[LISA LEWIS] The Am I Ok? Podcast is part of the Practice of the Practice network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Faith Fringes, the Holistic Counseling Podcast, and Beta Male Revolution, go to the website, www.practiceofthepractice.com/network. Welcome to the Am I Ok? Podcast, where you will discover that being highly sensitive is something to embrace and it’s actually a gift you bring to the world. We will learn together how to take ownership of your high sensitivity, so you can make positive changes in your life, in the lives of others, and it’s totally okay to feel this way. I’m your host, Lisa Lewis. I’m so glad you’re here for the journey. Welcome to today’s episode of the Am I Ok? Podcast. This is Lisa Lewis, your host. It’s so good to have you here today. My guest today is Danielle Bernock. Danielle is a childhood trauma survivor, international award-winning author, speaker, podcast host and trauma-informed, faith-based, self-love coach who helps men, women, and organizations emerge with clear vision of their value, take ownership of their choices and chart a path to their promise becoming victorious souls. She’s created courses and workshops to implement her four-step proven process called Self. Her mantra is Love Yourself from Survive to Thrive and she’s known as that lady on the internet who loves you. Welcome to the show Danielle. [DANIELLE BERNOCK] Thank you, Lisa. It’s a pleasure to be here [LISA] It’s so good to have you on too. I can’t wait to hear your story and to, I’m going to find out how come they call you the lady on the internet who loves you. [DANIELLE] Oh, we can start there. That’s fine. That started right before the pandemic. It evolved into that. Before the pandemic became full force I could feel the fear in the air before it even got to America where I live before it became global. My focus has always been on love anyways but when people are consumed with fear, fear just hurts people so badly and love is what heals it. Love is what drives it out and I wanted to help people with all this fear, all this trauma that was coming in. It was increasing and increasing. I wasn’t real skilled on being on video then I was still getting my feet wet about it. I’d done a couple of challenges. So it started out pretty, I was being pretty careful about it, so that’s why I said it evolved because I would do Facebook Lives and I would say I’m that lady on the internet who says she loves you and I was tiptoeing around it because it felt so weird and I was concerned how people would take it. I mean, how can I love you? I don’t know you. Well, I started leaning into it more and more because I know how powerful love is and I stopped caring what people thought. I’ve been called corny now about it. I just fully owned it. No, I don’t, I’m not that one who says she loves you. I’m that lady on the internet who loves you. I chose to become that. I branded myself as that. I show up on the Facebook Live. I had committed to doing a Facebook Live every day during the shelter in place, little did I know that would be 70 days in a row. So I got rid of my fear of video and speaking in front of people and I got more and more into just lavishing love on people because love is a need. We need love just as much as we need to breathe. And it’s come to light that people hate people for no reason. I can love people for what they think is no reason. They’re like, you don’t know me, how can you love me? I can love you because I choose to love you. I went through a period of life where I felt so unlovable and unloved, unwanted, thrown away, invisible. I know how powerful it is to know that you’re loved, to hear someone say, I love you and you believe them. I have people tune into my page and my YouTube, my lives, my podcast just to hear me say that. I post a picture frequently on my social media, “Good morning, I love you,” and people come to my page just to hear that. People need to know they are loved. So I’m that lady delivering that love and I’ve owned that title for myself and that’s how it came to me. [LISA] Oh wow, that’s amazing. I love that story. Wow. I’m curious, as you were talking about loving people up, did you receive love growing up as a child? [DANIELLE] I grew up with something called childhood emotional neglect. I didn’t know the term for it when I started addressing it with my counselor. Since then, I’ve learned the term and understand it a whole lot more and had no clue of it while I was a child. I grew up, my parents did love me, but I did not feel loved because I reconnected with my mother later in life. So we worked through a lot of things and she told me my dad loved me very much and they loved me. So I know that my parents loved me but I did not feel loved. Part of that is because I am a person who is sensitive. I have greater needs. Every child has a different amount of needs. That’s with, childhood. emotional neglect is when a child does not get their emotional needs met enough, the force, the part is on enough because no parent is perfect. They’re going to drop the ball here and there but every kid has a certain amount they need and there’s enough. And it can happen in multiple of different ways. But I had a lot of different trauma and part of it was childhood emotional neglect. I felt unloved and unwanted by my family, which is a side effect of childhood emotional neglect. And children can start developing this before their preverbal years. It’s part of what my counselor said about your preverbal years before I even had a clue. It was, I know that when my mom was pregnant or right after she went through a loss. So she was grieving. Who knows how much she was just needing to tend to herself or something. I don’t know how this all happened. I know parts of it. During parts of my childhood, my parents got involved in a hobby that they became very obsessive with and they focused on that and I felt they loved that and not me. And children do that and it’s just a side effect of that. So I felt unloved, but I had learned later that I actually was. So I want to help people know they’re loved because they may feel unloved and maybe people do love them. So if I can educate people about this childhood emotional neglect, they can address these things. They can work on their relationships. Because relationship problems, having, I mean every human has relationship problems because we’re human and we disagree, but we have relationship problems as a side effect of trauma as well. If I can help people with that as they connect with a thing called attachment styles, I can help them feel loved even when they think they’re not. And just to work through that, it’s a lot of work. [LISA] Yeah, it does sound like a lot of work and worth it too. [DANIELLE] Yes. [LISA] I’m curious, were your parents surprised when you brought this to them, that you felt unloved? [DANIELLE] Well, my dad never heard it because my father died while I was growing up. That’s one of the traumas I went through. I went through multiple traumas at home, at school, at church and in the neighborhood. But my father died when I had just turned 14. He died of some heart attack that was extremely noisy and disturbing. It freaked me out really bad and it freaked out my mom and it was a big trauma point in my life. So my dad never knew how I felt. He was emotionally unavailable, partially because of what generation he came from, how he was raised. He had trauma in his life, was probably emotionally neglected himself because talking about emotions is not something people did a lot of years ago. It’s come to light more in the last couple of decades and even just look at mental health, how people had to fight for people to talk about mental health. They would dismiss it, call you crazy and all these other things. So part of, with my dad, it was just a part of his generation of who he was at that time. And I learned from my mom they did the best they could with what they knew and I loved them for that. Connecting with my mom later, she had trauma and emotional neglect also, but we connected later in life, which I championed her for because she was the one who reached out for that. And neither one of us knew anything about psychology or trauma or any of those things. She just said, “Do you want to be friends?” So we started the journey to build that friendship between us. I shared things with her. I don’t remember all of her reactions along the way, but we worked through a lot of, when I was angry with her when my dad died and how she responded to it and when my grandmother died and when my brother died and how she did this. I was upset and she was like, oh, I was upset about you doing this and we just actively listened to one another. But I do know that she was surprised about one thing I shared with her and that’s when I shared with her the trauma that was surrounding my name. When I shared that story with her, she cried. That surprised me because my mother was not a highly emotional person. She was very stoic, very controlled. It was how she was raised and partially her personality too. She wasn’t a mushy gushy person. I’m a mushy gushy person. So I needed that, so a little bit of her personality and it was like, trauma is very complex and how it affects us and comes to be it’s not simple, but it’s worth working through. She worked through it and we were extremely close when she died. She’s actually the one, when I shared the trauma about my name with her and she cried, she suggested that I changed my name and I did. In 1988, I legally changed my first name to Danielle. That’s because of my mother. This is where I like to pause and encourage listeners that if you have a parent or parents and you have things, issues with them, try to reach out to them. Because if both sides of the relationship are willing to do the work, you can build a bridge between. You can heal your relationship and if you heal your relationship together, you can even heal your trauma through healing that relationship. But if they’re unwilling, I know that’s extremely painful and many people run into that. I was very fortunate that my mother was not just the willing of, but she was the instigator of it. [LISA] What made you decide to say yes to your mom when she reached out to you? [DANIELLE] I craved a relationship with my mother. I wanted a relationship with my mother. I was, I had developed the attachment style that I didn’t know back then. I had developed the attachment style of anxious avoidant or also known as disorganized. Part of that anxious is wanting to connect. When she said, you want to be friends, I jumped at the chance of being friends because I wanted that relationship. [LISA] And how many years had gone by since you were, you had your mother? [DANIELLE] Well, we were, we never disconnected. We were connected the entire time. We just had a very strained relationship and didn’t get along. It just was not a good relationship. It wasn’t healthy. There was a lot of coercion and manipulation. So when she did that, I wanted a healthy relationship. Not even that I knew what one was because I probably didn’t but I just, I wanted it to be better and the hope of it being better, I was willing to do whatever I needed to do for that. [LISA] Were you already an adult when you began to work on your relationship with your mother? [DANIELLE] Yes. I was married with two children already. As I said, we never disconnected. I watched my mother be a grandmother to my kids in a way she had never been a mother to me. So that was something that we talked about also. I have heard many parents say that about their parents, that they’re a better grandparent than they were a parent. Well, they’ve been through parenting now, so they’ve learned a few things hopefully. [LISA] I heard you say that you’re sensitive. Do you consider yourself a highly sensitive person? [DANIELLE] Yeah, I am sensitive to sound. When things get really loud, it can freak me out easily. When I’m around people who speak really loud, it can set me off so I have to speak up sometimes or pull away a little bit or something like that because I can be, not, triggered isn’t the right word for it, but like, it hurts. It’s like when they talk too loud like that because they’re just, that’s just their voice. Some people just have a louder voice and there’s nothing, they’re not doing anything wrong. But you have to find a way to work through that. And I do, I have some family that is like that and so we just work our way through that. Something else I’m highly sensitive to is on my skin. I can step on something on the floor that when I pick it up, you can almost not see it. But I feel like I’m stepping on a boulder. And if I get a hair that’s inside my shirt, it’s going to drive me crazy until I get it out. And I can feel things on me that you can’t even see. So that’s where I’m highly sensitive and that thing, plus I’m very sensitive, emotionally empathic with other people feeling their feelings to a certain point. So, yes, I would say I’m a highly sensitive person in some ways, but I also want to own that truth and not let that truth own me, if that makes sense. [LISA] Oh yes, that makes perfect sense. Yes, and I’m wondering if either of your parents were highly sensitive if they knew it or not. [DANIELLE] I don’t think so. [LISA] No, ok. [DANIELLE] I think I was the only one in the family. [LISA] Ok, yeah. [DANIELLE] I think that’s what made me odd [LISA] That may do the “outcast” or the black sheep of the family? [DANIELLE] I wouldn’t go that far. I wasn’t treated like a black sheep, but my parents were from that era where emotions were not something that we dealt with. So they shut down, me and my brothers, they just shut me down more because I was more sensitive. [LISA] What I hear in that is they didn’t understand you. They didn’t understand how, what you needed, how to like, talk to you, how to really interact with you. [DANIELLE] Right. Well, as I said, because of when they were born, the generation and to give, I’ll frame this so you can put it in a timeframe, my father was born in 1917 and my mother was born in 1928. So these are both before the Great Depression, the war and all that and how people behaved then. It was very stoic, it was very suck it up and I don’t think my parents really knew themselves either. That wasn’t something that people did back then. Psychology was one of those weird things. Art was something that you did at school because you weren’t good at something else. But now art is this beautiful thing and we can do so many things with art, but it was just a different time. So I feel like they were a product of that. And I have no malice toward them, no anger toward them. I understand where they came from and like I said, I believe they did the best they could. And me saying that helps my clients and my students own the truth of their life too because many people who suffer childhood emotional neglect, it’s because their parents were emotionally neglected themselves but they won’t own being emotionally neglected because their parents were good people. So if I say I was emotionally neglected, that means my parents were bad. No, it just means they didn’t have to give you what you needed. It’s, they didn’t have it so they couldn’t give it to you. [LISA] Yes. I love the way you just frame that and put it all together. [DANIELLE] So I want to encourage people to own that truth because you’ll suffer if you don’t own the truth. You don’t have to throw your parents under the bus to own the truth. You own your side of the story. You own the circumstance, which is cause and effect. Like a young lady I interviewed on a podcast recently, she was raised in a fundamentalist religious home, but so was her sister and she emerged with religious trauma, but her sister did not. She had wonderful parents. Her home life was just absolutely wonderful but her, what happened to her at church was not so wonderful and having to share that with her parents without making enemies out of her, enemies isn’t the right word I’m looking for, without villainizing them like they did something wrong. No, they were good parents, but this happened anyways. I want to encourage people, your parents could be part of the story, but that’s a, and they may have hurt you, but they might not have done it on purpose. It might be like, oh my goodness, I didn’t know that hurt you. I didn’t know. But that doesn’t mean you pretend it didn’t happen because if you pretend it didn’t happen, you can never heal. [LISA] What would you say to a parent that is not taking ownership? How would you encourage them to look at the situation differently? [DANIELLE] A parent? [LISA] Yes, a parent. [DANIELLE] The one who had neglected their child and didn’t know it? [LISA] Yes. [DANIELLE] I would encourage them to look at themself. What do you know about yourself? How emotionally intuitive are you with yourself? How were you raised? If I can get them to look at the bigger picture instead of just looking at themselves through eyes of blame, because blame is only useful for a moment. It’s useful for a moment to see the source of something. There’s no shame to put in here. There’s just a location of a cause and a fact and then if we will own that, then we can move forward. And there are parents who will not own it and I’m sorry that that’s true. And you can’t make someone own something. That’s how ownership works. [LISA] What would you say to the child or the adult child that their parent will not own it and they’ve tried to get them to own it or try to open this conversation and it’s just not going anywhere. How do you as that adult child come to terms with that knowing you’re not going to be getting what you’re hoping for? [DANIELLE] One thing is they’re going to need to grieve. They’re going to need to grieve the loss of what they wish for, of what they hoped for. I remember my counselor saying to me that I needed to grieve the relationship I did not have with my dad. He was dead. There was no way to have it now. I could never have that and I had to let myself grieve that and by going through the process of grief, it’s a process of being able to let go. So they need to do that, but then they need to evaluate what do they want to do, what do they want with this relationship, what are they willing to have in their life? What are they not willing to have in their life? Because I am not quick to tell someone to cut off relationships with others, but I do know there is a time for that. There’s abuse and you don’t let people keep injuring you, but there’s boundaries. I would explore boundaries. How can boundaries be a part of this? And to be self-aware, what do you need? What do you want? What can you get? And mourn what you have to let go of. [LISA] Ok. And does that process have a certain amount of time? Does it take as long as it needs to? [DANIELLE] I think it takes as long as it needs to. I don’t think you can put a time on it. You can’t put a time on grieving a loss because everyone grieves differently. [LISA] Danielle, do you feel the grief of losing a relationship is the same as losing or grieving the loss of a life? [DANIELLE] Yeah, it’s different but the same. I had to go through grieving the loss of a relationship when I was estranged from two family members at two separate times. The first time it happened with one person. I’m not naming these people because I’m not throwing anyone under the bus. I’m reconciled to both of them. But at that time, and I would say both times were because of trauma in their life that they were dealing with, so there we have relationship problems, but when the first one happened, I started to think about people who deal with soldiers who are missing an action and they never get closure. Because I’m like, I have to grieve the loss of this person, but they’re still alive. That is the most bizarre grief. I had never encountered that before. So I would say it’s different. I wouldn’t say, I’m not going to measure, I don’t measure grief, I don’t measure trauma. Trauma is personal, grieving is personal, measuring it is toxic. [LISA] What does one have to do to love themself? [DANIELLE] What does one have to do to love themself? [LISA] Or what does it mean to love yourself? [DANIELLE] What does it mean? Oh, that’s the easier way to answer it. To love yourself is to look at yourself with value, to see the value in who you are in your life and who God created you to be. You have value because you’re alive. To recognize that and to look at yourself with that, those eyes of value and to want what’s best for yourself. Then I go into explain that, then that leads to self-compassion, which is just a little bit different because compassion is action. So that loving yourself and having compassion on yourself then is to treat yourself with that love that you are seeing. You’re like, you look in the mirror and you look at yourself and you will see the value in yourself but when you treat yourself correctly and properly and with that value and having patience and giving yourself grace when you need it, that’s having compassion on yourself because nobody’s perfect. [LISA] Yeah, no one is perfect. There’s no such thing as a perfect person. [DANIELLE] Right. [LISA] What would you recommend to someone who’s just maybe coming to recognize that this has happened in their life as a child and they don’t know like how to get started or where to start and even like how to start to love themselves? [DANIELLE] Well, I would have a whole bunch of questions because there could be a variety of answers. They may need to go in counseling. I’m not a counselor. I would want to hear what they have to say to see if that’s what they need because counseling is focusing on the past and dealing with the past so that eventually you can move forward. On my website, I have some courses that would help with that. The one would help them identify it, which is the seven day challenge to love yourself. It’s just a seven-day or audio course. It’s really simple and helpful for them to identify well, why don’t you love yourself? What happened? And that could be a place to start. I also have a course Heal Your Childhood Self, which goes in depth and uses my process to identify what happened, where did it happen, how did it happen, how do you feel about it? Which may be done with coaching or it may be done with counseling. Again, it depends on the focus. If they need to focus backwards, they need counseling. If they’re forward focused, you can have coaching, which I do. And the visual I like to give people with that is you’re in your vehicle, you’re in a car and you put the car in reverse and then you’re turning around and you’re looking through the back window or you’re using just your rear view mirror. That’s your focus as you’re going backward. Whereas coaching is you’re in your car, you have it in drive and you’re looking through the front windshield, but you do look, use the rear view mirror and the side view mirror momentarily from time to time. But your focus is on going forward. So they would need to answer those questions. I can’t answer those for someone else, but that’s important of where to start and where to go. [LISA] Oh, I love those analogies. That’s great. Yeah, that’s a great way to explain therapy versus coaching. What would you like listeners to take away from our conversation today? [DANIELLE] I would like them to take away from today that only they can change their life. No one can do it for them. If you’re highly sensitive, I encourage you to own that where it fits but don’t let it drive your life. If you need counseling or coaching, get it for you because you matter and you’re worth it and I do love you. I am that lady on the internet who loves you and I implore you to love yourself enough that if something I said today touched your heart that you need to do something about, you yearn for a change in how you treat yourself, you yearn for a change in your relationships, you yearn for a change, then I implore you love yourself enough to do something about it. [LISA] I love that message. That is so encouraging. And do you have a free gift for my listeners? [DANIELLE] Yes. I have an emotional health journal that I created. It’s a 30-day journal. It’s got a quote that’s encouraging or inspirational or something like that on the one side and then it has just five questions for you to locate yourself emotionally every day to track your emotional health and takes about five minutes a day. You could do it in the morning at night and just to help you track your emotional health because that connects to your mental health and actually your physical health as well. So I wanted to give that to them. It’s 30 days. You can do it on your computer, you can download it and print it out and write on it or just not write on it and go through it, whatever serves you. [LISA] Wow, that sounds very helpful. So please take advantage of that. I know you mentioned your website, so where can listeners get in touch with you? [DANIELLE] On my website, daniellebernock.com. It’s d-a-n-i-e-l-l-e-b-e-r-n-o-c-k.com. You can find my podcast, my socials, my courses, my books, everything is in a one-stop-shop there. [LISA] Okay, great. All of that will be in the show notes too, in case you missed it. I want to thank you, Danielle, for coming on the podcast today and for sharing all your information and thank you for helping change people’s lives. I see how it changed your life and see how it, how that is serving others. [DANIELLE] Oh, thank you for having me. [LISA] Thank you my listeners for tuning in today. Please let me know what you thought of the episode. You can send me an email to lisa@amiokpodcast.com. While you are there, remember to subscribe, rate, and review wherever you get your podcast. To find out more about Highly Sensitive Persons, please go to my website iamokpodcast.com and subscribe to my free-eight week email course to help you navigate your own sensitivities and to show you that you are okay. This is Lisa Lewis, wishing you the best day every day. Until next time, be well. Thank you for listening today at Am I Ok? Podcast. If you are loving the show, please rate, review and subscribe to it on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you’d like to learn how to manage situations as a highly sensitive person, discover your unique gift as a highly sensitive person, and learn how to be comfortable in your own skin, I offer a free eight-week email course called Highly Sensitive People. Just go to amiokpodcast.com to sign up. In addition, I love hearing from my listeners, drop me an email to let me know what is on your mind. You can reach me at lisa@amiokpodcast.com. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want to professional, you should find one.