Who Hurt You? The Key to Profound Healing with Robert Blake

The profound inquiry at the heart of today’s discussion revolves around the pivotal question: "Who hurt you?" This inquiry, often overlooked in conventional therapeutic settings, serves as a catalyst for genuine healing. Our esteemed guest, Robert Blake, has meticulously crafted a therapeutic framework that empowers individuals to confront this question with candor and courage. Through his extensive experience as a psychotherapist and survivor of childhood trauma, he elucidates how addressing the roots of our pain is essential for long-lasting emotional restoration. As we delve into this episode, we explore the complexities of trauma, the misconceptions surrounding healing, and the transformative journey towards what Blake refers to as a "brighter heart."

An exploration of profound emotional healing takes center stage in this enlightening discussion. The episode delves into the pivotal question, 'Who hurt you?', a query rarely posed by those closest to us or even by professionals in the field of mental health. Our guest, Robert Blake, a seasoned psychotherapist and childhood trauma survivor, articulates how this deceptively simple query can serve as the gateway to profound healing. He elucidates the principles behind Source Completion Therapy, a three-phase therapeutic process he developed, which aims to meticulously address and resolve deep-seated emotional wounds. Through personal anecdotes and patient stories, Blake underscores the transformative power of confronting one’s past traumas and the necessity of addressing these emotional scars rather than merely masking them with superficial solutions. This episode is not just a dialogue; it is a call to action for listeners to engage with their pasts courageously and begin their journey toward a 'brighter heart.'

Takeaways:

• The question of 'Who hurt you?' serves as a pivotal inquiry in the healing process, prompting individuals to confront their emotional pain directly.
• Robert Blake's journey from trauma survivor to therapist exemplifies the profound impact of personal experience in therapeutic practices.
• Understanding that time alone does not heal wounds is crucial; instead, active engagement with one's emotions is necessary for genuine healing.
• The therapeutic framework of Source Completion Therapy emphasizes the necessity of addressing the source of hurt to achieve long-lasting emotional recovery.
• Emotional wounds, when repressed, manifest in various detrimental behaviors, highlighting the importance of confronting and processing these feelings for true healing.
• Forgiveness is not a prerequisite for healing; rather, the first step lies in courageously acknowledging and articulating one's pain.

Links referenced in this episode:

• robertbleck.com

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

There's a question that most of us never been asked directly. Not by a doctor, not by a therapist, not by the people closest to us. Three simple words.

Exploring the Question of Hurt

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Who hurt you? Not what happened to you, not how you are coping, and not what you need to do next. Just who hurt you. So today's guest has built an entire therapeutic framework around the courage that it takes to answer the question honestly. And what he's found after decades of work and his own journey through pain is that the answer to that question might be the beginning of the most important healing of your life. So hey day listeners, welcome back to another powerful episode of Mind Meets Machine, part of Healthy Mind by Yavik Podcast Network, where we explore the deeper dimensions of how we think, feel, heal, and function as human beings. I'm your host, Abik, and I want to say upfront that today's conversation is one that I think has the potential to genuinely change something for the person who is listening right now. So with this, I have a very lovely guest.

SPEAKER_01 1:22

Please welcome Robert Blake. Welcome to the show. Thank you, and thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here with you and your audience.

SPEAKER_00 1:30

Amazing. Amazing. So, dear listeners, before we get deep dive into this conversation today, I'll quickly love to introduce you with Robert. So, Robert is a psychotherapist, author, former university professor, survivor of childhood trauma, and the founder of the Source Completion Therapy Sedum. So he is the creator of Source Completion Therapy, a pre-phase process designed to clean and permanently heal deep emotional wounds. And he's also the author of Give Back the Pain, which brings the process of life through real human stories. So over the course of his career, he has helped thousands of people emerge from trauma, abuse, emotional suffering, and find their way back to what he calls a brighter heart. So I will not take much of your time, dear listeners. Let's get started. Welcome to the show again, Robert. Amazing. So Robert, I I I definitely would love to start with something personal, like because I think it matters that our listeners understand not just what of your work, but why factor behind it. So you have been open about the fact that you are yourself a survivor of trauma and you have spent decades helping others heal from that very kind of pain you uh know from the inside. So what I'm curious about is like not just about the clinical details, but also about the human journey. Like, what was it like to move from being someone who has, I mean, was uh uh hurt to becoming someone who dedicated their life to helping others heal. So what transformation? I mean, if you can share.

SPEAKER_01 3:26

Sure.

The Journey from Trauma to Healing

SPEAKER_01 3:27

So let's start with who hurt me, and that's my mother. Okay. My mother started abusing me when I was a toddler. Now I believe it was about three years old. She started beating me, she started degrading me, she uh humiliated me, and that was painful. It was scary and it was a difficult time for me. When she when she would beat me, she would sometimes use her fists, sometimes her open hand, sometimes she would use uh whatever was available, whatever she looked around, whether it was a shoe, she liked hitting me with a wooden spoon and the from the kitchen, a big wooden spoon. She particularly liked the belt buckle that she would use from the belt, and that would hurt me even more. So, again, that was painful, but she also got creative with her torment of me. One night, when I was I got up, I woke up from a nightmare. I went to my parents' bedroom, and because I was scared, she took me back, she pulled me back to my bed, and then she began to tie me to the bed. She the ropes went underneath the bed and across my chest. So as a little child, I was about three, three and a half, perhaps. I was terrified. I thought someone was killing me. I thought I would be dead. It was ghoulish to do that to a child. So so how did I how did I um suffer from it? I suffered from it in a number of ways. I bit my nails, I was terrified of the dark, I slept with uh the light on in my room all the way into my teenage, teenage years. I also had nightmares, I had night terrors, I had anger inside of me. So I had all of those feelings inside of me. So we moved forward to about nine years old. Um, that time I was able to develop a compassion for those who suffered or struggled in some way. So if you were bullied by somebody, if you were sick, if you were grieving, if you were experienced some kind of injustice, that that bothered me deeply. And that compassion and that empathy was the foundation for me deciding what I wanted to do for my life. And that that became clear. I wanted to help humanity, I wanted to help you out there to heal from your wounds. I wanted to help you in some way. So let's let's fast forward again to about I was age to 14. My mother was still hitting me at the time. Um, how was I going to survive it? How was I gonna get out to to go into helping humanity? So at 14, I remember my mother coming at me and um with closed fists, and I held up my palm of my hand like that, and I said, Stop, you can't hit me anymore. From playing sports, I'm stronger, and I will defend myself. So she looked into my eyes and she said, and didn't say a word, walked away, and that was the last last time she she hit me. So she still degraded and humiliated me, but at least I wasn't being beaten. So, so I had to figure out, though, still how to cope and how to survive this and get out of the house and go and do what I wanted to do in life. So I found two things that that helped me. One was this the sports that I mentioned. I became an athlete. I played soccer, and I played ice hockey. And that the camaraderie was terrific. I loved the camaraderie, I loved being outside, I loved that I was felt confident, I felt respected, and it and they kept me out of the house, like I said, from the torment that I received. I also found nature very comforting. I love nature. I would get up early in the morning, I would watch the sunrise, and I would listen to the birds sing, and I always thought they were singing to me. So these two things were really helping me. Nature, they were helping me cope. They weren't getting the feelings out that I had inside, but temporarily they were helping me cope. So eventually I got out of the house. I got a I went to college. I had two tracks I could go in: medicine to help humanity, medicine to help you, people, and I also had psychology to help. The medicine didn't feel right, psychology did. So I got a degree in psychology as an undergraduate, and then I went on to graduate school to get a PhD in counseling. Um, do you have any questions? I'm glad to answer it so far, but or I could continue.

SPEAKER_00 7:57

Definitely. And I was listening to it, and it is very important uh for listeners also to understand this. And but yeah, what what I uh what I hear is that um your work wasn't born in a kind of classroom or a textbook, it was born in the lived experience, right? And I think that's exactly why it reaches people so deeply, because there's a difference between someone who understands the trauma intellectually and someone who knows it from the inside, right? So that is uh much important, I believe. And also, if if may I ask you, like I mean, there's a lot of ideas out there about how emotional healing works, so time heals everything, all wounds, positive thinking, moving on, letting go of things. So these ideas are kind of well intentioned, but from what I understand from your work that they often miss something fundamental. So if you can share, like what is that biggest misconception that people carry about healing from the trauma or that uh deep emotional pain? And so what's the misconception here actually about?

Understanding Emotional Healing

SPEAKER_01 9:16

Okay, so so I'll start with time, doesn't heal the wounds. Time it will mute the wounds, that's all. It will mute them, it will like putting a band-aid on a self-um pussy wound, it just covers it, it doesn't heal it. So let me tell you how I found out how to heal it. And then because I was still had my own issues and my own pain inside. So I graduated with the PhD. I I worked, I was trained in many therapies, many theories. And I went out, I worked in uh schools, I worked in clinics, I got a job at a university to train graduate students how to be therapists and counselors. And I opened up a small private practice. And what what started to happen? I was getting referrals when I worked at the university from all different directions. And a lot of the people that I was getting referrals, they were asked me if I would see them in my private practice. And they told me they were abuse as children. And I said, okay, let's give it a shot. So I would, I would take them on, I would see them. And I guess I was somewhat successful because I kept getting more referrals. But but I wasn't satisfied. I wasn't satisfied for me personally because I still had issues inside, and the therapies that I was working wasn't enough, that I was in wasn't enough to heal all those wounds that I had inside. And the people that I work was working with, they they weren't permanently healing as much as I wanted them to. So I had to decide. I I took what worked, what didn't work, I put what didn't work aside, and I put what worked into a process, a three-phase process, that eventually I was getting the results that I wanted. I was getting permanent long-term healing. It's a deep process that requires you to go back in time, feel the hurt, who hurt you, and eventually confront the source of who hurt you with feedback. So that those three phases were really, really successful. And I still get letters from people from years ago telling me how I helped save their lives, how they went on to live productive and fruitful lives thanks to the therapy that I that I have and that I and I helped them with. So I feel rewarded by it. I feel there's nothing else I'd rather do in my life is to help you out there. So so that that's the story. It was just uh again something that I find valuable and I I I used on myself as well, and and I healed myself. So not only did I heal others, the therapy that I founded healed myself as well. So I'm really pleased about that.

SPEAKER_00 11:53

Amazing. So um okay. And I'd say that's really the uh crucial such a crucial distinction because the pain doesn't go away, it just goes underground, right? And and finds the expression in other ways as well, right? So that addictions, uh phobias, uh, depressions, uh, intense anger, you have named these as the behaviors that uh often signals unresolved wounds beneath the surface, right? So what tends to happen when someone finally connects a behavior that they have been struggling with for the years and years to its kind of uh I'd say the actual emotional source? So what would you say?

SPEAKER_01 12:43

Yeah, it's a great question. Okay, so what happens when a person, sorry, whether it's a child or an adult, they they repress these, they repress the hurts from the and they stuff it down, they suppress it, repress it, whatever you want to call it. So what happens to those feelings? Feelings like being feeling worthless, inadequate, empty, lonely, betrayed, not good enough, all those feelings are the feelings that people come to me with. They stuff them down, and what happens is they become an emotionally toxic brew that's swirling around inside of us. Now, even if we stuff it down, the subconscious wants to get those feelings out. It doesn't like, they don't like those feelings in our psyche. That's similar to eating a bad meal and getting food poisoning. Our body wants to expel it and it comes out of basically every orifice. It's the same thing with feelings that are repressed or suppressed. They want to come out, but consciously we still don't want to feel them. So what happens is they come out in what I call diversions. They might come out in a phobia, in an addiction, in an eating disorder, in a panic attack, in rage, in road rage. You see that all the time. Um, so they come out in those ways. I again I call them diversions because they divert you away from the actual source. So I have to take you and I have to connect it. Repressing of the feelings led to the diversions, that's just a symptom, really. And we have to get all the feelings out, and I guarantee you those symptoms go away once I get all those feelings from you out. And that's what happens with my process. It's exactly what happens. Wow.

SPEAKER_00 14:22

So so the behavior was never a kind of real problem. It was only the kind of I can say that messenger and a signal pointing back to something earlier, something which is not finished. So yeah, definitely. I understand. Yeah. And what healing actually looks like, it's like as you have described that, what happens on the other side of this process and kind of language that I find genuinely moving is um a brighter heart and openness to the magic, beauty and wonder of life. So from there I want to ask um about like not as a concept, but as a kind of lived reality. That what would you I I mean, what do you actually observe in people who have moved through that source completion therapy?

SPEAKER_01 15:10

Okay, so so recently I I worked with an actress, an award-winning singer and actress, who called me and got in c touch with me. She had read my book and she saw me on a on that on another show. And she said, Would you see me please? I've worked in with other therapists and therapies, and it's not helping me. Um, and in fact, it's making me feel worse. So some people worked with me on the just the symptom. I worked with what's called EMDR. Are you familiar with it, with you moving your eyes? They move your eyes. And I also went to a psychiatrist, and he just wanted to give me uh medication, thought I was schizophrenic, okay, because I was having these out of out-of-body experiences, and it was terrifying. So it so what was happening with the actress, she was in toxic relationships, she was taking drugs, and the cur her career was faltering, and she couldn't figure out what was going on, what was happening. So, so when she contacted me, I said, No, and you're not schizophrenic, what's happening? You've stored feelings from your past, somebody hurt you, you have to get that out, and then all of those symptoms will go away, and you'll you live a healthier life and you get back on track. So we did. So I I asked her who hurt you, and we we got to the truth. It was her father who abandoned the family, abandoned her emotionally. She was she felt empty, unimportant, insignificant, and that was the source, and that's what hurt her. And then she relived it, and then she wrote letters to her father, you know, telling him how she was affected by what he did. She got rid of the relationships, all the toxic relationships. Her out-of-body experiences stopped, and she got off the drugs, and her career is now fl back to flourishing, and she's really successful and happy in her life. And I get uh I got emails saying how much she appreciates what I've done for her. So that's how it looks.

SPEAKER_00 17:06

Got it. Got it. So, and also like uh I'd love to uh bring in your book here that gives back the pain because you have chosen to tell this story, not just kind of theoretically, but through real human stories. So, what was behind uh that choice?

SPEAKER_01 17:25

Well, I I mean the people I were working with were so happy in their in their growth, in their dealt and in their and the healing. They said, Bob, why don't you write a book and get it out to the world? And I I thought about, I say, well, uh, that's a good idea. So I wanted to help you as many people as I can out there. I wanted to help you, the whole, all of the world. So uh that's what that's what motivated me to write the book.

SPEAKER_00 17:49

Amazing.

SPEAKER_01 17:50

So what I didn't do, I think I'm gonna update that the book and and write, add a couple of chapters to it. Didn't they only include bits of me in there? I didn't include the whole the whole background, what I explained to you. So I think I'm I'll update that soon. But the book is out there right now as Give Back to Pain, and it's just the other day people told me that somebody I s I see in in sessions told me I find it so valuable. I'm buying more books and giving out to my friends. So it just validates the process and it validates that my work is successful.

SPEAKER_00 18:25

Exactly. Exactly. And here's also what I want to ask about like I want your most answer into this that healing from deep trauma is not a kind of straight line. People hit the walls and they they resist also, they get close to the source and kind of flinch away as well. But they make progress and then something triggers a kind of regression. So, what are that most common ways people get stuck in this process? And how do you help them kind of not give off themselves what happens there?

SPEAKER_01 18:58

Got it. It's a really great question. Thank you for asking it, Albert. I appreciate that. Okay. This is not a process that's quick, it's not, it's not easy. Um, it's not you're not gonna be cured on a weekend. Anybody tell you that? I would run away from that as soon as possible. Uh, it's fraudulent, okay? Because people come to me, they've been storing feels of their feelings for maybe 30 years. So it's that's not gonna go away overnight. Sometimes the people that are repressed feelings, they they're frightened, especially in the second stage, where I ask them to go back in time through visualizations, self-hypnosis, to experience the uh past in the present time. And I do it safely. They have to trust me, and that takes time to develop. So what what happens, they might be scared of that process, but uh I keep that that they stay with it. It takes some courage, it takes commitment, it takes persistence, and then they start to feel safe, and then they go into that second stage to go back in time, and that brings the feelings up to the surface. I never push them, I go at their pace. So that's a really great question.

The Journey of Healing: Confronting Deep Trauma

SPEAKER_01 20:03

Never ever push them. But again, it it requires the commitment, perseverance, and the courage in the last phase. The last phase is people are also uncomfortable with because it it asks you to confront the source of your pain, the actual source, whether it was an uncle, a father, a brother, a sister, a stranger, it asks you to confront them by giving feedback. Tell them how you how you were hurt, how they hurt you, how it affected you, and what you felt about it. So along the way, as you said, there is they have resistance, you have resistance because you don't want to feel pain. No one really wants to do that. I didn't want to do that, and neither do you out there. But that's what heals. You have to go through this, through this process to make real permanent change. It won't come with any, it won't it won't come with behavioral therapy. They that just works on the symptoms, so it never that never works to the way I want it, the way I'm satisfied with. It won't come with um exercise, it won't come with yoga, it won't come with relaxation techniques. Those are good tools. You can do that while you're doing this. I I I recommend it. Um, but they will only uh give you peace in the present for the moments. They won't take away any of the feelings that are still inside you. Exactly in fact, I found nothing but this process does that. I wish there was. I wish there was a pill that I could uh my my person that I deal with could take it. Hasn't happened. So they go through the process. One person that I worked with, she was referred to me, uh she had an um bad eating disorder. She would uh and then was bulimic, with which she would throw up. She came to me and um she told me the eating disorder, she would binge eat and then she would throw out. And she did we're doing that for years and years. She went to all the kinds of therapy, any kind of waiting weight program, she was weight watches, whatever, overeaters anonymous. Nothing was working. Maybe she was in it for 10 years, all of those mixtures. Somehow she got a hold of my book, read it, and said, You know, I I I I would you see me. I said, Yes. So so what happened there? Uh she was resistant, so resistant that she said, But I know the eating disorder has nothing to do with my past. Okay. And I said, Well, actually, it probably does. Let's get to the source. She says, Well, that'll never happen. Never happen. I said, See, I guarantee you this will happen. You you work the process, you work my uh my therapy, and you will get, you will stop, stop binge eating and you stop building throwing up. So we worked for years. She got into it, she started to believe it, because she was getting uh into the process,

The Journey to Healing: Confronting the Past

SPEAKER_01 22:42

she confronted her father, that was the issue. Father was an alcoholic, pushed any affection away away from her. She he pushed her away. The alcohol was more important to her, so she felt insignificant, worthless, and alone and hurt. When she got to those feelings, she confronted her father. She got the feelings out. She wrote letters to him and confronted him directly. Ben Jean stopped, and she's enjoying her life right now. She's she's she's actually loving it. It's connected. Any most just about any feeling and symptom you have is connected to somewhere where you were her.

SPEAKER_00 23:20

I agree. I totally agree on that. And uh, like uh and this is such an important clarification. Uh, I I believe that it's a relief for many people to hear because so often that believe that we must forgive before we can uh heal becomes a kind of I would say it's a bar barrier, and another way of asking that wounded person to do the emotional labor for the person who hurt them. Right. So yeah, and so uh one thing definitely I would love to ask you, like for the person who is listening right now, or maybe they will be listening, uh, who has been carrying um something heavy for a very long time, also who has told themselves that what happened wasn't that bad, or that they should be over it by now. So, what would you uh uh uh want them to hear from you this moment?

SPEAKER_01 24:20

You know, I am so happy with your questions. I think they're terrific, they're right on target, and they're they're wonderful, Alex. Thank you. Okay. There's no getting over them with time. There's no there's no matter how old you are, you no matter how young you are, ever. You could be 85. If you kept those feelings inside, you're not over it. So it have they have to be um expelled out of you, and then you get over it. Time doesn't work, uh, age doesn't work. I'm telling you, well, it's been 10 years, get over it, that doesn't work. Never. I I haven't seen it, I should say. I haven't seen it work in in my in my years, decades of doing this work. Um, I've never seen that.

SPEAKER_00 25:03

Amazing. And and definitely, uh dear listeners, I have to say one thing that what Robert has reminded us today is something, I believe, profound and simple at once as well, because the behaviors that trouble you most are not the character, they are the echo of that wounds that were never fully tended to. And the first act of healing is not forgiveness and not forgetting, and also not moving on as well. It's that courage to answer that one honest question, like we started with who hurt you, right? So so for the listeners, I mean, uh Robert, if someone wants to connect with you, how can they connect?

SPEAKER_01 25:46

They could go to my website, but pretty simple, Robertbleck.com, and they could connect with me. They could uh email me from the uh site, they could buy the book, or they did my phone number to my office, is is on listed on the site as well. Robert BleckLavac.

SPEAKER_00 26:06

Lovely. So the resistance, what I'll do is I'll put all these links and the details into the show notes for the easy reference so that you can easily reach out to Robert. And with this, I definitely say thank you so much for joining us today on Mind Meets Machine. And if this conversation touched something in you, maybe a memory uh recognition, a quiet ache that you have been carrying for longer than you can remember, please don't scrawl past it. Let it be the beginning of something. And you don't have to kind of have it figured out everything. You don't have to be ready too much, you just have to be kind of willing to ask the question. So share this episode with someone who needs to hear it because someone in your life does for sure, and also leave us a review if this conversation meant something to you and it helps more people find the conversation like this one. And we'll be back soon. So until the until then, like be honest with you with yourself, be gentle with yourself, and also remember that brighter heart is not just kind of possible. It's waiting for you. So thank you so much.