Somatic Healing, Freeze States and Safer Relationships | Darci Burke | EP205

Most people think they are broken when they feel emotionally shut down, stuck in painful patterns, or numb in their relationships. 

Somatic practitioner Darci Burke joins April and Chad to explain why your nervous system is not broken, it is protecting you.

And how learning to work with your body instead of against it is the key to healing, deeper connection, and love that actually feels safe. 


In this interview, you'll learn:

1. How to recognize if you are living in a freeze state without knowing it
2. Why your nervous system shuts down instead of fighting or fleeing
3. What the difference is between freeze and full dorsal vagal shutdown
4. Why trauma is not about what happened to you but what happened inside you
5. How childhood wounds get silently projected onto your adult partner
6. Why regulation does not mean calm it means presence
7. How to stay present with anger without destroying yourself or your relationship
8. Why you cannot think your way out of what your body is holding
9. How titration and pendulation release survival energy safely from the body
10. Why plant medicine and breathwork can re-traumatize an under-resourced nervous system
11. How to communicate your body sensations to your partner during conflict
12. Why relationship health is measured by how fast you repair not how often you rupture. 


You are allowed to choose yourself. You are allowed to stop playing small. The life you are grieving may be the very thing making room for the one you actually belong in.

With Love and Safety,
Chad & April ❤️


What We Discuss:

00:00 Teaser: Why relationships become self-serving without inner work 
01:30 Introducing somatic practitioner Darci Burke 
03:00 Live grounding practice, orienting and resourcing your nervous system 
10:00 How Darci's own healing led her to somatic work 
15:00 Chad on freeze, dissociation, and men's disconnection from the body 
17:36 What a freeze state actually is and why it is exhausting 
20:00 The antelope analogy, freeze as survival, not weakness 
21:35 Functional freeze, functioning on the outside, numb on the inside 
26:00 Trauma is what happened inside you, not just what happened to you 
28:26 The personality traits that are actually survival patterns 
31:00 Why healing must be slow, titrated, and consistent 
36:31 Women, anger, and the nervous system history behind it 
40:00 Regulation means presence, not calm 
42:38 Your partner mirrors your unresolved wounds 
47:00 How childhood rewires your definition of love and safety 
55:00 Your nervous system sets the foundation for your entire lived experience 
57:00 Practical somatic steps to heal freeze inside a relationship 
1:00:19 How to name body sensations to your partner during conflict 
1:01:17 Relationship health is how fast you repair after rupture 
1:06:22 How to connect with Darci Burke 
1:07:20 Darci's closing message, come home to yourself 

If you're serious about ...

❤️ Work With Chad
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❤️  Work with April
Instagram |  @aprilbenincosa 

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Transcript

Teaser: Why relationships become self-serving without inner work

SPEAKER_01 0:00

That's when the relationship starts getting self-serving. And we start focusing on my needs, my wounds, my triggers, my pain. You make it all about yourself. Instead of learning how to cultivate the garden and this land that you are developing together, it takes two of you nurturing and working together, not against each other, cultivating the space. Where are the weeds that we need to pull out and take a look at together? Not that you're doing this wrong, don't do this, but how can I help you? And how can you help me so that we can grow this beautiful space together?

SPEAKER_02 0:31

Welcome to Safe to Love. We are on a mission to help the world believe and love again and give you the courage to find it. We are so blessed to bring our next guest on, our friend and mentor, Darcy Burke. She is a somatic practitioner, and she actually has been working with Chad and I for the last couple of months and is a really big important part of us finding our voice and creating safety in our own relationship. And so we were just so excited to have her on and share her wisdom and some practical tools. And actually, we're gonna do something a little different today for all the listeners. We're gonna have her drop us into our bodies in a somatic practice that she does with us daily and her clients so that we can get the most out of this episode. So, Darcy, we'll turn it over to you and you can just drop us in.

SPEAKER_01 1:17

Awesome. Thank you. So this grounding practice works with what's called our neurosception. And our neurosception is this invisible threat detector that's constantly scanning our environment and asking one

Introducing somatic practitioner Darci Burke

SPEAKER_01 1:30

question Am I safe? Am I not safe? So when we work with neurosception, it's helping to train our bodies to scan for cues of safety. Okay. Not cues of like tremendous happiness, but just like signals of safety to our bodies using our senses. So this is a really good, um, it's called orienting, orienting and resourcing. And um, these practices are really good to utilize all throughout your day, but especially as you're transitioning from one moment of the day to the next, you know, offering these little pockets of embodiment, these little pockets of feeling our bodies, noticing where we're at in that moment before we just rush into the next thing really allows for our bodies to keep up with the pace of our everyday life. And also in speaking to people who are maybe lit experiencing trauma, recovering from trauma, is this is like an integral part of retraining our bodies to scan for cues of safety because when you're in a survival state below your conscious awareness, you are constantly scanning for signs of threat and for signs of danger. So we have to go in and retrain our nervous systems to scan for cues of safety. And um, so these are practices that we utilize to do that. So if you are listening, you

Live grounding practice, orienting and resourcing your nervous system

SPEAKER_01 3:00

can do this practice while you're doing dishes, while you are driving. Um, and just listen in. Let yourself drop into your body for a moment. So let's just start by landing in our physical spaces. Just start by noticing where our body is landing in this moment, what's currently holding our bodies. This noticing the chair underneath you. Maybe noticing the contact between you and whatever's holding you right now. You might want to notice the places it's making contact on your body, your back, your sit bones, your legs. Notice that. Notice what's holding you right now. Maybe what that feels like to feel supported, to feel held. You also may want to just start noticing if you're standing, just notice the ground underneath you. Maybe notice your orientation in your space in the room that you're in. And just kind of let your eyes land on whatever feels most neutral to you in this moment. Your body will naturally orient to what it is that is registering as neutrality or safety. So just gently scan your environment, noticing shapes, colors, patterns, textures. Maybe we need something that feels neutral to you in this moment, whatever that may be for you. So this is we're utilizing what's called extros extrosception. It's what's in our external environment right now. It's noticing. Noticing maybe any sounds that you might be hearing right now. Sounds in your space that you're in, or maybe sounds that you might be hearing outside of your room or your home. Maybe noticing what you're smelling right now. Let's just take a moment to travel to what we call interoceptions, so our inner world. And just with curiosity, noticing any emotions that are present for you, any sensations that you might be experiencing. Maybe you're noticing the temperature of your internal world. You might start noticing maybe some things that might not feel pleasant. Maybe you have a pain somewhere in your body. Tension somewhere. We're just noticing being curious. There's no judgment here. Maybe you're noticing how fast your heart is beating right now. If you can feel that at all. Hopefully. Maybe noticing the sound of your breath. You might be noticing it might kind of be difficult for you to drop into your body, and if it is, that's okay. That's just information. And maybe right now your body's wanting to orient in other ways. Maybe it prefers to orient through the channel of extraoception. So what you're noticing in your outside world. It's just information. And then we also have what's called relational resourcing. So you just might want to notice maybe like the tone of my voice right now. The texture of my voice. And also, I just needed to invite you to notice that we're all breathing. We're all sinking up to each other in a way. Our nervous systems are communicating with each other right now. And you might start to notice how you orient relationally with others. So as we close, just an invitation with that, that this is called orienting and resourcing. We're learning how our bodies orient to our environments that we are in by noticing through our senses kind of what we land on and what is signaling to our bodies safety. And you notice that by maybe throughout that practice, maybe you noticed your shoulders might have dropped us a little bit. Maybe your heartbeat slowed down. Maybe you noticed a little bit more warmness somewhere inside of your body. Maybe your body started feeling a little bit heavier. And again, if you didn't notice anything, that's okay. That's just information. It's a practice we develop over time, learning how to be in relationship with our body and how our bodies are orienting. I know I'm already feeling much more oriented.

How Darci's own healing led her to somatic work

SPEAKER_02 10:00

Well, so good. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, of course. Awesome. So that's a little taste, everyone. Thank you for following along. Um, we live in a world where everything's so fast paced. And for me, and my healing of my nervous system and the healing of my feminine is the hardest thing for me to do is to slow it down. Like I even found myself during that being like, oh, is this taking too long? And, you know, like just found myself wanting to rush it. And and that's kind of what keeps your nervous system like so intense, right? And so, how did you get into this work? What called you to getting into nervous system regulation?

SPEAKER_01 10:43

Yeah. It was basically the process of my own becoming and my own healing journey. And, you know, I'd I'd come to a point in my life where I had my world was really expanding all at the same time. And expansion can also feel like chaos. And oftentimes when we are expanding and growing, we look at it as chaos and we look at it as something is wrong with us. But actually, it's just like our consciousness just wanting to expand. And it needs a place to land to do that. And it shows our bodies. And um, that was a time in my life there was a lot of um things that were unraveling at the same time. And I had to come to a place of finding home with inside of myself. It was like non-optional. And the path to do that was through somatics. And um I felt when I learned about somatics, it just spoke to me. I knew that was a path that I wanted to continue to explore individually for myself. And then it led me down to wanting to be able to offer that space for other people because of how deeply transformational it was for me and my family. And um just it just unfolded in so many amazing, beautiful ways that has really added so much sustenance to my life and substance and um and to hopefully the people that I serve and and to my family. And it's just taught me so much about our human experience and being able to navigate that and being able to make sense of ourselves and understanding why we are the way that we are. There's a reason why we are the way that we are. And it's caused me to not have so much judgment for myself, but also like so much less judgment for other people. Because everybody makes sense. Makes sense why you are the way that you are. So yeah, I love you know, my space. I I love helping creating the conditions of safety and connection for people to be able to expand. And so that's the majority that I of the work that I do with people of creating a foundation of safety so that they can expand into their most sovereign, truest versions of themselves that they were created to be.

SPEAKER_02 13:10

Yeah. So yeah, I've noticed that in working with you that um I can genuinely feel that you want me to be big. And for someone who that's been a big wound of mine is like being afraid to be big, or like being in business or married to someone who didn't want me to be big, that's been like a very big wound. And I would say that's like one of the most healing things. Like as I'm feeling into it, I think it's just hitting me now that like that is something you've always given me is like you genuinely want me to be so big and so successful. And and even I do somatic coaching myself, and you're like, you can do it. Like, you want me to be the successful somatic coach. And um, there's just like no competition or no any of that. And it's been so healing of my feminine, of my relationship with women. Um, and just also from my own that part of me that like was coming from scarcity, you know, a few years ago. And and now I feel like I've been able to do that with with my clients and have my clients say that same thing back to me. And I feel like I can have that because of that space that you hold.

SPEAKER_01 14:19

Thank you for saying that. It's the gift of reciprocity. Yeah. I felt that from other women in my life. And I think when you come to a place of sovereignty, you're not threatened by the accomplishments and the expansion of other people. You want it because it it helps you unfold more into your own process. So I'm so happy to hear you say that. Yeah. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 14:43

How how has your experience been with Darcy baby?

SPEAKER_00 14:46

Um, you know, one thing I wanted to ask you about is this uh the prevalence of shutting down or disassociating, or you know, there's a lot of different kinds of terms for it, right?

Chad on freeze, dissociation, and men's disconnection from the body

SPEAKER_00 15:00

Um I know there's the four F's, the fight, flight, freezer, fallen. And I think that for most of my life um I've been fairly cognizant of the tendency to fight or uh uh flee. Um but the more and more I'm starting, instead of the work with you, I'm starting to become really aware of how often, and even fawn too, actually. I think I could kind of in retrospect often, right? But the more that I've worked with you, the more I'm starting to see just how much um the freezing is become like the go-to of my body. And there's something that we actually talked about in our session yesterday that really hit home with me that um my body is feeling like neither fight nor flight is working. Um after having been kind of maybe those were like the primary sort of uh responses of my sympathetic nervous system for most of my life. And and and all that it's left to do is shut down, is to go to that place. And um it's it's amazing how much work it's taken to even be aware of when that's happening. And the more that the work that I've done to become aware of that, the more I realize that's happening. And I'm starting to get a sense that that is become a very prevalent space for for a lot of men. Um and you know, like even talking with someone about it, about dissociating, people I go, I don't dissociate, but but but realizing how much men especially are disconnected from our bodies and how much we really need to bring in more of that work of just simply connecting with our bodies. Um, and you know, I we we were watching a show and um they were talking about having, you know, like our movies, right? Like we gotta we just gotta push this down, we gotta go into the battle and like just how much that has sort of trained into us, this disconnect from our emotions, because there's no space for them when it's time to do something, right? Where we um but we become sort of stuck in that, in that in that constant disconnect from our body. And that's why so much of it builds up. And I'm just curious, you know, what your observation has been working with people, and if you've if you've noticed this prevalence in men and how, you know, how we can become men and women can become more aware of it when we are basically shutting down or disassociating or going into a free state.

SPEAKER_01 17:34

Yeah, yeah.

What a freeze state actually is and why it is exhausting

SPEAKER_01 17:36

There's a lot of layers to that question of the conditioning and the domestication of men that has led to their disembodiment and then also men's own traumatic experiences. There's that. And then to your other question of seeing how common it is for people to be in a free state. So I think it would be helpful to describe exactly what a freeze state is so people can orient to that. So a freeze state is a combination of your sympathetic nervous system and your dorsal vagal nervous system. Your dorsal vagal is where you feel shut down. You feel emotionless. You may not even notice sensations inside of your body. You have no facial expression, you feel hopeless, you know. And um, you know, that's where people experience depression and just complete shutdown. Your sympathetic nervous system is where you feel a lot of like activation and anxiety and like this energy, this turmoil inside of you. And so freeze can be a very energetically exhausting space to be in because you have two equally opposing forces. So, like, if you were to like put your hands in like the prayer position and like push them together and push them together as hard as you can right now. And if you were to do that for quite some time, your muscles would start, like, even just me doing that for just a few minutes, like it's exhausting. That's what it feels like to be in freeze. It feels it's it's exhausting. It's this force of like, I need to do this, I want to do this, but I can't. I have to have, I want to have this difficult conversation. I want to repair with you, but I just don't know how. It's I want to step toward my life purpose. But when I go to sit down at a computer and create a business plan, I just go blink. You know? And it's exhausting. It's exhausting to be in that space. And I it happens when you're right, after like our first state of defense is fight or flight. It's where our nervous nervous system goes to can I run from this state of threat or can I fight against it? And we start out there. And when that, when all of our energy has been utilized for that nervous system is like, hey, that's not working, you know, then we could go into a free state. And a free state is kind of like a deer in headlights. If

The antelope analogy, freeze as survival, not weakness

SPEAKER_01 20:00

we were to go to nature as our teacher, like when you think about an antelope, when an antelope might sense or hear that a lion is an ear, what does it do? It runs. Well, no, it initially, if it just hears it, it's gonna just stay still, right? Freeze. If it were to hurry and run away without knowing if the lion saw it or not, it would be more likely to, you know, get attacked by the lion. So it goes to freeze, like it it immobilizes, then it waits and monitors. And if it doesn't see there's threat there, then it might run away. Then it needs the simple, it needs to have both states available to them in order to survive. It needs to be able to run away if it needs to, and it needs to be able to freeze in place and hold still. So it's it's it's its state of defense, it's a state of self-protection. Okay. Humans are no different. It's kind of like feeling like you're a deered headlights. It's like, I need to do something, but I can't. And so it can be a very, very exhausting space to be in. And it's the most, it's it's the state that I find the majority of my a lot of my clients to be in because it's so disguised as normal. Because when you're in this state, this functional free state, like you are doing what you need to do. You're going to work for the most part, you're showing up, you're like going to the mailbox, getting the mail, you're, you know, hanging out with friends, but it's almost that sense of inside, you just feel like frozen and dead inside.

Functional freeze, functioning on the outside, numb on the inside

SPEAKER_01 21:36

And um it can feel like a very lonely place to be in. And um it's um can feel very hopeless in that state.

SPEAKER_00 21:49

Yeah. I think um, you know, you talk about depression, and depression is kind of an extreme example of that, right? And some of that hopelessness. I think comes from like fight didn't work, flight didn't work, there's nowhere else to go. And um, you know, the social consequences of fight are a fight or flight are very severe, right? The social consequences are of the free state are not. They are the there are some, right? Like especially if we end up there in a prolonged state, we're labeled as lazy or um, you know, depressed, and then there's that stigma associated with that. Um, I think also, you know, sometimes you learn a lot about sort of the metaculture from memes and what what is commonly shared in this sort of common trope of like I'm tired all the time, I feel like I just want to nap all the time. I feel like I have no energy, I have no desire to do anything. Um and I know I can be the only one that's chased like physical causes for that for so much of my life, like diet or I got a gut health or um all sorts of other things. And not to say those things don't play a role, but what's amazing to me is how many times I've I've felt this sense of just like heaviness, like I'm kind of moving through molasses. Everything feels hard, every movement feels difficult, and found that through some emotional processing, whatever that is, whether that be uh working with a somatic coach, this is a preferred one, or maybe having like a really difficult conversation that I didn't even know I needed to have, that feeling of coming alive in my body from moving through that and realizing like how much we we're but we're always chasing, like I didn't drink enough water or I didn't do enough of that, right? And and our body and our emotional state have this sort of back and forth relationship. And sometimes I think we put way more emphasis on our body's effect on our emotions. And uh, you know, and I I I doubt, I I don't in in in any way mean to think that it's specific to men as the majority, but I definitely have noticed more and more some of the ways that it shows up in men and because there is no allowance for any kind of intensity of emotion. I had a uh a person the other day that a member of my men's group who was talking to me about when I get into a disagreement with my spouse, anytime I get any level of activated at all, you know, she just shuts it down and says, you're yelling at me and goes away. It doesn't really matter what is happening, like for a man in a relationship to become activated. It is so, it is so triggering, right, to a lot of the uh trauma that is within women, that there's there's no allowance for any level of activation. And so the body just I I and I've seen this cycle, my body like getting feeling angry, feeling activated, feeling upset, feeling hurt, and then immediately just going straight down into that space. And um, and then it and then we feel stuck there and we kind of feel that sense of of desperation and how to get out of that. And, you know, the the process that we walk through today, you know, is one that me and you walk through recently and to and to have those tools to shift out of that state of freeze are so helpful. But it's amazing to me how much work it's done to even recognize what I'm in it.

SPEAKER_01 25:26

Mm-hmm. It's a lot because you're already exhausted. So, you know, when you're in those states, your your prefocal cortex, you're not thinking rationally. It's hard to think at all. That's why you feel so foggy, you know. And so it's hard to you, you're trying to think your way out of a situation that is not that you just can't think through. You know, we don't heal by thinking, we heal by feeling our way through it. And we exhaust ourselves by trying to rationalize and by trying to intellectualize

Trauma is what happened inside you, not just what happened to you

SPEAKER_01 26:00

ourselves out of situations. And especially when you're in a freeze state, um, like I said, you you have those opposing forces and it's can just get to so exhausting. And from there you go into complete dorsovagal shutdown, where it's like you don't even have any sympathetic energy. Those are people who just like can't even get out of their bed. And so that's why it's so important to have an understanding of the nervous system, to have somebody to help you guide out mapping your nervous system with you so that you can have a sense of where you're at on that map without shame, without judgment, without fear of just like, oh, this is how my nervous system has learned to orient. This is my self-protection mechanism. And this is the steps that I need to help to take to help me feel my way out of the situation. You know, trauma is not so much about what happened to you, but it's about what happened inside of you because of that experience and the conditions of connection and safety that you had after experiencing that. And that's why a lot of childhood childhood trauma carries over into our adult ears because it's like I said, it's really not so much about the event. And I don't want to take away from the severity of traumatic experiences for people. But if you have the conditions created for yourself after a traumatic event, your body will feel safe to come out of that. But for so much of us growing up, our generation and beyond that, we didn't have the language for it. We didn't have the understanding of what was happening or how trauma affected us, you know? And this isn't to like uh put any blame on our parents. I feel like that generation was doing the best that they knew how with the tools that they had available, you know. And we actually get to feed off of the groundwork that they laid to help us be in the space now where there's so much education about it and podcasts and people out there to help you understand what happened to you. But that's something the most that I love about this work is that when I sit down with people and they tell me their symptoms and they tell me their emotions and their feelings and what they're struggling with. And I'm able to like explain to them about the nervous system, about their self-protection mechanism, that a lot of the way that the things that they have been, um,

The personality traits that are actually survival patterns

SPEAKER_01 28:26

the thoughts they've been having, their personality traits that they thought were them is not really them. It's it can be incredibly emotional of just so many tears shed of like, one, hope, wait, there's a way out of this. I don't have to feel this way forever. Yes. And two, that's not really who I am. And there's some grief that comes with that. There's some grief of realizing the ways that you have shown up in self-protection and not even known it that we've labeled as personality, you know.

SPEAKER_00 28:58

So well, and I like that process that you call titrating because, you know, we talk about, like I said, the the consequences, both internally and externally, of going into anger or fight and running away, even were like we show up, but there was some release, some release associated, especially with fight, right? But with the with the free state, we just it just all there's no release, it all just goes down and goes down. And so for a lot of our life, for especially when we're younger, we may not see those consequences, right? Like I think a lot about my son, who is for before I really had such an awareness of it, you know, was such a good kid. This and that's almost like what we like that's our reward system for a kid be a good kid, but a good kid, uh somebody who is in constantly that shutdown state can look well behaved from the outside. And um, you know, I've had my own experience with panic attacks that started, uh, I think the first one was three years ago. And since then, I had never like the honestly, the only time I'd ever even heard of a panic attack was at the opening scene of The Sopranos up until that point. And since then, the amount of people, women and men I've talked to who have who have said they've experienced that, right? It's like we it's almost like I I I call it like emotional credit card debt. Like we can only run that card up so much and then we hit the limit and it comes due. And not only do we have to, do we have to start to shift that process of pushing more down in there, but we have a lot of emotional debt to pay off. We have a lot of feelings that we didn't feel at the time that our body wanted to feel them. And if we if we try to let them all be felt at once, it can just be overwhelming, right? But we have to sort of, we have to sort of get them out somehow. We have to start to release that stuff.

SPEAKER_01 30:51

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. In the somatic space, um, with the trauma-informed lens, you want

Why healing must be slow, titrated, and consistent

SPEAKER_01 31:00

to work with the body at the capacity that it's at at that moment. You know, you don't want to come in and just like trauma dump and just put it all out there and shake it all off at once. Like that can actually lead to re-traumatic traumatization of people. And so I think in any transformation work that you're doing, um, working with somebody who has an understanding of how trauma um works inside of the body, because no human goes through life unscathed. We've all experienced some moments of disconnection. And that's what trauma is it's disconnection from yourself. And um, so yeah, in the somatic healing space, we use words like titration and pendulation, where we give, we create space in a container for us to be able to drop in and place our awareness on activation and sensation inside of our body. And then we try to titrate between that and a place where we notice feeling supported, even if it's just one percent. And we build up to that. And we, and that's actually how survival energy gets released from the body is through those titrated moments of not just one explosion. You know, I hear some people who have like deep trauma histories and will sign up to go do one breath work session and completely re-traumatize themselves because our bodies weren't made to release such built-up survival energy in that way. We heal the opposite the way that we were traumatized, and that is through slow, consistent, gentle uh practices and ways. Not our body doesn't respond to force, it doesn't respond to pressure. And so I I hope that's helpful to people who are listening to this who have experienced re-traumatization from either plant medicine ceremonies or breath work, like that makes sense. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you. It means your body did not have enough capacity, it wasn't resourced enough to be able to experience something like that. And you know, uh overly stressed body is just under-resourced.

SPEAKER_04 33:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:19

And that's why these practices are so important to stay resourced because life is stressful on top of healing from trauma.

SPEAKER_02 33:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:27

And the more resourced you are, the better able you'll be able to navigate life.

SPEAKER_00 33:33

And so Can I just ask one clarification point to that? Because uh uh both breath work, holotropic breath work, and plant medicine are ways that I have found help in sometimes sometimes breaking through some of those stuck points, but they were not the first, like it wasn't like I just went straight from zero to that. It was like they were part of that process. And so when you I just want to make sure to get clear, like, are you you're not saying that they are not helpful to people with trauma, because I think they're helpful to a lot of people, and I think pretty much all of us have some level of trauma, right? But it's more about being cautious of the it's almost like uh you you want to go to the gym and you want to bench press 225 pounds, but you if you go right in there and try to bench press 225 pounds, you're gonna rip your, you're gonna rip your body open, right? So it's more about like we have to kind of do smaller warm-ups to kind of build the capacity of our nervous system before we go into those processes.

SPEAKER_01 34:34

Yes, I highly, highly suggest that. There's a lot of people that have come to me actually needing help healing from those modalities because their bodies were just not resourced enough to be able to fully integrate that experience. And yes, of course, plant medicine, breath work, those are amazing avenues that you can go down and explore to help you heal. Of course. So grateful for them. But I do think that you have to, depending on how much survival energy you're carrying, your trauma history, I think that you need to be incredibly mindful and feel ready to be able to partake and participate in something like that. Cause I would just hate for see to see people get re-traumatized over not feeling enough resource enough. Yeah. You know, and so a lot of my work too is I help people prepare for those things, of having a sense of feeling what it likes to feel and be in your body before you go experience something like that. Because when you're in those ceremonies, you can't escape it. You can't escape your body. You are going to feel.

SPEAKER_00 35:46

And if you have a sense of embodiment of there's no titration, there's no medicine ceremony.

SPEAKER_01 35:52

Unless you know, yeah, that's true. So yeah, I just really encourage that. Yeah. And it's coming from such a place of love for people to not want to spread, yeah, you know, more harm. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 36:08

Yeah. And I, I mean, I I think that that is kind of like the American way in the American culture. Like, oh, I just want to take a pill. I just want to do an ayahuasca ceremony. I just want to do this certain breath work. I've heard it heals, I hear, you know, and that's just not, it's kind of like the being human, right? Like, yeah, it's not, there's not that one thing. It's a collective thing. It's a way of being. Um,

Women, anger, and the nervous system history behind it

SPEAKER_02 36:31

I really love when you said about we don't, we like especially when we're triggered, like we don't think our way into healing or calming. We need to feel our way. And something that's been coming up for me a lot with my personal clients and myself is uh the just the world, like a lot of things are happening right now where a lot of people are like feeling anger. And from my experience, a lot of women that I work with have a really hard time feeling anger and expressing anger. And I'm going through my own anger process now that it's been a year and a half since my divorce, and I'm I'm having these things come up with this like anger come up. And I think it's, you know, if you're not comfortable with your own anger, then you're not gonna be comfortable with someone else's anger. So I'm curious like what you think about why women have a harder time when men get a little bit anger. I mean, besides centuries of violence, um, inner nervous systems, but like knowing that that partner is like loving and safe and like wanting that partner to be able to have their own emotions. But like for me, anger does put me into freeze. It does shut me down. And I work with a lot of women who have a real like they're like, I'm so angry about what's happening in this world right now, but but I don't know how to be angry. Like, so that just turns into resentment. And I'm just curious what you have to say about anger and women and men.

SPEAKER_01 37:55

Yeah. Um, well, I think anger can be so difficult for women to embody and know how to express in a healthy way, because for one, we were never taught how to hold anger in our bodies and be safe while doing it. And when you think about like the history of women, for so long, women were property and they were objects. We, in order to stay safe, which is our number one goal of the nervous system, and for women, you know, years ago, when we were considered property, we couldn't own our own property, we had to rely solely upon a man for our survival. Well, what did we need to do in order to stay safe and survive? We needed to play small, we needed to be agreeable, not take up very much space, not be a burden on anybody. Heaven forbid we feel and express a need. Like our survival depended upon it. So we're uh unraveling a lot of that now. Like generationally, there's things held in women's body that uh we're working through and processing through it that's been carried down. And um, so there's that, there's ancestral that's literally carried down through our DNA. There's also the cultural conditioning of that it's not okay for a woman to feel angry and express that maybe it's coming from religion. Maybe it's looked like it's that's from the devil, you are not supposed to feel angry. You know, there's that, and then also just like again, our relational safety of I need to be a certain way in order to be culturally accepted or to be, you know, find a person that will love me and accept me. And so when those feelings, those sensations of anger start coming on for a woman who hasn't felt safe experiencing that in her body yet, it can, yeah, it can be incredibly overwhelming. And then we can go to shame of like, you know. So again, I think it's that process of like titration, of one recognizing what's happening

Regulation means presence, not calm

SPEAKER_01 40:00

here and also like allowing yourself to, and it's also like when titration is not like you can just like consciously choose of like, okay, I don't want to feel anger anymore and make it go away. It's how can I hold anger in my body in a safe way and feel safe while holding it. And so there's, I think there's that there are definitely somatic practices that you can do while you're experiencing anger. One, even just like standing up, pressing your arms up against a wall and just putting that pressure on a wall and breathing and letting some of that energy move through you. Maybe it's journaling while you're angry, and it's like writing all your angry words down. It's creating a safe container, container again, creating the conditions for you to be able to experience your humanity and in a safe way. And people often like coin regulation with being calm. It's like what you said. And regulation doesn't mean calm. Regulation means presence. It means I can stay present to the discomfort that I'm feeling inside of my body without abandoning myself, without leaving myself.

SPEAKER_02 41:09

I love that. Presence doesn't mean calm.

SPEAKER_01 41:12

Yeah. And I mean, what was it? Say it again. Regulation. Regulation doesn't mean calm. It means I can feel anger without resorting to destruction. I can feel anger without hurting somebody else or hurting myself. You know, you can stay so present with the discomfort in your body without abandoning. And that allows for you to be able to allow that in other people too. So yeah, regulation just means you can stay present. Yeah. And I heard a quote, I think I want to say it was from Corey Mascara, but I love what he said. He said, inner peace is the result of meeting yourself so deeply and so honestly, and with all of your shame, that you have nowhere else to meet and nowhere to run.

SPEAKER_00 42:05

Well, that's another reason why this association or avoidance mechanisms are can be so destructive, right? Not just because we don't feel that feeling that we're feeling at the time and we maybe have to feel later. But coming back to this sort of analogy, like we don't ever get any reps in. So we don't ever we we don't spend time practicing sitting with uncomfortable emotions to build the capacity to do so.

SPEAKER_01 42:30

Mm-hmm. And I think that's what where a lot of relationships find themselves in trouble is because

Your partner mirrors your unresolved wounds

SPEAKER_01 42:38

you are projecting your own activation and your own unresolved childhood wounds onto your partner. And you you because, you know, our relationships are a mirror for us. They're a way for us in a beautiful way, if we allow it, to heal some of our most deepest wounds. And we come into relationship not knowing that, not knowing that we have unresolved childhood wounds that we are then projecting onto our partner. And so I think one of the deepest work that you can do in your relationship is learning the trauma language first of yourself and then of your partner. And I think there's two things that are vital for relationships to succeed. One is that you're doing your own deep inner work and you're staying curious about yourself throughout that process. And two is you are actively participating in the nurturance and in the aliveness and in the care of your relational dynamic. And if you have that, if you have the willing a willingness just to put in the work and you're doing your own inner work, I believe any relationship can. Can heal and repair. And um, I know that like this work, like somatic work and nervous system work has like it saved my marriage. And because I we were able to understand each other so much better and understand ourselves better. And it's I'm not just not to say that we don't argue anymore, we do, but it has decreased a lot. Yeah. Because we are able to understand our own activation first before we then go project it onto each other and hurt each other. So somatic work is for me, nervous system work is vital in maintaining a healthy dynamic relationship for sure.

SPEAKER_00 44:45

And I'm glad you pointed to both of them, right? I think the we have to do the work to feel safe in our body. And that was I I think one of the premises that we wanted to invite you on and part of our show about safety, right, is um learning how to create safe relationships by choosing safe partners, by showing up as a safe partner ourself, by um learning what a safe relationship dynamic looks like. But also a lot of us like trauma, trauma essentially makes us feel unsafe even when we are safe. And so we have to learn to feel safe when we are safe, or it doesn't really matter if we're in a safe uh environment. We won't feel safe. And I think that's where, you know, some of the maybe kind of the adolescence of the current dynamic around trauma-informed therapy and somatics, right, as it sort of becomes more mainstream and enters the lexicon, is this idea that I don't feel safe with you. Therefore, you're not safe. Right. This idea that my I'm trusting my body. I want to learn to build trust with my body and my inner world. But just because I don't feel safe does not necessarily mean that someone else is not showing up in a safe way, right? We have to actually do the inner work to be able to tell the difference.

SPEAKER_01 46:10

Absolutely. That is so true. If you don't feel safe inside of your own body, you will constantly ask unconsciously for other people to do that for you. And you won't be able to differentiate between is this my intuition speaking or is this my anxiety speaking right now? Is this, you know, coming from a wound or is this truth? You know, usually when we come into a relationship, well, first of all, when you when you start a new relationship, it is based upon like relational dynamics. It's it's relationally based. It's almost like when you start a new relationship and it's like, okay, we bought this piece of land together. And you get so excited about how you're going to cultivate that land and what you're gonna do on that land and what you're gonna build on that land, you know, and you're developing this relationship with somebody that's new to you

How childhood rewires your definition of love and safety

SPEAKER_01 47:00

in a way. So things feel exciting and, you know, then the more intimate you become with each other and the more you share vulnerabilities with each other, and this person begins to feel more like home with you. That's when it's your nervous system, your neurosception is like, okay, where in my database did I first learn what love is and what love felt like? It's gonna come from our childhood. And so then our neurosception says, okay, is this person like that dynamic? And it's gonna constantly be looking for ways of how this person is or isn't showing up for you based upon how you learn to experience love and relationship and intimacy and vulnerability in your own childhood. And that's when the relationship starts getting self-serving. And we start focusing on my needs, my wounds, my triggers, my pain. You make it all about yourself. Instead of learning how to cultivate like the garden and this land that you are developing together. And that it takes two of you like nurturing and working together, not against each other, of cultivating the space. Where are the weeds that we need to pull out and take a look at together? Not that you're doing this wrong, don't do this, but how can I help you and how can you help me so that we can grow this beautiful space together? Instead, relationship can sometimes become this landmine where it's like there's all these holes of these unresolved wounds, and it can feel so chaotic. Instead of coming to a better relational space with each other, of feeling safe in your own body, but also safe to explore these things together. Because honestly, a lot of these wounds, you have to be in relationship to heal them. And that's why relationship can be feel like so much work. But it is work. And you have to be committed to that. It's like Chad with the gym analogy. It's like if you've never worked out and you all of a sudden want to have like be toned and have muscles, you know, getting to the waking, first of all, suddenly the alarm clock and waking up is gonna feel awful. Like you're not gonna want to do it, you know? And then the more you practice at it, you put in the work and you go and you start lifting weights. And then it's like, oh my gosh, I have a bicep now. This is actually kind of fun. Cause like, look at what came from putting in the work. And it's the same with relationship of getting to a place of like, this can actually be really fulfilling because look at the fruits of this. Yeah connected we are, look how amazing our sex is. Look at how like uh free we feel in this space because we're both putting in the work toward it.

SPEAKER_00 49:54

But yeah, it is, it is gonna, I mean, if you haven't been to the gym in a long time and you go and do a really intense workout, you're gonna be sore as hell for a week. Right. And that's I think that's where the it can be challenging because we that I think that's where a lot of times sometimes we may feel the least safe, we may feel the most activated in the safer relationships, because this that's like the first opportunity for certain parts of us to come out, and it's can be so painful and why it's so important to have these conversations because it's very easy, especially if you kind of follow the simplified uh um what do they call it? The the online um therapy fluencers and and the simplified messaging to think, oh well, I went I went with this person and we had some intimacy and I feel crazy and painful, they're bad. Right? Like just to completely be able to to differentiate what is trauma and what is instinct is probably one of the greatest challenges, but the most important challenge that we can that we can take on to be able to have better relationships.

SPEAKER_01 51:05

Yeah, absolutely. Your partner will always mirror to you where you're not free and where your own inner work needs to happen. You know, so often when when when in a relationship, when something goes wrong, we we we point fingers. You know, instead of being able to what is this really about? Why do I why do why am I so activated when you do that? What is this reminding me of? You know, it's and it's not that our partners can't do things that are hurtful or, you know, in their dysregulated states lose themselves and hurt us, like that can absolutely happen. But it's more about what is this showing me about me? And that takes a tremendous amount of capacity, safety, and accountability and emotional maturity to be every day meet yourself in the mirror. What is life reflecting back to me about me? It's like looking in the mirror and expecting the person in the mirror to smile back at you first. That's not how reality works. You know, reality is a reflection of our internal state, our internal beliefs about ourselves. And we usually attract partners who are gonna bring up our wounds. And if in a state where you both can see that and recognize it for what it is, and be able to connect on a deeper level that way can be the most incredible thing in a relationship. Yeah.

unknown 52:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 52:42

And like what we were talking about earlier when you're talking about, you know, your new packages, and it takes time. It takes time. And, you know, that's why the end of our podcast is like, be brave, love is worth it, because it does involve a lot of courage, accountability, and patience and compassion. Like, you know, Chad and I have never had a healthy relationship before. And so, like, we're coming together in our 40s. I've got 45 years of not that. And so there's lots of landmines, you know, and there's lots of landmines. And for me, like being like, it's okay, there's gonna be less landmines. I'm going to slowly fill those like together in our garden. We're like, okay, let's fill this hole. There's still more holes, but let's fill this one. Let's fill this one, right? And um, I think for me, just being an inpatient person by nature, being like, oh, I just want like, you know, going back to the pill analogy is like, you just want a couple sessions, but it's like, no, this is like this, you can just do it in a couple of sessions. Like it takes time, it takes months, sometimes years to undo all of those patterns. And your core wound is always going to be your core wound. You're not gonna, you'll just recognize it quicker. It's kind of like coming back to baseline quicker, right? You don't ever not get triggered as a human being. You're never your partner's not gonna just like one day not trigger you ever because that's also not being human. And so I think, you know, um, from anyone else out there also struggling and being impatient, is it is it is work. It does take time and it is worth it. Like you said, it is totally worth it. And anything that's worthwhile, like if you want to go into the gym and lift 225 pounds and you've never worked out, it's gonna take you some time. Yeah, you're gonna just be able to go four or five times and work out and like get that weight. Like it's gonna take months of time eating right, training, you know, all these other things with your body that it's like nervous system, sleep, hygiene, trauma language, love language, like all of those things also go into it. And um, it can be overwhelming when you are in a dysregulated nervous

Your nervous system sets the foundation for your entire lived experience

SPEAKER_02 55:00

system, which is why we're talking about this. Because if you want anything to change, if you want to have, you know, any kind of change, you need to have a regulated nervous system. Because if you're in freeze trying to fix your relationship or in fight, flight or fawn, you know, trying to be safe and feel if they're safe and understand all those things, you're just not even gonna have a good gauge with them. Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 55:24

So yeah, your nervous system sets the foundation for your entire lived experience. It's in charge of sensing, perceiving, thoughts, feeling, actions. It literally creates your entire human experience. And based upon the state that you're in, it will be based upon your thoughts and your feelings and your emotions. Like if you guys can think about a time when you felt connected, you felt calm, you felt peace, you felt happy, you felt excited, you felt possibility. You know, that's that's your ventral vagal system, that's your connection system. That's the system that that's our that's our that's our natural state that that we want to be predominantly in, you know, and that's your healing state. Your body will only heal in a ventrovagal state. So, like you spoke to earlier about like people taking supplements and peptides and all these things to solve um their emotional state. And you cannot outrun a dysray nervous system. You cannot oversupplement or out-peptide a dysregulated nervous system. You know, it might put a band-aid over something for a little while. But if you really want those things to take root, you have to repair the system in order for those things to actually land in. And um, you know, and speaking of like freeze in relationship. So if you're in relationship and you're noticing that you're experiencing freeze inside of your system and you're wanting to like become unfrozen.

Practical somatic steps to heal freeze inside a relationship

SPEAKER_01 57:01

So let's use this in relationship right now. Let's say in the past, intimate intimacy was not safe for you. Maybe you came from a home where your relationship with your parents, like your emotions weren't safe with them, or you were like parentified. You felt like you had to like parent your parents' emotions. Intimacy wasn't safe for you. And you're coming into a relationship and you're resourcing your freeze state. Well, what that might look like to be able to heal from that is that let's say you go out one night, you have you're out to dinner, you feel really connected, things are going really well, you're feeling safe, you're noticing like this, just it's a good state to be in. And then all of a sudden you might feel like some anxiety, anxiety come in. Unexplainable. Okay. It's at that moment where you want to take control of it. You notice, you recognize what's happening. Because in the past, intimacy was not safe. And now I'm in this intimate relationship with somebody, and that's unfamiliar to me. So your nervous system is gonna scan for threat. It's gonna send off signs of threat. So in that moment, what you might want to do is just communicate to your partner, hey, I'm just gonna go on a walk really fast. Or can we just like snuggle and watch a movie, not really talk about intimate stuff or not have sex, but just like watch a movie together? It's these small, tolerable moments of connection that you are working toward. And tolerable just means you can complete it and it's going to be uncomfortable. But you can complete it. And when you're talking about healing and repairing your nervous system, you want to take action, tolerable steps in a way that you can complete it, but it's going to feel uncomfortable. But the key word is that it's tolerable to your nervous system. You're retraining your nervous system to show up in the world in a different way.

SPEAKER_02 59:02

So, in that situation, you're at dinner, you're having this like amazing connection, that's something out of nowhere. They say one thing and you just, you know, make it like that's the old pattern of intimacy isn't safe. So instead of like leaving or shutting down, which would be what you did in the past, then you would say, like, you wouldn't, you wouldn't like name like I'm activated right now. Or would you just say like, let's like if you're in the middle of dinner and that happens, like, do you just end dinner? Yeah, and go on a walk?

SPEAKER_01 59:35

I think it depends on what the real what your relationship is like up to that point. I mean, obviously you're on a first date. Yeah. It's gonna be like this would be a first date. No, well, I'm saying if it was a first date and you notice that happening, yeah, it might be harder to be like, I'm noticing some activation right now. Like, so in that case, I would just, if you're on a first date, I would just say, just like end it after the date, after the dinner conversation and go home. Don't continue, don't force yourself into more intimacy if you're not ready for it. You know? Um, but the more familiar, like I said, you are with your partner and feeling safe in intimate relationships, that would be the way to go about it. And also it's like when you're in a rupture with your partner.

How to name body sensations to your partner during conflict

SPEAKER_01 1:00:19

Have you guys ever known, like if you guys have ever practiced this, of instead of saying, like, you are making me feel this way, instead of just stopping and being like, can I just tell you what I'm noticing in my body right now?

SPEAKER_02 1:00:33

Can we do that?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:34

Yeah. It makes such a big difference, right? Because then it kind of like you stop projecting and blaming the other person. And you can just say, okay, I'm this is what I'm noticing in my body right now. I'm getting my I'm heating up, my heart is pounding really fast. Can we just like stop for a minute? And can we just like sit by each other and just like breathe and hold hands for a minute? Tell my system comes back to a place of connection. Because you are not going to be able to repair properly when you're bolt dysregulated. You will not get anything accomplished. You will just further the fight till three, four days later. Yeah. You know? And I think the

Relationship health is how fast you repair after rupture

SPEAKER_01 1:01:17

I think a really good way to measure the health of a relationship is not how often you get in a rupture, but how quickly you are able to repair after uh rupture. And you do that by somatically engaging with each other, of attuning to each other, of communicating what your bodily sensations are, of maybe like, hey, I'm not in a place right now to be able to talk about this. I need to get back to a safer place within myself before we try to repair this right now. You know, it's like, it's like talking to a screaming child and telling them to do something that you don't want them to do when they're throwing a fit. They're not listening to anything that you're saying. It's the same thing with adults. Yeah. You know? So I think it's such an integral part of relationships, of gauging, engaging with each other somatically, learning each other's language that way, of understanding like what their core wounds are, like you said, and when that's showing up, and noticing when you're projecting onto your spouse and taking accountability for that. Yeah. You know? So for sure.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:29

Yeah. I feel like um Chad and I have done much better at that since we started working with you, but definitely um the like wanting to intellectualize it, you know. I think that's like something I'm really gonna take away, is just like allowing myself to be like the presence of anger instead of like not having to get rid of the anger. If that makes sense, right? Like when I get because I am just in an anger process right now, and I've, you know, I'm in this intensive program that's bringing up a lot of stuff, and we're like deep diving into our shadow and our like our childhood trauma. And I have a lot of sexual trauma and violence against women that's like anger towards men specifically coming up. And so trying to like let Chad know, like, I'm really angry. And not angry at you, but I'm just angry right now. I'm just like angry at everything. Like, I'm just kind of like angry. Um, I like that present scene though, of like being present with the anger instead of like, oh, I have to wait for it to go away.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:38

Yeah. And how does this anger want to move through me? Mm-hmm. Maybe I want to get more involved in um the injustices of things. Like, use that anger toward activation, toward making change. You know, which we're doing, April.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:54

Yeah, I have actually been wanting to get a lot more involved lately than ever politically. Like, I've never been a super political person, but I feel like the anger of that injustice is like coming up where I've been sharing a lot more posts and having a lot more conversations I wouldn't normally want to have. And like, oh, like sharing the number to call your senator and like, oh, I need to call the senator. I've never done that before. And so, yeah, channeling that towards activation. I like that.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:18

Yeah, for sure. I also think it's so important in relationship, too, is that you know, when you're anchored in your adult self and you're in your ventrovagal state, you're in your adult self, you're not in, you're not letting your younger parts take the show. It's taking some time to state what is really true about the situation. You know, what is true about my partner? They really care for me. They show up for me. I know they love me. Yeah. That's what's true. And when you're in a dysregulated state, you say things you don't mean. You know, you end up having regrets about hurtful things said or the way that you communicated yourself in that moment. And so I think that when you can like start picking up on like noticing what's happening inside of your own body and then taking the time, if you need it, to pause. Do whatever it is that you need to get your body more back to a place of homeostasis. So then you can actually do healthy repair work with each other. And I also want to voice, April, that how important it is in relationship for how you were just able to say how you communicated shadow. Like, I'm feeling anger right now. This is not about you, but I'm just feeling anger. And such a strong sign of the masculine is when he can just allow for the emotional expression of the feminine without taking it personal. He just like gets to hold that container for her because for so long, women haven't been able to do that. You know, and that's where like kind of like that polarity comes in of being able to. Have those differences and to be able to appreciate them.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:03

You know, I I strongly believe that polarity is necessary to be able to have that charge available in your relationship and however couples go about finding that in their relationship. But yeah. Yeah. Thank you.

How to connect with Darci Burke

SPEAKER_00 1:06:22

So, Darcy, um, if somebody was interested in getting a hold of you and maybe working with you, what's the best, what's the best way for them to reach out?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:29

Yeah. I have a website. Uh what is it? Holo. I don't even know what it is. W.h.sailing.info. Or they could just reach out through me on Instagram. They can DM or yeah, I have links on my Instagram profile.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:45

We'll include all of that here. But the website's the best the best way.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:49

Yeah, they can email me.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:51

Well, I almost selfishly don't want to recommend people to, so it's easier to get on your calendar. But I highly recommend if any part of this episode relate uh you found relatable or uh resonated with you, um Darcy is really good at what she does. And just like to ask you one question before we go. Um, what is one piece of advice you would leave our audience with to give them hope and love?

Darci's closing message, come home to yourself

SPEAKER_01 1:07:22

Come home to yourself. Remember that you are whole. There is a place with inside of yourself that is untouched by the impermanence of life. This stillness, this knowing inside of you. And when you can find that center, that place within side of yourself, your work becomes not about addition, but more about subtraction. Things that are not you, the survival patterns that are not you. And that at your core you are whole and abundant and love. Yeah, that's my core belief, and it's the I mean whole means whole in Greek. And when you can operate from a place of wholeness, then you can fulfill the fullest measure of your creation. And nature teaches us that every day. So yeah, that's my prayer for humanity to remember that.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:43

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:43

Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you, guys. I'm beautiful.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:47

And as always, remember everyone, be brave. Love is worth it.