782. Is Trauma Still Wreaking Havoc in Your Life? This is How You Finally Heal It

26:35Wow. Yeah. I maybe did have those perfectionist tendencies at the beginning. Um, but you were talking about the pressure and the perfectionist you know, this mentality that we can show up in and motherhood, but as long as you're securely there and as long as you're present, that actually matters more. I have an entire chapter in this book about attachment because again, it is so foundational, but there's one section that talks about this, this study called the good enough mother and essentially found that as long as you are attuned with your kids, that you will mess up, that there will be times where you don't get it right, or maybe you raise your voice, or maybe you didn't have the right thing to say, or you just didn't know, you didn't know how to help them.

27:26But they say, as long as you're attuned and as long as you get it right, only 30 % of the time, your kids will still come out securely attached and regulated and resilient. And the example that I gave in the book is like, when you think about a baby, you know, how often our moms or parents or caregivers, whoever attuned to you're crying. And I don't know why. So I'm going to change your diaper. You're still crying. I'm going to give you a bottle. You're still crying. I'm going to change your clothes. You're still crying. I'm going to take you on a walk. Oh, now you're okay. So it's less of like the baby doesn't, doesn't like remember that, oh, you got it wrong all those times.

28:05It was more so this attunement, this sense of I am with you in your discomfort and I'm going to help you figure it out. Even if I don't get it right all the time. Yes. Yeah. And so that gave me permission as a mom. When I started to look at the research, I'm like, it doesn't have to be so much pressure, but also our kids are incredibly resilient. Yeah. Yeah. And so there can be hurt, but there can also be so much growth and healing that happens. And that, yeah. So anyways, motherhood has been, it's just opened me. Yeah. What just in so many beautiful ways and heartbreaking ways. Yeah, of course.

28:41Of course. And I think that's, that's part of what people don't expect. You know, it's like your heart just opens so much, which increases the possibility for it to break many times over. which is I think also like a cool part of the human experience. I think if we like shield our hearts, we're missing out on that. So one thing that struck me, I mean, so many things struck me in the book, but one thing I want to kind of pull to this moment is just this idea that we are living at a time and a state of our society where people are like very stuck and in survival mode. And I don't know if people would relate to that.

29:27I'm not sure, but I guess, how would you describe that related to the nervous system related to, you know, what we see in society as far as like what success is, just kind of like bringing together that image because I think a lot of people are running their lives in a way that is unsustainable. Yeah, absolutely. And then they, they realize that when they've hit their, hit their, their dead end or their rock bottom. Yeah. Oh man, there's so much I could say about this. I feel like it's been a lot of the deep conversations I've been having with friends lately. Yeah. What is survival mode? So from a, you know, a physiological, we can just talk the science for a sec.

30:16From a physiological perspective, this stuckness that we're talking about being stuck in survival mode is what we call the stress response cycle. So when you experience something in your life that feels triggering or stressful or activating, and those are all synonymous, same thing. When you experience something that feels that way, what happens is your body automatically, autonomically goes into a stress response cycle. So think of it like a picture. And there's a graphic of this in the book. And so it starts with, I'm here and I'm at neutral, which is like, I'm at rest and digest. I feel safe.

30:55I call this neuroception. I feel safe inside my body. I feel safe in my outer world. and I feel safe with the people around me, call that inside, outside, between. And so in moments where we don't feel safe, either internally, like my heart is pounding or my stomach is in knots, or I don't feel really present in my body right now, or I don't feel safe outside in this environment that I'm in, which the world that we live in feels very unsafe for a lot of people right now. Or I don't feel safe with the people around me. And we have very surface level relationships now. We're very disconnected. And that's one of the things I've noticed being here in the city.

31:37We did a silent walk yesterday at our meetup just to see what it would be like to walk through the city in silence as a group. No headphones, no phones, no talking. And what came up at the end was the sadness that we felt as a group because there was this lack of eye contact, this lack of connection. I get emotional talking about it. It's just, it's so sad to me that there aren't these like bids for connection anymore. And we thrive in connection. Like we are primed for connection. We grow, we become resilient in connection, in attachment. And so anyways, getting off on a tandem. But when they, when we don't feel safe, either inside, outside, between, and again, this is not when we think we're safe.

32:23There's what we think and then there's what we feel, which are two separate things. when there's something that doesn't feel safe, which we call the felt sense, your stress response cycle initiates. The nervous system says, alarm, alarm. It's like a security camera. There's a trigger. There's activation. There's stress. Alarm. We need to survive. So we go into these predictable responses, which we know of as fight, flight, shut down or freeze. There's also fawn. There's functional freeze, which I explain in the book. So we go from neutral at the top. This is just the part where I look at the camera.

32:56We go from neutral at the top of the circle. And then, um, we're now activated. So now we're in what we call our mobilization stage, a stage. So when we're mobilized, there is the release of adrenaline and cortisol into the body, which are mobilizing stress hormones to mobilize us to fight or flee. if we can't fight or flee either physically or if we as these wonderful human animals that we are if we suppress the emotional charge of fight which is anger suppression how often do women especially do this you suppress push down our anger silence we call it self-silencing or if we suppress the emotional charge of flight which is often fear-based so anxiety panic worry fear How often are we taught?

33:46No, our anxiety, we just need to push it down. We need to calm down. If we suppress, then what happens is the adrenaline and cortisol stay stuck within the system. And we stay stuck in that stress response cycle. So we come down into what we call our shutdown response, which is the dorsal response of the nervous system. Kind of think of it like a freeze response. It's what we used to call it. But the upgraded science calls it dorsal or shutdown. down. So we're kind of like the walking wounded. We're here, but we're not here. And when you're in shutdown, you still have the adrenaline and cortisol, all these chronic stress hormones within you.

34:24And over time, think of it like a pressure cooker, right? All of these stress hormones, they're building up and building up and building up. Over time, if we don't take time to lift that lid, which is what we do in the somatic world, we allow for the natural release or what we call discharge of adrenaline and cortisol to be released from the body, then we will either explode or implode. Exploding is like, I'm now in high functioning anxiety, chronic anxiety, or I'm having panic attacks, anxiety attacks. Imploding is more of burnout, shutdown, kind of what we're talking about, right? People don't realize that they're in survival mode going through the motions without emotion until they have their crisis, their moment.

35:08So the stress response cycle is neutral. Then we go to mobilized. If we don't mobilize, then we stay there in immobilization. From mobilize, we then go to discharge. Now the body discharges, right? So either, and that can look like, you know, in the somatic space of, um, as I'm with the anger, like, what do I notice? Like rather than pushing it away or reaching for something, my phone to distract me from this frustration or, you know, foregoing that boundary that I want to set with this person right now. That's healthy aggression. That's a healthy fight response. Instead of being like, what does this feel like in my body?

35:42Can I be with this? Can I notice the heat? Can I notice the rising that comes and the clenching in my jaw? Can I allow that to be here? Usually if we allow it to happen, the body will naturally discharge the adrenaline and cortisol in a couple of minutes. and we go in and out of the stress response cycle roughly 100 times a day. So regulation, we're talking about nervous system regulation right now. It's not about being neutral all the time. So that's kind of the science behind it. But then once you discharge, then you come back into restoration and then neutral. So the stuckness shows up in so many ways because when we're stuck in those states of survival, fight, flight, shutdown, freeze, Fawn Functional Freeze, it really guides and informs everything about our life.

36:30It guides how we show up in relationships. It guides how we feel in our bodies. There are intense changes in the physical body that happen from state to state. And that's why, you know, when we look at emotional suppression and this rise of emotional suppression, I think that's a lot of the stuckness that we're talking about. The perfectionism, the overachieve, the muscle through, the dissociate, the scrolling, the disconnection. We're really talking about disconnection. We're not connected to our primal nature, to the body, to our emotions, to our intuition, to our gut instincts, right? And we're suffering because of it.

37:16Yeah. I think what you reference in the book too, just how animals are able to do this. And we have that as well, but because we have the mind, the mind says something about if we have a response, say we're at the office, we can't just get up and shake it out. We could actually. We actually could. But we say we can't. Can you actually describe that, what animals do in the wild? Yeah. So a lot of that work is based off of Peter Levine's work. He's the developer of somatic experiencing. So somatic experiencing is a trauma resolution modality where we take a body first approach to healing trauma.

37:58We focus instead on the body and body memory rather than cognition and narrative memory, which is what a lot of conventional therapy does. So we track how is trauma still stuck in the body? How is it showing up? And Peter's early work. So I am a somatic experiencing practitioner. But Peter's work, his research started back in the seventies and he was studying at the time, not just psychotherapy, you know, he's a psychotherapist, you know, trauma resolution, but also either ethnology or ethology. I say this a little, I never get it right. Whatever the study of animals in the wild, that's what he did.

38:40And he found that animals in the wild have identical nervous systems to human animals. And so it posed this really interesting question for him of why do animals in the wild, although they are routinely faced with threat, like every single day, they're always in survival mode. Why do they not get the same symptoms, physical symptoms, emotional, hormonal symptoms that we get? Why do they not remain stuck in that stress response cycle? So he observed that animals in the wild, when they go into a stress response cycle, their body will naturally mobilize and discharge all of the adrenaline cortisol.

39:22This can happen through shaking, trembling, emoting. And if you just go to Google, YouTube, type in animal discharge, you will see some of these things. And so we experienced that as well in our body, whether it's, you know, every time I go on stage, I still have a little bit of trembling in my hands or the way that our diaphragm pulls up and it's hard to breathe or the way that, oh, if we hear something that triggers our nervous system, it's the sound that reminds us of something that happened to us. Now it's, oh, my stomach just dropped or I'm feeling frozen in my shoulders or I'm closing in.

39:59That's all body memory. And so in the book, The Body Keeps the Score, I know so many people know that book. Bessel says that, the author Bessel van der Kolk says that trauma doesn't come back as a memory necessarily. It comes back as a reaction. And Peter says trauma isn't found in the memory. It's found in the nervous system. And what they're talking about is that trauma is less about what happened to you. And it's more so about how the nervous system is stuck in those responses of the past, these patterns, what we call implicit or procedural patterns, body memory. And so the definition of trauma, the best that I have found is that trauma is any experience that overwhelms your nervous system's capacity to cope.

40:49And when that happens, your system gets stuck in the survival states that it enlisted back then, here in the now. And there's a wonderful quote that Peter says that I mentioned in the book, which is that trauma is like a devastating moment or it's a trauma is when a devastating moment becomes frozen in time. And it's like this internal straitjacket. And this internal straitjacket is the nervous system. So like we're stuck with this armor on, not realizing that the experience or the event has ended. And that starts to shape our lives, you know, these patterns. And so we work with those patterns in the somatic space, noticing how that shows up in the body and recognizing, oh, there's something that's incomplete here in your body.

41:36And we explore how we can complete that in our work together.

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43:02So Upwork, I talk about Upwork with my clients all the freaking time. I was on the phone with one of my clients last night and I said, girl, you are no longer going to edit your podcast yourself. You are going to outsource with Upwork. This was her budget. She wanted to stay under a certain amount. So we had to find someone that would be a perfect fit for her. Upwork is really the one-stop platform where you can find, hire, and pay expert freelancers across everything from marketing and business operations to web development, design data, and so much more. So you can basically browse their profiles, look through their work, and even get help scoping for a role.

43:36I was needing to hire someone for Kajabi within our business to help us do Kajabi. And so I saw this little profile, said, oh, she seems like a great fit. We got on a call. She was incredible with Kajabi. She was so incredible. Whether you're a smaller business or if you're growing really quickly, their business plus gives you an access to the top 1 % talent on Upwork with AI powered shortlisting that can match you with the right freelancer in under six hours. So this saves a lot of time. This is actually what I've been doing because it does take time to find people. It does take time to vet people and it's kind of a thing, but I want you guys to be outsourcing more so you can enjoy your life.

44:12You can do what you need to do and you can grow your business and still have time for freedom. And Upwork is that place to have that. At Upwork.com right now, you can post your job for free, what you're looking for, who you need to support you. That's Upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to grow your business. That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com. Any somatic work that I've done in my life has been the most profound work. Yeah. You know, I can talk to my therapist for hours, but a little somatic therapy, I'm like, oh, there it is. Yeah. Yeah. The body's so intelligent. Um, you know, I think when people think of traumatic event, um, a lot of us will discount experiences that were traumatic because they aren't what we think are traumatic, right.

45:00Or like big T trauma. Um, but can you talk about the types of trauma and what people can kind of look for or feel for as they're thinking about, you know, their own experiences and how it relates to like just how their nervous system is today. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I am. I'm not a huge fan of big T, little T trauma, the way that we categorize that. I never understood it, to be honest. I like kind of did. And then I was like, wait, there's, where's the gray, right? Where's the gray? Yeah, exactly. Where's the, where's the nuance. Also, where's the individualization of it? Because what could feel like a little T trauma for one person could feel like a big T trauma to someone else.

45:43And it's really nervous system dependent. So the way that I like to categorize trauma, and I don't love to put it into boxes, but is there's direct trauma. So these are things that happen to you directly to you. that's kind of the first umbrella and then there's indirect trauma which are not things that maybe happen directly to you but you're still experiencing them like intergenerational trauma or collective trauma you know like as a nation as a community as a gender right collective trauma you experience in community um but more so talking about direct trauma there's different categories there.

46:29There's three that we can talk about. So the first is acute trauma. And this is more so it's like a single short lasting events. This is what you'd often think of like, I'm using air quotes here, big D trauma, shock trauma, you know, um, an assault, an accident, losing someone suddenly a sudden diagnosis of a trail. Um, that is acute trauma. The second is going to be compound trauma. I'm sorry, chronic trauma. I sometimes call it compound, but chronic trauma is more so not an event like acute, but it's an experience. So it's something that happens over time, doesn't necessarily have a clear beginning, middle and end.

47:10So these could be like cycles. So like a cycle of abuse, a cycle of neglect, you know, living in an environment where there's lack of security or scarcity to food resources, shelter, that is chronic trauma and chronic trauma often goes under looked because we have this big perspective, you know, this misconception of what trauma is. Oh, well, it wasn't, you know, it didn't leave a crater in your life, you know, or it didn't happen out of nowhere. So yeah. Um, so it often goes, what I would say is like almost undiagnosed. We don't realize that it's there. That was the attachment experience for me.

47:47And because I was focusing so much on losing my brother and the assault, which were the acute traumas. And then as I started to do the work and I'm like, oh, there's other things here. And, um, and what you often find too is, you know, there's a lot of research that comes out that has come out about soldiers, you know, what differentiates a soldier who will go through the same experience as another, but we'll end up with PTSD. Whereas the other one doesn't. And it's usually where their experience is earlier on in life, which means that it's set the foundation. It gave the foundation for a nervous system that wasn't as resilient.

48:29And so, and then the third category under direct is in complex trauma. And we're hearing a lot more now about CPTSD, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, complex trauma, but CPTSD is multiple either acute or chronic traumas that have happened over, um, you know, a prolonged period. And I think a lot of us are struggling with complex trauma because we're not realizing that, yeah, we've experienced trauma in our life and it's gone untreated for so long. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, what, what I always say to people is if it feels like trauma for you, it was probably trauma. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and just in terms of what people might be experiencing today, if they've, you know, experienced whether it's acute or complex or chronic, um, what physically might they be experiencing?

49:23What emotionally might they be experiencing on a day-to-day basis? Yeah. So I think, you know, it's going to be, it's going to be different for everyone. Yeah. Um, but I, and it's going to depend on how their nervous system responded. It's going to depend on the environment that they're in. Are they surrounded by people who are, um, who feel regulating to their system and supportive? And so I could look different across the board, but I would say that just in general, trauma in general, um, when we have unresolved trauma, that means again, we're stuck in that stress response cycle. Um, maybe what I can do is I can talk about the nervous system states and how we can end up there because of unresolved trauma and then what those states feel and look like because they're all very, very different and very specific.

50:12Great. Okay. So I love analogies. I love visualizations. Me too. Yeah. I just love it. Makes things easier. Makes my brain work. To understand. Yes. Makes my brain work better. So think of it like, think of the nervous system like a ladder. So this is again from the polyvagal theory. I also trained at the Polyvagal Institute, and there's a big chapter on polyvagal theory in the book, but think of the nervous system like a ladder and the polyvagal theory, I should just say, Stephen Porges, he created the polyvagal theory, which is the updated science of the nervous system. This came out in like the late nineties, 1996.

50:46And it's just now starting to catch up to the mainstream medical community, which is really exciting. But he created the polyvagal or nervous system ladder to illustrate how our nervous system works and how it follows this predictable path of regulation. So at the top of the ladder, there's three sections. The top section is your ventral vagal state, your rest and digest, where we're at neutral. The middle of the ladder is your sympathetic state of fight or flight. So again, as we come down the ladder, we experience activation, stress, trigger. Oh, I'm now mobilized into fight or flight. At the bottom of the ladder is that dorsal state of shutdown.

51:24This is not really the state of mobilization now, but now immobilization. So think of it like hibernation. Everything slows way down in the body. And then you can kind of think of it like a freeze response, although a freeze response is a blended state, but we don't need to get into all that. I talked about it in the book. So when we're stuck in these states, your flight response is, again, it's going to feel very fear-based. This is when you're in that sympathetic mobilized state, you are going to have higher levels of adrenaline and cortisol. And so, um, what also happens is everything in your body increases.

52:06So heart rate increases, respiration increases, digestion increases, um, your awareness, your sensory motor system increases. So we're hypersensitive to things. But emotionally, your flight response feels like fear, panic, worry, anxiety. And your fight response feels like anger, frustration, irritability. Now, when we come down into the shutdown state, everything doesn't really increase and now decreases. So for instance, your adrenaline and cortisol, it is still within the body, but your blood motility now is now not going out to your limbs to mobilize you to fight or flee. It now goes inward to the core to keep your vital organs warm and prepared for hibernation.

52:53So we feel lethargic. We feel like we have lower circulation. We feel colder. You experience here a lot of chronic fatigue, chronic pain, fibromyalgia, digestive issues as well. And emotionally, it can feel like a lot of sadness, hopelessness, despair. shame, grief lives here. Um, and so, yeah, that's kind of what, what that looks like from a, you know, physical, emotional perspective. Yeah. That's super, super helpful. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. We're always bringing it back to the nervous system because I think the more people understand just how important this is, you know, I think we can, we can, we're in a time where, you know, we have the supplements, we have the exercises, we have the lifestyle choices that we think are going to be the thing that make us feel better mentally, emotionally, physically.

53:51And often we're just not getting to the root of things. So I'm glad we're coming back to this over and over. So you said earlier that, you know, in terms of the nervous system, And we don't want it to be perfect and always neutral, you know, having no response at all, but we really want to build a resilient nervous system. Um, how do we do that? Yeah. Great question. Such a good question. And also, I mean, we can kind of thread into this conversation, you know, raising children with resilient nervous systems. I think they're resilient by nature as we were talking about earlier, but, um, yeah, I'm so curious about that.

54:35Yeah. So I think maybe even just talking to like, what does resilience mean? Because a lot of people would assume that a resilient nervous system or a regulated nervous system means that you're calm all the time, that you're up at the top of that ladder. and a bit of a myth buster here, a regulated or resilient nervous system is what we call a flexible nervous system. One that moves up and down that ladder all day long without getting stuck. And imagine kind of that stress response cycle. Again, we call that your bio rhythm, a healthy regulated and resilient nervous system will move up and down that ladder, roughly 100 times a day, which means it's not about being, you know, emotionless or not having anger or not feeling anxious or not feeling tired at the end of the day, that's a normal part of our experience.

55:24A regulated nervous system is more so in those moments, how can I now create a deeper capacity to be with the anxiety, to move through it rather than getting stuck in it? So a dysregulated nervous system is one that we would say is rigid, one that's fixed on the ladder down below. So the question you asked is how do we create resilience? So, um, it's first building a sense of safety. So when we're stuck down in those lower parts of the nervous system, that means that the nervous system, it's like, again, a security system that's constantly alarming for danger, even though it might not be there.

56:06And so again, stuck in kind of these old patterns. Right. And so the first thing that we actually have to do is we have to build up this felt sense of safety. So rather than scanning for like threat, threat, threat, threat, threat, we now have to intentionally start to bring in like, is there something that feels safe right now in my environment, in my body or with this other person? And so it might be as something as simple as like, and it could just be neutral, right? Like noticing, Oh, there's like some gray behind these panels or like noticing the grain on the wood here, even noticing this, this rock, this crystal.

56:42And if I were to take time to just feel it and feel the grooves, what that does is it slows down my nervous system. And it's like, oh, there's something here that's not a threat. And so we call these neuroceptive cues of safety. And as you do that, it starts to like turn down the alarm of the nervous system, which naturally allows us to come, come back up. So that would be step number one. Step number two is then creating a greater capacity, not just to be with what feels good, like we're talking about, but also creating a capacity now to be with what doesn't feel good. So in moments where my nervous system just touched down into a little bit of anxiety, how can I create space in my body to recognize that that's here and then allow my body to move through it?

57:29So rather than what can I do to make it go away? It's, we call this the, I call this experience, express, expel. So how can I first notice the somatic experience in my body? So what sensations, how is my body showing me it's anxious right now? My heart is beating. My armpits are sweating. I'm feeling really fidgety. Okay. There's some anxiety here. And if I allow that to be here, what happens next? So as we experience, we often notice that the body knows how to express and expel that adrenaline cortisol. So maybe it's okay. Now that I'm taking a moment to be with it, now there's even more sweat and there's a flash of heat that just went across my chest.

58:10Or now it's, oh, you know, as I put my neck up and there's a little bit of a vocalizing that comes through. There are little ways all throughout the day that our body is naturally discharging and letting things out, whether it's just a quick shake or a move and these micro movements that happen. And what that means is we're now, oh, we just discharged. We're lifting the lid of that pressure cooker, allowing the adrenaline and stress hormones and cortisol to come out, which means now we come up to the top of the nervous system ladder. And so we often think that it's about keeping that lid down, pushing it down, which again, over time just wears us out and makes us worse.

58:50So the resilience is less about like, what tools can I do to regulate? What practices, what self-care things can I do to make myself feel better. And it's more so about less regulation and more relation. How can I relate to my emotions when they come up? How can I relate to that tension that I'm feeling rather than pushing it away and warring against my very natural experience? If I just welcome it or get curious about it or connect with it, my body knows exactly what to do to move that through me. And I think we're kind of stuck in that time now where again, we're always reaching for answers to fix ourselves, which then just creates these intentional networks in our brain that like my body or my life is the thing that I have to war against, which just increases our stress response cycle.

59:42So it's more about like connecting with our body again and realizing we've had the answers all along. Yes. Yes. I mean, that's been some of my like deepest work is I feel like in my twenties, I was so disconnected from my body, which was giving me signals all the time. I know everyone's like, I know. Um, it was giving me signals and messages all the time about who I was dating, what I was putting in my body, who I was surrounding myself with. And I was just like unable to have that conversation with my body and really listen. Um, and once I reconnected with it, you know, I, I could never go back.

1:00:19It's just such a deeply profound relationship that, like you said, it will give you most, if not all answers that you need. What does that look like with your kids? So, you know, there's kind of like a, my son's a year and a half and we're, we're stepping into the, you know, eight meltdowns a day. He's August 23rd, 2023. Okay. Yeah. Shia was July 1st. They're not, they're not too far apart. Cool. Yeah. That just the natural developmental stages that happened and what we, what we think about them or say about them or how we want to fix them. It's kind of what I'm moving through. Yeah. But then also just being mindful of, you know, how we hold space around that and how that's related to the health of their nervous system.

1:01:16Absolutely. I could talk about this. I know. I want to hear about it all day long. I think like you, like I'm, I'm in it. I'm in it. Yeah. We're, we're both in it. So, um, yeah, you know, learning about nervous system development, brain development has been so fascinating and also very validating for me as a parent that, cause you know, I think, I don't know how we got this way, but we often look at our, our children's big emotions or their behaviors as like us, a sign of how we're doing as parents rather than just, yeah. Like where'd that come from? You know, it's like, I don't feel it as much, but I see, I see other, whether it's like the older generations kind of taking that.

1:02:03I don't even know. Or even now, like being out in public and you see that a kid is having a little one who's clearly a toddler, like, you know, below five years and doesn't really have emotional regulation towards yet. And they're, they're having big tears. Noah's like that. Um, you know, he, when he cries, he feels safe enough to cry in public. And, but you often will see, um, and sometimes I see this with my husband. He just like, it's like, he's wincing and it's painful for him and he just wants to shush him so much. And instead it's like, just meet him, just connect with them. And he, you know, like let him borrow your nervous system, let him borrow your calm, let him borrow your regulation.

1:02:42Cause he doesn't have that yet. And instead, when it's like this pressure of like, you're bothering people. Yeah. We just, we're so conditioned as a society and from these little, little ages to just be small. And so that's something that's definitely been coming up in our house with Noah's, you know, and they have a testosterone jump at around the age of four. So he's, his emotions are very big. Yeah. So let's talk about the development real quick, just to, again, give parents like permission that your kids are great. They're right where they're supposed to be. So it is appropriately or it is developmentally appropriate for kids to have big emotions.

1:03:22I'll just talk about the triune brain real quick. So the triune brain is the three-part brain model. So we have three regions in the brain. The bottom of the brain is what we call the reptilian brain, which animals in the wild have, by the way, reptilian brain. It's our brainstem. And this is where we really operate from in infancy and through our first six to one year of life. So the language of the reptilian brain is sensory. So you think about babies, they're very sensitive to their senses. They can't be too hot, too cold. It can't be too loud, too soft. That's why we have these noise machines, right?

1:04:00Everything is like very sensory driven. And then once they eat, you know, start to reach the age of about a year and a half to two years old, the emotional brain starts to kick in, which is now the midbrain. So that starts to develop and think of it like a circuit board. Your brain is like a circuit board, but there's not wires yet. So now we're starting to wire into that emotional midbrain around the age of two. And this is where the emotional language comes on board. So now they're very emotional creatures, but this is also the center of connection and attachment, which makes sense because, you know, our emotions are very heart centered, right?

1:04:37And it's also the center where our hormones operate from, which also makes sense because when we're emotional, we're very, when we're hormonal, we're emotional, right? And, um, and this is where the nervous system operates from. We call these two bottom regions of the brain, the subcortical or subconscious nonverbal parts of the brain. So the language here is somatics. It's emotion, feeling, sensation, and impulse. Impulse comes from that brainstem. And then when they reach the age of about three-ish, that cognitive, the top part of the brain, which we'll call the human brain, that starts to take over.

1:05:19This is called the neocortex. And this is the talking, thinking, conscious, cognitive brain, the learning brain, the making sense brain, the rational brain. So kids don't have access to that until they're really about the age of three. So this is why between two and three and really around three, like they start to have a lot more verbal language, like just out of nowhere. It's like, how do you know 100 words right now? Or like, When did I start having full conversations with you? And it almost feels like it happens overnight. But what that means is that for their first few years of life, and by the way, infancy is considered from zero to three years.

1:05:58They're still infants, even when they're three years old. But that means that those first three years of life, they don't have verbal language to express and explain their emotional landscape. and they also don't have the ability to emotionally regulate or to regulate. So we often assume, you know, people will be like, well, kids will learn how to self-soothe. They need to learn how to self-soothe or what we're talking about is self-regulate. Children learn how to self-regulate through co-regulating. That's how they learn it. So again, it's the whole borrowing our nervous system, leaning into our nervous system.

1:06:36so um and then again you can kind of think of the the brain and the nervous system as like still under construction through almost like the first 10 years of life and then even after that right and so the prefrontal cortex doesn't really fully develop until you're 25 exactly yes yeah and so i think sometimes we just we have really we have unrealistic expectations for our children not realizing they're these tiny little creatures. And to be, I feel like there's this, yes, that, and then they're creatures to be trained. Yes. You know, rather than to just be. Yeah. And it's funny, the, um, the ride over here, I was talking with Jules about a conversation I had with my husband last night and we were on, um, you know, talking over video FaceTime and, uh, And he was asking Noah in the background.

1:07:28It was late at night, past bedtime. Past bedtime. Time with dad. Dad's figuring it out on his own. And he's telling Noah, Noah, clean up your toys, bud. Clean up your toys. And he keeps saying it. And I'm like, honey, grown adults have a hard time just cleaning their closets or cleaning their bathrooms. And you're asking it almost for it. You're getting frustrated with a four-year-old. And my goodness, I get frustrated too sometimes. but it's just that reminder of like, we expect so much from them, you know? Um, and just, and just that reminder, he's like, yeah, you're right. How have you been able to have that, like that continued conversation with your husband and him be receptive to it?

1:08:09My husband's very receptive, but I feel like we have, he grew up with a single mom who it was like a dictatorship, you know, cause it had to be. Yeah. So I think he has that as a model. Yeah. Um, and it worked for them. Um, but I think, I think just moms and dads have a different approach. So how have you navigated that? Yeah. You know, I, um, it's been a delicate dance and it's not pretty and it's not perfect. And, um, it's been a lot of like figuring it out as we go. But I think that when Noah was born and then the first few years, he just really trusted my intuition. And I think that as he saw that Noah was really just a sweet, calm, really present little boy.

1:08:55I think he took that as proof to like, I guess she knows what she's talking about. I know, I know. I'm just going to let those moments like archive for you to bank them. So I'm like, proof is in the pudding. And, uh, it's hard because, you know, being a somatic therapist and also, you know, having so much training in these topics, I also didn't want to come across sometimes as I'm like pathologizing him. And that's, you know, that can be, be difficult, but I will say that sharing with him, what's helped is not when I am trying to, I'm using air quotes, teach my husband a lesson in the moment when we're in the middle of a rupture, when we're in the middle of a meltdown, that is not what I'm trying to get my point across.

1:09:37What is actually I've found to be helpful is in the moments after where we're in the calm, we're normal, things feel neutral in our life. and it's like hey there's this one thing i've been noticing lately like can we talk about it you know because we're we're already in this place where like our nervous systems are in a place of like reciprocity and co-regulation and we're more primed to like have open dialogues but when you're in the middle of a conflict with a child and you're trying to get your partner on board it's just not a good time to do that so true so i found that that has helped for us the proof is in the pudding is also a thing.

1:10:15And then number three is kind of like educating him. We did, um, um, a course thriving to what is it? Oh man. I'm going to find it. I already bought, I'm, I'm already buying it in my mind. There's a, I will find it, but you know, cause I know all this stuff, I know all this stuff, but he, um, he, he doesn't. And I knew that he wouldn't want to learn it from me. So I, we did like a little toddler course together. Love that. It's also, um, Oh man, is it big little feelings? I think it was their big little, Oh yeah. Big little feelings. Big little feelings is great. I'm shutting them out right now.

1:10:53Great. They have an online course for parents and it's super easy to understand. It's digestible. It gives you the science of brain development, what we're talking about right now, and then tangible tools. And so I think him hearing it from experts rather than me also helped. So like, I think having the support and the resources, knowing where to look can be helpful. Um, and then I think more than anything, what's helped the most in our parenting is not our parenting, but our own regulation, kind of like you said, like our own, as long as we're connected. And that's what, what we're talking about is that secure base and attachment is that like we can get it wrong.

1:11:35It might not be necessarily about the parenting styles, but as long as we feel like a secure base for our kids, the calm and the chaos, which it's not always calm. Um, as long as we can aim to self-regulate, that is the best thing you can do for your kiddos because they are always, always feeding off of your nervous system. Yeah. Yes.

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1:14:47Just a little part B of that point. if you're in a moment where you feel yourself being a little dysregulated when your child is dysregulated themselves. Yeah. What do you do in that moment? I absolutely model it. So I don't try and hide it from Noah. I will essentially call out how I'm feeling. Um, I'll say I'm feeling a little, and I will name my feeling, you know? So I'll say I'm feeling a little angry right now, or I'm just feeling frustrated or I'm feeling overwhelmed. Okay, bud, I'm going to take a moment. And usually what I'll do is I'll take a moment. I might go to like another part of the room and I'll do some kind of somatic practice.

1:15:30So if I'm feeling angry, I might just like clench my fist and go like for a moment. If I'm feeling sad or I'm feeling overwhelmed and tears come up, I allow tears to be there. And I'll say, I feel overwhelmed, but I just want to let you know, this is no reflection of you. And it's no reflection of how I feel about you. It's how mom's feeling on the inside right now. And my emotions feel big. And so I'm going to let them out. And so I kind of just let them know what's happening. And I modeled that. And then when Noah was younger, like when we first started doing emotion work together, we came up with all these fun little things to like welcome in his emotions, let them through.

1:16:08So like when he was feeling angry, we would do dinosaur stomps. So I'd be like, how are you like, you know, I would validate like, yeah, you're, you're allowed to feel that way. And I'm, that, that makes sense that you're, you're frustrated right now. And, you know, you would see that there's just, as he hears that, um, there's often like a bit of like a, yeah. And it's like, uh, I'm going to puff up my chest and that's right. I'm, I'm allowed to feel this way. And then we'll do like some dinosaur stomps or we do tiger growls or, you know, there's little things that we do to help the body. And these are somatic practices that adults can do.

1:16:42Yeah, I was going to say, just kind of move it. Right? Yeah. To just allow it to move through the body. And again, it's just sending these early messages to kids that there's no such thing as a bad emotion. What's not great is what we do with our emotions. And sometimes when we hold them in, they can turn into almost weapons against ourselves. And I always say like anger, when we bury our anger, we bury it alive. And it either works against us or it spills out onto other people. But when we allow permission for, I'm feeling this right now and I'm allowed to feel this way and my body knows how to move through it, that creates a lot of emotional resilience.

1:17:21So I, I try and practice that when I feel dysregulated. And again, it's not that, um, it's not that we want to feel calm all the time. It's again, that recognition that we feel dysregulated and we, we feel activated all the time. It's just about what we do with it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So good. We should do another podcast on parenting. You know, I, for someone who, for anyone that would benefit from treating and working with the body first, which I think is everybody, what would you recommend as kind of a first step? So if someone's like, you know, I know I have this issue and I, you know, always get upset or angry when things like this happen, say very generally speaking.

1:18:12I think their first inclination would be like, I, you know, I need to get help. And the first kind of general thing is like, should I talk to someone? Should I go to therapy? You know, is there something wrong with me, et cetera. So I guess for someone to treat their body first, what would be the first step? Yeah. So I realized I haven't really given like an example of what this looks like. So, um, and I think maybe by giving an example, it would give a bit more of a clear roadmap of where that starting point is for people. So how I got into this work was my own personal experience. I mentioned when I was 20, I was sexually assaulted.

1:18:53Um, and during that experience, there was a moment where I did try to fight back, but I was overpowered by my perpetrator. And I went into a shutdown response. My nervous system went into what we call tonic immobility. I froze like deer in the headlights. And so there was the assault, but then there was also the aftermath of the assault, which was the trial process, which was extended out for over two years. And, um, you know, this man had been in and out of the prison system most of his life. He knew how to work the system. And so the trial was postponed nine times. That's why it took so long to go to trial.

1:19:31And every time that happens, you have to kind of do like a dress rehearsal with your legal team. So that's listening to your tape statements, going through the depositions again, practice being on the witness stand, which was really hard, like exposure therapy. That's what it felt like. And then there was also this anticipation of, I'm going to have to see this person in the flesh again. So my nervous system was so, I was so dissociated from my body. And I think I thought to myself, and by the way, behind the scenes during that time of my life, I was in a very low place, heavy drinking. I found myself in a very abusive relationship, severe eating disorders, suicidal ideation.

1:20:15And I think that I thought once he gets convicted, If he gets convicted and sentenced, my life will go back to normal and I'll be okay. But during those two years, I would have moments where when I was drinking, I would get violent, which was not in my nature, had never been in my nature. And that was my nervous system trying to complete that fight response from the experience. I didn't realize that at the time. So anyways, he was ultimately convicted, sentenced to 60 years. you would think that I would feel better. I did not. I actually felt worse. And the reason for that is because my nervous system never, it didn't have to go through this, these dress rehearsals anymore.

1:21:01And so I started to come up out of the bottom of that nervous system ladder out of dissociation, which is where numbing happens. And, you know, I'm here in my body, but I'm not here in my body and all of this stuff that was kind of frozen and dissociated away started to emerge again in my body. And I started to feel things that felt so uncomfortable. So even heavier drinking and reckless behavior to numb, avoid, escape. And not even 30 days after that sentencing, I found myself in a jail cell. I was out with my partner who was drinking, driving. I always say that should give you a really good indication of where I was at the time of my life.

1:21:40He was pulled over arrested. And when the police officers went to pull me out of the car, again, I was assaulted by a stranger in my car. When they went to pull me out of the car, I went into a trauma reenactment of the night of my assault and my nervous system without even like thinking about it. I went back into fight response and I ended up in a jail cell with battery on an officer, two counts of battery on an officer. And that experience was profound for me because I remember being in the jail cell for a couple of days. My parents didn't bail me out. Tough love. But I experienced things in that jail cell.

1:22:21There was no alcohol. There was no crappy relationship. There were no substances. It was me and my body and this decades old, it felt like treasure chest of things that I had been avoiding and escaping. And so I experienced intense waves of emotion, trembling, insane sweating, like these waves of activation through my body. And then I went before the judge a couple of days later and she said, it's, you know, I, I know who you are. She knew me from my case and she said, we're going to drop the charges, but you need to learn to live with your pain better. And she didn't say, get over it, get past it.

1:22:59She said, learn to live with it. And I realized that for most of my life, I had been doing what I was taught to do by my parents, which is we get up, we move on, we, we, you know, buckle through. And so, um, that's where my entrance into the somatic world began. Um, I was seeing a conventional therapist at the time I had been for years. I was on different medications for anxiety, for PTSD, for depression at different points. And it wasn't helping. And And I remember telling her, I feel different in my body. Following this experience, I feel so different. And she said, work with a somatic therapist.

1:23:36And you would think that the work with the somatic therapist was, yeah, we need to like work out some of this anger that had been stuck in your system. Let's go back to that night and let's like, let's, let's move through that. It was less of that. It was actually, can we create small moments in our sessions together to just touch into anger? And so I always use the analogy of like a pool in conventional therapy. You often imagine people are thrown into the deep end of their trauma. We're like expected to just talk about the deepest, darkest things that have happened. And for some of us, that's what we want to do.

1:24:11Cause that's what we think we're supposed to do, but that can actually activate your nervous system more and cause more harm than good. And so instead in the somatic space, we walk you into the shallow end. So we won't throw you into that experience. We'll instead say, Hey, if we're talking about anger, what was a moment recently that felt frustrating for you? Or you felt a little pissed off by something? Yeah. That email that I got from my boss actually like, Oh, that pissed me off. And it's like, yeah. And I just noticed like, there's a look of like, Oh, on your face. Are you noticing that right now?

1:24:44It's like, yeah. Okay. Can we be with that just for a sec? Yeah. What are you noticing now is happy. I'm noticing my heart rate is increasing. is that okay yeah and now it's oh and even as i'm talking about i'm feeling it now it's like there's there's tingling and there's pressure in my jaw i just feel a little like agitated and now it's oh there's heat rising up in my body now my spine is starting to like i just want to sit up a little bit and take up a little bit of space and so we be with that for like a couple of minutes and then you touch back out and it's like okay now can we resource and find something that feels a little bit safer to be with.

1:25:22So it's like, we're just going to touch in for a moment and touch back out. It's very slow. It's very gentle. But what you're doing is you're just gently lifting the lid of the pressure cooker and then putting it back down and lifting it and then putting it back down. And what you're doing is you're building these new patterns in your, your nervous system that show you all these procedural patterns that I can be with a moment of anger and not get overwhelmed, or I can be with a moment of anger and not go overboard. And you're allowing the nervous system and the body to do now what it couldn't do back then in a way that feels gentle and not overwhelming.

1:25:56I don't know why I'm getting emotional talking about it. It's just the cool, like it really saved my life. It did. And I think what's so beautiful about it is, you know, SE, we talk about it is that it's a naturalistic approach to trauma healing. And that word naturalistic is the intention behind that is that we are turning people inward to their natural abilities, again, we've had the answers to heal and to recover. And it's also recognizing too, that like your nervous system isn't broken. Your mind and your body isn't broken. It's actually doing exactly what it knows how to do in order to keep you safe and in order to survive.

1:26:38And sometimes it's just about helping to guide the nervous system and show it, not tell it, because we can't tell it what to do. It has to feel it. We have to show the nervous system what the brain already knows, which is that we're safe. It's past. We can take off our armor. We can be present. We can be with our body and our emotions. It's profound. It's profound work. And I think, you know, like you said, it's, there's a process, you know, and I think people want so badly to fix things or just generally do things very fast. Yeah. Especially when it's been so hard and difficult and things have felt chronic, that desperation makes so much sense.

1:27:20But for as long as it's been chronic, you know, chronic, it's like, there might be some time that needs, you know, that tending time. Yes, absolutely. That it deserves. Yeah. Yeah. So profound. This has been incredible. Thank you for being here. I am so excited about the book. what is your wish last question what is your wish for people who read this book

1:27:47I would say wow what's my wish that's a big question um I would say that my wish for people is to not harden up against life I talk about this a little bit in the conclusion I'm getting emotional again just talking about it to not harden up against life, but to soften to life. And I talk a little bit about this tattoo that I have on my wrist, which says, I can't pronounce it. It's in Latin. I don't know how to say it, but whatever it says, it says strong and tender. And it's this reminder to me that like the things that you went through, yes, they can make you stronger, right? Oh, everything makes you stronger, but it also makes you stronger because it makes you more tender because it makes you softer because it opens you up.

1:28:31It makes you more empathetic to the world around you. And so that would probably be my wish for people is to not allow your circumstances, your experiences to harden you, but to soften you. Thank you. Thank you all for listening. Get the book now, Body First Healing. All right. We love you. We'll see you on the next one. Bye. Thank you so much, Brittany. Again, it's Body First Healing. You can listen to the first episode she did with us by searching Brittany Piper, almost 30. And you can follow her on Instagram, healwithbritt, B-R-I-T-T. Thank you so much for coming on the show. And thank you all for listening.

1:29:10And our book, as you've heard, is available now. We're so proud. We can't wait for this to be in your hands. If you already have the book, please leave a review. It would mean the world to us. wherever you got the book, you can leave a review and get this for a friend going through any season of change. We know it will be a really beautiful support. Yeah. And we'll see you on YouTube. You can subscribe to YouTube, which we're investing more in. We got our videos there. So you can come see us live and living color on YouTube, Almost 30 podcast on TikTok and Instagram, almost30.com. I'm on Instagram at itskrista.

1:29:41And I'm Lindsay. I'm at Lindsay Simpson. She is. That's me. Love you guys. See you soon. Bye. Thank you.