Welcome to The Good News with Angie Austin. Now, with The Good News, here’s Angie.
SPEAKER 03 :
Hello there, friend. Angie Austin here with The Good News. Very excited about the interview today. This is so up my alley on The Good News. We like to talk about healing and wellness and the stories of hope. And this is a book titled Between Wounded and Well, Lessons in Healing, Dr. Deborah Palmer, Ph.D., Lessons in Healing by a Nurse Practitioner. And it’s a memoir. Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Palmer.
SPEAKER 04 :
I’m happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
SPEAKER 03 :
You are welcome. Do you mind if I call you Deborah?
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s fine.
SPEAKER 03 :
You can even call me Debbie. For some reason, I love that name, Debbie. I always use it as like my example, Debbie and Susie, where I’m not just making up a name. Right. All right. So just give us an overview of, you know, the book Between Wounded and Well and why you wrote it.
SPEAKER 04 :
So my book is about kind of the journey between when wounds happen. and becoming well, and how our deepest wounds can kind of help us become the place where we birth into a healing presence. I wrote it basically for three reasons. Initially, during COVID, when I started it, I wanted to honor the nursing profession. I had recently retired, and they were so courageous, so much compassion. But I also knew I wanted to leave a family legacy behind. I have generations of woundedness that have crossed at least the past five generations, alcoholism, mental illness. And I wanted my children and grandchildren to know our past does not define us. And I thought I could show that in my story. But as time passed, I realized I had a right for another reason. I was recognizing that we were in a rising rate in America of Depression, anxiety, suicide risks, suicide ideation and successful suicides. And this had been rising over 10 years and it wasn’t getting better. And my story was about emotional woundedness. And I thought I had to write for a broader audience as well. So that’s why I wrote this.
SPEAKER 03 :
You know, I want to get into I want to keep you for the whole show today because I want to get into your story. But then I want to get into some of the lessons and healing to help people, because I think there are so many damaged people out there. When I was reading about your story and you talk about five generations and your childhood marked by trauma and chaos in which you chose to not let let your past define you. And it says in the description, through decades of personal struggle and professional insight, you discovered that healing begins with courage. You don’t know this about me, but I really related to it because when I started working for NBC right out of college, I moved to Los Angeles, and I got a great job there. And I had moved out of low income housing. One of my brothers ended up being murdered shortly after I got there. One was incarcerated off and on and moved there as a drug addict. I haven’t heard from him in a couple of years now. And then my father was a professor, but an alcoholic and an abusive husband. And I had the room next to my parents. So I knew that when he was drunk and abusive because I could hear him. Every word of their arguments and the abuse taking place. So he he was well educated. But obviously, that alcohol, I’m telling you, it can ruin families. If you have a predisposition towards alcoholism and you get started down that road, you can say goodbye to your family or at least goodbye to a healthy family. So I love it that you. are showing your children your grandchildren that this doesn’t have to be the path that everyone takes and that some of us can recreate um you know our the legacy that we’re creating is so different than the one that we were given that our kids can have a completely different life and i look at my children’s lives And it’s mind blowing to me how different it was from my own childhood and the opportunities that they have. And, you know, there’s no drinking in the house. There’s no cursing and fighting in the house. You know, my husband and I have been married for 20 some odd years. You know, we’re not getting drunk on the weekends and beating people up. You know, it’s so it’s just so different. So I, in a nutshell, can really relate to your path.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, thank you. And thank you for sharing that to your audience. It’s such an important message.
SPEAKER 03 :
All right, well, let’s get into what you went through that made you now want to help heal others. Because like me, I kind of educated myself out of poverty. Like I wanted to, like some of my, in fact, the two siblings, the one that was murdered and the one that’s homeless off and on, they dropped out of school early. And then my brother that has done really well graduated near the toughest class at West Point Military Academy and is a math genius. So I feel education was a big part of getting out of my situation.
SPEAKER 04 :
Right. So I think we share some similar paths. Difficult childhood. Dr. Vince Folletti, the author of The Adverse Childhood Experience, would say family dysfunction, which is abuse and neglect. He did write the foreword to my book, which I was really honored to hear for him to offer to do that. I experienced a lot of grief. I had a very hurried childhood. I grew up quickly. I became a mother at 14. I was a caregiver to my siblings from the age of 8 or 9. I ended up with infertility from a pelvic infection, looking for love in all the wrong places. After that, I experienced infertility, miscarriages, and I felt I was being punished. I felt shame. that those things happened to me. I experienced a lot of loss. My parents never married because my mother was denied marriage to my father. He was part Native American. And it was a big secret who my dad really was. And my stepfather was very abusive physically and emotionally. I did eventually move out of the house, went on to school to become a nurse. But as an adult, you know, just reliving that past because I’d get triggered by by seeing other situations that maybe reminded me of some of those things you just mentioned. And then having to face my family with courage and say, I’ve been way too codependent and cowering down to your demands of me to give in for your benefit. And no, you can’t smoke in my house. I have a baby. I have a teenager with asthma. You know, just learning to speak up for myself. You get boundaries. I read Codependent No More. There was just a lot of great authors that helped me on my journey. Viktor Frankl’s book, Finding Meaning in Life. So it’s always been a process of overcoming difficulties and realizing there is a better tomorrow. And then, you know, after 40 years of journaling, you know, I realized I had a lot of ups and downs. So I had to remind myself that when you fall down, you usually do get up. And, yes, sometimes you’re down for a while, but each time you come up a little bit stronger.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, I love the idea of the boundaries. I remember with one of my brothers that he, for whatever reason, and the males in my family, when they drank, they were mean. They weren’t the fun drunk, you know. And, you know, the guy that like the life of the party drunk. No, they were the surly, angry, offensive, aggressive drunks. And I remember telling my brother, even though he was quite a bit older than I was when I was 16. And I did live on my own at times during my childhood or in foster care. But I remember saying to him that I love the idea of your boundary saying like you can’t smoke around my child or you can’t do this around my child. and i said to him you can come for christmas or you know thanksgiving or whatever the holiday was you can come for the meal but um if you start drinking you have to leave and here i was 16 you know and he’d been in the marines and he was in his 20s by then and uh so the minute he would have my mother take him to the liquor store at the end of our you know family meal um and he would sit in a lazy boy with his drinks i’d grab my keys and excuse me how he couldn’t he didn’t have a car And I’d say, OK, I’m going to take you home now because you can’t drink here. Like we’re not we’re not having this dysfunction in the house. So very young, I learned that, you know, I could stand up for myself. And I even remember one time when I had him arrested. Well, twice once, you know, he kicked me in the face with his combat boots. And that was a given. Like there was no choice. Once I ran down the street and people saw me. be bleeding, you know, and stopped. There was he was definitely going to be arrested. But the next time he threatened me with a knife and I was so torn because my family was sweeping under the rug. Keep your mouth shut. Just keep moving on. Don’t say anything. And I’m like, no. So the very next day I called the police department. I said, how do I handle this? Like he lives in my house. He’s not supposed to live here. There’s a restraining order. He’s not supposed to be here, but my mom had let him move back in. And they said, oh, well, you could do a citizen’s arrest, but you have to confront him while we are there. And you have to say that you are requesting that he be arrested for this personal offense. So I had to face this man, you know, the next day and have the police there and have them take him, remove him from the property. And I think of the courage of a teenager, you know, to having to do that. So much like you did, I started setting up boundaries where I’m like, I don’t find this acceptable in any way, shape or form. I’m not going to live like this. And so even though my mom, you know, was paying the rent on the apartment, I was not having it anymore. And that that is one of the reasons I moved out of time. So let’s get into the four stages of healing, because I’m interested in how people like us change. you know, end up raising healthy children? Like, how does it happen? So for you in the book, what are, let’s get into the four stages of healing and we’ll obviously have to take a break and come back, but let’s start there.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, it’s based on wound healing, the healing of our tissue when it’s wounded. I got the idea while teaching a physiology course. You see, once the body is cut, hemostasis sets in and we have to stop the bleeding. And I realized that emotionally that first stage to stop the wounded process and start the healing begins with awareness of two things. Awareness of why I want to get up tomorrow and still be alive. What gives purpose to my life? Now that’s pretty deep. So I can narrow it down in a much simpler way, but you still have to face the deepness. You can also say awareness of what’s wounded, you know, acknowledge the pain, acknowledge the, the problem. Don’t sweep it under the rug like your family was doing, like I did for many years when I was wounded. I think because girls deal with life differently than boys in the past generations, that awareness was not allowed to come through. We couldn’t face our truth. Because it wasn’t acceptable that somebody hurt us. They abused us. I was molested three times as a child under the age of five. Nobody ever addressed it. Oh, my goodness. My first husband beat me. I had black eyes. People didn’t even ask me about it. What? So that awareness that there’s something wrong going on is the first step. And then the second step is, in the wound healing phases, inflammation, you got a fight going on. Those white blood cells are going to fight off any intruders that want to set in an infection. Well, in the emotional stage of healing, I call that acknowledging where our team is, where our fighters, where are our connections, where are our tools, what’s going to help us. So acknowledging those universal connections that help us all heal our emotional and spiritual wounds. And the third stage in the body, is proliferation we’ve got to build up new tissue to cross the divide between the wound and pull this pull the edges together in our in emotional stage of healing that is when we got to act we got to activate the potential to get better we got to pull things together we got to climb ladders we got to bring bring supplies in whatever it takes so that third stage is to act or activate our potential action matters. You got to do it, not just talk about it, not just be aware of it. And then that fourth stage as our body is healing, we are developing scar tissue. We’re revising tissue. We’re rebuilding the tissue a little bit differently, not quite as strong as it used to be. And in our emotional healing, that stage is the same as maturation and transformation. We are letting go of what no longer helps us in the healing process, like our body lets go of damaged tissue. And we are reaching for that which does help us and taking it in and acknowledging that, you know, sometimes scars happen and we have to just accept it and move on and work with our strengths, what’s left behind.
SPEAKER 03 :
All right, let’s take a break. If you are just joining us, this is Angie Austin with The Good News. We’re talking to Dr. Deborah Palmer, Ph.D. Her book is Between Wounded and Well, Lessons in Healing, a Nurse Practitioner Memoir. We will be right back with The Good News.
SPEAKER 02 :
With Easter right around the corner, Art Thrift is the perfect place to find great deals on Easter grass, baskets, bonnets, and those cute little dresses for Sunday school. You can decorate for the whole family gathering on a budget, from deviled egg dishes to Easter baskets, and still find those special items that make the day memorable. And coming soon is Art Thrift’s famous secret jean sale. Watch the Arc Thrift social channels for the secret Friday date because every pair of jeans in the store is just $2. That’s right. Rows and rows of jeans including great brands like Levi’s and 7 for All Mankind from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. with new stock going out all day long. Spring also means gardening tools, sports equipment, and seasonal treasures hitting the floor. And remember, Arc Thrift stores are size-inclusive and even have fitting rooms open so you can find the perfect fit. Find a store near you at arcthrift.com and follow Arc Thrift on their socials so you don’t miss a secret jean sale. Arc Thrift, there’s a surprise on every aisle.
SPEAKER 04 :
Burlington is listening to the mighty 670 KLT Denver.
SPEAKER 03 :
Hello there. Welcome back to The Good News with Angie Austin. We are continuing our conversation with Dr. Deborah Palmer, Ph.D. The book is Between Wounded and Well, Lessons in Healing, a Nurse Practitioner’s Memoir. We just went through the four stages of healing. And if you’re just joining us, we were talking about Deborah’s childhood and the five generations of growing up in dysfunction. And Deborah, one thing that really caught my ear when you were talking about healing and setting boundaries with family members, which I did as well, to back them off from the dysfunction and say that I’m no longer taking part in this dysfunction. One thing that I recognized in other women that grew up like we did around the alcoholism, the drugs, the abuse, the cursing fights, the verbal abuse. is that sometimes we gravitate towards a romantic partner that reminds us of home and that it feels normal to be around someone abusive. One of my girlfriends did that on a couple occasions, and I, for some odd reason, from… 16 on when I started dating and all through college, I dated a Christian athlete who was under a coach that was well known at the time, Coach McCartney. He started Promise Keepers, Bill McCartney. And so I was dating someone that was very, you know, prayed, didn’t drink that much, never cursed. and was super straight-laced and nothing like my family, and I kept choosing guys like that. I refused to date anyone like my family. But I feel that a lot of people, you mentioned that your first husband was abusive. Did you… did you initially feel comfortable with someone who was as abusive as your birth family?
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, he wasn’t to begin with. It’s something that happened. You know, there was a huge age discrepancy. I was 16. He was 19. His family was very good to me. That’s kind of what attracted me to him.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes, that lowers you in, doesn’t it? That lowers you in.
SPEAKER 04 :
And then once you’re pregnant, you’re just like, You got to do what’s best for the baby. Right. Right. So I ended up getting married. But in my when I wrote in my book, I wasn’t sure that it was going to be the right decision. My memoir turns out to be a bit of a love story as well, because my childhood friend from age six who tried to talk me into breaking up with this guy, he said, you’re going to get pregnant. He ended up marrying me when I was in my 20s, just finishing up college. We’ve been married 48 years. My memoir is a love story as well as a detective story, trying to figure out my birth family. I was in foster care for a while, who my real father was. So I didn’t go looking for an abusive person. I was looking for love in the wrong places because I wasn’t getting it at home.
SPEAKER 03 :
Right.
SPEAKER 04 :
I did find it. in a religious group that was very loving and caring. And they helped me build up my confidence and belief that I was a good and valued person.
SPEAKER 03 :
You know, for me too, it gave me, my Christian faith at least, gave me a foundation of being an honest person, being a kind person, treating others as I would like to be treated myself. So I felt that helped me as well. And we went through the four stages of healing in between wounded and well. And how each stage kind of builds on the previous one. But I’m really curious about yours. I like to pick the brains of people like you that have become a model, have created a healthy life after such a dysfunctional childhood and how you find happiness and contentment. and a fulfillment and the ability to raise a healthy family. So you talk about seven practices for emotional well-being. So I’ve got my pen. I want to hear those.
SPEAKER 04 :
Oh, goodness. And I’ve got them on my website. Do you think I’ve memorized them? I’ll try to summarize them. So number one is both using resources and Psychological, social resources or physical, these are two different ones, or physical resources that help you. Sometimes you’ve got to get help and you have to be willing to admit it and seek those kinds of resources. You need to be kind to your body by getting adequate sleep, nutrition, physical activity. You need emotional connection to something meaningful in your life. What gives you purpose? And that can change. We go through different seasons. Sometimes we have to let go of one. We’ve achieved it. But having a purpose, a reason to get up in the day is just as important when you’re in hospice on your deathbed as it is when you’re young and healthy. For example… I want to get up tomorrow and watch my granddaughter on Zoom getting married tomorrow. If I live for nothing more than that. I had a patient. That was her reason for living, knowing she was terminally ill. So we have to have that sense of purpose or meaning in our life. For many, they find it in spiritual practices, spiritual beliefs, connecting with a higher power, universal connection to, you know, all that. creates and connects us. You can call it a religion, a theology, whatever, but that is at the crux of meaning and purpose for many people in our lives. So those are the ones that come to my mind that I think are the most important ones.
SPEAKER 03 :
And when you talk about resources and getting help, reaching out to people, I remember in my 20s going to a therapist thinking that coming from my background, I definitely need that. And I remember I just sit there and talk to her. She’s like, you’re amazing. I just can’t even believe how well you’re doing. It’s like every week was a story for me to tell her that she was fascinated by, and she’d just be like, You’re amazing. Like, I can’t even believe how well you’re doing and how well you’ve done, you know, coming out of that, you know, background. And then I did end up getting someone who is a lot more like interactive with me and would give me like ideas for solutions. And I remember talking to her saying I felt kind of guilty about. I had started doing weather at the NBC station in Los Angeles, and it was my first day on the air, and my brother had gotten arrested for something, and I had to go in Los Angeles down to Men’s Central Jail, and I brought a Bible and something else with me. And I remember going in to see him, and he’s behind that plexiglass or whatever, and he was in an orange jumpsuit, and he had his hands shackled and his legs shackled. And then I was trying to talk to him about just kind of getting on the right track, and he said to me – he banged on the plexiglass, and he goes – No, he said to me first, you come in here and you ruin my serenity. And I’m looking at him in an orange jumpsuit with shackles on his feet and his wrists. And he’s accusing me of ruining his serenity. And I banged on the glass and I go, hello, you’re in there and I’m out here. You are ruining your serenity. And I said to my therapist, I said, I feel guilty like I was given a better hand in life, like, you know, gamblers or your poker hand. And, and for my brothers, and she said, you weren’t given a better hand, you’ve made better choices. And I do think that some of those resources, as you mentioned, you know, and finding someone to, you know, give you advice or like your book, for instance, for people as a resource, you know, to help with healing, how healing. It is beneficial. And the connections you mentioned, connecting with people, that’s been so big for me. You mentioned your childhood friend that you’ve been married to for almost 50 years. And I gravitated towards long term relationships with men who were super healthy. And in my case, I chose Christians and super healthy and, you know, not drinkers, not druggers and who were very driven and really into education because I was trying to find relationships. I create my own family even if I didn’t want to get married which I was terrified by I didn’t get married for a long time and had many I must have been proposed to seven eight times I just wasn’t ready for I think from our background as hard at least it was for me to commit and so um When it comes to healing and then the food and the exercise, you know, being kind to your body, you mentioned as one of the seven, you know, practices for emotional well-being. That’s always been very important to me, too. I work out every day still, even, you know, you know, at this point in my life with my kids almost raised now, I’ve really, you know, kept that healthy body thing going and mine. All right. So let’s talk about. Can I interrupt you for just a second? Yes, please do.
SPEAKER 04 :
This is your brother’s serenity. Another important thing I learned in writing this book, not everybody thinks like me and it’s okay. It’s the concept of neurodiversity. I discovered autism in my family across generations. And I think the autism is what caused shelf medicating with alcohol. And I have learned that. Wow. Wow. Like we’re judging that person who says you’re interrupting my serenity.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes, because I do, Debra, think that I think it’s Asperger’s in their case, but also depression. And one of them was schizophrenic. So I do think they were self-medicating mental illness as well. And so interesting that you found that. You said autism running in your family that probably was never diagnosed in those five generations you mentioned of the dysfunction.
SPEAKER 04 :
Right. We did not start diagnosing it until the late 80s.
SPEAKER 03 :
Wow. Unbelievable. All right. So I want to keep going in terms of you talk about healing can’t happen in isolation. And then I want to talk about how childhood trauma impacts adulthood. So healing doesn’t happen in isolation. I agree with that.
SPEAKER 04 :
So for me, healing is what happens when we are in a cycle of giving and receiving our gifts and which is our time, our talents, and our resources. And it requires another person, an interaction, a relationship. So that’s what I mean by we don’t heal in isolation. There are times we need to take in something. It might be resources. It might be counseling. It might be spiritual advice. And there are times we need to give. You see, in our giving, we find our purposes, what we contribute to. So that’s what I mean by healing doesn’t happen in isolation. It’s a continuous reciprocal cycle of exchanging our talents, resources, gifts, and it promotes healing. That’s where healing comes from.
SPEAKER 03 :
All right. Another thing I’m curious about, I don’t run across people like you all the time that I can really relate to. And so I’m curious, how do you think childhood trauma impacts adulthood? Sure.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, it’s different for everybody, but there are some similarities. Trauma as a child puts you on high alert. Your nervous system is overstimulated and you are used to that constant overstimulation. Yes. I call it the monkey brain or living in chaos. Yes. And I noticed as an adult when I didn’t have to live like that, I was stimulated. still doing it. I was working full-time, working on a doctorate degree full-time, remodeling a house, a parent, a grandmother. I mean, it’s been my whole life, and my daughter finally helped me figure out why. You see that childhood trauma triggers a need in us to somehow soothe ourselves because the high cortisol levels in trauma damage two parts of the brain, hippocampus and the magdelda. And that is responsible for soothing us. So we’re constantly trying to soothe ourselves. In children, you might see them rocking back and forth or doing a repetitive action. In adults, it’s that constant need to be busy, to have that chaos in our life, and always on alert. Walking on eggshells about other people around other people, assuming you’re the problem and you can fix everything. I mean, you’re not the problem. Everybody needs fixing and you’re the fixer. So you jump over volunteer over and then you get burned out.
SPEAKER 03 :
You’re the fixer. Oh, my goodness. So true.
SPEAKER 04 :
It’s called codependence. It’s unhealthy when it leads to harm for your own self. And sometimes you don’t even see the exhaustion or you’re getting infections more frequently because you don’t have your immune built up because you’re constantly going and not sleeping and not eating properly, not getting your exercise, not having healthy relationships, having stressful relationships, not having relationships that… are respectful and honorable to you, putting up with being treated poorly.
SPEAKER 03 :
Deborah, I want to have you back. Unfortunately, we’re out of time. Do you have a website between Wounded and Well Lessons in Healing, Dr. Deborah Palmer? What’s your website?
SPEAKER 04 :
It’s just my name, Deborah, D-E-B-R-A, Palmer, P-A-L-M-E-R.com.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, a great discussion. I can’t wait to have you on the program again. Thank you.
SPEAKER 04 :
Audio, print, and digital for 99 cents this week. Yes, I found.
SPEAKER 03 :
It’s on Kindle.
SPEAKER 04 :
99 cents. To celebrate nurses. I have reduced the price to 99 cents.
SPEAKER 03 :
I love it. Thank you, Debra.
SPEAKER 04 :
Thank you for having me, Angie. You’re welcome.
SPEAKER 01 :
Thank you for listening to The Good News with Angie Austin on AM670 KLTT.
