S2E3 Advanced Trauma Healing
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[00:00:00] Doc Sibson: Hello, fantastic humans. I am so glad you're here with me today. My name is Doc Sibson. I'm the host of Divergent Wisdom broadcast. And today I am sharing a conversation I had with Charlie Morrow, who is someone I met through my work at the Little Soul School where I have recently trained to become a certified Akashic Records reader.
[00:00:24] And this is my official moment of pronouncing myself out of the spiritual closet, it appears. And I am fully swimming in the deep end of the "woo" world and pool as of now. And I'm actually really excited about it because that means I get to speak to people like this brilliant human about their life experience and how transformative and healing
[00:00:57] it can be to embrace parts of yourself that you have been ignoring and not including. And I couldn't think of a better person to share this unveiling with than Charlie, who feels like a kindred spirit and someone I have known for a very, very long time, despite the fact that our first encounter, this time around, was only a few months ago.
[00:01:22] So I hope you enjoy our conversation around her experiences, in particular, her experience of neurodivergence as someone that has had a life lived with DID, which is Dissociative Identity Disorder, and her ability to move through that and have the experiences that she's had and come out as the person that you will see and hear in today's conversation is nothing short of astounding as far as I'm concerned.
[00:01:56] I am so privileged to consider her a friend and so very glad that she is here today to speak with us. So let's jump straight in and I can't wait to hear how much you love her just as much as I do. Welcome to Divergent Wisdom Broadcast, where curiosity reveals the endless aspects of convergence between science and spirituality. Join me, Doc Sibson, as we explore new perspectives with our guests, bridging the space between worlds to discover paradigm shifting common ground. It's time to get rebellious.
[00:02:40] We wish to advise that today's episode covers some sensitive material. Please head to the show notes for details about the type of content and timestamps of where it's discussed.
[00:02:51] Charlie: I would love to introduce everybody to my beautiful friend, Charlie, and she has graciously agreed to join us today. Charlie Morrow is someone that I've met through our Akashic Records certification. She is a records reader, and a writer, and in the midst of becoming a game developer. And Charlie, I would love for you to share with our audience a bit more about yourself and what's brought you to this point where we are now of expansion and change in your life. Ooh, that is the epitome of where do I start? Um, start with where, I am now, and that is, I have been reading Akashic Records for the past, really not that long. Um, just honestly, it's been about six to nine months of really being in them and reading them. But where I started was as a person who was deeply, deeply traumatised with a brain and body that coped with it in an exceptionally resilient way.
[00:04:09] And I found myself going through a awakening process and came into this next evolution of myself. And when I basically woke up, it was sort of the, oh my, the entire world is different. Everything in my existence is different. What do I want to do now? And I was really drawn to Akashic Records. I was really drawn to, to that space and that freedom of being able to ask any question you could possibly have and get loving, nonjudgmental, helpful information back and I've been able to now just kind of move my life.
[00:04:51] I, I came from a background in a bunch of things. I have three degrees. I was doing scientific research, I've taught preschool. I've taught college. I've, I've, um, I've worked in a political PAC in, in like back end capacity. I've, um, edited videos and helped create content for, continuing education for, psychology professionals.
[00:05:13] I've, I've kind of had this very mixed bag of a life that finally feels like it's actually in the direction of just living a joyful existence and that is actually pretty new for me. So I'm really happy to be here. I'm so excited to talk to you more.
[00:05:33] Doc Sibson: Thank you for spending your time with us your evening my morning. we were just talking before we got going about me being in the future and the time difference between us and there's so many places where I could start because you already, in your not that many years, have lived quite a varied life and I think that is a reflection of so many elements of a person, but really, really common in neurodivergence, I think, because we have different interests and different levels of passion that we follow things with.
[00:06:07] And I guess probably the place that I would like to begin that comes in first would be what I know about your neurodivergence itself, uh, would you mind sharing with us your experience of that?I guess maybe just a bit of definition and kind of, um, background for people because when I say, DID or Dissociative Identity Disorder, which, you know, it's labels, but, um, what does that mean for people, and what was your experience of it? I know it's hard to say in a nutshell, but just overview on we'll get into the nitty gritty of it
[00:06:50] um, once we have that kind of baseline for people to understand.
[00:06:54] Charlie: Yeah, um, so I am going to use a movie because it's just my favorite way of explaining it, the movie Inside Out. Um, when we think of Riley's headquarters, that's what everyone has, um, for me and for anyone else who has Dissociative Identity Disorder as children prior to about the age, it's debated, but the age of 8 to 12, when we're still in those really crucial developmental stages, if you experience a level of trauma that your brain and body
[00:07:23] cannot handle like you cannot continue thriving beyond that, then there are a number of things that can happen. DID is one of them. It is a way in which the brain segments everything using the natural dissociation process that we all just have. It's, it's kind of part of our, our just makeup.
[00:07:42] We have all of these pieces inside of us that we still don't really understand. But there are things that our body completely understands and completely knows what to do with. And so for me, around the age of three, I had, I just had a very severe amount of trauma that was occurring in my home, in my life.
[00:07:58] And effectively, my brain kind of shut down where one headquarters may have been to protect me, and new ones started forming as those core memories started coming in because they needed somewhere else to go. Otherwise, any parts of everything here, everything in this entire body literally wouldn't thrive, would not continue existing, would not be able to survive.
[00:08:24] And the reasoning behind exactly why, it's very, very deeply debated in the psychological community. There's a lot of folks who don't really know. They just kind of look at it and go, well, I don't know, it just sort of happens, there's just heavily dissociation. In the spiritual community there's uh, not really conversation around DID and what this could possibly mean.
[00:08:44] But for the lived experience of it to have these separate and individual headquarters, they are not connected. They're connected to, like, core, like, brainstem level of connected, but there's not an awareness typically and there certainly wasn't for any of us. Uh, we did not know we had this for a very, very long time.
[00:09:04] Um, and it's by design though, because what we would experience is what I like to refer to as being in the me position. So, being in the place where your consciousness is, you're experiencing life. Um, meanwhile, there are other pieces of you that are also themselves. And that is the, the lived experience is actually a shared experience.
[00:09:28] You are continuing through life with your brain and your body operating on a reactive and kind of trigger-based system, really. It's what visual and auditory and physical, what sensory information is, uh, going to be most compatible with the pieces of one large whole, that's going to be most conducive to success in this moment. Which, when you are in a traumatising situation in a home, that's very devoid of love, of help, of, of anything like that,
[00:10:01] you kind of find that, uh, different parts, they hold different information. They're holding on to different experiences. And, even after getting diagnosed, I got diagnosed in 2020, um, at the age of 33, uh, which is really shocking. We can get into like the, what happens when, when you get that diagnosis, um, especially as an adult and you're, you're just kind of thrown for a loop with it. But, it was a turning point for us to take this
[00:10:29] lifetime ofconstantly searching for a way to fix what was wrong. That was actually what we were doing, was this sort of inner feeling of, I don't know what's wrong, but I know that I'm not okay. And I know that I'm deeply traumatised, and all of the messaging that I get in this field of psychology that I'm studying and all of these things that I'm doing are telling me, well, if you had early childhood trauma,
[00:10:52] "oh, well, you're just kind of messed up." Um, I didn't like that narrative. I thought it was dumb. I thought it was dumb. And, uh, it was stupid. Like, it was a very stupid narrative.
[00:11:03] Doc Sibson: You're so broken, you're never changing.
[00:11:06] Helpful.
[00:11:06] Charlie: You're just, you're just, you're just done. you got cooked and you're just a pie now.
[00:11:11] Like enjoy.
[00:11:12] Doc Sibson: Exactly.
[00:11:13] Yeah. There's no unbaking that.
[00:11:16] Charlie: Yeah. It's like, um, you, you know, okay. I don't believe that. That doesn't make any sense. It just, it just never did. But, butthe pathway toward healing was always in that "there's something wrong for me, I'm trying to run away from" kind of mentality.
[00:11:30] That's why you're always running toward, like, the next goal, the next thing, the next thing that will make me feel okay, right? The, the constant searching, which I know is very common for anyone with a neurodivergence, is the constant "something feels wrong, so let me just keep trying to fix it,
[00:11:45] let's fix myself". Um, and once we got the diagnosis, it shifted. And suddenly it wasn't about fixing anything, it was about, "hold on. Hold on. I've done all the self-help things. Like, I've taken all the quizzes. I know all the personality types. I know all the things that you were supposed to know that means you know yourself,
[00:12:08] and I've been a 'we?'" Like, it was, it was a very pump the brakes, recalibrate and refocus situation, and that's basically changed everything.
[00:12:19] Doc Sibson: I, definitely want to talk about that journey because I think the experience that you've described of
[00:12:27] not being aware, you know, you've done all the thingsthat help you know yourself and then get to, you know, three decades into your life and have this revelation of who you truly are on the inside. And it's not that you didn't understand yourself in the concepts in the frameworks that you had accessible to you before that, it was
[00:12:51] a new piece of information that felt right. And I think that's a really common experience for people later in life that recognise their neurodivergence. I mean, like myself, I can say it's exactly what happened. I was 37.
[00:13:04] Charlie: Yeah.
[00:13:04] Doc Sibson: And I, felt like it was the first time where I was like, "that makes perfect sense."
[00:13:12] My entire life all of a sudden fits into this explanation that actually addresses how I felt as opposed to all of the other things that you try and describe your life.
[00:13:25] Charlie: Right?
[00:13:25] Doc Sibson: Right? So I definitely think it is extremely relatable no matter what, you know, labels we put on the neurodivergence. I think that experience of later in life recognition, as opposed to earlier on in childhood, or kind of in your formative years, when you're still creating your identity, to have that realisation later, no matter what the scenario is.
[00:13:49] Is a really relatable and common experience, I think, no matter the flavor that we're looking at. So, what, at the point of the official diagnosis changed, what was the kind of process that unfolded from that point for you?
[00:14:08] Charlie: So honestly, it's not a process I recommend, um, to anyone because so the, the actual leading up to the diagnosis, it was 2020, yay. Life was, just, it just was, you know? And I, we were actually, both my husband and I were grieving infertility because we had spent eight years trying to have kids and the end of 2019 was, was our like mental, like, we're destroying our relationship and ourselves with this process.
[00:14:39] So, if it doesn't happen, we're done. Um, and then 2020 happened and we, we were very lucky people to be able to work at home, but we also never left the home. And so we kind of were just, we were in this, this place of grief that we were attempting to do while being terrified of existence itself,
[00:14:59] while we were feeling those personal feelings of just, "please don't tell me that, that our entire relationship could end now," We're trying to rebuild our relationship, and ourselves after everything that we have really worked hard on to create life-wise. And by life-wise, I mean, like, us trying to kind of follow the life script.
[00:15:19] We, you know, we found each other. We got married. We got degrees. We got jobs. We were trying to do the kid thing. And, you know, none of that felt completely correct. But it was one of those, like, eventually I would have hit this wall anyway of, of, like, life needs to go this way. Like, you're, this is the path you're on.
[00:15:34] Doc Sibson: Yeah, one way or the other, the wall crops up in your way.
[00:15:37] Charlie: Yeah, it would have gone. It would have gone any, either way. But that was just what we were experiencing at the time. And so I started going back to therapy to try to work on my grief and just feel it, have all the big feelings. We started working in and doing EMDR, and EMDR is very helpful.
[00:15:54] It also brings a lot of trauma to the surface and what most, are being taught right now is, is actually, this is the thing that's really hard about DID because it's like most of the information is, "it's just too complicated and it's just too rare." Which it's not, but "it's just too rare. So just ignore it.
[00:16:12] Like, don't touch it. Don't do it." And there's, there's a little bit of wisdom in that because EMDR does, when you are intentionally taking a walk down trauma lane, and you have a brain that is heavily dissociated, you can still pull those pieces out during that. But the problem is a person who has DID, especially who does not know they have DID, they are going to start experiencing things that they have very, very heavily dissociated until then.
[00:16:44] So I went through about nine months of my trauma continually like getting worse. And therapists and I weren't quite sure why it kept getting worse, but, but I had no memories of sexual traumas. From early childhood prior to that, but I started having, and we're talking full on flashbacks. My husband would touch my arm.
[00:17:04] I would start to have complete just all of these memories coming back out, all of these things coming forward. And we didn't know what was happening, but our perspectives, emotionality, mainly emotionality, would shift and swing wildly. We would be so upset and so angry, and then in an instant, everything's fine.
[00:17:24] "Why was I so upset? Wow. Man, sometimes I look at my husband and I just, I hate, like, there's pure hatred for him, but right now there's nothing but love. And like, literally 30 seconds ago, I was, I was ready to, to, to justyou know, scrunch up everything and just scream at the top of my lungs and now I'm okay.
[00:17:42] Oh, that's weird, man. All this trauma work is bizarre, right?" And the more I talked about it with my therapist, the more she was like, "That's trauma. Yeah, like, it's just trauma kind of coming up. That's how you process it." Um, not really. That's how you just get yourself more ingrained in the trauma is just to kind of keep it.
[00:18:00] I say that because I'm, I'm a really big proponent of, of incorporating somatic work when you're doing that kind of thing. Because that's what I ended up eventually doing, which was a key in my healing. Like, I got to a point, I'm, I am an integrated person now, uh, that was never the goal when we first got this diagnosis.
[00:18:17] It's just what naturally occurred when we turned our attention inward and started having these, these bits of communication. Because the more you have these internal conversations with any part of you, the more that neuroplasticity is going to be reconnecting things in a natural way, because it's just loving
[00:18:35] communication. All of that trauma actually led to us starting a new protocol of EMDR that started it at birth. Because she, she was trying something new. She's like, "okay, we'll start with birth." Because I was adopted. I have some adoption trauma, too.
[00:18:48] Um, so we were actually starting there. And when we started pulling those memories out and kind of walking down it, everything in my awareness went white and one of us that, I didn't know it was one of us, just sitting there with her arms together. I was describing it. I was like, "no, I've got this like teenager whose arms are crossed.
[00:19:04] She's just like staring at me. And she's like, 'no, you're not, you're not removing us. That's not happening.'" And, uh, that was kind of what my therapist said, because she had not had experience with someone who had DID before. So, what happened then was a couple weeks of, um, doing various testing, she brought in a friend, like a colleague that, that could kind of help to really pinpoint, like, what, what's going on?
[00:19:27] What's this? After that, we, we stopped the EMDR and we just worked on both of us kind of trying to understand, okay, what is this? What is this disorder? Like, I'd heard about it in school. She'd heard about it in school, but it's, it really is touted as, as something that's not common, even though it's estimated that 2 to 4 percent of the population, I would argue more personally.
[00:19:49] I just, I did not know I had it. And I'm gonna be honest. I think that a lot of us do, at least some level of severe dissociation. Not to the extent that, yes, an entire internal, like, person. Again, go back to Inside Out, you have a headquarters, you're getting little personality islands, and you're getting connected into the essence of who you are. That existed,
[00:20:09] they were full people, with full opinions, feelings, um, when we started connecting in, all it took was, "what should I call you?" Like, "what should I call me? What, what should we call each other?" And we had first names we just kind of decided on. A few of them, it was even sort of back and forth like, "oh, this one, this one feels like the name that, that, that's coming, but I'd rather be called this.
[00:20:30] Anybody have a problem with that? Okay, cool." It was, it was sort of that internal back and forth that the moment we were able to put down what we thought was life and just kind of pick it up and go, okay, let me try this like theory on. Because at that point, it's just a theory until you actually start looking inside and seeing like, what makes sense.
[00:20:51] It was very quickly proven to like, like, scientifically minded, right? I've spent all of this time we spent all of this time really just kind of treating it like, okay, this is the theory as far as what's going on. Are we going to disprove it? Let's try.
[00:21:05] No. Okay. We started talking and there are people. Okay, let's, let's keep going, let's find out, keep exploring. Um, and then a lot of life things happened after that because I actually went back to school. I, I went back to get another degree. Uh, this time a master's in psychology This was part of the, I put down trying to have kids.
[00:21:24] So I picked back up an old dream of getting like a PhD and doing that particular route. Came to find out I don't really care for the, environment of an institution like that. I went to an R1 in Boston. I went to Boston University because they have a good psych program. That was enlightening because I was going through my understanding,
[00:21:44] we were going through our understanding of who we were and also now navigating a move, out of the town that we had both grown up in and like lived in our entire lives. But we just wanted a change and we didn't know what to do. So I was like, I'll go back to school. That'll be enough of a reason for us to move.
[00:21:59] Right? you know, small town ingrained, like you're not going to leave stuff was part of our, our story. You know so I, we moved to Boston. I'm going to school. Things are still chaotic inside because still, we're still learning and we're still trying to do all of these really stressful things.
[00:22:17] I was still working full time. Um, and so we're just kind of juggling all these really stressful moments, and still finding that being able to turn inward and really connect with one another and find out, we, we, we mapped our system. We mapped who was in here. We got to know what it was that we wanted. We were able to really loudly hear the voices of any,
[00:22:39] the ones that held onto the deepest trauma and the hardest things who, when they fronted, when they were in the "me" position, their entire purpose was to protect us. Was to protect us from more harm, protect us from adding to that well, from creating a bigger shit storm inside for anything that's bad. But that was, that was what we were doing. And when I moved to Massachusetts, I found a great therapist who works almost exclusively with folks who have DID. There wasn't really much that we did beyond just, she was a person who we could talk to who was just open, and encouraging the conversations that were happening internally. We did a little bit of EMDR, but not a whole lot. Um, and then we started eventually doing somatic experiencing work, which we did the last couple of years. Just because everything we learned about it was like, oh, you don't have to be, you don't have to bring up every traumatic thing?
[00:23:32] You can just, like, do body based things and, sidestep the, the remembering? Well, that's easy. Like, that's,
[00:23:39] Doc Sibson: Yeah, we can bring it out of the body, feel the feelings, you know, that part still has to happen, but you don't necessarily have to engage all the thinking about it.
[00:23:47] Charlie: You get stuck thinking about it.
[00:23:48] And especially when you,
[00:23:50] Doc Sibson: Really easily.
[00:23:51] Charlie: Yeah. And especially with, with the fact that what we were effectively doing was group-based trauma therapy. Like that's what we were doing because each of us held our own stuff, and our own memories, and some of them overlap. There was definitely some like, yeah, I can remember that.
[00:24:08] Yeah, I can access that. But no, many, many of us, were completely cut off from being able to access certain memories in the moment when they were fronting. And that's by design. The brains know this can only exist here, know this can only exist here, and there have been really fantastic, not a ton, but there have been studies that have shown that, in an MRI, if you're fronting as one, and you switch to another, the parts of the brain, they change, what lights up changes, and that's, that's in line with my experience.
[00:24:40] Doc Sibson: How fascinating. This is so cool that there is that information available about someone that has lived the DID experience. I'm, I'm so surprised that there is even anything that shows us, uh, that kind of level of information about it. Because that was going to be my question is, sorry to interrupt your train of thought, but
[00:24:58] Charlie: No, no, no, it's perfect.
[00:24:58] Doc Sibson: Normal for me and the question that came up as you're talking about that is,first of all, the part of how it translates to a wider experience is just all of this kind of stuff that you're describing, in my personal experience of neurodivergence, I think it is same same, but different, right? It's a, some elements are probably maybe more like dramatic in their experience of them, compared to what I might have experienced.
[00:25:28] But the counterparts of having different parts of you that are designed or created, to meet certain needs that you have as you go through life, as you encounter various challenges and traumas, big or little "T"s. And the way that your system creates parts of you, whether or not they're completely separate systems, or if they're still integrated into a more communicating whole, that are better equipped to handle these things that we come across.
[00:25:59] And it's the concept of masking, people wanting to unmask and all that kind of stuff that comes to mind when you talk about having different whole parts that move into that me position. It feels like the equivalent in a lot of other people without that clear separation between identities is the concept of putting on a mask.
[00:26:25] And we also, for a lot of us are not aware we're doing it, but I would have my "at home" Sarah, or my "at work" Sarah, or my "with my friends" Sarah, versus with the family Sarah. Like we would do these things of knowing what was expected of us in the situation, and I say we, because that feels like a bunch of we's, I guess, if I think about it. And it is deciding parts of my experience that are true that I bring up for engagement in my environment and
[00:27:02] Charlie: Yeah.
[00:27:02] Doc Sibson: All subconscious, obviously, but it feels like there's direct parallels to experience, even if the DID types of elements that are happening isn't what everybody can relate to.
[00:27:16] I think everybody can relate to how it parallels their own path. So I just wanted to highlight that first of all,
[00:27:23] and then
[00:27:24] Charlie: It's,
[00:27:24] Doc Sibson: oh, go ahead.
[00:27:26] Charlie: No, I just, like anything, it's a spectrum. And this is purely just a early, early developmental piece of a more turned up part of the spectrum. It's, it's really just the brain, and it's, brain-body situation.
[00:27:43] And I say this because I did have a full actual, central nervous system completion of a frozen state, I experienced that. Something that that I previously only seen in a video that shows a polar bear having an extreme stress reaction and then doing the, the, like, everything in body is shaking as this is coming out thing. I managed to do thatseveral months ago, and it's what came out with it were not only memories, like, what was coming out while it was happening. I was aware of what was happening, which was nice, uh, and good, because I was talking it through, because my poor husband was like watching it, freaking out, I'm like, I'm fine, this is fine, this is all completely normal. This is a central nervous system, like, thing, just, it's just letting it go, it's finally letting it go, and, but I had a knowingness that this was what shut me down at three.
[00:28:32] This was, I was three years old, and I was being assaulted, and my central nervous system went into fight, flight, or freeze mode. And when it does that, it freezes, and then you just have this part of your central nervous system that is stuck in frozen hell, basically, it's just stuck. And it, it could not release, because it also was just sort of bringing this storm, if you will, of, of emotionality. And this is where it went to for me, but the entire frozen state grew into a personified suicidality, is what it turned into.
[00:29:10] And so it's literally a part of me, perpetually in me and in my body, that was stuck in " death is happening now, need to create death, need to be dead, need to stop existing. This is too hard. Can't do it." Because of the everything is frozen kind of piece. And as that was coming out, all of the memories, all of the things were kind of flooding in, but not in a way that was causing any kind of internal reaction, there were no emotional pieces with it. It was sort of just this, it was like I could feel the flood of, hey, uh, we're just releasing everything right now, so if you could just be cool with the tidal wave for the next, like, 20 minutes, it would be great. You know, like, that was sort of the feeling I got, and I did, I just, I sat myself down, I let my body do its thing.
[00:29:59] I narrated what was happening as it was happening for myself, to just keep myself calm and on target, because it was kind of like, okay, I know I'm a, I am a dissociation expert. I can take my consciousness and go backseat myself. I can put myself in my own backseat and let my body drive and be in the front seat and do what it needs to do.
[00:30:17] And it, that process actually completely unfolded and it, it fully allowed that, uh, that really wounded part to just finally stop being a frozen problem, frozen ball in my central nervous system and allowed it to just, just finally dissipate and actually integrate just into my body as just another thing that I experienced, just another part of what this very, very complicated life has been. And not in a way that's,super mystical or anything, but definitely just in that,
[00:30:53] oh, my God, my body was holding on for dear life to keep me going, even though it was stuck in this fight, flight or freeze mode for what? 30 years, like, just hanging on tight.
[00:31:06] Doc Sibson: 30 years of keeping you alive, despite feeling like it was that point of transition to the afterlife. Whatever we, whatever our concept is of that.
[00:31:16] And yet it still kept going for 30 years.
[00:31:19] Charlie: Yeah. Like, like, because our bodies know when that, that moment is, is there, and in that moment can happen emotionally. It doesn't, it doesn't have to be a literal, you know.
[00:31:27] Doc Sibson: Yeah, it doesn't have to be a critical physical injury. It can be other types of injury.
[00:31:33] Charlie: Yeah.
[00:31:33] Doc Sibson: And I just want to pull out something that you said, that really struck a chord with me, which was, "I'm an expert at dissociating and I can take a backseat," but it was the exact way that that unfolded, it wasn't the trauma version of that, which is not consciously doing it, but subconsciously doing a protection dissociation. That highlighted that there are different ways that dissociation can happen as well.
[00:32:06] So if you know that you're going through a big thing. But you consciously chose to not engage, not let all of those emotional alarm bells get set off for it to recycle through, um, again and again, and chose to take that step back to let your body do what it needed to do to let it all out without reengaging with it.
[00:32:30] What a gift that you had that ability in that moment. Oh, look, I'm going to cry about it. That is so incredible. Because that little three year old part that had been stuck in that position in time and place, had an opportunity to become part of you again, because of that strength that you demonstrated by doing that.
[00:32:59] Charlie: And the, to the point that I was actually making 1st, before I went off on a loop, um, I just say that about parts and about it being a spectrum just in general, because parts is how we are. We are this sort of fractal being I mean, we're, we're multidimensional beings having a human experience, but even in this human experience, we are a bunch of parts.
[00:33:21] We just are. So I even mentioned, like, we put masks on. We don't know that we're doing this, but we're, we're effectively, if we're all in the "me" position, and I just, I say me position, because it's, it is like front and center. I know that I am engaging with you. I know that I am driving my body right now. I know that I am thinking my thoughts and I'm paying attention to what's happening.
[00:33:41] We have the capacity to just take that and just go, "You know what? Just gonna, just gonna get in the backseat." Oh, like we can, everyone can do that. That is, that is something that is just an innate piece of our capacity to dissociate. The common one to say is like, you drive down, down the road and you suddenly are where you intended to be and you don't remember getting there.
[00:33:59] You just, you were just off somewhere else. You dissociated. You just went somewhere else for a little bit. Like, it's, it's a very, it's not only common. It's what our brains do. It's, it's the way in which our brains do things. And we're dissociating all the time anyway, with, with just input like your nose is always in your face.
[00:34:16] It's always in your visual like input. It's coming in. How often do you recognise and see your nose when you're paying attention to what's going on? Yeah, it's what we do because it's, it's, it's a means of efficiency are everything in our brain and body is about peak efficiency, baby. Like, like, it knows how to make everything
[00:34:35] function at the level at which we can do anything else. It's why we have patterns of behaviors. It's why it's so hard to change those behaviors, 'cause the amount of energy it takes to just go, "yep, okay, that's how I'm doing it. Cool. Gonna put that on autopilot, it's gonna keep that up.
[00:34:49] Put that one on autopilot too." But to stop the autopilots and all of the associated autopilots that get kind of built up on top of those, it takes extra energy and it takes extra work. So everything inside of our bodies is already operating at peak efficiency. We just aren't really super aware of how much more we can do within ourselves.
[00:35:11] You actually can take a backseat to your own awareness. What I really think it is, is it's you taking your own ego and just going, oh, wait, let's go put you right here. It's you taking your own ego and putting it aside and just allowing whatever's happening to just happen.
[00:35:25] It's, it's radical acceptance on a internal, "yeah, sure, whatever's happening is whatever's happening" level. And I say that because it feels like it cherry picks all of these different, different concepts and different things from psychology and from different ways we do things, but I don't know that enough people recognise how powerful we really are within our own selves, within our own capacity to
[00:35:49] know what it is we're capable of. And I say it with, with parts because you have parts. If you go into like your own self and you ask yourself questions, you're going to get answers back, and depending on where those answers come from, you can dive deeper. You can go down this particular rabbit hole of where is this information coming from?
[00:36:07] And why? What is going on there? Where is it originating from? And depending on where different emotions go, you can do the same thing of like noticing without an MRI, like, where is that in my brain? Huh? That's, that's like full of a lot of anger and maybe some anxiety.
[00:36:25] I wonder if the amygdala is lighting up right now. Oh, look, I'm, I'm really like having a big brain day where I'm doing all of the like scheduling things and numbers are exciting to me today. Maybe, maybe what's firing right now is right up here in the prefrontal cortex. Like, there's all of these different things that are constantly in motion and constantly being used at various times.
[00:36:44] We just don't pay attention to it because when would we have learned to do that when we have an opportunity to do that?
[00:36:52] Doc Sibson: Exactly, that is not a few things that we are taught to do and I think that is a really key insight is, well, many. I could talk for hours and hours and hours about this stuff, but the power that we have that gets so downplayed by our systems, and our environments, and our family structures, and our education, and whatever else that it might be that disconnects us from ourselves and our own capabilities. And the vast majority of the time without any intent to do that. It's just the way it has been shaped, but it ends up with us not
[00:37:31] having any validation of our experience of the world. And so we go, "Oh, I guess it must not be true." And so we stop believing in it. And to have that awareness come back in, whenever that happens. I mean, if it happens 5 minutes before you're no longer on the earth or 5 decades, I mean, I'd prefer that. But at least then you
[00:37:53] have that connection to understanding there are so many different parts of yourself in the not only the perspective sense, but also the ego sense versus the body experience sense. That's why I like calling it a human suit because it feels like there are different ways to engage with our systems that that
[00:38:14] language gives us access to of sure, there's this ego part that's designed to keep us safe, is designed to be a logic processing system. But then who's there observing all of that? There's another part of you. There's a bigger aspect to this experience, that's also in the human suit, that gets to make these choices about what's driving, what's happening, and what you get to create from having that awareness
[00:38:42] just is endless. You're not trapped in the the concept of that self that you described being able to put in the backseat. And I think that is probably a crazy concept for a lot of people to even understand. But the more we can connect with the sense of us being bigger and being connected to other elements, uh, that help flesh out that power and help us realise that it's been there all along.
[00:39:14] It's not something that's outside of us. It's something that's in here, the more we can reconnect with it, I think the more we are able to change our own lives and our own environments in ways that support everybody around us.
[00:39:24] Charlie: Exactly. Beautifully said.
[00:39:27] Doc Sibson: Oh, thanks. Well, that was a perfect segue into the records, which I want to talk to you about for sure.
[00:39:33] So I feel like, we're kind of reaching that point in your experience, like timeline-wise of having had the awareness of DID as a label, but also one that really sounds like it accurately described your experience up to that stage, and getting to know all of the parts of you and having that
[00:39:55] I guess, critical point in the nervous system, reintegration. So once that happened and, you know, the dust settled, so to speak, what was your experience like from that stage once you had had that kind of critical turning point?
[00:40:11] Charlie: So interestingly, it didn't actually get super critical, so the, um, the central nervous system release, uh, didn't actually happen until after I started doing Akashic Records, uh, for myself. Which that occurred after my integration occurred, because I, I actually went through what, to me, was a near death experience.
[00:40:33] To be honest, I'm still kind of piecing it out, as we all do. Like you go through the mental, when you go somewhere else that you did not understand and, and things that you're experiencing and seeing and feeling are just on a completely different level and you haven't really studied spirituality, basically at all, because you ran away from spirituality because you grew up Southern Baptist and you were like, no, anything spiritual, anything is, is that is in my "no, thank you" land.
[00:41:01] Like, I just just turn away from it. Um, so when you, when you have these really big experiences, which, which I did have, um, you still process it more than you need to and there's still replays. But,it was sort of a series of events that happened over the course of about a month, uh, last March and April, uh, that,
[00:41:23] the best way I can say it is, me, who I am now, actually did sort of come into existence after, um, we, so it was one of us, her name was Patricia. She was just working one day in February and just in the middle of working, thought, "how about that? I think I love myself." Like, like, just sort of this, this sensation of, is that self love?
[00:41:47] Oh my gosh, that's self love. And then, what, what proceeded was sort of this internal, we would go inside, we had a meeting place in, internally in our head. To us, it looked like a beautiful forest, and we met on little logs, had a meeting around, because we all had a sense of physicality.
[00:42:03] This is the beauty of what, of what brains do is we have our experiences, those experiences shape what we think we are, who we think we are, how we think we are. And in here, there were, there were men, there were women, there were children, there were non corporeal beings, there were representations of things that suicidal part, it was manifested as a gun.
[00:42:24] Like, like literally it was like a personified handgun, unfortunately. Um, it's just all of these little, uh, pieces that, that kind of made up who we, we were. We would get together and we would meet and everyone sort of, one by one, sort of checked in, like, "hey, can you feel it?" "Can you feel it?" "Can you?" And we, we got to this, this place of everyone being so incredibly giddy and happy because it, what it felt like we had achieved is what we, was what our goal was. The goal that we had the entire time, even after, like, the minute we heard about it, and then did all the research in the world over the course of like three weeks.
[00:42:59] It was just one of those, like, consume all information sort of deep dives.
[00:43:02] Doc Sibson: Mm hmm. I know those.
[00:43:06] Charlie: But what we came to, the conclusion that we came to was, you know what, functional multiplicity sounds nice, because then we get to still all exist, even though we are existing in, in fractions of living, which admittedly that's, it sucks.
[00:43:18] I'll just say that, it sucks to live a piece of a life at a time. That was not a pleasant aspect of having DID, uh, for, for anybody, because it just, it's not pleasant. It's not pleasant to be you and then be someone else and then be someone else. It, it makes things kind of, Just not flow the way that they do for me now. We were trying to be existing as this shared life, where everyone got to say, everyone hadn't had their opinion heard.
[00:43:50] We were collectively building that life together with our husband and it really was a group, uh, method of coexisting together, because the alternative is what? Just continuing down a self destructive path where you just keep trying to fill the pain that you're trying to fill?
[00:44:08] No, what we were searching for was love. For us, it was this belief in something that we could not identify. We had never experienced before. We never known we'd experienced it before. And we just knew we were capable of it. We knew we didn't experience it. We knew we didn't have it, but we knew we were capable of it.
[00:44:26] And when that sensation was felt, it was like, it was like the internal, like, ding, ding, ding. We did it. Buy a trophy. We're like, we made it. We did.
[00:44:35] Doc Sibson: I love it.
[00:44:36] Charlie: You know,
[00:44:36] Doc Sibson: Where's the medal? I want my medal.
[00:44:39] Charlie: We actually did like buy, we did buy ourselves like a trophy, it was just, it was, a little like, like little angel wings, like shaped out of like really pretty stones because we're just really into pretty things.
[00:44:48] We're like, yeah, I'm going to do it. It really did feel like we had achieved something that according to literature, according to other people, according to everything was not available because we were "too messed up." We were "too deep." It was "too far." It was "too much." And meanwhile, we're sitting here going, I'm sorry, but it's just a resiliency mechanism.
[00:45:10] That's all it is. It's the resiliency mechanism that my brain and body were like, "oh, that's too much. You know what? We, we got a system for this. Don't worry. Got it. Totally got it." It's not the most fun way to exist, but when you really zoom out and you look at it, it is my body being like, "oh, no, you're not going to die.
[00:45:29] Got you. Got you." Like "don't worry. I got you. It's going to be a rough ride, but you know, we can, we can work on this" kind of thing. And after that happened, I then started just experiencing what felt like random downloads. Um, like in the spiritual community, I've heard that it feels like a download coming in.
[00:45:47] And the thing is, I have these like multiple perspectives where I'm like, okay, so from a spiritual perspective, I'm just getting all of these downloads because I'm now connected in with love. I'm now connected in with my soul. I'm connected in with, home, with source, with everything. I'm actually connected in with it in a way that I can feel. Awesome.
[00:46:03] So that's what's happening. And then from the psychological perspective, I'm like, oh, maybe that's just me connecting in with my brainstem in a way that we've never done before that actually connects in with my actual heart. And then I'm getting this, you know, the fact that these pieces are now being connected the way that we always wanted them to be without having to talk across the aisle by actually existing in a state of
[00:46:24] complete connection. Huh, maybe now we're just getting access to things in a way that is like hypercharged, which means that the information that was stored over here and the information stored over here, once the brain actually connects the two, it solves the puzzle. And now I have all this wisdom and things that I used to have concerns about,
[00:46:40] like, I, I just understand it now. And hey, I'm not mad at that person anymore. And hey, I understand why that happened, like, just sort of these, these emotional triggers and things that sometimes we had a really hard time reconciling. Like, sometimes there's some emotional things that are so big, you can't, it's like, you can't resolve it.
[00:46:59] You're like, I don't know why I'm just perpetually hurt by this person, or these people, or this thing, but I can't do anything about it. I just have to live with it.
[00:47:07] Doc Sibson: I don't have access to the way that I can clear that out and stop thinking that.
[00:47:11] Charlie: Yeah.
[00:47:11] Doc Sibson: And feeling that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:47:13] Charlie: Exactly. And what, what was happening was it was like I was getting wisdom download.
[00:47:17] That's what it felt like it was. So whether it was psychological or spiritual, I really don't care. It was just happening. Okay, probably both. Like, like
[00:47:24] Doc Sibson: I was gonna say, why not both?
[00:47:26] Charlie: Why not both? Yeah. And then it's, it kind of culminated in toward the end of March where I started going into sort of these meditative states.
[00:47:36] Kind of spontaneously, they would just start happening and then I would just sort of play out some of these scenes. This is part of why I, I still think again, this is like, maybe body saying like, "hey, let's go into a dream state real quick." Again, I have, I have this perpetual psychology background side of things, spiritual side of things, in my, my mind, just trying to kind of make sense of things in a way that feels at least accurate enough to, to feel "not crazy," because that's still a sticking point for me.
[00:48:03] Doc Sibson: Oh my gosh. All the damn time. Every time. I'm like, I feel crazy again. I'm imagining this. I can't prove any of it. I must be nuts.
[00:48:16] Charlie: Yeah. But that's, that's where I've sort of been is this, like, these are happening. And then, in April
[00:48:21] we moved to our new house in a new state. We had spent a long weekend, like two days after we moved, we went up to Vermont to watch the solar eclipse because it's solar eclipse. Um, got way too rowdy with some friends we don't see very often. Um, yeah, way too much consumption of all kinds of things. And came home and couldn't get out of bed, and then I couldn't get out of bed. And I didn't know it at the time but I had the flu.
[00:48:44] And what resulted for me was about a week of, you could call it fever dreams, you could call it going somewhere else, you could call it, you call it whatever you want to, but, um, at a point I stopped sleeping. And my husband didn't notice because I was in bed, but I was conscious, and I was awake. And there came a point whereI was still here, but I started having conversations that were quantum in nature.
[00:49:06] I started getting questions answered about quantum physics, which just makes me happy. And so I was, and I couldn't tell you, no, I couldn't tell you what any of these things are now.
[00:49:15] Doc Sibson: Oh, dang it, because I was going to ask about that. I want to know what they are.
[00:49:19] Charlie: Well,it was a bit experiential because it was, it was sort of this, like
[00:49:23] I got to see like the, the creation of perpetual motion or perpetual energy. That's, that's apparently in humanity's future. We're just going to be like, "Hey, perpetual energy" because it just exists. it's also the universe, you know, creates. Saw that, uh, saw, saw the bridge, like, like, I know spiritual worker, I now know, I didn't know it at the time, but you know, there's, there's talks of bridge workers, light workers, those who are creating this consciousness bridge. Well, I saw it. That was, that was, that was part of it. It was, it was this, I saw this, basically just it looked like a flow of energy up to, what to me was like, I was like, is that a lifeboat?
[00:50:02] Is that an ark? And it was just like, no, it's just the new consciousness. And I was like, wait, what? And I, kind of dipped down into other, other things after, after all of that happened. So you get into this, this question of like, was it just a dream? Did I go somewhere else? Did I, did I get into a few other things?
[00:50:18] I have no idea. It was really neat. It was really cool. And the feeling, uh, the entire time was just kind of like, wow, cool. Wow. And it was just sort of this, the message that I kind of kept getting was, was literally humanity's evolving. Consciousness is evolving. The earth is evolving. Um, and some of you were here to do it.
[00:50:37] Like you, you came to do it. And that was sort of a, like, yeah, you are one of them. Like you're, you're here to, kind of help with this whole thing. It was one of those really fun, " metaphysical, but I also don't know what I'm experiencing" kind of experiences. So after all of that, though, I started having these
[00:50:53] stories play out. And, and they felt much more like a dream, but in each story, I was observer. I was, I was in the observer position, but I was each of who we were. It happened, basically, it was like one at a time because there were, there were about 22 to 25 of us. When we mapped it,
[00:51:12] it was always a little bit like, not really sure. But only about 12 of us ever fronted, like, ever were in sort of that me position, ever were, were what we consider to be really fully, not fully, like, created, but more fully how I am now, how any, like, like, like person is. I think just, just because of the fact that they were the ones who fronted, I think, I think that that was just how the development worked of each of us inside was those who held the most experiences, became the more well rounded people because that's what brains do. As we become well rounded,
[00:51:46] we become people. It's why you're a potato when you're born and you turn into a person, like, you know, like,
[00:51:52] Doc Sibson: It happens to all of us.
[00:51:52] Charlie: You kind of have a personality, but not really. You're a potato. Like, like, you're, you're just kind of, you're, this is what you are. So as those, those were going down, it actually got down to our final part, which was one of our young ones, Scout.
[00:52:05] She actually fully fronted and I was, uh, I was her, she was, she was fully fronting, but it was the first time she'd ever fronted without adult supervision. Cause she was always a little bit, she was always a little bit different. Um, my personal theory is actually that she was a copy of who I was when I got
[00:52:25] locked up. Because I actually think that's what happened. Based on what I've experienced, that's what I feel like happened is I did, again, Riley, go back to Inside Out. Riley exists. There's a headquarters. Uh, you start to have your experiences. You start to build who you are, really horrifying experience that locked my central nervous system up.
[00:52:42] I went into mind jail basically. And I say that because this became a process of almost, it was almost like gates were being unlocked, sort of like in my mind. And as I was going through this process, each of us was integrating. So, each of us was ending their time as who they were. Like, they were, they were dying.
[00:53:07] Like, every single one of us was turning their personal lights off to connect in with the whole. Like, that's what was happening. And it was happening over the course of a matter of days, while everything in me was, was becoming like, I was, I was offline. Any amount of mind chatter, completely offline, but I was still conscious. I was still, I wasn't sleeping, all this was happening at once. It's like everything in my brain and body shut off the sleep, because there was a need to, like, and this is what I'm understanding about just our experience here. Like, in order to progress through anything, we have to experience it.
[00:53:46] We can't just think about it. That's a form of experiencing, but we, we have to go through the experiential process of whatever it is. And for them, it was coming to a resolution of whatever unresolved loops they were still on. And it's like, our bodies are trying to work through our emotional escape rooms.
[00:54:06] It kind of felt like that because there were definitely these, I call them like choice moments where in the, the like dream state, in this state where I was sort of observing and this story was playing out, there were almost opportunities to be like, okay, which direction? So the next part of the story, what are you doing?
[00:54:22] Okay, I'm going to go in this direction. And it sort of was this, it was this really beautiful release for every single one of them. It happened for everybody. And when it got to Scout. Scout fronted and she had very specific instructions not to leave the bedroom. Before she fronted. ,There was a very specific like, okay.
[00:54:38] Now, you know the rule. What's the rule? Don't leave the room. Don't touch the phone. Right? Right. Okay. Um, and she didn't, she stayed in the bedroom, made a mess of the bedroom, which is kind of funny. But she was, well, she's three. She's a three year old who had literally never had, had literally never not had adult supervision while she was fronting.
[00:54:58] That's why I say that I think that she was like a carbon copy of sort of me, just because I identified with her always. When I finally realised like, "Oh God, I'm just me. I'm just 1 of us, and I'm new." She, she was going around the room trying to find colours and I'm really sorry for what I'm about to say, because it makes me cry and everyone who has animals, it's going to make them cry. But Scout was finding colours
[00:55:24] to fill out her rainbow bridge, because she was going where our dogs, when she was talking about like, like dogs that we'd lost, she was going to the rainbow bridge, and she was really excited, but she needed to get the colours right. Because she was very specific about which colours belong on her rainbow, like, she was so, like, any three year old's like, "no, not that red.
[00:55:45] That's not the red. The red has to be this one. This is the red color." And so it was this process of her getting the right colours, lining them up. And then that was when the fever got real bad. And I dipped completely away, completely down, and everything got into this, um, really bizarre, uh, fear-based place.
[00:56:06] I wasn't scared, but I just started having, like, okay, so here's some fears, here's some primal fears, here's some big fears. Hey, fear of death! Like, it was, it was this, like, culminating, this unfolding of fears that resulted in, in this, again, story'd play out where I, I was dreaming that my propane tank, uh, behind my window exploded.
[00:56:26] Felt the heat, uh, felt time stop, and I could feel heat all, like I was sweating, sweat was pouring down my back, that I could feel. And then, I had an entity come into my awareness, just in my mind's eye, and I went, "Oh, hi, who are you?" She went, "I'm Gaia, now it's time to become stone." And I started to do random yoga poses.
[00:56:48] Where I sat down into, like, my fingers went together, everything went together, I sat down, everything in my body slowed down as I, like, I breathed as slowly as I could. And I say it now and I'm like, yeah, that was my, that was my entire central nervous system being like, okay, time to completely slow down as far as you possibly can.
[00:57:07] Slow it down. Everything inside, slow it down. Then she said "it's time to become Earth." Like, just the growing of the earth. And I started doing yoga poses. I don't know yoga. I've never studied yoga. Done a little bit of yoga with Adrian on YouTube, but that's it. And I know this because at one point I started laughing.
[00:57:26] I was like, if this is like, if this is like a weird spiritual experience, it's really funny that I'm, I'm just doing yoga without knowing I'm doing it, um, or knowing what I'm doing.
[00:57:35] Doc Sibson: Oh, I love it.
[00:57:37] Charlie: And, and I, while that was happening, I could feel things just releasing in my body, and I sort of got this visual of a beautiful island, it was like a fast forwarded, multi millions of years island growing and becoming what it is and then everything became lava.
[00:57:52] There's a new volcano and I went, "Oh, there is lava rocks in my chest Gaia. What do I do about that?" She said "now it's time to become to become water." And I crawled in my shower, turn it on and I have no idea what happened next because my husband found me the next morning. He found me in the shower and when I, when I was finally back into my, like, self, I won't even get into, like, the what happened after, but I, I eventually got back into myself and suddenly everything inside was quiet and different.
[00:58:24] And I questioned, like, okay, did I just go through a really traumatising experience? And now I'm just, you know, everything's just quiet and dissociated because that happens. That's a thing. Um, no, and I, I found myself now experiencing thoughts and just the literal experience of time completely different because I wasn't experiencing time in chunks anymore.
[00:58:49] I'd only ever experienced it like we had only ever experienced it in chunks, chunk of time here. Okay. Because every, every time there was a shift, there was a perception shift. And with every perception shift, the awareness of time shifted along with it. Like the, the capacity for knowing, how long something's been when, just any of that, and it's the kind of thing that you don't notice it until it's not there anymore.
[00:59:12] And then you're like, oh, time is just still time is just still. How is time just still? Time's always been like, like, it's one of those you don't notice it till it's gone. And then you're like, whoa. Um, and emotions got harder for a little while because especially the really hard ones, anything that was super traumatic.
[00:59:31] I just had to be there. We've gotten really good at switching. I couldn't take a break. I couldn't take a minute to breathe and be like, okay, back in, back into it. No, I had to just sit and sort of feel it and be through it. Thankfully, I had all of the internal resources that I had spent an entire lifetime building at my disposal.
[00:59:49] Doc Sibson: Right?
[00:59:49] Charlie: But I didn't know in the moment, once I started picking up on it and things started like progressing and getting much easier. And then that's what led me to finding the spiritual path. That was my long roadway thing. That's what led me to finding anything spiritual because when I started just trying to consume anything that would help, I landed on, I think it was Alex's podcast or Alex Ferrari's podcast.
[01:00:12] I think I landed on there and I started getting information and then I sought more information because of how it felt. Because I'd been through all of that and I had lost that, that love feeling. It wasn't there anymore. I couldn't identify it. Um, and I started down the spiritual stuff and I was like, ooh, ooh, okay, excitement.
[01:00:30] I found excitement. Okay. Ooh, I found joy. Oh, okay. Okay, I found fun. Okay, I found fun. And it was sort of like this feeling where I was just like, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, yes, yes, yes. And when I got to the Akashic Records, things finally, uh, stopped feeling frantic and felt okay. Okay, I found a lane. I found a place that feels good.
[01:00:49] I found a place that feels connected. And the more I connected in, the more I noticed my hands spontaneously moving. I noticed my body starting spontaneously moving. And then that's when I started noticing, oh, sometimes when I have really big emotional things come up, if I just sort of sit and allow it through and let my body do what it needs to do, I'm going to have this really weird, I call it "weird body" because I have to tell my husband, like, if something really big, like if something we're watching triggers something, we'll pause it and I'll say, oh, I need a weird body moment.
[01:01:18] And for the next half hour, I will just have spontaneous things that my body is doing and my hands are doing. And it's exactly what led me down the, like, literal down the road to getting that full release, uh, happen.
[01:01:32] Doc Sibson: Mm.
[01:01:33] Charlie: And so, so, I had a big experience. It was, it was a really big, it was a really big chaotic thing, but even to look at it from a psychological standpoint, I took a journey down into my brainstem while consciously aware that I was in my brainstem because that seems to be where my brain housed
[01:01:52] Doc Sibson: my soul, my essence, my everything, to prevent death, to prevent the, the presumption of that, which you cannot continue past, the point of no return. For my body, basically.Wow. That is all I can say to that, like, that is just so,
[01:02:12] Charlie: That's a long story.
[01:02:13] Doc Sibson: It is, but well, how can you shorten it?
[01:02:15] Really? I think that is even a truncated version to what we've already talked about because it's just so there's so many layers. There are so many aspects of it that are incredible, I think is the word to describe it. And I also want to point out that as you were experiencing it, you had the awareness of these things happening.
[01:02:38] So you had a perspective still that was holding all of that and observing it unfold. And, insight is what I would like to highlight because I think that's a key part about anything like this, where, you know, we're saying before we wonder if we're crazy and, you know, just making shit up all the time now, which is a daily question for myself. But the fact that
[01:03:02] I even have the insight to ask myself that question, I think is the key difference between states that are,what get labeled as delusion or illness, a symptom of an illness, versus an experience that is different, but we're still very aware of who we are, what reality we're existing in, what the rules of that reality generally agreed on are, and how that fits into all of that.
[01:03:31] It's a very different scenario to someone that doesn't have all of those components to their awareness as something's unfolding like that. So I just wanted to really put it out there and say is this is a question that I am constantly deepening my understanding of and my own interrogation of for my experiences.
[01:03:50] And that's kind of where I am right now of how I know how to explain it. But just so that we give people food for thought around the narratives of delusion and hallucination and all that kind of stuff. I'm sure there's, you know, an element of what happened for you that is related to a physical body illness and, the systems that kind of kick off and all that's going on and, you know, high fevers and the impact of that cascade of inflammation and, biology that influences your cognition.
[01:04:22] But that is a component that I don't want people to get lost on, is I guess what I'm getting to. So this process of coming back to one perspective and where it led you, I just loved how you described it, of seeking those little sparks of engagement or curiosity, or a sense of fun or play, and joy was another one you described in that list of the kind of pings that it set off in your system.I love to think about that kind of stuff as like your navigation system. And I think personally, for me, that's when I've been more connected to my heart again, and my ability to feel a wider spectrum of things because it's not so shut down. It is really helpful to be aware of those things and follow them, lean into them when they happened. So I would love to talk to you about your experience of the Records.
[01:05:24] Once you had that calming moment of, okay, here's a place we can stay for a while, instead of chasing those little flashes. Tell us more about what happened when you had made that realisation and then started to walk down that path with the Records. What was that like for you?
[01:05:42] Charlie: It was the piece that I didn't realise I had stopped trying to get, I think I'd given up, I think I'd given up after a point of actually reaching a state of prolonged peace, longer than like 5, 10 minutes, maybe.
[01:05:59] Because, yeah, they're,like little glimmers of things. You can grab it, you can hold it, and you can say, yay! And then in comes the emotional tidal wave of everything else that's just constantly on your plate anyway. Um, but being in the Records was just that, that fully home feeling. And
[01:06:19] it's interesting to say that because I feel like I say home and I, I define it so differently than, than anyone who can identify a loving home that they had or grew up in. It just to me felt like the safe place, the place where I can't screw anything up here. To an extent it's, it's allowed for that freedom of play that we can only do when we're not completely encumbered by anxieties and by the what we should be doing, by the should.
[01:06:49] The constant like, I should do it.
[01:06:51] Doc Sibson: That's what was coming to mind as we were talking about, you know, feels safe, you can't screw it up, because there is no judgment of action or choice or thought there. It is, that is the whole point. Nonjudgmental. Everything is what it is.
[01:07:05] Charlie: Yeah. And the other part that I just, I really, the part that really connected in for me was just being able to experience something
[01:07:16] that was not me. I, I had spent so long and I, my entire capacity for who I am as a person is something that I am finding out right now. Like, I'm, I'm in the process of discovering who I am because all I know is I'm not who they were. Uh, who we, I know I say we, I feel like I've been an observer of this life and then waking up, which is like you, you read awakening stories and that, that do kind of mirror how I've
[01:07:44] experienced, but I really do feel new. But I also have this full understanding inside of who is what, because I'm also all of us, I'm, I'm all of who we were now combined into one, which creates a very interesting, interesting, internal "what's going on," but from a really fun, curious perspective. But when I got into the Records,
[01:08:08] what was kind of taught was, if you start, anything that comes up, if you, if you don't hear anything or you don't see anything or nothing happens, that's normal. Um, and then if you do start hearing things or seeing things or thinking about things, you know, you're going to think it's you don't worry about it, like, just keep going.
[01:08:25] And that wasn't my experience because the moment I got in, I started feeling things. Cause I felt it first, I felt it in my body. I started feeling like, oh, there's a sensation. That's fun. And then as I would verbalise like the sensations that I'm feeling, I would start getting visuals and then I would start just kind of getting this,
[01:08:42] it's not really like hearing things, but sort of just the inner knowing that information is coming through me. And when that started happening, that was the first time that I was like, oh, that's not anybody in here. I know. I know what everyone in here sounds like. We spent four very dedicated years being hyper focused on what's going on, what's going on, and what's going on in everything because that's part of how you get to self love is you also have to, the whole way you get to self love is you have to accept what's in here.
[01:09:13] You have to just see it and be like, yep, that's me.
[01:09:16] Doc Sibson: That's us. That's the stuff. Here it is.
[01:09:21] Charlie: There it is. Like, like, correct. Yeah. Yeah. The parts that I don't like. Sure. Yeah. Nope. Still here. Still here. Love them. Love them dearly. Um, you know, like, like love and fight like it's fine, but, but you still had to accept it.
[01:09:35] And so being able to, to resonate and sort of know myself and then know what is not me was a really fascinating chance to explore. And it kind of felt like, oh, this is a new way of existing, like as a, as a human. Like this is a new way of being able to understand the greater cosmos questions that I have always had.
[01:09:58] And, and this is the part that I love, when you connect with someone else and you read their Records, you start by getting calibrated to their energy. To their unique signature, their unique cosmic resonance that you can feel or you can kind of see because sometimes there's, there's fun visuals and you don't see them,
[01:10:20] I don't see them externally. But, but it all happens as like an into my mind's eye as you imagine something. And just being able to, being able to have what kind of already was a pretty expanded perspective, because it was a perspective of 20 perspectives was kind of what I came into to, then have it
[01:10:40] just turned completely on its head. It was almost like, I kind of think of it like you're, you're on a wall. And you move back a little bit and you're like, yep. Yep. I can still see like, but it's just the wall. And then reading the Akashic Records was like, oh, oh, there's a whole,
[01:10:55] there's a whole room here. My head's just been against the wall this whole time. Okay. Got it.
[01:10:59] Doc Sibson: Also, there's a room of infinite proportion and facets. Yeah.
[01:11:04] Charlie: Yeah. But I had my, I've had my hands in front of my eyes this whole time and now I'm just like, oh, there's like, literally everything. There's, there's literally everything, well, cool.
[01:11:16] Doc Sibson: All of the things.
[01:11:17] Charlie: It was because of everything that had kind of transpired and how, how new everything felt for me and how much I really just wanted to understand, and how much I really wanted to continue this trajectory of healing, um, because I really did, I was like, well, all right, the body or the mind is, has,
[01:11:38] reconnected and done everything that it needs to do. Body, you ready to go on a ride? Like, you ready to, ready to heal too? It's already been, been kind of doing that, but it's, it's sort of this process of, of just sort of being open to this and I, I check in with my Records on a daily basis.
[01:11:54] I just open them and, I might just like, leave them open and just sort of walk around and see if something kind of comes out and occasionally I'll just get random, random thoughts that come out, random emotions that kind of come up. And as they come up, it's just sort of this really easy process of being like, oh, hey, horrifying emotion that usually would have me going down a deep depression spiral for like four months.
[01:12:13] You're just kind of here. What's up? Yeah, you're just hanging out okay. And oh, and now you're gone. Okay, cool, bye. And I don't say that to mean that I'm fully resolved a lot of these emotional, big emotional things. But it operates like the weather for me now, where I can kind of feel it coming, whatever it is. And as it comes in, I now have, you know, I put my umbrella up and I'm like, okay, it's raining for a while, cool. And my body does what it needs to do to kind of process it out and I can tell that these big celestial events that used to happen inside of me,
[01:12:49] emotionally speaking, they're just, they're diminishing over time. Like, I'm, I'm, I've been able to see the physics of our emotions actually get resolved and diminish in real time because it's been happening for me for, for the last nine months now, where huge, severely traumatising things that absolutely do result in like PTSD, they don't ping like that.
[01:13:12] It's not like a sense of detachment. It's more a feeling of being so incredibly secure in this position. If we're thinking physics and we're thinking of like self love, just love in general, being connected in with Source with your soul, if that is your zero point,
[01:13:30] then any amount of moving at this point, I just come back to my zero point. Like, I found my zero point and now I, I can bend any particular direction and I'm still just here. And because that's firmly planted, there's no crushing that. There's no keeping that away anymore at this point.
[01:13:50] And, and that's what I think is really amazing about the Akashic Records, because when you're in them for yourself, you're connecting in with your own soul, your own frequency, and when you're connecting with someone else. There is an art to it. It, it's not plug and play, you know, like, especially if you have a lot of mind chatter,
[01:14:08] Doc Sibson: Not at all.
[01:14:08] Charlie: If it's not, if you have a lot of mind chatter, it's hard.
[01:14:11] It is hard. And it's, it brings up a lot of insecurities usually. And it, and it brings up a lot of, it brings up that "am I crazy?" question, like in a big, big way. But when you're, able to take a backseat to your own ego, to your own sense, you can just kind of let it flow. And when you know how to read the Records, you're just translating.
[01:14:29] That's all you're doing. You're translating information out. But what's coming through is you being able to have a conversation with your own soul. because things on earth are chaotic and we get very disconnected from ourselves, it's almost like an opportunity to be like, okay, I can't, I can't connect maybe immediately myself, but if I could basically get a Zoom call with my, my own, frequency, my own soul, it just allows you to reconnect in a way that, I don't really know how else people really do unless they do have their own practices for kind of getting back in touch.
[01:15:02] It's, it's just a really direct one to one, what's coming through here and going back there is also coming. Like, there's just this very beautiful loop that ends up happening on this neat energetic level that clearly does things to your body, and clearly does things to your, your emotions. It unlocks things that have been locked and it does so in a way that is, just easy mode.
[01:15:28] That's what it feels like to me. It feels like, just say that as a person who has spent so much of my adult life chasing every self help thing like, I got a national board certification as a health and wellness coach, not because I actually wanted to coach people, but because we were, we'd finished the school.
[01:15:45] We weren't quite sure what we wanted to do. We loved coaching stuff when we saw it. And so we went through the process of it. And by the time we were done, we were like, this is really helpful for us internally. So we're just going to keep coaching ourselves.
[01:15:58] Doc Sibson: Yeah, the number of times that I've done stuff where I followed it because I was interested, because that's just me.
[01:16:03] My special interest is learning and curiosity and then I get the end of it I'm like, no, that one was for me. I might have thought I was using it somewhere else. Nope. That one was for me.
[01:16:14] Charlie: Exactly. Exactly. So, but I've done it. I've done it all the ways. I've done all of the self help things all the ways. I've also done the use a therapist.
[01:16:22] I've done the ways in which you help to heal emotional wounds. I, I'm an expert at healing emotional wounds the hard way. This is easy mode. This is easy mode in a way that I did not know was possible. And it's one of those like, you know, I completely understand why it had to wait until now for me to do it.
[01:16:43] But I'm also kind of annoyed. I'm on, you know, like, I just like, it would have been really helpful.
[01:16:47] Doc Sibson: As you were talking, I was sitting here thinking that too, I was like, because that's my experience of it as well, is when I finally had done enough of that own, like, detective, healer, healer detective, I kind of think of it as. Of, you know, you find the next piece that helps, and you implement it, you find the next piece that helps, and you kind of bring all of the perspectives back into something that is resembling the unified whole. And it feels more like you're in touch with that central point that is you anyway.
[01:17:17] And I call it "unfuckwithable" because it's what you described. Sure, you might get bumped off course, but you know who you are now. And once you know that, you can come back to it no matter what's going on.
[01:17:29] Charlie: You don't leave it.
[01:17:30] Doc Sibson: Yeah, and so, uh, yeah, that's also my experience is it took enough of that and pulling in all of those experiences with awareness and, kind of getting the roots in my system, I guess, reconnected as well. Like nervous system wise, rest of the body, and
[01:17:49] having all of those pieces at a point that's healed enough, let's say, um, or incorporated enough. I, I really want to emphasise that it's not that there's anything wrong with what was happening. Like you said, it's our body's protection. But incorporated enough that it could handle being in the Records A, and B, uh, have the
[01:18:14] knowledge of self and awareness of who I am and who I'm not, to have the discernment around the messages that are coming in. And also, I'm not going to say that ego has not been an issue for me in the Records, but what I will say is that it is much less of an issue if you have reached the stage of understanding who ego is, who you are, and how they do that dance already before you get in and get another stream of information.
[01:18:47] So I think there is, yeah, there is a kind of a rate limiting point in that process of being able to successfully access the Records just full stop and then, having, a fluid communication with the Records as well. I think that's the next layer, and then it just goes on from there, you know,
[01:19:06] Charlie: Right, yeah, continuous.
[01:19:06] Doc Sibson: Access is infinite, same as the information is infinite. So,
[01:19:10] is there anything that you feel called to share, um, kind of to wrap up the train of thoughts, around the Records before we kind of move into that, that last little bit that I like to, focus on before we finish?
[01:19:23] Charlie: I'm a big fan of the Akashic records, but it's, it's really just chasing that inner joy and chasing those glimmers pays off. And it really pays off when you feel the big spark. And that's what I felt, I felt when I, I went onto Laura Coe's website, I saw her course. I had never heard of the Akashic records before, but the moment I saw it and then I saw that there was a certification program, which admittedly for someone like me, that's catnip. like I,
[01:19:50] Doc Sibson: I know, same.
[01:19:51] Charlie: Like,
[01:19:52] Doc Sibson: I didn't start with the entry level one. I'm gonna get certified.
[01:19:56] Charlie: Gonna get certified because it's just, you know, It's part of the validation, it's a pattern of behavior that eventually might go away. But for now, if there's a certification attached to it, I'm probably going to be more interested in it. Uh, just in general.
[01:20:11] And so I, I did. I just, it was one of those right place, right time. I have the time. I'm still healing and recovering like body wise from everything that's going on. Like, I was sick, I was not, physically, I was not okay. Um, like, I couldn't walk well for, like, another month.
[01:20:25] I was, everything in my body did all kinds of things. And so I was just like, it's time, it's time to do something. Wow, this looks fun, this lights me up, this gives me that really, and it came from here, and I mean that literally. There was a sensation in my chest that was fun and exciting, and I dove in. And it doesn't really matter what that is for any one of us because our journeys are so uniquely curated for us, by us, that whatever it is that sparks that is like, just go that way.
[01:20:57] Just do it. Just go go for it. Like, try the thing because what, what results on the other side is just it's just you expanded. It's just you with more of yourself filling in the, the gaps, instead of you constantly trying to take something outside of yourself and shove it in. Like, it, it comes from here.
[01:21:18] I know that we know that, but I kind of just want to reinforce and reaffirm that whatever it is that lights you up, whatever it is that makes you go, yes. Like that, that feeling is like you said, that's the compass. That's the direction. That's how you fill up those what feel like holes. And it's really not.
[01:21:34] It's just disconnection from yourself. That's all it is. You're just disconnected from you. You can reconnect. It's actually pretty easy and it happens very naturally once you once you just follow the glimmers.
[01:21:46] Doc Sibson: Yeah, I love that. That is an amazing point to kind of wrap the perspective on and whatever that is for you, I think the only way to reiterate is just follow the compass of your heart.
[01:21:59] It knows exactly who you are, and you on that higher, big vantage point, you perspective. And the more you listen to it, the more that starts to feel like the you that's here too. So thank you so much for your time today. I am so grateful that you have been willing to come on and be so vulnerable about your experience of something that is really challenging to verbalise in a way that I think feels connected to your truth, in a way that is going to express a very personal inner experience in a way that others can understand it. And not shying away from the hard stuff because it's hard, without a doubt, I don't think anyone listening to this would have any other opinion about what you've described to us.
[01:22:52] I think we can all agree that that sounded like some hard shit to go through.
[01:22:56] Charlie: Interesting life, man. It's been an interesting life.
[01:22:59] Doc Sibson: Yeah, and I am just so grateful that you have brought the authentic you here today to share that experience with us, because it is so appreciated.
[01:23:10] Charlie: Thank you. And thank you.
[01:23:12] Doc Sibson: Well, you're welcome. Anytime. There'll be more of this. I'm sure. Um, I would love to wrap up, by asking you a collection of things
[01:23:23] I'll start by asking you what are your top three truths that have transformed your human experience? Don't need to have any explanation, just the truth itself.
[01:23:34] Charlie: Chase what lights you up. Definitely one truth. You are so much more than you think you are. Truth number two. And seriously, the harder things are, the harder you need to run toward fun. Like, whatever you need to do, run toward fun, because it's in the direction that is away from whatever it is that's hurting.
[01:23:57] That's all I can say. Run toward fun.
[01:23:59] Doc Sibson: I love it. That is amazing advice. Not walk, run.
[01:24:05] Charlie: Run, run.
[01:24:07] Doc Sibson: Yeah. So, I suppose, and feel free to pick one of those truths for this next one, or something entirely different if you're so moved. What words of wisdom would you share with past you as they stood at that big fork in the road? Whatever you foresee as are perceived as your biggest fork, let's say.
[01:24:31] Charlie: Truly, I've actually had so many forks in this particular life, that to any of them is simply, um, you made it this far, keep going. You, you did amazingly, keep going. And again, follow the, follow the, like, which way do you go? That one, which one feels fun? Go that way. Just, that's all you gotta do. Just pick fun.
[01:24:57] Doc Sibson: Cause you'll, you'll find love, you'll find connection. You'll find everything else that you need, but fun will keep you going. So they'll at least keep you going in the direction of everything else that you want. Oh, I love that.
[01:25:09] And in your experience, what is the best way to create more connection with others?
[01:25:16] Charlie: Connect with yourself. Uh, it feels like a, just a saying, but truly, you will literally never be able to connect with people the way that you want to if you are disconnected from yourself, I would know.
[01:25:28] Trust me. I would know.
[01:25:30] Doc Sibson: That's a mic drop moment, love it. Oh, Charlie, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. And I've had such a wonderful time talking to you about all the big things. And I am a hundred percent certain,
[01:25:45] I'm not a, a predictor in general. I I do not do that kind of work, but I would say this is happening again, .
[01:25:54] Charlie: I, 'cause I wanna talk more, but thank you so much for just keeping it a space that is open because this is not a topic that I have had success talking about with most people.
[01:26:04] Shocker. Oh no. Most people are not open. Most people struggle to be open with anything neurodivergence, but especially with a neurodivergence that has a very specific set of expectations that people come into a conversation about it with, or just reactions. It's just, it's a very reaction heavy neurodivergence. And you have created such a beautiful space that I want to keep talking forever, which is part of the problem. We can't just keep talking forever.
[01:26:35] Doc Sibson: No, I know. Well, I mean, we could, but no one will listen to a 10 hour long interview. So, I will,say thank you once more for your time and your effort and your heart, and I look forward to the next play around in the swimming pool that is this life. So, until then.
[01:26:54] Thank you for expanding with us on Divergent Wisdom Broadcast. We deeply appreciate the contribution of your time and attention to our shared adventure. If today's discussion resonated with you, we'd love to hear your thoughts, revelations, and experiences in the comments. Please take a moment to subscribe and share us with your cosmic crew.
[01:27:21] And remember, We're all made of the same stardust.
