Caroline Rena: Healing Deep Trauma and Raising Your Vibration: A Guide to Breaking Generational Cycles
Healing deep trauma is never a straight path; it’s a brave and sacred journey back to wholeness. For spiritual guide and grief alchemist Caroline Rena, this path is illuminated by one unwavering truth: healing is possible. In this profoundly moving episode, Caroline Rena opens her heart and story, sharing her passage through childhood abuse, military trauma, inherited Holocaust pain, and the devastating experience of parental alienation. With raw honesty and deep wisdom, she reveals how somatic practices, radical self-compassion, and a commitment to elevating her energetic frequency became the keys to breaking toxic generational patterns. She also reveals how healing the nervous system not only liberates the individual but also creates a ripple effect that uplifts collective consciousness, and she speaks candidly about navigating the depths of depression and the Dark Night of the Soul—and how these trials ultimately led her to a place of divine purpose. Today, Caroline stands as a compassionate, intuitive guide for those seeking transformation, offering hope and healing to others walking the path back to themselves.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL HEAR ABOUT THINGS LIKE:
- Trauma can be macro (major events) or micro (simple events).
- Trauma overwhelms coping, affecting mind and body, with short or long-term impacts.
- Generational trauma passes down unconsciously.
- Military Sexual Trauma (MST) ranges from harassment to rape; the military has struggled to address it.
- The “Dark Night of the Soul” involves depression and hopelessness, but can spark healing.
- Parental alienation is painful, manipulating children to reject a parent, often in high-conflict divorces.
- Healing involves releasing stored trauma from the nervous system through somatic work, EMDR, and EFT.
- Empaths and highly sensitive people are prone to trauma but can heal and impact collective consciousness.
- Emotions are energy; stuck trauma prevents healing. Releasing it raises vibration.
- Healing is continuous, but it gets easier, allowing quicker recovery from emotional challenges.
- Personal healing and raised consciousness ripple outwards, influencing hundreds and driving planetary change.
- Gentleness, healing work, and self-love are key to joy and reducing triggers.
SOME QUESTIONS IRENE ASKS CAROLINE:
- Let’s begin with the childhood trauma you experienced. What happened when you were 12 years old and the relationship with your mother ended? ?
- Please describe the military sexual trauma and harassment you experienced.
- How did losing your connection to your children, referred to as parental alienation, bring on overwhelming depression, the Dark Night of the Soul, and bring you dangerously close to homelessness?
- How did a lifetime of personal and generational Holocaust trauma become the catalyst for your own healing?
- How did your transformation lead you to embrace your intuitive gifts?
- How is the healing grief work you are continuing taking the burden off your soul and the past and future generations?
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GRIEF AND REBIRTH LINKS
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Healing Deep Trauma and Raising Your Vibration: A Guide to Breaking Generational Cycles
Welcome To Grief And Rebirth: A Journey Of Healing
I hope this message finds you 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 Caroline Rena, a Spiritual Guide and Grief Alchemist whose mission is rooted in one powerful truth. Healing is possible. With over 35 years of lived experience and training, Caroline has been impacted by profound trauma, childhood trauma, military sexual trauma and harassment, generational Holocaust trauma, and parental alienation. Her path has taken her through the unique lens of being an army brat, a military spouse, and an eight-year Army veteran herself.
These experiences have shaped her into a compassionate and deeply intuitive guide for others, navigating their own healing journeys. Caroline no longer operates a traditional coaching business. Instead, she shares the wisdom she’s earned through her own healing and transformation, offering insights, tools, and heart-centered reflections through her show, Awakening Soul Divinity. She is devoted to helping others release anxiety, overwhelm, and limiting beliefs, heal trauma stored in their nervous systems, and raise their vibrational frequency as she holds space for them through grief with profound empathy, helping them reconnect with their authentic self and divine purpose.
I had the honor of joining Carolina on her Awakening Soul Divinity show, where we shared a deeply nourishing, heart-centered conversation about my own spiritual awakening, healing journey, and personal transformation. In this episode, I’m looking forward to another deeply touching and meaningful conversation with Caroline, who is joining me on the show from West Palm Beach, Florida, where I will interview her about the horrific traumas she has experienced, the devastating impact of parental alienation, and her experience with overwhelming depression and the dark night of the soul.
Caroline will also share her journey of profound healing and awakening, the insights and tools that helped her to heal, how her transformation led her to embrace her intuitive gifts and inspired her deep passion for guiding others through trauma, grief, and spiritual rebirth, and when trauma and grief becomes stuck in our bodies, how we can each begin to shift that energy and raise our own vibrational frequencies. This interview will surely be filled with wisdom, vulnerability, authenticity, and inspiring insights.
Caroline, a heartfelt welcome to the show.
Thank you so much, Irene. I’m so glad. I’m so happy we’re together again. This is so much fun. I love connecting with you.
Understanding Trauma: Beyond The Obvious
We’re having a great time and it’s interesting because we turned the tables on each other. Now I get to interview you. For those who hear about trauma all the time but they’re not sure exactly what it is. I’m going to define it and then let’s begin with the childhood trauma you experienced. Trauma is a strong emotional reaction to a deeply distressing or disturbing event like an accident, abuse, or natural disaster that overwhelms a person’s ability to cope.
It can affect both the mind, body, and its impact can be short-lived or long-lasting. Let’s begin with that childhood trauma you experienced. What happened when you were twelve years old and your relationship with your mother ended? You also have an Easter mother-daughter and hamster you want to talk about, which maybe illustrates this point.
Before I get into that, I wanted to mention. I call trauma like macro traumas and micro traumas. I don’t call them that. Everybody calls them up. It doesn’t necessarily have to be this major thing. It can be something as simple as, for example, me dropping my son off at daycare. He’s young and I know I’m just leaving him there because I’m going to work and he feels abandoned. That can cause trauma, too. I’ll get into more later into what happens within that. My entire childhood was based on parentification by my mother and my father. I know they love me in their way, but my father was more of a controlling type of person.
Was he in the military also? You’re an army brat.
He was well.
I would imagine.
He was a JAG Officer, which is Judge Advocate General. He was an attorney. He was a lawyer in the military. He was in Vietnam, so he experienced that. When he got back from Vietnam, that was all part of the energies of trauma that mixed in. During the time from my birth until I was twelve years old, it was just all mixed in with parentification. My mother would call me on the phone when I was like six years old. I have records of all this stuff. She would say, “Why haven’t you called me to tell me you love me and ask about my health and all this stuff?” It was always about her because of her trauma.
Generational Trauma: The Easter Ham Story
I was just going to say we’re going to later talk about ancestral healing and intergenerational trauma. She was displacing her stuff onto you, the little old you.
There was a lot of it and for good reason. I was angry at her, so it took me a long time to figure all that stuff out to heal. Between that, lack of nurturing, and all these different things then my parents went through their divorce. Long story short, when I was 12 years old. I found paperwork or records of the fact that my dad paid my mother $1,250 in 1976 to leave. They had gone through the whole child custody and the divorce stuff. All these things were going on up until that point and I don’t know what happened, but he paid her off to leave and had me reeling that she’s terrible. She wasn’t. I don’t think she was a terrible person. I think she was a traumatized person. That’s what that is.
I’m not even sure how to add the story into the space but I’m going to do it anyway. When I talk about trauma, I talk about it from a generational perspective. I use the Easter story that I was mentioning to you. It’s so interesting because when I heard this story for the first time, it was like, “I get it now.” Basically, the story is this mother and daughter are in the kitchen while the mother is cooking Easter dinner.
This is not your mother. This is another story that you have.
No, this is another story but this helps people to understand exactly how generational trauma works. What happens is, the mother starts cutting the ends of the ham and she’s placing it in the pan naturally or normally. This little girl, and I’m going to just say she’s seven years old and she asked her mom. She’s like, “Why are you cutting the ends off of the ham?” Her mom’s like, “I don’t know. I’ve been doing it as long as I know how to cook ham. Maybe you should go ask your grandma. She’s in the living room.”
The little girl jumps off the chair and scampers into the living room and runs up to her grandma. She’s like, “Grandma, why is mommy cutting the ends off of the ham before she puts it in the pan?” The grandmother’s like, “We’ve been doing that for a long time and I do it too, but I don’t know why we’re doing that. Your great-grandma is right over there on the other side of the living room. Why don’t you go ask her?”
The little girl jumps up off the couch with the grandma and runs over to the great-grandma. She hugs her and says, “Great-grandma, why is mommy cutting the ends off of the ham?” The great-grandmother says, “She’s cutting the ends off of the hand because when I was a little girl and all the way back, we had small pans. When we needed to cook him, we had to cut the ends off so they would fit in the pan. That’s why we cut the ends off of the ham.” That’s where the generational teachings come from that we stick to until we recognize that it’s not useful because the pan that the mom was using, the little girl’s mother, was perfectly big enough. That’s the story and I just think it’s helpful for people to understand how generational trauma works.
We hold on to generational teachings until we finally recognize they’re no longer useful. Share on X
That’s a great way to illustrate. It’s a great story and it’s a perfect introduction to a lot of the things that we’re going to be talking about. Thank you.
It’s not my story but I’m sticking to it.
Military Sexual Trauma: A Veteran’s Experience
That’s a good one. You are an army brat, a military expat, and an eighth-year army veteran. I’m so sorry you went through this but please describe the military sexual trauma and harassment you experienced.
That one’s a tricky one because military sexual trauma runs the gamut. It could be anything from harassment all the way up to rape, which are again micro and macro traumas. Thank goodness I did not experience rape, but I did experience touching, hitting and different things like that. The harassment piece was interesting because I stood up for myself. This was my supervisor and the commander of the unit. The harassment continued after I stuck up for myself.
The supervisor, who was the main person who was doing it, didn’t appreciate the fact that I was standing up for myself. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know how to go about doing it. When you’re in the military and you’re supposed to follow orders. It’s not exactly the best thing to do to stand up to somebody.
He’s abusing you and he’s the one who’s protected.
Especially when I was in. This was over many years ago and it was a whole different ballgame to a point. Now, they recognize it in the military but they still don’t. I’ve heard stories about women getting raped and instead of taking care of the person that raped them. They move the woman to another unit across the country. That doesn’t make any sense to me, but it continues to cover up certain things.
For me, the hardest piece of that when it was happening was the parental alienation piece because my supervisor and my ex-husband were energetically, I guess that’s the best way I can explain in personality, all of it, was the same person. I had my ex-husband on this side doing the things with the parental alienation, his behavior is with the parenting alienation, then I had my supervisor on this side doing his thing. It was like the same energy of both people.
Trauma is the strong emotional reaction that overwhelms a person’s beliefs to cope. There you were.
That was the thing. The more these things were happening to me, the further down I went on the coping scale. I never knew what to do and I never felt like I had anyone there to support me. Please understand. One of the things I learned was my feeling of not being supported came from inside of me. It’s not necessarily that no one was supporting me. I did have a few people there who supported me, but it scared me to be supported.
In your formative years, you have a mother who was not supportive of you. She wanted you to be supportive of her from her wounds, which you didn’t even understand yet. How could you know?
You don’t.
How could you know without having had that nurtured experience yourself?
That’s a good point. I’d like to bring something up. Another little story tidbit. When the ships were coming from Spain to South America, the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. This is the story. As the story goes, the natives in the country where it was coming to had never seen ships before. Ever. They didn’t know. Technically, I heard this one time and I was like, “Our brains are powerfully interesting.” They were like, “They didn’t see them coming in because they didn’t know what they were.”
It’s the same thing. When we go through something, for example, we’ve never been nurtured or we never felt loved as a child. When we get older, if we’ve never seen or felt that, then we don’t have the capacity to understand what that is. It can be overwhelming, especially if we’ve been traumatized. I just wanted to give that example.
If we've never seen or felt love as a child, we don't have the capacity to understand it as adults. Share on X
You had no reference point at all. Your ex is doing this to you and obviously, doing maneuvers with your kids.
Can I clear that up, because this is now where I’m at. My ex wasn’t doing it to me. He was doing it for me because if all that hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be sitting here.
The Dark Night Of The Soul: Facing Depression And Homelessness
At the time. It brought you to your knees and brought up depression, and the dark night of the soul, and brought you close to homelessness. That’s a beautiful thing for you to have gone through all that. Now, you say he did something for me and we’ll talk about that. Do you want to say anything about how the heck did you function with all that going on?
My entire experience has been going on for a little over 35 years. We’re talking about the healing process, therapy, and all these different things. It wasn’t like twenty years ago, this thing happened and all of a sudden, I was almost homeless. We’ve got life happening and all these other things and me trying to figure things out and me trying to heal in other ways. It ended up happening that the biggest dark night of the soul.
I did another show in 2022 called the Ride of My Life because I wanted to share what my experiences were with the healing process. I was on the road and I was bouncing. That was like the beginning of the experience of homelessness, but I didn’t call it that. I kept saying in my head, “I chose not to live in a home because I wanted to live out of my car. I wanted to drive and I wanted to do this.” That was probably something that was keeping me afloat. Whatever.
When I got back at the end of 2022, I was bouncing from house to house, couch surfing. In Florida, you can’t live in your car because they don’t allow that. They don’t let you go to rest stops. You literally have to go to a campground or something. That’s why you see so many homeless people around here because there’s no other options. That went on for a little while. I started driving for Uber. This is me starting to go diving into the deep dark night of the soul.
By the time 2023 rolled around, I was on my last option for a place to stay and it turned out to be a city job with a dog sitting. That was challenging. I don’t think the dog likes me very much. It was an experience. In the meantime, I’m sitting there at his home. Honestly, these people allowed me to do this. I’m so grateful to them for letting me be there, but that’s where the opening. I was in a safe space for everything to open up.
You’re alone. You were in private.
With the dog and technically, I’m not even a dog person. I’m a cat person. That was an experience in and of itself. During that time, I think it was sometime in September, if I’m correct. I don’t remember exactly the timing. I found out that my daughter was pregnant on Instagram.
She was not talking to you.
We were texting. There were some things. We’ve been going back and forth. It’s been a big challenge and we’ll get into that piece of it. She wasn’t talking sometimes. She wouldn’t respond and that’s part of my healing journey and part of her healing journey. Anyway, I found out that she was pregnant on Instagram and that was it. Along with everything else, I’m like, “Where’s my next place I’m going to stay when they come home?” I don’t know what’s happening.
When that happened, I immediately went into this depression. I was sleeping on the couch as you said for twenty hours a day. All I could do was barely take a shower. I had to walk the dog and I had to feed the dog. That was pretty much the capacity of what I had going on. I couldn’t take any other thing. For ten days, I was sleeping. The four hours I was awake was with the dog and doing my best to try and figure out how to find a place to live in all that.
Basically, what happened was, I had met this guy who was a student in a personal development course a few years earlier, who was part of this group called Fort Freedom, in Jupiter, Florida, who helps veterans who are wanting to die by suicide or just general depression and anxiety, and for the most part, all these different things. I remember something just hit me. I was sitting on the couch, and it was like, “Something hit me and told me to call the sky.”
I called him and he said, “Stay put. I will have someone on the phone with you in twenty minutes.” I wasn’t going anywhere anyway. Sure enough, it was the craziest thing. It’s funny because the guy who I called lives in the area that I was house-sitting, but he wasn’t there. He was in Kentucky. That’s a very powerful part of the story, too.
In spiritual terms, it would seem to show that there was a plan and you were being set up in a way, step by step.
I was recognizing that all through this because I’ve been doing my work for so long. It’s so painful when you get in it and you’re in that and you’re crowded and you can’t keep clouded over. You can’t see anything. It’s like, “I got to trust. No.” One of the people who works for Fort Freedom, literally, twenty minutes later, the phone rang.
He was on the phone with me for three days in a row, two and a half hours each day doing crisis management with me. This guy’s incredible. His name’s Glenn. He and his wife are amazing and everybody at Fort Freedom. He was my lifesaver. He was my fishing pole or whatever. He fished me out of that space.
Is he a licensed therapist? What are his qualifications?
I know he does therapy. I’m not sure how. I think he is, but he was mine when that was going on. I also had another therapist who was doing EMDR with me at the time once the VA got him in the system.
For those of you who don’t know what EMDR is, it’s the eye movement desensitization and reprocessing.
Again, our brains are so powerful. We don’t even know this much of how they work, and then they just do. Going through the process with them, I started going to the gym. Movement is the most important thing of healing. I was offered the gym and yoga. I was doing my own work with the therapist, as I said. I had Glenn as a therapist, and I went through this process or program called HUD-VASH. If you are a veteran and if you’re looking at homelessness, that’s the process.
Our brains are so powerful, and we don't even know much about how they work, yet they just do. Share on X
You would go to your VA and talk to the HUD-VASH. I think every VA has a HUD-VASH office. I went through the process with that and what you see here, even though it’s not much, is two years later of the landing pad from that process and coming out on the other side. Even from when I graduated in December of 2023 to now, I recognize the difference of who I was then and how I am now. It’s like night and day. It’s incredible. That was the dark night of the soul.
Uncovering Generational Holocaust Trauma
I wanted to tell everybody that there’s one piece of trauma we haven’t even reached with you, which we’ll talk about, which is called generational Holocaust trauma. That was heaped on top of everything else that you had.
That was. That’s not even heaped on top of. Everybody carries that. No one’s immune to ancestor generational trauma or intergenerational trauma, if you hear it that way. You can hear ancestral trauma. It’s all the same thing.
The trauma could be, every time they slice the edges of the ham off. They burnt their fingers and that was part through the generations. It’s almost like the people pass on the trauma from generation to generation.
Now, do you want me to go into the parental alienation piece first? The generational trauma was part of my healing work. Not part of the traumas.
No one's immune to ancestral generational trauma. Share on X
Take your pick.
The parental alienation thing was the catalyst and that was like over twenty years’ worth. My son told me when he was fourteen years old that he didn’t want to speak to me until he was ready, which was until he was 22 or 23. Now, he and I have a wonderful relationship. My daughter and I we’re working through it the best we can.
I’m so happy for you.
Thank you. It’s very limited, but I respect her fears and her boundaries. I understand what that feels like. I do my best to just drip love. We call it that in the parental alienation world. Now I have a granddaughter. I was told that she is the generational breaker. The work I’m doing is setting up for us to be able to break this, whatever.
Somebody in my family and I had the same experience. Someone has to change the legacy. Someone has to break the cycle. You can even see in certain families where maybe one or two people broke the cycle and other siblings did not. You could see how that works. How some people heal it and other people live with it, but at least in those cases, some of the people of the family are starting to change the legacy for others.
What’s interesting is, to me, it feels like it’s a chosen path for those people who are doing that. I don’t think it’s meant for every single person in the family to do that work. It’s meant for the empath or the highly sensitive person or whoever you want to call that person. We pick this somehow. If you don’t know a parental alienation is, it’s usually happening with high conflict divorce. It can happen in an intact family, though. There’s generally a narcissist and an empathic that come together because it’s been researched that narcissists and empaths come together.
What happens is that the children are either lied to or not told the whole truth. They start pushing one of the parents out. It can be the father or mother. It can be the grandparents, aunts or uncles. It happens with everybody. As I said, my daughter was four years old when we separated and my son was ten. He at least had a little bit of time with me, so that helped our relationship. I don’t generally dive into what happened or all this stuff, because that’s just part of my healing journey. I don’t do that but what I can say is that it’s very painful.
Seventy percent to 80% of the countries in the world experienced parental alienation that they have a record of. In the US alone, and this was like in 2018 or 2017, there were 25 million parents, which might be more. I don’t know. I haven’t been digging in there, and got a double that with the kids that are experiencing that. We’re not talking about drug addicts or bad parents. There are lawyers, doctors, and actors. You name it. There are people who are perfectly good parents who love their children, but because of the way the system is set up, the court system it doesn’t allow for gray areas. Nothing allows for gray areas.
One thing leads to another and then the healing process, my healing journey was the catalyst. That was what got me into the space I was in with almost being homeless. That was what got me into Fort Freedom. That was all that stuff going on with the last couple of dark nights of the soul. Trust me, you don’t just get one. You get a lot or at least I did and one thing led to another. I’ll go into the generational trauma piece.
Healing Journey: Regulating The Nervous System And Somatic Work
Please do that because I want to talk about that from there. We’re talking about the turning point and then from there, I like to ask you, how did this lifetime of generational trauma become the catalyst for you? What did you start to do to regulate your nervous system? We’re starting to get down to how to heal from all this stuff. I know you also formed a desire to help empaths and high sensitives. How do you identify with all the trauma you went through, that was who you were also?
From the piece of going through the dark night of soul, when I got to this place in 2024, I had already looked through my mother’s paperwork you had mentioned. I think you mentioned that earlier. I don’t know if we were talking to ourselves.
How did you come upon your mother’s paperwork all those years later? She was out of your life since you were twelve years old.
We’re bouncing around a lot. She was living in New Mexico in Albuquerque at the time and she experienced some issues with a medication that she was taking, Coumadin. They had to take her off the medication. They ended up putting her in hospice. They put her under State guardianship in New Mexico. They contacted me and they’re like, “Do you want to come?” The guardian contact had said that and I said sure.
Not to throw myself under the bus about breaking any laws or whatever. She’s like, “I wanted to take you to her storage room. I want you to take whatever you want.” I got quite a bit of her Native American stuff that she treasured. I found the paperwork and all kinds of things like that. I was like, “I am not going to let this go to the state because they’re just going to throw it away. This is my family history.”
It shed light like crazy on why your mother was the way she was. Your mother was part of the Holocaust or her parents were?
Both, and that’s part of this generational story. Now that I have the paperwork, I started digging into it and I had done this years ago. I had tried to do it, but I didn’t have any way to translate anything, so it sat with me for a long time. When I was here, I started digging in. Thank goodness for Google Translate because it literally helped me with each translation, unless the Hebrew was in cursive because there’s two variations. There’s the block and then there’s the person. It didn’t help the person. I might just find somebody but anyway.
I started to find things out about myself. I started to understand what happened. My mother was born in 1932. They were living in Prague, Czechoslovakia, at the time. It’s now called the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Right before they annexed Czechoslovakia, the Nazis Czechoslovakia in 1938, my grandfather was beaten and had all these things happen to, which I’m absolutely sure that my grandmother and my mother saw, or at least didn’t see the beating, but saw the results.
That’s getting transferred down through the generations. Also, they lost their home, their money, and their bank account. I had money trauma, and then they also lost the business that my grandfather and his brother had. Everything was taken away from them. In that process, they ended up escaping when Prague was annexed and they left to go to Palestine in 1938. It was still Palestine back then. For me, I’m a second and a third generation Holocaust survivor, if you want to look at it that way.
They ended up staying in Palestine until they changed the name of the place to Israel in 1948. By that time, my grandparents moved to Germany. My mother was old enough. She was in her twenties by then, and she started her life but they ended up moving to Germany and lived their life out there. I lost touch with them when my parents got divorced. That was the end of that.
That’s terribly sad. With all this that you went through, how did all this trauma become the catalyst for your own healing? Especially when it comes to regulating your nervous system because I went through tremendous trauma too. My big issue was tremendously anxiety all the time until I was able to heal that. How did you go about it? Did it help you identify empaths and are highly sensitive? While you were healing, you must have discovered that about yourself. Am I right?
I’ll start with the highly sensitive and the empathy piece of it because I figured that out the first time I was in my late 30s. I knew something was up because everybody was always telling me, “You’re so sensitive. Why are you always crying?” I did a little bit of research, but I didn’t stick with it. What that led to was me coming into understanding of the fact that I had done cognitive therapy most of my life. I knew exactly what was happening to me.
I’m very analytical and I study. I love putting puzzles together. I love trying to understand things, so I understood what was going on. One day I got an email that was linked back to money. That’s where the money piece comes in. It’s been there the whole time, but the awareness of it. It was like I’m watching. I’m literally watching myself freaking out. I learned a lot about somatic. Trauma is stored in our nervous system.
That’s called somatic healing.
I got the email and I’m pacing. I’m like, “I don’t know what to do. Help me.” I had a friend of mine at the time who was sitting there holding space for me like, “Hold on. Wait till they tell you what’s going on.” I’m freaking out because I didn’t know the next thing. Fear of the unknown and all the stuff. That woke me up to the somatic piece of it and that’s what put me into the first show, the Ride of My Life. I learned that because trauma is stuck in your nervous system, it needs to get cleared out.
The somatic work was what I started to do on that journey. One thing led to another and I had these friends of mine that were helping me. A couple of years ago, I think it was while I was here. I ended up taking a trauma and formed a course so I could match my lived experience with what it was. When I took the course, I was blown away. I was like, “We just put the puzzle pieces together.”
Embracing Intuitive Gifts And Guiding Others Through Trauma
Look at how wise it’s helped you to be. I feel the same way. I’ve thought and healed so much that I have a reference point for a lot of this and it’s the same for you. How did you discover your intuitive gifts? Why did you get this marvelous, deep passion to guide others through trauma, grief, and spirit? What was that piece about?
That comes from my healing journey. That part of it, because I knew there was the intuitive stuff going on. I know now that I have clairsentience and claircognizance.
Which clairsentience is a clear feeling?
It’s like I feel things deeply. That’s an empath. Clear cognizance is being able to piece things together without knowing exactly how. It’s like a story could open up in the world and I’m like, “That’s going to happen next,” and then people start talking about it. Years ago, I would have said it was a curse, but not anymore. It’s just part of the process, and I’d like to explain exactly what the process is about trauma real quick. It’s a short little thing.
That way, you’ll understand why that helped me. In trauma as a child, we go through something and we don’t know how to respond to it. It’s an emotion because children are feeling creatures where they don’t live through life like little butterflies. They’re doing their thing or whatever. If something happens and they are traumatized, they don’t know how to handle it unless they have someone there who knows how to do this to teach them.
Most of us have not been taught. What happens is trauma is like a loop. You go in a loop. This is what I learned in that course. You have the slope and the processes of trauma go around this loop but they stop. There’s like a gap before they close if you’ve had trauma. Everyone’s had some sort of trauma. You can’t be on this planet without having some trauma. There’s this gap.
Unless you live in a jar or something.
The gap is where we get caught. The gap is where we get stuck and where the new trauma stack. That’s the gap because we don’t know how to clear it. It doesn’t clear. When something comes in that’s painful or creates anger for us or whatever. It hits, but it’s stacks. Complex PTSD, which is what most people have throughout life, especially if you’re older. It stacks on top of each other. If you don’t do the work through the trauma in your nervous system and by the way, the name of the book is The Body Keeps The Score. It’s written by a man named Dr. Bessel van der Kolk.
He did research on World War II or World War I. Let’s just say veterans. He did research on veterans and he was working with the nervous system. That’s how they discovered that the nervous system holds the trauma. It doesn’t go away. It goes into your physiology and into the nervous system. My learning and understanding from all these books that I read, all these processes that I did and all the deep diving that I did.
One thing led to the other and it started to release that energy out of my nervous system. I want everyone to understand this, emotions are energy. They’re supposed to be in motion but they get stuck when we’re traumatized. If we don’t release it out of the nervous system, it’s very difficult to heal and then we feel stuck in life.
What happened to me is as I kept releasing, I released. I did the somatic work. I did the EMDR work and the EFT work, which is the tapping thing that you were talking about. I got into nature because it’s so important for empaths to get in nature, to connect with nature, and it balances us out. It’s Mama Earth. That’s what it does. One thing led to another.
It left your body.
Yes, and it’s gotten lighter. My body has gotten lighter ever since, and it taught me about embodiment and about connecting with myself. My middle name is Rena. I don’t go by my last name, and Rena means joy. One thing led to the other, and now it’s like, that’s what it does. It just releases and it’s not. It’s very subtle and as long as you do the work the work. I have a mantra that I used to say for myself, “You must be willing, be courageous, and be free.” The most important part of that mantra is you get to choose that because sometimes, you have to choose that.
The Continuous Healing Journey: Stepping Out Of The “But” Quicker
I want to ask you something else and it’s bringing me into another question. Are you still doing healing work or does it continue on? The other thing I want to say is I also think that if you have unhealed trauma, that is why so many people are killing each other with road rage and stuff. Is that if the trauma keeps building one on the other and on the other through that gap you’re talking about and the original traumas haven’t been healed. It takes a trauma, the new trauma that could be on a 3 or 4 and brings it up to a 15 or 20.
That’s why there’s so much going on in this world from unhealed grief and trauma because it builds on it. You would agree with that, and that’s one of the purposes for this show, so that people understand how important it is to heal. Are you continuing healing work on your own?
Yes.
It never stops.
I laugh in your general direction. I don’t remember what movie that came from or whatever, but yes. That’s why they call it a healing journey. There’s so much happening and there are days when the stuff comes up. It’s always going to come up. It’s like people say, it’s like peeling an onion. It doesn’t stop, but it gets easier. I’m going to repeat something that Louise Hay said when she was 90 years old. Someone asked her, “How are you doing with your healing work?”
She says, “Some days, I still step in the crap but nowadays, I can step out a lot quicker.” I was like, “That’s exactly it.” It’s constant, then I can understand. I’m working with people now or getting back into my work with people to do grief work and grief alchemy. Now I understand it better. I can hold space for that because I get it but you’ll never stop doing the healing work, but it’s okay because it gets better.
Are you helping healthy people now? Besides your show, you’re seeing people?
I’m starting to get back into work. I got brave. I had to finish, but that’s the thing. When you do the healing work, you’re going to open up and do the truth of who you are and why you’re here on this planet, which is technically to do your healing work.
There are people reading this who are going to say, “I have been traumatized and I could use someone to help me.” Now, they know about you and what you can do. We’ll be sure to leave links to what you’re doing so that people can access you and all of that, which is part of your healing resource for people, which is wonderful.
I’m back in it. It just happened but that’s because of all the work but everything’s shifted. You had also said something I wanted to touch on about driving, the rage driving, and all that. It brought up something for me because there are two things. One, if you don’t do your healing work, the older that you get, the more challenging it’s going to get. We think that it’s just going to go away. I heard people say so many times, “That will happen in the past. I’m just going to leave it there.” Don’t forget about Dr. Bessel van der Kolk who found out that it was stuck in your nervous system.
If you don't do your healing work, the older you get, the more challenging it's going to get. Share on X
If it’s in your nervous system, it’s going to feed you with these things that poke at you to say, “Time to look at this. Time to look at that.” You can leave it in your past all you want to, but it’s still going to come up. If you’re interested in any work like psychological work or whatever. Carl Jung is a good thing to look at because he talks about how. He calls it our healing journey because every time something comes up, it gives us an opportunity to heal that. Don’t wait till you get old.
What I get from your message about healing is you’ve got a conscious choice. I would say our lives are about whether we consciously choose to drop the backpack of pain and to move forward, or whether we consciously choose to stay stuck. That’s our story that never changes.
I’d like to add something to that. You mentioned the driving piece of it and it’s everything. Everything going on in the world. There’s so many people who are angry. There’s so many people who are hurt and grieving and don’t even know they are. It’s like, when I drive down the road and I see somebody, especially in Florida, feral down the road or trying to run somebody over. I look at them now and I’m like, “That person is traumatized.”
Raising Your Vibration: The Ripple Effect Of Personal Healing
What happened to you? What was your childhood like? I do that now too. It’s interesting as you become healthier and more enlightened and it’s not an ego thing. As you free yourself more and more and make that choice, you don’t take as many things personally. You see it more as, that’s their story and do I want to choose to join them in that story or not? What am I going to do?
That story is triggering me or whatever. You start to identify it and not take things so personally. I want to ask you one of the questions as we draw to a close. When we talk about having trauma and grief stuck in our bodies and then we begin to shift the energy because we’re letting go of the backpack of pain. We talked about raising our own vibrational frequencies. What does that mean so people understand that, Caroline?
Anger, especially fear, and sadness. All these different emotions are low-energy emotions, and energy is vibration, then you start getting to the quantum stuff. Which would take us just to start researching that. What that means is that when you do your healing work, as you release those energies, as I mentioned before, from your system. It raises your vibration. What’s cool about this is, especially as empaths and highly sensitive, because you have so much deep understanding of what this is without knowing what this is.
That’s why it’s so important for you to do this healing work. As you heal yourself, you raise your vibration. Anyone who does this, we touch energetically. Each one of us heals 600 people, which moves out to the next 600 and then the next 600. It’s like the 100th monkey theory or the butterfly effect or whatever. You can do research on that thing. Especially as high energy, when you release all the lower energy stuff and you’re raising your vibration, love, joy, and bliss, and all these different energies are such higher vibrational energies. You’re automatically going to raise up into those energies.
As you heal yourself, you raise your vibration. Share on X
When you do that, you’re going to start tracking other people and you’re going to start walking. I call them Yeshua. It’s like Yeshua or Jesus. He walks through somewhere and everybody can feel his light. It’s the exact same thing. It’s like your light is shining like a lighthouse and people are attracted to you. It can get unnerving for someone who’s been through trauma when it starts happening because that’s been going on for me. Many people are coming up to me to talk to me and I’m like, “No, I need my personal time. Get away from me.”
Special Offer: Free Ebook And Discovery Call
You’re radiating and your aura has changed because even if they can’t see the aura, they can feel it. They can perceive it. Caroline, do you have a special promo for our readers or anything that would bring them? I’d love them to be able to come and discover who you are through your website and also may want to work with you.
Thank you. I have two things. On my Awakening Soul Divinity show website, you can sign up there. Give your email and you will get a free eBook on anxiety. I just put my Caroline Rena website back up again for the work and I do offer a free half-hour discovery call. I couldn’t think of what else to call so that’s what it is.
That’s a great idea so they can explore with you and find out if you’re the right gal for them.
That’s what I’m offering and don’t forget about the show itself, for sure.
We will provide links to all of these things. I want to know what is the Carolina Rena tip for finding joy in life?
Being gentle with yourself, doing the healing work, and finding that love within yourself because once you do that and you mentioned this earlier. Even when somebody does something out there that triggers you later down the road, it won’t trigger you anymore, then you’ll have some compassion. That’s the main thing that keeps me in that space. It’s just not being triggered so much anymore, but creating a space of compassion and love and just creating that love within myself with my little girl.
That’s beautiful. Caroline, I want to close with this very meaningful quote from your website that inspired me deeply. “As each individual does their inner work and raises their consciousness, it contributes to the evolution of the whole personal healing and awakening, ripple outwards affecting families, communities, and eventually the entire world. The healing journey thus becomes a catalyst for planetary change as more people awaken to their true nature and live from a place of love, compassion, and higher awareness.”
“It shifts the collected field. This creates a feedback loop. As the planetary vibration rises, it becomes easier for others to awaken, creating a cascade of positive transformation.” I could not agree more. My heartfelt thank you for this interview so filled with true wisdom, your refreshing authenticity and your inspiring insights. Many blessings. Thank you, Caroline.
Thank you, Irene.
Guest’s Links:
- Connect with Caroline Rena on her website
- Connect with Awakening Soul Divinity with Caroline Rena on Facebook
- Connect with Caroline Rena on YouTube
- Awakening Soul Divinity
- Awakening Soul Divinity Podcast
- Fort Freedom
- The Body Keeps The Score
- Find Your Calm! Enjoy a FREE Beach Meditation and breathe into peace
About Caroline Rena
Caroline Rena is a Spiritual Guide, Writer, Podcaster, Army Veteran, and former Trauma-Informed Transformational Coach dedicated to supporting others on their healing journeys through trauma and grief. With 35 years of lived experience and training, she has walked through Childhood Trauma, Military Sexual Trauma/Harassment, Generational Holocaust Trauma, and Parental Alienation. She brings deep insight from her life as an Army “Brat,” Spouse, and 8-year Army Veteran.
Caroline’s own path of transformation led her to embrace her intuitive gifts and passion for guiding others. She focuses on releasing anxiety, overwhelm, and ingrained beliefs, helping people heal trauma stored in the nervous system and raise their vibrational frequency. Her work supports a collective shift in mass consciousness.
Her podcast, Awakening Soul Divinity, features heart-centered conversations with healers, spiritual guides, and everyday people with powerful stories of awakening and transformation. Listeners gain practical tools for healing trauma, grief, and anxiety, raising consciousness, and reconnecting with their authentic self and divine purpose.
By subscribing to her YouTube channel, you’ll join a supportive community rooted in shared experiences and spiritual growth. Together, we heal, raise our vibration, and uncover the truth of who we are—creating meaningful, positive change within ourselves and the world around us.
