Beth Anne Fisher, PT, DPT and I have been thinking about holding a series of conversations for awhile now. Now is the time. In this episode we talk together about our lives, where we are now, and how it relates to the nervous system support, and retraining, we need.
As we continue the series you can reach out to us with questions or ponderings of your own. We'd love to research and explore further in alignment with what's also interesting for you.
Send us both (or either one) of us an email:
ellen@ellenwyomingdeloy.com or hello@bethannefisher.com
Enjoy the episode!
Beth Anne Fisher, PT, DPT and I have been thinking about holding a series of conversations for awhile now. Now is the time. In this episode we talk together about our lives, where we are now, and how it relates to the nervous system support, and retraining, we need.
As we continue the series you can reach out to us with questions or ponderings of your own. We'd love to research and explore further in alignment with what's also interesting for you.
Send us both (or either one) of us an email:
ellen@ellenwyomingdeloy.com or hello@bethannefisher.com
Enjoy the episode!
Hi, thanks for tuning in today. This is the first in a series of a few conversations that I'm having with my friend, bethanne Fisher. Bethanne is a doctor of physical therapy, but also so much more, and we are diving in because we're both really interested in talking about aspects of nervous system recovery and how we can learn more about it to increase her capacity to have resilience and regulation, and I hope you enjoy. Thank you so much. Hi, you're listening to the Inner Light with Ellen podcast. I'm your host, ellen Wyoming Deloy. I'm an executive coach, trainer and facilitator who helps people and teams get from where they are to where they want to be, through inquiry, reflective listening and by expanding what's possible along the way. On this show, I bring you conversations with leaders and wellness, spirituality, healing, mindfulness and more. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen and, if you love the show, leave a five star review so others can find us. If you want to learn more about my work and what I do, go to EllenWyomingDeloycom. Thanks, enjoy the episode. Hi everybody, it's Ellen and Bethanne.
Speaker 1:Bethanne do you want to introduce yourself really fast?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm Bethanne Fisher. I'm in Colorado. I'm a human who has a lot of curiosity about their own life. Right now, I'm not sure what else to say about it. I have a background in body work, I love writing, I'm on the cusp of doing some new things and I'm super curious right now about semantics, about the evolution of healthcare and about my own process actually of recovery, because I've had some things happen.
Speaker 1:So, bethanne, thank you for that introduction. I've been gone for the past 10 minutes because I pause this, because my child is having a meltdown and I'm going to talk about why am I here. I'm here for my own sensory sematic support, to connect in partnership with somebody that is really good at talking about these kinds of things, and so you and I talked a few weeks ago. Anyway, we've both had really interesting years 2023, in different ways, but, strikingly, when we hadn't talked for like 10 or 11 months and we connected, we were both connecting on some of the same points, which I thought was so fascinating.
Speaker 1:I have always been interested in nervous system support. I'm like kind of through the lens of recuperating. I always feel weird saying childhood trauma, because I didn't have what I think people tend to think of as a traumatic childhood, but I had an emotionally violent childhood and I think that the effect of the emotional intensity, explosions and anger have really, in my life now, wired me in a way that I have a hard time regulating around emotional intensity and then I have a hard time being good when I'm in emotional intensity, not being good, but I have a hard time managing myself in emotional intensity. I don't have great, I've learned a lot of tools and skills. But also this year has been especially taxing and so I have just felt myself unravel a little bit this year. And the example of I'm saying this more for the listener than for Beth Ann, because Beth Ann knows that I just left and I came back and my daughter's having a bit of a meltdown and I'm like she literally has a meltdown as soon as I leave. So because now I have to go attend and what I ended up just doing was talking to my husband and being like hey, and he's good, and we know that she does this, and he's talking to her right now and I can hear them vaguely in the next room working through whatever she needs help with.
Speaker 1:But also just my sheer frustration that so much is anchored to me. The kids anchor to me for emotional stability and I do really well with that, like 99% of the time. But also I'm like how much are they learning to anchor for themselves when I'm not present? And that's the big thing that I'm sort of recognizing now and they're seven and 10. My son is much more self-managing, I would say in a positive way, for his own self, and he does need help from time to time, like anyone does, and we do our best to help him. My daughter, she's very, very intense emotionally, kind of big feelings, and so, yeah, it's a lot.
Speaker 1:And so this is all kind of spinning together in a long, tangled story of my own ability to manage myself and feeling that when I'm not well managed, if I'm the anchor for my family so much like A is that even appropriate? B is it? Am I exacerbating the situation when I'm not perfect? Right, quote, unquote perfect, and I'm not trying to be perfect, but I'm just. There's a part of me that's like if I could be regulated all the time, I could, just everything would be great and stable. But it's so much to ask one person to be the regulator for the family, all the humans.
Speaker 1:All the humans in this space.
Speaker 2:I'm wondering if I can pop in and ask a question. Yeah, I'm like what does it look like for you to be regulated, like if you for you to be regulated all the time?
Speaker 1:I mean, I'm not because I know it's not flatline.
Speaker 2:You know, like I, I always used to tell my patients like it's not flatlining in the middle, the happy medium, because that means we're not experiencing life, right. Right, I'm just curious to know for you, like, what does that look like or feel like, or how do you sense that you're in a place of regulation?
Speaker 1:When I'm in regulation, I'm calm and I feel very steady and I'm not buffeted by the winds that blow by Right, it's a really grounded place and I can take things a lot more lightly than seriously. I can laugh at stuff a lot faster, which sometimes is irritating to other people because they're like having their own moment and I'm like this is kind of hilarious, right, like that we're all spinning about this and it's not that important. When I'm really grounded, I'm like that and I think I've been like that a lot more in my life in the past five or eight years, five years this year it kind of fell apart, so I'm like the highlight was going what happened that I don't have that resilience this year? Right, a lot, and I think you're right. Yeah, we're not always regulated. That should not be anyone's goal, right, because we have to experience life and life is experiencing those ups and those downs, and I think that the gift is learning the skills to come back eventually, right?
Speaker 1:So you said a couple of things. You said patience. I don't know if you introduced yourself also as a physical therapist. So a little bit more on you and then also your story, because your story is similar but very different.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I still have so many questions, but we'll stop for a minute on that. Okay, just more backgrounds Ask the question. Yeah, so I have a 20 plus year history as a physical therapist in a variety of backgrounds. I started out in the hospital and did sports medicine for a year early on and was like I don't know if this is my cup of tea. So I went back to the hospital and did intensive care unit physical therapy thereafter for about 15 years and then I took a break because there was a burnout cycle that I don't know how to put it Like in my career as a healthcare provider.
Speaker 2:As a PT, I just kept burning out and this leads up to, I think, a little bit more of the present, which recently I had a private practice that I created in women's pelvic health and I've run that for the last five years as a solo practitioner until this late July, early August, when the way we've described this in brain retraining is I had my perfect storm. My body essentially fell apart, and that was sort of the perfect storm that led me to the wake up call of needing to create some bigger change in my life, which I'm in the midst of right now. I hesitate to really give specific symptoms and things like that, because sometimes people go on and they're like oh, what did you do? I need to do, you know. I don't want to get into that, except to say that I did a lot of testing and I'm we're still doing some, but essentially the anatomy in my body is all fine. All my anatomy is good. It's the circuitry that's a problem. The way that things are communicating to each other is the real issue at this point.
Speaker 1:I make a note really quickly and I want you to talk about this because you said it to me earlier. Yeah, when you were telling me a few weeks ago yeah, your anatomy is fine and it's the circuitry, but you have some experience to be able to put those clues together, because I think a lot of people might be going to practitioners going, we can't find anything wrong. Yeah, say something about that, because I literally have heard from two other people in the past two weeks through other avenues and I was like I don't want to go down the rabbit hole because I don't have enough information, but I want to send them this episode when it's done, so that they might have a hint of maybe they should also investigate this.
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah, yeah, I will say that I've had the fortunate that's a weird word. I've been fortunate in my career to work with a lot of different kinds of people who have a lot of issues going on, and prior to the office that I was just in, I was sharing with a practitioner who saw a lot of folks with syndromey kinds of things. What I mean by that is things that don't have a clear diagnostic indicator. They keep getting tests and everything's normal. People are trying to not say that it's in their head, but that's the message they get and nobody understands what's happening. I think that I'm just going to take a breath, because there's 12 different ways that I could talk about this and every time it comes out it comes out differently. There's this big group of things that I was watching with the patients that were being sent to me from this other practitioner treating a lot of mysterious illness kinds of things. I kind of had a front receipt for a while until I was on the stage myself experiencing it, to know pretty quickly that what was going on with me looked like, smelled like and felt like what a lot of these other folks were experiencing and I was able to kind of jump in and start tending to myself in a way that looked at what's happening with my circuitry, because we don't have a lot of great tests per se. I mean there are electro diagnostic tests for the brain and for the heart and for some different organs. But once you clear, kind of the major scary ones, then you start down this path of well, okay, like I have real symptoms, and that's what I would say to anyone like if you are identifying with this, you have real symptoms. They're not fake, they're not made up in your head, they're not, they're real. But they don't have any clinical medical indicators tied to them to help you have a way to know how to treat them. And that's the tricky part People who are told that nobody knows what's wrong with you. There's a sort of despair with that, because when we know what's wrong we can treat it.
Speaker 2:The further I got, though, down the path of knowing what wasn't wrong, ie, my anatomy is okay and my circuitry is not. The circuitry piece came from myself. Because of this prior knowledge and observation and experience with these other patients, like I know what's wrong with my circuitry, very early on I got myself into a nervous system retraining program that I'm still very much in the midst of right now, and I thought you know what this is the empowered path. I know what to do here, and we'll see how far this takes me as we keep working up other things, but I started and continue to work at least an hour and a half a day on circuitry issues, and I'm getting a lot better. So the better I get, the further I go. The longer I go without solid diagnoses actually, the better I feel about not having a diagnosis, because I know what I'm doing for myself and I can see that it's working. I don't do you have any other questions about that.
Speaker 1:in particular, though, no, that was it. Cause it's this sort of the thing you mentioned made me think, cause I heard someone was telling me that they recently got diagnosed with POTS, and I know that POTS is one of these sort of constellations of symptoms that you can try to treat but it doesn't respond until maybe some people do have it respond to whatever the treatment is cause. That's the functional diagnosis and it's also potentially something that could be supported through nervous system retraining, right. So when we say nervous, I think we should define that really quickly.
Speaker 2:Sure yeah, it means different things to different people.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm hesitant to say what program I'm using in particular, just because I'm an affiliate and I don't want to like you know, I do like the program I'm doing.
Speaker 1:but so the way that I think of it right now, cause it's the simple, simple way that I'm approaching it. I don't have the same depth of knowledge as Beth Ann. I'm more of a. I feel like I'm this casual observer who stumbles into conversations with experts often enough where I've been Awesome.
Speaker 1:And I'm like thank God you heard that and I heard it finally. But like, polyvagal Theory has really been helpful for me and the book Anchored by Deb Dana is a great intro into that and it's so good. It's so good If you feel like your circusery around, how you respond to emotional stress, or maybe your body actually is going into sort of a collapse. Maybe your blood pressure is really low and you don't know why. Maybe you are super fatigued, maybe there are many reasons that this could be happening. But, similar to you, I am anatomically very healthy Diet. I don't sleep enough, I know that's a real thing.
Speaker 1:But the responses I have to old triggers, which are kind of a lightened up because of my unraveling a little bit this year, like I've mentioned this before somewhere, but like male footsteps walking up the stairs, my heart rate if I'm in a really kind of on my own place and then I hear that suddenly, even if it's my husband, who's safe and warm and welcoming and sanctuary and all the things, my heart rate will rise, then I will start to get short of breath.
Speaker 1:I'm having a fight or flight response because my father was extremely explosive as a human being, very not able to control his emotions, very angry and brooding or depressed, often in cycles through my life, and so I still also feel the love that I want to have the safety that I could have with him when I was very young. But it's been really switched over the past many number of years, and so I was like, oh, this is my fight and that's what kind of queued it up for me. I was like this is a fighter flight response that I have a very difficult time coming back down from, when it's not real, and that's what sent me down the. I want to go learn about how to support what that is, and the way I learned about it was through polyvagal theory.
Speaker 2:Yeah, beautiful, and I think that example is very illustrative. So one thing you learn about me I'm a little more reflective than on the fly. I'm like, oh, now I've got the answer. But what you just described about the footsteps, your brain is making an association with information that you're receiving and it's a negative association. And as humans, for survival's sake, we have a negativity bias. Those associations become very strong very quick because it will keep us safe.
Speaker 2:And what brain retraining? At the end of the day? My simple way of putting it is it's trying to create new associations. It's trying to break the old ones and create new ones. And some people might say like, oh well, I'm not going to be safe anymore. But the key is what you just said. Even if it's my husband, I feel unsafe because of this painful past learning, this prior association. So brain retraining goes in through a kind. There's a lot of programs, whatever we can get in touch with me, I can tell you programs.
Speaker 2:But at the end of the day you're creating positive associations, because the negative associations perpetuate survival, stress, and I know you mentioned you were having trouble like, do I call it childhood trauma? Do I call it I actually like a term that Irene Lyon uses, who's a nervous system expert, and she calls it stuck survival stress. There's survival stress. It's a little bit more of a palatable term and I think I would never want to diminish anyone who's had some real childhood trauma stuff. But we all actually have stuff and that's been a part of my challenge at this point personally is I've missed out on recognizing there's a lot for me to actually need to work with because, like you, there are certainly things in my childhood but I wouldn't call them, like you know, the worst trauma kind of childhood experiences, but I definitely have stuck survival stress from childhood.
Speaker 2:So when we go in and do the rewiring and the associate brain brain association rewiring with different events, we create a different chemistry. So in these circles we talk about can chemistry versus dose chemistry and can chemistry is associated with the survival stress running the catecholamines, the adrenaline and the norepinephrine, and the more we have those running in the system, perpetuating cortisol and all these things, the more we reinforce the negative associations. When we do brain retraining we're working on an elevated emotional state, this is like. So people will have a million questions and that's fine. This is so an overview, but we're trying to teach our brain dose, chemistry secretion in the body, which is dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and orphans, and that creates a different bath, so to speak, in the body for the cells to get a different experience so that they can detoxify, so that they can heal, so that they can receive and release the things that we need our body to do, and I think one of the most thank you for that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I want to say like two things about that One. I really love stuck survival stress as a terminology because it can be along the gamut and I also think that there are kids who are more and less sensitive. I do believe children are more sensitive than adults, period, and there are some who are highly sensitive and some who kind of like roll with the go, with the flow and they're kind of like unfazed by many things. And so the stuck survival stress in a really highly sensitive child could have been just a car accident outside and it really shocked them and it got stuck and it had nothing to do with their family or their upbringing. But there's a sound association with being very scared. That didn't get cleared right To the situations where you grow up in an emotionally explosive household and that is constantly bathing you in stress chemicals, which would be a very apt way of describing a significant part of my childhood, even if the explosions were 15 to 20% of the time and 80% felt like waiting for the shoe to drop. Often, you know, even if it was peaceful at the moment, if you did one misstep something could go off, and so that was sort of like my experience. I really like stuck survival stress as a new term. So thank you so much. And then I really appreciate you outlining the chemicals and the endorphins and the things that are happening, because it made me remember through polyvagal theory, and this is why the brain retraining helps when you're giving your body different chemicals to absorb at the cellular level.
Speaker 1:80% of the information that informs our way of being in the world is coming through the body. 20% is coming through the mind and cognitive thing. So this is a very bottom up strategy, is what you'll hear a lot. Bottom up is body oriented, kind of helping to rewire. Top down strategies are like when you go to cognitive behavioral therapy, talk therapy, analytical stuff, where you're working from the mind down, and I think they can both be really helpful. They both have a place. The top down strategies help the intellectual person who likes to chew on stuff understand what's happening.
Speaker 1:I need a lot of that. And the bottom up strategies, the actual implementation and doing through physical, physical work, is what helps release the way the mind has been thinking, because if we're bathing our body, that's a bottom up strategy in the serotonin and dopamine and the activities that create more of that in our system that's signaling our mind also in a way to be like let's go find the calm stories to spin inside of. But if your mind is like mine, you'll be like but wait, I have to still be on hyper vigilance alert and there's a bit of a. That's why we need the brain retraining. We need to also help unhook the thoughts. We need both and that's that's a lot of the work I've been doing. Like the footsteps analogy. When I had on a ha moment, I heard them and I was like oh I'm now I can feel my body being sort of overstimulated and I paused because I knew a technique to bring myself back down to the present moment, to anchor and to connect. And then I went through a storytelling of it's okay.
Speaker 1:Thank you for protecting me when I was young. I am safe now. Just affirmations of safety on a cognitive level. While I did some breath work and meditation kind of mindfulness work for the body supports but also physical stuff can help to like it's all these things that you could do physically. Yoga is great stuff with a little bit of weight and movement, but I'll stop there Cause you just made me think about all those ways.
Speaker 1:but I wanted to say 80% is from the body going up to the brain, and so really supporting and experiencing how to do things physically and not just think through it is extremely powerful.
Speaker 2:And I would and what you're talking about too. So a lot of people have probably heard this word somatics. Like what is somatics? I remember when I first heard it, like 15 years ago, I was like what is this magical thing? You know? I thought it was like an energy modality or something and I didn't know. But recently, in my own process, I've had my understanding of somatics as someone who is studying deeply and somatic, experiencing as a modality. I'm a student of that, I'm learning.
Speaker 2:You know I've always talked about oh, I need to learn to trust my body, and that's not untrue. I mean that not to be redundant. That is true, we need to learn to trust our body. But what I realized in a moment about three months ago was that my body needs to learn to trust me. It's nuanced, but it's a bottom up idea. My body has always been true and right and good. The body keeps the score.
Speaker 2:As Bessel van der Kolk's lovely book talks about. The body doesn't forget things. The brain can latch on to certain things or get over, identified with thoughts that aren't true, and can loop and ruminate and do these things. And I'm not. I'm not a fan of vilifying the brain. I don't think anyone is, but that's what happens sometimes in the process. Oh, my brain. It's so wrong, you know, but we do over identify with thoughts.
Speaker 2:And so this flip for me from I need to trust my body to I need to show my body that I, my brain, is a trustworthy source of information, I think is a really important twist in the understanding of somatics. Because what you're doing with those bottom up strategies then, or bottom up practices breathwork, movement, very especially slow movement, being very aware in the present moment of what's happening in your environment we call that neuroception noticing cues of safety in the environment versus cues of threat, and being really intentional about noticing the safety that's how your body learns to trust you again. And I'm still unpacking that and I'm going to write about that on Substax soon. But, yeah, that's a really important concept, at least for me right now. Thank you.
Speaker 1:That is again mirroring some thoughts that I've had swimming in my mind, probably since we spoke a couple of weeks ago Through mindfulness, and I feel like the best way to say this is that there are a number of minds happening.
Speaker 1:In my own experience, I have like my spirit mind, which I feel like is the greater sense of myself, and I do believe that the energy of me will continue once my physical body is gone. And so there's that mind that if I'm in a trans-like place I can have access to. It's this very greater consciousness, presence, me. And then there's my me that I am mostly living inside of. It's very formed and informed by ego and my nurture and nature, environmental spaces and how, my affective speech, all the ways that I've become Ellen in this lifetime. That's that mind. And then there's my body mind, kind of what you're talking about, and my body mind is very primal, it's very animal. I have joked with one of my clients that it's like the puppy of ourselves that just needs some nurturing and attention and love. Right, and I was maybe taking a shower, maybe on a walk, I don't remember where I was, but I had this notion that I was like wow, I have not allowed my body mind to be heard for quite awhile. There's like, and I think that's kind of typical maybe in society. We're very cerebral. You know we're all about thought, partnership and strategy and organizing and planning, and these are all very mental faculties, like the thinking mind. But I need my thinking mind to be in service, subservient to my spiritual mind and my body mind, but my thinking mind, for most of my life, has been the one who decided to be in charge. It's like I'm the project manager, so I'm also the CEO, and really it's more like I need my mental mind to be the project manager that is guided by the CEO of my spirit and maybe the VP of my body. Right, there's a three part partnership to my own self and I've just been implementing this a little bit over the past week, like listening to my body a little bit better about when she needs to go for a walk, when she's thirsty, just very simple queuing and signals, things that I have learned.
Speaker 1:You know, when you're a student and you're in grad school, like this was ages ago, but work habits, right, that just kind of persist, like I just got to push through and I'm like no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's the mind taking over the body and the body getting unhealthy and the body getting stuck, staying stuck in different types of layered on at this point right, survival stress. There are so many reasons we'll push through things, so many beliefs that anchor us into pushing through, and so I just I'm waxing proactively too long here, but the the my. I've been thinking now about how my, my thinking mind needs to be in service of, like, my higher self as well as my physical self. And then, when I thought about, I have one more thought, sorry, I love it.
Speaker 2:I thought about it that way.
Speaker 1:I realized how much my body is a gift of this experience on earth, and it really is the earth, right, like our bodies are the food that we eat, the water we drink, what we put into them, the energy of how we think about ourselves, as well, informs the cellular structure. We're a living thing, but we're kind of like I feel like I'm silly. It's like I'm in a rental car right. My body's on rent for, like, hopefully, about a you know, 80 to 100 years, and I got a treat at well, so it does the things that it was made to be able to do to carry me on. Whatever it is I'm learning in this lifetime, that expansion of the higher self, I guess. I mean, we're hearing a lot of my worldview right now.
Speaker 1:Right, this is a lot of how I think about things, and I was like, oh, like I take really good care of Airbnb's, like when I go to them, I like really want to leave them nice. I want a good review, you know, so that people let me go stay at their other Airbnb next time. I want to go on vacation, right, and it's like I want to give my body a good review. I want to love it how it is and it's, you know, it's definitely changing. It's in its 40s and it's like softer and curvier and squishier and just does not do what it used to do. And I realized how much I would be like hard on myself as if I were failing because of some things, as opposed to just going hey, you just need something different this decade. We're going to roll with it, I'm going to take care of you, I'm going to love you. You're such a good rental vehicle. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:It's such a good metaphor, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it's something we can relate to because we don't have a lot of good metaphors, models, you know, broad stroke of I don't know information, so to speak, in our population, or people demonstrating this way of living from a body-centered perspective. I mean, there's a lot of discussion about this and maybe I feel like there's more discussion about it because of the circles I'm in, but we're a very mind-centric, mind-as-ceo, the way you put it. I like that culture and I'll admit too like for me personally, because of stuck survival stress, it, at least for a while, was a much safer place to live. In my mind, body was scary, 100%, and body is.
Speaker 2:There's a big debate about this going on right now too, and I'm working with a psychotherapy friend on some things, but trauma. Forgive me for those who might feel that this is a little bit whatever outside the box, but trauma is a physiology that lives in the body. It's not solely. It's always been relegated to the scope of practice in the realm of the psychotherapist, but I can tell you, as a psychotherapist, I've been working with trauma and people who have trauma for over 20 years and I guarantee you that every body worker on earth has been doing the same thing. Now there's a lot of things about like who's this, that to deal with and in what ways and whatever, and I don't want to get into that right now. But trauma is a physiology in the body and if that's running and your body has a difficult time like you talked about your experience of re-centering or using mindfulness around the footsteps and reframing what was happening with that, that's an awareness concept of being in the present moment. The present moment is safe, but the challenge with trauma is it keeps us out of the present moment and we're either spinning about the past or forecasting about the future so that we can keep ourselves safe in the future. It keeps us out of the present moment and so getting into the body gets us into the present moment or, from a bottom up, listening to our body, really listening, not just like the fancy self-care concepts that I know are really common, but that whole idea around getting into the present moment is that's where the trauma is not and that's on some level.
Speaker 2:I'm not simplifying trauma healing, but that is a part of how we heal. That is, by being in the present moment. We're absolutely not talking about if you don't have food to eat, shelter or those basic needs absolutely need to be met first, a place that is free of the potential of harm to your body, to your person. This is not the conversation for that, when your survival mechanisms should be instinctively followed. That is absolutely true. I think that what we're maybe talking about here is when that survival stress mechanism gets stuck and it's running all the time past that point, when you're in a present place where that's not your reality anymore and you have shelter, you have food, you have social connection, and support is also key here. And yeah, so if you don't have those things, this is not a conversation for that. So, thank you.
Speaker 1:There's also not a perfection about this or a way to be or should be. I want to talk about the being where you are and working with what you have and identifying for yourself what your goals are, not by someone telling you it should be this or should be that my goals identified this year, or because I could feel myself becoming un I think you said it. Similarly. It's like is it fortunate that this happened? Not fortunate, we had to. We went through something. We realized there was an accumulation of stuck survival stress or acute survival stress In my case this year. That's what really triggered everything was the acute survival stress of managing new stuff in our family's life that was making me lose a lot of sleep and then so kind of perpetuating a lot of patterns and behaviors that were not supportive and I felt myself unraveling, which is what really dove me down to a polyvagal, neuroscience oriented yoga teacher training program for more of those physical somatic tools and education, as well as learning about polyvagal theory deeper.
Speaker 1:With the book Anchored by Deb Dana and as I've been able to come out of my complete feeling of I went through, I felt feeling like I was just incapable of functioning for a couple of months there, and as I'm aware that I'm kind of emerging from that. I have goals for myself that I've set not to be perfect but to kind of go at this pace and also for me to not know exactly where it's going. I don't have a solid. This is interesting because me, most of my life is a very goal oriented person, of just being like I know I don't really know what I'm doing or where it's going, but I'm here to experience the alleviation of some suffering that I'm experiencing. And that's about where I'm at, step by step, day by day, backsliding a little bit half the time and then figuring out how to move forward. Working with you, Bethanne, is a strategy for me of becoming more present, because conversations like this are very helpful and therapeutic for me, co-regulating for me. So I really thank you for these opportunities.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I love that co-regulating. For people who may not know what co-regulation is, is this idea that we're wired for social connection and not just like social, like going out for drinks or whatever a party, like conversation, noticing what's happening with one another's faces, connecting through smile, feeling the warmth and safety of another human. That is in and of itself a healing and regulating to our own nervous system because we have these things called mirror neurons. And so, ellen, you know, smiling at me or offering compassion to me allows me to give it to myself on a certain level, and that's kind of an idea around co-regulation, which Deb Dana also talks a lot about and many others do too Stephen Porges's work.
Speaker 2:But one thing you touched on that is a big goal for me, since we're talking about that, is the idea of capacity. So I do brain retraining and I do vagal toning and I do somatics to increase my nervous system's capacity to hold what's happening in the moment. That for me is huge. So so much of my life I've not been able to hold you gave a great example the uncertainty of what's going to happen next or not. And for me to learn to hold uncertainty. You know, in the past uncertainty was scary and terrifying, and for good reason, like if I didn't worry about something. And worry is a mechanism for trying to create the illusion of certainty in the future and the operation that you know that you're going to handle it.
Speaker 2:Right, but it's releasing a lot of the can, the unhelpful negativity, bias chemistry, and it's actually giving us a dopamine hit. I just learned this recently too. Dopamine gives us a dopamine hit because it keeps us ruminating in that cycle of creating a false sense of certainty that helps us to feel better for the moment, but then five minutes later we start doing it again. Did you know that? I didn't know that.
Speaker 1:No, but that makes a lot of sense and it kind of keeps you petually getting a hit in the canned sort of neurochemistry, as opposed to the dopamine kind of supporting the connectivity of you and I having, like I'm sure oxytocin is happening because you are having a deep conversation and I, like that you said I mean I'm going to you made me think about it's like it's being social. You were worried for socialization, not just going out to drinks and having dinner, which actually can be perfect also, absolutely.
Speaker 1:It also doesn't have to be super deep, but I think the key piece here is the social connectivity where you're seeing and being seen by somebody else. Fully Right, that's it. You're seeing and have heard. There's a disconnect, right. True connection is around, like seeing and being seen, hearing and being heard, feeling and being felt. If that's where you want to go, right, and we're not always able to do that, we're not able to always offer that for somebody else also, and that's okay, and so sometimes maybe someone else just does that for you in those moments, and then vice versa, sometimes you just get to hold the space for someone else who just needs some of that sanctuary with one another, and so these are the ways of connection that I was thinking of that can probably create dopamine in the direction that helps us have in the positive, the positive ways. Yeah, let's get that back toAnthony A dustar. Yeah, permission is what I was realizing was the other thing that you made me think of.
Speaker 1:There are some people who wouldn't have permission to be seen, who don't have permission to let themselves receive something from somebody else because they're in this perpetual energy out. It's my job to do and not my job to. I don't deserve sometimes, or it's not right, it's not how my family does it. I would be going against the norm. It's selfish. There are lots of things.
Speaker 1:These are things I hear very often in coaching, right when I'm working with somebody around the ability to have different things in their life that they would like at times, and so I'm curious what's your gift thoughts on that for someone experiencing that right now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the permission piece is tricky and I can relate from my past work as a pelvic health PT with a lot of especially the new mothers yes, you know I, like you, have this little baby and they are your worlds that they literally are especially at that very new, young, newborn, vulnerable stage and how you know, and moms would come in and you know, working on postpartum challenges they're having with physical therapy and we're trying to negotiate a little bit of how do I take two minutes, even two minutes away from I mean I take the baby to the bathroom, like I don't even have time to go to the bathroom by myself. They don't feel that permission to still be their own person for any length of time. That's such a good question and so, yeah, I'm not good on the spot with that one.
Speaker 1:How do we actually just?
Speaker 2:feel the permission.
Speaker 1:You reminded me of something that, because you brought the parenting example in, okay.
Speaker 1:And I was like oh yeah, I've had to like just tell myself, yeah, that I have to do this, even though it feels counterintuitive to my body, which just wants to stay. And the very example of you and I trying to start this conversation this morning, I can hear my daughter having a meltdown. I know that I help emotionally co regulate her very often. Yeah, my husband was not doing the same co regulation job that I was doing beforehand, so I was frustrated. And now I can hear them chattering happily like, right, we're 45 minutes past that moment, everything's fine, everything's resettled, everybody is existing in reality.
Speaker 1:But it was very hard for me. When I left momentarily, I thought about you know, I should probably just reschedule with Bethanne, even though I know I need this. This is literally why I wanted to have these conversations with you is because I need them. They are good for me. They help my brain be active in a way that's productive and not rippinating or perseverating on stuff, and they help me feel physically connected outside of the bubble that is my life sometimes, which is sometimes very small because of the young children, even though they're not babies anymore, right, and my strategy is there's like this little bit of a speed bump is the way that I visualize it, and it might be different if you're the parent of a newborn. A mountain, different speed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, different speed bump, but I have to get myself over the speed bump and go. You know what? I just have to let this moment pass and know that I'm not going to fix it. Everyone is actually physically safe. Their needs are met, even if they're emotionally having a moment. I need to go take care of myself Because I have seen me in depletion and me in depletion is a non function.
Speaker 1:It's like so non functional to my normal level of feeling good and my functionality. I have to recharge my batteries or I'm going to be a dead battery, right. And so, coming in here like I can feel myself at 50% battery charge now, versus the 25% I was at probably when we started, versus if I had canceled with you and stayed, I'd probably be at 10% now. So it's just this like this way maybe it's visualizing a battery within us. We do need recharging and even if you don't want to give yourself permission to recharge, just tell yourself that you functionally need it and then build in the practice like fake it till you make it a little bit. Yeah, because you do need it and you're.
Speaker 1:If you're the person who is struggling with feeling selfish about taking time for yourself, you are not selfish. Exactly the person who is not selfish, right? The person who is just not thinking about it and thinking that this is irrelevant, like maybe that's somebody else and we're just not talking to that person right now. If you're worried about being selfish for taking time for yourself at this point in time, you probably need it and you need to do a little practice of fake it till you make it to have some capacity to build up your reserves again, so that you know and feel like it'll be interesting. I like the. I like the concept of building the capacity of our nervous system to handle more. Yeah, because life is uncertain and it moves and there's wind and rain and storms and hurricanes and elections and all the stuff that. And how do we increase our capacity? Because I hear capacity for resilience, capacity to come back to ourselves and and be home.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I just want to be home.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and this goes back to an earlier point which maybe could be a future conversation but one of the things I'm working with is the capacity to hold bigger emotions and still be regulated.
Speaker 1:Is it?
Speaker 2:possible to be angry and still be in a place of regulation? Is it possible to be really sad and grieving and allow some diss? You know I don't want to create dysregulation as a bad word, but getting ourselves back into that zone of more I forget what I'd like to call it kind of the zone where the capacity is the best I'm not remembering the word right now and I took down my sheet. But can we hold big emotions?
Speaker 2:That's a challenge that I have had in my life persistently, and it's it creates a big stress response for me to not be able to hold the bigger emotions in myself and others. And so this idea of capacity and building capacity is so important, not just for that, but it's also important for me in this moment because capacity also allows me to hold my symptoms. Symptoms are not what we think they are all the time, and especially when we're experiencing some mystery illness kinds of things and I don't want to get deep into a new subject right now but a part of being able to hold what's happening in our bodies is about having a bigger capacity to hold it Body, mind, spirit, emotion, all the things. So it's really key and it's it's a big part of why we do the work. I'm curious if that brings up anything else for you, though.
Speaker 1:Oh it just made me have this picture of what that could look like. Like what does that mean to have more? Because part of me was like, oh, I don't want to set an expectation for people to think that that's also their goal, because, bethanne, you're sharing your goal for your desire, for your capacity. And I was like, yeah, what would it look like to be able to have the capacity to hold grief? And I had this visualization of a wave, like a huge tsunami ocean wave.
Speaker 1:Two scenarios the first one where it gets knocked and the person is laying on the beach and they're just spent and they're laying there and they can't get up and the wave is long gone and the ocean is no longer as turbulent and they're still there, kind of reliving the experience of the wave versus. So the visualization of what does capacity look like? Still getting knocked over on the beach after the tsunami wave, but then kind of laying there and connecting with your body and looking up at the sky and knowing that the water is farther away from you now and just breathing for a while, like you don't have to get up yet, you definitely don't have to, like go do anything else, you can just lay there for a while and catch up with yourself. And that's what that capacity building feels like to me in the day to day, because that's what I visualized while you were telling your story.
Speaker 2:I love it. Yeah, that's beautiful and yeah, that is me in this moment. That is certainly a goal that other folks working intentionally on this nervous system retraining have, but it's not everyone's goal at every given time and yeah, I certainly don't want folks to generalize it, and it can look a million different ways.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, even being in grief and being in capacity. Those two bystander could look like the same thing Somebody's laying on the ground after a wave has hit them. It's up to the individual inside how you're meeting it, or how you're helping yourself learn to meet it, or what skills or tools at some point you're practicing to try it a little differently, like it's not for someone else's point of view to tell you how you're doing. It's up for you to discern what's right and what's working for you and then to decide how you're going and what you'd like to be doing. That's it, and I think that is what's so beautiful about this. It's this really deep inner work and I want to fundamentally say it's not with expectations or huge goals or lofty places to arrive to, but this kind of ongoing.
Speaker 1:I'm getting better at driving this car. To go back to my rental car, I'm figuring out the blind spots in this suburban that I rented. For some reason unknown to me, I would never rent such a large vehicle, but you know what I mean. No, I love it For the very reason. I don't know how to back it up and maybe the gas, but yes, I did learn how to drive on a suburban at 15.
Speaker 2:So you're just bringing me back.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh yeah. But yeah, the 15 passenger van Side note.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this feels like a good spot for today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So there's a lot of reds here and it feels like a good stopping point.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and Beth Ann and I have talked about as it works for us when we're in the mood to do a few of these episodes. So maybe also, if you're interested, we're going to put both of our information into this, like the comments or the description, show notes, show notes. There we go and send us questions. Right, if you're interested, you can send it to both of us or whoever you resonate with when you're listening to them talk. Send us some questions because that might help fuel. We could do some research, we could look for some answers. We could have a chat about it in a future conversation. Yeah, love it.
Speaker 2:Yay, yay, thank you. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you. The feeling is mutual. Thank you for having me. Thanks so much for tuning in today and listening to the show. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen and, if you love the show, leave a five star review so others can find us. To learn more about my work and what I do, go to ellenwiamingdolloycom. Thanks, see you next time.