Hi I’m Lewis Howes and today’s guest is the author of the international best seller From Tragedy to Triumph: Recovering from Complex Trauma the Easy Way. Her courses, “Improving your Money Imprinting” and “Find Your Joy” sell out in hours of launching and she now lives her dream life travelling the world, helping others to Find Their Joy.

Lewis: Welcome Caroline and wow! Your book starts off excrutiatingly raw but ends on such a heartwarming, positive and inspiring note. It’s almost like two different people wrote it. Was it difficult to write?

Caroline: It was initially, and it was like two different people wrote it, because the person you become after you heal is so different to the person you are when in the midst of your trauma.

So I wrote the first part years before the second part as there was no way once I healed that I would be able to replicate it again as my perspective and memories had changed as my experiences healed.

The second part I struggled with for years, but once I changed the focus to love, it just flowed. So that was the point… the first part was to show the messed up and brutal thought structures that go with complex trauma and PTSD and the second part was to show how differently you think and behave once you have healed.

Lewis: How did you feel when Oprah picked out your book for her book club?

Caroline: I’m still in shock (laughs). I remember getting the email from her saying she had read it and wanted to add it to her book club.

At first I thought it was a friend playing a game with me but then I realised it was actually Oprah and I think I sat in stunned silence for about 20 minutes.

But I was just as blown away because I did a wonderful course called The Master Key System 2 years ago and with that I had to write my Definite Chief Aim in life, and part of mine was to finish my book and that I would be interviewed by Oprah herself, and a few others, so I was equally blown away with that coming into reality as I was about Oprah getting in contact.

Lewis: No way!! So it pays to get clear on your goals and write them down.

Caroline: Absolutely, I am living proof of that and the book and its success has allowed me to bring into being one of my pet projects which is to have the Positive Living Skills program, which I talk about in my video “Stemming The Flow”.

It’s placed into every early learning and childcare centre and primary school in need. If we had that as children my life might have been completely different and those girls might still be alive. So 10% of my book earnings goes to implementing the program worldwide.

Lewis: Tell me about your courses which I have read and heard so much about. I see lots of people posting and doing videos on their experiences with them and the results they have got from them.

Caroline: Well, my first course was “Improving Your Money Imprinting”. What I realised through working with hundreds of people who have had crappy childhoods is, so many seem to have major issues with money. I certainly did.

Money represents freedom, security and while it’,s not always justified a certain amount of respect is given to people with money even if they don’t really deserve it. If you were unsafe and controlled as a child, or made to feel lesser, then your unconscious will look for ways to replicate that because it knows you have already survived it so you are in a way ‘safe’.

And then we build all this meaning into what money means and how our worth is tied up with our finances thinking it’s money and not a reflection of how we feel about ourselves. So this course is about neutralising all the emotions people feel around money.

You need to be neutral about it before you can change it or you get thrown every time an unexpected bill comes in, or you get that child support but it has so much anger and resentment attached to it, you’ll never take the leap to follow your dreams because you are more worried about not having enough.

Lewis: That is so true! We have so much emotion and meaning tied up in money. It is one of the biggest things that stops people from living their dreams. It comes up in all the comments I get from people all over the world. It really is a universal problem and shouldn’t be. Most people are trying to avoid losing money rather than being open to receive it.

Caroline: Exactly. And that is the perfect segue into “Find Your Joy”. You can’t Find Your Joy if you are worried about money and losing it or it being scarce.

“Find Your Joy” is all about discovering the hidden values you live your life by but don’t even know you do and then bringing those values into the light and finding a career or a business of some kind or even hobby that are aligned with those values.

Some people call this their purpose. Most people think their values are truth, honesty, kindness, those sorts of things and they are all great values but they are more societal values that we ourselves don’t always live up to depending on the day and they certainly don’t align you with your true purpose or you’d already be living it.

Once we have uncovered the values that power your actions we then look look into building your dream life and how you can align with what inspires and motivates you naturally and then be open to receive it.

It’s about working through all the fears and/or beliefs that are holding you back from stepping into change and being who you are truly meant to be in a supportive, nurturing environment.

Lewis: I really love the sound of that. How long do the courses run for?

Caroline: They are 12-week courses. “Improving Your Money Imprinting” you can do at anytime and I recommend, if money is holding you back, do that prior to “Find Your Joy”.

“Find Your Joy” I run live 3 times a year, for a small group at a time, so people can really get hands on support from me if they need it, and at the same time build a new network of people who only know them as the person they want to be and not who they were in the past.

Lewis: So what did you have to change about yourself to get you to where you are now?

Caroline: I had to learn that the meaning I gave things was what created my life… this was really hard.

When kids go through trauma as children, the only way they can make sense of the abuse is to put meaning to it. Generally the meaning is about themselves and life… it also forms our beliefs… I’m not good enough, I’m not important, I’ll never amount to much, life is cruel and unfair and so on.

In that home environment we live up to those… we kind of have to, to survive that environment. If you come from a family that doesn’t want you to be ‘good enough’ and you try to be, your fate will more than likely be even worse, so you take it on to fit in.

Unfortunately, when we get out of that environment the meaning we have given to life about not being fair, or unkind, is then reflected back to us, but we no longer know why or how to change it as we think once we change our environment it will change.

But as you and I both know the change we need is internal. Life is about the meaning you put to it, not the meaning others have put to it that we have picked up on. I also had to learn to forgive and let go… this was again incredibly hard to do and I am still working on it (laughs).

And the biggest one of all is shame. Most people have no idea how much of their life reflects back their shame. Shame is the hardest emotion to work with, mainly because we ourselves don’t even admit to ourselves that we feel shame.

I have had many client who have told me they don’t feel shame, but then they do one of the exercises I give them to complete between sessions and they invariably text or email in shock at how much shame they actually do feel.

Shame is the most important emotion to feel, face and let go. The biggest shifts in my life came when I faced mine.

Lewis: Lived experience really does give you an edge, doesn’t it?

Caroline: Yeah it does. I have been lucky, as I never gave up trying to find things that worked. I did all the traditional therapies and they made me worse, much worse.

I was sometimes retraumatised for months after… that’s not to say they don’t work they absolutely have their place, but there is a whole forgotten group of people they don’t work for.

25% in fact, just move around to different counsellors, psychologists, psychiatrists, placed on all sorts of different drugs that never get relief and it just reinforces their belief they are no good and something is wrong with them.

Haanel refers to something similar in the The Master Key System. To paraphrase, he says that if you set goals you don’t then achieve, you are reinforcing a sense of failure rather than success.

This is the same thing, spending years doing therapy that does not change things for you, reinforces all your negative concepts of self.

Lewis: So how is what you do different?

Caroline: You have to go back and change events, people and situations in peoples’ lives – neutralise them, so they are no longer a long forgotten filter they are viewing life through. You need to change their experiences in life to change their experience of life.

Lewis: That’s sounds incredibly logical (laughs)

Caroline: I know right (laughs) but that is the only thing that worked for me.

Lewis: So what do you do for fun?

Caroline: I trade (laughs)… weird I know but I love it and have dabbled over the years and traded all kinds of markets. Not very well I might add. I was a fantastic paper trader but would lose money when I tried to trade live!

The only market I was very profitable in was crypto, but I found being focused on that meant that my Emotional Wellbeing Coaching started to slide off as I hadn’t built it up to the stage it is now, so I had to make a decision.

Coaching soothes my soul… so I gave up crypto. Now I feel I have more time. My coaching is flowing and I also need something different.

I have spent my whole life in trauma, either being traumatised, healing from the trauma and for the last decade helping others heal from the trauma so having something completely different to that is a wonderful soul and mind cleaner for me.

Lewis: That certainly is left of centre (laughs). Most people do art or garden or cook… you trade.

Caroline: Hahaha … I do cook and I do garden, in fact I have 2 biodomes that grow enough food to feed 60-80 people year round as the temperature stays a beautiful 25/26 degrees in summer and a lovely 21 degrees in winter.

Each week, a group of volunteers and I box up all of that excess food and we deliver it to the elderly pensioners and families who are struggling with disabilities in the neighbourhood.

It is so wonderful to be able to make sure people who need it, who often eat substandard food as it’s the only thing they can afford, are able to have really healthy food.

There is a crispness and freshness to freshly picked veggies you just can’t get in the stores and the cost for organic food is way out of reach for the people we provide food to. I’m hoping in the near future to be able to add cooked meals to the fresh produce as well.

Lewis: I love the sound of that. A healthy diet has such an effect on our lives and as you say, more often than not, the people who need it most can’t afford to eat healthily.

Lewis: I’ve really enjoyed our conversation today. If you haven’t yet read Caroline’s book, you must even if you haven’t experienced trauma in your life.

The book will help you understand the way trauma effects people and maybe that understanding will lead to more compassion in the world and help to make the world a more tolerant and forgiving place.

Thank you for being with us, Caroline. and all you who are listening. If you’d like to know more about Caroline’s work and book visit her website.