38. The Body Remembers: How Tapping, Safety, and Somatic Healing Help Us Move Forward with Mitch Gainey

What if the symptoms you're trying to "fix" are actually your nervous system's best attempt to protect you?

In this powerful conversation, Leanna sits down with Australian counselor, facilitator, and evidence-based EFT trainer Mitch Gainey to explore the profound connection between trauma, the nervous system, and the body's innate capacity to heal.

Together, they unpack why traditional talk therapy isn't always enough, how unresolved experiences can become "stuck" in the body, and why creating safety is often the first step toward lasting change. Mitch shares his journey working with youth experiencing homelessness, refugees, trauma survivors, and helping professionals, and how those experiences led him to discover the transformative power of Clinical EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques), commonly known as tapping.

Whether you're a parent, helping professional, or someone navigating your own healing journey, this episode offers a compassionate reminder: there is nothing wrong with you. Your nervous system has been doing its best to help you survive and healing begins when we learn to listen.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• What Clinical EFT (tapping) is and how it differs from social media tapping practices
• How trauma gets "stuck" in the body and why symptoms often make sense
• The connection between nervous system regulation, safety, and healing
• Why increasing your capacity is more important than eliminating activation
• How tapping can help process anxiety, fear, grief, anger, and unresolved experiences
• The importance of learning to tolerate joy, connection, and feeling fully alive
• Why compassion—not shame—is essential for lasting transformation

If you've ever wondered why you keep getting pulled back into the same patterns, emotions, or survival responses, this conversation will help you understand what your body may be trying to tell you and how to begin listening differently.

About Mitch Gainey: 

Mitch Gainey is an Australian counsellor, facilitator, and trainer specialising in Evidence Based EFT, Focusing, somatic practice, and trauma-informed change. His work helps therapists, coaches, and helping professionals understand the body as an intelligent living process, not just a set of symptoms to manage.
With a background in youth homelessness, refugee support, executive facilitation, and practitioner training, Mitch brings both depth and practicality to the healing space. He teaches Evidence Based EFT as a body-based method for creating enough safety to process emotion, trauma, stress, and stuck patterns without overwhelm.
Mitch’s work is influenced by Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing, Internal Family Systems, Somatic Experiencing, and contemplative traditions of deep listening. He is especially interested in how tapping, presence, and somatic awareness can help people stop fighting themselves and begin listening to what the body is trying to carry forward.

Connect with Mitch:

Website: https://www.mitchgainey.com/

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Connect with me:
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Website → leannahunt.com

Disclaimer:
Although I am a licensed Associate Clinical Mental Health Counselor, The NeuroHeir℠ Podcast is not a substitute for therapy, counseling, or medical treatment. The tools and practices I share are for educational and coaching purposes only. Every nervous system is unique, and what we discuss on this podcast should not replace your own individual therapeutic work or professional support.

The focus of this podcast is my coaching work, which centers on education, nervous system practices, and generational healing tools designed to support—not replace—your personal journey with a qualified provider.

If you are struggling with your mental health or experiencing overwhelming emotions, please seek support from a licensed professional in your area. You don’t have to do this work alone.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Nervo Air Podcast, the show for cycle breakers, parents, young adults, and helping professionals ready to understand their nervous system through a generational lens, heal what isn't theirs to carry, and consciously choose what comes next. Hi, I'm your host, Leanna Hunts, an associate clinical mental health counselor and certified performance coach. Each week you'll get stories, science, and somatic practices plus my signature for and framework. Notice, name, nurture, and navigate to help you honor resilience, break silence, and build deeper connection with yourself and those you love, all while shaping a legacy of safety, freedom, and possibility. Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Neuroair Podcast. I am so excited today because I have my friend Mitch here. Mitch, say hi to everybody.

SPEAKER_01 0:54

G'day everyone.

SPEAKER_00 0:56

So excited to have Mitch Ganey here. I have known Mitch, I think, for like several years, five years. Yeah. Already.

SPEAKER_01 1:07

Gosh, that's crazy.

SPEAKER_00 1:09

I'm sure you can tell where Mitch is from. We're gonna get into his story in just a minute. But Mitch, I'm just so excited to have you here and I'm gonna read your bio for everybody. Sound good?

SPEAKER_01 1:20

Sounds good.

SPEAKER_00 1:21

Mitch Daney is an Australian counselor, facilitator, and trainer specializing in evidence-based EFT, focusing on somatic practice and trauma-informed change. Already we have so much in common, hence why I invited Mitch on the podcast. His work helps therapists, coaches, and helping professionals understand the body as an intelligent living process, not just a set of symptoms to manage, which I love. With a background in youth homelessness, refugee support, executive facilitation, and practitioner training, Mitch brings both depth and practicality to the healing space. He teaches evidence-based EFT as a body-based method for creating enough safety to process emotion, trauma, stress, and stuck patterns without overwhelm. Mitch's work is influenced by Eugene Gendlin's focusing on internal family systems, somatic experiencing, and contemplative traditions of deep listening. He is especially interested in how tapping, presence, and somatic awareness can help people stop fighting themselves and begin listening to what the body is trying to carry forward. Mitch, I love all of that. Yeah. So based on me sharing that, just tell us a little bit about you, even hearing your own bio out loud.

SPEAKER_01 2:36

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting always to hear those things and to hear them back. Yeah, I think I've always had a deep interest in what really works for us. Like how are we kind of designed and put together? And how do we work with that to kind of help this thing that we call healing to kind of carry life forward or to live really? How do we live in contact with this thing we call life in a way that is healthy, in a way that we have capacity? And one of the things I'm so grateful for is that my career kind of started working with young people who were experiencing homelessness. Because it was a bit of baptism by fire, really. Because it kind of had to go, whew, I've got to figure out what works and what works in a real precarious situation rather than just theory in a university classroom or something like that. But how do we actually heal from some of the deepest, biggest things that can happen to us? And I learned so much from those young people, and they pushed me to study more and to learn more. And I think from those lessons and from those contemplative traditions that I've been a part of, you know, there's definitely a stream that moves through every single person, every single context, whether I'm working with a young person experiencing homelessness, refugees that have gone through torture and trauma on their way to safety, or even facilitating in Saudi Arabia with executives of gold mines and stuff like that. There's a strong stream through everything of just how humans are wired and what we need to thrive. So that's what I'm really passionate about.

SPEAKER_00 4:22

And so, in that, with like you've talked about that stream and all of that, I think you and I can both agree too that what we learned in university, especially in upper level education and clinical work and psychopathology and psychotherapy and all those things really are not even what we learn as far as our body-based tools. Would you agree that a lot of that comes from this experience of working with different populations and having that life experience with real humans and people and trauma?

SPEAKER_01 4:52

Yeah, I mean, it's always one thing to learn. This is what you do in this context, and then you're sitting in front of a real human being and you're like, Well, crap, what do I do here? And you kind of, I think you just get stripped in those contexts. And you're like, Wow, I have to be human. What the heck does that mean? And how do I help be human in this context and work with what's in front of me? So yeah, I definitely have to go and do other learning, I think, to be effective in the work that I did.

SPEAKER_00 5:22

So let's kind of talk about some of that other learning. That's actually how I met Mitch. He was a trainer in evidence-based or still is an evidence-based EFT, and that's how I met Mitch when I started graduate school. I went back later in life, as many of you know, and metch. And he helped, I don't know how many sessions we had together to kind of learn the protocols of evidence-based EFT. I had learned tapping years before, but had really fell in love with Dr. Stapleton's work and the research that she's doing. So, in all of that, maybe just kind of talk about how your life and all these different populations and experiences kind of led you into that tapping world.

SPEAKER_01 6:02

Yeah. Again, big shout out to all of big shout out to all of the young people I worked with down in Melbourne. Yeah. So again, I was working in a crisis center with young people, and they were kind of getting their standard in Australia, you get your kind of your standard 10 sessions. It's generally CT, some form of cognitive therapy, which we know has a lot of evidence behind it. It's great in the context that it's great in. And yet, what I repeatedly heard from young people who were in active trauma, they just went, I don't want to go. I'm sick of talking about my problems. It doesn't change. And it doesn't make me feel better. And, you know, the kind of language at that time when some of these kids would kick off or, you know, they would display some difficult behaviors was, oh, it's behavioral. It's all behavioral. And I just remember thinking, well, of course it's behavioral because behaviors are engaged, but there's a reason why these young people are doing it. They don't feel safe. And these are strategies that these young people have learned to get what they need. And they're telling me that the therapy that we're offering isn't working. So surely there's got to be something that works. And I think in my own life, I was also processing a whole bunch of my stuff because you know, most therapists and social workers really we get into the work because of our own family of origins. Other than we're like, what?

SPEAKER_00 7:34

Are you gonna be able to do that?

SPEAKER_01 7:35

Can we fix our families so that everyone loves me and everyone's okay? I'll go fix everyone else first. And then I'll figure it out. Yeah. And and I kind of came across EFT, this tapping thing. And my initial thought was, what a load of crap. How is tapping on your face gonna do anything?

SPEAKER_00 7:53

Amen. I remember thinking that same thing.

SPEAKER_01 7:56

Yeah, sometimes I still that thought still crosses my mind. And I've been training in it for like 10 years or something like that. And I came across the work of Dr. Laurie Leyden. And Dr. Lori Leyden is an incredible human being, and she was working in Rwanda, working with survivors of the Rwandan genocide, and she was teaching their cunning call EFT and raising up community members to deliver EFT in those rural communities. And there was a documentary done on her, which I got to see, and I was like, this is amazing. And I was a plucky 25-year-old and went, sure, I can email this woman. And emailed her, and she ended up putting me in contact with Kate Helder, who's an incredible woman in Australia, and Dr. Peter Stapleton. So that's how I got to learn about Dr. Peter. I met with Dr. Peter and talked about could we get some training with young people or with youth workers I was working with. And she invited me to attend her training. And I attended her training, and it's a very practical training, as you can remember. You work on your stuff. And yeah, I experienced big shifts in lifelong anxiety patterns, even in three-day training. And I kind of was blown away at that point, went, okay, I need to get all of this and understand it. And so studied it, got accredited. Dr. Peter ended up asking me to be one of her trainers. And yeah, have worked with different people, worked with Kate Helder and gotten it into different communities there with the refugee people as well. And been training therapists in it for the last, I think, 10 years now as well. And so it's been a big part of my life.

SPEAKER_00 9:36

That's incredible. And so when we think about tapping, I just actually have started talking briefly about EFT just throughout the episodes. I haven't done a full episode on tapping. So people that are listening, like, why tapping? Maybe somebody did some of the research too, but if they're Googling tapping, and we even said sometimes it feels weird at first, right? And I do hear that, they're like, that's weird. Like, why would I want to tap on my body? So if someone says, why would I want to tap on my face? Or what's the why for you?

SPEAKER_01 10:02

Yeah, so probably the closest thing that people might associate it with is EMDR. It's not the same, and it works slightly differently from what we can tell. But it's that similar working with the body, working with the brain to help the body reprocess. We might say reprocess memories or reconsolidate memories, or help the body release stuck survival responses. Again, these are all words and concepts we use to talk about fairly complex body processes. One thing I will say is that there is different types of EFT. And when Liana and I are talking about EFT, we're very much talking about clinical EFT or evidence-based clinical EFT, which is the version of EFT or tapping that has gone under so many clinical trials. There is a lot of what we kind of refer to as maybe social media tapping or self-help tapping that I might say goes off script and doesn't follow the clinical protocol, which again has been measured and measured and measured over and over again and tested for trauma populations, anxiety, phobias, food cravings, such on and so on and so forth. So if you are going to look it up, make sure you look up clinical EFT or evidence-based EFT, is probably one of the best ways to do that. But what we can tell is that there's a whole different bunch of factors that are going into what looks like a very simple process. On a really basic level, is when you bring up a memory or when you think about a specific memory or issue that happens in your life, there's generally a level of activation that occurs. So the neural pathways that are involved in that memory get activated and you feel some synthetic nervous system activation. Really bluntly, you feel a bit crap about something, or you feel a bit anxious about something. As you can hold that lightly, that's like any good exposure therapy, you don't dive right into it, come at it slowly from a distance. When we engage in tapping in various points in the body, which come from acupressure points, what we can see on brain scans and what we can see from various studies is that there is a downregulating system. There is a calming response that happens to the nervous system. The amygdala downregulates, which means the hippocampus can process the memory quickly. The tapping, the way that I think of it mostly is what the tapping does is it calms the body and the brain long enough that we stop greasing and contracting against a certain fear. It increases our window of tolerance or our window of capacity, so that the body and the brain system can naturally process what got stopped. Because our body isn't actually really designed or evolved to get stuck in trauma. Like our system's made to be able to process and live life. And what happens in trauma is your listeners would know we get overwhelmed. It's too much too fast. And so the body kind of contracts against it. And then so it doesn't get to complete its survival response. And with all of that energy in the system, it keeps looping in the brain. And so it then starts to tag all of these different experiences as threats and overlays what is incomplete on our current experience. So when we're tapping and going through this kind of sequence, we assist the body brain to stay present and calm enough that it can begin to reprocess and go, oh, that is done. I'm safe. Now I can update my audience. And one of the things I love about EFT is that you don't have to reframe your client's experience. You don't have to get them to challenge their thinking or to think of a different way to look at it. Meet them where they're at, go through the tapping process. And as their distress comes down, as their brain begins to metabolize that experience, stuck stress response, you see something in their eyes start to shift and they start refraining. Because their brain is more resourced, it's more in the present mode. It's not stuck where it was. It blows my mind every single time when it's stuck that someone's had so much therapy around after just shifts organically from them rather than trying to do the refund with them. Does it make sense?

SPEAKER_00 14:48

Totally. Everything you said, and I think the thing I love the most is especially all my work on the window of tolerance and like you said, window of capacity. Things like tapping really do increase our capacity, increase our capacity for connection, for being present, for feeling fulfilled and fulfillment. Because if we are out of our window of tolerance, again, we're in that survival state. And that's not thriving. That's not living a life from presence and connection. That's literally thinking, how do I run from this? How do I run from this? How do I fight this? Or how do I shut my system down completely to try to avoid this? And so as we do things like tapping and as we shift that in the brain and the amygdala, that downregulating, that actually allows us to be more present in our life. Would you agree?

SPEAKER_01 15:32

Yeah, very much so. Yeah. I think that's probably one of my favorite ways to think through clinical team is that, you know, there's lots of different ways to talk about it. There's different ways that it has been spoken of. I can say how I talk about it, which is that it increases our ability to stay present to what's happening in our system. And each time we do that window of tolerance or that window of capacity gets bigger and bigger. And it means that we don't have to spend the rest of our life tapping away on things, that actually we learn I can tolerate this and the and it shifts. When I stay present in contact with it, and I deeply and completely love and accept whatever's happening in my body, something shifts and changes. And actually, my capacity to then leak life grows. So that what would have caused me to contract and shut down or run away before my brain learned, oh, I don't have to, I can leak this. I've got the skill and capacity to do this. And so we start to live richer lives, deeper lives, possibly more simple lives, because we're not running and fighting and contracting against things that we don't need to, because our bodies learn, oh, I'm safe and capable. And I think that's a huge gift to give anyone, everyone.

SPEAKER_00 16:51

Well, a huge gift because safety is that most important thing, right?

SPEAKER_01 16:55

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:56

I don't know. Can anything shift if our body actually doesn't feel safe?

SPEAKER_01 17:01

I don't think so. I think we can do incredible things out of fear. I think if you look at if you look at the world, most people are operating out of some level of fear. But I think for the world and the lives that we want, when we can cultivate the ability to feel safe in our bodies, or the ability to be present to what doesn't feel safe in our bodies yet, and help it find safety, then that's when we have access to that more resourced brain or that wisdom.

SPEAKER_00 17:33

Where we I like to call it the wise mind.

SPEAKER_01 17:36

Yeah, we have access to wise mind, which then helps us see things from that broader perspective, helps us take responsibility for actually here. I've been terrified or I've been angry or I've been in projection, and that's okay. But now what's possible? And I think that's one of the that was one of the really beautiful things Dr. Laurie taught me was, you know, in clinical EFT towards the end of the session, that shift, one of those questions is so what's possible now? Because it does kind of invite us to go, yeah, when I look at this from wise mind, what's the next step?

SPEAKER_00 18:11

Yeah, and I feel like that wise part of us is always there, but sometimes it's just really hard to access because the anxious mind becomes can become so big and can feel so urgent and pressing, right? It's not that the wise mind are that part of us. If we look at IFS, it's the core self, right? It's not like that part disappears, but it just becomes harder to access that that part of us that I believe is always there.

unknown 18:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:36

Yeah. When your brain perceives threat, the smartest possibly wisest thing to do is to run. Um and then stay physically alive, and then we'll deal with it. Um so it makes sense. Like, and I think that's the thing with with myself and with my clients, and this is what all of these things are given is um, you know, our clients don't come to us with problems, they come to us with their current solutions. And really what they're inviting us to do is go, yeah, this makes sense. It makes total sense that your body, brain, mind does this. If this is how it's learned to feel safe or to manage unsafety, and what we want to do is not shame that part, but to give it enough safety and enough resource that it can find another solution that's better for the whole system, better for the whole community, better for you. And I think it's just I only ever walk away with more compassion for people and the human experience concessions. When you learn what people have gone through and learn how they've managed to survive, it just it just blows my mind what people are capable of. And then what happens when they're met and with safety and you know, positive regard and all of those things that we learn. What more we're capable of when those conditions are there, and the more we can cultivate that for people and help people learn the skills to cultivate, the more shift personally, internally, our families, you know, communities, the ripple effect of that.

SPEAKER_00 20:14

Just extends outward.

SPEAKER_01 20:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:16

Well, I love what you said too about I think you said something like expanding or widening perspective. Because that's really important because we see too when the body is in a stressed state and we're in fight or flight, that that autonomic nervous system actually like narrows our vision. And that when we activate the parasympathetic, which is that state of rest or digest, which can happen through processes too, like tapping and breath work and other body work, we can actually see that then our peripheral vision expands just in the body alone. That's so that our body has that built in that when it feels safe, our peripheral vision can become wider. I love that.

SPEAKER_01 20:55

Yeah, our body is always shifting and changing and doing what it needs to in order to keep us alive. And I think, you know, that's also one of the gifts of EFT and all of these other things, is it gives us an appreciation of the intricacy of the body system. And when we hear this kind of idea of stay present or be in the now, do that familiar with connecting. What's happening in the body is the body tells you what it's perceiving or what it's reacting to. And the more we can cultivate a sense of, oh yeah, there's something happening now. Oh, yeah, I really focused it here, and then we can see all the work I'm doing is changing. Because literally the peripheries come in, person has access to it, or the hearing is changing, the postures change. The body's kind of that because the body is here now, the body's never somewhere else. And so we can work with the body to bring that real change in.

SPEAKER_00 21:53

I love that so much because we talk about a lot in therapy that trauma doesn't have a timestamp, meaning, like you said, yeah, the body's here and now. But we know the minds and parts of it like can go back to any, like you said, looping. It can go back anything with our senses, right? A smell, a sound, something visual can remind us of something that again never processed, and the brain can go back at any time and take us into whatever it was. And so, do you feel like tapping also helps allows the brain to be more in the body? Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_01 22:25

Yeah. So one of the key questions we always ask in clinical T is so when you think about this particular memory or this particular experience, what is happening in your body now? And we're always working with, well, what's happening right now when you think about it? So the invitation, because as much as the client person has the capacity to, is yeah, well, let's see what happens here when you bring this to mind. Because if we work with what's happening in the body now, then it gets to go back and finish what it didn't get to finish back then. So Jenler referred to trauma as a stoppage. So I often think of that when I'm doing tapping is okay, so someone's bringing an issue or a memory, or they bring an issue when a memory pops up, and it tells me that something didn't get to finish. A process got stopped and it's kind of stuck back here, and often it's projecting far out there in order to preempt what could possibly happen in order to, you know, protect itself. And when we can hold and acknowledge those things gently and go, and so as you hold these things, or as you think about these things, what's happening now, and it's often something just like, oh my chest feels really tight. So that's how the body is holding and carrying this. Something has learned that if it braces in the chest, it's not gonna get, or it needs to brace, because it still is thinking that attack is coming.

SPEAKER_00 24:01

Right.

SPEAKER_01 24:02

Or that words are gonna come which are gonna hurt the heart needs to brace. And so we just slowly, slowly meet that with the tapping, whatever tool we're using, and the body starts to go, oh hold on a second. Or maybe I don't need to brace as much, and it slowly opens, that breathing changes, and maybe there's a yawning happening, and you watch in real time the body process and shift, and then there's this moment where someone kind of goes, I can't believe, like I can feel in my body that the issue is different now. And I think that's again, that's the beauty of this work is that it's kind of immediately testable. For sure. Again, the real proof is in the pudding when they go back into their real life. But I what this work does, I think, is that it allows things to finish, it allows things to be tended to that we something in us went too much, I've got to put this over here for now. For sure. And then we slowly come to the body, and the body to use the overused phrase, and I know it's been questioned a lot recently, but you know, the body keeps the score. And if we learn to listen to the score it's playing, we kind of go, okay, this is what we need to attempt.

SPEAKER_00 25:14

I love that. Listen to the score that the body is playing. Yeah. Because the body is talking to us, I believe, all the time. Yeah. And it wants to finish. I believe the body like wants to heal, wants to finish the stories, wants to wants to disengage from the looping, wants to complete the cycle, right? And I think sometimes we're so quick to judge and be like, oh, maybe something's wrong with me because I I still have this thing. But I I truly like to see it that the body does want to, it does want to heal, it does want to repair, it does want healthy connection, it does want to thrive and feel fulfilled. But so many of us have never felt those things for a long time or maybe our whole lives.

SPEAKER_01 25:55

Yeah, 100. And I think the other thing for that is I had this thought Sunday, which is that it can often be as scary to feel alive. Absolutely scarier to feel alive. Because again, that's often those similar pathways that in order for me to feel joy and excitement, my system has learned that going up here equals a panic attack, or you know, if I reach out for connection and I lower my guard, and then that's where the attack comes.

SPEAKER_00 26:33

For sure.

SPEAKER_01 26:34

What's your system's gonna go, no thanks for relationships, or I'm not gonna be vibrant. And then something tender underneath, or another part of us, if we use that language, because sorry, but I really want that relationship, or I really want to be kind to my partner, but I just can't do it. Yeah, yes, something within you can't do it yet. So let's make a lot of room and space for something that can't, because it's probably got a good reason that it's holding you back. And if meet it and honor it all the ways that it's protected you, and we can help it tap. There's another way we could talk about it. Then it learns to trust our capacity that actually even if I do get wounded by someone's word, I've learned that I can deal with it, and that I don't have to have the strategy of ever again layle out post that goes with having money or having a healthy relationship with food. Like we just gotta meet ourselves where we're at.

SPEAKER_00 27:35

I love that.

SPEAKER_01 27:36

Sometimes that sucks like this idea of well, what's my true capacity? So many of us have an idea of what our capacity is, and we're constantly pushing past ourselves in this kind of grid culture. Just smash it, just do it, just push past it. There's I think there's wisdom in that, but there's disability. And it's a it's an interesting thing to go, well, yeah, what's my true capacity? And can I pick the parts away that kind of go, hold on a second. I'm not sure about this shit. Can we can we take a pause and breath? Yeah, let me just pause for a second and tap with this part, breathe with this part. And then I think when we go as slow as the fastest part, we build as much safety and capacity and skill into our system. Then we really have the ability to meet those big audacious goals. Or we just get to a point where we're really content with life and we're like, yeah, I'll meet it as it comes. I think both of those are valid options.

SPEAKER_00 28:34

Well, maybe content is okay for a lot of people because I just think about so many of my own clients and my own life for so long that content wasn't even, I didn't even know what that was. Or I became content staying in the story or the pain, right? Like, and I think sometimes that's why healing can be scary too, because it's kind of like who would I be without this thing? How would I have to show up if I didn't have this thing?

unknown 29:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:01

And sometimes that's what I yeah, like you said, in relationships too. Could there be are there gonna be risks in attempting a relationship again, especially after hurt or loss or betrayal? Absolutely. But what happens if we don't ever try, then what? Yeah, staying in that, right?

SPEAKER_01 29:25

Yeah, yeah, I think it's you know, I've been seeing some of my quiets of my own life at the moment, and it's like, oh, how often do within the relationships that I have do I not show up? Or do I not risk saying, oh, do you know what? I'd actually really like this. Because something within me, or those mirrored processes that you have with your clients sometimes, it's like, oh, I'm not allowed to ask for it, or if I ask for it and I don't get it, what's gonna happen?

SPEAKER_00 29:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:56

Even through using tapping to kind of work through some of those memories and going, oh, do you know what? Even if I ask for it and I don't get it, I'll be okay. But maybe I can risk asking for it and then I do get it. Oh gosh, what's that like? I get to experience you and something lovely. And then, you know, for a lot of us, it's oh, can I tolerate the lovely? Can I tolerate softness? Yeah, totally tolerate excitement. And it's okay when the answer is no. And it's okay when the answer is no when you know you have tools to slowly help the oh, it's okay, I can't this it's insane. I can handle this.

SPEAKER_00 30:35

This is yeah, and I think that that's also important to think about like life, like working with the nervous system too, and through life experiences. And we're not meant to live in our window of tolerance all the time, right? We need that sympathetic activation for certain things, for even exciting things, right? If you're gonna go play a soccer game or you're gonna go give a big presentation or performance or speaking, right? Or your big training thing, like we need sympathetic activation. And I think sometimes now with social media too, there's a lot of people talking about nervous system work that's like if I feel hyper-aroused or shut down completely, that that's bad. So I think that also looking at tapping is a great tool too, especially if you are still in sympathetic activation, that you could still use it to help you get through that really scary big thing. And that scary big thing is still a really good thing, it's exciting. Like I have a high school baseball pitcher and he taps in his mitt before he goes out to pitch. And it's like, should he not do that because he's scared? No, he's facing his fear, but he can still use tapping in the moment to help his nervous system be able to stay present, even though that thing is big and scary. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_01 31:40

Yeah, I think that's the key thing that we're kind of forgetting in this social media age is that the goal is to not never be activated. We want to be activated. We need to get activated to get out of bed, you need to be activated to get up to go to work. You need to be activated if you see your kid walking towards the road. Like you need your and move you into action, and it's incredible. Like, you know, and I say that, and I can feel my nervous system getting activated now. Like I can feel the energy, just a wave tingles through my body.

SPEAKER_00 32:13

Same.

SPEAKER_01 32:14

But what's happening is that because I know you and I'm enjoying this conversation, there's also social engagement. So ventral vagal, you know, I know polyvagal is underdebated as well, but social engagement systems also in play with sympathetic, and so my body's like, oh, this activation is good. I like this, it's play. And so you said this thing of, you know, he taps and he stays present. And I think that's really what a lot of these things are teaching us is can I stay present to my experience without being overworked or without shutting down or dissociating because it becomes too much. And I think that's where we go. That actually what we want to, what I hope I'm doing in my sessions, in my personal sessions as well as professional work, is that I'm teaching them to stay present and in contact with their bodily experience, realizing when an experience is getting too much for them, so that they can back off and settle the body, so the body has room to digest. Okay, that was a lot. Let me process it, let me update my learnings, and then I'll try again. And now I've increased my capacity to stay with a big experience, and in that, that means I get to have great love because my body can tolerate it. And because the other side of that is likely if I'm gonna have great love, I've got to have the capacity to experience great grief.

SPEAKER_00 33:48

Totally.

SPEAKER_01 33:49

Because at some point that love might change or that that person might leave.

SPEAKER_00 33:56

All kinds of things.

SPEAKER_01 33:57

My heart will break. And do I have the capacity to go and yet I'm okay? I can do I have the capacity to be really, really angry about something and stay in contact with myself so that the anger doesn't flip me over into narrow brain, but I stay in contact with wise brain and I stay in contact with the people. And that's I think this is the thing that I'm really thinking through at the moment is we're often talking about a skill issue. It's like it's a skill to be able to calm yourself down, it's a skill to resource and get into parasympathetic. And it's a skill a lot of us are learned because we've all spent our time up here in sympathetic disconnected from social engagement.

SPEAKER_00 34:51

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 34:53

So, yes, we've got to learn this, but also eventually we've got to learn oh, yeah, how do I handle activation and stay present and skilled in having this amount of energy and information in my system? And yeah, this is where we kind of go, oh, this is too much for me. I need to cough, and now I can use my farming skills. Yeah, now I'm gonna try around two. How much can I this time?

SPEAKER_00 35:17

That's really, really important. Yeah, no, it really does. And I think that's the other thing I want to kind of bring in it that as we kind of just wrap up to like thinking about social media, just to be really careful because of all the somatic tools, right? And so many different types of body-based practitioners sharing their skills. I see Mitch's eyes get really big. I'll let him talk on that in a second. But we have to be really careful to look at tools, is that to make sure that we don't feel like we always that emotions are okay to feel like you just said anger. Anger is a very big one when I have clients that come up to me for therapy, especially men feeling so much shame around anger. And we see that because anger unfortunately harms people. We know that anger is an emotion, it's so big, right? So much sympathetic energy that unfortunately sometimes that turns into something that's very, very painful, harmful, detrimental to somebody else's life. So I think we have to kind of be careful also how we frame it, but also that not that feeling anger is not bad. And I think for a lot of my life, I felt that anger, that emotion of anger itself was not okay. Because I just didn't know what to do with it. I didn't know how to sit with myself in it, I didn't have tools to work through it. So I turned to emotional eating, which is really how I found tapping in the first place before I met Mitch was my whole journey of how EFT totally changed my relationship with food. But really, what I saw was that the food was just a symptom of me not knowing how to be able to handle big emotions or feeling like big emotions were bad. So just kind of as we as I say that, just like what would you want to share? A lot of my followers, a lot of moms, lots of moms of teenagers, right? They're struggling. We know anxiety is on the rise with teens specifically all over the world. So just what would you say with people just feeling shame for all these big emotions that they don't know what to do with?

SPEAKER_01 37:09

So much. I think I might point out just one thing you said there about you know, you had all this anger, you had shame, you didn't know how to deal with it, so you turned to eating. And again, for me, I hear that and I go, what a beautiful strategy. Your body learned how to comfort and soothe itself when it didn't think it was available anywhere else. And then you learned another tool and and a tool that helped you deal with the underlying emotions, and now you've got different strategies. And I think that's always the message that I want people to have is that you know it sounds so cliche, but there's nothing wrong with there's nothing wrong with it. We are in a world at the moment that is in huge flux, systems are changing and shifting rapidly, there's a lot of uncertainty. And, you know, we talk about internal family systems, but we're a part of a system. So there are external reasons why most of the population right now has anxiety through the roof, and so most of us are having an adequate response to what's happening in the world, and acknowledging that let's find the ways and the tools to settle our systems, to work through those stoppages, to help our body heal from fail so that the majority of us can access wise mind and compassionate mind. And yeah, like shame has been a big thing for me. I've had to learn how to have anger in my body because I just dissociated and then I remember kicked in. I thought, oh, yeah, handle this.

SPEAKER_00 38:52

I'm glad you said that because that's just the other side too, right? I've so much of the anger or not knowing how to feel it at all, like shutting it down. The system just completely shuts it down because like I don't know what to do at all with this.

SPEAKER_01 39:02

Yeah. And I think there's a lot of things for us to be angry about at the moment. So my I guess my message, if I could simplify it, because I could talk for ages, is there is nothing wrong with you. You have the capacity to take responsibility for maybe how some of your strategies have impacted you and other people. And what we can do is use the tools we have to bring compassionate healing to ourselves, to pass those tools on to other people, access wise mind, and start to make more aligned decisions about well, yeah, how do I actually want to live my life and what skills do I need to develop in order to do that well in community? Because I think that's the other thing, it all happens in community. We all need each other to do this well.

SPEAKER_00 39:50

Totally, I say that all the time. We don't live in isolation, even when we're alone, we're still living in relationship with ourselves and what we've been through and our parts of us. We're still in relationship all the time. But we do need community. So, Mitch, how do people find you? How do they connect with you? I know you Mitch lives no longer in Australia. I'll let you tell everybody where you are, but how do they find you? And also, you guys can check out Mitch's bio and his website and Instagram all in the show notes as well.

SPEAKER_01 40:18

Yeah, so I'm now living in London. I still do quite a bit with Australian time zones as well, because it just works. But yeah, if you just find me on Mitch Gainey.com or Mitch Gainey on Instagram, I'm not the most social media literate, but I do post them there at Substack as well. So and also check out evidence-based EFT as well, Dr. Peter Stapleton's stuff as well. She's pretty awesome.

SPEAKER_00 40:41

She's pretty awesome. And I love you can go to the website and there's research there and stuff. So if you guys are curious, skeptical, I love skeptical people to read some of the research and then try it out. Can people just hire you for an individual session or tell me like what people can hire you for? And are you available to my US followers and friends?

SPEAKER_01 40:58

Yeah, so definitely have some US clients. I do one-to-one sessions, so kind of your more typical therapy sessions. I do somatic mentoring for therapists where we're really working with what's happening in your body during sessions with your clients, so that therapists or social workers or healers, whatever word you want to use there, we're working together to grow your capacity to hold more on a client level. I offer the evidence-based EFT trainings. So if you want to become a practitioner in that, and I'm also putting together something called focusing semantics training. So again, it's this essentially developing qualities of presence at deep inner listening to carry us forward to deep in our work with clients as well.

SPEAKER_00 41:39

Ooh, I can't wait for it. All that'll be on the website. Sounds amazing. I can't wait. Well, thank you. Thank you so much. If you guys have any questions, please reach out and I'll make sure I get them to Mitch, or you can just send him a message if that's okay with you, Mitch, on Instagram or okay. And follow his website. And maybe if I can twist his arm, I can invite him back to do some live tapping. That would be so special and really fun.

SPEAKER_01 42:00

Yeah, anytime.

SPEAKER_00 42:01

Okay. Thank you so much for being here, Mitch. It's just been a pleasure. I've loved following you, working with you. Is there anything you want to say in closing to everybody?

SPEAKER_01 42:10

Just go well in this world. Look after yourselves, be kind to one another, and keep listening to the amazing stuff that Liana's bringing to the table.

SPEAKER_00 42:18

Thank you. And as I say, just try your best with everything that's happening to find the beauty throughout the week, even when it is hard, even when it feels like some of those days that you just can't go any further to still see the beauty. So make it a beautiful week, everyone, and thanks so much, Mitch, for coming on the show.

SPEAKER_01 42:36

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 42:37

Bye, guys. Thanks for joining me on the NeuroAir podcast. This work is about honoring resilience in yourself and also those who came before you, all while finding freedom from what was never yours to carry. With the help of stories, science, somatic tools, and the four ends, notice, name, nurture, and navigate, you have a path toward deeper connection with yourself, your loved ones, and the legacy you want to pass on. If today's episode spoke to you, share it with someone who's ready to step into this work too. And follow the show so you never miss an episode. Remember, you may not have chosen what you inherited, but you can choose what comes next.