Kristine B. Jensen, LCSW – Author Of Bruised Not Broken: Healing The Shame Of A Troubled Childhood

Shame stemming from childhood trauma seems impossible to shake off. These are deep wounds that sometimes even time cannot heal, making self-doubt a constant part of your life. Timothy J. Hayes, Psy.D sits down with licensed psychotherapist and certified trauma professional Kristine B. Jensen, LCSW, who discusses how to recognize patterns of shame and finally unlock your most confident self. Looking back to her own battles with poor self-esteem, anxiety, and depression, Kristine explains why it is never too late to experience self-healing and face your trauma. Kristine also breaks down the three most critical elements of genuine forgiveness, how to stop rejecting genuine compliments, and what motivated her to write her book, Bruised Not Broken.

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Kristine B. Jensen, LCSW – Author Of Bruised Not Broken: Healing The Shame Of A Troubled Childhood

Kristine B. Jensen, LCSW is a licensed psychotherapist in the State of California and a certified clinical trauma professional with over four decades of experience and helping individuals overcome traumatic shame. Recognized for her expertise, Kristine has presented has professional conferences on diagnosing and treating trauma related issues.

Early in her career, she worked at the University of Davis School of Medicine as an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and faculty member. She has trained directly with renowned experts like the late Sue Johnson, founder of Emotionally Focused Therapy, and John Gottman of the Gottman Method couples therapy.

She also studied the work of respected trauma experts around the world. After her first retirement, from 30 years of private practice, Kristien worked as a counselor for the US Army in Germany and Okinawa. When she returned, she opened a private practice in moderate, California and began researching and working on her new book about chronic shame titled Bruised Not Broken.

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Kristine, welcome. Thanks for joining me.

Thank you, Tim.

How Kristine Discovered Her Passion For Self-Healing

I hope you can start us off by telling us a little bit about how you got into the work you’re doing and what drives your passion for it.

As you know, I didn’t know what you were going to be asking me, so I will start by saying that when I was in my twenties, which is when I finished my graduate degree and started practicing psychotherapy. The profession appealed to me in many ways. One of them is because I just felt like I was so screwed up that I was embarrassed to tell anyone about that. I also didn’t trust that anyone could help me. I thought, “I’ll go and learn about these things. That will help me.”

The second thing was that, I also knew that it was a profession that was practiced in a way in which the therapist was not very so revealing. That suited me just fine. As I began to practice, different clients came to me that were extremely significant in my development. I started working with multiple personality disorder, probably about maybe ten years into my career. That led me into severe trauma and I became quite conversely with that. I also began to see my own self-healing but not in a way that I was happy with. I wanted to be much more comfortable in my own skin. Anyway, that’s how I got into the profession.

Kristine’s Motivation To Write Bruised Not Broken

I remember in reading your book, you were talking about at least one particular client that helped you understand that the path you were taking at looking at self-esteem issues or other what we might call common surface area disruptions in our thoughts wasn’t working. Nothing was happening. It led you to this wonderful book called Bruised Not Broken. It’s about shame. Give us a little insight into how that developed for you.

It was my own personal story and it had to do with the first time I retired. I moved from Sacramento, California over to the Central Coast of California. I was expecting to have a wonderful little retirement. What happened was that because I wasn’t working anymore, my professional self wasn’t active. What happened in stood was my personal self was my daily companion. I had always known that my professional self was, in my opinion, more together than my personal self.

Sure enough, when I just had my personal self to hang out with. I was very dismayed at how many ways in which I didn’t have the confidence that I wanted. I didn’t have this self-possession that I wanted. My whole life I called a poor self-esteem or mild moderate depression. We have a four little terms like social anxiety.

We are good at labeling.

I had an experience that I like to tell you about that shifted my perception. I started realizing that I’ve got to do something about working on myself a little bit more. I didn’t have a full practice anymore, which takes up a huge amount of my space as you know. I had all that mind space now that I could focus on myself. I just decided I’m going to create these little therapy sessions. I’m going to see what I can do with myself.

While I had focused on different elements of healing, I don’t know that I’d ever give it as much focused attention. Anyway, one morning, I was singing and I was having coffee. This memory that I had many times in my life started surfacing again. My first reaction was, “Good lord. How come that thing keeps hanging around? I’ve looked at that and looked at that. What is that here for?” I decided I’m going to do what I would do with my clients. I wouldn’t say to them, “Here we go over this again.” I would say, “Tell me more about it or let’s explore this again,” and so I did.

As I watched the memory play out, I saw the same who did and what who said what. It was a memory of just being deeply hurt and humiliated when I was about maybe ten years old. I watched the whole thing play out. I saw all of the ways in which I had felt but then I started noticing something else. I noticed a reservoir of feeling that I had never labeled before. I started observing that, then I started observing how I acted after this incident took place.

A complaint I began. How I acted like nothing happened. How I offered to help was one of my little things. I thought, “I think that feeling is shame.” Now, I had that word in my mind because Brené Brown was published in books about shame. Honestly, I had read her books and appreciated her work particularly the way in which she popularized that concept. I never identified particularly with her concept of shame.

This made it very clear that this little pocket of emotion that I had at the bottom of this memory was one in which it was shame. I thought, “I’m going to learn more about this.” This is my experience anyway. As you know, Tim, I was not taught anything about shame. It was a few years ago I went to a continuing education workshop in which they specifically addressed shame. That was the first time that I’d ever had any training about it even though I’ve lived in my whole life.

Anyway, I started reading everything that I could. Mostly, I read traditional literature. I started putting together, “This is what it looks like. This is what it’s about. This is how it triggers.” I’m always taking notes. I had a little notebook. These little notebooks that I would fill. I then started thinking, “What are some specific ways that people heal?” I realized I’ve been engaging with clients in a way that was very healing but I had never put it together like, “Do this. Do this. Do this.”

I didn’t have a sequence or an idea of what were the important elements. I started writing those down and then I started doing them on myself. I started putting myself through those particular insights and contemplations, going back over things and educating myself. I was sitting one day and I was writing in my notebook. I have never said this before, but I heard this little voice in my head. It said, “Maybe you would like to contribute to the conversation about shame.” I remember thinking, “Right,” but that’s eventually what I decided to do. That’s how the book came to be.

Excellent. In a week or so that I’ve had the book and read it, I’ve already recommended it to 4 or 5 people that I work with and to a little internet show that I do called All the Same. I have mentioned it there because there is such an overlap between the things that you’ve learned that work well for you and others. The things that I’ve learned that work well for me and others.

I almost thought we should book a two-hour interview. From my perspective, I deeply appreciate when authors share their personal stories. Instead of talking from some disconnected place. You’ve done that in the book. I’ll leave it up to you how much you want to share about that here, but let us know what you want people to take away from your book.

I want people to take away, first of all, being able to identify what it is that I would say ails them, for lack of a better word. Something that keeps them from being engaged in a joyful experience of their lives. I want them to be able to see that it’s possible to heal. As you can see, I am in my later years. The message is also that it’s never too late.

As a matter of fact, the internal imperative to work on ourselves is even greater as we get older. There is a beckoning for us to work with ourselves, become more comfortable in our lives and become more alive. There’s a beckoning, but there’s a push. I believe that it’s not one that we can ignore. If we ignore it, we just get more and more miserable. I want people to see that healing is possible at any age.

How To Forgive And Why You Should Forgive

I agree. I don’t think it’s necessarily universal, but I believe that I’ve seen in myself and others what you’re talking about. This is a pull and a push to not stay stuck and not have the same old discomforts or the same old regrets or bitterness or vengeance thoughts. One of the things I love about the book is the third section, where you talk about how forgiveness.

Many of the things I read in your book echo the words of other people, other good clinicians or whatever. One on page six, you have a thing that says, “The feelings and thoughts of being broken and unworthy are not who you are. Rather it’s the sense you made of how you were treated as a child.” In my mind that echoed that Diederik Wolsak has a six-step worksheet process of the essence of it.

He says, “Once you figure out that you’ve got an upsetting emotion, ask if you felt it at an earlier time. One of those times will bubble up. You go back and interview that younger self. You ask yourself, “When this situation happened, what did you make it mean about you?” Personalized the meaning and downloaded it. Whenever that meaning resonates in you, you feel it again. You feel the emotion that went with it. You feed the conclusion that you drew. Uncovering those and being able to see them from a different perspective is curative all by itself.

That is a strategic intervention. That’s lovely. I love that. What was that guy’s name again? You got to tell me.

I will. It’s Diederik Wolsak. His process is called Choose Again. He is heavily informed by a lot of different things. The biggest one that turned his life around was reading A Course in Miracles and applying it directly in his life. Later on, I jumped to another highlight that says, “Forgiveness is the only way to free ourselves from the trap of persistent and unfair pain.” That’s a quote from Smeets. One of the researchers that you quote throughout the book.

If we can help people understand that, then forgiveness is about you and not about the other person. Now we’re at the door. When you’ve had somebody who’s experienced a disruptive, a painful, a disrespectful interaction with someone else and you say, “It would help you to forgive them.” You’re probably hearing or that person is probably hearing, “It wasn’t that bad. You’re making too much of it. They deserve your forgiveness.” Here’s the point. You deserve forgiveness. You deserve peace. You deserve a life, as you were talking earlier of being able to have compassion, joy, and a life of flourishing, as a human.

I want to just say forgiveness is such a loaded word. That it’s hard to even say that word. In my book, I wrote something. One of my clients said to me something like, “I hate that word. I’m never going to use that word. I’ll call it something else.” It doesn’t matter what people call it. In some ways, the entry point of curiosity is when we say something more like putting the past behind us or we stop dragging the past with us. We stopped reviewing our wounds and sufferings as something.

Shame: In some ways, the entry point of curiosity is when we put the past behind us or stop dragging it with us.

Forgiveness sets people off. Also, there’s the Sunday school version. This is what I call a forgiveness where you just say, “I forgave them.” I had thought that I had forgiven a number of people in my life. When I started going back in a deeper process, I realized I hadn’t gotten into what I was forgiving them for, which was one of the processes that I learned.

When you say the phrase, “What I am forgiving them for,” my mind is translating it into all of the stuff I’m carrying in me that I created and/or downloaded in that interaction. Even though the interaction isn’t happening and may have happened decades ago. I still have this dynamic in me that can get activated into alert status or overdrive any day, any time until I go in and unravel it and see what it is.

Speaking of alert status for a minute, Tim. I was talking to this friend of mine who has teased me for a number of years about how she doesn’t want to forgive her mother. She’ll say to me something like, “I know, Kristine, that you think I should forgive my mother.” I’m like, “I don’t think anything. You should do whatever makes sense to you.”

She said, “I enjoy how I feel.” I asked her, “What is that feeling?” It was a very activating feeling. It was a feeling of regent, revenge, which is a juicy feeling. It’s a hopeful feeling. It’s energizing. Some people have a certain juice that they get out of not forgiving that is maybe worthwhile exploring briefly. They don’t have a sense of what it feels like on the other side to have forgiven someone.

There’s nothing to pull them there into that better feeling, “I’m working towards this.” They’re just using this the suff. One of my favorite teachers says, “If you’ll notice, pay attention. The next time you get angry, you never feel so solid and alive.”

That’s exactly right. If I may just add this. If you’re depressed and you get angry, that might be a healthy move.

Step up the ladder of quality of emotion.

We don’t want to make you angry and I don’t think you were.

The Process Of Creating Our Experience Of Life

I’m saying that whatever I have as an emotion. This is the way I like to talk to people about it these days. I don’t know who made me, when I was made, why was made or how the world can. I don’t know any of that. I can observe that a lot of things seem to work. They consistently work like gravity and the deep breath for calling. These things work. If I look at the system and I say, “This is a system that was put together, whether you think it was God, the Creator or the process of evolution or whatever.” Everything in this system is here for a reason.

If I am trained by my culture to believe that my emotions are there to let me know when I need to scan the environment so I can figure out who I need to attack or run away from or bribe or seduce so I don’t have to feel this energy in me. My course of action is pretty well laid out. If I observe and I recognize that the dynamic that’s creating what I’m feeling is something inside me, then there’s a whole different set of tools I can use, courses I can and take actions I can step into.

One of them has me focused out there or I can’t control what anybody else says or does or doesn’t do. The other has me focus here. If I say, “My anger, my fear, my sadness are just my alarm system.” If I rewire the conditioning that I was raised with and of looking out there when there’s an upset in here. I call a timeout and turn the focus inside. Now, I have the capacity to manipulate those things I have control over to make my experience in the moment better if I start building that or I have a life I prefer.

You make such a lovely point, Tim. I don’t know that a lot of people believe that they can craft their life or create their life. They see themselves more as the reactors to and the recipients of. I would love to know what you think about this, but our culture reinforces that. We are miserable because of things that happen to us or something that’s happening to us now. You’re talking about the process of seeing that it’s how we are interpreting or reacting to what is happening that is creating the feeling that we have and that we have choices.

Literally, that’s the process we use to create our experience of life. Not just our emotions. We’re not taught that. This is not the only factor that’s operating but one simple way to look at it is in a capitalist society. This society needs consumers. It needs consumers. It needs consumers to consume. Consumers think they need to constantly consume. You don’t have to attribute some nefarious demon doing spiritual warfare to see that the way our culture is set up has got some benefits and some drawbacks.

One of the drawbacks of growing up in this Western culture is that so much of the focus is on things, accumulation, acquiring and adding on rather than being able to sit in appreciation in the moment for who we are, where we are and what we have. We are conditioned actively to think we need something different, something else to stop, somebody to change, more money, a different car or a better partner.

Those are our distractions.

That’s the conditioning that if people engage in a practice like your forgiveness practice. They can start to unravel because that conditioning feeds these negative beliefs about ourselves.

It definitely does. I don’t know if you would agree with this, but I want to go back to even how those beliefs got set up in our minds. You quoted something about how these beliefs about who we are happen or come about by virtue of us trying to make sense of how we were treated. I talk about shame as being one of the survival responses. We’re familiar with the survival responses of fight, flight, freeze, and there’s another one that people had named, fawn.

I don’t like that word because I don’t think it captures exactly what’s going on. That’s a shameful response. The shame response is one more of collapsing, which is a disempowerment. It’s a parasympathetic response which just shuts us down. We collapse then we appease. We then try to please whoever it is that we’re feeling vulnerable towards. That becomes a response. We have a very disempowered response that we learn early on even before we have words. We can learn those patterns if we are in a dangerous or threatening or unsupportive environment.

Shame: We learn a very disempowered response even before we have words if we are in a dangerous, threatening, or unsupportive environment.

These become neural pathways and they get triggered. It keeps us and causes us to scan for danger like you were talking about before. It keeps us out of ourselves. We don’t go into ourselves. We live this perpetual feeling of that there’s danger coming and what I need to do about it. I’d like to just put a plug in for something that some people do quite regularly that keeps them from healing in a way that could be beneficial to them.

That has to do with telling and retelling of our trauma stories. Noting that every time we do that, we are reinforcing. Our body goes back. It relives the experience. We’re reinforcing those neural pathways. Yet for many of us, myself included, that was one of the ways that I bonded with people. We shared our stories. We went back over them. We demonized the people that had offended us or hurt us. The people have a lot of identity with these stories. This is like, this is what I went through. It’s like our war stories. This is what shaped me.

When you say people have a lot of identity with those stories, some take it to the next step or beyond and that becomes their identity. It’s not just a part. That’s a tough nut to crack. The terror around asking someone to give up who they think they are can be intense.

A lot of scaffolding needs to happen before we start trying to dismantle that. Even the piece of information. When we live those stories, our whole system relives in the neural pathways. It reinforced. Is that the neural pathways that we want to have be like the big freeways we have here in California? We don’t want that. Many times, it’s an intellectual conversation to help people see what it is they’re doing because many times they don’t know what they’re doing. It’s like, “This is just the way we relate. This is just who I am.”

It’s an automatic process as far as they’re concerned.

Gaining Positive Thoughts By Accepting Compliments

Speaking of scaffolding, I’d like to highlight one of the things that I learned as I was studying this a little bit. It’s a very simple thing. It’s about taking compliments. When we are raised in a family that gives us a lot of inaccurate messages about who we are because as you and I know Tim and I think you agree with me about this. We come in not knowing who we are. As children, we do not know who we are. We need our parents.

A surveyor individual who says, “I’ve known from an early age.” We get handed it genetically, through the language and through the family inheritance.

Also, the way we’re treated. Direct messaging modeling and all of that. Something that dawned on me as I watched some people who I thought had healthy self-esteem. One of the things I noticed is when they are giving a compliment, they take it. They say thank you and hold on to it. I noticed that in contrast, myself being a good example.

Someone would give me a compliment and I would go, “Ah,” then I’d make some little thing like, “It wasn’t all that great or anyone could do that, or that was no big deal or whatever.” I didn’t take the compliment. I’d sit around and wonder, “Why don’t I feel better about myself?” It’s because you’re not eating the things that are coming your way that you could digest that could help you.

The old line about how there’s two wolves in every human and they’re always fighting. The one wolf is all about positive emotions and the other wolf is all about negative emotions. It’s exciting but which one wins? The one you feed is the one that wins. You can feed those positive thoughts by learning to accept compliments.

That’s one of them. I don’t know if this is your experience, Tim. Many times, a client would come in and talk to me about some horrible situation that they’ve gone through. I would say to them something like, “What do you say to yourself to help you through this?” They would have blanks. If anything, they had an inner messaging like, “You should have known better or you screwed up. Why didn’t you learn your lesson?”

They did not have any of what I called self-soothing languaging. When I was first beginning to identify the lack of self-soothing messaging that I had, by virtue of seeing it, mirrored me in my clients. I would think, “I don’t have that either.” I set out to actively collect it. I looked for it because I knew I needed it. I listened to other people’s phrasing. I had this man helping me change out a microwave and it was tricky because it wasn’t the right size exactly. We had to do some things. I listened to his inner talk because he was talking out loud. He would say things like, “We’ve almost got it. Now, we’re getting closer. This didn’t quite work out but I can see now.”

This is so perfect because he might have been doing that to help call him you but it’s also calming him.

I think it was for him, but I don’t know.

The point is, it’s the same things you would hear. One of the best things I’ve done for people in my therapy career, as ridiculous as this might sound. If I find out that they have cats and they’re cat loving people and their cats are like their children. If they’re coming to me for therapy, they’ve got some of these issues of shame or self-esteem issues or whatever. One of the most powerful things I’ve done for them is ask them to talk to themselves in the voice they used to talk to their kittens.

Isn’t that something? I’ve done that also.

It’s just so transforming if one people will do it. It’s very diagnostic when they refuse to or they think they can’t. That gives us another good place to explore.

I don’t want to say that I’m more directive in my therapy now but I want to say that I can see so clearly now it’s on the other side of doing those things. When people hesitate around it, I explore that with them. I think they also get this little feeling that I’m a bit impatient.

Three Critical Things To Do When Forgiving Someone

I looked at the clock and realized that we’ve only got a few minutes left. I’m pretty sure we’re going to do another one of these. In this first edition, can you talk to us a little bit about the process of forgiveness? There’s at least three critical things that you’re asking people to do specifically as they forgive.

First of all, I want to give credit to the man who taught me a lot about this, Robert Enright. He’s a psychologist like you. He’s a research psychologist. He has written so many books about the process of forgiveness. It goes on and on and on. Also, there’s been other sources that you and I talked about in terms of learning about forgiveness.

The first thing is a willingness to just try it. Explore it. We don’t have to say, “I’m going to forgive like the end point is going to be forgiveness.” It’s more like, I’m going to just explore this. We talked about why you would even be interested in it. It’s about unburdening ourselves. It’s about letting the past go into the past. It’s not having our past form and dictate our lives now. One of the processes is picking someone that you are willing to explore forgiving. You might not pick the person that is the hardest for you.

I want to slow you down and back you up. If I remember correctly in your book, the first step there is to make a list. That in itself, some people have a difficult time doing it. We have resistance to it. As we work out that resistance, we understand what was behind them. We have more liberty to proceed.

I agree.

Once you have your list, you don’t do the whole list. You pick one.

The list is an open list. I made a list and I added people. Open-ended. The next thing is to let yourself explore. What are you forgiving them for? I’m trying to think about how I want to put this. You can write down what you’re forgiving them for or you can remember what you’re forgiving them for. You’ve got to know what it is that you’re forgiving them for if you’re going to forgive them. It’s not some big blanket of like, “I’m going to forgive you, X, Y, and Z, and we’re done.”

I don’t know what order you want me to talk about this but what we do then is we explore that the person is more than just their worst behavior like you and I are more than just our worst behavior. We start looking at that person from a standpoint of understanding and being willing to explore a little bit about what their background might be. I did this with my stepfather who was a very difficult man to be with. He’s someone that I carried a lot of unforgiveness for.

I started exploring more about who he was and I noticed that my heart started softening as I learned that. I thought about that, who he was as much as how much he had offended me. Pretty soon, the balance began to shift a little bit. I noticed my heart opening to him. Which previously had been pretty closed off. At some point, I made this decision to not keep going back over the offenses. Let them go into the past. That, to me, is the tipping point of the forgiveness process.

When I was reading it in your book, I was thinking about how it’s very good and very clear that you’ve said, “This isn’t like you throw a switch and it’s done.” You make the determination that you want to forgive or you have forgiven. You then realize that’s a process that you’re beginning and committing to. The thing that showed up in my mind was, how many times I’ve worked with people who wanted to quit smoking. They would quit and then they’d have cravings come up. Maybe sometimes they’d sneak a cigarette or two, but then they would quit again. One of the best things for them was to rehearse the phrase, “I don’t smoke or I’m not smoking now.”

As you talked about the neural pathways. You’re starting a new neural pathway and practicing it to strengthen it with the ultimate consequence that that’s going to be a default for you in the future. If you keep working at it, you can rehearse it enough that it becomes second nature, and eventually first nature.

Your example of smoking is a great one because. After I’d gone through the process of forgiving my stepfather, there would come like a memory. All of a sudden, it would activate this, “I haven’t forgiven him.” I would think, “This is just one more thing I need to let go of.”

“I’m three steps into the plan for revenge. I thought I had forgiven him.”

Exactly. It’s an ongoing process. It’s not just done. You never have a ugly thought that crosses your mind again. That’s not the case at all. It’s an ongoing process.

If we are successful at that level and it’s starting to soften, dismantle the neural pathways for rage and revenge and start to increase the neural pathways for comfort and compassion and gentleness. What’s next?

I can speak from experience. What’s next is that something else opens up and the neural pathways that we’ve been reinforcing for connectedness, appreciation, love, joint nature, and being present with people starts to be more our experience. The stories, I don’t remember them that much anymore. I don’t like it when people ask me stuff and I have to go back and remember it.

When I was writing this book, one of the thoughts that I kept having is, “I don’t want to go back there.” I did it because I wanted to write the book. Those stories feel like they don’t belong to me anymore. My old imaging of, say, my stepfather and his example. It’s changed. He’s become a human being like me with faults and shortcomings.

Everybody started as a sperm and an egg. There’s this wonderful little movie. I was smiling there because your words triggered the memory of the movie called the Atom Project. It’s a B level movie with Ryan Reynolds. He time travels back to his younger self and his younger self is a year or two after his father had died.

The adult Adam hates his father and the younger Adam hates his father until they go through this adventure together. The information is given to the younger generation about life events. The younger one has his fond memories of his father open up. He remembers that when his dad died, he made himself hate his dad, believing and that was what blocked all the good memories.

That is what happens, isn’t it? You start having more good memories.

If you can get the beaver dam to explode, the river flows.

Yes.

Cultivate The Skills That Heal You

I would ask you to take a breath, collect your thoughts and think what’s something we’ve already mentioned you want to highlight or something we haven’t even touched on yet from your book that you want to put in this first interview?

I want to emphasize two things. One of them is that there are skills, such as developing self-soothing, being able to cultivate and use self-forgiveness. Being able to extend compassion to ourselves and enter into the process of forgiving others. Those are skills, I think. We have to actively cultivate them. I play golf. I have to learn certain skills if I want to be good at golf. I have to practice with them.

When my golf game goes a little on chasing the ball out into the bushes, I have to go back and remember what skill I forgot and reactivate that. Those skills are important, then we have to do it diligently. You can do it haphazardly but then you’ll have a haphazard result. You mentioned it several times and that is people sometimes get a little wiggy when we start talking about speaking to their younger self.

There’s a lot of stuff around that. I find that it’s extremely helpful to be able to do that. It’s important to be able to do that. The younger self is very accessible. It’s quite pleasurable in some ways to go back and speak to our younger self about all kinds of things. Not just the tough stuff that happened but also just being able to reinforce that we’re proud of them for many things. The opposite of shame is pride. Being able to reinforce to the younger part of myself like, “I’m proud of how you handle this. I’m proud of how you did this.” That builds me, even though I’m speaking to a part of myself that from how we understand time happened a long time ago.

I tell people, there’s this weird thing about us as humans that in the first few years of our lives, depending upon which expert you read, 5 to 8 years or whatever. Our physiology, our brain neural firings, our mirror neurons, all this good stuff is set up such that we can take in the loving good stuff from our parents as they cuddle us and tell us how sweet we are and loving. We can take that in if there’s enough of it consistently and not constantly jumping back and forth.

We can get it from the outside in that window. Something happens developmentally, physiologically, brain formation, neuron formation and pruning of the neurons that we know happens. After that period of time, we can’t get it from the outside. People panic at that thought but you don’t need to panic. You can get it from you. You are an adult. You’re putting one foot or both in the reality or actuality of the moment that you are a competent adult addressing an issue of a five-year-old. You can do that.

That’s very interesting, isn’t it? I was thinking about that as you were talking to him because I haven’t thought about it like that. I was thinking, “Is that true?” I was thinking about things that have shifted inside of me by virtue of loving things that I’ve heard. What happens is, it’s more of a correction. What comes to me now from the outside is more of a correction of a perception or a thought that I had of myself.

I’ll share this one thing with you in the little time we have left. There’s a little blue love seat over here. A number of years ago, I had a patient in here and they were on the love seat. We were going around them beating themselves up and feeling miserable, despite all the evidence of the contrary. On paper, this is a magnificent human being sitting here with great accomplishments and loving nature. All of a sudden, I got this image. I started with her.

He said, “You’re sitting there on that love seat and I get a picture of an elevator shaft that goes straight down 33 floors to a steel reinforced concrete bunker. It’s as big as it needs to be to hold every wounded memory you have. Every person that’s a wounded child of you from 5 years old or 8 years old and your mindset when you were twelve. All of those entities, characteristics, personalities, cells, or whatever you want to call it. They can’t hear a word I say.

You could come to see me in therapy 3 days a week for 40 years and I can tell you how lovely, beautiful, creative and intelligent you are. They don’t hear a word of it. There’s a direct line from your thoughts and words to them and from their thoughts and words to you. That’s how I try to help people see that you can’t marry somebody who will make you feel better. If you’re so wounded that you think you’re worthless. Their words will fall off you like the raindrops bounce off your car.

Using your image, you need to be the adult person who goes down the elevator.

Maybe visualize in any way or recognize that you need to take parts of the dialogue because you’re an adult. They don’t know they’re not to be all and end all. The way to think about it is, the thoughts that create the mindset of my memory from when I was five years old are based on what I knew of the world and based on what I knew of my skills and abilities.

When I was five years old, if a 5-foot, 120-pound person of any gender or age was in front of me and wanted me to do something I didn’t want to do, I was helpless. At 6’4” and still some relative strength, I’m not so helpless. If I control the dialogue and start to do everything you just said, I show the appreciation, the compassion and the literal description for my young self of their qualities that I admire that helped me get from who I was when I was them to who I am now.

Get In Touch With Kristine

I don’t have to visualize the elevator shaft. I just have to know that all of these thoughts I have when they’re negative about me are from the past. They’re not based in truth and they’re right there for me to access them and change my relationship to them. I can’t necessarily end them but I don’t have to believe them. I don’t have to be terrorized by them. How do people find you? How do you want people to be looking for you?

I have a website and it’s Kristine-Jensen.com. There’s a way to contact me there. The book that you mentioned is for sale on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Although, I think they’re having some problems. You can find them at your bookstore. If you order through your local bookstore, they’re accessible.

The title again is?

Bruised Not Broken: Healing the Shame of a Troubled Childhood.

Bruised Not Broken: Healing the Shame of a Troubled Childhood

Excellent.

Thank you, Tim.

Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us. As I mentioned, I hope you’ll agree to another one.

Thank you very much. I enjoyed this. Thank you, Tim.

—

Kristine B. Jensen, LCSW is a licensed psychotherapist in the State of California and a certified clinical trauma professional with over four decades of experience helping individuals overcome traumatic shame. Recognized for her expertise, Kristine has presented professional conferences on diagnosing and treating trauma related issues.

Early in her career, she worked at the University of Davis School of Medicine as an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and faculty member. She has trained directly with renowned experts like the late Sue Johnson, founder of Emotionally Focused Therapy, and John Gottman of the Gottman Method couples therapy.

She also studied the work of respected trauma experts around the world. After her first retirement, from 30 years of private practice, Kristien worked as a counselor for the US Army in Germany and Okinawa. When she returned, she opened a private practice in moderate California and began researching and working on her new book about chronic shame titled Bruised Not Broken.

Important Links

• Kristine B. Jensen
• Kristine B. Jensen on LinkedIn
• Bruised Not Broken: Healing the Shame of a Troubled Childhood
• Diederik Wolsak
• A Course in Miracles
• Robert Enright on LinkedIn

About Kristine B. Jensen, LCSW

Kristine is a licensed psychotherapist in the state of California (1975) and a Certified Clinical Trauma Professional with over four decades of experience in helping individuals overcome traumatic shame. Recognized for her expertise, Kristine has presented at professional conferences on diagnosing and treating trauma related issues. Early in her career she worked at the University of Davis, School of Medicine as an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry and faculty member. She has trained directly with renowned experts like the late Sue Johnson, founder of Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), and John Gottman (Gottman Method Couples Therapy) and studied the work of respected trauma experts.