Unlocking a Stronghold from Trauma to Impact the Healing in Your Own Life

Warrior DIVAS | Real Talk for Real Women

Episode 13 Transcribed and Edited

Hello and welcome to Warrior DIVAS | Real Talk for Real Women. I am your host; Angie Leigh Monroe and we are going to have a great show today. Not because it's going to be a great topic to talk about, but because the potential it can do for us if we just embrace this topic. So, before we get started, I just want to remind you that Warrior DIVAS is part of our DIVAS Impact organization and DIVAS Impact stands for Destined Inspired Victorious Accountable Sisters who are making an impact in the world we live in and you can find out more about us by going to DIVASImpact.com and when you go there, you can learn about our conference that's coming up in October, October 11 and 12th. You can learn about our magazine and how to subscribe to our magazine. You can submit articles for the magazine, you could submit blogs or read blogs on our website. And so much more is coming. So be sure to go to DIVASImpact.com and connect with us there. If you have any questions about the show today, if you have any input you want to give us, all of that goes through the DIVAS Impact website.
So today, we're going to talk about unlocking some stuff. We're going to talk about stronghold, have you ever heard of a stronghold? A stronghold is something that holds you strong. I mean, it's very, very easy to dictate that the stronghold is more about what a prison is, something that holds you back from being able to do more, be more, see more, right? So, if you are in a locked up and held back, then you can't accomplish and do all that you're meant to do. Right? It's like, Okay, so my mom had shoulder surgery last month, her arm is in a sling. And when her arm is in the sling, she is limited on her movement her you she can do all she wants with this left hand, but there are some things that she needed both hands for that she can't do right now because that arm is locked down. For the time being, Yes, she can take it out of her sloft and do her exercises that she has to do to work out her arm, but she is still limited. So, strongholds are things that limit you. So, what we're going to talk about today is what my pastor friends and all that call the anatomy of a stronghold. Alright, so the anatomy of a stronghold has four components.
It has the event.
So, there may be an event that happened to you, maybe it happened to your parents, but you're still dealing with it. Maybe it was a trauma you experienced, maybe it was your parents’ divorce, maybe it was your divorce, maybe it was a sexual trauma, maybe it was the loss of a job, whatever it is, it's an event that happens in your life that kind of derails you for a little bit, right? And then what happens after that is after that event, we create a lie that we believe about that event.
All right, so lots of times when I hear women come out of a divorce, they say that they are just unlovable. Well, that's a lie, because they have been loved. So therefore, they can be loved again, right? If they lose their job, they say, nobody wants them or their unemployable or something like that. Or if they've been sexually assaulted, it may be that they are just a trash receptacle. They feel like a trash receptacle; those are all things lies that people create about it. And you can either choose to believe the lie. And you may even inherit or embrace a lie that your parents believed before you, that's something that happens to and then sometimes you create other lies, and lies about others, because of the event. So, you see someone that acts in a certain way, and you automatically without knowing them without getting to know them, you automatically create a lie around them. And there's a reason you do this. And we'll talk about that here in a little bit. Or, and like we said, you believe there's nothing better for your life, because this is just the hand that you were dealt. I mean, does any of that resonate with some of you out there listening to today? Have you ever had something happened, and it just totally sent you into a mindset of, there's nothing better for me anymore? This is the best I will have ever had, the best I've ever been the rest of my life, I'm going to be less than I'm going to be subpar. I'm not going to be worth anything, I'm unlovable, I'm unemployable. Nobody wants me, nobody likes me. I mean, there's some of you out there that are big, strong, self - confident people. But you also still believe this, although you'd never let anybody else know, you believe this, but you never let anybody else know that you believe this about yourself. So, what we do when we hear, when we have those lies is we begin to build up defense mechanisms.
Now, when my son was elementary age, we noticed he was having some problems reading, he kept telling me that the words were dancing on the screen, on the pages for him. And I sat in with the counselor, the Vice Principal, his teachers, the reading teacher, and all that stuff. And they had done all these tests on him by this time, he's in third grade. He's well into his learning how to read years. And he had built up some, some coping mechanisms, let's call them coping mechanisms to help him read, he still wasn't a strong reader, he still wasn't a good reader, he was still struggling, he was still below average on reading scores. But because he had built up those coping mechanisms, when he took the test, the standardization on the test showed that he was quote, unquote, borderline.
Let me just tell you, nothing sets a mama bear off, like telling her that you can see there's a problem that their child may help but not being willing to help them. I slammed my hand right in the middle of that table. And I said, ladies, it's kind of like being pregnant. Either you are, or you aren't, this is a young man sitting in front of you begging for help. He needs help. And you're telling me because he's borderline, he probably won't qualify for it? Well, a lot of times, we come up with defense mechanisms, very similar to that, to where we can go in and out with people and act, quote unquote, somewhat normal.
But when we get pushed, or we get challenges; challenged, our defenses come up. And it may come up in something that's more like passive aggressive or even passivity, you just avoid and go away from then turn into, you may be over analyzing the situation, and trying to bring reason to something that is just not reasonable. You may be what we call a BS or that's for blame shifting, you may be blame shifting. So instead of accepting blame that you need to do or you even accept blame, that should go somewhere else. See, you just thought it was all going to be about you right see it may be that you're accepting blame, that solely belongs on the person that caused trauma to you. Or you're not accepting blame for your part in what happened to you. I know this is going to strike a nerve with some of you that you may turn into a total control freak, because you didn't have control in that one part of your life. Now you tried to control every other part of your life and all the other people that are in your life. And what happens is that runs people off.
My husband and I a few years ago had a conversation and you know, when a woman tells a man, we need to talk, the guy's eyes roll in the back of their head, and they're like, never has that term coming out of a woman's mouth ever ended well, right? Well, we had one of those talks, we started late at night and we rolled into about nine o'clock the next morning, it was just a good soul-searching gut-wrenching conversation. Even my husband will say today there was a lot more that came out of that conversation in our marriage, then in the previous 20 years of our marriage, combined. And you know, there's some things that happened to my husband's past and, and a lot of people have left him, a lot of people have taken care of themselves and just left him high and dry. And he has what I call, quote unquote, spiritual or psychological term would be abandonment syndrome. He has a fear of abandonment. All right. So, his reaction is he's going to walk away from you. He's going to cause something to cause the abandonment before you can abandon him. Right? So, he's always the one if something argument would happen, or a discussion would happen. He'd walk away first. Well, I've told you before in other podcasts, I'm a toe to toe fighter. So, I'll follow him, I don't care where he's walking through, I'll follow Him and we’ll continue it on, but he laid there on the bed that day. And even though I knew he had this fear of abandonment; it wasn't mine to call out and he laid there on the bed that day. He says, “I guess I just have a fear of abandonment”, and I'm going to tell you, I said, “well, nope ****, Sherlock. We all know that already. Let's reveal something new.” Right? Well, that's another thing. Another thing that we do whenever we get caught up in these strongholds, and we start to build our defense mechanisms is we start rejecting other people and pushing them away before they can ever have a chance to reject us. If you're if you can't stay constantly busy, because you don't want to address your own pain. And maybe you have anger issues, maybe you're self-medicating, maybe your attention seeking. Yeah. Now, another one is you may be fantasizing about what a life would be like if…now I'm going to tell on myself. When we were first married, my husband and I lived in a tiny little apartment, we had our daughter, I just had my son, and I didn't work. So, I would get up in the morning. And I do a couple of things with the kids. They get to play, and I pick up my book, and I love to read. And I would read Danielle Steele novels. I know this, I'm giving you some real insight. I don't read them anymore. But for a longest time, when I was growing up, I read the Little House on the Prairie series, I read the Nancy Drew series, I read Sweet Valley High. I read you name it, I read series of books. So, Danielle steele was the next one. My mom at the time had been into the Harlequin romance series. I couldn't get into that back and get into the Danielle Steele’s these seemed like real people to me. And I could literally pick up a book and read it from beginning to end in a day, if I just was left alone to do it, right? But I had to stop reading those books. Because what was happening is Mike and I were needing to build our marriage and build our relationship. And I kept comparing him to these heroes, these romantic interests in these books that were not real. It's called fiction people. And we get it wrapped in our brain that “Oh, they should treat us this way or we want them to treat them that way.” So, if you're addicted to shows like The Bachelor or, I know I'm calling some people out, Love Island or any of those stuff, and you're starting to go, “Well, I want my life to be like that.” First stop, stop fantasizing and get to work on working on the relationship you're currently in. So yeah, it was a rough go. I kind of went through withdrawals. When I put down the Danielle Steele books, I went to Half Price Books, I sold them all back to them, got them all out of my house. So, I would not do it again. I literally would be in the line when the new books would come out because I'd read them all. It was crazy. But the thing is, is when you build up these defense mechanisms you have, you cause a reaction. So what happens if you're a control freak, and you're trying to control people, people recognize you're a control freak, they may not tell you, you're a control freak, because you don't have time in your schedule to listen for them to tell you that you're a control freak, because you're too busy controlling them, right? Did y'all follow that? Yeah, it was a little, little crazy there. But if you're overanalyzing, you're too busy, trying and figure out what the problem is to listen to somebody talk to you about how to fix the problem. People will notice a chip on your shoulder, people will notice your attention seeking, they will notice your overmedicating they will notice all these things. But a lot of times people have also come to realize until you're ready to address it, it doesn't help for them to bring it up. So, all they try and do is treat the symptoms.
A friend of mine who lives in the Dallas Fort Worth area, she is a CEO of a large company here and has won numerous awards for that; is a highly intelligent woman. And hopefully we'll have her on the show one day. But a couple of years ago, she asked her daughter, I believe she was in third grade. What is it that she thought would make mommy better? Because she was doing that 360 review of herself. She was doing a lot of what we all do. But it wasn't until her daughter turned to her and said, “I'd like my mommy not to drink so much.” See, it wasn't that the mom was a falling down drunk, all that stuff. She revealed later on that she did have some blackout moments. But she went home every night, she had a wine cellar, she went home every night she had wine. Every night, she'd have a bottle or two, or whatever of wine, while she was doing her work. It was just as common as picking up a bottle of water for her. But it had started to cause problems in her life, and there were some things she needed to address for herself. Not so much for her daughters, her daughters would get the overflow of the benefit of her doing the work on herself. It was right after that she went and got help. And she went and got sober, and her husband cleared out every bit of alcohol that was in the house for her, so she wouldn't be tempted. And she walked through this season, and she talks now about being clear and being able to see and what she was self-medicating during that time. But it wasn't until she allowed someone else to speak into her.
See, back in the day, I used to tell everybody, with my arms outstretched, I'd say I'm an open book, you can ask me anything. But what I was really doing is I was making a defensive posture in my mind, where I had my hands up in a defensive mode going. You can, I'm an open book, you can ask me anything, but if you really knew me, you would have already known it. So, you shouldn't have to ask. I was deflecting, I was in denial. I was keeping myself from letting others in so that they couldn't reject me over thoughts, over actions, over things that I've done in my past. You might want to be the one that wants to fix everyone else. You might see problems in everyone around you. But here's the deal. If everyone around you has problems, you might be the only common denominator to that problem. And you might have to look at yourself. Question is, are you willing to look at yourself? Are you ready to look at yourself? People can see the destructive pattern, they can call it out, they can do all that stuff. But they can't go beyond surface level with you until you are ready to go beyond the surface yourself.
Couple of years ago, I was in the citizens police academy and in my hometown, and the officer was talking about an Oodle loop. And I'd heard it before we had used that thing back in the military. Or maybe my dad had mentioned it, I'm not exactly sure where I'd heard it before. But it stands for observe, orient, decide and act. So just like the anatomy of a stronghold, and observe sometimes is an observance of something that happens that brings pain or trauma. Maybe you saw something, saw your dad beating your mom, maybe you were physically assaulted, whatever it is, you're observing what your observation of that event is. And then we orient, we develop information, we figure out if the information we want to develop around this event is factual or fiction, a lie. Then we decide what we need to do to ensure that bad thing never happens to us again, right? And we find our defensive mechanisms to self-preserve. And then our actions, our actions react and reflect all those lies, and decisions we've already previously made. Now, one of the things that they taught us in the police academy, is they use the oodle loop to train people, like when there's an active shooter, right? So common sense would tell you we're sitting in a studio today, there's a door to my right, when the door opens up, literally I would be face to face, eye to eye, with whoever's coming through that door. Well, immediately, whoever's coming through that door is going to be looking straight ahead. They may turn and look around the door or to their left when they come through the door. But first thing they're going to focus on is what's right ahead of them. So, one of the things we have to do is to disrupt their oodle loop, because their mind is, they're coming through that door, and they're going for the first thing in front of them. What we do instead is we put people on either side of the door, so that when they come through that door, we're disrupting their thought process immediately. We're, we're shaking them up immediately. So, they're disoriented. All right, they don't have a chance to come in, and they may see somebody in front of them, they don't have a chance to do anything with it. Because the two people on either side of the door, disorient them, they don't have a time to get their orientation with the room straight. Right? So that's what we need to do with this anatomy of a stronghold.
If you've had a trauma, if you're walking through a trauma now, if you have never gotten healed from a past trauma, well, no matter how big or how small it is, there's ways we can help you do that we can help you, disorient those lies that you are starting to believe about what happened to you, we can help you build in things that will help you see the truth, and the life and, and help you walk better, stronger, bolder into who you are created to be. It's what we're all about. We're going to be talking more about these strongholds in our DIVAS making an impact group. It's a private group on Facebook, that you can be a part of. If you're listening to this or watching this podcast, you can see the link to it in the comments below but we're going to be talking about unlocking yourself from some of these strongholds, we're going to start that conversation on September 1 and go ahead and jump in the group now because we're having a great conversation in there right now. I don't want to spoil it for you. But we're having a great conversation in there right now for you and get to know what we're about. Get to know what we're talking about. Let us help you walk through some of those things. There's times that we do teachings during the week. And then there's times that we have a question and answer time where you can get on and you can ask questions, and we can walk through things. And of course, you can always schedule time to get on a call with us one on one as well. But these are the ways when we say we want to have real talk with real women, we want to get to the root cause that's causing a lot of these things that are holding you back. And we can't do that until you're ready to do that. So please, please, please go to DIVASImpact.com You can learn more about the group there, or you can learn more about the group in the comments section of this podcast below. But talking about unlocking. I am so excited today to tell you about our EVERYDAY DIVA. Our EVERYDAY DIVA this week is Kerrie Ole. She is the founder of unlocked ministries. And I love her ministry name because it was while I was standing in her kitchen a few years ago that she unlocked some things for me. I had been doing some things with her. I helped her with the conference which again, the help she gave me was far more than anything I did at the conference. I had helped her beyond the conference, helping her put some things together, organizing, getting social media together, all of that stuff. But again, every time I sat with this woman, I was just filled with so much yummy, ooey, gooey goodness, that I couldn't help but be changed, right. So, after we had a morning meeting, she turned to me and said something that really just astounded me. I've been doing a lot of things for a while for people that they would say without saying it, they would say with their actions, their words, their deeds, what can you do for me? It was never that way with Kerrie. It was always, “How can I help you”, if you're helping me, I want to be able to help you too. And so, I love that about her. But she and I had a great way of laughing and joking and she is hilarious. So, if you ever want to read any of her books, let me just tell you, her books are amazing. I recommend her book “REAL” for sure. And then hurt she has another book called “Revealed”, as well. Oh, my goodness, they are good. But anyway, standing there kitchen, we're laughing and we're joking. And she makes the comment just in the middle of us laughing and joking. She goes, “uh, why aren't you doing this for yourself?” Yeah, well, if I was completely honest with her, I would tell her that I was running away from myself at that time, I really didn't feel the value in myself, I felt about my value, adding value to others, by him feeling my value in what I had to offer on a broad spectrum like she was offering it. And it was just a dropped bomb right there. And it's because she is a woman that helps other women unlock their future that she is today's EVERYDAY DIVA, and if you want to learn more about her, you can go to Kerrieoles.com. And I'm going to spell that because it's not a normal spelling. That's kerrieoles.com if you go through her website, you can learn about her movement called the unlocked ministry. You can learn about her being a conference speaker, you there's a few videos on our website that you can see her more hilarious side of things and just go on to her social media. So, you can see that on her website too, and just tell her how much we appreciate her, not just me. We appreciate her for all that she has unlocked for all of us that are listening today. So, I want to thank you again for tuning in. This is Angie Leigh Monroe, your host of Warrior DIVAS | Real Talk for Real Women. And until next time. I will see you soon. Bye bye