How To Unlock That Frozen Energy with Marta Luzim

When we encounter a trauma or a shock, the fight, flight or freeze is very common. That is where trauma can get locked in the body and holds everything tight in place. Unless we’re willing to go back in the body and feel it, we can’t unlock that frozen energy. Psychospiritual healer and creative coach Marta Luzim grew up in a home that, in her words, looked pretty from the outside, but was repressive, filled with rage and denied terror. She missed out on a happy childhood and her teenage years, although she was very rebellious. A therapist once said to her, “You rebel, but you don’t leave,” and that has stuck in her brain her whole entire life.

Marta shares her unique perspective of how the chakras and energy systems in the body need to be healed in order to release the energies of frozen trauma held in the body. She says we’re in a really traumatized time in our culture. Women are the ones who are going to heal that, but they have to heal themselves first. They have to tell their stories. They have to go into their bodies. They have to step away, individuate, be brave, courageous and ferocious to have this voice, and let it be gritty, gutsy and raw. Instead of saying, “I can’t say this, I can’t say that,” no. Say it all.

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Listen to the podcast here:

How To Unlock That Frozen Energy with Marta Luzim

This interview is from the While We Were Silent project, it is with MartaLuzim.She is theFounder of two organizations, WritingLike A Madwoman and Give Her A Voice.On her website, she says, “I wrote and wrote until I felt alive.”She’s raw and gritty herself and she has a way of helping you get into your own.She says, “Spiritually raw and emotionally gritty story of trauma and recovery and bring that out, notfrom your mind, your thoughts and your memory but from your body, from your viscera.To get that out and bring it to healing.” This interview, it’s long but it is worth it. Marta gets into insights from historical perspectives, from mythology, from energetics, from the chakras and everything.From the way we hold trauma in the body, the way we process and the way we heal.It’s a strong interview. Enjoy it. Thanks so much.

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Our guest is Marta Luzim. Welcome, Marta.

Thank you for having me.

Marta Luzimhas worked with women, families and couples for over 40 years. She is a PsychospiritualTherapist with an MS in Counseling Psychology and a BS in Education. She is a Next Level Practitioner, an expert in women’s trauma and recovery. She is a certified Intimacy Trainer in the Moseley Method. She is certified as a Kaizen creative coach, a Metaphysician, somatic body worker and mindfulness breath worker.

She is a published novelist, columnist and playwright.In 2004, she created a nonprofit,501(c)(3) that she is President of and it’s called Give Her A Voice, a multimedia presentation dramatizing stories of women’s recovery. She is writing a memoir and launching her new program, Writing Like A Madwoman.Can you go ahead and tell us more about your story?What led you to where you are now and the beautiful work that you’re doing to help other people?

What’s led me in my life were so many different reasons and factors and some of them might seem contradictory to one another. By myself, coming from childhood abuse, growing up with a mentally ill borderline mother, a basically absentee father, emotionally and in the house.During those years,men were working and women were home doing whatever they were doing.

One of the issues of abuse that I suffered which is not spoken of enough for women and John Bradshaw, he was the one that brought this out and healing the shame that binds us. The originator of bringing to consciousness codependency issues,underneath addiction and that was emotional incest. My father was emotionally incested.

It happens a lot in a family where the mother and father are not connected as equals. The father seeks out the daughter to get the emotional juice and the mother will seek out the son.There’s a lot written on this and I don’t want to get all into it in a psychological way. However, my home basically was a home where I suffered from not being seen, not being heard, being abused and in angst most of my life.

In a sense, I missed out on a happy childhood and I missed out on teenage years, although I was rebellious. A therapist once said to me, “You rebel but you don’t leave,” and that’s always stuck in my groin my whole entire life. It’s a powerful statement.

SCS 12 | Unlock That Frozen Energy — The Heroine’s Journey

What happened was at age sixteen, I was suicidal. Something inside of me broke me open to realizing there was more than one dimension, more than one reality. Joan Borysenkoin Fire In The Soul, she stated that when a child is severely abused, she can have an out of body experience and meet with a light or a wise being. That’s what happened to me. I was into my 30s when I read that. I was like, “I’m being validated here,” because I could never speak to anyone about this, no therapist or anyone.

They didn’t understand what I was saying. It was always a very difficult integration but there’s always been this powerful force in me that made me question everything,“Why am I here? Who am I? Why is my mother mentally ill? Why is my father this way? Why am I Jewish? What is the Holocaust? Why am I supposed to be afraid as a Jew? Why was I hearing that in Afghanistan?

I was such a curious child, which teachers hated. They do not like that I asked many questions. They just wanted, “Shut up and just answer the question.” I felt like I never belonged because I never could stop asking questions. I was basically ostracized for that. My whole life ever since I’m a child, I didn’t feel I belonged in my home, in school and in the social world I grew up with. I was born in the ‘50s, which was Donna Reed with pearls around your neck and be the perfect virgin mother.

It went into the ‘60s with Janis Joplin, Stevie Nicks and, “We love and throw your bra off and burn it.” I was totally split between these two worlds,very confusing. I felt like Alice’s rabbit hole. I fell down. It was like everybody was the Mad Hatter. It’s like, “Where am I going? What am I doing?” I always felt I was on some LSD trip.It got to the point when I went away to college in Boston, I got very much into drugs, sex and free love.It all exploded on me and I felt the pain of my abuse.Growing up in the ‘50s, nobody identified abuse, it was unheard of. Particularly in the culture of being a Jewish mother, it’s unheard of that a Jewish mother might abuse her child.It was silence.

I had this volcanic rupture in me that wanted to explode but I was a very silent, introverted child. As a teenager I tried to rebel. When I entered into Jungian Therapy, that’s when it all exploded.All of my rage came out.My voice was that of rage.That’s what I knew was my voice of rage, which was my mother’s voice as well. I knew that had to come out of my body.That started my journey. That’s when I started to realize, “What’s going on in my unconscious?What’s going on in my psyche?”Jungian therapy is deep depth psychology.

It takes you on that mythical heroine’s journey into the psyche, into dreams, into art, symbol and metaphor. I was also a child. I painted, I drew and everything to me was a mystery. It’s like, “This is like a big candy store of mystery to me,” and nobody understood me. They kept saying,“What’s wrong with you? Shut up and get dressed.Be clean.Follow the rules. Marry a rich man and whatever looked good,” it was always this superficial and materialistic assimilation. I battled it.

From that time on, it’s been my heroine’s journey to come back to my feminine. My feminine was fragmented into many pieces. Like many women, I was seeking to find my identity, my soul, my worth, my power through the male system, through men, for the validation of my sexuality through men. Through beauty, through very external things that women are taught. When women’s lib came around, it was exciting and wonderful, but I knew there was something missing from it.

It’s great to have equal pay and equal sexuality, however it was being compared up against the male system.What a woman’s worth was?How much she should be paid?Even now we know that women are not paid equally to men and that’s becoming more of an outgoing issue.It led me to many magical mystery tours all over the country, getting academic degrees, getting certifications, studying with spiritual teachers such as Ram Dass. It’s innumerable. I can’t even list all the things that I did.

Becoming a Metaphysician, I was led. As I was doing this, I also was doing my art. I was painting, I was writing poetry,I was writing books, I was journaling and this was the very important part of my journey. If I didn’t have that and I had just the therapy, I knew it wouldn’t work for me. The therapy left me in pain, where the art helped me to embody and express. There was some clue there I was starting to see.

That’s when I was led into the feminine way of healing.The Heroine’s Journey by Maureen Murdock. Her book talks about the cycle of how we have fragmented and split from the feminine and have to come back to it.We’re born into a patriarchal society that we didn’t create and don’t even realize that was still being part of that.It’s very subtle in many different levels and ways.

Being the person I am, I had to know everything. I had to know mysticism, I had to know anthropology, I had to know it all. I was like a mad woman. That’s what my program is called Writing Like A Madwoman.I could put my hand in the side, my hair was standing on end, I was floating in the air and nobody knew what to do with me. They thought I was literally insane.

I wanted the answer, “Why is this happening? Why was my mother mentally ill?” I had to go back into generations to generations from the Holocaust understanding the trauma of that. Then slowly but surely understanding the body and understanding that trauma is in the body and that we cannot fix it. We cannot do it through our heads in psychology. That’s when I began my journey into the somatic arts and into the creative arts more and more.

My art starts to emerge when I started to follow that and understanding what is the energy of the body?What is the true energy?What came from that is the realization that it’s emotional. It’s emotional energy, which is of the feminine.Emotional energy in our culture is negated. Although we talk about compassion and love, compassion and love is a concept.

To feel that in your body, you have to go through the layers, which I had to do. I had to go through where I was frozen from trauma that I was terrified of my own body. Being a woman, all of the mythologies that brainwashed me from beginning of time,with Eve as we talked about being birthed from Adam’s rib and women being second and a companion more than the leader. My story is intricate and intimate but it’s been a lifelong journey that I’m still on and I have so much to offer that I can ramble on and on.

The core of it came out of abuse. My journey started from abuse. It started from the darkness and it started from the psyche.That to me is a spiritual world.For me to integrate the light into that had to come from the feminine.Not from this all-encompassing life that is outside of a body and inside of a body. It takes us into this place of perfection, the perfect god. The feminine is not about perfection. The feminine is messy and emotional, intuitive, psychic and creative and has body wisdom.

This is very new to the planet.This is my passion and advocacy as a woman because I am so wounded as a woman.I had to learn to trust women because I had a mother and a sister who were hateful towards me and abusive. That was branded to my psyche. It was terrifying being Jewish,for me as a woman, especially being taught that anybody and everybody wants to kill you because you’re a Jew.That’s how I was brought up.

The issue of trust, because I was brought up in such a terrorizing environment that looked sobeautiful, it wasbeautiful on the outside but on the inside, it was hell.My desperation, passion and desire to express that truth inside of me and to break down those walls of perfection, protection and shame has been a lifelong journey for me probably until my next lives. I wanted toshare this with as many people as I could.

You do some incredibly amazing work with people and you have been doing a variety. Can you give us an idea of what you do with people to help them to find their own inner voice?To their messiness and find their wholeness within their messiness and all of the beautiful things that you do. Can you give us an idea of what you do with people?

It’s difficult to explain experiential processes, that so much spontaneous in the moment with no real agenda, except to follow the energy in a person’s body but I’ll do the best I can.I haven’t always been doing it the way I do it now, my Writing Like A Mad woman program because it’s been in the last ten years that I’ve incorporated the arts as part of my program.

Before that,the arts were always there, the movement, the breath work was always there but it was more as a technique. Now, it’s become a forefront as a goal, as an intention, as a commitment to do art like our ancient foremothers did. They painted on walls, they did beautiful vases, dresses and everything.We can read our history in cavemen prehistoric times through the walls in the caves.

The feminine is not about perfection. The feminine is messy, emotional, intuitive, psychic, and creative and has body wisdom. Share on X

This to me was looking at using the techniques that get into the right brain.That’s the easiest word I can use is the right brain. We need to get into the right brain, which takes us into the body.Mostly,we’ve been doing left brain techniques,analytical, breaking down things instead of making them whole.Breaking down things was a male way of doing things,memorizing.

The female way of doing things is going into the whole, into the unknown and into mysteries, which takes you into the body and the psyche. The psyche is the soul of the body.What I do is I am an emotional intuitive. I’ve had a psychic wisdom since a child. I was eight. This was natural. I didn’t know what it was. I’m allowing it because I was able to see into the dark. It was very offensive to people because I was seeing things that they didn’t want to see.

I feel like I’ve been an apprentice of the invisible mystery matriarchs of my lineage.All the women who were the priestesses and could do this because it was something that needed to be contained and directed and navigated. There are not that many people that can navigate that. That’s why I’ve got so many different certifications outside of the traditional university because they don’t teach any of this. You have to go outside of the university systems if you want to do something alternative or more of the female heroine’s journey type healing.What I do is I basically use the intuitive gifts I have along with all of the tools, which is art, meditation and breath work, movement, sound, somatic work,voice work, which takes them into a place in their body that is unknown.

If they’re in know, they’re repeating things that they already know. It’s going to the place, “What don’t I know?” It’s experiential, it’s in the moment.In that container is where my academic knowledge is important and the trainings that I’ve had. Within that is understanding the energetics of mental illness, the energetics of what’s a borderline personality? What is a victim victimizer? What is the schizophrenic?

All of these personality disorders and psychotic disorders that I’ve described, understanding the energetics, emotional energetics and the trauma behind it helps me to help the person come more deeply into this part of their body that’s the core trauma. Coming out of it, expressing it through the arts, through sound, through movement, through many different ways that can access that spiritual ignition that would begin to transform it.Not change it, not make it go away, not make it better but to allow it to be expressed and said, heard and witnessed.

That takes us to the whole purpose of this series, While We Were Silent. The big question is,is this valid, all these things that are coming forward now?Why are people silent for so long when they’ve experienced abuse?

This is a multidimensional answer and some of the things that I’ve said that led me to asking that question and why is it taking me so long? Why did I stay silent about certain things? Why was I scared? One of the things I want to say is from Biblical mythologies and Greek mythologies, although they have many female goddesses who are powerful,even in the Greek mythologies, Athena was birthed from Zeus brow. The erotic and the sexual, which is very much the feminine. She’s the life-death-rebirth cycle and she’s the body. She’s the blood.

Mankind, the patriarchal was frightened of this. It was terrifying for them that women had that power to birth, to bleed, to have these great, prophetic powers.During the matrilineal culture was during the time of Abraham and Sarah.There was a matrilineal society during that time, it was not patriarchal. The patriarchs came in, they were the warriors.They wanted to destroy, which they did.They murdered, they pillaged and they raped to take power over the land and power over the consciousness of the people and to create fear.

Women at that time,I don’t know where Wonder Woman, Amazon ladies were, but they weren’t there at the battle.They got wiped out.A lot of the feminine Asherah, Isis and Astarte, they were all destroyed.For years in the Hebrew religion, Asherah stood as one of the goddesses and eventually she got torn down. There isn’t even a word for goddesses in the Bible. They have the word Shekinah, which is the feminine face of God, but there’s no word for goddess in the Bible.

When you wipe out a consciousness, that’s what they’re trying to do. Thousands and thousands of years ago, what do we expect?Women have been struggling for centuries to reclaim their power and it’s been slow in coming. The patriarchal culture of warriors, they are cruel and mean. This is in our psyche, women have been traumatized. In addition, during the Crusades, there was a female holocaust.

I know I’m saying things that people say,“What the hell has that got to do with it?” It does have a lot to do with it because we have now been shown through the science of Epigenetics that we hold generations of trauma in our body from our ancestors.All of us women who are these intuitives, healers and I always say, “You killed us off but we’re back,”because we reincarnated are here now and saying,“You’re not going to do this to us again.” When knowledge and wisdom is born into the body, it slows down just you have to slow down to your inner self, your guide and your harmony connection.

We have to slow down to receive the information. We’re not a slow-down culture or world,we’re sped up.We’re not a preventative culture, in addition. There are many reasons why women, particularly women and many men who are damaged by this culture and don’t want to be a CEO of a corporation or a doctor, whatever that men are supposed to be. It’s evolution.The feminine consciousness is an evolution and it was taken away and now we’re getting it back.

Here we are with all of this bodily wisdom and this lineage that lives in our psyche.We’re born into this culture that is a patriarchal culture that we’re not meant to live in and we didn’t create and we’re trying to find our way but it’s been completely wiped out of the culture.Our way of being or the truth of the feminine consciousness has been completely wiped out of the culture.We’re trying to find our way in something where we have no examples and nothing to compare to.

In this Crusade, women were killed.It was during a time where women were property and women were turning on women. For many decades, women have been in competition, in comparison, climbing the ladder and trying to get the better man or the more money. It’s part of the patriarchal culture,what success might be?To undo this, I’m going to assess the most I can do is work on myself.

In Judaism they call it the owner to come,the Humpty Dumpty. We’re all splat into millions of pieces. We are. Women need to understand themselves beyond the victim-victimizer and they don’t. How do you say what comes first, the chicken or the egg? The egg or the chicken or whatever? Here are these many women, however, when we keep saying, “I wasn’t going to get the job. I wasn’t going to get the status, so I was going to lose my money or is going to lose my house,” these seem like solid rationales.

We live in a culture where that is put as a priority, it’s life or death and you’ll be exiled from the tribe and shamed, if you’re not taking care of your nest. If you’re not being the mother and whatever women of the world types, there’s this tremendous, energetic backlash in our bodies that guilt ourselves, blames ourselves.We’re trying to find a voice to say,“It wasn’t my fault.” At the same time,we finally have gotten there where we can feel that. It’s not just intellectually saying things and repeating things, it’s feeling it. I could tell you you’re beautiful, but if you don’t feel it,you don’t feel it. The words that we say, the intelligence that we have, that we understand, it has to come into the body. We have to feel it.

If you’re sitting on a nail and you can’t feel it, you’re not going to get off.This has been the problem for women. They haven’t really been in their bodies. They haven’t really been feeling the abuse.I worked with a client and it was a huge awakening for her. She was severely abused by her mother, her father was emotionally unavailable and definitely abused her mentally and abandoned her.

She was having this memory of her mother choking her and she must’ve been about twelve. She had this memory because she was deeply in her body, deeply in her connection to herself, as we traveled there. She had this realization that at that moment she made a decision she was going to feel nothing. She was going to tolerate the abuse that she was going to be good at abuse. She was going to be the winner. She was never going to show her mother the pain. She was never going to show pain. At that moment she went into freeze.

That connection in her body woke her up and made her see why she keeps staying in this collapsed victim state or blaming. It was a vicious cycle for her. She knew everything intellectually,very smart,very talented but could not get out of the stuck place. It was all about the energetics of feeling the trauma. There are whole theories that don’t bring them back into the trauma. I’m not talking about re-traumatizing. We retraumatize ourselves everyday by telling ourselves we’re not worthy, we’re not good enough, I have to protect somebody, I have to give up my voice. We do that on a daily basis.

I’m talking about releasing the emotional freeze.Where you lost yourself and then you develop layers of defense to protect yourself, rationales, excuses.If I’m going to make it in a man’s world, I can’t make this important. I can’t make it important if this guy did this to me, this person did that to me.I can ignore it. It’s okay. I can tolerate this. Women are so strong, you learnt it by giving birth.For some women it was easy-peasy. For me, it was sixteen hours of hard, natural labor.

Women can tolerate a lot of pain. Their bodies are made for it.They learn to tolerate the abuse because they want it desperately, to have that equality in that system and have a voice that they forgot where they are and what they’re doing, but they don’t have to do that.Now, they’re waking up and realizing, “I can’t say no. If I lose my job, I can do it another way.”Women are starting their own production companies or writing their own book or starting their own organizations.It’s slow in coming because to bring it into the body, to feel it as an activism, as a rage, as a passion, as a way of transformation takes a lot of time and slowing down to feel it and receive it.

I want to reiterate or highlight something that’s commonly known that you brought up is that fight, flight or freeze. It’s a part of the nervous system. When we encounter something that is a trauma, a shock or a, “We don’t know what the heck to do with this,” that fight, flight or freeze is very common.

That is where trauma can get locked in the body and holds everything tight in place. Unless we’re willing to go back in the body and feel it, we can’t unlock that freeze, that frozen energy. As you say this, it’s like, “I can see why it would be hard to break through that freeze,” that wall of silence that we hide behind for so long, for so many years and some people for a lifetime. If you want to take that step, you’ve got to get through that wall of freeze.

You have to be willing to go into the body and be able to build up an emotional muscle. I call it emotional yoga,to hold that feeling as long as you can until it begins to wake in your body. When it awakens your body, it gives you a voice,it awakens your emotions and your energy.You start to feel that aliveness coming through, your blood running again.

Often we’re saying,“Why didn’t you just say something?” To say something is like stepping on the other side of that big, giant, frozen wall. You’re going against everything you’re feeling in your body in order to try to use your voice to get something done. I see that struggle within the self is to go against what’s on the inside energetically of your nervous system. Your nervous system is frozen in trauma there and you’re trying to step out of that boundary of safety in order to speak and that’s hard.

It re-activates the nervous system.The brain and then whole trauma cycle begins all over again. To make it current, we have in the medical field or the psychological field really begun to know that trauma except in the last twenty years.You’re talking about women who didn’t realize that they were already traumatized in the culture and maybe holding epigenetically generationally trauma.

Here, they’re in this culture that demoralizes women and thinks that it’s okay to put the hand up a woman’s dress or skirt or threaten her with a job. They automatically go into the trauma not realizing that’s what they’re in. That the more and more we begin to understand trauma, the feminine, the body and the right brain,where spirituality and the psyche come together in the feminine way of healing, the more women are going to be able to take action on what they know is true.What they know needs to be said, feeling it and then doing it.

Each part of our body holds a different trauma for women.For women, there’s a lot of trauma in our vaginas. There’s a lot of trauma in our bellies,our breast and hearts. My work with women is to go from the bottom up in terms of the chakras. To me, the third eye for a woman is in her vagina and her belly. Her feet hold her to the ground for the energy to open it up. It goes up the nervous system, the spinal cord, opens the breast, the lungs, the throat and out. Whereas we’ve been taught that it comes from up to down, when we do it that way we can’t get past the upper body because that’s where the frozen child is. We can’t get that energy past that. Our vaginas are in trauma.

The generations of what we’ve been told about our vaginas, sexuality and who we are.Sexuality meaning something what?What does it mean?Teach women to mean something different. Basically how they were brought up by the families,their culture and their religion. To take authority over our sexuality and to say that our sexuality is part of our spirituality, our creativity and our power.

How do you do that without sexualizing it? Without being an object of sexuality, then thinking, “Your spirituality is sexual,that okay now.We can do what we want.”No, it doesn’t mean that.I’m not saying that all women,I’m saying many women, especially women in our masses who don’t have access to this information and can’t afford therapy or busy trying to make a dollar to have a one-parent family.They don’t have access to this understanding. How many coaches are traumatized from every ethnic group to every neighborhood?They don’t have this information.

The masses, their association with the sexuality and with the vagina are all about,“Don’t go there. Keep that hidden. We don’t talk about those things.” There’s an association of shame.

Or “I will use my sexuality to have power,”it’s either/or, it’s both.We’re either the victim or the victimizer in our woundedness. It’s either shame it and hide it,be part of the tribe and play it safe or it’s let me use it and have power.We’re stuck like, “What does real power mean? How do I feel that?”We’re beginning to understand what that might be but we have far to go.

Look at our governments and our institutions. They’re in Roman ruins and ashes.We’re in a really traumatized time in our culture.Women are the ones that are going to heal that but they have to heal themselves first. They have to tell their stories. They have to come into their bodies. They have to step away and individuate and be brave, courageous and ferocious to have this voice and let it be gritty, gutsy and raw.Not be,“I can’t say that. I can’t say this.” No, say it all.

Can you help us to understand? Honestly, I believe we’re ingrained in the way we’re supposed to be based on our culture, based on all of the things you’ve been talking about that we don’t even recognize the effects.Can you say, from your perspective, what this time of silence, keeping all of this in especially if we’ve experienced abuse, violation, and trauma?What the effects of keeping this inside, keeping up that wall of frozenness, the wall of shame, the wall of silence, how does that ripple out into our lives? How do we even recognize that we’re in that place? What’s happening there?

You have to slow down to your inner self, your guide, and your harmony connection to receive the information. Share on X

I don’t think that we don’t recognize it, I think we’re just in denial. Denial is the most negative, awesome thing in our culture. First of all, it protects us when we’re children but when we’re adults, it’s no good anymore because we’re holding the trauma.We’re good at delusion and fantasy. We’re very good at all of this. We can just say,“I don’t know I’m doing that. I don’t know I’m feeling that. I don’t know this is happening.” That’s the victim. The victim never knows. It doesn’t know what’s going on.

That’s what part of not being able to be in the body. When you’re in the body, in the moment, you feel it.You know it’s happening. You can feel it.In that moment,like I always say, change only happens in the moment. In that moment, if you are conscious in your body feeling, thinking, breathing, responding and reacting, you’re going to know exactly what’s happening. It’s very subtle and it’s almost like having inner eyes and outer eyes.

It’s like you’re looking inside, feeling inside and then you’re seeing the results.If we’re depressed, if we have anxiety, if we’re sleepless, if we’re having a chronic illness, if we’re having intimacy issues, if we’re having mental health issues, if we’re blaming, if we’re still in shame, I can list a myriad, which I have a book that lists all the outcomes of trauma. We know, but we don’t want to know.

Our culture says you’re depressed, take a pill. I’m saying not to, because sometimes the brain has to be balanced enough to be able to receive information.At the same time, it’s not the cure.Healing isn’t a cure either. Healing is a self-acceptance and self-love.We don’t know what unconditional love is. We’re first learning.I’m in a 47-year-old year marriage and I say,“Be married 47 years and maybe you’ll know what unconditional love is.”

I certainly am still learning what the hell that means,being married for 47 years.Even about myself,to not keep being perfect. Even now, saying this perfect, doing this perfect,whatever is going on in the back of my brain, I will say again, it seems simple but you have to work on yourself. Women have to make the decision. They have to make a decision to make it a priority to come into their bodies. Learn what that means to come into the body. Really begin to expose their feelings and to express their feelings, whether they’re good, bad and ugly. Really learning what self-care means, learning what true creative expression is,learning to get familiar with their bodies, their vaginas, their pains, their sorrow, their grief, their rage.

There’s this whole article that I have that’s written it’s called Lunacy. It talks about what if we took all the women and all the mad women, we bathe them, we stroke them, we sang to them, we let them scream and we let them hit bats.Where do you see that happening? Except to say,“This woman belongs in a padded cell or something or let’s get rid of those dealings.” Our culture hysteria has been made into pathology.

Women’s emotions have been pathologized. We first have to break through that and we have to know the difference between blame and expression. Blame, feelings and expression.A lot of times when I work with people, they’ll think,“They did this,”they’re expressing. “You did this to me,” and they think they’re expressing. I said, “No. What do you feel?” They go, “I felt hurt.” That’s an expression,”I feel hurt.”

I said not to make them the reason for it. Maybe they did hurt you but usually the trigger some past woundedness. Also, some people don’t realize that they’re doing or saying it.We’re all unconscious in the moment, in our relationships. Relationship is also one of the key mirrors and tools to see how unconscious we are. Dass once wrote, “If you think you’re so enlightened, go home to your family.”

He always says the best things. He’ll say, “You can be floating in the air but you still have a zip code.” This is what it is. This is coming into the body, into the reality, the oneness of being human. The imperfections, the wounds, the flaws.We have to feel and we don’t know we’re not feeling.To really know, to me it’s always the same answer. You’ve got to come into the body to feel.Most people do not know they are not feeling.

Part of the purpose of this is to help people who have not experienced abuse, trauma or are not aware of it, who are looking from the outside in.They’re looking at, say for an example, a young girl experiences abuse, experiences violation. Her boundaries are totally wiped out and confused. There’s a tendency to waver back and forth between frigidity and totally no boundaries at all.

Promiscuity, if you will. I’m not saying everyone does this, but it’s common. I’m thinking of in the last couple of years, for example, we had a number of cases in the media of the college campus rapes. Where there was so much discussion about what’s the man’s supposed to do when a woman is drunk?She’s this or that.

I’m not saying that the women in those cases are victims of childhood sexual abuse or anything like that. I know that there is, there can be that promiscuity. Then there is that judgment that comes in that says,“What did she expect? She deserved it. She asked for it.” I’m trying to help to shed some light on what’s happening on the inside. How can we be more understanding of each other and compassionate with each other, male and female?

I think it’s important because we can’t just say, “This happened, this happened and therefore she asked for this. I have the right to do that.” This is the common conversations that I hear going on in our culture, in our meeting. As these things are coming to light in the media. You’re speaking from a place of this is the Epigenetics, the culture, the history and all of these things that’s embedded in the DNA, the nervous system, the trauma and all of getting back into the body. What I’m saying is from someone who’s on the outside looking in, who is nowhere near to that, how can they recognize what’s happening in the world and have us come into a place of understanding of each other?

I got it perfectly what you’re saying because it is an ongoing dilemma. I’ll just share something personally. My husband is an attorney and he looks at the legal definition of mental illness. Like we’re watching Law and Order: SVU. We’re always having this ongoing argument about mental illness, cause and effect. Is it, “Is he legally mentally ill?” I say, “What person in their right who’s not had some mental illness going to kill somebody?”He goes, “If they planned it and premeditated it, then they’re not mentally ill.” I said, “Mentally ill people are capable of planning something.” They can be very smart, mentally ill people.

This whole idea of mental illness is a stigma. My mother was a borderline and she functioned in the world.Nobody knew she was a border line, they just thought she was mean.They thought she was cruel. That’s how they labeled her. I was like, “No, she’s a borderline personality.”“No, she’s just mean.” It’s that conversation of how do we begin to understand why this young girl was doing what she was doing? Why whatever happened to her happened with men or women? Whatever happened that was a trauma? How do we begin to open the conversation that is more flexible, more open-minded and open-hearted?

It’s a global question because it’s going to take education. It’s going to take a lot of education in the universities. In our adult universities,they have the adult colleges and even in our elementary schools.We need to start programs. I was a teacher for seven years in the school system and I realized that I want to teach children to love themselves. The academics wasn’t as important to me and I realized I was teaching them to love themselves more than anything else.The outcome of that is that they academically improved. It goes back, what comes before, the chicken or the egg?

What’s cause and effect? What you’re asking about is all an effect of our culture.What we’ve been taught,what’s right or wrong? What’s good or bad? What a woman’s supposed to do?She shouldn’t wear a short skirt that shows her bosoms or whatever. That’s not a call for rape, for women showing her boobs or wearing a short skirt. This is where our cultural and emotional ignorance is. It starts in the families. We come from so many families that have alcoholic parents, addicted parents or where they’ve been abused in the home. There’s so much that we need to know.The question is, are we willing to want to know? Are we willing to want to be educated? Are we willing to want to be human?

Our culture is set up where even if you have two parents, they’re so busy and it takes so much and so many of our children are raised by media. I was raised by media, I feel like it even back in the day of black and white TV.Even back then when it was just, “This is what a woman is supposed to be.”You’re talking about Donna Reed versus Janis Joplin.

It’s funny you should be bringing that up because one of the things that’s coming out of my memoir is that I always wanted to be an actress.I guess you could see that drama in me. I loved Hollywood. I loved it. To me, all these actresses were archetypes to me, they were role models.Each one showed me a different piece of myself of like, “That’s who I want to be,” because my mother was out. My mother was mentally ill. She showed me only the dysfunctional way.

The Hollywood stories, movies and archetypes, they gave me an insight and awareness, “There’s something else I could be.” I understand when you say media brings us up because even years and years ago, we all had that. We idolized the actors and actresses,because they were like gods and goddesses because our homes were so dysfunctional. We couldn’t find the role models or having tragedies in our family systems and we didn’t have maybe a mother and a father or our mothers and fathers fought all the time.

Even the “norm” these days is that the parents are too busy. We’re left to figure it out with what we’re seeing.

You know that you’re talking about outcome when you asked these questions. Do you know that you’re maybe talking about the outcome of something that’s been in motion fora long time?

Yes. I do recognize that and that is part of what I want to educate people about is what we’re seeing right now,it is an outcome. It is a product.

When I talk about trauma, and people hate that word especially complex trauma or personal trauma. When they say I’m depressed, I’m anxious,you know that’s an outcome or I hate myself or I’m not good enough.You know that’s an outcome. It’s not real. It’s not true. It’s not who you are. This is something that can be reversed. This is something that can be done, but you have to be willing to want to do it.You can’t teach someone and lead someone.

The old saying is, “You can lead someone to water, but you can’t make him drink.”This is something I learned as a therapist for years.I had to learn where’s my boundary where I don’t step in and try to be like, “Just do this. Get better or whatever.”I had to learn to allow that person to have their own destiny in their own path.It’s hard when you’re an empathic and want the world to be a better place and you want to see children have a better world.

It’s hard to let go of control and to say, “I can only do what I can do but I have a voice, I can educate, I can point out, I can write about it, I can create courses about it. I can come together as a tribe of people. I could be an activist. I could be a lobbyist. I could do all these things should I try to educate and raise consciousness so that we understand that what we’re trying to fix and they keep saying, “How do you fix this? How do you fix that? How do we fix if the FBI agent didn’t follow through on the leads? What do you mean how do you fix this?” What was wrong with this guy that he didn’t want to report it?What’s wrong with the system?What happened?What’s the line of command? What’s going on?

Systems are made up by individuals. We make up this system.It’s taking responsibility.It’s also being able to let go, knowing we’re not going to be able to help everyone, that we can only help those who are meant to be helped or want to be helped. It’s important to let people know. That’s why we’re fragmented because we have holistic health and eating, and then we have mental illness, and then we have metaphysics, spirituality, energy work and somatic work. These are all part of the same thing.These were the multi-dimension of resources,and tools and medicine bag that we all have to have, step up and be responsible for, learn and want it. Really wanting to have that fire, to want to be whole and well,and coming into the world and sharing that.

To let people know when you’re depressed, it’s more than taking a pill.When you’re in pain, it’s more than taking a pill.When you can’t sleep or you feel lonely,where do these people go? Who do they talk to? We’re talking about a whole revamping of a system and we can only take one piece at a time.I don’t know how else to answer that question because it’s questions. It’s going into the schools. It’s creating programs and for parents to want to help get well. Where did the children get it from? It’s their parents.

When we begin to recognize that we are not as connected with our bodies as we could be, thatthere is something that we’re holding inside that we want to find our own inner wisdom,and our inner voice and tap into that fire that we have. It’s giving ourselves that permission to step out of this chaotic world we live in, that’sso busy or it has all these expectations of us or we have expectations of ourselves in fitting in with this world that we’re in,it’s letting go of that and giving ourselves permission.

How did you come to that place if I’m giving you permission?

I’m going to admit, I’m still working on that. I’ve done it in a number of ways.It’s a journey and we’re all works in progress. I find new places all the time where there’s still a part of me waiting for permission. I’ve come along way in the in the healing work because I studied with a spiritual teacher for twenty years and did a lot of healing work.

I helped to start a school of spiritual healing in California and I work as a spiritual healing practitioner with others. I have all kinds of programs to help people with all kinds of things and I continue to do my own work. As long as I’m in a physical body, I will continue to do my own work. I still come up against places where it’s like, “I haven’t quite given myself permission to go there yet. I need to give myself permission to go yet another layer.”

You are self-motivated.You’re a seeker. Ultimately,you are giving yourself permission.That’s what you’re saying, and that’s what I’m saying is that at the end of it all, at the bottom of it all, none of us can give somebody else permission. You can be inspired. You can be motivated but ultimately, we may give ourselves permission to bust through that wall. That energy wall lets us know.You have to have the fire to want to take risk and change and to tolerate the shaming of the tribe, to want to step away from the tribe and act like everybody else.

In my next level practitioner, they talk all about the shame and how from the very beginning of time, the way that they kept communities together was to say, “If you left the tribe, you would die.”Nobody’s going to feed you, nobody’s going to take care of you, you’re on your own.We still have that in our consciousness that if I leave the tribe, I might die.It’s,“I might not be loved and alone.”We have that in us, this fear of dying because there is going to be something that dies in us.

Healing isn't a cure either. Healing is a self-acceptance and self-love. Share on X

Joseph Campbell said, “In order to live the life we want, we have to let go of the life we’re living.”That’s a death in a sense and there’s grieving in that.That permission is a mysterious, risky, courageous, fiery, fierce thing to give permission and you have that. That’s part of where I try to get into, too. It’s like, “Where is that going to click?” It’s like the safe, you’re listening to the click. How am I going to get that person to hit their own click? They open up and give permission.It’s a constant dance. Whoever your teachers were,your relationships were, your family, you want to open the safe. You keep listening for the clicks,finding where.

That’s something that sometimes is innate in someone and that sometimes it’s not. It’s like when you see somebody who was a prodigy in piano, they play. You see someone who is a brilliant pianist but had to work hard. One, it’s this gift and one, they worked for it.Some of us, we just are seekers. It might be taught, it’s not easy, and it’s challenging, painful and uncomfortable. There’s that something in there, that strength that says,“I’m going to do this. We’re warriors.We’re battlers of our spiritual selves,” but some of us had to work really hard to find it, and these are people that need support, encouragement and models.

One way that we recognize that we have a need is when we recognize that we are in pain and we don’t want to be in pain anymore. That pain can be the biggest motivator.

My motivation was pain and needing love.The natural need for love, but it was pain. If you don’t know you’re sitting on a nail, you won’t get off of it. It goes back to the same thing coming out of numb, coming out of freeze, coming into the body, starting to feel.This is the feminine way of coming into the body to feel. Some of us have come into this life and we get to that. I got to my body without people telling me, but I didn’t know what I was doing until somebody told me what I was doing. I was able to be even more practically, without being like a hurricane in the world.There are so many ways and it’s such a mystery and we don’t know why.

My sister and I came from the same home. We both were raised in the same way.My sister became a borderline and she committed suicide,not through taking a gun or taking pills. She had tried on other occasions to want to take her life. When she developed breast cancer, she went,“My way out,” and she told no one. A year later she died. That’s what she chose.I say my sister committed suicide because she chose to do nothing because she wanted to die. That was devastating. It played all kinds of havo

c in my journey. It woke me up in ways that nothing else could, into a very deep place in many ways. Why? I don’t know why that was her way. She would always say to me, “I’m not like you, Marta. I don’t have that in me.”She knew that. I would say, “I don’t understand.” I’m not supposed to understand. I’m not the creator of the universe. I’m the creator of my universe. Many of us think,“I’m the creator of the whole universe.” No, you’re not. You’re arrogant.You don’t control everything.

For people who are perhaps recognizing a pain and recognizing that, “They do want to step beyond that wall of silence, that wall of froze?” Can you give some hope for what’s on the other side of that that can help them to muster that courage and take that step? Give themselves permission, find that click.

If that person was to be in the present and say, “I’m in so much pain now,” and they know that.“I have shame around it. I don’t want to speak it. I’m afraid of what will happen. I can’t tolerate judgment and criticism. It’s easier this way.”If they were to think about how short life is, how precious it is and how incredibly awesome they are to be here at this time, they were to think about all the dreams, all the desires, all the love, all the freedom, excitement, juice, passion that they would want to feel in a lifetime. I’m not saying they’re going to feel all that in a lifetime.

Even to be able to feel those moments of such elation and also to feel such loving acceptance of grief or hurt and to have that closeness, intimacy and love that we all want,it’s digging in and asking how much do I want to be alive? Do I really want to be alive?I once worked with this client, she had this chronic illness. I asked her a question. I said to her, “Do you really want to be alive?”She had to stop and think and she said,“Nobody’s asked me that question.” I said,“You need to ask yourself how much do you want to be alive?”From that, two years later she healed herself. She was in this illness for many years. I’m giving an example of what’s possible with hardwork.

That reminds me of when I first started doing the healing work.As a person seeking healing, I remember going to healers and saying, “My biggest fear is that I’ll die before I had a chance to live.”I haven’t lived. I’m stuck in here and I have not lived.

Someone said, “If you want to play the piano and you say,‘I can’t do it.’What’s going to be the difference in ten years from now that you said,‘I won’t do it,’ but instead you made the decision you’re going to take lessons and learn?”In those ten years you learn how to play versus you’ve wasted those ten years and said, “I can’t do it.”It’s about not having to be perfect. It’s not having it to be this grandiose thing.

It’s about being alive and it’s asking, “What would it be like to actually write that book, do that painting, get that degree, move to another state, get out of a marriage you want to be,love somebody you don’t want to live? What would that be like? If what you’re doing is getting the same result, which is called insanity. What would it be if you did the opposite? It might be difficult but that’s the difference between conscious suffering and unconscious suffering. This is what Jennifer Welwood said, “Most of us are suffering.” It’s either conscious or unconscious.If we’re consciously seeking, yes, it’s painful but at the end, we have joy.When we’re consciously suffering, at the end is more unconscious suffering.

I can say from my own perspective, I am glad that I asked that question and that I kept seeking because I can honestly say,“If I die now, die tomorrow, I” got to live.” There’s still more and I’m still working on it. I don’t have that fear any more that I didn’t get to live.

You did the best you could and it was messy, maybe you did many make mistakes but so what?

I’ve got out of here. It was fun. I’ve got to live. Feel alive. How much do you want to be alive?

On my website I said, “I wrote until I felt alive.”

I want to ask you, as a person who isinto history and how the heck did we get here from there?What do you see as this time in our culture, in our world with this wave of people coming forward? With the #MeToo Movement and with all of the things that are perhaps going to be forcing some change, what do you see as our next step in the evolution of this?

It’s already happening. It’s always been happening. Right now, we’re in a healing crisis.Everything is coming out to the surface and it’s oozing. That looks ugly and disgusting. I laughed.It’s not funny just looking at Syria, what they’re doing to their people is horrible. They’re bombing, throwing chemicals on.If you looked at what’s happening in the world, you would say it’s getting worse. We would say that. I see that it’s a healing crisis and it’s very scary.It’s a scary healing crisis. We feel we’re going to die and everything’s going to come apart, but it has to come apart in order to be rebuilt.That’s what I see happening. I see it slowly, the bricks on the bottom of the foundation are starting to be pulled out. I don’t think it’s going to happen overnight. I don’t know if I’ll see it in my life. I’m seeing it. I’m finally accepting it’s not going to happen as fast as I thought. That has always been an angle for me.

As I grew up and have wisdom, I realized I don’t have control on the timing of it.All I can do is keep doing it and putting my nose to the grindstone.I see the evolution and revolution happening. I saw it happening even when I had a boss running after me around the desk and I told him to stop.I saw it, it’s happening. It’s going to happen. It’s going to come from the feminine, the feminine energy and consciousness. Erica Jong said,“Feminism is no different than democracy. If we stop paying attention to it, it’ll die.”All of us have to keep paying attention and not give up no matter what we come up against.

I think it’s going to happen anyway because I truly believe it’s written in the divine blueprint.It might not happen in ten years, twenty years, 100 years, I don’t know. The evolution is happening. It has to happen because the universe evolves.We might be a little bit million-years behind the universe in terms of how we’re supposed to evolve, but we have no choice. Unfortunately, a lot of people are going to be hurt along the way and change, just like Cro-Magnon Man became human. Along the way we no longer have Cro-Magnon Man, they’re gone.That’s what’s going to happen in humankind.Certain species are going to just die off.Certain consciousness is going to die off. I see it happening.Do you see it happening?

Yes, definitely. That’s part of the series is to raise awareness of where it is happening and what’s happening.What we’re moving into as all of this stuff is coming to the surface. The healing crisis that we’re in and what’s on the other side of the healing crisis for the mass consciousness where this issue with women, men and abuse has been something that’s gone on and on for so long. It’s coming to a head for a reason and what is potentially on the other side of that.

With that said, to that one person who is reading this, who is right on the other side of that wall, who is looking for that hope, that courage, what is one thing that you could say to that one person, who is perhaps is still suffering in silence?

What just came to me something that I just saw? Sometimes things come to me in images. What I would say to that one person is take out a picture of your child and look at that picture.Place your hand on your heart and place your hand on that child’s heart in the picture and say, “I love you, and I want to love you. I want to be all we can be together. I want to heal and I want to take your hand and I’m willing to do this. I’m willing to grow and be that where you feel.” It all starts with that.

It starts with honoring that child in us. Jesus said, “Children are the closest things to God,” and they are. Even the child in us is waiting for us to heal, so that they can come out and be magnificent.It’s all about our wounded children.I always ask the people that I work with to have a picture of their child in front of them, always. Sometimes they can’t feel right away their own child or feel connected to it. Sometimes that child’s angry at them, like, “You left me.” That relationship is important to healing.That’s where it starts. If you can start feeling that child in you, and you start feeling that mothering and divinity in that relationship, see what happens.

Thank youso much,Marta.If someone wants more information about what you do and who you are, how can they find you?

They can do one or two things. They can go to my website which is www.WritingLikeAMadwoman.com. They can go to my Gmail which is WritingLikeAMadwoman@Gmail.com.Either way you can reach me.I have a contact there and I go to my emails every day.I would love to hear from whoever and help them with healing,get onto the path of celebrating their womanhood and all of that which is in them.

Thank youso much, Marta. Thank you for sharing your wisdom, your exuberance, your joy and your beauty. Thank you so much.

Thank you. I appreciate it. I feel privileged and honored, Debra, that you asked me to do this. It’s a joy for me.

Thank you.

You’ve made itcomfortable to have this interview.Thank you.

Thank you for taking the time,thank you for being here. Share them far and wide. Do help us to spread the message, the word.The intention of this series to bring understanding, to bring things to the surface, some education into this messiness that we’re going through,this healing crisis that we’re in. To bring some understanding, some awareness and some education to it so that we can come to understand each other and live in a way that is mutually respectful of each other.

Understanding and have more compassion and more love for each other and hopefully,stop the abuse. To understand and love each other as human beings and creatures of beauty and come to a loving space with each other. If you felt that you want to be a part of this conversation, you are invited to be a part of the conversation. By all means, please join us in the Facebook group While We Were Silent and let’s continue this conversation. Thanks a bunch.

About Marta Luzim

Marta Luzim, MS has worked with women, families and couples for over forty years. She is a Psychospiritual Therapist, with an MS in Counseling Psychology, BS in Education.

She is a Next Level Trauma Practitioner, an expert in women’s trauma and recovery. She is a certified Intimacy Trainer in the Moseley method. Certified as a Kaizen creative coach, Metaphysician, somatic body worker, and mindfulness breath-worker.

She is a published novelist, columnist and playwright. In 2004, she created a 501C non-profit called, Give Her A Voice, a multi-media presentation dramatizing stories of women’s’ recovery.

Currently she is writing a memoir and launching her new program Writing Like A Madwoman.

You can find Marta at www.giveheravoice.org, www.writinglikeamadwoman.com, and writinglikeamawoman@gmail.com.