430 | Core Memories, Unhealed Wounds, and What It Looks Like When a Dad Does the Inner Work (Mark Odland)
Episode Description
Most dads are carrying something they never dealt with. In this episode, therapist Mark Odland explains how unprocessed memories stay stuck in the brain and quietly shape the way you parent, the way you react, and the way you show up at home. You'll also hear what trauma therapy actually is, why doing the inner work is one of the bravest things a dad can do, and how healing in one generation changes everything for the next.
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Mark Odland is a licensed therapist, trauma specialist, and the founder of Lion Counseling. He's also the author of Escape the Cage. Mark and his wife have four kids and live in Duluth, Minnesota, where yes, he has surfed Lake Superior.
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When your nervous system gets overwhelmed, memories can get stored in a way that doesn't heal properly and that affects you more than you realize years later.
The "butterfly hug" tapping technique is something you can use with your kids in real time to help a hard moment not become a stuck wound.
Trauma therapy helps the brain do what it was already designed to do, heal itself when the right conditions are present.
The cage many high achieving men live in isn't always visible from the outside. But deep down, they know something's in the way.
Whatever you wish your dad had done differently with you, ask yourself if you're doing that with your kids. That question is a powerful starting point.
Doing one therapy session doesn't commit you to years on a couch. It's just a first step, and first steps create momentum.
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JEFF: Welcome back to Dad Awesome. My name is Jeff Zaugg and I'm so thankful you're listening today to episode 430. I want to quickly acknowledge and say thank you to our community at Dad Awesome — those of you who have stepped in and bought the book Dad Awesome. We're one month in since the launch in mid-March, and my heart is just so glad and so thankful. One, it was a ton of work, so I'm thankful the book is out in the wild. Two, many of you have been purchasing more than just a copy for yourself. You've been gifting the book to your friends, your brother-in-law, and some of you to your kids if you're a grandparent. Some of you have bought it for your small group. I have a friend who bought it for his men's ministry. It's been so fun. The ripple effect — it's hard sometimes for a podcast to ripple outward and impact others around us, but the book, because it's distilling the eight and a half years of discoveries, it's been really fun. I've been sending video text messages to all of you who bought ten books, and the response has been really encouraging. Hearing how you're giving them away, how you're choosing to use the book as an affirmation — "I see you being an awesome dad, I knew you'd resonate with this mission, maybe there's some helpful discoveries in here for you." So thank you. I just wanted to say thank you.
If you haven't grabbed a copy yet, just go to dadawesome.org/book. I've been talking about it the last six to eight weeks. One more invitation: the Mom Awesome Challenge kicks off May 1st. It's a ten-day challenge around pursuing the heart of your wife. It's ways to pray, specific daily activations we can step into. It's a free challenge for ten days. You just need to text the word "mom" to 651-370-8618. You'll receive a daily text message for ten days equipping, resourcing, and nudging you to pray for, serve, love, and pursue Mom Awesome.
Today's conversation is with Mark Odland. So grateful for him. He's in Duluth, Minnesota. He's also gone surfing multiple times on Lake Superior, which — there are very few of us — and we found that out during our conversation. He has a heart for men and helping men walk in freedom. You'll hear in a moment how he has gone about doing this for decades. This is episode 430 with Mark Odland.
JEFF: Mark, I'm in Florida, you're in Duluth, Minnesota. Welcome to Dad Awesome.
MARK: Thanks, Jeff. Happy to be here. I have to say I wouldn't be sad if I were in Florida right now, but I'll take it.
JEFF: We can make it happen if you have a wealthy friend with a private jet. We could fly you down. That's it for next time. Okay, so just for fun, to dive into dad life — you have a new chapter. Before you even talk about your kids and your learnings, sometimes it's good to learn through a side door. So: fatherhood learnings from an Aussie Labradoodle. Did I get it right?
MARK: You were close. It was an Aussie Labradoodle. No golden in there.
JEFF: Sorry about that. What are you learning that could possibly apply to me as a dad from the first two weeks of welcoming a little puppy home?
MARK: One thing I'm learning about myself is there's this part of me that loves my freedom. My wife and I trade off using our office space. She's a life coach and wellness coach, and I'm a therapist. Mondays and Tuesdays she's in the office, and I'm working from coffee shops. I love that. Mondays and Tuesdays are different now. I'm gone and I'm thinking about how to capture time and be efficient. But I feel like God was telling me, "Mark, you struggle to be present sometimes." There's nothing better than this puppy who is on this schedule of bathroom, eating, playing, repeat — it's going to force you to slow down, smile, be in the moment, and embrace it. And you can get that through parenting too, right? Put down the phone, let the email go, and look your seven-year-old son in the eyes. Connect with him so he sees me, I see him. Just because I'm a therapist doesn't mean I have that all figured out. It's a constant challenge to dial in and be present.
JEFF: Yes. We are champions and cheerleaders for courageous dads going to see a therapist, a counselor, going into their story, doing the below-the-surface work. It takes courage, and most dads don't. That's one of my prayers for this conversation. Now, some therapists and counselors will actually have a dog in their office, especially working with kids — it just lowers your guard. Have you found any of that with the puppy?
MARK: Definitely. Our puppy's got a lot of energy, so we have to run it out of him before he'll contentedly sit in our lap and chill. But one of the things that attracted us to the breeder we picked him up from was on their website — they've got twenty or thirty photos of previous puppies that are now with police officers or EMTs. Not the dogs who go after the bad guys, but the dogs who sit there with officers to help them regulate their nervous system after seeing and doing really hard things. My wife and I were praying about it and we felt like, yeah, we trust this is a good move for our family at this season of life. The net positive of what it's going to do for our joy and our nervous system — it's going to essentially be our therapy dog. So it's good.
JEFF: I love it. So you're a dad of four kids, oldest is eighteen down to your youngest who is seven. In this phase, give us a little snapshot. What is your family like? What do you guys do for fun? What's causing joy and laughter on the home front?
MARK: This phase is interesting — we're seeing our first off to college in the fall. We're really conscious of the time passing. There's some excitement there and some heartache too. I'm thinking about how our family will look different. Part of it is really planning those family events. It doesn't have to be a big vacation — just fighting for family time while honoring her independence as she naturally moves toward spending more time with friends. We still usually find a way to have family dinner. We try to tuck our kids in at night. On the weekends we're getting outside, doing something adventurous here in Duluth, Minnesota. Even though it's cold, we have beautiful scenery, trails, hiking. But also watching a family movie, playing a board game. The other day my son who just had his final knee surgery — third surgery after a bad basketball injury about a year ago — he said, "Dad, I think we gotta get that old board game we used to play together. It's one of my core memories." I'm like, whoa. We ordered it on Amazon and last night we had it spread out over the dinner table and it was an unfinished game. So my wife's really happy that the whole dinner table has been taken over by this board game that may never end.
JEFF: Never-ending board games — that is real. You're five or six years ahead of my father chapter. My oldest is twelve. When you use the phrase "core memory," I think sometimes they're accidental versus intentional, but they can be more intentional. What stirs up for you around that theme? Is there anything you wish you knew five or six years ago at my phase?
MARK: I don't know if any of you have seen the movie Inside Out. That movie is actually a window into the kind of trauma therapy I do in my day job. The metaphor of core memories — they really do form our identity. They shape us behind the scenes. All you have to do is think about people who are struggling with watching a loved one go through memory loss, and you see that their essence seems to diminish as their memory decreases. There's something powerful about that. We just came off Good Friday and Easter, and that thief on the cross is looking at Jesus and saying, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." And he says, "Today you'll be with me in paradise." God has been speaking a lot to me about the role of memory in my life and in my faith. At the end of the day, there's something so powerful about not only what we remember, but who remembers us. If our Savior remembers us, we're okay. And as a dad, if I remember to spend time with my kids — as exciting as Christmas can be, it's okay to give gifts — but building memories tends to be a lot more lasting than the stuff we get. I can barely remember what I got last year for Christmas. But I remember experiences.
Core memories can also be unexpected. When we went to Disney World for the first time, our now eighteen-year-old was four or five. We had this place on the beach, all these cool things. We asked, "Honey, what was your favorite part?" And she said, "Playing with the shells with my aunt." Playing with shells. We could never have predicted that. But we laid the groundwork where that opportunity could happen — because she felt safe, she felt loved. Our job as parents is to create those conditions and then trust.
JEFF: This is really helpful. I'm thinking about yesterday, a moment that happened on our couch. Two of my daughters were crying over a transition we're working through. It was during my work day and we just paused — it took two hours. The first part was just sitting with it. I even read this quote I learned from you, from Jordan Peterson: "A little compassion goes a long way." Such simple wisdom. But in this case it was a signal for my wife that we needed to stay in this moment versus move past it. Then we did a step two — we went out for ice cream. Not to wash over or numb, but actually to give thanks for what we're stepping through. Celebration and grief aren't that far apart sometimes, are they?
MARK: That's a great way to put it. Some parents might try to distract too much, and that can be its own issue. But if I bring my kid to the doctor and they need a shot, there's the sucker at the end, the sticker. There's the kiss on the knee after they skin it. There's something psychological that almost rewrites that memory. There's something about it at a neurobiological level — when we stitch a positive experience into a hard memory, it actually helps that memory get packaged in a more balanced, more beautiful way, filled with truth rather than just pain. It's a very intuitive thing you're doing as a dad that's actually a principle I keep in mind when I'm doing trauma therapy.
JEFF: I want to go a little deeper on trauma therapy. I'll share a story from when I was a kid. I was driving a snowmobile on our driveway in northern Wisconsin on an icy day. Another snowmobile came down the driveway in the other direction. I didn't see them until we were at a corner. I locked up the brakes, we slid, and my foot ended up between the two snowmobiles when they collided. Probably should have gone to the hospital. But we iced it, it wasn't swelling too bad, and the next day I had a hockey game. My hockey skates provided enough support that I felt pretty strong, so I figured I didn't need the hospital. Thirty years later, when I wear rollerblades, the way they tighten on my foot — something broke and it was never set correctly. I'm using this as a parallel to parts of our story — core memories, positive or suppressed, that still affect us today. I'd love to hear from you what that stirs up and how we can become curious about deeper healing instead of just dealing with the pain every time we strap those rollerblades on.
MARK: As dads, sometimes we're trying to balance our parenting with the energy our wife might be giving. That Jordan Peterson quote implies we do need compassion, and you gave it. But the dark side of too much compassion is that complete compassion with no boundaries can actually be destructive. We want our kids to feel loved and safe, but we also want them to be resilient. And sometimes we go too far with the "tough it out" mentality. It has its place, but sometimes it comes back to bite us.
What you just described is actually a metaphor for how the brain heals. A bone needs to be set so it can heal properly. Similarly, if we experience something that overwhelms our nervous system to the point where we can't cope the way we normally would, often there's an impulse to run, to fight, or if we can't do either of those, to freeze in place until the danger's over. For little kids, a lot of things can feel unsafe.
What happens sometimes is those memories don't get processed. They don't become learning. They get stored in their own little bubble, almost frozen in time. We compartmentalize, we grow up, we develop coping skills, we stay busy. But then something in our life pokes that old hibernating memory from the past, and we get a disproportionate emotional response. We have a lot of dads who are steady ninety percent of the time, but when this specific thing happens at work, or their wife says this thing, or their kid does this — that's what I do a lot with the guys I work with. We do detective work. We figure out what the core sensitivity is, what the lie is that's embedded in that feeling. It's usually an "I" statement. I'm not good enough. I'm a failure. I'm not safe. I'm helpless. I'm worthless. I'm out of control. It's not rational. But if you had an experience early in life where that memory got stuck, you're vulnerable in the present to feel that same feeling and believe that same lie. Until some of those things get healed, you're walking around a little exposed, a little less steady than you'd like to be.
Back to the metaphor — sometimes the memory gets stuck. It doesn't get set the right way. That's essentially what trauma is. An experience that was emotionally overwhelming for our nervous system and got stored incorrectly. It gets in the way later in life. But the beauty is, whether you're doing trauma therapy as an adult or doing simple things in the moment with your kids, there are ways to help a hard experience not become a stuck wound. Not become a beaver dam. Up here in Minnesota we have beaver dams. They block the river and force things in a different direction. If we can dislodge what's blocking the flow, the brain — these amazing brains God gave us — can actually heal itself. Just like a cut heals unless it's infected. Just like a bone heals if it's set properly. Our brains can heal as long as we have the opportunity to be connected to safety and truth in relation to that experience.
JEFF: I want to stay there for a moment. Something happens with one of my daughters and I want to not rush past it, not say it's not a big deal. Give me a little more coaching for how to help remove the beaver dam so it doesn't cause harm later.
MARK: Sometimes it's as simple as an outside distraction, in the best sense of the word. Walking. Or for kids, what they call the butterfly hug — you cross your arms like butterfly wings and tap left, right, left, right, left, right. There's something about thinking about something difficult or painful while you're tapping, especially if they're sitting on mom or dad's lap or you've got an arm around them, and you're reminding them of the truth. "You're safe now, it's over. You did a good job. You know, God loves you, God forgives you. We're not mad at you. Everyone makes mistakes." There's something about the left-right brain connection and that outside distraction that helps that stuck memory flow. Helps the beaver dam get removed. Helps the truth get woven into the memory itself. That's a mini version of the kind of in-depth therapy I do with people in my office.
JEFF: Can you give a flyover for someone who hasn't heard of trauma therapy in this deeper clinical sense? What might that look like in a session?
MARK: The therapy I'm trained in has been around over forty years. It's endorsed by the Department of Health and the Department of Defense. It became well known for helping soldiers with PTSD, and since then we've found it helps anyone struggling with unhealed trauma from their past. A lot of the guys I work with come in presenting things like: I'm feeling stressed out, I'm feeling numb, I'm struggling with a behavior I'd like to shake. My relationships aren't great. We do detective work to figure out where the seeds of those lies and insecurities came from. You can usually pinpoint a series of memories.
In session, a client pulls up a painful memory, shines the spotlight on it, feels it in the safety of the office with a therapist they trust. Then we do a set of about thirty seconds — not talking, just thinking, prayerfully letting the mind go wherever it goes. Then we stop, take a deep breath, and do a quick check-in. What's coming up for you? What are you noticing?
Here's what I hear: "Man, I know it's been thirty years, but I felt a lot of emotion there." Okay, just notice that. Another set. Take a deep breath. What are you noticing now? "That's weird. I feel a lot calmer." Okay, go with that. Another set. "I just thought about a scripture. It's really comforting. It actually wasn't my fault. I was just a kid." Okay, go with that. Your brain is doing the work. For my Christian clients, we're trusting that God is part of this process. We're removing the barriers biologically so the truth can get in.
By the end of the session, we know the memory is healed because you can go back to it on a scale of zero to ten — zero being completely calm, ten being the worst — and it's a zero. And then we measure how true the truth actually feels, not just in your head but in your heart, in your gut. "It wasn't my fault. I was just a kid." When you hold that truth and think about the memory, how true does it feel? "Completely true." That change sticks.
At the next session, you check in on that memory. And here's what people say: "It's hard to see the memory now. It's almost like a positive image is taking the place of that painful one. And I feel calm." The skeptic might say, are you erasing people's memories? No. If I asked any of those guys to write down everything that happened, they could still do it. But the way they hold the memory has changed. It's calm. Like bricks in a backpack — with every memory that gets resolved, every brick that's removed, the whole system gets a little lighter.
JEFF: As you're explaining that, I'm having a flood of memories with four different counselors over the last twenty years. I can remember details about the rooms I was in. One was virtual while I was traveling — just his voice on a call. And the title of your book, Escape the Cage — the idea of being caged. You wrote this for high-driven, achieving men. And that was me. Major things happened in my story that caused me to go see a counselor. For me, it took a major thing. And my kids get the benefit of dad going because of those major things — my dad passing away, or this thing or that thing. These major events became a big gift to the normal life I get to live today. I want so badly for the dad listening to get curious and courageous. To be able, a couple years from now, to look back and say, "I actually looked like I was free and charged, but I know there were areas of my life where I was living caged." How would you add to that cage metaphor and why a dad should take a step toward seeing a therapist?
MARK: First of all, that's awesome, Jeff, that you did that work. What a gift — for you, for your family, for the ripple effect in your life. I've had three rounds myself. My own trauma therapy sessions have been really life-changing.
I think sometimes even in Christian circles as guys, we can write off therapy as something that's not masculine enough, not tough enough — too touchy-feely. But if your car has the check engine light on and you just ignore it, eventually something's going to break down. Our emotions — the word emotion literally means "what moves us" — these things move us. And it's not just the emotions we're aware of. It's all the gymnastics we do to avoid feeling certain emotions through coping behaviors, through workaholism, through addiction, through numbness, through distraction. And then we're missing out on the most important things in our lives — the family we love so deeply, our friends, even our own faith. Our nervous system isn't always very good at nuance. If you start to go numb in one area of your life, it spills into other areas.
My dad passed away about four years ago, so that's a tough one for many of us. Around that same time, I was also getting burned out as a trauma therapist, working thirty clients a week, just grinding, walking down the journey with all these people, feeling their pain — and not taking good enough care of myself, not being spiritually centered the way I needed to be. Then COVID hit. It was a perfect storm and I was burned out badly. I had to take quite a bit of time off and regroup, focus on my own healing. By God's grace, I'm on the other side of it. Part of what was birthed out of that was this new chapter — Lion Counseling. God created us to be lions. Not just providing and protecting, but being creative and loving and leaving a legacy. The cage is what a lot of high-performing guys feel, whether they're aware of it or not. They're feeling the stress, the weight. They're stuck. And I feel like God is calling me to help nudge guys to say: you can break free. Maybe the door is already open and you've just been conditioned to think you're still in a prison. You don't have to be.
JEFF: I'm envisioning polar bears or lions at a zoo. They have this strength and size and swagger, but in a cage they just loop around and around. All day long, nothing disrupts the loop. There's a little bit of safety to those rhythms, right? Maybe in a career, we find ourselves going around and around because it's allowing us to provide. And maybe God has called you to stay right where you're at and trust him. But for some of us, healing usually precedes breakthrough. Doing some looking back before you try to propel forward in a different direction. And I want to parallel this to something we both share — we've both surfed on Lake Superior. We've both paddled out. You're on Park Point. I've been on Stony Point, maybe twenty or thirty miles up the coast. Vicious lake during storms. Absolutely vicious. But we've chosen to go out into cold water and surf. You do that because you've seen other people surf, you have an idea of what it might be like. But you don't enter freezing water and face those waves without some vision that it's going to be epic. And usually it's harder than you thought, takes longer than you thought, colder than you thought. But what would you add to the surfing metaphor for a dad considering taking a step into counseling?
MARK: You know Jocko Willink, the Navy SEAL? His whole thing is just: Good. Whatever happens, good. If you're a dad listening and you're like, "Yeah, I've never done the therapy thing. It seems like a hassle. How am I going to make time? Do I have the budget?" You're creating barriers in your mind and ignoring that part of you that already knows. Instead of feeling like it's something happening to you, which makes you feel like a victim, something about just saying "good" changes your nervous system. This might be hard. I might pick the wrong therapist. That's going to be awkward and I'll have to start over. Don't run from that feeling. Say, good. Bring it on. I got this.
And even if you can't muster up the belief that you're worth it — because maybe that's a struggle for you — you are. You are a child of God. But even if that's a stretch, look at a picture of your family. They are worth it. There are generational patterns that can be broken by doing this work.
When you think about your own dad, there's probably a mixture of things you want to emulate and things you'd like to do a little differently. Our human fathers are like us — imperfect. But the hope is that with each generation, we can move the needle. Pass on a little more healing, a little more stability to our kids.
Take a deep breath and ask: when I think about my dad, is there anything I wish he would have done with me that he never did? Anything I wish he had said? I wish he'd given me a few more hugs. I wish he'd told me he was proud of me. I wish he'd not just led by example but actually taught me how to do things. Or I wish he'd thrown the ball in the backyard instead of just watched the game. Whatever it is — am I doing that with my kids? And if you aren't, there's a lot to be hopeful about. That can change. Whatever invisible force is standing between you and the dad you know deep down you want to be — a lot of guys love their families so much. They want so badly to be a great dad. And sometimes these forces just push us around, kind of like those Lake Superior waves. They're smashing us. Sometimes we feel like we're making progress. Sometimes we're closer and then get slammed against the rocks. And we're like, why is it so hard to just be the dad I want to be? Sometimes those waves are our own pain, our own insecurities, our own trauma, our own stuff we have to face.
You don't have to sign your life away. Just make one appointment. Sometimes just filling out the paperwork ahead of time is a good reflective exercise — looking at your life and asking what you'd like to change. And if your therapist isn't great, give up on that therapist. But don't give up on therapy.
JEFF: That's so good. When I mentioned four counselors, I've actually seen seven. Three were the wrong fit. Both virtual and in person have been very effective for me. When you were talking, I had another memory spark. My dad leveled up so much from his parents. He gave me this boost. But if I could go back in time, if there's any way he could have gone and seen a counselor, taken a step into his own story for healing — my dad did hard things. He was one of the hardest-working people I've known. But he never had friends who encouraged or suggested it. And that gift would have kept giving into my daughters, his granddaughters, if he'd gone to see a counselor thirty years ago.
This is one of those gifts that is packaged and grows over time, and the effectiveness of who it blesses expands the moment we make that first appointment. And when it's hard and vulnerable and you want to quit, you whisper with a little grit: good. Bring it on. Because doing hard things makes us better men and fathers. For some of us, it's not the Spartan race or the hundred pushups. It's actually spending whatever it costs to do that first appointment. It's not the money — it's the vulnerability of committing.
MARK: That's like James Clear's atomic habits idea, right? You don't get overwhelmed by the whole process. You take the first step. You set a manageable goal and then momentum starts to take care of itself. You're not signing up for five years of psychoanalysis. With something like trauma therapy, we're talking maybe ten to twenty sessions over three to six months. But if it changes the way you carry yourself in the world, the way you see yourself, the way you relate to your kids — how do you put a price on that?
JEFF: Thank you so much for joining us for episode 430 with Mark Odland. The conversation links, the show notes, links to learn more about counseling resources and experiencing inner healing, freedom, and being set free from the cage — go to dadawesome.org/podcast and look for episode 430.
I mentioned earlier the Mom Awesome Challenge. You can text the word "mom" to 651-370-8618 to join that daily challenge.
One more time — I just want to express my appreciation and gratitude to each of you listening. You've chosen to lean in, listen, and become Dad Awesome for your kids. I'm so grateful for you. I'm praying that God gives you one action step this week — whether that's pursuing a local or virtual counselor, someone to help you with your story and experience freedom and healing. Know that I'm praying specifically for you to have the courage to take a next step and experience one counseling session. I believe that God has deeper healing, deeper freedom for each of us. Way to go after it. Let's not remain the same. Have a great week, guys.
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"As long as we have the opportunity to be connected to safety and truth, the brain can heal itself." — Mark Odland
"You don't have to sign your life away. Just do one therapy appointment." — Mark Odland
"Whatever invisible force is keeping you in a cage, the dad you want to be is in there." — Mark Odland
"If you can't muster up the belief that you're worth it, look at a picture of your family. They are worth it." — Mark Odland
"Some healing usually proceeds breakthrough. Doing some looking back before you try to propel forward." — Jeff Zaugg
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