The Mind-Body Couple

What's the Next Chapter: Life After Chronic Pain and Illness with Anna Holtzman

• Tanner Murtagh and Anne Hampson • Episode 107

Share episode

What happens after chronic pain subsides? When the symptoms that once consumed your attention finally ease, where does all that pent-up energy go? This powerful conversation with therapist and coach Anna Holtzman explores the rarely discussed "what next" chapter of the healing journey.

Anna shares her personal path from debilitating migraines to recovery through mind-body approaches, detailing the stages that transformed not just her pain experience but her relationship with herself. Through psychoeducation, journaling, and letting go of perfectionism, she discovered that healing wasn't about making her world smaller—it was about expanding into creativity, purpose, and authentic expression.

This episode challenges the common belief that we need to restrict our lives to heal. Instead, Anna reveals how symptoms often decrease when we engage fully with our passions, provided we replace our inner "drill sergeant" with a compassionate coach. She addresses the delicate balance between stillness and creative drive, offering practical insights for navigating this middle ground without triggering your nervous system.

Whether you're still in pain, beginning to recover, or fully into your "what next" chapter, this conversation provides valuable tools for channeling your energy into what truly matters. 

Anna Holtzman is a licensed therapist and coach who helps creatives, entrepreneurs, and coaches move through fear and self-doubt so they can grow their work in the world without abandoning themselves.

After healing her own chronic migraines using mind-body techniques—and supporting others in chronic pain recovery for the past five years—Anna became passionate about helping people navigate the “what’s next” chapter after pain. She guides clients through the tender terrain of visibility, creative leadership, and sustainable impact, drawing on both her nervous system expertise and her past careers in publishing and television.

Through her coaching, workshops, and podcast How to Trust Yourself, Anna supports sensitive, passionate people in showing up boldly, gently, and unapologetically in their work.

She lives in Queens, NY with her husband, stepdaughter, and three orange cats.

Contact Anna Here: https://www.annaholtzman.com/?r_done=1


Tanner Murtagh and Anne Hampson are therapists who treat neuroplastic pain and mind-body symptoms. They are also married! In his 20s, Tanner overcame chronic pain and a fibromyalgia diagnosis by learning his symptoms were occurring due to learned brain pathways and nervous system dysregulation. Post-healing, Tanner and Anne have dedicated their lives to developing effective treatment and education for neuroplastic pain and symptoms. Listen and learn how to assess your own chronic pain and symptoms, gain tools to retrain the brain and nervous system, and make gradual changes in your life and health!


The Mind-Body Couple podcast is owned by Pain Psychotherapy Canada Inc. This podcast is produced by Alex Klassen, who is one of the wonderful therapists at our agency in Calgary, Alberta. https://www.painpsychotherapy.ca/


Tanner, Anne, and Alex also run the MBody Community, which is an in-depth online course that provides step-by-step guidance for assessing, treating, and resolving mind-body pain and symptoms. https://www.mbodycommunity.com


Also check out Tanner's YouTube channel for more free education and practices: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-Fl6WaFHnh4ponuexaMbFQ


And follow us for daily education posts on Instagram: @painpsychotherapy


Discl...

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the MindBodyCouple podcast.

Speaker 2:

I'm Tanner Murtaugh and I'm Anne Hampson. This podcast is dedicated to helping you unlearn chronic pain and symptoms.

Speaker 1:

If you need support with your healing, you can book in for a consultation with one of our therapists at painpsychotherapyca or purchase our online course at embodycommunitycom to access in-depth education, somatic practices, recovery tools and an interactive community focused on healing.

Speaker 2:

Links in the description of each episode. Hi everyone, welcome back to the MindBodyCouple podcast Today. I'm very honored to have Anna Holtzman and Anna you're a licensed therapist and coach who helps creatives, entrepreneurs, coaches move through fear and self-doubt so they can grow their work in the world without abandoning themselves, using mind-body techniques and supporting others in chronic pain recovery. For the last five years, Anna became passionate about helping people navigate the what's next chapter after pain, so thanks so much for being on with me.

Speaker 3:

Thank you so much for having me, tanner, and it's such a pleasure to meet you again. The first time was in person, which was awesome, and it's so nice to meet you again, virtually like this.

Speaker 2:

I know it's very lovely. We were saying right before we went on that we saw each other in person, which is rare in this day and age, but in person in Boulder, colorado, in September for the last Big Mind Body Conference, which was wonderful.

Speaker 3:

And when I met you I was like, oh my gosh, I feel like I know you because I've been following along with your work online and through your podcast. So it's nice to connect like this.

Speaker 2:

It's an interesting world because we know of one another, like there's probably, you know, 10's, probably 10 big Instagram podcasts out there. So I feel like I knew you before I met you, because I'd seen so many of your videos and liked so many of them along the way, and then we finally got to meet.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it's funny. I don't know. I've made a bunch of friends that way, which you think. You start an Instagram account to do marketing for your business, but it's an amazing way to connect with colleagues and make friendships.

Speaker 2:

It really is. It really is Well. Thanks again for doing this. So I thought we'd start, anna, by maybe sharing a bit of your own personal story around recovering from chronic pain and symptoms.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, absolutely. So I'll take us back quite a ways just to start that off. So before I became a therapist and a coach, I've had a very, very winding professional path. I've done a lot of different things and I worked in reality television for 10 years as a video editor and on the very first day of my first job in that field I experienced my first ever migraine attack. It was, like you know, a very stressful day, high stakes day on this very high pressure job and I got this just blowout headache that I'd never experienced before. Experience those headaches very sporadically at first, and then I eventually went to the doctor and was diagnosed with migraine and was given prescription painkillers to deal with them. And that was basically how I managed migraine for those 10 years that I worked in TV. I was just taking painkillers and that actually worked fine and it wasn't a massive intrusion into my life until I left that field and went to grad school to become a therapist. And it was while I was in grad school that the migraine attacks really began to balloon and take over my life and it was like three days out of the week I'd be totally taken out and having to miss classes in grad school and miss sessions with the clients I was working with in my clinical internship, and it, you know, became a really emergency feeling situation.

Speaker 3:

No-transcript year was 2018 and the Curable app had come out just recently I think, two years before that and for those listeners who might not know about the Curable app, it's an app that teaches you about chronic pain recovery through the mind-body lens, and it was like you know. It instantly made sense to me. It was the missing piece I'd been looking for. I already had a quite holistic orientation and I was studying to be a therapist, as I mentioned, so this approach was a perfect fit for me and I just, you know, went down the rabbit hole and gradually recovered from that chronic cycle. It took a few years and then, yeah, and then it became the focus of my work. It was such a life-changing experience and so fascinating too. It's just endlessly fascinating.

Speaker 2:

Wow, that's amazing. I appreciate you sharing that and I relate to you there. It's because I was in my undergrad becoming a therapist at the time when my thing started, yeah, and kind of in between undergrad graduate when I developed. But you know, even as therapists, like we don't necessarily realize like what's going on internally, as we're kind of dealing with things because we're just not taught this about pain or chronic symptoms no, not at all.

Speaker 3:

and the therapist that I was working with you know I was her client she had not been taught this framework either, and so, like I was seeing a somatic, experiencing therapist for 10 years and it was very helpful in lots of ways and that experience helped me to understand and believe that the physical pain I was experiencing was related to emotional stress. But that understanding was, you know, she and I were both missing the piece of okay. Well now, what do you do with that information that these things are connected? How do you then use that connection to recover?

Speaker 2:

And it wasn't until I found the Curable app that I started to learn those missing pieces found the curable app that I started to learn those missing pieces and so, as you were healing, obviously recovering, things are going well. I know the listeners always want to know like what were the main kind of practices? Like what were you spending your time doing during the healing process?

Speaker 3:

I'd love to talk about that. I've talked about this many times, but it's actually been a while and it's nice to revisit it. So the way I experienced my recovery was that, in hindsight, it had several kind of distinct stages to it, and the first stage was when I found the curable app, and it was like devouring all of the psycho ed that that app provides. And so the first thing that really started to change things for me was psychoeducation. It was just like learning a new conception of what pain is, and learning this framework that pain is a danger signal that the nervous system sends off when it feels unsafe. And so that you know, that just instantly started to change everything. For me, it's like, oh, oh, painful sensation means my nervous system feels unsafe. Well, that's helpful, because then, all right, how do I help my nervous system feel safer? And now I have something to do. I know what the problem is, so I can experiment with different ways to address that problem. So that was the first stage and practiced for about a whole year and started to see changes in the frequency and intensity of the migraine attacks. I started to see changes almost immediately. That doesn't mean they all went away immediately. It was like, oh, things are reducing, and then they're picking back up again, and then they're reducing. It's like not a straight line reducing it. You know, it's like not a straight line.

Speaker 3:

And then, about a year into um, practicing brain retraining, I'll just say, uh, I I felt like I had hit a wall, like I was. I had made some improvements, but I was still getting these really extreme attacks periodically. And I I felt like I needed a new tool to add to my toolkit. And I'd been hearing about journaling as a tool. I mean, that's one of the tools in the curable app, and it was the only tool in the curable app that I just had completely avoided Didn't know why, but didn't want to do it, avoided it. And so I thought, well, if that's the one thing I haven't tried, let me try journaling.

Speaker 3:

And I came across Nicole Sachs's work. Her whole thing is journaling for chronic pain recovery and she has a very prescriptive method of doing it. So I just learned her method, copied it down, was like, threw myself into it and for about another year I practiced journaling daily, almost religiously, started off practicing it in an energy of like desperation. You know like I need to do this because I need to recover from this pain. I need to do this because I need to recover from this pain, but as I got more and more into it, I started to really love it. It started realizing I was developing a new and deeper relationship with myself through journaling. And that was really amazing to me because I was like I've been in therapy for years at that point and I was even en route to becoming a therapist already. Actually, I know I already was a therapist at that point and I was even en route to becoming a therapist already. Actually, I know I already was a therapist at that point. But I was like, wow, through this journaling I'm having these emotional exchanges with myself on a level that's much deeper than I knew was possible.

Speaker 3:

I started using Nicole's method and then gradually improvised my own method where I was dialoguing with myself on the page, like having the conversation between therapist and client, but I was both roles and that me was the most deeply transformative element of my recovery. But there were a such like expectation of outcome and that intensity was bringing more pressure into my nervous system. So I had to loosen up with my practices, get a little less religious about them. Um, I shifted my uh, my, like, what I was aiming for I shifted it from less pain to just being more loving with myself, and that was really helpful.

Speaker 3:

And then, kind of and sort of stage four but it's very similar was letting go of perfectionism around this idea that I had to be 100% healed, and that was something that really kicked up when I started to put myself out there as a chronic pain therapist. Once I started telling people that this was something I could help them with, that triggered this perfectionism in me, like, oh well, I've got to be completely healed if I'm going to help other people with this. And, of course, that only created a massive amount of pressure. I could feel it, my clients could feel it, but it wasn't helping me. And so I realized this is the next step, I've got to let go of that, and I decided to use this phrase that I am 100% imperfectly healed. So I can just let that go.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I really like that. That's beautiful and I appreciate you kind of breaking down the different phases and I'm sure the listeners are going to a lot from that, because there are phases to this and this kind of leads into the work that you're doing now of like the what next chapter, which we're going to dive into in a second here. But there are stages to this as we kind of go along. Uh, I think I relate to you a lot. The perfectionism is one of the, the later stages, and I and I see a lot of your content, this lens of perfectionism, pressure, how this affects our nervous system, the emotional effect, and starting to reduce that as we go. But I so much relate to you as you talk about it because if you ever want your perfectionism to be really tested, just go publicly on video, you know, like once a week, or on your podcast. Now, all of a sudden, you know, regardless of how many people are watching, you're like, oh, I need to be like a certain way, I need to be this way or that way.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely and you know really what I want to talk with you about, anna, and I know you're super passionate about this is that kind of like what next chapter? Like yeah, because I think people and you can correct me if I'm wrong here, because this is kind of your area of expertise but I think I think people often think they get to this line of like my pain's no longer chronic or my symptoms no longer chronic, and they almost see it as this like completion, like okay, it's not, we've dealt with that and it's not that. Like that's not the path that I've taken personally, that I know you've taken, and every person I've kind of worked with right, there's always this continuous work.

Speaker 3:

That needs to happen Because when we're in that locked up chronic pain cycle, you know, it's like one way to describe it is that our energy is very locked in, like we're bracing and tightening around our life energy. You talk about this experience. I think we can probably all relate to this description of it, that it's like there's all this energy stuck inside of us. The energy feels stuck or stagnant, or maybe it feels like it's bursting to come out but it can't, and there's this frustration feeling. And when things start to soften and we start going easier on ourselves and start helping our nervous system to feel a little safer and things start to relax, this energy starts to flow again. It's like this iceberg inside of us starts to melt and flow and it wants somewhere to go.

Speaker 3:

So when I was getting to this stage of my recovery, there was like a different sort of discomfort that emerged for me. It was like there reached a stage where I was like I've got all this energy inside me and it's got nowhere to go because I've been so focused on healing for so long and now that that's not my full-time pursuit anymore, I sort of feel like antsy and like almost jittery, like I've got all this energy flowing and it wants something to be poured into. And I would see that with clients too, because many of my clients would stay with me beyond the point where pain was a focal issue anymore and what I would see? I would see a range of things with them. One end of things was like they were better. Sure, they would experience symptoms, like things crop up, but that's being human right. But there was this habitual focus on the symptoms and they continue to come into session wanting to talk about symptoms, even though they were able to do anything they wanted to do with their lives at this point. And I could see that the continued focus on symptoms. It had been necessary in earlier times, but it was now becoming unhelpful and we needed some other focus of attention to move toward.

Speaker 3:

And then for others, it was just this kind of natural blooming and blossoming that would happen, like one client had used journaling as part of her recovery and then she just never stopped writing and the writing turned into a book and she published a book while we were working together and that was. I was like gosh. I freaking love working with people at this stage, because that wasn't without its challenges. You know there were all these new kinds of fears that came up with that process of writing the book and like sharing personal experiences about family and life and then publishing it and all that. You know the fears of like will I get in trouble if I share this out loud? Or like, will people even read it? Does what I have to say even matter? And I just really, really relish working with people in that stage of things. And I was naturally moving into that stage of things myself, wanting to share more of my own creativity, my own writing. I started a podcast at that point and, yeah, just wanting to expand.

Speaker 2:

Yeah Well, there's so much of what you just said there that is important, important takeaways. One thing that makes me think about uh, I don't know if you remember this you posted this um, I can't remember how long ago it was and I'm not going to get it exactly right, but you can correct me. You posted this idea, think it was. I think it was an instagram post. It was a. It really hit home for me, though you had kind of said something around the lines of I thought I would become pain-free and I would do that by making my world calmer, smaller, kind of more still. Do you remember this?

Speaker 2:

yeah, I totally do but what I discovered is actually what happened is like my symptoms reduced, went away, as my world became bigger, more vibrant, more alive. Probably not the exact word, but I think that's such a useful narrative for people to be aware of as they're starting to get better.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I love that you're bringing that up. Um I this comes up so frequently with my current clients um, where? And yeah and I experienced this too, which is why I wrote about it that when the symptoms are high and persistent and they're a big problem in our lives, I think there's this common narrative and really a widespread cultural belief that we just need to rest and get quiet and stop doing everything, including the things that we love to do, including the things and maybe even especially the things that we're passionate about. Because you know and this often happens with creative people I've seen a lot of like musicians and filmmakers, writers, who have thought, and sometimes even been told by their friends, their family members or even their doctors, that engaging in these pursuits just gets them too worked up and that's putting stress on their nervous system. So they need to take it easy and stop painting or stop making music or stop making films or writing, because it just gets them too worked up, and that really breaks my heart because it doesn't work. And I know that from firsthand experience, like I've experienced getting caught in that trap, too, where I've thought like actually this happened to me when I got to that stage in my recovery, where my energy needed something new to plug into, because recovery wasn't and didn't have to be a full-time job anymore. The thing that it plugged itself into was growing my business, my coaching business.

Speaker 3:

I was like I freaking, like I come from a media background, so I love marketing, I love creating infographics, I love creating blog posts and Instagram posts and videos and podcasts. That's my creativity zone and I just got really passionate about it and there was a certain amount of intensity that I brought to it and I'm using the past tense amount of like intensity that I brought to it and I'm using the past tense but like this is still something I navigate and dance with. You know, like I can, I can get pretty worked up and intense because, um, there's like excitement that I feel and but then it can like be mixed with a strain of fear-fueled thoughts and that can just lead to short circuiting, hitting a wall, you know, crashing into some burnout in my business. And at an earlier stage I did hit one of these like like I'd been going on all circuits for like a while and was like this is so fun and exciting, I'm creating stuff, I'm really feeling inspired.

Speaker 3:

And then I hit a wall and initially I thought, oh gosh, just my ambition is a problem. It's pushing me to my. I thought my ambition is pushing me into burnout. So I just need to lower my expectations. Lower my expectations. I need to make my vision for this business smaller. I need to just really. And I was like I'm going to be 50 in a few years. I just need to chill out and live a smaller life and then my nervous system will calm down. But what actually happened was I got into a bit of a funk. I started getting a little depressed because I was bored and I realized like this is not the way, like getting smaller is not going to get me to the feeling I want to feel.

Speaker 3:

Being ambitious is something I enjoy. Being creative is something I enjoy. Expanding my work is something I enjoy. Being creative is something I enjoy. Expanding my work is something I enjoy. But I need to be kind to myself while I'm doing those things. I need to recognize when I'm driving myself like a drill sergeant and then shift that to a more encouraging, loving coach.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and for people in the listeners. I'm smiling right now because I relate so much to this and you're right, this, I think, is one of the harder things that I have to work on with people. Um, because it's it's so complex in almost understanding our own nervous system and where those like edges are you know what I mean Like because, like you have on one spectrum, complete Zen mode where you're like just in ultimate calmnessness which no one can maintain forever. But that's one spectrum and I think there's value in that spectrum, like it's great to be there sometimes, and then in the other, in the middle, you have like this passionate creativity, purposeful action that you're taking, that you're excited about, and then on the other side, you have more that. This is where, like perfectionism, I think, can kind of land. You know, high pressure, pushing past our limits, not being connected to our body, and I think it's such a I think there's like an element of addiction in it.

Speaker 3:

Like I I can get pulled into like sort of addiction to that adrenaline mode.

Speaker 2:

Oh yeah what I 100 agree because you know several years ago, what would happen is I would get an idea, a brilliant idea, and I'd be like, oh, this is a great idea for a project, like I'm gonna do this project, and within two hours I was like deep in fight or flight around the expectations. Being those expectations, um yeah, like it's just like we get so used to living there.

Speaker 2:

I think for a lot of people, at least in my personal experience absolutely and I think a big problem with, with perfectionism, high intensity, is a lot of us we live in all or nothing. That's like at least how I understood the world. It was like all or nothing, like either I'm going to do this fully or I'm not going to do this. But like that passion, that creativity, as you, you were kind of talking, I kind of see that in those shades of like it's in the middle where you still have this drive and purposeful action taking place, but you haven't pushed yourself so far in that direction that it starts to become very dysregulated.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just as you were speaking, I was flashing back to a moment actually just earlier this week. I was flashing back to a moment actually just earlier this week. So one of the current projects that I was like I have an idea for a project. I want to write a book and I'm in the process of writing this book now and my process at the moment is I write one section once per week and I look forward to it and I enjoy it.

Speaker 3:

And something I've noticed is that when I'm preparing to do that writing, I've decided such and such time of day and week is when I'm going to do it. And I always do this writing in a cafe, because that's where I like to do my writing. And I'll notice that as I'm walking to the cafe with my laptop over my shoulder, my breath starts to get more shallow and my shoulders are getting tense and my mind starts to race a little and then thoughts start to come in like oh my gosh, am I going to have any inspiration today? I better get to the cafe quick before the inspiration runs out, and I better like write really really fast so I can like catch it before you know. I'm like oh, okay, okay. I'm like oh okay, okay.

Speaker 3:

I see what's happening. You care about this a lot, so the stakes are really high, so the excitement is intermingling with fear and your nervous system is getting all wound up. So you know what? We're just going to remind ourselves that these fear stories are not true. Your creative energy is not finite. There's plenty of it. If it flows today, great. If it doesn't, that's also fine. We're going to take some deep breaths, because we've got to make this sustainable, or we can easily fry our own circuits, and sometimes that happens. You know what? Sometimes I do fry my own circuits, and that's not the end of the world. I do fry my own circuits, and that's not the end of the world. I can recover from it, and that's an important piece of it for me too, because it's so easy to also get perfectionistic with keeping ourselves in a steady flow.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and I appreciate you saying that because I do think it's doing this and essentially like practicing, being passionate and being excited and practicing driving towards some purpose, whatever that might be for someone. You know that's not, that's not going to be perfect. As we practice that, that's the idea. Like for all of us, there's times where I've gone deeply into fight or flight, even though I went in with the best intentions to do it this way. I think this is the harder stuff. After we're starting to heal or we've gotten better and now we're learning how we want to live in our life, now that we don't have all this energy pent up around pain and physical symptoms. What do we want to focus on in life? How do we want to go about living our day, each day?

Speaker 3:

yeah, and what you know, what I find and what I see in clients too, is like, yeah, we don't have as much constriction holding us back anymore and in addition to that, we do have all of these like really hard-won skills and knowledge and tools that we were sort of you know, forced to learn through the chronic pain experience. Like, had it not been for the migraines that I was dealing with, like, I would never have bothered diving so deeply into learning how to communicate with my nervous system, learning how to emotionally relate with myself in a different way. Like those were hard things to learn. I don't think anything would have motivated me to learn them other than, you know, pain or something equally as disruptive. But now I have those skills and those tools. So it's like what do we want to use them for? What do I want to apply them to?

Speaker 2:

Now, the last thing I know we really want to discuss today and I know it's a big part of some of the themes you see in your work with people is almost this opposite, back and forth, of people having this deep desire to be seen, to share their work within the world and simultaneously they have this fear right, this fear of being visible, of taking up space. Can you tell me a bit about this theme that you often see?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, this is something that's just so close to my heart and I feel really connected to, because it's something that I experience. It's this intense longing and pull to be known, to share what's true and genuine from inside of ourselves with the world. And, yeah, just to bring our voice into the world in some way, whether it's actually with our voice, through speaking or singing, or through writing, or just simply through, you know, being more of our full selves in our interactions with other people, in our work, in our way of moving through the world, in our work in our way of moving through the world. So, yeah, this really strong and compelling need to share ourselves authentically and then, simultaneously, this fear that often takes the form of like am I going to get in trouble if I speak openly or if I am myself, if I let myself be seen, if I take my mask off? Am I going to get in trouble? Are people still going to like me? Are they going to accept who I really am? Will it matter to anyone? Will anyone listen or will too many people listen and will I feel overwhelmed by that?

Speaker 3:

And, yeah, this is, I mean, it's something I just can relate to so deeply. So it's very tender to me and I just love walking people through this and helping clients sort of you know, learn how to gently guide themselves through it, because I think that we all have really really valuable stuff to share with each other. You know I think we know this instinctively like anytime you've had a deeply vulnerable conversation with someone and they've shared something that's like just so true and so human, like we just get so much out of it. You know, we feel like this relief of like oh, I'm not alone in the world, even if my experience is different, like the fact that you're sharing openly with me just gives me permission to also be myself. It's just, it's kind of the greatest experience we can have, and so many of us hold ourselves back from it because of this fear.

Speaker 2:

So to me it's so worthwhile not just for my clients or for myself, but for everyone around us it's worthwhile to spend the time and the care that it takes to work through these fears so that we can share more openly it is such a common theme and and I think some people don't realize it because, well, everyone has different experiences with with pain, with symptoms um, myself, I probably didn't feel seen, and then, when I came out of symptoms, it's like I desperately wanted to feel seen.

Speaker 2:

And then, when that started to happen, there was this like pulling back of, like oh no, like I don't want that, even though I desperately want it, like you know what I mean like there was this push and pull that we almost need to bring words to and understand. I think about it almost um, I might be simplifying it, so apologize, but I think about it almost more as like this exposure kind of work that people are doing where they're and that could look a lot of ways, but giving yourself exposure to authentically being yourself or authentically sharing something, even if it's to one person, but all those those little bits, like that's what teaches us.

Speaker 3:

Oh, I'm safe to do this absolutely and I also use that framework and that phrasing of graded exposure when I'm working with clients on this and just being with someone who is helping to guide you, someone who has already walked through this particular path and isn't afraid of it anymore. It's so helpful when, like I'll just I'll give two related examples. So when a client is in recovery from chronic pain and their movement has been painful, it's really helpful to work with a therapist or a coach who's already been through the process with themselves and with many other clients, and they know that even though the nervous system feels scared, it is safe to get back into movement. So their confidence the coaches or the therapist's confidence helps the client's nervous system feel a little more safe. Safe enough to take one step, pause, regroup, get some co-regulation with their coach or therapist, take another step and gradually the nervous system feels safer and safer. And I walk my clients through similar experiences, but I'll use one of my own as an example.

Speaker 3:

I really wanted to speak on stage and it was something I wanted to do very much, but I was terrified, definitely terrified of it. I mean, just the thought of it could send me into like brain fog and feeling frozen in my body and just totally and feeling frozen in my body and just totally spaced out and at a loss for words. And I worked with a speaking coach and it was a group program. So not only was I working with a coach who was very confident speaking on stage, but I was with other people who were also working through this fear side by side with me. And as I went through that program I was like whoa, this is graded exposure, what we're doing. And with each small enough step that I take in a safe enough, supportive enough environment, my nervous system is feeling just a little bit safer, it's relaxing just a little bit more, the brain fog is alleviating a little more, I have a little bit more access to self-connection. And that just grew and grew with every step. Same thing graded exposure.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah. Well, I really appreciate you coming on and sharing, anna, just the amazing work that you're doing. I wanted to save a little time at the end just so you can share a bit about your practice and possibly who or how people can work with you.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, thank you so much, Tanner. I really I so appreciate getting to have this conversation with you and appreciate the invitation to share about the work that I'm doing. And I am currently working with one-on-one of things who is maybe perhaps coming out of a chronic pain recovery experience and is wanting to expand into book or step on stage or start a business or just dive more fully into whatever feels purposeful in your life and you might be feeling both excitement and fear about it. Where I love to work with people, help you learn some tools that will completely make sense if you're already familiar with the mind-body lens and take those steps one by one so that you can step into that next stage and that thing that you're passionate about Wonderful that you're passionate about Wonderful.

Speaker 2:

Well, I will make sure I put a description of you and your practice, but also all the links in the description of the episode for anyone listening. They can go to the description and check that out, thank you. Thank you again. It's great to see you again since September. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, and hopefully we'll be in person eventually again at a conference in the near future.

Speaker 3:

I hope so too, and I can't wait to have you on my podcast, because that's coming up soon as well.

Speaker 2:

That's right. We're doing that in a month or so, so that'll be great. I'll see you soon, actually. That's right, we're doing that in a month or so, so that'll be great. I'll see you soon, actually, yeah.

Speaker 3:

I look forward to it. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2:

Tanner, yeah, and thank you everyone for listening and I will talk to you all next week.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening. For more free content, check out the links for our youtube channel, instagram and facebook accounts in the episode description we wish you all healing.