61: Sacred Knowing: Choosing Healing After the Hurt with Cherie Lindberg, PhD

00;00;02;11 - 00;00;29;07

Cherie Lindberg

Hi, I'm Cherie Lindberg and welcome to Elevated Life Academy where we share real stories of healing, hope and transformation. Tune in to hear how everyday people are rising above and lighting the way for others. So welcome to another episode of Elevated Life Academy and I am your host. Cherie Lindberg, and today I'm going to do something a little bit different.

00;00;29;10 - 00;00;56;20

Cherie Lindberg

I'm actually going to share about my book, Sacred Knowing, and why I felt it was so important to publish this book and why I felt compelled to to write. Mostly, it's the same reason why I have this podcast, is to want to bring voices of hope to people that have experienced trauma. I want people to know that you can live an elevated life and whatever that means for you.

00;00;56;22 - 00;01;27;07

Cherie Lindberg

You know, I, I go around and I talk to many healers, people that are supporting people in their journeys here on Earth and helping them shift out of pain or woundedness and learn how to accept, find love again, find ways to flourish and and thrive regardless of what has happened to them. And so I really wanted folks to know that, you know, if you're a score, which is the Adverse Childhood Experiences scale is really high.

00;01;27;10 - 00;01;53;03

Cherie Lindberg

There's so much literature out there about how, you know, it causes disease, it causes relationship difficulty, higher incidence of addiction, higher instances of mental illness, which are our true. And you can make a personal choice to do it differently. I'm not saying it's going to be easy, but with support you can turn that around. And I just that's what my book is about.

00;01;53;04 - 00;02;14;05

Cherie Lindberg

It's about letting go of my history, the things that happened to me, how I got through it. And I just wanted to have a real discussion about that. So I'm going to go through some of the chapters here and talk to you about why I decided to title some of those chapters the way I did. So, so sacred.

00;02;14;05 - 00;02;38;11

Cherie Lindberg

Knowing again is is the book, and that got launched in October, and some of you may have read it already and know that my life really changed almost four years ago. Now it'll be four years in April when my best friend from elementary school passed away from breast cancer. And, you know, I had I had been a trauma therapist for 20 years.

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Cherie Lindberg

And that next day it just felt like something. I mean, it was really big because we talked every Saturday, no matter where I traveled, where I was, her and I talked and I had just done a training with Cynthia Schwartzberg, and we had gotten, you know, through the training. The next day was a Monday, and I walked into my office and I said, I'm, I'm done with with trauma.

00;03;03;15 - 00;03;27;17

Cherie Lindberg

And therapy. I'm going to work with I want to do more coaching, I want to do more high performance work, how to flourish and how to thrive. Because if you were any one like me, and maybe you are, maybe you're not. That's okay. But I've spent my entire life on a healing path, and I know there's a lot of other therapists out there doing it too, that we're always working on clearing.

00;03;27;17 - 00;03;47;18

Cherie Lindberg

We're always working on clearing. Once you decide to become a healer, if they're going to be a really good healer and have longevity in this field and not get burnt out, you have to continue to clear all these things that you hold, whether it is, you know, trauma work that you're doing or the energy that you feel from from your clients.

00;03;47;21 - 00;04;12;24

Cherie Lindberg

You know, most healers are empathic. And if we don't do the work to release that, we carry it around with us and there's lots of research that shows that healers end up with higher incidences of autoimmune and disease and digestive issues. And so forth, and that's not a coincidence. Number one, they have their own trauma that they need to work on moving out of their central nervous system.

00;04;13;01 - 00;04;34;23

Cherie Lindberg

And then because they're holding space for people's trauma that equally, you know, affects us. And so when you choose this path, it's not an easy one. And I didn't know that when I chose this path, I naturally chose this path because I was the family counselor. You know, growing up, I was the compassionate one. I was the one that felt things very deeply.

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Cherie Lindberg

My friends always came to me with their troubles and their problems. I mean, and I know many, many healers talk about this. I'd be on an escalator in a department store and all of a sudden a person would come up and start talking about their divorce and start crying, and I'd be in the middle of a mall comforting and and helping this person like it would just be become out of the blue.

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Cherie Lindberg

It almost was like some of you feel like you have a sign over your head that says, you know, hey, you got an issue. You know, come here. Almost like Lucy on peanuts, right? So that was a lot of my life growing up. I had my own trauma. I grew up not feeling good enough. I grew up not feeling smart.

00;05;14;28 - 00;05;42;02

Cherie Lindberg

And unfortunately, that was reinforced by teachers. That was reinforced by guidance counselors. Nobody took the time, and I should say that differently. It was an era of where we did not know a lot about trauma either, and being present wasn't really something we studied. Nowadays, everybody knows what that means. A lot of folks knows what it means to a tune.

00;05;42;02 - 00;06;11;13

Cherie Lindberg

Many people understand, you know, holding things in your central nervous system. But these were not things that were talked about when I was growing up. In fact, trauma informed schools were not a thing, you know, when I grew up, in fact, there was many traumatic events that happened in schools. Lots of bullying went on. And I grew up primarily in Tinley Park and then moved to, oh, let's see, I went to Lincoln, but I'm trying to remember Frankfort.

00;06;11;16 - 00;06;32;22

Cherie Lindberg

Excuse me, I couldn't remember the town, but in my elementary years we saw things by beating each other up. I mean, that's what you did. And that's what they allowed there was no, you know, really good supervision on the playground. And and so it was rough out there. I mean, girls beat up girls, boys beat up girls, girls beat up boys.

00;06;32;22 - 00;06;58;27

Cherie Lindberg

I mean, that that was the environment. I grew up in a very blue collar town, and there was still remnants of segregation and racism. And the high school that I went to in the park, they were busing a lot of diversity into the schools, and it was a struggle, all of us trying to get along because this wasn't what had happened, you know?

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Cherie Lindberg

And so now they just threw us all together without any support on how do we manage our differences, how, you know, adults couldn't even do it. And here they were expecting, you know, high school students to do it. And so it was, you know, very, very challenging. But anyway, the reason I wrote this book is that when my best friend passed away, it was like this veil got lifted and I realized I'd spent 20 plus years excavating all of my stuff.

00;07;32;12 - 00;07;59;15

Cherie Lindberg

And I wasn't fully living. I was not, I mean, I was better than I was for sure, but I wasn't flourishing necessarily. I was not thriving, and I didn't feel passionate. I mean, I felt good about what I was doing as a therapist. I knew I was making an impact. I was helping and watching people heal, but it just felt like something was missing.

00;07;59;17 - 00;08;28;26

Cherie Lindberg

And so I decided to switch over to coaching. I took a parts coaching training. I took a flow coaching training. I studied more about flourishing and thriving and how to hardwire your system for happiness. And I started to use brain spotting to teach others business owners that were in the same situation that I was. They knew there was something more they wanted to be, you know, reconnected to their vision in life.

00;08;28;26 - 00;08;53;29

Cherie Lindberg

They wanted to feel the spark and the passion again. And so that's the work that I'm doing now. And this book came out of all of this. And so I talk about Kim and the very beginning of the book. She was one of the first people that I told when I was a kid that I saw ghosts, you know, and I saw her grandmother, who had passed away in the house that she lived in.

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Cherie Lindberg

And it was so hard because as a young kid, I wanted to spend the night, you know, you want to spend the night over at your friend's house and so forth, and every 10 to 3:00 in the morning, grandmother would show up and she would show up as this very hard to describe, like a light, but you could see a silhouette of a figure, and then I could hear a voice in my head.

00;09;19;19 - 00;09;39;02

Cherie Lindberg

She wanted me to, you know, talk to Kim for her. And it would freak me out as a kid. Right? Because this this was between third and sixth grade, you know, my parents would tell me it was my overactive imagination. And I told myself it was my imagination. You know, kids called me the weirdo, you know, things like that.

00;09;39;02 - 00;09;54;19

Cherie Lindberg

But I was terrified because it would happen. And then I have to call my dad, Kim's mom and Kipp set rightly so, because we'd be waking up in the middle of the night. My dad would drive and come pick me up, and every time he would just talk to me about how it was my overactive imagination and and and so forth.

00;09;54;19 - 00;10;18;27

Cherie Lindberg

And I did not realize, like, I was a very intuitive child. I was very could pick up on things, I could read energy, did not know any of that. And I think a lot of that came because of my trauma. I could read a room. I knew what was going on with everyone to keep myself safe, and I think those skills just got amplified as I continued to study in this field.

00;10;19;00 - 00;10;47;17

Cherie Lindberg

So my the second chapter in this book is all about attachment and attunement. And so I talk about how attachment really impacts our ability to connect with another. It really impacts our ability to take in another's perspective and our physiology of how to emotionally regulate ourselves. Like it starts from day one, right when we come out of the womb.

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Cherie Lindberg

And if we have caregivers that are very attentive to us, they help us, they co regulate with us and they they help us. But if they're not able to like if your parents came from trauma and they were not regulated, well, you're going to borrow their central nervous system. The good news is though, you once you figure that out, that you have some deficits or you have some challenges there, there's a lot of internal work that you can do, which is the work that I did.

00;11;16;05 - 00;11;42;23

Cherie Lindberg

And first I did that. I started out doing eMDR and this was when I was in graduate school. I didn't realize I had PTSD, did eMDR and eMDR significantly reduced my symptomology? I didn't have flashbacks anymore. My mood was more stable. Really, really helped me. But I still didn't feel alive. I didn't feel alive until I came across brain spinning.

00;11;42;25 - 00;12;03;29

Cherie Lindberg

It got deeper for me again. You know, I think all somatic therapies are very, very helpful in helping people heal because we got to go deeper into the brain. Talking about it is not enough. It's a deeper in our brain. It's developmental. So we have to go deeper in there. And so brain spending I say, made my soul come alive.

00;12;04;06 - 00;12;34;29

Cherie Lindberg

This is when I went deeper into my parts work. And what that means is parts of me that were stuck developmentally, like I was stuck at eight years old developmentally, because that's where my big biggest trauma happened. And of course, what was associated with that? Well, elementary school trauma memories, right? I couldn't focus, of course, I'm neurodivergent, I have ADHD, and I wonder, okay, do I truly have ADHD or is this the result of my brain getting changed because of trauma?

00;12;35;02 - 00;13;06;09

Cherie Lindberg

All really good questions, right? So then we have a two minute and two attunement is about resonating with with another being able to hold the space being held by another without judgment. Your central nervous system can really, really feel that. And so I talk about how to use brain spawning in this book every single day, not only to help yourself heal, but also to help yourself expand, to help your creative brain open up again.

00;13;06;12 - 00;13;26;15

Cherie Lindberg

And you start to realize you can do more than you think. You can. And you start to focus more on your potential and possibility than your wounds. And I just again, I want people to know that that is possible. You've got to do the work right now. If you have trauma, I don't recommend you try to heal it by yourself.

00;13;26;18 - 00;14;04;05

Cherie Lindberg

Get somebody you know, interview the person, get a good therapist or coach somebody that gets you, you feel safe with that really resonates with you and is holds no judgment, and that you can be 100% transparent so that you can release all the burdens that you're carrying in your body and in your brain. So that took me to brain spotting and parts work where you can go really, really deep into again, I talked about the developmental parts and this by doing this work over and over again.

00;14;04;07 - 00;14;31;17

Cherie Lindberg

When you get into that deeper part of the brain, it's also connected to spirituality and intuition and creativity. And as you start to do this personal work and you heal these old things, it releases your brain so that it can go into creative spaces. It can go into more imaginary spaces that are all very valuable for spirituality, intuition and creativity.

00;14;31;17 - 00;15;12;22

Cherie Lindberg

And so I wish that for for all of you. And then where does that lead us manifest in your true life? Now, a lot of you are going to listen and go, all this is woo woo and and things like that. I'm putting the science in the woo. Heather Corbett and I have a Spirit Code membership group because of all the things that I'm sharing with you right now, what we've discovered and that our brains are powerful beyond all measure and that I want you to know that because you are powerful beyond all measure, and you can create your reality, and your brain helps you do that.

00;15;12;29 - 00;15;43;12

Cherie Lindberg

So you can practice with brains by putting your eyes on a spot that, like when I look over here and I think about all the teaching that I do and my soul comes alive when I teach. I absolutely love teaching brain spotting to my my fellow therapists and healers and coaches because I know that the more that they do their own work and the more that they master brain spotting, they're going to watch their clients heal right before their eyes.

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Cherie Lindberg

And you, you can get addicted to that because you're witnessing a blossoming. You're witnessing somebody releasing all this old stuff that no longer serves them. And they're rising into their potential. And you're sitting there witnessing it, and you get to feel that energy. And it it's it's amazing. I've seen so much in just in the last four years, people shifting from trauma into more, deeper flourishing.

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Cherie Lindberg

Like here's some examples. Somebody coming into me and I'm working with them. This was when I did the trauma work, and they didn't feel like they were good enough to own their own business. And then we're doing some work and they take all these leaps of fear. They they just leap into it. And now they own their own business and they're doing fantastic at it.

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Cherie Lindberg

They never knew that they were capable of it. Or you have somebody that has carried 30 years of trauma that's created migraines and back pain, and you're working with them and they're like amazed because all of a sudden they don't have any more back pain or, you know, that they're not struggling with the migraines anymore. This stuff happens.

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Cherie Lindberg

Like, I'm not making this out. This is what happens. Or here's even more beautiful things. And this happened, you know, you can read the story in the book with Kim and I, where a loved one shows up in the room while they're doing brain spinning. They feel down, they smell them, they hear them, and they do. They do that work.

00;17;16;16 - 00;17;52;15

Cherie Lindberg

I've worked with people that are terminally ill, and it helps them prepare for when they're getting ready to transition to their next existence, you know, whatever your belief is on that. So we talk about all these things in the book. And then one skill that I really want to highlight that I never knew anything about is I learned through all of this, all of these experiences, the skill of discernment, starting to listening to myself and discerning who were safe people to have in my life, who was a good mentor.

00;17;52;15 - 00;18;26;03

Cherie Lindberg

And how I did that was by observing them. Were they aligned? Did they say one thing and do another? If they did, I pulled back because that was a misalignment. If I watched people over time and I saw for the most part because we're not perfect. But if I saw that, they would say something. Their behavior matched. There was conflict that we had, and they were able to work through it with me in a very integrity way.

00;18;26;07 - 00;18;45;26

Cherie Lindberg

Like those were things that built up trust and helped me discern and know who to bring into my life and who not to bring into my life. These are these are skills that we all need to learn. And through all of that, my husband and I, 36 years of marriage and that there's some in here too, of hard times.

00;18;46;03 - 00;19;08;29

Cherie Lindberg

We both had to learn all these skills because we did not have them. We did not witness them growing up. So we, you know, we we still see our coach, you know, every other month. And we bring these things there and we work through them together and we're a team. So I hope this topic and what I'm talking about is interesting to you.

00;19;09;01 - 00;19;35;03

Cherie Lindberg

ey've had a really hard go in: 2025

00;19;35;03 - 00;19;55;14

Cherie Lindberg

I would love it for you to read my book and give me some feedback and let me know what you what you think about it. Was it helpful? That is the most biggest reason that I put it out there is that I was hoping that it would be helpful and impactful for people that have had severe trauma in their life.

00;19;55;14 - 00;20;17;18

Cherie Lindberg

I just wanted it to be something that was out there that was helpful. If I can do it, so can you. I want everyone to know that. And so, as I've said before, thank you so much for listening to Elevated Life Academy stories of hope and Healing. I hope you find this story helpful and hopeful, and that you might share it with a loved one or a friend.

00;20;17;18 - 00;20;23;29

Cherie Lindberg

Until we meet again. Thank you so much. This.

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Cherie Lindberg

Thank you for joining us today. An Elevated Life Academy stories of hope and healing. As you move back into your world, I invite you to take a breath and hold on to whatever stirred something in you from our podcast today. Healing isn't always loud, but it is always sacred. Whether today's story Open Your Heart, gave you a new perspective, or just reminded you that you are not alone, it matters.

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Cherie Lindberg

And so do you. Keep choosing alignment. Keep trusting your becoming. And remember the elevated life is imperfect. It's present. If this episode resonated, share it with someone who needs a little more light. And if you're ready to go deeper in your own journey, you know where to find me. And till next time, stay rooted, stay rising and stay you.