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Resolving Trauma to Step Into the Life Meant for You
01:12:59
In this episode, Sarah explains how trauma is something we all experience to varying degrees and the impact it has on our lives. When we have yet to resolve past trauma, it actually gets stuck and stored in our bodies, meaning our system essentially thinks it is still happening or could happen again at any moment. For many of us, this unresolved trauma is what keeps us stuck in chronic dysregulation and unable to step toward the life we’re wanting. Sarah is going to guide you through the latest neuroscience and trauma research in a way that’s easy to understand and applicable to our everyday lives. You’ll learn how we can teach our bodies to regulate again and gently begin releasing that stuck energy, so that you can heal in a way that lasts.
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Sarah
Hi, I'm Sarah, and welcome to youo Makesense. I'm a somatic experiencing practitioner and expert on trauma resolution, attachment parts work, and nervous system regulation. This podcast is a manual to understanding your human experience so that you can navigate the world with freedom, ease, empowerment, and create the life that you desire. Remember, you make sense all parts always. So. So in this episode, we're going to talk about understanding trauma and how to actually resolve it. Years ago, trauma kind of became a buzzword. Everybody was talking about it, which I think is a really good thing, that we are normalizing this very human experience. What usually happens when something becomes kind of a buzzword or a part of, in some ways, even a part of pop culture is there can be a lot of misunderstanding about it. So my hope is that in this episode, you're really going to gain an understanding of what it actually is and how to resolve it in. So, first of all, the most important thing to understand is that trauma is not actually about an event itself. It's about how an event overwhelms our system's capacity to process what is happening. So what might be traumatizing for one person might not be for another person, because it's not the situation alone that causes trauma. Instead, it's that energetic component that overwhelms our system's capacity to process the experience or to do anything about what is occurring. So it's too much for our system. Now, if we don't have the conditions necessary after a trauma ends for it to resolve or leave our body, then it becomes stuck and stored or locked in time. And there are two primary things that our system actually needs in order to process the trauma through after it's completed, which is, number one, safety. So we have to have an experience of safety after. And number two, we have to have something called a mutually empathic witness. That simply means another human being who has the capacity to hold a container for us in their own nervous system. So for them to be anchored in regulation and not try to change us, not try to fix us, but instead be an attuned witness so they are able to connect to our nervous system, to lean into and connect to what we are experiencing on their own autonomic level. So, meaning feel for us but not get washed away in it and hold, I think of it like holding an anchor or holding a rope to regulate for both of us. By the way, that's what attunement really is. There's a lot of confusion about the word attunement, and people can tend to think Attunement is just what you say. But in fact, attunement is not really about much about what you say. It's about connecting to someone on an autonomic level. So if someone is feeling sorrow, I'm going to give you an example of this really quick. If somebody was feeling sorrow and they said to me, yeah, I just feel, like, really hopeless. I can't imagine things are going to ever get better. And imagine I reflected back to them what I heard, but from regulation, And I said, yeah, so I'm hearing you say that it feels like things aren't going to ever get better and that it feels hopeless. Is that right? So can you hear the misattunement there? I'm not actually connecting to them on a nervous system level. Instead, what I need to do is absorb what they're saying, keep a rope to regulation for both of us, but respond while connecting to their nervous system, which might sound something like this. I know that's a lot. And I'm really hearing you say that it feels like things are hopeless and they might not get better. And am I getting that right? And see, do you see the difference there? There's a real difference in my ability to connect. So in order for us to resolve trauma, we need that mutually empathic witness, somebody who's really connecting to our experience. And for many of us, when we experience traumas along the way, like, let's say you experienced chronic bullying or racism in school, and you came home to loving parents, but they couldn't be a mutually empathic witness. And when you were upset, they said, you're fine. Suck it up. It's gonna be okay. This is gonna make you stronger. They're not actually holding a container for your system to process that experience out. And so the result of that is it becomes locked in time. A really simple example of how this works is I want you to think about a bird hitting a window. I know that sounds. You're like, sarah, why do you want me to think of a bird hitting a window? This is a terrible thing to think about. I. This bird I'm about to tell you about survives and lives an amazing bird life. So I've actually seen birds hit windows before, unfortunately. And when that happens, the bird will fall to the ground. And of course, obviously, and you may think, oh, my goodness, the bird's dead. But much of the time, the bird is actually not dead. What happened was its nervous system just experienced trauma. So an overwhelm of energy or stimulation that it couldn't control, and then it goes Into a deep survival response, its dorsal vagal complex. So it shuts down, and it'll look like the bird's not alive. Its eyes might even be just open, not moving, because that's. That's the result of shock trauma. Its system is going to be almost. Almost look like it's stiff or frozen. Again, a result of shock trauma. And it'll look like it's not even breathing at all. Before I understood this work, like, literally as a kid, this happened a couple times, and I was so distressed because I loved animals. And I would get a shoebox, put the bird in a shoebox. I was going to have a bird funeral. And then what would happen was like 15, 20 minutes later, the box would start to shake. And I got so freaked out, like, oh, my God, the. The bird was resurrected. But what was actually happening was that bird had the safety that its system needed in order to discharge or get rid of that trauma, meaning have the trauma leave its body. So it would start to come out of that heightened level of a shutdown response, its dorsal vagal complex, and come out up, what I call its highway, or up, up its nervous system into its sympathetic nervous system. So now it comes into a place where it can actually be with the dysregulation and do something called discharging it. So that means it's gridding itself of that energy. So by shaking and convulsing, and then 15 or 20 minutes after that, it will have that energy cleared from its body and it'll often do something called orienting. So you'll see the bird look around and what it's doing is it's imprinting to its system the past is over, that experience is complete. And now I can fly off a free bird. And the result of that is it sees windows. And it doesn't get traumatized because that trauma's not stuck and stored. Instead, it sees windows. And it just says, oh, don't fly near a window. Now, for many of us, because we didn't have those conditions necessary to process trauma through, what occurs is it gets stuck and it gets put in that receptacle of past information that we all have that the threat detector uses to figure out if we're safe or not in our present lives. And so the threat detector essentially says, well, I'm going to make sure that you never ever experience something like that again. And I'm actually gonna be on the lookout for it because I wanna prevent against it. So when anything happens that reminds our system of the past, the threat detector said, that must be traumatizing just like the thing in the past was. And in that moment it's as if we travel time and we are re experiencing that trauma in. So trauma is not a thing of the past. Trauma is a thing of the present moment. When people tell you just get over it or like that was in the past, why don't you move on? It was 20 years ago. They don't understand the science behind trauma. Time does not heal. I really think that's important to name here. Healing heals. Time in some ways can actually exacerbate our symptoms and our problems. Because when we've experienced trauma for a long period of time, our nervous systems that means our nervous system continues to protect us for long periods of time time. And then we have greater symptoms because of decade decades long experience of self protection. So time certainly does not heal trauma and you can't just get over it. What heals trauma is doing the somatic work necessary that we're going to talk about throughout, you know, the rest of this podcast and of course the rest of this episode as well. So a couple other things that are really important to understand about trauma itself is that when we, when we have that experience, our system is going to say, never again do I want this to happen. And the result of that is we have two options for how our nervous system then orients to the experience. And that is called over coupling or under coupling. So over coupling essentially means that my nervous system now has associated anything like what I experienced in the past as dangerous. An example of that is this. Let's say that you had a babysitter when you were a kid that harmed you in some way. Your nervous system might say all babysitters are really bad. So when you have children, your system is going to say, I can't possibly have a babysitter because babysitters hurt people. And so you go into panic around having a babysitter because your system has decided it's a global thing that all babysitters are bad. Or maybe you get into a car accident and you're hit riding a bike by a white car. What's going to happen is your system might over couple that experience. And now your system says all white cars are dangerous and bicycles are dangerous, even bicycles that are on a main road bicycles in your backyard will be dangerous because my system has done what's called over coupling or an over association as a way to try to prevent me from ever experiencing that again. Now, another way that our system can orient to traumas is called something called under coupling and under coupling is a disconnection from the embodied experience of what happened. It was so overwhelming, so even more overwhelming to our nervous system that we couldn't be with the activation at all and we had to disconnect from it entirely. The way that you disconnect from it is by using or resourcing your dorsal vagal complex. So what does that look like in your life? It might look like here actually. I'll just give you some examples from my life. I think I've named this before, but I would tell people about my trauma history and all the abuse and everything that I experienced and I felt nothing. So I had no affect, there was no sensation, there was no feeling about it. I felt a bit like a robot. And when I would tell people, I could see them having a lot of feelings about it, but I felt nothing. That is an undercoupling. Or if you've ever heard somebody who. I would say a lot of standup comedians might be undercoupled. I was a former comedian myself. That might be very hard for you to believe. I did improv for a really long time and I'm insulting myself slightly by saying that might be hard to believe because I'm assuming you think I'm not funny. Anyway. I don't mean to insult insult to the comedians listening to this, but it is a survival response that a lot of people use comedy to disconnect. What a brilliant survival response. So that might look like somebody making a joke about something that happened in their life that was so overwhelming to them that they can't actually access the overwhelm. So instead they use humor to be disconnected from it. That is under coupling. Another example of undercoupling is not remembering what happened, which is also part of my, my story. I didn't remember much of my childhood, so I was so disconnected or under coupled from it. When you come into healing, I just want to say that we go from being under coupled to sometimes becoming over coupled or connected to it highly. And then we are able to actually differentiate from it and process it through. So all of that is a real normal part of the healing process. So when we are our system has unresolved trauma, it again is preventing against, trying to prevent against that trauma from ever happening again. Which means a lot of us are experiencing chronic dysregulation in our lives. Why? Because remember, dysregulation is just active self protection. So if our nervous system doesn't think the past is over, it's going to be trying to protect us in our present lives. In the form of dysregulation, which is why something may have happened to you 30 years ago, but your nervous system doesn't yet know it's over. So you still feel on edge and hyper vigilant all the time. Now and again. That is the importance of understanding that trauma is not a thing of the past. It's a thing of the perpetual present until it's healed. Another thing to understand about trauma is it is subcortical. It lives in your body. Of course, there's a connection to your amygdala and hippocampus, but the overall experience of trauma is. Is a subcortical one of your body. That energy actually lives inside of our tissue and inside of our autonomic nervous system. So a lot of people ask me this, like, do I have to remember my whole trauma history? You don't have to remember it at all because it's remembered in your body. So in terms of healing trauma, you cannot talk your way into that. Meaning, talk therapy is not the right therapy for trauma resolution. And this is what research shows. One of my. A friend and mentor, Bessel van der Kolk, wrote a wonderful book, the Body Keeps the Score, which essentially talks about this, that it is not a thing that our minds are able to resolve. It must be resolved in our bodies because that's where it's experienced. So you actually, when we're doing somatic trauma work, we're actually not going back and telling the whole story and rehashing it again and again and again. That actually doesn't bring resolution. Oftentimes that just imprints the trauma more and overwhelms our system. Instead, what we want to do is we want to begin gaining regulation of our nervous system and then learning how to be with small amounts of that energy and processing it through our body, which I'm going to talk about in just a second. The last thing I just want to say about trauma is it's stored in implicit memory, not procedural memory. So procedural memory is essentially, think of it like linear memory. So my ability to recount this entire day. I got up this morning, I saw Truman. I said, hi, Truman. How are you doing? That's my dog. You don't need to know the whole thing, but I'm going to walk you through a little bit of it. I had a matcha. I showered. I had someone come do my hair and makeup. I do have people do that when I come on do this podcast with you because I'm not very good at that. Then I came and met with my lovely team who is here at the studio recording this with you? We had lunch, and now I'm talking to you. That's procedural memory. I just went through the day. Okay? Now, implicit memory is embodied memory. Here's an example of what implicit memory might look like, and this is one I just give a lot because it was such a big part of my life. And I want to name this. I know when I talk about my trauma history, it's quite extreme, and I just want to name that. If you're listening and you're like, oh, my God, I don't relate to that at all. You do not have to have a history like mine for this work to be relevant to you. It is relevant to every human being because we've all experienced trauma in some way. Um, it just might not be to the degree, let's say, like, I have. But. But when I give this example, I'm gonna give a couple. But I want you to think about a version of this in your own life. So, for me, I experienced abuse in my house and. And in my room a lot of times. So that meant a door would open. And when that door opened, something bad was gonna happen to me. So my system in my body recall or experienced an overwhelm. I went to freeze. So an overwhelm shock of, I'm not going to be okay. Really intense survival response. And it was linked up to the sound of the door. So until that trauma was resolved, anytime that I was around any door that had, like, a knob that you turn and made a creek, my system would respond as if it thought something bad was going to come around the door. And what I would do is I would go into a quick stress response, my freeze response. And my shoulders would get tight, my eyes would get really big, my heart would race. I would freeze. Like, I couldn't move. It was really intense, like a startle response. And, excuse me, this was before I was connected to the story, meaning I had dissociated from it. I didn't even know what happened, and I would still have that. That response. That is traumatic memory. That is how traumatic memory works. Another example of how this might look is imagine. Imagine when you were a kid, anytime that you did something wrong, you were reprimanded. And it felt a bit like a dictatorship inside of your home. Well, your system learns to be on eggshells, and. And it's not okay to get things wrong, because when I get things wrong, I'm reprimanded. So now in your adult life, you. You have a friend who says, hey, there's something that happened the other day that, that I just want to talk about. It didn't sit well for me or land well, can we talk about it? And this is a loving friend who's not going to reprimand you, but. But the implicit memory says this is confrontation and that's not going to be safe. And then it responds as if the trauma is happening and you feel panic all of a sudden. Even though your friend is loving and kind and this is going to be a really wonderful conversation, there isn't a story attached to that. It's an embodied experience. That is how traumatic memory works. And as I named before, the resolution of trauma does not happen by rehashing the story. In fact, I want to name this. A lot of times what I see occur and, and by the way, I'm going to actually, I am going to tell you this story because why not? But a lot of times what happens is we will go to see someone for help with our trauma. And that person might not be trained in trauma. I don't know if you knew this, but not all clinicians or therapists are trauma trained. That's a additional specialty that you have to go in to get training around. And that's somatic in nature. That's one of the specialties that I'm trained in and the work that I focus on. But that's not something that everybody does. And certainly there are things like I don't do cognitive behavioral therapy. There's things that I'm not an expert in myself. But all that is to say, not everyone is equipped to do trauma work. I think of trauma work like brain surgery. It is. If someone tells you they're trauma informed, ask them what that actually means. Did they do a three day workshop? Did they read a book? You know, trauma training should take years in order for someone to actually be a safe facilitator of it, because it is extremely, extremely complex and extremely delicate. So I just want to name that. Whoever you're having help you just be really tentative and, you know, careful about who you choose. That's all. So what can happen a lot is you go to someone who's not actually an expert in trauma resolution and they'll have you start telling your trauma story. Or you go to, you know, you go to a retreat and they're like, all right, let's journal from your young parts. And what you might notice is you start to talk about it and you start to get activated. Why? Because your nervous system is re beginning to relive it. And they might have. You continue to talk about it, and then your nervous system relives it more and it's reliving it without making it different, which means your nervous system. And you just become overwhelmed. And then you leave the session. You're like, I don't feel very good. I feel out of it and weird. That is not good. That actually imprints the trauma further. We never do that. So the one on one of the 101s of trauma resolution is less is more. We never, ever, ever just retell the story. So if you've been afraid to lean into this work, I just want to name that it's actually really gentle work. It's not ever supposed to overwhelm you. What instead we do is like, if I'm working with someone and they start to tell me something like, let's go back to the car accident. And they say, I'll say, what's the first thing that you remember that day? And they say, oh, I remember waking up in the morning and I was running late. And I'll stop them and say, so what do you notice in your body as you recall that? See, we haven't even gone near the accident yet, but there's probably already anticipatory anxiety there. So what we would then do is we process that energy out of their body before we go any further into the story. And then bit by bit, we chip away. But we do not overwhelm the system. That is so important. The more we do this in the way that I just described, the faster that trauma is able to resolve and leave our body forever. The truth is, when we begin to resolve it, that energy actually goes away. For me, I just named the thing about the door after doing trauma resolution work around that. My body doesn't have a shock response anymore. When I hear a door open, it also doesn't have a response. Feeling that all men are bad because that was a response that I had, or that intimacy is bad. And not just bad, like dangerous, life threatening. And my nervous system sees those things as safe now, which means my life is able to be really full because of it. And that's what trauma resolution brings. So before I walk you through a little bit of the process on how all of it happens, I just want to say this. That chronic dysregulation, which again is the result of trauma, is not always the result of trauma. Chronic dysregulation is also a symptom of where our world and our culture currently is. And I think of it this way, you know, with a Plant, right? You have plants in your house? Maybe you do. I have plants in my house. I water them. And those plants need a lot of different things. I also talk to my plants and sing to my plants because I am one of those ladies that does that. But I water them. I also make sure they have the proper sunlight that they need. I will give them some, like, plant vitamins, you know, the things that they need to nourish their soil. And I really tend them in the way that that is going to facilitate their thriving. Now, we are animals, and there are things that we need in order for us to be thriving. Here are just a few things we need. You need movement in any way that you have the ability to move. So including if I'm, you know, let's say that I am currently bedridden. We want to be able to move our body in any way we can, which might be just lifting our arms up, up or going for a walk. So whatever we're able to do to create movement in our body, that creates regulation of our nervous system. So we need movement, we need sunlight. That's very, very important. We need connection, so connection with other living beings. We need purpose, purpose of some kind. Something that we're doing that makes us feel impactful in the world and filled up. Those are just a few things that we need. And of course, nourishment with food and so on and so forth. So. But those are the major things. Now, we live in a world where right now, a lot of people are looking at screens all day long. I am one of those people, because a lot of the programs I offer are all virtual. So you're looking at screens all day long. You are sitting all day long. You are so busy that you don't have time to connect with people in community, like make food together and laugh together and dance together, all of those things that create regulation. We are spending enough time in sunlight because we are working 10 hours a day. We are not feeding ourselves with food and nourishment that actually is going to lead to greater health in our bodies. And so for all of those reasons, we aren't getting our primary needs met. And when we don't get those primary needs met, our nervous system becomes dysregulated, literally, like the plant not getting the things it needs. So I say this a lot. I live in the middle of Los Angeles, like the middle of the city, and not downtown. Though people in la, you might think downtown is the center of the city. I hope as you get to know me on this podcast in longer form than 90 second reels on Instagram. You get to know the weird things about me, like these side shoots of conversation I'm having by myself right now, which I think is pretty funny. Anyway, not in the center of downtown la, but I live in the middle of Los Angeles. And it's not a place where, I would say high levels of regulation happen easily. So there's a lot of people, there's a lot of energy, there's a lot of concrete, which, you know, does not absorb the energy, Meaning energy is moving around a lot. There's not a lot of earth exposed. There's horns and sirens, which creates dysregulation. People are hustling. So there's not a lot of connection happening, or as much as there might happen other places. Now, when I leave Los Angeles, and I was just outside of the city and the country for a week, and it was quiet, there was crickets, there was like one road there. People were really attentive at the grocery store. Like, someone was literally. The woman checking me out was like, do you want me to go get the popcorn for you? And I was like, oh, my God, this woman is so kind. She looked me in the eye, Debbie, and was gonna go get the popcorn for me. I thought she was the kindest woman in the world. Anyway, that moment of connection, like, deep connection, was really beautifully regulating for my nervous system. Being in nature, not having that hustle culture. What I noticed, I didn't have to do anything, and I already felt more calm and regulated. And so my point is that a lot of us live in environments that are not conducive to regulation. So it's not just trauma. It's also how are we watering ourselves? And that's something I want us to think about. How can I start creating change in my everyday life that that is conducive or is facilitating more regulation? Like, for me, in between calls, I get up, I go outside, and I hang around with Truman for five minutes. Or I smell a flower. Literally, like, I'm. I'm a flower hunter because, you know, flowers don't blossom for very long. You might be the only one that gets to smell it. So just find the flower and smell the flower, for God's sakes. I actually really do that. Or I put my hand on a tree in my backyard. I will put a song on and let my body move to it. I'll shake, I'll light some incense. Just anything that I know regulates me. All of those things regulate me. And I do it all throughout my day. The reason I do that is because it lessens the dysregulation that might be occurring in my body and allows for me to have greater regulation. And I always prioritize seeing people. So sometimes when you're feeling burnt out or you're exhausted, the inclination is to just be alone. And the truth is sometimes when we're exhausted, we're not just exhausted because we haven't got enough sleep. We can actually feel exhausted from not having enough connection. So coming into connection, that nourishes you, not that depletes you, but nourishes you, can actually energize you more. So I just want to name that. How can we also create conditions that, that really support more regulation in our lives? And that makes a big difference too, to lessen chronic dysregulation. So I just want to talk about now, this process. Now that we understand what trauma actually is. It's not just the event, right? It's the overwhelm of stimulation. We understand the different types of trauma, how it's remembered, how it lives, how it's re experienced, all of that. I want to talk about the process of, of getting rid of trauma from our bodies. We've already talked about it a little, but I just want to go a little, a bit deeper into it. The first thing is there's, or there's two concepts we're going to go over that, that come from Peter Levine's work, and they are pendulation and titration. And so I first want to talk about pendulation. So think of like a pendulum, right? A pendulum swings back and forth and back and forth. So your autonomic nervous system, which is the system that lives in your body, remember, it's responsible for your whole experience. It's also the system that you re experience trauma through your nervous system, innately has the ability to do something called pendulate. And pendulate simply means going from dysregulation to regulation, dysregulation to regulation, dysregulation to regulation. So that means that without me trying, my system is able to discharge traumatic energy or dysregulation from my body. So if you think about like a zebra that is grazing and it sees a cheetah, let's say, and the cheetah is, you know, it wants to have lunch and the zebra starts to run. It goes into a stress response and it's trying to get away from the cheetah. And let's say this zebra is miraculous because it has other zebras who use their stripes in order to get. I don't even know how to say this properly, but they use their stripes in order to evade the danger because it's kind of like an optical illusion. So they're able to get away from the cheetah. Okay. And then after they're in safety, that zebra is going to discharge that traumatic energy. It might shake and convulse. And then after that, they do something that's really beautiful, actually. It's called pronking. And they will literally, like, jump up and down when they come into regulation. Not just zebras. All mammals will do this. We will do this when we come into safety after our nervous system is able to discharge. And our pronking looks a little bit different. More like a celebratory I am free. But these animals will jump up and down, right? Their system says it's over, so they were able to take the traumatic energy and get it to leave their body. Now, when we've experienced trauma that was not able to resolve, our nervous system loses the ability to pendulate. And I want to give maybe one more example of what pendulation can look like and what our goal is. Let's say you oversleep, your alarm goes off, and you're like, oh, my God, I'm late for this thing. So you get up, you go into a stress response, your sympathetic nervous system. You're like, I have to, I have to. I have to. I get to get there. You're hustling as fast as you possibly can, and then you get to the place you're going, and your nervous system naturally lets down, so it naturally pendulates. And all of that stress response, that adrenaline and cortisol, begins to discharge and leave your body, and you come into relaxation. That's pendulation. And that's what we want our nervous systems to be able to do. But again, when we experience trauma, our nervous systems lose that ability. So they get stuck in what is called what is often called the trauma vortex. So they get stuck over here in dysregulation, and our systems no longer understand or know how to pendulate on their own. So when it comes to trauma resolution work and somatic work, what we're teaching our nervous systems to do is pendulate. Again, the job of an expert like me is to help. Help usher your nervous system out of the trauma vortex and into regulation. So what we do is we might even begin, you know, a session or work I'm doing with folks, and we notice something that is in what's called the Counter vortex, or regulation it literally. That means notice something nice in your room or outside and you let yourself feel into it, like the tree, the beautiful tree. Let yourself really absorb how wonderful that is. So now we're in the counter vortex. And then I would ask them to notice. I might say, what do you notice isn't working? Or what do you notice that's uncomfortable in your body? So now I'm leading someone over into the trauma vortex purposefully. But my job is to help them only take a tiny bit of that activation, meaning just enough that they can feel it but not be overwhelmed by it. So I have them notice and they might say, oh, I notice. Yeah, when I think of that, my throat gets tight. And so I'll ask them to just be with your throat being tight. And what will begin to occur is sometimes that will build a little bit, it'll get a little bit bigger. And in the early stages, I need to usher now their nervous system back over to that counter vortex. So I might say, all right, notice the tree again. So what I'm trying to do is pendulate them. And they say, okay, I notice the tree. And I'll say, now go back and forth between noticing your throat and the tree. And we continue to do that until their system pendulates over. What occurs is now that activated energy that was in their body is actually gone. It's left forever. And so this is. This is what trauma resolution work looks like. And I'm sharing that because see how gentle that is and how. How not scary it is. It's not re traumatizing. And I think a lot of times people think trauma resolution work is supposed to be. Is going to be re traumatizing and scary because so many of us have experienced that. This is the story I was going to tell you that now we are coming back to. I forgot about it early on in my healing journey. I was 22 and I had no money and moved to LA. I had all this like, like a hundred grand in private loans because I was really poor. Stolen from me, from my stepfather. And so I had nothing. And I was, was. Yeah, it was just a really destitute time. And I had no money. So the only way I could get therapy was going to a free clinic. And I paid like 3 dol because they said, what can you pay? And I was like, I think I could do $3 a session. I actually did that because integrity is really important to me. And I sat down and thought, like, okay, I think I could go without, you know, whatever the loaf of bread and I'll get other stuff. So Anyway, I paid $3 a session. What you get a lot of times at these clinics are people that are getting their hours. And I went in this room. I had suppressed my whole childhood. I didn't remember any of it. And this woman started to dig. She had no business doing trauma work because she wasn't a trauma therapist. And she, meaning she could probably tell from her training, was like, this woman seems like she has a lot of trauma. She seems disconnected from it. I don't know what it is. And so probably her curiosity had her start digging, meaning asking a lot of questions. And all of the sudden I started to remember things and I threw up in the office. I was totally derealized and destabilized. She actually ran out of the office to get the supervisor. And it's not funny at all. I'm laughing at this. This because it's, you know, almost 20 years ago and I've done so much work since then, but in the moment, that certainly wasn't. And the supervisor came in and honestly, they were just trying to make sure that I wasn't going to sue them, I think. And I was stabilized and. And drove home. And. And anyway, that was very dangerous. Never ever should that happen. No therapist or clinician or practitioner should ever be digging up things, even if they think they're there, unless we are the ones that are presenting that meaning, bringing that. Because our psyches are really brilliant things. Everybody and our psyches have the ability to put things in boxes for us that are overwhelming. So, you know, if you've experienced trauma, we all have to some degree. Again, you do not have to have my trauma history. You might have had, you know, loving parents who couldn't meet all your needs, or you moved all the time, or your parents got divorced and it was overwhelming, or you had a sibling who was sick. All of those overwhelming themes get put into boxes. And so those boxes, our psyche does that so that we can continue on. If someone opens up all of those boxes all at once, it overwhelms our nervous system's capacity to process it, and it's retraumatizing. And at the very least, and dangerous at the highest degree. This is also can happen with certain psychedelics like ayahuasca or LSD or mushrooms. Now, those things can be really helpful to some people and profoundly helpful in certain situations. But there are also others who that wouldn't be maybe the best course of action. Or at the very least, we should know that there's a possibility that it can open up all those boxes for us that we then have to put back into the boxes. So that's all really important to understand about trauma resolution work. And, and I hope that concept of pendulation makes sense. Which just brings me to a couple more things about it. And the next is this concept of titration that I mentioned a moment ago. So titration is what I've been talking about. Titration means taking small amounts of activation and supporting it to discharge or leave our bodies. The way I like to think about this is imagine, usually I have a visual if you're watching this video, usually I have visual. If you're listening to me, usually I have a visual component to this that I don't have right now. So imagine that in my hand I'm holding like a, let's say it's like a half gallon jug of water. So that half gallon jug of water is filled with traumatic energy. That is all the traumatic energy that lives inside of your body. So what we never want to do is we don't want to unscrew that half gallon of water and dump the traumatic energy onto us. It will just overwhelm us like we experienced when we were first traumatized. And instead, when it comes to trauma resolution work, what we do is we imagine there's a spigot at the bottom of that half gallon of water. So what we do is we turn the spigot and we take out a tiny bit of that activation, just enough that we can hold in our hand and we close the spigot back up. And this is exactly the process I just described a moment ago. And then we allow ourselves to be with that activation, feel it in our body, and then let our body discharge it through. Now your body can naturally do that, or you can use a regulating resource like therapeut regulating resource to help it process out. Tapping, humming, swaying, singing, bilateral stimulation, shaking. There's lots of ways to discharge the energy and then let it leave your body. And that beautiful thing is when you do this, that energy leaves your body forever. Now the more you do this, what happens is you actually build your capacity to hold more dysregulation. And so as you begin to heal and we are opening the spigot, there's gonna be greater amounts of energy that's going to want to be held. These are called energy wells. So we start with small amounts of activation because that's all our nervous system can handle. But once you've built your capacity, your psyche and your nervous system say, wow, she's pretty badass, or he's pretty badass, or they're pretty badass. They can hold a lot more now. So all of the sudden, things start to bubble up and terror or panic from childhood, even from things like being a preemie, like a baby. A preemie baby. That's a traumatic experience. And so there's energy involved in that also peri. And prenatal trauma is a very real thing. And trauma that happens in utero, birth trauma, et cetera. So that energy wants to be resolved. It's very big energy. And so once we build our capacity, we might notice, oh, my gosh, it feels like I've gone backwards, because now I'm dealing with all of this activation that's not backwards, it's actually forward. Your nervous system just has the capacity to hold it now. And then we discharge that out, too. So that's the process of titration and how we resolve trauma. And the discharge process simply means that energy going from being in our body to leaving our body. The last thing I want to say is later in our healing, we can do work that Peter calls the eye of the needle work. But this is really in any other of the. The most forefront modalities on trauma resolution is eye of the needlework. Like psychodrama, you can consider eye of the needlework. Bessel Van der Kolk, who I have assisted many, many times. Him and his wonderful wife, Lisha Skye, they do amazing psychodrama workshops. They call them structures, and they're both very dear to me personally. So anyway, that's eye of the needlework. Two to I have the needlework essentially means we are going back to the most poignant or highly activating moment of a traumatic experience. We never want to do this at the beginning. We only do this when we built our capacity to hold it now. Otherwise, what happens is we're just going to be overwhelmed. So regulating our nervous system and doing all the work that I've named it makes us become like a. Like we're becoming the. Like an incredible martial arts athlete, like the best of the best. So that I can then go back to the experience and make it different when I name or talk about I have the needlework. This really means we're going back to state dependent memory. State dependent memory essentially means I am going back to what it felt like to be in that experience. I am actually in the state I was in when that happened, happened. So I'm not in the. The. The reality or state that I am in right now. And in many Ways this and I've experienced this so many times. This feels like time travel. It's psychedelic in a lot of ways. Like truly psychedelic in a lot of ways. It's shamanic. We are going back. Our psyche is going back to the experience. And so I'm refeeling what it was like to be there, but now I have the capacity to be be there. And our system is desiring our animal body, our soul is desiring to do something called complete the incomplete experience. Meaning my system is desiring to do what it wasn't able to do to ensure my survival. So when we go back to state dependent memory, whatever the situation was, our ability to self protect in that moment is going to match whatever happened to us. So if you experienced traumas that were really overwhelming, that means that completing the incomplete experience might involve my system wanting to fight back and, and, and stop that person or kill that person. I just want to name. We are not killing anybody. We are not actually doing this in real life. This is your physiology wanting to have the appropriate response to, for example, violence, which is to self protect. The appropriate response isn't violence. The appropriate response is self protection. So for me, with the violence that happened to me, my system was saying in that moment, I need to make this stop. I need to make you stop. I need to make you stop existing. Because this continued to happen for so long to me. Did I ever do that in real life? Of course not. This happens in a therapeutic container. Now it doesn't have to of course be like that. Going back to state dependent memory might be something like this. Let's say you were in a snowboarding accident, you went off a jump, you broke your leg. Like going back to the state dependent memory would be going back to the moment that you were going off of that jump and being in your body in it and then letting your body actually land safely. And when we do that it's, it's fascinating when we do that, it actually gets imprinted as over. I was able to make it different. I have watched this happen with medical trauma so many times. People have like, let's say a surgery that they wake up from or something and the scar never heals properly because that is as rendered as trauma. It's not completed in their body. And then when their system is able to actually resolve it, scars will literally start to change because that traumatic energy is leaving our body, it's marked as complete. So trauma work is, I hope, what you can see if someone tells you that they're in this episode. If you're like, holy shit. This is a lot of information. Yeah, it is. Trauma work is complex because you are complex. We all are complex. And it's so important to have whomever is helping you on your journey really be an expert and well versed in this work. And I want to also name that. Trauma work is not just going back to the eye of the needle stuff. That's such a small part of it. Trauma work is literally regulating your nervous system by doing, regulating resources, continual regulating of your nervous system. That is trauma work. That's something that we all need because again, none of us make it out of this world without experiencing some kind of trauma. And our work is to get that energy that's been stuck in our body out to teach our nervous systems how to do this again, how to pendulate again, so that we can. The past can actually be the past and we can actually be free. And, you know, when I go through all this, I think like, like all the time, how amazing you are, how exquisitely well working you are, and how this is the why this podcast was named what it's named, how much you make sense, all parts of you always. And I say that because I spent so much of my life feeling like I didn't make sense for so long. And it's so incredible to know that science confirms. No, we actually do. And if we make sense, there's things we can do to change things too. Want to learn more about your nervous system specific to you? Take my free quiz called what's keeping you stuck? You'll receive a personalized guide with in depth somatic tools to help you regulate your nervous system. Check out the link in the description to get started. All right, it's time for our Q and A portion of the episode. Hey, Rachel, it's so good to be here with you. It's really good to be here with you at this point in the episode because otherwise it's just me talking to people. So it's nice to have you here again. By the way, Rachel's in way across the pond in England. How far outside of London are you, Rach? I've actually don't even know that.
- [44:40]
Rachel
About an hour and a half train ride drive as well.
- [44:43]
Sarah
In the country, in the beautiful country, but via technology, she is right next to me now. Okay, Rach, so we've got three questions that pertain to this episode. So, Rach, can you go ahead and ask us the first question?
- [44:58]
Rachel
So this question says. Hey, Sarah, thanks for answering my question. I've seen a couple of trauma informed Therapists, and some things have gotten better and some haven't. Is it possible to heal from all trauma or will some things always stick with me?
- [45:13]
Sarah
Peter Levine, who I talk about a lot here, he's a creator of somatic experiencing and someone I consider one of my mentors. He says a lot that in terms of traumas, you can think of them like vortices. So imagine in an image we have this giant piece of paper that is you, and on the paper there are all these, you know, think of them like a circle. And that is a trauma vortice, an experience that you've had that's unresolved. For me personally, I had tens of thousands of those because I had complex trauma, which simply means something that happened over and over and over again in my childhood. So there's a lot of those trauma vortices. And something that people ask me a lot is, well, do I have to address every single one because I'm going to have to live till I'm 10,000 years old in order to resolve it all? All the beautiful thing is that we don't. So when you address one particular trauma or experience it actually, so it resolves or disintegrates. You can think of it this way in terms of the image I'm painting. That particular trauma vortices gets rid of it, and then it also shrinks all of the other trauma vortices around it. So every other trauma vortices doesn't maybe fully go away in that moment, but they get smaller. And then I address another trauma vorticey, and that one completely goes away, and the other ones shrink, and then another one, and then the rest of them shrink until I have resolution around. Around all of the experiences that I've had. So you don't have to go back to every experience in order to gain overall resolution. What I want to name is this too. There was a time in my life where, you know, even in doing this work for. Professionally as an expert for a really long time, that. But I'm also a human. And I remember this is probably a perfectionist part of me for sure, or is was that felt like, and one day my past will never exist and I will just be an entirely different person who had this idyllic childhood where nothing bad happened. And that was a. I guess I would say a subconscious goal I had that I didn't actually have full awareness around that with was what I was striving for. And of course, that's not true, meaning I will always be me. And my past is the Only reason I do the work that I'm doing in the world, you know, and I would say probably that's. Would you say that's true for you, Rachel?
- [47:42]
Rachel
Definitely, yeah.
- [47:43]
Sarah
So, you know, there are so many things about it, especially when you have developmental trauma, that shape you, shape who you are. And I like us to also focus on how are the. What are the positive ways that it shapes us and then the benefits that later in life we can have from it, especially when we resolve our trauma. So the goal isn't that we suddenly don't have our past. And as I was saying, that was the goal that I kind of had, that one day I'll wake up and I've had this idyllic life and my past wasn't my past. That's not the goal. The goal is that the things that engulfed us or overwhelmed us or the experiences where we feel like we are traveling back in time and I'm reliving those traumas are no longer occurring. So I just want to give an example of what that might look like. As everybody listens to this podcast, you're going to get to know me more and more, and Rachel, too. And I think it's important. I just want to preface this and say the mental health field has too much of an iron curtain. And it's important, of course, that I'm not. Maybe any mental health professional isn't sharing the thing they're currently in the middle of the throes of working on. But we have to humanize ourselves so we can feel deeply connected. And so whenever I share any part of my history, my hope is that it makes you feel more connected and more understood. So I was sexually abused for the majority of my childhood inside my home. And the result of that is before that trauma was resolved, I really couldn't experience my sexuality. At first. I was totally disembodied, so over sexualized, which is a very common trauma response. And then after that, totally sexually shut down. So not connected to that. All because my system said that's really, really dangerous because it was so dangerous in the past. That's called over coupling, which we talked about a bit in this episode. So over association, meaning because that was dangerous in the past. Sexuality must be dangerous now. And then, through doing a lot of somatic healing work, I was able to show my body that the past is over. I was able to get rid of that traumatic energy that was in my body and literally discharge it it from my body forever. And now what that might look like for me is that how that might show up is, you know, for some people, they can really engage in casual sexual experiences. And of course, there's no right or wrong, good or bad. It's what. What feels good for a particular person. For me, that's not something that would ever be a part of my life. And because for my nervous system around this area, I need more of a holding meaning. I need to know someone deeply, feel safe. And so look at the difference there, right? Those are wildly different experiences when I know someone and feel safe with them. And I'm choosing that I can feel, you know, more fully expressed in my sexuality than maybe perhaps somebody who doesn't have a history like mine and am not inhibited. And it's beautiful and wonderful and full aliveness. But I just want to share that because there's. There's a difference there, right, Than somebody who doesn't have my history that might say, well, I went to this party and had this lovely time and it was freeing and whatever. And I think of it this way, that we start with another way to think about this. We start with, like, when we have a trauma, it's a gaping hole or an open wound, and through healing it, we, in somatic trauma work, we close up that wound and then we have a beautiful scar. And I say a beautiful scar because I have a lot of beautiful scars. And I'm proud of them. Them because they represent the brave work of healing like I did that somebody else didn't have to do that. And I had to put all of the effort in and the strength in the resiliency in to make that heal. And it's something now I'm deeply proud of. And at the same time, if anyone's had surgery before, you have scar tissue, right? So it's not the most comfortable thing. If someone pushed on scar tissue, it doesn't really hurt, but it's not the most comfortable versus pushing on tissue that doesn't have any scar tissue under it. That's how I think of trauma healing, that when we resolve it, it's not that there's no scar there. In fact, I want us to be proud of those scars and instead seeing it as. Yeah, and I don't love when that gets poked at, but it's absolutely navigable and something that I can hold in my system. And so it's what makes us so unique, each of us unique. Not just, you know, saying people with trauma histories, but also the acceptance of. Yeah, and this is how I navigate the world in order to be safe, in order to have full aliveness. Rather, and that I guess I want people to really know in the example that I gave, that this isn't going to inhibit you. Meaning when you do this work, you can actually supersede people who don't have a trauma history like you, who maybe are inhibited in particular ways because they haven't looked at the fact that maybe, like, intimacy is hard because their family never talked about emotions. But instead you can go from, you know, way below where they started to supersede far beyond where they could ever imagine being by embodying this work. And that's what I have certainly experienced and just this one in many areas of life, but this one area that I. That I named. And so that's what. That's what we can. What we want to look for. And I. And I. My hope is that people can be really proud of the beautiful scars that they have healed.
- [53:16]
Rachel
Oh, and you weaved in so many different elements there of actually when you've had that trauma that you've had to work with and heal and. And actually that can take you further in your journey than someone who hasn't. And also that you don't have to revisit every single traumatic experience either, that by working with some, you can create a more overall healing effect too. So. Oh, that was so beautiful, Sarah.
- [53:44]
Sarah
Thanks, Rach. Yeah, I think just one more thing I want to say on this. I know this is a lengthy question. Usually we keep them shorter. But just one thing I want to say about it is, you know, I think something that's not talked about enough and maybe we should do an episode on this. At some point is the starting off point in life for everybody is not created equal. And you know, for me and so many people, the starting off point was like the bottom of the barrel. And other people might start. If you can't see me, I say keep saying this because we have a visual component to this podcast, but you might be listening in your car, so you can't see what I'm doing, doing. But let's say I'm holding my hand, you know, pretty one hand pretty low and one hand like three feet above the other hand. So that low hand was like what I consider where I started out, not having any safety, not having caregivers who are safe at all and love me and all those things or in poverty. A lot of. A lot of things that made me start at the bottom. And of course there are people want to name who start even lower than that, but that was my starting off point. And I would say a lot of people might have started, you know, three feet above that. And then of course, for those people, there's always someone who started even higher than you. Right? So there's always people who have had it better and people who have had it not. Not as good. But what's not talked about is those variations in starting points. And so for lots of folks who started, you know, at this lower level like I did, you have to work your way up just to get to the baseline of a lot of people. And that's not talked about enough. And one thing that I think a benefit of that is when you start at that place, it can sometimes feel like I have to do this work because the alternative to not doing it is too much. So I actually have to versus someone else might say, well, I don't really have to. I'm skating along pretty okay. It's not great, but it's pretty okay. And so. So the benefit is when you have had that starting off point that's lower, usually those people continue to supersede and go beyond and have even more aliveness than somebody who didn't have a history like theirs. And I also want to name for others who had loving parents, no one got it exactly right. And nobody goes through life unscathed by difficult challenges. So for every single one of us, there are people who might have had it easier and people who might have had it harder. But it's this work that allows for full, true aliveness. You can't just have that without putting the effort in. And that's something to be really proud of.
- [56:22]
Rachel
And what you were saying there leads really great into our next question.
- [56:25]
Sarah
Beautiful. Let's hear it.
- [56:26]
Rachel
I feel a lot of shame because I struggle so much. Even though I don't have any big traumatic events in my past asked. My parents loved me a lot and always provided for me. And I know so many people who've had it way worse. Why does my life feel so hard if things weren't that bad?
- [56:44]
Sarah
I am so glad that someone asked this question because I get this asked a lot. Don't we get this asked a lot in our communities and programs?
- [56:53]
Rachel
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was really glad to see that someone had written that in for us.
- [56:57]
Sarah
I mean, there's so many people that, that write into us and say, like, I don't know, do I need to take. Take you make sense. That's one of the programs we have. Because other people, I'm hearing, like, you know, they have these really big traumas and I don't. But I still Struggle so much and you know, people have it worse. So we get asked that all the time. Not to be a broken record, but you know, one of the pioneers of trauma resolution work, Peter Levine, says all the time, no one goes through life unscathed by trauma. You cannot, it is not possible, no matter how hard your parents tried to ensure that you don't experience things that overwhelm your nervous system's capacity to process what's happening, which is simply what trauma is. And here's the other thing. Very few parents get it exactly right. I'm gonna say no parents get it exactly right. And the amazing parents listening to the podcast, you're human, right? And here's the other thing. Parents of our generation, you and I, Rach, or older than us, had no blueprint for how to parent right. Mental health work was not normalized at all, at all. Going to therapy was something only do if there's, you know, there's a lot of shame around that. There must be something really wrong with you. And of course there are lots of places in North America and the world that that's still the case, that there's that stigma around it. But nobody taught our parents to parent. So here's what your parents did. If no one taught them to do, if you how to do it, you had, let's say you have really loving parents when they have a child again, nobody has given them the guide post of what they need to do. None of them understood. None of them understood that you have a nervous system that can't self regulate. So when you're born you can't self regulate, meaning when you're in distress, you need another adult's regulated nervous system in order for you to regulate and you need them to do that at least 30% of the time. They didn't know that. They didn't even know what it meant to regulate you. And so what a loving parent did was when you're in distress, they're taught you must leave the baby alone. This is going to teach them independence and they're going to calm down, they're going to learn to relax. Actually, it's not physiologically possible. This is the crying it out method that of, you know, our generation was the thing that parents did that actually just creates heightened dysregulation in a baby's nervous system. They can't self regulate. So no, they don't. When they stop crying, it's because they go into their dorsal vagal complex, their extreme state of shutdown. We're actually teaching their system to be Higher and higher, dysregulated and to be in a higher stress response. But our parents didn't know that. So my point is, is you might have had really loving parents who couldn't get it exactly right and they did the best they could. Another example is maybe you had a really incredibly loving father. But in his home, nobody taught him intimacy, nobody knew how to do intimacy. And so his caregivers didn't know how to actually be vulnerable and open up to each other. So when he, at a really young age had feelings, his parents said, you're fine, stop crying, you're okay, suck it up. You're a tough boy. You know, like all of those kinds of things that teaches him to repress his experience. And then when he has children, there's a deep desire to want to attune with you emotionally, but it's overwhelming for his nervous system. So instead he buys you stuff without having the ability to actually connect with you and to know you deeply and to let you see him. And you never see him cry, and you never see him feel anything. And he can't really hug you, but he, you know, buys you stuff. And maybe he can in a letter he can express himself, but really can't any otherwise. So your system is affected by that, right? My system then learns intimacy is not available. Intimacy is also not safe. And then I get into an adult relationship and I struggle to be intimate. I can't be intimate. And I don't mean sexually intimate, of course, that could be a part of it. I mean emotionally intimate. Others of us, we have. I'm going to give it just a couple more examples because so many people have this experience. Let's say that you had a mother who in her childhood, her caregivers didn't help her regulate her nervous system. So she is chronically in anxiety and distress and she feels like she needs you or closeness to be okay. So she becomes codependent with you and she maybe even leans on you you for emotional support. And so the result of that is then you get into your adult relationships and you do one of two things. You either mimic that and you need other people to be close in order to feel okay. And you have an anxious attachment or when someone else has big emotions, you shut down like you can't do it. It's overwhelming to you and you push people away. And so all of that is happening not because our caregivers were doing anything wrong or they didn't love us. That's happening because they were were doing their very best. And nobody Taught them how to parent. And so, you know, the work of nervous system regulation work and somatic work is for everybody. Everybody. Because we all have unresolved trauma that's living in our bodies that is affecting our present lives. And because of that, we all need to regulate our nervous system. We all need to address our parts, and we all need to discharge that energy that's in our body. And lastly, the human experience isn't so much more similar than it is different. Different. I've literally heard thousands upon thousands of stories, and they might seem really different people from. We. We have people inside of our communities on every continent. I'm hoping a scientist in Antarctica decides to join a program soon. Should we solicit to them? Maybe we should. So we can get.
- [62:32]
Rachel
We did have someone who had been to Antarctica and they were during being in. You make sense.
- [62:38]
Sarah
Really. Okay, this is amazing that I didn't know this. I'm hearing it now. Now I'm going to just say every continent, I think that counts. They've stepped foot on it and they were in a program. Wow, What a fun fact. Okay, so on every continent and with wildly different, seemingly wildly different stories, but they all come back to the same thing, of not feeling safe, of not feeling loved, of not feeling seen, of feeling overwhelmed, and so on and so forth, forth. So this work is for everybody, including the person that asked that question.
- [63:10]
Rachel
And that's so insightful and just so helpful for everyone. Because if you haven't had those big traumatic events, it can be so confusing as to why can life still be so hard? So I think, yeah, you've just answered a really big question and a powerful question.
- [63:27]
Sarah
Thanks, Rach.
- [63:28]
Rachel
Okay, so our third and final question. I feel like I'm so behind in life. I'm 39 and I want a family, but I feel totally frozen, like I can't do the things I need to do even to start dating. Why is it so difficult for me?
- [63:48]
Sarah
I just want to name that. We live in a world that really perpetuates for us a lot of the time. An experience of us being behind or of comparison and can make us feel like the things that we desire are not going to be possible for us. And so we work with a lot of people around this age that are desiring family and in some ways can feel like they're waking up to that desire and not not knowing what to do about it or why they can't actually step towards it. So I don't know the. Because I don't know this person. I'm hearing three sentences of their story. But I want to give some possibilities of why this is happening. So the way that our, remember the way that neuroception works, that threat detector is it looks out into the world to see if we're safe or not. And it's always resourcing the database, this internal database in our midbrain frame as essentially the bible of resource that shows it whether we're safe or not. And so again, it doesn't look for identical matches. It looks for similarities. So for so many of us, and this was actually part of my story too, if home and belonging was not a safe thing, then our nervous system is going to say, home and belonging in our adult life is not a safe thing. Don't do that. For me, that looked like really being disconnected from my desire to have a family. So much so that I don't know if I told you this, Rachel, but in my early, very early 30s, I'm also a double Capricorn. For anyone who's into astrology. That tells you something about me. I did two egg retrievals. I froze my eggs twice. That's a lot, right? Especially a lot when a doctor asks you, so do you want to have a lot of kids? And I said, I don't know. I don't think I want any kids. Why was I doing that? Spending, I don't know, exorbitant amount of money and pumping myself with hormones. And she looked at me shocked. She's like, what is this woman doing? Why is she doing this two times in a row? The truth is I was so disconnected from the desire to have a family because my nervous system, meaning dorsal, was coming in to disconnect me from my embodied experience. Because my system was saying families are so dangerous based on the past that we never want to do that again. So it let me do the egg retrieval, but I couldn't actually connect to it. And for years I just felt like, I don't know. I don't know. I have no feeling about it one way or the other. If you have no feeling one way or the other, that's a clue that you're disconnected. And it was through a lot of healing that I came into what my truth was around this. And so for this person, it's very plausible or possible that that there's an over association with family, belonging, connection, love, intimacy, not being safe. And then our system says, don't ever do that again. I would rather you. I think if my nervous system could talk and my parts could talk, they would say when I was Doing those egg retrievals. They would say we should have 200 rescued animals and we should just roll around in the grass with them forever and have a wonderful vibrant purpose and career and friends and never ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever have a family. Because that's a dangerous thing. So the more that we show our system that that's actually safe, that we are safe, that the past is over, that family can be different, the more it opens us up to the possibility of having it. The other thing that I want to name is the more that we do internal CO regulation. So parts work and we, we begin to give our system the childhood it never got in the here and now. The more that our system begins to see the present and the future can be different than the past. And lastly, if we haven't done parts work yet, what can often happen is we're overidentified with young parts. I would say that a lot of people have younger parts running the show in their lives. That means that there are people who have started. I'm not going to name the companies, but major companies from young parts, like teenage parts that don't feel like they're worthy. You can create all kinds of things from your parts. A 10 year old part does not want to have a family, doesn't want to be a parent. A 15 year old part doesn't want to be a parent. Only your adult self will be the one that wants to be a parent because that's the only person who's appropriate to be a parent. So the more you come into your adult, adult self, the more you'll connect to that too. It's those three things that are really vital. And the more that we do this work, the more it leads us to where we're meant to go. And then lastly, I just want to say I do not think that we live. You know, everything we talk about here is science based. For a moment. I'm not going to talk about science. I don't think we live, although there is some science behind this. I don't think we live in a cruel universe, meaning everything. If we look at nature, everything is planted where it gets its needs met. And of course evolution was involved in that, right? To, to help the, the plant or the animal to evolve, to, to adapt to its environment. But everything isn't like, like a dolphin doesn't live in the Alps. That would be weird. It wouldn't survive. It lives where it gets its needs met. And of course again, evolution is what made that happen. I believe deeply that the, because of this, that. The desires of our soul. The things that. When I say desire of your soul, I mean the things that knock at your door internally that almost feel like they haunt you. They're knocking at your door and saying, wake up. Wake up to this. This is for you. Like, wake up. You're meant to be a parent. Wake up. You're meant to travel the world. Wake up. You're meant to make music. Wake up. You're meant to dance. Wake up. You're meant to have this community. Wake up. You're meant to write that book and you can't put it down. You know, the things that. That haunt you. And if your soul's really, really persistent like mine, it'll knock pretty loud. I believe that those things are meant for you. And including, like, this person being a parent and, you know, it might look a little different. It always looks a little different than we imagined, but I think it always looks better. So if it's a desire of our soul, it's meant for us, and it's our healing that gets us there.
- [70:12]
Rachel
Oh, I'm really glad you brought that last piece in because I've heard you share before about how the things we're longing for, they are meant for us and they are for us, and they'll keep coming to us so that we keep taking the action. It's like they don't just disappear and then we forget about them for good. They. They kind of stay in our energy and. And cool us. And so I'm really glad you added that piece in at the end.
- [70:37]
Sarah
It's so true. And, you know, it's different for everybody. Like, there's someone listening that feels really called to. I don't know. What do they feel called to do, Rachel? Maybe they feel called to bake cupcakes. I'm being actually serious. There's somebody who's saying, I want to have this bakery, right? Like, that's the thing that I feel called to do. And they feel terrified to do it and overwhelmed to do it. There is not one moment in my life, life where I have felt called to have a bake shop. I love bake shops, though. I like visiting them. I do not want to have one because that's not a soul calling for me. And so I think it's like, isn't this beautiful thing about the way the universe works is we all. Thank God we're not all me? I'm not going to say we're not all you, because you're pretty incredible, Rachel. But it's so good that we are so different and that's what makes the world so beautiful. So, yeah, those desires of our souls are meant for. For us.
- [71:32]
Rachel
Oh, oh. And that gives hope. And you know, what you share in the programs I know helps people step towards those things and it helps their nervous system to feel more at ease to. To. To tread gently to opening up to the things that are calling them. So it's kind of like a two way journey where the things that are longing are calling for us. We sort of edge nearer to them and meet in the middle. And yeah, I've seen that happen for lots of people in programs and for myself too.
- [72:02]
Sarah
So thanks for saying that, Raishin. Yeah, I guess just to add on to that real quickly is people can sometimes think, like, joining these programs, like, wow, you must have to have a really serious trauma history to be in these programs. Or it's just about the past. You heal the past, but what is the point of healing the past? Honestly? Like, do I just want to heal the past? No, we're all doing this because we want our present life to be different. Like, me too. Nobody is just saying, I feel very interested in healing the past and doing all this heavy lifting work for the sake of that. No, it's so that we can have this expanded life. And so this work is for everybody. If you're not fully living the fully expressed life you are here to live, come join one of our programs. It literally is what unlocks the life waiting for you, this work. And that's what science confirms too. So thanks for saying that, Rachel.