Codependent Doctor
Podcast focusing on codependency. Learning how to create healthier relationships, healthier self and healthier lives.
Codependent Doctor
55 Healing Chronic Stress, Trauma, and Codependency: How to Regulate Your Nervous System and Break Free
Your nervous system—not just your mindset—holds the key to healing. In this powerful conversation, Elizabeth Kipp shares how she recovered from 40 years of chronic pain and why codependent patterns are actually survival strategies, not flaws. You’ll learn simple breathing techniques to shift from stress to safety in minutes, plus holistic tools for releasing trauma, breaking cycles, and finding true regulation.
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If you've ever felt stuck in survival mode, caught in people-pleasing or like your body is constantly bracing for something, this episode's for you. We're talking about how chronic stress affects your entire nervous system, why codependent habits often start as survival tools, and what healing actually looks like. Beyond just positive thinking, you're going to walk away with a whole new perspective on recovery, one that's compassionate, body-aware and deeply validating. All right, let's get into it. Welcome to the Codependent Doctor, a podcast where we unpack the messy, beautiful journey of healing from codependency. If you're burned out from people pleasing, stuck in unhealthy patterns or just tired of putting yourself last, you're in the right place. I'm Dr Angela Downey, a family doctor and fellow codependent, and I'm here to help you reconnect to your authentic self, one honest conversation at a time. Here we go. Hello to all my wonderful podcast listeners and welcome to the 55th episode of the Codependent Doctor. I'm your host, dr Angela Downey, a family doctor and fellow codependent, here to help us untangle our patterns, heal our hearts and reclaim our peace. For today's episode, we have a guest with us.
Speaker 1:Elizabeth Kipp is a stress management, historical trauma specialist and addictions recovery and betrayal trauma coach who uses post-betrayal transformation methods, trauma-trained and yoga-informed addiction recovery, coaching, ancestral cleaning and yoga to help people with their healing. Elizabeth healed from over 40 years of chronic pain, including betrayal, trauma, anxiety, panic attacks and addiction. Now in long-term recovery. She helps others tap into their healing potential. Addiction Now in long-term recovery. She helps others tap into their healing potential, discover freedom from suffering and lead a thriving life. She's the international best-selling author of the Way Through Chronic Pain Tools to Reclaim your Healing Power. Welcome, elizabeth. I'm so glad that you're able to join us today. How are you?
Speaker 2:I'm good, thank you, and I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 1:Amazing. I'm really excited to have you on the show. Your story is absolutely incredible. So 40 years of chronic pain and anxiety and now you're helping others find real healing, and I love how you reframe codependent behaviors as survival strategies not as flaws and how you bring in the nervous system and body-based tools. Elizabeth, one of my traditions on the show is that we discuss what we're grateful for, because when we stop and think about what we're grateful for, it helps our brains focus on what's working instead of what's missing or what's broken. So I'd like to ask you is there anything that you're especially grateful for today?
Speaker 2:Well, today because I work on a list every morning. I have a list of five things I'm grateful for, One thing I love about myself and I trade it with a bunch of people, and the top two on my list today were evolving understandings and compassion, and I think they make a really nice pair.
Speaker 1:They do, so this is a tool that you use every day. You list five things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I do that consciously because my most challenging part of every 24-hour period seems to be those wee early morning hours, say around three, 4, 5 o'clock in the morning, and so I like to start off my day in the frequency of recovery, not in the frequency of addiction, which is what that negative thinking thing is. That old stress pattern kind of flares up at that hour. I'm not sure why it does that, but there it is, and so this is. I just think it's a good tool for recovery in general, but I actually apply it very specifically every day, every morning, okay.
Speaker 1:So this kind of helps change your mindset a little bit and starts your day on a better foot, that's right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right away. This is how we're doing this day.
Speaker 1:Right? No, absolutely so, for today. I'm grateful. This lady yesterday stopped me in the grocery store and she just told me she loved my shirt and this was completely out of the blue and I, you know, so far like I'd been having a so-so day, and that one comment completely lit me up and I think that I, I need to do more of that. I need to take the time and just, you know, tell somebody that their hair looks good that day, or, you know, it's a complete stranger Cause for me it was. It was a complete 180. Like, it totally lifted me up, that one little comment, and I love that she took the time to do that, and so I think that's something we can all do for each other. Wonderful, I love that. So, elizabeth, why don't we start by having you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your journey?
Speaker 2:Sure, I'm a stress management and historical trauma specialist, addiction recovery coach and ancestral clearing practitioner and that sounds like a lot of hats, but they're all under stress management and those are just audiences that I happen to serve. I also work as a I'm also a certified trauma betrayal coach, and I work on a platform that specifically works with people that are just healing from that. So that's what I do, and I started my business in 2014, which was like I got clear of all that medication and pain in 2013., and I was. So this is what happened when I got to treatment to get off all that medication and went into pain management. There were 100 patients on campus and 20 of us went to pain track, into this chronic pain program, and the other 80 were not.
Speaker 2:And so in the afternoon, the 20 of us went to pain track, which we call it pain track, and the other 80 went to relapse school, and so I didn't get any training on relapse, and so I asked my counselor one day well, what's the story here? I'm not getting any training in relapse. And this is what she said there's an 80% relapse rate in the first year, and I started out as a social scientist in college. So as soon as I heard that, I was like, two things happened in my mind. One I'm doomed because I didn't like the odds, and the second was what's wrong with the model that we're using, that we're not doing better than 80% relapse rate, Like right. So I mean not knowing anything more than I knew in that moment I was like we got to get a better model here for recovery.
Speaker 1:So can you clarify what you mean? You had chronic pain for a really long time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Is that?
Speaker 1:what you're referring to, and when you say relapse, what kind of relapse are we talking about?
Speaker 2:Well, she was talking about relapse in general and so that was a chemical dependency facility and so anybody that was they came in with maybe alcoholism or they were on drugs of some sort and the relapse when you go back to that, when you go back to that behavior. I had an accident when I was 14 and broke my fifth lumbar and it broke front to back so the front part of it slipped forward. I didn't know at the time that I had quite that bad of a. I didn't know I'd broken a bone for one thing. It hurt, but I didn't know I'd broken a bone because I walked away from that. But I didn't know I'd broken a bone because I walked away from that. But I had a history of chronic pain, not understanding at that time.
Speaker 2:I grew up in an environment where the environment was chronic pain, environment Dysfunctional. So let's just define chronic pain for the audience, right? Chronic pain is any pain that's felt 15 days out of 30 for three months or more. So physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, financial. The brain can't tell the difference between one kind of pain and another. It sends the same signal it hurts. And why is that a thing?
Speaker 2:With an acute pain, that pain clears within a few weeks. In chronic pain it doesn't, and the difference is the stress response in the body, right. So we have a mechanism in the body called the stress response that turns on. It's off most of the time unless there's a threat that presents itself or we perceive a threat. Then it turns on and we bring all kinds of psychology and biochemistry and biology to meet the threat and then we meet it and the stress response goes in the off position. That's a balanced stress response. In chronic pain the stress response gets stuck in the on position and so we're always in this threat mode. We're always looking for the threat.
Speaker 2:I mean this is one of the reasons I had anxiety. It's just a really stressful, obviously, state and we really don't have a chance to rest and heal. We're really not made for chronic stress. It creates all kinds of toxic stress hormones in the body that we have to clear and it also creates confusion in the brain. So it affects the memory part of our brain and it affects the emotional part of our brain. So that normal, slight negative bias that we have already as a normal human being if there is such a thing on the planet anymore, a normal, healthy human being we have a slight negative bias In chronic pain that gets accentuated. So now the whole world is well, you're wrong, the world's wrong. And then we turn it in on ourselves and we're wrong. And so now we've got, we've really dug ourselves into a hole and that's kind of chronic pain in a nutshell. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1:So what was it like living with chronic pain for over 40 years and what shifted for you when you began questioning the conventional medical model? Great, question.
Speaker 2:It was hard. I had a few things going for me and I love that you started the podcast with what are you grateful for? Because that was one of the tools that I used. Because that was one of the tools that I used, I came in my ancestors. I swear I didn't think it up, it was right there for me and so when things got crazy at home which they did on a regular basis I would go. You know, oh yeah, that was bad and I'm grateful for this other thing, right.
Speaker 2:So I always had a way of kind of naturally balancing the good and the bad in my life, and gratitude is one of them. So gratitude is one of the ways I got through. I also had a meditation practice, which isn't as powerful when you don't have pain and you're not on medication, but it's still helpful because I learned to stay present and it helped me manage time better. Now it was 14 years after that accident that I finally started having surgery, and that's when the pain medicine started. The pain medicine and anxiety medicine started, and that went on for 31 years. The doctors at that time did not have an answer for chronic pain. Well, they had an answer. They just didn't have the right answer.
Speaker 1:Pills and pain medication, chronic pain. Well, they had an answer, they just didn't have the right answer.
Speaker 2:Their answer was you can't heal from chronic pain. Here are your opiates and your benzodiazepines, right, and I was trained as a research scientist. So when I first heard that it was like, well, they're the experts, you know, and. But something didn't sit right with me when they said you can't heal from chronic pain. It was kind of like I it upset me like a lot for a couple of weeks and but I kept thinking and thinking and thinking, and sometimes a little slow on the uptake, but I at the end of two weeks I was like, oh, I see what happened here. They made an error. They said you can't heal from chronic pain and they forgot their basic science, which is probabilities. It's not facts, right, and we live in the all that is, but science is just a piece of it. Science operates in a framework that's limited relative to the all that is. It can only comment on that which you can observe, measure and describe. So they were telling me more about the model they were working with and its limitation than they were telling me about my ability to heal because of their orientation. And they made the mistake about they forgot probabilities. And I was like, oh, okay, I see we've made an error here.
Speaker 2:And then I knew that well. I also knew that scientific paradigms changed. So I knew that the science would evolve eventually and I knew I was going to have to look outside of the scientific framework for other options for healing. And I did, and meditation was one of them which kind of really kept me pretty steady relative to my experience of just being flared up in pain all the time. I had a massage therapist, I had acupuncture, I did very gentle yoga that kept me kind of flexible and I had a lot of support. I had a lot of kind of encouragement and support.
Speaker 2:So it was difficult but I finally found a doctor who actually understood the nature of chronic pain and he was Western and Eastern, so he was a Qigong healer as well as straight up Western and he was a brain physiologist and a neurophysiologist and an addiction specialist. So he knew kind of the basic science, but he also you will love this the first time that I met him he said to me I don't need to see your records or your x-rays, I want to know who you are. And I was like who are you and where have you been all my life? No doctor ever asked me that question. So it was pretty cool.
Speaker 1:Sounds like a Pretty smart guy yeah, so that was.
Speaker 2:That was kind of the story and kind of how I shifted my orientation to like how am I going to handle this situation here?
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, and just recognizing that you know medicine offered one route but that there was other routes that you could, that you could look into. So you say that chronic stress isn't just mental, it's a full body experience. So can you walk us through what that actually means on a nervous system level?
Speaker 2:Sure, Well, if you think about it just in terms of, I like to reference Stephen Porges' work in polyvagal theory because it makes the most sense to me in my own lived experience. He maintains that theory maintains that the nervous system is always checking for safety. Nervous system is always checking for safety. So right now, you and I are having a conversation and we're kind of co-regulating with one another and our nervous systems are talking to one another and we're trying to. We're saying are we safe? Are we safe? Are we safe? Well, we're safe, we know we're safe. Right, it doesn't mean the nervous system has stopped talking. Right right Now. They're not in hypervigilant mode because you and I are both. You know, we both know our area. We're not feeling threatened.
Speaker 2:But in chronic stress, the nervous system, like I said, the stress response is stuck in the on position and so it's out of balance. Response is stuck in the on position and so it's out of balance, and so the nervous system is. When it's in that kind of state, it's either going to fight, it's going to run, it's going to shut down, and there's a few different stages of shutting down. Depression is an example of shutting down. Appeasement, people-pleasing, is an example is an aspect of that kind of depressed, and there are kind of this blend where we're moving from one state to another as well, so it's not quite cut and dry like that. But we have these certain strategies that we use. But we have these certain strategies that we use and in chronic stress we're kind of in one or the other of those where rest and digest is not really. We don't hang out there, and so this makes it very difficult to heal, because we can't heal when we're not resting.
Speaker 1:So when you're in chronic stress, your nervous system is constantly in this fight or flight response, or freeze response.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's in one of those states.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so many people. They see people-pleasing or overgiving as just part of who they are. So how do you help people understand these as trauma-informed coping strategies rather than just personality flaws or just being part of who you are?
Speaker 2:I'm going to define people pleasing, just so everybody's super clear on where I'm coming from with my answer. If I'm doing a people pleasing thing, then I'm changing my authentic self in order to elicit a response I want from you. I'm anticipating that if I do this, you'll do that and I have to change myself. I become a chameleon and I have to change myself in order to do that. So why is that even happening? That's happening because I don't feel safe in my own body and I'm looking for safety in that other person.
Speaker 2:So again, we're getting back to this chronic stress situation. It's a fear-based response. Yeah, and so the way that we bring trauma-informed, there's a lot. I'm still learning. I'm still getting trained. I spent a year training with Dr Gabor Mate and his Compassion Inquiry. I've had a ton of training in polyvagal theory. I've had like I've got over 500 hours in trauma-informed yoga. So I've just a lot of training and I'm still learning more, because we're still learning more in that space. But mostly we need to learn.
Speaker 2:You know, this is the quick, this is the quick and amazing thing that I'll teach everybody today. There is a profound connection between a long exhale at the brain and when we bring a long exhale. When we do a long exhale we're telling the part of the nervous system that we're telling the brain that it's safe. So we now have a tool in the breath that when we're activated and I could get into that and I'm not going to because I could get really into the weeds here. So I'm trying to keep it kind of simple and I start getting in that fight or flight or shutdown because I can feel it in my body. I can bring in a long, I can start doing long, deep breathing and make sure that that exhale is as long or longer than the inhale, and I can do that. I mean I like to do three to 11 minutes of it, but you could try six or seven of those breaths and you'll notice a difference in the body.
Speaker 1:You'll feel so, instead of being stuck in this fight, flight or freeze response because of your chronic pain or whatever your stress is doing, that longer exhale will convince your nervous system that you're in a safe place.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there are at least six ways right off the bat that we can use to change our state, and for me that was good news, because I thought the pain was doing it to me and I had no agency.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if you have no control over the situation, the anxiety.
Speaker 2:So I had my wits and then I learned there were tools. This is great, right. So we can. We can change our state by how we move, what we eat, how we breathe, our rest, where our attention, where our focus is and is, and by releasing the past.
Speaker 1:Are you okay going into some of these a little bit, because I find this really interesting. I think this is something that'll be really helpful for a lot of people.
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah, so one of the things I mean, my yoga practice is amazing. It's not the only thing. Qi Gong is amazing. Tai Chi there's lots of movement practices that are powerful. So, you know, pick the one that works for you, but please explore. There are movements that I can do that if I'm feeling a little bit sleepy, maybe a little bit like I have to maybe it's 4 o'clock in the afternoon and I've got a 6 o'clock thing and I don't have time for a 20-minute nap and I need to. Well, I can do some activated breath practices and I'll show you one right now. I'm not sure you can see it all in the mirror, but I'm going to raise my hands up like this, and then when I bring them down, I'm going to grab the air, like grabbing the energy, and bring them down. I'll show you. I'm just breathing it out, okay.
Speaker 1:And you do that. So as you're breathing out, you're grabbing energy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm grabbing, the hands are up and then I'm grabbing the energy and bringing it in and you do that for three minutes and you are not going to be the same person.
Speaker 1:Okay, interesting.
Speaker 2:You will be energized right. Another one that I do is just really simply just sitting and breathing in four sniffs here, and I've got my eye focus here because it helps focus the mind on the task at hand. So four sniffs in.
Speaker 1:One sniff out A long exhale, nice and long.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you want the exhale to be longer than that inhale, as long or longer than the inhale, and you sit and do that for I do it for 11, but you could do it for three. You'll notice a difference. I mean, run the experiment I did. I don't do these things unless they work. I just like I got other things to do so?
Speaker 1:do you find that these help control that pain a little bit better?
Speaker 2:Well, I went into Dr Prescott's program with 40 years of chronic pain andI walked out 52 days later, so I don't have pain anymore. Okay.
Speaker 1:Not at all.
Speaker 2:So it's not an issue. The issue was, if you're asking like what happened, there was what happened in 52 days. That's another conversation, right.
Speaker 1:We're not going to fit that in 45 minutes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I don't have pain anymore, so that's not an issue. Yeah, now I don't have the pain, but what I do have is the stress habit that was underneath it. I'm still working on that, that's right. That started when I was in the womb Right, it's like that started, you know. So I'm still working on unraveling that, 12 years in to my recovery. And so every day I sit down and I do an 11 minute breath practice. So every day I sit down and I do an 11-minute breath practice. That's a regulating breath practice in the morning, and the message is this is how we're doing life today, and so we're retraining the brain and the nervous system to be calmer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you've talked about the importance of somatic healing over just mindset work. So why isn't mindset alone enough to heal from chronic stress or trauma?
Speaker 2:Yeah, great question. So we can't think our way out of chronic stress. We have to nervous system our way out. We have to actually the nervous system has to actually believe that it's safe in order for us to actually rest, digest, calm, get back to a regulated state. So this is why, when we have a chronic stress habit, that we do all these practices that tone the nervous system, retrain the brain's habits.
Speaker 2:If you think of it like in physics, they tell us an object in motion stays in motion until acted on by an equal or opposite force. Think about a habit, a stress habit, right as a habit. It's an object in motion. It about a habit, a stress habit, right as a habit. It's an object in motion, it's a habit, and so we need to come and break that habit. In order to shift that, we need to bring in an object of equal or opposite force, and that's what these practices do. Meditation is an example, breathwork is an example. Those six things that I read off. This is how you change your state. Those things are examples. Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 1:It did it does. You mentioned that there was other things. So sleep plays a role. How you eat, are you just talking about like, having a like a normal, like healthy diet and making sure that you get eight hours of sleep, or is there something more behind those?
Speaker 2:Well, I think one of the things in this society that's the hard part is the sugar, Because it really it creates. First of all it creates inflammation, so now you're inflaming the gut, you're inflaming the body, so now you're setting yourself up for chronic pain, chronic stress. But it also, because of its effect on the gut and how the gut operates, it also wreaks havoc on our emotions. So if I have clients that are having anger issues or depression issues or whatever you know what's interesting, Nine times out of ten there's a sugar thing going on. They've got a sugar habit that they're having difficulty with.
Speaker 2:So, coming off of alcohol, alcohol is a sugar, so coming off of alcohol, when I came off of opiates I had a sugar addiction because they're the same, they hit the same part of the brain and they didn't teach me about that in that pain management program. They just kind of let that slide. We were working on other stuff. We were working on the low-hanging fruit that's a little higher up on the tree, but I was able to break it using and I use bilateral EFT tapping. I teach that now. That was how I broke that, that sugar habit with the. So that because that was just creating more havoc in my life instability. Right I was mostly unstable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you kind of took these different healing modalities one at a time, starting with, like you know, start with breathwork, and then you start with. You know, now you're getting rid of sugar and as you kind of get a hold on that, then you start working on other things. Is that kind of a stepwise approach that you took?
Speaker 2:Well, I would say I used a lot of tools to for each. I mean, I, you know, we did meditation, breathwork, movement, food. We did all those things to address clearing the body of the medication and finding stability in the nervous system. It was a holistic, it was a whole suite of tools. We also did ancestral clearing. That's a big part of my practice.
Speaker 2:So what is ancestral clearing? Yeah, so that's a beautiful energetic it's called energy healing medicine. It's kind of classified like that and it's a spiritual practice. It's a prayer practice where we call on a source God, whatever you call that which made all of this. We call on it to help us release that which no longer serves us. And in the context of the ancestral stuff, we come into this world with the gifts and the burdens of our ancestors. Remember, I said I came in with gratitude, right, I also came in with the effects of war and family. I mean, I felt it as a four-year-old. I felt it. I just didn't know what to call it Right. I don't know what it was right, but I sure felt it. So we don't have to carry that stuff.
Speaker 2:There's a way, there are ways to clear it. Yoga is a beautiful way to help clear those old patterns, and so is ancestor clearing, and I often will blend the two. So if I'm teaching a mantra course, which is a great way to help clear old habits, it's a great way. But the first thing I do is I bring in ancestor clearing to help people clear their stuff around. I can't use my voice. All their stuff they have around, nobody wants to hear what I have to say, or shut up and be quiet. All that. We use ancestor clearing to clear all that. And now I'll teach you how to use your voice, because now you don't have any blocks to using it in the first place blocks to using it in the first place.
Speaker 2:So what is? What is betrayal trauma? So you mentioned that you're a betrayal trauma coach and she used alcohol to manage her condition and she was very difficult. But she was especially difficult one time when I was 15. And she had the flu and she was taking antibiotics and drinking at the same time, which nobody knew back then. That that was. You didn't do that. That's deadly, that's like. And she had a psychotic episode and she came at me with a knife and tried to kill me.
Speaker 1:so that's that's massive betrayal that you know that's a that would.
Speaker 2:that would. That's massive betrayal. That's a big example of betrayal, tom. But domestic violence is unfortunately rather common. This is somebody you're of a sudden right like that that just disappears, and that is a specific. Dr Debbie Silber did a whole PhD on that and she's got a sample size of 100,000 people that she's sampled, that she's surveyed and taken through her program. So she has found that betrayal trauma is. There are five stages to healing it and it's a little different than other traumas in terms of how you heal. And so I work on that. Yeah, I actually my job in in that platform is really I bring in the trauma-informed yoga and get people to understand the power of the breath and get their nervous systems on board and then they can work with the rest of the coaches.
Speaker 1:But this would an example of betrayal trauma be not knowing which parent is going to come home right. Going to come home right, is it the parent who's had a good day at work and is going to be happy to see you? Or is it going to be the parent who went to the bar after had a stressful day and is now going to take it out on you?
Speaker 1:So this is a parent who's supposed to be taking care of you and making sure that you have a safe place to be and you, just you don't know what you're going to you don't know what you're going to run into, and that's scary 100%.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's again. You've just described a child whose nervous system is in chronic pain. I call that a brain on chronic pain because you're walking on eggshells the whole time. I was more comfortable at school than I was at home, and I was under pressure at school, but not like I was at home.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes it hard to go home when you don't know what you're going to walk into every day.
Speaker 2:Well, I knew. I was going to walk into trouble, I just didn't know when it was going to hit. That was the problem.
Speaker 1:Fair enough. It's a lot of uncertainty there and you really have no control, which is where anxiety is going to come in, because you can't control the situation in any way. Which is where anxiety is going to come in, because you can't control the situation in any way. No-transcript.
Speaker 2:Well, that's an interesting question. That's kind of a general question. I'll answer it like this the first thing I do with a new client is assess the state of their nervous system and, like I said, new clients, and because they come to me and they're usually in chronic pain of some sort, they're usually dysregulated. Now, they all have this thing in common. I had it myself, we talked about it, the pain's doing it to me. So their nervous system is in this state and they're feeling victimized by it. And the first thing I do is I take them through three minutes of alternate nostril breathing, which helps to balance the emotions and balance both hemispheres of the brain and helps calm the body. And after three minutes that was you plug.
Speaker 2:One Alternate nostril breathing is you breathe in on one side, plug that side, exhale on the other, exhale and then inhale on that side. Switch, exhale, inhale again, switch. That's another tool. Inhale. That is a beautiful. It balances both hemispheres of the brain, helps balance the emotions. It's one of the standard ones that I do. And what happens with someone who's in chronic pain and does that? Comes into a new session and they're dysregulated and they do that for three minutes with me. They're calm and all of a sudden, and because I didn't do that, they did the breathing. And now they've gone from victimhood to empowerment in three minutes.
Speaker 1:Right, just helping them see that they have some control over the situation and empowering people to.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Even if it's something really small, just showing that you do have some level of control, that's right.
Speaker 2:And then the next thing I do is I take them into ancestor clearing to help them clear whatever current burden is showing up from the past, and then we start working on. Then I'm going to have a conversation with them about the rest of you know, then we'll get into it. But that's kind of where I start with a new person.
Speaker 1:So for someone who's listening, who feels stuck in this survival mode, what's one small, accessible first step that they can take to begin re-regulating their nervous system?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so learn how to breathe. It's really simple. So, sitting up straight, relax the shoulders back and down or raise the heart. Bring the chin in just a bit so the back of the neck is flat and the energy can flow freely up and down the spine. Now we have full access to the breath. Inhale and, as you inhale, allow the belly to relax and then, as you exhale, bring the belly towards the spine to help you fully exhale. Fully exhale before you inhale again, relaxing the belly towards the spine to help you fully exhale. Fully exhale before you inhale again, relaxing the belly and then exhale again, bringing the belly towards the spine. Fully exhale before you inhale again, keeping the inhale and exhale even or, if they're not quite even, exhale a little bit longer than the it's got to be even or a little bit longer than the inhale. 11 minutes.
Speaker 1:Start with three. We can all do that. We think we all know how to breathe.
Speaker 2:but Start with three minutes, because if you've got a, you know, if you've got a stress habit, three minutes is going to be tricky because the mind is going to kind of bounce and it's okay. The mind's like what am I doing? You know, just bring it back to the breath. You just it's not going to want to focus, so you just now. One of the cool things about this practice is you can help focus the mind on the task at hand by focusing on the tip of your nose or the third eye point or just a single point in space ahead of you. If you focus the eyes, it helps focus the mind on the task at hand. So that's a great little. So what are you doing? You're pointing. So I'm just, I pointed to my nose. I'm just like keep your eyes focused on the tip of the nose or the third eye point here between the two brow points, or just a single point in space. If you focus the eyes, it helps focus the mind on the task at hand and that will help you with the breath.
Speaker 2:Start with three minutes of long, deep breathing. Work up to 11. I'm telling you right now 11 minutes a day for 40 days is a game changer. It will change your life. It will change your life. It'll help reset your nervous system and you'll start to unwind from that stress habit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 11 minutes in a day is not a long time, but I think if you're stuck in this fight fright, fight flight or freeze response 11 minutes is a long time.
Speaker 2:It can be. One of the things that I encourage people to do is put on a set of earphones and listen to mantra. It's like nice soothing mantra music while they're doing the breath work, because that gives the mind, it kind of hypnotizes the mind a little bit and it helps to calm things down. The breath work itself will calm the body, but the music will help to calm the mind. Right, and, by the way, I don't teach anything that I haven't already tried and run the experiment myself, because that's just the way I operate. Right, it's got to work for me or I'm not going to teach it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're not going to solve something that didn't work, so that's awesome. So you said that healing isn't about going back to who we were, but about learning to live with presence and self-trust. So what does that look like in everyday life?
Speaker 2:and self-trust. So what does that look like in everyday life? Well, I think that I mean. It's interesting that question, because the if you ask me what is my current, what is the state of my current practice, I would say building my capacity to be present. So I feel like there's always more possibility of being present. And here's the thing about a chronic stress habit or a chronic pain sufferer we're actually not present. We've got one foot in the past and one foot in the future and we really aren't even here at all Because we're so worried about what just happened or what's going to happen, so we miss the present moment. This is why a meditation practice can be challenging for someone like us, like it was for me. Even when I had all that pain, I still had a meditation practice and that was very helpful because I had the habit. I had the habit of, you know, the mind would wander. I kept coming back, I kept coming back, I kept coming back, and it was a real lifesaver for me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I always thought in meditation when my mind would wander that I wasn't doing it right. But really you just need to bring your mind back to where you are.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it doesn't matter how many times the mind gets off course. It matters how many times you come back. You just want to keep coming back. That's the practice.
Speaker 1:Elizabeth, where can people find you?
Speaker 2:Oh, you can find me at my website, which is my name with a hyphen, so elizabeth-kippcom website, which is my name with a hyphen, so elizabeth-kippcom. I have lots of free information there. All my social media is there. You can contact me through the website and I'd love to hear from you. You can book a session if you want. I've got free introductory sessions as well.
Speaker 1:Amazing and you've got an offer that you're going to give five ways to relieve stress, anxiety and fear.
Speaker 2:Yes, it's actually seven ways, but it's five ways with two bonuses and it's really the tools that, the main tools that I used in my early recovery. I still use some of them and my early recovery really kind of unwrapping this stress habit. It includes a whole section on the breath, a nice practice that you can do. I think one of my favorites is the parts of. That is one of the I think it's. The last bonus is re-scripting your inner critic. So it's an exercise where you can. I just had had it with my inner critic and I took her to inner mean girl reform school and I gave her a makeover mean girl reform school and I gave her a makeover and it was profound how it affected my life in terms of self-care and self-compassion and all that. And that was a very specific exercise that I did and I lay that out in this offering.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I think that's really important. We do tend to talk to ourselves in a very negative and mean way. It's terrible. Well, thank you so much for joining us, elizabeth, your wisdom and vulnerability and deep understanding of trauma and healing. They are such a gift to my audience, and I'm grateful for the way that you reframe codependency with so much compassion and you offered real helpful tools for recovery, showed us how to do them, which was amazing. It was an honor to have you on the show, so thank you for that.
Speaker 2:Oh my goodness. Thank you so much, angela. This is such a treat for me. Thank you for having me as a guest.
Speaker 1:And thank you to everyone else who was hanging out with us today. If you'd like the episode, I'd love it if you would share it with someone that you love and someone who needs to hear it. Share it with the whole world. I'd love to help more people out there. I'd also really appreciate it if you would be so kind as to follow and subscribe and maybe leave a comment. I'm most active on Facebook at the Codependent Doctor and threads and Instagram at drangeladowney.
Speaker 1:I wish you all a great week as you learn to foster a better relationship with the most important person in your life. I'm going to talk to you in two weeks with another episode of the Codependent Doctor. Take care for now You've got this. Thanks for spending time with me today. I hope something in this episode resonated with you. If it did hit, follow, subscribe or share it with someone who needs to hear it today. The Codependent Doctor is not medical advice and doesn't replace speaking to your healthcare provider. If you're in a crisis, please go to the nearest ER or call 911 or reach out to your local mental health helpline. I'll be back here next week with more support stories and strategies, because we're healing together.