Healing Love Wounds with Tammy Cox

What if the hardest patterns in love aren’t personal failings, but brilliant survival strategies asking to be updated? We sit down with trauma specialist Tammy Cox to unpack how childhood and generational wounds quietly script our relationships—and how to turn that script into wisdom we can actually use.

We start by redefining trauma beyond TV‑worthy extremes, focusing on the subtle moments that overwhelm a young nervous system and get stored in the body. Tammy maps the classic fight, flight, and freeze responses and shows why opposites so often pair up in couples, creating conflict loops that feel fated. From there, we explore epigenetics and the seven‑generation echo of stress, scarcity, and fear—inheritances that shape our triggers around intimacy, money, and safety without us realizing it.

Then we get practical. You’ll learn a simple process to track triggers down to core beliefs, test those beliefs against real evidence, and replace them with language your body can trust. We share gratitude practices that lower the nervous system’s alarm and reframe tough moments without denying pain, plus real‑life rituals that shift family energy from victim to agent. The heart of the conversation lands on inner‑child work—how to meet the younger you with warmth, give her what was missing, and build a relationship that makes self‑respect and secure love feel natural.

Tammy also invites listeners to her podcast, Behind the Veil Anonymous Transformations, where qualified participants receive a powerful, anonymous session focused on relationship patterns. If you’ve grown in many areas but one stubborn thread keeps pulling you back, this conversation will give you a map, language, and doable steps to create change that lasts.

If this resonated, follow and share the show, leave a review to help others find it, and tell us: which pattern are you ready to retire next?

Chapters

• 0:00 Meet Tammy: Trauma, Love, Patterns
• 2:41 What Counts as Childhood Trauma
• 5:41 Generational Wounds and Inherited Pain
• 8:51 Fight, Flight, Freeze in Relationships
• 12:31 Neutralizing Trauma Into Wisdom
• 15:11 Spotting Triggers and Core Beliefs
• 19:11 Epigenetics and Seven Generations

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:11

Hello there and welcome back to the next episode of Overcome Yourself the Podcast. As you know, my name is Nicole, and I'm very excited to be here today with Tammy. And Tammy, I'm not going to butcher this. She helps people overcome trauma. Is that close enough? Yep.

SPEAKER_00: 0:28

That's close enough.

SPEAKER_01: 0:29

Perfect. So take it away, Tammy, and please um introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about who you are and who you help.

SPEAKER_00: 0:37

Yeah, I am Tammy Cox. I am a trauma specialist. Uh mostly, I mostly help women who are looking, either looking for love or looking to save their love. I help them heal those uh those wounds, the love wounds, um, and I help them heal their childhood wounds in order to really find that lasting love. So that's who I tend to help more than anyone else. Um, but really the work I do is is around those trauma wounds in early childhood.

SPEAKER_01: 1:12

So okay, so as someone who lost her mom when she was just one and a half, I know all about childhood traumas and how they rear their ugly heads when you least expect it as a grown-up. So can you tell us a little bit about um what it could mean to have childhood trauma? Um, because I used to be like, well, I'm just a kid from the suburbs. Like I don't, I'm not traumatized. But then, you know, as you grow up, you're like, oh, wait, that was that was trauma. So can you talk to us a little bit about what that means?

SPEAKER_00: 1:43

Yeah, I think that's such a funny statement when I have so many people that said, Oh, I didn't have a child, uh traumatic childhood. And uh yes, we all do. I mean, the the birth experience itself is very traumatic. Do we remember it all? No, not necessarily, which is the reason why I I work mostly with a subconscious mind. But here's another fact that people need to know. On the moment of conception, you inherit all of your mom and your dad's DNA, which means all of the traumas they didn't deal with, all of their pain, all of their wounding. So what I find with most of my clients is that if we follow that pattern all the way back to where it originates from, it almost always goes before their lifetime. So, um, and and here's the deal this is how you know you have trauma. If there is something in your life that you have wanted and you have not been able to either have or retain it, keep it, you have trauma. So just think about it like that. So I deal with people who are wanting love, who are uh stunted somewhere in their their romantic department. So what we're looking at is those patterns. And we we have to look, we have to look either in the childhood or before, because those don't start later on in life, they just surface later on in life. Very big difference. So um we all, if if we have something in life that we want to obtain that we have not yet, it all goes back to that wounding. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01: 3:27

Um yeah, it just make me think like um when I was really little. One one thing that you said that we don't remember the trauma of being birth, something that I learned recently is that when you go under anesthesia, the doctors give you one medicine to like calm your body, like to shut down your body, but they have to give you another medicine to kind of erase the memory of the time so that your mind doesn't remember, because our bodies do remember the trauma, even if we're not consciously there. And so that is something that stays with us inside of our bodies. Um, and if they didn't do that, like we would we would be traumatized about it and we wouldn't even know why, because our body would be scared, right? Um, so it is a big deal when we go through these things. And and I think we think of like big examples like what we see on TV, like when a little girl, like you know, like her dad beats her, like that happened to me, and then you end up getting into relationships where people are beating you, like happened to me, right? So, can you give us some examples of those patterns that might not be so obvious, maybe?

SPEAKER_00: 4:38

Yeah, so there's some, so you've heard of like the fight or flight, right? It's that response that you have, it's the way you have learned how to survive your trauma. Some of us freeze, we get small. Like within my my my husband and I all talk about because we have the opposite trauma responses. And this is what I find with a lot of my clients. They marry someone with the opposite trauma response. So my trauma response is to fight. I go into fight. You know, that's what I learned to do because I, like you, came from abuse, and you know, we fought in my family of origin. That was just normal. With within my husband's family, it was the opposite. He gets quiet, he gets small, he leaves, right? So it's that freeze response, it's that flight response. Um, so we have opposing, you know, trauma responses. And this is what I find is those are the two um very common ones. So if you are in an altercation, say with your with your significant other, what is your response? And then we can look at that and track it back to where it started, the moment it started, right? That goes back to childhood. Those are the sort of subtle ones. If you, you know, go into a classroom, you'll see the one kid like hiding, being very quiet, and you'll see the other one loud, bully-like, conduct, um, aggressive. Those are the two very common trauma responses. And of course, there's like everything in the middle, but um, we all have them. Like there's not one person that is alive today that hasn't been through trauma. Like I said, we come into the world with trauma, we exit the world through trauma. It's trauma is just a normal part of the human experience as of you know, up to date. Like it's just normal. It's just about what we do with that trauma. So, with my clients, what I'm looking to do is to neutralize the trauma. So, trauma minus the emotion is wisdom. So, we we we get to glean the wisdom from it by removing that emotional tag. Because imagine just going back to each and every one of those traumatic events from your childhood and literally just pulling the tag that that emotional tag off of it. What happens is it's neutral, it's as if it wasn't even you, you know. So it really becomes this beautiful thing where you now get to create the new identity because your identity was created in those first five years and you didn't have any say over it, really.

SPEAKER_01: 7:10

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, when you talk about generational trauma, I actually was reading a study um of they did with mice, and they they shocked the little feet of these little mice. And then the next generation, the first time that they put them into this cage, they they were scared. Nobody told them that this is what was gonna happen, but the trauma was there. Um, and so this is a very real thing. This is not a woo-woo thing. Um, when we're talking about generational trauma, not just in the patterns, the rules that our parents set for themselves, like, you know, like our great-grandparents who survived the Great Depression, like my, you know, like their favorite snacks are so different than the ones who came after them. And then they grew up in the 90s, and there was an abundance of everything, and it was like lunchables and and all these things in excess, right? But there's also the the the deep down to the DNA level, like you were talking about about the generational trauma. So what do we do? Like how do we how do we face this? How do we take inventory and then how do we reach out to you and say, help me with this?

SPEAKER_00: 8:25

Yes. Well, so if someone didn't have the meat, I think anyone who's watching this podcast is already on their healing journey, right? On some level or another. The easiest thing to start tracking is your emotions, your uh beliefs, your uh thoughts. And here's how I like it to go. When you get triggered, start to track your triggers. Okay. So I give, you know, I'll give I've been giving this example recently. I have teenage daughters. Uh it's very triggering for me when they speak to me in not so nice ways, right? And so I started to look at that. I said, okay, what am I getting upset about? And I start to just journal, you know, and I journal all the way down till I get to the belief. So this is what I I highly recommend people do. I look at the triggers. What am I really upset about? And then keep writing out the beliefs. Well, at the base of that belief was I'm not a good mom. That was the at the place that that was the reason why I was getting so upset, is because at the base level, I believed that I wasn't a good mom. And so then you get to work with those beliefs, right? Is that true? No, I'm I I've kept them alive. I mean, I gave them, I gave birth to them, I've been feeding them, I put a roof over their head. Uh, I've gone through my healing journey even because of my kids. So um, I don't believe in perfection. That's not a thing. So throw that one out. But uh you have to look at those beliefs and say, where did this come from? Well, it didn't come directly from me. I've, you know, I received that from my parents and on and on and on. But you get to look at your beliefs as malleable, knowing that um a belief is just a thought you keep thinking. So you could change that, right? Um, your words you could change, your emotional state you can change. It's about like healing that nervous system and just looking. So instead of getting triggered and be like, I'm triggered, making it everyone else's problem, go inward and say, What is bothering me? What is the belief that is creating this emotion in my body? And sometimes I like to even make it easier by saying, What would I have to believe about myself to feel like I'm feeling right now? What would I have to believe about life in order to be experiencing this emotion right now? What would I have to experience about you get it? You can go down the line, but but you get to start really analyzing your beliefs, knowing that your beliefs are not you. You don't get to judge them. Yes, they came down the trap. You were you were talking about epigenetics just now. Um, and epigenetics, you're right, it's that's science now. We've been, you know, that's that came out, I believe, in the 50s, uh, starting to study epigenetics, where literally wrapped around every strand of DNA in your body is something called epigenetics, which is the beliefs um and the emotion and the trauma of the past seven generations. So, yes. And it is our honor, it is our honor to heal it.

SPEAKER_01: 11:32

Yes, seven generations. That is that's a lot of generations, that's a lot of of baggage that our DNA is carrying. And yeah, and we get to decide um, are we gonna pass this on or are we gonna face it, right? Because it is about facing it. Um, and I love how, and you you said it yourself, how do you approach this with curiosity? There's no shame here, like you don't shame yourself into into oh, you think you're a bad person? Well, of course you think you're a bad person because you're a worse person because that's what you think. And you just spiral down, right? And so approaching it with curiosity and thinking, where is this coming from? Is it even true? Is there any evidence that this is true? And and and just going down that rabbit hole of questions and just finding out what's the root of it. I absolutely love that. Um, my one of the foundational things that I teach is gratitude. So I'd like to know what part gratitude plays in this journey, I guess in in coming back to the right now, right? Because if we're going into these memories, we're taking the emotion out of them, but then we got to come to the right now. And that's what I use gratitude for. So I want to know what role you you feel it plays in this journey.

SPEAKER_00: 12:54

Well, if you look at our beliefs as like, I like to see it as like a prescription that we're literally wearing, right? Um, what gratitude, when you put the prescription of gratitude on and you see everything through the lens of gratitude, it's like everything is always working out for my good. That's why I tell people, you know, I'm so grateful for my trauma. I wouldn't be here today doing what I do now if I didn't go through all that. It was such a gift to me. But if I didn't heal it, it would not be a gift to me still, you know. So it's that lens, that prescription that says this is all working out for my good, versus I'm a victim. Every life is happening to me, um, everyone's against me. Life sucks. Whatever the whatever those um beliefs are that you got imprinted with, that's a prescription. So gratitude allows you the ability to put on the rose-colored glasses and to see that no, it actually all is a gift, and you did just didn't see it through that perspective because you you had the wrong prescription on.

SPEAKER_01: 14:03

Yes. And that's such an important point because we're looking at the same thing, you know. And I had to train myself when something is going wrong, you know, you start getting mad, you start getting upset. Hold up. I tell myself, like in my head, you know, if I'm in a big crowd, sometimes if I'm by myself, I'll be like, hold on, staff meeting. What are we feeling grateful for right now? Because it does reshift that focus, exactly like you said. I love the prescription um analogy because that's exactly what it does. You're looking at the same thing, you're just looking at it differently. Um, and that, like I said, that brings you back to the here, to the now, to the I'm safe, to the to the level, right? Oh my gosh, I love that so much.

SPEAKER_00: 14:45

So I um and if I may intervene this too, when my kids were young, my older two were young, uh, whenever I'd catch them complaining, they had to give me 10 things that they were thankful for. And we'd go like this because I wanted to shift their um, I wanted to to to shift their energy, right? And so this, I found that it worked for me. So I started doing it with them. And at the first, when they first started listing off, they're like, you know, like in a terrible mood. By the then you'd see them soften with each thing that they had to, you know, come up with, it shifted their their their thought process. And so instead of going into victim, they went into victor, right? They went into, oh, I get to own all this. Look at how great my life is. And that is the the shift that's called taking thoughts captive. That's what I like to call that. It's it's saying, I get to choose my emotional state by choosing my thoughts. So yeah, beautiful.

SPEAKER_01: 15:42

Yes, and it changes like your body as well. Like there's reports of faster healing, of lowered blood pressure, like these are real results, like people literally healing from surgeries faster than they're supposed to. And it was gratitude, was the you know, was that what they had changed. So um, it's so powerful. Um, so thank you. Thank you for mentioning that. So um you did mention to me that you might have a gift for the audience. So can you tell us a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_00: 16:12

Uh yeah, so I have a podcast. It's called Behind the Veil Anonymous Transformations, where you can literally um well apply to beyond, but you can I what happens is you'll you'll come on, we will find your particular pattern, usually in in the realm of like um relationships. And uh I take you through a process, my my personal process. And the the great part about this is that it's totally anonymous, and you get a free session out of this. And I've been getting reports back that it has been profoundly powerful just in one session from people coming on them, finding um having really, really big transformations from it. So yeah, I I would love to offer that to your audience. And and just so you know, this is not for someone who has barely started their inner journey. This is for someone who has been going through the things and they have not been able to fix this one part because it is a it's it would be considered a pretty intense therapy for for just a beginner. So um, but if that sounds like you and it's like this one area, I'm been successful in all these other areas of my life, but this one has just really been a stock point for me. That tends to be um my ideal uh audience, an audience, not audience. Um what is the word for someone that comes on? Participant. We'll call them.

SPEAKER_01: 17:41

There you go, participant. I love that. Um, and so you can listen to the podcast or you can apply to be on the podcast, or you can do both. You can listen and then apply to be on the podcast. That is awesome. Yeah. And um, all right, and then talk to me. How can we stay in touch with you? Like, how can we follow you on social media?

SPEAKER_00: 18:00

Yeah, so I have my link tree that has all my socials on it. I'm on just just about every platform. So pick your platform on my link tree. Um, there's also uh, if you want to book a discovery call, if this sounds like some work that you'd be interested in, you could book a discovery call for me, 20 minutes um of my time to see if maybe we'd be a good fit in working together. Or you can come on and apply to be on the podcast. Either way, stay stay in my little bubble, get all my updates. And um, yeah, I definitely put a lot of content out there, especially on Instagram.

SPEAKER_01: 18:38

Awesome. So, you guys make sure to check out the podcast as well as if you're interested um and you want a free session, um, apply to be on the podcast with Tammy. Now, before we sign off, I like to know what is like your best tip, you know, like that big tip that gives your clients the the biggest aha moment. Like we want you to spill it here first.

SPEAKER_00: 19:02

Okay. So, what I find to be most effective with my clients is really nurturing that inner child. So the greatest work that I do with them is to really develop a relationship with that little girl within them that is still scared, that is still hurting. Um, as she nurtures that little girl, she heals herself. And so it's just a really beautiful thing. If you watch the podcast, you know, you'll see the the little journeys that I take people through. But it almost all of them, it's this connection to that younger them that really needed to be nurtured and loved and didn't get all their needs met. And so we get to do that for our little self. And she's still in there and she still wants all your time and your attention, and you get to be the parent that she needed. So absolutely, I love that.

SPEAKER_01: 19:54

I love that so much. Um, and yeah, I I love to remind my clients like, have grace on yourself. Remember, you are still that little girl. So, like when you make a mistake, you spill something, right? Um, you're not gonna yell at her. Like, imagine you in pigtails when you were four years old. Like, you're not gonna yell at her. You're gonna be like, oh, sweetie, come on, let's pick it up. It's okay, let's get some paper towels. So always have grace for yourself. And I think that just goes in line with what you said. Um, I love it.

SPEAKER_00: 20:22

Yeah, and it makes it, yeah, it makes it a little bit easier when they see her, when they experience her, when they go to her, all of a sudden you can't unsee that. You know, it's that because someone could tell you that, like, oh, nurture yourself like that little child. But when they connect to her and they feel I have them feel her emotions, they go in and they feel it for her. They they really release that that emotion for her. And then it's just like you can't not have that relationship when you experience her on that intimate level.

SPEAKER_01: 20:52

I love that. I have um, I have a picture of myself when I was a little kid, which is like, you know, just full on laughing. And so I just remember, I'm like, oh, that's you're still her, like that's still you, you know, like that happiness, that joy. Um, that's still you. So I love that so much. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you so much for being here with us today, Tammy. This has been absolutely amazing, and we will catch you guys next time on the next episode of Overcome Yourself the Podcast.

SPEAKER_00: 21:21

Bye. Bye.