this and sometimes it has to do with being neglected or abused as a child. And those issues never got dealt with to realize that we are valuable and we are worth more. And we don't need to put up with those kinds of relationships.

And so those are some things, but as they take the quiz, they're going to see some eye-opening questions. And I've worked with women who have done amazing things in their lives and are incredible professionals. And they have told me, I never knew this was a symptom. Yeah, it's amazing. I love that you developed the quiz because in addition to, you know, discovering some of these things about your relationship for yourself, it's also a proactive tool that's going to help avoid violence, but also develop a safety plan.

Maybe you didn't even know you needed. Yes. And thank you, because that is part of the quiz is you need to have a plan. If things get worse and they escalate that you can get out and you have a place to go to, you have somebody to call and you have someone who's aware of what's going on in your life.

So you're not isolated and basically muted so that no one can hear your voice. Right. So this is just absolutely incredible. I appreciate the resources that you offer through your books, through your course, through your program and and this quiz.

And I'm going to encourage everyone to check out SallyBetters.com and learn more about you and to reach out to you. It is another option. Sometimes therapy is what you need and that's the right fit for you.

And sometimes you're like, I don't know yet or I don't want to go back and rehash all the things. I just want to move forward. And and really that's what the life coaching that you provide does. It helps people say, OK, where am I now? Where do I want to be? How do I get there?

And you provide that support and really roadmap primarily for women to do for themselves and for their families. So I'm just so grateful that we got connected. people can support Zoe International by working through you because all of the revenue that you make through Sally Better's coaching is donated to Zoe International. So tell us a little bit more about Zoe. Yeah, Zoe is an amazing organization. My husband and I heard about it about 17 years ago, but they've been around a lot longer than that. They are present in five countries in Thailand, where they started, in Japan, in Australia, in Mexico, and in the United States. And we had the pleasure of being able to see the groundbreaking home that was built just outside of Los Angeles. And my husband and I saw it when it was completed and saw the amazing resources they provide from education in the community, prevention of being there after rescues are made by the sheriff's department or the police and providing a safe and welcoming home that has educational support, mental and emotional support and spiritual support if the girls are interested. And it's just a beautiful property that provides a safe haven with equestrian therapy,

with a garden, with a swimming pool, with basketball courts. I mean, just so much goodness that's there for them. So we really see it. We've been there, we've participated, and we know our money's going to a good place. I love it. That is so commendable that you guys are doing that. Well, Sally, for the moms listening out there who are maybe struggling, who are in overwhelm, whether they're in a marriage, they're in a blended family, they're raising kids on their own. You know, you being a single mom with two active boys, Like you said, you went through that phase for a bit.

You can relate to them. And just kind of that feeling that you're in over your head. There's hope. There's a way out of that.

So I encourage you, mamas listening, to reach out to Sally. Learn more about her and how she can help you. And thank you so much for being with me today on the show. It was my pleasure.

Thank you. All right, parents. That's it for today. Make sure you head over to the website, noproblemparents.com.

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