The Hero Within Karen Hall

Surviving Kidnapping and Escaping the Clutches of a Narcissistic Sociopath, Part 3 with Kristi Christensen

• Kristi Christensen • Season 1 • Episode 55

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Unearth the transformative power of ketamine therapy with our guest Kristi Christensen, a brave survivor of complex PTSD. As she illuminates the shortcomings of traditional talk therapy, it becomes clear that for individuals with severe trauma, the path to healing might require a different approach altogether. Kristi shares her deeply personal journey, revealing how ketamine treatments have been a beacon of hope in the darkness, through neuroregenerative connection to the prefrontal cortex, and disconnecting the painful memories stored in her amygdala.

Join us as we step into Part 3 of this powerfully enlightening episode. Kristi stresses the importance of understanding and education in tackling untreated PTSD and breaking the vicious cycles of trauma bonding. Immerse yourself in her inspiring narrative filled with resilience and endurance, as she talks about her ongoing 35-year-long battle. From her personal experiences with trauma bonding and her current legal struggles, Kristi's  story is a testament to human strength and courage. There's a lot to learn from her journey that might ignite a spark of hope in your own struggles and perhaps even provide a roadmap for overcoming them.

Kristi and I would love to hear your thoughts!  If you'd like to support the podcast, please follow/subscribe to be alerted to upcoming episodes and also, leave a review.

Wishing you lots of love on your own hero’s journey,
xoxo, Karen

Thanks so much for listening!  Please share this episode with your loved ones and spread the love to bless others!
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Connect with Karen Hall

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Podcast: The Hero Within Podcast

Connect with Kristi Christensen


Kristi states, "I was born to an empath and a narcissist/sociopath, and my mother tried to kill my dad and he had my mom committed.  They both lost custody and I lived in a foster home for a year.  Then my mother won custody and was going to move to Japan so my dad kidnapped me and my brother for 6 years.  The FBI found us in the Ozarks in 1995 in a survivalist situation and returned us to our mother.  Eight years later, the cops removed me from the home when my mom attacked me viciously and I was homeless for a year.  I married and divorced 4 times from age 18-24 and the last marriage was super abusive.  He is a super rich rancher in a small town in Utah."  She  divorced and is in the middle of legal battles for custody of her 2 children.

Books Kristi discusses in the podcast:
 
The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz
Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker
Attached by Amir Levine
Scream-Free Parenting by Hal Runkel
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk

Instagram: @fairybrowmother

Speaker 1:

Hey there, welcome back. I'm Karen Hall, your host of the Hero Within podcast. I'm passionate about sharing inspiring true stories of unsung heroes who've overcome some of life's most challenging adversities. Come along with me and learn how you too can find hope and healing to return to love.

Speaker 1:

My friend, christy Christensen had a sudden awakening which began her healing journey. In part 3, she continues discussing what happens in our brain when we undergo trauma and how trauma responses are often mistaken as mental illness, when actually the brain is misfiring. Have you felt that therapy and traditional medications haven't worked for you? Are you looking for something to heal your brain? Christy was too. I want to hear her discuss why talk therapy doesn't work for complex PTSD and can actually be re-traumatizing. I was thrilled to hear her share the amazing breakthroughs she has had with ketamine treatments. If you haven't yet, be sure to listen to part 1 and part 2 to hear her backstory about what happened after she was kidnapped at age 2, which led to a life full of additional trauma. Continue listening today to hear about her awakening, which was a pivotal moment to begin healing.

Speaker 2:

I just got to a point where I couldn't go on anymore. I stayed because my boys and I never want to do anything, but I just didn't want to live anymore. I think breathing was hard and so I did ketamine treatments, which are awesome If you are going through anxiety or depression. You have PTSD or CPTSD or postpartum depression. Ketamine is very neuro regenerative, so it basically restores your brain to fire. It's amazing and I highly recommend it, and it saved my life. It really saved my life, because last year I just couldn't. Ketamine actually makes your brain fire the right way. It gives you access to this again, so when you get triggered, it rebuilds neurons so that you can access this. That's why it's so good.

Speaker 1:

I do not realize that it would help you to get back to the prefrontal cortex.

Speaker 2:

Oh yeah. So it does a few things. Whenever you take ketamine basically cuts off all access you have to your amygdala and it is neuro regenerative. So it builds the neurons, basically the highway. It rebuilds this and it sends a ton of blood to your prefrontal cortex. If you look at the brain scan of people with PTSD, they have larger than normal amygdala and very tiny prefrontal cortexes because your brain essentially is a muscle. So whatever you work out will grow bigger and whatever you don't will atrophy and shrivel and so it basically starves blood from here, gives blood here, starts working this out so it can work. It builds the neurons back and there's a really great book the Body Keeps the Score that everybody should read if they've gone through trauma, and it tells you how trauma is stored in your tissues.

Speaker 2:

It's a physical thing. The only way through trauma is through trauma, right? Most people, when they think of something bad that happened to them, they think of a trauma that immediately triggered. So they're either going to get angry and do something angry, which is fight, or the moment they think of that trauma, they're going to sit down and eat a bunch, drink a bunch of alcohol, watch Netflix, anything to flight, right, and so they can't get through the trauma because they can't even think of the trauma Right. And you have to think of it and come to conclusions.

Speaker 2:

And I've done every therapy for PTSD out there, like every single one that you can even imagine, from EMDR to psilocybin mushrooms, and everything has been very emotionally painful. Traumatized people never want therapy like very traumatized people because it's hopeless. We know it's hopeless. Nothing ever works, yeah, and so when you're on ketamine, it is the loveliest, nicest form of therapy I've ever been. It is so nice. You get an IV in your arm, you lay back, you feel it hit the back of your throat like anesthesia because it is part of anesthesia and then your eyes close and you're just floating. You experience what it's like to be a dense energy of a physical form, which I think is probably what happens when you die.

Speaker 2:

But you can think of anything that happened to you and it is not painful, you're not in fight or flight. We like to internalize it. Something was wrong with us and that's why they chose us. But you just had a lot of pain and you're like you must add a horrific childhood or inherited familial trauma, like something horrible. But I don't need to internalize it. It was a horrible thing but it did not break me, and you're so calm thinking about these things, which is crazy. You come to these conclusions and when you come out of the ketamine they stay. These conclusions stay and you can think about that trauma and you won't get triggered again. It is amazing.

Speaker 1:

You know, what I think is so interesting about this is that one of the most powerful skills is to be able to observe our thoughts and, like you said, when you've gone through trauma it's very painful to observe those thoughts and it's painful to feel those feelings that come with those thoughts. And so, with the ketamine, to be able to observe the thoughts but not feel that deep pain and in a way you're rewriting the script. At that moment You're seeing it so differently and that's another skill is to learn to rewrite the script. But what a gift to be able to now have a treatment that allows you to move past that deep pain.

Speaker 2:

So many psychologists try to treat people with PTSD. Here's the problem with that If you have really bad trauma, we always get sicker. People with really bad trauma who go to talk therapy usually end up like suicidal or they just quit the therapy Because the moment as a therapist that you asked me about the trauma, I'm triggered. And then you're trying to have a com logical conversation with me but I am like triggered, I am fully in fight or flight. So they're trying to treat it as a mental problem, like a mental illness problem. It's neurological. So until you repair your neurology you can't go to therapy. You can go to therapy after that, but before that it's going to trigger you and make you worse, which is why it's so hard to get people with PTSD into treatment, because they don't believe anything's going to help, because definitively they've tried everything a lot of time and it is how I've done.

Speaker 2:

Emdr, which was terrible for somebody, was isolated trauma. Emdr is good but really bad. Ptsd is like poking a hornet's nest with nowhere to go, Like you're stuck in a room with a hornet's nest. You're poking it.

Speaker 1:

You know. I'm so grateful that you address that because so many people that I know that have been through severe trauma have tried so many different forms of therapy and different therapists. They're like I can't find a good therapist, and you hear it all the time it doesn't help anyway. And so when you're left with all this pain and you can't find anything that's working, well, of course you're going to do something to numb, to not live with that severe, excruciating, debilitating pain and now to have a treatment that allows you to move through that pain. And it must have felt so healing for you to experience that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it was. I have been in therapy since they recovered me from the kidnapping, basically, and I just quit. After that I tried it a few other times. Antidepressants don't work because it's a neurological problem. Like nothing works because it's neurological. Mushrooms do too. Psilocybin mushrooms are. They're on the docket in a lot of states to get legalized right now. I think they got legalized in Colorado. They're neuro regenerative but they're very painful. Like you take mushrooms and you are in your worst hell and you have complete access to your mental health so you think you're dying. It's not good. So the ketamine is kind and calm. It restores this link so you can like stay here. People with PTSD or CPTSD have terrible memories. Our whole history is splotches. Like we can remember maybe like one thing from when we were eight and we have nothing, and then we remember another thing from when we were 12. Like we have no memories because you dissociate.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and probably the additional thing is the repression repressing that memory.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you repress bad things, but you repress good things. So after you've been triggered, if you have really bad trauma, you go into a state of dissociation. So my ex-husband did this. I don't know if he knew what he was doing. All he knew is that if I told him I was going to leave which I did so many times over the years he would just scream at me and terrorize me until I'd hyperventilate and pass out and then when I'd basically come to, I dissociate for days. So I would just be like a zombie you just exist, you're on autopilot and you don't remember anything. But people are getting like micro triggered all the time if they have PTSD and so they're dissociating all the time so they don't remember their history.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, how that makes so much sense.

Speaker 2:

And those triggers are a really big problem. I mean it could be somebody jumped out to scare you. It triggered your PTSD and then you just kind of like are a zombie for the next little while. And the longer you don't treat your PTSD, the more sensitive you neurologically become. So everything triggers you. That's why people become shut-ins. I became a shut-in the last two years. Stanley liked the house a lot, ryan my guy. He would like drag me out to do stuff, but in between him dragging me out I just sit in the house because I can't even drive because everything was triggering me Red lights. I can't even explain it. The longer it goes untreated, the higher risks people are with PTSD or CPTSD to drink themselves into a grave OD because it gets worse and worse to where you can't handle it. You can't even function or live. So it's really important to get it treated. But there was never a viable treatment until then.

Speaker 1:

Right, and I think that's interesting too about that. When the triggers happen, you can think everything's going okay and the slightest thing can come up and the thought can come from nowhere and that can bring on being triggered, and so it's like you can't predict it and you can't control for it. And so staying at home, even that, you can't control the thoughts that come into your mind all the time, but there's less things that are coming at you, and so I can see why a person would want to be a shut-in and just try to cocoon at home. Yeah, so when you were saying you've worked with women that have gone through these abusive situations, and, besides ketamine, are there any other things that you have felt like have helped them to increase their awareness? Because until a person has the awareness, they can't make those decisions and they may not feel that there are any options. And so what can a person do in that situation? What can be done to help increase the awareness?

Speaker 2:

My women I'm trying to help get out of these situations. I explain it like this. I say you cannot spontaneously change because the way you think dictates your actions. You cannot spontaneously, on a dime, change your actions until you change the way you think. So I always tell them read yourself out of your situation. That's what I did. Change the way you think, change the way you see the world, before agreements turn your worldview on its head. Until you change the way you think, you cannot change your physical actions in the world. And until you change your physical actions in the world, you will get the same result over and over. So change the way you think and you will change your life. And the best way to do that is to educate yourself to understand.

Speaker 2:

It seems like a very trite platitude. The moment you understand why, you have power over it, whatever it is. When you don't understand why and your own behavior is a mystery to you it completely rules you. But when you understand what trauma bonding is and that's why I bonded to this guy oh my gosh, I can control that. That's illogical, that is insane. I did that. And then you have control over it.

Speaker 2:

So they read the books, and the first one if you're in a bad situation, I would say, is the four agreements. Everything else is too big, it's too much of a commitment, because when you're in those abusive relationships with narcissists, they've destroyed your confidence. You don't even think you can leave, so they don't wanna read a book. So when you give them a big book to read, they don't. So the four agreements is a tiny little book and it's such a great first step. And so I tell the women I'm trying to help that they have to read this book before I'll help them more, because I used to like run around and do everything for people who weren't willing to work for themselves. So now I have them in the book and if they read the book then they get the next step, and then they get the next step and if they're willing to do the work, I will absolutely help them to get out of the situation.

Speaker 2:

But I would say that educate yourself out of your toxic ways of thinking that puts you in a life you don't even want. If you look around, you don't like your spouse, you don't like the things about your life except responsibility. But that is not a death sentence. If you put yourself there, you can get yourself out. But you can't do it spontaneously. Educate yourself out of your situation.

Speaker 1:

I am so proud of you. I am so, so proud of you because, first of all, I am so proud of you for your courage, and I'm so proud of you, from such a very young age, to be so courageous and to be able to then have the fortitude to move forward and to keep working to find solutions. Like you said, I will find a way, and you sold the bath bombs here. He was controlling you with money, but you still found a way. And I see such resourcefulness in you and such incredible resilience. And you do give us hope because, like you said, if I can make it through what I've gone through, other people can too. And so thank you so much for sharing that hope, and I just want you to know that I'm just so proud of you, I'm so proud of you.

Speaker 2:

Meeting you has been a blessing. You're really a special soul. You just radiate light. You're like light in human form. So thank you for being so nice and having me on your podcast.

Speaker 1:

Well, thank you. Thank you for joining us, and is there anything that our listeners could maybe help with your legal situation?

Speaker 2:

I just don't know. I don't know how to combat this. I don't know how to combat this and my lawyer doesn't really know, but I think I'm going to have to do the KSL thing. You know, just because there's so much corruption, there's so much evidence of corruption, that there's a thing there. It's just hard. I'm just getting so tired. I have been just. I feel like I've just been fighting for 35 years.

Speaker 1:

I'm kind of tired but Maybe one of our listeners has a resource or knows something.

Speaker 2:

If they do, I would love their help.

Speaker 1:

We'll add that to our show notes, if there's anybody that has any recommendations or resources that could aid you in this situation.

Speaker 1:

That would be great.

Speaker 1:

We want to get your boys back to you and we want you to be able to bless their life with all that you have learned and all the ways that you have grown, and now you can teach your boys these things, you know as they go through life.

Speaker 1:

Now you have so many skills that you can use to bless their lives and teach them these tools, because we all need to learn these things, no matter if we have capital T trauma or a little T trauma. We all need to learn these skills. And so thank you for being such a wonderful example and for being so willing to be vulnerable and to share your story with us, because I know that you are going to touch people, because you're not the only one that's going through things like this, and when I've gone through my hard things, I have felt so alone and I've wished that I could talk to someone. We didn't have podcasts back then, but I wish that I could hear someone's story, and so I hope that our listeners, when they hear you, that your words resonate with them and that they don't feel so alone and that they gain hope from your story, because I feel hope when I hear your story, so thank you for sharing with us. Thank you.

Speaker 2:

Well, thank you for having me and giving me a platform. I used to not share my story and then doing eyebrows. You would not believe how many women are currently in really abusive situations. So that is why I started sharing my story and that is why I started this program of trying to help women get out of these abusive relationships. Right, thank you for being so nice and having me on.

Speaker 1:

I know you will help somebody, and I wanted to tell you too that it kind of reminds me of the story about the starfish thrower and somebody said why are you throwing that starfish back in the sea? There's all these starfish on the beach, it doesn't matter. And he says, well, it mattered to that one starfish and if you can help just one listener that would be amazing, that would be so amazing.

Speaker 2:

They can always reach out to me if they need resources. People reach out to me on my Instagram all the time.

Speaker 1:

We'll put your link for your Instagram, so if they want to reach out to you, they can. You are just so amazing.

Speaker 2:

I just feel tired.

Speaker 1:

Well, fighting for 35 years and fighting for these boys.

Speaker 2:

I've handled all the things. This is going to be the thing that breaks me. It's so hard.

Speaker 1:

It's not going to break you, because I really feel like you are going to be given a path and that somehow you're going to find a way, just like you always have, and I believe you will again. I really do.

Speaker 2:

Oh, you're so sweet. Thank you, you're so wonderful. I've never met somebody who embodies light like you do. You're so wonderful. Your soul is so good. Thank you. It's not very common. Thank you for being you. Thank you.

Speaker 1:

Thank you. Okay, bye, have a great day. Bye. Takeaways from today. Have you heard about ketamine and been curious about how it works on the brain? Christy shared why talk therapy is re-traumatizing to someone who has complex PTSD and why it might not be helpful. She felt like nothing worked and then she found ketamine treatments and discovered a powerful way to observe her thoughts and not experience being triggered while doing so. She explained how ketamine is neuro-regenerative and actually restores the brain and increases the blood flow to the prefrontal cortex, where we have logic, reasoning and our value system.

Speaker 1:

Christy described trauma, bonding and its danger, along with the abuse that she suffered in her marriage and her current legal battles over custody for her two young children. Christy says that if she can overcome what she has gone through, anyone can overcome their trauma too. If you or anyone you know is suffering from abuse and trauma, be sure to read the show notes for Christy's recommended reading list and see her links to connect with Christy. We can each save one starfish at a time. Thanks for listening. I know you're busy. Did you know that you help spread the love by leaving your review and following? This helps increase our visibility so people can find us online. I really appreciate your help. I'm wishing you lots of love in your own hero's journey.

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Karen Hall

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