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In 2022, I published my most recent book, Happy Days: The Guided Path from Trauma to Profound Freedom and Inner Peace.”

Sharing my trauma story was terrifying—stirring up buried parts of me like shame and fear.

Yet, my inner voice of courage was stronger than my fear. 

Speaking the unspeakable is no small thing. 

It requires profound dedication to personal growth to feel safe enough to vulnerably reveal the truth.

Today, I am thrilled to introduce you to a woman who’s bravely journeyed through healing and emerged from her trauma to share her story of recovery with you.

Don’t miss this Big Talk conversation with Kimberly Shannon Murphy on healing trauma through IFS therapy and inner courage.

*Content Warning: This episode touches on sensitive topics, including sexual abuse, which might be difficult for some listeners. Please listen with care and prioritize your well-being. If you need additional support, please consult this list of resources. 

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In the episode Kimberly and I share our deep love for Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS)—an integral part of our trauma recovery.

IFS has played a significant role in my own recovery journey, leading me to become trained in the model and dedicate my tenth book, Self Help, to this approach.

Self Help is an IFS-informed book that presents a 4-step method to bring the transformative power of IFS out of the therapist’s office and into your everyday life. 

When you preorder the book today I’ll give you a FREE Full-day Virtual Masterclass on November 16th. 

Join me on November 16th to bring the book to life! 

This is your season for elevating your spiritual connection and manifesting our dreams and I’ll be your guide.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

  • The impact of childhood trauma on adult behavior and relationships.
  • Techniques for processing your emotions in a healthy way.
  • The role of setting firm boundaries with family to support your healing journey.
  • How sharing your story with courage can break generational cycles and empower your life.
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Enhance your practice today with my

FREE MAGNETIC ENERGY MEDITATION

to supercharge your manifesting power

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Are you ready to unlock the greatest resource of your life?

My latest book is the ultimate self-help guide, offering a revolutionary practice to radically shift your core beliefs and connect you to an infallible inner guidance system: the energy of Self within you.

In this book, I demystify the power of Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy, taking its life-changing teachings out of the therapist’s office and into your everyday life. You’ll discover how extreme patterns like addiction, rage, pleasing, or constant self-judgment often develop as ways to suppress old feelings of inadequacy, shame, or fear.

Once you bring these patterns into the light and care for them, healing happens swiftly.

Order your copy now!

If you feel you need additional support, please consult this list of safety, recovery and mental health resources.

disclaimer

This podcast is intended to educate, inspire, and support you on your personal journey towards inner peace. I am not a psychologist or a medical doctor and do not offer any professional health or medical advice. If you are suffering from any psychological or medical conditions, please seek help from a qualified health professional.

dear gabby #223 Sep 09, 2024 emotional wellbeing

healing trauma with inner child work & courage: insights from hollywood stuntwoman, kimberly shannon murphy

[00:00:00] The following podcast is a Dear Media production. Hi there, Gaby here. This podcast is intended to educate, inspire, and support you on your personal journey towards inner peace. I am not a psychologist or a medical doctor, and do not offer any professional health or medical advice. If you are suffering from a psychological or medical condition, please seek help from a qualified health professional.

Hey there, welcome to Dear Gabby. I'm your host, Gabby Bernstein. And if you landed here, it is absolutely no accident. It means that you're ready to feel good and manifest a life beyond your wildest dreams.[00:01:00] 

Welcome back, my friends. Welcome back to Dear Gabby. I have extraordinary episode for you today. I sit down with my new friend, Kimberly Shannon Murphy, and she's so fabulous. She's a Hollywood stunt woman. She's an author. We'll And a very, very brave soul. She is a sister to me in our soul sister trauma recovery journey.

And Kimberly shares so courageously in this episode about her memoir, Glimmer, and it's a story of survival, hope, and healing. We both open up very vulnerably about our own experience with childhood sexual trauma. And the Emphasis here is on healing and recovery. We talk a lot about our shared love for internal family systems therapy, which as many of you know is the model behind my next book, Self Help.

It's all in there. Self Help is democratizing IFS and [00:02:00] making this therapeutic model helpful and supportive and effective for you to be. Really practice on your own through a self help method and both Kimberly and I share the experience of using IFS as one of the main tools for our own trauma recovery We go deep into this in the episode and God am I proud of her and her recovery and her bravery and her courage to Share this story with you.

So my friends if you are ready for a deep dive into going into healing, recovery, what it means to be free from trauma. This is a gorgeous episode. I don't want you to miss it. And when you're done listening to this episode, I highly recommend that you go enjoy my Magnetic Energy Meditation because so much of what Our healing journey requires is our commitment to healing our energy and our energy fields.

And this meditation is inspired by a lot of the internal family systems work and the work that's in my book, self help. So check out the magnetic [00:03:00] energy meditation. It's totally free when you go to deargabby.com/magnetic. This is a big episode. I'm so proud of my sister here. Enjoy the show.

It's interesting because I think my PR people When my book came out last year, they, I think they tried to get in touch with you, which was really interesting because I was forcing so much last year before my book came out. Like I have to, you know, and I wasn't ready. I'm in such a different place now I hear, I feel that too.

I also know that is how the universe works. I wouldn't hear it if it was coming, like I wouldn't see it or I wouldn't get it or you know, if it was coming, not me, just anyone, right? And then when you're meant to be in dialogue with someone at the right time, it's when the energy aligns. And I feel that even just in your presence right here, right now.

I feel like we're meant to have this conversation right now. Really good. Yeah. Really good. Yeah. [00:04:00] Kimberly, welcome to Dear Gabby. I'm so happy and proud to sit with you for many reasons. One, we have a thousand friends in common, good friends in common. Some of my best friends. I know. Paris Stiles. Yeah.

Charles Zullo. Yeah. Mark Ficarra. Pete Borba. Yeah. I love Pete Borba. Yeah. So we were sort of in the same circle 20 years ago, but hadn't been directly connected until now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we also have a lot of life in common, a lot of life in common, which you have bravely gifted us with in this book, Glimmer, a story of survival, hope, and healing.

This is definitely a gift to me and to any trauma survivor, particularly survivors of childhood sexual trauma. We have a lot to share here today. And I welcome you to share whatever you feel is. [00:05:00] in your heart right now about your experience, whether it be about your experience in the past or whether it be about where you are now.

I want to just start where you are right now. Where are you with your history, your story, your journey today? Well, it's interesting. Like I was saying before, Before my book came out last year, I, you know, I wanted it to be a bestseller. I, I had all of these expectations that I put on myself and I think I lost the reason I did it a little bit for a little while and I feel like I've gained that back now and I've put this book in the universe and it's going to do what it's meant to do and it's going to touch who it's meant to touch.

And there's not many books out there like this. Not many people write about incest because it's so layered. And as I learned after I wrote it and I slowly lost family member by family member, even [00:06:00] when they said they supported me, some of them, some of them were very honest in the beginning that they didn't support me.

My goal was to never tell anybody else's story, but my own. And I know that it's helped so many people. And I'm in such a different place now, thankfully, this year than I was last year in my healing, in my journey. If I was to write the book again, it would be quite a different book, but I think it's a great for the people that are where I was a year ago.

So we're probably most are, right? Yes. We write our books for ourselves, I think, particularly when it comes to our own recovery. But this book is exactly what people need because it's truth telling. Yes. about things that we become so afraid and ashamed to tell. Yeah. I think as I was writing it, I realized how much patterning I had been doing my whole life because of my childhood.

And I never really put those two things together. [00:07:00] I never put the fact that I was entering bad relationships, I was making bad choices, I had an eating disorder, I was cutting myself, I was doing all these things. Oddly, I never connected that to my childhood trauma. It was just so embedded in me. It was such my life from the time I can remember that nothing else felt normal.

So I didn't see a normal outside of my normal, which was quite abnormal. I understand completely. I understand completely. I had, As you know, dissociated from my childhood experience of sexual abuse. And for so many years I was like, why was I a cocaine addict? Why am I a love addict? Why am I a workaholic?

Why am I in hypervigilance all the time? Why do I have the most intense pain threshold? That's something that I wanted to talk to you about particularly. Before we go any further though, just to the listener who hasn't seen any of your other interviews or read the book, just if you've been very bravely shared about [00:08:00] abuse with your grandfather.

Yeah. Yeah. It was my mother's father. He has been diagnosed now. I've come into so many relationships with these incredible doctors, Dr. Schwartz being one of them, Dr. Matei, Dr. Romney that has diagnosed him as a sociopath. And I believe his wife was one as well because she was aware and enabled all of it to happen.

It happened to my mother and her siblings. It was a generational thing. And the abuse happened from the time I was three until he died when I was 11. And no one else has spoken except for you in this way. Not in this way. Bravo. Thanks. Bravo. And for those who have in any way, shape or form denied this.

Let's say prayers for them. Yeah, because that's their own shame and their denial. Yeah, it's hard though Really hard because because what it does is it? It's reinforcing your own shame [00:09:00] when it is not accepted, acknowledged, and these are the people that were meant to care for you and they're, they're denying this court vote.

Yeah. And then they, what I've noticed after I wrote the book is they sort of double down on their narrative, you know, just, just sort of him as crazy. How dare she write this book, tell the family's secrets, all of the things. And it's been a really interesting journey to witness and been really painful.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's the parts of us want to be like, well, that's, that's their suffering and be compassionate. But at the same time, that's your little girl is like, where is my, where are my parents? Where is my family? Why aren't you taking care of me? Yes. I'm with you. Yeah. I'm with you. I got you.

My father passed away a month and a half ago. I'm sorry. Thank you. And that was really tough because the last year and interestingly enough, he was [00:10:00] very much like, I want you to write this book. I know it's going to help people. I can't read it. He could never go there. He was a Vietnam vet. He had his own traumas.

He, I think had so much guilt for allowing this to happen to me. And But he was also very supportive. Like, I know you're gonna help a lot of people. And when he passed away, I have more siblings. I have three sisters. I only write about one in the book. And I write about her very, you know, I don't write in detail about her because I knew none of their stories wanted to be told.

And out of respect for them, I would have never done that. And no one told me that he died. No one called me, not even my mother. And again, it was like that little girl that I think it was the moment of, Oh my God, I just, I don't exist in this family. I didn't exist as a kid. I don't exist as an adult. And I'm also being punished because I'm trying to speak my truth so I can [00:11:00] heal and not pass this trauma onto my daughter.

And I'm just being punished again. Can I be your sister? Yes. Did you, when we sat down, I said, you're my sister. Yeah. I want to listen back to this because I really feel like that's what I said because we've had shared experience. We've also both lived to tell. Yes. and live to find peace and hope. That's the miracle.

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This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. People are always asking me, Gabby, how do I find a therapist? Because I'm always, you know, I'm the self help book author. I'm waking people up to that spiritual connection. I'm helping them see that there's work to be done, little bit of exploration inside. And they're often asking me, how do you stay so happy?

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Now for your family, I can't imagine the pain that they are in right now as well. I actually emailed Gabor when my dad died because I was struggling so much and I just said this feels so heavy like it feels like I'm suffocating again. And he said, it's only heavy if you carry it. Beautiful. He said, you tried to give the gift of healing to your family and they were not able to receive it.

And that's not on you. Hmm. That gives me such chills and such beauty. That's amazing. So I'll be walking down the street. I'm like, it's heavy, but I don't have to carry it. Yeah. I'm talking to myself. Yeah. And you do parts work. You do IFS. So you know how to care for that child part that feels like it's heavy.

denied by your parents, by your, by your, not your father, but your siblings, your sisters, your mom. You understand? Yes. How to [00:17:00] connect to her. Yes. Which took a really long time. I felt very disconnected from her, probably because during the abuse I disconnected from my body, so it was somehow a disconnection from her as well.

And I was angry at her, and I hated her, and I had all these feelings when I would see pictures of her, and just feel like, how did you not scream? How did you not tell somebody? And as I do more work, and more parts work, I realize that she actually did all of those things. Yeah. And just nobody heard her.

Yeah. Or nobody could hear her. Yeah. Or was willing to hear her. And she also dissociated and left her body and couldn't even speak, right? It's all of the above. Mm hmm. As you know, my story, I dissociated until I was 36 years old. I didn't remember any of it. Yes. It was in a dream that the memory came back to me.

My body remembered, my imprinted images, my addiction, my, I was, I was living proof of trauma. unresolved [00:18:00] trauma, but I didn't fully remember. I had feelings and sensations and thoughts, and I even said things like, what happened to me? And then at 36 years old in the stream, I remembered. Wow. And that took me about a year to fully accept, of course.

Yeah. Yeah. The thing that I found quite interesting is your path as a stuntwoman. Mm hmm. So you're Cameron Diaz, a stuntwoman, probably many other people as well, or particularly just Cameron. All the tall blondes. All the tall blondes. You are jumping off. I've pretty much doubled every tall blonde in Hollywood, yes.

Right. Yeah. So the tall blondes are getting their stunts done by you. Mm hmm. The physical pain that that would endure is real. Yeah. How much of being a trauma survivor do you think plays into your ability to do that all of it all of it? Mm hmm. Let's talk about that. I think that there is a correlation between high intense sports And trauma.

Mm hmm. I just don't [00:19:00] think it's possible to have one without the other. And for me, it was like I had an overnight success because I got in the business really fast. My first job was doubling for Uma Thurman. I got a movie. I, I booked the job and it was a year long movie with her, which was huge. And I learned so many things and was putting myself in extremely dangerous situations, but financially for the first time in my life, I could do so many things that I couldn't do before because I struggled a lot through my twenties.

I was a dancer. I was broke. I was living paycheck by paycheck, if that. So it was like, I had this financial freedom and that somehow It was an interpretation to my family that I was okay and the way I was spoken about in my family by my father, by my parents, you know, we're so proud of her. Look at all the things she's doing.

And I'm like, I'm literally getting f ed up all the time. Right, right, [00:20:00] right. I'm putting my life at risk every day. I'm coming home with bruises and I had a few big incidents at work. Like one is in the prologue. That. You know, I cut my face wide open because a rig went bad and I fell into a bunch of glass and I didn't go to the hospital.

It was almost like it happened. I felt like the my face bleeding and it was this relief where I was like, people can now look at me and say, are you okay? Are you okay? And I didn't know how much I needed that. I've never heard it put like that. I think something just clicked for me when you said that.

It's like so much of my hearts want to be seen in my suffering because they never were. That's right. I'm like screaming like, I'm f ing losing it here, everybody fix it, everybody help me. And sometimes I would literally say, most of the time, I feel like I'm alone in a room screaming. Yeah. [00:21:00] Yes we were. Or silently screaming, yeah.

Oh, sister, wow. The pain threshold thing I get also, you know, like I just have such a high pain threshold that's almost strange. Right. It's like a weird thing, but it's because and actually the more embodied I become, the more I can feel the pain or the more you can express that you feel pain instead of holding it in.

Right. Like you had to hold it in for so long as a child. That's what I feel is a part of it too, right? It's not only about being able to withstand the pain, but it's like. I'm not going to say anything, even if this hurts so bad. And even if I know I need stitches or I know my legs broken, I'm just going to sit here and be quiet because for me, my grandfather was also extremely violent.

So for me, it was, I, I was so afraid to say anything because I was afraid [00:22:00] something worse would happen to me if I said something like, I'm in pain, that hurts, stop, any of those things. I was terrified of that. Your healing journey. So IFS, got Gabor Mate on speed dial, Dick Schwartz on speed dial, all my brothers here, genuine healing.

I feel like these incredible souls have, have entered into people's lives like yours and mine to be not only teachers from afar, as we've found them maybe through books or through, but then when you connect to these people, these brief encounters, even, you know, Dick's a good friend now and I kind of, you know, we'll just shoot the shit with him monthly.

Yeah. But Gabor, one conversation on. A Zoom one time, dude changed my life, like literally was like, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. I know. And I was like, what? I know. And then of course the gifts that they give us in these books and in the work that they do. [00:23:00] So what has been the most profound part of your recovery?

The biggest thing that happened, like you're saying, I was on a Zoom with Gabor for the first time. I sort of like stalked him on Instagram. So I was like, after watching all of his videos, I'm like, I have to talk to this guy. And I knew he didn't run his Instagram. So I reached out to his son at the time and his son wrote me back right away and said, I'm going to be with my dad tonight.

I can't promise anything, but let me see what I can do. And I was on a Zoom with him that night. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he said something to me that changed my entire path of healing. He said, your primary trauma was not the abuse, your primary trauma was that you were cut off from all adult support, which is what allowed the abuse to happen in the first place.

Mm-Hmm. . And it, it took me a really long time to digest that, but ultimately what he was saying is that there were adults around me that were doing absolutely nothing and [00:24:00] neglecting me. In order for this type of abuse or any type of abuse to occur. So I had to really start looking at my whole family system, which was extremely painful.

The neglect. Yeah, it's, it's the processing, right? It's two, two people could experience the same trauma at the same age in the same way. But if one child has a parent who's going to process it, going to accept it, going to embrace it, going to give the tools, going to even just be a presence of truth, that person, their life will be different than the same person, the same situation, same sex, gender, whatever.

It will be completely different based on the processing. Yes. And even just acknowledging that it happened, which wasn't, that's it too, really. Even just the acknowledgement alone. It's often I get a lot of calls from coworkers or friends or people that, that find out that their daughters have had sexual abuse and then they find that their daughters are addicted or that they're cutting or, and they'll come to me, it's [00:25:00] happened many times.

And the thing I say to them most is I just say, just believe her. Yeah. Believe what she says. There's a lot of other steps you can take and here's guidance, but the biggest one is just. Believe her. Yeah. And listen to her. Mm hmm. And validate that the experience happened. Validate. Yeah. That's the whole, the whole thing.

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That's addyi.com. Addyi or banin is for premenopausal women with acquired generalized hypoactive sexual desire disorder HSDD, who have not had problems with low sexual desire in the past, who have low sexual desire, no matter the type of sexual activity, the situation or the sexual partner. The low sexual desire is troubling to them and is not due to a medical or mental health problem, problems in the relationship, or a medicine or other drug use.

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So we're moms now, right? We're moms. We're probably about the same age. How old are you? Yeah, my mom's gonna be 45 in November. I always age myself like months before I need to. I've also forgotten how old I am. Yeah, but you know what? Wait a second, let me count. Exactly. I'm kind of in that place. It's all good.

The good news about being 45 and 47 when you've done the personal growth and spiritual development is you can actually enjoy your life. Yes. You know what I heard once was that most people, if they've had dissociated trauma, the majority don't remember until their fifties. I believe that. I do too. Yeah.

Luckily, I was 36, but oh my God, if I had, [00:30:00] I actually don't think I would have sustained the way I was going if I hadn't remembered when I remembered because I was so, I mean, I was. in such extreme hypervigilance and workaholism. I remembered at 15 how I did. I don't know. That is still crazy to me. So you dissociated and then I remember you were watching a, like a lifetime special with your mother and you were watching it and you looked at her and you said, I think that happened to me.

Yeah. Cause I was starting to have flashbacks. Yes. Like I was starting to have these flashes that felt really. Yeah. Like physically nauseating to me and shadows and I was extremely fearful and the same thing was happening. Thank God for lifetime and so many ways, but the same thing was happening to this woman.

I was like, Oh my God, that's happening to me. And I told my mom and she ran out of the room and then came back in and was like, you're going to see my therapist tomorrow. You're not going to school. And I was like, you have a therapist. I had no idea that she was also having memories at the same time. She had [00:31:00] dissociated too.

Yeah. My mom still dissociates. Yeah. My mom is like, and it's, you know, it's really difficult because I, I can in moments have a lot of empathy for my mother and for my father and for my siblings. For me, it only goes so far because the pain of what happened is too great, at least for me now, to embrace full empathy for them.

So I go in and out of it. Yeah, it isn't in and out. Two things can be true. Yeah. You can have empathy for their shared experience that they do not have the resources or the spirit or the safety inside to accept. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And you can also be pissed. Yeah. I was writing the book actually and I was still in relationship with my whole family and it was really keeping me from my healing.

And I say [00:32:00] this because for me it was a necessary step to really, really heal, was to walk away from everybody. I'm not saying that that's for everybody, and I'm not saying that everybody should do that. I think it's a necessary step at times for sure. Yes, and it, and it doesn't mean that it won't come back if they show up in a different way.

Just that they're re traumatizing. They're re traumatizing. Especially if they're not going to believe you. Yeah. And I don't feel safe. That's the one thing I learned from doing the work. I don't feel safe around my family. My inner child doesn't feel safe. I'm constantly in, like my husband used to say, every time the holidays come around, you're in this like manic mode and you, your, your family's coming over and you're not happy and you're running around cleaning the house.

Cause I'm just trying to control everything. And I used to say, you're crazy. I am not. It's just, it's, this is what you do at Christmas. And since I've released everybody, it is not what I do at Christmas. That's right. And it's very freeing. It's so freeing. I've had to cut people out of my life too. [00:33:00] So f ing freeing.

Yeah. That boundary of like, no, no thanks. And it's a, and not like a leaky no. Like a no, no. Yeah. That no, no is huge. It takes a while to get to that. It does. It takes a really long time. And I, I've had a lot of people reach out to me and say things like, I was abused by my dad. I'm still in relationship with him.

How do I move through that? And the hard answer is you don't. You know, in that sense of if you are going to do really commit to your healing, there has to be some separation for some time, at least I think, because yeah, my daughter was probably two months old. The last time I was with my entire family, my mom is one of six.

So we were all together. My grandmother was still alive and she used to wear his wedding ring around her neck and Drank from a mug that said, I love my husband. I mean, it was the most, it was just insane. [00:34:00] And she asked one of my aunts if she could hold my daughter. Oh no, no, no, no, no, no. And that was always her because she just wanted to put the picture on her wall and, and say, these are all my grandchildren.

Aren't they beautiful? Aren't they amazing? Yeah. And it was in that moment where I realized that life was going to be different for my daughter and I looked at my aunt and I said, hell no, she's not holding my baby. That's right. Good for you. And I left that party and I never saw any of them again. Get it.

Beautiful. Congratulations. Beautiful. Thank you. It's thinking about your daughter and your little girl. Yeah. Your little girl does not want to see those people. Yes. She doesn't feel safe with those people. Yes. if your daughter was coming to you and saying, mommy, I don't want to see those people. Get the fuck out.

Right. Same with your little girl. And that's how you're treating yourself. It's very freeing. Yeah. It's very freeing. Oh my God. I could talk to you for five hours. I could hug you for five hours, but we're going to be really good friends. And [00:35:00] I'm actually So grateful that we did come together right here right now in this way.

God gifted us with you on this planet at this time to tell this story in this way, and I'm so proud to be your sister. Thank you. Thank you. And back at you. Don't cry. I love you. Glimmer, a story of survival, hope, and healing. Thank you.

Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss any of the guidance or special bonus episodes. Your experience at this show means a lot to me, so I really want to welcome you to leave an honest review. And you can follow me on social media at Gabby Bernstein. And if you want to get in on the action, sign up for a chance to be Dear Gabby'd live at [00:36:00] DearGabby.com.

See you next week. Gabby. Please note that this episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services. Individuals on the show may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to in this episode.