Welcome to the tenth episode of Season Three of Wisdom for Wellbeing Podcast. On this episode I interview Michael Anthony, coach, mentor, & educator for adult survivors of child abuse, and author of the best-selling book Think Unbroken.

Michael discusses the importance of approaching this healing with compassion for the experiences that you had and the importance of understanding that you are not to blame for the bad things that happened to you.

Want to keep in touch? Head to @drkaitlin on Instagram or @wisdomforwellbeingpod on Facebook to connect.

What is covered in this episode:

>>How to leverage your inner strength to get yourself out of what Michael calls ‘the vortex’

>>Michael shares a metaphor of cleaning up trash that someone else left in our yards and the idea that while it is not okay or fair to have to take care of our yard because of it, and in this case to take of ourselves and our lives, we are responsible for our healing and we don’t have to do it alone.

>>Healing trauma through building a community of professional and personal support with therapists, friends, and family

Links Discussed

• Read Michael’s book, Think Unbroken: Understanding and Overcoming Childhood Trauma
• thinkunbroken.com
• You can find Michael’s social media platforms here: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter
• Listen in to The Michael Unbroken Podcast

You’ll find a copy of the Episode Transcript below.

Transcript

Michael Anthony: You have to be willing to come to this place of compassion for the experiences that you had and understand that you are not culpable for the bad things that happen to you.

Intro: You’re listening to the Wisdom for Wellbeing Podcast, the show that blends science and heart to bring you evidence-based tips and tricks for cultivating a healthy, wealthy, and meaningful life. Now here’s your host, therapist, Yogi, and fellow full-life, balancer, Dr Kaitlin Harkess.

Kaitlin Harkess: Hi there, welcome back to the Wisdom for Wellbeing Podcast. I am delighted to be joined by Michael Anthony today and ultimately, this episode is all about acceptance and resilience. Acceptance of the experiences that come up in our lives. Although often and certainly in Michael’s case, not wanted, not condoned, not okay in any way but that in finding this place of acceptance of what is, we can move towards the state of resilience and thriving. Michael is the author of the best-selling book Think Unbroken and is a coach, mentor, and educator for adult survivors of child abuse. Michael spends his time, helping other survivors get out of what he calls the ‘vortex’ to become the hero of their own story and take their lives back. Michael hosts The Michael Unbroken Podcast, teaches at Think Unbroken academy and is on a mission to create change in the world. Now in sharing his journey, his experience and his wisdom, Michael does describe some of the experiences, the details of his childhood, which are immensely painful and quite possibly triggering. So I would advise you to take care of yourself if this is a topic that right now, might be feeling a little bit raw or might be feeling you know, not in the place to be listening to to details of incredibly difficult childhood. Maybe now is not the time for the episode or take it bit by bit or listen to it with someone you care about and certainly reach out to your support network, to people around you, if you do need to discuss. And, of course, connect with Michael as, as needed for further, support and resources. But without further ado, I think Michael tells his story and shares his wisdom best. So let me introduce you to Michael Anthony now.

Kaitlin Harkess: Hi Michael, welcome to Wisdom for Wellbeing. I am delighted to be with you here today. Thank you so much for creating the time to sit down and have a chat.

Michael Anthony: Yeah, thanks for having me. I’m super excited.

Kaitlin Harkess: And I guess just for listeners who might not know exactly who you are and what your mission is, your mindset mission and this mission towards, you know, becoming unbroken and thinking unbroken. Would you mind just sharing a little bit about why this is so important to you and the magical and important work that you’re doing?

Michael Anthony: Yeah absolutely, you know, in Western societies and most societies around the world, honestly, and that’s all my travels. I’ve seen this, you know, people who come from adversity, who, perhaps have mental health ailments, who are not necessarily quote-unquote, the status quo are often labeled as broken and and that’s sat with me for a long time because that was very much, a label that was bestowed upon me over various portions of time in my youth and then in my 20s and in one night, I was just laying in bed after I had started this blog and this quasi company five years ago and, you know, a few years into it, I was like laying in bed thinking, man, you know, that’s just not me, I’m not broken, I’m not whatever this thing is and and that it just kind of happened 3 a.m. you know this this crazy middle of the night thought think unbroken and it kind of just spawned and taken its own life really into creating, not only a pathway to mindset change for people who have come from trauma, but of all backgrounds. And, you know, now that I look at it, having written a book and having coached people around the world and hosted my workshop from Bali and Singapore to LA and Portland and everywhere in between, you know, it’s really so much about how can we, how can I do two things? One, how can I empower people to create change in their life through willing to acknowledge that something bad has happened, which I believe is really kind of like the precursor and baseline to change. And then two, how can I effectively make me obsolete and make my job pointless in the world by giving people a change that ultimately over a course of time, impacts the world for a greater change across the spectrum, meaning on a long enough timeline. And I recognized that I will probably die before this happens, that people will no longer hurt their children because I didn’t sign up for this. I don’t necessarily even want to do this, but there is a calling to do it because I’ve recognized, if someone from my background can create change, then it’s very plausible that anyone can.

Kaitlin Harkess: I think that’s a really incredible, underlying motivation and framework that you working on that. There’s this systemic change that we can evoke by the work we do on ourselves. You know, when you mention making yourself obsolete, that empowerment approach is incredible. So, I’m curious because you mentioned, you know, you didn’t sign up for this. You want people to no longer hurt their children? Would you mind sharing with listeners a little bit about what the background is that you come from? And you know, where you’ve come from? How you’ve gotten through this?

Michael Anthony: Yeah, I mean, I don’t mind at all because I think that, you know, I don’t think I know when I decided to step into this, I made the declaration that the only way it’s going to make sense is to be honest. So I grew up in Indianapolis, the middle of America. It’s literally called The Crossroads of America, it’s dead center, it’s super boring. But my, my mother was a drug addict and alcoholic and when I was four years old, she cut off my right index finger so that gives you just baseline of understanding what this is. And when I was six, she married my stepfather, super hyper abusive, the guy that you pray is never your stepfather. He would just kick the crap out of my brothers and I, it was, it was literal torture. And we were growing up in the Mormon Church while this all was happening. And, you know, a lot of our food, a lot of our clothing came from the church, we were probably the most poor family in our community, and by the time that I was, I was 10, we had been homeless quite often, and so, I got shuffled around from church family, to church family, I lived with like 30 different families over this period of time where my mother was either just completely gone and no one could find her or in rehab and my stepfather was an over-the-road truck and we never knew if, or when he would be around, which is also terrifying in its own right. By the time that I was 12, my grandmother adopted me and you would think, oh, awesome, God send somebody send in the calvary. I’m biracial. Black and white. My grandmother was a super old racist white lady from a town in Tennessee, you’ve never heard of. So now insert identity crisis, the thing about growing up in the neighborhood that I grew up is that statistically you don’t make it out. You go to debt. You go to jail or you die. And and I by all probabilities should not be here having this conversation with you. And by the time I’m 13, I’m running with drugs, I’m running with gangs, I’m running with guns, I’m selling drugs and breaking into houses, stealing cars, hurting people, like really all these really awful things, but that was the nomenclature of the society in which I live. I didn’t know anything different. All the, while my friends are going to jail, my friends are getting murdered, my three childhood best friends have all been murdered and I got expelled from high school and when that happened, I got super lucky because I got accepted into a Last Chance Program, needless to say, I make it to the end of high school. I don’t graduate on time. And I’m thinking to myself, like, what? What is happening here? Like what, how did I get in this place where my life is so incredibly horrible? And how did I become effectively the laughingstock of my school and not graduating on time and looking at the impact of abuse on childhood education. Like it makes sense to me now, then my solution was it must be money, right? It must be poverty that makes this happen. I mean, we were so poor that I would have to steal water from the neighbor’s house spicket during the summer because our water would get turned off. Imagine people don’t get this like, growing up in America, and your water gets turned off. And so now, I’m in this weird place where I’ve graduated high school, I can’t get into any college on planet Earth. I had like a 1.1 GPA, seriously. And and and I was like, oh, it’s money. It’s gotta be. And so I made this declaration to myself, the thing that I’m going to do is I’m going to get wealthy legally, right? And, and I made a choice that by the time that I’m 21, I’m going to make a hundred thousand dollars a year working in Corporate America. And so lo and behold, I kind of figured out how to navigate that, I find myself making this happen at 20, I get a job for a Fortune 50 company which is almost impossible and right around my 21st birthday, I get my first check for $10,000 and I spent it the same day and the crazy part about it is when you don’t come from money, you don’t know what to do with money. And so everything was excess right? More cars, more clothes and then that turned into more drugs, more booze, more food, more women, more and more more. And, and I found myself at 25 years old laying in bed at 11 o’clock in the morning, eating chocolate cake, smoking a joint and watching the CrossFit Games, asking myself like what is happening? How am I 350 pounds? How am I destroying my life? What is going on? And, and I had this moment where I when I looked in the mirror and this fat face was in front of me, a reflection that I didn’t understand because I’d never to that point actually like looked in my own eyes and in that moment I remembered this experience of being nine years old and stealing water and telling myself I’m never going to live that life. What I didn’t understand was that I wasn’t living that life in terms of finances or wealth or anything like that, but it was living exactly the life that had been dictated to me from my trauma experience being, I had no self-esteem. I was dissociated, I didn’t know up from down and I I’m at one point, I actually thought that I was a sociopath because I hadn’t cried for 15 years and that’s because it was beaten out of me, right? If you cry, I’ll hit you harder a terrible phrase that exists especially in America. And and in that moment, I said to myself, I’m going to do whatever it takes to create the life that I want to have. And and that started, this immense amount of work, all the therapy, all the going to social meetings of minds and people and personal growth and listening to everyone around me saying, I think the thing that was really fascinating about that moment, is that I used to think that the personal growth journey was stupid, you would see these people at these conferences, jumping up and down and yet all these people around me kept saying like you should go and check this out. Well lo and behold the thing that I discovered about myself was if I was constantly going to be quote unquote, the smartest person in the room, I was likely in the wrong rooms and and it was that understanding of why, that’s why people go to this, they want to know something, they want to learn something about themselves and all this, you know, that’s 10 years ago. My path today is very different, right? That’s how we’re sitting here having this conversation and so I’m going around, I’m gonna go on and on and on, I want to elevator pitch this, but there’s no way to tell the story without telling the whole story.

Kaitlin Harkess: Well, I think that’s a really important background in history for us all to understand. Because you’re right, there is no way because that, that childhood experience you had in and I believe you’ve used the term, you know, you’re A score was 10. So for listeners, who don’t know what that means, it’s adverse childhood experience scores that, am I getting that right now? (Exactly.) Yeah. So everything everything that could go wrong went wrong for you. And we know that actually a lot of kids who have these experiences don’t make it out alive, let alone, going to, as you said, this journey of personal growth and transformation. Getting to that crux point where you go, wow there’s patterns, there’s cycles here. And while it’s not the water, it’s the chocolate cake, it’s the booze, it’s the drugs that we can move in what from the outside might look like a path towards success but it sounds like internally, you were still the same person, you were still really that little boy who was hurting and had all these walls and shields up and wasn’t letting himself cry or experience the emotions that might have been sitting underneath if I’m getting that right?

Michael Anthony: Yeah, I mean like here’s the thing, right? When you come from a place that everyone tells you to man up or put dirt on it, you’ll be okay. Don’t be an emotional person. Don’t step into it don’t you know, you carry that with you and then you compound that with people always telling you you’re not good enough, you’re not smart enough, you’re not capable enough. The only thing that I knew is like I wanted to move towards things to see what would happen. The problem with that is like I did it without intention and without clarity and without understanding that effectively what I was doing in the excess in all the things in my life that that I was consuming as a distraction was because I was terrified to face the truth of the reality that really bad things had happened to me. And because of not being willing to face that reality, I was getting consumed. That’s what I call the vortex right, that’s that place where it’s just dark. And it was within that darkness that I had to, I had to ask myself that question, like, what am I willing to do to have the life that I want to have? And I adopted this mindset of no excuses, just results meaning that I was willing to do whatever it would take to eventually, and at the time, it was only like be okay, right? It wasn’t anything like it is now, it was just like, be okay with who you are and then eventually it like transmuted but initially, you, you have to come to this place at least in my experience and I don’t want to preach by any means, but you have to be willing to come to this place of of compassion for the experiences that you had and understand that you are not culpable for the bad things that happened to you. And I think about this often like it’s not my job to pick up people’s trash when they throw it in my front yard but it’s my front yard and so the journey of this whole process would what really sucks is it’s not your fault, you’re not culpable for these things that happen to you but you are responsible for picking up the trash. I wish that wasn’t the case but I don’t know another way.

Kaitlin Harkess: That’s a really really helpful metaphor, I haven’t heard that before. So thank you for sharing that with us and coming back because you highlighted something that I think is crucial particularly you know as a man and particularly as a man who is growing up, a boy, who is growing up in a particular environment. This idea of not feeling emotions, not crying, as you said it. Like, if if you cry, I’ll hit you harder. I’m gathering that’s not your perception today. I’m gathering that you meet your emotions, you feel the whole spectrum. How did you get to that place? Because was that part of the journey? You know, I guess it kind of seems vital when you say compassion meeting yourself where you’re at and the experiences you’ve had. How did you, how did you kind of unfold into that? Given the I guess, the cultural elements that that would have been at play.

Michael Anthony: You know, I think in one from one perspective, it is the journey, right? How do you learn to know yourself? That’s the journey. And I don’t think if you’re unwilling to do it all, you can do any of it and and so the real came because like, look, here was the thing. I was in this place of, I’ve got to do something. And for a long time, I’ve been going to therapy and I’ve been going, and I’ve been paying this guy, hundreds of dollars to tell him what I thought he wanted to hear because at least, it made me feel justified in the things that I was doing. And then I will challenge myself, in two ways. One, I recognize that my journey wasn’t going to continue if I stayed in the environment, meaning my home, Indianapolis. If I stayed in that City, I was never going to be able to step into who I could be and the reason I felt that way is just there was too much, too much damage, too much darkness too many of the same streets, the same people, the same smells, the same emotions. And then I put myself in this position of saying what you actually need to do here is create connection with other men because I recognize that the only human connections I had with men is this very bro-y thing, how many girls have you had sex with? How big’s your car? Like blah blah blah, that stupid stuff that doesn’t actually matter. And I also understood that the only connection I had with any men older than me. Had always been in violence, it always had felt unsafe. And so I thought to myself, if you want to be a man, you have to learn to be a man, because no one taught me. You know, I was raised by women exclusively and the only men in my life were abusive, right? And so, I sought out men’s group therapy and I did that with the intention of only trying to understand myself and connection with other men. Now, you’re probably asking what the hell does have to do with the question I just asked. Well, what happened was as I was in this therapy and this was probably about five years ago. And I’ve been in this thing for a long time at this point, like, really deep into it. And one of the guys looks at me one day and he goes, you know what your problem is? You don’t know how to be angry, and I was just like, I’ll punch a hole through your face right now, I know how to be angry and, and he was like, no, no, no. You know, how to express outwardly this emotion of anger, but you don’t know how to actually use anger. You don’t know how to let that exist. And then ask you said that I was like he’s right. I don’t know how to be angry because it was stolen from me as a child. To be angry meant that you were going to get your ass kicked. If you dare showed up as who you are in any capacity of your emotional scale, you might as well dig your own grave. And and that to me, became this self-fulfilling prophecy in my 20s because I’d shut off. But in this and I guess I was probably 30 at the time. You know, he said this to me and I was, I never felt so mad in my life, right? I never felt so open to the idea of stepping into it. And that night I went home and I just journaled all the things right, hours and hours. It was the longest journal, I just went to like, 2 in the morning or something crazy til my hand hurt. And I just put all the things that made me mad about the world in there, all of my experiences and I felt this beautiful weight, come off my shoulder and what came from that was an understanding that if you want to feel any emotion, you have to be willing to feel them all, and vice versa. And, and in that I stepped into this really profound exponential growth. Whereas now there’s this Adidas commercial with this old dude running, and I’m just like bawling like a baby and it’s like that to me is life, right? And and I think that I get happy, I get sad, I get everything in between and that’s the Human Experience because to negate your experiences of emotion is to negate the very thing that makes us human.

Kaitlin Harkess: That’s such a beautiful, a beautiful description, and a beautiful way of processing because I think you’re right. I think that, you know, to feel true joy, we need to be able to feel true sorrow and to hold that whole range of experience, we don’t get to just choose the, the comfortable emotions. Do we? We take, we take them all and we’re human, we experience them all. So you said that that was a catalyst for exponential growth, and you have created The Unbroken System, like you really started to pull together, these, you know, pieces of information. You know, your experience is trial and error. Would you mind sharing with listeners, what the system is? And kind of what that could mean in terms of them progressing forward and cultivating a life that’s meaningful for them that’s full of feeling.

Michael Anthony: Yeah, totally, you know the thing is and I’ll parlay it with this first, is, you know, there’s two-fold, there’s you know, the in-person conferences and there’s the book, and all that stuff, but but then there’s the one-on-one coaching and that, that honestly is where I see the most change happen in my clients. And, and that’s parley, that’s another parley with like, I always require people, like you have to have a therapist. If you’re going to come into this arena with me, you need more support right? Because I always think about this as a team. How do we build a team? I’m effectively, you’re the general manager of your life. I am simply just the team manager and I’m trying to help you win your championship. As far as defined, whatever that means for you. And in the system, what happened, it’s it’s really broken down based on my understanding of my own Journey over the course of 10 years and my whole life but specifically I reference 10 years because that’s when I stepped into okay I’m going to read all the books, all of them all like all of it from Pete Walker to you know Gabor Maté like you name it. Everyone in between and then I’m going to find myself being the only civilian in rooms of PhDs who are getting continuing education with certifications and all these things about trauma and I’m going to learn and I’m going to decipher and it’s something I still do, I just started a new course today, right? And I don’t have a doctorate, I don’t have a PhD, officially, but I’m consumed with education. And then it was okay, I look at all these conferences, I read all these books. I go to all, they do all the podcasts, the whole nine. And I kept thinking, like something about this is just missing, right? Something about it for me, and this is my experience, doesn’t seem to be fulfilling me. And what I recognize what happened when I got my own coach, was the action, right? Because on this one side, you have all of these experiences and all these people telling you, go do this, go do this, go do this, and then what you’re lacking is accountability and action because ultimately if you want to create change in your life, you have to do something. So it’s broken down really in a couple of ways. One, can we first start with reframing our understanding of the world as we see it now, because in order to get to where you’re going, you have to know how you got to where you are. And if it is true, which I believe it is, that we are the sum total of all of our experiences leading up till right now, then that means that those experiences have informed who you are. Thus you have a meaning within that context of who it is, that you perceive that you are. However, on the backside of that, you have a choice to make. Will you continue to be that person or will you step into the unknown? Which also includes possibility. Something we are all very terrified of and in that find out what you are made of and that comes with guidance and help and coaching and trust. And one of the things that I will say, which I think is so important is that, there is no one who has ever done anything great alone. And this process is about building a team, it’s about community, but at its baseline, it’s about changing the way you think about yourself,nand moreso asking yourself the question of, what am I willing to do to have the life that I want to have? So much of this, let me say this one last thing because it’s really important. The biggest thing missing in the personal growth space right now is the honest truth that no one’s going to help you. No one is going to change your life. Everything that happens on you, and just the same as literature, this is a you versus you battle.

Kaitlin Harkess: That’s a really important point that like taking responsibility for that step that we’re taking forward. But also you highlighted this incredible paradox, that it’s like this acceptance of everything that’s happened to this point, accepting things exactly as they are and only when you can accept that, can you move forward and change. That there’s this acceptance and discontentment or you know, motivation to move forward and cultivate this transformation that kind of have to come together.

Michael Anthony: They do because, I’ll relay it in my own personal experience. When I came to the moment of recognizing that I had to acknowledge that bad things had happened to me, it actually gave me a sense of freedom because for the first time what happened is, I was able to stop trying to stuff it down all the time because it doesn’t work. The idea of ‘get over it’ is, it’s never going to work because you’ll never like look, I literally have things in my life that I will never get over. I won’t, it’s just too much and why should I? But that doesn’t mean I can’t live my life. That doesn’t mean those things get to inform my decision and in that moment of like acknowledging man, this happened, deal with it, everything became different because for the first time in my life, I stepped into personal responsibility.

Kaitlin Harkess: So with this personal responsibility, listeners are now going, okay, there’s like a few things that, you know, we have that we may not get over that we might be holding onto. How do we, how do we step forward with this responsibility? Like what would be, you know, one step obviously creating a team, looking at oneself, you mentioned you did a lot of journaling. What’s something that we could maybe do today, this week just to just to have that sense of action and get some motivation?

Michael Anthony: Yeah, you know those things are down the road, right? If you’re at step one, day on,e moment one. You’ve just now even in this moment, come to the realization like, wow, I need to do something about this. I think the very, very first thing that you can do is just sit with the understanding that though trauma maybe your foundation, it does not have to be your future. And in that there’s hope. Can you leverage hope? Can you leverage possibility? And just the fact that you are willing to step into the pathway means that there are something better on the backside of it. It may take twenty years, like, seriously. It may take up a lifetime, you may never actually get to that thing, but at least you’re on the path. And in stepping into personal responsibility, look, we all know inherently the thing that we’re supposed to be doing with our life, the way we’re supposed to be showing up, the way we’re supposed to be in community and conversation with people. The way we should be taking care of ourselves, but we don’t honor that because our wants, needs, and interests had so many times come with ramifications, there’s a price to pay for being you, right? And when you learn that over and over, then the hypothesis of, if I move towards the things that make me feel like a human being, then I suffer. That’s held true to this moment and it’s the unfortunate truth for many people. However, the thing that you have to do is take a look at your environment and assess whether or not that hypothesis still holds true, i.e., if I move towards the things that I need to make my life better, will my life become better? The immediate answer, probably not. The long-term answer is yes, right? Because it is through repetition, and through continuity that you see change occur, right? I think about this place where I started this journey, I got serious about it, I quit smoking two packs a day, I lost a hundred and fifty pounds. I did the things I said I was going to do. Guess how long that took? A very long time and people want a quick fix, but guess what? That’s not a thing. Sorry, if it was, I’d bottle that and sell it to you and I’d be on a yacht, not talking to you right now. And here’s the reality of this entire thing, it’s all plausible. Everything you want to have in your life, you can have but it starts with acknowledgment. Yes, something bad happened. No, I won’t let it control my life. That doesn’t mean that you push it down. That means that you get on the path of doing the things that, you know, that you need to do.

Kaitlin Harkess: That’s an interesting point because you also kind of highlighted what linked back to your environment, like look around, does this still hold? Is it still true? And our environment might have shifted to a place where it’s safe and where we can grow. But you also highlighted earlier that when you were in your, you know, surroundings of it was central America, you thought actually this environment isn’t conducive to the person that I want to become and my future. So you made that deliberate decision to move. So maybe it’s us kind of looking at our environment, checking, what’s working, what’s not and knowing that we can make shifts, whether it’s moving suburbs, moving locations, changing friendship circles, changing, you know, the gym we’re going to, making changes so it feels different is that kind of what you’re you know, framework maybe entails or how, how does that?

Michael Anthony: Right, I think change is inevitable but are you going to, are you going to go with it or not, right? Because it’s really easy to fight the river. But change is going to happen either way. It’s inevitable, as sure as I know the sun will rise tomorrow, I know that change will come and you can battle it and you can fight it or you can be in control of it. That’s the thing that I, you know what, fine, I’ll go back. I’ll change my previous answer. If I gave you one thing I want you to know that you’re in control of everything that happens in your life moving forward. The question is, are you going to take control, right? Because trust me, you name an excuse, I can tell you why it’s not true. I can give you a million excuses why you should fail in life. Then I can help you find the pathway to why that doesn’t hold true. It’s all in our mind. And then once you understand that, it’s all in the action, right? You make a choice to either live your life or to let it pass by.

Kaitlin Harkess: So, there’s a bit of a bi-directional element going on, you know, our mindset and our environments, like the things that we’re surrounding ourselves by, as well as how we’re looking at things and they, they relate back and forth. And we get to choose, we get to choose how we’re approaching things, how we’re stepping forward, where we’re moving forwards to ultimately. So it seems like a little bit of clarity and that’s where maybe having someone to bounce ideas off of is really useful in defining what it is that we want to move forwards to and then kind of figuring out the steps, the progress to get there.

Michael Anthony: Yeah, hundred percent you’re spot on. Like I look at all of the most successful people that I know, and that’s from billionaires to mom’s and everywhere in between. I know this huge beautiful range of people, they are curious and they’re willing to have the conversation and even in my own Journey, the most growth I’ve ever had and like look you asked me like what was that like to like step into this emotional place? Had I not been willing to step into conversation and Community with that group of men, I likely would not be talking to you right now. I mean, I can’t guarantee that but that’d be my guess. And and so the thing is what I recognize in so much of this journey, not only through therapy and having the parley of the back and forth with this non-biased person who wants to communicate something. But also like within coaching, it was like can I be in connection with someone who can help me understand what I don’t understand? And that’s what it is like think about the education system in westernized countries. Like once you’re through High School, you might go to college. But after college you stop learning and this is all a journey of learning and instead of having this big book that you write a thesis on at the end and you regurgitate a bunch of, you actually have this conversation with another human being who says this was my experience. It may help you. It may not. But you may find a bit of lighter hope or joy or love or happiness or compassion or whatever that thing that is that you need to help you understand where you are in your life. And that’s why like the human connection aspect of this entire thing is so important. That’s why I always tell people like you’re not going to ever read my book and expect your life to be changed. It’s not going to happen, but if you’re willing to put your team together and if you’re willing to go and seek the help that you need and do it with compassion and without shame and guilt because like that’s easy to do and much harder done than the thing is like once you step into it, are you willing, when the change comes to ride that wave and to control the outcome of what happens when you hit the shore again?

Kaitlin Harkess: Tell me how the listeners can connect with you because you’ve highlighted your books, so people who are going wow like, that story is incredible. And obviously Michael you’ve made gross, incredible transformation in your life, you know, the the legacy that you’ve created is phenomenal. So, reading that story, understanding, okay, this is possible, is one way. How else can listeners connect with you? You know, social media, website, where where you at?

Michael Anthony: Yeah, let me say this. The, the book is not my life story. This is really important. It is prefaced with the high-level overview of my journey because it’s really important but this book is a culmination of all of my understandings of the world and and from practical to scientific, broken down into what I would call a 101 version and then followed by at the end of each chapter, an intrinsic reflection of the understanding that you’ve just made. And so this isn’t my story, this is your journey. I’m just giving you a little bit of a tool book to help you understand what’s already there. So, to answer your question, I’m on all the social medias @michaelunbroken, the book is on I think, I know it’s on the Amazon across the world but it’s also in your library. So if you can’t afford it, go check it out. It’s free.

Kaitlin Harkess: And it’s also on request at libraries in case no one spends as much time in libraries as we might, you can actually ask your librarian to order the book. So if there’s a book there that they don’t have, please ask them because other people will need it too.

Michael Anthony: Yes. Absolutely. Thank you so much for saying that. Yeah, I mean as a child I spent so much of my time in libraries. There is no question that you can get your hands on pretty much anything you want for free. And then yeah, I also have a Michael Unbroken Podcast.

Kaitlin Harkess: Beautiful. Thank you so much for making the space to share this with us today, Michael, and for sharing your transformative, empowering, and I do, you know it’s really almost this journey of moving through something that most of us would love to put a lid on and disconnect from and actually embracing and embracing that shadow side, so that you can shine and share that with everyone else. So, thank you so much for being brave enough, vulnerable enough to do that for us.

Michael Anthony: Yeah, it’s my pleasure and I would just like to say, this one last thing, I’m not an anomaly, and I am not somehow special, and I’m not better than anyone. And I don’t know anything more than anyone else on planet Earth. The only thing that I do know is the difference of people who step into life and are successful and who are not, are the ones that make a choice.

Kaitlin Harkess: That’s a fantastic note to end up on. Everyone, make your choice today. All of the links to connect with Michael will be in the show notes as well so you can connect with us there and yeah, happy journeying.

Kaitlin Harkess: Well, I hope that you found that interview as powerful and ultimately, as inspiring as I did. I really love the metaphor of cleaning up the trash in our yards. And this idea that while it is not okay, not fair, ultimately to take care of our yard, to take care of ourselves, to take care of our lives. We’re responsible for the next step, but we don’t have to do it alone. You know, whether it’s calling in therapists, friends, family to help clean up the trash in the yard to to speak, backups. This is what we do in our lives. We call in our support people, we make time for reflection, journaling, practices of moving our bodies, consuming the foods, the information, the energies that are supportive. So I think Michael does a really wonderful job of highlighting that we do need a community around us. And I hope that you’ll take this opportunity to reach out to your community as you need for support and then of course join us next week on Wisdom for Wellbeing.

Outro: Thanks for joining us this week on the Wisdom for Wellbeing Podcast. Please visit drkaitlin.com to connect, find show notes, other episodes, and to subscribe. While you’re at it, if you find value in the show, we’d appreciate a rating or perhaps simply tell a friend about the show. Wisdom for Wellbeing is not a substitute for professional, individualized, mental health treatment. If you are in crisis, please contact 000 your local emergency number if you are outside of Australia or attend your local hospital ED.