PTSD in Military Soldiers: A Military Woman Shares Her Hopeful Journey -14

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Dakota [: 00:00:03

From a childhood shaped by emotional distance to a deployment that sparked a spiritual awakening, this episode explores one soldier's profound journey from trauma to transformation. Discover how these experiences forge the path toward understanding the deep impact of emotions on the mind and body.

Kim [: 00:00:22

If you're ready to explore the resilience of the human spirit and the power of healing, this conversation is one you won't wanna miss. Welcome to Dog Tag Diaries, where military women share true stories. We are your hosts, Captain Kim.

Dakota [: 00:00:40

And Captain Dakota. The stories you are about to hear are powerful. We appreciate that you have joined us and are eager to learn more about these experiences and connect with the military women who are willing to share their stories in order to foster community and understanding.

Kim [: 00:00:57

Military women are providing valuable insight into their experiences, struggles, and triumphs. By speaking their truth, they contribute to a deeper understanding of the challenges they face and the resilience they demonstrate.

Dakota [: 00:01:11

We appreciate your decision to join us today to gain insights and knowledge from the experiences of these courageous military women. Thank you for being here. In this deeply personal episode, we explore the transformative journey of a soldier who turned their military experiences into a lifelong mission of understanding trauma and its impact on the mind and body. Raised primarily by grandparents with distant parents, this journey is shaped by a sense of detachment from an early age. We dive into the pivotal moments that led her to join the military, including the events of 9/11, financial pressures, and a profound sense of destiny.

Kim [: 00:01:57

The conversation touches on their spiritual awakening during deployment and how it became a turning point in her life. Ultimately, guiding her to a career in researching the complex relationships between emotions and trauma. This episode is a compelling exploration of resilience, self discovery, and the ongoing journey to heal and help others. Welcome Annie Emprima.

Annie Emprima [: 00:02:22

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Kim [: 00:02:24

We are so happy to have you. And so the way we usually start our episodes is just by learning a little bit about who you are when you were younger.

Annie Emprima [: 00:02:34

I was very defiant. I was a very angry child. And and it's not my parents weren't there. They're just not present, physically available, not emotionally in any way. So I had to figure out life on my own. I remember walking to school, walking 5 miles to my friend's house. Like, the independence was already set. It was already destined in that sense long before I touched high school.

Kim [: 00:03:04

You have here that your grandparents were a big part of your life.

Annie Emprima [: 00:03:08

Yeah. They lived 5 houses away. So we lived on one corner of the block in this very suburban town. They were on the other corner of that same block. So as little kids, we would walk through 4 backyards to get to their house. And we we had just been doing that for so long, the neighbors it was part of the routine. So they did the grocery shopping for the families. They cooked a lot of the big meals for the families.

Annie Emprima [: 00:03:34

That was the patriarchal home base for their children.

Kim [: 00:03:40

So were you an only child?

Annie Emprima [: 00:03:42

No. I have 3 younger siblings because my parents weren't present. Whatever times they may have had, I was the oldest. And it was that was very traumatizing to me because I had younger brothers and a very Arabic Catholic family. I was born. I was not a boy. My sister was born. She was not a boy.

Annie Emprima [: 00:04:01

My twin brothers were born, they were boys. So a lot of the attention went to the males in my family. So I had a lot of resentment. I had a lot of anger. My dad would blame me when they would get into a fight and break the coffee table or the side door or whatever they may have done just being really rambunctious, undisciplined children. That came on me because I was the oldest, and I was supposed to set the example.

Kim [: 00:04:28

Oh, yeah. Dakota, you're the oldest too, so you can relate to that because you had similar experiences. Correct?

Dakota [: 00:04:36

Yeah. It kinda gets pushed on the older child. Yeah. Right. I feel that. Yeah. Absolutely. Unfortunately.

Dakota [: 00:04:44

Yeah.

Kim [: 00:04:44

So what led you then into the military?

Annie Emprima [: 00:04:48

I was engaged at the time to someone who had gone into the military right out of high school. So he graduated high school. He was a split option, enrollment, enlistment. So he did his basic before his high school year, and then as soon as he graduated, he hit the age mark. So he went straight out to finish his army AIT. So he had done 12 years, and I think 9 years, and was in Germany. So I had a friend of his at the time. We were friends.

Annie Emprima [: 00:05:20

I was dating his friend, so I knew him pretty well. We would write letters. We exchanged letters when he was in Germany. When he was deployed to, other countries, he would send letters. And at the time, it was the you know, the Social Security number went on the envelope, and it was the paper with the seal back in the nineties. And so we stayed in touch, and then through life events, we connected again, ended up becoming engaged, and there were some financial struggles. And at the time, the military was offering a $20,000 sign in bonus, and you would get 10,000 right after basic and 10,000, a few years later or a period later. So what do I have to lose? We wanted to build a family with health care costs, education.

Annie Emprima [: 00:06:05

All of these perks seemed very enticing. And he already spoke the language. It was familiar to him, so it was something that he would have been comfortable with me entering in and not something that he would be excluded from.

Dakota [: 00:06:19

And how old were you?

Kim [: 00:06:21

33.

Dakota [: 00:06:22

When you entered the military?

Annie Emprima [: 00:06:23

32, I think.

Dakota [: 00:06:25

Okay. How was that for you, going through, like, basic and training?

Kim [: 00:06:30

Yeah. Because usually people, we go in at a younger age.

Annie Emprima [: 00:06:34

Many of the drill sergeants were younger than I was. So it was very interesting. I was the oldest female. I also had one of the best PT scores. So there's this age it was uncomfortable. Uncomfortable sleeping in a bay because we were OSET. Military police is OSET. It's one stop unit training.

Annie Emprima [: 00:06:55

So you just go 21 and a half weeks straight, is what I did, in the same barracks with the same people. And so all the females were in 1 platoon, like a sleeping platoon, but we had our administrative platoons mixed with the guys, but we would sleep in the same bay together. So it was the same women, and I don't know that I acted 32 when I was in basic because it's really hard not to you either go into the mother role or you go into the same age role, and I could feel that. It was very interesting. And then the drill sergeants, of course, being younger, and I was different. Older, little more stubborn. So that there was a little bit of friction in day 1 of joining the military. Like, we're we go through reception.

Annie Emprima [: 00:07:39

We're in basic day 1. I'm meeting the drill sergeants. We're in the platoon space, and I think we'll call him drill sergeant k. He says, okay. There's 5 women, and there's 45 men in the platoon. Alright, women. You need to decide right now which one you wanna be. In the army, there are only 2 types of women.

Annie Emprima [: 00:07:56

You're either a bitch or a whore. You have to decide right now which one you wanna be. And I was like, there's my initiation. Oh

Kim [: 00:08:03

my gosh.

Annie Emprima [: 00:08:04

That was my like, what did I get myself into? What is this? And then the other drill sergeant, I don't remember his name, he had deployed multiple times to Iraq during the surge. So he says straight up, I hate Arabs. No offense,

Kim [: 00:08:20

Oh my god. So you had your ethnicity, your gender, your age

Annie Emprima [: 00:08:26

and my age. Three strikes. And it was comical at now, but it was not comical when I was there. No. Wow.

Kim [: 00:08:34

How did that make you feel? Wow. Yes. Yeah. How did you feel?

Annie Emprima [: 00:08:38

I felt like this was such a game that I did not wanna play. And there were times when the drill sergeants would provoke things because they had their own biases. And I also could read handwriting, and we had this issue where they were trying to get one soldier removed from the platoon. So somebody made a fake letter with him having some racial slurs in it about another soldier. And I looked at it, and I said out loud. I'm like, that's not his handwriting. And that was not the answer because it was one of the drill sergeants that did it.

Kim [: 00:09:11

There's your 4th strike that you're outspoken.

Dakota [: 00:09:15

Wow. Yeah. So how was it for you, like, sticking with who you are, like, not conforming to, like, what was expected of you? Does that make sense, Monterrey?

Annie Emprima [: 00:09:26

I just kept swallowing it and swallowing. Because what do you do? You you're not gonna get in your drill sergeant. You're not gonna get even when I was deployed, I did try to speak up during my deployment, and they threatened me with an article 15 for even getting myself involved. So you just swallow it. And at some point, swallowing that causes a lot of physical disease.

Dakota [: 00:09:44

Uh-huh. So you also mentioned the influence of witnessing 9/11 that also impacted you.

Annie Emprima [: 00:09:52

It did. When I was watching, I think it impacted people around the world of you're watching this horrific thing happen on TV. And I was in Massachusetts at the time, so we were only not even 4 hours away. So I had friends that were in New York City. I had friends in DC, and I'm watching this. It's very interesting that that same day, I was working for an outdoor advertising company, and that same day was the National Outdoor Advertising event. And so advertising agencies from all around the United States and, I think, parts of Canada would go to this annual event to receive their award for most creative billboard, most compelling. And so that morning was the event.

Annie Emprima [: 00:10:35

So I my boss, my coworkers were down in New York City for this. So it's I'm watching I'm at work watching this unfold with people I know, and we're trying to get a hold of them. It was so chaotic, and I felt so helpless, so deeply helpless. And then the weeks following of I've gotta have something in my toolbox. Whatever toolbox I may have, metaphysical, phys I've gotta have something that can contribute and had nothing. So it was this feeling of never wanting to be hopeless in that sense again to not help a fellow human that lingered in the back of my mind even before the financial reasons to join the military. So it was really a stacked answer of why I joined was layered of multiple emotions.

Dakota [: 00:11:20

Wow. Just gonna ask if you could talk more about your deployment to Kuwait.

Annie Emprima [: 00:11:25

That was the catalyst of what I do now. In the process of writing a book, I have, like, critiques all over. What you don't see what you don't see on the screen right now are, like, 1,000 pages of different editors in around the country that have edited my book that critiqued it. And so I've got margin notes on it's, like, pages and pages and pages of these margin notes. I wrote a book and I comically say this. My life has been a series of it's trauma drama comedy. So things don't necessarily make sense unless you put it into a comical view. When I landed in Kuwait I'm from Las Vegas, so I'm used to the desert.

Annie Emprima [: 00:12:06

I'm used to the heat. I'm used to that sense of heat hitting my face and the humidity when I would go to, I mean, other parts of the world. When I landed in Kuwait, we got to Camp Arifjan, and I felt things touching my skin. And I just chalked it off to this must be prayer in the air because I'd never been in a holy Muslim country. I'd been into Lebanon. I've been Jordan. There's where it's mixed religion. Kuwait is predominantly Muslim.

Annie Emprima [: 00:12:34

So I thought, okay. This is prayer in the air because I had nothing else in my drop down menu to pick from. And then we kept going, and I'm like, okay. Maybe it's not prayer. Maybe it's burning oil, but nobody else was feeling it. Okay. Maybe that's not it either. And I realized it was these Claire capabilities awakening, but no one gave me the warno to say, hey.

Annie Emprima [: 00:12:58

This is coming in. Prepare. There was just things happening. So things are happening internally, not necessarily on the battlefield, and I'm starting to hear voices in my head. So you have voices in your head. You're not that's fighting against itself and the morale is down. You don't go to the chaplain and say, hey. I've got voices in my head to, like, go to lunch at certain times and not to leave a person alone.

Annie Emprima [: 00:13:22

And that started getting a little bit stronger, and then I started feeling these hands on my shoulders. And this is all new to me. I have this is not my world. I'm I'm deployed. This is not what I'm thinking about. I'm not in any spiritual metaphysical space at all, so I am confused and trying to figure this out without speaking it out loud. And these hands I would go into the chow hall in in zone 6, Camp Erev John. You enter in and then there's a whole bunch of buffet you walk through and they just fill your tray with what you want.

Annie Emprima [: 00:13:52

And then you have to choose if you're gonna sit on the left side of the chow hall or the the left side or the right side. So I knew my friends were sitting over there, and I would feel these hands just hovering my shoulders. It was big, burly energy hands. Okay. And so I'm holding my tray. I'm having these internal conversation of what do you want me to do, and it's just pushing me, pushing me, and then push stops. And I'm looking around, like, where am I supposed to sit? And I would just plop down next to someone that was familiar sitting by themselves. This happened many times.

Annie Emprima [: 00:14:24

So it's still not really clicking what's happening to me because when you're not thinking about something being a possibility, it doesn't show up in your dashboard of options. But I know something's happening. And as the deployment kept going, more things are happening. We had EO complaints. We had this massive court martialed sexual assault case. We had suicidal ideation. The the unit is just, from my perspective, crumbling. And I'm feeling that there was an issue with a married lesbian couple.

Annie Emprima [: 00:14:52

Christian members of the unit had an issue with that. So this constant separation of unity, and I'm then having my own personal situation and trying to find, like, who's even capable of having this conversation with me? It's not the chaplain and it's not mental health.

Kim [: 00:15:10

You were placed in this huge place of turmoil and then you yourself have all these feelings coming up. So, 1, when it first started happening, were you scared or intrigued or both?

Annie Emprima [: 00:15:22

Confused. I wasn't scared. It didn't feel unfriendly, or it was just confused of why is this happening? What is this? Where did you come from? It felt like I was supposed to be doing it, but I was confused because there was no warning order. Like, no one no one said, hey. Here's the warning. When you're on deployment, these things are gonna happen and no one else is gonna have an instruction manual for you. You'll be okay. I never got that pep talk.

Annie Emprima [: 00:15:46

It was just

Kim [: 00:15:48

I like how you say things. You like you said, you have a at the end, you have this comical drive at the end of it. Trauma drama comedy. Okay. So continue with that.

Annie Emprima [: 00:16:01

All of this was my entire experience of the deployment was theatrical. I got called into the JAG office. I thought it was for the EO complaint, and now, like, the person who I've been confiding in is part of this court martial sexual assault. It's like whiplash.

Dakota [: 00:16:16

Oh, wow.

Kim [: 00:16:17

Who did you find to confide in? Because you said before you weren't you didn't know who to go to the chaplain or who did you end up confiding in?

Annie Emprima [: 00:16:24

The jokester. The one who wouldn't take anything seriously because at least I could speak it out loud, and it wasn't like he was gonna take it seriously anyway. So she wasn't gonna do anything with it. And then he ends up being, like, this massively floodlighted spotlight headliner of this drama trauma sitcom for these sexual assault issues. And I sided with him in this situation with leadership was so confused, and they they just didn't know what to do with that because I challenged my leadership for their army values, which is a no no, their integrity, their leadership. I also sided with him because I watched this investigation. Can we swing around the podcast?

Kim [: 00:17:03

Yes, you can.

Annie Emprima [: 00:17:04

Very half assed investigation. So the woman that went to investigate me, the voice in my head was like she had been sexually assaulted. She's not unbiased. And so as she's asking these questions, I'm shaking my head that this isn't right. She should not have been the one assigned to this. This is too personal for her, and she's overlaying. And then the other individuals that had put their names into this case and what he did was wrong. I'd like in no way am I defending it.

Annie Emprima [: 00:17:29

It was how it was investigated that I had a really big issue with because it wasn't an unbiased objective approach to the situation. So we had 2 LDS senior leaders, the the general and the command sergeant major of the brigade. They were both Mormon, so they had their values imposed and overlaid. And then other senior leadership had daughters the age of one of the women that had reported. And so they even said to me, what would you do if this was your daughter? And I remember that voice in my head saying, what would you do if this was your son? You've isolated him. You're putting him in a position for suicidal ideation because you've completely alienated him, and you're not giving him a fair trial. And so I just kept seeing these pieces that were so jagged and they weren't clicking together properly. And so the ethics of what was happening, I went to my leadership and said, this isn't right.

Annie Emprima [: 00:18:19

And instead of acknowledging that, it got pushed back, and I got threatened with an article 15 for publicly attacking leadership, which it was done in an email. No one else was involved in it. And then when I pointed that out, JAG and the leadership, they responded not with kind words. So I realized on that deployment, I was not there to enjoy myself.

Kim [: 00:18:41

Oh gosh. There was Annie's 5th strike.

Annie Emprima [: 00:18:43

It just keeps getting better.

Kim [: 00:18:44

But good for you for speaking up and speaking your truth.

Annie Emprima [: 00:18:48

Yeah. And that, without those extreme experiences, I don't think I would've had the sparks to ignite the flame of what I'm doing now. I needed to see trauma in its rawest form to understand the implications of not healing traumas as we go. So without those stories, I wouldn't have the research observations that I have now.

Dakota [: 00:19:13

Can you elaborate, when you said healing the trauma as we go? Mhmm. Can you talk more about that?

Annie Emprima [: 00:19:21

What happens when we hold onto it? Let's say as an adult, we have a situation with a coworker or a boss and we bite our tongue, we swallow our words, we hold it in, it's eventually going to sit somewhere because trauma will whisper first. It'll say, hey. Here's some irritation in our throat. And then if we don't listen to the whisper, it becomes a roar. It becomes a thyroid issue. And if we still don't listen to it, it becomes a trauma stone, thyroid cancer or stomach cancer or colonitis or anything with the digestive system or if a lot of anger and rage sits in us, it starts impacting our gallbladder and our liver. So if we're not paying attention to when it whispers and say, hey. I hear you.

Annie Emprima [: 00:20:01

And find a way to dissipate it, we then pay the penalties and interest in the weight of trauma stones.

Dakota [: 00:20:07

I like that. And I think the military, like, the culture is just that. Like, we're not allowed to address it. We're told to, you know, drive on, and so I really like that. I'm glad that you're addressing that.

Kim [: 00:20:20

And your body is a huge like you said, a huge indicator. A huge indicator to let us know that something is off. However, being in the military, when you are in fight or flight, which we are taught to be in all the time or someone's gonna die if we let down that guard, it's so hard to feel that in your body because you're always ready to go and you don't have time to relax and just listen.

Annie Emprima [: 00:20:47

You don't, but at some point, you have to so it's it's like taking a loan. When you get a home or a car, you have payments, and you make payments. You you chip away slowly. You may not be able to pay the whole house in cash. You may not be able to pay the whole car in cash, so you have installments. And that's the same with trauma when we're in a dysregulated state for a prolonged period of time. It becomes chronic trauma. But if we can take increments and chip it away while we're dysregulated, at least we're not the the tea kettle isn't getting so hot that it whistles.

Annie Emprima [: 00:21:15

So we can at least manage the heat of the contents in that tea kettle. We can't do that if we don't even have an awareness of what trauma is. And I when I came back from deployment, there was that voice in my head that said, pay attention to how people heal after they come home. And those are pieces in my book of people who were supported heavily during the deployment by family. They received a lot of care packages. It was, don't worry. We got you. We got your back.

Annie Emprima [: 00:21:42

We the kids are fine. You just worry about you. That kind of family, those individuals came back and they rebounded much faster. They didn't have a buildup of interest and late payment fees in their emotional healing. It's the people who were very isolated or there was turmoil or their spouse conflict with the spouse that it was this double tap of impact. We get the dysregulation of what's happening in front of them and then at the 15 meter mark, and then they've got the dysregulation at the 300 meter mark of what's happening at home. So it's this double wave. Those individuals, when they came back, were more susceptible to suicidal ideation, more susceptible to depression, more susceptible to ankle, feet, limb, joint injuries, and more susceptible to stomach issues like irritable bowel syndrome and gastric issues because the fees got so high that they could no longer pay in payments.

Annie Emprima [: 00:22:38

They were paying in the weight of the accumulation.

Kim [: 00:22:42

That's so true. That's so beautifully said. And one, being an ER nurse, it's interesting enough that there's a lot of people that come in with physical ailments. And when we do blood work and test everything, look at you, yes, you know, you're

Annie Emprima [: 00:22:58

shaking your head. That's my lane.

Kim [: 00:23:00

Come back negative. The blood works fine. Your tests are fine, But you ask them then, hey, what's going on in your world? And, wow, if there is something that's really like you were talking about, the stressors have been involved in their lives and you start listening to it and you're like, oh, yes. That's a you're manifesting now because you're so full inside. You're manifesting on physical.

Annie Emprima [: 00:23:25

Yeah. It's somatic pain. It's somatic. It's the mind being so overwhelmed that it's, like, misfiring into the body. The nervous system, the respiratory system, the circulatory system, all of these systems like a computer, it they're glitching. So if you go to look at the cable, the cables are fine if we were a human computer. The cables are fine. It's the operating system that's glitching because it's it's got so much happening.

Annie Emprima [: 00:23:53

It can't process the data anymore.

Dakota [: 00:23:55

I don't think people are aware of that that it can present in our body because so I'm a counselor for veterans and service members, and I do hear their stories. They've gone to the hospital. They've talked to the doctors. The doctors aren't listening. There is something wrong with them. The doctors don't know how to do their job, but they don't understand that it does present like, that mental health does present in their body, and so they're, like, stuck. They're not able to make that connection.

Annie Emprima [: 00:24:24

And that's one of the gifts that unfolded in all of this. I can psychically even saying the word psychic is such a foreign word for me. But psychically step into someone's body, I can overlay in and feel what they're feeling. So it's with someone who has suicidal ideation, I can step in. It's like, oh, here's where the jam is. Let's get this traffic in motion so we can get words out. We can come out of shock and at least get into into fight or flight, but we gotta get them out of freeze. So that loop get the loop to stop.

Annie Emprima [: 00:24:55

And then I work with a lot of first responders. I created a a modality called the mural method where we are using multidimensional tools to travel through the timeline. So it's not like eye movement desensitization reprocessing through first person recall. It's separated because the original document that experienced it so let's say, like a firefighter, their first event going in where there were, casualties to the fire and that rookie experiences it, that's the original document. That first moment that they experience it, we're gonna call it the original document. But through time, you replay the story. It gets altered. It gets it becomes the revised document.

Annie Emprima [: 00:25:35

We get more information. We learn more about trauma. We go through through therapy, and we add more pieces to the story. We're no longer in the original document. So we go back and we visit that version as a separate human, and they can reconcile by talking to each other. It sounds similar to a psychotherapeutic modality, but it's we're using energy to lift the seed so it doesn't become the tree, and we release the seed from that point. And stepping in with someone also allows us to start connecting the dots between the physical ailments and the traumas and when those traumas occurred. Because some of these traumas, they originated at 3, 5, 8, as we know, in the mental health side, but then they get that 3 year old story gets overlaid with the 25 year old story, which gets overlaid with the 42 year old, the the incident that happened at 42, and then we have now stacked stories.

Annie Emprima [: 00:26:22

So if we can clear 1, we can clear the collection because they're look alikes. So really interesting and I'm not a mental health professional. I'm looking at it from a metaphysical perspective of trauma, how this is truly a triangulated effort of the attributes within the mind, the body, and the soul or the spirit, depending on the belief system, that all three have to be the belief system has to be in there. I've tried working with people and, like, oh, I had a client once, and they just insisted that if they were supposed to be healed, Jesus would heal them. I said, yeah. Okay. If that's your belief system, there's nothing I can do. I can't interfere with your belief system.

Annie Emprima [: 00:26:59

That those are the ground rules that you're operating by. I can't change that unless you're willing to move that fence line. I can't help because if you believe that it's outside of your control, what am I here to do?

Kim [: 00:27:11

Usually, it takes drastic measures for people to want to open up. They get so desperate. They're like, I need to open up more.

Annie Emprima [: 00:27:20

When I came back from deployment, my world was so crumly. I had PTSD. I had physical injuries in my knees and my ankles. I had all these things happening, and I came back to a very dissociated husband, like, not home at all. And I tripped over my own feet. I got up to the top of the stairs of our brand new house. I took a couple of steps and I tripped over my own feet. I didn't have any more juice left to get up.

Annie Emprima [: 00:27:42

The battery was at 0. And I just started crying and bawling of, I can't be a wife. I can't be a mom. I can't be a business owner. I can't be in the military anymore. I can't help myself. I can't help myself. And that feeling of being at 0, all I could do was let go.

Annie Emprima [: 00:27:58

I couldn't hold onto anything anymore. There were too many trauma stones. It crumbled me. So I got to, that was my breaking point. Everyone has to have a breaking point to get to a point where they want to understand who they really are.

Kim [: 00:28:11

And that's why you are such a strong force in this world. I feel like and much like you, this is your gift. You have this website and you say you help remove inherited and experienced emotions from your mind and body so you can feel lighter and more empowered. Put down your trauma stones and walk your path with purpose.

Dakota [: 00:28:36

I love that. That's amazing. Can you kinda talk about what you do now?

Annie Emprima [: 00:28:41

I work with individuals in stages. So the when people first come to me, the first thing we do is I step into their body. I wanna find out what their body is whispering. So I talk to just the body. As if there were 3 microphones at a meeting. I turn all the other microphones off, the mind, the spirit, and all of the internal. So if we go into, like, internal family systems, Richard Schwartz's modality work, like, inside out, anger has a voice, fear has a voice, everybody aside, and it's just the body, the body will say, here's the map. Here are all the places we want you to go look.

Annie Emprima [: 00:29:12

Here's where the where the trauma squatted. We want you to go focus on those areas because that'll help me, the body. Once the body feels safe, then we can step it up. Then we start doing some deeper trauma work because now the body is being heard for the first time. Then from there, we go into a heightened awareness for people who have never worked in 4th dimension. It's just a buzzier. It's like a little like, I don't use any hypnosis, no drugs, but it's a little bit of a buzzier experience. The cerebral cortex activates.

Annie Emprima [: 00:29:46

It's a little like tingly, and we go into a heightened state of consciousness. And then we start doing the work. We go back through the timeline to meet with the younger selves. I have a modality where we can go into the ancestral tree. We climb the tree, and as we climb up, it splits. We either sit on mom's branch or dad's branch, and they will feel like, no. I feel like I'm being pulled up. Okay.

Annie Emprima [: 00:30:07

We're gonna go with grandma, grandpa, great grandma, great grandpa, and we just keep going up. And then they sit on that branch, And I have them pull that epigenetic, inherited trauma out of their body because, genetically, we can transfer down. Let's say great grandma our grandmother is very anxious during this pregnancy. There's a lot of financial woes. Maybe, there's some other factors going on in the environment. So she's got anxiety. Anxiety goes into the fetus of mom. Mom develops the eggs for us.

Annie Emprima [: 00:30:37

Mom and grandma experiences it, but mom and I have now inherited that anxiety. So we go back to give it back to grandma. And what I wasn't expecting when we started doing this, when I started doing this work with the ancestral work, in returning that epigenetic comma, I thought we were gonna have to, like, here, you take this shit. I don't and it was the opposite. It was, oh, please give it back to me. And then they would decorate their branch because it was in honor of the traumas that they endured. And it's it was like a museum piece. They would decorate it.

Annie Emprima [: 00:31:08

So when I've worked with Native Americans, sometimes they take the trauma and they weave it into a blanket or a basket. And it's like, here's the display of who I was in my lifetime and the traumas and my completion of the lessons I've endured. And they are in honor of the tribulations that they had, the the path that they walked. And I've had other ancestors decorate it with lights. Like, if they were very religious, it might have been some religious. They turned the trauma into, like, a cross or a different religious display to say, these are my beliefs. These are my plamas, and this is how I wanna be honored. And so it became this very beautiful emotional release.

Annie Emprima [: 00:31:51

It allows that person when they come back down the tree, they're now settled more into their body and not carrying the weight of their ancestors anymore. So and these things just keep happening. These modalities keep showing up in my tool my metaphysical toolbox, my quantum toolbox, and it's allowing me to do things that are a little bit edgier, a little bit more advanced than what we can get in traditional approaches. We get to do things and understand the mind, body, spirit whole and the relationship that those three primary voices have to have in addition to the secondary of the emotions. And then we have sort of these ex these tertiary individuals. It's like like a great big city council meeting, and they can come up one at a time and speak. And oftentimes, those trauma stones just wanna be heard. They don't need action.

Annie Emprima [: 00:32:41

They just need to be witnessed. I wanna be witnessed for what I experienced. I wanna be witnessed for being here. And then they just very gently release themselves, then the the trauma stones drop.

Kim [: 00:32:53

How did you come up with trauma stones? Because I really like that.

Annie Emprima [: 00:32:57

As I'm writing this book and I've been, like with the hands on my shoulders, it's go write this book. Things are just channeling in. So Trauma Stone is what I just started calling them because they carry so much weight. When we talk to someone with, like, really heavy mental illness, it's heavy. They look heavy. You look at someone with shame, the shoulders are curled, the head is down, they want to shrink, it's heavy. When we talk about when people are trying to come out of grief is heavy, Anger can be heavy. So it's I was trying to find something that encapsulated the weight of the emotions that we carry when they've gotten past the whisper, past the roar.

Annie Emprima [: 00:33:33

And I was calling them pebbles originally, like these accumulated these pebbles, and they've become bigger than the damn boulder and outweigh the boulder. And I was saying that in front of my therapist. He's like, those are not pebbles, Annie. I'm like, you've been stoned. You've been stoned. Call it what it is. I was like, alright. Trauma stones.

Annie Emprima [: 00:33:52

Okay.

Dakota [: 00:33:53

I like it. I think that's very accurate.

Annie Emprima [: 00:33:56

Yeah. And not all of the trauma stones had to be put down. They can get repurposed. Like, we have post traumatic growth, not just post traumatic stress. We can take my PTSD had to be repackaged. So my PTSD is part of what awakened some of these pieces, so I don't wanna get rid of it. I mean, it's very useful. It's very functional to me.

Annie Emprima [: 00:34:16

I had to just give it a different purpose. And then that, you know, goes back to 9/11. I felt like I had no purpose, no value to contribute, and our emotions do the same thing. They want to have a purpose. They want to know what their job is and how they can truly support the path, the path of arriving at the destination of authenticity. Wow.

Kim [: 00:34:38

So what's the name of this book that you're writing?

Annie Emprima [: 00:34:41

I'm gonna leave it up to the publisher to name it because I keep weaving through different names. And right now, it's, like, 20 words long and that can't

Kim [: 00:34:48

that doesn't sell well. So at the moment sweet.

Annie Emprima [: 00:34:54

At the moment, the primary name is Traumas Whisper Before They Roar, Are You Listening? Oh. But it will change because I've added some more terminology such as, cognitive healing cognitive processing and healing formula, and I started talking about why everyone is so different. It's the cognitive processing and healing formula is what is your learning style? What age are you? Is your do you have developed prefrontal cortex? Do you have a high a score, adverse childhood experience score? Do you have all any of these pieces? And each of those numbers affect this very big math formula of how you digest trauma and heal from it. So because so often I have clients like, well, you know, so and so on TikTok, when I work with another person, they did it this way. You can't do it that way. Your formula is different. You you have a different mouth formula. You have to abide by your formula.

Annie Emprima [: 00:35:46

And so I added some new terminology into this 3rd revision of the book. So we'll see what the name is. We'll see where it goes.

Dakota [: 00:35:52

How exciting. So when are you going what's your goal for getting the book done?

Annie Emprima [: 00:35:57

I'm hoping that it's published and ready by early November. We're on track. We're ahead of schedule. So it goes to the 2nd evaluator September 1st to 4th. So they should get it back by October 1st. I'll do the edit revisions. It should be out it could be out as early as early November.

Dakota [: 00:36:15

How exciting. I'm definitely going to be in line to get that book. Mhmm. Me too. This is so intriguing. Yeah. Absolutely.

Kim [: 00:36:22

And congratulations on that accomplishment.

Annie Emprima [: 00:36:25

Thank you.

Dakota [: 00:36:26

How long have you been writing it?

Annie Emprima [: 00:36:28

I started writing it in in 2020 without any understanding of what I was writing. I was Mhmm. Leaving the pandemic. And so I'm writing the story, like, trying to get this memoir. That was the first revision. That it was by the time we got to the second revision, it was no longer a memoir. It was mostly self help. And here's the 3rd revision, and almost all of my stories have been pulled out and all of my client stories were put in.

Annie Emprima [: 00:36:51

So it started out as like, this shit happened to me, and this sucked, and the the trauma drama.

Dakota [: 00:36:57

Mhmm.

Annie Emprima [: 00:36:58

And I've since modified it to be a little bit more comical.

Dakota [: 00:37:01

I love that. I'm so excited to read it. You'll have to tell us when it comes out.

Annie Emprima [: 00:37:06

Oh, I will. I will. Thank you.

Dakota [: 00:37:07

So can you tell the listeners how they can reach out to you or, like, talk about your website if they're interested?

Annie Emprima [: 00:37:15

Yeah. The website, and we're gonna have those links in the podcast. Right? Yes. So it's 1 Prima. Spell out the word 1 because there's only one of me. There's only one of you. We are I'm here to help you understand who you are. I don't want anyone to repeat what I'm doing or learn my methods.

Annie Emprima [: 00:37:31

I want you to understand what you are capable of. So it's oneemprima.com, and that's the same with TikTok. There's literally only one Emprima. It was the last name that I made up. I changed my name almost 20 years ago, to be more empowering. And so if anyone types in Emprima, that is me. oneemprima.com and the same with TikTok and YouTube as well. So if someone wants to go, like, dive into some really squirrelly metaphysical stuff, that would be YouTube.

Annie Emprima [: 00:38:00

My YouTube channel is some of the weirdest stuff. My website's a little bit tamer. And, TikTok people are able to watch the demos in real time as different people come up. Observers and viewers can watch how it works before they commit.

Dakota [: 00:38:16

Wow. That's amazing. Well, thank you for sharing that with us. So the way that we like to close out our podcast is, what advice do you have for women in the military now or women thinking about joining the military?

Annie Emprima [: 00:38:29

I think one with women coming into the military is understanding that as a female, we bring different function. We have a different perspective of life. We process information very differently. So to make sure that that isn't swallowed, especially in some of the more testosterone branches, I think it's a little bit less in the air force and certainly more in the marines, for women to hold their own and hold their space as a woman and not let that be a deterrent for pursuing higher rank. And also the ability to recognize when there's trauma. Because so many moments in my career, if someone had said, hey, how are you feeling right now? Check-in. Like, who or what is that feeling or thought in your head? What's rumbling? We could have prevented the tree from growing. So if we have people understanding how to put that, like, street light up and say, hey.

Annie Emprima [: 00:39:24

Here's a red light. Let's do a checkpoint. How are you feeling? Genuinely, how are you feeling? Are you frustrated? Are you angry? How can we help dissipate that as fellow brothers and sisters in arms? And then to seek support. It may be internal. It may be military services, but it could also be religious counsel or spiritual counselor. It could be a mentor to have always someone that is an arm's reach away because I see a lot of women come out of the military with anxiety, a lot of anxiety because the nervous system is so dysregulated. But if we had had checkpoints to help dissipate that along the way, we don't have such a heavy package when we exit the military. We've taken care of our nervous system as we moved along and progressed.

Annie Emprima [: 00:40:09

So seek support.

Kim [: 00:40:10

Annie, thank you so much. You've been such a light on this podcast. And so, we just wanna thank you for being on and for everything that you've gone through and making it just become a reality.

Annie Emprima [: 00:40:22

Thank you for having me.

Kim [: 00:40:27

Thank you for tuning into Dog Tag Diaries. We appreciate your willingness to listen and engage with these stories. As we understand the challenge that comes with sharing and hearing them. Your support in witnessing the experience of our military women is invaluable. These stories are meant to inspire and provide meaning, and we hope they can help you find your own voice as well.

Dakota [: 00:40:51

If you or anyone you know are in need of immediate help, call the crisis line by dialing 988, then press 1. There are resources available to help and provide guidance during difficult times. Please visit our website, www.reveilleandretreatproject.org, to learn more about the Reveille and Retreat Project, including upcoming retreats for military women and resources. The link is in the show notes. We'll be here again next Wednesday. Keep finding the hope, the healing, and the power in community.