The Science of Somatics: How Trauma Lives in the Body with Irene Lyon

Hello and welcome to the Arkhamon podcast. This is an exploration of woman kind. Here we discuss what it is to be a woman in the modern world while utilizing ancient and modern modalities in tandem to create a bounty of health for the body, mind and spirit. Before we start recording today, I would like to pay my respects to the elders past, present and future who reside on the lands of Literaturita Tasmania, where I am recording this podcast today. Always has always will be baby. My guest today Irene Leone has spent over two decades at the intersection of neuroscience, movement and trauma healing. She's someone I've been genuinely wanting to have on for quite a long time. She holds a master's degree in biomedical and health science and she is also a certified boulder-chris practitioner. She's also studied somatic experiencing and she's one of the first people in the world to bring the actual word nervous system and trauma healing education online. She's been doing this since 2012, reaching tens of thousands of people across 90 countries. Her work sits at a place most of us have never been taken before. The body, not the mind, our thoughts, not our stories, the actual physiology of how unresolved stress and trauma live in our nervous system and what it takes to actually move out of it. She teaches us that trauma isn't actually what happened to you, it's what happens inside of your body as a result and that chronic illness, anxiety, exhaustion and feeling stuck are not character traits or bad luck. They are often the nervous system doing exactly what it is learned to do to keep you safe. She is the creator of Smart Body Smart Mind and an amazing 21-day series, if you're interested. For a YouTube channel, has hundreds of videos and that have been described as truly boongeworthy with good reason. So let's get into this incredible long interview with Irene Leone, strap in. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy realm to be here today and educate women on semantics and fellow in-christ and all of the other amazing nervous system tools and mindsets that you have. Do you mind just introducing yourself and kind of the trajectory that brought you to SE and for everyone listening, when we say SE, we mean somatic experience. It's experiencing. Yeah. So what brought me to SE specifically was I was working in the mind-body world already doing something called the Felden-Christ method. So this was sort of my third career, if you will. I was in exercise science and physiology and then I thought I was going to go into academia and then I was in rehab science and then long story but some injuries led me to the Felden-Christ method and it changed my life. It was amazing and then I was in private practice. This would have been in 2004 through to 2007-08. I was in practice doing really great work with people Sarah because it was the only thing at the time that helped me recover from some pretty serious injuries but I was missing a piece. Like I could tell I had reached my limit of what I could do professionally with certain things. At the time I didn't know what I was missing but what I was missing was not that I'm not working with the nervous system doing Felden-Christ. Of course I am but it was the trauma, stored trauma piece. It was the early abuse. It was the constant state of survival that my clients were in but I didn't really know what that was. I was a pretty lucky kid even though I had injuries and stuff. I had a fairly healthy household. I wasn't screamed at. I wasn't spanked. I wasn't locked in my room or abused by my parents or others. So to me, even though I knew that stuff happened, to people, nobody ever told us, just like most medical doctors aren't told or haven't been that these early adversities can create problems not just in our psyche everywhere. So I got introduced to SC. It was a colleague of mine or a Felden-Christ colleague who had studied SE with Peter when it was very Peter Levine when it was really really beginning in the 90s I think and she said, "Ah, you might want to check out this work by Peter Levine and I did." It's like literally within months I was signed up for a training in California and that would have been in '09. So it took me about a year and a half to get to that next step which is so interesting because now if you want to do an SC training, you can do it immediately because everything is online and I don't know, I kind of miss that world where you have to wait and you have to like travel and you have to commit in a way that's super different to now. So that's how I got into SE and then it was literally this holy moly, this is, this early is the missing piece. This is what the clients I was working with were not getting better because they had been in propane explosions or had been crushed by a horse when they were young and had back problems or had fallen off of a cliff and was fine but they weren't fine and I didn't know how to get in through my training. So got into that blew my mind and I just kind of kept going on that track of not only SE but doing more advanced master classes with Peter Levine which aren't part of the regular curriculum of somatic experiencing which I believe they should be but they're not. That's a whole other story and then I also did some offsuits where his main we could say Prada Jays, the people who were really pushing the work forward, created their own branches of working with early trauma, developmental trauma, more attachment related wounds but at that body level and a lot of the offsuits were created because Peter's model, well wonderful, is more of a shock trauma model. It doesn't mean that he doesn't, he personally doesn't, he knows how to work with early trauma but the model is set more as a you have stored stuff inside and we need to get it out through various ways whereas if one has had more developmental kind of pervasive all the time things aren't safe, you don't work in the same way with that person. So just like any profession really the creation of new things occurs because there is a lack to help that one area or many areas and I was just fortunate to get in at the time where all these instructors, the two all name was Kathy Kane and Stephen Turell, they were still do everything it was in person, you know it was in California it was in kind of that hot bed of where Esteline is in the Bay area and there was just that vibe. It always felt different learning in those spaces so I got that for until about 2017 I was working in that world which I guess gosh that's almost 10 years ago now isn't it? Wow, you didn't get for a long time. I got that. Yeah it's 2027 next year so I really stopped my formal training in 2017 it doesn't mean that I'm not learning but my my stint in that world was sort of '09 to 2017 and then of course at some point you have to kind of get to work and put your learning into practice so that's what I've been doing. I understand as well you had your own personal injuries that you were working with at the same time and that would have taken time as well and that was a knee injury right that's spontaneous knee injury and I remember hearing and reading through your resources your story is so interesting that you did all the physiotherapy you did the food you did all of this stuff but then there was just this part of it that just like wouldn't work and then you did some automatic experiencing all fell in Christ and it started to let it started to see change that you will like well hang on a second how can the Nova Scotia is a cool body. Yeah totally there's sort of two parts I would say that the knee injuries those were from my early 20s and late teens so I was big into ski racing not professionally but I was really I was really good at it and I was figure skating and at the end of my sport career I was paragliding quite consistently which is you know not the the easiest thing to do so I was sort of in that world of the mountaineer world I lived and worked in Whistler, British Columbia for over 13 years and it was there that I broke my kneecap but it was a complication from a surgery so I had had an anterior cruciate ligament repair which is a common ligament that gets ruptured in sport I had done that two times prior to each knee and so I had a third ACL rupture they fixed it it's a long story but we think there was a previous fracture in my kneecap that was undiagnosed and then they used that it's called the patella patella tendon which is the kneecap they use the patella tendon to to create a new ligament in my knee it's how they do it and the knee surgery was wonderful I was re having the strongest I've ever been I was you know by then in my mid-20s and I knew what to do I wasn't a silly teenager not doing my exercises and yeah I was walking down my stairs in my home home in Whistler and I went to put my foot on one of the steps quadricep quad muscle contracted and no word of a lie I felt this almost like a ratchet tear and the worst pain to this day I have felt in my life and I you know was in shock sat down and within minutes there my knee just was like swelling because of obviously when you break a bone the blood comes out got it went to the medical center they're like how did you do this I'm like I was just walking down the stairs but I had had a bruise on my kneecap a year prior due to a mountain bike fall and this was before we wore knee pads you know elbow pads even my god before the gear I kind of imagine getting on a mountain bike now old oh my god And so, I mean, I still was skiing when we weren't wearing helmets. You know, I didn't grow up wearing a helmet riding a bike. I mean, no one did back in the 80s or 90s. So they were like, whoa, this is really weird. They fixed it. What was important to understand is I had been recovering from an injury when I had that fracture. But before that, I had also been rehabbing that other injury. So I was kind of on the string of not walking properly, kind of being in a bit of an asymmetry that I had the patellar thing. I had to be off my feet for quite a few months, crutches. And I was strong. Like, it healed. They took the hardware out. I was actually in Australia about a year later. And functional, very fit. But I was just in all this chronic pain that didn't make any sense. And it wasn't like fibromyalgia pain. It was just stiff tension, no matter how much I stretched and nothing made any difference. And so that's where I was introduced to Feldenkrais. Was in the rule, actually, New South Wales. And I had some amazing sessions from a physical therapist who also had Feldenkrais under his belt. And that it literally within a month, I was light as a feather. All of the asymmetries had shifted. Now, did I-- had I fixed the trauma of those accidents? At that point, no. That came much later. But the structural elements that got resolved through the Feldenkrais work. It was so transformational. And of course, I had just spent eight years studying exercise science, rehab science. And not that everything I had learned was thrown out the window. I still had the anatomy knowledge and the physiology knowledge. But how to actually help someone? It didn't get taught to me in university. So a couple of years after that, I think I tweaked my back. Actually, I was at a gym and I did something. I was like, oh, I should try to find those Feldenkrais lessons. Again, they were literally on a cassette tape. So I was listening to them through my Walkman super old school. And I was looking for the tapes. And they had obviously been lost in my move from Australia back to Canada. And at that point, Google was just starting to come on to the world scene. And so I looked up Feldenkrais. And there was a training literally on Vancouver Island close to where I lived at the time. And I just signed up. And so that was '04. So '04 to '07 was Feldenkrais training. I was then in private practice for about a year and a half. And then that's when I was like, I'm missing something. And then that's where the SE piece came in. And now, you know, a lot of people think I don't practice Feldenkrais. Well, I'm not in private practice. It is embedded in everything that I do in my online work. So that's a quick arc of how we went from science to science, biology, anatomy, physiology, into neuroplastic work with Feldenkrais, and then into the trauma work with Peter's work. We would call it the new traumaology. So just looking at not just the biology or the neurology, but how they come together and how they work at the body level. I don't even like using the term somatic that much anymore because it's been hijacked and co-opted and people don't really know what it means. So I try and not use that term anymore, and say, oh, yes, I'm bringing in the somatic pieces, but at a real level, not just, let's just do some movement kind of level, if that makes sense. And I really appreciate that story because I kind of see myself and I see a lot of other practitioners in that story as well of we've been classically trained, and then we get into practice and we're like, hang on a second, work out, this person is wait. Hang on a second, why is this person's thyroid not repairing? Hang on a second, like why is their heart not working properly? There's other elements to this, and there are other undercurrents. It's like, it's so interesting. You study for like six to eight years and you've only just got to the tip of the iceberg, really. Nine, it was nine years doing my undergrad 'cause I worked under work study. It was, yeah, it was a long time. It's a lot of anatomy to learn, and that's so vital to your work as well, understanding the ligaments, the bones, the fascia, all of these things go into somatics and go into Feldman Christ as well. And I love the story that you tell also that you were the first person on the internet to put nervous system on your website. And then you're like, what the developer was like, don't put that on, no one's gonna know what that is. This is such an antithesis of what is happening right now. I feel like everyone has the word the nervous system on their website. And I just have a question, like what made you want to go from kind of in person, cassettes, bringing things online? What was the, what made you want to do that? Was it good so you could reach more people? Was it ease of work? It wasn't 'cause I wanted to reach more people, Adley. It was, I was at that time, it would have been 2011, 12-ish. And I was, so I was in the thick of my SE trainings. I was in private practice at that time. I would say I was at the, even at the beginning of my private practice with SE combined with Feldman Christ. And I found myself constantly having to repeat myself with graphs. I always have paper, like I'm like drawing these pictures and this is this and this is this. And, and then I started when I moved back to the city, I had a beautiful office downtown and I would cram like 30 to 50 people into it. And I would do like with a projector, a slideshow teaching what I would call the biology of stress, like these are the different traumas. This is your es sympathetic and these are the parasympathetic branches and blah, blah, blah, all that stuff that I teach. And one thing led to another, I learned about online learning. I was like, oh, that's interesting. You can put a course together. 'Cause at the time I would record audio and my husband would burn it onto a CD. And then I would give it to my clients, like a little package. And some of those lessons are still the lessons in my courses. And I would say, please do this, like at least three times before you come back. But that's what happened to me when I saw the Feldman Christ practitioner in Australia. He gave me that cassette tape. I saw him in person, but then he's like, you have to practice. You can't just not get this into your system. So it was very clear that one hour a week with me while a great hour and people got a little bit was never gonna move a person's needle forward in terms of really getting to the root of things. If someone just had like one shock trauma and they had a fairly solid regulated system which I personally have not worked with anyone like that. My husband has done one session where this person all they needed was help getting over a shock from a car accident and they had a pre-solid childhood. Like that's a, like that's a really unicorn, total unicorn right there. So people needed to learn. They needed to learn about their nervous system. They needed to learn how to sense themselves. Because what happens is someone goes to say an SC provider, let's just say, and I know these stories all too well. And the practitioner sees we need to work with this person's car accident, I'll just use that as an example. But that person doesn't know how to trust anything that they sense or maybe they don't even know where their feet are or how to feel their feet or how to breathe without forcing a pattern of breathing. You can't really do organic trauma work with someone who doesn't have that skill on board. And then if you're working with one of it with a person and this isn't a hit against the person, this is just how humans are these days. We've lost that ability to sense and be introspective and trust and follower intuition, right? That person needs to understand that when I sense something or see something and I might say, I need you to just pause and feel that, or what would it be like to actually slow your breathing down? Or what would it be like to bubble-buff? If they haven't learned why I'm asking that, they then go into their mind and they try to make sense of it and then we've lost that moment. And so that's a crude way of saying, I started to put the work out online because I needed something more for my private clients 'cause it was just not cost-effective for people to see me. By the time I stopped my private practice, there were people that had been seeing me for five years once a week. And if I think about the stories that I've heard where I haven't even met a lot of our online students, the people that I've seen heal online have done way more healing than those in my private practice. It's not because we weren't doing good work, it's because they needed to be learning the language of their nervous system 24/7, right? So it's like taking a baby and I always go back to the baby and what the baby needs to teach a young little human how to talk and walk and write and all the things that you and I know how to do. You can't just tend to them for an hour a week and then the rest of the time you lock them in a room. I mean, it's ridiculous. You wouldn't do that. But if you have a human who has a chronic illness and they weren't neglected as an infant and they didn't get good regulation, you essentially have to re-teach that human how to find capacity and regulation before we even begin to process that car accident or that abuse or whatever it might be because they don't have the language on board. And so, yeah, sorry. That's, yeah, I'll stop there 'cause I could keep going but that's sort of, that was the first reason. And of course now, you know, close to 15 years later, I understand. it a lot better. It's still, it's almost like the words don't fully explain it, which is why I always go back to like infancy because that lays the groundwork for what did we get or what did we not get, and depending on what a person got or didn't get, they might need more or less of that foundational work. Some people will spend five years just learning the foundational work, and that's a reality. Others might need a couple months, and they have a little bit more capacity or vitality. They might have more safety, more support in their system, not internally, necessarily, but socially. So they can spend more time with these things, but you have a, you know, a mother of three who's single and working two jobs. Like that's really difficult to learn a new language. You couldn't learn a new language if you were that busy. So to relearn this language of the nervous system, it does take time. Speaking of the language of the nervous system, what is the nervous system? Do you mind explaining that? Because as you said, I think semantics in your own words has been bastardized a little bit. So it's a nervous system. I see a lot of information online, and quick reels kind of displaying really complex nervous system, understandings and anatomy that I'm like, almost, I just feel like there's not enough time in this nine second reel to explain what you're trying to do. So do you mind explaining in simple terms what the nervous system is, the arms and the nervous system and how it functions in the body? So there's many systems. The quick way is to just, I'll speak it and then a person could draw this on a piece of paper if they wanted to, but there's, I see it as two nervous systems. There's the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system. And then from that things branch off. So the central nervous system is the brain and the spinal cord that runs through your vertebra and then the brain then connects, brain stem connects the brain and spinal cord. And then you've got the peripheral nervous system and that's all the nerves that come out of the brain and out of the spinal cord. So it's very easy to pop an image up on Google and you were to put that. You would see this brain and this long snake like thing that's your spinal cord. And then if you then add the peripheral nervous system, you see all these branches coming out. So you have the nerves that come out of the brain. They're called the cranial nerves. The vagus nerve is one of those, right? And then there's all the other nerves that go to the face, the throat, the ear, etc. And then you have all the nerves that come out of the spine. Like I'm using my hands right now. You're not in your head. You know, you mentioned that you went for a hike before our talk. You know, you're using muscles. You're moving. You're feeling, you're sensing. I've got some water here. I'm having a sip every now and again. Like all of these movements are facilitated by everything in our body, namely this central and peripheral nervous system. Some people will distinguish the interic nervous system as separate, but that is still part of the peripheral nervous system, the interic nervous system would be the gut, the viscera. Yeah. So the one nervous system that I focus on is the peripheral nervous system. So the peripheral nervous system and the reason why Sarah is because it's like it's using my hands here. It's hard to like get into the brain and like maneuver it. And our spinal cord is really protected by the vertebra as it should be. And it's very automatic. It's very primitive. Of course, we have the cortex in our brain, which makes us incredibly human, especially the prefrontal and all the other lobes. But oddly, you know, in all my work and all the folks I've helped heal through the work I've done complex PTSD anxiety, I don't want to ever say limbic system or a mcdala. Like it doesn't even come out of my mouth in any of my videos. And that might confuse people because they're like, oh, well, isn't it the amygdala and the limbic system that's like on on alerts? Like yes, it is. But we get into that via the peripheral nervous system. So the peripheral nervous system has kind of two main branches. One would be called the autonomic nervous system. And then the other would be the sensory motor or the motor sensory. I always say them together because they're it's just one together. The autonomic nervous system is our survival. So fight, flight, freeze, shut down. But it's also the regulation of all of our internal organs. So again, you went for a hike this morning, your heart rate naturally came up, right? You probably sweat it a little bit. All those things are being governed by your autonomic nervous system, the digestion, the hormone release, all that stuff. What's interesting is the survival nervous systems are part of that autonomic, but also the digestion. So I'm going to put a little piece in here. Someone here might be watching who has say gut problems, which is a really common thing. If we are always in some form of survival where we have fight flight and I'll describe those in a second, fight, flight, freeze, and shut down kind of running our show, the system is like we have danger to focus on. We have to focus on survival, survival, survival, even if we're shut down and collapsed, it's like a survival. So if the system is always attending to that or co-opted to that, that other part of the autonomic nervous system that governs the digestion is not going to get its fair share of time. There won't be enough time to repair the gut. There won't be enough time to help the food, you know, do the things it has to do. Absorption of minerals and nutrients and all the things. Does that make sense? Partially, it makes total sense. If your body is stressed out, it's not going to prioritize digesting a burger. It wants to run away from the threat or fight it. It makes total sense. Yeah. Very good. So we've got this autonomic nervous system that is again part of the peripheral that is essential and that we will always prioritize the danger of the threat at the expense of these internal organs needing good stuff, right? Repair, rejuvenation, etc. The other part of the peripheral is that sensory motor, motor sensory. So again, I've got, you know, a cup here and a glass here. There are different weights. I can feel them. I can sense where I am on my chair. I can sense my breathing. I can see outside. I can see you. I can see color like all these things. We're constantly processing things through this sensory and maybe motor nervous system or both, right? We know that if we get like a tooth taken out or a root canal, they, what do they do? They put freezing in, right? They, they numb your mouth. Afterwards, if you try to, if I was to try to sip some water, I can't feel it and it might dribble out my mouth. So I'm not properly sensing that wetness or I might eat something that's too hot and I burn myself. We need those senses to tell us what's happening. But if we've got this nervous system, I'm being very crude in this example, that is in this constant state of some kind of threat, we can turn off our senses and not sense what's going on inside. So this would be that we would call it interception. It's like, you don't notice that you've eaten something that's not good for you, right? Or you don't sense that spidey sense of this person doesn't seem too safe, right? Or I feel something funny in my back. Maybe I might all ignore it. Like, there's these things, these cues that our body gives us where we do need that accurate sensory perception. The interesting thing though, of course, is that if we have too much survival, we can also swing the other way and have hyper sensitivity to things and that's not good either. So there's like, there's like this smorgasborg of possibilities and it's too simple to say this person has stored trauma, therefore they're just associated or this person has stored trauma. Therefore, they always live in a collapse or this person has this terrible thing that happened to them so they're constantly anxious. All those might be true. But even within one person, you can have different states of your system depending on the time of day or where you are, who you're around. So to go back to your question, what are the nervous systems? Again, central nervous system brain spinal cord, the peripheral nervous system is everything else. You've got your autonomic nervous system, the governs fight flight phrase and all of these internal systems. Then you've got the sensory motor, motor sensory that governs the movement and and and balance and all those things. What I didn't mention are the branches of the autonomic nervous system. Many people will know them. I've already said fight flight. So that would be the sympathetic nervous system. I call that the get up and go the fight the fleet. But also we need it. Like I have a bit more sympathetic energy here because I'm sitting upright. I need to, you know, make my muscles stay on. So I don't fall over. You're using that too. It's we're not in threat, but that has to be on a little bit more. And then we have the parasympathetic nervous system, which is also part of the autonomic. And that one is much more complicated. This is where the vagus nerve comes in because the parasympathetic has two main branches. The ventral portion and the dorsal portion. The ventral portion just means that that portion of the nerve bundle, the vagus nerve comes out of the front down the front of the brainstem and it goes to everything above the diaphragm. So face, a throat area, heart, lung. Everything below that is the dorsal branch. And dorsal just means the back and French or the fin with, you know, that dorsal fin. It goes behind the brainstem and it snakes in and feeds everything underneath the lung underneath the diaphragm. To let's just say the viscera for the sake of simplicity. That one is a bit more complex because you can have two different tones of this dorsal. So right now there's all sorts of screaming in the internet world around the polyvegal theory. And we don't really need to go into the detail I've ever seen. written article about it, it would take someone probably a couple hours to read through the things there. But essentially the dorsal portion of the parasympathetic governs two things. One is a portion of the freeze response. So when we go into like that deer and headlight, that's a bit of sympathetic and it's a bit of dorsal shutdown energy. It's called the high, high-tone dorsal on the parasympathetic. That's a protective response, right? If a person can't fight, they can't flee and they stay consistently in this state of there is a threat, there is a threat. Some systems will then collapse. They will go into shutdown. And that is where the high-tone dorsal of the parasympathetic takes over. Everything just comes to a halt. It's like hibernation mode. It's low oxygen. It's low metabolism. That's lethargy. That's depression. That's the gut, just not working. It's the immune system being depressed. It's not having even tone in the muscles to be able to move and have that. If you're a body worker, you feel it in the tissue. Tissue or a person that is very much in a shutdown, their tissue feels very doughy, very blacks. Joints can be really, really, blacks and over flexible. But then the other thing is this same dorsal portion is also our rest digest. And this is how you know if someone understands their nervous system science. The dorsal vagal portion of the parasympathetic when it's in the low tone is rest digest. People often say parasympathetic is rest digest. That's partially true, but it's this low-tone dorsal. And it's again, everything below the diaphragm. And so when we are in low-tone rest digest, that's where we repair. That's where we recover. That's where we want to go to when we go to sleep at night. And we have a good night's sleep. The system literally goes into fix it mode. I like to think of like little, you know, little things going and stitching up the cells and enhancing the things and repairing the tissues and the skin and the cuts. And anyone knows when they've had a good sleep, they wake up and they literally feel like they've been renewed or duvenated. That's the low-tone dorsal of the parasympathetic doing its job. Where this connects with trauma in the nervous system is that if you are co-opted to survival, and you live in some form of fight, flight, freeze, or collapse, the system is like danger, danger, danger. We got no time to repair the system. We can live that way for a certain amount of time in our use. And this is why we tend to see people get sick later in life. Sadly, we're seeing more and more people get sick younger. And there's a whole host of reasons for that. But youth will keep us going for a while. And then eventually, that rest and repair, it's like, it just, it can't keep up with what the body needs and one could say that that's where a lot of our premature aging occurs, right? You might have someone same age, but they look completely different. And it's not just genetics. It's the fact that they have way more stress than the other person and they don't go into that repair mode. So I think that covers the main branches of the nervous systems. They love how we just touched on polyvegal. I want to go into it a little bit deeper, but I'll calm like further reflection. It is such, I feel like that is its own topic. But do you mind just defining what polyvegal theory is really quickly and what the controversy is because the controversy and everyone's opinion on it is so interesting? Well, so here's, here's where I am with it. The work that I do clinically and the work that the Peter Levines of the world do and my teachers and our esteemed colleagues who have gone through the rigorous training I have, for example, we know what we do and we know that it works. But it doesn't work because of a theory, but the theory explains what we know to be true happening in clinical practice. So let me explain. The somatic work that we do, whatever we want to call it, it was there before Porge's published his papers. His first client, he talks about which was in the late 60s, he calls her Nancy. She came to him with what we would call now fibromyalgia, chronic pain, fatigue, panic attacks, severe premenstrual disorder, like the classic thing that unfortunately is all too common these days in men and women, you know, minus obviously the PMS that severe. And what he found out was that she had stored in her old surgery trauma. You know, they're both young, you know, this is like late 60s. She was a, I think, a grad student or something at Berkeley University, Cal and he was given her as a client because nobody could figure out what to do with her. He was, I think he was called like the mind doctor because he liked it breathing and meditation at the time. That was like kind of a weird thing to do, right? Like it was just starting to happen. So he sat her down and I'm going to really paraphrase this story, asked her to relax and take a deep breath. And she did that and her anxiety got worse and it got worse. He's like, uh oh. And he had this image sent to him. He says it was a message from the gods of a tiger and he saw this tiger and he looked at her and he goes, Nancy, run, run like you're running away from a tiger. And she was just sitting in a chair and she just starts like running, just spontaneous, shaking, running, wetting. And somewhere within this session, she had a flash of being five years old and having ether put over her mouth for I think a ton select to me. And back in that day, you know, pediatrics wasn't very trauma informed. So you're going to strap down this child. You're going to, they're going to be struggling. And essentially they go under with a high stress fight flight, but that fight flight doesn't get completed. So you have your surgery, you come out, you wake up, probably she doesn't remember because it was so traumatic and then fast forward to her 20s and she has all these health problems like what's going on. And turned out that it was that trapped. We would call it the fancy word is traumatic procedural implicit procedural memory. She wanted to fight. She wanted to run. She couldn't. It was living within her system. And it was keeping her co-opted in that survival physiology, even though she was a functional human being. And this is where functional freeze comes in. Grad student, you know, doing all the things, but just these terrible symptoms of her symptoms, her syndromes healed. You know, wasn't just that one session from what I've heard they worked together after that. But he, he was doing that before porges realized that there isn't a reciprocal, there isn't just a reciprocal relationship between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. So if I really simplify it, the old way of seeing the autonomic nervous system and I'm going to use my arms to kind of describe this like a graph, like the sympathetic goes up and then the parasympathetic comes in to bring the system down. We would call it a reciprocal relationship. One goes up, one goes down in human system because of our higher brain, we can have a sympathetic go up. But we can keep ourselves in sympathetic with this parasympathetic, dorsal shutdown at the same time and still be fine. Steve importers in the polyvegal theory is that he realized that we could be in both. We could have that fight flight, that freeze and that shutdown all happening at the same time. So there isn't just this true reciprocal nature, which is really important. And so that was one piece. But the other pieces that, and I will encourage people to read the article, I literally posted it today, what's been happening is people are getting, they're getting up in their knickers as we might say with the anatomy and it not being measured properly. It's a very much a technical measurement thing. Whereas the actual functionality of how the nervous system works, we know is solid. And with anything scientific, you know, things are going to evolve. We're going to figure out more specific detail of how this nerve connects with this other nerve and other parts of the brain. But from a very clinical perspective, what we were doing to help people out of these things was happening before that theory came on board. If anything, the theory backed up what we were seeing in chronic illness, it backed up what we were seeing when we got better rather than getting a person to be cathartic and get out the emotion, well, that might be important. We might need to start with establishing safety. Like, is it okay to just sit and just check out the environment? What are your resources? How can you not release the trauma necessarily, but create capacity to feel a bit more whole first rather than let's just get the fight out or let's just get the fight flight or freeze or shut down out? Because everybody's different, we need to look at all of these different nervous system states, which we can have in a mixed fashion and go, "What does this person need the most right now?" Maybe they don't need to cry for a million years. Maybe they just need to watch a funny movie and have a laugh and then find that goodness through that interaction with the environment. So yeah, there's no worry. The polyvegal theory is not debunked. Everybody seems to think it is. But when you really look at the critique, it is not clinical. The other thing I want to add, there's been some strange thought that forges said that a regulated nervous system is a calm nervous system and that's not accurate. I'm not sure where they got that from. What I think has happened, Sarah, is because of the popular press and social media and the influencers have really co-opted and made the nervous system and trauma and the vagus nerve, they're like holy crap. - Holy crap. - Yeah. - You can't take a vagus nerve exercise, which I teach in my courses, by the way, but you can't just take that as an entity and give it to someone and expect them to create full regulation. You need to, it's like saying to a baby, "Hey baby, we're gonna give you this humming sound. Just do that and you will find regulation." - By the way, you never feel angry and never feel activated. And you should never wanna run up hills. I think it's very interesting, this obsession will come. And it's like, kind of like a second, your emotions, like they're a rainbow. And it's also gonna be reflected in your nervous system. You need to have a flexible nervous system and that is a regulated nervous system. - Exactly. Your calm is, yeah. - Yeah, and I don't know where that came from. We could figure, try to figure that out to the cows come home, but something got massively lost in translation. I would say over the last six or so years, 'cause this confusion was not there five or six years ago. And I think what's happened, if I just kind of make a macro assumption, is all these quick hacks were produced on mass and delivered to people as biohacks. And now these people are realizing that they still have got problems and anxiety, troubles, and all the things that goes with dysregulation. And rather than owning up to the fact and saying, "Hey, maybe this wasn't the right solution." They're now saying that solution is invalid 'cause it didn't work for me, right? And that's a bit dangerous because it's like, well, it was never the right solution from the beginning, but because it was a quick way to sell some product, you did it and that's fine, but now we're having to kind of go back and fix this issue of, well, you just need to hum to feel better. It's like, yeah, okay, humming might work, but if you are in a dorsal shutdown, just forcing that sound or that breath isn't going to work. We might need to do something different. So that's, read my article. - Yes, I'll link it in the share notes for everyone. I really appreciate you going into that because it is a very interesting realm. - It's very complex. And if you read Porges' article that, I don't, Rebut isn't the right term. He critiques the critique. Most of the words that are there, most people won't even understand because it's so depth at the scientific level that again, it's not essential to have that level of scrutiny. I don't know why there is a witch hunt against him, but say, lovey, he's a big boy. He doesn't need to defend or take, I don't have to defend him. We know it works, but the other thing I'll add, the polyvagal theory isn't a method. And that's the other part that's gotten confused. It's like saying, germ theory is medicine. I use this example the other day. It's like, germ theory is part of an idea that we need to pay attention to, but it's not all of medicine. You know that a doctor should wash their hands before they go into surgery, right? That's one part, but it doesn't create the entire surgical theater of what has to happen when someone is having a general surgery. And so there's been something where this, I think the over-zealousness of science has really co-opted people into thinking, "Oh, I know about science, 'cause I'm talking about the polyvagal theory." But again, it's not a method. It is a contribution to understand human evolution and function at this autonomic nervous system level. - Okay, thank you for explaining that. And that is the thing that you need to understand. It's a theory, and you can disprove or prove it. It's not a method. I think that's something that you really need to understand. - Yes. - And it is kind of when we see things like this happen, I think it is interesting, because it does kind of show that we're moving in the right direction in a way that people are starting to use critical thinking and maybe they're not using it in the correct way. But that's fine, like you're moving in the right direction. You're looking at science and you're looking at rigorous-like studies. That's great. That's just, I don't think a lot of people have learned how to read through those studies and how to apply those critical-- - I don't even like reading through those studies. - Yeah, and who dogs? - They're broad. - They're jargonny. I'm never thinking about the nucleus ambiguous of the dorsal medial branch of the thingy ever. When I'm working with a person, it's like we have a human here. What does this human need help with? I know the things to look for based on the nervous system physiological states and what a healthy system is. And here are all the tools, one of which might be, yeah. Trying to initiate a bit more of a response in the gut or in the face or the eyes. But I'm never ever. If someone says we're gonna tone the vagus nerve, they don't know what they're talking about. That's a dead giveaway. Just moving back to trauma. - Trying to find the finding trauma. How does it show up? What is the distinctions that you have around trauma? What makes a traumatic experience? Because not everyone who has a car crash is going to have trauma from that, right? - Yeah, so I like to define it in two ways. It's okay to say I had a trauma. I went to the hospital. I saw a trauma surgeon because I had a broken rib and blah, blah, blah. That's okay. I don't worry about those semantics. In the new trauma-tology world, we're working with the physiology of a nervous system, the somatic systems, et cetera. Trauma is not necessarily the event. It is what occurs in the human system after the event. And you are absolutely right. A person can have a car accident and suffer a broken leg, but they're not gonna have necessarily PTSD after that. Someone might have a accident and it's so minor, like a fender bender, like nothing to write home about. There's no bruising, there's no whiplash, anything it's in nuisance 'cause you have to take your car to the insurance place to, you know, how it works. But that person the next day is in pain. That person the next day can't function over weeks. Their gut starts to go off over weeks and months. They fear leaving their home and they don't wanna drive. They don't wanna get in another car with someone. They're afraid to even cross the street. So why does someone who has, who has say a worse accident and they break something, walk away and they're pretty okay. And another person has a tiny little thing happen and they're just afraid. It all comes down to what was going on in the nervous system before that event. What was stored in their system? What did they not know was there? I think about when I was in private practice, this one individual I worked with. She, she wasn't so much pain. She had all these, it's called thoracic outlet syndrome, like the nerve pain headaches, fatigue. Like I can't even mimic her eyes. They were just like deer and a headlights. Lovely human. Just like you and I here to like, she's so gracious and lovely and a mother and but I'm like, something's not right here. Her accident wasn't that intense. And yet years later, she's still bouncing through the system, trying to get better. And one thing led to another and as you get to know someone, you start to hear their history and this poor young woman had been in a really abusive household. She was kind of the care provider for her younger siblings by the time she was eight 'cause I don't think there was alcoholism but there was just her parents were not taking care of the house, weren't paying the bills. And so she did what any old enough human would do who's got that energy, I'm gonna take care of things. So she was the perfect student, whereas her, you know, her sibling was kind of the, you know, skipped school didn't do that well but we traced it and we're like, how is he today and she's like, he's fine, right? Because he got to be the kid, he got to be reckless and get into trouble and she had to be perfect. And in that perfection, swallowing the emotions, probably the anger, I think there was also some sexual abuse that occurred that we didn't even have time to uncover 'cause we were on the limit of I think 10 sessions 'cause that's what the insurance would pay. But that case was a very classic case of, that accident doesn't make sense. Why is this person in so much pain so terrified? And as I started to ask certain questions, it was just so clear that her little nervous system had been in some form of dysregulation and trauma adversity we would say from a very young age. So trauma essentially, if we really simplify it, it lives in the nervous system but if we poke it out a little bit more, it's in the entire physiology. But it's also how we relate and see the world around us. So someone might be like, oh yeah, I've never had any trouble getting up with illness, let's say, but yeah, like everybody in the world is out to get me. Like this is a classic thing we'll hear from someone who grew up with a lot of turmoil and stress in their home life. Would be the world is dangerous, I can't trust anyone and I have to do it all myself. No one is gonna help me, nobody cares. And I'm just gonna be that soldier. The opposite to that is the collapse system that often will kind of represent more in chronic illness. Kind of that, that despondent, lethargic, no energy that I was mentioning a little while ago where the skin and the tissue is very overflexible and very doughy. This also goes to Sarah the ACE study, which I don't wanna assume, yeah, the Adverse Childhood Experiences study, which really put on the map, this connection with early adversity, chronic stress in our younger years and how that pervasive milieu, if you will, creates a system that is just on alert, terrified or collapse or a bit of both. And so the other thing that is tricky is that when we have that physiology, it's like we've got a lot of things to do, emit a signal and we actually can be more susceptible to traumas because it's like in the wild, I'm sure you've seen wildlife shows where the pack of Impala are running and that Cheetah can pick out the Impala that's just a little older. It's got a little bit of a limp, right? And they've got this radar that is completely internal and they go go for that one, you know. We know and Peter has done many, I'm sure he's got this in some of his books, but I've heard him talk about this in person, where he'll talk to perpetrators. So the ones who are hunting and attacking people and they will say, I can tell exactly who in this bar or who in this room I can attack later on their way to their, yes, it's sad, but it's true because we have that animal instinct and even if someone looks perfectly put together, if they have that little glassiness in their eye or they're just a little too rigid, they will also emit this sense of fear of guard as opposed to having a physiology that is a little more relaxed, but still alert and engaging and that perpetrator knows don't go to that one. They're not going to give up, you know, the fight and fight, but they can see the ones that are going to be much easier to essentially metaphorically break. It's a terrible thing to say, but we just we know this to be true. So trauma, it it seeps in in so many different ways. The final thing I'll say about that one is I see it as three categories. I see the traumas that we have as shock-based. So that's the car accident. That's the life event. That's the dog dying, the spouse, you know, sick and the stress of that, but then there's the early and developmental trauma that typically occurs pre-verbal when we're really young, when we're in utero, I even would lump in transgenerational trauma with that because it's before we were here aware of what was going on, but that imprint gets taught to us through our parents and how they relate to us and their autonomic nervous system. Right? We learn that. We learn mannerisms at the beginning from how our mother or father or primary caregiver look at us, talk to us, etc. And then the other category would be I just call it chronic stress. That can be a trauma too. Living in our world under the circumstances that many do can create a lot of stored traumatic energy when we can't do what we want and we have to keep pushing to make ends meet, raise children, work with the system that isn't that fair for everyone. So that's the other element. Most people that I've met have a little bit of everything. Right? Yep. So many golden nuggets that you just spoke about, I'm going to put a study down below that I want people to look for if they feel ready for that. I would say you might be surprised I've done it. I've made other people do it in my life because you're like you would be surprised of your score. I think a lot of people go throughout their lives and we'll talk about that freeze and shut down. I think a lot of people are in the reason shut down and then I think that a study is a really nice cornerstone for people if they feel ready for it to go actually. That's a lot higher than I thought. Then maybe I do have a few things to work through. And so going back to what you were talking about before with like that nervous system shut down. You speak a lot about freeze and shut down. Most people know about fight and flight. But we don't really know about that freeze and the fawn response and that's something that I feel like a lot of women have especially when we are looking at the statistics around sexual assault. I think a lot of women go into freeze and fawn and then they feel guilt later on. Why did I not worry? It's because your nervous system put you in a fawn state because that was the safeest option for you. So do you mind talking about freeze and shut down and like what those states actually are and how they show up in the short term and the long term for women? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, freeze is a very, smart way, the simplest of them in that it is typically a state that doesn't last for very long. It is that deer in the headlight. It is I can't fight. I can't flee. I'm not quite shut down yet, but I'm kind of in limbo. Right? It's like, oh, I don't know what to do. Right? It would even be, you know, going blank when you have to public speak and all of a sudden it's like, and like the words literally can't come out. I've experienced that once in my life and it was so fascinating to feel my whole physiology just take over. And it's like, what's happening? And I came out of it really quickly because someone in the audience, I think could see that I was really young, could see that this was happening and that social engagement, that ventral vagal portion of the nervous system broke me out of that spell. I was like, oh, right. And then I knew exactly what I had to do and to teach. So that's an example of freeze in not a life threatening manner. But if we are under a threat, whether it's a car accident or an assault, our system will protect. It's so good at protecting. And so if we are being attacked under some form of abuse, yes, if we know we can't fight and flee and typically there will be some of that. But not always that phrase occurs. And then the collapse comes in so that we don't feel as much. Now, this doesn't mean that we don't feel something, but it numbs us out. Often people will say, I could see myself from above, like I floated out of my body and I watched it happening. That is a true out-of-body experience. Now, we don't need to be attacked to have an out-of-body experience. It can happen with severe injuries, right? Where it's like I saw myself being lifted onto the stretcher after that car accident, for example, right? But that numbing is protective. We want it. So yes, when someone says, my body failed me. I didn't fight. That's actually good because if the perpetrator was bigger than us, and usually that's the case, especially if we're little, and it's our mother or our father who's harming us, we can't fight. We know it. And so I don't really like the word fawn so much in this situation because this is not that. It is a freeze and then it is a collapse or a shutdown, along with maybe some more mental dissociation. Fawn is much more sophisticated and it's what we start to do to save face, to stay safe, to appease the situation. So it might be that when we're little, we have all this energy which a lot of kids should because they're little, you know, think about puppies and kittens, their little menaces, right? And so they're like, we're like that when we're little. And if we realize that that exuberance is not met with equal energy, and we maybe get shouted at or yelled at or hurt, then we don't necessarily, we don't have to necessarily shut down, but we'll be like, oh, okay, I'm going to shift a little bit how I am next time. And then over time that that just becomes our personality, right? It's like, I'll be that good girl or I'll be the quiet little boy or whatever it might be. And even certain practices that we might applaud in children like, oh, they're just such good readers. They just love being in that book. They're so quiet. Like, my kid is so quiet and like, okay, I think there is space for really quiet children. Like, I was a nanny for years. I've met really quite quintessentially quiet children, but like you can tell when a child has been shut down. I think young girls grow up with this, you have to be a good girl. This is what good girls do. So gendered. And it really shuts them down. I think separates them from their emotions. And so women very young are taught to be in a shutdown and almost a collapsed nervous system space, but they feel really just associated from their emotions in a way. Yeah. Yeah. It's very complex. I think because of our higher brain, which I mentioned when I was talking about the different nervous systems and how our brain works, we're so smart. Like humans are very clever and very manipulative, right? We can manipulate ourselves to be more safe in a situation. And in many ways, to me, fawning is that it is physiological, yes, but you won't have a toddler fawn. They're too young to understand it. You can you can toxically shame a toddler, but that puts them into collapse. Whereas when you get to, there's something changes at the age of five, and I don't follow the exact science of this, but there is a difference between kind of four and five and definitely six, where you know how to play the game differently, right? And that is where that shift occurs. So yeah, the difference between fawn to me is there is a reason I don't use it very much, because I like to just look at that pure physiology of what would the mammal do to stay protected. And within that fawn is definitely a managing of survival energy, but it's a little more, there's a little bit of a consciousness to it, if that makes sense. Totally, it makes total sense. It's kind of like guilt. Like shame is a very hot topic, and people will now we it's more accepted that there's such a thing as healthy shame and toxic shame. And a lot of people say, oh no, healthy shame is guilt. It's like no, it's not. I don't think there's any healthy shame. I mean, under the frameworks that I've learned from Brunei Brown, is there any healthy shame? I don't think there is. There is. Do you think there is? Okay, that's so fascinating. I've done, yeah, this is where Brunei I can't really agree with. And all of the fields of somatic experiencing Peter, Kathy Kane, there is a healthy shame, but it isn't about, so the difference Sarah is healthy shame, is you've done something bad. Let's figure out what it is, but we're going to do that in connection, whereas toxic shame is you've done something bad and you are bad because you've done that bad thing. But when you're a toddler, you must learn healthy shame to know what right for wrong is. And if you don't put that out when there's that very, very specific time of development where baby, not baby, toddler is learning hot stove, don't touch, right? If you don't have a strong no, like you have to have a baritone sound that they feel in their body and they go, "Oh, right, you need to actually have that tail under shame response, but it has to happen with connection." So if I were to offer healthy shame to a little one, when they're learning, I need to stay with them, let them feel they've done something wrong. It's the only way we learn, but I'm like, "Okay, let's try that again." It's okay, and usually there's tears, but then you correct it, whereas toxic shame, sadly most people, my husband was toxically shamed. Like we've you've done actually quite a few talks on this because he and I got completely different upbringings. He was called useless, worthless, stupid, you know, all the things that typically happen in abusive emotional situations. That created this toxic shame, so when he was learning this, interestingly enough, he couldn't believe that there was such a thing as healthy shame because he had never felt it. And then it wasn't until he was parenting his own son, I don't have biological children, but he does. He realized, "That's why I can't discipline my son because I don't know what it feels like to have a healthy discipline where I'm not ridiculed." Whereas guilt is like, "You have to be a little older." That's the, "I just broke mom's vase." And I, "Okay." So the difference is knowing what you've done is wrong in a way. It's not, oops, I did something bad. I actually did something the other day in the house where I broke something, and I was like, "But I'm not going to beat myself up about it." But I was like, "Damn it, and I've already forgotten because it doesn't matter." And I'm like, "I can't believe I broke that thing." I was like, "I felt so bad." I'm like, "Oh, that was such a good thing, but I'm not. My body isn't going into this. But if we were raised with that kind of toxic shame, even if we do something that is inconsequential, we might feel that it's death because it's over-coupled with our sense of safety when we were young. And a lot of people will not put themselves out there and risk in good ways because they don't want to feel the rejection, the failure, the mistake. But if we had gotten healthy shame from the beginning and realized a mistake doesn't mean that we're bad, we just did something bad. It's a very different, somatic imprint. The feedback you get from young beings, and I remember that being a nanny, being like having a really, really hard-known thing like, "No." And they were like, "Okay." You're like, "But this is really instant." This is the video circulating online, which I find really interesting. It's the swimming instructor who's a male holding a little baby girl. I think she might be too. And she went, he was a little bit stressed out. She didn't look really regulated, and she turned to the swimming instructor to kiss him on the mouth, and he went, "No." And she immediately started crying. He was like, "You kiss mommy and daddy. Do not kiss me." But how about we do something else? And he immediately diverted. And I was like, "Wow, so many to the little children haven't gotten that." And I think that just goes into semantics and away, because we've spoken about trauma. We've spoken about childhood experiences and the A study and all of these amazing things that you've taught us about, like, the nervous system. Can we talk about semantics? Because semantics, as I understand it, is a way of being with where your nervous system is, and trying to get it to a place where you are a little bit more regulated, and you're not depending on all of these external tools in order to regulate your system, and it's experiencing the stored things that you have inside of you. Is that correct? Yeah, so it's interesting, because the word semantics, to me, doesn't mean anything. I'm going to say that real bluntly. So here's the history behind the term semantics. There is a gentleman, I think he's long past. His name was Thomas Hannah, and he's studied with Moshe Feldenkrais, the originator of the Feldenkrais method. And if you type in Hannah's semantics into the internet, you will get somatics, the trademarked practice of Thomas Hannah. And so he took some of Feldenkrais's concepts, in my opinion, oversimplified movement patterns of flexion and extension. Peter's somatic experiencing, I think its name doesn't do it justice, because when you're doing actual somatic experiencing work, it isn't just about the body. It might be about what we think, it might be what we relate to in the environment, it might be emotion, which is body, or it might be a movement. What's happened, I think, like I'm like literally I'm like looking at this from the top, when how did this go wrong? Is we know that trauma gets stored in the body, it gets stored in tissues and fascia, but it also gets stored in our memory and in our movement, and in how we feel our body. And so yes, we need to get into the body, i.e. the soma, but it all depends on the person. So what's happened is these somatics movements have been taught, open the pelvis, do things with the eyes, etc. But if you don't have a system that understands how to track what's happening, you're actually not going to do actual somatic experiencing i.e. trauma work at that somatic level. So it's funny because like we need to bring in the body, but it's so much more than that. You know, I might do a somatic experiencing session with someone and not once do we, do I ask them to move their body? Whereas we could do something where there's lots of movement, but we might not even get to the root of what is happening in store. It's a very interesting distinction. So what's happening, I think, is that we know we need to move, and yet movement is not what's needed necessarily always to get to the root of what needs to come out. So how I'm understanding what you're saying is that you need to be aware of your nervous system, and then you need to work in these specific tools to what you need, and you need to be aware of how it's impacting your nervous system, and be present with your nervous system, and that is the work of somatic experiencing. Part of it. It's also being able to, yeah, and you see, this is so fun because this is a great example of how it's gotten oversimplified. That piece, for instance, where I talked about the shame, toxic versus healthy, someone who has, say, a system that has deep imprints of toxic shame, that is obviously going to be in how the spine is, but also how we sense and see the world, how we think about things. Working with someone who, I'll just give you an example, who say has fibromyalgia, they know they were abused, they know they were ridiculed when they were young. Working with an individual with that system, I could say, okay, well, they have this collapse in their spine. Let's just work on getting this pelvis moving, and getting, you know, this, this was why the Feldenkrais work worked for some people and not for others. So it's like, okay, there's this, definitely this trauma. It isn't just one thing. There's this huge collapse. And if I was to say to that person, let's just do some movement. If they don't even know how to feel their pelvis, if they don't even know that they have organs, because a lot of people don't, the last thing I'm going to do is be like, let's just focus today on your pelvis and getting some movement in here. It might be white. Much for that person. It wouldn't even know how to start to feel it. So what we might say is, again, this is just like, this is where the entry is so interesting, because you don't know what you might do. It has to be based on what you're seeing, what you're sensing, and what they're able to do. So one of the classic things that we might have someone do is, are you able to just see a little bit around the room? This is like the classic orienting, which was really popularized through SE. Sometimes you'll ask kind of someone and they'll be like, oh yeah, I can see out there. And then they just go back. Or some people go, oh, never thought about out there. Okay, well, let's see what it's like to just let your eyes wander out there. What do you see? And then they might, they might actually move their, like, their body a little bit at that point. You go, did you just sense how you moved on your pelvis on that chair? And they'll go, I don't know. And then you might go, do you want to try it again? And again, it comes down to that person having interest and curiosity to explore. But if we have someone who doesn't even have that, then what do you do? Then you might need to do touch work. So this is where the touch work comes in that is popularized in the advanced levels of SE and through the work of Kathy came. But this is also why a lot of the higher level, I think practitioners of this work usually come from a bodywork perspective, which is where I came from. It's like, okay, well, I'm not even going to put you on the spot. I'm just going to have you be on my table or sit in this chair and we're just going to offer some touch to this area. And you might say, is that okay? And they'll say, sure, okay? And then the moment you go to touch, you see that they flinch. And that flinch is a protective response. And I might say, okay, did you notice that? Or if that, if you can tell that they're not even going to want to go there, you just log that in your mind for later. And you go, okay, I went to touch this person and they had a flinch response. Next time, I'm going to touch from the other side and see if they have a flinch, oh, they didn't have a flinch response on the left, but they did on the right. And then I might say, do you ever have a car accident or you might know their history? And then you have to start asking questions to start to unpack what is the easiest entry point so that this person can have just a little bit of ease. Sometimes it might be through doing a sound. That popular voo sound that Peter Levine kind of put out there that everybody will do now to try to stimulate the Vegas nerve. And if you watch him work he sometimes will go right in and start with that sound as a way to see where that person's capacity is. Because if he shows or if I show my client the voo sound and if their eyes look terrified and they go back, that's fascinating. I'm not gonna say, "Oak me Sarah, let's do that sound." And you're like, "You're great." But if I do the voo and you're like, "And you light up a little." I'd be like, "Okay, let's try it together." And then I might say, "Let's do that again, but now let's put your hands here and feel the vibration." So you see every single moment you're assessing, "What can we do to do a little bit to to to get this person to sense?" Or, "This is where I get to even work complicated. Let's say someone comes in and they're oversensitized." Everything hurts. Ouch, that hurts here. And this is like, this is true, right? Some people are so sensitized in their nervous system due to dysregulation, maybe tons of injuries. You actually don't want to go into the body, right? You might need to work with memory. It's like, "Okay, so this started when you were 12 after that car accident that your parents had and maybe someone died." It's like, "So the car accident was bad, but you were okay, but the real trauma was the fact that your mom died in that accident." And so those events are coupled. And so that's where someone might have a chronic pain, but we need to work on the grief of mama dying, right? They're in front of me first. And then that's where there might be emotion. There might be, "Oh, it was my fault because she was driving me to gymnastics. We shouldn't have gone that day. It was raining." And so, right? But this is how that layer gets stuck. And if we just go into the somatic, it will miss that the fancy word is over a couple. There's a coupling dynamic between that event, that grief that never got processed because everybody was just glad that you were okay. Yes, mom died, but thank God you were okay. And then you hold that grief in your body. I mean, this is where Gabor Matez book, when the body says, "No, it's still in my opinion the most most brilliant written piece on how the body stores these events." So it's kind of funny because I'm technically a somatic practitioner, but I'm here saying, "Somatics isn't the only thing. It's one of the most important things and to really work at this level, at the nervous system with the body, we have to consider all the aspects of what might be keeping that person not connected to their body or over connected to too much." Because you're a individual who will be a hyperchondriac, right? So you've got these spectrums of not paying attention to anything or I pay attention to too much. Yes. So what you're really explaining is there are layers to trauma and where things are stored in the body and every single person's entry point is going to be different depending on what their nervous system was and what their whole experience was before of big tear or a little teatrummer. And so as I understand this how you're saying, we unravel things on a personal level and we have a relation with that person. So is that neuro-classic healing sequencing? Is that your. It's part of it. It's part of it. So the one thing I'll also say is this is in context if I was working with someone more than one, which I don't do anymore, but I did. And so someone might be going, "I don't get it Irene. How can you have these online courses where everybody's learning the exact same thing?" Which is true. And I just want to add that the reason it works from what we've seen is we're not going into the somatic lessons that I give people as a technique to fix a thing. It's a language that we're relearning. And within that language you learn about all these important pieces that maybe never got taught. And because there's so much theory, you learn, "Oh, this is that thing. I'll pay attention to the next time I feel scared. Or the next time I'm not sure what to do. I just follow this impulse or I do this thing." So I wanted to add that in because there's also a way to do this where you're not having to do one-on-one work. But if you are working with someone one-on-one, it becomes a much more, I think, nuanced art because you have the luxury of being with that person one-on-one and you can be much more diverse and how you enter into different things or leave things until they're ready to be worked on, if that makes sense. And it makes sense why you are like, "I'm not going to give you tools." And why? I love how you speak about how like jumping into breath work or plant medicine or like going to a somatic experience could further traumatize you and worsen it. And it might not be the entry point for you. But a lot of people how they understand trauma and how to work through it is with those systems. But what you really teach and what I really appreciate is you have an integral nervous system that is unique and no one has this experience. And the entry point for that is going to be unique to you. And the only person who's going to figure that out is you, really, by paying attention and that you're understanding like, "Hey, these are resources for you to regulate your nervous system." Or maybe calm your nervous system. Or get yourself to a point where you can function. But like if you're codependent on breath work or plant medicine or an ashruganda supplement, you know, that's not actually sustainable. Like the real mission is to go, "How? Why am I feeling this way?" What tool can I use with someone else to get me through this? So I have more of a regulated nervous system. Yeah, the word I would say that I haven't said, I don't think yet, this capacity. So rather than what these, I call them neuroscience exercises are that I teach. They're building capacity to be able to pay attention to this, you know, orchestra of human experience, sensation, movement, how we think, how we feel, how we see, how we observe, how we behave. So it's building this capacity to have more ability to understand what's happening. The neuroplastic healing sequencing piece is embedded in what I've been saying, but it's kind of been hidden. So neuroplastic healing is something that Norman Doge popularized in his book, The Brain's Way of Healing. His first book was The Brain that Changes itself, the second one, Brain's Way of Healing. And in that book, at the beginning, he breaks down five main stages of neuroplastic healing. One of them is, I call it housekeeping. It's just making sure we have good food, light water. We're not filling ourselves with toxins, all that kind of stuff. So that's a huge part. The second part he would call is neuromodulation. And to me, neuromodulation is regulation. And again, these are not necessarily all in this order. And some of them should be. The next one he would call is neuro stimulation. Everything is a stimulus in some ways when we're healing. Whether we choose to not go down a path or we choose to activate with movement, you know, when you're with that child, you're maybe helping it stimulate with sound and movement and play. So neuro stimulation, we need that neuro relaxation is where we rest, where we repair. That's the rest I just someone who has had a lifetime of dysregulation, let's just say, and they have never considered that they could rest and repair. When they start this work, and I fall into this camp, I have fallen into this camp, it is really tough to slow down because your system has been surviving off of go mode for so long. And it's going to feel like you're not doing enough when you let yourself rest. It's going to feel like you're being lazy and you're going backwards. The tricky thing with that is for some people, they have been so shut down and their life is like that that you actually have to push them a little bit out of the gate to have them get up and go for a two minute walk. For example, because you need to stimulate the system a little bit. So this is where these sequencing pieces ping pong off of each other. You need to relax and rest, but you also need to stimulate in good balance, depending on where you are in your system's journey. The final one would be neuro differentiation, long word differentiation. And that's, I like in that to like when you have a child and they're learning how to, you know, I've got this nice little mug here. When you give it, when you give a toddler a glass, how do they hold it like all their fingers, right? Like this. But as you become more dexterous, you can hold that little teeth cup with, you know, your finger out and, and you can walk down the stairs and not spill it. And you can be a waitress, you know, with a gazillion signs of beer and plates of food. And so that waitress or waiter that can hold all these trays and not spill thinking of like the October fest ladies, you know, in Germany with all the, like they are differentiating and feeling. Whereas you can't offer that to a toddler or even if you were to get me to do that, I, everything would fall because I've not served. So neuro differentiation comes later. So out of all those neuroplastic healing elements, the housekeeping one, the neuro modulation, neuro relaxation, neuro stimulation are all essential. The end result is differentiation. And that's where in my work, at least the Feldenkrais work comes in because deep, real Feldenkrais work is actually teaching people to be more differentiated in how they think, feel, act, move, and sense. I blend that in at the beginning a little bit more than most people would, but it's also within that. So we're always kind of, like, I'm not sure if I'm right. of differentiating a little bit, but the sequencing is important. And this is why when I was doing my Feldenkrais practice back in '07, '08, I was trying to differentiate and teach people higher level, we would even call it somatic movement, but their nervous system was so afraid or shut down. So we had to work on them just knowing that they were there in the room, that they weren't there in that accident anymore, that they weren't being abused as a child anymore. Like I worked with some, with some woman who the details aren't all important, but like she had a physical injury, but before we could even work with that shoulder injury, we had to see every time she would lay down on my table, she would hold her breath and look terrified. And turns out, she had had long standing sexual abuse, usually laying down, tied up on a bed, horrific, terrible. But there was no way that I was going to be able to work with this poor woman's shoulders, frozen shoulder due to broken ribs, until she was in her body, fully there in my office. Otherwise, we're just pushing through tissue for the sake of pushing through tissue. And as soon as we started to get this safety on board, and I had to work with her, this is where I didn't have to work with breath. She had no clue that she was holding her breath. No clue. But of course she was breathing because she was alive. So she had a very strategic way of breathing to keep herself really small. And so she had to feel comfortable breathing as she was laying down on this table. And we worked on that for months and months before we even touched that shoulder. So this is where in her case, she was going to all these practitioners where I lived trying to get this shoulder working, and nobody could figure it out. And she came to me for Feldenkrais to work on the shoulder. Luckily, I had just started learning somatic experiencing that year. And I'm like, some things we're missing. We need to we need to modulate. We need to work on the neuro. So this is where that sequencing comes in. It's like, gosh, I really want to help her with her shoulder. She can't brush her hair. She can't, you know, put our bra on. I can't hug her kids. But we need to worry about that shoulder later, because her overall system was just still in shock mode. And she had been re-traumatized due to breaking some ribs. Yes. Yep. She had full shoulder, like her shoulders were perfectly fine. Broke her ribs had to be in a sling to protect those ribs. And then that brought back the memory of being tied down. Oh my goodness. Yeah. And that's the importance of trauma time informed care. And it's like, this isn't this is a shoulder issue and we don't want her shoulder, you know, we have to function. So there's also that. It's not just emotions. It is, you know, we didn't work with that. It would ossify and she wouldn't be able to use her arms. But a lot of the time, something like frozen shoulder and 90% of the time, it is due to old traumas that are stored in the system. And so we had to work. This is where we really had to work at that nervous system level, providing safety and learning. It's okay to breathe. Yeah. I think a lot of women, I wrote an article about this three weeks ago, about women in menopause, um, frozen shoulder. This is such a common thing. And it's like from a hormonal perspective, that's where I work. It's like a drop in estrogen, so your collagen's low. But it's also like you have a bunch of traumas coming up. But then we can also connect that to autoimmune conditions. Fibromyalgia, you've mentioned that a few times. I know a few women who have had specifically sexual trauma early in their life that develop fibromyalgia. It's something that I've seen multiple times chronic fatigue. The list could go on. So could you like speak to this female experience and why women are a little bit more susceptible to their nervous system being dysregulated? Of course, like speaking to the patriarchy, like living under a chronic stress, but also being more susceptible to those big two traumas that are very often unfortunately like sexual trauma. So what's occurring typically, and this isn't going to be everything. So I'll generalize from a nervous system point of view, is when you have kind of these cluster of syndromes, like fibromyalgia, chronic pain, yes, the severe pre-menstrual disorder is a huge one. You don't have to be in menopause. It could be at any age. You know, when you have your cycle, my green headache is another huge one, IBS, got problems, right? What's happening, and this actually goes back to Stephen Porges in the polyvegal work, is you have got fight flight on. Usually you're not aware that it's on because a lot of these traumas that we endure happened ages ago, and we've not forgotten about them, but we don't think that they're playing a part in our current day physiology, but you've got this fight flight that's still zoned in, and I'm using my hands here, you've got the freeze, but then because you can't stay in that hypervigil, like some people do, but most people, if they're functional and they're live in life and doing all the things, they're in what we might call a functional freeze, where there's like this shutdown, but they're pushing through it. And so what happens is that the nervous system is in this cycling of sympathetic fight flight with a bit of freeze, and then collapse, and then sympathetic fight, oh, collapse. And this is why we see these ping ponging of symptoms. Typically, when someone has fibromyalgia, they don't just have that. There's other issues going on. They know there's a little bit of anxiety, there's insomnia, these sorts of things. It really is theoretically quite simple, and it's the fact that the system wants to move this energy out, but it has been stopped. It's our own brain that's stopping it, you know, like some people have these things happen to them and they break out of them, right? So it also has a lot of it has to do with how we raised, you know, what is our environment like. I've seen, especially in our female clients or students in the course, those who have good supportive systems, maybe it's a husband, maybe it's a sibling, maybe it's a job, maybe it's a group of friends. They tend to, I don't want to say always do better, but there's like a little bit of a camaraderie, like there's a support system that's there, maybe it's church, you know, something that helps them, no, it's okay to be myself, but what often occurs is when we get into these situations where we're in this collapse state and we feel that we can't express, we will put ourselves in situations where we stay smaller, where we know that we can kind of hide and be that introvert, so to speak, right, and not get that out. But working with, say, a fibromyalgia syndrome that someone might be living with, you have to be very titrated. I haven't used that word yet. Very slow because the system, not just the nervous system, Sarah, but the tissue, the fascia, the bone, the digestion, the immune system, it's gotten used to this state of being. This is why just going and doing a big cathartic thing or retreat or as you said, a ceremony or a breath, a big breathwork session, if your system doesn't know how to expand at that big level, you can actually harm it more by trying to do too much. So this is where it can be so frustrating for people, because it's like the steps are so small at the beginning, but if we can be small with those steps and move forward a little bit, the system opens up a little bit, it gets a little bit more energy. The window of tolerance, as you say, we have this time window of tolerance and we're going to go on this breathwork, retreat for 10 days, boom, and it's going to retract even more. What we're going to do is we're going to slowly, maybe the first thing is like, where is my pelvis right now? Okay, we've opened up a little bit. Okay, how many colors are in the room? I'm noticing colors, but okay, cool. Oh, I'm noticing my emotions a little bit more. Yeah, but then you can change anyway. Yeah, you got it. And that's that, and you know, one of those changes you might want to integrate and keep like that for a month, right? Because you need all the other systems to kind of follow and suit and then you move a little bit and then you're at a different level and then you add another stimulus or you add another differentiation or you you work on that that event that you thought had nothing to do with this, but actually it was a pretty big deal that might open up some more stuff and sometimes people will feel more symptoms come out when they move through a piece. That's okay. The key is you don't want those symptoms to last for like weeks. So if you have something that lasts for more than a few days, you know that you've probably done too much and then that gives you a QK next time I'm going to do half of that recorder or an eighth of that. But yeah, these, it's a doozy, like these survival mechanisms are there to keep us safe, obviously, but then when we keep them held when they're held in, it then it literally destroys the physiology. Personally, I avoided a chronic illness by the skin of my teeth. If I had not have gotten into the SE work when I did, as I mentioned at the top of our talk, I know I would have a diagnosis of probably five different conditions right now. Definitely rheumatoid arthritis. I would definitely have my fibromyalgia, definitely chronic pain. My guts always been pretty strong, but I just know based on my history and based on seeing those in my cohort who did not do this work. So the people that I played hard with, mainly men, you know, they're already getting their joints replaced, you know, they look aged. So, my husband, when I met him, he had complex PTSD from a lifetime of abuse and shame. And it takes time to come out of this. You know, a lot of times people, I will say this because I have to say this, we tend to wait until things are so bad before we take our health seriously. I don't know if you've seen that in your work, but it's all the time. All the time. Women? No, I've got kids to look after. I've got to look after my parents. Women put everything before themselves until it falls apart. Yeah, and they've swallowed their anger. They've swallowed. I think there's lots of amazing literature around specifically African-American women and Black women presenting with really corrosive autoimmune conditions because they've been swallowing their anger. If you swallow the emotion and the trauma, it doesn't just dissipate. It's the first law of physics. Energy cannot be created nor destroyed. It's just a love-the-word emotion. It's energy and motion. It's living in your body. If it doesn't have a safe out, then it is going to live somewhere and it's going to burn out your nervous system. It's going to constrict all the blood vessels going towards your gut and you're going to develop IBD. You're like, "The list could go on." It never innovates literally every single cell in your body. It makes a sense that your emotion will be super important that we should prioritize. That's the thing is what I've been doing this so long that I've tried to speak the word of prevention and do this before. It's too late. I was really lucky. I got into this work not because I was sick at that point, but I needed to learn it for my clients. Then it wasn't until I went into it that I went, "Oh, boy, there's a lot stored in my system that I had no idea that I had stored." This is the double whammy. It's like until you realize how bad it can be. It's hard to get into this work and do it. As I mentioned at the beginning of our talk, I haven't met anyone who is scotch-free without any kind of early trauma. Even if we're born in a hospital, that's going to impact us to a certain degree the way that babies are put into things and not allowed to be with mom and all those elements. It's not all doom and gloom because we can heal so much. That is the beauty of not just neuroplasticity, but the reason we can do this is humans is we can think. We can change because of this higher brain, but the odd thing is that the higher brain is also what keeps us holding on to these things. It's like this weird catch-22. It's like this thing up here will help us heal, but it can also keep us from not pursuing it even though we know we should. Yeah, it's the miracle and also the albicus crutch is our intelligence as human beings. Thank you so much for all the time and all the lessons of this. Do you mind sharing a little bit about where people can find you? You're amazing online course. I think you take rounds with people in smart body, smart mind. Do you mind speaking about these resources? Yeah, so everything is just my name and my site is easily found. Smart body, smart mind is sort of the main curriculum that I developed 10 or so 12 years ago and it's still going strong. We are typically in curriculums. I will say right now that I'm probably going to shift that. The curriculum is not going away. The infrastructure is going to shift, but yeah, things are different now online as I'm sure you know and we're trying to figure out ways to like have it be a little easier for folks to start. So I do have a course at this point in time called the 21-day nervous system tune up. It gets confused with all the other 21 day things out there, but it is literally a portion of SBSM is in that smaller course. So that is one way that people can start if they wanted to really learn about how their physiology works at a fairly deep level. Those talks that I used to do in my office form part of the education and then of course the neuroscience exercises are a malgamation of the SE principles, the Feldenkrais elements, but also in some way and we haven't talked about this, but the work that I do with early trauma is working with the stress organs. So we are literally your I am teaching folks in these programs how to work with their kidneys, their adrenals, their gut, their brain stem that we call them the diaphragms. It's an osteopathic word for all the containers essentially throughout the body they line up with the chakras, the fascia, the layers. So this is all in the SBSM curriculum, but if I go back to that example that I gave you Sarah of working with someone who's in my office and we can't get them to move and we can't get them to think about memory, I might work with the diaphragms, I might work with the kidney adrenals. It isn't about manipulating or moving the organ, it's about intention and it's about offering safety and security to that part of the body and then that's what creates a shift in the stress chemistry. So we're working at that neurobiological level through intention and touch. If you were with me in an office I would do it manually, but in the lessons I'm guiding through audio how to get into that in your own system. So that would be I think that the one two of the factors it is most unique about the course is we're not doing movement for the sake of movement, we're really working how I would work clinically and then the person learns how to do that on himself. And the interesting thing is that if we had good regulation from the beginning a human would just do that stuff naturally and so we're sort of re-teaching now. Maybe it doesn't think should I cry? Like I heard you say that on a different point, should I cry? Am I agree? It is do you? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly and if our window of tolerance is big we have a stress happen but we come back to baseline without having to breathe a specific way or do a containment exercise we just come back to baseline without having to do anything and that that might be a good place to end is like real nervous system regulation you don't have to do anything it just happens. And one of the things I've learned from our students is because they're not thinking anymore about how to help themselves they're sending me all these amazing paintings and drawings and art projects because they have time to actually do creative endeavors because they're not constantly trying to fix their system. They just have real self-regulation. Takes time this isn't something that happens in like a year. These are students that have been with me for three four five six years and once that happens it's like it's set it's it's there and they say it takes the human body I think seven years to fully create a new one. I think that's the turnover time and that's kind of the time that I see once we get to that five or so year part the organs have shifted obviously the blood is all new and refreshed and the skin is different and then when the bone has really changed over then you know you've really shifted the whole physiology which is cool. That is such an amazing place to end. Yeah thank you so much. You're welcome. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy day to listen to this episode. If you loved it please remember to like, subscribe and send to a loved one. If you want to learn more from our women please check out the website at rquoman.com.au where you can find a plethora of offerings like charts, masterclasses, courses and organic clothing. You can also head over to patreon.com/rquoman or subsdac.com/rquoman to join the community. I hope you have a really beautiful morning, afternoon or evening wherever you are in the world and I will see you on the next episode.