Discovering Your Inner Child

Most people think they can ignore their inner childhood trauma, but they’re wrong. Childhood trauma doesn’t go away if you ignore it. It will jump into future generations until it gets dealt with. This is why you need to tell your story and acknowledge that trauma. Remember, “Your voice is healing and your silence is killing.” Join Michelle Faust as she talks to Michelle Brown about her new book, The Inner Child of Me. Learn more about why you need self-love to get in touch with your inner child. Discover how you can heal your childhood trauma so future generations don’t get affected. Find out why Michelle wrote the book despite having no experience writing. Start finding that inner child within you today.

—

Watch the episode here:

Listen to the podcast here:

Discovering Your Inner Child

An Interview With Michelle Brown

I’m so happy to have as a special guest Michelle Brown. Welcome, Michelle. I’m so happy to have you.

Thank you.

It’s got to be a good thing when to share a name.

I would like to say that there’s a lot of Michelle’s out here, so you got to represent.

Great minds think alike. I’m a few years older than you, quite a bit. When I was growing up, there were no Michelles and now, it’s like everybody I meet.

We spell our name the same, though.

Yes, we’re two Ls, which is the correct way to spell it. Anyway, welcome to the show. Whereabout in the world are you located?

Jackson, Michigan.

Inner Child: When you see another person going through what you’re going through, you feel like you’re not alone.

Both of these pictures are me. This is me as an adult and the mirror is a reflection of me as a child. As the child’s tribulations to save me to be this person, I had to heal that inner child to grow. Now, my book came through meditation because I was going through a lot in life. I was like, “I want to get away. I want to escape. I want to get away from everything.” I heard about meditation and when I first started learning doing meditation, I didn’t know how to do it because, in meditation, you’re supposed to focus on your breath and your breathing.

Every time I tried to do it, I kept thinking about other things. Everything kept coming up. I had to go get a book to learn how to meditate. Once I did that, I did it for 30 days. I don’t remember what day it was, but there’s one particular day I’ve seen a little girl. It showed me a little girl. I love kids. It showed me a little girl in a sense like when this girl gets around kids, she gets safe and comfortable.

It also showed me that this little girl wants to be free. After the meditation, I was confused because I was like, “What happened?” When I thought about it, I said, “That’s me at six years old being molested.”It’s interesting because I thought I let it go, but it showed me that I know how to cope with it. I didn’t let it go. It was still there and the kids were like the coverup, but they were also reflecting back to me of the main person needing that protection. The main person that’s screaming for help is that little girl inside of me.

You also write about meditation. For some people, it comes very easily. For others, it’s a learned process. I’ve tried so many times and my mind goes everywhere.

What I learned, Michelle, is that when meditation, they say, if a thought comes up, acknowledge it and accept it. If you acknowledge and accept it, then it will go away. If you act like it’s not there and it’s not existing, then it’s going to stay there. That’s like with a pattern or a cycle. If you see a pattern and you act like it’s not there, then it’s going to stay there, but if you acknowledge it and say, “This is a problem,” then you can change it and it can go away.

I’m going to have to try that sometime. In the process of meditating, do you bring up a memory that had been suppressed?

Yes. When I was listening to the meditation video, it was on YouTube. It’s by Aaron Doughty. It said how to attract love to your life. When I realized that, I was like, “I know I was not that desperate now,” but if you get deep into it, it’s not even love in a relationship. It’s self-love. It’s the love of a child, the inner child.

You know how people go out in the world and try to find it through this person, but they try to find it through drugs or drinking. The real love is the love within their self. That’s what the kids were showing me. I’m thinking, “If I give it to them, I can heal,” but I’m not understanding it because I didn’t even know that it was a problem, so I started meditating.

You may not have seen the problem that there was something that triggered you to meditate. What specifically puts you in that direction?

Inner Child: In today’s day and age, people are really trying to heal their past and childhood traumas so that they can grow. Those people should know that they are not alone.

Life. I was tired of being stressed. I was tired of being depressed. I was tired of being sad and angry. I was like, “I want to get away.” In my book, I have a tattoo. It is called flyaway because I felt like everything I’ve ever been through in life, I wished I had wings to get away, like fly away. It’s so interesting because when I say fly away, everything I thought of was something way deeper than what I was thinking. I was thinking about birds, but it’s butterflies which I didn’t know butterflies represent transformation.

From the cocoon to the beautiful butterfly. One thing I have to say and acknowledge is your escape. It was such a healthy escape. When people say, “I want to escape. I want to get away,” it can be alcohol, drugs, other behaviors, eating poorly, all kinds of things, but to turn to meditation as a way to escape in a beautiful, healthy way.

Yes, because I was like, “I wanted to find something. I need something. I wanted to get away. What can I do to escape life?” It’s what I was trying to do. When I went on YouTube, it popped up and it started talking about meditation. I’m like, “What is this?” Once I started listening to it, I tried to learn it, but I couldn’t get it because I kept everything that I was going through. I couldn’t focus. That’s why I went to the library and I got the book. This lady named Sharon has a book, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation: A 28-Day Program. I read the whole book. Step-by-step for 30 days, I did it. I did it in the morning and when I went to sleep every day.

You were doing it twice a day for 30 days. That takes discipline as anything. It took discipline for me.

I just wanted to get away. It was a task for me. I was like, “I’m about to escape.” That’s why I kept doing it, but I didn’t know that it was going to lead into something different. It was going to go back and show me certain things that I didn’t even know existed.

How did you feel when those memories and the thing you didn’t realize existed came back to you? Was that uncomfortable?

No, it was shocking and also, it was like I got into protect mode because I love kids. To see a little girl and that’s me, I’m like, “I have to feed this little girl.” I thought of getting on top of a mountain and jumping off. I’m like, “I’ve got to go on a mountain and I got to jump off and I’ve got to free her.” That was in my mind and my thought of free and her, but when I moved into my apartment, I got the vision of the book. I got the title of the book and everything, so then I started thinking about it, like, “I can write a book to free her.”

It was a back and forth thing because I’m like, “I’m not an author. I don’t write. This is not me.” What gave me my motivation, Michelle, is that I watched a video on YouTube. This lady made a video and it was her inner child healed. She talked about going to free her inner child. Her inner child was left in a hotel lobby. She was waiting on her dad to come get her. He left her down there and she said she kept going back to get her and the little girl was kicking and screaming. She didn’t want to go.

Instantly, I was in tears. I’m like, “This is real.” People do go through this. You know how you see something and you see another person going through the same thing? Now you feel like you’re not the only person alone in this. This is something that is occurring and happening. I’m glad I did it because now we’re in an age where people are bad at healing their inner child. They’re trying to heal their past and heal those childhood traumas in childhood things that they went through so they can grow.

That brings me to my next question. What are the readers going to get out of it? Are they going to get the art of meditation? Are they going to understand the importance of healing the inner child? Give me your perspective of what you think the reader is going to gain.

One thing they will gain is a little bit about me and also about the awakening, my spiritual awakening and certain things that shaped me to be person I am now. I tell people that half of the things we go through are from our childhood, but it’s not a bad thing. You just have to heal it so it doesn’t become the next generation problem.

I say, “The problems that we go through are not ours. It was given to us through our DNA because of our ancestors, but because they didn’t settle the rest before they left here, it became our problem.” We could say the same thing, then we give it to the next generation. Right now, we’re building for generations that we don’t even see.

The people that started these childhood things or whatever didn’t know that it was going to be years and it was going to get passed to me. That’s because we don’t see the future. That’s why I say what we’re building now. We’re building for generations that we don’t need to see. We build it for ten years from now, our kids, their kids, so that’s why I had to stop the cycle. I didn’t want that to be the next generation’s problem.

It’s so easy to turn everything inward to yourself. “It’s all about me.” What you’re saying is, yes, it is about you, but the importance of that is that in healing yourself, then goes on to heal for generations to come.

They are the future. If we don’t do what we are supposed to do with it, it affects the generations.

Is it on Amazon?

Yes, it is.

The Inner Child by Michelle Brown on Amazon. We want to make sure people know how to go and get it. What are some next steps for you now that you are an author and you have a book underneath you? What do you want to do?

nner Child: Most people think that their childhood trauma would just disappear, but they don’t. It gets passed on to the next generation.

My main thing is when I wrote the book, that’s why I’m always promoting. I’m always talking to people, trying to connect, and trying to network because I say when I wrote my book, I didn’t just write my book to sit. I tell people, “Your voice is telling and your silence is killing. Think about how many lives you’re saving by you telling your story because our story is not our story. Our story is for someone else’s telling.”

The thing that I went through wasn’t for me, it was for someone else. Think about how many lives you’re killing because you’re not speaking up. Let’s say if you have a child and they don’t know that this is something that’s a pattern or a cycle. They’re going to be familiar with it because you’re the parent. It’s in their DNA. They’re going to step into it.

However, if you acknowledge it and let them know like, “This is something that’s been occurring after a long time and over and over again,” because molestation happened to my mom and my dad. Now, I’m like, “This is a pattern and I have to break this cycle,” because I don’t have kids, but I want kids one day. I don’t want that to be the generational cycle that gets passed on to them because I didn’t take the time to heal it.

It’s important to leave that legacy and understanding to the next generation because it’s almost getting to the point where I believe some people think that it’s normal because it is so frequent. It does happen and occurs so often that we need to say, “No, stop. This is not normal. This is not a healthy pattern. Not okay.”

It was my cousin. It’s a family thing as well. The family tries to hide it because they don’t want to look like, “This is happening in our family,” but I’m putting it out there. I’m glad I did it because when I wrote my book, a lot of more females in my family came out and talked about the same thing. The same people that did it to me and my sisters, they said they did it to them as well. It took for someone to speak up for someone else to feel comfortable to say, “Yes, that happened to me as well and this is something that I have to heal.”

I think that’s a very important point that you’re making now. You need to talk about it. One of my more recent books that I published was called Suicide & Sequins. It was Jenny DeBolt’s story of her family history of different suicides and deaths that had happened. One of the things that came out of that she was very passionate about is you have to talk about it. It’s like the white elephant in the room. It’s like, “I don’t want to bring it up because I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.” They stay quiet then people manifest that silence as being maybe judgmental. A whole lot of things happened. We need to talk about it.

That’s the same thing with my book. When a lot of people like my friends and some of my family read my book, they feel like I should have put more because I’m a talker. They’re like, “Michelle, I feel like you didn’t put enough.” I tell people the way I wrote my book, I have no regrets. I said everything I needed to say. I put everything I needed to put for my healing. This book wasn’t for me to be in competition with nobody. It wasn’t to try to put nobody on the spot. This is something that I had to do for myself because I see that little girl and she wanted to be free. I felt like it was my job to free her because that is me.

What a way to break that different perspective, the beautiful thing. You are very brave and courageous. My specialty is helping people share their stories. I believe in the truth and people’s stories. It’s a very courageous thing to do, but it’s also very necessary. We need to hear this. We don’t live in this little safe world in TV like Leave It to Beaver or whatever show you want to bring up.

That’s not a world. That’s not where we live in. A few maybe do, very few. They’re in the club of ten or less, I think. The fact that when we come out with story, I’m always amazed when I hear people say, “I thought I was the only one.” Why do you think you’re the only one? Are you living in a bubble? That’s why I think it’s so important that you are getting your story out there. Some people say, “That’s me too.”

It’s so amazing because now I have people coming up to me like, “How did you do this? How did you publish this?” I say, “This is free information because I wouldn’t charge no one for this because this wasn’t even mine. This was a vision that was given to me.” That’s why I’m glad I answered the call and I took the assignment because it was going to be people that I was going to come up to me and ask me, “How did you do it?” I always wanted to write a book. I just don’t know how to do it, what’s the process and it makes me feel good because I’d be like, “It’s not that hard.”

The only hard thing I tell people is being consistent. Being consistent is the hardest thing because when I was writing, I was at my computer like, “I want to get up and get some chips. I want to go watch a TV show. I want to go call my sister.” It was a lot of things I wanted to do, but I had to stay focused because it was something that I wanted to do. It was a goal that I was trying to reach. I was in school when I started writing my book, but I had to tell myself, “Once I finished my last semester in college, I was going to finish the book because now I have the focus to focus on a book without all these assignments coming up.” That’s the hardest thing. It’s being consistent.

I find in writing that once the juices are flowing, it’s not the thing that you want to sit down for twenty minutes, walk away or find another twenty minutes. Usually, it takes twenty minutes for me to get the first thought out of my head. The flip side of that is to make sure that you’re taking the break and walking away and letting your mind rest.

I had to do that in the chapter in my book because my mom was abused by my dad. She told me certain things. I remember when I was younger, she told me a lot of things, but when I was writing the book, she told me a lot more things. I’m like, “I got to take a break. It’s too much.” It was too much for me to take in. I’m like, “We’re going to finish this tomorrow. I need to lay down. I need to rest.” I needed to think everything over because it was too much going on.

You need to take care of you at the same time. You are going through a process because every time you’re writing about your life, your story, you’re reliving it, so you’re bringing up a lot of memories good and bad.

I had a TV interview. My sister was like, “Why were you crying?” I said, “Jasmine, I could talk about the abuse and stuff but when you mention the little girl, I’m like, ‘You’re about to make me cry because now you hit in an emotional spot there, that little girl.’” Even though she’s healed, there are still some emotions behind it.

I think you continue to heal just as we go through life. When you put that first effort, then it becomes a continuation.

It happened through Hook a Sista Up. That was my first live video and I was so scared. Now, I can do interviews and talk to people, but at first, I was like, “Hold on. Wait a minute.” I was so scared. In the second video, it’s always getting your feet wet. Once I get my feet wet, that’s when everything is like, “I got this,” but it took a minute.

I’ve experienced so much through my journey, too, in getting comfortable in front of cameras, then sharing your story and being on a stage. It’s like, “What am I doing here?”

The Inner Child of Me

The thing is, when I was at the Zondra interview, they were so nice. It felt like being at home because she has a great team. They’re so spiritual and I was like shocked at some of the staff. I was like, “You have a great team.” That’s so good to have because if you have a great team, then it’s so easy for you to grow because everybody is on the same page. Everybody is working together. Everybody is on one court. At the show, I was like, “Wow.” I was blown away. Everybody was on point. Everybody was working together. It was a good environment. It was so positive.

I’m so glad you recognize the whole team because it is a great team. She and I work regularly together. I had a show with Zondra called Legendary Leaders.

She gave me your magazine while I was there. It’s so interesting how life takes you though because I haven’t read the magazine, but I’ve seen it. I was like, “Okay.” When they started sending me the pictures of my interview and they said to me, “Joining her page, add her,” stuff like that, I was like, “Okay,” because I’m always looking for opportunities. That’s why I reached out to you because I’ve seen the opportunity.

I’m always looking for opportunities to get my book out there. I’m trying to do radio stations. I don’t care if it’s a radio station, a podcast, or a magazine, like different avenues because, like I said, everybody doesn’t go to the library. Why does your book have to be at the library? Your book could go to different platforms like the TV. It could go multiple different platforms and that’s why I’m always looking for opportunities.

When I saw your page and you started talking about your podcast, I’m like, “She got a podcast? Let me email her and see how we could get connected and how we can network and how we can work together.” I feel like it’s a community. How can me and you work together and we network with you and build with each other?

Isn’t connecting a beautiful thing?

Yes and I didn’t even know you were with Hook a Sista Up, so we connected and wants to go different directions.

Things happen for a reason. I believe that.

Everything happens in divine order as well.

We’re going to have to wrap it up. Can we tell people how to find your show, which by the way, on Zondra’s show, will you be on Fireside Chat or Biz Talk?

I believe it was Fireside Chat. That’s what it was. She gave me the link, so I posted on my Facebook page so people could click on it.

How do they find you on Facebook?

Look up my name.

It’s under your name and you can also go to ZondraTV.com, where she has all of her shows and you can scroll down.

They also can go on Hook a Sista Up business page too, as well because I’m on there as well. She posts stuff for me on there as well. It’s all different types of ways you can do it.

I got to let you go, even though we could continue this, but I’m going to have to say goodbye for now. I want to say thank you to all my readers for doing another great Lemonade story and know that all it takes is making the lemonade, taking the lemons and making the lemonade.

Make something out of it.

That’s right. I’ll say goodbye and until next time.

Important Links

• Zondra TV Network
• The Inner Child of Me
• Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation: A 28-Day Program
• Hook a Sista Up – YouTube
• ZondraTV.com
• business page – Hook a Sista Up

About Michelle Brown

My name is Michelle brown I’m the author of the book “The Innerchild of Me” my goal is to inspire others to tell their story as well because “Your voice is healing and Your silence is killing”