Is healing from childhood trauma possible?
At six years old, Iman Gatti witnessed her father brutally murder her mother. Her father was sentenced to 25 years in prison and Iman, now parentless, spent the next twelve years in foster care.
Fast forward to today: Iman is a published memoirist, grief recovery specialist, certified coach, a wife, and a mother to a beautiful baby girl.
How did she get here? How did she process and heal all the trauma she experienced over those formative years? And how has she been able to turn her own journey of healing into one of empowering other women to heal themselves?
On today’s episode, we get to hear from Iman Gatti about her courageous journey of healing of herself after unimaginable pain. We learn how she spent a decade in therapy and other recovery and healing modalities, how she ended up starting a business, and how her business now supports women in their own journeys to healing, forgiveness, and self-love. Through her work in healing her own trauma, she found a path to becoming a courageous living coach and certified grief specialist.
In this episode, we also get to listen in and hear how Iman shares how motherhood changed her and impacted the way that she works. While she found raising a baby to be demanding, she also found the logistics of it straightforward. What she wasn’t necessarily expecting was how much the soul work of becoming a mother would rock her to her core.
Join us as we talk about what it looked like for her to heal from trauma: her journey and deep work around forgiveness, self-love, and the surprising ways that pregnancy and birth were a portal to deeper healing.
IN THIS EPISODE WE TALK ABOUT:
- Iman’s profound story of trauma––witnessing her father brutally murder her mother just before her seventh birthday and spending the following 12 years in foster care––and her decades long commitment to healing herself.
- How the work of healing her own trauma led her to become a courageous living coach and certified grief specialist who helps others heal their own trauma and grief.
- The surprising role of forgiveness as a cornerstone of healing trauma.
- How becoming a mother herself reignited Iman’s grief over losing her own mother at seven, but also strengthened her feeling of connection.
- The vulnerability of writing her memoir and allowing herself to be fully seen.
- How she found raising a baby to be demanding but straightforward, while the soul work of becoming a mother rocked her to her core.
The Startup Pregnant Podcast Episode #106
SOME QUOTES FROM THE EPISODE:
- “I surrendered. I literally surrendered. I just fell to my knees one day and I said to the universe, ‘Show me what I’m supposed to do, because I’ll do it, because I’ve been through everything that I could ever endure and I have survived that. I know that this won’t be worse than that, so please show me how I can be of the most service.’”
- “You can’t tell this story if it’s still unforgiven. I had to go through each and every person that had made their mark on me and forgive and forgive and forgive. That’s not an easy thing.”
- “I felt really interesting, because as a grief recovery specialist, all of a sudden I was suffering from grief of [losing] my mom again. When I thought I couldn’t grieve her anymore, I get pregnant and I realized, ‘I miss my mommy.’”
- “I look at my daughter and I think, ‘Mom, I get it. I get it. I get why you did those things. I get why I was spoiled. I get why you didn’t want to say no. It’s hard. It’s hard to take things away. It’s hard to make all these decisions all the time.’ Then I also think like, ‘Oh, my God. How much it takes of your soul. Oh, how weary you must have been.” She had three and I’m thinking, I have one and I’m like, ‘I’m tired.’”
- “I found that in the middle of night, it’s a holy time because you don’t have a lot of thoughts yet of the day and there’s not a lot of distraction in your brain. I actually wrote some beautiful things.”
- “The baby part is the matter-of-fact stuff. Okay, feed, change, clean, sleep. Very to the point. The hard stuff is your psyche, your soul, your body, aching at the same time as someone demanding you to do these things. I was like, ‘Oh, the hard part was my soul changing. Got it.’ “
- “This is the most profoundly beautiful and terrifying and inconvenient and adorable thing I’ve ever done. I’ve never been more proud and exhausted.”
LEARN MORE ABOUT IMAN GATTI
IMAN GATTI, author of Cracked Open – Never Broken, is an empowerment coach, transformational speaker, and Certified Grief Recovery Specialist™. Through her work, she helps people overcome self-limiting beliefs, heal past wounds, and step fully into their limitless potential.
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