Episode 152: Therapy: Committing to Doing it Differently

In this episode, I’m talking with therapist Riva Stoudt, about therapy committing to doing therapy differently.

I didn’t always know I wanted to be a therapist. It took me a while to ADMIT it out loud that I wanted to be a therapist (I was 34 before I got my license). I honestly have a love-hate relationship with the world of therapy and psychology. It endlessly fascinates me—and yet the industry as a whole is notoriously dysfunctional and, at times, archaic. 

At 25, I was getting ready to start my second year of my Master’s in Counseling. I had registered for classes and was less than a week from starting when out of the blue, I decided to drop out. I still remember walking from my apartment to the registrar’s office to withdraw. It was a totally irrational decision and 100% based on my gut which was SCREAMING at me to withdraw. I didn’t know why… I just knew I couldn’t go back and continue my studies. 

Seven years later, 4 different jobs, and after completing a different Masters’ Degree, I decided to complete my studies and earn my Master’s in Community Counseling. This was also a gut decision—and a particularly amazing one because miraculously, I re-enrolled just under the deadline where I would have had to start my studies over. 

What happened in those 7 years? A lot of my own work, my own soul searching, my own therapy and a commitment to doing it differently. Committing to doing therapy differently was how I could ultimately make the choice to continue the work and it’s why I’m here today.

It’s rare that I meet another therapist who has this same commitment which is why I was so excited to bring you my conversation with Riva Stoudt of Into the Woods Counseling.

Listen to the full episode to find out:

• What inspired Riva to become a therapist

• The changes we both would like to see in the therapy profession

• Positivity culture and how it can keep people from healing and making progress

• Some tips on finding a good therapist

Resources mentioned:

• Into the Woods Counseling

• Coach In Your Pocket

• The Happier Approach Book

+ Read the Transcript

Transcript:

Riva: It's hard to say things like I was being passive aggressive. Everybody does that, but to say it and to just acknowledge it and sit with it, even at that level is so hard. And so , if we can't do that for ourselves in our own relationships, in our own lives and look at those impulses that we have and how we do or don't succeed in managing them, how are we possibly going to sit with our clients when they tell us some awful story about something they did?

And if they're be isn't the place for that, then.

Nancy: I didn't always know I wanted to be a therapist. It took me a while to actually admit it out loud that I wanted to be a therapist. I was 34 before I even got my license. I honestly have a love, hate relationship with the world of therapy and psychology. It endlessly fascinates me.

And yet the industry as a whole is notoriously dysfunctional. And at times, arcade. At 25, I was getting ready to start. My second year of my masters in counseling, I had registered for classes and was less than a week from starting when, out of the blue, I decided to drop out. I still remember walking from my apartment to the registrar's office to withdraw.

It was a totally irrational decision and a 100% based on my gut, which was scary, screaming at me to withdraw. I didn't know why I just knew I couldn't go back and continue. My studies seven years later, four different jobs. And after completing a different master's degree, I decided to complete my studies and earn, and my master's in community counseling.

This was also a gut decision and a particularly amazing one because miraculously, I re-enrolled just under the deadline where I would have had to start my studies over. What happened in those seven years, a lot of my own work, my own soul, searching my own therapy and a commitment to doing it differently.

You're listening to the happier approach, the show that pulls back the curtain on the need to succeed hustle on the cheap at the price of our inner peace in relationships. And I'm your host, Nancy Jane Smith. Yep. Committing to doing therapy was how I could ultimately make the choice to continue the work.

And it's why I'm here today. It's rare. I meet another therapist who has this commitment, which is why I was so excited to bring you my conversation with Riva stout of, into the woods counseling Riva. And I dive into all things therapy. We talk about what inspired her to be a therapist, the changes we would like to see in the therapy profession, positivity culture, and how it can keep people from healing and making progress and tips on finding a good therapist.

Riva inspired me so much. A few takeaways I hope will inspire you. No one has the answers for your life. A therapist's role is to listen and help you get to know yourself better. Their job is not to tell you what to do, have all the answers or heal your past their job is to help you find the tools that work best for you to unpeel the onion that is your life.

We are all human. We all have blind spots, traumas, and places we need help. And it reminds me of a quote by rom Doss that guides my work with clients. We are all just walking each other. I'm so excited today to bring to you Riva stout. She and I are going to be talking about all things therapy, which is just going to be awesome.

And I think in a, be a little eye opening for a lot of us. So Riva, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Okay. I hear from your bio, you are a third generation therapist and it is part of your family business. Tell me what drew you to becoming a therapist?

Riva: , so I actually was determined not to cause I was going to forge my own identity and my own path.

So my mom's parents, so both my grandparents were actually psychiatrists. Back in the day when psychiatrists were the ones who did therapy and no one else did therapy in the sixties. So they, they did that. And then my mom was a school counselor and worked with kids of all ages throughout her career.

And we had all sorts of books lying around the house about psychology and trauma, which was, in the early nineties, trauma was like a very cutting edge idea, and read a lot of these books probably before it was age appropriate for me but it gave me a head start. And then when I went away to college, I was like, no, I'm, I'm going to be an artist. I don't want to, I don't want to follow this path. That that is. What my family has done before I wanted to do my own thing, but you can't get rid of that interest in people, and they're everywhere and it's fascinating.

And I took a few psychology classes and social psychology, which I still think is a major influence for me as a therapist too. And then I had this moment in my twenties where I was talking to a friend about a relationship that he was in, where you know the person that he was in the relationship with was treating him really badly.

And my friend kept talking about all these reasons why he thought if he just stuck around long enough, it could change and all of this. And so at some point I was trying to, snap him out of this relationship trans that he was in.

And I said something about how we teach people, how it's okay to treat us, and that he was teaching this person that it was okay to treat him like shit, basically. And there was this pause and then my friend looked at me and said, I never thought about it like that before. And that was the moment.

It was like, it was really like a single moment where it was like, I heard that and the clouds parted and it was like, this is what I want to do. I want to help people see things in a new way and change their perspective and in a way that really impacts how they live their lives. That was that. And then I, that summer.

Started, signing up for classes that I needed for prerequisites for grad school and all of that stuff, all of the hoops that we have to jump through so many hoops and never looked back after that.

Nancy: And then did you just go right to private practice?

Riva: No, actually worked in crisis for a while first.

. And I feel like every year in crisis intervention is like five years in regular I'm sure. . That for a couple of years and then started my private practice overlapping while I was still doing some work on the crisis team and then shifted over.

Nancy: That's one of my so I call the inner critic a monger and one of my monger messages, I went right out of grad school into private practice. And one of my Monger messages is I am not a real therapist cause I've never done crisis work because that's what real therapists do

Riva: All right. Oh, that's so funny because it's just, so it's such a different mindset, like to switch over from crisis to private practice, even though private practice is what I always wanted to do.

And that was the ultimate goal. It was such a weird mindset shift from okay, how do I help this person through the next 12 to 48 hours? To actually, sitting with somebody on an ongoing basis and making some major life changes. So . It's not, of course there's transferable skills, many transferable skills, but at the same time, it's a whole different world, so .

Nancy: Very different job. . Okay, so this is going to start us off in this competition. And this is a very broad question. What do you wish you could change about the therapy industry?

Riva: What do I wish I could change about the therapy industry? So many things. Starting from the super broad wide angle lens, I wish that we had universal health care in America.

So that being the first thing that I am always, as much as I think so many of us try to make ourselves accessible through, having sliding scale or pro bono or donating our time or advocacy work or whatever. It's not an individual problem, any one of us can solve that, like that access to therapy is is so limited.

And so that is something that always nags at me is I wish more people had access to good therapy more of the time. So that, that being the backdrop of everything and then, within the field I really would like to see, and I think to some degree this is happening but I would really like to see the field just moving towards a more social justice informed, racism, informed sexism and informed.

All of that bringing that lens to our therapeutic work and understanding more about the context we're situated in, moving away from this idea that we can still get into of humans as these atomized individuals who it's all within. It's all, everything is a matter of individual choice and mindset.

And if you just change that, then you know, then that you'll be fine, looking more at the systems and the material conditions. I think also too I think therapists, So many of us come from a background where there's a lot of family trauma, family dysfunction, and I think sometimes we really bring that to the way we relate to each other.

I think there's simultaneously within the field, there can be a real fear of conflict and it needs to be nice all the time. And then at the same time, when conflict does emerge, then it's just like this knock-down drag-out, aggressive, like everybody hating each other, especially with now with social media.

I think that this is very it's an outlet for that kind of energy. And so I think we're not good at disagreeing with each other and being in relationship with each other at the same time, just in the field. And so I would really like to see us developing more of a culture of vigorous debate, vigorous disagreement, where we're also not just throwing each other away all the time.

. So I that's an evolution I would like to see. And I think that the therapy industry has that in common with many others. Right now that's a place we need to get better,

Nancy: . for sure. . Definitely. It is a toxic culture and that is, like I related so much to your story, of how you got started.

I actually started my graduate school and then dropped out because I was like, I can't deal with this culture. Like it was so competitive yet supportive yet passive aggressive, that weird mix. And I was, and it wasn't until I entered, I was in my thirties when I finally went back because I was like, I'm strong enough in myself that I'm not looking that I can forge my own path.

I'm not looking. To this group to be mentors to me and help me figure it out. Because when I was, it was : bad.

Riva: Totally. . That's super relatable to me. I went back. So I did my undergrad at the usual, I went at 18 and finished at 22 and then I went to grad school. I started just about a month before my 30th birthday.

And I feel like having waited a little bit was. So much better because just as you said, I felt very much more settled in myself. I wasn't looking for validation and mentorship in that environment nearly as much. And it made getting through well. And when you combine the therapy industry with academia, like those two cultures collide all kinds of craziness. So , I think you need some inner strength to get through that intact,

Nancy: but you're right in this, that is, that is a stereotype that all therapists, most therapists have come from their own trauma and that's why, but I think it's accurate because why else would you be drawn?

To this world of listening to people's problems and helping them figure it out, if you weren't a little broken,

Riva: Intense interest, I it's, it doesn't just come to people like randomly. I don't think at all. I think it's very much we have a lot of us have a lot of early experiences in common, I think.

Nancy: Yes. . And I was actually just reading, which is a really old school book the drama of the gifted child. And I was just pick that up and was reading it and it just, she talks about that very fact that we are all and then the danger comes, which I see all the time that we reenact our, we become to our clients, the parent that we had.

And, like we want that the support from our clients. I am not saying that right.

Riva: No. . I get what, , it's an incredible book. She, , the way she talks about just the reproduction of those cycles and then . That we learn that like level of attunement to other people from having had to attune that way to our own parents and then, oh my God, that just comes into the therapy room in a million different ways, have you ever read her sons and work? , I haven't.

Nancy: I haven't picked up the book.

Riva: It’s fascinating. I, cause he's also a psychotherapist and his perspective is so interesting just in that, he says about how she did not succeed as a mother and being, breaking that cycle that she describes in the book.

And yet it was her work and her insight that also helped give him the freedom to understand and to try to break out of that cycle himself. , super fascinating. And just, I think an example of just how freaking complex everything is with all this stuff.

Nancy: And that's where I think if we're not owning that as therapists that, like I know part of what makes me really good at my job is I'm in there with them.

Not, I'm not, I'm saying like I am, I, I'm working on my own anxiety. I'm trying to heal my own mongers, everything I'm saying to my clients to do, I'm doing it to it's not like I've been healed, but I've, I've gone to therapy my entire life. I've been around a lot of therapists who act like they are.

Riva:

. My, my motto is just to try to stay one step ahead in my own healing. And just to try to keep up with that process so that I'm not I'm not lagging, but also at the same time. It doesn't get done. It's not oh, here's my, I'm going to look up my solution and my solutions book and give it to you.

And I think like when you're doing good therapy, you're actually asking your clients to do some really hard things. And how do we have the right to ask that, if we're not willing to do that ourselves.

Nancy: . Preach. Amen. I totally agree. Okay. Which that brings me to one of my biggest pet peeves.

And I think it's up there with you on, in the therapy industry and. Coaching the whole freaking self-help transformational, whatever. And I don't, and I'm not as firm. I guess I don't, I didn't know it was a problem in the therapy industry. I'm talking about positive thinking and positive psychology.

I didn't realize it was such a problem in a therapy industry until I heard you talking about that. So share more about your thoughts on that.

Riva: , it's interesting because I think I think there's so many layers to positivity culture, like I think the most obvious layer being this sort of very simplified, like the secret, like you control your thoughts and manifest and everything, positive will come to you and all of that.

And in those aspects of various cultures and subcultures that really shut down any expression of difficult emotion, painful emotion, et cetera. And I do think that, hopefully we don't see a lot of therapists doing that. But I do think there's a deeper layer where we are so locked in as a culture, I think as a broader culture to this black and white thinking of like good and bad people, wanting to toss people in one basket or another.

And I think as therapists, we like to think that we don't do that. But then I think we often don't show a willingness to really acknowledge and. And talk about and sit honestly, with just what it really means to be just a mixed bag as a person, which we all are, we're all a mixed bag.

And so how I see it playing out often is that therapists want to put a positive spin or like an understanding a spin of kind of. Understanding certain kinds of behaviors as the result of trauma or is the result of previous harm in a way that skirts really close to minimizing or even excusing them sometimes.

I don't know what your experience is working with therapists as clients that's a whole, that could be its whole own episode. But I noticed that when I have therapists as clients and they come in talking about relationships that they've had or family experiences where somebody has really harmed them is immediately followed by this explanation where the therapist that takes this takes the person's perspective and is but I understand, that as a kid, they went through all this stuff and it was really hard.

And I'm like, okay, that may all very well be true, but like, why are we just sailing right past the impact that it had on you and the harm that was done, and the, the perhaps negative intentions that came from that person, whether or not they were a result of trauma, that's real. And I, and so I notice it, with people who are our therapists when they are my clients, but also I think I see it happening with therapists with their own clients.

Especially I see this a lot with couples actually, where there's a member of the couple is getting away with some really like egregious provocative kind of behavior. And that's. That's, people get under each other's skin that is that is part of relationships and like people needle each other and they get into power struggles and all of that.

And I see often with couples therapy, that sometimes I find couples, therapists want to put the best, most positive spin on that partner's behavior. Or even both partner's behavior instead of really confronting. You're being an asshole right now. You're getting away with it, there's just some letting off the hook that happens. And I've had, I've had clients come to me to work on childhood trauma where they talked about, my last therapist just kept talking about how my dad was like that because of the trauma he'd experienced as a kid.

And it's that's not really that. , it's not enough. It doesn't actually help that client undo the impact of the trauma that was per petrated against them. And I think that to some degree how I see it is I think that it's a. I think it can be a defense mechanism against some of the secondary trauma we experience and the stories that we hear.

I think that we, when I think back on some of the stuff I've heard, I've, I, of course, like you, we hear hair raising stuff in this work and I've heard, I've had clients tell me about stuff that they've done that is really upsetting. And I think in that context, it's easier to S to go to the explanation and say it's because of this this childhood trauma it's because of this other thing, et cetera, et cetera.

Rather than really sitting with wow. My client did something really mean and sadistic to their kid or my, client's partner is, making their lives. Really unpleasant purpose, that's, it's hard to sit with that.

Nancy: , because I also noticed they get, sometimes I'll have clients that'll come in, a lot of my clients love dropping the narcissism, like I saw, my husband's and our husbands and my brother's a narcissist, but and I, but, and they get really caught up in the diagnosis and doing all the research and figuring out, naming the stories and seeing the connections and intellectualizing that process.

And sometimes they're jumping from therapist to gather all the narcissism information they can. . But I don't really care about the diagnosis. Let's talk about how you feel and you know what that's doing for you, about the impact.

Riva: And the actual behavior versus okay, we can put the, NPD stamp on this person. What does that do? . Yes.

Nancy: . What do we have there? But that is, but I think there is this problem of intellectualizing everything, change your story, get a different mindset, look at it from a different lens.

Rather than, and much of what I'm working with my clients on, and I think is general good therapy is how do I build a self loyalty to myself taking in the larger cultural . Conditions I've been raised with and have affected how I see the world.

Riva: Yes. I love what you just said about I love the self loyalty piece and I love what you just said about the change, your story idea, because I think I think actually, of course, many of my clients, I think very much do need to change their story, but I think that's because they need it to be their story needs to reflect the truth better.

Not because they need to pick a a nicer story, and I very well said, I think that we, or let me backtrack a second there. So I think I actually often find myself saying to clients when we're going through some of the trauma, especially the relational trauma is I think I often say something right.

I think you are, telling me the, the most flattering version or the best version of this story, but I don't know if that's the most true, truthful version, and here's what does it mean if we actually look at some of the other versions of the story that feel harder to look at more painful, but actually might be a better reflection of the truth.

And I think that can be a much more freeing Point of view to look at one's narrative from because then there's, you're not engaged in that avoidance process. It's not oh, I have to construct this narrative that makes everybody look as good as possible. That's the one I'd be more comfortable with it's okay.

How do I sit in the real truth of all of this? And I think that comes back to the self loyalty piece to me, because then if I'm willing to really look at myself, the people in my life, my actions, my history from a really truthful to the best that I can accomplish from a really truthful point of view, then I think that's a way of really embodying that allyship to oneself that I'm not going to, I'm not going to avoid the truth for the sake of, making myself comfortable.

I'm going to sit with myself. And the difficulty of all that is and has been, which is a big task for all of us, but I think more genuinely transformative one..

Nancy. So the idea change your story. I say in air quotes to be look at it. That's used largely in the context of make it be more positive.

Let's explain this away and you're saying change your story. Look at it. A different lens. Let's go a little deeper on this. Look at the yucky stuff that we're trying to, that you're, we're trying to intellectualize a way in dive into those feelings, which is what I found was so fascinating about Alice Miller.

Is that her name that here she's written this phenomenal book back to the drama of a gifted child. She's written this phenomenal book about reprogramming childhood trauma and, or the need to do she doesn't, it's not really a how to, but she. Couldn't do it completely in her life and ended up passing it onto her son, which is what she rails against in the book.

And it's just, is the, in some ways in reading the book, it's so disappointing to go oh crap. No matter how much I look at this, I still am going to have blind spots. But I definitely think her, had she not, and I'm not saying, oh my gosh, she was an amazing person.

So it doesn't matter that she abused her son. That's not what I'm saying, but but she did some amazing work. In unhooking as much as she could.

Riva: And I think she, I really believe that , it was very much before her time, like writing about that kind of stuff, in the mid 20th century, I think was I don't think there was a real culture among people who were involved in psychology at the time who could really receive the weight of what she was getting across.

I think that it having been a very male dominated field up to that point and, just the influence of Freud and all the. The prominent male thinkers. And then, it's not that there, of course wasn't an emphasis on childhood at that time. Of course there was, but it felt very much there was a, there was even at that point, that sort of intellectualized rarefied, we're going to talk about it in terms of complexes.

And I, I think Alice Miller was really ahead of her time in talking about, I'm going to look at what's actually happening. What is the what's actually happening between parent and child. And I think about that book now. One of my most important influences and teachers around this stuff that we're talking about now is David Schnarch.

I don't know if you're super familiar with him. So he's a couples therapist primarily. And how do you spell his name? So it's S C H N a R C H. And so he's primarily in the couples worlds but he has recently done this incredible deep dive into the neurobiology of trauma and how the brain and has this incredible book brain talk that I'm just constantly I bought copies to give to people.

So I'm constantly pushing that book and I use a lot of his model inside my practice with my clients. And. And he talks a lot about this idea of mind mapping, how we internalize maps of other people's minds. And sometimes the pictures that we internalize of other people's minds can be pretty terrifying.

And awful, and how you can observe these dynamics playing out between people. And when I think about Alice Mueller's book and some of the examples she gave in the book, I'm like, wow, this is exactly what he's talking about now using this neuro-biological lens that she had no way of having at the time, because neurology was barely a thing.

So , so I think in some ways she was a little bit personally disadvantaged because she could see all of this stuff. And then there was no context for then what do you do with it? Zero at the time, there was no trauma therapy. There was nothing. So . Hopefully if she had lived in 2020, it would have been a different outcome, but who knows?

Nancy: So we've we were talking before I hit record about kind of the changes in therapy in, just in the differences in our generations or our worlds and how you were saying, oh, like the mask of the therapist is, this is a, a blank slate. And then and I was saying that a lot of my colleagues still do the blank slate right world.

And how I, that I just think that is just. Aw drives me crazy because I just don't feel like that is how good therapy works.

Riva: It's also just not possible. Always communicating something about who you are.

Nancy: Yes. And so I think, and still to this day, even though clients will say to me, because I share of my own life, like stuff that's happening not a ton, but I do even now see, I have a huge complex.

Riva: It's so hard to even say that we go against this norm.

Nancy: . The norm is so strong. Like it is…Strong. And so the fact that I share stories with clients, I'll be like, oh, I'm such a terrible therapist, even though they're like, that was so helpful. Thank you for letting me know only one or whatever it still is, put into us not to do that.

So I wanted to hear just what, how you see therapy changing with your peers and the differences that you're seeing and how it's hopefully.

Riva: . So I went to Lewis and Clark for grad school. And it's has its issues like any institution and academia, again, a whole, we're rural. But one of the great things about the program is that it is explicitly a social justice program.

. So we, that idea of the blank slate was thrown out from the very beginning. And they really did make it a norm in the program to incorporate, that each class it's not oh, you go to all the classes and then here's the social justice class. Every teacher was expected to be incorporating that into their curriculum to varying levels of success.

It was very much like lip service, but some of the professors really did, I think, especially, I just have to give so much credit to the adjuncts who are working for so little pay. They love it and are practicing it and really made an effort to bring in relevant material about actually, what does it look like to incorporate social justice into your practice, not your theoretical practice that you haven't been doing for three weeks.

And so that was a great. Place to be an emerging therapist, because we were really encouraged to think about our own personal history is not just, family and and immediate relationships, but what does it mean to be white? What does it mean to be a person of color as a therapist with white clients?

What does it mean to be a white therapist with clients of color or, and any variety of combinations? Like how do, how does it change what's happening in the therapy room when, each of those pieces is different. And and I live in Portland there's a strong social justice therapist community here, which is great that people who are really aware of the impact of power and privilege and identity on the therapeutic process.

And so I think I, I'm sure I, to some degree I live in a bit of a bubble because I'm like, oh, things are changing. This is really good, to some degree, that's, I'm sure, just part of the community that I'm working within. But I do see, people talking about that even in the larger therapist community, I think more than certainly 10 years ago or 20 years ago, And so I'm excited by that, just from the standpoint of honestly if nothing else, it helps you do better therapy.

When I I felt so grateful just during this past summer. So of course we're in this moment where black lives matter has really erupted in a new way and it's really powerful movement. And I saw a lot of white therapists really scrambling to know how to, how what do we do? How do I address this?

Like how I don't feel like it's okay for me to not say anything, especially if I am a white therapist working with black clients, but then what do I say? And I felt I felt really lucky not just in terms of my grad school education, but just in terms of having had a background in activism and.

Learn from a lot of really amazing black and people of color activists around being less fearful and talking about this stuff, so I just felt so much more equipped going into session, last month with my clients of color and really saying I know this must be affecting you, let's talk about like how this is bringing up racial trauma, if you want to.

And if not, we'll just continue with what we were doing before, but and not really missing a beat. And so if only for that reason, right? To be a blank slate in that moment would have been w it would have created a therapeutic rupture rather than to go in and say Okay. , like I'm a white therapist and this is like a situation we're positioned differently.

And we're going to navigate this explicitly and talk about it and create a space where that's the fullness of you as a person, as being welcomed into the room. And I'm not pretending that's irrelevant, right? . .

Nancy: Because that was interesting. And even some of my some of my white clients.

When they would bring up what was happening and then I would engage and we would start talking. They were like, oh, I didn't know. And I'm like, , this is the work. And I think that's an interesting stereotype of I'm just talking about individual, like I love how you're saying we need to be expanding this beyond just I'm an individual and I'm make individual actions, or to my family of origin, but to the larger cultural, patriarchal norms that we are living and that are affecting us.

And how that shows up.

Riva: And as individuals, we carry all that stuff with us. . It's not like in a box somewhere else. .

Nancy: Which has been interesting, and I, so getting into more of this, the politics. I think that's been something I've noticed in my space, especially since Trump was elected that people would come into my office.

People would talk to me before they went down. We went into therapy and more than not, they were asking me why I political my politics, which I just was, and I live in Ohio, this is a red state. Like we are Trump country. There's blue and then red, but yes,

Riva: It's just that our population is all concentrated in those areas. . But,

Nancy: That had never happened to me where someone, ask and would say, I don't think I'd feel safe talking to someone who, voted for Trump or supported him which was just really interesting. And I also ran into the opposite where a client. I was pretty vocal about in session, especially about who I was, who I was voting for. And in a group I was running at the time, just assumed everyone was going to vote for Hillary and got into trouble when I had individual client. And then they had individual sessions and one of them had voted for Trump and we took much of the session was discussing that.

And I don't, and I don't know that I would have, I probably wouldn't have assumed that everyone was going to vote for Hillary, but I don't think I, I doing an over, I probably wouldn't, have made the assumption, but I still would have shared my own viewpoint in there because that's what she was upset about is that I assumed.

Riva: Okay. Okay. Gotcha. .

Nancy: . because she in her mind had really good reasons for voting

Nancy: Why wouldn't, of course, that's right. That's where we do it. But I think that, that is interesting, that to me was the first time that politics entered the therapy room. But in reality, they're there all the time.

Riva: Exactly. Exactly. . And I think that's, what's been so interesting about the past, almost four years wild is that, I think we're starting to see more and more the way. With that election and the way things have gone since then people are starting to make more of that connection where it's oh, it's not who you vote for.

And then, like you think about that once every four years and that's politics, right? It's the context of our lives, where that occurs and it's not it's again, it's just not something you put in a box and set aside. It's something that is really impacting people's lives and all of our relationships.

And it's pulling the veil off, I think in that way of how we think about what politics are and how they're integrated into our lives or not, and how they're integrated then into therapy or not. ,

Nancy: the holistic. Viewpoint of it, it's fascinating to me. So this, I just had this thought, which is not related to anything. I'm going to go back to positive thinking and going into the dark side, because I think the challenge with that is if you don't have a therapy, a therapist who is in therapy and doing their own work, it's very hard for that therapist or anyone to hold the empathy space that is needed.

Yes. And not jump in and try to rescue someone who's going into that door. Space. Yes,

Riva: I that's absolutely true. And they need to be doing not only doing the work, but doing the right work themselves, and yes, I think that's, it's what you said about going into the empathy space and really holding that is, is something I've thought about a lot.

With respect to this question of kind of the darker side of human nature, human behavior, however you want to frame it. And because again, it goes back to that sort of black and white thinking. Good and bad kind of thinking where, okay, I'm going to if say I have a client who's sitting in front of me describing something they did, that was really shitty and really driven by some, crappy motives and some intent harmful intent.

Let's say so I could, one of the things I could do is I could lean away from it and try to put this like childhood trauma, spin on it or whatever, whatever version. And I could talk with them about why they think they did that. What happened in their past that made them want to whatever.

And that to me is bypassing it maybe to get there eventually. Sure. But to just jump to that is bypassing or I could bypass it by, maybe I just write them off as they're narcissist and they have, this, whatever diagnosis, then they're just an asshole and that's it, which is another way of bypassing it.

So to really, but to really sit to sit and really see someone in their worst behavior to see someone at their worst, or to see someone describing themselves when they are at their worst and to really sit with it and to not throw the person away and to be invested in helping them become better. And to have the level of compassion and the level of accountability and the level of courage to be in that space with someone is incredibly difficult. And I certainly have not succeeded at it. In all the opportunities that I have had like we, we are confronted with those opportunities, somewhat regularly, I think.

Hopefully and we're not going to succeed in all of them, but to do that, to succeed some of the time and to succeed, hopefully more of the time as we go along really does mean in my experience that I have to learn to sit with and hold that stuff within myself and within my own relationships and within my own marriage, and I'm about to I'm six months pregnant.

So in my parenting, so that will be a whole new ball game of that, and to and we don't have a lot of encouragement and support and doing that. I think it's hard for people. And I see this every day with clients, but just in any body in general, it's hard to say things like, oh, I, I was being passive aggressive.

Like I did XYZ, like my husband and I were arguing about the dishes or whatever. And then I did XYZ because I was being passive aggressive and I wanted to get back at him. Everybody does that stuff, but to say it and to just acknowledge it and sit with it, even at that level is so hard.

And so , if we can't do that for ourselves in our own relationships, in our own lives and look at those impulses that we have and how we, do or don't succeed in managing them. . How are we possibly going to sit with our clients when they tell us some awful story about something they did and if they're happy, isn't the place for that then what is?

Nancy: But that's when I started becoming a really great therapist, if I do say so myself was when I started really showing up for myself when I really started recognizing, okay, there is no perfect here and owning with clients of, oh, I didn't do that. I, I don't have to be like Oh I intellectually bypassed you, but I, but the next week when they come in to be like, let's start here.

Riva: I think I think I went by something it's gone by. . . Totally.

Nancy: . I think that is so important to recognize that I'm going to mess it up, but I got to circle back. You have the ability to notice when I messed up and how can I fix that if it's possible and what do I need to do? And that only happens in the therapy room when you've done it in your own life.

Yes, exactly.

Riva: Exactly. Like it's if you're starting to get into that practice of better self confrontation and it gives you that, it's like anything else, it's that muscle you're exercising and then you're more able to do it with clients. You're more able to confront yourself with them and to confront them and to encourage them to confront themselves, which is to me where so much of the power of really good therapy comes from.

.

Nancy: , definitely. I totally agree. Okay. So if someone is looking to. And I get that. I get this question all the time. Like I want to work with a therapist on something that's not in my wheelhouse, how do I start? Where do I start? How do I do this? And so then you go to psychology today and you see the 50 billion people that are doing it.

How would you recommend someone? What are your tips ?

Riva: On finding like the right therapist for finding a good therapist? I think, I really think it's so hard and I am just the aside is that I just wish that Therapists were, I think this is another area of courage, just better at writing their profiles and websites to reflect who they authentically are.

And I don't know. Do you know Laura Long at all now she has a great program called your badass therapy practice that I went through at the beginning of 2019. And there's so much encouragement around showing up authentically in your marketing. And it's so easy to create that to do that from like a cynical oh, it's the marketing, it's all about the money perspective, but truly since I have improved my marketing, the, my best fit clients find me so much more easily.

And so I think there's so much we need to do on the therapist side of that. But in terms of, in the absence of that for now, in terms of a good fit I think there is so much about the more willing you are as a client to show up courageously like in the consult or like in the first session and really lay on the line, what it is you're dealing with, which I know is terrifying.

I'm a client too. I know how easy it is to even when we're seeking therapy, to go in and want to put our best face forward. For some reason, even though we're there to theoretically dump out all our crap and figure out what to do with it. But I think to go in. Really willing to lay it on the line as much as you can and see if the therapist seems like they're able to contain that.

I think that we there's so many lists of questions, right? I'm sure there's. I can tell when a potential client has Googled it and is reading the bullets and questions about what to ask a potential therapist. And it's very cute and I totally get it. And I, it's like when I was looking for a midwife, I Googled the list of questions.

You ask a midwife. But I think sometimes we give our intuition short shrift. If you go in and lay it all on the line and you have someone who can really see that you can really see they're sitting with all that you brought in and then. Not afraid of it. They're not weird about it.

They're not shrinking away from it. They're just really leaning towards you and ready to take it on. Then I, that to me is a better sign of a good fit than any particular answer that you could that you could get to any particular question. I think also having said all that, the the particular question that I think should be should the therapist should have a good answer for if you go in and say like, how would you approach X, if the therapist doesn't have a good answer or they're not willing to say, I don't know, that's not a great sign to me, we should be able to, I think a therapist that's the right fit for somebody.

We'll be able to say not like here's steps a through Z to say here's where I'd go in. Here's the Trailhead. I see, I have internal family systems training. We talk a lot about trail heads. And so if I'm sitting with a client in a consult and I don't see trail heads, like that's probably not the right client, and so I should be able to articulate what those are and say here's, here are some places we might start. And so I think that's a, that's an important an important sign. If you go into a consultor for a session with someone that they are able to articulate something about their sense of direction that the therapist is and then it's like, when I have a consult with someone and there's somebody comes in I don't do OCD, for example, like that's just not my specialty.

And I think it needs, specialty approach. And so somebody comes in and says I need help with OCD. And what would you do for that? I would be like, I will get you a great referral, so that's that's important too.

Nancy: , because I love what you said about trusting your intuition because I think too often, we cause I've, totally done this in picking a therapist, we go in and think, oh, the therapist knows everything. And I'm just the lowly person and ignore. And I'm talking from how quickly they return your phone call to how quickly they set up. If they have a con consult or, all of the things that emails they send you the, what their message says, like paying attention to all the little clues and being like, does this fit me?

And even if you don't know what that means to be to get grounded enough to be like, this is a person I'm going to be spewing my guts to. So I better have a connection. And if I go in there being like, Ooh, they have to know everything, then it's going to be a pro.

Riva: Totally. . And just the reality of knowing that.

We aren't the right fit for everybody. We aren't everything to everyone. And I think that, that's another thing that I think sometimes we give lip service to, but then, I do think therapists often try to be everything to everyone. And we just aren't. I know, and I, and increasingly, as my practice matures and I mature as a therapist I have a stronger sense of who are the people that I really that I am at my best with, and that.

Be at their best with me. That's not the same as who it's going to be for another therapist, which is great. There's, , exactly.

Nancy: That's the, , because I know when when a client comes in and is talking about severe trauma from their childhood and I'm like, you need to go work with someone that works with that.

And I think a lot of therapists have the why, therapy, trauma, that's what we do.

Riva: . Totally. Or, . , for sure. Or I should be able to, work with every personality type or whatever, and it's actually it's funny the thinking about that's what we do as therapists.

So another thing right. Is like depression is that's what therapists treat depression or whatever. I actually really don't do severe depression. And I actually don't. Work well with clients who are severely depressed. And that unfortunately is something I had to learn by working with clients who were severely depressed early on and realizing actually this is not I'm not doing a great job.

This is not the best scenario for me to apply my skills. And there are great therapists out there who specialize in severe depression, and that is where these clients belong. And I'm so grateful that there are people out there who work well with people who have severe depression, who I now can send folks to, if that's how they're showing up.

And then I can work with the people who are coming in with the stuff that. It's the right puzzle piece for what I do, right?

Nancy: .Because I remember that a lot of people would be like, I remember, because I had a very similar experience and I was like, this is, I should be able to do this.

Like I really was like, depression and anxiety they go together and then I'm like, we are very different in how they present and the behaviors that go with and someone else needs to be working with this

Riva: , the complexity. I think another challenge around that is then how clients describe their experience is not the same as how we described their experience.

So I still have to say right that I depression. And it's not that I don't, of course everybody, I think personally, I think everybody goes through a depressive period at some point in their lives, so of course there is some of that depressed mood showing up among people in my practice, of course, but so many people will come in and say my problem is depression.

And it's really not, from a clinical perspective, that's not what it is. And so it's like we have to do so much translating of how clients use language to how we would use language and then filter out and in people. Based on, finding the shared meaning under the different words, we're all using for stuff, right?

Nancy: Yes. , absolutely. . Okay. I could talk forever about this stuff. I don't know that people want to listen to it forever, but thank you so much for taking time out of your day to chat with us. And I think this, I think anytime we can, I think therapy has such a Vale for some reason, and anytime we can remove that veil and make it more accessible, we're doing a service to the industry.

Riva: Absolutely. Yes. I completely agree. And it was such a delight to talk to you about all this stuff. Thanks so much for having me.

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Episode 151: How We Store Trauma In Our Bodies

In this episode, I’m talking with Sarah Dionne, yoga psychotherapist and founder of Whole Health Collaborative, about getting out of our heads and into our bodies and how we store trauma in our bodies.

For those of us with anxiety, it’s pretty common to go into research mode and ask ourselves: why am I feeling this way? And if you already enjoy thinking, analyzing, and solving problems like me, well, then thinking and researching why you’re anxious is your go-to pattern. 

When I was writing my book, The Happier Approach, I learned that my default pattern—researching and asking why—didn’t actually serve me. The solution to my anxiety had nothing to do with the why. 

So what’s the solution to anxiety if it isn’t figuring out the why? 

Honestly, I was a little disappointed by the answer.

It’s about getting into your body. 

Moving from exploring our thoughts and opening up to our bodies is very hard for many of us. We live in our heads. We forget we have bodies. But what happens when our bodies have a lot to tell us about our experiences—and we don’t listen? 

In Episode 149, I talked with Nicole Lewis-Keeber about the t-word: trauma. 

In this episode, I’m talking with yoga psychotherapist and founder of Whole Health Collaborative, Sarah Dionne all about getting out of our heads and into our bodies and how we store trauma in our bodies.

Listen to the full episode to find out:

• Sarah’s unique blend of yoga and therapy and what it means to be a yoga psychotherapist

• The false belief that stopping the thoughts will stop the experience

• How ignoring our bodies and criticizing ourselves is an act of violence against ourselves

• The importance of compassion and how it is key to everything

Resources mentioned:

• wholehealthcollab.com

• Connect with Sarah on Pinterest

• Follow Sarah on Instagram

• Follow Sarah on Facebook

• Coach In Your Pocket

• The Happier Approach Book

+ Read the Transcript

Sarah: So compassion is the first step in compassion helps to disperse the anxiety and the stress because compassion is ultimately love. And then I'm creating the energy of love within my body. And that energy of love is very healing. So I'm already in the process of healing it. When I'm practicing compassion.

Nancy: Before we get into this week's episode, I want to do a quick note a couple of weeks ago, my guest Nicole Lewis keeper, and I chatted about the personal development industry. And we used broad generalizations, especially about the coaching industry. So I want to clarify that the key to finding help from a coach or therapist is to be discerning.

There are amazing coaches and therapists out there, and there are crappy coaches and therapists out there. A quality coach or therapist will be certified and we'll be helping you build the skills to listen to you. Trust your gut, listen to your inner wisdom and remember there's no secret formula.

So now on with this week, though, I love my mind. I love thinking, analyzing, solving a problem. When I have anxiety, my default response is to go into research mode. I asked myself why am I feeling this way? And then while writing my book, the happier approach, I realized that I was going about this all wrong.

My default is not serving me the solution to my anxiety. Has nothing to do with the why you're listening to the happier approach, the show that pulls back the curtain on the need to succeed, hustle and achieve at the price of our inner peace in relationships. I'm your host, Nancy Jane Smith.

So what is the solution to anxiety? If it isn't figuring out the why? Honestly, I was a little disappointed by the answer, which is getting into your body, getting out of your mind and getting into your physical body. This is so hard for many of us. We live as if we're walking heads. We forget that we have bodies that have a lot to tell us about our experiences.

All this month, we are looking at our pasts. And more specifically, we are talking about the T word trauma today. I'm talking with Sarah Dion, a yoga therapist and founder of whole health collaborative about getting out of our heads and getting into our bodies and how we store trauma in our bodies. Sarah and I talk about her unique blend of yoga and therapy and what it means to be a yoga psychotherapist.

The false belief that stopping the thoughts will stop the experience, how ignoring our bodies and criticizing ourselves is an act of violence against ourselves and the importance of compassion and how it is key to everything. So this month we are continuing our conversation about trauma. The big T I always feel so powerful saying that.

And specifically today to be, we're going to be talking about trauma and our bodies and I have brought in yoga psychotherapist. Sarah Dionne. Welcome Sarah.

Sarah: Thank you. So happy to be here.

Nancy: I'm so excited to have you here. So tell us about just dive right in what's yoga psychotherapy.

Sarah: So yoga psychotherapy is a blend between traditional methods of psychotherapy and the eight limbs of yoga.

So when I say the eight limbs of yoga, I don't just mean as Asana practice, which is the postures that you get when you go to a yoga class. All of the different pieces of yoga, like meditation, like breath work introspection, blah, blah, blah, like all of that. And I mix that. Psychotherapy. So I'm a licensed psychotherapist and I'm also a certified yoga instructor.

So I've put them, I put them both together.

Nancy: So when someone comes to work with you as a yoga psychotherapist, what are the, what is what could they expect? What's that going to be like?

Sarah: So when someone comes to me, there are coming to me as a psychotherapist. So they're looking for therapy, but they're also looking for a way to include their body, which is what we do together.

So I'm not a yoga instructor, but what I should say is that I'm a yoga instructor, but I don't give yoga classes. That's not what it's about. It's about blending together, the physical experience, and also all those eight limbs with the psychotherapy practice. So oftentimes what I'll do is I'll send people home with homework and they'll go home and practice, maybe a yoga posture at home, and then they'll also have some insight or self discovery work to do.

And then we'll talk more about that, the next session. So a lot of my work is about, we go over things in session, but they have, but it's really about the client becoming their own therapist when they go home. Ah, okay. Practicing this stuff. And then when we come back together, okay, what's happened. What's come up and let's talk about it and let's add something to it so that you can continue growing.

Nancy: So it's using these eight principles, limbs, as you said of yoga combined with traditional talk therapy that they can do at home. The actual practice. It's not like you're sitting in a room and people are doing asanas and you're having them talk about themselves.

Sarah: They could, if that's what they felt they needed.

So I might offer something. If they were doing us and us with me, it's not going to be like a yoga class. We might choose one or two postures to do that would benefit their specific need. Got it. If they if they were someone that was dealing with a lot of tension in the chest because of anxiety, we might do some chest openers, or we might also do something that could explore what's going on with their heart center and why they are having a lot of tension there.

And so yoga posture may help to clarify what the problem is…

Nancy: by helping them get into their bodies and not just live up in their heads, which is where therapy tends to put them. Yes. So it's the blending of both. I love that. I think that's where we need to head as an industry.

Sarah: I agree. I agree. 100%.

Nancy: Which takes us into, as someone who is a therapist and has gone to a lot of therapy, one of the things I really like about therapy is that it's cognitive. It doesn't require me to get into my body. And so as someone who doesn't want to get into my body and really deal with those traumas, that's a positive thing, but it's not really a really allowing me to move forward because I'm I say I, and many of my clients, we ha we live as if we don't have a body.

Sarah: I think that it we can move forward to a point. And then eventually our body is going to ask to be addressed. Okay, so it's going to send us, it's going to start giving us messages that something is off. Something is wrong because we're storing the one, one of the things that's really important for people to understand is that the mind and the body are not connected.

They are one full thing.

Nancy: Ooh, Tell me more on that one.

Sarah: So they, there was no way to fully explore the mind without the body and vice versa. And they are functioning as one. So with the mind is communicating to you through the body. So if I'm having anxiety, I'm having bodily experiences of anxiety.

I'm having gut problems. I'm having chest problems, I'm having throat problems. And that is your mind within your body . So your mind, it's not like it's connected. It's all one big thing with all of these hormones and chemicals, not just to be physical biological, but that is part of it with all of these hormones and chemicals going through our bodies that also cycle into the brain and back down through our body.

So it's not just one, we can't separate it.

Nancy: So even though I've tried (laughter),

So what ends up happening… it's the upset stomach. It's the chronic pain. It's the headaches. It's all of these physical symptoms are showing up and continuing to ignore those by just living in only acknowledging one piece of the mind, body of the body gets us.

Sarah: Yes. Okay. It does get us into trouble because we can start to develop all kinds of physical illnesses and problems that we can't figure out such as fibromyalgia, such as it used to be called chronic fatigue, such as ongoing headaches that just have no explanation, ongoing gastrointestinal problems that have no explanation, just weird chronic pain or adrenal fatigue is another one that one's a pretty common one for anxiety.

There, all these things that start popping up and sometimes doctors will say this is the issue. And let's take care of that. The, let's say it's an ulcer that is formed in the stomach because of ongoing stress. So they may be able to medicate the ulcer, but the ulcer is not the problem.

The problem is the anxiety that caused. But if we're not getting into our bodies, and if we don't, aren't able to discover, then it's the ongoing anxiety that's creating the ulcer. The either we'll have to be taking that medication forever or for the ulcer is going to come back. So if we, but if we are able to connect to our body and discover that, oh, this is anxiety being stored in the gut, how can I work through that anxiety?

How can I experience it? How can I let it go? Then I'm going to be able to get to the root of the problem so that I don't have ulcers anymore.

Nancy: Okay. So I'm someone who has irritable bowel syndrome.

I know when my irritable bowel syndrome is acting up, I'm stressed. Like I know there's a link, but I have a problem then taking that any further. So I might recognize, oh, wow. My irritable bowel syndrome was acting up. Oh yeah. It's because of this stress, but then that's as far as I go.

Sarah: Okay. So what I might suggest in a situation like that is first of all, how can I build compassion and acceptance for myself and compassion for my body for developing this issue?

Because a lot of times we get frustrated with it. And then we're annoyed. And then what does that create? More tension, more stress. Yeah. So step a is compassion. Yep. How do I develop compassion for myself and just allow myself to not feel right now. And then the next is compassion for the fact that I feel disconnected from my body rather than why can't I get connected to my body.

It's I have compassion for myself that I am not connected to my body. So it's

Nancy: compassion for the symptoms and then compassion for the fact that I'm feeling those symptoms.

Sarah: Yes.

Nancy: Okay. I love that. I love that double layer

Sarah: So compassion is the first step in compassion helps to disperse the anxiety and the stress because compassion is ultimately love.

And then I'm creating the energy of love within my body. And that energy of love is very healing. So I'm already in the process of healing it when I'm practicing compassion.

Nancy: Got it. Okay. Love that.

Sarah: So then the next step would be doing some chakra work. So if we go down into the gut, that's where the solar plexus is and the solar plexus is, that third chakra that's above the, so when I talk about chakras, I'm talking about like an energy system in the body.

You don't have to believe it. Like I tell people that it's not like you have to buy into any kind of new agey stuff. You don't have to, you don't have to even believe that they're called chakras. I don't care. It's just that our gut, you talk about, you get a gut, feeling, your stomach drops.

I have butterflies in my stomach. They're all about the stomach. So something's going on there? I really don't care what you call it. I call it the solar plexus. That is above the belly button and right below the sternum, the once we've clarified that it's, that having compassion, that's the first step.

And now the chakra work on the solar plexus. So I might do some vision. The energy that I have there and what's going on with that energy. A lot of times we'll have images or thoughts in our mind that is actually the energy in our body. That's just presenting itself as images in our mind.

So if we're like, let's say I'm doing that solar plexus work. And I close my eyes, take some deep breaths and I get a color in my head. Maybe I get black, maybe the black pops into my head. What does black mean to me? That color as in like this absence of light, or maybe I get the color green, what does that mean to me?

And what's the feeling that comes with. Great. Okay. Because different colors resonate with different experiences, different memories, different, if I'm having an experience of absence of light that's a pretty difficult experience, right? There's something going on there.

That's pretty hard. So the solar plexus, typically not for everyone, but typically the assign the color of yellow to it. And if we're experiencing some kind of dull color or we're not even able to connect to the energy there, I would suggest that means that we're having a really hard time with our identity and competence.

And we're having a hard time with security in ourselves and also who is my authentic self, because all of that is here. And also the last thing is power. Am I do I have power over my life? So if we can get into the different chakras, which is also part of the yoga practice. That they, we can figure out a lot of things just by understanding that.

And like I said, you don't have to buy into the new age. If you can still connect with your body in this way. Yeah. And if that's not your belief system,

Nancy: but I so in the process of connecting and I can be like, okay, I see a color red it's, whatever color I see. Because a lot of people get caught up in the right or wrong.

It's my color, my answer, what it means to me. But, when you said yellow, that's just like the standard colored that's assigned to that particular chakra.

Sarah: Typically people experience yellow there. And if we can enlarge. Because when we say solar plexus is the sun.

So like the shining light of you.. So if it's another color other than yellow, there may be something else going on. For some reason that you're not experiencing yellow there. That's like that shining self. And why is it not the shining self? Why is it not that powerful sun?

So maybe it's red. And what does red mean to me? Just for me, what comes to mind for me personally, it might be anger might be irritation, like you're feeling annoyed or agitated. For me not, that's not going to mean the same for everybody, right? Yeah. But that doesn't, but why is that present in my identity?

Why is that present in my, that shining light of me? Why am I feeling this red sense of tension? So what that does is it gives us some way to explore. So this is where it branches into psychotherapy

Nancy: I'm with you. Let me pause. Just because what I love about is it gives me a way to, tap into my body.

Yes. By just looking at colors and feelings it's a useful way to tap in because that can be like, oh, what's the color that comes up. And then what's underneath that. So I love that. Just this first part with the compassion. Because this is where I get stuck. Oh yeah.

Sarah: No, I'm I hope that it's a little helpful. I don't know.

Nancy: I would love that just in my like oh yeah. To think of the colors and the feelings that kind of brings it into a more practical than then, oh my gosh, something's really wrong with me. And I'm a total mess.

I'm in all this denial and I have secret things that I don't know that are happening, but just to break that down. Okay. So then once I figure out it's red, it's anger or I'm irritated. Now, what do I do?

Sarah: So that's just the very personal psychotherapy session, right? That person experiences red, we're going to be whatever that's meaning to them.

We're going to be exploring that for them in particular. So maybe they have a relationship that's causing a lot of stress and is very disempowering. Maybe there's, there's just something in their life that's really creating this lack of self-esteem lack of, self-confidence so we can explore that.

And then what do we do about it? So that might be taking action in life because sometimes we have to work from the outside in, so if I'm, if something is causing a feeling of lack of power, what is it and what do I do about it? So can I take action or is this if we go into yoga the act of acceptance..

So if I'm not accepting of the situation and I can't change it, can't, I cannot change it. Then I have to look at acceptance because if I'm not, then I'm going to be residing in resentment and anger. And that is going to go into the solar plexus and other chakras too. It's just that we're talking about that one in particular.

But so like you start to put pieces together. It becomes like a puzzle. So we start with the body, then we start, what's like experience what's going on in the mind. And then also is there traumas back there that are informing this what's happening and we just start putting a person's puzzle together.

Nancy: So can the body. Inform. I know the answer to this, but the body can inform the trauma. So can I recognize, oh, because I'm repeatedly having trouble in my gut or I'm repeatedly having trouble. Maybe there's a trauma I need to be looking at or is it not that simple. That's just making it way too simple.

Sarah: I think that we don't want to jump. Because sometimes if we say that okay, I'm having gut issues. So there might be a trauma. Sometimes we can begin to have a lot of fear that we have repressed memories and then we're going to start like, oh my God, what happened to me when I was such and such age?

And that's not good either because maybe nothing happened. So we don't want to jump to conclusions that it is a trauma. Could it be? Maybe, but that's not the first place. I'd go. Okay. The first place I'd go is just let's investigate. Whatever it is, if they do have trauma and. And we know that they have trauma, then we're going to think about, is that playing a role?

Because it likely is.

Nancy: Yeah. Because that repressed memories, idea and trauma, obviously they go hand in hand, but I think for a lot of people, that's why they don't want to touch on trauma because it's going to unearth all these repressed memories, which isn't necessarily the case.

Sarah: No, it depends on the person.

Yeah. Yeah. That's going to be very individualized, that's a very visible thing. And some people are going to unearth repressed memories of just very scary. And as like people don't might not want to do that. And so might avoid but other people are not going to. Sometimes that's frustrating for them as because they might have an unexplained something or other going on. And they know that something happens. But they'll never get that memory. And so that's another level of acceptance. But it's not always going to be any one way.

Nancy: Yeah. It's all individualized. Yeah. That makes sense. So why do you think, I know the majority of my clients, I'm in this world as well, are really uncomfortable with our bodies.

Like we, like I said, we really do live from the shoulders up. Is that some of that is obvious. This is societal, but tell me your thoughts on that.

Sarah: First of all, there's nothing essentially wrong with it. There's it's just that it is what it is and it's just limiting. And it we can do lots of wonderful growth and introspection with the mind.

But, like I said, they are functioning as one, so we're only unearthing piece of a part of it and we're not unearthing the rest. So first of all, if someone wants to stay in their mind, okay. That's totally fine. But if they're still having a lot of problems and it's clear that they're going to have to do something to move forward in their self discovery, then if they don't go into the body, then they're going to be living very limited.

Nancy: Because it's all connected

Sarah: . It's all one thing. It's all one big thing.

Nancy: So just mind blowing. When you, like, when you think about even you correcting on the, it's not connected, it's one thing, because we have all heard the mind body connection. Yeah. There's no such thing, right?

It sounds like there's this little wire that runs between the two, but you're saying, Nope, it's all one big thing. Stop thinking it's a thing. It's a body,

Sarah: it's a body and your brain is part of your body. It's not a separate organ. So is my liver. Am I going to call my liver? Is there a liver body connection?

it's just part of my body. The brain is an organ in the body. The liver is an organ in the body. They're all functioning together as one big thing. It just will be limiting on how far we can grow. If we don't explore the body, I never want to shame anybody and say if they're having a very key ingredient is if I'm not ready to go into the body, then I have compassion for that.

Ah, let me reside with compassion for that. Be where I am and when I'm ready, if. Then I'll explore that. Yeah. But so it's still it's okay.

Nancy: Yeah. It's all. Okay.

Sarah: So that's like the kind of the yoga is all about compassion. Like when you go to a yoga class, they'll talk about it, but if you dive into yoga and the practices of yoga, the essential component is love, acceptance, compassion. Those are the, I should say three essential components, but they're really all one, yeah. So that, that's my basis for everything. And because that is the basis of yoga. So when I come from that. I come to the mat at all angles for all people, even if they're not ready to go into the body, even if that's not where they are, it's still total love, total compassion. That's where you are.

And let's just start there. And if that's where you need to reside. Okay let's find love and compassion for that.

Nancy: Okay. So if I'm like, okay, I want to start exploring my body. Then it is about just doing, how would I start that process?

Sarah: So it depends on the person. Some people can do trauma informed yoga.

Okay. So this there's a place in Boston, but I, depending on where someone is in the country, I don't know there aren't a lot, like it's not a widely practiced thing yet. It's spreading and thought. So someone, if they are near someplace, that practices that there is trauma informed yoga, which is a very basic type of deal.

That walks people through it, low body experiences as they practice very basic postures. So you'll be doing self discovery while you're in the yoga postures. So that's one way if someone has that near them, if someone does not have that near them two good ways would be, first of all, visioning, like we talked about visioning inside the body, getting a touch with the chakra system that really engages the thoughts in the mind, but then it's also bringing it down into the body.

So that's one way, another way is meditation. When I meditate, can I connect with the sensations in my body? So can I feel where I'm having pain and can I bring compassion to the pain that I'm having? So I might focus somewhere like on my, if I'm having a lot of pain in my shoulders. So if I'm in meditation and that's distracting, Bringing my mind there and having compassion for that and being with it, that's coming into my body.

That's all coming into my body and for yoga, that's that mindfulness practice. And there's also a part of yoga called Pratyahara, which is stepping back from the senses. So what I mean by that is that you can be, or in your body in observing the pain, but the pain is not controlling you.

Okay. So it's just there and you can see it , you can feel it, something that's going to really influence you in a negative way. So that is being able to really have compassion for the body and taking a step. It's not disconnecting from the body, but it's being able to see it objectively and having just love.

Nancy: Because I think that's the piece. Yeah. For so many of my clients, working with people that have high functioning anxiety, they're pushing, pushing, and the idea of slowing you, just, even the idea of slowing down is going to be painful because that's going to hurt my productivity and I'm not, so the idea of being able, then, that's what I love about what you're saying is that by being the first practice is I'm going to be compassionate.

Or I always say I'm going to be kind to myself, same things by doing that first, then whatever I can, that's the mindfulness practice in another thing.

Sarah: Yeah. Then you can stem from there. Yes. It's the starting point. And throughout the psychotherapy that I, I do and throughout the yoga compassion is always the foundation.

So I start there and then I just bring it with me because I continue forward.

Nancy: And as you're going deeper, it's just compassion.

Sarah: That's just deeper and deeper compassion because once we can get to a point where we're just totally embraced in compassion, we have total self love.

And then we, it's hard for most people even imagine that what is self love? I can't, I don't love myself and I get it. I get it in there . So I get it. It's hard for people to even imagine what that could be like, but when we start from a basis of compassion and continue to build it, eventually, I don't know when for each person, but eventually we can get there.

You can get to a place where, Hey, I'm okay. No matter what,

Nancy: 'because I’m in my body a nd I can navigate from this grounded place. Yeah. I love that. So what got you into the yoga psychotherapy?

Sarah: So I've been in psychotherapy. I got into psychotherapy when I was in, in 2009.

That's when I got into grad school. And before that I was working in the mental health field. Prior to that, I discovered yoga when I was 25. I'm 41 now. So I discovered it when I was 25. And I was dealing with eating disorders and terrible anxiety and also issues that looked a lot like bipolar.

So I was dealing with a lot of stuff at that time in my life, and I discovered yoga. And so I began exploring that I should back up a little bit and say that when I was even younger, when I was like 19. I began exploring spirituality. And what is deeper in life? What is more, I've always been had that kind of interest and what is even out there?

What is all of this, right? What's the point? What's the point of it all. And so then I when I was 25, I got into yoga. When I was going through all of those very difficult things. And yoga brought me deeper into my spirituality and brought me closer to my healing. And then in 2009, I was like, I decided I really wanted to help other people.

And I dove into psychotherapy. However, once I graduated and started really working in the field, what I noticed a lot was how much all of it is in the mind. And I also noticed that a lot of my clients weren't perfect. Ah, okay. So I noticed that people were getting stuck. A lot of people were very stuck.

The people that weren't stuck or the people that had a spiritual practice or some kind of practice in which their whole self was involved. Okay. And they were typically people that, yoga is not the only way. But they would typically someone that were involved in some kind of thing that reconnect, like whether it was running, whether it was yoga, whether it was something that really got them into their body.

Nancy: Okay To build awareness of their body and how they were feeling

Sarah: like Tai Chi They were able to get into their body and feel their body. They were the ones that seem to progress more. Not always, but usually then other people, I noticed that a lot of people stayed the same. And it, there were some people that would progress, but it wasn't like, I was like, there's got to be more. And another thing that I, a lot of people talked about is stability. What will help someone be mentally stable? And I thought, what kind of life is that? That you just get to be stable?

Nancy: That's what I thought. When you said it, I was like, oh

Sarah: . And so when I kept going and kept working in this field and kept seeing that there was, there had to be more, there had to be more. And I kept seeing that we were all, everybody was not everybody, but a lot of people were very much in the mind. And that the trauma work was difficult because we couldn't get into the body.

And all of this trauma was hanging out in their bodies and being in that practice, it was limiting, because of the office space, because of just what the agency would allow. There was just, you were limited. So in two thousands 14, I ha so I went on through this period and I started to grow and I started to change and I started to see that I needed to be something more.

So I got certified as a yoga instructor, I think in like 2013 and began to bring that into the practice. I got certified as a children's yoga instructor. I got certified as the adult yoga instructor. I also started doing things with play therapy for adults and children's Sandtray therapy, like things that were going to get the body involved.

In 2014, I had my daughter and I was thrown into postpartum problems. Like you wouldn't believe like postpartum OCD terrible postpartum anxiety, postpartum depression. It was horrific. And not long after that, about a year after that, I went through what I can only call a spiritual awakening.

And when I went through that, I knew that I had to help people become whole, and I knew that the only way to do that was going to be through embracing the body and mind within practice. I just felt this absolute yearning to help people with that. So I decided to blend the two together and I also founded a little private practice called whole health collaborative.

And it's, that's building, but still in the future, we're going to be including like nutrition and massage therapy and stuff like that. And the body more involved. So I guess all of that stuff informed my absolute belief and combining body with mind and spirituality and therapy.

So I believe that's, what's needed to really embrace total healing. And I, so I guess that's the long story. But I felt, I feel like, that's just how I came around to it

Nancy: because, in therapy. Through the ages and in our, regulations that we have it is very clear no body like it is not something we are taught to include. So in the therapy world, what you're doing, although brilliant is very cutting edge.

Sarah: I think it's more and more now people are really starting to grasp, the necessity of bringing body into the practice. And the use of yoga is something that's becoming more and more.

It's not super out there yet, but it's not everywhere yet, but it's more and the people from India. And around the world have used yoga for thousands and thousands. I think it's been around for about what they think anyway, about 5,000 years. And they were using that in order to explore themselves and move through issues.

And so we're finally catching on over here,

Nancy: right? Yes.

Sarah: Yeah. We're finally catching on. But I am part of that movement. But there are other people out there that I'm really grateful for that are also no seeing and using strategies to involve, but body, mind, and spirit.

Nancy: Yeah.

Because it is a fascinating when you just when, I just think about how that's such a hard, no, of bringing the body in the therapy room and yet, so freaking important, especially with the idea that it's all one,

Sarah: Because what does that tell you? Yeah, we were going into the therapy room when they say, oh, nobody can't talk like, you can't bring that into the therapy room.

Isn't that disconnecting us even more. Isn't that saying that I shouldn't be involved with this thing that his body is saying that this isn't okay, but my body's not okay. And that I should just be residing in the mind. Isn't that the message it is.

Nancy: That's totally the message. And even, I think that's why I loved your thing about the color.

Because I've totally, in all my years and all my years of therapy have been asked, where do you feel that, where do you feel that sensation? But then, and I'll say, oh, I feel it in my stomach or whatever, but then it's never taken any more than that has ever taken any more than that or B it's I interpreted as a shame.

Because I can't really access it, I don't really know what to do with it. Once they say, where do you feel that? And so then I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm totally disconnected from my body. I don't even know that's there. And then I started spinning off rather than your idea of compassion, with whatever comes up.

Yes. And that's the piece I think we miss is that we're quick to judge because our body isn't, especially, us high productivity people, we buy the lie that we're robots and we need to be able to make this body function better. And so the fact that the body isn't functioning better is because we aren't in control.

And rather than being compassionate to ourselves, we're just going to drive it home.

Sarah: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We're basically running it into the ground. Yes. Our body doesn't like w where our mind is just pushing our body beyond what it was meant to do. And very often that's what we're doing.

And some people can do like these, let's say like I said, it's always very individual because you have some people that can run these, like ultra marathons and for them, they're like, you have to be so dedicated to do something like that, but for them that might not be beyond their scope.

Their particular body structure might be able to handle that. And then you might have other people that just like go and they work late at night. And they work with who knows, maybe that's right for them. But then you have people that are not functioning well anymore and are starting to have health problems that are starting to have there's, they're not happy.

They're not fulfilled. They're tired all the time. Blah, blah, blah. They are doing something that is beyond the limits. And no one likes to hear, I have limitations. No one likes to hear that. They're like, I'm not limited. I'm guess I'm strong. And they are Absolutely strong. But your body is a physical entity.

It's a physical thing that needs, it needs compassion. It needs love, it needs rest. It needs kindness. It needs care. And if we don't take good care of what it's asking, then it's going to start falling apart.

Nancy: Yes. Because rather than, what we have been taught is then you just ignore your body and then you don't have to deal with it.

And that is just creating more and more of a mess.

Sarah: Yes. And if we go into trauma, we're talking more about the connection with the body and trauma. And we've talked about ignoring the body and not wanting to connect with it. And I know that this is probably something that you run into a lot with people is that there's just so much shame connected to the body

Nancy: Yes. Yes. Thank you for bringing that up.

Sarah: Yeah. Yes. Very obviously huge issue for people that have experienced a lot of different types of traumas that their body becomes a source of shame because it stores memories because it stores experiences because it also goes through kind of physical experiences of flashing.

And so, it can get re-traumatized through flashbacks. So hence why would I want to reconnect with my body, right? No, I'm not doing that. And I get that completely because it's scary. I don't want to disrupt it. I don't want to, I just want to leave this thing behind.

That makes total sense to me. Like I get it. I get why that feels. That I get why that feels so important for people to do or not important. I get why that is such an urge for people to leave behind their body. But the problem is that since the trauma is stored in the body, it's just going to keep coming back.

And if we're ignoring it, we're probably going to eventually do something to start numbing the body.

Nancy: Yes, there you go.

Sarah: We're probably going to start doing something to not feel the body, whether that like eating disorders. That's a huge one. Yeah. Any kind of food issue, huge one, any type of addiction and it doesn't necessarily have to be a drug addiction.

It could be shopping. It could be gambling is something where it creeps that adrenaline. I'm not thinking about this totally up here in my adrenaline. Yeah. It's like something to get me out, so I'm not experiencing this thing anymore. And obviously severe anxiety, panic attacks, or we get so caught up in the mind that it, we feel like we're completely disconnected from the body.

It's not that the anxiety is created because we're trying to avoid our brains. The anxiety is the result, according our body. And then oftentimes to cope with the anxiety. Yes. Is when we're putting all that other stuff on top of it to shut the body up and to shut the anxiety up. Yeah,

Nancy: because that is totally what I have found, with me, with a lot of my clients, the idea that it is the unhealthy coping mechanisms we have developed around the anxiety that then we'll do things that will start fighting that those symptoms.

So I'll go, I'll stop numbing or I'll stop. I'm going to fight my overeating or I'm going to fight my perfectionism. And then once I start doing that, then the anxiety comes up and I don't have any place. I don't know how to deal with the anxiety because the problem was the perfectionism or the problem I thought was the numbing.

That's just a coping mechanism to what's really underneath there that we haven't figured out until we get that connection built.

Sarah: So if I'm someone some other things that people do cutting or any type of self injury, obviously that's also very anger, a lot of anger towards the body, right?

So all of those definitely ways that people deal with trauma and deal with anxiety and deal with these memories and issues within the body. So I would always recommend to someone first. I'm always talking about,

Nancy: I had someone say to me recently Yeah. I know I'm supposed to be kind to myself. I get it right?

Sarah: Yes. So if I'm someone that is dealing with an eating disorder, whether it's binge eating, that might be it. So if that's me and I'm continuing to binge eat and I'm continuing to numb out the experience of the body, the first thing that I, again, encourage people to do is how do I have compassion for myself, even when I'm binging, even when I'm in, in that addiction or in that behavior?

Because then I can not fight it. So we got to put down the bat. And we can't fight. We have to accept and move beyond. So if I'm able to accept that, I have, if that was someone which I have suffered with binge eating disorder, if I was someone that was dealing with that, the first, the very first thing is to accept that I'm someone that's living with binge eating disorder.

Then I'm someone that's fighting binge eating disorder. I am someone who's living with it. And how I have compassion for me as a person who's living with this. And then as I continue to act out the behavior, I continued to develop compassion towards myself as acting out this behavior, someone that's struggling and that's okay.

Because intrinsically, is there anything wrong with it? There is nothing wrong with it. You can be a binge eater to the moon and back. And is there any, there's nothing wrong with it, right?. We internalized shame about this behavior that has nothing to be ashamed of. Who cares? We care because it causes harm,

Nancy: Yeah. It's not ideal. Like we need to be bringing it out into the air that this is really happening

Sarah: Yeah. It doesn't even matter if it matters in the sense that it's causing us harm. It doesn't matter in the sense of shame. It's not something that is wrong.

Yeah. So compassion shines, like you said, bring that out to the light. Compassion, shines, light on it and says that this, there is nothing wrong with this. Why am I thinking there's something wrong? And then I'm doing something wrong.

Nancy: Yeah. Because from that place, then you can start healing. Not overnight, but it's where you can start dealing with what it is you're dealing with instead of the I'm going through all these hoops of making sure no one else sees that you're binge eating and hiding it from yourself.

Like all the games we'll play in our heads to keep it under wraps. When in that, when it's that idea of let's just honor what's happening.

Sarah: Yes, exactly. Let's just honor what's happening. It is what it is. Obviously that's oversimplifying and if we could all just say it is what it is.

Oh, totally. Yeah. And I wouldn't have jobs. Yeah. So obviously that's oversimplifying. It really is not right or wrong. And that we can live in this kind of space of grace rather than black, white it's, we can live in, like I say, compassion and love for the self. Even if we're doing something that we wish we weren't doing.

And that it can going back to the trauma and how this is all related to trauma the numbing and trying to numb out the shame and the experience of shame in the body. So if we also go back to yoga and the physical experience and connecting to the body, and if we're talking about shame has a very physical presence in the body.

So it's there, it's within you and within your body. So if you're experiencing the thoughts, it's not your thoughts. What is most uncomfortable, what's most uncomfortable is the experience your body goes through because your body starts to do all of this really difficult stuff. It starts to develop all of this.

Like some people have that pit in the stomach or they feel all of this tension and their whole body feels like it's closing up or they feel like they're paralyzed and they can't move. So there that's the body. That's not the mind. So it's not like the thoughts might be perpetuating it, but the whole, but that really uncomfortable experience was my body,

Nancy: yeah.

Sarah: Yeah. So the just stopping the thoughts. Does not mean that my body won't react that way,

Nancy: Say that one again. Because that needs to be heard

Sarah: if I just stopped the thought it does not mean that my body won't react that way. So I was working with a man who had post-traumatic stress from, he was a combat vet.

So obviously a lot of really terrible trauma. And he had very severe PTSD, very severe. And it really interrupted his quality of life. And one of the things that was a trigger for him was the smell of gasoline. Okay. And when he would walk by a gas station, like he had coping skills that he put together, but that's not, let me just talk about what would happen.

Like he would walk by a gas station and he'd smelled a gas. He would not have any thoughts, but it wouldn't be a thought. But his whole body would start to react.. His whole, all like his whole body would enter into a place of fight flight, fight, flight freeze. Without a thought. The thought would come afterwards.

. So the body reacts first a lot of the times. And then the thought would come after, because my body has gone into this fight flight freeze mode, which then brings up all of this physical experience of shame, which then goes up into the mind and creates all this stuff. So just by stopping the thought is not going to necessarily stop this bodily reaction.

. So if we go into the body and you start addressing what's happening there, we start to learn about it. We might not be able to completely get rid of it, but we have compassion for it, acceptance, and we have understanding and know how to cope with it. Then we're going to be able to manage it much more quickly and not enter into those really difficult states of PTSD.

And that has all to do with the body work.

Nancy: Yes. Yeah. Because and my listeners have heard me say this a thousand times, the change, your thoughts drives me crazy. Because it's so much more than that. And we have bought that lie that if I just change my thoughts, everything will be fine.

And if it isn't it is not.

Sarah: No, it isn't. We have to change our innermost beliefs and that's a whole other bag of worms. So in yoga, what we talk about is basically these thoughts that we have over and over and over and over again throughout our lifetime create like kind of pathways in the brain, almost how water runs over a stone and eventually creates this indent.

And that indent is the belief, right? It's really hard for those thoughts to get out of that, in that rut they're in it, because now it's an indent in the stone and the water, or the thoughts are going to want to run down that way. They're going to want to run down that way. And in order to create another path, a lot of work has to happen.

Yeah. Yeah. If we just try to change the thought. What happens is we don't believe it. It's like that's stupid. And we might be trying to like, say I shouldn't believe it. And keeping it to myself. And I'm going to bang my head against the wall and what you don't believe it. And that's useless.

It doesn't matter. You have, there's that samskara, there is that pathway that has been created and it's going to take a lot more than just trying to redirect my thoughts,

Nancy: Yeah, absolutely. Because then it becomes, I'm beating myself up because I should be able to change this thought and what's wrong with me that I can't, and I should be thinking positive.

Maybe I should be more grateful, like all of that.

Sarah: And then it just makes the pathway deeper. Yes,

Nancy: exactly. Yeah.

Sarah: Yeah.

Nancy: Because I was struck when you said. We about the back to the binge eating and the numbing out, and you were like, you know what? You need to put the bat down. I loved that because that's what we do.

But that is such a Western, even I was because I wrote down like cancer. Like we have I'm going to fight this cancer and I'm going to beat it instead of having compassion for the body that's being attacked in this way and how you know, and not coming at it from such a violent perspective,

Sarah: I couldn't agree more.

I couldn't agree more. Why don't we say I'm for healing? Yes.

Nancy: Yeah.

Sarah: I'm against cancer. Why don't we say I'm for love I'm for equality. Why do we say I'm against racism? Why do we like it's always against always, no matter what it is, I'm against it. That's going to create more anger and more violence.

There's no way around it. It's going to and it's also going to create more anger towards our bodies if we're just, nevermind all those big societal issues, to, if we're just talking about our physical body, we're just creating more anger. We're just creating more violence towards the self.

A major part of yoga is the, is non-violence. Nonviolence obviously doesn't mean outward violence towards other people. Whether it's verbal, whether it's physical, but it also means non-violence to the self that I'm treating myself with absolute kindness and without violent or harmful thoughts, violent, not necessarily being like blood and war violent being.

I hate myself. What's wrong with me? I'm so stupid. Those are violent thoughts because I'm hit, I'm beating myself up. I'll be abusing myself. So non-violence says I am for healing. I am for self-compassion. I am for pick your societal issue. And that creates a well of compassion, which then creates the road for healing.

Nancy: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I'm, I just want to leave it there because that is, that's the message that I want people to get, okay. So how could people find out about you or working with you, what you got going on?

Sarah: They can go to my website which is. Whole health collab, We will link to that in the show notes.

Okay. So that, that that link, they can go there. I have a tab there that they can easily message me. There's a message right on the bottom that they can scroll down to. You can even I have a calendar there that you can even schedule your own a free consultation with me..

So I make it super, super easy because I know that it's hard to reach out. And I just want to make it as available as possible. So there's a, you don't even have to message me, go into the schedule and schedule your consultation. A lot of people do want to message me first and I love that. So there is a, there was a form right on the, my, my page.

It says, shoot me a message and just do it right there.

Nancy: Awesome. Great. Cool. We'll have all that information in the show notes so people can get more information about working with you and set up a time, et cetera, et cetera, and get into their bodies. Yes. After this interview with Sarah, I decided to practice skipping my default pattern of asking why I woke up and I felt stressed and I didn't go into my normal litany of all the possible contributors to my stress.

In fact, I didn't have any curiosity about what was behind the stress. I just noticed the stress. I took a couple deep breaths, put my hands on my heart and kept repeating to myself. You're okay. In this moment. You're okay. Right where you are. Then after a few moments I would ask, what could I do to ease the stress, make a cup of tea, go for a walk, call a friend throughout the week.

I practice just giving myself acceptance where I was and curiosity, if anything could be added. And I felt better building this practice allows me to build self loyalty and safety within myself, rather than constantly judging my experience. I can meet myself where I am and unpack whatever feelings or sensations come to the surface.

It was amazingly freeing to not get stuck in justification to not go through the wall.

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Episode 150: How to Let Go of the Past

In today’s episode, I continue looking at the power of our past and how we can face our stories and move through them so they don’t cause more pain.

Your past matters—even though the personal growth industry is obsessed with the future you at the expense of the past you. In that world, the only real change and movement in your life comes from looking forward, setting goals, and just doing it like I talked about in Episode 148.

But I believe that it’s OK to have a past. 

It’s OK to be perfectly imperfect.

It’s OK to share stories from your past. 

It’s OK to have trauma and pain in your past. 

It’s OK to have a joyful past, too.

The bottom line? You cannot ignore your past. 

If you do, it will creep up on you in the personification of your Monger as your parents or in the way you talk to your kids or how you interact with your spouse. Your past plays a role in your current life—period. 

It’s immensely powerful to face our stories—to look them dead in the face and slowly release their power through patience and compassion for ourselves. That’s how you live happier.

Listen to the full episode to find out:

• The first step in the process of not letting your past control your life

• Practical ways to move through the stories from your past that are holding you back

• Why we often tell our stories like a news bulletin—drama and all—and how we need to focus more on how something made us feel

• How you can learn from your past and make peace with it

Resources mentioned:

• Coach In Your Pocket

• The Happier Approach Book

+ Read the Transcript

Nancy: Imagine your ex partner broke up with you out of the blue, you were caught completely unaware and were stunned by the breakdown. Now, here you are. Years later, you have a new partner who you absolutely adore, but you notice you've constantly feel like you're walking on eggshells, expecting the other shoe to drop.

Oops. Over every little thing. She does checking her phone when she's gone and hyper analyzing everything she says, and you notice you pick fights over the silliest things. This is not the relationship you want to have. And you know, it's because of your past partner and you love to blame her for her. And damaging him so badly, but it isn't hopeless.

You can move past this pain and hurt with a little work and a lot of stuff. Loyalty. You're listening to the happier approach. The show that pulls back the curtain on the need to succeed, hustle, and achieve at the price of our inner peace in relationships. I'm your host, Nancy Jane Smith. As I mentioned in the last episode, the personal growth industry trend is to tell people that real change and movement comes only from looking forward, setting goals and just do it.

Yes, we do need to set goals, look forward and just do it. And sometimes we need to heal our past first as with any all or nothing thinking we have lost some key components of real and lasting change. Your past matters. Yep. I said it it's okay to have a past. It is okay to share stories from your past. It is okay to have trauma and pain in your past, and it is okay to have a joyful path.

Bottom line, you can't ignore your past. It creeps up on us and the personification of our monger as our parents and the way we talk to our kids or in how we interact with our spouse. Our past plays a role in our current lives period. Let's go back to the example of past relationships. You're letting the show and hurt from that past event.

Impact your thoughts about this new relationship. Now rationally, you can see that your new partner is a different person altogether and should not be treated as if they were the same as your ex. This isn't fair to them. They are a totally different person, but once your monger gets talking well, rationality, it just goes out the window.

The first step in the process of not letting your past control your life is owning the fact that this is even happening and chatting with your new partner about the fact that your past emotions are clouding your current relationship. When you notice it happening, lovingly remind yourself that this is a different person, that learning how to trust again is hard and that she is worth the risk.

The glitches, when we get stuck in the past, when we are living and reliving the past, over and over in our day-to-day lives, we become victims, martyrs, and just plain unhappy people. I assume this getting stuck in the past is what all the only look forward people are talking about, but I believe the message gets skewed and turns into an absolute, rather than the message being healed your past.

So you don't get stuck there. The message becomes ignore your past altogether. In today's episode, I want to share some practical ways. You can start moving through the stories from your past that are holding you back. To start off with share your story. That's right. Share it, bring it out of the closet, dust it off and share your pain, your struggles, the irrational beliefs that you got when you were eight years old, share those stories.

Find someone who loves you and you can trust to just listen without judging. In this day and age, we don't seem to have the patience for each other stories. We get impatient. We give too much advice or we want to share our story too quickly. So choose wisely. As you go through the act of sharing your story, your perspective will change.

You may be able to see the other person's side. You may be able to let go some of that old resentment, or it may just feel really good to say out loud. What has been playing unconsciously all these years? A quick note of caution here. We often tell stories of our past as if we're reporting a news bulletin.

We share the story as we always have. We share the injustice, the unfairness, the righteous indignation we get. So caught up in sharing the drama of the story. We forget to share how the experience made us feel. I mean, really feel, not just the obvious anger or sadness, but that we were dismissed or made to feel less than.

Befriend yourself during this process. It's one thing to have a supportive person who gets it, but we need to be willing to find the compassion for ourselves. I have a shame filled story from my past of cheating on a test in the sixties. Looking back now, it's a funny story because I was literally sitting next to the teacher's desk and a friend was walking up to put her paper on the teacher's desk.

And I asked my friend for the answer, what was I thinking? The teacher gelled. My parents were upset. I was a mess. I can fully remember that moment. And the aftermath talking to my parents feeling consumed by shame. How I felt the shame, the confusion, the fear of not knowing the answer. And today I can say to myself, wow, sweepy that was so hard feeling.

All those things. As a 12 year old, you made a mistake and you aren't good at cheating, but allowing myself to get fully in my body and having the compassion for that little girl. Make sure to befriend yourself through the feelings, allow everything that comes up and just be there. I always say, treat yourself as you would your niece allow yourself to feel the feelings of anger, sorrow, grief, self doubt, and insecurity.

This is often the piece that gets missed. We convince ourselves it isn't important, or it isn't a big enough deal. Well, if it is playing there over and over in your head, It's a big deal. For example, I remember a time when I was shaving my legs as a teenager, and I didn't check the razor before I went over my leg and the razor was damaged and I scraped up my entire leg, blood running everywhere from the numerous scrapes and burns the razor had left.

It was so freaking painful. I immediately went downstairs and showed my mom who said, well, why didn't you check the razor first? That was really stupid. I was mortified. I assumed she would give me more sympathy and understanding, but instead she focused only on my silly mistake as an adult. I've shared this story with my mom who not surprisingly has no recollection looking back.

I'm sure she was tired and stressed and just didn't have the capacity to comfort me when I had done something. So avoidable to myself. I share that story because it is a simple every day non-traumatic story. And yet for years, my monger used that story to remind me that I can't be trusted. I caused my own problems with my patients and not checking things out before I take action.

It is a simple story from my past that kept me. It's an easy story to stay in blame around blaming myself that I'm incompetent blaming my mom for shaming, me and round and round we go. The only way out is to befriend myself through the feelings. I shared that story out loud. I talk with my mom about it.

I gave myself compassion. To not get stuck in the story, you have to allow the discomfort cry for the eight year old, who was told they were stupid and would never succeed, punch a pillow for the anger you feel for not getting that promotion. You deserved grieve for your mother who you lost at age 18.

Just allow it allow the resentment, the bitterness and the anger. Then what can you learn? This is the piece that we lose sight of not saying that we can always learn from past tragedies. Please hear me when I say that. But often when things happen in the past, we are too quick to pull it out as a poor me story.

One of the ways to heal it is to ask yourself, how can I do this different. So you had a parent who puts too much pressure on you and made everything about achievement. What can you learn to notice when you were repeating that pattern in your own life to catch yourself when you overly praise people on their accomplishments to notice when you get caught up in building your own life based on praise.

Now one quick reminder. One of my guiding principles is everyone is doing the best they can with what they have in rising strong Bernay brown talks about how she operates from the assumption that everyone is doing the best they can. But I like to add the phrase with what they have. As a reminder to myself that we're all on different spots in our journeys.

Usually people aren't trying to hurt us by doing something different than we would. They're just doing the best they can, based on their past coping skills, personality traits, life stress, their reaction action probably makes sense. It might not be our reaction or one that feels good to us, but it is a logical reaction based on who the person is.

Like my mom in the razor story, she was doing the best she could with what she had that day, who knows what she had going on. When I walked down with my cut-up legs, we will never know, but living in a state of blame for the fact that she said the wrong thing, won't help either one of us. So by repeating this phrase, it allows me to give them a little room to be who they are and to not take the action quite so personally.

When I was dating my now husband, he would drive me crazy because when the world overwhelmed him, he shut off his cell phone. So you couldn't reach him no matter how hard you tried, he would do this for a few hours or a few days as his girlfriend at the time, I would take that action personally. I mean, he should want to talk to me.

I'm his girlfriend. But in reality, it had nothing to do with me. It was his coping skill. It was him doing the best he can with what he has for him. When he gets overwhelmed, he needs to shut out the outside world. And he does that by turning off his cell phone. It's how he takes back control it. Isn't what I do.

In fact, it's the opposite of what I do. But when I could pause and remember he's doing the best he can with what he has, I could move on without getting hurt or sad. And I knew he would call when he felt like re-engaging with the world. A more serious example. I had a client who was struggling with her sister because her sister had done something that hurt the family and they were having a hard time.

Her family. Hadn't spoken to the sister in a few years and my client was experiencing a lot of grief, frustration and anger when she pulled back and looked at the whole picture and the context of who her sister was, personality traits, family placement, coping skills, et cetera. It wasn't that big of a stretch to see why she had engaged in the negative hurtful behavior.

At the time she was doing the best she could with what she had as was my client. Once my client was able to see this. She began to start the process of healing and moving forward, it didn't change. The fact that my client felt hurt by her sister or take away her sister's responsibility for the behavior, but it did help my client pull back from the emotions to see that her sister's behavior wasn't meant to be intentional so she could move towards forgiveness rather than holding on to all.

We are all just doing the best we can with what we have. Most of us try very hard to be good people and make good decisions. And we are all human. We all make mistakes. We all, at one point or another, have poor coping skills, poor response skills, poor conflict skills or listening skills. But the secret is to have a little curiosity and ask yourself in the context of who this person is, are they doing the best they can with what they have?

These steps are in no way, a quick fix. Each of these steps can take days, weeks, months, or years, depending on the power of the story and how far we have buried the story in our own psyche. It is immensely powerful to face our stories. Look at them dead in the face and slowly release their power bottom line to live happier.

We have to face our past with patience and compassion for ourselves. We have been taught that our deepest needs feelings and desires are scary and we need to protect the world from them. So we hustle to perform, achieve and earn our worthiness. But it's time to be loyal to you to take off the mask, to face your high-functioning anxiety and to become confident in who you are.

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Episode 149: How To Recognize Trauma and Show Up for Our Inner Kiddo

In today’s episode, I am talking with Nicole Lewis-Keeber, a social worker, business therapist, and mindset coach about the T-word trauma and how it plays out in our lives.

Trauma.

This word is loaded for so many of us.

When we think of trauma, we think of what we call Big T Traumas: images of war, combat, natural disasters, physical or sexual abuse, terrorism, or catastrophic accidents usually come to mind. 

There are also Little T Traumas. These are often personally traumatic because of the timing, the place, or our emotional state: interpersonal conflict, divorce, infidelity, legal trouble, financial worries, moving, and many more. 

Although something could be considered a “Little T” Trauma, that doesn’t mean it’s less traumatic or less damaging. Instead, it allows us to see the word trauma in a different way and realize that it can take on many shapes and forms.

Today on the show, I’m kicking off the month by chatting with Nicole Lewis-Keeber. Nicole is a business therapist and mindset coach who works with entrepreneurs to create and nurture healthy relationships with their businesses. She's a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with a Master’s in Social Work and has rich and varied experience as a therapist. 

Listen to the full episode to find out:

• Nicole’s definition of big T trauma and little t trauma and how big T trauma explodes and little T trauma erodes

• How the personal development culture keeps us trapped by discouraging us from looking at our past

• Why the phrase “inner child” has gotten so much flack and why being willing to listen to your inner kiddo is so important

• How our inner kiddos come out in our present-day work and wreak havoc and what we can do about it

• Nicole’s tips for finding a quality coach or therapist

Resources mentioned:

• nicole.lewis-keeber.com
  

• Follow Nicole on Facebook

• Coach In Your Pocket

+ Read the Transcript

Nicole: We have been taught that if it's not big explosive and like life-changing in a moment, then it's not trauma. And that's just absolutely not true. That is a type of trauma. One of the other ones is, as you said, small to your little T trauma, and that is those cumulative experiences that we were have when we are in our formative years, which is usually when we're kids that change how we see ourselves.

They change how we value ourselves. They change how we feel, either responsible for something. And we'd begin to take that information in and it changes us

Nancy: in the professional development world. There is a belief that has been sold to us for too many years. Frequently, when you hear the difference between a coach and a therapist, you'll hear that a therapist makes you go into your past and dig up all your old wounds while the coach just takes you from where you are and moves you forward.

No need to go into the past and dig up all that stuff. I confess that I believed a version of that lie for too many years. I believe that while our past might influence our future, the important part was moving forward. I'm sure this belief was largely influenced by my monger, pushing my high functioning anxiety, self relentlessly toward accomplishing and doing it.

Who has time to look in the past. Let's keep marching forward as with everything in life. It isn't that. It isn't that explainable and it isn't that black and white, the process of personal growth is nuanced. Today. I know that ignoring huge parts of our personal history, won't help us move forward. We have to look at our past if fruit going to heal anything, we have to be willing to go back there and see what we're carrying into our current life, which is why I'm so excited for this episode.

A chance to put down the ever-present push towards the future and dive into the nuance of personal growth. You're listening to the happier approach, the show that pulls back the curtain on the need to succeed, hustle, and achieve at the price of our inner peace in relationships. I'm your host, Nancy Jane Smith.

This month, we're looking at our pasts. And more specifically, we're talking about the T word trauma. This word is so loaded for many of us. When we think of trauma, we think of war, natural disasters, physical or sexual abuse, terrorism, or catastrophic accidents. Those are what we call big T trauma. And then there are also the little T traumas.

These are things that happen in our lives that are personally traumatic because of the timing, the place or our emotional state. They can be interpersonal conflict, divorce, infidelity, legal trouble. Financial worries. Moving. Let me be clear because we call them little T traumas. That doesn't mean they're less traumatic or less damaging.

I believe the term loyalty allows us to see the word trauma in a different way because we've gotten so stuck in seeing trauma only in the big T trauma way. I think it's helpful to recognize that trauma can take on many shapes and forms. Today on the show. I'm kicking off the month by chatting with Nicole Lewis, Keeber a licensed clinical social worker with a master's in social work.

She is certified in Brené Brown’s dare to lead methodology and works with entrepreneurs to create and nurture healthy relationships with their business. She's been featured on numerous media outlets, including fast company and NPR for her work in breaking the stigma of mental health and business ownership.

She writes and speaks about the impact of small T trauma on businesses. But her biggest, most important work is combining therapeutic processes with business coaching to help entrepreneurs build emotionally sustainable and financially successful businesses. On this episode, Nicole and I talk about why the phrase inner child has gotten so much flack and why being willing to go back and listen to your inner kiddo is so important.

How the personal develop culture keeps us trapped by discouraging us from looking at our past Nicole's definition of big T and little T traumas and how big T traumas explode and little T traumas. How our inner kiddos come out in our present day work and wreck havoc and what we can do about it and tips for finding a quality coach or therapist today.

I'm very excited to have Nicole Lewis Keeber on our podcast. And we're going to talk about trauma. Yes. So welcome Nicole, before I I'm excited to have you here. So Nicole is also a social Worker?

Nicole: Yeah, I have a master's degree in social work and I'm a licensed clinical social worker. Okay.

Nancy: And Nicole specializes, or one of the things she works on is healing that inner kiddo as she calls it.

And I was telling Nicole, before we hit record that I have railed against the idea of which is very unusual for a therapist to rail against this, but railed against my idea of inner kiddo and little T traumas. And I feel like I have bought into. Incorrectly bought into all of the stereotypes and the crap, I will say that's around this topic.

And so I'm owning my own skepticism and I'm owning that. I have also talked about it in a skeptical way, and I went to bring, Nicole's going to start us off this month. We're talking about all things, trauma Going to start us off by dealing with my skepticism around this topic. So we're going to dive right in.

I love your phrase, inner kiddo. And a lot of times when we hear about healing, our inner child, the phrase inner child can be loaded. So I want to break it down and make it a little less scary for people. What does that mean and why is it important to be aware of our inner kiddo?

Nicole: Yeah, you're right. Like the, it does feel very loaded.

You, what comes to mind is like almost deep shamanic workers, something like go in and do a soul retrieval or, and not that those things are great. I know people who've benefited from things like that, but it does, it feels very heavy. And so that's one of the reasons why I say inner our kiddo, because I think it, it lightens it a little bit.

And really what it boils down to is that. As human beings, the thoughts, feelings, or behaviors we have as adults. They come from our experiences when we're kids, that's how we become who we are. That's how, the patterns of our behavior gets set in place. And so many of those experiences that we have that create that adult self

Are connected to experiences that we had when we were kids that made us think or feel something about ourselves in relationship to the world around us. And so when you look back, a lot of the times you can say, oh my gosh, when. For instance, when I was six years old in the first grade I was in the regular reading group and then I couldn't read the I'm still bitter about it.

I couldn't read the word lion because I couldn't read the word. I got demoted to a different reading group that was low.. And so that six year old, that was the very first initiation into my inner kiddo. My six year old, six year old inner kiddos saying, we're not smart.

We don't get it right. Which was reinforced multiple times over the years because I have alerted learning difference and prophets to process information differently. But that's six years. That first experience of being punished in a way for not being able to read a word, oh, she is still there.

So that is an inner kiddo of mine that got created that still whispers in my ear at 49 around things that I do in my life that require me to put myself out there.

Nancy: So it is just fascinating. It's like a duh, obviously the things we're going to have done as a, as the things that are going to have happened to us as a child are going to affect us growing up.

But I feel like the self-development world has said, especially one of the things that drives me the most crazy is in the differences between a therapist and a coach is they will say they being the coaches will say I will take you from now and move you forward. And those nasty therapists, they make you go into your past and pull stuff up and it's just yucky.

And so we don't want to do that. So we're just going to go. Forward and that just doesn't work

Nicole: . No. And what shaming language is that you did to abandon the first part of your life that you had before you met this daggum coach? That's telling you that none of that matters, and I get it.

When I started my own business, I was a money mindset coach for small business owners and entrepreneurs. And I. Really got taught a lot about mindset, tools and tricks and how not to focus on the past. We want to move you forward. We want to do this, want to do that. And I could not abide it for very long because I just saw that you know who we are, I'm trained with Brené Brown and her Dare to Lead processes.

So one of the things she says is who we are, is how we lead. Who we are came about by these experiences that we had. And then for a coach to say, we're going to ignore the first half of your life to help you be successful in the next chapter of it. It makes no sense to me whatsoever, and it doesn't work and it's dismissive and bypassing and gaslighting.

And I don't like it.

Nancy: talk more about that. That it's dismissive and bypassing and gaslighting.

Nicole: I'm being really dramatic here. (laughter)

Nancy: No please, I think we need to, I think we need to dramatize this, bring this up. Put an exclamation point on this?

Nicole: Exactly. Because I've been a therapist, I've been a coach.

That's why my clients now call me a business therapist because I'm somewhere in the middle and I've been in therapy. I get it. It's dismissive because you're not meeting. If you're a coach and there's a lot of h arm done by coaches in the industry. And I'm sorry to say it is true. In fact, there's a lot of coach abuse that happens, which again, sorry to say, but it's true.

And what happens is that when someone's asking you to dismiss the thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and patterns that you have in your life, where do you go from there? What you go, where you go from there is you begin to mimic what this person is telling you to do, to be who they're telling you to be, to buy into their one trick pony model to change, all these people.

So it's dismissive because it does not allow for you to be who you are to understand yourself in a new way. And it's gaslighting because they're trying, I'm being really dramatic here. It's gaslighting because it is. It's having the experience of someone saying that wasn't true for you. You just weren't looking at it the right way.

Nancy: Oh yes. I don't think that's dramatic at all because I think that happens all the freaking time.

Nicole: And you should have the same experience of all these clients I've worked with, who come from diverse backgrounds, different experiences, different motivations, different opportunities. You should be able to have the exact same outcome that they have because.

Let's ignore everything that happened to you up to this day. That is gaslighting.

Nancy: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I felt that's dramatic at all because I think that is, that just repeats the process of what I'm experiencing. Isn't accurate. So I need to go outside of myself and figure out what they're experiencing and then swallow that as my experience.

And then it just sends us down the spiral again and again,

Nicole: It doesn’t bring all the versions of you with you. And that's why I love the in our kiddo work is because when we do this work, we bring your six year old. We bring your eight year. We brought your 16 year old, who can be a real, hell on wheels bias, but she's really fantastic in a lot of areas in my life and others, not so much, but she gets to be a part of it.

So we are not bi- passing her. We are not leaving them behind. They're getting healed with us along the way. And I think that is a true aligned experience in our life as we are healing and becoming the next version of ourselves when no one gets left behind. Yes.

Nancy: Because I think also, part of where I got dinged on it or messed up with it, or didn't enjoy being the inner child work was when I was doing my training.

And one of the. Professors would be, was very much in the model of, he was a narcissist He said it himself. It wasn't like, yeah, I should have known red flag right there. But he said he would pride himself on being able to talk to someone and then be like, oh, it wasn't this bad, but your dad wears blue pants.

And so now you don't like any man that wears blue pants and it was just like those connect and there wasn't any, is that true for you? Or does that resonate with you? It was just like, let's make these bizarro connections that I'm, I think it's scary to think. I might be unconsciously acting out things that I'm not even aware of.

Nicole: Yeah. And we all are though. Yeah,

Nancy: exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And so rather than facing that, I have been. Then no, I just, I can't, I push it away rather than being in the past, few years I've started being like, let's look at that rather than running from it.

Nicole: Good. Hey you are in company, excuse me. I was in the therapist's office as a therapist.

With her talking to me about, so what have you done to work on your trauma? And I'm like, yeah, I don't really think what I had was trauma. Like I was a therapist in the therapist chair yelling, or I still did not think that my trauma was trauma. Cause he wants to look at any of that.

No fun. Who wants to go back and think about your seven year old? Scary. Yeah. So I get it. Yeah.

Nancy: So let's talk about trauma, the big T word cause. And cause a lot of people have this definition. If I wasn't sexually assaulted it, that's the one I hear the most. If I wasn't molested, I wasn't sexually assaulted.

So therefore I have no trauma that it has to be some big T trauma, but really these little and not that big T trauma is, Yes. And there are little T traumas that happen all the time. And there is them the comparison of my trauma isn't as big as your trauma. So therefore I don't need to discuss it.

Nicole: Yeah. Brené brown calls that comparative suffering. Yeah. Again, been there, so yeah, let's unpack that a little bit. We, as we, as a culture, we don't like to talk about our feelings a whole lot. And we certainly don't like to talk about things, like trauma. And so we give very, a very small wedge of attention to what we will allow to be trauma.

And so as a culture, we tend to look at trauma as those big T traumas, catastrophic illness, violent violence or maybe you got in a really dramatic accident or Natural disaster know, stuff like that. You have PTSD, like combat trauma. Those are really the only places that we allow for anyone to.

To trauma, you had childhood child abuse these things. Yeah. And even then we don't have a comfort level where we allow people to really address it and get the appropriate attention and treatment for it. So we've barely allowed anyone to define trauma from a big T standpoint. We certainly, aren't going to make a lot of room for people to look at it from a small T standpoint.

Yeah. And to be honest with you, a lot of the small T traumas are connected with the systems around us and need us to be traumatized in order for them to work. And which is big, but yeah,

Nancy: talk about unpacking something

Nicole: So we have been taught that if it's not, big explosive and like life-changing in a moment, then it's not trauma and that's just absolutely not true.

That is a type of thing. There are other types of trauma and one of the types of trauma there's many of them, and I'm not going to go into all of them right here. But one of the other ones is, as you said, small T or little T trauma. And that is those cumulative experiences that we were have when we're in our formative years, which is usually when we're kids that change how we see ourselves.

They change how we value ourselves. They change how we feel either, responsible for something. And we'd begin to take that information in and it changes us. It changes how we see us and it can be things like maybe, you got bullied at school and I'm not talking the extreme. Bullying, but maybe just like everyday this, we don't want to play with you, or like me, I grew up with a learning difference and I'm 49 back then. They did not. I'm like back in the olden days, it was severe or learning disabilities, that any, if anyone got any attention whatsoever for their learning difference. And so I went through 12 years of school.

Not being able to learn the way I was being taught and just feel every day, going to this place every day and feeling lost, that is a traumatic experience and not a lot of people would consider to be trauma moving around a lot and always being the new kid having, a parent who's working all the time and you don't have their attention the way that you need.

Form your identity or your sense of self from this adult. Who's important to you. We could go on and on about how these small T traumas can show up for us that are very different for us. And, but they change how we see ourselves. And so I always say that big T trauma explodes, small T trauma erodes, but they are both powerful enough to move mountains.

because we don't identify those experiences, like getting made fun of, and with your book report or w not having money for lunch every day, whatever it may be. Like, it can be different for you. Whatever that is, we don't look at it towards trauma and therefore we internalize it and think that was just me.

Or maybe I deserved it, or everybody has a bad experience at school. I'm no different. And it takes away our agency over those. And people just accept it. They're just like, yeah, it was just stuff that happened. And a lot of times we don't make those connections that your best friend, not being your best friend anymore.

When you were 13 and went to junior high school impacts the fact that you have a hard time with your partner. I do a lot of business work with the partner that you have in your business right now. It absolutely does. Yeah, it absolutely does. And so there's small T traumas add up and they're usually more, covert and hide under the surface a bit, if they're a little bit harder to upack and make those associations and understand those patterns, unless you're willing to go back and look at that seven year old and say, what was it about that experience that you're still feeling now?

Yeah, but again, we don't look at trauma in the way as a culture and as a society in ways that allow for people to work through this process. So when you said earlier, like I didn't look at it and want to look at it. We are not socialized to look at it.

Nancy: Yeah, totally not. And, but it's interesting, even that example you gave, I remember sitting in my therapist office and having her say that's a little T trauma and me being like oh no, and it was, it's a story I tell over and over that I went to college andI did not fit in.

It was a bad fit for me in and I was miserable and. And all the things I did in that time to, to try to fit in. And I didn't, and I was like swimming upstream. And that affected me, like in my ability to make friends as an adult, in my ability to talk about my college experience, because everyone else had an amazing college experience, but mine sucked and what's wrong with me.

And. But all of those things that I could say to you now, oh yeah. This major, legally affect my life. Even saying that I'm still embarrassed to say it was a little.

Nicole: Yeah. We've been socialized not to. Permission slips are a big thing permission to, feel it and I said earlier I did have, I had small T trauma.

I also had big T trauma. I had a parent who was very abusive, and even still sitting on that couch because it was a couch sitting on that couch. I still said I don't know that I would go so far as to say what happened to me was trauma. And she was like, Yes it is. And I was like, yeah, but she, it wasn't like, a good time to penny.

Did you watch that show?

Nancy: No. No.

Nicole: Okay. I'm dating myself again. It wasn't like, the afterschool special where you see the kid, abuse and neglect, like what, the way that people think about it. So I would say, and again, I was a therapist still saying this out loud, cause it had to do with me.

And I was like, I don't really know if it would. And I said, but all these other people who have all these terrible experiences, I see those as trauma. I just don't know if I get to have I get the claim, that word, like I deserve it to be that word, which is so messed up when you think about it. But it was so very true.

Cause I hadn't really allowed myself at that point. To see that those things were in fact big T and small T traumas, until I could really understand that I couldn't move through the process to heal it.

Nancy: Yeah. Because that was the, the irony is once I, once she said that to me, I think that's a little too trauma.

And then I came home and I shared that with my husband, which took everything I had because I'm sure I was sure he was going to be like, get over yourself. I then was like, Gave myself so much more grace and kindness around it, and then could see it playing out in my life. And when I would go into social situations would be like, you're not 22, you're 47.

Get it, we can do this, we are that we're not replaying this. And just that little permission to be like, this was a big deal. Helped so much, but if we don't give ourselves that this is a big deal. We're constantly minimizing. And then I would be the first to share with someone how much I hated, I had this demonizing of my college of the university, how much I hated it and it was miserable and I'll tell them, I would tell people not to go there.

But that was because of my own little T trauma that I'm like throwing up all over the world about

Nicole: exactly. Beause what does trauma do? It creates a pattern, right? And so the traumatizing experiences tip sometimes goes away or the traumatizing person goes away their circumstance. And what happens is we pick it up after that point and we continue to traumatize ourselves with the experience of it.

Like we pick it up at that point, we become the person playing out the pattern, the belief system around it. It becomes ours at that point. So no matter what the trauma is, that's a pattern that happens around trauma and that you can see play out in that. And that's how it works. But if we don't allow ourselves to see it as a trauma, then we miss those opportunities to see how those patterns.

Really happen. And I was at a retreat couple of years ago that I was asked to come be a part of, and my goodness, there were people in that room that were tentatively rolling out the fact that they had a sexual assault. And they're like, yeah, I guess maybe that was probably a small T traumas and I'm pulling my hair out.

It was a big T trauma and you can't even let yourself have that, oh my goodness. name it!

Nancy: And you think that is socialization.

Nicole: Yes. Mostly socialization. Yes. Yes. Because lifts, if you grew up in, you had an abusive parent, if you grew up in a system around religion, like these systems around us usually are the ones that are participating in some of those traumatizing events.

And so what benefit do they have? They have, let us experience them. Speak about them and get help with them. We get socialized too, childhood's rough, no one had a great childhood, just suck it up and deal with it. Or, works just like that corporations are evil. Like we just get socialized into just shut up and deal with it.

Nancy: Yeah. So how, because even as I'm talking, is that even if my monger, I call my mom the inner critic, my monger is saying. Oh, that was such a stupid example you gave, as someone has such a bigger trauma and you're giving your freaking example from college. Come on, like that's, it's insidious.

Nicole: Yeah, our inner critics are very loud.

And honestly, I always say you have a loud inner critic. It means that you probably had a lot of, Hey, I probably have more childhood trauma that you need to unpack. Because I really believe, I think our inner critic is there for a lot of these there's people who tell you, as a part of our nervous system, it's a part of us.

That's supposed to keep us alive and keep us on the straight and narrow as far as, our reptilian ancient nervous system and our, our. Prefrontal cortex, right? Yeah. It's really new part of our anatomy, old brainstem and system is really geared towards like that list. Scary. Don't do that.

What can I do to get you not to do that? Can I berate you internally until you don't do the thing? Like it's a truth thing. But I always say that I feel like our inner critic is connected to our inner kiddos and that it's a protector of them. And so that's why I always tell people, I'm like, don't shut down your inner critic.

Don't dismiss it. Don't say it, kill it, fire it, all the things we tell you to do get curious about it because it's usually protecting some inner kiddo that needs some attention.

Nancy: So how would you do that?

Nicole: This is what I do. I say. So when my inner critic starts to get up there, I'm like, okay. So I'm doing what I'm experiencing feels unsafe.

Right or it feels vulnerable. Like I just shared an experience and I'm comparing it to what other people might think trauma is. And so my inner critic is trying to put me out, get me back on track, show me not to do that thing anymore, or to protect the younger version of me. And so what I will say is I hear you, I'm listening.

And what oftentimes say all the time. Cause sometimes your inner critic's just being the pain in the ass, but they, 80% of the time, what will happen is the inner critic, voice will step aside in a younger voice version. It sounds. And I don't have multiple personality. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but that's what people are afraid about.

When I talk about this work, they're like, you're going to make me, oh, get the Sybill, from the seventies. No, that's not how it works. What will happen is a younger version of voice will say I, I, it feels like the Lunchroom, in school and the first day again, that didn't feel nice.

I didn't like that. Where do I fit? I don't feel like I belong somewhere. Like when you take a breath and you say, I hear you what do you need here? A lot of times I'll come up and then you can attend to it and say, oh, you're right. That did feel like the first day of school in the cafeteria.

When you can't find your place and you don't feel like people know you and you feel misunderstood. Like I totally get that. And I'm so sorry. And you're still. We're good. We're good. Yeah.

Nancy: Yeah, because that's, when I first, I talk about acknowledging your feelings, like that's, when you hear your inner critic talk, then, start acknowledging your feelings.

But the trick to that is really what you're saying is you have to go, it's not just what I'm feeling right now. Like you have to be willing to go a little under the surface because sometimes you might be thinking you're feeling angry or ashamed, but you're really sad or and fearful because the inner kiddo is sad and fearful from that example.

So it's a deeper work than just. Acknowledge your feelings, which people can do like mindlessly, if that, like they can name off their feeling mindlessly, but you ground into the feeling

Nicole: exactly. Why am I having these feelings? I can identify them, but like, why me? Yeah. Because you felt this before, and you felt this before in a place in time when you didn't have a lot of power and agency over your life.

And that seven year old still thinks that she doesn't have any power or that, not having, not having a seat at that table means something about her, and so when you can unpack that my 49 year old self knows that's not true. And that we're no longer there and that, perfectly fine, but she doesn't know that.

And so you have to catch it.

Nancy: Yeah, yeah. And that's a lot of times, one of, I remember a client of mine who said the most powerful thing I ever said to her was to remind herself that she's not eight years old, like to be like I'm 47. And she said she's cause I walk around like an eight year old all the time.

Absolutely.

Nicole: I can't tell you how many people were running their businesses from their 12 year old self, but actually every day, a lot are running the PTO meetings from their 12 year old. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. Or Instagramming from their 12 over their 15 year old self.

Nancy: Exactly. They're 15. I can totally see that.

Yeah. But it is such an unconscious. Thing that's playing there. And so that's what's so what has been interesting just in my own personal journey, professional, whatever personal now from professional to personal is the idea that Once I started tapping into it is about building a self loyalty. It is about acknowledging your feelings.

Then I couldn't ignore those inner kiddos anymore. Like they had to see them cause it wasn't just about thinking positive and mindset and being, all that bullshit. It was, a deeper work and that has made all the difference. But it's not easy and it's not comfortable and it's, but we spin our wheels on the thinking positive and the mindset stuff and the surface, we're just spinning our wheels at that surface level.

When dropping down into the, into what's really there is where it's.

Nicole: Yeah. And it's true. It's absolutely true what you're saying and it mindset work. It works right. It can, but you have to have done some work prior, at least in my belief is that you have to have done some work prior to allow yourself to know that there is a choice to be made.

If you have trauma operating, it is so unconscious. And it's so instantaneous you, when you think about polyvagal theory and the fact that we've decided we were safe or not, before we even put our foot all the way into our room, because our nervous system is working, at that level. How are you supposed to believe in law of attraction if you've already, if your nervous system, because of trauma has already made that up before you even have the choice to make the decision.

There's work that has to do before that. And I'm all about, claiming a positive outcome. I'm all about choosing to see something in a new light, but not at the expense of, bypassing my humanness and my emotions. And also, I don't want to tell myself that being sad.

Angry disappointed any of those things are bad things. They are a part of who we are and we get to experience all of them. So again, that we've been socialized, not to claim our full self in that includes mad, sad, glad, and when we go straight to the positive, my dear cousin, as a coach on transformational positivity, I love her.

I don't know how we both came from the same family, but I love her. And it's really all about she's like I had no interest in you and being Pollyanna. I have no interest in you being a human doormat. Positivity has nothing to do with that. If it's transformational, positivity around how you choose to see the world, because you've done your work to have agency and sovereignty over yourself.

And when did we get told to do that, right? Yeah. Let's just do that. So I love to hear what you're saying about the work that you've done, so that you can see the mindset stuff and the positivity, cause it is bullshit. It is absolute bullshit until you allow the other stuff to work first,

Nancy: because even the idea of saying reminding yourself, you're not eight years old, And you're 47 is if you haven't done the work around that, of what that really means, that's just a mindset shift that won't hold.

Nicole: Nope. We'll hold. Beause you have to trust for the stuff to work. All the law of attraction stuff you have to trust and believe that it is possible. And if you have trauma and you have a seven year old, just a wounded, no, that's not happening.

Nancy: Yeah, because you could go into the meeting and fake it, that you're a 47 year old, but that seven year old inside of you is still,

Nicole: she's calling bullshit on you and your critic gets really, your critic gets really pissed off

Nancy: .Yeah. That is that is I'm I, that I'm speechless, which doesn't happen very often. Cause I really want to it makes me so angry. The. How this industry is con is messing this up so much and the socialization piece because everyone, I, everyone I talk to is railing against this. That sucks.

That's extreme to say everyone I talked to, but a lot of people are railing against this. So even in your, so your business is you're working with helping people solve this stuff for their business. Do you. And so the people that are buying in to you have to be. Is there a level of convincing them that this is important?

Nicole: Yes and no. So I would say 80% of what I do when I speak, do you know a workshop work with clients, coaching? I don't really call it coaching, but whatever I don't know what it is. Transformational work. Is education. Okay. Because we have been so taught that what trauma is and what isn't.

And so a lot of it really does have to do with educating and shining a light on how this is different so that they can let go of the shame, guilt responsibility. The should to really allow for that even still their needs buy-in. Cause what they can see is they can see that their business has become unmanageable.

And I'm just using this as example that their life has become unmanageable, their businesses become unmanageable and no matter what they do to try and fix it, it's not quite working because. They don't have the full picture. They don't have the inner kiddo work. They haven't recognized that the experiences they had were trauma as an in fact, which requires a different lens to see it through.

They don't see that, they keep hiring employees, but they don't let them do their job. And so they end up with all the work still in their lap and a salary to cover. So they see the pain points if you want to call it that, but they still need some convincing that. It is that.

And so I'm constantly saying, that's because this was a trauma and not, a one-time experience or that was because your seven year old doesn't let his, is projecting onto this person or is triggered by this type of client or, if a constant unr aveling to help people really understand that it's not an overnight thing.

So the buy-in has to be continuous around it. It really does,

Nancy: but it would be to see the transformation in your business would be. I don't know what you're doing to me, Nicole, but I'll keep doing it because I'm seeing this transformation in my business.

Nicole: Yeah. Yep. Yep. It's you know, I've worked with people who have businesses or people who are CEOs, whomever it is when you can see that you have an inner board of directors who is making decisions about what you were doing in your career business, whatever.

And that the majority of them are under the age of 18. And that they are very concrete thinkers. When you can see that and you can attend to that piece of it and bring them on board or send them off to have a cracker or give them a job, like whatever that may be, then, everything can change.

Your situation, your relationship with your money can change. The relationship with your business can change your relationship with yourself changes. It's just very impactful, and one of the things that, I keep talking about Brené brown, cause I just finished up a cohort or dare to lead with people.

And so she's in my brain. But one of the things that she'll say is, what is the story I'm telling myself about this? And when we can do that, when we have these challenging experiences, it helps us train ourselves to see things differently and make different choices and feel a different way about ourselves.

And so it's very expansive. Once you can do this work.

Nancy: Cause I know for me, like in my business, I know I'll hire someone and then I eventually get, oh, the last time it happened, it was I held it off for longer than I normally do, but it would happen that I would end up abdicating my business to them.

So I would hire an assistant and then they would come in with some ideas and I would just be like, yeah, let's do that. Yeah, let's do that. And I would let go of the reins and let them take it. And then eventually would be mad at them. For taking the reins in the wrong direction or being too bossy or not letting me up my business, like I would turn it on them.

And I saw that happening years ago. Like I knew that's what I was doing, but it wasn't until I said to myself, wait a minute, this is a pattern from childhood that you would abdicate. You had to abdicate and get, you have to, and someone else, my dad was very domineering. He took over and that was great.

And he would tell me what to do. And it was really comfortable for me. That's a really comfortable place to be and really uncomfortable all at the same time. And so it wasn't until I really started unpacking that. And even more so than the recently when my last virtual assistant she had, she found a full-time job, so she left, but I noticed it was starting to happen.

Like I was starting to do that same pattern. And so it's just fascinating that it's more than just looking at, oh, there's the pattern. Let me change my mindset. But about, I got to go back there and unpack that and see where it starts to happen and be like, oh, there it is. You're abdicating right there.

Nicole: Was this myself with as much self-compassion as you can, right? Because it is a trauma pattern and patterns have to be disrupted and they have to be disrupted more than once. And we have to build out the new way of being right, building those new neuropathways like we've got this entrenched way of being.

It's not going to be easy or natural to move into this new way of being until awhile. And that's why unpacking this and having this knowledge about ourselves and being able to look at it in ways that are not as connected to shame and blame about this is what happened. This is the pattern it created.

This is how I've been showing up. This is how I want to show up. And these are. Kiddos. I need to get on board for that. This is a trauma I need to recognize and to do so with as much, self compassion and grace as you can, because that's, what's going to make all the difference.

Yeah. Like you just said that pattern, that you've noticed and recognized you're going to catch it sooner than next time, or you're going to put this stuff in place. So it doesn't end up being that way where you say, the final decision will always come to me, and we will discuss it, but I always get final say, and this is how we.

Operationalize that you tell them. I tell you what the final say is you tell me what you're going to do to enact, to make it happen. And then I say, yep, that works. We're on the same page. Let's go do it. Yeah. More steps, more work. And it, in the long run, it's easier.

Nancy: Yeah, because for the, it was annoying for the assistants.

Because they were like, wait a minute, you told me you changed the rules. You told me to do this. Then now all of a sudden you're mad at me like, which I could see that, but I couldn't see it. You know what I'm saying? I couldn't see the hook yeah. Where it was coming from. Yeah, and even, like the idea of when this is totally left field, but the idea of I'm always amazed.

My dad died a few years ago and the how your body can sense the trauma before you can. And so it'll be January and all start feeling goofy. And more memories of him will come in or that's when he died, and it will hit my body before it hits my mind of, oh yeah. That's what's, that's what we're feeling sad about.

Yeah,

Nicole: Our body knows. And when we ignore it or stuff, what, what happens? It shows up in our body first with illness or an injury, our bodies will not let us off the hook when it comes to processing stuff or paying attention to it. We ignore it, but our bodies are wise. And I don't know if this is a term that people call that I used to call it a sense memories because I would wake up and be in the most fallow mood and could not figure out like, what is up with this day.

And then eventually figure out, oh, that was the anniversary of my parents' divorce. I don't pay attention to those dates really. But my body's oh yeah, it's June 18th or whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of wisdom there

Nancy: there. Yeah. A ton of wisdom there. Okay. So what are your, so keeping in mind as we've lambasted the entire.

Personal growth industry.

Nicole: There's a lot of good folk up in there.

Nancy: So what are some of your tips for help for helping people find good people to work with?

Nicole: Yeah. Investigation there is a fair amount of personal development that you can do on your own. I really do believe it. Like getting into the awareness state then started to.

Get curious about where this might show up for you. There's things you can do when you're reading books, taking, watch it over or whatever that, at some point we need someone to hold space for us or hold the container for us to let go our defense as much as possible and begin to do some of that healing and transformational work.

You can't do that on your own as well, because you know how people say you can't read your own label when you're inside the jar, right? Yeah. And nor should you. If you're doing this work, you should not have to do this alone, right? Yeah. You deserve to have someone hold you and create, some safety for you to be able to relax a little bit.

People love the personal development world and I'm not opposed to what I've benefited from that a lot, but what allowed me to be able to benefit from some of it's because I had done some work in therapy first, right? And to be perfectly honest with you, a lot of people in the personal development world found one thing that worked for them and that's what they teach.

And they can't always attend to people who have something different than them, or, they were a marketer who went through some personal pain. They were someone who has a marketing background, who went through a personal transformation. And now to share that with everyone, we come to it, how we come to it.

So any aha moment I think is valuable, right? Yeah. I'm not crediting that, but I think that what comes next is who do you choose to work with? You know if you've had trauma, if you identified, Hey yeah, this was trauma. I really want you to be in, in capable hands. And so my go-to always is listen.

That is a childhood trauma. It, and I really feel like that if you should probably work with a therapist who's trauma informed. So maybe someone who maybe understands internal family systems, because that's a lot. Like this inner kiddo stuff and like the parts of yourself, that's very much like internal family systems.

And so I will tell people I'm like you deserve to have someone to support you through this. What is it that you're looking to get relief from? May not know what it is specifically, but how do you want to feel differently? Can you do this in person or do you need to do it virtually, like what works for you?

And do you need to use your insurance to help you pay for it? That's a whole different, category. And so it could, whether it's a therapist or whether it's a healer or, whether it could be a trauma. And I'm just going to say a trauma, at least the trauma informed coach. If you're going to work with a coach, please make sure that you interview them and get references and look at their work.

Make sure they've been around longer than six months. You understand that they are I trauma informed or trauma. Yeah, please. Yeah. You don't want anyone to just unpack, in your psyche, right? They can, a lot of harm can be done. So I would prefer that people start. If they've got trauma, start out with a therapist, if that's at all possible.

That's always my preference and go-to because I know they have a base skillset and licensing body, typically that's overseeing them. That will keep you safe. Like you'd be safer. Yeah. Afraid to interview the therapist. Don't be afraid to interview them and find out are you a good fit? Do you have, are you like-minded in some ways where I live here in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, it's a very conservative area is a very religious based area.

And so it is hard to find a therapist here. It's getting better, hard to find a therapist here that is not. Trained and has a platform that is very much sacred, and religious base. So if that's important to you, then you need to do some interviewing and, I always tell people I'm like people give more effort, trying on and finding the right pair of jeans and they do finding a therapist and they throw up their hands.

Say it didn't work. No, go to the next one. You deserve this. Try again. Give it three sessions before you decide, because we're not mind readers. We can't know what you need all in the 45 minute span of working with someone to get rid of minute as well. So that's a long answer to say that I really want you to.

If you can start with a trauma informed therapist, if you are recognizing that you have some kind of trauma.

Nancy: Yeah. I wanted a long answer because a lot of times, it was just like, oh, hop on psychology today, ended up blah, blah, blah. But I, but that idea of interviewing your therapist and paying attention to everything, how they respond to your emails, how they respond to the phone calls, if they are willing to be interviewed, if they're, if they're, all of that stuff just is.

Investigative work, as you said in, cause this is someone I'm going to be sharing my deepest innermost thoughts with, I need to click with them and not just abdicate to them that they know everything. And I know nothing. It needs to be a partnership.

Nicole: It absolutely needs to be a partnership. And if you keep finding fault with every single person, then, what is you, your inner critic and your resistance is railing its head and that's okay.

And you can call it out and say to the therapist, I'm having a lot of resistance, like I'm finding this thing and that thing, like it's okay. We're we don't allow ourselves to have honest conversations about this and that they are not God, they can't read your mind and that this is a partnership.

So the more honest and open you can be, which I know is hard. The better and easier it will be for them to partner with you in the healing process for you. That is, that works for you, not what worked for the client before them, or that works for everyone who read that book or whatever,

Nancy: yeah.

Thank you for giving all that information, because that's really helpful for people because I think therapy and this work just sounds, we make it somewhere. Scary and threatening than it actually is. And we need to own that. It's scary and threatening, yeah. So anything else you would want people to know? Before we close up.

Nicole: So I also want to say, I know some highly skilled coaches that are niched into one specific area that they've done a lot of work, but that this is their thing healing, the, The challenging relationship between mothers and daughters.

That's not, I just want to say, that's not to say that there aren't people in the transformational healing, coaching world that aren't doing really good work. I know people who are doing fantastic work and they have the opportunity to really help people with this one thing. Because.

They've really done all this research and they have extreme expertise in it in a way that maybe, a generalist, a social worker therapist, like myself could have a general idea of it, but not the very specific drill down knowledge, that this person has. Want to discount that there are people out there doing good work.

Just to call that out and also to say that, if you can avoid going to the yellow pages or making some kind of random choice when it comes to a therapist, the people, if you feel comfortable, your doctor, people, peers, friends, they probably have a line on a really good therapist already.

People don't talk about it. They probably do to allow your people in, to know where you're at and what you're looking for as well. Yes. And

Nancy: a lot of times the therapist, like if you're interviewing therapists, they may have, I am quick to say I don't do trauma. I am not, I don't have the inner family systems.

That is not something I've studied, but here are some names of people that I know are good. So a therapist will be able to refer you to people too, if you. That's another way of getting more information. Yeah.

Nicole: I refer people to therapists all the time. I'm like, this is not the work I do, you need to see a therapist first before we do this work together. Or you need to say the therapist while we're working on your business. Like I'm fine to partner with your therapist.

Nancy: Yeah. I appreciate, I'm glad you said that about the specific coach, coaches that are specifically in things I think.

Where I have found the danger with coaches is someone who is gone through a divorce and then said, I can heal all people in divorces and, or they've saved their marriage, quote unquote. And now they can heal all people and saving their marriage. And there needs to be more to their body of work than just their own personal trauma or.

Hardship that they've overcome, it needs to be, your additional work, and I've done additional work in Brené brown. You've done additional work in Brené Brown, having that continual education piece behind the work, I think is what's important is one of the factors that support.

I agree. Cool. No not to be slamming all coaches.

Nicole: No, but it's a highly unregulated population that really, I can wake up tomorrow morning and say, I'm a coach. It just says it's just the facts, so we have to do our due diligence around

Nancy: it. Yeah. Okay. Nicole, thank you for this awesome conversation.

I'm so glad that to jump into the, I call this jumping into the deep water. But I'm contributing to the cultural norming that this is a scary thing. Instead of just being like, this is life, we've all lived parts of our lives that have had little T traumas and we need to address them in order to keep moving forward.

It's really that simple.

Nicole: Yeah. Just claim them. We don't have to get rid of them. We just claim them, recognize them, invite them in. And sometimes we find them out the play and it's just, it's a part of who we are. Yeah. So it's a part of being human.

Nancy: Chatting with Nicole reminded me of the power of shining a light on our history with empathy and kindness.

It isn't just about looking at the bright, shiny, happy moments, but at the times that were challenging and painful. Here's what I know to be true. Looking at our past isn't about getting stuck there, engaging in blame or playing the victim. Looking at our past is about self loyalty. It's about owning where you came from and all the messiness that went with it.

It's about having kindness and empathy for our inner kiddo who did the best she could with what she had. And if we don't acknowledge her, she'll come out to play in our future. The bottom line is how can we heal our lives when we're ignoring huge parts of our past.

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