Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Incorporating SuperPowers. My guest today is Madeleine Black and I’m excited to have her on because she’s got a very, very powerful story that I think is very pertinent to a lot of what’s going on in the world right now.
We’re going to be talking about the power of forgiveness because what most people, I think the way they would responded to what Madeleine experienced would have created something completely different in their reality.
And rightly so right. But Madeleine chose to do something different. I’m not going to share her story because I want her to share her story, but this is extremely important.
She’s an author, she’s a speaker, she’s a psychotherapist. She gets it at multiple levels and the power of forgiveness that she’s been able to wield and from what she survived and went through is just absolutely amazing. Madeleine, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much. Lovely to be here with you
Now you are in, what part of the world are you in now?
I am in sunny Scotland. I’m in Glasgow across the pond in the UK.
That’s it. I love this. This is what I love about podcasting is that we can be anywhere in the world and the message is still the message. It doesn’t matter where you’re at, where you’re from, this message in particular is extremely powerful.
Madeleine, can you share a little bit about your background? I know you’ve got a book called Unbroken. What was the culmination of that book and the experience that you had?
Well, Unbroken really is my memoir. It tells my own story of being gang raped when I was 13 by two men, two American men. It really is about my journey of surviving it, healing, forgiveness, transformation, and hope.
I was 13.
Yeah, it was. It was over 40 years ago now.
But we still carry those with us. We still carry those stories, those wounds, and those experiences with us. Talk to me a little bit more about your process. How did you rise above it? How did you not let it continue to drive you back throughout the years?
Clearly, obviously I was very young, so the trauma impacted on me in many ways. It really had a huge effect on me and I haven’t got to the place where I’m at right now overnight. It’s been a process. It’s taken me a lot to kind of clean up from th, is what I call it. I don’t know if something in me just always drove me to clean up, so eventually I realized long after I was married and had my kids, that if I don’t go and deal with this once and for all, it’s going to hang over me for the rest of my days.
It’s been a combination of many different things talking therapies or different kinds of body therapies, alternative therapies, sport, connecting back in because I had left my body on that night. And just really, I guess, connecting back to me who I was before all of this happened, the essence that I was born with. I realized that they could never touch that. But my journey has been really about getting back into my body and retrieving all of my memories because they weren’t available to me for a long time.
For those of you that are listening that haven’t experienced trauma, who haven’t been through something like that, oftentimes when we experience trauma, we separate from our body. Our mind just disconnects as a way of surviving through the trauma. While the body’s experiencing it, the mind will separate its defense mechanisms to protect itself. If left alone, if not reconnected, it creates all sorts of other wounds out there.
I want to dive into that a little bit more because if you’ve experienced trauma, if you know somebody that’s experienced trauma, I want to go through some of the stuff that Madeleine went through and the processes that she went through and what she just talks about in her memoirs right after the break, so stay tuned. Madeleine, where can people go find more about you and your book?
I have a website, Madeleineblack.co.uk. It has all the links to all my social media platforms and my book as well, Unbroken.
Fantastic. Talking to Madeleine Black on her book Unbroken and the power of forgiveness. If you’ve experienced trauma or you know somebody who’s experienced trauma, stay tuned, we’ll be right back as we dive into this further.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
Podcast: Play in new window
