Unstressable with Helen Marie - Unraveling Ourselves

0:01I am so glad you could join us. I'm your host, Mo Gaudet This podcast is nothing more than a conversation between two good friends sharing inspiring life stories and perhaps some nuggets of wisdom along the way This is your invitation to slow down with us Welcome to Slow Mo

0:34Welcome back. My guest today, again on the mini series of Unstressable, is going to focus on the topic of trauma and self-work. Helen Marie is a trauma therapist who focuses and specializes in helping people get to know themselves in a way that allows them to go through the challenges of life and the scripts that we build around life as we navigate through it. She is quite successful and popular on social media, unlike me, such as TikTok, you know that one, and Instagram with her wonderful, simple approach to explaining very complex concepts. Helen's book Choose You is coming out May 16th. So just one week after Unstressable.

1:20So I'm going to ask you if you're going to order Unstressable to also order Choose You at the same time. That would be a lovely, I would love to see Amazon and other websites recommend frequently bought together because choose you basically is a is an approach to help you find a way to understand yourself, but also to give you the courage to put yourself first when that's the appropriate thing to do. Without further introduction, I want to get into the conversation, but I remind you once again that Unstressable is a mission. So we're attempting, Alice and myself, to take a million people out of stress every year.

2:00And it is, believe it or not, an achievable task. You could help us by kindly making a simple choice. If you're planning to buy Unstressable, I'd ask you to order it right away because the very first week or two of a book's life really determines if people get to know about it. So if you do plan to order it, please order it today. Unstressable is a very balanced view of my highly engineered mind and Alice's beautiful spiritual and feminine approach to things. So, yeah, I actually think you will like it. in any case, I'm very grateful that you followed me on this entire series. It's been wonderful to meet other incredible thinkers on the topic of stress, which I believe is a pandemic of our time.

2:49Today's guest is one of the most wise, I would say, Helen Marie. So Helen, thank you for being here. I love your background. I told you as soon as you came on the camera and we had a lovely conversation around that background because I told you that my wonderful wife Hannah basically does the same. She tries to focus the conversation not on herself as a therapist. She tries to remove her persona and give her focus to her clients and anyone that listens to her, you know, work basically, which I have to say has been quite eye-opening for me, especially in the age of social media where everyone tries to make the focus themselves.

3:36So can we start there and tell me a bit about your experience as a therapist and what choices did you have to make that were maybe a little counterintuitive before we start to look at your work and choose you? Well, firstly, Mo, thank you so much for inviting me on. I was really looking forward to this conversation. So thank you. Yeah, we did have a bit of a chat about my background. I think like Like your wife, we train to not self-disclose. I don't know what modality your wife's trained in, but I don't disclose as a therapist. It's very much about my client so that they don't have another layer to me that they're overthinking who their therapist is, that the conversation is just us together.

4:24But you're right. I do write on Instagram and I have a lovely community of people And I'd love to share more about myself, but I have to keep a check on myself the whole time that this is for the goodness of other people and not bringing myself too much into that space. This is a very difficult choice, Helen, if you don't mind me saying. You know, we live in a world where the currency of the Internet is bragging. And while I find it almost noble what you and Hannah are doing and many other great therapists, I would say, it's almost counterintuitive to the way our world has gone, where you have to brag about yourself.

5:06You have to show up in a way that might not necessarily be you. And there is a, you know, that I think leads a lot of us to, not me, by the way, I don't give a shit, but well, I mean, a lot of people tend to say, well, if I want to reach impact, I might as well play the game. I'll share openly a very distressing fact for me, you know, because Unstressable has been written equally by myself and my co-author, Alice. Alice is wonderful and she really knows her topic. But the media, whenever we are trying to be in podcast or on TV or whatever, will say, no, no, no, no, we will host Mo, we don't want to host Alice, right?

5:50Of course, she's the younger writer, okay? And Alice is a very humble, very effective, like really effective, but she doesn't want to show off and create that whole noise of social media, if you want, because she's very effective at what she does. And it's quite confusing because in a very interesting way, she probably brings as much, if not more, to the topic than I do. She's really a very serious stress management expert because of her life experience, but yet the world is forcing us to be in a different corner. How do you strike that balance? How do you get popularity online when you're trying to do the right thing?

6:28Well, firstly, I'm really sorry that's been your experience. That's a difficult one to navigate for both of you, actually, when you've written that together. And I loved that podcast you did together on the book and you shared your favorite parts. It was a beautiful podcast. There was so much fun. I loved it. I could feel it. I could tell you were. I think coming back to the question, I think there comes a time where you have to lean into your own acceptance of what the world wants versus what you want. And maybe come back to that acceptance of your own truth. Otherwise, it will just chew you up inside.

7:14and it is difficult to to fight against society the masses when it doesn't feel comfortable yourself so it feels very unfair when you've both written the book together and I can only imagine the the feelings that you have towards Alice in those moments as well must be very difficult. It's quite an interesting challenge because you know Alice and I were talking today about the fact that from one side, you should stand up for what's right. So we should simply say, no, you either have the two of us together or you don't, right? Which I think is the fair, right thing to do. But at the same time, she was saying, but Mo, if you show up alone and 10 ,000 or 100 ,000 or even one person gets the message and it helps them become less stressed in the world that we live in today, then that's a worthwhile cause.

8:08And I think that balance is very difficult to strike. Again, I mean, for years and years and years, I told my team that I didn't want to be online at all. I actually, for the first two and a half years, I had like 80 ,000 followers on LinkedIn and 12 ,000 on Twitter and 40 ,000 on Facebook and so on. And I had not posted once. Like I was like, yeah, I didn't want to. I didn't want to be the face of this. And then my team sat me down and said, are you nuts? Like, if you really want to make a difference, you need to play the way the world is playing. I remember Sonia, my wonderful coach and partner in 1billionhappy.org, simply said, look, people don't listen to advice, to intellectual advice.

8:52They listen to people. People relate to people. If they don't see your face, if they don't know your story, they're not going to relate to what you're saying in any other way other than intellectually. And intellectual connections are not that deep. So I changed, but I still struggle with that. I struggle with the idea that there is the right way of doing things. Shouldn't we just, like your background, the right way of doing things? Shouldn't we just say, you know what, sorry for my English, the system, it will eventually work out. I'm not going to play that way. Yeah, I hear you. I really hear you.

9:32And I'm interested in you saying about how you hadn't posted and weren't showing up and I remember when I was meeting with Penguin my publishing team and my editor said Helen how do you feel about showing up on social media where you never never show your face you never you never come online it's always just your words and I said I'm not sure there's obviously some resistance because I'm not posting myself I'm posting words and they were very kind because they actually said to me so my experience was different, they actually said to me, Helen, what you're doing is obviously working. So they basically took the pressure off of me showing up.

10:12So and I really appreciated that because I wanted to stand in my position of I am a therapist who enjoys sharing words. I'm not a, I'm not a marketeer. I'm not a social media person in that, in that light. And I felt I could feel that soothing me that I wasn't under pressure to show up in that way. As it's happened, I have shown up a bit more since the book's, the book before the book's release. But my natural habitat is not to be so visual. Yeah. Before we talk about the book, tell me about trauma. We haven't covered trauma in this mini series. And, you know, Alice and I in Unstressable, we were very clear that we're not trauma experts.

10:57You chose to be an expert in like the most difficult thing ever. So tell me about trauma where does it come from how do we recognize it some of your experiences on this work of course i mean i have my own personal stories and i that and some of them aren't ones that i can share because they also involve other people's stories but my own my own trauma is what led me to train as a therapist. So my own trauma led me to university again at a much later stage in my life to retrain, to give back the help that I'd seen that therapists can give to people who are struggling with trauma. and such a powerful impact on me that there's so much healing and help available for people that have been through trauma where I felt before there wasn't help I hadn't realized so I now have a wonderful international private practice thankfully to my Instagram community of clients from all around the world that are all presenting with trauma.

12:14Now, trauma, there's different types of trauma. I'm sure you're aware there's PTSD trauma, sudden impact trauma, and then there's long-term trauma, relational trauma. A lot of my work I do is around childhood trauma and how what should have been in your childhood was lacking and how that's impacting you as an adult today and I think I sort of take you on that journey in the book in a way to understand yourself from a younger perspective and how that manifests today but allowing people the the space to heal to grow to make choices where their life their future can look different One of the philosophers I studied at university was Heidegger.

13:06And some people love him, some people hate him. It resonated with me. He resonated with me purely from his perspective of we can't change what's been thrown at us, but we can change how we respond. And that's probably the crux of my work is showing people the way that they have a choice to change now going forward. If you look at childhood trauma, I'm going to ask a very, very weird question. So please don't blame my ignorance. Do you think an African tribe in the middle of nowhere, where they grow up with all sorts of challenges in the world, right? My uncle was eaten by a tiger. My aunt popped her eye while she was walking in the jungle.

13:53They lost 16 kids while they ended up with three. Do you think those people grow up and sit around the campfire and say, my daddy wasn't there? Or like my mom shouted at me one time and that created a story or a script. I'm not undermining trauma, but I'm sort of asking, are we dealing with those issues because we have no other issues or are those issues really what makes our modern world? I love the way you brought in that example and then at the end of the sentence mentioned modern world because I think our modern world is shifting. I think when you mention the tribe in Africa we're looking at a support network, a village network and I think what's happened in modern world is we've become so isolated.

14:45So we feel scared within our own self because of this lack of support and community. We're also missing this ability to help others within a community because we're becoming so isolated. There was, I'll come back to the beginning of the question in a minute, but there was a doctor in East London who was noticing rapid increase of cases of depression and anxiety and his patients were incredibly isolated and what he did was said right on for a story's sake on saturday morning i want you to pitch up and we're going to go around to the back of the surgery where this this dumpling wasteland and we're going to do some gardening and he invited all of these people that were really lonely and had no community and this group formed where they started gardening, growing, and building this community together.

15:46And their symptoms of depression and anxiety lessened considerably. So I think there's something to say about the beautifulness of community that we're losing in the modern world. And, Mo, I saw it in COVID with my clients that I was seeing online that were spiraling into deeper levels of depression and withdrawal, particularly in my late 20s cohort. Something was really happening with them. They were living on their own as well, lots of them. they were very very very isolated and couldn't give them the tools to do the things that could help so it was just very difficult to manage their depression in that time the moment they could go back to work and mix and socialize with people and feel part of something again the symptoms lessened considerably so I think there's something in that when we're looking at a tribal state versus a modern world isolated state.

16:56I think you're spot on, honestly. I mean, the truth is, it's not only that connection to others in the tribe, it's the connection to being itself, to nature, to all of the animals, to the trees around you. There is something. you feel safer it seems in in the middle of the jungle than you then you feel in the city because you're surrounded by all of those who share your same objective survival in the jungle or being having a good time together in the jungle or feeling part of the tribe together in the jungle I think that really makes a massive difference yes hugely and I I know when I've been on holiday before to Kenya and spent some time in the Maasai Mara.

17:43And the community effect of these people is so beautiful to witness. The smiles, the happiness, the wanting to talk with you, the wanting to be with you. It is wonderful. And I mean, I live in London, I could walk down the street and I don't get that same welcome from people around me. But there, there was such fascination to mix and be with people. I love the analogy you brought of nature and this, I mean, the science and the research behind spending time in nature for trauma sufferers is vast, you know, we just have to remember to do it. Yeah, yesterday, honestly. So Alice always tells me that connecting, of course, connecting with nature, but also grounding and yourself and so on.

18:35I have to say yesterday I had a very stressful, very, very stressful day. My mom's not doing well. She hasn't been doing well for three months now. And, you know, I love her very much. My mom really, in all honesty, is probably one of the big reasons I look at the world the way I look at the world. And she's a very strong woman who is very independent and very stoic in many ways. But also on top of that, you know, a few business deals are like, yeah, very painful and annoying. And, you know, you get people to have a bit of power over you and they immediately abuse it. Right. And anyway, I'm like, it is really stressful and my whole body is aching.

19:15And Hannah had, you know, a few clients to work with over in the evening. And so I called one of my dear friends who lives nearby and we went for a walk on grass, like we took our shoes off and we walked on grass. My God, like immediately that simple connection. They had to text Alice and I say, I hate to admit this because the scientific method has no way of proving this, but this shit works. Like it seems we're so disconnected from our nature. Yes. And I don't know how familiar you are with EMDR. That's a trauma therapy. intervention what's that yeah i am not familiar and i even if i was i want my listeners to be familiar of course okay so it's emdr which is eye movement desensitization reprocessing yes yes yes yes yes yes and we use it with trauma and i'm almost 90 through my training of somatic emdr working with the body doing the training in new york online with dr scott lyons absolutely fantastic guy who founded the Embody Lab.

20:26Great, great program for somatic learning. Now, the founder of EMDR, I think you'll love this, Mo, was Shapiro, Frances Shapiro. And she's a psychologist. And she was stressed with something. I'm going to take myself on a walk. She went out into nature and she noticed she started to feel better. But as opposed to just saying, oh, I feel better, a great go home and carry on as a psychologist her mind was working what is it i'm doing that is making me feel better and she noticed that her eyes were moving left to right left to right flicking up down across and she thought it's something about the eye movement using the left and right hand side of the brain so she brilliantly went on and did huge huge amounts of research into this eye flicking and found that it reprocesses the brain.

21:29So in therapy, we use it with, we can use our finger to move the eye movement left or right, but it all started from her feeling better in nature and actually looking at what she was actually doing in nature. So I'm not surprised you felt better. But it gets me to think because I really am. I mean, I'm honestly proud of myself leading into the publication of the book. I've had an incredibly stressful year. It's almost as if God or the universe, whatever you believe in, I believe in God. So it's almost as if God is testing me to say, you arrogant little prick, you know, you want to make a, to help a million people a year, show me that you're a good example of this, right?

22:17And it's been so stressful. It's been so stressful, it's incredible. Probably the most stressful year of my life. And I'm doing so well. It's, you know, of course you break every now and then, but then I'm like, yeah, chill, I can deal with this, you know? And I sort of look back at the stress equation we have at the beginning of Unstressable, and which basically says that like in physics, stress is not just the events and challenges that you face, but it's also your skills and resources of how to deal with them. Right. And I'm sort of celebrating that I'm now older because this amount of stress when I was in my twenties, I would have completely freaked out.

22:55Right. Now I'm like, yeah, it's chill. Hey, I can hug that and move on. But it pauses the question of how did we end up here? How did we create an environment where, like you say in Choose You, where everything else seems to come first? Everything else seems to be the way the world wants us to navigate life. How did we end up in this place? well i i think what you i mean firstly i love the way you said um an incredibly stressful year but i'm chill and i was like wow and i love the way i'm listening to your mathematical brain with your physical equation and i'm thinking we were to relate that back to therapy we talk about the window of tolerance i don't know if you're familiar yeah i think that sounds really familiar here yeah And it's so wonderful when we think about the window of tolerance because someone with trauma, unhealed trauma, their window of tolerance is incredibly narrow.

23:59So they can't hold big emotions. It pops out into the hypervigilant or down into the hypervigilant. So they either get very activated, mobilized, or they pop down throughout it and fall through into their very demobilized, procrastinating, stuck, frozen states. What you're suggesting to me is that through a very stressful year, your window of tolerance is actually quite large and wide. You can hold the stress now where you couldn't have held it in your 20s. 100%. You see, this is, I think this, let me repeat this because I think this is really important for our listeners. When your response to events exceeds the actual magnitude of the event, it's because you're responding to the event multiplied by your trauma somehow or magnified by your trauma, right?

24:52And so you'd find yourself exploding because of a small comment from your partner or something like that. that it's not because of the comment, it's because the comment triggered a much larger script and a larger story. And that as you increase your window of tolerance, as you work on yourself, you start to see the world differently. You start to first of all differentiate between the event and your trauma, but also put your trauma within the right magnitude of what it is, right? An event in the past that you can revisit and you can reframe and you can understand and you can focus on. So to me, this is very important for everyone to understand, But Helen, honestly, it's the most difficult thing to do for most people, right?

25:33We're constantly triggered and we don't understand what's going on. No, and I think what you see there is really important that we, why are we? And I think it's about coming to a state where we actually get very intentional about our choices, about caring for ourselves as someone we actually care about. about understanding those triggers understanding why it's happened i sometimes i sometimes think that we show up as humans with such little understanding of what it actually is to be a human it's almost like getting into a car and having no idea how to drive a car but going for it anyway yeah and i think a super car as a matter of fact in a very busy in a very busy formula one track yeah the ferrari you were meant to have outside your house in california yeah exactly yeah yeah for for those who who didn't listen to that story when i was chatting with helen before we started about the time when i published soul for happy and a tv team from korea came to to make a you know a documentary about the happiness and so on and they said we'll come and shoot at your place.

26:51And they expected the chief business officer of Google X to have like a few Ferraris outside and a very large mansion, which is typical in California, to be honest. And, you know, I was already on my path to completely really minimalizing my life in many ways. And so all 15 of them, you know, had to fit somehow into my one bedroom apartment. And I made coffee for all of them. And that was actually the opening statement of their program that, oh, we were very surprised that this guy is not really the chief business officer. At least he doesn't look like it. So yeah, so that's why the Ferrari. So go back.

27:27We're rushing around the world. We have no idea why we are so triggered because we don't know how to drive the car at all. Is that what you're saying? Yes, it is what I'm saying. When I work with my clients and I work very closely with the body, I'm very passionate about people understanding their nervous system and how it works so that they become in control of their nervous system and not the other way around. And from what you're saying, you've learned that inadvertently, or I'm sure through a lot of self-work as well, to understand your nervous system responses. And that tool of understanding yourself so that you can show up for yourself in the world, in your human body, so that you understand it, is what I'm saying.

28:15But we don't get into a car and just go for it. And I feel we're expected to be human without really understanding what it is to be human. Okay, I'm not going to let you get away with that. What is it to be human? I think this comes into, for me, it comes into meeting yourself with a softness, a gentleness, an acceptance, a compassion. and then dropping that expectation of self or beating yourself up or self-sabotaging yourself or abandoning yourself and then meeting others with that same level of understanding, compassion, seeing the humanness in us. We are human. We're not robots. We're not machines.

29:12We're real living, feeling bodies and I would say almost to get out of the cognitive and come more from the body perspective and I often use a technique I often use a technique actually with people that lose that sense of self to get them to pat their body down so literally tap their body and feel the form of their body so they almost come back in as a oh this is who i am that like a sense of self in that moment a lot shifts for clients when they try that exercise can i be a bit philosophical here about what you just said because everything you just described is what kids are it's literally like you're self-compassionate you're happy with life you're not you have no judgment of yourself at all.

30:05You're in flow, you're almost in love with everything. And then we develop that cognitive anchor in our head. Like we anchor ourselves to everything that we think about. And we start to struggle. And I have to admit to you, I mean, me being a video gamer has really helped me in many, many ways because I really very frequently, and not all the time, but I very frequently dealt with the most difficult situations of my life as a gamer. It's like, yeah, you know what? By the way, gamers try to do the best they can. And so I'm trying to do the best that I can. But you know what? If my mom's 85 and she's old and she's really, you know, in not her best health, I can try my absolute best.

30:55But I don't think I have the ability to fix this. So you know what? but I'm going to do my best and I'm going to try and be close to her. And I'm going to try to, you know, make her feel the best that I can, but I'm not really disgruntled with life and I'm not really, you know, I'm a bit more of a kid in this. It's like, yeah, I have her now. I don't know very much what the future is going to look like. Is there any way to bring that back up in us, that innocence, that embodiment, embodiment, that sense of play, that lack of self-judgment, that compassion to oneself and to others. Is that possible at all?

31:36I always say anything's possible, but I would, I'm drawn to ask you, and I hope you don't mind, that when you say those things, what sensations do you notice? Oh, I'm just very elated, I think. It's a calmness, isn't it? It's calm, yeah. It's almost like, this is how it should be i know it sounds really weird i'm i think i'm sharing very much today because i've been experiencing a very interesting phase right where it's not that things don't matter because things do matter but things matter in a way where you engage with them not not try to change them i don't know if that makes sense i think what i'm hearing is you're saying about meeting something where it's at as opposed to fighting it yeah or meet or trying to make it what you want it where you want it you know meet it you can't where it's at yeah you can't and it's almost there's a and i think i think as we get older mo that there's i think we find it easier to lean into acceptance lean into making choices that the feel a bit easier that we work we work with ourselves and not against ourselves and noticing how I loved noticing because I work with body language a lot but I notice how when you talked about gaming I was like that that was your self-soothing self-regulating tool that's really effective yeah regulate your nervous system so instead of spiraling with the cognitive the thoughts the the worry is actually what you did was self-soothe in how you know best.

33:27And I bet that then your perspective was then very different to how it was when your thoughts were ruminating. Yeah, for sure. I think this is the biggest advice I ever give anyone is that incessant thinking is really the biggest negative that we can ever apply to ourselves. You know, thoughts should be either useful or joyful. They shouldn't be incessant. They should be observed. I'm the podcast host, you're the guest. So we're going to go to trauma again. Tell me a little bit about how childhood trauma is created, is formed. Well, I think it can be very different. It manifests in different ways.