From Religious Cult Trauma to Radical Self-Reclamation
What does it take to finally break free and begin the process of healing from trauma bonding to reclaim your power and truth? Guest Brooke Deanne, a Trauma Healing Mentor, Rapid Transformational Therapist, and Neuro Linguistic Programming Practitioner, joins us to share her raw and profound journey of overcoming religious cult indoctrination, a 17-year abusive marriage that perpetuated the pain of her past, and toxic relationships. Brooke, author of Shattered, Broken, and Beautiful: Losing my Religion and Finding Faith, and founder of the podcast Goddess Rising, discusses how her spiritual awakening was catalyzed by grief, her reliance on Shadow Work and holistic methods to uncover the root source of her pain, and her mission to empower women to restore their nervous systems and fully integrate mind, body, and spirit.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL HEAR ABOUT THINGS LIKE:
- The psychological impact of being raised in a religious cult and a narcissistic family dynamic, and how this environment creates a trauma bond with abusers.
- How an unexpected, profound grief event can act as a catalyst for a spiritual awakening and force a person to confront years of ignored pain and false beliefs.
- The significance of finding a partner who can provide a safe space and act as a mirror to reflect trauma-based reactions, enabling the beginning of deep internal healing work.
- Discovering the root cause of complex PTSD through the surfacing of a repressed memory, and the subsequent healing modalities used, including Shadow Work, Rapid Transformational Therapy (RTT/hypnosis), and psychedelic-assisted therapy.
- Why the nervous system keeps a “score” of trauma, and the holistic approach to retraining it to feel safe, release outdated patterns, and achieve mind-body-spirit integration.
- The belief that “pain is sacred” and serves as a necessary “fire” to sharpen a person, leading to growth, wisdom, and the ability to pass on generational wisdom instead of trauma.
- The mission to empower women to reject the “Damsel in Distress” narrative, take back their power from patriarchal messaging, and stop chasing love to finally “come home to themselves.”
SOME QUESTIONS IRENE ASKS BROOKE:
- In what ways did your difficult childhood within a religious cult teach you that emotions were to be ignored and difficult subjects were to be suppressed?
- What was your spiritual awakening experience and the pivotal grief event that catalyzed your transformation?
- What was your turning point, when you stopped trying to “get over it” and started walking with your grief as a companion?
- What role did mediumship, your spiritual practices, shadow work, therapy, and psychedelics play in your journey from broken to reborn?
- Why do you say that pain is sacred, the doorway to a woman’s power?
- What would you like to tell us about the wisdom you’ve shared with the world through your powerful books, The Grief Monster and Shattered, Broken, and Beautiful: Losing My Religion and Finding Faith.
- If you could go back and sit with the version of you who was lost in the thick of it, what should you say to her now?
- How is healing not about fixing what’s broken but about remembering who you were before the world told you who to be?
- As you healed, how did that affect your children?
- What is the importance of presence when it comes to feeling joy?
📖 ➡️ Grab Brooke’s books, Shattered, Broken, and Beautiful: Losing My Religion and Finding Faith, and The Grief Monster.
GRIEF AND REBIRTH LINKS
✨ Irene’s new anthology book, Good to the Last Drop! Embracing Your Life’s Third Chapter is now available on Amazon.
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From Religious Cult Trauma to Radical Self-Reclamation
I hope this message finds each of you so very well. I’m speaking to you from my studio in West Orange, New Jersey. I could not be more delighted to have the pleasure of interviewing Brooke Deanne, who is joining me from Chandler, Arizona. Brooke is a trauma-healing mentor, rapid transformational therapist, and neuro-linguistic programming practitioner. She has overcome the grip of religious cult indoctrination, abuse, and toxic relationships with both professional mastery and profound lived experience. Her mission is to help survivors reclaim their power by transforming the narratives that once held them captive.
Through her holistic and compassionate approach, Brooke supports women in breaking free from cycles of trauma, restoring balance to their nervous systems, and releasing outdated patterns. She guides them towards deep integration of mind, body, and spirit, empowering each woman to reclaim her voice, her body, and her truth so that instead of chasing love, she can finally come home to herself. Brooke is the author of The Grief Monster, a beautifully illustrated children’s book about grief, and Shattered, Broken, and Beautiful: Losing My Religion and Finding Faith, her raw and powerful memoir of breaking free from indoctrination and discovering faith beyond dogma.
A sought-after speaker, she is the founder of Goddess Rising and the Thriving After Abuse Summit, as well as the host of an acclaimed podcast, Goddess Rising. I’m looking forward to talking with Brooke about her difficult childhood within a religious cult, her profound grief journey through loss that became a portal to deeper self-discovery, and the powerful transformation that carried her from broken to reborn. We’ll also discuss what it means to stop chasing love and come home to yourself, and more, for a courageous interview, sure to be filled with liberating truths.
Hi, Brooke. A heartfelt welcome to the show.
Thank you, Irene, for having me here. It’s such a beautiful space to be in and to have this conversation with you. I love what you’re doing to help people through their grief and to come out the other side.
As we have both done. It’s not an easy journey, but it is worth it.
Yes, it is worth it, for sure.
Growing Up in a Cult: Suppression, Control, and the Narcissistic Dynamic
Let’s start from the beginning. You had a difficult childhood. Talk to us about your childhood within a religious cult and how it taught you, which is exactly the opposite of where you are now, that emotions would be ignored. Difficult subjects would be suppressed. How did all of that affect you?
It’s crazy as I look at my childhood now. I didn’t know any better. As a young girl, I didn’t know what I was surviving in. I didn’t know that there was something beyond that. I was just in it. As a little girl, I knew that I couldn’t question things. When I did, I was usually shut down. I started to learn that early on. Being raised in a narcissistic family dynamic, my father was the narcissistic person. He was controlling. His demeanor was one minute he was a teddy bear, and the next minute he was raging. He was angry about something. He was volatile. You could flip a switch, and he was a completely different person.
You spent your childhood on eggshells?
Yes, I didn’t know what was going to happen next. My parents fought a lot. I remember being a little girl hiding in the basement, waiting for them to stop the screaming and the dishes to stop flying. I remember being afraid, honestly. I was alone. I was the only child for a long time. I kept to myself. I was a quiet little girl. Everybody told me that. “You’re such a good little quiet girl.” It’s because I had to be. I was expected to be. Growing up in the religion that I was raised in as a Jehovah’s Witness, that’s the messaging you got. You have to be a good girl. You have to be that perfectly conditioned spiritual example.
If you’re not, you’re going to get punished. You’re going to either get punished by the religion. God is watching you. You’re going to get punished by God. I didn’t want the shame that came from my family, especially my father. There was something in me, a fire in my soul that was like, “I came here to be rebellious,” apparently. I decided to push all the narrative. I tried to push the boundaries. I wanted to desperately be like the other children. When you’re raised in a cult like this, you’re told that you can’t be like the other kids. You have to be different. You can’t celebrate the holidays.
When you're raised in a cult, you're told that you can't be like the other kids; you have to be different. Share on X
It’s so hard.
You don’t get to celebrate your birthday. I had to go sit in the library. I couldn’t have the cupcakes with the kids. I couldn’t enjoy life. I couldn’t enjoy what everybody else was enjoying. They sell you the story. “It’s okay. You still get presents.” They tried to sell you the fact that you do still get things, which is fine. At the same time, you just wanted to be like your peers. We couldn’t be like our peers. We were told that we could only associate with the people who are inside the society. Anybody on the outside, we were told, was evil and that they were from Satan’s world.
As a little girl, I looked at the outside world as something that was a threat. These people on the outside were evil. Something was wrong with them. When you’re getting that messaging as a child, what are you supposed to believe? You believe that this is true. Your parents are teaching you this. You’re like, “I guess this is the truth. People on the outside are evil. I have to stay in this. My only safe place is this community. I can’t go outside this community.
It’s about power and control.
You’re stifled. You’re restricted to this one space. There was something inside of me that wanted to break free.
Was your father also raised as a Jehovah’s Witness?
He was. I was a third-generation Witness.
He had all this bottled up inside of him. He didn’t even know what that was.
He had his own anger. He had his own trauma. He had his own wounding. I look at him now, and I see that. My father was my first abuser.
I had one, too.
My second abuser was God. I had an abuser because I had a trauma bond with God. I was taught to fear Him, but He was also supposed to be my source of love. It was the same messaging I got from my father. “You’re supposed to fear me, but I’m also supposed to be your source of love.” Why wouldn’t I then recreate a pattern in myself that I would also find an abusive relationship later?
How could you know anything different? I did the same thing, Brooke. In my situation, I thought that my husband was going to be a step away from my father because he was as angry as my father. I realized I went from the fire into the frying pan. It was the same thing. You had the same experience.
Yes, I did. Carbon copy of my father, with some different attributes.
You experienced domestic violence as your mother did.
Yes. I don’t know if my mother ever got hit, but my mom was definitely an abused woman. I never saw that, if that did happen. My father was physical with me. At the same time, that was okay. Generationally, that was the messaging that we were getting from the Bible. It’s okay to use the rod against your child. It’s okay to spank your child. We’re seeing the effects that this corporal punishment has had on our children. We’re seeing the traumatic effects. It’s trickled down.
Escaping the Cult: Disfellowshipping, Elopement, and the Abuse Mirror
There are so many people in the world who were brought up this way. They have trauma, and they don’t even know it. It’s so sad. That’s what you’re in the world for. That’s what I’m doing. We’re trying to help people. How long were you married to your first husband before you started saying, “This is not right?” Like it was for me, this had to be huge for you to break away. It could not have been an endorsed behavior and all that kind of thing. What happened to you? How long were you married?
I met him when I was fifteen years old. To rewind a little bit, I don’t know why I think this is an important part of the message here. When I was in that cult, if you had sex before marriage, you got disfellowshipped, which meant that you were outcast from society. No one could talk to you. No one could associate with you. This happened. I met this boy. I was a young girl. I’m blossoming. I’m curious. You fall in love. You think you’re in love.
What happens is I have sex before marriage. I get caught. I have to tell the elders in my congregation. I get disfellowshipped. You get shamed in front of them. I also had to spend a year outside of that society with no friends and no one to talk to. I would go to the church, and no one could look at me. No one could smile. No one could talk to me. I was put in a corner and was very ashamed. That was a traumatic experience for me in itself.
Because that happened, I became angry. I was like, “What is wrong with this system that they outcast the people that they supposedly love and make you have this punishment?” I was very much against it. I became angry with the religion and my family. I also wanted to have contact with this boy. My parents got the law involved. They put a restraining order against him because they wanted to control me even more.
They did not want me to be around this boy. What does that do to a young girl who’s been controlled her whole life? She wants to burst free. She becomes even more rebellious. I ended up eloping when I was eighteen years old. The minute I turned eighteen, I was getting the restraining order off, eloping, and marrying him. My parents didn’t talk to me for six or seven years after that. My father was livid. Shortly after I married him, we fought.
That was the first moment that I realized that something wasn’t right. I didn’t know what to do. He got angry. He suffocated me with a pillow. I was fighting to breathe and fight for my life. He let me go finally. I ran into the bathroom. I didn’t know what to do. I questioned. What have I just done? My pride wouldn’t let me crawl with the tail between my legs and go back to my parents. I said, “I made this decision. I’m going to have to make it work.”
I kept on going, but not even realizing that this was a form of abuse, and not even registering that. I continued on that path. He was volatile. He was the teddy bear, just like my dad, but if he got angry, he became the source of pain and suffering for me. There was so much of that, hitting and breaking things and violence. We were together for seventeen years. We had children. I stayed for a very long time. There was infidelity. I left at one point, but then I still went back because, as an abused woman, you don’t know how attached you are to this person that you see potential in.
As an abused woman, you just don't know how attached you are to a person that you see potential in. Share on X
You see that there may be something good in them because there is. There’s something good in every abuser. It is the truth, but the evil side or the insidious part of them is always going to win out until they actually heal themselves. I always tell people it’s because they’re hurt people. They’re wounded people themselves. I stayed in that environment for so long and didn’t realize what I was existing in because it was all I had ever known.
The Dark Night of the Soul: Navigating Abuse and Loss of Identity
You didn’t have family backing you up or anything. We have our commonality. My family abandoned me for 23 years. Who did I have to talk to? I found people outside the construct of my life, including starting to go to therapy, which started to help me. You had a long, dark night of the soul. Did this start while you were married? You were going through this.
No, I left my marriage and the cult at the same time. In 2017, my then-husband found out that the cult was a sham. He told me about all of the CSA cases that were going on that were being highlighted. They were in the news against this religious entity. It was wild what was happening. This made me question, even though I was afraid when he said to me, because I was trained to stand up for my beliefs. I was trained to refuse anything when someone says something is wrong with this religion.
I reacted that way. When he started to put these seeds of doubt, it started to make me question things. I started to do my own research. I opened up to, “Maybe I need to look further into this.” I let my intuition lead me. In that same moment, and all of that same place, I realized I was existing in an abusive relationship. The day that he put a knife to my throat is the day when I realized what I am doing.
You had kids there, and you were seeing all this, too?
Thankfully, my children were upstairs.
You grew up seeing all this stuff with the flying dishes. All your kids had to be affected.
My kids were definitely affected, especially my oldest. To this day, you have regrets, but I always tell myself I took this path for a reason. Even though the path was difficult, and I wish that the younger version of me had known better, at the same time, I’m here today because I was meant to be. I trust that. I believe that. I go with the fact that I can’t have any regrets. I was affected. My children were affected. At that moment, I realized it was time to part ways. It was time to let go.
Being severely trauma-bonded to him, I didn’t realize what it was like to come off a chemical trauma bond that you have. Your body is so used to the highs and lows of the relationship. It’s like a dependency. I always tell people, “Maybe I never tried heroin, but I know what it was like to get off of heroin because he was my special choice of heroin.” When I left the relationship, I didn’t eat. I didn’t sleep. I had severe anxiety. I lost 25 pounds in six weeks. I was severely detoxing from this relationship, this toxicity.
I never tried heroin, but I know what it was like to get off of it, because he was my special choice of heroin. Share on X
Detoxing a Trauma Bond: The Physical and Emotional Cost of Leaving
Did you blast off, or did he know you were leaving? Was that even more traumatic?
It was a little bit of a battle to get him to go because we were codependent. In all abusive relationships, we have a codependency on each other. We want to go, but we’re also afraid to go. We feel like we need this person. We’re afraid to lose them because we’re afraid to be alone. We finally did. We parted ways. That was the beginning of the journey of losing my identity entirely, my religious beliefs, being a wife, and all of these things.
I survived by taking care of my children, putting my head down, going to work, and figuring my life out because I couldn’t process what happened to me. I was still in shock and denial, honestly. This is the grief cycle we’re talking about. I was in shock and denial for a very long time until I felt like I got bulldozed by the universe when my ex-husband died tragically of an overdose. This happened in 2020 when the whole world was blowing up with COVID. People were afraid. Things were changing on such a huge level. My whole world shatters again.
Even though you couldn’t live with him anymore, you still had this unbelievable connection.
Yes, a soul connection. I tell everybody that when he died, I knew it even before I knew that he died. I knew it the night before. I felt like I had this urge to call him. Something is wrong with him. I want to call him. We’ve been divorced for four years. I’ve never had that feeling or that sensation before. The next day, he didn’t show. He didn’t answer his phone to pick up the kids. I knew he was gone. I told my then partner, “He’s dead. He’s gone.” He goes, “No, that’s crazy talk. That’s not true.” I was like, “No, he’s gone. Sure enough.”
You hadn’t awakened yet to your abilities, but you were intuitive. You had a sense about things.
I knew something was wrong. Sure enough, that was the case. That was when I say my dark night of the soul happened. My spiritual awakening happened because it made me have to face everything I had ignored, all the pain, all the things that I had been told, and all the beliefs that I had found out were a lie. I had to go and look at it instead of avoiding it because I was running from a girl, but it was chasing after me. It caught up. I had to sit and look at it now.
Grief as a Portal: The Pivotal Event That Ignited a Spiritual Awakening
What would you say was the exact spiritual awakening that you had? I know this was the pivotal grief event that catalyzed it. What happened one day? You’re going through all this. You’re feeling empty. You’re having all this experience. What happened to turn you towards spirituality like this?
It was the grief. I’m getting emotional even talking about it. When he died, it was like my heart broke. It literally physically felt like my heart broke. I was like, “What is this feeling?” I don’t even know how to explain it. It was like this deep pain in my chest. You’re very familiar with this, Irene.
Yes, I am.
I was like, “What is this? Why am I feeling this deeply? I felt like I cracked in two. Am I going to be okay? Is my heart going to survive this?” That was the type of pain that I was feeling. When I felt that, I was like, “I’ve never experienced grief like this.” I wanted to do more research because I was told in the religion that when people die, or our loved ones die, they go to sleep. They’re in limbo somewhere sleeping, and God is going to resurrect them after Armageddon comes. God restores the wicked. He’s going to resurrect them, and then we’re all going to be in a paradise on Earth. We’re all going to be perfect little humans.
How marvelous.
It was a very good fantasy. I didn’t have that belief anymore. I was like, “God, first, You give me a sham of a religion. I don’t know what to believe.” I was angry. I wanted answers. I desired answers. The more that I asked for those answers, stuff started happening. People told me to go watch Surviving Death. I was like, “What is this?” It was a Netflix documentary. It’s all about near-death experiences. I had never been open to the idea of near-death experiences, because that would have been Satan, voodoo, and my old religion.
We couldn’t have believed that. They don’t want you believing that. They want you to think of their doctrine. This opened my mind. I shouted to the universe. I didn’t like to say ‘prayer’ anymore. It was very triggering. I said, “I want you to show me someone who has had a near-death experience. I don’t want to just watch it on a TV. I want someone to tell me with their lips all about their near-death experience.”
Sure enough, three days later, and I used to be an esthetician, someone lay down on my esthetician table to get their facial. This woman tells me her near-death experience unprovoked. I couldn’t even believe it. I was dumbfounded. I’m bawling. Tears are streaming down my face because I’m like, “Somebody listened. Somebody heard me.” That was the point of my real opening and awakening because I felt a presence there. It was a very loving presence. I felt wrapped up in love. That’s the only way I can explain it. It made me feel like there is something more to this life. That gave me the comfort that I needed.
You had been through all this since you were fifteen or sixteen. You’re married for how long?
Seventeen years.
This is all happening to you. I can’t relate to a single thing. I’m teasing you because it’s amazing. You’re starting to talk to different healers.
What’s funny is they were finding me. The first time, I went to get a massage. She was a medium. She was also a massage therapist. I lay on the table. She’s like, “I have your dead husband here.” I was like, “What?” First of all, you are told that mediumship is also the devil’s work. I was terrified of psychic mediums. I was like, “This is bad. This is wrong.” I was very afraid. When she’s like, “I have your dead husband here,” I’m like, “Girl, I just tried to get a massage. I didn’t know he was going to show up.” Sure enough, he was finding any way to connect with me to know that he was there. He was still there watching over us and making sure everything was okay.
I’m sure once you got a little more of him, and you knew more, he started apologizing to you, because that’s what they do.
That was the first thing he did through that medium. He apologized.
They get a life review. I’m saying this for those who are tuning in to this show. When you cross over, you get a life review. You get to feel everything that happened to you or that you perpetrated in your lifetime, and how that hurts.
I can’t even tell you how many ways. He used other mediums. They would seek me out. He would be apologizing. I knew it was them because he would say things that no one would know. He did that on purpose because he knew I was going to be like, “This is not true. This is crazy.” I started to seek out mediums, as you did. I know you did the same story. I was like, “I got to have more.” I went on this journey of finding more and more of these people who could hear the messages.
Honestly, the beauty of being able to hear from the other side is healing that part of oneself that is the grieving. It doesn’t take away the pain of them being gone here in the physical, but what it does give us is the fact that in some shape or form, they’re still around. They are still making sure that they’re giving us gifts and maneuvering things in our lives to help us find joy, despite the loss. That’s the beauty of it. I know that I am going to see him again in some shape, form, or fashion, however that is.
I tell people I don’t know all the answers. What I’ve understood and what I know about the universe is that it’s loving. There is more to this life than we see and understand. Nobody has all the answers. Anybody who tells you they do is nonsense. That is the mystery of the universe. It’s being able to know that there is so much mystery out there. That’s part of the fun of the journey.
Turning Pain into Purpose: Why Our Suffering Becomes Wisdom for Others
I’m relating to what happened to you. I’ve been told that I had to go through what I went through because I had to gather the knowledge and the empathy and heal from it, to be able to inspire other people.
Same story.
What was the turning point when you started to use your grief as a companion and got a shift of perspective to knowingly inspire you to start healing, that I have work to do here?
My pivotal moment, I’m grieving my ex-husband at the same time, but I had found a very healing and loving partner, a partner that had the capability to not only hold a safe space for me, but also know and understand that when I would react or when I would do something, it was for my trauma. It wasn’t the real me.
What a blessing that you found this person or that he found you.
I say it was divine intervention. The way that we met, there was no question about it. He was put in my life to help me be able to be feel safe enough to even do the healing work. I wouldn’t have been able to do it without that space, if that makes sense. He was the mirror to help me see, “That’s not how we treat people. I can’t do that. This is not okay in a relationship. What am I doing?” I was reacting from such a wounded place from all of the abuse. I needed to see and reflect on that. I needed to witness that in myself.
I needed to say, “This is not going to work out, or I’m going to chase this man away. He’s going to run the other way.” That’s when I said, “I’ve got to do the internal work. I need to go in, and I need to figure this out.” Honestly, I was suffering. I had severe anxiety and severe complex PTSD from everything I had survived. I had to find the root source of my pain. My ex-husband just deepened the wounds I already had. I tell people they were already there. He just validated them.
He poured kerosene.
The deeper wounds were already there. They were there from the cult I had survived. They were there from the experience I had in my family, but they were also there. I found the root cause a few years ago. I’ve never spoken about this on a show. For some reason, I’m being nudged to do it. I’m going to listen.
Someone here needs to hear it.
My pain had been buried because the brain is a beautiful source to bury pain that is too painful for us to process at a young age. It’s there to protect us. After I had done so much internal work and so much healing, memories surfaced. That was the root cause of my pain. It was the root source. The root source was that my father had been my sexual abuser. I had always known that I had been sexually abused. I thought the perpetrator was someone else.
The brain is a beautiful resource to bury pain that is too difficult for us to manage. Share on X
When I told my dad that I had been sexually abused and who the perpetrator was, he told me I was a liar, that I had made it up, and that I had dreamed it up. Years ago, I didn’t think anything of it. When I remember that memory, and I questioned my brain, I was like, “No, that can’t be true.” I questioned it because “No, I was there. It was visceral. I could see it. I could feel it. I could remember it.”
How old were you when it happened to you?
The memory begins when I’m three. It could have been younger. I don’t know. The fact is that I didn’t believe my brain when it told me this. I didn’t believe my body. When I couldn’t ignore it anymore, that’s when I did the deeper work of understanding it in psychedelic-assisted therapy, because I found that this is the reason why I had been the way I was, why I chased love and validation, why I thought my body was the way to receive love, and why I had lived with this body dysmorphia, hatred, and shame about my body for my entire life.
It was the key to my ability to say, “This is very painful to sit here, look at, witness, and understand.” At the same time, this is the root source of my pain. If I don’t heal this, then I can’t heal all the other stuff. I had to do that. That’s when I decided to go all in and dive in to discover what I needed to heal inside and how I could return to safety within myself, a self-love I’d never experienced.
We are so in sync with our stories. I was just going to say, you had never learned self-love, and neither had I. To get in touch with your healing and to identify what happened with the trauma and all, I also had a similar experience with that. Finally, you identify it, and you start to heal it. It shakes you up because it’s such a change. Your mindset is completely shifting, but it’s also a part of loving yourself enough to embrace yourself and not judge yourself for what happened to you. You didn’t make it happen. You didn’t attract it to you. It wasn’t your fault and all that kind of thing. That’s important. Something I had learned is to forgive myself for not being perfect all the time or for things that happened. It is a form of self-love. I know you used shadow work. Tell everyone what shadow work is.
Shadow work is looking at the parts of self that have been repressed, rejected, and abandoned, and not necessarily because you wanted to do that, but because someone else made you think you needed to repress or reject these parts of self. When we have deep trauma, especially when it happens at a younger age, what happens is that the psyche becomes fragmented. We have parts instead of a whole. At least it feels like that. It feels very broken. The shadow work is helping you sit with these darker parts of yourself.
That’s why they call it shadow work. It’s the dark parts of ourselves that we want to reject, we want to avoid, and we don’t want to look at. At the same time, these are the parts of the self that need the most love. They’re often younger parts of ourselves that need to be looked at and integrated into the whole, because ultimately, the story is that you are always whole. You also have to recover and restore those broken parts that happened so long ago. That’s the part of healing.
Holistic Healing: From Shadow Work and Hypnosis to Psychedelic Therapy
I want to ask you another thing, though. You went through shadow work. You also went through therapy. That was regular traditional therapy.
I’ve done every modality probably known to man, I feel like at this point.
That’s me, too. I’ve used a ton of therapy. I’ve used energy work and everything. I haven’t done psychedelics. Could you tell everyone a little bit about how that played? I have a friend who helps people use psychedelics to heal. Can you explain to those tuning in? They’re like, “What is she talking about, psychedelics?” How does that apply?
I first want to talk about how traditional talk therapy keeps re-imprinting that trauma. First, I found RTT, which is what I do, rapid transformational therapy. It is accessing the unconscious mind, so we can get to the root cause of the trauma.
Is that done through hypnosis?
Yes. That’s done through hypnosis. It’s powerful. It’s very transformational. It happens quickly. You can be in traditional talk therapy for ten years and not get anywhere. This is so different. It’s fast. Psychedelics are very much the same. Psychedelics are not for everybody. There’s a lot of psychedelics out there. There’s ketamine, which is a lot more mainstream now. There’s psilocybin, which is magic mushrooms. There’s ayahuasca. There’s San Pedro. There are quite a few things that you can tap into, but I felt intuitively called to psilocybin, the magic mushroom.
I didn’t hesitate to go all in when I got the message that I needed to work with this medicine. I said, “I’m going to work with this medicine.” While I was working with my unconscious mind and hypnotherapy, there was a part of me, because I’d had that sexual abuse, that couldn’t tap into safety. Psychedelics can help support the body in a different way. It heals the nervous system in such a different way. It helps you work through your unconscious, your shadow work, in a very beautiful way. It can be difficult, but again, you’re going to move through things quickly. You can sit in the space.
With someone helping you as visions came up, they took notes and helped you process them afterward. Is that how it works?
No, I did it in a ceremonial setting. I would go into the setting in a safe place where I felt safe. I did the internal work myself. I always tell people this is about preparing yourself to do this. I don’t recommend going into an ayahuasca ceremony. A lot of people do this, and you come out with psychosis. You come out with an even more fragmented self because you can’t integrate if you haven’t already done the preparation for this work. It takes a lot of internal quietness and stillness that some people don’t know how to have.
Not with your racing mind and all the anxiety that’s going into it all the time.
What psychedelics do is they amplify what you already have within. If you have that racing mind, then you have anxiety. It’s going to amplify what is already happening within. I always tell people, “I want you to meditate before you go into psychedelics. You need to be an avid meditator before you want to go and sit with space like this because it’s going to be difficult if you can’t process.”
I’m guessing, but I’m betting also that in your healing, you help people to learn how to meditate and to do some healthy healing through that, too. Some people have never meditated before. They don’t know how to access anything. Their brains are too busy. You probably do that.
The Foundation of Healing: Retraining the Nervous System and Holistic Health
I don’t help you learn meditation, but what I do help you do is your foundation, which is healing your nervous system and learning how your nervous system operates, because it’s a holistic approach, mind, body, spirit. Through my hypnosis recordings, I am teaching you how to meditate because I’m asking you to once a day, sit quietly and listen to the recordings. We can repeat to the mind what we want to actually believe about the self, what we want to believe about the world, because this is how the mind learns.
We also have to retrain the nervous system, especially if you were in abusive environments. We need to retrain the nervous system to know that it’s safe again. I’m teaching people this foundational piece, too, so that they can understand when they’re not regulated and what’s happening inside their body, because we become so disconnected from our bodies half the time. We don’t even know that we’re a mess. We’re living in chaos. Our body is chaotic. It’s why we get sick. It’s why we have disease. It’s why we have autoimmune disorders. It’s why people are so unhealthy now, because ultimately, they don’t know and understand the state of the nervous system.
We need to retrain the nervous system to know that it's safe again. Share on X
The nervous system keeps score. I will always say, because grief, anxiety, or whatever goes into your body, probably a lot of what you do is help them to get the energy of that out of their bodies so that they can start to function in a different way. They’re also shedding outdated patterns, things that they learned that don’t make sense for them.
I’m helping them emotionally process it, not only through their mind, but through their bodies, somatically, being able to process the information and then release it from the body. Next time that your ex-husband pops up and calls you on the phone, you’re no longer angry or get triggered. You’re neutral. You don’t feel anything. You have no response because it’s not interesting anymore to your body or to your brain. You’ve neutralized the trigger.
That’s marvelous. Why do you say that pain is sacred, the doorway to a woman’s power?
Nobody can rise if they’re not forged through a fire. There’s got to be some pain. There’s got to be some discomfort in moving. If life were all easy, wonderful, and perfect, there would be no growth. There’s no challenge. Life is uninteresting. To be honest, we act like, “We want a perfect little happy-go-lucky life.” At the same time, sometimes, we want to challenge because, as humans, we desire challenge. We thrive off of that.
Even though it sounds like you and I have had a very similar past, difficult, a lot of suffering, a lot of pain, and a lot of grief, it has also gotten us to this other side of how beautiful it looks from the view from up top. We climbed a big mountain. We were forged in a fire. We had some pain, but the pain also created this beautiful space where we could show others how to heal from their pain and what they needed to see and understand about this pain. If we hadn’t experienced that, we wouldn’t be able to pass on the wisdom.
Brooke, why do you say that pain is sacred, the doorway to a woman’s power? Another thing you like to say is that we need to stop chasing love and come home to ourselves. Can you explain each of those statements to us?
Pain sharpens us. We have to go through sometimes the suffering, but it sharpens us to rise above the pain and to look at it differently with different, fresh eyes, a new perspective, but also to take that wisdom that we get from the pain and share it with others. That’s the beautiful part of this journey of life. Why we’re even here is to take what we have moved through, evolved out of, and then grow from it, learn from it, but also then be able to pass it on.
If this is the generational wisdom now that we get to pass on, not the generational trauma, we get to pass on that. The most important piece of what I love to teach women is that they get to take their power back from the stories of the past. You do not have to be last. You don’t have to sacrifice yourself. You don’t have to believe that you’re not worthy, that you have to chase, that you’re desperate, and that you’re a damsel in distress that needs rescuing anymore.
You’re not complete without a man.
Sacred Pain: Why We Must Stop Chasing Love and Come Home to Ourselves
We have had that messaging everywhere. The Bible tells us that we’re weaker. It tells us we have to be in subjection to a man. They see it in Hollywood. We’re the damsel in distress. We need to be rescued. We’re not anybody if we’re not married. We don’t have this perfect little life if we’re not married. We’ve had so much messaging over the years, women specifically, because the patriarchy doesn’t want women to be in power. Why? It is because women are powerful on their own. They don’t like that. Women are very intuitive. We are sacred and able to move the divine feminine and the divine masculine energy through us. We’re oracles. That’s what it is. I’m not saying that men can’t be either, but there’s a certain type of power that has been given to women. It’s no wonder it’s been suppressed.
The patriarchy doesn't want women in power because women are really powerful on their own. Share on X
They’re afraid of us.
Some men were like, “These women are going to take over the world if we don’t suppress them.” Every system that has been put into place through religion, through the way women are treated, has been to do that, to keep us away from our power, to keep us in a way from our intuition, from our real, true wisdom, the inner compass that has already been innately put in within us to guide our life. That was my experience in the cult, being told that I couldn’t trust my heart. It was treacherous. You couldn’t even think of the word intuition. I’d never even heard it before. After I left the cult, I was like, “Intuition, what is that? I was never taught about that,” yet knowing that I had it my whole entire life because I was always intuitive. I was born with it.
Thank God. Your intuition to tell you the truth saved your life. I feel the same way. I was a very intuitive child, not that it was recognized or anything. I was one of three. One of my siblings never got into the healing thing at all, but I was a seeker, just like you, of whatever could come along to help me. I kept being guided to the next step and the next step. More and more of the layers were coming off.
That’s what I always tell people. If you are open, whatever comes into your awareness, and it feels like it’s a ping, “Go and see this. Go and understand this. Go and learn about this,” if you listen to the call, you’re just opening doors, door after door to your freedom.
I always tell people who are afraid to walk through the door, and if it doesn’t feel right to you, you can walk out that door and go in another one.
There you go.
Wisdom in The Grief Monster and Shattered, Broken, and Beautiful
Now is the time for you to tell us about the wisdom you’ve shared with the world through your powerful books, The Grief Monster and Shattered, Broken, and Beautiful: Losing My Religion and Finding Faith. What would you like to tell us? I read some parts of your Shattered, Broken, and Beautiful. What a beautiful book. Tell everyone about it. The Grief Monster sounds like a wonderful book for children. Tell us about that.
Shattered, Broken, and Beautiful: Losing My Religion and Finding Faith
I’ll talk about The Grief Monster. It’s right here. I have my little grief monster. He’s pretty precious. Honestly, you don’t even think of him as a bad person. He’s so sweet-looking, but that’s what people always tell me. That book, I was obviously inspired because when my boys lost their father, I saw them grieve. I saw how painful that was for all of us. They don’t have enough books about grief and how children can process grief. This is such a deep emotion that needs to be talked about and expressed, and helps children to move through.
When we suppress our grief, this is why we have trauma. We’ve been told that our emotions are threats. We’ve been told that our emotions are bad. “Don’t be emotional. Why are you crying?” No, I wanted my boys to know that it’s okay. It’s safe to cry. It’s actually important. If you want to talk about this, we can talk about this. This is an open space. That’s the reason why I wrote this. It’s very near and dear to my heart. It’s special.
It’s important. How do you teach a child and talk to a child about that? Just because they’re kids doesn’t mean that they’re impervious to everything going on, to loss, or anything like that.
Honestly, I wrote more books. There’s more to come in my emotional intelligence series for children.
Good for you.
I’m going to keep going with that. Shattered, Broken, and Beautiful is the book about my life. It’s my memoir. It’s my life’s work, my soul’s work here in this lifetime, about being raised in a generational trauma, what it was like being in an abusive environment, and why we keep repeating the pattern that we are unconsciously doing that we don’t even know that we’re doing. My purpose in writing this book was to awaken people, to awaken within them why they need to heal within themselves.
Everyone who has read this book has told me, “I didn’t even know that I was doing this. I didn’t even understand this about myself.” I wanted it to be a little nudge to say, “This is what needs to awaken within me. This is what I need to heal. This is what came from the family lineage that I need to look at to heal, so I’m not passing it down to my next generation, to my children, and to my grandchildren.” Whatever you have in your life right now, this is your responsibility to look at. Everybody is avoiding doing the work.
I once went to therapy. I said, “I want to be healthy. I don’t understand. I’m working so hard to do this. I don’t understand why more people don’t do this.” She said, “When you’re in therapy, or you’re going into healing, you have to face yourself. A lot of people don’t have the courage to face themselves.”
Many people are afraid. They can’t look in the mirror. This is why we have a society that is addicted to drugs, to alcohol, to their social media, and to anything to avoid looking at themselves and to want to blame everybody else. We talk a lot about narcissism and all of those things. They did a study. One in five people is narcissistic, not because they want to be evil. It’s because they cannot look at themselves. They want to point the finger and blame everyone else in their life.
We want to be the victim, but honestly, there’s a villain in everybody’s story. The minute that you can stop pointing at the villain and start looking internally, “Why did I have this villain in my story? What was it meant to show me? Why was I meant to heal from this?” then we’re starting to do the self-work that we need to do to heal in our own evolution of our existence and our consciousness.
What to Tell the Lost Version of Yourself
That is such a precious, important thing you said. It is so crucially important for people. As they go through all the courage they need to face this stuff, but you and I can both attest to the fact that once you’ve let go of all that, you’re experiencing life like you never did before. It’s so much better. There’s so much more space. Let me ask you. If you could go back and sit with a version of you who was lost in the thick of it, and so many people tuning in to us are, right now, lost in the thick of it, what would you say to her now?
It’s so funny that you asked me this question. I wrote something. I said, “This is what I would tell that younger version of myself.” I would tell her to go and take the leap of faith. Do it, being afraid, because on the other side, you’re going to land where you are exactly meant to be. It’s about letting go of the control, trusting the process, and letting things unfold. We want to control everything so badly. Part of our ego is that we thought we had to do to stay safe was to try to control our environment. Ultimately, you have to learn the lesson that there is nothing to control anymore. You can’t necessarily control everything. All you can control is how you feel inside and what you believe inside.
Also, what you choose and how you choose to respond to it.
That’s all you can control. Anything outside of that that you think you’re controlling is not true. It’s an illusion. It’s remembering that, when you trust life, you’re feeling different because you’re like, “I trust life is working out for me. I trust that whatever’s happening right now, I’m going to move through it. I’m going to be okay on the other side.” What saved me, honestly, in my journey is my sense of humor. I tell people, “Just sit with your sense of humor.”
Did you always have a sense of humor? This is funny because I have a sense of humor too. Did you always have it, or did it become sharper as you started healing?
I’ve always had it, but I feel like it’s become sharper. I recognize this part of myself that’s very cynical, but I’m like, “This part of myself is hilarious because she is so cynical, and that’s okay. I’m accepting of the cynical part of me because you made me survive some of the hardest stuff ever.” Some people would collapse. Some people would give up. This part of me kept me going. I am so thankful that I had that sense of humor to say, “This is dark right now.” Life is grim, but finding the humor in every situation has been beautiful. I don’t know why this is coming up, but I’ve been estranged from my parents for a while because of not being in the cult anymore. They’re very happy with it.
Now, I just laugh about it because I’m like, “That’s great. I don’t have to take care of my parents.” In life, everybody’s complaining how they’re having to take care of their parents, and they’re doing all these things. I’m like, “I don’t have to worry about them. They’ve got it. They’re over there. They don’t need me.” I also see the freedom in it. It’s freeing. Maybe life gave me that because I wasn’t meant to, and that’s okay. I had to grieve it, and it’s okay. I have found family and love everywhere I’ve gone.
I have to say, when I was abandoned for 23 years, I made friendships. They became my family. Even for my son, certain people became aunt and uncle who were not blood-related. I tell people that my life has taught me that love is not about blood. It’s about the heart. Some people are strangers who can have greater hearts and more love for you than your blood, but have their issues or whatever that is. With that, tell us how healing is not about fixing what’s broken, but about remembering who you were before the world told you who to be.
That’s beautiful. I love that because that’s exactly what my experience was like. It was remembering who I was underneath all of the trauma, all of the conditioning, and all of the things that I was told that I had to do, be, and act. It was finding the real self, emerging, and being able to be like, “This is who I am. This is who I want to be in this life. This is what I want to believe about the universe. I get to choose it. No one else gets to tell me what to believe. No one else gets to tell me how I have to dress, act, or behave. Nothing. I get to be all of me. I get to embrace my authenticity.” What we came into this world to do is to be our true selves and to shine. That is the work of going through all of the darkness.
The Legacy of Healing: Restoring Relationships and Finding Presence-Based Joy
I want to ask you one other question. As you healed, how did that affect your children?
It changed everything, honestly. It changed my relationship with my children. I was able to be more emotionally present. I lacked emotional awareness. I had to sit with grief in that as well, thinking I could have been a better parent. Even though I was there physically, emotionally, I wasn’t always because I didn’t have the capacity. I didn’t have the capability. I wasn’t taught that. At the same time, it has also helped me to heal their little hearts, to show them a different way, and to help them understand things about life that I was never taught as a child. It has given me the gift to pass down to them that I hope will eventually be passed down to their children. That in itself is beautiful. I’m very grateful that I was able to take this path and be able to give that to them because they are my whole world.
Very similar to my story also. As I healed my relationship, my son healed. We’ve gone through all of that. What you’re doing when you heal yourself is you’re also changing the legacy of your family. You’re not passing the pain on. You’re passing the healing on. Let’s talk about the importance of presence when it comes to feeling joy.
I can’t even tell you. I didn’t even know what joy was until I came to this space in my life where joy is bliss. You don’t know the experience of it until you’re allowed to feel that safety and that connection to self and be able to understand what real joy feels like. I don’t know how to explain it other than that. This is the thing that we’re chasing. We’re chasing this our whole life. It is finding joy and real happiness. We chase it through money. We chase it through our careers. We chase it through a relationship.
Joy is like bliss; you don't really know the experience of it until you're allowed to feel that safety and connection to self. Share on X
We are chasing that carrot. When you find a real presence, and you heal enough to find that, you understand what the word joy feels like in the body. You can connect with it in a different way. I always tell people that it’s something to desire. That’s the real thing. It’s being able to be so present. The joy is here. It’s nothing outside of you. It’s nothing that you have. It’s nothing that you need to go and get. It’s just here.
When you heal, you have quicker, unimpeded access to joy to experience it. Brooke, in closing, I’d like to read this wonderful quote from your raw and unflinching memoir, Shattered, Broken, and Beautiful: Losing My Religion and Finding Faith. I love this quote. “I do not believe in coincidences. You found this book for a reason. Maybe you’re ready to break the chains of generational religion and unchallenged societal norms. Maybe you’re ready to hear that you don’t have to play small to gain the love and appreciation of others. Maybe you’re finally ready to live your own life on your own terms, even if you have to sacrifice some of the things you were raised to love.”
“The family that I thought loved me and would always support me abandoned me. The religion and all the friends I thought I’d know forever excommunicated me. I didn’t just leave. I escaped. Now, my life is my own. I am free.” Brooke, your journey from broken to reborn has made you a radiant guide and role model for women, showing them that they are never alone and that a path forward always exists. Thank you from my heart for this deeply moving interview filled with its wisdom and liberating truths. I wish you abundant blessings as you shine your bright light for others on their own journeys of healing and transformation.
Thank you so much.
My pleasure so much. To my cherished Grief and Rebirth fans, stay tuned. See you again soon. As I like to say, to be continued. Much love.
Guest’s Links:
- Connect with Brooke Deanne on her website
- The Grief Monster
- Shattered, Broken, and Beautiful: Losing My Religion and Finding Faith
- Goddess Rising
- Connect with Brooke Deanne on Instagram
- Connect with Brooke Deanne on YouTube
- Connect with Brooke Deanne on Facebook
- Connect with Brooke Deanne on TikTok
About Brooke Deanne
Brooke Deanne is a Trauma Healing Mentor, Rapid Transformational Therapist (RTT), and NLP Practitioner who empowers survivors to reclaim their lives by rewriting their stories. Having personally overcome indoctrination, abuse, and toxic relationships, Brooke brings profound insight and unwavering dedication to her work. As a highly sought-after speaker, best-selling author, and passionate advocate against religious abuse and domestic violence, Brooke’s influence extends well beyond her practice.
She empowers women to shatter the chains of abuse and childhood trauma, enabling them to create healthier relationships and reclaim their true lives. She specializes in helping women break free from the cycles of abuse and trauma to build fulfilling and authentic lives. With her holistic approach, Brooke works through years of emotional baggage in half the time of traditional talk therapy. By helping her clients create a new foundation for their sense of self, healing their nervous systems, and removing outdated stories and patterns, she enables them to access new levels of mind, body, and spirit integration. This transformative process empowers women to reclaim their power and live in their authenticity.
