In this episode of High and Healthy, host Richard Zwicky interviews holistic health coach Rebecca de Lia about the profound impact of early childhood experiences on adult relationships, nervous system regulation, and overall well-being.
They challenge the misconception that trauma is limited to extreme abuse, discussing how subtle forms of emotional neglect often shape our attachment styles and subconscious behaviors well into adulthood.
Key takeaways
- Childhood pain does not have to be extreme abuse, because a parent who was often absent can teach a child to believe they cannot depend on others.
- Habits like people pleasing and always saying yes can be trauma responses that people mistake for personality.
- A simple check for boundaries is to notice whether your heart shrinks or expands when someone asks for something.
- Healing is built from small daily steps and regular time alone with yourself, not from a quick fix or becoming a new person.
- Relationships act as a mirror that shows what still triggers you, which gives you something to reflect on instead of treating every conflict as someone else's fault.
The big idea: Is It Your Personality or a Trauma Response?
More conversations on Trauma and Healing, Attachment and Relationships
Read the full transcript
Richard Zwicky: Hi everyone, it's Richard Zwicky with High on Healthy, the show where we know there's no one path to healthy, so we explore them all. And one topic that we've come back to a number of times from different angles is the childhood, its effect on our attachment style and our relationships as adults and how we view the world. And how going back to some of those experiences really allows us to unlock the doors to find pathways to feeling better and engaging better with the world around us. And that's because our earliest experiences shape our nervous system, our expectations, and our sense of self-worth. And even the stories we tell ourselves and others about who we are. And all of that comes out of really adaptations, adapting to the environment in which we're growing up in. And joining me today to discuss this is Rebecca Dia who is an expert in the material and a journey has a really interesting journey through addiction,
Rebecca de Lia: Thanks for having me.
Richard Zwicky: Unresolved childhood trauma and recovery that is worth sharing and helps everybody else emphasize and understand what it takes to go through and emerge on the other side and Welcome aboard the show, Rebecca. So, Rebecca, there's a saying that childhood never ends. And I'm very happy to still be a child at heart, still growing and learning, and I look at my world as if I don't learn something every day, I'm wasting the day and I'm not growing. But no, there's different meanings to that, and there's positive and negatives. When did you first realize that many of the struggles you experienced as an adult actually became and originated long before adulthood?
Rebecca de Lia: So I would say that realization probably came during my second round in drug treatment. Realizing there was continuous patterns and it was like you wanted to blame something that was close in the timeline but then if you keep looking back you're like wait a minute this has been repeated in various scenarios various different disguises or suits throughout life and it's just at least for me progressively has gotten more extreme and more extreme repetition until I became aware and was like, " this is this pattern 500 times in my life starting at a young age." Yeah.
Richard Zwicky: And that's a challenging piece because we don't often look in the mirror. And getting the experience of both holding up the mirror for ourselves, but also allowing somebody to reflect back upon us that we care about enough to validate and understand what they see in us is a huge challenge for people. H how did that come about for what you said you went through the second time, but really when did that mirror appear and when did you allow yourself to see yourself in it?
Rebecca de Lia: For looking in the That's a good one. So, I would say that I really started to look in the mirror probably maybe halfway in the mirror after I had been clean for four or five years and then I had another traumatic thing happen where I was a victim of an armed robbery and now I wasn't in the past it was like I'll just go get high forget about this. But now it was like, I have to look at what is going on up here and what is happening with these patterns in this life and all these things. And then I would say I really looked in the mirror when I lost my house, a long-term relationship, a business venture, all we're going to start over at the age of, 33. And then it was starting to deep dive. I am kind of stubborn in many ways. And so having to really get to the furthest deep end is where I'm like, " it's time to look in the mirror." but I would say it's like once you have that awareness of looking in the mirror and starting to reflect and connect all the dots that have been causing these life circumstances to happen. It becomes easier not to have to go to an extreme to correct behaviors and see this negative thing has been going on for 30 years or since I was four. So, yeah.
00:05:00
Richard Zwicky: You say for 30 years or since you were four, and many people when they hear childhood trauma, they think of extreme abuse, but it isn't always. Adverse childhood experiences or ACEs are far more common than people would realize. That's why 61% of people have been affected in some way and 25% have suffered abuse. But there's a lot of other things that affect trauma. What do people misunderstand from your experience about trauma and how it can compound and build over time?
Rebecca de Lia: I mean I think my biggest realization is, it doesn't have to be that you were boarded up in a basement or had some kind of extreme abuse happen to you as a child. It could be simply that your parents maybe weren't as emotionally intelligent to support your needs that you needed or they're humans, too. Just trying to figure that this is the first time they're having kids. And so realizing that maybe the things that you lacked or when you were neglected or you felt neglected in some kind type of way. It starts when it happens at that young of an age. For instance, my dad was working all the time to provide he wasn't there. If he did come to sports games or anything like that, he was on the phone outside. But in the back of your subconscious, you're programming that is like, I can't depend on this person. They're not going to show up for me. You don't see anything else. And then it compounds into either you finding relationships where that is normalized and maybe you find one that's not so great and it's even larger amounts of neglect and you kind of repeat the pattern or it starts to snowball when it's programmed into your subconscious at that young of an age. But it doesn't have to be something extreme. And when we're children like that, our brains can't comprehend like, " if he doesn't answer the phone, we don't have a house to live in anymore." yeah.
Richard Zwicky: No, you don't have those points of reference to understand and the point you raised quite interesting there I don't know if you have siblings or where you are in that order but parents make the most mistakes with the eldest child and the eldest child usually feels that the youngest child is favored or is the preferred child but it's really parents learn through the mistakes with the first one and do a bit better with the second. And by the time some people are 17, they figured it out. But on the opposite end, you put your hand up, you're the eldest, I was the only and
Rebecca de Lia: I'm Yeah I'm the oldest of three.
Richard Zwicky: We, right? So, you got all the mistakes. And how does that affect you? How's that affected you when you were trying to reconcile these things and cope with the trauma you were dealing with relative to your siblings? Because their experience would have been different. So, did they understand what you were going through or was it foreign to them because that experience is
Rebecca de Lia: I would say it was foreign to them because the experience was different. I was always seen as the problem one. They didn't necessarily understand why anything really happened. And then as the years have gone on, it almost is like they're trapped in a memory that is a decade old. They can't see the shifts and the changes that the person has made. They're kind of trapped in that childhood viewpoint or teenage viewpoint of how things were. But I can see exactly what you're saying where the first child gets all the learning lessons and mistakes of the parents and then they slowly get better. And yes, my youngest brother, the baby of the family, definitely appeared favored for a long time until I started to wrap my bra. They have more experience to handle him differently.
Richard Zwicky: It's unfortunate that babies don't come with a true guide book. We're all reading to skip some of those steps because I think everybody who's been a parent and everybody, who's been a child and experienced those experiences wishes we could have done better. We all want to do so. Which leads me to the question of you've had these experiences. How are you turning them into benefits for others to help others avoid or overcome the same challenges you went through?
00:10:00
Rebecca de Lia: I work as a holistic health coach and primarily with women that are dealing with either hormone or gut issues, nervous system dysregulation. But a lot of we hear gut and hormones and immediately think it's only the physical body. But I would say over 90% of the women I work with it is trauma related. There is unresolved things going on that need to be corrected. And so that's what I've been doing to give back because I feel like all the practitioners and all the people that helped me to kind of process and put all the puzzle pieces together. I also wish a manual of life just came out when you were born. But all those people that helped me made such a huge difference that I've on have just wanted to be able to give back to the best of my ability to as many people as possible because I don't feel like western medicine always has the solutions or is willing to look at the full picture of what's going on for the person and trauma cases are always so complex compared to deal with. So just going to the doctor and saying, "My stomach always hurts." They don't ask about your trauma or your anxiety or any of these other factors that could be playing into it. And so just helping as many people as possible realize that it's more than just the food you're eating. It's the thoughts you're doing, the emotions you're having, all these things that have to be processed by the body so that you can feel your best.
Richard Zwicky: And it's as you said, doctors don't look at those same things because I mean, they're under time pressure. They're trying to deal with things that are easy to identify and work with. And 95% of what doctors see is the same thing over and over. So when it deviates, it's a challenge. Unless they're looking for it, they won't see it. Which actually leads me to the point of a lot of times people mistake trauma adaptations for personality and don't know how to overcome that. And then when they comment, they're commenting not on the behavior but on the character, which is incredibly wrong. How has that affected you?
Rebecca de Lia: I would say that's that's a big one for me and for people I work with is you think, this is just the way I am. You don't realize that the chronic like people pleasing or the always saying yes and never saying no but then burning yourself out and not feeling so great is a response because maybe you weren't liked when you were in school or you were made fun of at some point. So you just feel like if I say yes to everything and I just keep everybody else happy then everyone will like me and everything will be great. And it's like as I've started to see and work through those behaviors on my own, it's like, wow, you don't owe anybody anything in the form of or a favor or any of that if it doesn't sit right in your own heart. I always tell people it's like when somebody asks you for something if you're dealing with the peopleleasing boundary setting issue and thinking, I'm just that person. I'm a nurturer." And it's probably goes way back. And it's like when you can ask something it's like does your heart immediately shrink or does it fully expand? Because if it's shrinking in any way at all, just have the balls to say no and not do it
Richard Zwicky: But on the same token,
Rebecca de Lia: Because you're going to feel better living out your truest self than you are constantly bending over backwards for everybody else in your life.
Richard Zwicky: People who have dealt with a lot of that similar trauma, who feel they're not enough and are searching for autonomy often don't recognize they have it. And it becomes a question of avoidance.
Rebecca de Lia: I think the biggest thing is overcoming that not enoughness and realizing that you are enough just the way that you are. And then once you have that confidence then you are more able to see some of the behaviors that have been labeled as personality traits more clearly. But when we're sitting in a position of lack and not enoughness it's so hard to see anything past that or wrap our brains around it. So really the first step I think is figuring out how can we feel like we are enough in our own body.
00:15:00
Richard Zwicky: And that's a tough one. That's an incredibly hard one for anybody who's dealing and recovering from, traumas, but just anybody who's dealing with avoidance.
Rebecca de Lia: And it's not a straight line. You can feel like you're enough one day and then something happens at work and all of a sudden you're back down to I'm not enough. I'm worth absolutely nothing. And so it's kind of like a giant circle that you're always going through. And the more you can raise your awareness of the loops that are playing, I think the easier it becomes to snap yourself out of past behaviors and trauma responses.
Richard Zwicky: That being able to take that moment pause and live with it and accept what somebody else sees maybe may be real. That gives you the chance to actually start seeing yourself more appropriately sometimes too. And that's a hard thing to do to accept it, right? Because when you have that fundamental belief that you're not enough, that your self-worth isn't there, there's no self-love, accepting that somebody else does and they can see something that you believe that they haven't seen the true you yet and that's why they're confused, which is tough. What as people as you go through that, you went through that, I imagine through your journey.
Rebecca de Lia: It's very hard. Yeah.
Richard Zwicky: People love and now there's always a lifelong battle on some things but you're through huge hurdles and people love stories of transformation because healing sounds more dramatic but it's far less glamorous than the daily work really is which is one small step at a time. What does healing actually look like? And when you're starting to work with somebody, what you set out as expectations
Rebecca de Lia: I love that you said the one small step at a time because that is like my mantra for everybody because people think you get put into some capsule and you come out and everything's Great. But it's in the small daily steps that make the biggest changes. And I would say one of the biggest things is having people take time to care for themselves. So whether that's in the morning or the evening or whatever time works with their schedule. But what I find is we tend to keep ourselves very busy with either work or home or family some kind of aspect to not have to sit with ourselves. And the more time that we can take to sit with ourselves, whether you are meditating, praying, taking a hot bath, doing something for yourself, sitting on the porch, drinking hot tea, like carving out that time purposely as this is me time where I get to love myself for who I am is probably one of the biggest or things that I work with people on. And it's also one of the hardest to get people to make time for because it's doesn't make sense in people's heads. And it didn't make sense in mind when I was told by a therapist, you need to start meditating. I laughed at her. I was like, what is sitting quietly going to do for me? This is crazy. I just need to get my to-do list done and I'll be happy. But I was like, I'm at the bottom of my rope. What do I have to lose to sit here for five minutes? And within 30 days like things so many things drastically changed in my life that I was like there's something to spending some time with yourself and your thoughts and your being. But it's hard for people to slow down and want to just spend time with themselves.
Richard Zwicky: And that brings up the question is when did it happen when you finally gave in to trying to do that you realized healing wasn't about erasing your past but learning to live differently with it?
Rebecca de Lia: When I started to sit and meditate and see what was going on, it was like, " I can't just erase this." And I also can't keep blaming it for all of my behaviors. I yelled because I was traumatized when I was 14. Like you cuz that's what my brain would tell me to do. It'd be like, " you can just justify it by this." And it's like, or you can take ownership and responsibility and start to live differently and choose differently because we are the creators of how we show up in the world and how we act. And regardless of whatever awful situations have happened in the past, we have the ability to shift it one tiny step at a time, moving forward to be better each day instead of reliving a record that we don't even like to listen to.
00:20:00
Richard Zwicky: No, you don't break out of it by reliving it. And one of the relating that one of the ideas and not ideas but one of the data points that keeps emerging from neuro neuroscience on the other side is that many of our wounds happen in They happen in our relationship with our parents and our siblings and friends early on. But our deepest healing experiences also happen in relationships later on with our partners and in how we guide our children when we have them. Has this been true of your own life?
Rebecca de Lia: I would so I would say relationships are probably one of the greatest teachers because it kind of gives you a mirror into because if we live in isolation all the time, we only have ourselves and then nothing can bother us because we can control all the aspects that are going on. And dealing with trauma, we love being able to control everything that happens. Because then our nervous system's like, I know what's going to happen next. But relationships, you don't have the control of the other person, of what they're going to say or how they're going to think. And it's really helped me learn how I interact with people, what things maybe are still triggering me that I need to reflect on and work through. It's a great mirror into what you still need to work on, what's working why is there conflict here? But again, it's like we have to take the time to realize that and not just look at it as another awful life situation. This person's so mean to me.
Richard Zwicky: Or even this person who loves me. And right and that become begs the question which a lot of people struggle with which is why is it so difficult for people who have experienced trauma to accept and trust the love from somebody else in a relationship that really is the key to healing.
Rebecca de Lia: I think part of it comes down to loving ourselves is for a long time for me I looked back at the things I did during active addiction the things I did even after that and it's like you feel like an awful person like you're not worthy of the love you're not worthy of recognition or having anybody body care for you or do something for you. And so when we can learn to love ourselves more and be okay with what has happened or what we have done, then I think it becomes easier to accept the love from others. It still can be difficult at times because it's a constant, especially if your trauma dealt with Yeah.
Richard Zwicky: It doesn't always feel like a comfortable cloth on our shoulders.
Rebecca de Lia: Sometimes it feels like it could be ripped away. Someone could just take it and
Richard Zwicky: Y and it's also hard in a culture where everything's promised as a quick fix, There's supplements, there's books, you can take a pill for this, you can hit a button and your AI will give you the response of how to deal with the next thing. We can go away to a treat for two weeks and we're going to resolve everything. Healing from trauma doesn't work that way. What's the biggest danger in believing healing can happen quickly beyond falling off the cliff and recognizing it doesn't?
Rebecca de Lia: I feel like the biggest danger of that is you give up too soon. You don't feel better after 3 days of meditating. You're like, " this doesn't work. I guess I'm just doomed to be miserable and traumatized for the rest of my life. Or you decide to go to some type of therapy and maybe it's not the right therapist for you or the right form of treatment to work through it and you think, " no therapy works. I'm just going to give up." I went for two sessions. It's not working. And cuz it's so easy for us to just give up. We've already had so many things that felt like failures or felt like they were ripped away from us at young ages. It's easier to just not take any action than it is to keep pushing forward and realizing that everybody is different and everybody's trauma is different. So, the treatment they're going to need or the care they're going to need or the steps they're going to need to take to heal and feel better are going to be different. It's going to be slow and it's going to take some time.
00:25:00
Richard Zwicky: You can't avoid the hard work.
Rebecca de Lia: You can try to Yeah,
Richard Zwicky: We are complicated. And you can try to. Exactly. But it's like people say, my situation is complicated. That's exactly why it's going to be hard work, but worthwhile. And do you think healing, for some people think I'm going to heal myself and be a better person and be almost somebody new? And is it less about that and more about grieving who you had to become in order to survive? Mhm.
Rebecca de Lia: I think I hate somebody new thing because you're just evolving as a person and finding better ways to cope with things that maybe you weren't taught at a young age. And then grieving who you've had to become, but also seeing, at least for me being able to see I had to become that person because I didn't know any other tools to use besides negative behaviors. And so then it turns almost to a form of gratitude for being given the tools for better behaviors and learning how to choose differently and regulate emotions and things like that. But yeah, if you go into healing thinking you're going to just come out a totally different new person, it's similar to the quick fixes. That's not the goal of it. The goal is to make small sustainable changes so you can keep being better and help others that have gone through similar things as you.
Richard Zwicky: You're going to learn new skills. You're not going to become a different person. That person is inside you. It always has been there and always has been enough. You've just crammed them down and hidden them. So, for the person who's listening and feels exhausted because healing is taking longer than they would have hoped, and we all hope it's done quickly, it's a quick fix. So, I think everybody's in that who's actually going through the process discovers it takes longer. What would you want them to understand before they are going to get there and so that they don't give up?
Rebecca de Lia: I would say the thing I would want you to understand is that all those baby steps equate to the big steps. So even when it feels like no progress is being made or you're running around in the same circle over and over again, if you look back 5 years, a year, you'll start to see the progress being made. And keeping a gratitude journal to see the growth that you're achieving because when you first start looking for things to be grateful for, you're like, I have shoes. And then it gets deeper and deeper over time. And I guess raising your awareness because that's really the way that you can see the small shifts and how they're turning into the big shifts because it's not exactly we have to Go ahead.
Richard Zwicky: And taking the moments to reflect on our day and see what we did different. So, Rebecca, I know. Go ahead.
Rebecca de Lia: I was going to say we have to have that awareness and the reflection process over and over again to see where the progress is happening because sometimes it's so small but it's actually huge things because you're changing behaviors, you're changing mindsets, thinking patterns, all these things and it doesn't happen overnight.
Richard Zwicky: No, it really doesn't. And I was just noticing we are running low on time but people who want to, listening to you and thinking about how your approach could help them, how can they learn more and how can they reach out to you?
Rebecca de Lia: So the best way to reach out to me is probably on Instagram and you can find me there at Rebecca\_Paisley and just shoot me a message there or you can email me at hello pazley.com. I am literally always happy to chat and share info and go back and forth. It just brings me so much joy to be able to help other people that are in similar situations start to see how they can potentially turn their lives around and start feeling better.
00:30:00
Richard Zwicky: And is there an ideal type of individual who you connect with and find they're struggling with a particular aspect or they've tried certain things and you really connect and seem to be able to help them in a way others can't.
Rebecca de Lia: So I primarily work with women and then it's a lot of times where the trauma and the nervous system dysregulation has started to create these physical problems in the body whether it's an autoimmune disease or their gut or their hormones or any part of the body that's starting to shut down because of trauma and that's gone through any addiction or any type of sexual ual trauma and stuff like all of those things I have helped women with and worked with to overcome but the trauma gets trapped in our body and starts to create the havoc right that's where if you see the liver shutting down and you're not a drinker and you're not this and it's like okay let's look at this other aspect that's often ignored in modern medicine because they're just running tests and labs and saying hey this is it and doing the best they can with the tools And so yeah, that's what I would say for the people.
Richard Zwicky: Thanks for joining us today on High on Healthy Rebecca.
Rebecca de Lia: Thanks for having me.
Richard Zwicky: Thank It was great conversation and thanks to everybody for listening. I'm Richard Zwicky with High on Healthy and we'll be back again with you soon.
This transcript was generated automatically and lightly edited for readability.