How to Feel Your Feelings with Simone Saunders

(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to Being Well, I'm Forest Hanson. If you're new to the show, thanks for joining us today, and if you've listened before, welcome back. I am something of a recovering overthinker. If you've been listening to the podcast for a little while, you probably already knew that one. And like many people, I have been told many, many times to feel my feelings. This is a great piece of advice, but it's also a bit of a strange piece of advice if you think about it a little bit. In part, because we're usually not told how to actually do that. So today, I'm joined by somebody who is hopefully going to help us out a little bit. Simone Saunders is a trauma therapist, founder of the Cochlandiv Corner Group Practice in Alberta, Canada, and the author of the new book, where do you feel that in your body? So Simone, thanks for joining me again. How are you doing? - Thank you so much for having me. I'm doing great, I'm glad to be back. - Same, yeah, glad to have you. Love talking to you last time we talked about overthinking and Cochlandiv bypassing and intellectualizing. And that's I think a bit of a theme in your new book, but I wanted to start by asking you what the experience was that people were having inside of your practice that made you want to write this book. - Yeah, I think the biggest thing that I noticed was, and I think I noticed this pretty early on in my practice as well, was that folks would learn coping's tools, they would know exactly why they are the way they are, what's happening for them and nothing would shift. They couldn't use the coping tools, they didn't feel like there were changes happening. And so it got me to start thinking more about, okay, what is the barrier here? Because if so many people are experiencing this, there's got to be indicative of something. So through that process, I started looking a lot more into body-based therapies, somatic therapy, and I really started to understand more about the nervous system and sort of how it plays a huge role in the way we show up in the world. And so through my learnings, I started working with clients a lot differently. So I stopped working mostly from that cognitive lens and started working more from a body-based and nervous system lens, which from that point, I started to notice shifts and even in my own therapy, I started going to a body-based therapist and noticed shifts for myself. And so I think that the whole process asks me as a therapist to be in my body and it also asks the client to be in their body. And so I think that was the biggest shift that I was able to notice is once we were both able to sort of do that work, once I was able to be in tune with my nervous system in order to be in tune with the client's nervous system, then that's when shifts actually started to happen. - There's this experience that you'll see a lot of people talk about online where they go to therapy and they just feel like their therapist tells them how self-aware they are. But they don't feel like they know how to do anything about whatever it is that's bugging them and it feels like that's the experience that you're really speaking to here. - I think it's very common for a lot of people, right? They say, okay, this is my attachment style. This is exactly where my trauma comes from. I know that I react in a certain way and so next time, I'm gonna do something different and then next time comes your nervous system gets overwhelmed and you do the exact same things that you've been doing before. - I wanted to ask you a little bit about your own adventure with this, the name of the group practice that you built is called the cognitive corner, which I thought was kind of funny, given your focus on the body. You have a background in CBT from a training perspective. And the last time that you were on, you talked a little bit about yourself being kind of cognitive bypass or having tendencies in that direction. And I'm just wondering kind of in an open-ended way, like what's your adventure been like with that? - I think that my adventure with it has really come from a place of number one hyper-independence. So for folks who aren't sure what that means, it's sort of the drive to need no one. So it's independence, but sort of to a fault. And I think that being in this field also is really great, but it sort of adds a layer to that intellectualization. So you learn a lot of the things about the brain, how people function, all of those different pieces, and you apply it, and you apply it to yourself as well. So I think that for me, it's definitely been a survival strategy. And as many other people have gone to therapy and sort of worked through a lot of those pieces. And there is definitely a fear sometimes of being in the body, because what if you feel too much, what if you feel things that you are scared of, what if you feel things that you don't like, and the unknown is really scary? - I wanna ask you a question that might sound like a silly question, but it just does your talk and it's coming to me. What do we mean when we say be in the body? - Yeah, that's a great question actually. When I say be in the body, what I mean is sort of be connected to your external and internal signals. And this is something that I go into in the book, but so internal signals might be things like butterflies in your stomach or a drop in your stomach. It might be things like tension that you can feel. External sensations might be the fact that I can feel the headphones on my ear. I can feel the cuffs of my sweater on my wrist. So being able to understand and tune into those sensations, which maybe right now it doesn't feel like it means anything, allows us to be more in touch with what's happening for us internally as far as our environment and the relationships that we're in and our different experiences. - One of the things I appreciate about the book and about the work in general that you're doing is that you do a great job of describing what's actually going on for somebody. When they're having that kind of moment that you're talking about where they've done all this work, but they can't do the next thing. They can't arrive in their experience in this way that you're describing. And so I wanted to ask you, what's happening cognitively for somebody? When somebody can't access the tools that they feel like they've built through all of this great work in therapy or listening to podcasts like this one or whatever else. - Yeah, so in moments of activation, the amygdala, which is kind of the emotion center of our brain, it might fire off and say, okay, we're in danger. And so in the book, I kind of use the metaphor of a smoke detector and the smoke detector or amygdala sends a smoke and it's like, okay, there's a fire. And so that response for us might be the fight, flight, freeze, fawn response. And so in those moments, something's happening in our body. It doesn't feel super great. Our go-to is, okay, I need to cognitively make sense of this. And so even if we have coping tools that are maybe more body-based or whatever it might be, those aren't accessible in those moments because our brain perceives us as being in danger. And so the thinking part of our brain, the part that rationalizes and is able to make decisions and think through things and stores our coping tools, we're not able to access that part. So practicing those coping tools of, okay, I mean, this try and sense where I'm feeling this, I'm gonna try and be more in tune with the different sensations or get curious, that doesn't feel accessible because it doesn't feel safe. It doesn't feel accessible because it doesn't feel safe. Yeah, I think that's a great summary way to put it. People have a lot of different ways of talking about this. Some people will use phrases like an amygdala hijack or that kind of thing. And when I was prepping for this conversation with you, it made me go back to the literature a little bit. And I bumped into a couple of things that I thought were just so interesting that I would love your take on. And this is probably going to get a little nerdy, but that's what we do here. So one of the first practices that you suggest is call is noticing a naming. So you're observing what's happening. You're just kind of being with the rock experience that you're having. And then you're putting some kind of a language to it, right? Whether that's like feeling words or sensation words or where am I in the room right now words, whatever's going on for you, whatever you can access. And then you go to what you call, I think, choose and tend, asking yourself what might help and then try and some little experiments based on what you think might help. Now, a big marker for how the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, these different parts of your brain, interact in the literature is based on controllability. So what actually makes the amygdala kind of take over the process is when we're around stressors that we perceive as not under our control. That's what actually empires your prefrontal cortex. So more moderate stress or like moderate arousal, which is how it's typically referred to, when you feel in control actually makes your prefrontal cortex stronger. And this is one of the reasons that I talk about agency on the podcast all the time. And a lot of the practices that you suggest in the book, including like noticing a naming, runs along similar lines. You're kind of like getting your arms around something, you're making a situation or a problem, feel like something that you can influence. So it doesn't feel quite so overwhelming. And that's what then helps us get to these other phrases you use like window of tolerance or window of presence, staying under that overwhelm threshold. And I just thought that that was such a cool thing to have that like validated in terms of people's scientific testing on this kind of stuff, what seems so intuitive in our experience, which is when we feel like we can influence something, we feel a lot better about it. - When we feel like something is just happening to us and we have no agency, no control, that's when our system starts to get overwhelmed absolutely. - We've got so many messages from people who have more of a trauma history, talking about their struggles, with more top-down approaches like CBT. And it makes me wonder, why is the kind of bottom-up work that you do, particularly relevant for working with people who have had more difficulty? experiences. Yeah, so the way that I sort of describe the different types of therapy in the book is different entry points essentially. So if you're thinking about a therapy like CBT, the entry point is from the mind. So it tries to take a look at the meaning you make about things, reframing different thoughts, all of that. Whereas more bottom-up approaches or body-based approaches takes a look at entering from the brainstem, meaning entering from sort of like the body. And so it takes a look at things like your heartbeat, your breath rate, the different sensations that you made experience, all of those different things before it takes a look at the cognitive part. And both are meaningful, but I think for someone who might often be stuck in their head, and that is their survival strategy, starting with the cognitive top-down-based approach, might feel challenging, and it might feel like you're kind of spinning your wheels and not going anywhere. Whereas with the bottom-up approaches, oftentimes starting with those felt senses, and the things that happen in your body before the thoughts even arrive, allows you to understand more about your experience. What is even coming before those thoughts? It's a great way of framing it, and I'm wondering a little bit, what is it about these kinds of experiences, like difficult experiences, traumatic experiences, that makes it more difficult for somebody to feel their feelings or regulate them? It boils down to safety, to be completely honest. I think that there might be certain emotions, experiences that either felt safe or unsafe. And so one of the things I reference is that for a lot of families, there might be certain emotions that felt like, okay, this is an okay emotion to have, and this one is more restricted. And a lot of times for kids that's anger, right? And so anger is okay for adults. It's not okay for children. It is okay to be expressed in this way. It's not okay for it to be expressed in that way. For some, it's sadness. And so when there isn't that foundation of safety, of I can experience this, feel safe within myself, feel safe within the people around me, then your body reacts to that. This is going to be another, what do we mean by a question? So what do we mean by safe? I would love to give somebody, like a kind of target, a phrase that people are probably familiar with if they're listening to a podcast like this one is regulate your nervous system. That's typically interpreted by people as calming down or sort of pushing down unpleasant sensations. But I liked the way that you talked about regulation in the book. And also the last time that we talked is being kind of more open and present with sensations in general. So I'd love to just hear you speak about that a little bit. Yeah. So I like to say that regulation means that you're connected, not necessarily calm. You can become, but connected means that you can kind of experience those highs and lows, frustrations, anger, sadness, all the things. And you still feel connected. You still feel like you have a sense of agency. Whereas if you're sort of out of that window at window of tolerance, let's say, you might not feel connected. You might not feel like you have control over your responses or you might feel like things are happening to you rather than you being a part of that process. When I describe safety, I often like to ask people, how do you know whether or not you want to gravitate away from something or towards something? What happens for yourself internally? So away from something for myself might be maybe I feel a bit tight, maybe I feel stiff, maybe I have a drop in my stomach or butterflies. Maybe I can feel the hairs on my arms stand up. There's signs and signals that my body gives me to say, I don't know about this. This doesn't necessarily feel okay. Whereas if I am feeling like I want to go towards something or I am feeling safe, my body might feel a little bit more relaxed. I might feel more open. I might share more. My posture might be different. So I think it's really taking a look at rather than the cognitive sense of safety of is this person safe or not? Like, for example, a therapist? What is my body sharing with me? Because I often find that even in therapy, I'll tell folks that you might have a cognitive sense of safety of, yes, I'm your therapist and there's a sense of you should trust me because this is my job and I have a professional designation and all these things and you know that there's confidentiality and all of that is true. But what does your body say? Because it's okay if you don't feel safe here because that's something that we have to build towards. It's not something that automatically happens. What does the arc look like when you're working with somebody? Like where do you start? Where are you trying to get to? You mentioned before we started recording something called the Physic Trauma Treatment Model. I think this relates to that a little bit. As far as where I'm trying to go, I think most folks who come to work with me, they're looking to feel more embodied in some way. When I say embodied, I mean connected to their felt sense being able to quote unquote feel your feelings. They are typically kind of stuck in that cognitive head space. So in the beginning, we sort of work through a lot of psychoeducation and so there isn't a ton of body-based stuff there. And the reason is and I wrote the book in the same way is because that safety and stabilization period is really important for their nervous system to be able to settle as much as it can around me. And so that means understanding what's happening. So what is happening in your body? How does the brain work? How does the nervous system work? What can you expect from me? What can you expect from the therapeutic relationship? Understanding a little bit more about them. So we go from that safety and stabilization into processing. And that safety and stabilization period is a long time. I think that for both therapists and clients, the expectation is okay, one to two sessions will get to know each other and let's dive right into processing. But it's simply not how it works and it's a much longer process than that. But yeah, the next sort of phase is we moving to processing and taking a look at your experiences and being able to slowly, slowly sit with them, understanding more about your body and your personal signs and signals that your body sends you. And then that last phase is sort of integration and being able to integrate both your past experiences with your present experiences. And it's not something that is linear, per se. I think that we might hit a spot where a client has a new experience and maybe we need to move back into safety and stabilization. Maybe a few sessions later we're in the integration period. My fiancee Elizabeth is also a somatic trauma therapist. So you guys have something in common in that way. And I hear her talk about this a lot with people or with me about people I should say, where she talks about just how long it can take with somebody to get them to a place where they can open up around it. And it's very understandable why somebody wouldn't want to be because they've had experiences where that vulnerability was really penalized in different ways. You know, they were they were hurt through their sensitivity. But their sensitivity then becomes a kind of target that you're trying to return to in the course of treatment. And that's going to be a real delicate, push full with people. And I find to that folks who especially maybe are over intellectualizers, cognitive bypassers, they often get very frustrated with the therapeutic experience of more bottom up approach. And I think that's very natural and it makes sense. But I like to preface with those folks that this is going to be really annoying for you because it's very, very slow. And your nervous system doesn't want to go slow. It wants to say, okay, these are all the things that I struggle with. Give me a solution. Help me figure it out. And then I can move on with my life. But part of the work is how can we feel safe enough to slow down? I don't know quite how to ask this question. So maybe you'll help me with this one. I'm wondering how people can tell if they're the word I'm finding is disconnected. But I don't know if there's a better word here. Disconnected in the way that you're describing. I ask in part because my journey with this stuff was pretty long. And it took a lot of experiences and learning and self awareness before I could even get to a place where I saw how defended I was in various ways. Like defended against emotional intimacy or defended by moving into more of an intellectualizing or like cognizing stance about something. And you're just talking about how people who are in that position can often want to move with a lot of speed because they just like they think that they can get on to the next one. But there's something about it where you haven't even like really internalized the last lesson if that makes sense. I'm not sure if I'm talking about this go here. And like it's kind of difficult to wrap your arms around. Yeah, no, I'm completely following. I think as far as someone being disconnected, the things that come up for me is, are you able to like notice what's happening for you? So as far as like the sensations that you experience on a day-to-day basis, are you able to to notice those things? If you are in an argument, let's say, are you able to notice that, oh, my body gets really hot when I'm angry or my stomach really sinks when I'm embarrassed or sad or I think my body kind of curls up or I try to make myself smaller when I feel anxious. And I think also in your ability to sit with other people. So both are you able to sit with other people's big feelings and big emotions and withstand the slowness of maybe sitting there with out fixing it and are you able to allow others to sit with you? Because I think sometimes, especially for over intellectualizers, it can be maybe easy sometimes to sit with other people in their stuff because it has nothing to do with me. But when it comes to me sharing, how does that sit with me? Am I able to allow people in to my raw experience without it being something that is more perfected over time? Because I think that a lot of people may feel like, "Okay, I'm being vulnerable," but it's something that they've neatly packaged beforehand and then deliver. But there isn't that ability to say like, "I don't know what I'm feeling right now," but like, I'm going to try as much as I can and explain it. I don't know what I'm experiencing. That more vulnerable, less perfected part of it really landed from me. I think that's a great way to talk about it. My experience with it was around sharing things that I actually cared about, if that makes sense. Being open about the stuff that I had some real skin in the game about that wasn't just intellectual skin in the game or like academic skin in the game performance driven. It was more about things where there was a real sensitivity there or a real sense of caring associated with them. That that was the stuff that was difficult for me to kind of put on the table, including in my most intimate relationships, like my relationship with Elizabeth, my relationship with really close friends. I took a really long time before I got to a place where I could even kind of talk about that stuff. Even while I was going on being in a perfectly, you know, socially acceptable way in terms of my interactions with other people and all of that kind of good stuff, and this is coming from somebody whose dad is a therapist and like my job is mental health stuff. So just kind of highlights how tricky this stuff can be. Absolutely. And I resonate with that as well because I think even the perspective of therapists is like, okay, you must have it all together because you're a therapist. You must be like more connected than all of us. But I think sometimes being so in this work allows for that removal of self and removal of the felt experience of, oh, I know theoretically what to do and theoretically how things should feel and all of those things. But in when you, like you said, when you have more skin in the game in your more intimate relationships or closer relationships, then how do you show up? Are you able to actually sort of let those walls down? And a good example of how tough this can be for people to see or recognize is something that you write about it in the book, functional freeze. It's a phrase that's become a little bit more popular. It's popped up a little bit more on social media recently. Would you mind describing like what that is, what that looks like? So functional freeze is again a survival response and I think a lot of people struggle with it now, but it is a sense of going on with everyday life. There's a sense of autopilot, but disconnection on the inside. So you might be able to show up at work, maybe with friends, maybe with other people, your family, and then by yourself, there's this disconnection. And so it seems like you're, you know, functioning really well on the outside, but internally there's a lot of stuff going on that you maybe can't name or can't describe. And so maybe that shows up by just doom scrolling for all of your nights. Maybe that shows up as overworking yourself. You don't allow yourself to have a free moment. Maybe that shows up as, you know, shopping or eating or whatever your coping tool might be, but it's a sense of I'm feeling frozen, but I'm functional enough. I'm functional enough to get through the day today for other people to see me as competent and as whether it's successful or contributing, but not enough to feel connected to myself. What tends to kind of put somebody in that spot? I think it really depends on each person, but I think it can be number one, a lot of responsibilities. So I think part of our life is that you kind of have to go on with day to day life, even if you're struggling. So you have to go to work, you have to take care of your kids, you have to do whatever it is that you have to do in order to survive. And so I think that there isn't necessarily a lot of moments that are created in our current society for us to be connected. So I think it's often a very easy route, but I also think it stems from a previous wound, right? So is there the sense of like it doesn't matter what's happening, but you just have to keep going and keep going. Yeah, there's a part of this for me that gets to some emotional avoidance stuff, at least in my own experience of it, like there's some kind of underlying sensation or emotion or feeling that understandably a person doesn't really want to feel so much, you know, distress at us overwhelm. Elizabeth Toxel could have managed as a part's work perspective about a kind of going on with life part, a manager part that's keeping the train on the tracks, and that manager can be a very, very effective manager, can really move you, shuttle you from from spot to spot in the day, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you're having all of the appropriate emotional experiences that would accompany that. You know, there's this sort of background sense of emotional shutdown that's going alongside that like train conductor that's really driving you from place to place, and that was a way of thinking about it that actually really helped me, I think, it helped me kind of be with myself a little bit more. And I think what comes to mind as you share that, is that for a lot of people, I think the perspective of, you know, someone might feel disconnected, or they maybe aren't coping well, is what I refer to as like underfunctioning, right? So overfunctioning, I would refer to as that sort of like functional freeze part, I'm not doing well, but I'm going to get everything done, I'm going to make sure I work really hard, I'm not going to miss any deadlines, etc. And I think more people see the underfunctioning sort of response where maybe it's hard to get out of bed, it's hard to do the tasks of daily life for basic hygiene or like the things that, you know, really sort of propel you through life. I think more so society looks at, okay, I know this person is struggling, but with overfunctioning, we don't necessarily see that. And so we might say, oh, that person just works so hard, they're great, that person just is able to do everything. That's amazing, but we might not be able to see what's actually under that. We'll be back to the show in just a minute, but first a word from our sponsors. This episode is sponsored by Rocket Money. 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There's a phrase that you use in the book that I really liked and this idea of moving into more of a partnership with your body as opposed to a kind of dictatorship over your body and that intellectualized process that we've been talking about a little bit can feel a little bit more like a dictatorship like my brain is telling my body what to do and my brain's kind of in control and I know how to hit the gas. I maybe have some ability over the break but maybe not so much and you're kind of the one who's in control and I'm wondering if you if you're working with somebody who is in more of that stance where do you start like how do you move them more into that sense of partnership. I think it starts with noticing where that dictatorship starts and ends. So there's a bunch of quizzes in the book but some of the questions that pop out to me are things like do you often override yourself when you're tired and your body is saying I need sleep or I need rest and you continue anyways. Do you ignore signals of hunger or thirst or bathroom needs just because you want to keep doing whatever you're doing and are those things that are occurrences very often. Do you only notice when your body is feeling bad or hurt or something feels wrong versus also feeling the things that are going right or the things that feel pleasant or joyful and so I think understanding where does that dictatorship sort of live mostly and what does that look like and being able to pay attention to those things because I think as much as a lot of us want to say okay I've noticed this let's fix it I think that noticing and curiosity portion similar to that safety and stabilization portion is quite long so we can't always expect ourselves to change things immediately that has taken sometimes decades to build and so noticing when okay I'm tired but I'm working and I'm going to continue working even though that I know that I'm exhausted and I probably should go to bed right now even the noticing even if you're not doing anything about it the noticing matters because it builds that awareness for you to actually start listening to those things because before you're just on autopilot you're not listening you're not hearing the signals. Part of that noticing can include some of the stories that a person might have about various emotional states to you mention in the book in particular anger and sadness. For a lot of people they were raised in a family where I mean you talk about this in your own story where like anger is only permitted to certain individuals that's something my daddies even talked about in terms of his family of origin parents were allowed to get angry kids were not allowed to get angry just kind of appreciating your individual background and the experiences that you had that added up to like a nice little package of stuff you know and it's kind of like no praise no blame about some of it there can be an appropriate going back through and saying actually that was a little messed up what filled the black person did sure absolutely and also you're here right now and here we are with this package what are we going to do about it and I appreciated that kind of narrative aspect that you you had in the work as well. This work is not one-size-fits-all and really understanding okay what is my personal story and what about my life and my experience has led me to some of these different places because you and I both struggle with cognitive bypassing and intellect over intellectualization but it might come from completely different places for us and we might have different experiences of maybe you were allowed a certain emotion maybe I wasn't maybe I was allowed a certain emotion maybe you weren't and being able to understand okay what parts of my identity my history my experiences my family what parts of that created this package allows us to slowly work through that. There's a piece of this that you do a really good job of talking about in in the book and also just in your work in general the somebody who comes to you and says well I don't know what you're talking about here I had a great childhood essentially because in part psycho education is great I love how much mental health content is is out there at this point you know obviously it's been fantastic for us so no complaints here at the same time sometimes when you bump into therapy content it feels like everything comes back to your relationship with your mom when you were three years old or whatever it is and so this can kind of perpetuate a view of it where okay if you had like good enough parents then that means that you should have popped out fine and that's just such like a one-dimensional view of the whole thing I had a pretty great family environment when I was grown up and I had a lot of struggles with other kids I was not popular at school I was bullied often on you know like you have experiences that take place outside of the family container you're interacting with society in very complicated ways based on your you know intersectionality or whatever your personal background is these things are all putting pressure on you and so it's not just like oh my parents did the best they could and therefore I should be fine and now I should feel bad about not feeling fine it's it's just more complicated than that and so I appreciate how you really bring that in yeah and I think that's so important for so many people to hear is that you know if the family experience that you had was was great and or good enough and but you've also been you know experiencing or have experience things like bullying or judgment or stuff at the workplace or stuff with other systems or other people that also counts as impacting you even if it's not something that you might notice right away even if it's not something that other people might notice but I think what we what feels normal to us we often don't notice I would love to get to the feel your feelings part of the episode here yeah so if somebody hears all of this and they go that sounds great love it good setup good context but how do I actually do this thing that people keep telling me to do that I'm struggling with for whatever reason where do you start with that person like what gets them in the door and for contacts are we have we passed the safety and stabilization period are we straight out the gate quick question yeah let's even start there and I'm gonna assume for the point of this exercise that this person is not actively working with a therapist because that's probably most of our listeners but if you've got something in here for if you're working with a clinician as well feel free to go there yeah so for someone maybe not actively working with a therapist I think the first portion is that understanding understanding your nervous system and maybe you already do but really understanding beyond okay I know fight flight freeze I know what that looks like but I describe the window of tolerance in the book and it essentially is a great way to visualize your nervous system in the middle is the window of tolerance where is the ideal sort of place to be where you can navigate life's highs and lows your nervous system can activate and deactivate at a great pace up at the top is hyper arousal where there's too much emotional activation usually consistent with that fight or flight response at the bottom is the hypo arousal usually consistent with the freeze or fawn response beyond understanding those pieces what does that actually look like for you so when you're in your window of tolerance what does that look like how do you know is it just a cognitive understanding or is there a felt sense what does that feel like what sensations tell you that you're in your window if you're in hyper arousal again how do you know what sensations tell you what experiences tell you and again with hypo arousal and with moving between those windows what tells you that you're moving into hyper arousal hypo arousal what tells you you're moving back into your window so I think that that can often be a good place of psycho education to start with of not just knowing the framework or the model but how do you actually apply it to your lived experience again maybe way too granular question how does somebody know are there particular feelings or sensations that a person could tune into if they don't have language for this that might give them an indicator when they're in one of those states yeah so usually with hyper arousal you're there's a lot of emotional activation so you might notice things like your body might get really hot your heart might beat really fast you might notice things like lots of racing thoughts panic attacks anxiety attacks usually happens sort of in that phase and I also describe like the like flight for example flight doesn't have to quite literally look like I'm running away from something it could also be okay I am using a flight response to to run away from my feeling so that might be I am going to impulsively gamble the shop whatever it might be and so whatever kind of takes you away from that experience for hyper arousal you might feel a little bit more disconnected you might feel really tired you might feel a little bit numb frozen maybe dissociated in your window you might feel more open you might notice a lightness when you are feeling calm when you're feeling a little bit stressed or sad you might feel your throat sort of feel dry, you might feel the tears welling up behind your eyes. With anger you might again feel that like a little bit of heat in your body or you might feel the heat completely go away from your body. So I think that there's lots of different sensations that can sort of fit in all of the different windows. Notice first feel later is a phrase that you use in the book. You're having this kind of curiosity about all of the things that you were just describing there. These different sensations at the very beginning of the conversation you talked about, you know, the feeling of the headphones on your head right now is we're recording even that kind of granular sense of like what's really going on around you. And then you have this line that I wanted to ask you about. Shame is often the primary inhibitor of our ability to be curious. So shame is a big thing for everyone. And I think it is one of those feelings that most people try and move away from. Right. Shame tells us that for whatever reason we're not good enough, we're not lovable. We don't deserve connection. There's something wrong with us. And so to be curious means to take a generally neutral stance of okay what's happening here. But shame is often like what's wrong with you? Why are you reacting this way? Why is your body so hot? This is embarrassing. Why are you so quiet? People are going to think you're weird. And so shame sort of clouds our ability to actually take a look neutrally and say like okay what what's happening? Whether it feels good or bad, what's happening? Is the safety development part of the whole process is part of that so that you can help somebody with the shame aspect? Does that tend to like diffuse it? Or are there other things that you do that help people with that aspect of it? I think giving shame space is really important. So understanding the stories behind it. So one of the things that I talk about is oftentimes when I ask people so what are you noticing or like what are you feeling? They might say something like I feel like I'm a bad person, right? And so there is stories attached to different sensations that we feel and that might be outside of our awareness, right? And so maybe I feel chest tightness and a drop in my stomach and I'm talking about a recent experience that I had with you. And maybe that is the sensation that I've correlated with. I feel like a bad person. And so understanding the stories that shame also attaches to different sensations can be helpful for that curiosity part. It's really interesting. So if I'm zooming out on this a little bit, a person has a kind of sensation. So they have a tightness in their chest, they feel their heart drop a little bit, they feel tight in their throat, they feel something kind of like welling behind their eyes. Okay, so they're having what we would call like a sadness response and I'm kind of why. And then for that to immediately be just connected through experience to some version of this emotion isn't safe or I'm not allowed to feel this way. And that takes you right to the kind of narrative that was developed around it, maybe from a caregiver, maybe socially who knows? Around like, oh, you are a bad person if you feel this way. And part protectively, right? Like if you're that feeling is trying to stop you from expressing something that would have gotten you punished in the past. And so you can see how there's this kind of very, very close relationship between the like sensation state, even at the front end of the funnel. And this like cut off, can't feel that not going there, stayed at the back end of it. And then sometimes that narrative work that we're doing of like, oh, it's actually really totally okay for somebody to feel that way. Like, oh, that person was actually kind of fucked up for whatever they were saying or doing backland, right? Like whatever it is, that sort of storytelling could then maybe give somebody the the cognitive piece of the puzzle of going like, okay, I appreciate that this is okay. Still I got to say for myself, even when I had the cognitive piece of the puzzle, it was still really hard to do this stuff. Because there's something that's like so visceral about that actual sensation of like can't go there or oh God, no, or whatever kind of feeling state is. That's just really tough to work with, man. And I don't know if it's just something that you experience as like a long and very individual process with people or if there are things that you've seen or things that you've done that can help people through that piece of it. I mean, I think what you're referring to is this process called procedural learning, right? And so I talk about this in the book, but procedural learning is your brain's way of learning whether it's a skill or response and it kind of codes it and does it automatically and it's to save energy. So the examples that I usually use are think about tying your shoe, right? When you learn to tie your shoe, you really have to think about how to do it repeatedly until you just do it. And then now as an adult, you probably don't even think about how do I actually tie my shoe? Your your hands just do it. And so that is procedural learning in action and procedural memory. So the memory is like the act of tying your shoe and the learning is like how you learn the actual skill and your body and your brain does that with absolutely everything. So it does that with responses, with heart rate, with nervous system activation with everything. And so this sense of, okay, an emotion has come up. This feels really uncomfortable. I don't know what to do with it. Maybe there's tension pushing it down in some capacity and then whatever response comes out. I think another part of this work is understanding what are your procedurally learned habits and understanding that procedural learning comes from necessity, right? So if your nervous system has seen and expected, when I feel sadness, it is shut down. Okay, I know that now I have to push down sadness. And so this becomes a procedurally learned habit of I know what to do when X comes. And so it's kind of like trying to write with the opposite hand. You have to remember every time, oh yeah, I got to try and remember to write with my left hand. And so taking a look at your procedurally learned habits, part of where I like to start with outside of the awareness of what those habits might be, is what does that resistance feel like? Because that's also a sensation, right? So if I don't feel like crying and it doesn't feel like an appropriate place or maybe I'm scared to be vulnerable, what does that resistance feel like? Is it a attention, right? Another example I like to use is if you are about to sneeze and you want to hold back your sneeze, right? You can feel like all of the tingles happening sort of in your nose. And then like there's that tension and bracing so that that sneeze doesn't come out. And that's similar, right? So we our body tenses and braces in some way in order for us to resist expressing or feeling different emotions. And rather than jumping to how can I feel this emotion, what does the, what does the resisting feel like instead? That's a clever way to do it because when I mean, when I think back to times when I was in that kind of a state of resistance to something, it definitely, I mean, it has its own strong associations or like strong feelings that are associated with it. One of the things that you do in the book that I appreciate is you kind of carve out the difference between an emotion and a feeling. And I think it kind of relates to this often when we talk about emotions and feelings, we kind of mash them up together or reuse them interchangeably, which generally is fine, but I think is important to know the difference. And so an emotion is sort of that physiological experience of whatever it is, right? So with anger, that might be like the heat in your body or maybe a chest tightness or clenching your fists or something like that. And a feeling is sort of the meaning that we make from that, right? So when I feel anxious, I feel my chest get tight, I feel tingles all over my arms and my legs. When I feel sad, I feel a drop in my stomach. When I feel embarrassed, I fold my body in. And so really understanding, okay, there's the emotions, which is your body is going to feel those things anyways. And the feelings, which is your response or the meaning that you make from some of those pieces. And those are the things that you can work with. So step one, as you lay it out is observing all of this stuff. Being with it, noticing it, seeing where it lands for you, what's the feeling that I have associated with this thing? What's the emotion that I'm experiencing? We start to get a little bit better at putting words to things. So having a kind of language that we develop inside of ourself for different kinds of sensations. You have this whole taxonomy of different feeling states and associated sensations and the back of the book that I thought was great. And so if you're looking for that kind of like more psychoeducation aspect that's in there as well. And it can be helpful for people who struggle with this sort of interoceptive process. So okay, we're doing all that noticing. Then we're moving our way here to the second step where you talk about identifying motivations and inclinations or going from I wonder what this is to I wonder what this needs. So what did you mean by that? Yeah. So when we notice certain sensations or certain experiences within ourselves, I think after we've allowed ourselves to just observe it and sit with it a little bit, understanding, okay, what does this need? Right? And so maybe the part of myself that feels really angry and I can feel the tightness in my chest. I can feel the heat rising in my body. Maybe the part of that is I feel like I need a voice. I need to stand up for myself. I feel like I need to set a boundary. And so sometimes there is an overt inclination or an overt motivation. Sometimes there is it. I think sometimes what's needed is the observation and just the space of noticing. Other times there is overt motivation that has come out of some of these things. And so I think a very simple connection could be when my stomach is rumbling, that's the sensation. The motivation is I'm hungry. I need to eat. You're doing something about it. You're solving the problem in a way. One of the kind of formulas that you had that I thought was really helpful here was when I feel fill in the blank, my impulse is to fill in the blank. And the story that I tell myself is fill in the blank. So you're building this kind of relationship between those emotional states or feeling states that a person has. And then all of the things that we lapse into in order to do something about them. And just as somebody could have a problem solve around feeling hunger that is totally adaptive and totally great. We have problem solves around all different kinds of emotional states or feeling states that are adaptive and great. No no problems with whatever you're doing to kind of help yourself out or navigate whatever you're trying to navigate here. But sometimes we have habitual responses that are not so adaptive. You could think of all of the different tendencies that we talk about on the podcast at length to fill in the blank here. You know, people please on tendencies, that kind of a thing where we notice that when we are feeling anxious, distant from another person, whatever it might be for you, there is this drive to solve that problem by dropping into certain kinds of behaviors. And a lot of what I feel like you're trying to do here is you're trying to get somebody to a place where it's not so much about do they do those behaviors or not. It's more about how conscious they are of this whole process. And then you get to be at choice about am I doing those behaviors or not. If you want to problem solve that way, if that's what's right for you in that moment, great. But you just don't want it to be like happening with you as the passenger in the car as opposed to the driver of the car. Is that kind of a fair characterization here? Yeah, absolutely. And I think that comes from a place of understanding trauma, right? And so a big part of trauma is the loss of autonomy and a loss of identity. And so with creating space to notice and be really aware of some of these pieces and to be collaborative with your nervous system, rather than just like you said, a passenger, it sort of gives that autonomy back, which in the therapy room is something that is super vital for clients to be able to feel autonomy over their life and experiences and choices. Not just that things are happening to them, but even if I don't like the decision that I made or if I don't like the way that I reacted, I know that in that moment, I chose that and I might be able to reflect why, I might be able to decide to do something different at a different time, but there's autonomy there. To the show after a quick break. Like many self-employed people, I spent my week jumping between a dozen different jobs. Then I learned about something called attention residue. Basically every time you switch tasks, a piece of your attention stays stuck on the previous task. So you never really have your full brain power. This led to me doing more time blocking, which has really helped me out. That's an idea that former Being Well guest, Cal Newport, teaches in his class on masterclass. I was thrilled when masterclass reached out to sponsor the show. They have over 200 classes across 13 categories taught by people who define their fields. People like Esther Perrell on relationships, Dr. Anna Lemke on dopamine, James Clear on Habits. Plans started just $10 a month. They're built annually and every new membership comes with a 30 day money back guarantee. Masterclass keeps adding new classes, so there's never been a better time to get in. 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They have a typical habitual behavior that's based on feeling a sensation of anxiety. They might be able to get to a place where they recognize. Here's where this come from. Here are the various problems that this tendency creates for me. Wow, it puts a lot of pressure on me. Wow, I don't like that I'm the passenger in the car. I want to develop more agency around it. Okay, and then you get into the testing phase. All right, the next time that we're feeling this anxiety sensation, like we're going to try to move into a different kind of behavior. We're going to try to have a different relationship with that behavior. Often the person really does not like this, and I've experienced this myself, like doing something different is hard. Even if you've done all of the pre-prap that tells you, oh, I should want to do this other thing more, this past thing that I was doing wasn't working out for me for whatever reason. Still, you get to the moment and your brain comes up with a thousand reasons why you absolutely should move into that people, please, in behavior. You are absolutely a verifiable crazy person for not doing that. I'm wondering what helps people out with that. Yeah, I mean, I think I, when I'm working with people, I preface by saying, this is going to feel like shit. It's not going to feel good when you start to make decisions that maybe help your nervous system a little bit more. Because your nervous system is screaming at you, like, no, we have so much experience to tell us that you are unsafe if you do this. This is going to be the result. People are not going to like you. You're going to experience shame and we're trying to protect you. But when we've gotten to the point of being able to create enough space in our experience to notice what's happening, notice what's happening internally and potentially make different decisions, then again, it gives us that autonomy, but it's not going to feel good. And it's probably not going to feel good for a while. It's training your nervous system that we're not back in that stage of life when I learned this coping tool. And your nervous system is going to take a lot of time to catch up. One of the ways that people sometimes try to close that gap is through various, I'm not quite sure what the right phrase is here, quick fixes, like social media interventions, you know, release your trauma by shaking your body or whatever it is. What's your take on this kind of stuff? My take is that some of the tools that you see on social media can be good tools and just as that tools. I don't think that some like an exercise to release your trauma is going to be something that feels effective for you long term. Because again, if we look at your relationship with yourself and your body as a partnership, essentially your body and your nervous system has been choosing to cope in a certain way for quite some time for some reason. And so doing a certain exercise is not all of a sudden going to convince this other part of you that now it's safe. It has to learn through repeated experiences. And so I talk about corrective emotional experiences in the book and essentially corrective emotional experiences are experiences where you're able to counteract negative harmful, traumatic experiences that you've had in your life. And so, you know, the quick fixes aren't necessarily going to do that. They might make things feel better momentarily, but oftentimes we'll see people returning to the same loop of, well, I tried all of these exercises that I saw on Instagram or TikTok and still nothing's working. And the reason is that corrective emotional experiences are important and your nervous system needs time and experiences in order to catch up to that. Understanding myself for kind of collecting different frameworks that you'll see people do, you know, the person who I vary into a personality test. And then next month, there can be really antismatics. Then the month after that, there can be really a dive as, you know, whatever it is. These various tools can be great for people, but getting more self-understanding doesn't necessarily lead to more testing, which is the part that you're kind of more focused on. This intimate process of feeling your feelings, understanding where they're trying to move you and then doing something a little bit different to try to solve the problem that's being created here. And people can use these, this kind of framework accumulating as almost a form of like procrastination, you know, I can only move into action when I figured myself out. And there's always something else to learn about myself. So I never feel like I've really figured myself out. in that kind of a way. I think that people who particularly have that really intellectual, like cognitive event, can struggle with that one. I've fallen into versions of it myself, where I feel like I'm trying to almost like solve a puzzle about something, as opposed to actually, I don't know, being with an experience or making a different choice out in the real world. I don't know if there's something in here that you're connecting with, but it's a little bit difficult to articulate. Yeah, and I think what comes up for me is perhaps the way that, quote unquote, healing has been framed as this end point, right? So if we figure out the puzzle pieces then, then I'll figure it out, and then that's it. That's all I have to do. But the reason why I frame it as a relationship is that it's ever evolving, right? The version of you now is going to be different than the version in two years and five years and ten years, and all of those different versions might need different things from you. And being able to understand that this is an evolving relationship of not consistent self-monitoring, not consistent, always I have to be self-improving, but you know, a relationship where you can listen and tune in, and also just exist when needed. Can sometimes take the pressure off of, okay, I need to be better and better and better, and then this next thing is going to work. Because what I would challenge is like, what does work mean? Like, if something worked, what would that mean? What would look different? This might be an odd question, Simone, but I think it relates to what you're saying here. How can a person know when they've felt a feeling the right amount, or like when is the, what is the feeling complete? What are they, when are we transitioning from feeling it to trying to squeeze all of the juice out of an orange that has been thoroughly squeezed? Mm. I would say urgency will give you a lot of information. So if there is an urgency to like, oh my gosh, I feel this, okay, how do I get rid of it? I would say give yourself some space until that urgency sort of dissipates. And if there is difficulty with that, that's okay. And if you, you know, to try even for a second or two longer, and then you need to do whatever it is to sort of cope with that, that's also okay. But I think being able to be with that urgency is important because that's also a sign for a nervous system that like, things feel too big, too much. I need to get rid of it. Even throughout the book, there's a few prompts where I, you know, I'm talking to the reader and saying like, there might be like a felt sense of urgency to skip to this page, skip to the next part whenever we might be talking about coping strategies or skip to the part where you feel healed or quote unquote fixed. And notice that for yourself. Notice if you have the urge to, in the scenario, close the book, notice if you have the urge to have a quick fix. When we've done content like in this in the past, we will often get comments from people along the lines of, okay, I try to do this. I try to notice, I try to tune into my body, but I just feel like there's nothing in there. Like I don't, I don't feel something strongly inside of myself that I like should be connecting with. And then they typically assume that either there's something deeply wrong with them or that they're doing something wrong kind of mechanically. Is this something that you've bumped into much in your practice? It is. And I think, again, that story is going to be really interesting for folks, right? Of that absence of feeling turns into the story of like, I'm doing this wrong or I am wrong. And what I would sort of look at is what is it like to not notice anything? So I think oftentimes people stop at, well, I don't feel anything. And so let's move on. But I often find when that's the case, then the speed is often too quick. And we're hoping to look super quickly, look for a couple of seconds and try and find something. But even in my own experiences of therapy, sometimes when I'm trying to find a sensation or really understand what's coming up for me, sometimes it tends takes 10, 15, 30, 45 seconds a minute and being able to have that safety with my therapist and sit in that space for quite some time allows things to service. And so if you're not noticing anything right away, that's okay. But notice what it's like to not. In at least one of the boxes in the book where you have these various kind of experiments that somebody can do, it seems a bit aimed at this. And you talk about a somatic inquiry practices from sensory motor psychotherapy. And there's these different like very attuned ways that you can just kind of be with what's going on right now. For some people, this can have an almost meditative bent. You want to be a little careful with that maybe because meditation can easily become a kind of intellectualized process for a person. It can be a little cognitive and its quality. It doesn't have to be, but that's how often how we're taught meditative practices, at least in the United States. And the way that you really detail being with a feeling I think can be kind of helpful for people even there. Yeah. And so with the lens of experimentation, the reason I even use the word experiment is because I think that in itself can be disarming. So when we try certain things, I think there's often an expectation of like, well, this will probably work or this will do something. And so and even the lens of like homework, right? I often use this language with my clients as well of experiment with x, y, and z. And we'll see what happens next time, even if you don't do it. And with experimentation, it allows us to just say, we're looking for information. That's it. Does it feel positive, negative, neutral? Did you complete the experiment? Did you not? How did you feel about the experiment? And so those are interwoven into the book in order to get folks acclimated to again, these micro moments of curiosity. Okay. What's happening? What am I sensing? Is there anything that I'm able to name or notice? And if not, that's okay. And we can move forward. And it doesn't have to mean anything about who you are or your process. There's a lightning up in all of this that I think can be really helpful. And it certainly been helpful for me where early on in this kind of a process, everything just feels very intense and very heavy. At least that was true for me. That's true for a lot of other people as well. And as you get just a little bit more comfortable letting some of the fizz out of the bottle or, you know, emptying the bucket is spoonful at a time. All these different metaphors that people have for this kind of thing just helps you sort of lighten up about it. Like you just feel a little looser, a little bit more relaxed, a little bit less burdened by all that stuff that's going on inside of you. Because I think that it is a lot to take in at one time. And it often feels like a lot of pressure or, and there is often the sense of, you know, if I engage in this then, what if I feel overwhelmed? And like I have to engage in this heavy process, but I agree. I think the spoonful at a time or, you know, letting the fizz out a little bit, we're sort of doing this micro moment by micro moment. And it doesn't all have to be fixed today. You don't have to experiment with everything today. Or at all, sometimes I think it's okay to also recognize your capacity. And that's the, again, the part about building your relationship is that this is something that gets to be lifelong is that you get to explore and learn about yourself and learn about your needs. And sometimes you might be able to meet your needs. Sometimes you might not be able to. So I asked about the person who struggles to feel something at all when they look inside. Then other side of the coin, there are plenty of people who get floated or overwhelmed by their feelings and all of the sensations that are going on inside of them. Sometimes so much so that it's difficult to even piece out what they're feeling because it's just a big ball of wax in there. And I'm wondering what tends to help somebody stay in that more middle range that you were talking about where you can feel something without being overwhelmed by it. Yeah. And so I think that, again, kind of comes back to titration, which means sort of being able to experience things a little bit at a time, but also as far as coping strategies. In the book, I talk about different types of regulation, right? And so there's upregulating and downregulating. So when you are in a space of like, okay, I'm flooded. There's too many things going on and feeling too much. What your nervous system needs is something that pulls that energy down a little bit, pulls that activation down. And that could look like something like breathing. That could look like a weighted blanket. It could look like like a stuffed animal or a walk, something that sort of like pulls that activation down a little bit. And I think it's important to remember that if you're in a space of dysregulation, the expectation is not for you to just grin and bear it and withstand some of those sensations just to in the name of feeling or feelings. I think part of that is a need too, right? Is that your nervous system is overwhelmed and it's okay for you to need to take break and step back. And being able to, once you feel safe enough again and regulated enough, coming back to that experience and understanding, okay, what was that like for me? Was there signs or signals or experiences that I noticed that led up to that emotional activation? And so that retrospective piece can often be helpful. for people to take a look at it like well what happened there? Because that can build that awareness so that instead of it feeling like one time I'm in my window and then the next minute I am hyperventilating and I'm feeling too much, building, expanding that window to say okay well I noticed a little bit of chest tightness I noticed my heart was beating really fast my body got really hot and then this person said something and then that's it. Another Elizabeth thing here that she's told me a lot about is that when you're gripped by something if you're like in the in the grips of a trauma response for lack of better weight putting it it's tough to do a lot about it. You're kind of you're you're you're on the roller coaster at that point and we're sort of off to the races so a lot of what this is about for that person is getting more granular at identifying a head of time exactly like you're talking about here when you're about to get on the roller coaster and that can create a lot of tension for a person because often that they had experiences of when they express the needs around that like you're talking about in terms of personal history where they weren't allowed to press pause they weren't allowed to take a break they didn't feel like they could speak up for themselves in that kind of way and then that becomes part of the process of the work is like okay how do we help you feel more comfortable with that how do we work on the shame story how do we change the sensations associated with this thing so you start to see how these different kind of aspects of what we've been talking about today can stack up together into what starts to feel in retrospect like this really natural of course one thing led to the other kind of process in those moments like you're saying you can't often get out of that's about right because you're if we think again about that amygdala smoke detector the brain is going off and that front part of your brain prefrontal cortex it shuts down right it shuts down temporarily to allow yourself to engage in the safety responses that your brain and your nervous system feel like are necessary in order to help move you through that experience so the noticing beforehand if you can or the noticing after can be super helpful and I like to sort of manage people's expectations sometimes by letting them know that it's going to be a while before you notice things in the moment and that's okay right if we're able to come back and reflect and notice okay what happened just then or what happened last week then that's great but not noticing in the moment doesn't isn't a failure or anything like that it's your nervous system doing exactly what it's been designed to do as we get to the end here one of the things that I wanted to ask you about that could be its own poll episode but I'd love to touch it a little bit here at the end is how to do this when you're somebody who has a more painful history with your body a lot of the people who are doing trauma work are doing trauma work because they had some real bad experiences and some of those relate to the container that we find ourselves in this could also relate to experiences of marginalization or social experiences for people where they are receiving a lot of messages that they're in not the right kind of body or there is something that's problematic with their body and this is something I've always been really curious about in more somatic work how there's this kind of like tension there where like the medicine is also kind of like how the pain got in yeah and I I'm curious how you try to balance that and the work that you're doing yeah I think a lot of this is grief work to be honest I think a lot of it is grieving the body maybe society feels like you should have the body maybe you wish you had the experiences that you deserved and I think that grief is not something that just you work through once and that's it I think that grief shows up time and time again in a multitude of experiences and so I think that's something as you know from a starting point is understanding your relationship with your body is incredibly nuanced and complex depending on who you are and I think that there's also this idea that you have to especially immediately really like your body and love your body and I think that it's okay to feel betrayed by your body feel sometimes ashamed of your body feel grief feel angry at it and allowing space for some of those emotions allows you to move through some of that grief I think that often when those themes come up as a society we can be very quick to know like just love the body you're in and all of that kind of stuff rather that's physical emotional experiential and I think actually making space for some of those really really painful feelings of your body maybe hasn't shown up for you in the ways that you needed it to or you thought it would and maybe that has to do with things like chronic illness for example right maybe that has to do with you know violations maybe that has to do with the size of your body and how people treat you or you know culture or whatever it might be but I think ultimately it comes down to allowing the painful space for grief to exist is there anything as we get to the end that you've just had in the back of your mind as we've been talking that you wanted to share with people or make sure that you communicated I think the biggest thing is that there isn't a one-size-fits-all or right quote unquote way to sort of like move through this work often right and I think that having curiosity as the foundation will allow you to move through a lot of different pieces I think we can all argue about which is the right modality which is the right coping tool which is the right etc and what it really boils down to is how is it serving you how is your process feeling for you and if you're able to make space for that curiosity I think that's important and then I think one of the final things that I'll say that I think is important is I think a lot of self-help literature focuses on the self which I think is incredibly important but I think even less focus is on connection and relationship and connection to the self and as much as we want others to be there for us I think we also have to make sure that we're able to be a resource for others right and so I talk about sort of the different types of regulation and all that kind of stuff but being able to want to co-regulate with other people and so I kind of reference it as borrowing someone else's nervous system I think as much as we want that I think we also have to be able to provide that as well and so cultivating a sense of I'm doing this work yes for myself and I want to be able to connect with people and rely on people but am I able to also show up for other people am I able to also hold space for other people's big hard feelings even ones that might activate things in me and I think that that's part of a you know a core tenant is being able to connect with yourselves and other people where should people go to find more about you or the book or the work that you're doing so our website is www.thecognitivecorner.ca I am Simone C. Saunders on all social platforms and you have a I think it's fair to say huge social following you got like 200,000 to quarter million followers across the various platforms Simone does a lot of very fun stuff on at least Instagram I assume you're also doing something on TikTok yes but a lot of the videos and the skits is not quite the right way to put it maybe but things that are kind of in that lane that you'll do I love I'm Elizabeth really enjoys them as well and it's been great to talk to you today Simone thanks so much for taking the time for this thank you so much it was great to be on thanks for having me I had a great time today talking with Simone Saunders she's a trauma therapist and the author of the new book where do you feel that in your body and the reason that she wrote the book is because people were coming to her with a very common experience that you'll hear about in therapy all the time the person could talk about themselves very effectively they were very self-aware they understood their history they had done a lot of psycho education and yet when it came to the actual moment to change your behavior in a meaningful kind of way to feel a feeling experience and emotion and then make a different choice than the choice that you had made in the past based on all of those feelings based on that anxiety based on whatever's going on for you they really struggled to do that and part of the reason that people struggle with that is based on the nature of the brain itself people use phrases like an amygdala hijack or the amygdala taking the prefrontal cortex offline in terms of the actual neurobiology here it's a little bit more complicated than that but the basic idea is correct there is a complicated relationship between the thinking part of your brain the part of your brain that is doing all of that self-development understanding your personal history doing the psycho education all of that kind of stuff and the part of the brain that wakes up when we are stressed or activated and that's more your amygdala one of the really interesting things that I bumped into when doing prep for this conversation was that relationship the relationship between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala because it turns out that the prefrontal cortex starts to shut down when we experience something as being outside of our control in other words we're very stressed and we don't feel like we have a lot of agency but when we feel like we're stressed but we have some agency were in that moderate range where we have some influence over our experience, turns out the prefrontal cortex actually gets stronger. So there isn't a clean amygdala hijack based just off of how stressed you are. It's based also on what do you feel like you can do about those stressors? Do you feel like you have any influence over them? And that's where Simone's work lives. Her work really lives in the space of, okay, how do we help you feel your feelings get in touch with your body? Do all of the work that you need to do to get to a place where you feel like you have more influence over your experience. We talked a little bit at the beginning of the conversation about the phasic trauma treatment model. This is a three-part model that starts with safety and stabilization that moves into processing before concluding with integration. And Simone really talked about the importance of that safety and stabilization phase. I forget what her exact line was, but it was something along the lines of people who tend to cognize, tend to overthink, want to really move quickly. They want to feel like they got to the end of this process because their brain is moving a little bit faster than their body can actually keep up. So people are often surprised at how slow and how deliberate this process is. In similar ways, we talked about how it can be really difficult to make a different choice when you get to that moment, even if you've done a lot of really great stage setting before you get there. Your nervous system is trying to solve problems and it has built ways of operating in the world that are really superficially successful for you. That's why you're listening to a podcast like this one. That's why you've gotten as far in your life as you have. So even if you experience yourself as having a lot of problems right now or a lot of issues that you're dealing with, things are probably better than they could have been based off of whatever your experiences are, right? And our coping strategies are developed to help us solve different kinds of problems, but sometimes those problems don't exist for us anymore. Sometimes we move from a situation where we really needed those coping mechanisms into ones where we don't need them quite as much, but that doesn't change the fact that we still have them. And so we're trying to figure out what can we do these days to create the healthiest possible relationship with our body, with our emotions, with our thoughts, our feelings, all of that good stuff. And about halfway through the conversation, we started talking a lot about how to do that. So Simone mentioned mapping your relationship with your body. This includes how you talk to it, what you notice about it, whether you trust its signals or not, and how you respond when it asks for something. We gave the example of somebody who is feeling an emotion or feeling sensations that could be associated with sadness, and how that person might immediately move into shame and self-judgment based on those sensations, but we're trying to notice something before we move into a judgment or a thought about it. Mapping your relationship with your body could include different things, like noticing that you have some difficulty with interior reception, or that you feel unsafe in your body. You could notice that you struggle to meet your body's needs. Maybe you have limited energy throughout the day. Maybe you start to notice different kinds of coping patterns that you have. So we're building an inventory of what's true for us right now. This could include some of the stories that a person has developed about different emotional states, maybe particularly anger and sadness. And this takes us to the actual how to feel your feelings part. Simone started with observing those feelings with curiosity and a sense of connection. So we're going to notice first, and then we're going to feel later. We're curious about what's going on inside of ourselves, and we're trying to move out of a feeling of resistance to the emotion. Or hey, even notice that we are experiencing resistance to the emotion that can itself have a bunch of sensations associated with that. She also talked about separating our emotions from our feelings. Our emotions are our body's automatic responses while our feelings are our subjective experience and awareness of those emotions. And this took us to something that we didn't actually talk about that much during the conversation, but that she talks about in the book extensively, which is this idea of how do you know if you're sad or happy or angry and she'll ask clients to describe their sensations or their emotions as if she had never felt that emotion. So if you were forced to put words to I feel sad, well, how do you know you feel sad? And that's of course related to the title of the book. Where do you feel that in your body? She talked about using sensation words to describe a feeling before adding meaning to it. So you might start by saying a word like tight or warm or heavy, maybe fuzzy. That's one that can be really real for me personally. And then you might move on to applying a label to it. I'm anxious or I'm sad. And then we move on to meaning-making associated with that emotion. So telling some kind of a story around it. And this then takes us to step two of the failure feelings process, identifying motivations and inclinations. You're going from I wonder what this is to I wonder what this needs. And this is really a process of getting on our own side. So we notice the typical pattern, which is when I feel fill in the blank, my impulse is to fill in the blank. And the story I tell myself is fill in the blank. So we're noticing this poll to do something that includes motivations and inclinations related to our emotions. There's a key point here, which is that our adaptive behaviors, the stuff that we do habitually based on a given feeling or a given emotional state is comfortable because it's familiar, not because it is either good or smart or safe or any of those other things. We do it because that's what we learn to do in response to that feeling because at one point in time, it made sense, kept us safe, meant that other people didn't criticize us, you know, whatever the function was for us at the moment in time. But again, hopefully these days, your circumstances are a little bit different. And as an adult, you can develop a different kind of relationship with these sensations and you can interrogate some of those stories we've picked up along the way. Like, do I really need to view my anger or my sadness as something that's unacceptable? Or is this like a perfectly normal, perfectly beautiful human emotion? And then this takes us to the third step, meet your needs. How are we responding to those feelings and emotions? Particularly, we're appreciating the function of different impulses. If you have an impulse to shut down and hide, that motivation might be safety-seeking. If you have an impulse to people please, that motivation might be because you're trying to move into more connection with somebody else. We're seeing our typical hardwiring and then we're starting to ask ourselves, is there a better way to solve this problem? We closed by talking about a couple of different situations a person might be in. The first one was when somebody tries to tune into themselves, but they just don't see anything in there. The second one was when somebody gets overwhelmed by their feelings and sensations. And then the third situation was one where a person has a painful history with their body. How could that person engage in this kind of somatic work? I really enjoyed this conversation with Simone. She is so good at this stuff and is such a fantastic communicator around it. Her book is excellent. I would really recommend it for people if this is a category of things that you struggle with. And frankly, I think that most people struggle with this. I certainly struggle with this. So again, the book is where do you feel that in your body? And if you've made it this far and you somehow haven't subscribed to the podcast, you should subscribe to the podcast. It really helps us out. You can do that if you're watching on YouTube. You can also do it if you're listening on Spotify, Apple, wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com/beingwhilepodcast. And for just a couple of dollars a month, you can support the show and get a bunch of bonuses and return. I'm also writing a little more on Substack these days so you can check out my work there. Until next time, thanks for listening and I'll talk to you soon. Should she say that about the kisses? Is that weird? She doesn't care if she presses send. This is the love story of real hinged couple Daniel and Rochene, written and read by me, Ruby Thorpe. Listen to the free audiobook now.