35. The Journey from Hypervigilance to Healer w/ Renée Zavislak

What happens when a young girl growing up amidst conflict, neglect, and trauma decides to spend her life helping others heal?

In this episode of The Butterfly of Why, I sit down with trauma therapist, speaker, and podcast host Renée Zavislak to explore the experiences that shaped her journey, from childhood adversity and decades of personal therapy to becoming a specialist in trauma. Together, we examine resilience, the lasting impact of childhood experiences, why some people avoid pain while others choose to face it, and how healing often unfolds in ways we least expect.

This is a conversation about trauma, meaning, purpose, and the remarkable ways human beings learn to transform survival into service.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:16

In light, there is darkness. Sometimes hope disappears. But in our search for a light, we grow, persevere, sleeping at the bottom, still dreaming of the sky. Here he is the best teacher, the butterfly of why.

SPEAKER_01 0:40

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of the Butterfly of Why. I'm your host, Jamie Weddle, and we are here to explore the why behind every first step that leads to growth, resilience, and perspective. And sometimes the questions that shape our lives are born from the struggles we never expected to face. For Renee Zavislak, those questions began early. They led her through years of therapy, a career in education, and eventually to a profession devoted to understanding trauma, healing, and the human experience. Today, she is a licensed marriage and family therapist, trauma specialist, and host of Psychotherapist the Podcast. Now, what fascinates me most about Renee is that she just doesn't study healing. She lives in conversation with it. So whether she is working with clients, speaking to audiences, or just sitting behind a microphone, she is exploring the same enduring question. How do we make sense of what has happened to us and how do we move forward? Renee, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_03 1:44

Thanks, Jamie. Happy to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:47

So as we were sort of uh discussing before hopping onto this, uh this to me is going to be a really cool conversation because there are many parallels that I see between the two of us that that help me relate to a guest like you. So I'm I'm uh grateful and and excited to have you on here today.

SPEAKER_03 2:10

I'm happy, like I said, I'm happy to be here, I'm excited to dig into the stuff.

SPEAKER_01 2:14

Let's do it. Let's do it. So, Renee, as I have learned about your story, I uh I can't help but think about there being a young girl at the center of it all. I see someone who grew up in a home that was conflict-ridden uh and emotionally strained, if I could say it that way. You had a mother who struggled to provide positive nurturing that you needed. A father that was on the gentle side uh but was busy because he was working a lot, and you had to experience some abuse that no child or teenager should ever have to face. That is a lot for anyone to carry. So can you take us back to that time and help us better understand what life felt like through your eyes? Sure. And what was it like for that, for that what was it like for that young girl trying to make sense of that world? And how do you think those experiences eventually shaped the path that led you towards helping others heal?

SPEAKER_03 3:10

Okay. Uh yes, I can definitely answer that. I think I may have told this story on my show, but regardless, you probably heard it, but I'm sure the people listening have not. It actually I can trace it back to a very precise moment when I was four years old. Remember it very clearly. Um, I have some vague memories before that. I actually have infinitely more memories of my childhood than most people with the severity of trauma that I have, and I'm strangely grateful for that. I remember quite a bit. Um, I was four years old. My sister had not been born yet. I have a sister who's almost five years younger. My parents were, we were living in Connecticut, and at this point, um, my mom was not working. She didn't start working until after my sister was born. She was home all day with me. And my father at the time worked in what I think was an insurance office. I'm not entirely positive. But in the scene, my mother is dragging me, quite literally, into like walking real fast. She's real Carolyn was always mad. She's walking real fast, she's real mad, dragging me into the office to pick a fight with my father in his crowded office. I remember he was standing like behind a counter, like a reception counter, and she's I don't remember what was said. Um, but I remember the counter sort of being higher than I and my mother yelling at my father. And the part that is the most potent in my memory is her going, let's go, Renee, like this sort of just sort of defiant sort of. And my parents are very young. If I'm four, they're 25 each, right? Um, and dragging me out. And Jamie, as she's dragging me, I had this very, very clear, very specific sort of truth come to me. And when I've never thought about this bit, this way of describing it before, but for anybody who's done like heroic journeys or high doses of psychedelic mushrooms, and sometimes even at the lower doses, these truths just sort of descend onto you that you don't really need to understand how you got to them or anything. They just come to you and you know that they're true. It was like a preschool version of that without the psychedelics. The experience was psychedelic enough. That I just all of a sudden knew, oh, these people are crazy. Like this isn't this is a total shit show. And I've just got to keep my head down and make it to 18 and get out of here. Like there's a very distinct awareness of the fact that like there was something really broken and that I just needed to like figure out how to get through it, right? And I don't remember there was a there was a tremendous amount of fighting, and as you know, then things really went off the rails for me about seven when all of the abuse started. But my mother, especially after my sister was born, was increasingly impatient and critical and hostile, just sort of in general across the board. My dad, as you said, is is lovely. He has a lovely personality, he's a lovely man, and we've come quite a long way. We did a lot of work as adults. I sort of forced it. I'm good that way. Um, and so we have a really solid relationship now, but he was just absent. He wasn't abusive, he wasn't, I mean, he had his, you know, sort of traditional things that would ru any kid or teenager, but none of them was particularly problematic. He just really wasn't around and very misattuned in the sense that my mother was not my primary abuser. If we're talking about severity of abuse, she did not sexually abuse me. I'd have a pretty significant sexual abuse history, but she was abusive emotionally and verbally and intermittently mild to moderately physically, nothing really serious physically, a lot of pushing, a lot of pinching. So it was gener, I was just scared all the time. I was scared about when she was going to start yelling, when she was going to be angry, when she was going to like, you know, pinch when she was going to. It just there was a constant threat of either she's coming after me or she's going after him. Somebody was getting yelled at all the time. And so what I learned to do, like so many other traumatized kids, was be hypervigilant, right? The primary symptom of post-traumatic stress was just to constantly be watching everybody else. I needed to know all the time what everybody was thinking, what everybody was feeling, what every, what everybody was doing to say, to stay safe, right? And so this predisposed me at a very early age to thinking about behavior. I just got really fascinated and I understood, not at four, sure, but pretty young, pretty young, I understood quite a lot of sort of relational psychology or family psychology systems think of what was going on in the larger system. I was with my extended family, both of my parents' parents and their siblings and kids, quite a bit when I was younger. That changed when I was older. So I had the whole picture. And I think I even had like almost an intuitive or at least experiential understanding of intergenerational trauma. Because if my mom was, you know, difficult, my grandmother was, you know, it tends to go like that. It often softens with every generation, right? And and so, and my grandparents were also very young. So I was around a lot of relatives and I could see what was going on. When I I developed an eating disorder, so predictable and cliche, um, as a teenager. And I remember my grandmother saying to me, this is it's not more funny than horrible, but it will get the idea across, coming up to me when I weighed like 85 pounds and saying, When I was 18, my collarbone stuck out more than yours. Like it was just a constant, there was always some sort of fucked up, excuse me, I curse quite a bit, messed up stuff being said, right? So it was a lot of criticism. It was a lot of competition between the women. So the competition meant there was just a lot of trying to beat each other down. So there was this feeling always of every time I entered a room, I had to steal myself for like what's coming, what do I have to try not to be hurt by, right? Something that I think has persisted into my adulthood. I didn't realize until I stopped drinking that I still feel like that with a lot of people in the room. Like, what, how do I keep myself safe? It was the whole reason I drank, right? And then when I stopped, I was like, do I have social anxiety? What's my problem? And I think that's what we would call it. That's how it presents. But it comes from the combination, I was neurodivergent before it was cool, right? So it comes from a combination of masking some neurodivergent needs and knowing any given time when I'm in a room that I might not be able to get what I need to be comfortable. I think that's part of it, right? But another part of it is definitely just this learned behavior of I have to brace myself for what's coming. Somebody's gonna hurt me. Like one way or another, whether it inadvertently or on purpose, right? I'm I'm getting swiped at. So I think all of that combined to create all of the stuff we would sort of be able to predict it created. Because you were saying, you know, we have similarities, and it does seem like we have some unique ones. But my experience as a therapist has been that, you know, there's like 20 things that happen to people in different combinations and in different contexts, but really they affect us all the same way. You know, there are variations, not exactly the same way, but there are sort of like there's this presentation of it and this presentation of it and this presentation of it. Sort of the same negative core beliefs about the self get formed whenever there is, you know, whenever a kid's needs aren't being met emotionally, right? The results are somewhat, somewhat predictable. Um, and so when the things started to happen, the things started developing me that any of us in the field would be able to predict they did, and I sought out therapy, starting they I was forced into therapy when I was anorexic and then went intermittently throughout my late teens and my early adulthood, and nobody was ever really able to help me. And so it wasn't until I had supervisors as a clinical intern that I ever got any real like good therapy. And so all of this swirling together, there's just the tendency to look at how everybody is thinking and feeling and doing, combined with the fact that it bothered me that I could figure out more about what was going on with me than a lot of the clinicians with whom I worked, I just wanted to do it better. So there was always, and then there's this thing that used to happen to me quite a bit. And I remember a friend in high school explaining it to me from the time I was pretty young, like mid-teens, strangers want to tell me all of their horrible secrets and their life stories at the bus stop, like wherever. And I said once to my friend Valerie, who was with me one of the times that it was happening, like, why does this happen to me all the time? This is when we were maybe about 20. I was like, the number of times that people just start telling me, she said, because they can tell you're not going to judge them. And I think, I don't know, you know, how you feel about astrology, but I'm a quintuple Scorpio, right? So I'm real comfortable in the, so it's all dark up in here. I'm real comfortable in the darkness. And so by the time I was a teenager, I had already started to really plumb some of my own darker places. And I think was somewhat inured to a lot of content that maybe isn't comfortable for other people. And so I think those three variables, sort of like the comfort with darkness, the deep desire to give people help that I couldn't get, and the way that my brain was trained to one of the biggest, I think the most important part of my job as a therapist really is pattern recognition in a certain way. And I think that's part of that's the neurodivergence, right? Any neurospicy peeps out there know we're generally really good at patterns, but also I had to be. When dad does this and then mom does this, somebody's throwing a coffee cup. You know, there was always an equation or an algorithm, I don't really know which one applies, I hate math, um, to figure out. But I think those were the things that got me to the place that I knew exactly what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it. And to your point that I just sort of live it, I work a lot and people talk to me a lot about how are you not burnt out and run. Because this is what I do. If I if I won the lottery, I'd still do it. I just wouldn't bother charging anybody for it. If I'm talking to you and you're my friend, we're having basically the same conversation. It's all, I don't do small talk. It's all, unless I'm, you know, doing very small talk. It's very extreme, right? So it's just kind of, it's always been what I do. Like I don't remember ever not thinking this way or or thinking about these things or wanting to understand how people felt or you know, how to help them understand how they felt. It's just always been what I do.

SPEAKER_01 13:03

Renee, there are 15 different episodes I could create just based upon what.

SPEAKER_03 13:11

I know that was a long answer.

SPEAKER_01 13:12

No, no, no, but but I love it.

SPEAKER_03 13:14

That's not my strong suit, James. No, no, no.

SPEAKER_01 13:16

Trust me, trust me. Like, I I absolutely love that because I relate so much and and and understand so much of that. My mom, as we called her crazy Karen, she was a person that would love to.

SPEAKER_03 13:33

That was hard C's, man.

SPEAKER_01 13:35

Dude, she she would love just to pick a fight. Yeah. Um, and she was extremely antagonistic. And you spoke of the hypervigilance. As a kid growing up, I I really had to learn what the mood was like, what the vibe was like. And I got used to it over the years to go, ooh, I feel this. And I would feel that part of my stomach just start bubbling up with that with that intensity. And and I had the the double effect of a father who worked a lot, but had the same had had a similar level of disruption happening. Both of them were alcoholics. Mom was a mom was a great combination of Xanax and vodka. And then dad would work and come home, and then he would take down the vodka.

SPEAKER_02 14:31

Got it.

SPEAKER_01 14:32

And he would just, he, he was more of like the the the quiet and stormy type. Old Midwestern.

SPEAKER_03 14:39

Almost worse because it's always simmering, and you're it's it lends itself more to the hypervigilance, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:44

You see, you see where it goes. So he would just come home and just brew and simmer in terms of I've done my job, leave me the F alone. Sure. Mom at the head, sometimes she was really great. But on the days where she wasn't great, and then that storm was brewing, she would just go at it with him. And she would push and push and push until boom. Yep.

SPEAKER_03 15:06

Next thing I was like, Oh, yeah, that was Carolyn's game too. Yes, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 15:11

So, and and then as I got older to be a teenager, then father wasn't home. Oh, then it became me, or it was my two older sisters. So, with that being said, I wanted to kind of go back to your to your point about having those moments where you're like, you're aware of what's happening more than the people around you. You're not actually aware of what's happening, but there's enough under the surface where you're processing it. It makes me think of how Einstein was just innately looking at the world and universe and processing everything.

SPEAKER_03 15:46

I mean, I love being compared to Einstein, but it does that does sound like what this constant, it's constantly there. It's just a constant data gathering and assimilating. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:57

And it and it's it's all about survival.

SPEAKER_03 15:59

And I would survival.

SPEAKER_01 16:01

And I would I would go to school, and we moved around a lot as a kid, so we were East Coast, West Coast, I was constantly the new kid. So that level of dysfunction that was happening in my home, I'm going to school and I don't know what to do. I'm struggling to learn. Right. And then seeing the way the teachers are behaving negatively towards me, seeing the way my peers are sort of rejecting me, all of those things were just creating this level of of instability and insecurity and and devouring my confidence. But going back to what you were saying about the dark, there was dark, but the i in my mind it's very akin to to the yin-yang. I was experiencing dark, but it was never an eclipse. There was always some level of hope that I had, and I think that little light that was in the dark was me accumulating information from that dark and going, well, I I gotta do something with this dark. And now it serves a purpose for me because I now I have the experience, the emotional experiences that now serve for me to work in a capacity to have a podcast. Or again, uh another similarity, I I'm a school counselor, I've been a school counselor for the past 12 years, so uh duh.

SPEAKER_03 17:17

Right.

SPEAKER_01 17:17

I I'm so better suited to be a school counselor because I understand what it's like.

SPEAKER_03 17:22

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 17:22

I understand what it's like. So a part of me moving into that space twelve years ago was based upon what it was like for me to be a kid and to feel misunderstood and to feel isolated and invisible. So but keying on that dark part, it's it's taking that dark because I think so often more often than not, when people experience trauma, it's a shit ton of dark that anyone has to deal with.

SPEAKER_03 17:49

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:50

And there are so many people that they they experience the dark, like my mother. I I I don't know all the ins and outs of how she got to be where she was at, but I know well before I was born there was some level of darkness and there was not enough light. My father, there was a level of of darkness and not enough light. And I I'm through my journey of self-discovery and therapy, I can see those things more objectively than I ever could have as a child or as a teenager, even well into my adult years. Now I can see it to go, wow, they're just characters in a story. But now having experienced all of that information, now it's well, how how do we, Renee, turn around with that same level of knowledge and experience and share that with others, whether it be a podcast, whether it be in therapy, whether it be working in public education. It's so it's it means a lot for you to have that moment as a child where that thing became very clear to go, oh, they're nuts.

SPEAKER_03 18:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:54

They're nuts. All right, I don't know how I'm gonna get from point A to point B, but when I get to point B, somewhere this is gonna mean something to me. Yeah, you know, and and I see that now you're in this position in your life where we can never really understand why things happen to us. And that that is that is kind of what this podcast is about. When it we can never understand why, but you understand enough of the why I made these moves to be in the position where you're at today to now serve as a person who's going to provide support, caring, nurturing, and information for those who might not be able to see it the same way as you.

SPEAKER_03 19:33

Yeah, agreed. Yep, yep, yep.

SPEAKER_01 19:37

Um talk to me about your so you were about therapy for about 20 years, right? Intermittent.

SPEAKER_03 19:44

I never did any really good long runs of therapy because none of it was really helpful. Um, like I said, I got forced into it when I was 15, 16, and it wasn't actually my parents, it was my boarding school, which is a largely nefarious figure, if I want to personify it in my story, but I will give them this. I was so obviously anorexic, and my parents weren't doing anything. And so they called a meeting and told my parents that if they didn't get me treatment, they would expel me. They sort of forced my parents to take me to the doctor, and I got evaluated at Yale at the family study, and my mom just really wasn't interested in dealing with it. So somehow I managed to just go to weekly therapy, and I remember it so clearly. I'm 55 years old, right? So you got to figure this is like the mid 80s where you could still smoke cigarettes everywhere. And I'm 16. I had started smoking the summer between junior and senior year. So this must have been senior year when I was seeing this one. And I just remember going to his office and smoking cigarettes and just telling him stories about my day and him being somewhat bemused, and that was every week. There was never any. I mean, I literally smoked cigarettes and made him laugh, right? It was super fun, you know, at a great time. Um and then I would sort of pop in and out. There was this one really important moment in my early 30s before I was a therapist. At this point, I was teaching, and I was being sexually harassed by my principal. And at this point, I've had, you know, two different sexual abusers and then some other gray area stuff that tends to follow those of us with a victim history for all of the reasons. Well, there's one primary reason that happens. We can talk about that another time. Um, but I was being sexually harassed by my principal, and my mom and I at this point were still talking. We have a I have a no contact boundary with her now. But I called her and she said something she probably regrets now, which was Renee, I'm I'm not saying that what's what he's doing isn't wrong, but you seem upset about this in a way that seems like it's about something else you should talk to somebody. And so I called one of my advisors, um, my primary academic advisor at college, because I I had Been a psych major and I still had contact, it was a small school, I still had contact with the faculty, and asked him to refer me to someone. And he sent me to this old Freudian analyst who would very literally fall asleep in my sessions. But if I said something really important, he'd sort of stir and wake up, right? And so I'm I'm ranting and raving about the fact that the school that I worked at was called Aces. It was an outplacement in Connecticut for kids anywhere on the special education spectrum. And the woman who ran the company was, well, I was meant to say the person who ran the company was a woman. And so at this, in this particular moment, I was ranting and raving to him about the fact that I would expect her as a woman to do a better job of protecting me because they totally bungled how they handled it. They kept putting me in meetings with him. It was just the whole thing was really ugly. And I'm he's sleeping pretty much. He sort of dozed off. And I said, She's supposed to be protecting me. And he sort of went, Do you feel like that a lot? I said, like what? He said, like people who are supposed to be protecting you aren't. And I said, No, I feel like that right now because that's what's happening right now. But it got in there. I remember I went to a bikram yoga class afterwards, my first one, because this was my other like something's got to help me with this. And anybody who knows yoga, I think it's called eagle pose. You know, you're on your stomach and you open up your arm, you lift your torso and your shoulders and your chest off the ground. You're opening your heart shock right. And I just started to sob. Fortunately, it's so sweaty in there, nobody could tell, right? But it got in there, and over the next, like, I think it was about a year, I it just sort of percolated. And that was what led me to sort of leave the East Coast to go to California so that I could I put myself in eating disorder treatment. And that's when it all started to unravel. So even though he wasn't a particularly effective therapist, it was worth all of the times he fell asleep for that one sort of skimmed rock into the ocean of my brain that really got me where I needed to be and started to put the pieces together. Because when he said it, I realized every like adult boyfriend I've had, I've had this fight with them. They're not sticking up with for me, they're not protecting me. So again, it's this experiential education about how we import our trauma into our childhood trauma into our adult relationships. Like I really understood my own stuff before I understood anybody else's. And I would say that that shitty therapist was relatively pivotal in that with that one question.

SPEAKER_01 24:26

He was a shitty therapist, but it seems like his ineffectiveness in that moment provoked enough like sort of animosity in you totally that it's totally stirred something. It was nothing of his doing in terms of like his skill set.

SPEAKER_03 24:41

He still caught it half asleep. I gotta give the guy that. It was a good catch. It was a good, it was a good clinical catch. I mean, now I look back on it, I'm like, duh. Like ever, you know, that's kind of therapy 101. But at the but for somebody who's half asleep, you know, it was pretty decent.

SPEAKER_01 24:56

So hearing that, it makes me think about people that have experienced any level of trauma, or just suffering from depression, or just anything that that they cannot get out of their own emotional way. Someone could hear that and go, well, why the hell would I go to therapy anyway? It didn't work for her. And I've heard I I've heard that from a lot of people.

SPEAKER_03 25:23

I hear it all the time.

SPEAKER_01 25:24

And and I think the way I I've always expressed it for myself, and this is just my process, is that like it's like dating. You just can't find one person. You can't find one person and go, I tell everybody this is it. Because so many times people don't know where to begin.

SPEAKER_02 25:41

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_01 25:41

And they just have a recommendation. Well, oh, he was so great for my for my sister, and they just go there, well, they cost a lot of money, it's a great recommendation. They sit there and they nothing's happening. And and I think it's a matter of finding two or three different people, set up in consultation, and which one makes you feel something.

SPEAKER_03 26:02

Right.

SPEAKER_01 26:02

And you have to really sit there and go my my barometer is always if if I cry during the first session, we're good enough.

SPEAKER_00 26:10

Right.

SPEAKER_01 26:11

If I'm sitting there just going through the motions and I'm telling you the same strong story I've always told, it's not gonna work. I know how to tell my story in a strong way. I've told it to everyone.

SPEAKER_03 26:22

Sure, right.

SPEAKER_01 26:23

But there's still there's there's there's the residual effects of hurt little Jamie that's in there. If you and if if I don't feel comfortable enough, then then it's not it's not working for what I really need. It it makes me think in the same way of how people talk about meditation. Well, meditation doesn't work. It's not that it doesn't work, it's just you need to figure out how meditation works.

SPEAKER_03 26:46

That's why we call it a practice. Because it takes practice.

SPEAKER_01 26:49

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_03 26:50

So there's a level practice, it's never perfect, right?

SPEAKER_01 26:53

So there's when it comes to therapy, there's a level of of openness to finding something that works for you, but then there's also patience and knowing that if there's something underneath, the only way that the growth is gonna happen is by bringing it up.

SPEAKER_03 27:10

I agree, absolutely, absolutely. And there's a lot of bad therapy out there. I mean, there's just a lot of ineffective therapy, and not because people are trying not to be helpful, not because they don't want to, but I think that in grad school we get scared out of our instincts, we get scared out of taking any power in the room, we get scared out of everything that works in deference to we don't want anybody getting sued because they went too far or got too close or anything like that. And so I really felt like they scared us out of our instincts and had that's part of the reason that cognitive behavioral therapy is so preferred by schools and everybody else, because it's so safe. Yeah, it's so safe. It's also really surface level. It's great once you've done the depth work, right? You've done the trauma work, you've done the deeper work. It's not gonna promote that much change other than some behavioral or cognitive change only when there isn't trauma littering the ground underneath it, in which case you're just gonna get symptom substitution, right? So I think there's a lot of ineffective therapy out there. And also the way that I see it is like therapists get a little scared out of it. It was my mentor Roger, who, for people who listen to the show, like if you know nobody even knows him personally, everybody's more obsessed with Roger than they are interested in me for good reason because he's absolutely like, I don't even know how to describe him, but he's like a deity to me. But um, Roger was really the one who brought me back to my instincts. You know, I was so I love school, like especially college and grad school, you get to pick what you want to study, like huge dork. And so Roger would ask me questions in our supervision meetings about cases, like, well, what do you think about that? And I'd be like, Well, if I'm looking at it from an object relations perspective, I think this. But if I'm looking at it from like a self-psychology perspective, it could be like, right, right, right, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know, I know, I know, you know all the theory. It's great, you're smart, it's really good. What do you think they need? And just constantly coaching me back to myself. And then there were moments when I remember we were at, Roger and I were at the AFTA conference together, the American Family Therapy Academy, and Terry Real was speaking before it was before he blew up. I think he'd only written a book or two, not us hadn't come out. This was about 12 years ago. And he was talking about taking sides in couple therapy. That people think couple therapists are always neutral, but he's not. If somebody's done something objectively wrong, he's going to call that out or he's going to break that down, right? And Roger was friendly with him. And so after he spoke, we were talking, and I said to him that I was so compelled by what he was saying about taking sides that it made so much sense to me, but I can't do that. I don't think I could get away with that. And he was like, oh, absolutely you can. And Roger really grabbed on to that and would really sort of push me. And I think learning that really what's most important for a healer, don't get me wrong, education is important, theory is important. And I still go back to theory when, when, when it isn't really clear to me instinctively or intuitively what to do. And of course, those instincts and intuition aren't entirely instinctive. They are also formed by all the theory that I've learned. But usually I'm just working from what comes up in me naturally, right? I think that and being able to not be afraid, right? Like not being afraid that if the client doesn't like what I'm going to say, and this is after I've nurtured enough of a relationship that I can go to some places that maybe are a little more direct, that I need to be more focused on doing the work right than I am on losing clients. And I think that's something that works against a lot of therapy. I think that capitalism is internalized very easily, whether we know it or not. And I think that if you're doing a really good job in therapy, the goal is to make the client not need you anymore. And I think that's really hard for people to work within. It's really anxiety-producing, especially for any of us with any sort of scarcity mindset. You just want them to keep coming back. And moving too efficiently through the work endangers that. I think that's in there. I think that people watch therapy on TV and they see somebody sort of squirmy and uncomfortable, and the therapist, and they think, well, that must be how it works. I go when I'm uncomfortable and we don't say anything, and somehow the magic happens. No, it doesn't. But people see that so often that I think they tolerate the number of clients I have who are like, I was in therapy for 10 years. We never talked about this. What the heck were you talking about? Right? But they just people think, oh, my stuff must be so complicated. It's gonna take us years to sort it out. And like I said earlier, it's not really. I'm not saying it isn't somewhat complex sometimes, but it's not that we've seen all the stuff already. You know what I mean? We know the stuff. So I think on both sides, client and therapist, there is a little bit more of a like a tolerance for it not to do anything than there needs to be. There are certainly stretches of time with my with my clients when we're just kind of what feels like kind of shooting the shit. And it's out of that that things come to the surface sometimes. But there should be really distinct periods of growth and an awareness of where you're going. I am, I don't, paperwork's like my nightmare. So I don't do like formal written up treatment plans, but I, with every client by the fifth session, we're like, okay, what are we actually doing? How are we gonna know when we get there? Right? So that we can otherwise I could talk, look, I could talk to people all day long every day and never get anywhere and have plenty to talk about. So we need to make sure we know where we're going, and that's just another thing that doesn't happen. And and also people are too locked into whatever their theoretical orientation is. I'm a cognitive behavioral therapist, I'm a this therapist, I'm a that therapist. That's great, but then what you need to do if that's the case is know that that isn't going to work for every client. And are you willing to turn business away if they're not the right client for you? Right? Like, so there's a lot of factors I think that make it not because anybody's, you know, not empathetic or not trying to be helpful, but there are sort of just things that we learn from what we think therapy's about, and things that I like I said, I think are part of intro, because you know, like there's only two things that cause suffering, capitalism and trauma, right? And I think capitalism gets up in here and makes it so that the trauma work doesn't happen, you know.

SPEAKER_01 33:16

There are I I think in in every profession you're going to find people who care a lot and those who just don't have the same level of care factor. You look at uh b doctors, police officers, you having worked in education, you could see a lot of teachers who are just they're going through the motions. And I I think therapists in some ways uh could could be operating on on that same level of just I'm I'm going through the motions. That's just because that is their personality, that is, that is who they are. And I think for anyone that is trying to heal and grow, you owe it to yourself to find someone that is not going to be rigid in their I have to use this theory because to your effect, it's it's not a one-size fits-all approach. Like as a school counselor, I there's a million different theories I can try to use, but if I'm sitting with a student, none of that matters. It's it's hearing a student what they're going through, what the crisis is going internally. Now I I can I can easily cherry pick from a few different things based upon a moment, but for the most part it's like how can I care enough so that that this individual can at least see a small beacon of hope to move forward. And that that's a really critical thing to to provide for anyone that that's really trying to to heal in growth.

SPEAKER_03 34:48

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:49

Let's look at the idea real quickly that that suffering is relative. Uh you could have two twins living in the same house and they are going to experience the one thing entirely differently. Why, from from your perspective, from uh a neurological standpoint, psychological standpoint, why do you think suffering or just hurting in itself can be such a unique experience?

SPEAKER_03 35:16

Sure. Good question. There I think there are two main reasons for that. The first is that there are individual differences in resilience that we don't even really understand. They're particularly difficult to research, right? Twins would be one of the only ways to do so with any real accuracy, right? Um and so it's definitely difficult to research. I know the factors that have been extracted in the research in the past are that intelligence tends to be a resource for resilience, which I don't know, feels like sometimes it's the opposite, but that's what the research says. And um, that if a child, if we're talking specifically about childhood resilience, if a child has one consistent positive adult, doesn't have to be a parent, doesn't have to be a primary caregiver, but somebody that can build resilience. I think that there are individual differences in resilience that are inborn, and I would say even with genetic twins, I just don't feel like everything's genetics, right? A lot of things are genetics, a lot of things are genetics, but there are individual differences in resilience that are inborn that are about certain circumstances, again, like if you have this one consistent positive adult. Um I think also that from a more neurological standpoint, what makes something trauma or not trauma is not the severity of the event, even though there are things that are almost universally going to be stored as trauma. What makes something trauma is how the individual's information processing system stores it. Basically, is it stored as a right brain memory or a left brain memory? And right brain memories are stored in fragments, and left brain memories are full stories, left brain memories aren't trauma, right brain memories are. Any moment of impact, right? Any sort of, if we're talking about complex post-traumatic stress, there's going to be a number of them, right? If we're talking about single incident trauma, you know, the minute you have to drive through the flames. Like I lived in Sonoma County where there was a lot of fires. I did a lot of single incident fire trauma work. Um, but whatever that moment of impact is, there are variables stacked on top of each other about about attention and about how the memory's working in terms of what are the experiences in the past that you already have schema for that it could hang on in the long-term memory and maybe not get stored as trauma. There are information processing differences that just means sometimes it's stored that way and sometimes it's not. And again, I don't think we understand all of the things that inform how that information is sent to one place or the other, but we do know enough to know that that's the case. And so I think that it is relatively impossible to predict with precision how traumatic or even if something is going to be traumatic. There are certain things that you can be pretty sure anything that's threatening your life is likely to be traumatic. But what's tricky about it now is I think we used to define trauma as any experience that was outside the normal human experience. And I mean we've gone so off the rails now it all is, right? Like it's all normal at this point. So you don't judge it by the experience, is just what I'm trying to say to your point. There, you just you you can tell by the way the symptoms present. You know, I'm not really that interested in diagnoses. I throw them out for like parsimony where words are concerned, but I deal with symptoms. I don't deal with disorders, I don't really believe in disorders. Um and I think the symptoms tell you what you need to do if it's trauma, if it's not trauma, not the objective details of the experience.

SPEAKER_01 38:27

Adding to that, it it's I think there's an importance for for meaning and purpose. I think there are those who they could they could look for meaning in something like they're they're looking under a rock, or there are those who can manufacture meaning. It makes me think of Victor Frankel's man's Search for Meaning. It's right. There's no understanding why a Holocaust is happening, but how do you find meaning in the actual human experience of what is happening with that suffering? It's not the meaning of why is this thing happening, but like what am I obtaining as a human being with this that is going on right now? How do I manufacture purpose so I can sustain one more day with this unexpected traumatic event that I'm going through? Alright, Renee, last one, last one to get you out of here. So while I was working on this episode and thinking about you, I I this metaphor sort of popped into my brain specifically regarding a bird that is building a nest. So when you have a bird that is building a nest, it is gathering small, unrelated pieces over time. Like many of us that that when we are in our healing journey, all these pieces, all these experiences, and over time, we put all these pieces together, and then we eventually have a nest. And at the at when we have that nest, then we realize that all of these pieces were a part of thing uh part of a bigger thing that would allow for us to feel safe and secure. But the nest is also big enough that we can have little baby birds in there or have others in there. So to your effect, your childhood, your years in therapy, your time in education, your work as a therapist, what do you think are some of the pieces that ultimately formed who you are today that now is a part of this nest that allows for you to feel safe and secure and not just terrified all the time?

SPEAKER_03 40:22

Oh, um, safe and secure and not terrified all the time. That's been a combination of trauma work, psychedelic work, which is trauma was trauma work for me, um, mindfulness practices, and yes, specifically meditation. And I was one of those people who rolled my eyes every time somebody brought up meditation. I can't meditate. I get, I totally get it. And I think I feel particularly resourced to help people who are reluctant or can't meditate, right? To get into meditation. Um, and also in how to make meditation more accessible, you don't always have to be sitting silently in your mind. There are other ways to create meditative practices. That's been really big. Honestly, nutrition's been huge. I think people, and I understand why people don't really want to know this sometimes, but like what we put in our body has a huge effect on how our mood functions. And if you're suffering any sort of physiological-based mood disruption when you already have trauma-based mood disruption, it's really important to separate out the strands so you know what you're dealing with and where the feelings are coming from and where they belong. But I think corrective emotional experiences are really critical. They're the gold standard on healing. It's just that you can't generate them. It's the work that we do, you know, in therapy or through these other modalities, whether it's bibliotherapy or psychedelic therapy or mindfulness work or whatever, that allow us to be open and receive the corrective emotional experiences. But I think I've had some pretty potent experiences with other human beings, right? But I also think that all right, this is the best way I can explain this, and I'm gonna try to make it quick. When I was an English teacher, um, I was a middle school English teacher for a long time, and with almost every class I taught, I did a unit on theater literature. So we would read plays. And I would teach them how to build character pages. You know, as you're reading, all you have, unlike at most novels, you don't have direct description usually, you don't have thoughts and feelings, you just have words and actions. You've got to decide from what the character does and says, what do we know about them? And they would keep these sort of logs as they went through the plays. And the last play we read, every class was the play version of the diary of Anne Frank, right? Everybody knows this story. So another thing I would teach them is that, you know, some actors, when they do plays, develop what's called a character spine. Theater was my major for a year before I switched to psychology, so I pulled this from there. And, you know, you read a play and you decide who your character is, what they're about, and then you decide what is your character's spine. And the spine is expressed as an infinitive verb, and you know you have a viable spine for your character if everything they do and say in the course of that play can somehow be traced back to that verb. So I would do this with the class as a whole when we got to the end of the book and they've got their character pages and we put all the characters on the wall and we aggregate their responses. And if I did it with 10 classes, they always came up with roughly the same answers, right? Anne's spine was always something like to experience life. Her mom's fine was to nurture, her dad's was to protect, her sister's was to be a good girl. Mr. Van Dan's fine was to get his needs met, Mrs. Van Dan's fine was to get Mr. Van Dan's needs met, and Peter's spine was to fly under the radar or something to that effect. And there was a day when I was, I don't know if I was thinking about a client or sitting with a client or thinking about myself. I don't know where this came from. Frankly, I was pro I probably was high because that's when a lot of this stuff tends to poke through. But it occurred to me that for those of us with unresolved trauma, we only get one character spine to survive. That's it. Everything we do and say while the trauma is unresolved is about emotional or for some of us, physiological, physical survival. And so I said to a client, Okay, so you've done the work. Now you've healed all the things on the list that you want to heal. So it doesn't need I explained this idea to them and I said, so your character spine no longer needs to be to survive. What do you want it to be now? That's how we're going to decide with the rest of your work like because this was someone who wanted to stay in, well, what do we do now? Right. We decide what are you doing now? What are you doing here? And I had done it for myself the night before when the idea came to me, and I realized, oh, this is easy. It's to heal. Whether it's me or everybody else. And what that's given me is it's so easy for me to decide now what's right for me, what the right path is, what the right, I don't believe in right decisions, but because it's just what's most consistent with my spine.

SPEAKER_02 44:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 44:44

Right. And I think that developed from all of these experiences and all of these ways of understanding things and all of the things about my personality that are inborn. But I think that's that's what's given me the nest is I know what I'm doing. I know why I'm here.

SPEAKER_01 44:58

I love that. There's like a level of objectivity to it. It's just it becomes more matter-of-fact as this is what I have to do. Yeah, it seems you know, it's fine.

SPEAKER_03 45:05

Roger, my mentor, said to me once, I get the feeling you just think like you feel like you just obviously have to do this work, meeting with other people. I was like, Yeah, I absolutely feel like that. Not an obligation in an onerous way, but just that's why I'm here. Right. And so I don't, I don't like when people are like, I'm thankful for my trauma, because I think that's really invalidating to people who are suffering. And I wouldn't say that I'm thankful for it. It would have been lovely to have a real childhood. That sounds great. Yeah. Um with that said, I, you know, again, like I'm 55, I'm old enough now that I can look back, and every single shitty thing that's happened, it's like, oh you see it. I see why. It's the only story I was ever going to have, and I know that from the mindfulness work now and the psychedelic work. Like this was always going to be the story. What do I do with it? And so it all just makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 45:52

Yeah. You you become grateful not for that it happened, but for for what you learned from it. What a motion.

SPEAKER_03 45:58

I'm grateful that I was resourced to learn it internally, externally. You know, like therapies are it's like nutrition, it's a real class warfare situation where you have to have the resources to access it. And often you have those resources. If you have the resources to begin with, it's you know, it's tricky like that. So I've had enough privilege to put me in the place where I could access this learning, you know. That's amazing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:21

That's amazing. Um, Renee, I know you gotta go, so I don't want to take up any more time. Um, dude, you're amazing. I would love to have you on the show again because I'll come on anytime you want.

SPEAKER_03 46:31

I could talk about this stuff for a week straight.

SPEAKER_01 46:34

I'm like you, I don't do small talk. Like I'm I'm really obnoxious when it comes to being in public because I just like I can't do small talk. No, I go deep right away. All I all I do is this. Yeah, all I do is this. And you see people like when I talk, they just kind of go Homer Simpson in the bush. There's like Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 46:49

They're just like, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:50

Can we just talk about Costco?

SPEAKER_03 46:52

I'm like, yeah, no, I don't want to do that. I literally can't. I start to crawl out of my skin.

SPEAKER_01 46:56

I cannot do it. Um, but thank you so much for coming to the show. Uh yeah, thank you so much. You're very welcome. And we'll do this again soon. Um, with that being said, for the butterfly of Y, I am Jamie Whitele, your host. My only goal with this show is to leave the world a little bit better than I found it. So please let's share that together. Renee, enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_03 47:19

Jamie, thank you. Bye-bye.