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welcome to another friday night we've been doing this deep dive into the 60 characteristics of complex trauma and today we're coming to dissociation and it's one of those characteristics that many clients or many people who have complex trauma don't initially see as being something that's true of them until it's explained to them and then they go oh yeah i dissociate so i think it's important to start by saying that complex trauma always results in some form of dissociation some form of disconnecting from yourself or from your circumstances so let me begin by just kind of

explaining what's going on here so the original response in the brain to danger is fight or flight but the problem becomes for a little child who can't fight back they're too small and they're too small to flee or take flight so what option then does the brain have to keep them safe and so we talk about freeze and what freeze really is is dissociation it's you can't go into an external flight or fight so you flee into an internal world where you can disconnect from the external world that's dissociation so it's a it's a way

of the brain trying to keep you safe by fleeing inward so it's important to understand that dissociation is on a continuum from mild forms of dissociation to extreme forms of dissociation and what's important to understand too is that the greater the danger the greater the complex trauma the more one progresses along the continuum the more a person dissociates into deeper and deeper protective internal worlds so that is what dissociation is all about so let me give you some of the degrees of dissociation so adhd is a form of dissociation for a child they are having

trouble being present connected to what's happening around them connected to their internal world because they're worried about what's happening in their external world what's going to be happening tonight when i get home what's going to happen at recess with the bully and so because of the external danger that they don't know how to deal with they dissociate which means they have a hard time staying focused another thing that children will do is they will dissociate or disconnect from certain emotions or all their emotions because often their experience is that certain emotions cause their parents to

respond or their siblings to respond by punishing them making fun of them oh you cry oh you're afraid you're too angry we don't like you you're weak you shouldn't do that and so they realize that emotions make them vulnerable to getting hurt and so some children disconnect or dissociate i'm not going to feel that emotion anymore some harden their heart so much that they shut down all emotions and say emotions are bad i am dissociating from that part of my humanity another type of dissociation is distractions i don't want to be in the present i

don't want to feel so i'll just stay busy and so it's a form of dissociating from feelings from what's going on inside of you a fourth type is escaping to a fantasy world and we just did a talk about that so i won't go into it but it's the person who i don't like what's happening externally internally there's a lot of fear pain so i will escape into a fantasy world daydreaming etc and then there's a term used in psychology called depersonalization so now we're getting to the more extreme types of dissociation and depersonalization is

a person who it's like they watch their own life as if it's happening to somebody else or they're watching a movie they don't feel things they're not even aware of doing things they detach from feelings actions thoughts and so it's almost like they they live out of body and that is that doesn't happen a lot but in the more extreme forms of complex trauma a person can do that and it's almost that the world around them almost doesn't feel real they're just so disconnected from themselves and from reality now i want to stop and just

make an observation you may not have thought of this but when you get to a narcissist a pure narcissist a psychopath a social path it's important to understand that they basically live dissociated they are dissociated from their conscience from their emotions they don't have empathy they don't have guilt they they are dissociated from anything in themselves that they consider weak and so they live in a very much a dissociated state without even realizing it now the final type of dissociation is the most extreme it's called dissociative identity disorder or did i want to develop it

a little bit i have dealt with many people with did it doesn't happen a lot but in the most extreme forms of abuse did is what the brain does as its last ditch effort to protect the child who has been severely abused and it's like it has to fracture it has to break off from what is happening and so what we talk about with did is that the brain develops different alters alter net personalities alter egos so it used to be called multiple personality disorder and so you would a person in extreme physical abuse sexual

abuse they could have a bunch of different alters that are part of protecting the little child from getting hurt and so each of the altars has a predominant personality a predominant emotion so you might get one that is a very angry personality one that's a very controlling personality one that's a very logical personality each one develops a personality that comes into play at times as a way the best way to protect this child what i think i want to say up front with this is a lot of people with did feel a lot of shame

i'm just so broke and i'm so messed up and what i want to say to them is but you went through extreme abuse you didn't choose to develop these alters that was your brain's last ditch effort to try and protect you so don't feel shame that was your brain wanting you to survive so these different altars people can have various numbers of them each one will have it's a different age a different voice a different vocabulary a different knowledge of the person history a different perception of reality many don't even know that the others exist

sometimes they do know about others that exist but the thing is that the main person the child originally now the adult their personality is usually quite passive they're they gave up hope they they knew it was help they were helpless to resolve their situations to protect themselves from danger so they just became passive dependent often feeling guilty that they brought all this on themself very depressed and so these altars then have to come in to protect this passive personality each personality is usually dormant it's not active unless it gets triggered and it can get triggered

by an event it can get triggered by meeting a certain person and so the type of danger that is sense triggers the personality and so then what happens when the trigger happens is first of all the person might just hear extra voices in their head brain chatter because the personalities are talking and more than one personality can be triggered at a time or the personality might just take over and all of a sudden they speak in their voice with their vocabulary and they are taking charge and that can result in what we call dissociative and

the amnesia so while the person is taken over when they come to later and it could be a couple hours longer they have no memory of what happened in that block of time because when the altar took over they didn't know what the altar was doing it's like they blacked out and so that's part of what makes life difficult for them because they don't know when they're going to get triggered and switch to an altar and they don't know what they do when they're switched and that can create a lot of fear about life in

general that can cause problems with jobs with relationships with parenting and so people with did it's the most extreme response but they have such a difficult life with so many challenges and often people with did have suicide attempts they have self-harm behavior sometimes when they're in an altered state it's a very difficult thing but i want to say this it can be healed it's a long journey to heal you're going to need outside help a professional that can help you re-integrate and become whole again now let me just say this why am i talking about

this dissociation stuff what happens in recovery is a person connects to their emotions to their thoughts to who they are that connection state is so important to getting healthy but often they don't realize how easily they slide back to their default of dissociating being out of touch with their emotions being out of touch with a lot of things around them and and their thought life and when they start to disconnect they often without realizing it are going back to old behaviors as well which for an addict can be they start towards relapse so heading into

dissociation or falling back into dissociation is very dangerous for people in addiction because it can often start them down the road to relapse and so it's important to be able to spot when i'm sliding into dissociation so i can stop it so the dominoes aren't starting to fall on their way to a relapse now i want to talk about trauma in light of dissociation so we've talked about if a child can't fight or flight then they go to freeze but let me just fill it out a little bit more for you so trauma is not

just a bad event and i'm going to explain that in a minute trauma happens because of what happens inside of you in light of a bad event so again let me give you an example let's say we're going to talk about three different people and there's a fire at a public school okay so the first person who's going to be in touch with this fire is a fireman it's their job they're cautious they're on guard because they know the danger of fires but they don't leave fighting the fire traumatized by it because they've been trained

they know what to expect they know what to do so that fire did not cause the firefighter trauma the second person is a small child and the fire starts in the room where the child's classroom that child is scared to death they see the fire all around them they hear people screaming they're trying to get to the door through the smoke that fire for that small child was traumatizing it created terror the third child third person is a child at the very other end of the school in an older grade they hear about the fire

but they know they're not in danger because they know it's at the other end of the school and they actually find them quite themselves quite curious they want to go and check this fire out so the fire is not traumatizing to them they know they're safe it actually this event creates a curiosity what we have and what kind of the research and trying that what is trauma discussion is the three e's that are part of trauma so first there is the event it's a bad event but the second thing is what is the experience what

happened inside the person what happened to the stress response did they go into fight or flight so dr gabra mate says trauma is not what happens to you but what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you and so forth the fire in the school the one that went into fight or flight was the little child so for them the experience was a trauma event and then the next one is the effects and this is how did it affect you in the moment but also was there an ongoing effect in months years

later so whenever a person sees a fire that little child growing up does it still trigger them to go into fight or flight does it still trigger their stress response system years later so here's what i want you to understand what complex trauma complex trauma is ongoing danger so if you look at the fire the child in the fire they adapt their stress response system adapts to say fight flight after they're out of the fire if they have good resources their stress response system calms down and they go back to other ways of coping and

so the adaptation was a healthy thing it was a way of coping in light of the danger but what happens in complex trauma is your adaptation a new way of coping in light of the danger so that you've lash out in anger you run you avoid you numb all of those things you have to do all the time so what keeps you safe and lets you survive the adaptation is very important and necessary but once you get to adult life where you don't have that danger anymore but you still use those same ways of coping

what was once a healthy adaptation has now become maladaptive now if you still lash out in anger now if you numb and avoid all the time you feel a little bit of stress that is no longer healthy it is going to start to hurt you destroy relationships hurt other people and so the ongoing effects becomes an important consideration in understanding trauma now let me give you the next thing and i it's a a table that i want us to look at and it really helps us be understand that our brain is very dependent on the

state of our environment so how my brain operates is dependent on the environment so my brain will adapt it will switch to different ways of functioning depending on my environment so if you look at the top the the darker blue you'll see five different brain states it can be calm alert alarm fear or terror okay under that will be the dominant brain area that is working in that state so if you are in a calm state there's no danger you're feeling great about what's happening you are in your cortex then under that you will have

two adaptive options one that has an arousal component and one that has a dissociation component so when you're calm and in your cortex what does your brain want to do it wants to an arousal thing create be creative or in a dissociative thing in a good way it wants to just daydream about life to travel around to different ideas and subjects and vacations etc it's in a very healthy place and then you're you can have abstract thinking when you're in that very calm state you can think in the abstract world so your brain is go

able to go to very important areas that it doesn't go to in other states and then your brain functions with the greatest iq when you are calm when you are in your cortex so for most people that would be an iq of 100 to 120. so that's optimum optimum performance access to all parts of the brain takes place when the brain is in a calm state so let's move to the right to alert so let's say you're out and about and you hear somebody yelling and it's an angry yell so immediately your ears picked up

okay so what happens now is your brain switches a little bit it's still in the cortex but it's also in the limbic there's danger potential danger not sure yet if it's totally dangerous so then the adaptive response of arousal is what we call flocking or you look around at others to see what is their response and you're saying are they on guard are they running what and so you're you're getting the flock mentality we i need to see how others are doing and then you become more vigilant then the dissociation type adaptation would be i'm

going to walk away i'm going to avoid this part of the street i i'm i'm not going to keep walking the direction i am going so you're not in flight totally you're but you're in the beginning of the limbic now when you're in the limbic you are not thinking about daydreaming you're not thinking about abstract thought because now survival things start to kick in and as long as there's survival things all of those parts of your brain are not available you can't access them so your brain goes now into concrete thinking what do i need

to do it's no longer in an abstract thing and so your iq drops from 90 to 110 okay so let's go to the third alarm the person keeps yelling and now you hear somebody yelling back and you see you feel the anger escalating now you switch totally to your limbic this is really getting dangerous and so your two possible adaptations are freeze i'm gonna get ready to fight i'm gonna stop and think what do i need to do you're not in fight mode yet you're freezing to prepare for that or if the people are close

you freeze and then you go to people pleasing comply i don't want to do anything to aggravate them anymore i would be totally submissive to whatever they want me to do in order to try and calm them down and so now your brain is feeling it's all about what i am feeling your limbic brain but your iq just drops a bit more from 80 to 100 because you're out of your cortex now you're now in your limbic brain okay so let's say that these people then start heading towards you and one of them looks at

you now you go to the fourth to fear and what is happening now is you're moving from your limbic brain so you got your cortex on the top your limbic brain and then your brain stem which is the first part of your brain that was built so now you're between your limbic brain and your brain stem now you're in either flight mode i am out of here and cortisol kicks in and when cortisol kicks in it gathers sugar from parts of your body to send them to your muscles it sends extra blood to your muscles

so that you can run faster or fight and then for some though if they don't feel they can run or fight then the brain goes to the adaptation of dissociation we're going to shut down so now what happens instead of cortisol pumping opioids are pumping the the brain is preparing the person to get hurt and then the blood doesn't get pushed to the extremities the blood gets pushed into the center of the body so that you won't bleed as much if you get cut or hurt and so the the brain is preparing the person for

hurt so they go to dissociation they flee inward and for some they go to catatonic they're just blank they can't move they're paralyzed deer in the headlights so they then your iq drops even more to 70 to 90. then the final one is absolute terror you've gone beyond fear to absolute terror now you are totally in your brain stem and what the brain stem now does is i have to prepare this person to survive so i have to get rid of kinds of all kinds of things that might slow down that so i am going

to they're going to wet themselves they're going to void their bowels they're going to just shake so i am getting them ready for what i got to just keep the basic survival organs happening everything else i got to start shutting down clearing out and so for a person you are in really a shutdown type mode some people faint some people collapse it is it is the body's way of just surviving so in that extreme case of dissociation your iq drops to 60 to 80. so what i again want you to see is that dissociation happens

when you get to the limbic brain and then it happens even more when you're in the brain stem only the shear terror and it is putting you in a place in your brain where you don't have very good access or any access to the thinking part of your brain to your cortex because it's gone inward it's gone into total self protection so having said that what would be some indicators that you are sliding back into dissociation so you've been doing great in your recovery you've been very present to yourself very connected to your emotions but

what are warning signs that you're starting to slide most of them when you start to dissociate just be aware it's often connected to growing stress in your life so your stress system is being triggered so some of the indicators that you're starting to slide into dissociation is you can go through a day and then you can go was i in the bedroom i can't remember did i go to the bank i can't remember so your brain is so occupied with the stress stuff going on that it starts losing track of what you're doing because that

part is in autopilot then you can do many things that you just make coffee makes get your cereal ready and you're not even thinking about it you're in total autopilot and so now a lot of what you do around the house you just go through motions you're not even conscious totally of what you're doing another indicator for many people is you just become more forgetful you forget what somebody told you five minutes ago it just doesn't seem to stick as well because your brain is so preoccupied with your stress you may catch yourself starting to

daydream more you have a hard time just focusing you sit down and your brain just starts wandering or you go for a walk and your brain is just daydreaming or you might find that you start to spend time mindlessly playing computer games flipping through your phone it's just a numbing escape so you're disconnecting from reality or you find that you're avoiding stuff more and more problems responsibilities anything that requires kind of extra energies or potential pain you just find you avoid a void or you find that you procrastinate more than normal and so what you

then begin to realize is your life seems out of balance you're not super happy you're just frustrated more you have more painful emotions and then for many people they start to realize they just feel kind of alone lonely they don't feel connected to others very much and they feel a restlessness and often they think okay i'm going to do this they start doing it and that doesn't make them feel any better then they try this they start doing it that doesn't make them feel any better and the reality is you're in your limbic brain and

you're looking for limbic brain solutions which usually don't work and so you go in a spinning spinning discontent but nothing you try is helping and so those are signs of disconnection and just for you to be aware of okay now having said all of that for some of you you might go okay i'm not sure this is really applying to me a whole bunch so i want to end this by talking about one of the most subtle types of dissociation that i think everybody with complex trauma struggles with and that is the tendency in relationships

to not be present so i want to focus on this because this is where i see so many people with complex trauma doing damage to their children they're with their children but they're not present they're with their partner but they're not present and so it is something that can happen so easily without you even realizing it but it does a lot of damage so let me just explain what i mean by being present being present means being fully conscious of the moment and free from the noise of internal dialogue it means you're focused and engaged

in the here and now not distracted or mentally absent it's often often associated with feelings with feelings of stillness and peace so flip that not being present is you're physically present but you're not emotionally or intellectually engaged or available so that means you're physically present but you're in some form of dissociation you're dissociated from what's going on in you and around you and with the other person so what are indicators that you might not be present and i want to give you 17 and you can check off as a test ones that might be true

of you right now and if they are it should be a warning to okay i need to make some changes quickly so number one you would rather do a mindless job or activity than to talk to somebody or to do other things that you really should be doing you see things more negatively so when a person comes and wants to talk to you so your partner a close friend but you're not present now you tend to sit in your brain go wow are they ever being inconsiderate and you're more defensive when they make suggestions or

you go boy are they ever insensitive to the fact that i want some alone time and so you your brain goes to a more negative place when it's interacting with people and then when they share painful stuff you just have less empathy when you're not present you just want them to be done sharing so you can get on with your day you don't have tons of empathy and then you criticize stuff that they're sharing stuff that they're talking about you find something negative to criticize in your mind so again the critical negative part just keeps

getting worse and then you find yourself impatient you just want the person to be done and so you kind of go okay i'll give this person a minute or two but they better be done sharing by then because i'm going to start tuning out so you just are more impatient you you kind of want it all to be over or they're talking but you got so much on your mind you you're finding it really hard to focus on what they're saying sometimes when you're not present they're sharing and you get to the end of it

and you don't have a clue what they were talking about or the main points of it you are just somewhere else there's another type of not being present let's say you fall in love with somebody or let's say you get a new object toy that you fall in love with guess what now you want to be present only and connect only to that new toy or to that new love and so when you're around other people you don't want to be there you don't want to connect with them you want to be playing your game

you want to be with your new sweetheart and so when you love something and are kind of obsessing about that thing in an unhealthy way it makes you not want to be present with the people you're with another thing you might find is that you just have more brain chatter than normal it's just like you got a lot of static and noise going on in your head or you just find that you get annoyed whenever anybody starts to talk to you and want their your full attention or somebody starts talking and they go beyond a

minute you start getting edgy and looking for a way to escape because you just don't want to be sitting there listening or somebody talks to you and you just keep playing on your phone distracted looking around or your bubble starts getting bigger you somebody comes into the room even where you're sitting and you get annoyed because you just don't want to deal with anybody have anybody talk to you at all or you find yourself just wanting to avoid social events you just don't want to go to places where you're going to have to talk and

listen to people or for some people when they get in conversation they think they're present but they're not because what's really going on is they're dominating the conversation they talk all about them what they want to talk about but the minute they're done talking about what they want to talk about the other person starts they check out they're gone or somebody's talking to you and you just respond with the mindless uh-huh mm-hmm yeah yeah you're not hearing what they're saying you're just acting like you're present but you're really not and then i've had parents tell

me that their young children sometimes when they know their parents not present takes their little hands and puts them on their cheeks and turns the parents face to look them in the eye and when a child has to do that they sense that you're not present so 17 indicators that just um show or warn us that we're either not present or heading more and more in that direction so what do we do about all of this dissociation stuff i think it's important to say that this is going to be a long journey don't just fix

this overnight that's been the default for years but you start with mindfulness and that again is connecting with yourself connecting with your higher power connecting with those around you but when you connect with yourself ask yourself what emotions am i feeling where is my head at these days and then for some people they need a little ritual that helps them connect with themselves to be mindful of what's going on inside of them so they might have a meditation type exercise that just helps them to center and get connected to themselves then learn the triggers the

stress activating things that cause your brain to want to begin disconnecting dissociation not being present as you become aware that realize that once your stress is triggered you're going to your limbic brain and it's just looking for a quick fix to feel better and it's losing track of the most important things in life all the time and the most important things of life often involve connection to self others and spiritually and then learn your patterns so when you're starting to dissociate or not be present what does that look like for you how does that work

itself out what are the warning signs and if you see it stop it because to continue is going to do damage to yourself and damage to your kids and to your relationships so you can get back into your cortex and say okay i'm disconnecting i'm i'm not present i choose to be present i choose to connect with others what is going on in my life that's causing me to disconnect i need to change that and figure it out so that you can get back to healthy and then again for people who have dissociative identity disorder

it's that long process that usually takes several years of reintegrating all the parts of you that had to splinter off in order for you to survive don't be ashamed of it don't be afraid to reach out for professional help in doing that it is going to seem overwhelming is going to seem like the journey will never end but it can it can result in wonderful healing and growth well that's the end of part one we're going to take a short break and then we're going to come back for the christian part if that doesn't interest

you not a problem you're free to go thank you for being part of part one and everybody else will be back in just a minute well welcome back i want to start a new series tonight on the bible character by the name of joseph and he has been a favorite character of mine over the last 40 years i have just benefited so much from studying his life and tonight i just want to introduce basically who this joseph is so joseph is known mainly for the fact that he was a jew one of the 12 brothers

of so there's abraham the father of israel isaac jacob and then joseph the fourth generation he went to egypt and through a bunch of horrendous circumstances that we're going to look at in a few weeks but there he rose to power and saved the world because of this massive famine that took place and saved israel but what the bible writer focuses on is not the saving from the famine so much that made him great but it wasn't what made him truly great what made joseph truly great was his character his commitment to being healthy even

in very difficult circumstances and his trust in god even though it seemed like god had let him down repeatedly and that is what just makes me admire this joseph but for tonight we're not going to really look so much at joseph i want you to look at his dad and his mom i want to kind of understand the family that joseph grew up in so okay so there's abraham isaac isaac married rebecca then jacob and esau so isaac and rebecca had twins jacob and esau jacob was joseph's dad what we find in the isa and

rebecca family with jacob and esau is tremendous favoritism isaac favored esau rebecca favored jacob and so what you find is a family that okay that's not healthy and then what we find is rebecca was a schemer a manipulator she came from a family of manipulators and she manipulated things to get her way she deceived her husband tricked her husband and so you go whoa what kind of marriage would they have had with that kind of favoritism manipulation going on i'm a little bit concerned about the healthiness of this couple so then we come to jacob

and esau and it's interesting to me that the name jacob means one who grabs the heel and in the hebrew world then your name described your character describe what you were like and so when we're told that jacob is one who grabs the heel that phrase in the hebrew culture meant a deceiver a manipulator a schemer somebody who tricked people and tripped them up and so what we find is jacob is being described for us as a con man as a man who's always working a secret hidden agenda a man who's always manipulating and trying

to control people a narcissist a man who we see in the first 50 years of his life didn't trust god had tremendous difficulty coming to trust god he fully depended on his powers to manipulate to get what he wanted not trusting god so this is a young man who's got a lot of issues a lot of unhealthy behaviors and so he as he grows learns from his mom and becomes this manipulator like his mom and so we're as we read through jacob's life that what the writer focuses on is every time we see him in

the first 50 years he's manipulating he's tricking somebody he's trying to get his agenda accomplished and doesn't care who he hurts he's acting like a narcissist so he tricks his brother deceives his brother on two occasions that greatly hurt his brother made esau extremely angry and jacob had to run for his life part of that is he tricked his father he deceived his father lied to his father got his mother in on the plot and they deceived together and so what happens is it shatters this family jacob has to run for his life but his

brother is deeply hurt his father is deeply hurt there's tension in this family so when he runs for his life his mother rebecca says go to my brother laban and he'll take care of you and what we find out is laban is a deceiver just as much as his mother is and so when jacob is there he falls in love with his cousin laban's daughter the beautiful rachel and wants to marry her and laban says sure i'll let you marry her if you agree to work for seven years as kind of your dow repayment jacob

agrees to that and on the night of the wedding he discovers that laban tricked him and gave him his other daughter leah who wasn't so pretty and so now he goes back matt to layman and says i wanted rachel you promised rachel and lady says ah too bad you can still have rachel if you work another seven years and so now he has two wives and as if that wasn't enough what jacob then starts to do is trying to manipulate laban and he works out schemes to try and take all of laban's wealth and make

his his own and so it becomes so bad that laban gets so angry at jacob jacob has to run for his life again and so he got what he wanted but it was destroying families all around him and so then he runs for his life to set an up a new life he's got rachel and leah both now as his wives and he decides he's going to favor rachel over leah and that causes tension in the home but then rachel isn't able to have any children but leah has lots of children and now leah starts

rubbing rachel's nose in the fact that she's barren and that causes tension in the home so what does rachel do well she learned from her dad and her husband to manipulate so now she starts scheming as to how to get children and so she's going to use her slave girl as the way to do that which was allowed in that culture the slave girl could bear a child that would be considered yours and when leah sees that she uses her slave girl so now you have jacob with four women all this scheming is constantly going

on in the home there's tension there's anger there's bitterness there's hatred [Music] jacob has created a mess he has 12 sons and as if he hasn't learned his lesson [Music] that favoritism and manipulation destroy everything what he does is favors one of his sons joseph because that was the first son that rachel was finally able to conceive and have so now he has twelve sons with only one favored and now the other eleven hate that son and have resentments to their dad wow what a mess that joseph comes into the world he didn't choose to

be a favored son he didn't choose to grow up with all of the tension and manipulation in the family he didn't choose to grow up with his brothers hating him but that is what happened jacob his dad has created extremely dysfunctional family he has created a family that for joseph was a complex trauma family isn't that interesting so as we go into the life of joseph two things that i want you to be aware of number one he comes from a messed up family it might even be more messed up than your family was but

he comes out of it this godly wonderful man secondly and this is the absolutely amazing fact he grew up with manipulation scheming secret agendas not trusting god but you know that as we study joseph's life he never manipulated once he never had schemes secret agendas he totally trusted god he went in a totally different direction from the unhealthy behaviors of his family and that to me gives hope because it to me it says it's possible for people who grow up in complex trauma who still have very messed up unhealthy families it's possible to go in

a different direction you don't have to follow in their footsteps and create trauma in the next generation and joseph provides an example of that so i hope you're going to look forward to learning about this young man and just how wonderful his character and his relationship with god is let's pray father thank you that we have examples of people that come from very messed up places who make choices that change the narrative of their life and result in them being these wonderful healthy people and i pray they would just give encouragement to each person here

who might be just struggling with breaking free from some of the family stuff that they grew up in amen so thank you again for being here today part of this friday