Candice Wu 0:00
Let’s get real, playful, and authentic with Liz LaForce. She is just a wonderful, bright, brilliant energy and in this episode, she talks about her identity crisis and how she’s witnessing herself, the idea of daring to see yourself reconnecting with love, dance expression and voice as a way to hear the reflection of self and finding the love inside of you.

Hello and welcome. You’re listening to the Embody Podcast, a show about remembering and embodying your true nature, inner wisdom, Embodied Healing, and self-love. My name is Candice Wu, and I’m a holistic healing facilitator, intuitive coach, and artist sharing my personal journey of vulnerability, offering meditations and guided healing support, and having co-creative conversations with healers and wellness practitioners from all over the world.

Cleanse and release dead weight with The Ally with Death experiential. It’s an audio experience where you can listen to the sound of my voice along with some beautiful, provocative, and stimulating handpan music by Larry Saint Germain, an artist in Chicago.

In this experiential, you can make space for what’s growing and emerging inside of you, within you, and shave and slough off any excess old habits, energies, beliefs, stuff that’s just lurking and molding perhaps inside of you, and purify your being of what needs to die, give space for new creation, nourishment, and take some forward steps. You can find the experience at CandiceWu.com/death.

Hello, everyone. It’s wonderful to have you back on the Embody Podcast. I am in Mexico City, Mexico and I am just loving it here. Last week, I shared a few updates and also sound bites from Mexico City. I love the sounds that hold this culture together, the taste, the smells, and the colors, as well as the different mannerisms and ways that they’re kind to each other. I’ll share a little more next week so that we can jump into this episode with Liz. But, I’m having a fabulous time and just took a week trip to Oaxaca and came back and just went riding today for a full day.

And this horse, Cornella oh my gosh, he was just — wanted to run. I’ve never met a horse that wanted to run so fast to gallop. And there was this long stretch in this backcountry road of the Hacienda that we just went for it and it was so much fun. The guide that took us there, his horse is younger than mine, but he couldn’t even get his horse to go as fast as my horse was going and not particularly because I wasn’t trying to get him to go faster, he just wanted to go and in fact, I was slightly slowing him down just to maintain a connection with him. But it was so much fun. You can find some of those pictures and stories on my Instagram if you hit travel or if you hit horse love, you can find some of the bits of my trip in Mexico City and my ride with this horse, Cornella. You can find my Instagram at CandiceWu.com/instagram.

Let’s jump into this episode with Liz.

I really enjoyed talking with Liz because she’s just so incredibly authentic and open and herself. And here she is having a crisis, identity crisis, as she said, and it was quite fitting because I was in something myself, something was emerging. But it was really lovely to hear her talk about it.

So, a little bit more about Liz. She had a major turning point in her life at the age of 24 and it was the beginning of a totally new lifestyle for her, in which her talent by birth, to connect with the intangible, reopened, and started to blossom. At that time, she studied with a spiritual master, traveled the world to classes and sessions on spiritual and personal growth for many years, and mostly learned by tuning into her own inner guidance and life itself. She’s guided and taught others towards their own path for 25 years now as a life coach and personal development trainer and has been a teacher at the ICM coaching program and lived and work on Ibiza for four years. She gives one on one and group transformational retreats. Nowadays, she’s based in the Netherlands, in her home country. But she works globally, combining her background in business, economics, and spirituality, she guides business leaders and entrepreneurs back into their core through compassion, connection, and communication. So, let’s talk to Liz.

So Liz, last time we talked you were in Ibiza, and you were working with couples. And where are you now in the world and what are you doing?

Liz La Force 5:35
Right now, I’m in Amsterdam, the city of Amsterdam. I’ve taken a little break, to be honest. I’m still giving some sessions but I’ve taken a break just to — it’s quite a transmission from Ibiza back to the Netherlands. So, I’m taking the time and space to, yeah, to get grounded again in my own home country after seven years of leave. I mean, I left the country seven years ago.

Candice Wu 6:02
Oh, I didn’t realize that, that’s a long time. What called you to come home?

Liz La Force 6:06
Well, exactly that… I was just called, I don’t know what you would like to call it, but I just strongly felt, yeah, I certainly felt I needed to go back. Yeah. And it feels like the right place to be at this moment. So, I’m at peace with the decision and being here but it just, yeah, it’s also an opportunity for me to sense again, like, deeply what I want and what I really want to manifest over here. So yeah, it’s good. It’s nice to have time, it’s a luxury I think.

Candice Wu 6:41
That’s really lovely. Yeah, I love that you just follow the call and that’s how I’ve been really — That’s how I’ve been really functioning lately too, in the last several years but more so than ever I just feel what the answer is, even if it doesn’t make sense in my mental logic.

Liz La Force 7:02
What was your last calling?

Candice Wu 7:05
Oh, well, to really stay home actually, for this last year, I’ve been in Michigan with my family and it has been truly wonderful. Like, all the work I did, healing, all the dynamics that I have inside of myself, really paid off with my family. And it’s just been this lovely time. But suddenly, a couple of weeks ago, it was really cold here in Michigan, lots of snow and I just started to feel the call to go to Mexico. So that’s where I’m headed next.

Liz La Force 7:39
Oh, that sounds lovely. Yeah, that’s a good call.

Candice Wu 7:44
Yeah.

Liz La Force 7:45
It’s my experience that’s not always like, well, sometimes it’s something you really are looking forward to like you’re saying like, okay, I’m, it’s, the call is me going to Mexico and it feels really good but I also have calls where I was like, “Okay, seriously, do you want me to go there?” And then just after having the experience, I understood why, you know, so it’s not always as I see it already in the beginning and you’re like, “Oh, yeah, this is a good call. I really want to do this.”

Candice Wu 8:16
Right. Yeah, that’s so interesting, when you get the call and it’s not like really? And when was that last that you had that experience?

Liz La Force 8:25
Well, I think like, two years ago already, I came back from a visit to the Netherlands and I came back in Ibiza where I was living at the time and I just felt like, really felt like, oh my gosh, it’s going to end here. I’m going to leave this island. I’m going to leave my life here which was — I was given retreats and I was having fun and it’s a beautiful, lovely island and I had my friends there but I just knew it was time has come to say goodbye. And so that was like, almost like a shock, there was a distance between the knowing and the personality I guess. So it took me like a whole summer and I took the whole summer to just, to close that gap, like, to really understand like, yeah, it’s a good call, I need to go. Yeah.

Candice Wu 9:15
I love how you describe it, the gap between the knowing and the personality. So how did you close the gap? What was that process like?

Liz La Force 9:23
Well, I think, a part of it was mourning, you know, allowing myself to mourn for the fact that I was closing something and I was closing something that at the surface at least, felt good, feeling deeper inside of myself, I could see that I had learned and experience everything I could on the island. So it was okay to leave it but I mean, yeah, I think that was the process. Allowing myself also to feel the sadness and, yeah, all the human stuff. Sometimes, at least for me, it always has been, I wouldn’t say very easy, but easy to tap into my higher knowing and just following my intuition, but my lessons have more been to really allow my human side also to mourn or to grieve or to you know, to be bad angry or to just really feel those human emotions too, that come along with changes.

Candice Wu 10:21
Yeah. Is that part of what brought you to Love4Life Academy and what you do now? What brought you here?

Liz La Force 10:28
Yeah, definitely. I think, my own process, but also seeing, I mean, when you start to experience that being yourself, which sounds so easy, and it’s so hard, otherwise, more and more people will do it.

Candice Wu 10:44
Yeah.

Liz La Force 10:46
So, when you start to see what that can bring to you, I mean, the relaxation and the joy, and with the joy all the — I mean, all the abundance and all the things that come along with it. That’s something I wish for everybody.

And when I was very young, I already could sense when people were not like being authentic. And of course, a lot of us, me included, I mean, sometimes you’re totally unaware of the fact that you’re not authentic. You believe that what you’re expressing and the way you’re acting is who you are until you start to really feel and connect more honestly with yourself and start to, again, close that gap between what you are thinking that you are and the way you really truly are.

Candice Wu 11:38
Yeah, I find that I’m continually finding different layers of that inauthenticity, you know, layers of things, ways of being that helped me survive something in the past, but it’s not really who I want to be now. But it would come in many layers even now, I’ll find other layers and, well, okay, you know, there’s a clear way to be myself now, with that mourning or healing or looking at whatever feelings are there, but yeah, I’ve often found it’s just a continual process. How has it been for you?

Liz La Force 12:13
Well, I think it’s an endless process. It’s like you’re saying, sometimes I definitely had the arrogance in a boss to say like, Yeah, I do know myself. And now, I can laugh about it because no, I don’t. You know, I know myself as I am at this moment. Yes, that’s true.

Candice Wu 12:34
Yeah.

Liz La Force 12:34
And I try to be as authentic as I can in this moment, you know, by really being honest about what I feel and what I think. But I’m discovering, like you were saying, I’m discovering new layers, almost no, almost daily now, you know, and it’s like, okay.

Candice Wu 12:50
Yeah. Okay.

Liz La Force 12:54
But it’s fun. It’s getting more and more fun because we’re both laughing about it. You know? That’s the way I think you can, if you can relax and embrace yourself and love yourself more and more and feel that it’s okay, whatever comes up and whatever you’re seeing about yourself, even if it’s the dark inside of you, if you can feel and sense that it’s okay and you’re still lovable, then it becomes lighter and more humorous. And it’s, yeah. And then the process becomes more fun.

Candice Wu 13:26
It took me a long time to get here.

Liz La Force 13:28
Yeah, me too. Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

Candice Wu 13:34
Even sometimes I can be so serious.

Liz La Force 13:36
Oh, yeah. I’m still learning to be more and more playful, but I, yeah, absolutely. But it’s, sometimes it is serious as in if you’re really dealing with some, like, the shit to call it that way, you know? Then it is, it can be quite heavy. And so it’s not —

Candice Wu 13:57
It calls for that…

Liz La Force 13:57
Yeah, so it’s easy to say, yeah, it’s playful, but that’s something that comes, there comes a moment where you can feel like, ease and you become lighter and more joyful, but it’s not something, again which you can just fake it’s palpable, I suppose a lot of people try but it’s, all these things just come from the inside you know and they come up and then it’s true and then really there and still I’ve got my dark days, I mean, it’s not that I’m always laughing and always having fun. It’s still sometimes a battle going on inside of me.

Candice Wu 14:36
So what kinds of things you want to talk about today on the podcast? I know you mentioned authenticity. What else is alive for you right now?

Liz La Force 14:46
Well, I think what’s also very much alive, it’s all interconnected. It’s like giving space and taking space. Like you were saying, I’ve spent my time last year with my family and I’ve stayed in one place. For me, to also just stay in one place and being in the Netherlands now, I can sense what it does, and what it can do instead of like, going everywhere or, you know, filling ourselves up with all these experiences, all this entertainment, almost, all these activities, and yeah, creating the space and really going deeply into that peace and rest and allowing things to come up. I really treasure that at this moment. I really treasure it and I can see the value of it. And I still believe that while most of us, myself included, we’re often still in the very Yang energy so the acting and the doing instead of, yeah, really deeply sinking into the — just sitting thing with whatever appears, yeah.

Candice Wu 16:02
Yeah, we can just so easily get moving to not look at what appears or to try to find the next thing.

Liz La Force 16:11
Definitely.

Candice Wu 16:14
Yeah, there’s such a value in being home and being rooted and just letting it all have the space to open up and air out.

Liz La Force 16:23
Yeah, and we’re blessed. I mean, you’re blessed to have the family and the place to do that right?

Candice Wu 16:30
Absolutely.

So you grew up in the Netherlands?

Liz La Force 16:34
Yes, I did.

Candice Wu 16:35
Okay. Yeah. What was it like for you?

Liz La Force 16:40
I grew up in a very small village in the Netherlands, in the southern part of the Netherlands. And yeah, I guess I always had this, more like, I’m always calling myself a “world citizen”. So the village was quite small and the ideas people had we’re not like the same ideas I had already as a child. So yeah, that —

Candice Wu 17:05
Is it really diverse in the ideas and also the people or no?

Liz La Force 17:10
Yes, also the people yeah.

Candice Wu 17:13
Oh wow.

Liz La Force 17:14
Yeah that was interesting when I was very young. It’s a — yeah. But it was a good start and a peaceful village and yeah, I can look back with joy to my youth definitely.

Candice Wu 17:28
It sounds really lovely. I’m just curious. I think, the first time you and I talked we just jumped right into part of your story. You know, the journey of you getting towards this place in your life when you are working in Ibiza and working with couples, working with different people, just teaching them to love life and be themselves and really find authenticity. Would you like to share that story here with everyone listening?

Liz La Force 17:59
What exactly do you want to know?

Candice Wu 18:01
I don’t remember, I can’t remember which pieces of the story that really intrigued me but just like the journey of you, you feeling like you and being yourself. I remember feeling that was very interesting.

Liz La Force 18:14
I was giving trainings in businesses and at a certain moment, it was like, almost like an out of body experience.

I was looking down upon myself and I was like, “Okay, this is me, but it’s only a part of me.” And I already was like, doing the spiritual work and I knew and also, I mean, I’ve been born with certain, well, I don’t know if I want to call it gifts because I think everybody has them. But I’ve developed like the clairvoyance and a clairfeeling and I couldn’t use it in the job that I was doing, being hired to give like, these leadership trainings and I just, in that moment, decided like, okay, this is it, I’m going to stop. I’m going to sell all my stuff. I’m going to travel. I know I need to travel, and I need to see how life will be when I’m fully myself. Again, as we said earlier, as far as I know, myself —

Candice Wu 19:21
Yeah, as far as you could tell —

Liz La Force 19:23
Yeah, but that’s what I did.

I left the Netherlands and I started to travel for two years, I just traveled the world. I had a foundation called the Best of U. And I was just giving trainings where I was too young in self-confidence, a way, to just to earn some money, but also to meet people. And I just started to be me. And the amazing thing was that I was, of course, as we know, I started to attract certain kinds of people. I started to have these experiences. Yeah, life was really taking care of me instead of me needed to be in control and so for two years I was just guided to all these countries and met people and I was invited and but after two years I ended up back in the Netherlands. A little bit tired I must say of all the traveling.

Candice Wu 20:18
I bet. Yeah

Liz La Force 20:20
Yeah. So, and then I asked the question like okay, I still don’t sense that I’m supposed to live in the Netherlands but I don’t know where to live. So whatever it is, just give me a clear sign because I’m not moving anymore. I’m just staying where I am in this moment.

And then I woke up the day after or two days after and I had a song in my head. I think it’s Britney Spears song like, we’re going to the Ibiza and that’s — I didn’t hear that song on the radio, but it popped up in my head and I was like, okay, you know, funny but then Ibiza starts to pop up like, everywhere. Like, I was seeing it on posters and people were starting to talk about it. And I was like, okay, perhaps I need to check this out. Ibiza is known as a party island so it didn’t really appeal to me. I was like, I don’t know, I’m not really into partying or —

Candice Wu 21:20
One of those moments like, really?

Liz La Force 21:21
Yeah, that was really — Yeah.

But then I looked it up in the internet, and of course, I saw that it had more aspects and also like, a beautiful nature and I just decided to book a ticket and I left with my suitcases, and I ended up at the island and in the, I think it was within 48, 24 or 48 hours, I just, I felt like okay, this is the place where I need to be. I found a house. I bought a car. And a week later, I call my family and like, well, I don’t know, I’m living here and I’m staying here.

So yeah, that’s how I —

Candice Wu 21:58
It’s really happening.

Liz La Force 21:59
It’s really happening. And I didn’t even know what I was going to do there but the moment I found my house and I was sitting in the house within 10 minutes, I just wrote my business plan, so to speak. And I just knew, okay, I’m going to give retreats and I’m going to have people coming over and people from all over the world came.

So yeah, it was an interesting experience.

Candice Wu 22:24
That was the next seven years?

Liz La Force 22:25
No, that was the next five years.

Candice Wu 22:30
Okay.

Liz La Force 22:31
Yeah.

So, yeah, that’s, then for me that was I think that the first very clear message from the universe, like, if you are just being you, you know, this is what can happen. You know, it doesn’t take that much more than you being you. But the moments you’re going to step in between and you’re going to just think about what you need to do or what you need to say or what you need to — then it gets tougher.

Candice Wu 23:03
Yeah, it’s a, how do you be in that flow? How do you find yourself aligned with that? I think that can feel challenging for people and for me sometimes.

Liz La Force 23:14
That’s very challenging and I think it’s about because, I am not saying that I’m always in the flow now, sometimes, I’m definitely not. But that’s for me the moment that I can sense now that I’m not. I think the first thing is to acknowledge it, you’re not in the flow.

Candice Wu 23:30
Yeah.

Liz La Force 23:31
The first thing is to acknowledge that you are struggling. The first thing is to acknowledge that you’re not feeling really happy, you know, that’s, I think, the first thing. And then to really start to look honestly about what is it, what’s making me feel sad, or what is it that’s not allowing me to be in flow, so you can self-investigate, like, really reflect — self-reflection, but for me, it really helps to sit and feel. I think my body is like the computer telling me where the default is. So for me, my body is really the entrance to the information I need to understand what’s going on and why I’m not in the flow.

Candice Wu 24:15
Yeah, I have a similar process. I find that if there are like questions in my life or if I’m just sensing what’s next, or even what’s today, if I sit and just be with myself, then whatever is in the way of those clarities or what needs to be revealed for that to come forward, it just starts like matriculating and I love that you said like a computer because it’s almost like, it’s that time I can defrag and then it’s a lot clearer but sometimes I don’t have answers and that’s okay. It’s just, okay. Here’s maybe what’s the next step or I’m here right now. And that feels good. So it’s, yeah, I love that idea of the computer and how it feels.

Liz La Force 25:04
Yeah. It’s like you said it’s giving attention to yourself, right? It’s like being present with yourself, that’s already 80% of the solution, that’s my experience. As you said, you don’t even need to know the answer. You don’t need to know exactly what’s going on. At least for me in the past, I was always eager to know. I wanted explanations. I wanted to know everything. But it also took a lot of energy and now I’m learning. I’m still learning to just — yeah, it’s okay. Whatever I know, I know. But if I don’t know things, that’s okay, too. Whatever is happening is happening. And I guess that’s what I meant with creating space and becoming comfortable in that space, and that’s also becoming comfortable with unknowing.

Candice Wu 25:55
Why do you think unknowing or the unknown can be so scary for people? Is it scary for you?

Liz La Force 26:02
Oh, yeah, definitely.

Candice Wu 26:04
Yeah.

Liz La Force 26:04
I don’t need to think about that. Now, it’s —

No. It’s very scary at moments. It’s very scary. It’s like you’re going to die. That’s how I feel it. It’s how I experience. It’s like, Okay, my gosh, whenever I really truly connect with that space like that dark unknowing, then it feels like I’m going to die. And in a way you are, because everything you thought you knew is going to die, it needs to die to get into that unknowing. So for me, I don’t know about you, but for me, it’s really about all that — we totally think we’re in control rights with a lot of stuff, we think we’re in control and we identify ourselves with everything we do and say and think we are and the things we see and the materialistic things we have gathered and you know, the status we have and yeah, but letting go, totally letting go and stepping into it is letting go of all of that.

Candice Wu 27:02
Yeah — Right. Yeah, I don’t know, if you know, the thought that we think we’re in control, like, I don’t know, when you asked me that, I think in the past I would have said, Yeah. I am, or at times I would have said absolutely not like, I’m just kind of subject to my own emotions and like the things that happened to me. But now I feel some sort of mixture of both, or maybe sometimes one and sometimes, not both as far as the world happening to me, in my emotions, but some sense of like, collaboration maybe, like, there are things that I can control, there are things that are not in my control, that pop in or come in or are part of some unconscious part of me or the world and there’s this constant navigating through that, playing back and forth with that. I don’t know. I really don’t know but that’s just how I can put words to something at the moment.

Liz La Force 28:02
Yeah, but I think it’s true. It’s definitely, yeah, I sense the same, but it’s very, yeah, I don’t know, either. I mean, I’m also still discovering and playing around with it in a way and I think yeah, that’s, we’re all just trying to figure it out, and we probably will never figure it out, right? That’s what I sense like, okay, it’s, yeah —

Are we ever going to really know? I don’t know.

Candice Wu 28:30
Yeah.

Liz La Force 28:32
As I said, it seems like an endless spectrum of things we can learn and discover and I don’t know if there’s an end to it, to be honest.

I do know the experience and I had the experiences of really being in a certain place, space where there was, yeah, and I would call it the unknown. I don’t know if that’s what it was, but where there was absolute peace and yeah, nothing is. And I was totally okay with it. But it’s just fractions and moments. It’s not like a constant state. So, yeah, and whatever that is, I don’t know, you know, who even that is like, I don’t know.

Yeah, that’s an experience. I mean, and at that moment, you sometimes think you have a glimpse of something, but you don’t even know. So, but that’s the thing.

Candice Wu 29:23
It’s part of the magic.

Liz La Force 29:24
It’s the magic. Yeah. And, I think, for me, freedom is coming.

When I was much younger, and also when I started this spot, I really wanted to know. I needed to know things. I needed to know what was over there, you know, and now I’m so much more relaxed and I’m okay with not knowing. I’m totally okay. And if this is life and nothing is ever going to change, then it’s okay too, you know, and then —

Candice Wu 29:52
Yeah.

Liz La Force 29:52
To me it is a very nice, yeah, place to be in.

Candice Wu 29:55
That sounds beautiful. Yeah. There’s a lot of acceptance and being with what is.

Liz La Force 30:03
Exactly.

Candice Wu 30:04
It sounds like —

Liz La Force 30:05
Yeah, and that feels for me, I was always looking for freedom. But that feels like yeah, that in a way feels like freedom. It’s like, oh, okay, just not that much that needs to be done. You know, it’s another — in a passive way like, Okay, so I’m going to sit here on my couch and I’m not going to do anything. No, because there’s a lot of aliveness next to that. There’s a lot of things that want to come alive through me but yes, I think it’s the right word you’re saying, it’s certain acceptance and then yeah, that feels good, gives a lot of peace.

Candice Wu 30:40
Beautiful.

Liz La Force 30:42
Yeah.

Candice Wu 30:43
Yeah. I find the same thing, just that more acceptance of not knowing. But for me, you know, it’s a multitude of different things that supported me and being more comfortable with it. One was looking at my young life and how things that were unpredictable, were scary and then felt like I was going to die because it was so like, big of an emotion without the proper kind of support that I needed.

But then, also looking at, for me, in my experience of past lives, like, they would just appear at different times to me that something was of a past life and that maybe I did die or that I didn’t die, but I felt like I was going to, in these kinds of severe, more severe experiences. And there was a lot of healing for me in seeing that part of me from a past life and letting that part see me in this life that I was actually alive again, or still or whatever it is, you know, maybe it’s not a past life, maybe it’s another dimension, but whatever it is, there’s this feeling that it’s a part of me and that really started to release some of my fear, fear of actual death, you know. And then that cleared up the unknown and unknowing space was like, oh, that, you know, it might feel painful to let go of some things or change things but it’s not feeling like, I’m going to die into a million pieces and crumble anymore, but sometimes it has. So —

Liz La Force 32:25
Yeah.

Candice Wu 32:25
Do you relate to any of that? How was it for you?

Liz La Force 32:28
Yeah, definitely I can relate to what you’re saying.

There are so many different experiences in us, aren’t they?

I mean, it’s like you’re saying sometimes I’ve experienced that I, Okay, I understand I’m not and never ever got, I’m going to really die. And then at the same time, you can sense that you’re really dying because it’s also who’s the experiencer in that moment. That’s what I hear in your story too, like, which part of you is having the experience and so giving the interpretation of the experience. Yeah.

Candice Wu 33:08
Yeah. So what’s fun in your life right now? What’s bringing you joy? What feels like you?

Liz La Force 33:16
What feels like me? Wow.

Candice Wu 33:20
I dare ask that question after the beginning of our podcast so far.

Liz La Force 33:29
I’ve no idea this moment. To be honest, I have no idea this moment, that’s the most honest question I can give to you. And it’s —

Candice Wu 33:35
Yeah.

Liz La Force 33:36
Yeah, because I’m going through so many changes that it almost feels like I’m in an identity crisis, you know? So all the things I thought I was, I’m still am on a certain level. And at the same time, I’m really again, figuring out who I am.

So yeah, that’s, I think the space where I’m in right now. It may sound crazy, but this — Yeah, this is it, this moment.

Candice Wu 34:05
No, it doesn’t sound crazy.

Liz La Force 34:08
Yeah.

Candice Wu 34:09
So not to me at least. Yeah.

So you’re figuring out who you are now and sounds like things are breaking down.

Liz La Force 34:15
Definitely.

Candice Wu 34:15
Dying off.

Liz La Force 34:17
Yeah.

It is going as I said, it’s a crazy time. It’s really happening quite fast and it’s like, Okay, I have no idea and the moment I want to, like, create like an image of myself I’m like, Okay, but I do want to do things or I do want you to know, and then I can feel that I’m forcing myself into a form. And so, I’m really allowing the form to come like, to really understand like, Okay, this is the new me. And at this moment, then the most honest answer is like, I don’t know and I’m okay with it.

It’s not that I’m like not able to do my groceries or I’m not eating or you know, I’m doing all the normal stuff. I’m doing all the normal stuff. Nobody’s seeing it even, I think, if you would see me as like, but I can sense if I’m really honest. And I’m like, Yeah, I don’t know, at this moment. It’s really taking a new form and I don’t know how it’s going to look like exactly.

Candice Wu 35:03
It feels so alive. You know, in the death, I feel so alive. Because, yeah, who knows what’s going to come out for you and who is going to come out?

Liz La Force 35:29
Yeah, and it’s scary. It’s sometimes too, and it’s not like, but, yeah, no, I’m really, like I said, I’m really happy that I’m allowing myself to really go through it. I think I’ve done this kind of process before, but now I’m really staying with it. I’m like, Okay, I’m not going anywhere. I’m just going to be here and yeah, it’s quite interesting.

Candice Wu 35:59
Yeah. I’m curious for you as this continues, you know, just how it is for you. And, I don’t even want to say, you know, who comes out on the other end because it’s just being in the now.

Liz La Force 36:11
Yeah.

Candice Wu 36:12
So here and now.

Liz La Force 36:14
Yeah.

Candice Wu 36:18
So do you even find it a struggle? You know, I hear what you’re saying, you know, that it’s not always easy that sometimes it’s, well, I hear you say it’s not, it’s sometimes scary. But these are the kinds of experiences that most people say, are a struggle. But to me, what it feels like you know, even the lightness in your voice about it sounds like it’s a delight.

Liz La Force 36:43
Yes, it is. But on another level, it’s a struggle. There’s so I can sense the struggle inside of me, but I don’t experience it as a struggle. So there is a struggle going on and sometimes it can feel like ugly and nasty and I can even feel nauseous or whatever. I don’t know, I can just, yeah. Look at it and be with it.

Candice Wu 37:08
Yeah.

Liz La Force 37:10
Accept this thing again, I think. I mean, I’m accepting that this is the case and I’m just allowing it to play out the game. And then yeah, so yeah. But it’s not like, again, not that people will think that I’m only like laughing about this whole process. Sometimes there’s sadness coming up you know, or still anger or whatever and then I’m not in the I’m so happy mood. I mean, then that’s the emotion that comes up and I’m allowing that to be but there was always the one that’s observing it. I think that has been the practice over the last 20, 26 years.

And I think because there was a practice, it’s easier now to be the, yeah also very much and strongly be connected with the observer when the past, I would like have lost myself in the process where I would like — it felt like really in those dark places but also, I was in a dark place and now I’m not in the dark place. I’m the one that’s looking at the one in the dark place and that’s a huge difference.

Candice Wu 38:17
Yeah and that agreement to look and be with it makes all the difference between true struggle and suffering —

Liz La Force 38:24
Exactly.

Candice Wu 38:24
-and the emotion. The whole plethora of emotions that you do feel.

Liz La Force 38:29
Exactly, yeah,

Candice Wu 38:31
Yeah.

Liz La Force 38:32
And it’s funny, I haven’t even, while talking with you and I’m saying these things, Oh, yeah, that’s the difference. You know, I didn’t mean —

Candice Wu 38:40
That’s a big — realizing it now.

Liz La Force 38:44
Yeah, a little bit more than I did before. So thank you. Yeah.

Candice Wu 38:46
Yeah. That’s great, glad to share this moment with you.

Liz La Force 38:53
Yeah.

Candice Wu 38:54
Yeah, and I appreciate you sharing with everybody that’s listening.

Liz La Force 38:58
I’ll happy to share always.

It’s sometimes hard to find the words right, for these kinds of things. And also not to make it sound like too light. Because for the people that are still like, you know, sometimes me too, in the past, I did have my struggles and it was heavy and it was, you know, anything. I do believe if I look back because some sometimes, I wonder, I don’t know about you, but I want to like, okay, the way I’m now experiencing this couldn’t have done the same like 20 years ago, and I wouldn’t have been so much easier. But then again, I think I can experience it this way because I went through all of this. So it’s every step of the way is one step. And I don’t know if it is, or if you can just trespass one. How do you think about that?

Candice Wu 39:53
If I’m getting it right, yeah, I would agree with my own experience with that. Like, I don’t feel Iike I’d want to change anything that happened or didn’t happen and the struggle that did happen.

And yes, they were huge, painful struggles even, you know, even a year and a half ago, even last summer, you know, big feelings, big emotions, big experiences, and then the amount I struggled or suffered, varied, given, you know, how much I could really witness and be with myself and want to be or, want to abandon myself or do it unknowingly. But, yeah, I wouldn’t really want to change anything because, because it gave me everything that is now, I think, as you’re saying, and it’s all okay, it’s now. But there were so many times in my life, I didn’t feel like things were okay. So I think it’s just a lovely place to feel now, where It feels like, maybe the words for me are like the past is a bit at peace or I am at peace with who I have been and who I am now, in this moment, and maybe not all the time, but for the most part that’s more of how I experienced myself and not.

Liz La Force 41:21
Yeah. And for me, it’s interesting that even if I’m, well in the past and I, when I did like inner child work or, and I went back to my inner child, there was always these well, also things that happened in my past and created like sadness or anger or whatever. And now if I go back, there’s only happiness, which is really fun for me. It’s like I, you know, at a certain moment, you’ve rewritten the program. So there’s nothing — if I go back, there’s a happy family and it’s a happy parent and it’s like happy, where in the past, when I went back, the worst of course, I also had my traumas and my things.

So that’s also a very interesting thing. But you need to connect with the traumas and the things first to rewrite them. If you don’t acknowledge them and you hide them, and you’re not able to rewrite them. So, but it’s an interesting thing for me to experience like, Okay, this is so funny. My whole system is rewritten.

If you’re talking about joys like, Oh, okay. Yeah.

Candice Wu 42:34
Yeah, I had an experience similarly, and actually, I was feeling really tired at this point in my life.

It was some time in the last six months, I was like, I’m just tired of doing, just feeling certain things and it hadn’t even been that long that I was feeling those things. It was more just like the words needed to come out, the feeling of that needed to come out and come to the front. So I was feeling like, I’m just so tired of feeling this. And then I thought, well who’s feeling this? And I checked in with my younger selves and I was like, Is it anyone, who’s feeling so tired right now? And my younger self was just joyful and playing and just like, what we’re fine back here. She’s looking at me like, you’re the one that’s feeling tired. You adult self Candice, and I’m like, oh, now my younger self is healing me.

Liz La Force 43:33
Exactly, but it’s also because, at a certain moment, you’re so used to doing the work that you forget, even when the work is done, you’re still doing the work.

I think that’s funny was like, an interesting point, where I’ve done so much healing on myself and then I hardly could, it was like an addiction almost. It was like, Oh, but I need to do the healing. I need to do all the stuff out of myself. And then I’m not saying again that the healing is stopped or that nothing will come up or, but, yeah, it’s a different experience now, whether it was really like almost that, yeah, I’ve always so used to doing that kind of work and then and letting go of that phase was also, yeah, quite a big thing for me. Yeah.

Candice Wu 44:17
Yeah, I can relate to that addiction as well.

Well because you know, I think for me that came about because it really worked, you know, things were really working when I was choosing to do certain kinds of healing techniques or like, being with myself in certain ways. And then I thought, well, let’s go for more. Every time I felt better. So I kept wanting more so yeah, it was, but it’s such a different experience to say well, healings, not everything you can just go straight for the joy or straight for whatever you want to experience or a full experience of human life.

Liz La Force 44:54
Exactly, yeah, and that will heal you.

Candice Wu 44:59
Yeah. Anyways, okay. That will heal you but not for the purpose of let’s do more —

Liz La Force 45:08
No, exactly, yeah.

Candice Wu 45:10
Yeah. It’s funny how that works. Yeah, funny. Perfect, right?

Liz La Force 45:15
Yeah, definitely.

Candice Wu 45:17
Yeah.

So what, in the work of supporting people with authenticity, what do you find comes up? What are the struggles or what are things people are working with or that you’re working with that really help others, you know, see something for themselves?

Liz La Force 45:41
Well, I think the most important thing in becoming more authentic and daring to really face yourself, the ugly, and the nice part is at first, reconnecting with love and feeling that you are loved.

You described earlier that did you understand that there is a love inside of you, outside of you everywhere and that’s always there for you.

And for me, if you start to connect with that and start to feel that, then you can bring that love towards all the pieces, all the aspects of yourself. So for me, that’s the first step. And it’s not, yeah, and so for me how it works is like different kinds of ways.

I mean, like, I really like to reconnect people with their body because that’s where we sense and where we can feel things.

Nowadays, I’m using all kinds of creative expression forms for it, like dance and liberation of the voice, like singing, some more creative forms than I did in the past.

In the past, I was mainly working with meditation and visualizations and healing. Nowadays, I bring in more like, creative expression forms. It’s playful and that’s what I really wanted to bring into my work, you know, more playfulness and also things that people can do at home. I mean, you can dance at home and start to feel things if you do it in a certain way or you can use your voice and start to hear things in your voice and understand that, your voice is also a representation of certain aspects in yourself.

Candice Wu 47:26
Can you say more about that, that intrigues me about just using your voice and hear things in your voice?

Liz La Force 47:33
Well, you can hear in somebody’s voice, I don’t know about you, but I can hear in somebody’s voice if where they are in their body. If they’re like, really grounded or if they’re like, high or if they’re excited, or if they’re tired or you know, all these kinds of things, I think everybody can hear it in a certain way.

But then there’s also the making of sounds which can start to really loosen up certain blockages in our body. So yeah, you can use the voice in different ways. But it’s very interesting for yourself to hear if you’re like, I had a tendency, I still, I’ve got a loud voice. If I’m really excited, I’ve got a very loud voice. But if I’m really deeply connected, I’ve got a very soft and lower voice, you know.

So it’s, yeah, just whatever is needed also, if I’m, yeah, sometimes and all okay for me. It’s not like, I’m all I need to be in that kind of a voice and I always now, I need to focus with Candice, I need to be very Zen and very spiritual and I need to talk like this. And you know —

Candice Wu 48:22
Right, Not for control.

Liz La Force 48:43
No, it’s not for control. Is there a Yes or No?

And it’s there when I’m giving meditation, visualization, my voice, you know, it starts to become different and it says another resonance. So it has another effect on people. That’s how it works. But that’s with everything. If you’re talking about being authentic, it’s like, also allowing whatever wants to be spoken through your saying through your — Yeah, to happen.

Candice Wu 49:12
I just love that because it’s so indicative of or not indicative it’s so like, everything you know, the playfulness and just letting things be witnessed, arise, and that it’s not for self-criticism, it’s for the exploration and everything has a different effect in resonance. Everything has an impact in a certain way and you get to see what that is.

Liz La Force 49:38
And beautifully put like as you’re saying, everything.

I just wrote in Dutch, a blog, and there I told a client of mine like, everything inside of you has the right to be there. Everything inside has a right to be there.

And for me, you know, sometimes you saying things to another you’re like, Oh, wow.

Candice Wu 50:02
I love it… Yes, right. Yeah.

Liz La Force 50:05
So I was hearing myself saying those words, and I took them in and later, and I was like, just sitting with the words I was like, Yeah, but this is it, you know. We’re so, often, we’re just saying like, Okay, if I want, like, I’m a spiritual teacher and I need to be like this, or I’m a singer and I need to perform, and I need to do it like this. We all have, I am a director in the business and I need to act like this. We have so many ideas about how we need to act and what we supposed to be, and we’re neglecting and disowning all the rest inside of us all the time.

So for me, it’s like everything is allowed to be there.

If the happy child wants to come out and wants to come out now, then it comes out, you know. And if the Zen master wants to say something, then he will speak and it’s okay, you know, because it’s no longer about me identifying with one of them. I’m all of them. So they’re all allowed to be here.

Candice Wu 51:10
Yes.

It just gives my whole body complete relief to hear those words. Everything inside of you has the right to be there. One-hundred percent is so beautiful. Beautifully said, thank you.

It’s such a cool experience, you know that it just came through you?

Liz La Force 51:30
Yeah.

Candice Wu 51:31
And it was like, yeah.

Liz La Force 51:33
Yeah. But it is like you’re saying, I had the same it’s like, okay, you know, okay. Because, yes, exactly.

Candice Wu 51:42
Yes.

Liz La Force 51:43
And I really if it is something I’m passionate about, and I’m going to share this with the world. If there’s, you know, like — okay, everything’s okay. Everything’s okay, seriously. So let’s stop also, let’s stop thinking we know what is okay and what is not. Because we don’t?

Candice Wu 52:08
Yeah, we keep trying.

Liz La Force 52:09
We keep trying. Yeah, and we will. I’m not going to end in this year.

Candice Wu 52:16
Yeah.

Liz La Force 52:19
It’s interesting. But it also, as we said earlier, and I said earlier, I mean, it takes a lot of self-love. It takes a lot of love to start to see that everything’s okay and to embrace everything.

Candice Wu 52:34
Completely. It takes a lot. Yeah, especially in the pockets, the pockets of myself that, like, felt historically that didn’t get what they needed. It’s like filling in those gaps, takes a lot of love, takes support. And yeah, I don’t want to downplay how much that takes and going back to like, heaviness or seriousness sometimes that’s truly needed and truly the place we’re at, and it’s all to be seen and honored in its time.

Thank you, Liz. This is so lovely to talk to, and I know that you’re going to be offering an experience or meditation. Do you want to say something about it? Is anything coming to you about what you’d like to share? Create?

Liz La Force 53:23
I don’t know yet.

Candice Wu 53:28
I love it.

Liz La Force 53:28
Yeah. Because I think it has. Yeah, it’s probably going to have to do with the last sentence we share. You’re allowed to be here.

Candice Wu 53:38
Yeah. Totally.

Liz La Force 53:39
Let’s see what pops up.

Candice Wu 53:42
Yeah, let’s see.

So for anyone listening, it’s in the unknown. You’ll have to find out.

Liz La Force 53:49
Yeah.

Candice Wu 53:50
Yeah. Anything else you want to mention or share today, Liz?

Liz La Force 53:53
No, I’m grateful. I had this conversation with you. I’m, yeah, it was a nice talk, Candice.

And for everybody who’s listening, I do hope you can start to love yourself like, endlessly, like you’re so worth it.

Candice Wu 54:11
Yeah.

Liz La Force 54:11
And I also know it’s not easy and it’s sometimes, it’s just words in the beginning. But yeah, it’s worth starting to look at yourself and just, even if you’re just saying the words you know, I love you. Yeah.

Candice Wu 54:32
Thank you. Yeah.

I really enjoyed this conversation and I feel like one of your strong gifts is your presence, your energy and it’s almost like, felt like, it didn’t even matter what words you were saying even though I love what you did share in the words but the energy of what you’re exuding is just so juicy and I can feel it in your presence. So thank you so much.

Thank you, Candice.

Before we go, Liz, where can people find you?

Liz La Force 55:14
Well, they can find me in the Netherlands but it is a little bit far away for you. You’re very welcome to come over, but, no, they can find my website. It’s www.lizlaforce.com.

Candice Wu 55:31
Okay, wonderful. And we’ll have it on the show notes and everything.

Liz La Force 55:34
Yeah.

Candice Wu 55:34
So they can click there.

Liz La Force 55:36
And I’m, yeah, I’m available for online sessions too. So this doesn’t need to be an obstacle.

Candice Wu 55:44
Okay. They don’t have to literally travel to you.

Liz La Force 55:47
I will travel to them. Yeah.

Candice Wu 55:51
Thank you, Liz.

Liz La Force 55:52
Okay. Have a lovely day.

Candice Wu 55:55
Yes, you too. You too, Liz.

Thank you so much, Liz for being on the show. I just feel so refreshed by your energy and your radiance and just what comes through so clearly and purely. And I hope that all of you out there are getting something from this transmission of energy that Liz brings.

Be sure to tune into Liz’s meditation this week. Her meditation is an active one created for you to experience the joy of free self-expression. So enjoy this light-hearted and playful exercise that she brings you into, where you are the boss, you are the master in her words, and where you can help the cells of your body remember their own light and true capacity to love and receive love. Those are Liz’s words. They’re just lovely. So tune in later this week. You can also find her meditation at CandiceWu.com/lizlaforce.

Well, it’s so great to have you here, and thank you so much for listening.

Next week, I’ll talk a lot more about what’s happening with me, what I’m doing in Mexico, and what else is coming up.

If you’d like to stay in touch with me through my newsletter, you can sign up at CandiceWu.com/embody. And that’s where I give some updates about my travels, self-love notes, different workshops and experientials, events, etc., and also the updates about the podcast.

As we close today, I want to just send a shout out to all of you out there that are listening. All of you that are a friend of a friend of someone who shared this podcast with you or, if you’re therapist shared this with you, if you stumbled upon it yourself, thank you so much for being out there existing and for listening.

I love hearing your feedback, you can always feel free to email me.

And recently, I was just so delighted to hear that there are people in Wuhan, China listening in. Thank you for being out there and sending you all the well wishes for your health, for all of your loved ones to be safe and I am seeing and noticing what’s happening from here. With that, I will wish you a wonderful week and see you next week on the Embody Podcast.

Candice Wu 0:00
In this meditation, Liz Laforce, a guest on the podcast, encourages you to dance, sing, or do some art after this lovely, deepening meditation.

Hello and welcome. You’re listening to the Embody Podcast, a show about remembering and embodying your true nature, inner wisdom, Embodied Healing, and self-love. My name is Candice Wu, and I’m a holistic healing facilitator, intuitive coach, and artist sharing my personal journey of vulnerability, offering meditations and guided healing support, and having co-creative conversations with healers and wellness practitioners from all over the world.

This is an active meditation created for you to experience the joy of free self-expression. So enjoy this light-hearted and playful exercise and also feel free to tune into the full Episode with Liz, who is such an authentic, present being, you can find the full episode at CandiceWu.com/lizlaforce. And with that, I will hand you over to Liz.

Liz La Force 1:14
Welcome. When you’ve listened to the podcast I recorded with Candice, you may probably have noticed already that I love to create spaces. Space to feel free enough to express ourselves, express myself and there are certain forms I like to use for them and it’s dance or singing or painting and that’s what I want to do with you today too.

So, I will start a meditation with you in a couple of minutes. But I would like you to choose one of the three options. So dancing, singing, or painting to do after the meditation just to express your soul and to really connect with your self-expression.

I will explain a little bit more about how this could work for you.

So, the dancing, when you’ve chosen that, just after the meditation, get up, or if you’re already up, just start moving your body, put some music on if you want or do it without but just the loud movements your body wants to make to come up. And be aware of how it feels, perhaps you’re feeling tension, perhaps you’re feeling totally relaxed because of course, you have done the meditation, but whatever you feeling is okay, just allow it to be there without the need to change it but continue to move.

In the beginning, this can feel awkward or strange, but you will notice that at a certain moment, you can come in a certain flow and it will be a lot of fun.

So that’s for the dancing, and then, when you feel more like singing, after the meditation, start to sing or simply make sounds.

It doesn’t even matter if you are a singer or if you’re talented at it, just start to sing any song you know, improvise, make new lyrics, make sounds, it’s all about free expression. There’s no good or bad involved. There is no judgments, although perhaps judgmental thoughts will come up but just allow them to be there and observe them, take notice and allow them to go again.

This is a great help by the way, for your throat chakra to really open up and to enable you to feel freer to self-expression.

And then the last option is painting.

For this, you need a white paper, some paint or color pencils and then after the meditation, just pick a color, pick a pencil and start making stripes and perhaps it will end up in just only stripes and colors and perhaps it will take a form. But this is about your soul expressing itself. And so, allow anything that wants to come on paper to come out, be playful.

And, certainly have fun while doing all these things. You can choose one of them, you can of course try them all out. If you repeat a meditation, that’s all up to you.

And again, it may take a while for you to get really into this, but give it time and give yourself a break when it doesn’t feel natural in the beginning, and that’s normal. I mean, we all come from a background where, well at least most of us, weren’t really supported in self-expression and we were judged or we will learn to judge ourselves on it. So, it takes time to overcome that hurdle to really loosen up and to disconnect us from these old memories, and to feel free enough to just do like a child, like when we were children and we weren’t yet, well I must say, poisoned by all these judgments or ideas how we are supposed to be.

So in a short while, I will start the meditation.

If you are into the painting option, perhaps you can just stop this meditation and started again. So you can get some paper and some pencils. But for those who have chosen to dance and sing, they can continue to listen and we will start the meditation in a few moments. I will just give you some time to set up perhaps how to put away furniture and set up your things.

And for the meditation you can either lay down or sit it’s up to you, as long as your feet are next to each other and your arms are next to your body or into your lap.

So if you can just sit or lay down, I will start a meditation now. Just feel your body in the chair or on the grounds, become aware of your body. Either laying on the ground or sitting in the chair. You can put your hands for a moment on your belly and start to breathe towards the belly. If you’re not able to, that’s okay too, but just see how deep you can bring your breath. Pushing the hands up and allowing them to go down while breathing out.

It can help to breathe through the nose in and out, through the mouth. Find your body already going into relaxation because the mind can only do one thing. So if we start to focus on the breath, that’s where the mind will be. And if the mind calms down, the whole body calms down.

Just breathe in and out a couple of times very consciously, and then start to bring your attention to your feet, your feet and your toes. Let’s bring the attention towards the feet and the toes and if your mind is going to wander off, just bring it back to your feet. You’re the boss, you’re the master. And then internally, just say feet, relax and move on to your legs, gaining the muscles in the legs, coming away of the knees, thighs, just concentrate and focus on your legs without the need or necessity to change anything.

Just being the observer, allowing your body to relax deeper and deeper and then move on to your pelvis, a place where we hide a lot of old information, old pain. The attention and the love going towards this place is very welcome.

And then move on to your belly, aware of the intestines, while your body’s relaxing and relaxing deeper and deeper.

And then move on to your chest, bring your attention to your heart, perhaps feeling any tension or perhaps feeling that is totally open, all is fine, all is good. Everything’s allowed to be here.

And then from the heart, we bring our attention to the back, your spine, and the shoulder blades, sinking deeper and deeper into relaxation. Allowing the body by concentrating, bring focus, attention, and love to it, and find his own way into relaxation.

There’s really nothing we need to do and to bring our attention and love towards it.

Then we move on with our attention to the arms, the elbows, hands, and fingers. Going deeper and deeper into relaxation. Perhaps your body’s feeling heavier.

Finally, we’ll get our attention to our neck and head.

Notice our body is really entered in this relaxation modus, you visualize above your head above your crown a golden light. And this golden light enters the crown and starts to fill up your brain cells, your senses, the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the ears. All of it is going to be filled up with his golden light I mean clean stain-cleared.

From any old information no longer needed in the brain cells or in the senses. Helping the cells to remember their own lights, their capacity. It’s a true capacity that goes way beyond what we’re using.

And then the golden light enters the neck and goes into the chest and enters the heart and starts to fill up all the cells in the heart, as the cleaning cleans the whole heart’s remembering its capacity to love, and to receive love… opening and up, you can receive even more love and gave me some more love and it has been doing until now.

Then when the heart is totally filled up, the light starts to spread over the chest into the arms, all the way down into the fingertips.

Every cell is going to be filling up, built up with the golden lights.

Your arms and hands and fingers can be used again for your self-expression, to put your love into action.

Then the golden light goes into the belly, fills up the intestines and the organs, clearing, cleansing them from all the inflammation no longer needed to be there. So you can reconnect with your power, the power that can be found in our belly.

Strength, vitality.

Then the golden light goes into the pelvis into the legs, all the way down to the feet and the toes.

Again, cleansing and clearing the cells, filling them up with golden light. Making it easier for you to stand, stand up, for standing your own truth, and to walk your own path, to know your purpose, find your way on this planet.

Then the golden light goes up the base of the spine and starts to curl up around the spine, all the way up to the shoulder blades filling up all cells in the back. Cleansing and cleaning them, bring golden light into them, allowing you to feel the support. The support of the universe, of your guidance, the people around you, the support you need to feel.

Feel free to express yourself. Feel safe. Feel loved.

And then finally the golden light enters the neck and the head, and your whole body is now glowing with golden light, vibrating. Perhaps you can feel it. Whatever you’re feeling is okay. No good and bad involved.

Just for a couple of minutes, allow this golden light to really integrate into your system, into the cells.

While the golden light is integrating, you can ask your soul, your higher self, what it would like to express through you today and to invite it to express itself through you to give it the allowance to express itself through you or it needs your: “Yes”.

And then when you feel ready, just stand up and start the dancing, start singing or do the painting and enjoy it, allow this energy to just flow through your body and to just start to make the movements, to start to make the sounds, start to make the stripes on the paper.

Just go for it and allow it and enjoy it. Enjoy the fact that you are alive. Enjoy the fact that this energy is always available for you each day, every day, every moment of the day.

Wishing you a lot of fun and thank you for listening.

Candice Wu 20:42
So as you transition from this meditation, to some self-expression of your choice, I want to thank you for joining us and thank Liz for offering this experience.

Thanks so much and again, you can tune into the full episode with Liz at CandiceWu.com/lizlaforce.

Candice Wu 0:00

This episode is with special guest Cynthia Lubin Langtiw, who is a Haitian-American licensed clinical psychologist and professor, and in this episode we talked about knowing and unknowing, being known how we decolonized knowing and qualitative research, being a mother, as well as believing in yourself and the power of your own being, to bring forth impact to the world.

Candice Wu 0:26

Hello and welcome. You’re listening to the Embody Podcast, a show about remembering and embodying your true nature, inner wisdom, Embodied Healing, and self-love.

Candice Wu 0:39

My name is Candice Wu, and I’m a holistic healing facilitator, intuitive coach, and artist sharing my personal journey of vulnerability, offering meditations and guided healing support, and having co-creative conversations with healers and wellness practitioners from all over the world.

Candice Wu 1:03

It is with great honor to introduce our guest today, Dr. Cynthia Lubin Langtiw. She’s just a wonderful, vibrant human being who cares so much about people and I appreciate so much her ability to just be herself, bring who she is to the table, and to love people around her and give the gifts that she is in herself.

Candice Wu 1:30

I especially enjoyed the pieces of the conversation around her alter ego and her grandmothers and the lineage and what gifts they’ve given her and how she’s shaped her way of seeing the world because of her ancestry.

Candice Wu 1:44

Cynthia is a Haitian-American licensed clinical psychologist and full professor in the Clinical Psychology program at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology and she’s also served as a supervising psychologist at Mount Sinai Hospital and currently consults with their doctoral clinical training program. And on top of that, she’s also a volunteer psychologist and clinical supervisor with the Marjorie Kovler Center for survivors of torture.

Candice Wu 2:12

She provides training on psychological trauma for the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights and her clinical work reflects a strong systemic and community sensibility that integrates a relational cultural perspective. So much of our clinical work has been helping youth, adults, families, and communities utilize their own resources to heal from trauma. And in this conversation, you’ll hear exactly that, especially at the end of our conversation, where she speaks about uncovering our own knowing and trusting in who we are. So let’s jump into the conversation.

Candice Wu 2:52

So, Cynthia, I’m so thrilled to have you here today, you are Haitian-American, licensed clinical psychologist, and your full professor at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, among other aspects of your professional career where you’re a volunteer psychologist and clinical supervisor at the Kovler Center. And yeah, you have just plenty of conversations in the air around youth violence, betrayal trauma in the black community and around the world, supporting families and children in natural disasters, advocating for families, healing trauma, working with couples. And the first question I have for you, Cynthia is, tell me about Harriet the Spy, your Alter Ego?

Cynthia Langtiw 3:39

Oh, I love that question. So, you know, as a kid, I just lived in my head, and particularly as an immigrant child, just trying to figure out the world, books were everything for me and there are so many wonderful characters with whom I related and connected. But Harriet The Spy, just sparked for me, this inquisitiveness, right, there’s a part in the book where she’s writing in her little notebook, and she says, “I want to know everything, that is why I am a spy.” And that reverberated in my core, because I just thought, that’s me. I want to know everything and in large part, that’s why I’m a clinical psychologist.

Cynthia Langtiw 4:32

So, and I think that connecting with the strong female who had this deep curiosity and said that curiosity in bizarre and strange ways, resonated for me so deeply as a child and continued, you know, on my quest to know, and my continued quest to know as a clinical psychologist, but also as a researcher. I think that that stays with me still, like that desire to deeply know, but also be known. You know?

Candice Wu 5:03

Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Cynthia Langtiw 5:05

So yeah, that’s me and Harriet the Spy. I read this like, every couple of years.

Candice Wu 5:12

I can see that she, Harriet the Spy in you is just well alive and it feels like she’s just thriving.

Cynthia Langtiw 5:19

Yeah, absolutely. I would hope so. Yeah.

Candice Wu 5:23

Oh, that’s wonderful. Yeah. And how do you see yourself on your journey right now?

Cynthia Langtiw 5:29

Yeah, so I’m at an interesting place in my journey both as a professor and there’s a clinical psychologist. And also, as a researcher, you know, there was a lot of push as I was moving towards promotion and there was a way that once I sort of, achieved full professorship, if you will, and there are so few women of color, who do. That part hit me too, that it wasn’t only for me, but for so many, and I felt my grandmothers, you know, who are no longer with us physically, but sit on my shoulders, right? But then also lift up my arms.

Cynthia Langtiw 6:06

And there’s a way that in my journey, now, I’m thinking about, well I’ve always thought about what I have to offer, right, what I have to offer my clients, what I have to offer my students, but there’s a way that I’m thinking more broadly about what I have to offer the field and that can feel a little heavy, like, who am I to think that I can offer the field of psychology something?

Cynthia Langtiw 6:29

And yet, there’s so much that I’ve been offered and learned and engaged. And I feel like I’m in a different place of scope, and impact in terms of what I can offer. And that’s where I am now. I’m at this precipice where all of these ideas have been swirling, and I’ve been working and doing an offering. But all of these ideas are swirling and converging, in really interesting and beautiful ways. And figuring out what’s next for me, figuring out how I want to use my scope of influence and knowledge to really impact in the way that I think that I’m meant to impact and to not shrink back from that, because even saying that out loud, feels hottie, right? And there’s a way that as a black woman, I’ve been taught my place, if you will, or I guess books have tried to teach me my place.

Cynthia Langtiw 7:27

I’ve embodied my grandmother’s places, if you will, and understood that there’s a reason that I am here in this space, and embodying what I do, and that my life is meant to impact in a particular way and that I, not only can I not shrink back, but I have a moral obligation to not shrink back from the space that I meant to step into. And that’s a lot to hold.

Candice Wu 8:00

It is.

Cynthia Langtiw 8:02

You know, I’m a mom of two boys and of course, that’s a role that I embody, hopefully, as a primary role, they see that, but then balancing all of these other ways that I think that I’m meant to be in the world, and in our field and in people’s lives, but then also, on pages and other places, is the precipice I’m on right now.

Candice Wu 8:29

Yeah, and it’s like, it feels like almost like a beautiful, I don’t know, challenge, a beautiful struggle. And like the experience of not drinking back.

Cynthia Langtiw 8:40

Yes.

Candice Wu 8:40

And being in yourself, being with what you have here. And I’m reminded of, I watched a video of you speaking

Cynthia Langtiw 8:49

Oh, my.

Candice Wu 8:50

Yeah, I’ve got a couple of them. But one of them, you shared a quote by Margaret Mead: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

Cynthia Langtiw 9:09

Yeah.

Candice Wu 9:10

I’m just bringing that back now, as you’re saying, “Who am I to think I can make an impact?” and “who are you not too?”

Cynthia Langtiw 9:17

Right.

Candice Wu 9:17

I also wonder, when you said that quote, in that speaking engagement you had, you teared up almost or?

Cynthia Langtiw 9:27

Yeah.

Candice Wu 9:27

Yeah, and I wondered what touches you about this?

Cynthia Langtiw 9:30

You know, it’s funny that you say that, because I feel really emotional right now, is thinking about that, because I think there’s a way that we can feel so disconnected and alone in this world. And feel like it’s so big in particular, in this season, in the US, where it can just feel somewhat hopeless, right?

Candice Wu 9:53

Yeah.

Cynthia Langtiw 9:54

And it can feel like, “Whoa, what is my smile going to do? What is my banding together with my students going to do? What is my, working in my coalition for immigrant mental health going to do?”

Cynthia Langtiw 10:08

And then it reminds me of every single movement, every single change that’s occurred has happened, because people believed and came together and it wasn’t necessarily a, you know, a huge swell of people. But as people who have a sense of social justice, a sense of integrity, a sense of purpose, and they come together in that purpose, and they band together, and they lift each other up, you know, as one person sort of starts to not believe that lifted up by one, and they’re the ones who lift up the next day.

Cynthia Langtiw 10:46

And I think of all of the social movements, I mean, it’s Black History Month, right? And then having these conversations with my kids, you know, I think about our, you know, current immigration situation, crisis, emergency, there are many ways that we can think about it. But I think about the work that I’m doing with the Coalition on Immigrant Mental Health, and how each day, you know, we’re chipping away at some of the injustice that’s going on and it is actually making a difference. I think of all the movements across time, and space, right., and how it was always spurred on by a small group of people who said, “You know what, we’re not going to stand for this anymore.” Right?

Cynthia Langtiw 11:35

I think of my work right now, part of what like, really, I was at a conference, I’m on the board of Point Source Youth, and our aim is to end youth homelessness. And there’s a way that when I first you know, became a member of the board, I thought, yeah, we’re going to work to help some kids who don’t have a home and in that moment, looking at that room, at that conference, when I read that quote, what got me emotional was, here was 500 people, right, and I looked out into the audience and each and every one of us, in that moment, believed that we would end youth homelessness in the US.

Cynthia Langtiw 12:20

And there’s no way that was, so like, I felt like, I was levitating. And I believe that wholeheartedly today, that we will end youth homelessness, and it’s this group of people who’ve been chipping away in their offices with one or two trans youth who don’t know where to go or what to do, or who are living on the street or, and for us to all come together, having had hopeless moments. But in that moment to look into each other’s eyes and say, this room of people will end youth homelessness, period, full stop.

Candice Wu 13:03

I can even feel that here.

Cynthia Langtiw 13:05

Yeah. Heavy.

Candice Wu 13:06

Yeah.

Cynthia Langtiw 13:07

It’s like, oh, my gosh. And that’s the thing, like, that’s what happens. That’s the power of love and purpose, and community.

Cynthia Langtiw 13:19

So yeah, I get emotional, whenever I think about it. Right.

Candice Wu 13:23

Yeah. It’s incredible. And just that little desire can become united with so many other pieces of people that are desiring that, too. It just grows.

Cynthia Langtiw 13:36

Yeah, absolutely.

Candice Wu 13:39

So we want to swing back to knowing and Harriet the Spy, and wanting to know everything in the world, and you are working on in your qualitative research, ways of knowing.

Cynthia Langtiw 13:54

Yeah.

Candice Wu 13:55

Sounds like you’re challenging ways of knowing. Can you tell us about it?

Cynthia Langtiw 13:57

Yeah, there’s so many, there are a couple of different things floating around for me, and one of them is this idea, I have a couple of ideas for some books that I think will help us to tap into how we transform. So one of them actually came from one of my students, who is now a professor and teaching at the Chicago School. But, it’s called Interlogs and the whole idea of an Interlog is a process that happens while you are researching that transforms who you are and that in turn, transforms the work. So I’ll give you an example of this Interlog. I’ll give you two briefly.

Cynthia Langtiw 14:37

So the student of mine, now professor, Dr. Elena Pinkston, was working on this beautiful qualitative dissertation, and which she was asking first-time mothers, their phenomenological experience of showing. And that was the title of her dissertation, which I thought was great at the time, and she disclosed this in her dissertation, so I feel comfortable disclosing it with you, and your audience.

Cynthia Langtiw 15:04

Her aunt, who was close in age to her was pregnant, and so she’s doing this dissertation, talking to pregnant women and her aunt is pregnant, it’s really exciting. And during her dissertation process, her aunt actually loses the baby and it was devastating. And she had to hit pause, and she didn’t know what to do with that, because here she was continuing in these interviews with these women who were so excited and their babies would be born. You know, it was a really hard time for her. So she had paused and she wrote a chapter called Interlogs. And it was how she wrestled with her own, right, transformation, as a result of the interviews of these women, but also this event that happened in her family’s life.

Cynthia Langtiw 15:56

And so she wrote this chapter called Interlog and she included it in her dissertation. Because it indelibly influenced the way that she viewed the rest of the interviews, but also how she interpreted her data, understood her data, and then moved forward with the dissertation. And so this idea of interlogs became so powerful to me. And I, you know, I’ve had several other students who have had significant challenges and the way that it comes up, it’s really interesting. It’s typically a time delay.

Cynthia Langtiw 16:33

I had another student who is Muslim and was writing a dissertation looking at millennials Muslims and the impact of 9/11 on their day to day lives. Right. Beautiful dissertation, really important, necessary needed, we need to understand their phenomenological experience.

Cynthia Langtiw 17:00

Well, it took the student much longer than she had anticipated and there were all these stories that she told herself, right, about why, about her writing, about not being committed, about all kinds of stories. But then when we sat down, she actually completed the interviews. She’s a great writer. And we’re trying to figure out like, why this wasn’t getting done. Well, she was interviewing people who looked like her, who had her experience, at her dissertation defense, we ended up getting her moving and have that conversation and had a conversation, which was actually an interview about her own interlog, her own transformation, her own reflection. And we’re able to move her through the dissertation successfully.

Cynthia Langtiw 17:55

And she’s out practicing now doing wonderful work with her community and with many others as well. But that would not have happened with that level of reflection on the stories that she was telling herself.

Cynthia Langtiw 18:09

I mean, to give you a sense of it, like, during her dissertation, we had her read some of the quotes, some clips, if you will, from her dissertation and she got so choked up that she couldn’t. And so I took the transcripts, and I want to read, and I got choked up, and I’m not a millennial-Muslim woman, you know, like, it was the things that she was reading, the stories that she was being told were so heavy to hold as a researcher, and they were her own story, right, in many ways.

Candice Wu 18:44

Yeah.

Cynthia Langtiw 18:45

And it was critical for the transformative process of the dissertation, the transformative process of doing research to be codified, and to be reflected, and to understand how we are embodying a new way of being a researcher, as a result of what we’re learning in our research. We can’t be removed. We’re not removed. This idea that we’re this objective researcher is a fallacy, and I want to debunk that.

Candice Wu 19:21

Oh, thank goodness, because it’s like, we are absolutely part of that story of what we’re seeing and researching, and —

Cynthia Langtiw 19:30

Of course.

Candice Wu 19:31

It always comes from a specific lens. So the more we can be honest about that and congruent with that, sound like we can glean so much more out of the whole understanding.

Cynthia Langtiw 19:42

Yeah, and clarifying our own lens, right? In clarifying our own lens, and I teach qualitative research, and I have this soapbox around validity and rigor, and it’s not because I want my students to get published, although if they want to, that’s great. But for me, right, clarifying one’s lens, which is for me, what rigor and validity and research, in general, is about, is about the primacy of the voice of our participants. And our participants come to us, and they share these powerful stories, and they trust that we will represent them in a way that will make a difference in the world. And it’s critical as researchers, not just qualitative, I would say quantitative too, as researchers, that we clarify our lens. So the clarity of the data is the participant’s voice and not our own. So —

Candice Wu 20:41

Yes.

Cynthia Langtiw 20:41

Yeah, that’s all so important to me, and particularly, because much of the research that I end up doing, ends up being with groups of people who have traditionally been marginalized, or treated poorly, or targeted in a negative way. So people of color or other folks in the world, and so for me, the idea of being a researcher and training and teaching researchers who would see people holy, who would, you know, have a sense of sacredness, of somebody offering you their story or their information, and take that seriously it’s so important. Decolonizing methodologies, right? I’ve been wrestling with that. Like, what does it mean to decolonize our work?

Candice Wu 21:13

What does that mean?

Cynthia Langtiw 21:34

Yeah, exactly. I’ve been wrestling with it a lot. In many ways. It’s about understanding the unique, but also situated perspective of the person who’s sitting in front of us, but also recognizing the ways that we’ve been steeped in a particular way of knowing, right, and how to unpack for myself, for ourselves, that way of knowing.

Cynthia Langtiw 21:59

So I’ll give you an example. I was having a consultation around the dissertation with someone this week and so this person has a wonderful dissertation topic, they, in their dissertation chair have a different idea about how to work through it. But their question is a clear qualitative question and so this person’s question was, well, what group will I compare it to?

Cynthia Langtiw 22:28

And I said, “Well, who says you have to compare in this particular dissertation?

Cynthia Langtiw 22:35

You know, this group of people, this targeted, marginalized group of people is one, that you have a unique niche perspective on. You have a sense of why they haven’t been asked these important questions about their teaching strategies, right? Why do we need to compare them to another group? Right? Their voice is uniquely important but there’s a way that this person has been steeped in sort of the capitalistic Adam Smith The Wealth of Nations, compare, contrast, there has to be a winner, there has to be a loser. Right? Like, all of those narratives are so deeply ingrained and for me, decolonizing methodologies is unplugging from that and saying, “This group of people has a really important story to tell us. Let’s sit and focus on them.” Period. No comparison.

Candice Wu 23:32

Yes. Well, and I think about what you’re saying, with research and just broadening this to the idea of life, and you know, us, as researchers in our own lives, us, interacting with people and seeing what happens, us decolonizing our ways of seeing ourselves and others and the way we looked at what we think we know, and how our Interlog like that, if I’m getting it right, like, what goes on in us that influences how we see the other person?

Cynthia Langtiw 24:06

Yeah, exactly.

Candice Wu 24:08

Yeah. What are your thoughts on that?

Cynthia Langtiw 24:11

Yeah, you know, taking a step back, for me, the whole idea, one of the reasons that it’s so hard to unpack decolonization is because, I, myself have been so steeped in my ways of knowing, right? Like, I kiss my boys’ goodnight and say, you’re the best, and my kids are great. They’re awesome. They’re like, why do they have to be the best?

Cynthia Langtiw 24:37

Right? That’s even like, troubling that language for myself?

Candice Wu 24:43

Right.

Cynthia Langtiw 24:44

It’s another way of traveling the idea of decolonizing in my everyday life, you know, that the competition, right, like that idea, is a very Western way of being and so how can I think about other ways of being in the world, giving my work across the world? And I think for all of us to be troubling, right, the ways that we are steeped in knowing, and I think, you know, to go back to my grandmother, you know, Stephanie, is one of my grandmothers and Andrea, the other one, these two women, and I love, I say this with pride, like neither of the two of them could read or write. Right. And, their two, of course, of the most brilliant women that I knew, that I know and so for me, I knew at a very young age that they could not formally read or write and that they were brilliant. So there was a way that when I got to grad school, and I’m learning about assessment, right, and they’re looking at about other ways of knowing, I thought, well, yeah, of course, there are people who are smart and don’t know how to read.

Candice Wu 26:02

Yes.

Cynthia Langtiw 26:04

My grandmothers, right, and even my grandmother, Andrea, I’ve never met anybody who could recite more Psalms than she could from the Bible. She was a deeply spiritual woman. And when I think about that, right, like for someone who didn’t read or write, but then to memorize the scripture and hold them in her heart, because that was important to her, how brilliant and I always knew that.

Cynthia Langtiw 26:30

And so for me, there was a way that that I was always troubling, sort of these rigid ways of knowing and also unknowing, and the wobbliness and the unsteadiness of unknowing and how that unknowing place is the birthplace of creativity, like you can’t be fully creative and like, burst forth from a place of like, solid knowledge all the way through. There has to be a place of unpacking, unknowing, of wobbliness, right, in which we get steady, right, because that it’s so important.

Cynthia Langtiw 27:12

So like all of it, the knowing, the unknowing and moving through, and finding the courage to sit in that unknowing, wobbly place is another part of, sort of my unpacking of knowledge and ways of knowing, right? Now, that I think, in my clinical work it’s certainly present, in my research it’s present. But in my life, you know, as a parent, holy cow, I always joke that I was an amazing clinical child psychologist before I had —

Cynthia Langtiw 27:46

But now, I’m like, I hope I didn’t break them, you know?

Cynthia Langtiw 27:53

I think I’m doing okay now, but I check in with them every so often “Am I doing okay guys? How are you feeling?” You know?

Cynthia Langtiw 28:02

I said to my son once we were, just cuddling once, I said, “Sweetie, how are you doing? You know, am I doing okay as a mom?” And he’s 12, and really sweet, and we’re cuddling, and then he gets up. And he looks like he’s 20. And he looks at me, he’s like, I think you’re doing the best you can.

Cynthia Langtiw 28:29

Like, such a sweet moment.

Cynthia Langtiw 28:34

But he was so honest.

Candice Wu 28:35

So much wisdom.

Cynthia Langtiw 28:38

You know, there’s some room for improvement, but you’re doing okay, you know, but also acknowledging that he gets it, that I’m trying. Right. So, I think that being a parent has certainly been, you know, a wonderful, wobbly place for me.

Candice Wu 28:57

Yes.

Cynthia Langtiw 29:01

I’m still I’m learning so much. But then it translates into other places in my life, too. And as a teacher, it helps me to sit with my students in their places of discomfort as their unknowing, and to walk as — in companionship with them, right, as their unknowing and to trust their unknowing process. And I —

Candice Wu 29:31

You hold such a save space then.

Cynthia Langtiw 29:33

Right, I tell them, you will get frustrated with me, because you’ll come to me and want an answer and you’ll get more questions, and you’ll leave cursing at me under your breath, and then you’ll come back feeling so proud that you uncovered the answers that you already know.

Cynthia Langtiw 29:52

Like, you, already have, right, that you felt like you wanted me to tell you, but there would be no sense of pride, no sense of ownership, no sense of, “I did this.”

Candice Wu 30:07

Yeah, we have to find the answers for ourselves, the ones that are most important, is what I’m getting from that.

Cynthia Langtiw 30:14

Yeah.

Cynthia Langtiw 30:15

There are ways that the whole idea weaves its way. But it’s also because I have a firm belief that we have so much of what we need to know and that we need to uncover it and unpack it and come to our truth. And that there’s an importance in silence, and sitting with to uncover the things that are already there.

Cynthia Langtiw 30:41

And so that’s why, I mean, one of the reasons I appreciate your podcast so much, because you focus on the sense of oneself, and meditation, and sitting with because there’s so much knowledge that we already have in our spirits, in our core, from across time and space, the ancestors, right, like are here with us, have been here with us, they knew us before we knew, and we ourselves, our ancestors that know, our great-grandchildren. And we’re already offering something to them, right, like in this moment. And it’s, like, when I think about that level of connection, I think like, how can I feel lost? How can I feel lost when I’m so connected to the past and to the future? You know?

Candice Wu 31:35

That’s a beautiful image and energy, like, the connection of what’s already there, anchoring us to who we are.

Cynthia Langtiw 31:44

Yeah.

Candice Wu 31:49

I just have one last question for you, Cynthia. What’s your indulgence or guilty pleasure right now?

Cynthia Langtiw 31:56

Oh, trashy novels.

Candice Wu 31:59

Like what?

Cynthia Langtiw 32:00

I won’t name them. The last one I got from the library, I thought, really? Is he not wearing a shirt?

Candice Wu 32:13

That’s hilarious! It’s like we have to let go somewhere, you know, when the rest of our lives are so important.

Cynthia Langtiw 32:21

Yes.

Candice Wu 32:23

Taking our energies, yeah, something has to give.

Cynthia Langtiw 32:27

Absolutely! I love them. I indulge. Of course, I have, you know, my book club with our high-end books and my psychology books, and my trauma books. But yeah, the trashy novels. They’re my indulgence.

Candice Wu 32:41

So if I see, like, a book covered in like, a black paper just to be hidden from — next to your travel books, I may take a peak —

Cynthia Langtiw 32:55

Gladly.

Candice Wu 32:57

Oh, funny.

Candice Wu 32:58

Well, thank you so much. This is so much fun talking with you, Cynthia, and you bring so much wisdom, vibrancy, and life. You’re such an advocate for people and I just appreciate you so much.

Cynthia Langtiw 33:11

Thank you so much. I am honored. I have such a respect for you and your work, and your podcasts that to be asked to be a part of this community, a deep honor and a sacred time. Thank you.

Candice Wu 33:25

Thank you so much. Where can people find you, Cynthia?

Cynthia Langtiw 33:29

Sure!

Cynthia Langtiw 33:29

So, I can be reached — my email is CLangtiw@thechicagoschool.edu. I hope that you can open those links. My LinkedIn is also a profile for me and I have a page on the Chicago School. So all of those are places that you can reach me, and feel free to email me or you know, send a LinkedIn message.

Candice Wu 33:55

Beautiful. We will put all those on the show notes so it’ll be easily accessible. And thank you so much.

Cynthia Langtiw 34:02

Thank you.

Candice Wu 34:07

I’m so honored that Cynthia was able to be on the show today. Thank you so much, Cynthia, and thank you all out there listening. I hope that this was interesting for you, especially her conversation about Interlogs and how transformation, our own transformation affects how we are seeing the world. And she specifically was speaking on research, but I feel as we spoke about, touched about briefly, how that is so much a reality in our life right now that we’re waking up to, that we are showing up more. I’m seeing this happen more and more with people, that they’re showing up more with who they are and what they’re experiencing as valuable, and not something to hide and pretend that we are this blank slate, and pretend that we just come with nothing and are seeing the world completely neutrally. It’s just not the case.

Candice Wu 35:01

Of course, we’re affected by who we are and what energy and material we’re looking at the outside of us. What kind of person we’re experiencing outside of us. And it’s that kind of connection with ourselves, an interaction with what comes up, that is the healing work. That is the power of what energies we bring to the table and what wants to be seen and uncovered, so that connection can happen with even more, not just ourselves, but with others and it’s valuable. It’s worthwhile.

Candice Wu 35:41

So thank you so much, Cynthia, for bringing that to the table and your important work in the world.

Candice Wu 35:47

I encourage you to check out part two of this episode, especially if you’re interested in trauma in relationships and also in betrayal. We talked about feeling brokenhearted where things don’t feel complete, and that there’s an opportunity to rebuild within trauma or experiences that are very challenging.

Candice Wu 36:05

We also explore our ancestors and how the past and the future can anchor and ground us and resources in the now, as well as how in relationship, in intimate relationships, it’s often that there’s trauma involved when things become challenging. We explore true intimacy as well as boundaries and betrayal trauma that’s on a micro and macro level with people as well as in the black community.

Candice Wu 36:31

If you’re interested in looking at Interlogs for yourself, and how that can touch into your personal life, go ahead and look out for her guided experience that’s going to come out later this week, where you can be guided by Cynthia through this process of looking at your own inner transformation and exploring how that’s coming to life for you.

Candice Wu 36:57

If you’re just listening in and you want to find the link for that, you can find it at CandiceWu.com/cynthia.

Candice Wu 37:03

I am leaving today’s conversation with a great deal of energy and love and most of all acceptance, as Cynthia was talking about unknowing and the ways that we’ve been steeped in a certain kind of knowing which I have to.

Candice Wu 37:27

It’s very important that we’re embracing all the parts of ourselves because that brings us forward to more knowing and a different kind of compassion for ourselves in each other, ways of compassion and being seen, things being seen and unsilenced to that, bring us to a greater fullness. So with that, I look forward to seeing you next time on the Embody Podcast.

Candice Wu 0:00

This is part two of the episode with special guest, Cynthia Langtiw, and in this episode, we talked about trauma, how to utilize your own resources and feel connection and wholeness with yourself, within trauma experiences, trauma in relation to couples, and healing in relationships as well as the experience of betrayal trauma, when the hand that feeds you is also the hand that hurts you, and we talked about that on a micro and macro level.

Candice Wu 0:30

Hello and welcome. You’re listening to the Embody Podcast, a show about remembering and embodying your true nature, inner wisdom, embodied healing, and self-love.

Candice Wu 0:44

My name is Candice Wu, and I’m a holistic healing facilitator, intuitive coach, and artist sharing my personal journey of vulnerability, offering meditations and guided healing support, and having co-creative conversations with healers and wellness practitioners from all over the world.

Candice Wu 1:05

This episode is supported by my listeners who have contributed on Patreon. If you found the podcast to be interesting, inspiring, healing or supportive for you and you want a way to contribute back, feel free to check out my page at CandiceWu.com/patreon where you can donate even just as little as $1 a month to support the production of the podcast, and all of the love and details that go into every single episode. Thank you in advance for considering to donate, it really means a lot to me. And every single person that’s on there, just also adds in their energy towards the life of the podcast. So thank you, all of you out there.

Candice Wu 1:52

I’m thrilled to have Cynthia back for a second day here on the podcast. The podcast that went out yesterday, part one, was all about being your best voice, believing in change and healing. It was about connection, ancestry, and lineage, as well as the decolonizing methodologies in research and in life.

Candice Wu 2:14

I really wanted Cynthia to come back to talk more about trauma because she is a trauma expert, and she’s just somebody that holds space for so many people that are suffering in the world. She’s worked with refugee populations. She’s worked with relationships and couples, as well as individuals who are experiencing trauma or have, at some point in their life. And she sees people with such a beauty and wholeness that brings people to see their own wholeness.

Candice Wu 2:44

If you haven’t listened to the first part of the episode yet, go ahead and find it on my website at CandiceWu.com/cynthia or CandiceWu.com/ep64. I encourage you to listen because it’s truly inspiring and even brought me to feeling this radiance within myself. Without further ado, let’s jump in and talk to Cynthia.

Candice Wu 3:13

Welcome back, Cynthia! It’s fantastic to have you here on the show again.

Cynthia Langtiw 3:17

Thank you for having me back. I’m excited to continue our conversation.

Candice Wu 3:21

Yeah, you know, I was just so happy with our conversation and inspired, and I felt this vibrance and brilliance in my whole being. And I know that you work with a lot of trauma and trauma is just such an important topic of the Embody Podcast. A lot of people are tuning in because they have trauma or they know of somebody or they’re just revealing to themselves, maybe I do have some trauma. And so I wanted to hear your wisdom on that. And specifically, I have read somewhere that you were talking about supporting people and utilizing their own resources to help them trauma. So I’d love for you to talk about trauma and how you support that.

Cynthia Langtiw 4:08

Yeah. I really appreciate that question so deeply.

Cynthia Langtiw 4:12

And I’ve come in my, you know, years of doing this work to realize how pervasive trauma is. And so that’s a bit heavy and heavy to hold. But I also realize the spectrum and so I think many people would shy away from the term, trauma, you know, big T or little t, because maybe they think of a big event that happened.

Cynthia Langtiw 4:37

But what I find, and I did a workshop a couple of years ago, and I borrowed from Brené Brown, thinking about being wholehearted and one of the things that connected for folks was the idea of being broken-hearted, like having pieces of yourself that don’t feel completely connected.

Cynthia Langtiw 4:54

And so when I think about trauma and the experience of trauma over the lifetime, I think about broken-heartedness, and how we’re meant to live wholeheartedly. But these breaks in relationships, or these things that happened to us that we experience is traumatic, leave us not feeling like we’re able to live wholeheartedly. And so that gets to how I think about the impact of trauma. So much of the trauma that’s long-lasting, is interpersonal.

Cynthia Langtiw 5:25

Now, there are some things that happen. So say, a fire or a car accident, they are not necessarily interpersonal, but so much of the trauma that I see in the world, and my clients, you know, in my day to day life, is interpersonal trauma. And I find that to be especially difficult when it happens early on in life when we’re having less than optimal experiences, from which to build, because that’s when we build our foundational resources. We learn how to have an interaction with someone, have it be difficult, but get resources from our parents or caregivers, about how to move through. We learn to feel sad. We learn to feel angry. We learn to feel happy. We learn to hold all of these resources and being able to make —

Candice Wu 6:17

Or, we don’t.

Cynthia Langtiw 6:18

Oh, we don’t, right. And that’s why we ought to, I should say that’s where we ought to be learning those —

Candice Wu 6:24

That’s right.

Cynthia Langtiw 6:25

Fundamental building blocks and resources that we draw upon later on, right, in order to move forward. If we don’t get those initial building blocks, that becomes really difficult later on to even notice one, that we don’t have those resources, but then to had a move on in life. And so when I talk about being resourced, I mean, some of these very basic building blocks, how to communicate. What we had to understand? What we’re feeling? How to communicate what we’re feeling? How to understand what we need? How to ask for what we need, right?

Cynthia Langtiw 7:04

The beauty is, though, when we realize that some of these resources are lacking, or not there, or were not available, we can start building them. So it’s never too late to learn how to notice your emotions, to notice how something that happens to you is sitting in your body. I know that the whole somatic world is so important for you and your work and it is for me, as well. Like, to notice, like, what is happening in our bodies in response to a stimulus, any stimulus. What’s happening emotionally, right, and then to be able to use some of those, and build resources from those is so important.

Candice Wu 7:04

Absolutely.

Cynthia Langtiw 7:51

And then the world opens up in terms of resources, right? Connecting with our emotions, connecting with ourselves, and then being able to connect with others in meaningful ways, in ways where we can share and ways where we can emote, in ways where we can offer love, guidance, support, in ways that we can get love, guidance, support, right. True, deep emotional connection happens when we’re connected to ourselves first, and that takes understanding, important resources and then building upon them. I hope that starts to answer your question.

Candice Wu 8:32

Yeah, you know, I am hooking into that experience of most trauma being within an interpersonal relationship and in the context of relationship, therefore needing a relationship to support the healing. And, you know, where do we learn the building blocks of how to feel something in ourselves, by ourselves?

Cynthia Langtiw 8:54

Yeah.

Candice Wu 8:55

If we don’t have that we just don’t have it.

Cynthia Langtiw 8:57

We don’t. Yeah, and it’s so important, right.

Candice Wu 9:02

Yeah, and the other thing I was thinking, what you said early on in this question, something I’ve been thinking about a lot and something people ask me is, do you see practically everything is relating to trauma? And I see trauma as something that’s incomplete, that wanted some completion in some way, whether that’s staying with a feeling that just didn’t get enough space or time or a fight, or something being said that felt like it wanted to happen instinctually, but didn’t get a chance to, or protect it in a way.

Cynthia Langtiw 9:38

Yeah.

Candice Wu 9:39

And so I just see these little and big things happening to us all of the time. Like, we don’t scream at our boss because, you know, we want to protect our job, right?

Cynthia Langtiw 9:53

Right.

Candice Wu 9:54

And that has a whole, perhaps a whole branch of other experiences linked with it. But do you see it that way? Or what is your thought about that?

Cynthia Langtiw 10:03

I think that’s such a beautiful way of putting it, things that aren’t finished, you know. Be it the most minute, seemingly, I should say seemingly minute fissures, right? Maybe you didn’t get something you wanted, or there was a need that, a want that felt like a need that didn’t get much, that you don’t even realize in the moment or you know, as babies, that happens, when there’s no language. Actually, there are no words, I should say there’s, you know, some language in terms of interaction, and so I think that really links into what I was thinking about in terms of being broken-hearted, right? These events, emotions, these things that happen, that don’t have resolution, or that leave us feeling not complete, right?

Cynthia Langtiw 10:51

But I think that sometimes those are, I think of those as opportunities, right? I think of moments that we don’t get what we need, or what we want, I should say, as opportunities to build, then move towards communicating about that need with our caregiver? How do we let them know? How does the caregiver then help repair by offering what it is that we need?

Cynthia Langtiw 11:23

So I don’t think that those fissures are necessarily problematic. They’re problematic when they aren’t complete. When there isn’t resolution. When we don’t learn how to move through, right. And that’s when we’re left brokenhearted.

Cynthia Langtiw 11:39

So I think the idea of not having a resolution, not completing, from the minute to the very large is so important, you know?

Cynthia Langtiw 11:50

Whenever someone tells me of something that happened to them, that has left them feeling sad, or traumatized, if they use those words, I asked them what happened when you told someone? What happened when you communicate it to someone? And what I found, by and large, is that the events that happen are often very painful and difficult. But what many people experience as a second trauma, and sometimes even more impactful is how someone else responded, either callously or not fully, or not completely, because they weren’t resourced, or negatively, or harshly, right, has such a long-lasting impact. The words that were said, the look on a face, has such a long-lasting impact.

Cynthia Langtiw 12:51

Similarly, when someone has had something really difficult happen, and they receive love, when they communicate, they receive compassion, they receive vulnerability in response to their own vulnerability, there’s such a different way that they talk about in their experience, you know. And so, I think that that’s another really important piece of understanding the intense power of pain, but also healing that can and I think it must happen in the context of relationship.

Candice Wu 13:31

Absolutely.

Cynthia Langtiw 13:32

Yeah.

Candice Wu 13:33

That’s beautiful. Thank you.

Cynthia Langtiw 13:35

You know, the other piece to that, that just made me think, and I think so much of it happens in the context of relationship, but for me, as someone who is a lifelong reader, I think if I wasn’t a clinical psychologist or professor, I would be a librarian or a spy…

Cynthia Langtiw 13:52

I’ll be a librarian because from the end, especially as an immigrant child, reading books was how I entered the world, like, how I came to understand and make sense of the world. And sometimes seeing another person, even a fictional character’s experience, resonated so profoundly and deeply within for me, that it changed me.

Cynthia Langtiw 14:25

There are ways that I’ve been healed by hearing and seeing a character in the book heal. There are ways that I felt validated, like, I think about Pecola Breedlove, from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. I’ve only ever read that book once, because it shook my soul to know that another little girl had this experience of being black in America. And, so there are ways that I’ve felt so seen in the context of a novel, that it’s overwhelming. And I think that’s another really beautiful way that we can connect with ourselves and with others interpersonally.

Candice Wu 15:11

Absolutely. I am just thinking about a book that I read when I was in fourth grade. Oh, goodness, what is it called? It was a book about the Holocaust and I can just see the cover, it’s red, it’s got two children on it, and the star of David right in the middle of it. And, I was just enthralled with reading about the Holocaust and reading stories like this and it was a fictional book, but just what you’re saying, something in it touched me even at that really young age and I had no clue why, you know? I am a Chinese-American girl that time and who knows why I’m just like, engrossed in this, and it’s terrifying, yet, also very healing.

Candice Wu 16:03

And later in life, I just felt very connected with something in me. I can name it as maybe it was a past life, experience of being Jewish or something, but aside from that, even, there was something in me about hiding in this life. And so whatever it was, there was just so much there, that was in an unspoken version of me, but read through these stories. So, I completely relate to what you’re saying and it’s, — we can find so much in story.

Cynthia Langtiw 16:43

And I think that speaks to relationship too, like, there’s a relationship that I had with, Pecola Breedlove rate and then with Toni Morrison, there’s a relationship that you had with these two characters, that was meaningful for you, right?

Candice Wu 17:00

Absolutely, and you said to me, one time, when we were speaking, feeling grounded across time and space was really important with finding resource around healing trauma, knowing you’re not just in this moment by yourself.

Cynthia Langtiw 17:18

Yeah.

Candice Wu 17:19

That you’re with your ancestors as long as those to come and that really resonated with me. Can you say more?

Cynthia Langtiw 17:26

Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think, you know, with respect to literature, I think one of the things that can feel so difficult is when we feel untethered, unconnected, alone, and lonely, not just alone, but lonely, as if we are solitary in this world, and I realized one of the important resources for me, and I’m blessed to come from a line, and to have known, you know, through the really important matriarchs, my grandmothers, Andrea Hipolete and Stephanie being the two, that I think about most prominently, and they’re no longer here physically on earth with us, but they’re with me every day, you know, and in moments where I feel like, “Oh, my gosh, I had this task before me.” I often stand very still and call upon them, and I feel their courage, buoy me, you know. And I feel the courage of all the women whose shoulders on which they stood, you know, I feel the courage of my ancestors grounding me.

Cynthia Langtiw 18:39

And I also think about, like, you know, I have these two boys, and I think about who they’ll bring into the world, who they’ll love, you know, who will love them. And all of the progeny, like, who will come from my family and I feel grounded, both in the past with my grandmothers, but also with who and what’s to come and there’s the way that I can’t feel alone in the world, when I really ground myself in both the past and the future. And I feel tethered, but not torn, in both ways. And that’s such an important inner resource for me. And I think that, and I hope that my kids feel that way. I certainly know that my siblings feel that way. But I hope that more people really stopped to think about, you know, the ways that they can ground themselves, in the past and the future, and in the ways that they are.

Cynthia Langtiw 19:40

And sometimes that can be really challenging because it’s wonderful and amazing as my grandmothers are. I have these beautiful memories. But there are some painful memories, you know, in the past as well. And I know the important work that you do around intergenerational family work, that there’s some pain that can be there as well and as I say that knowing that those inner resources that come from the past and the future are complicated.

Candice Wu 20:13

Yeah.

Cynthia Langtiw 20:14

Yeah.

Candice Wu 20:14

Right.

Cynthia Langtiw 20:15

Yeah. And that’s very real as well and I honor that. I honor that it’s complex.

Candice Wu 20:22

Absolutely. It’s very real. Thank you. So you’re doing trauma work with couples as well and you were writing a book?

Cynthia Langtiw 20:32

Yes. So it’s one of the books that’s at the forefront of my spirit, you know, I feel like it’s not even something that I’ve come up with, but that it’s come to me. And, you know, in recent years, I’ve just come to seek so clearly, with all the amazing couples with whom I work, and I don’t know how people find me. But whenever a couple leaves my office, I think, wow, what amazing people I get to work with, you know, and I just feel so honored that they let me in their lives and let me in their couplehood.

Cynthia Langtiw 21:08

And what I found with almost all of the couples, if not all of the couples with whom I’ve worked, is that when there are significant challenges, that there often is trauma or multiple traumas that had been experienced, right. And so what happens is that, and often, in both members of the couple that have experienced significant trauma, that they’re working through or need to work through, or maybe never even realized, was situated in them as a traumatic experience or series of experiences.

Cynthia Langtiw 21:51

And so I find much of my work is helping them recognize, one, the trauma that they’ve experienced, and how it’s showing up in the context of relationship. How it’s keeping them from being vulnerable with each other. How — and there are moments that are happening around self-preservation, that are not about what’s happening in this moment, that are tethered to the past, connected to the past trauma, but are showing up right now. And so how can I be a compassionate, you know, partner, right? How can I understand this as related to the trauma, and so give some space for my partner to be and to work through? How can I, as the partner who is living out, working through a traumatic experience in the context of the here and now, communicate with my partner, what I’m learning about myself, what I’m understanding about myself, what I’m not understanding, or recognizing might not be related to what’s happening with this partner here, but maybe something that’s happened in the past.

Cynthia Langtiw 23:05

And I find that my work, as the psychologist in this space, is to offer some space to see the dynamics that are happening. What’s happening in the here and now? What’s related to your past trauma? What is being worked through right now? And how can we understand how all of it is situated together? It’s a really delicate dance. And, but it’s a dance that the couples are doing every day, and maybe not recognizing how it’s playing out for them.

Cynthia Langtiw 23:40

I keep coming back too in the work that I do with couples is how one of the things that we, you know, one of the papers that I read, years ago, must have been like 25 years ago, and it stayed with me, Susan Sands. And she’s, I think she comes from a self-psychology perspective. But the title of the paper, I think, was, What is Dissociated?

Cynthia Langtiw 24:02

And the preps of the paper was: what is dissociated, is connection, right? Like, so when somebody experiences a trauma, what happens is, it cuts off their ability to connect, right? And it was so powerful to me because it was so clear. And so when someone starts moving away in the context of relationship, a partner it’s because they’re trying to protect themselves. And so we talk about what it is they’re trying to protect, the way that they’re trying to disconnect as a means of self-preservation, and how at some point that was working for them. They had to do that, that was how they protected themselves. But that strategy is no longer working in the context of this relationship, because what you want to do is move closer to your partner, not away from your partner, right? You want to move towards intimacy and that disconnection, that lack of vulnerability, that self-protection and self-preservation is moving away from intimacy, rather two of them towards intimacy.

Cynthia Langtiw 25:14

And that’s a big ask, you know, that’s a big act for someone who has had to protect themselves and has used strategies that have kept them alive, in some cases, to say, Okay, I get it. It made total sense at some point in time. But right now, it’s not the strategy that’s helping you move towards your goal. And so how can we say thank you to that strategy and put it aside, while we’re trying to employ strategies that can help us move towards our goals in the here and now.

Candice Wu 25:50

I think that’s such a powerful experience to shed the past strategies and recognize they were helpful. And that feels to me, now, as you’re talking about it, one of the signals of trauma, you know, we keep using a strategy over and over, even when it’s not presently useful anymore. And we can get locked in that reaction or pattern, where we keep on doing the thing that’s not helpful to now because we have disconnected with the moment or with the vulnerability of now. And so, yeah, and you spoke about intimacy and we have talked in the past about intimacy, how to have true intimacy. Can you speak about that? What is true intimacy?

Cynthia Langtiw 26:42

Yeah, I mean, I think that we all desire to be, you know, our complete selves, and I talked about being able to like, the couples of whom I work to be able to walk in the door and feel like you can breathe free, right, you can be your whole self. You know, my good friend, Dr. Tracy Rogers, you know, talks about bringing your whole self to the table. She’s — and the importance of being able to bring your whole self —

Candice Wu 27:11

How does she say it? I love it.

Cynthia Langtiw 27:13

Your whole self. I love her so much.

Cynthia Langtiw 27:17

And it’s real and I say that with such fondness because she is a friend of my heart and someone with whom I can bring my whole self and being able to be laid bare before someone else, right? And have that be and know that that’s completely okay, you know, be able to be vulnerable. That’s the stuff of relationship, because it’s in that quivery, open, laid bare, vulnerable space, that we truly connect with another human being. Right?

Cynthia Langtiw 27:58

And what this quandary that I find, because I find that oftentimes, what we’re trying to do in relationship, the couples with whom I work, and I myself is put my best foot forward. But like, I want you to see the shiny parts. I want you to see the glimmer, I want you to see the glitz and how amazing I am, you know. We want our partners to say that we’re, you know, the gold standard. And yet, what breeds true intimacy are those more difficult moments, you know, the stuff that isn’t shiny, the stuff that’s patched over, but that needs to be unpatched and healed because it never healed in the first place. You know?

Cynthia Langtiw 28:46

And so that’s the paradox is that we want so much to be connected. We want to be connected. So we put on the mask, we put on the show, we put on the glitz, the glamour, the gold. And yet, the paradox is that it’s those quivery moments. It’s the patched up part. It’s the truth of who we are, that allows the vulnerability, that breeds that kind of authentic connection we’re actually looking for. Right?

Candice Wu 29:26

Yeah.

Cynthia Langtiw 29:27

We connect.

Candice Wu 29:29

Like, when you put it like that. Like, of course.

Cynthia Langtiw 29:34

We don’t connect, not really. I mean, yeah, we’re attracted to someone. But we fall in love, like, deeply in love with the parts of each other, that are quivery and vulnerable, and real and authentic.

Candice Wu 29:54

I could not say that better. Exactly. Well, and we become that glittery facade version of ourselves. Because it seemingly worked at some point.

Cynthia Langtiw 30:08

Sure.

Candice Wu 30:08

And we just keep ongoing —

Cynthia Langtiw 30:11

We do.

Candice Wu 30:13

And yet, our soul yearns to connect with the messy painful parts too.

Cynthia Langtiw 30:20

Yes. Absolutely.

Candice Wu 30:21

And so we want to see that in each other. We want to help each other to see those parts of ourselves.

Cynthia Langtiw 30:28

Yeah, and the more vulnerability, the more connection. If we’re able to accept ourselves and then accept the other and keep accepting the other. And so I see a big part of my work as a couple’s therapist, is to help, you know, partners, one, accept themselves and keep creating space for vulnerability, and true authentic connection, and to keep opening up that space. Right?

Cynthia Langtiw 31:11

I mean, that’s, yeah, that’s the work.

Candice Wu 31:15

Yeah, it is. And I find, in conjunction with that, keep accepting the other, and keep accepting yourself and the other and self. It’s such a fine balance. I guess just personally I have experienced accepting the other without accepting self, can tip over into that, and somehow neglected myself.

Cynthia Langtiw 31:44

Yeah.

Candice Wu 31:45

Or accepted. I think it’s a fine line of accepting someone’s vulnerability in their experience and what they’re sharing, but not accepting something that doesn’t feel good to you in terms of a treatment or way of relating or experience.

Cynthia Langtiw 32:07

I say this from deep experience with that very thing you just shared, Candice, that resonated for me so deeply. Where I was so accepting of the other, that I couldn’t even see myself anymore, which actually is a false acceptance of that other person, because I didn’t trust them enough to be completely myself, and so it wasn’t really accepting them. You know, I didn’t fully accept them if I don’t fully accept myself, and have boundaries for myself. Like, I can love you completely and say, this is how I’m going to love you from afar or up close, or we can continue this piece because it’s what’s right for both of us. Right?

Cynthia Langtiw 33:03

And so that, what you just said resonated so deeply there isn’t a way that I can deeply accept someone else or say that I do without being fully real, because then there’s a part of me that knows that what I’ll get in response, won’t be okay, won’t be enough. I’m not enough. So I have to shrink back or disappear in order to show up for this person, which isn’t trusting them and isn’t trusting their abilities.

Candice Wu 33:39

Their wholeness, their ability to accept you, to accept more or —

Cynthia Langtiw 33:47

Yeah.

Candice Wu 33:47

Be respectful or to hold that. Yeah.

Cynthia Langtiw 33:51

Yeah.

Candice Wu 33:52

I love how you described how that works in complete tandem.

Cynthia Langtiw 33:56

Yeah.

Candice Wu 33:56

Yes, it’s no separation.

Cynthia Langtiw 33:58

Right, and it takes so much courage to be in relationship. It takes so much self-compassion, compassion for others. It takes having clear and appropriate boundaries. So that’s something that we learn and if we didn’t learn, we can learn, right?

Cynthia Langtiw 34:19

And so it’s quite a bit of work to be, you know, fully in relationship. And yet, you know, it’s, I think it’s how we’re meant to be, not necessarily partnered. I’m talking about relationships, period. I absolutely believe that we were meant to be in deeply connected relationships and sometimes that looks like being partnered. Sometimes it looks like having, you know, a family relationship. Sometimes it looks like a best friendship. Sometimes it looks like X, Y, Z, a parent, a child. But I absolutely believe that we were meant to be in deep, authentic, connected relationships. We were and are built for it. I do.

Candice Wu 35:16

Absolutely. I can see. I feel that. Yeah. So there’s one other topic that I’m interested in, and let me know how you’re feeling now about it, is betrayal trauma, and both micro and macro levels of that.

Cynthia Langtiw 35:35

Yeah.

Candice Wu 35:36

Yeah. I just want to start with what you had written. I think somewhere in a profile about betrayal trauma. And you mentioned a psychologist, Jennifer, is it Freyd or Freid? That she identified betrayal traumas, a type of trauma that occurs when people or institutions on which a person depends for existence, significantly violate that person’s trust —

Cynthia Langtiw 36:03

Yeah.

Candice Wu 36:03

And well being, and that you mentioned it’s particularly harmful because one’s sense of trust, their connectedness, and their well being is compromised.

Cynthia Langtiw 36:13

Yeah, absolutely.

Cynthia Langtiw 36:15

And so for the years, you know, I worked with children, and I still do, and I saw this so clearly the confusion that happens when a child who is supposed to rely on their caregiver, right, they have to rely on their caregiver, is betrayed by that caregiver that I have found to be some of the most long-lasting, ingrained, embedded type of trauma, that’s the most difficult, from which to heal.

Cynthia Langtiw 36:49

And what I found over time is what Dr. Freyd shared, is that the mechanism that happens is that the very hand that supposed to care for you and feed you is the hand that slapping you and hurting you. And yet, you still need to be fed, in order to have sustenance and to live, your very survival depends upon you, figuring out how to manage this double-edged hand, if you will, that both feeds and hurts you. And so you figure out strategies, right, to both get the sustenance that you need from that hand, but to also know when to run away. No one to protect yourself, no one to — how to care for yourself.

Cynthia Langtiw 37:38

It’s a very unstable, difficult is an understatement, traumatic way to grow up, and I saw so many kids who had that double-edged hand, if you will, that sometimes fed them, sometimes hurt them. And they had to learn how to ingratiate themselves. They had to learn how to, you know, manage all of that, in order to survive. And so they came up with strategies to figure out how to do that. And so then, part of my work as a clinical psychologist with the kids who are now adults, right, who are couples, is to learn what patterns were learned in the context of that relationship. How to unlearn the patterns that weren’t helpful, and how to come up with strategies that are.

Cynthia Langtiw 38:32

What I came to realize, and I’m only going to touch upon this briefly because it’s so profound, so heavy, so large, that it gives me pause, is that very same pattern that I saw with the kids who became adults, who experienced betrayal trauma in the context of their caregiving relationship, that pattern, was happening on the micro-level, in the family, between parents and children or caregivers and children. But that pattern happens on a macro level.

Cynthia Langtiw 39:08

And I wrote a paper in which I reflected on how black children in particular, and both the Dominican Republic and the US, but I think that other people, children, experience this, experience betrayal trauma on a macro level. And what do I mean by this? What I mean is that there are structures in place that systematically discriminate and harm black youth, black children, black boys in particular and that is a form of betrayal trauma.

Cynthia Langtiw 39:46

So you have these black youth that are going to hospitals, to schools, to all of these systems that are supposed to care for them. And yet, within those systems, they are betrayed. They are actually harmed, right, the criminal justice system.

Cynthia Langtiw 40:06

As a mother of multiracial kids who present as black, my heart cannot comprehend what parents like Tamir Rice’s parents who was, you know, a 12-year-old boy, he was killed on a playground, what his parents must be experiencing?

Cynthia Langtiw 40:28

What Trayvon Martin’s parents must continue to experience?

Cynthia Langtiw 40:33

How on a macro level, these institutions are supposed to care for, you know, our children, and yet are systematically betraying them, is heady. And so what does that look like then in the work that I do? Right?

Cynthia Langtiw 40:53

In the work that I do, clients come in, and they’ve experienced betrayal trauma at the hands of their caregivers, but they’ve also experienced betrayal trauma on a macro level, and feel currently discriminated against and pained.

Cynthia Langtiw 41:09

And one of the things that I see as part of my job is to name that, to name that they should be treated better, to name that the feelings that they’re having are real, and a normative response. You know, psychologists talk about a healthy paranoia that some black people have, how that’s actually somewhat adaptive, right, in the face of this large scale, macro betrayal trauma.

Cynthia Langtiw 41:41

And I think that by naming that together, that we can begin to look at the psychological and emotional and spiritual impact, right, and also biological impact, right, like all of it, and begin to work on it, because we’re recognizing how large it is, and how these larger systems are complicit in terms of structural violence and systematic inequality.

Cynthia Langtiw 42:07

You know, the fact that school systems where people pay higher taxes are better, is just accepted, is unacceptable. Like, we just accept that as par for the course. That’s ridiculous.

Candice Wu 42:22

It is.

Cynthia Langtiw 42:24

And that’s part of the betrayal trauma that can happen on a macro level and I named that. And I named that as it related to how the clients that I see. How the people that I see working through their lives, experience the world and experience within themselves and can take that on as something that’s problematic about them. So similar to kids who have experienced betrayal trauma in the context of, you know, their caregiving relationships can take it on as they were bad. There’s something defective about them as a child that’s why it happened to them. I named that that was not the case. In a similar way, I named that for the clients that experienced betrayal trauma on a macro level.

Candice Wu 43:11

When you are talking about this, naming it, I was just thinking, how much of an impact that actually can have you to validate someone’s experience as real. And even if it’s the paranoia that is adaptive, whereas if someone said, well, you don’t have to be afraid or paranoid, like that, just invalidates everything, but when we can feel so helpless about this larger, macro-level betrayal and aggression and hurt, it can just feel heady, it can feel so big, like, what do we even do about it?

Cynthia Langtiw 43:56

Yeah.

Candice Wu 43:57

Reminded how these small droplets of validation and naming it, shifting just even a tiny, baby step away from silence and invalidation. It’s like homeopathy that can do so much for one individual and that can ripple out into their community or their loved one. Or, just being for themselves.

Cynthia Langtiw 44:25

Yeah.

Candice Wu 44:26

In that knowing of one person believed me, or felt me and understands my pain or suffering. It’s huge.

Cynthia Langtiw 44:35

Yeah. I love the way you put that homeopathy, and it is, right, like, that’s powerful.

Candice Wu 44:43

Yeah, like to not bypass how important these little tiny pieces of vulnerability can be and are.

Cynthia Langtiw 44:51

Absolutely.

Candice Wu 44:52

Yeah.

Candice Wu 44:55

Thank you for sharing these really important pieces, and I agree, it’s just so almost too profound and big to give it justice in the words here. But I appreciate what you’re doing and I feel that love for people comes through here in terms of people who are experiencing that on a very large level.

Cynthia Langtiw 45:26

Yeah.

Candice Wu 45:27

Thank you.

Cynthia Langtiw 45:28

That’s so meaningful to me. Thank you.

Candice Wu 45:32

It’s been incredible again to have you, to be talking with you, and for you to share what you’re working on and what’s inspiring you, what’s also paining you in your heart. And is there anything else you want to share?

Cynthia Langtiw 45:48

You know, I think I started all of this by saying we’re at our best when we’re connected to ourselves, and when we’re connected to others and this work that you’re doing to help reflect on how to do that is the stuff of life, and I so deeply appreciate it. Thank you, Candice.

Candice Wu 46:08

Thank you, Cynthia. I could not agree more with that for you and about you. And it’s just so wonderful that you exist, and you’re doing this work with people and that you exist as who you are in the world. And I look forward to the Interlog experience that you’re offering.

Cynthia Langtiw 46:30

I’m so excited.

Candice Wu 46:31

Thank you. Yes.

Candice Wu 46:35

Wonderful. Okay. Well, thank you so much. I learned so much. And let’s end it here, and just, I’m so grateful.

Candice Wu 46:46

It was such a pleasure to have Cynthia on the show and I’m so glad all of you are out there listening in. I hope it’s helpful to you and support you and finding some of your own belief in yourself, believe in your wholeness or even helps you see where you’re feeling broken hearted and where you want to take another step for yourself.

Candice Wu 47:09

Be sure to check out Cynthia’s experiential on Interlogs. In the first part of her episode, part one, she talks about Interlogs as a way of reflecting on your own process, if you’re a researcher, if you’re examining something and how your interaction affects the process, and what kind of transformation goes on within you, but she’s taking this to another level with Interlogs and opening up to, apply to anyone that’s looking at themselves and their process in any way. Maybe you’re an artist, maybe you’re doing healing work, or some sort of art, healing arts or something, that you can use this process to explore into yourself in a different way. So that episode will be coming out later this week. Look out for it. And again, you can find her full podcast with that experiential on the website with all the show notes and links at CandiceWu.com/cynthia or CandiceWu.com/ep64.

Candice Wu 48:10

Before you go, I’d love to invite you to hop onto my newsletter that comes out twice a month. This gives some updates about where I am in the world, what I’m healing and thinking about, as well as self-love notes that can support you in loving yourself more deeply, healing aspects of yourself, and it also keeps you up to date on any workshops or retreats that are happening. You can find everything at CandiceWu.com/embody.

Candice Wu 48:35

One last thing I want to mention is I encourage you to reach out to Cynthia if you’re interested in her work. If you’d like to stay in touch about her book that will be coming out. I’m not sure when, but if you want to stay in the loop, and if you want to contact her about speaking engagements, to invite her to your workplace or other places, reach out to her, the show notes are what will connect you directly.

Candice Wu 49:01

If you’re interested in reaching out to me to connect or to explore if we might be a good fit for healing work, feel free to reach out to me at CandiceWu.com/connect where you can set up a free 20-minute consultation and there’s no pressure to go forward. It’s 20 minutes we get together where we can talk about what you desire, what you want in your life for yourself, how you’re feeling and how you’re doing, and we can explore your next steps or check out how Constellations or Somatic Experiencing might support you. Or, I also give recommendations for other healers and therapists that may be a good fit for you. So that’s at CandiceWu.com/connect. I’m so glad you’re here and I hope you enjoyed this episode. See you next time on the Embody Podcast.

Introduction

Candice Wu 0:00

This is a special experience of Interlogs brought to you by Cynthia Lubin Langtiw.

Cynthia will explain what Interlogs is in a much better way. But if you want to hear the interviews that I’ve had with Cynthia, you can check out part one and part two, at CandiceWu.com/cynthia. There we talk about trauma in couple relationships, trauma in the world on a micro and macro level. We talked about belief in ourselves and the belief to create change in the world, and so many other beautiful things. She’s incredibly inspiring. So without further ado, here’s Cynthia.

Hello and welcome. You’re listening to the Embody Podcast, a show about remembering and embodying your true nature, inner wisdom, Embodied Healing, and self-love.

My name is Candice Wu, and I’m a holistic healing facilitator, intuitive coach, and artist sharing my personal journey of vulnerability, offering meditations and guided healing support and having co-creative conversations with healers and wellness practitioners from all over the world.

Hello From Cynthia

Cynthia Lubin Langtiw 1:17

Hello, my name is Cynthia Lubin Langtiw and I am a licensed clinical psychologist and I’m also a qualitative researcher.

And I want to walk you through a process around a really interesting liminal space that I’ve been exploring called Interlogs. So what are Interlogs you might ask?

Interlogs, with respect to qualitative research or formative experience or chapter in the qualitative research process that has the possibility of shaping and influencing the rest of the process.

The events or experiences of the Interlog can be directly or tangentially related to the actual research topic and they bring relief or different perspectives that can make the research process more personal.

Interlogs both clarify the process as they muddy the waters. Interlogs are stored in nature. And with respect to data analysis, interlogs are a critical aspect of bracketing or understanding our lens, that has the power and potential to transform the qualitative research process.

I want to take a step back as we’re thinking about being embodied and creative and think more broadly, as writers, as creators, as musicians, as inventors, as parents, as human beings, and whatever spaces in which we’re creating.

I want us to think about how we approach a particular topic, how we researched that topic, the lens with which we approach that topic. And I want us to think about the process that happens for us personally, as we engage in a professional topic, right?

There’s a reason that we chose the particular topic that we did, there’s a reason that we’re engaging with the characters in our writing and the way that we are. And there are sometimes ways that we feel stuck, or in between and that’s where the Interlog happen.

It’s what happens between the prologue and the Interlog underneath the story, in between the story, and I want us to, together, explore that liminal space.

Let’s Begin

And so, here’s our experiential project for today and I want us to think broadly, so it could be some writing that you do, it could be a drawing, or could be some reflection, but we’re going to spend about five minutes reflecting on the liminal, the in-between the lens, right, the pieces that aren’t directly the story, but that come from us. What is our personal connection to the topic at hand?

I want you to think about the topic and then I want you to think about your personal connection, those in-between thoughts that don’t make it necessarily into the story, or at least not in a direct way. But that absolutely, are woven into your connection.

And I want you to spend about five minutes in reflection and I want that reflection to be broad.

It could be a drawing. It could be words. It could be some free writing. Try not to edit yourself as you are doing some writing around this. Here’s to the in-between. I’ll come back to you in about five minutes.

[TAKE FIVE MINUTES :)]

Closing

Hello, everyone, we’re back together.

I hope that time of reflection helped you to think a little bit more deeply, differently, doubtfully in a different way, about the topic at hand.

My hope is that by exploring Interlogs, by exploring our transformation as we’re in process, by exploring the liminal spaces that we can expand on our creative process as we embody and live out the work that we intend to do, and that we are doing.

Here’s to being creative. Here’s to embodying. Here’s to in between. Here’s to liminal spaces, continue to Interlog.

Goodbye.

End

Candice Wu 11:22

I hope you enjoyed this experience with Cynthia.

Just a reminder that her podcasts are out as well at CandiceWu.com/cynthia. So check those out if you haven’t already and also check out the other experientials from other guests and myself on the podcast itself, CandaceWu.com/podcast.

Thank you so much for joining us today. It’s wonderful to have you here and hope to see you next time on the Embody Podcast.