Break Free from the Pain of Sexual Abuse & How to protect our children with special guest Rachel Grant

Digital Audio Health by Cymotrax. Welcome to the No Problem Parenting Podcast. Hey there, parents. Did you know there's a way to transform your kids' behavior?

That's right. I'm a parenting coach and strategist, and we're going to seek first to understand why your kids are behaving the way they are, so we can really go deeper with your own behaviors and what is happening in your relationship with your kiddos from the inside out to take the actions and steps necessary to problem solve and transform your parenting so that you can become the confident leader your kids crave you to be.

I promise you there is a solution for your parenting problems. Hey there, I'm Jackie Finnaman and after 30 years and more than 50,000 hours of working with countless kids and families ranging from the severe behaviors that required out-of-home placement to the, ah, she just doesn't listen to me anymore behaviors. There is a solution when you, the parent, feel confident. When you don't feel the need to rescue your kids and you aren't losing your cool and yelling all the time, your kid's behavior improves and your kids trust you.

They trust that no matter what they're going through, you are gonna help them get through it. No Problem Parenting supports and teaches parents how to be the best leader and advocate for your child. If you feel like no matter how nice you are or how strict you are, your kiddos are still struggling, it's time to get off the struggle bus and become the confident leader your kids craving to be. Join me on this journey of behavioral strategies and resources so that you can feel empowered as a parent again and turn your everyday parenting problems into no problem. I'm so excited that Leslie Doris introduced me to Ms. Rachel Grant because I've been looking for a resource for parents who have either been sexually abused in their life early on or they suspect or know are helping support a child who has been sexually abused. So I'm really excited to welcome Rachel Grant to the show. Thank you, Jackie, for having me here today.

My pleasure. And Rachel, you are the owner and founder of Rachel Grant Coaching, and you're a sexual abuse recovery coach. You have a master's in counseling psychology, and you're also the author of Beyond Surviving, The Final Stages in Recovery from Sexual Abuse. Based on your educational training, study of neuroscience, and lessons learned from your own journey, you successfully used the Beyond Surviving program since 2007 to help survivors of childhood sexual abuse who are beyond sick and tired of feeling broken and unfixable.

You help them break free from the pain of abuse and finally move on with their lives. So let's start with how did you arrive at where you are now and specializing in sexual abuse recovery coaching. Yeah, thank you. Well, like so many things in life, unexpectedly arrived.

So I really, in growing up, thought that I would be a high school English teacher. That was really my path and my journey, what I wanted to do with my life. And then I graduated college with my degree in English. and but along the way as I was working with high schoolers I was like uh-oh these are no thank you and so I started working with elementary age children and when I moved back from Chicago to St. Louis I started working at a private elementary school and was really enjoying that but also found like my time in the after-school program really fulfilling and I loved this space where I was kind of just nurturing the kids and what's going on in your life and kind of the social emotional development. And I had a real kind of like rock your world moment when I realized,

oh my gosh, I don't think I actually like necessarily being in the classroom. I think I love more, you know, being with the kids. But, you know, I had been given the opportunity to develop the curriculum for their computer education program. They didn't have anything in place. So that was a really great challenge for me. And then I moved to California in 2004 with my then husband. And I, you know, was at another moment of, well, what am I going to do with myself? And I actually decided to become a nanny. I was like, this would be great, right?

Snacks, naps, what, you know, play with the kids, but also that kind of like social emotional development. And, you know, when my marriage ended, and I found myself at a really important crossroads. And I was looking at the 10 years of that relationship that had been very physically abusive and emotionally and verbally abusive. And I knew, like, I was 28 at that time. And In my early 20s, 23, 24, I had started sort of kind of working on the abuse that I experienced at the hands of my grandfather when I was 10, 11, you know, 11 and a half.

And therapy had, you know, done some work and I, you know, began to understand some of the things. But at this moment when my life felt like it was really falling apart, I was sitting in my new apartment with just a sleeping bag and a lamp, you know, those kind of moments where everything is just stripped away. And I just had this moment, Jackie, where I thought, oh my gosh, like if I do not get my ish together, can we curse? I didn't ask you that question, right? If I didn't get my shit together then, you know, like I was just going to spend the rest of my life just kind of surviving and just continuing to repeat these patterns and just miserable and suffering. And so that really lit a fire for me. And that's when I started getting really serious about healing from the sexual abuse I experienced. And so I started reading everything that I could.

And then I was actually working through a workbook myself. And but at the same time, using myself as a guinea pig and thinking, well, what are the other things that are missing here? Because I had really hit a point in my therapy where I was like, look, I've talked about this up one side and down another. I have all the great little insights. I'm very, what I call book smart about trauma, right? I know all the lingo. I understand the connections. I can tell you why I do a lot of the things that I do and react the way that I do in my life. But I don't see the moment of what do I actually do about that? And the mentors that I kept, you know, were finding would keep putting that back towards me. Like, well, what, how, how would you think you would approach that? Or what would you think? I'm like, dude, like, why am I paying you money?

You can't guide me out of this. If I knew the answers, I wouldn't be here. And so I said to hell with that. I am going to figure this out. And so that became my lens, every single thing.

I can't trust people. Okay. Why? But then what do I do about it? All right. I have all this shame and feelings of worthlessness. Why? But then what do I do about it? I like 2000, late 2006 or so, I had really shifted quite a lot in my own life. Things were, it was like the trauma. I often describe healing from trauma as like shedding the layers of the abuse and the layers and the lies.

And I felt like I had kind of come into this new sense of self. And I just had a thought like, well, what if what I'm doing for me could work for other people? And so my friends often joke that I kind of always do things in the opposite order of what's expected. So I went straight to working with people. I found some women in my church community. I went to my care pastor and I was still in church at the time and he supported me in putting together a group.

So long story short, these women come in, I'm like, you're totally Guinea pigs. Let's just see what happens. I'm going to do my very best not to like cause harm right here, right? Like let's have just open conversation about what's working, what's not. And it was a really satisfying experience. And it really showed me that I was onto something because all of them walked out of that experience going, wow, like I've been spending 20 years trying to shift this. And in these eight months I got there. So Jackie, that's what really convinced me to take it more seriously. And I went and did my master's in counseling psychology, right okay let's get some education like let's get some meat on the bones here and you know make sure we're not gonna do do harm and I continued developing the beyond surviving program I was writing the guidebook the kids were napping I was writing the guidebook you know it was this kind of overlap and then um and then yeah it all came together you know I've really spent a lot of time with the program thinking about what we need to do when in order to maximize healing and minimize traumatization. That's one of my beefs with therapy that oftentimes people step into therapy and they're asked right away to do a full inventory. Like tell me all of your stuff and everything that happened before having onboarded any like nervous system regulation tools or grounding tools or releasing and working through the shame that they feel about that

experience. And so that's one of the reasons why also because I have a background as a teacher, right? That beyond surviving is a curriculum and like a very step-by-step process. That's all about teaching people. So, you know, let's focus on this. Let's onboard these tools and skills.

Like every single session ends with, okay, here are your tools, here are your skills, here's what you're going to be practicing and actually applying in your life so that we can really start to see those shifts that people are longing for. Well, that's awesome. And I think I I did the same thing with when I rebranded to No Problem Parenting. I did a pilot course first, you know, and I basically said to the parents and, you know, business owners, companies, people that would be likely to refer.

And I had each group of 10 for just four weeks to go through this. Give me the feedback. Tell me what you liked, what you didn't, what you need more of, what was working. And I think that's so smart. And so it's so awesome that you had friends in your church community that were willing to do that with you.

and you could really, you could learn from them. And of course you went and got the credentialing. I did not. It's all right. Letters after your name mean very little at the end of the day.

It's really like, do you have the juice or not? And you know, if you make a difference in people's lives, they don't care. They don't care about any of that. No, that's absolutely true. Absolutely right. But I do agree to not do any harm. And as a parenting coach, I make sure that if there is something I'm like, I was in the counseling field for 20 years. I've got a pretty good radar of this is deeper this there are some deep ones that need to be resolved so we refer uh then to therapy but the difference in coaching is more about we're not going to go back and process all the trauma and all the things that happen to you right we're going to be looking forward yeah i mean i think that there's a little bit of both in beyond surviving i mean we certainly want to take a look at the experiences of abuse but the lens is less of you know just the space of naming it and expressing it, which I think is an important stage in healing because most people who've experienced sexual abuse are first in the stage of denial, right? Which I actually, I call that the victim stage is because we're not empowered. We're still in many ways, victimized and feeling victim me, if you will. And that is often from the place of, I don't want to look at this.

I don't want to touch this. I don't want to like, I'm fine. I'm good. Like in that whole, like kind of in a boy, I was in that stage from, you know, 11 to 22. Right. So I get it.

But then there's this moment of acknowledgement where we say where we have most of the time, there's a life experience or an event that makes us say, well, this thing that happened actually is impacting my life. And that little bridge of acknowledgement moves people into the survivor stage, where therapy is a beautiful space during that time, because that's the moment where you really do just need to start talking about it and acknowledging it and naming it and beginning to understand the role that it has played and the impact of that abuse. And then when you get into beyond surviving, the shift of focus is we're going to look at the trauma and we're going to talk about the trauma, but only through the lens of what does that tell us about why you're experiencing life the way you are in the present day? And then what do we do about that? Right?

So yeah, there's that shift of focus where people hit a moment of enough is enough. Okay. I need to become what I call street smart about this. You know, what do I actually, how do I actually respond and how do I actually address these symptoms and resolve these symptoms?

And so coaching for me was the modality that supported me. And first of all, being able to be a little more coach driven than client driven. Therapy is very client driven. The client comes in, sits down, whatever is on their heart, mind, let it out, pour it out, pour it out.

And the therapist is holding space for that sometimes might direct, you know, or offer some redirections, but for the most part, just absorbing, offering reflection and, you know, insight, asking great questions. So coaching allowed me to say, look, this is our path. And you don't have to worry about figuring out how to get from A to Z. We're just going to take the steps.

It also allowed me to share more of my story more authentically because in those early days, what I kept hearing back was that the tools were amazing. The content and understanding the neuroscience of trauma was super helpful. But it was the stories that I would tell about, yeah, like I totally lost my shit and like threw Tupperware all over the house. Right.

Yeah. And being able to name those experiences and it was a way for people to see like, okay, this person gets it. I've been there, done that. And that kind of rapport and connection is what I really love being able to create, which I can do more so in coaching than I could in the context of therapy.

So there's a time and place for both. That's not a, or it can be. Yeah, exactly. But I agree.

that's one of the things I love about coaching as well is that I can say, okay, here's what I want you to do. Try bring back next week. It worked. It didn't what was, you know, all those things and then be able to say, okay, let's pivot or let's try again. Yeah, that's it. That's it.

Yeah. If people are curious and want to, want to know more about kind of those stages of healing and exactly that, like what are some of the goals and what are the best kinds of support? they can go to rachelgrantcoaching.com checklist and get that little guide because it's a nice way to just kind of break it down it's not that we are like we can actually be in more than one stage in our lives like we can be kind of in denial about one piece and be working through something and even be self-resourced in another but it's a it's a great framework to help people understand because a lot of times people who have experienced sexual abuse they don't exactly know where to start. And then sometimes there's misalignment between where they are in their healing and the kind of support they get. And so they can end up being re-traumatized. So that's a little resource I put together to help people navigate that a little bit more easily. And then you also have the guidebook that people can grab from the website as well. Before we get into all of those resources or talk a little bit more about those, I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the things that parents need to be aware of when it comes to protecting their kiddos from abuse?

You have some great tips for that. I'll say that there are kind of some main things to really pay attention to. Number one is that most trauma occurs in the context of one-to-one interaction. There are circumstances and situations where we have, you know, a group context where we have multiple adults in a situation, but most of the higher percentage of trauma happens when there's one-to-one. And so we statistically know about 80% of child sexual abuse happens in one-to-one situations. And so what that means is one of the best ways to minimize and reduce the risk of abuse is to minimize and reduce the occurrence of one-to-one situations. That's one level. So for example, my colleague Toby Stark and I, we do a program called The Empowered Parent. And if people are interested in that program, they can email me about it. I can get you on the wait list.

We do that program about once a year. And one of the stories that she shares that I really love is that her child was a musician, right? Learning piano. And at the school, right? At the little conservatory where she was taking the child, they have those, you know, those individual rooms, right? Where kids can go in and practice their instruments, soundproof. So, but the, she asked, okay, so when you're doing lessons, you know, where are you going to do those lessons?

and when it was found out that it was in these kind of it closed off no windowed you know kind of spaces she was like my child taking my child somewhere else like they didn't have any accommodation or any alternatives so she didn't go there and and didn't leave the child in that situation for example right makes sense it totally makes sense and it's tough like it's not that we're man ever, ever, ever going to be 100% at this. Yeah. But when you are, when you have awareness about that, right, then it's just about, can I, what can I do to try to minimize those interactions? Because every one of those that I, you know, get off the table is a moment where the child is going to be safer or protected. Right. The other thing is making sure that you have an empowered child, but you also have to be an empowered parent, which is why we call the program, the empowered parent, not impaired child, because ultimately the more comfortable you are as a parent talking about abuse, talking about sex, talking about body safety, the more empowered your child is going to be and the more confident they're going to be to navigate these kinds of situations. So, you know, sending messages like your body belongs to you, you have the right to say no to unwanted touch. You know, here's how you tell an adult, it's never your fault if something happens. And just making sure one of the things that is important is when you're teaching body

safety to avoid language like good or bad, or at least make it more nuanced. Because one of the challenges of sexual abuse is that the touch is confusing. It can feel good. And so when the child has been taught, you know, you don't want bad touch, which is why unwanted touch or touch that makes you feel uncomfortable or confused or scared is better language to use to avoid that trap of the child kind of going, well, this felt good. So maybe it's not abuse or maybe it's not bad or wrong, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. Also tell parents oftentimes to the language of even saying sometimes when somebody touches you and it's uncomfortable, they'll tell you not to tell. They'll tell you to keep it secret or private, or they're going to hurt you or they're going to hurt your siblings or your parents or somebody else. And that's, and I always say having those conversations in a very matter of fact way, not so cautionary because it's delivery is everything. And so you're doing the dishes and you're like, Oh, I was just talking to my friend And she was saying that her cousin had this, you know, and it just make up, you can make it kind of up if you don't have a realistic one, but just matter of factly sharing with that and being like, oh yeah, did you know?

And I thought, I never told you, you say to your son or your daughter, I've never told you about how this can happen and how that person can make you feel like you're wrong. And you did something bad and scared to tell somebody else. Can you believe people would do that? and it's amazing how many clients I have had over this last 30 years when we've done that with kids that'll come and say but that's what this person did or and they're very still very scared nervous to tell but they tell for sure for sure yeah that's it it has to be normalized like we can be just like you asked you know what happened at school today how was you know your lunch what did you learn being able to have these conversations and I would say that's the other important thing. Like you want to have, like you can do body safety at the infant stage,

toddlers, high schoolers. And that's the important thing too. It's like in the empowered parent, we offer a workbook that helps people make sure that they're doing this conversation like every six months. It's not something that you want to say, well, I said it once and therefore we're done because kids will hear it differently. Yeah. Each time they'll pick up something like one of my clients, children who she's, she'd been doing this work, you know, with the child for years and saying the things like this can be any person, including me. Parents are sometimes scared to say that, but it's actually important. If I do anything, if your dad does anything, if your siblings do anything like anybody. And it wasn't until like three years later of hearing this message that the little boy was like, wait, it could be anybody. It finally clicked, like really clicked in. And so that's why, you know, having the ongoing conversations. And of course the conversation evolves as your children grow and the things that they might be navigating or challenging, you know, faced with when they're, you know, high schoolers versus, you know,

when they're toddlers. I've had clients too, where the kids came from an abusive situation. They are now living in a new home or the abuser is out of the home, but the siblings end up perp and on each other. And so the parent will say something like, well, this kid is just not sleeping at night or she's constantly wanting to come out of the room or she's, and they're sharing the bedroom with the sibling who is actually inappropriately touching. Then we get into now the parent, when they find out is mad at the child, that was the perpetrator. And we pushed that child away and pull the victim closer. And now we've got all kinds of dynamics. I just love that you have a powered parent program and all of this. You have some to do's and some to don'ts for responding to trauma being discovered or disclosed. So tell us a little bit about that.

The first most important thing you can do if you suspect abuse, but particularly if a child discloses abuse is to just slow down because your gut instinct is going to want to just launch, right and to react and so find a place of calm find a place of centering and the best first answer and the best first response is always i believe you that's it i believe you this is not your fault and i'm so glad you told me and honestly that's about it that you need to say to the child our temptation is going to be why didn't you tell me um well you're just never going to see this person again. Like you want to avoid making promises that you can't keep.

Your anger and your, your rage about this is in there, but you know, sometimes people that anger rage takes over, like I'm going to kill them or I'm going to hurt them or I can't believe they hurt you. I'm going to hurt them. And things like, you know, they're going to pay for this again. We don't know. That's good. That could be like a false promise. We don't know if there's, they're going to end up in jail or if there's going to be any kind of justice. And so ultimately the, the big picture of that is avoid asking questions about when and where and what happened, because the person who needs to do that is going to be the person that you report to.

They're going to take care of all of that. Let them take care of that. Let that's their job. They're trained how to do it. And so your job as the parent is just to nurture. And I believe you, it's not your fault. I believe you. It's not your fault. And they're going to need to hear that message a gazillion times. I love that you say that too. They're going to need to hear that message a gazillion times. Yeah. Not just once and thinking as the parent, they already know, I told them, I believe them. They're going to need that validation time and time again.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. You're currently working with adults, right? So adults who've experienced trauma and abuse, specifically abuse, and you're helping them, but then like you have this empowered parent so that you can help parents who have children who have been abused.

Tell us all the things, how to get in touch with you and how to follow you and connect. So for sure, if you're somebody who has experienced sexual abuse and you'd like to explore working together and participating in the Beyond Surviving program, then pop over to their website and click the link to apply for a Discover Your Genuine Self session. This will be an opportunity for us to connect, to get to know each other and make sure that the Beyond Surviving program is a good fit and see about taking that next step. And then for sure, if you're interested in the Empowered Parent, you can email me about that. If you also want to find just resources, you know, more resources for you as a parent who's experienced sexual abuse or for your children,

email me about that and I can get you over to my resource page. I think we'll probably share that in the show notes as well, but ultimately they're, you know, great resources there at the website. And if there's any way that I can be a support to you in your journey, I'm here, reach out, do not hesitate. Coach at rachelgrantcoaching.com. I so appreciate you being on the show and for all of your resources, Rachel, I'm, this is, it's just a much needed service for parents. Not only like you say for the parent who has been sexually abused physically abused emotionally abused what's true is that most of the time abuse is co-occurring and so you know sexual abuse is emotional abuse if you will and oftentimes where abuse is sexual abuse is occurring there are is often other forms of abuse and so in the program like it's written through the lens of addressing sexual abuse but actually i've had people join the program who have experienced physical abuse and not sexual abuse.

And just with a few adaptations, you know, it's the same journey. So parents, if you are interested in the Beyond Surviving program, these are live coaching calls that are going to help you finally be free of the past and be able to move forward with your life. Thank you for being here today, Rachel. I'm excited to have you in my circle.

Same, same, same. I've already added you to my resource list. Thank you, Jackie. All right, parents, that's it for today.

make sure you head over to the website, noproblemparents.com. Sign up to get our emails. We're going to be giving away tips, tools, techniques, and resources, updates on podcast episodes, roundtable events, and more. Check out noproblemparents.com. For now, hugs and high fives.

You got this.