Overachievement is something that some victims of abuse do as a way of surviving trauma. They either go one way to the pendulum or to the other. For Rev. Dr. Anthousa Helena, that overachievement was working to fill that void in her. She thought that having all these learning credentials would give her value and self-worth. Anthousa is the founder of SOLLITE Integrative Medicine, a holistic medical approach that addresses the entire being on a physical, mental, emotional, energetic, and spiritual realms for healing and conscious awakening. Anthousa is also a licensed mental health counselor, massage therapist, Doctorate in Divinity specialized in Spiritual and Energy Psychology. Her story begins at an early age when she went through physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual abuse. She feels that the biggest injurious effect was a spiritual break, the connection that broke within her spirit. Anthousa shares some insights and wisdom from her personal experience as well as the wealth of knowledge she has amassed from her many training and certifications.
Listen to the podcast here:
Surviving Trauma And Taking The Next Step with Anthousa Helena
Our guest on this episode Rev. Dr. Anthousa Helena. She is a beautiful human being who has amassed an incredible amount of training and wealth and knowledge and wisdom and personal experience on healing from trauma. Her story is one that is the perfect representation for the While We Were Silent Project. In her year of personal healing from her very traumatic childhood of physical and sexual abuse, she began to speak out and actually developed cancer on her vocal cords. With the onset of the cancer, she was literally silenced for a very long time, unable to speak. She found ways to overcome and to heal and she is just got a wealth of information and tested experience on how to heal and to reclaim her voice and to reclaim her right to existence and her right to have a healthy and vibrant life. She is doing that now. She is living it and she is helping other people. I do hope that you’ll enjoy this interview and enjoy connecting with Anthousa. Thank you so much.
—
Our guest is Rev. Dr. Anthousa Helena. Welcome.
Thank you. I’m very happy and grateful to be here.
I am very happy and grateful to have you here. Rev. Dr. Anthousa Helena is the Founder and Developer of SOLLITE Integrative Medicine. This holistic medical approach addresses the entire being on the physical, mental, emotional, energetic, and spiritual realms for healing and conscious awakening. Anthousa is both nationally board certified and state-licensed Mental Health Counselor. She’s a massage therapist with a Doctorate in Divinity specialized in Spiritual and Energy Psychology. With 43 years of professional experience, Anthousa has facilitated thousands of private clients, groups, lectures, workshops, and trained professionals in her field of Integrative Medicine.
She has been on radio, television, and a featured published writer/author. SOLLITE’s mission is to heal the illusion of separation and enter into unity consciousness by remembering the truth of who we are, utilizing integrative medicine to bridge the gap between medicine and spirituality. That’s a beautiful body of work that you have put together. Anthousa, can you tell us a little bit more about your story and how it has led you to do what you’re doing now to help so many people?
At a very early age, I went through physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual abuse. I feel that the biggest part was a spiritual break, the connection that broke within my spirit. That caused so much chaos, lack of self-worth, feeling lost, and not knowing what to do. Therefore, I became an overachiever. That is something that people do. You either go one way to the pendulum or to the other. That overachievement was working to fill that void in me, thinking outwardly that if I’ve got all these learnings and credentials, I would have value and self-worth. That isn’t what happened and how I ended up getting that value and self-worth. In the long run, it was a great gift because I have a lot of wisdom, knowledge, and education. All of my teachers were medical physicians that I trained with and I have the scientific background. It was when I entered into different realms of spirituality and getting my doctorate in divinity that the spirit and my soul started to come back into my life.
I am happy that you are doing this program. It’s such a grand project. I am sure there are a variety of people, maybe clinicians or someone that’s trying to help someone they know that’s going through abuse and possibly still silent. Some may be on their way in their healing or their journey and may be even on the other side, I feel like I have gotten to the other side. What I want to say to those that are still struggling, possibly still being silent, I want to encourage them and inspire them that they have already survived. Surviving the trauma and whatever situation or incident, however it occurred, they have the courage to move forward because they have already survived. They’re already warriors. Taking the next step, when you’re ready to take the next step to begin to speak about it a little bit more, just remember that the biggest part is that you’ve already gone through it.
I may say things a little differently than some other people that you might have interviewed or continue to interview because we all have our gifts and talents and we all learn in different ways. As I got to the other side, I saw the harm, the injury, and the hurt that was happening from the perpetrators. I am not diminishing that the incidents that occurred were right. I do not condone that and definitely if we’re just starting our journey, it might be hard to hear that.
You’re talking about the hurt that the perpetrator is experiencing?
Yes, and there is a saying that, “Hurting people hurt people.” It took me a long time to get to that point of coming to what I call radical forgiveness and understanding and seeing the perpetrator’s view. They most likely, too, came from abusive families. Maybe their parents and their grandparents, all that ancestry, all that generational lineage, I’m sure it was learned behavior. I’m sure that they had all been somehow abused in some way and then it becomes what you do, what you pass on. I feel like now, we have a lot more resources than my parents did and their generation. Also, the stigma. Even if my parents knew that there were these organizations out there, which I believe there were, the stigma of coming out in that generation was clouded with collective consciousness and opinions would be judgmental. They had to struggle with that. We have it a lot easier now and openness to be able to come out and look through these resources.
We have stronger resources and maybe some clearer channels when we get to the point of being ready to speak up and seek help.
I do not want to sound like I’m speaking up for the perpetrators. That’s totally not correct, and as we go on with the interview and I tell you how it affected my life, you’ll definitely see that I’m not doing that. When I was in graduate school studying psychology, during my internship, I learned that in the 1950s, an endocrinologist, scientist, and medical doctor had discovered that we have a mechanism. We are structured this way. We have a mechanism inside our brain in the middle of our head that in Craniosacral Therapy is called the Cranial Fourth Ventricle. It creates the illusion of separation. It holds on to all our fears, all our belief systems, all our traumas, and all our memories. As someone that’s a survivor and someone that wants to start their journey and come out of being silent, know that we are built this way. All of us are built this way, so it’s not just what you are struggling with. This is the human condition.
It’s part of the human path, the path of humanity, the path we travel.
It’s a built-in mechanism physically in our physical mechanics.
Anthousa, you’ve got a lot of credentials, a lot of training, and an incredible program that you’ve put together called SOLLITE. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you do to help people individually, in groups, in different populations and how that works?
You've already survived the worst part, and so you can make it through and you can find and discover the truth of who you are. Share on XI’ve been in private practice and on this road of progressing on healing. It is a layering effect. It’s like peeling the onion. Even though you rise above, you progress, and you feel good, it’s that circular stairway. We’re coming up and we hit that same place again and that’s just clearing the deeper layers within ourselves. I pretty much stuck with small groups and individuals. For 43 years, there was about half of my lifetime that that’s all I attracted. It’s not that I publicized that I worked with people that were sexually abused or physically abused or emotionally abused. It’s just that those were the clients that were coming to me. I was like, “Why is this happening? Why am I getting the same kind of clients?”
This was about 25 years ago, about half of my career. The majority were women and about a handful of men, maybe even less than a handful. Now, that is changing definitely. Men are coming forward more, but 25 years ago that was not the case. I am also a believer that life is our medicine and there is a mirroring theory effect. As a healer, the clientele that I was attracting was mirroring myself and what inside still needed to be worked on. I realized that at a very early time in my practice. That’s a gift within itself. I know some people wait until they are all the way healed to start caring and giving to people or they feel like their own wounds need to be taken care of and then they feel readier to step out. I’m not judging that, but for me, I just started where I was. This was my work. Wherever I was, I gave what I could. As I elevated, I could help people better. That’s still continuing.
I do believe, especially people that have been through trauma, this is our greatest gift. We have hidden gifts, talents, and skills within us to help humanity and help other people. It’s almost like the greater the wound, the greater you have the ability to help others. I’ve been doing 43 years of private, small lectures and workshops, I have trained professionals, but on a smaller scale. Right now, I’m in a turning point in my life where I wanted to focus and be in a larger audience, but I also want to train more healthcare professionals or other people interested so they can learn to do the type of work, so other people can continue to offer what I offer and it’s not just me.
If you can tell us about what SOLLITE practice is and in what ways it helps people.
I use triangles a lot. There’s duality and this happens in our stress mechanisms, too. When we’re chronically stressed with coming from this type of situation, it’s post-traumatic stress disorder. You get into this high level of stress. Your nervous system is always vibrating at the most intense level of being on alarm, feeling unsafe, and reacting too quickly. It’s like a cat. They hear a noise and they jump right away. We are just triggered. We need to learn how to calm our nervous system down and live on an even hill. With SOLLITE, the mission is to heal the illusion of separation, which is this mechanism in our brain that we’re built with. I feel the illusion of separation is the global illness. It causes disease, and if we can get to that and rise above in this triangle way, then we can get to seeing the world differently, like being in the world but not of it.
The bottom part of the triangle, we live in a world of duality right now. I do think that it’s going to change, but this is what’s happening. We swing to good, bad, black, white, male, female, light, dark, and that’s how we go. That’s how the brain works. That’s the base of the triangle and that creates stress. We feel good, then all of a sudden, something happens and now, the world is falling apart. It’s a catastrophe, so I work to bring people to the top of the triangle. That top of the triangle is the truth of who we are. It’s the divinity of who we are. The word “God” is literal, but it’s the God of your own understanding. My dissertation for my doctorate degree was done on comparative religions.
I studied the metaphysical or the ancient wisdom of those religions, not the religious structures themselves. In studying that, I took a part in that as well. I spent my whole life doing this. For instance, I was a yoga teacher for 28 years of my life, but as I was a yoga teacher, I was also studying Christianity or being in a Christian counseling school. The strong path that I’m in right now is Sufism. They intermingle and overlap, but this is how it started with my doctorate and dissertation. I was always looking for the common denominator in all this wisdom and all this spirituality because that’s what’s broken me. My body broke, I still have problems with spinal issues because of severe beatings that I had, my deep-seated emotions were off the charts, and psychological issues, too. I knew I needed to connect back to who I was.
I’m thinking of so many people that have been hurt in the name of God through some religious structure. As spiritual beings, we all have a knowing that we are spiritual beings, and then to have that severe trauma come in the name of God causes a split. The work that you are doing, I could totally understand that path of seeking and going underneath the structure of religion to find the truth and how you could help so many people who are along those lines trying to make sense of what happened to them that split them from their connection with spirit, connection with source as they are deeply knowing that they are spiritual beings.
That happens because you do get angry and mad at God when you are in that situation where your perpetrator was somebody you trusted. We went through that a couple of years ago where the Church found out and was exposed. I know several clients that were altar boys. That was tough. How do you get over it? To heal yourself when it was somebody that was a godly figure to begin with? The common denominator I found, besides love, is light. I have a six series course called Color and Light Therapy, which I trained by the leading doctor, Dr. Jacob Liberman. He wrote Light: Medicine of The Future. Our bodies speak to each other through light photons. We need to remember the light that we are, and that’s the foundation. I do different levels. The Awareness in the Brain talks about that whole mechanism. That was my internship in mental health counseling. Right now, the logo is rewiring the brain and the happiness projects. That’s what their wording is right now. This is coming back from the scientific bases. Those two are the foundations.
I’m a CranioSacral Therapist. People know me throughout the world for that. That is the spinal column, the cranial spinal column. I got into that because I’ve been severely beaten and gotten severe scoliosis and some head injuries from that. I had troubles in my early twenties. Luckily, God sends me to meet Dr. Upledger and I ended up working for him in his head trauma and spinal cord injury rehab center, battery, post-traumatic stress. Mainly, our communication networks are within the craniosacral system, our autonomic nervous system that travels and gives all the messages to all parts of our body, organs, cells, everything. Also, the endocrine system, which is our hormonal balance. My interpretation with the endocrine system is after years of me practicing. Nobody taught me this belief system. I believe the endocrine system is our link to communicating the spirit. I get into that more during my trainings.
My next phase would be medical qigong, a traditional Chinese medicine, which is the energetic form of clearing the energy body. We need to take care of what’s happening energetically as well in our systems because we recreate instances that we don’t even know we’re doing that. The other important thing about medical qigong is all our internal organs hold different emotions. For instance, the lungs hold all the shame, grief, and sadness. The liver holds anger, resentment, and jealousy. Heart and soul healing. There’s a famous person that I studied with there. He’s more in the metaphysical but he brings up points about we need to clear our ancestry, our culture, the places where we live, the countries that we live, and things that are common throughout history, like war, poverty, starvation. These things have to be addressed as well because they are living in all the humanity. These are issues whether you have been abused or not.
The last one is spiritual medicine. This is where I get more into the different worlds and realms of reality. I compare Sufism and the Kabbalah because they have the same differentiations of the different worlds, but with different names and language. Then we start to work more with, “Let’s get back to get connected with the spirit.” That’s the outline of what I’m training people in. I believe that we need three things. We need to know ourselves, which I’m going to refer as the mind because I’m a psychotherapist. We need to then train our minds, discipline ourselves, so we are not always looking at the negative and focus more on the positive and our divinity. If we have created bad habits or situations, we need to be honest and get help and take care of that. The last one is we need to free our minds or free ourselves to come into full freedom and liberation so that we can live our true divine soul’s purpose and plan and have fulfillment in our live so that we can now live in happiness and joy. We can do that, and I know that people that come from backgrounds like myself, it is very challenging. However, it’s possible. That’s what I want to get across. It’s possible to make it to the other side.
Everyone needs love and compassion exactly where they are. Share on XIt’s an incredible body of work that you have put together. It makes me want to jump and take that training with you, it truly does. I’m happy to hear that you’ve put together a training course where you’re going to be training other people to do that because it sounds like a very important comprehensive combination of therapies to bring out on a very holistic approach. Those last three things you said, “Know, train, and free.”
Especially with abused people, we’re looking at not so much our righteous qualities and our divinity. We’re looking at, “I’m bad. I did something wrong. I’m not good enough.” We’re always focused on that. You have to retrain and that’s part of the popular thing, rewiring the brain. I took another course on that, and the teacher said that it’s a five to one. We want to have a positive thought, but we’ve got five of those negatives that we’re battling against.
That’s a survival mechanism because it’s part of what we’re wired to survive. Let’s take this then into the topic of our summit, While We Were Silent. In your experience, can you talk about why people stay silent for long periods of time during or after abuse?
First of all, I am sure different people have various reasons to stay silent. I know that I was threatened, “Don’t tell anybody or I’ll kill you,” so you are always in fear of whether you were going to survive. Everybody in my surroundings was holding the secret and didn’t want to talk about it. Also, there’s always a deep sense of, “I did something wrong. It’s my fault.” Then the sense of feeling guilty and feeling shameful, especially if you feel like it’s your fault. For instance, even though when I started talking about it and I got a lot of personal psychotherapy and started to reach out and just tell certain people beyond my perpetrators and the unit that held that together in secrecy. I probably did about ten years of real deep work, then I decided I was going to confront one of my abusers.
After ten years?
After ten years of deep work with lots of different various alternative medical techniques as well, psychotherapy. Craniosacral therapy used to be an alternative modality when I started. It’s not so much now, but I was working for Dr. Upledger then. We would sometimes take little retreats, the people that work there. He would work with and it was funny. These issues were coming out while I was being worked on and this is our cellular memory. He kept saying, “This is what’s been going on. You had this. You have that.” I hung on to that so long, I was fighting with the doctor who’s my teacher and my employer saying,” “You are wrong, that didn’t happen to me. I didn’t get strangled. I don’t know where you came up with that.” It did happen during the healing. We bury a lot of the memory.
For me, when I started doing my healing work and especially cranial work in this particular instance, the memory starts to come up, flashbacks start to come up, and then you start to remember. A lot of things that I believe happened to people that have been abused, I know it happened to me. You doubt yourself and then you’re fighting and being resistant and rebellious saying, “No, that couldn’t be true.” That lack of trust within oneself or myself is very hard to rebuild trust and believing in others, let alone in believing that what you’re getting from inside of you is true that that happened. After about ten years of deep intense psychotherapy, cranial work, acupuncture, and all kinds of things, I used to go to retreats where you’re banging on the floor kicking and screaming. It’d be like, “This is ridiculous.” You feel good, but you walk out of there and you say, “Is my imagination making this up, or is it true?” It’s hard to decide, especially if you’re not trusting yourself.
I went and I confronted one of my perpetrators. I got about fifteen to twenty minutes of time to be able to vocalize, and they said to me, “Don’t you ever speak about this again to anybody. Don’t you tell any of the other family members, especially don’t tell your sibling,” because you know this person already knew that it happened. They sent me right back up right away. I was old enough to take responsibility not to be shut right back up right away, but I did get shut up right away and lost my voice again to the point that twenty years later, I ended up having vocal cord stage four cancer.
It was only located on the left side of my throat, which in metaphysics, that’s the feminine side of the body and it’s the feminine that was being abused within my situation. This is why I want to help people. I don’t want people to have to go through for as long as I went through it being silent, and then end up with an illness. I only had 30% chance of living because it was stage four by the time we found it. It was in my vocal cords and through that period, I lost my voice for about eight months to a year just from the medical treatments. However, I’m still here. I’m grateful to be here. I have a voice.
What have you then realized as the greatest opportunity that has come to you, the greatest gift, through the healing? This can be for you or for the people you work with. It can be general or it can be specific.
The greatest gift is regaining your voice.
You not just figuratively but you literally lost your voice.
Somehow, I got attacked at the voice level. I do believe it’s divine intervention, that the God of my own understanding was shaking me up and saying, “You have to deal with this.” It was to such a degree that it ends in my vocal cords.
You can see that as much as your life was threatened and then to have that threat come back to you when you begin to speak again after doing that work, how the body would say, “I’m going to save us by cutting off your voice.”
That’s the basis of Craniosacral Therapy. The original founder said the body has inner wisdom to heal itself. It’s going to find a way to knock you, a little bit of tap in your head, a little bit tap in your heart, and say, “You’ve got to deal with this situation or it’s going to get worse.” The survival mechanism is so strong. There was a point when I was choked to death as a child, meaning choked to the point of unconsciousness. Luckily, the perpetrator realized and took the hand away from the throat. That was already ingrained in my cellular memory so strong that I’d better be quiet or I’m going to be killed. Some 40 years later, it happens again, but that was one of the greatest gifts.
I’ve always been on the spiritual path. I’ve been on many spiritual paths, but that particular cancer point in my life, I’m not trying to be an evangelist or anything, but it brought me to my spiritual guide and to Sufism, which to me is the path that was right for me to go deeper into healing and to have a deeper connection to the God of my own understanding. All the other things I did, they were building blocks. I’m not saying that I didn’t gain from yoga, ashram, studying qigong, or things like that. It brought me to where I needed to evolve to the highest place that I can, to enlighten myself, to wake up, or to have those possibilities, to know the truth of who I am. I’m still working on it.
It’s a journey as long as its own body.
This is what I want to inspire our audience, too, because those were my biggest steps. You asked for other pivotal breakthrough points. Taking ownership and responsibility for what was my part in this, how did this to all happen, not why did I wait so long. I like to think about Shakespeare. I’m paraphrasing his quote, “The world is our stage and we are all playing the part.” Having the family that I chose played a certain part. If you believe in metaphysics, I somehow chose that family so that I could evolve to the fullest that I can in this lifetime.
It took a long time for me to get to that point and take ownership of my part, and then take the responsibility of, “I waited so long. I could have done this, and I could have done that.” There was a lot of judgment, self-punishment, and shame about, “Why did I wait so long?”I want to encourage our audience that I don’t think that’s the way to go. I’ve come to the point now of having more acceptance and compassion for myself. We are ready when we’re ready. All those years that I beat myself up, it probably was not healthy at all.
Whether it’s a spiritual seeking or a healing seeking or whatever, you are doing to cope and get by and to find your way. It’s all building blocks and it’s all part of a path. Whether you’re holding things in, or even if you’re still staying in a relationship that is abusive and you’re trying to find a safe way out, or you’re not there yet. It’s all a part of a pathway. I had a question in the Facebook group about, “What is something that you wish that people knew, people who have not been in abusive situations? What is something you wish that they knew?” Everyone needs love and compassion exactly where they are, and they might not be ready to move out of the relationship because they haven’t found the way to feel safe in doing so. Wherever you are that is keeping you safe, then like you said, don’t beat yourself up.
That’s the big issue, too. It was a challenging one and still is sometimes for me to go through. Here’s what happened to me. I wasn’t taking care of it to the depth that possibly I could have. This happened in my childhood. In my early 30s, I ended up in bad relationships that were abusive. I had a date rape at one point in time. It’s a repetitive, energetic pattern that we’re carrying that hasn’t been resolved totally. Then I had two other relationships that I had entered in where there were near-death experiences because they tried to kill me, one with a spear gun and one with an axe. How did I ever get away from those moments? That’s why I believe so much in divine intervention. The God of your own understanding comes in and saves you because right at the instant when somebody was going to pull the trigger, it doesn’t happen.
When you look at the things that you’ve survived in this life, it’s like a reinforcement that you are here for a purpose and you are meant to be here. Whoever that was trying to take you out could not take you out. There was a divine intervention and a very strong intervention there that says, “No, you are meant to be here. You are here, and I am going to keep you here.”
That’s the other side of it. I had to fulfill whatever my divine soul plan and purpose was. I feel like I always have been, but I feel now it’s even going to be on a larger scale and a larger way. Thank you for this opportunity because you are bringing it out in all of us in many different ways. What a gift you are. What I’m saying to all those people that are still struggling, you have a gift in there, too. You’ve already survived the worst part, so you can make it through and you can find and discover the truth of who you are and what’s your special gift within your own self and end up believing in yourself throughout your process.
Our mother earth is evolving and so we must evolve with it. Share on XAnthousa, in the collective, you were talking about what the timing of where you are in your journey and in your evolution. It sounds like the timing is perfect for you as well, but as the timing of the collective consciousness, things are opening up, more and more people are coming out. It’s creating more openness and safety for people to speak about what they’ve kept concealed. Do you have any insights to share about this shift in the collective and the changing times that we’re in?
It’s the 100th Monkey Story. I do believe in whatever metaphysical realms out there talking about the Earth is changing. I do use the words‘ ascension’, but I also use the word ‘incension’ in my triangles. I have two triangles. One goes up to ascension, and one triangle comes down to incension. Incension means to me, and I speak about it more in my trainings, that we need to embody that light first. We need to be in our bodies, feel safe in our bodies, and be here on this planet. That is an energetic that propels us into ascension brining us into a higher state of consciousness.
The planet itself is in its own ascension process, so it’s speeding up and changing. I don’t think that anybody, animals, plants, humans, on this earth right now can avoid that because our Earth-ship, our Mother Earth, is evolving. We must evolve with it, which helps the collective consciousness as well. Everybody is coming out. it takes a few people coming now, the gender identity people way back when the gate community and the AIDS situations. The school systems now, our young kids that are being vocal about the guns and what happens with the shootings. We got all that instant social media. Technology sometimes bother me, but it’s wonderful. There’s such an opening and everybody’s stepping into speaking, stepping into the truth of who they are, stepping into accepting themselves the way they are, and just being. I have a lot of faith, but that’s what’s happening collectively.
Any insights about what is to come for humanity as we continue to evolve?
It’s all one energy. There isn’t a good or bad or evil or light.
At the beginning of the interview, you said you feel like that’s changing.
It’s one energy. You look at a coin, let’s say a quarter. You’ve got the tail and then you’ve got the head. We’re in a world with duality. You look at one side of the quarter and then the other side is different but it’s still a quarter. It’s the same energy. Even within ourselves, especially within yoga, they talk about the Kundalini. We have this Ida and Pingala, which is masculine energy and feminine energy. In order for us to rise through the Sushumna, the midline, to break open our webbings or chakras and get that lotus flower opening or coming into enlightenment or awakening or unity consciousness, that’s happening internally with all of us, too.
A lot of the gender identity stuff is reflecting outwardly, too, because the males are accepting their femininity. The females are accepting their masculinity. It’s all intertwining. We are becoming one as a natural process of the evolution of the planet, of our collective consciousness. It’s the natural flow, and that’s where we are headed. Within that, things only looked dark sometimes. I don’t want to get into politics, but it looks bad but that dark side has to bubble up and somehow unite or integrate with the light, too. Sometimes that’s why we’re going in certain areas of our culture and parts of the world, that we’re still swinging so far, but I’ve always heard from many teachers, the darkness is looking to want to be in the light as well. It’s a natural urge that everyone wants to raise up and be free too.
I love that explanation. It’s like as we’re coming closer and closer into unity, these places of separation that are still in resistance have to be spoken. This is the part that feels messy right now, but it’s got to come up.
The light is shining like a great big beam or a spotlight. It’s almost like it can’t find a place to hide.
It’s like it’s got to be seen so that it can be integrated, so that the unity can come about.
That’s what I’m talking about. We need to integrate all levels. Everything has to be paid attention to. Western medicine saved my life, as well as alternative. You can’t keep looking at just one part of a person. A person is made up of many different parts, you need to look where are the core issues, what’s going on. We just got healed of an illness, let’s say cancer. You might get cancer back again showing up in a different area even after you are in the state of remission. If you didn’t find out the reason and learn the lessons on why did you get that to begin with. We must find the underlying core issues that caused it to begin with and heal those in order to avoid reoccurrence. We do need to have what I call “honest self-inquiry”. Sometimes, we look inside honestly within ourselves, but we need to be honest with ourselves.
Thank you for saying that in those words too, because that’s the first step. To begin to be honest with ourselves. Sometimes we have to talk it out, so that we hear it, so that we can even figure out what’s honest with ourselves. That is the most important part, because sometimes we hear, “You’ve got to speak up,” and we think we’ve got to go out and go public. It’s not necessarily that, it’s about speaking to ourselves and being honest with ourselves.
You have to know your mind and what part of your brain is talking to you. Use discernment on what you choose to listen to. Do you want to be listening to that one, or maybe you want to be listening to some other chairman of the board talking to you in your head in any given instance? That’s why we have to be radically honest with ourselves and engage in honest self-inquiry. Again, you don’t have to tell anybody else, but be truthful to yourself.
And loving and accepting at the same time.
It comes all together.
Thank you so much, Anthousa. I know you have shared a couple of things directly for the people who are in the audience. If you have something else to share, or even if you need to repeat something, I’m going to give you the space and the invitation.
I want to encourage them and inspire them, especially you have already survived the worst. You are already courageous. You are already a warrior. You have incredible strength and power within. You don’t have to come out and tell somebody right away but start to at least be honest with yourself and look inside. When you’re ready, I believe people will come to you when you’re ready. It’ll naturally happen. It is a process. I know that through the process myself, it was a natural habit of learned behavior that I did judged, punish, and blame myself a little bit too much. I want to encourage people to have mercy and compassion on yourselves.
You don't have to come out and tell somebody right away, but start to be honest with yourself and look inside. Share on XIt doesn’t help in any way to keep beating yourself up or judging yourself. Just accept it and say, “This is where I am at and I’ve been through a lot.” I’ve been through the hell. I’ve been through the dark side of my soul, down in a void at the bottom of the well, and I am on my way back up. I’m the phoenix rising. I am coming back into the light. I had some bad coping skills, especially around food. It’s because every time an incident happened, I always got a treat afterwards. Now that was sick, but my family was in the vending machine business, so they had big boxes of all kinds of cakes, candies, chips. After the incident, it was like, “Go pick anything you want to pick.” It became this reinforcement of a reward for unwanted behavior, but also chaos and confusion with the reality. I have an unhealthy relationship with food that became one of my coping skills. Have mercy on yourself. If you’re carrying extra weight or you’re doing something else you don’t want to keep doing, it’s okay for now. You’ll come out of it. Just do the best you can, and things will change.
Recognize it for what it is, a coping mechanism. Thank you so much, Anthousa. This has been a fabulous interview. I greatly appreciate it, and I’m so glad that we got to do this and that you are a part of this project. I want to thank our audience and invite all of you. You’re invited to join us in the Facebook group for a conversation, asking any questions of Anthousa. She’s a member of the Facebook group also, and she can hop in. Tag her, Anthousa Helena with your questions, and you’ll see a post there of her interview.
Come join us, and let’s continue this conversation. If there’s anything that has spoken to you that you would like other support with, please reach out. That Facebook group link is accompanying the recording, it’s a Facebook group called While We Were Silent. Please join us, and we’ll see you there. Thank you so much for being a part of this program and for bringing your energy and for being you, whoever you are, wherever you are, whatever, you are a being of light. Thank you.
About Anthousa Helena
Rev. Dr. Anthousa Helena is the founder and developer of SOLLITE Integrative Medicine. This Holistic Medical approach addresses the entire being on physical, mental, emotional, energetic, and spiritual realms for healing and conscious awakening.
Anthousa is both Nationally Board Certified and State Licensed Mental Health Counselor and Massage Therapist with a Doctorate in Divinity specialized in Spiritual and Energy Psychology.
With 43 years of professional experience, Anthousa has facilitated thousands of private clients, groups, lectures, workshops and trained professionals in her field of Integrative Medicine. She has been on radio, television, and a featured published writer/author.
SOLLITE’s mission is to heal the illusion of separation and enter into Unity Consciousness by remembering the Truth of Who We Really Are; Utilizing Integrative Medicine to bridge the gap between Medicine and Spirituality.
Contact through www.sollite.com.
Important Links:
- www.joyfullylivingwellness.com
- Self-Care for the Soul Facebook
- Self-Care for the Soul Twitter
- Self-Care for the Soul YouTube
