Unlocking Hope: John Labman's Guide to Overcoming Childhood Trauma

My guest today is John Labman. John has made all the psychological and spiritual mistakes possible in recovering from a traumatic childhood and moving towards an integrated and functional life as a liberated human being. He now teaches others how to be human, wake up their spiritual reality, while avoiding the common mistakes that he made.

John is a licensed professional counselor and a special certifications in trauma treatment, licensed massage therapist, certified yoga teacher, energy healer and liberation teacher. Well, John, welcome to the podcast. How you doing today, Keith? I'm really happy to be here and I want to recommend that all your listeners press like and give you five star ratings because you're doing this out of your service to God and your love for humanity. And I want you to get some encouragement too.

So I appreciate that. I'm doing fine. Really happy to be here. Good to have you on. So I'm going to ask you my favorite question. I love to ask all my guests, what is the best piece of advice you've ever received? Best piece of advice I've ever received is to notice that you have hope in your heart, even if you're suffering a lot. And that hope is seen in the fact that you're seeking help. So anybody tuning into a podcast like this is seeking some kind of help for their lives.

And we want to say, I want to say there is hope in your heart. The other thing that I want to tell people is the God that you're seeking is already right here in your heart of hearts. So you don't have to look anywhere else. It's all right here already. That's interesting. Interesting quote. I hadn't thought about that. It's always fun for us as believers because we know that God is placed in our hearts and he's there to give us comfort, to give us direction, give us wisdom.

And so it's always fun to be reminded that we don't walk this planet alone, but we have that person alongside of us. That's right. I'm always curious, for people like yourself, who are some people in your life who served either as an inspiration for you or a mentor on your journey? Well, I would say there are two categories of people like that. There were the psychotherapists that I worked with, and that starts with Pat McGrath in Princeton, New Jersey, although she's retired now.

Joan Fisher in New York City, who I worked with for four years every week, and somebody named Mark Falanga who's out here in Eastern Pennsylvania. And they were the psychological people who were so influential in my life, as well as a woman named Sandra Glickman. In Iowa, who did both psychological and spiritual work with me. And then the spiritual teachers, Ariel and Shia Cain, a married couple I met in the 1980s.

Adyashanti, who's a very famous Eastern mystical teacher and also combines Christianity with Buddhism and Hinduism. And David lachapelle, the late David lachapelle, who is from Colorado and Alaska, and Samuel Bonder, and most of late would be Angelo, Dr. Angelo DiLullo, who's from Boulder, Colorado, and Richard Farmer. So many people. I'm almost 70 years old and in March I'll be 70. So it's a whole list of people. I hope it's not overwhelming your audience too much.

I'm sure that if we think about our lives, there are a lot of people who have influenced us along the way. So the longer you live, the more people you run across that impact you. Absolutely, yeah.

So tell us about your personal journey of overcoming trauma in childhood and how it led to your current path. Well, I'm going to try to condense this again. It would be hard to believe now, but I was raised with sexual abuse at home and bullying at school. And although I was part of a religious tradition, I did not believe in God in those days. And when your parents are so crazy, you tend not to believe in God because your parents represent God to you. And so at around 15, things got really bad.

I was coming home from school every day with terrible headaches, and somebody showed up to show a film in my 10th grade class, and there were 750 of us in the auditorium. And that was a film about an international high school on the south coast of Wales that was the very first of the United World colleges. And this one was called United World College of the Atlantic. And something in me leapt up and said, boy, get me out of here.

Let me see if this is my ticket out of all the abuse and trauma that I was going through. Would it be a new start for me? And I don't know where that came from, but your audience members may have had moments in their lives where something leaps and they say, okay. And I think really it was the prompting of God. And at the time I applied to the school, I got in, but they told me that our family, as a middle class family, had too much money to qualify for scholarship. So I put God to the test.

And I said, God, if you exist. I was such an arrogant little whippersnapper in those days. If you exist, give me the scholarship that's impossible to get and I'll believe in you. And I waited a whole month Just like biting my teeth. I'm sure, you know, people listening have had these experiences too and saying, oh, is this letter ever going to come? There was a postal strike in Wales and so it took a month for that letter to come.

But by golly that letter came and said I had a full scholarship, I had a ride, I was going to be able to go. And that began my spiritual journey because I, I also kept my promise and I believed in God thereafter and I went to school there. I converted to Evangelical Protestantism. I was originally in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church which later emerged well I think they may still exist, but then later in the Reformed Presbyterian Church Evangelical Synod.

And I went to college at Covenant College which was recommended by Dr. Francis Schaeffer who was the leading evangelical thinker at the time time. And I got my degree from there and I was pre seminary but in the meantime my mother divorced her second husband. I had no home to go to. My life was sort of up in the air and some friends at school said why don't you come and spend summer in our church community.

And so I did and I was love bombed into joining them and talked out of going to Seminary at St. Louis which would have been Reformed Theological Seminary. And I went and lived in this community which very quickly there was a schism in the church. The elder that I had stayed with in the summer was excommunicated with his whole family.

And the family, I mean the church gradually devolved into a mind washing or brainwashing cult and over many years of kind of terror and fear, devolved and devolved and devolved into probably an ex member set the church on fire. And at that time we were tasked both with rebuilding the church and we were told that somebody was hiding secret sin in the church. And so the whole of the membership of the church, about 120people were suspended from communion and went into daily counseling.

It was sort of torture and agony and psychological pressuring and you know, I finally fessed up what I thought was a secret sin which to me was. And they didn't believe me. And they said as we were completing the refurbishing of the burned down church because all of us had to work on it. They said if you come back into this church and you haven't confessed your secret sin, you're a hypocrite and doubly damned to hell. That's choice number one.

If you leave the church and break your vows, then you're going to hell. Maybe not doubly damned, but. And you'll probably die because of the HIV epidemic. In those days of aids, I'm like, great, okay, so they put me into a double bind, a false double bind. As again, I'm sure many of your listeners have been put into these odd places where they're supposed to make a choice given to them by someone else that doesn't really meet the needs of their own heart or their own life or their own truth.

And I paced the floors for six months till 3am in the morning, went to work the next day. Anyway, I was supervising a new word processing center when the technology was brand new in the 80s and did my job and came home and got subjected to that sort of torture every day. And eventually some little still voice in me said, you know, you've got to get out of here.

And so when all the guys that lived in my house were gone one morning to do something that I didn't need to do, I packed up all my stuff and I fled. And next day found me right in a therapist's office. And that therapist said the thing that I was mentioning earlier. She said I was going there feeling suicidal, feeling like I had broken my promises to God.

I had been a strict celibate for seven years in my 20s, a babe that kept the Sabbath holy, did everything they told me, but I was allegedly in some kind of secret sin. And something inside of me said, there's something wrong with this. That little, little voice of truth that we have that we often ignore. And everybody who's listening, you know this. You've often ignored your deepest, truest intuition because some authority figure tells you otherwise.

But this therapist said to me, you wouldn't be coming to me unless you had some hope that things could get better. And so she identified a deep hope that I didn't realize I had. And the other thing she did was finally asked me what I thought and felt about anything. Because in a brainwashing cult, you're only interested in saying what they want you to say, and they want to hear what they want to hear.

And they want to hear the doctrine that you've been taught come out of your mouth, and they want to hear your obeisance to them, the elders and the woman who actually was behind them, who ran the church. They don't want to know anything really about you, even though they claim they do. And so this therapist was the first person in my life who'd ever been actually interested in me other than the founder of the church who love bombed me. As you look at this story, I'm curious.

I don't want to Interrupt. But I want to kind of go. Because you had a really traumatic experience there. Besides helping you to kind of be able to voice that in therapy, what other things did she do to help you deal with that personal trauma? Because I know a lot of people are dealing with trauma and they're not even sure where to start. What was the breakthrough moment for you as you were trying to overcome that traumatic event?

The breakthrough moment was that she actually said, we're going to treat this as a divorce. We're not going to treat it as a religious problem or as a doctrinal problem. We're going to treat it as a breakup. Because you've lost your whole community and your family, the mother and father figure and all of your siblings. They're all gone. And because she. I mean, I didn't even remember the original trauma that was going on at home. So we never worked on that.

But she treated this as a terrible divorce and treated me like I was suffering from, you know, post divorce syndrome. Like, I didn't know where to go. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know who I was. I had no idea who I was in the world. And again, I think your listeners can relate to having those moments where, like, I thought I was this person and I'm not this person at all. Who am I? Right?

And so I think she really steered it that way and really focused me on what was I feeling and was I feeling safe? Which I learned later as classic trauma treatment. And so from her, I said, ooh, I really like this kind of work that she's doing. I think I'd like to do this kind of work, but I had other things to do in the meantime, and I didn't get to it right away. I went to New York and studied acting, singing, dancing, because I was a trained vocalist.

And I had two Broadway coaches who thought I could sing on Broadway. And when I realized I hated performing and it felt inauthentic, and I didn't really want to feel anybody else's feelings, I wanted my own. I then began a search into Eastern spirituality, given my terrible experience in the. In that orthodox variety of Christianity. And I started working with some people while I was living in Philadelphia, mind you, I was working with some people in New York.

I would go up every Wednesday night. I was so passionate about this, and listen to people talk about how to live in the present moment, what we call mindfulness now. And they taught me how to meditate on a long meditation retreat in Hawaii. And they gave me the second Half of my model for how to be a healer, which was use breath, work, use the body. They did deep tissue massage therapy to loosen very old wounds in the body, use meditation, use mindfulness, use counseling.

And that kind of, from 1989 on, became my model. And I was so in a hurry to move out of doing administrative work to doing the work that I do now with people, that the easiest and first thing to do wasn't to take a PhD, but I could get a massage therapy license in one year, part time, every evening, three hours a night for a year. And so I learned to work with people first physically, and then I added the other skills later, the emotional skills, meditation skills.

I became a yoga teacher, I became an energy healer and did a three year certification in that. And all of these things I've sort of combined so that when people walk into my office, I can help them on all kinds of levels, sort of holistically. And really the thing that I've noticed most is that I can hone right in on where is it that you're really hung up. And so what I do now is I teach people how to be human beings because nobody teaches us how to deal with our thoughts or our feelings.

We never talk about them overtly. And I also teach people, okay, once you know how to be a human being, I can teach you how to wake up spiritually. And so my journey really gave me all. I mean, there's all these formal certificates and all that that I sent you, you know, information about that. People don't even want to see them on the walls. They're in a book in my desk. Nobody ever asks.

But, you know, the people listening know that if you find somebody that really gets you, you can work with them, they can teach you the basics. Then really you should be on your own. You should never be dependent on anybody else ever again. For the basics of how to be human or even for the basics of your spiritual life.

I want to go back a little bit to the spiritual trauma you dealt with as well. What were some mistakes that you made during your recovery and what did you learn from those? I made so many mistakes. I try to help people avoid the mistakes that I made. The biggest mistake I made was to not listen to my own truth telling voice. Because, you know, in our hearts we have love and contentment and freedom and peace and the truth as essential elements of being human beings. That's right. Built in.

I'm coming from a mystical perspective, primarily Hindu and Buddhist, but even the Christian mystics will say this too, that God is right here and truth is therefore right here. And I always kept looking for somebody else who was going to save me, somebody else who was going to teach me, somebody else who was going to approve of me, somebody else who was going to make it all right for me and a ready made family or community so I didn't have to create one.

And that was a really big mistake because I kept falling into looking for charismatic but also narcissistic leaders who would take my money and my time and pretend that they were going to make me their equal and I'd someday be special like them. But they always kept their followers subservient. They didn't want equals. And that was the biggest. That was the second biggest mistake I made. I always went to people who reminded me of the original abuser in my life.

Freud called it the repetition compulsion. Somebody who loves you but also scares the living daylights out of you. So I would say those are the two biggest. Keith. And they're really, really difficult. And we're all taught not to trust ourselves. Whole culture is based on that. I'm curious. As you think about your traumatic childhood, it seems to me there's a danger there.

Like most things I think about, when you come out of an abusive relationship, you're more likely to find someone in your life who feels the role of comfort that the abuser gave you. As you think about the spiritual situation that you kind of fell into for someone coming out of an abusive situation, what cautions do you have for. Because the spiritual aspect of that's really, really touching because it can really impact your life in some very, very negative ways.

Your connection with God. If you fall into a situation where you find like you did, a narcissistic abusive pastor spiritual leader who will drive you away from God and then Satan just has a lot of field day with you as you're now God is the one who's abusing you as opposed to the human being who was abused before. So how do you help people who kind of are coming out of that to not fall into the trap of looking for that in a spiritual mentor who then abuses them?

I would say that if you do not feel safe in some way, even if it's subtle, if your body goes into a kind of a contraction around that person, even though they might be love bombing you, giving you all this attention, if you feel some wariness in you, I would pay attention to it. And if you have questions that they don't let you ask, there's a great expression, run screaming from the room.

If they can't answer your questions and do it with a straight face and not make you wrong for asking your questions, they're probably some kind of narcissist and they're not interested in your spiritual welfare. They're interested in having a follower and you. So you have to really keep going back to, am I safe? And does this feel like the truth? Because the truth, even if it's difficult, will always calm our bodies down.

Lies. Just like you're telling a lie to, a lie detector machine always makes the body riled up, full of adrenaline and uncomfortable. And even if you think, oh, this person looks so familiar, they're just going to be like the parent I never had. That's another big clue that this is the wrong one for you. If they feel like the parent you never had, they're going to be like the parent you did have who was abusive.

And again, you better run screaming from the room audience, because you don't be anywhere around that person. That person is going to abuse you at some point. Maybe not at first, but eventually. How do you teach people to trust their inner voice? Because if you've been in an abusive situation, you tend to just think that inner voice is mistaken and you tend to not trust it. So how do you encourage your people you work with to go, no, that voice is giving you something you need to listen to.

How do you tell people they can trust it? It takes practice. It takes making the mistakes. Hopefully not in such an egregious way as I did. And so, you know, you really have to take a look at the evidence. Feel what you feel in your heart and your body. If you're telling yourself the truth, your body again will be calm and peaceful. Even if you don't like what you know, there will be a peace that you'll have in your heart about it.

If you're not kind of on the mark, you will be suffering some kind of fear that doesn't seem to have a rational cause. There's plenty of fear that's there for good reasons. This kind of fear will have a sort of irrational cause and feel like you can't see where it's coming from, but then you know you're not in the truth. Either that or you're in a flashback from trauma and go and get professional help at that point. How do you integrate all your certifications into helping your patients?

That's a great question, Keith. All of these various skills can be used either for psychological healing or for spiritual liberation. So mindfulness and meditation are great practices. For just calming the person down psychologically, but also for getting in touch with the spiritual heart and mastering, getting to know that a lot of the thoughts that you've had and a lot of the thoughts that people throw at you are false. You're not in there cranking out false thoughts.

The thoughts just appear in your mind. Thoughts self generate in your brain. So I teach them to vet their own thoughts. And everybody, whether they're spiritual seekers or psychological wishing, psychological healing, check your own thoughts. Are they absolutely true? Check the thoughts of other people, the propaganda that we call the news, whatever side it's coming from, check the thoughts of other people. When they talk about you, does it sound true to you?

And then I also am teaching people, learn where your emotions come from, learn to name what you're feeling and learn, does that emotion come from the truth, actual event that happened, or is it coming from something that you've made up in your head? And that basic set of kind of truisms or teachings is good for people, whether they're spiritual seekers or psychological sufferers and want healing. Both of those cases, all that is true.

And I also, because of my training also I'm always looking at, how does your body feel? Are you getting enough sleep? Are you drinking too much caffeine? Are you getting exercise? Because your body audience, your body is the platform that your emotions sit on. If your health and your bodily safety goes, then your emotional life goes and collapses. So those are the basic skills I can teach either the psychologically or spiritually minded.

I've heard someone say that trauma often manifests itself in the body in different ways. What do you commonly. So if you think there's been a trauma in your life and you're not quite sure, what are some. What are some parts of the body that you may see on a common basis where it's like you're having this problem because your body is holding on to some trauma. Is it, you know, is it like tension in certain places or other physical issues that you'll notice in your body because of past trauma?

There are so many. And the more adverse childhood experiences you've had. According to the site, the studies by Vincent Felitti at Kaiser permanente in the 90s, the more symptoms you may have. So you may have autoimmune disorders because of trauma. You may have coordination difficulties because of trauma. That was a symptom that I manifested all my young life. You may have.

You certainly have chronic tensions or holding in your body, in your jaw, in your neck and shoulders, in your belly, in the psoas muscle, which is the muscle that lifts your leg when you're running. And that muscle runs from the ribs, down the ribcage all the way to the inside of the thigh. That muscle I found for me was like critically tight all the time. And that was the thing that told me I was still suffering.

That was the indicator, that inner tension and that big muscle that makes the leg move like that, that's the fight or flight, running or fighting muscle. So that kind of contraction in the body, especially if it's chronic and there isn't anything that you've been able to access that helps it totally relax, that may be an indicator that you have trauma. Now, it isn't always.

Some people do work, like sit at a computer and use a mouse with their right hand and makes the shoulder tight all the time. So you've got to have a little discernment here. But typically that kind of chronic holding, also a very strong startle response to loud noises or to strangers. That could be another indication of past trauma. I love that. I'm always curious, what are some success stories of someone you've helped that particularly stands out to you?

Well, there's so many clients, thousands, probably over these last 25 years. The two that came to mind, and thanks for sending the questions because I had to think about this, from all the clients, are two of the most traumatized people that I worked with. And when there's a lot of serious trauma, the basics of my book, for instance, in my short course, aren't going to do it. You really need to work with somebody and gather some trust and some safety. But these two.

One is a guy, and I won't use any names because I don't want any identities being blasted across the universe. This man grew up in a family of a lot of kids. His father was a sadistic, abusive guy who used to beat him with a broom almost every day, used to yank him out of bed till he banged his head on the floor and hit him constantly and never explained the reason why. And this kid was also sexually assaulted by a stranger and couldn't go home and tell his parents.

I was like the second person he told when he was in his early 60s or late 50s. And this kid was also sexually abused by relatives, and he was emotionally abused until the day his father died. His father was insulting and sadistic in the worst kinds of ways that I've heard about. This man medicated himself with alcohol for a number of years, but he then stopped medicating. He also got himself into martial Arts rather wrestling, and became a champion.

And that helped him to get some sense of efficacy in his life. But when I met him, his father had died a year ago. He had seen a colleague of mine for a while, and he was still a wreck. He was always anxious. He woke up in the morning with a start. I wonder how many of your folks listening do that. And he just was never able to calm down. And at times he would go into a blank mind state, which we call dissociation, and be extremely angry.

And I've been working with him probably for eight years now, and we finally got into the origins of this. We finally got him to realize how much he's loved other people. He raised a family without hitting any of his kids, without, you know, emotional assaults on them all the time. He loved a wife for all these years. The man's in his 60s now. They have grandchildren they love and take care of. So I had to kind of show him, hey, it's okay to love.

Love doesn't mean being beaten by your father because he mixed up love with being beaten. And then I helped him to see that he loved and that he could also love himself and that his abuse. This is so important for listeners. The abuse is not your fault, especially when you're a child. Look at any five or six year old and tell me they have any power at all over abuse. It's ridiculous. Okay, that's person number one.

Person number two is a woman whose mother was psychotic and bipolar and grew up watching her mother be carted out of the house on gurneys in straitjackets and gave her entire life to her mother's care and even learned to push down or repress or suppress her own emotions and just feel what mother wanted her to feel. And when she came to me, she was married. She had three kids. This is a dozen years ago.

And every time she sat down in my chair, I remember I would kind of turn white and be ready to pass out. She would say, I want to die. Like, okay, every single time you come in here, you want to die. It took a long time to figure out that was her only relief valve from the torment of her life. And again, audience may be able to identify with this. And I've worked with this woman now for a dozen years. It's taken a long time.

She has bipolar disorder like her mother, but she's never been psychotic. She's gone to school and graduated and has a professional career, but she never valued herself. She always gave too much of herself away, just like she had to Mom. She really had no sense of self at all. When I met her, she would have been classified a borderline. Borderline personality disorder. But I just saw her as a trauma survivor, and she.

Now, she wrote to me the other day, and she said, I can actually exhale and relax. I can actually get up in the morning not feeling like I want to die or feeling the dread of being alive. And I thought, oh, some music to a therapist and a spiritual mentor's ears. It was so wonderful. So there are two of the cases, Keith and I hope that's not too long, but I think they deserve some time. They're such brave individuals.

And the healing is available for people who will have the courage to take their fear into the treatment room or into the spiritual center and get help.

Now, those are great stories. So you wrote a book, Being Human and Waking Up, A Therapist Guide for Psychotherapy Clients and Enlightened Seekers. What made you write the book? Well, I'm getting almost 70, as I mentioned earlier, and I've learned so much from my own journey and then from the journey of thousands of others that I've worked with, that I wanted to put the simple principles I use into a book that people could understand. It's actually a workbook, too.

So they actually can do exercises in the book. And my sense is that everything people need to know to master being a human being, how to deal with their thoughts and their feelings. You know, what thoughts are reliable, what aren't. Where do feelings come from? How do they deal with their physical lives, their bodily sensations? How do they get proper care for themselves? Because Jesus had to love your neighbor as yourself.

But a lot of people who come in here only love their neighbors and don't love themselves. And so all of that, plus what meditation is, what mindfulness is, and how meditation and mindfulness dovetail beautifully with emotional and thought skills to either free you up psychologically or take you all the way to liberation. That's why I wrote the book. I wanted it all in one place, very simply put, without a lot of academic gobbledygook, because it's not helpful to people.

All the intellect we have is great as long as we can translate it to them in terms they can understand. And you know that, too. With having a doctoral degree, you have to be able to speak to who you're with, Right? Because I could give you all my charts, but no one really cares. The certificate's on the wall. Great, right. Like we were talking about earlier, right? And you know your audience has the capacity to heal.

And so I wrote the simplest but most comprehensive book I could about how they can heal. And how is the book being received. I'm an unknown author, so it's a very slow go. It's been out for a year. But I'm about to change that by being on podcasts like yours. And also there's going to be an offer for your listeners at the end of our podcast, whenever that is. That's great. So as you think about your 25 years of experience, what's been the most rewarding aspect of your work? That's easy.

I get to love people for a living. Now, we don't ever use love in the consulting room as a therapist, right. Or very rare cases. The man whose father abused him and beat him after a suicide attempt, I started saying to him, because I could be a father figure to him, I love you. And there's a man who's dying of Parkinson's, and I say that to him, but I rarely say that to anybody.

But the fact is, when we care for those in our care, whether as a pastor or as a therapist or as a liberation teacher, there's love coming out of us for them. And that's the great motive force to feel the love coming out toward another person. That's the greatest reward any human being can have. And I get to do that anytime somebody walks in here. And I think the other reward is seeing the transformation in people's lives.

They come in, you know, like the two clients I mentioned, they're sort of some of the most shattered and have taken the longest time. But even people coming in for problems with food or self image, to see them walk out, realizing they don't have to believe every thought that appears in their head, they can deal with their emotions. They can make themselves a happy life. That's extremely rewarding. Thanks for. That's a beautiful question. Yeah, no, that's great.

So I love to ask my guest this question. You're 70 years old or so. What do you want your legacy to be? You know, I'm one of the creatures in a billion billion galaxies in a multiverse that I can't even comprehend. So legacy is kind of a goofy idea to me. You know, I'm such a small part of everything and yet one with all that is I just want people to gain some understanding that there is hope and that it isn't complicated to heal unless there's been a real serious injury.

But even then, it's possible. And I just want to leave that wisdom, knowledge, information out there. That's the only legacy I can really leave behind. I don't have any children to my own. That's great. So John, where can people find your book and buy it?

Well, as a thanks to you for being such a generous host and giving so much of yourself to people for free, I'm going to up the generosity and offer people two things, which is first, a free 15 minute consult with me which is worth about $60, and secondly, a copy of my book. And to get that, all they need to do is direct message me on Instagram on which is J O N L A B M A N and use the words being human or a human being if that's how you remember it.

And I will get in touch to arrange a free consult and I will send you a copy of my book. If they want to buy a copy, of course they can go to Amazon. I'd prefer to give them one at this point. Well, John, thanks so much for taking the time and being an awesome guest on this podcast. And blessings on the work you're doing helping people to heal and connect more with the healed self. Because God's desire for us is that we be whole and helping people get back to that is an amazing endeavor for you.

So thank you and thank you, Keith, for having me. And again, to your audience, thank Keith by supporting his podcast, by giving him five star ratings and really giving him a little love back because it's an awful lot of work technically and personally to do these kinds of podcasts. So thank you, Keith. Thank you, John.