The Nonlinear Path to Healing: Finding Wholeness After Trauma with Daria Burke

In this episode, Daria Burke discusses the non-linear path to healing and how to find wholeness after trauma. She shares her experiences growing up in Detroit with parents struggling with addiction, the impact of adversity, and her path toward self-discovery and integration. Daria also explores the complexities of healing, the importance of embracing all parts of oneself, and the power of nature and personal growth as metaphors for transformation and hope.

Key Takeaways:

• Exploration of trauma and its impact on personal development.
• Discussion on resilience and the capacity to heal from past experiences.
• The concept of integration as a means of reconciling different aspects of oneself.
• The role of inherited legacies and environmental factors in shaping identity.
• Examination of coping mechanisms, including dissociation and adaptive avoidance.
• The nonlinear nature of healing and the importance of self-compassion.
• Insights into various therapeutic modalities, including somatic therapies.
• The significance of control and surrender in the healing process.
• Metaphors illustrating the journey of healing, such as the growth of hydrangeas.
• Emphasis on the ongoing nature of personal growth and the importance of community support.

Daria Burke is an award-winning business leader, board director, investor, speaker, and advisor. Her creativity and impact have been recognized by Women’s Wear Daily, AdWeek, Forbes, Vogue, Teen Vogue, the CFDA, Town & Country, the Cut, and NYLON Magazine. She has written for Fast Company, The Huffington Post, Black Enterprise, and has appeared on The Melissa Harris-Perry Show on MSNBC, Philly Speaks, and numerous podcasts. Her new book is Of My Own Making: A Memoir.

Connect with Daria Burke: Website | Instagram

If you enjoyed this conversation with Daria Burke, check out these other episodes:

Healing Painful Patterns and Finding Freedom with Radhule Weininger

What Brings Healing, Strength, and Connection with Dani Shapiro

By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you!

This episode is sponsored by:

Persona Nutrition delivers science-backed, personalized vitamin packs that make daily wellness simple and convenient. In just minutes, you get a plan tailored to your health goals. No clutter, no guesswork. Just grab-and-go packs designed by experts. Go to PersonaNutrition.com/FEED today to take the free assessment and get your personalized daily vitamin packs for an exclusive offer — get 40% off your first order.

Grow Therapy – Whatever challenges you’re facing, Grow Therapy is here to help. Sessions average about $21 with insurance, and some pay as little as $0, depending on their plan. (Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plans. Visit growtherapy.com/feed today!

Delivering the WOW; Check out Richard Fain’s new book, a behind-the-scenes look at how he transformed Royal Caribbean into a world-class company through culture, innovation, and intentional leadership. Available now on Amazon and wherever you get your books.

Smalls – Smalls cat food is protein-packed recipes made with preservative-free ingredients you’d find in your fridge… and it’s delivered right to your door.  For a limited time, get 60% off your first order, plus free shipping, when you head to Smalls.com/FEED! No more picking between random brands at the store. Smalls has the right food to satisfy any cat’s cravings.

LinkedIn: Post your job for free at linkedin.com/1youfeed. Terms and conditions apply.

If you enjoy our podcast and find value in our content, please consider supporting the show. By joining our Patreon Community, you’ll receive exclusive content only available on Patreon!  Click here to learn more!!

Episode Transcript:

Daria Burke 00:00:00  I think I always knew that I could survive things. I had proven that to myself. I was highly confident in my ability to navigate difficult things, but I think rather than chiding myself, I could say, what is this here to teach me? What am I supposed to be getting from this moment?

Chris Forbes 00:00:26  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:10  Sometimes growth depends less on sheer effort and more on where we’re planted.  Daria Burke tells a story of hydrangeas she thought were ruined, chewed down, wrapped in burlap until she replanted them in new soil, where they eventually bloomed. Even more beautifully, it’s a perfect metaphor for her own life. In her memoir of My Own Making, she shares a journey through trauma, resilience, and self-discovery, reminding us that no matter how deep the damage, with time and care, we can still flourish. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Daria, welcome to the show.

Daria Burke 00:01:49  Hi, Eric. Thanks for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:51  I’m happy to talk with you about your book, which is called Of My Own Making a memoir. And it’s wonderful on so many levels, and we’ll get into it in just a second. But we’ll start like we always do, with a parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild and they say, in life there are two roles inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:20  And the grandchild stopped. They thought about for a second. They looked up at their grandparent. They said, well, which one wins? And the grandparent said, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Daria Burke 00:02:36  That is such a rich way to start and to think about so much of what I’ve written about, which is nature and nurture. And I think we’ll get more into that in a moment, in that I hear choice, that there is a decision that we get to make. We may not choose to stay with the parable and the metaphor. We may not choose the wolves that exist. The way our lives begin is not up to us, but we get to choose who we become. But it makes me think a lot about and I don’t see it as a binary. Honestly, I see it as and so much of my my own personal work and to some degree, professional work.

Daria Burke 00:03:24  The ideas that I explore and what the science of healing teaches us, is that integration is the goal, that we have to find a way to coexist with the truth of what we’ve inherited. Maybe it’s our psychic inheritance, our emotional inheritance, the the ways in which legacies have been left in us or on us in the form of footprints. And sometimes those are traumatic and threaten to debilitate our sense of self or or destabilized the ways in which we might develop, but that if we can pull it in and hold it close, that we can get to know it, befriend it to some degree, at least create conditions for the courage to tolerate it in closer proximity that actually you can feel more integrated and feel more whole. And so that also, I would say it leads me to think a lot about epigenetics, right? This study that suggests that our environment, our behaviors, the conditions that we create and find ourselves in play a meaningful role in the ways in which our genes get expressed. Our propensity towards something may or may make manifest. But all of that is rooted in choice. And so I love the way that it ends, even though I don’t see it as a binary. I think of it very much in the integration, but that it’s a choice to do so.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:49  Yeah, that’s wonderful. As I was reading it to you, it occurred to me that it’s a story that has grandparents in it. And your grandmother is a big piece of your story, and I’d like to get to her in just a second. I’m wondering if you could just. However you do it, give people the basics that they need to kind of understand what this book about and who you are. Before we go into more specific pieces, let’s set the general stage.

Daria Burke 00:05:19  Sure. Well, the context in which I was born was Detroit in the 1980s. I was born in 1980. And so at a macro cultural systemic level, to some degree, that looked like coming into a city that had fallen from favor, it had been the richest, most powerful, arguably American city in just the generation before me, when my parents were born, it was the richest, fourth largest from a population standpoint.

Daria Burke 00:05:50  And by the time I arrived, it was at threat of bankruptcy and had sort of collapsed under industrial conditions that it moved. You know, moved a lot of automotive manufacturing out of Detroit, but also. The blast radius of the poverty that existed when those jobs left. And we saw heroin and crack really ravaged a lot of the neighborhoods in the city. So that was the greater context in which I was born and the specific context with my family. I was born to parents who struggled with addiction. I’ve since learned, since reading the book, actually, particularly with my mother, that her addiction began before I was born and continued to plague our family and really be leading sort of factor for what my early experiences were like as a child. They were young when they got married, 18 and 21, and I was born three years after that. And I should add, in deep poverty. I grew up, my parents split up when I was two years old. And so my front row seat to my mother’s addiction, I had greater proximity to that.

Daria Burke 00:07:01  Although my father struggled with heroin, it really sets the stage for a lot of early years that were conditioned by loss. And my grandmother, who you alluded to, I think to to an extent that I can’t even fully articulate because I was seven when she passed away, was the scaffolding that upheld some semblance of normalcy. She kept a roof over our heads. We actually lived in a home that she owned. My mother didn’t work. And so my grandmother was the financial, the emotional, the spiritual. Yeah, the structural support of our family. But it was a really tumultuous upbringing and one that I think caused a lot of trauma. You know, I didn’t use the word abuse really, until I started to write the book. It was very hard for me to use that word for some reason, for many reasons. And but it was, it was it was deeply a lot of neglect and abuse took place, particularly after she passed away.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:06  Yeah. You talk in the book about something called the Ace test. Adverse childhood experience test? Yes. And it’s enough to say for right now, you you scored very high on it. Right. You know, you were you were a nine out of a ten, which means you were dealing with a lot. And coming out of that, you became very successful. And part of what I’d like to explore with you, and I think the book explores a lot, is it seems like you had to do two contradictory things throughout your whole life. One was you had to completely ignore where you came from, the messages that put in you, the messages your mom put in you. You had to be like, just no. This is a different world that I’m going to create, and I’m going to just laser focus on it. And eventually you also had to integrate to use the word that you just used a minute ago. These old wounds had to be dealt with. And I just as the book goes on, I was sort of noticing again and again how you even once it became time to sort of start healing the trauma, there was still that first part of you that was the coping mechanism that was also still really valuable.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:33  And I think sometimes we get mired in we can get mired in trauma work, right, where just everything is about that. Or we can be get mired in just shut it all out and work mode. And I think you eventually found a place where you did both.

Daria Burke 00:09:53  Yes. Dissociation is sort of this extreme flight response. And as a child, it absolutely helped create that laser focus. It allowed me to sort of float above those circumstances and detach from them enough to be able to imagine something else, something different, that I didn’t get so lost and swept up in it that I couldn’t function, and it kept me detached from myself as I got older, and I could appreciate the ways in which I was so deeply disconnected from feeling all of those things. And so it is. I’m constantly, even to this day, I think healing is very much a practice, and I’m always interrogating the ways in which I’m being able to disconnect from something, have perspective. Therefore, I can have a different relationship with the the emotions that are arising from it, and it feels that it can function in a healthy way.

Daria Burke 00:10:58  However, it was definitely, I think, in the ways that triggers were disruptive, the ways in which I could get sort of knocked off my star or off balance and be disoriented by things that were resonant with or rhymed with my childhood. And I couldn’t figure out why those things were happening. And it was because, oh, well, you haven’t dealt with them. You haven’t allowed yourself to feel them. You haven’t. You haven’t created space and the conditions for that interrogation to happen and to do it knowing that you’re safe. And so it is this really interesting sort of thing. I describe it in the book as, as a warm blanket with a glass of wine by the fire, because if there’s comfort in that, but and there’s strength and power in that, but there’s also I think we all have to know our own limits and bound our emotional boundaries for when we’re hiding from ourselves, when we’re so deeply disconnected from ourselves that we can’t move forward.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:23  I interviewed a therapist yesterday, and he had a term that I had not heard this exact phrase before. Adaptive avoidance. That avoidance sometimes is a very adaptive trait. Yeah, there are times where that is the right approach.

Daria Burke 00:12:39  That is so good.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:40  And as we know, anything you do too much of becomes a problem. That avoidance can then become maladaptive. And I actually think what I’ve seen just for, you know, a decade kind of talking to people about all this is that people can go a long way on that, like fuel of getting away from where they were.

Daria Burke 00:13:03  Yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:03  And the ambition that that can drive, they can go a long way on that. And then sometime 30s or 40s, it starts to break down. It’s like that worked. And now it no longer does. You know, and I think about it like your parents, I’m an addict. I was a heroin addict. It got sober at 24. There was a period of time where my use was sort of adaptive, meaning it solved all sorts of problems in me that I had not had the resources to solve. And then, right. It became extraordinarily maladaptive over time. But I was just struck by reading your book, how the balance of that with you has been really interesting.

Daria Burke 00:13:52  Thank you. We all find ways to quiet the noise in our minds. I happened to be fueled, for better and for worse, by work, by achievement, and more than anything, by the awe that I received from others. The applause that came when I did something that people thought, damn, that’s impressive. And it was enough to keep me going. That hedonic treadmill was driven both by the brain’s need the dopamine dopamine hit that I would get every time I achieved a goal, but also whatever sort of oxytocin I could sort of generate, too, from what came from others when I did those things. And it’s a dangerous cycle to be in. My mother’s was crack, right? She tried to quiet that noise with crack and she couldn’t figure out how to how to quiet it enough. Right. And so then you tip over to yeah, full blown addiction where everything is, is stunted.

Daria Burke 00:14:58  But yes, it is. It’s an adaptive avoidance. I love that term. It’s such a great way to describe it. And I think the work of our life is to figure out where the line is 

Eric Zimmer 00:15:10  100%.. And I think that’s the other thing that really struck me in your book, was the nature of a healing journey, because there’s a whole lot of you sort of move forward. You think, yeah, okay. I think I’ve got I think I’ve covered all this, like you move on and then boom, something else happens and you’re like, oh, wait a second. I clearly maybe have more work to do here. And then you do that work and you’re like, oh, things are right. And it it kind of comes up and that can seem discouraging. So tell me how for you, you didn’t get discouraged by that, because what is really easy to do in that situation is to say, I did all this work. It must not have done any good, because here I am again.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:55  How do you think about that? And how did you encourage yourself when you found those moments?

Daria Burke 00:16:01  I think I’ve come to think of them as moments of information, right? Those triggers, those setbacks, the things that challenge your sanity, where you say, how do I feel like I’m reliving this all over again? How is it that I’ve changed the set? My wardrobe is different, the cast of characters is different, and somehow this feels like the same script I just read five years ago. Ten years ago. Oh, it’s the story that I’ve told myself about those events. I’m recreating them. And I think choosing to see healing as a conscious intervention to disrupt despair. To disrupt the instinct for the brain. To sort of predict where it’s going to go next, what the outcome is going to be, how this is supposed to end. But it’s a conscious intervention. And I think trying to be kind first to myself and to say that if a child were learning how to do something, that they were going through the repetition, you get your reps in enough where you can learn to tie your shoe, and then you can remember not to touch the hot stove.

Daria Burke 00:17:15  And oh, this other thing is not the hot stove, but it’s hot as well. I mean, all those things that seem really obvious when we’re dealing with vulnerable beings and creatures are the same practices that we have to give to ourselves. And when you didn’t have that growing up in particular, I think being so willing to find and create some kind of space for that compassion Passion and to know that it’s okay. That you can survive those feelings. I think I always knew that I could survive things. I had proven that to myself. I was highly confident in my ability to navigate difficult things. But I think rather than chiding myself, I could say, what is this here to teach me? What am I supposed to be getting from this moment? Why does this rhyme with this other thing? There’s clearly something I’ve not looked at. And typically when that happens and when it’s really earth shattering, it’s because you’ve spent a long time avoiding it and not looking at it. And it’s sort of telling yourself the story that I told myself was I was healed, and I had spent a decade in talk therapy and everything was great.

Daria Burke 00:18:29  And then I see this photo of the accident that took my grandmother’s life, and I lose. I lose it, and I’m sent back in 30 years. Oh, there’s a lot I haven’t been doing. And I could only in that in that instance in particular, I could. I could very clearly just say, oh, there’s something that needs to be held here. I’ve not made a home for this grief.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:54  Yeah. And you’ve worked closely with therapists. I think they can help us center that. A couple years ago, I had a couple of things happen in my life that re triggered for me. I’m careful with words because I don’t necessarily want to say re triggered because I, you know, I think maybe if I had trauma, it was more of a complex kind of trauma. And anyway, it brought a whole bunch of stuff back that I’d not felt in a long time. And I was a little freaked out, and I was a little discouraged because I thought, But I’ve done all this work, I’ve done all of this work, and my therapist put it in a way that I thought was really helpful.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:33  He said, what your work has done is it has allowed you to be able to deal with that stuff in more and more and more and more situations.

Speaker 4 00:19:44  That’s right.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:45  And put under sufficient stress that will come back. It’s there. It’s not going away. Right. You’re not going to just unearth it and throw it out. It’s there. And to your point about how there’s an integration, his point was it just doesn’t get triggered for you 98% of the time now. And that’s a huge accomplishment. And there are going to be times and, you know, this was one of those times. And the way it was, it was it was just custom built to do it. Right. It just was the right, right exact button. And but that really helped me think about what the work of healing often is. And I think you may have had I might be mixing this up, but the idea that I get from your work, and I don’t know if you said it explicitly, is we become bigger and bigger around the thing that’s the problem.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:40  It’s not that it’s gone. It’s not that we erase it. You were talking to Elena Brower and talked about, like, footsteps in cement, right? It’s not that that engraving in the cement is going to go away. It’s just that there’s so much more space around it.

Daria Burke 00:20:52  That’s right. Gosh, you’ve said so much, right? Judith Herman talks about about healing and trauma in that way, that it’s not an exorcism. You don’t get to just exorcise it and it’s gone. You do have those footprints. You do carry them with you. And and yes, I love that you referenced my conversation with Elena. We were talking about her partner, who had very similar childhood experiences to mine, a parent who struggled with crack addiction. He had grown up in New York City. But this idea that a tree that grows next to a fence doesn’t stop growing. It grows differently. It grows around the fence and it finds its way around it. And that it’s such a beautiful metaphor for how, if we can imagine our lives working in that way.

Daria Burke 00:21:41  We can do that. You know, Eric, I do SoulCycle, and I’m sure some of your listeners will be familiar with this idea. But there’s a part in the ride where you’re holding weights and you pick up weights, and you’re doing weights like a song worth of lifting, essentially. Right. Couple minutes and, you know, they’ll inevitably have you hold the weights out away from your body. Just hold it. Maybe you pulse, but you just hold it.

Speaker 5 00:22:09  You’re like God.

Daria Burke 00:22:10  These £3 weights are really, really heavy. I’m now feeling it in my shoulders and my elbows and even maybe in my in my lower back a little bit. And the moment that you get to pull it closer, the moment that you get to release and come back and bring those weights and you’re like, gosh, I could hold them differently now.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:25  Totally. Yeah, that’s a great that’s a great example.

Daria Burke 00:22:28  Differently with them now right. That’s what it looks like. And so the triggers change. They’re not the same as the ones before.

Daria Burke 00:22:37  And the stimuli will change and and hopefully healing is, is that your relationship with what comes up starts to change. Not that it goes away.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:11  Hey, friend, before we dive back in, I want you to take a second and think about what you’ve been listening to. What’s one thing that really landed, and what’s one tiny action you could take today to live it out? Those little moments of reflection? That’s exactly why I started good wolf reminders. Short, free text messages that land in your phone once or twice a week. Nearly 5000 people already get them and say the quick bursts of insight, help them shift out of autopilot and stay intentional in their lives. If that sounds like your kind of thing, head to one Eufy net and sign up. It’s free. No spam, and easy to opt out of any time. Again, that’s one Eufy net tiny nudges, real change. All right, back to the show. There’s one other metaphor that I find helpful with this, which is the idea of a spiral staircase.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:07  And if you think of a spiral staircase, imagine there’s like pictures hanging on the wall. You keep coming around and seeing that picture again. The picture doesn’t go away, but each time you’re seeing it from a slightly higher level. And I often think that’s how this process works too. You know, your mom just keeps reappearing, reappearing, reappearing, reappearing. Right. It’s not that that’s not going to happen, but when she does, you are at a different place than you were before. You know you’re higher up that spiral so you are able to engage with her. And I don’t even mean with her personally. I mean the idea of her differently.

Daria Burke 00:24:47  Yes. You’re rinsing the sponge as my very first therapist said. Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:52  Share that analogy.

Daria Burke 00:24:53  Yeah. I remember just questioning, am I am I always going to feel like this? Is it always going to be like this? Is it always going to be this hard? Well, I always be doing this work. And she said, think of it like rinsing a sponge when you wash the dishes, or you clean something soapy and you run it, you put it under water and you rinse some of that soap out and gosh, okay, you think it’s rinsed and then you squeeze it again, you wet it again and the soap comes back.

Daria Burke 00:25:21  You sort of think about healing as rinsing the sponge. It’s a slow release over time, and there will be moments where you think you’ve got it. And don’t be alarmed. Something will be there, remnants will be there. And so, yeah, I think that whether it’s the a different elevation than you. Elevation on the staircase, the bringing of the weights back into you to hold them differently. The rinsing of the sponge, right. These are all metaphors for how it feels and looks and to not be surprised, but it really creates a different strength, really that we’re talking about that, that you can have for how to hold it, how to live with it and to not let it completely disorient you.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:03  Yeah. And I think the other piece that’s important in that is not to focus on like that. You’ve got to get to the end of some process before it starts to yield benefit. Right, right. Like even though for me, I continue to as I think all humans are doing this right.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:21  We’re always trying to sort life out. Right? Because as soon as we get one thing sorted, something else happens, right? That’s right. You know, it’s just life. But there’s this idea that we’re going to get somewhere and then suddenly it’s all going to be fine. And and I think that that is an illusion. But I also think if we look at it healing that way, we’re not cognizant of the very real benefits that are occurring as we go. Now, sometimes in those moments, as you’re working on it, it doesn’t feel like a benefit, but you don’t have to get to the end of some long journey before life starts to improve.

Daria Burke 00:26:57  I don’t think there is an end. Yeah, I really don’t know. And I think that’s why I’ve always tried to use the word integration. I know Elise Lunin, who’s been a guest on your show. I’m a huge fan of hers, and she talks about wholeness. It’s the same idea. Yeah, yeah. It’s just it’s all the same idea.

Daria Burke 00:27:14  It’s like, can I be whole with all of the holes that have been left in me? Can I find a way to feel complete? So much of this book I’ve described as a reassembly of all of these selves that I sort of shed along this journey of survival, feeling like this part of me was too innocent to move forward in the journey. This part of me doesn’t belong here because her narrative doesn’t fit the environment that I’m in, right? All of these selves that I had to let go of and to see this as a knitting together, a reassembly, a re dash membrane right of all of these parts of myself and saying they all have a room somewhere in the house, that is me. They all have the same amount of space, but they all live here. And that’s okay. That’s okay. They all belong here.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:07  Yeah. You share in the book about how you did ten years of talk therapy, and then still had a place where you realized that you needed to go sort of deeper into the experience, the felt sense, the emotion.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:23  And I think that mirrors a lot of people’s journeys for me. I don’t feel like all that cognitive work was like, misplaced And that I you know, what I really need to do is to get to this other work. It feels to me like that had to happen. Yes. For me to get to that place, say a little bit more about what I’m describing, how it showed up in your life, and how you think about it.

Daria Burke 00:28:46  Well, I integrate by speaking, so it gave me a place to do that. I think to some degree I integrate when I say that I mean ideas. I can start to piece things together in a way that I say, oh, that makes sense to me now. I’ve heard myself articulate in a way that once it was out of my mind and sort of it got some air, it could land in a way that I could make sense of it in a different way. Right. And to your point, we are seekers and we are meaning makers.

Daria Burke 00:29:12  And there will always be things that will push us to to do that kind of work. And talk therapy allowed me to do that. I think, first of all, it allowed me to just surface everything that I swallowed and pretend it didn’t exist. And so I went into therapy at 26, thinking that I was troubleshooting a very specific acute problem of how do I tell my classmates when I graduate from business school that no one in my family will be there, right? That was my impetus for going to therapy. It wasn’t. Oh, hi. I’m 26 years old. I’ve spent my entire life traumatized by my drug addicted, abusive, neglectful parents.

Speaker 4 00:29:53  And I need help.

Daria Burke 00:29:55  Parsing that because, you know, I’m an MBA student at NYU and I’m about to go launch this beauty career. Not at all. So when I went into therapy, it was with that one intention and what that experience allowed me to do for the very first time in my life was say it out loud and then start to say, oh gosh, that did happen.

Daria Burke 00:30:17  And, you know, for better and for worse, the more you remember, the more you remember. And so I sort of flipped the cap off of all of these things that came flooding. Now. What was great about that was that I started to try to create containers for it. What was not great about it was that I did not have modalities that allowed me to deal with the feelings when they emerged, so I could name things and I could label things and I could go, oh, that was this, oh, this thing happened. And then it sort of just that was where it ended. That’s where the work sort of ended. And I was doing that week over week for basically ten years, not with the same therapist and a little bit off and on, but largely for that period of time. It was important. And it was, I think, step one, and I think it laid the foundation for a kind of resilience that would allow me to when I saw that image of grandma’s car accident in the article that I wrote about, about was it was tragic and it was brutal.

Daria Burke 00:31:22  And so it made the news. And so in finding that and reading it and remembering that and being carried back to that time when I was seven years old, I did have some support in the work that I had done in talk therapy. Even though I felt ill equipped in other ways, I wasn’t. My psyche could only allow me to go there because of the work that I had done.

Speaker 4 00:31:48  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:49  And so then what did the work? Moving from a more intellectual understanding of what happened to you, being able to put it into different cognitive frames, all these things that were really helpful. What then prompted you to try different approaches, and what did you do then?

Daria Burke 00:32:11  First it was learning about neuroplasticity. It was just the term that kind of was this light bulb moment, this idea that our brains are not fixed, that we are not just who we are. That you sort of get baked and you arrive and that’s it, that we will continue to grow and change and form new neural connections with experience and information, and that our brains could could adapt to accommodate a new paradigm.

Daria Burke 00:32:41  And I thought, that explains a lot. But also, what does that mean for what healing might actually then look like in my life? I learned about it in the context of Norman Deutsch’s work, amongst others, but he was really kind of the person who, through a podcast interview, introduced me to that term in 2017 and was sharing it in talking about people who had experienced Parkinson’s and debilitating neurodegenerative diseases. And I thought, well, if they can do that, what does that look like for other kinds of emotional trauma? And then it was during that time that somatic healing in many forms began to kind of fill in my understanding of what that might mean, that it wasn’t just talking about it, that you had to actually do something with it. And for some people, that was in how they could physically get it out of their bodies through movement. And that could be dance, it could be exercise, it could be jumping and shaking and tapping. And, you know, there are lots of ways that we do that.

Daria Burke 00:33:47  But that was really kind of what cracked it open for me and starting to more actively research ways in which I might do that for myself. And so that has looked like at you name it in the ways that I’ve tried to test that it’s looked like eMDR therapy and actually trying to resurrect those memories and emotions tied to those memories, the stories that I created related to certain events in my life, but it has also been extremely physical in nature. Breathwork is a really, really big one for me. I meditate, I find all the ways to feel it in my body to recognize, and a lot of it honestly. Eric was the pattern spotting of oh, when I was really nauseous. This was happening when I was feeling like this. This was so a lot of it too, was really kind of going back and figuring out when my body was telling me something. I just wasn’t paying attention to it and thinking about how it was moving through me physically and what I might do to to respond to that.

Daria Burke 00:34:56  And so for me, it always starts in my in my gut and my tummy. And so I tend to get very nauseous and then sometimes very sick. And so just that awareness that it was not just my mind that needed to do some work, that I needed to figure out how it was showing up physically in myself.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:17  We were talking about how we cope. And one of the things that you used as a real tool early on is you said something to the effect of a relentless pursuit of control. To what extent have you been able to lessen control? And how do you tell useful control from not useful. Right. You’ve been very successful in a lot of different ways, and that’s not a bad thing. Right. And and control is part of a control of yourself. And I don’t want to say control of others because that sounds bad, but like guidance, like there is a place where thinking about what’s going to happen and trying to shape the way it happens is a back to our maladaptive and adaptive strategies.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:05  This seems to have been one of your big ones. So I’m curious how have you lessened and how do you tell when you are sort of in. All right. I’m in a maladaptive control mode versus I’m just doing what kind of what needs to get done here to move this thing forward.

Daria Burke 00:36:22  Sure. It looks like hypervigilance for me when I feel like I have to be hypervigilant around the environment or what I say, or how something is presented, or that I am over architecting and solving for circumstances that, first of all, aren’t my business, that I don’t need to be managing, or that I actually have no real influence over. That’s when I know that it is not serving me well. And when my thoughts are consumed with trying to manufacture something that is just either I don’t want to say not there, but that doesn’t need that level of attention from me. That is not my work to do. And I find myself often actually one of the questions that I sort of ask of myself and I suppose to the universe, to God is, is this mine to do? And that shows up for me that question a lot, whether it’s an idea that I’m noodling on or.

Daria Burke 00:37:26  in real time, some problem that needs to get solved. And I’m like, it’s mine to do. And it allows me to just take a minute and say, okay, who’s showing up in this moment? Because it could be this protective part of yourself that feels like if you have all the knowledge that you can gather, that information is control, right? That if you know everything, then you can you can thwart off whatever threat you’re you’re trying to anticipate. Or if it’s just am I trying to create a set of conditions that I will never fully be able to? I’m not singularly responsible for these conditions. I think that’s typically how it shows up for me. And so that awareness is step one for sure. I think that’s the step one for any kind of change, any kind of of evolution. I think the second thing typically is that question of is this mind to do? And what do I do with what I what comes up for me in that moment, right? Sometimes it’s the reframe.

Daria Burke 00:38:27  You’re safe. You’re fine. There’s nothing for you to do. Be there. Be present. Lots of things can inspire what I call a psychic surrender. Right? Which is just the like. Take your hands off the steering wheel. Because this is not mine. And I say that without any sort of religious context, but this deep faith in knowing that I’m held and that I have the tools that I need to actually handle something if it comes up. But this isn’t something to manage right now. And knowing the difference. But I think that interrogation and slowing down and not operating from this place that feels, you know, we like to call it instinct. And I think, I think even about success in the same way. But we want to call it. Oh, gosh. Well, I’m just driven. I’m ambitious. You’re like, is that ambition or anxiety? Yeah, that’s my instinct. Well, sure. Is that your instinct and is that coming from an intuitive place or is that coming from fear? And I think having the courage to actually ask yourself that question, determine what the answer is and then say, okay, this I need to I need to stop here.

Daria Burke 00:39:32  This is a moment to pause.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:34  Yeah. I want to come back to intuition and fear for a second, but I want to stay with this a little bit longer. You and I, before we started, we’re talking about book covers, and I was sharing. You know, I’ve had quite a journey with my publisher on getting to the book cover that we want. And I was talking about how wonderful your book cover was, and it sounds like we had a very similar sort of journey. Like you, you exercised a certain amount of control or will to get the book cover. Right. And what I always think is interesting is in something like that, how do we know when, like we’ve done what’s the right thing to do for the situation or when have I tipped over? And for me, that’s kind of how I think about it. Like, yeah, book covers are important. Right. I put all this time into writing a book covers one of the most important parts of it. I want it to be right.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:29  Yes. And there’s a place at which point I need to set it down and put it back into a bigger global context. And and I’m curious how, you know, for those things where you kind of have to do it to a certain degree. I think it’s easier when we’re like, that’s just not mine at all. Yeah, it’s harder when it is ours. We are responsible, but we don’t want to become obsessed.

Daria Burke 00:40:54  Yes. That’s such a great example. And thank you for saying that. I’ll thank you on air as well, because I do love the cover and how it turned out, and I don’t feel like I needed to control that situation so much as I was demonstrating my own agency in that part of the process and having the vision that I had for the book. This is a very deeply personal story that I’m sharing, and having the clarity to bring forward how my story would exist in the title, in the cover and in the text, those things that were all mine to do.

Daria Burke 00:41:38  And they were things that to some degree were co-creative.  I think where I try to hold the line is when I felt fully out of alignment in trying to get to a good place. So as long as I was in a good place, even if I meant another round, another round, another round, right? Another. But when I found myself like losing my shit where I was like, oh my God, I’m going to lose it.  It’s like, okay, Daria.

Daria Burke 00:42:07  What is happening right now? Is it that you’re not feeling cared for in this moment? Is that you’re not feeling understood? Is it that you’re feeling somehow neglected? What wound is being scratched.

Daria Burke 00:42:21  Here and I could be very clear and.

Speaker 4 00:42:24  Usually.

Daria Burke 00:42:24  Quickly I could say this is scratching something and I know what’s coming up in this moment. And also, I think I could rely on my professional experience as a career marketer. I have great taste. I have a great eye. I know the vision, and I.

Speaker 4 00:42:39  Knew that we had a shared vision, too.

Daria Burke 00:42:41  So, I could also come back to the good intentions that we all had. And to say, I know I’m pushing for something that right now we’re not all aligned with. We’ve got to keep going, though. We can do better. I know that we can. And then knowing again when, when to take your foot off the gas and when you’re not going to fight, you know, fight the fight. But I think I did I did have that, try to hold the space for those, those two things to be true, to coexist, and also to realize when I was being completely sort of taken out of my own kind of alignment, where I felt so upset by how difficult it was. And I was like, okay, this is good information. What is this telling me? And then in some cases I was like, okay, got it. I’ve captured what it’s telling me. I’m still going to push because it means that much, and I’m not going to be told that it doesn’t matter as much to me as I as it does.

Daria Burke 00:43:37  Right. And I think to me, I just I see that as agency more than anything. And sometimes it’s okay to really, really fucking care. Excuse my language, but like, sometimes things really matter and I think we have to allow ourselves to feel and know and recognize and name those moments to let that desire be a teacher. Now, how I handled it all the time, I think that’s a different yeah, that’s a different conversation. I think I handled it largely pretty well. But, you know, I had moments where I was like screaming into the void when I was alone.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:11  One of the things that we’re not capturing as we go through this very well is how beautifully written the book is, And I want to give listeners just a small flavor of like a paragraph that jumped out to me, although there are so many of them. I mean, it is so beautifully rendered, but if you would read the bottom of page 176 for us, because I think it kind of sums up a lot of what we’ve been talking about up to this point.

Daria Burke 00:44:38  Thank you. Yes. Integration, then, means knitting together these detailed observations and broad understandings into a coherent sense of self. It is about acknowledging the contradictions, holding the complexities and finding clarity in the confusion. It is a series of ongoing negotiations between the past and the present, the self and the other, the details and the bigger picture. It is delicate work, one that requires patience and the courage to face the world as it is, not as we wish it to be, and the courage to do the same with ourselves.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:15  That’s a beautiful section. Is there anything you would like to add to that, or is it just stand alone?

Daria Burke 00:45:20  Thank you. I think it stands alone because of what we’ve been talking about. Yeah. And it’s that simply stated and that hard to do at the same time.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:31  So where I would like for us to wrap up here is to have you tell us the story that ends the book about the hydrangeas. And I may ask you to read something else from that also, but set us up.

Daria Burke 00:45:45  Yes. Well, I bought a house, so I’m here now, a little house in East Hampton, out in the woods, and I’d have this fantasy of planting hydrangea bushes in the front of my house. I found all these pictures, and I have a little cedar shingle, gray cedar shingle house. And so I could imagine these big blooming white hydrangeas in the front of the house, under the windows, under the two front windows. And so I finally got into a place where I was ready to do that kind of work, and I bring in my, my landscaper, and we make the plan And even in talking about the kind of hydrangeas I wanted, I said, well, I want yeah, I want white hydrangeas. And he says, well, you know, he calls me Miss Daria. He says, area. The, the soil is really what determines the color, right? You have to actually have the right conditions for it to turn out that way. There are some that are bred that way.

Daria Burke 00:46:37  Yes. The pH in the soil helps dictate the color. So funny story, which I’ll get to, but mine have actually changed color as the season has gone on. But so I say okay, interesting. Well this is my aspiration. And so maybe it’s this breed and this variety, this variety. So we plant them. And at the time I was in Los Angeles and so he had done the work. And I come back maybe a month later. And they had been ravaged like the leaves were chewed, it looked like lace, and the deer had gotten to them. They had started to bloom and they were apparently quite lovely. I didn’t get to see them because they had been ravaged by deer. And I’m like what is happening?

Daria Burke 00:47:18  So I call him. He comes over and we try to figure out what to do next. And I was so beside myself, forget the expense. It was like the emotional investment that I had made in them. And so I said, well, can we just cover them with burlap for now? I don’t know what to do with them.

Daria Burke 00:47:33  I don’t know what else we can do to save them and leaving them like this. They’ll only continue to be eaten. So we cover them in burlap, and a whole year goes by before I decide to relocate them, to repot them, to change their environment. So one by one and I had a dozen of them, six on either side. I dig them up myself really gently and try to protect the roots, and I repotted each of them in planters on my deck, which is fenced in. And as you can imagine, when I first replant them, they looked kind of quite sad, actually. But as the season goes on and months go by, and then eventually, especially the next summer, they began to bloom. And they were stunning and beautiful. And they had they were just sprigs when I had replanted them. So I was terrified that nothing would happen. And they began to bloom these big green, leafy leaves and flowers. And it was such a beautiful articulation of the pain that we go through sometimes in certain environments, and the ways in which if we can just reframe and reimagine, get creative.

Daria Burke 00:48:44  And sometimes it takes time to figure out what that looks like. But we can move to a new space and find flourishing again. And that’s exactly what happened. And I can actually see them right now. And what’s really funny, I’ll add, is that they started this season white and now they’re bright pink.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:03  Really? That is so interesting.

Daria Burke 00:49:05  And I’m deeply invested in what happened over the course of the summer because I’ve never seen them like this. And so the soil clearly has something, has found its way in there and has changed the color. But it’s such a sometimes obvious but beautiful I think metaphor for how this all works. We’re not unlike them in many ways.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:29  As we wrap up, take one thing from today and ask yourself, how will I practice this before the end of the day? For another gentle nudge, join good Wolf Reminders text list. It’s a short message or two each week, packed with guest wisdom and a soft push towards action. Nearly 5000 listeners are already loving it. Sign up free at oneyoufeed.net/sms. No noise, no spam, just steady encouragement to feed your good wolf. 

I’m going to say something. I’m going to ask you to read something to wrap up, and I can’t. I just can’t go without saying it. There’s a book I’ve been reading called The Light Eaters, and it’s all about plant intelligence, for lack of a better word. Although a lot of people in the plant world tread carefully around that term, it will blow your mind. All these things that that plants can do. It really is like what it shows just how embodied into nature is this incredible intelligence, resilience, change, evolution, all of these things. Yes. So I would love you to read the last two paragraphs of the book. Thinking of that idea and of those hydrangeas in mind.

Daria Burke 00:50:48  They stood there, lush and quiet, their fullness a far cry from the brittle beginnings of the year before. And there, amid the green, the first white blooms unfurled, delicate and resilient proof that life could return even after what felt like a devastating ending.

We carry that same power in us to rise again, to transform to flourish. Against all odds. To stretch toward the light. Even after being buried, we can still grow. Still we become. And in those quiet moments when new life finally breaks through, we remember that we were always meant to be.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:28  That’s so lovely. Thank you so much for joining us on this show. This has been wonderful.

Daria Burke 00:51:33  The pleasure has been mine. Thank you so much.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:36  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time.  Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.