Episode 34: Coffee with Gabi! What if Your Greatest Pain Turns Into Your Healing?
Last weekend I had the privilege of speaking at Amberly Lago's Unstoppable Success Summit in North Carolina.
I asked the question: What if the thing that is most painful in your life right now is actually intended for your healing?
I wanted to share a recording from this talk with you all today and pose this same question to you. In this very vulnerable 15 minutes, I share my lowest low, the point at which I started to think God wasn't good and didn't keep His promises, and how that rock bottom launched me not only into my own personal healing journey, but also into my purpose in a way I never saw coming.
I truly believe this message will resonate with and bless you!!
Thank you for listening! Please leave a rating a review if you are enjoying this podcast - it helps so much!!
Connect with Gabi:
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TikTok - @gabiruth84
Facebook - facebook.com/gabiruth84
Website - gabiruth.com
(TRANSCRIPT) Ep. 34: Coffee with Gabi! What if Your Greatest Pain Turns Into Your Healing?
Note: Transcript is created by AI. Please excuse any errors.
Gabi: Hey, my friends. Oh my gosh, I'm so excited to be here. I'm so thrilled to be on this stage. It's something that we've all been looking forward to for a long time, and I am one of those crazy people who decided to change my entire message last night. So every Friday on my podcast, which is called Pain to Passion Live
Amberly just mentioned. Every Friday I release an episode called Coffee with Gabi. It happens to be Friday today. So if you wouldn't mind just pretending you're sitting at a coffee shop with me and we're just gonna chat about some stuff that's on my heart. How's that sound? Have some coffee with Gabi.
You know what? It's totally Saturday . Whatever. We'll pretend it's Fri, we'll have coffee on. But all I have to say, I have a question to propose to you guys. Do you think that maybe it's possible that the hardest and most painful thing that you're experiencing in your life right now is actually intended for your healing?
Think about that, and I want to tell you a little story about Little Gabi when I was small. I loved Jesus, and yes, I'm a Jesus freak, so we're gonna be talking about this a lot, but I love Jesus as a kid. My parents took me to church, and Jesus was just so real to me. Even though honestly my parents did not show me the love of Jesus like they should have.
I grew up in a very mentally, emotionally, and spiritually abusive home with a narcissistic mother. And it's what I knew. It's all I knew was toxicity. Of course, I didn't know it was toxic. It was my normal, but I still love Jesus, like he was so real to me. I remember being a little kid and my little twin bunk beds with my twin sister and waking up one morning, I was probably like, I don't know, eight, and thinking, I'm gonna fast today because I love Jesus.
It's like eight o'clock in the morning. I put a post-it on my wall. It said fast today. So I went and I read my Bible probably for a good solid 10 minutes. Made me pray for 30 seconds, read a couple Dr. Seuss books cause I was getting bored and then I got hungry and so I had breakfast, but I really tried to fast.
I really, really loved Jesus. So all of that to. He was everything to me. I always believed he was real. I knew that I was wrapped in his love all the time, even when I was suffering. So fast forward couple decades, me and my husband, we get married and we have on our heart to help orphans and widows. We want to live out the heart of God.
So we decided that we were gonna adopt a. Which had been on my heart honestly since I was like 10, but he had the same passion. So it was a two and a half year process, and after two and a half years, my son Emmanuel came home from Ethiopia. I will never forget walking into his orphanage and seeing my baby for the first time.
There's literally nothing in the world like it. I'm bringing home this person who's depending on. , my first child, like we did not know what we were doing, but we knew we loved him and we brought him home again. First child, it felt like something was off. I didn't know what was wrong, and we tried to talk to people about it, but people were like, oh, no, no, no, it's, it's normal.
He's acting normal. He was 15 months old when he came home, so he's little, everyone's like, no, he doesn't even remember anything from. Okay, well, it feels like something's off. I got pregnant three months later after he came home, so I practically had two kids in one year. It was nuts when my daughter was born, Sarafina, uh, my son was two and a half and I had a newborn baby, and I was a brand new mom.
I did not know what I was doing, but we continued to have these struggles and after she was. They heightened. He wasn't attaching properly. There were behaviors that I didn't understand. I felt like there was angst between me and him, and I tried so hard to just love him, to just love all of the pain out of him, because I knew he'd had a traumatic beginning,
but it wasn't working just to. and a little backstory on that, like he's the coolest kid ever. He's almost 10 now and he's amazing. And any child who starts with trauma is going to have struggles. It's not just him. There are attachment things that happen in the womb, and then if there's an attachment disruption between being born and three years old, it's actually harder to heal than if there's.
Moved after three. So what people don't understand is if you bring a baby home, it could actually be much more difficult for them neurobiologically to wire for attachment. Here we are almost nine years later, and this is still what we're working on full-time with him. So my daughter becomes a toddler and my son is about ready to go to kindergarten.
We had moved across the country. I had uprooted my life, quit my job, was full-time momming, and my son needs a lot of attention. And as you can imagine, that's hard for my little daughter who is just watching me give all this attention and she's just little having to hang out in her room by herself. So needless to say, she starts having extreme anxiety.
My two-year-old having extreme anxiety and I remember one day this was my rock. I had just spent about 45 minutes helping my son calm down for her rage, and then my daughter starts screaming at the top of her lungs. This was something that was happening four to five times a day. She would scream and thrash for a good 45 minutes, four to five times a day because of her anxiety.
So I just depleted myself with. And then my daughter is losing it. I go into her room and I have to wrap my arms around her and hold her. So she hasn't banged her head on the floor for 45 minutes. Me unknowingly coming from a trauma history myself, at that point I did not understand that I had grown up in trauma every single day of my life.
Turns out my son and me were at the. We are the same, and his issues were triggering me so badly because they were mine. They were my issues too. So after holding my daughter there for 45 minutes, me, the girl who loves Jesus, has loved Jesus my whole life since I was little. She's finally finished. I walk into my living room and look at the ceiling.
and scream at the sky. Jesus is a liar. My kids, my kids are like, what the heck is happening? I lost every sense that God was good in that moment. I knew he was real, but I didn't think that he was good cuz I had prayed for these kids every day on my. Put scriptures up on my wall, believe the promises of God for them, and here we were completely falling apart as a family.
I need to tell you guys something. Okay? This is important. Hopefully this will be a takeaway for some of you who really need to hear this. If you are wanting to break generational curses or generational traumas in your family, in your family line, you will. Raping it will break you because you are the chain link that will snap and it sucks and it hurts like hell, and you might feel like you're dying.
But I'm so grateful that God gave me the mantle to be the one to go through the breaking so that my family. Does not have to deal with toxicity and trauma anymore.
Shortly after this, I'm continuing to try to find therapeutic intervention for my son who is just struggling so very much, and I find a modality called therapy play. It's a little different than play therapy. Therapy play. Parents go to therapy with the. It. And we sit there with a practitioner who does these attachment modalities with the kid.
I went to the first session, it was me and the therapist, and I had to pretend to be my son. So she sits me down on a pillow on the floor, crisscross apple sauce, and she grabs my hand and she starts tracing the lines in my hand, touching my hand, and tracing the lines. And she says, your hand is so cool.
Like, look at these lines. It's like a little, you're so precious. This is beautiful. I did not cry in public at that time. I do all the time now, but at the time I fell back the tears till I got in my car and I lost it because never in my life had I ever. Someone seeing me just as myself and seeing that I was precious and that I was worthy here.
I was supposed to be pretending to be my kid, and I was like, what he's getting with this practitioner is something I need. So you know what I did? I went out and found it for myself and that's what we have to do, guys. That was the catalyst. For me to embrace my own healing, I found a therapist. I looked real hard for a great therapist.
I found a therapist. I did somatic experience in coaching. I learned all about polyvagal theory, which Henry talked about earlier today, which was so exciting to me, and it changed my life. It also helped me see that the love of God is so intertwined. In our nervous systems and what it's like to be really attached and attuned to and to be seen.
And now this is my passion, my son, who is so beautiful. If you could put up the picture of my kids, that'd be so awesome. Aww. Aww. I know. They're so cute. He's, he's almost 10. She's seven. My son is the greatest gift I've ever been. Because he has taught me that I needed to be healed and we can heal together and both of us can learn that we're worthy of being seen.
I truly believe he's gonna change the world. Both my kids are. So what I wanna leave you with you guys, you takeaways that are so important for your life. If you are committing to heal, are you committing to heal and be the. Version of yourself for the generations that are coming. After you think about that, the first thing you need to know is that you are so worth it.
You deserve to heal you. For you. You deserve to heal regardless of who else it affects. You are precious and worthy enough to have the healing that you need for your. Pursue it. I don't care how much time or money it takes, I'm telling you this will be the thing that will impact everything else. Pursue it, go after it.
The second thing is you may not be able to see the good in your painful situation right now, but you need to believe no matter how dark and awful it. No matter how much of a death of a dream, it looks like there will be something beautiful to come. That is a promise. It's a promise. You can imagine it. I started to imagine it by putting my feet on the ground, hiring coaches, seeing a future that looked impossible with the amount of time I had to spend with my kids helping.
and I put my feet to the ground. So imagine it. And the third thing is declare the truth over your life, even if it looks completely opposite to what you're experiencing. Declare the truth for me. I get into the word of God, I put the promises up on my wall, and I know that I am worthy. And you are worthy.
I'm gifted. I'm chosen. I'm. I'm created on purpose for a purpose. You are created on purpose for a purpose, so embrace and pursue your healing. Imagine what's possible, declare the truth, and let's change generations.