The Pause Between Worlds

In this episode, I’m sharing from a place that is very real and very present for me. After suddenly losing my dog Tucker—I’ve found myself in a space where I’m not fully in the grief, but I’m also not back to normal life.

So instead of forcing an episode I wasn’t aligned with, I wanted to talk about that in-between… the pause.

We unpack what it means when your body and nervous system aren’t ready to process something yet, and why that isn’t something to rush. I share both the physiological and energetic perspective on this state, and how it actually serves a purpose in healing.

I also talk about a tool I’m currently using—expressive writing, based on the work of James W. Pennebaker—and how putting experiences into words helps the brain begin to organize what feels overwhelming.

This is a conversation about honoring your own timeline, understanding the difference between avoidance and readiness, and allowing healing to unfold without forcing it.

In this episode:
The sudden loss of Tucker and the impact he had on the clinic and healing space
Why grief isn’t just about loss—and the many ways it can show up
The nervous system’s pause state and the Freeze response
What happens in the brain when experiences aren’t fully processed

Amygdala and threat detection
Prefrontal cortex and meaning-making
Why unprocessed experiences can feel like they’re still running in the background
Expressive writing and how it helps “close the loop” in the nervous system
The difference between suppression vs. not being ready
Reiki, energy work, and the concept of healing without timelines
Reflections on mediumship, intuition, and ego in readings

Summit takeaway:
“You don’t have to heal it today. You just have to stay connected enough to yourself that when you’re ready—you can.”

If this episode resonated, share it with someone who might need it.
Continue the conversation on Instagram: @alannacrawford_

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Welcome to the Summit of Deck, where science meets a goal and you don't have to pick one or the other. Hi, I'm your host, Elena Crockett, osteopathic manual practitioner and recognition teacher. On the pod, we're talking about body wisdom, energy, intuition, and becoming an expert on your own feeling. Whether you're looking to find yourself again, create a new version, or see, just here for the results, you're in the right place. I'm here to demystify spiritual curiosities while adding a layer of humanness to the healthcare experience. No gatekeeping, no pedestals. This podcast is for the woman who is ready to take her power back. Let's do it!

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Hello everyone. Happy Wednesday. Um, honestly, I don't really know how to begin today's episode. There was no episode last week. Um, we suddenly lost our dog Tucker. I just I really couldn't do anything, and I needed a second to grieve. And honestly, I've still found it really hard to get back to a normal life. I feel really uninspired. Um I just have like a lot of feelings about life, and I'm in a real like when it rains it pours moment. And as you can probably tell from my voice, I am sick. I just got my ass handed to me by whatever this like COVID-ish thing is that's going around. Um, and I'm finally just like coming back to life after six days. Anywho, this episode isn't it's not gonna be about grief specifically, but I wanted to share some stuff. I don't know if stuff is the word, but that's what we're gonna use. Um, about what I found helpful, what I found interesting. Um, honestly, I just really want to share some stories about Tucker and the role he played in my life and the experience we had with the pet medium last night. And I don't know, maybe by the end of this I'll tie it all up nice in a pretty bow, but I I might not. I might just share some random stuff with you guys today, and I really hope that this is okay because it's what's happening, and I think it's what I need. Um, Tucker, if you don't know him, I just assume a lot of people are people who come into my clinic who listen to this, but Tucker was a big goofy 90-pound burnadoodle with the kindest human eyes and a very, very calming energy that seems so counterintuitive to his demeanor. Um, when we got Tucker, sorry, if you hear clicking, that's Argo walking around. I never have the dogs in here, but I now can't leave Argo alone. So yeah, those clicky clickety clacks are just Argo's chilling with us. But um, so Jay and I got um Tucker right before we got married. So when we got on our honeymoon, he like wasn't even a year old, and we took um him and Argo to a border uh because we were going away, we were going to Italy for three and a half weeks. So we go to pick him up, and the boarder's husband was like, Well, you guys have a sensey, and we're like, What the hell is a sensi? And he's like, Your dog, like Tucker feels everybody's feelings, like humans, animals, all this kind of stuff. And he was like knew that I had friction with Tucker, like, I don't even know how he knew that. Knowing I've learned so much about pet communicators and pet mediums recently that like he's probably a pet communicator, but um he he sensed that like him and I had had tension, and he's like, he probably like you probably can't get him inside your house, can you? And I was like, No, and at this point, like when we had Tucker, it's like he would not come in the house when it was just me in the house, and I'd be like screaming at him and he wouldn't come in. And the the boarder's husband was like, It's because he senses your anxiety and he doesn't want to be like around that anxiety. And he said, you know, this dog would make an incredible um therapy dog, and you should take him to training. And I was like, Okay, obviously, you know I have anxiety, like I'm I've just started osteo school. I can't like I can't take train him to be a therapy dog, like we got enough shit going on. Anyway, we had that in the back of our minds. So he was a clinic dog. When I was personal trainer, he would come, him and Argo would always come in like to train people with me, but then he was clinic dog as soon as I opened my clinic. And I never had him in here during Reiki because when I did my first Reiki level one, um, she made a point to say, like, if you have animals in the house or in the area where you're doing Reiki, you don't want them to be around Reiki because um animals are grounders and they're energy transmuters, so it's like if people are letting things go in Reiki, the animal might pick it up and then it might get stuck on them and it can manifest as illness. And she'd seen that happen, and it actually happened to one of her dogs. So I never had I never had the dogs in here. And when, like, so my clinic is my double car detached garage out back, so I'd put them in the house when I was doing Reiki, and sometimes when I was doing osteo, and Tucker would only bark his head off when I was doing Reiki. If I was doing osteo and he and he was inside, it wouldn't matter, but if I was doing Reiki, he'd be going crazy, and I thought that was really weird. And so I was at another training something, and the woman's like talking, and she's like, Wait, who has the big black dog? And I was like, Oh my god, it's me. She's talking about Tucker. So I was like, I do. She's like, Yeah, he needs to be in the room when you're doing Reiki. He's a he's an energy dog, he's a he's that's part of his purpose in life. Like, he's he's here to help with energy, like grounded or something, I don't know, but he needs to be in it, and don't worry about the rules, like he can go in. And I was like, Well, I can't leave one dog without the other, and he and she was like, No, no, no, the other dog's there for you, the other dog grounds you. Tucker does the people, he's there for the people. So ever since that day, he's always been in here, every single day with all of us. And I know if some of you are listening have been in here with him, whether it's Reiki, Ostio, like it, he was truly something special. He was a healer in every sense of the world. It's the heart and soul of the clinic, like it's we've never known a day without him. And when I posted about it on social media, it I mainly only posted about it because I wanted everybody to know he died because I couldn't deal with like 10 people a day walking in the clinic being like, where is Tucker? But when I posted, I got, guys, I'm not joking, over a hundred, over a hundred messages about what he meant to people. It was so moving. And also in those messages, I got a lot of tips or just insight or stories about how people deal with grief. Um, and I think grief isn't really something you talk about until it happens, you know? Like the grief hits and you're like, okay, well, now what? But it's not like we don't really talk about how do we handle grief until it happens. So I offered an intuitive health program, healing from the outside in. And no, I didn't say that wrong because everybody says you have to heal from the inside out. Guys, it's really, really hard to heal from the inside out. If you actually go, physical is the first way in and heal from the outside in, life-changing. You never go backwards. That's besides the point. So in month five of this program, I had a grief specialist teach us about grief because grief and emotion and acknowledging emotion, like it's a huge part of your healing process and in like the grand scheme of things. So something that really stuck out to me is like, I can't remember the number, it's something like there's a hundred types of grief, something like that. And she took us through, I think, the most common 20 or 25. Um, because like the typical, there's loss, like loss of a loved one, loss of a pet, a divorce, a miscarriage, but there's also things that are grief, like moving, ending a relationship, becoming a parent, um, fertility issues, betrayal, ending a friendship. There's so many different ways we can experience grief, but I think we only ascribe it to a loss. And I thought that that was really like that was a mic drop moment for me to think about some of these things that we push aside or push down because we're like, oh, these are silly, but they're grief. They're grieving processes, or they're they're processes that require you to handle them as grief. Um, and I also think, even just with grief of like a loved one or a pet or that kind of thing, it's one of the emotions that we push down because we tell ourselves it only time heals. And that's not true. Like, yes, it does take time, and and the analogy people always give with grief is like it comes with waves. And in the beginning, it's just like waves of a storm are just crashing, crashing, crashing, crashing. But the the more time you have, it's like the waves, there's more space between the waves, or sometimes there's like a really rocky, rough day at sea, and there's a ton of waves, and then it's very calm. And and so, yes, we do need an element of time, but we also have to feel our emotions. So she taught us this thing, the 90-second rule. I don't know if you guys have ever heard of it, but it's like an emotion takes about 90 seconds to peak and then come into its refractory period. But the issue is as soon as we feel an uncomfy emotion, we push it away. In our head, so when we're not feeling an emotion, we're like, oh, 90 seconds, minute and a half, like that's nothing. But when that emotion hits us, we do everything to push it away. Or we start making up a story in our head so that we can ascribe that emotion to something or someone else. And it's like you pick a fight with them, or you create an issue that maybe's not there, or you make up this scenario and where you're fueling this emotion and you're putting it in onto something else, like an experience that you're not really, it's not really happening and you're not sitting that emotion. So when that happens, we're not truly letting the emotion run its course. So when we're dealing with grief or any emotion, really, it's super important to say, like, hey, I feel this uncomfortable feeling, it's sadness, and I'm gonna sit here and feel this. It's sadness, I don't have to do anything about it, I just have to let it be here. So having had done that in the month five, like, so that was back in December, um, right after Tucker died, I knew going into that that I was gonna need to give myself some space, like to slow down and free up time where I could just feel my feelings and like be capable of of handling like the 90 seconds and not try to fix them or do anything, but just like be in a place where I can actually let them just be there and I can start the grief process because I really didn't want to push it down. Um, but the issue is I didn't know what I felt. I actually just had like I couldn't name the emotion. Really, like all I could name is that that I had like a ton of anxiety and I was like very hyper alert and none of it made sense. And so I kind of have to explain what happened to Tucker, and I so apologize if this is gonna make you sad because if you went through something similar, um it was really traumatic. So Tucker, we thought he had gotten Kennel cough, so it was like a day the day before he died, maybe a day and a half before he died, he started coughing, like typical of that like goose honk cough. He's had kennel cough before that both the dogs have had kennel cough many times. It was textbook kennel cough. Um, but he was coughing up like a little bit of white, but it, you know, if you look up Kennelkoff, that's normal too. Argo would cough off so much when he had kennel cough. But he was eating, drinking, playing, like everything was normal. He was just having this cough. Um, and then the that next day, like the night before he passed, we took him to the park. He was playing with these little girls, like it was such it was so beautiful. He actually like didn't even cough at all at the park. And then that night he had a rough night. He coughed a lot. Um, he sleeps with Jay and he didn't sleep in the bed. He went into a different room, he's uncomfortable, he was up a lot. Um, but then Jay said he coughed a little bit at like 4 a.m. and from four to five, like they laid, they slept in the bed, and then Jay went to work. So at about six, I let him outside. He he he wasn't even coughing. I let him out, but he didn't want to come back inside. And again, like he's part Bernie's mountain dog. He lives to be outside, but he also lives to eat. So um at around eight, I was like, buddy, you want some breakfast? Didn't want to come inside, so I thought that was weird. Dropped Reagan off at school. He wouldn't go in the house when I dropped off at school, and that's very uncharacteristic of him. And when I came back, I could tell like he was his his breathing was labored. So I said, Jay, you know, we need to take him to the vet, something's up. Um, and they say with Kennel cough, like if they start to have labored breathing, bring them to the vet. So this was like 8 30. We could get him in at 10 40. Jay was gonna take him to the vet. And that morning, it's like my energy already knew he was gonna die. Actually, the two nights leading up to that, I was waking up at 4 a.m. in a panic and I couldn't go back to sleep. And 4 a.m. in TCM, like traditional Chinese medicine, that's the lungs, and lungs is grief. And I was like racking my brain from like 4 to 5:30. I'm like, what am I grieving? Why do I have grief? Um, so it's like my energy already knew. In that like, time between when Jay I was getting ready for work and Jay was gonna take him to the clinic. I couldn't function. I was like, just wanted to burst out in tears, and I wasn't even ascribing it to Tucker because I was just like, he has kennel cough, he's fine. And I would sit outside with him and he would smile at me and wag his tail. He was just he just was labored breathing a bit, and then when Jay took him to the vet, I had this voice in my head, and it said, go say goodbye to him because you are never gonna see him again. And I fought my body not to do it because I was like, that is an intrusive thought, Alana. You're so crazy, like he's fine, and I didn't say goodbye to him. And I think it was like 15 minutes later, and Jay calls me and he said Tucker died. And went zero to a hundred, like, really quick. Jay said he took him in to the vet, and the vet was like, Okay, he's probably like, we're gonna need to transfer him to an emergency vet to get him some oxygen, like extra oxygen, throughout for like 24 hours, but let's run some x-rays. We think it's fluid in his lungs. We'll take him back. Tucker was good, the vet was good, Jay was good. Um, so they did the x-ray, they came back to Jay and they said, no fluid in his lungs, which is great. Um, we want to do an ultrasound of his heart, and we're just gonna give him, I think they were giving him like an injection to like slow the heart or something, so they could put an intubation tube in. I don't know, it's a little bit blurred, but they said, Okay, can we permission to do that? Jay said, Yeah. Uh the vet walks out. As soon as he walks out, he runs back in, grabs Jay, and he says, Your dog's gonna die right now. And Jay goes to the back room with him, and they're giving him chest compressions and cardiac arrest, flat line, dead. So, like the vet didn't know, the vet doesn't know what happened. We could guess. Um, they were saying I always say it wrong, congenital heart failure, congenital heart failure, they thought maybe, but like how did it go zero to a hundred? I don't know. We uh all we we were spiraling, we were spiraling, and I think that's why I just had anxiety and I was hyper alert because I just like it was traumatic. And then I came across this Instagram post and it said trauma and unprocessed emotions are stored in the body as incomplete experiences, the nervous system keeps them active because they were never finished, and that caught me. I was like, yes, from what I know about how a brain functions, tell me more. So, one Dr. James Pennebaker claims that some people who experience trauma recover fully while others do not, and the people who recovered had had found ways to put their experiences into words. So he says that you should write about the deepest emotions or most difficult experiences for 20 minutes, four days in a row, because trauma and unpressed emotions are stored in the body as incomplete experiences. So the nervous system is keeping them active because they they have not finished, and writing forces the brain to organize it so that the brain can then like flag the experience and file it away in the prefrontal cortex. So I'm not sure if you listened to the last episode, but we talk about the role of the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, what they do and why they're important. So when the brain organizes an experience into language, it takes the experience from the amygdala. So the amygdala, that's like a threat assessment. It's where like threat lives, whether we know the amygdala will signal like we're gonna release stress hormones, this is a stressful experience. So it takes it out of the amygdala where that threat is living, and it it moves it into the prefrontal cortex where meaning lives. And the prefrontal cortex is where we flag our experiences and we organize them, and then they live there as experience. It's why, like when people do dumb things, we say like they haven't developed a prefrontal cortex yet, because you have to have so many experiences to then form your thoughts and views, patterning behaviors from your prefrontal cortex. So when you can do that and move it to the prefrontal cortex, that's when the body stops treating the memory as a current danger. Because as we know, our nervous system does not know what's happening in real time. Something triggers it and it believes that it is continuously living that experience, even though it could just be a thought that you keep replaying in your brain. The nervous system doesn't know what's real and what's a thought and what's not and what's real. So that's why that's important. So Penny Baker calls this expressive writing. So it's like raw, unfiltered writing about what actually happened and how it actually felt. And there's no goal with this writing, there's no like guidelines how to do it, and you don't have to read it back and you don't have to share it with anyone. You just have to get the experience out on paper. Let me say, like, I am in no way an expert. I'm only telling you this because, spoiler alert, I'm gonna tell you in 30 seconds that it really worked for me. If you experience like extreme trauma, I'm not like you see a therapist, you get professional help with this. I'm just explaining something I found that makes sense to me both logically and emotionally and help the process. So his theory is that every unwritten experience stays open as a file in the nervous system. And I 1000% agree and back that statement because I see it every single day in my clinic, both like physically with osteopathy and energetically. So, like reading that was a really aha moment for me, and that's where I was like, okay, let's give this a try because maybe this can take me out of my anxiety state, and I can start to like understand what it is that I'm feeling. And guys, it helped. Spoiler, it big time helped me. Even after the first day of writing, I was able to start identifying emotions when they came up, and I was able to sit with them. And it goes back further. Yes, my writing started about that specific day, the event, but it ended with like I have so much guilt for the way I treated that dog after I had Ray. Like, if you are, if you have had an animal postpartum, I mean, if you didn't take all your anger and frustration and be the most overstimulated with your animal, you are a hero and you deserve a medal. But I unfairly took out a lot of my stressors on the dogs because I couldn't do it on a baby, and I can't do it on my husband because I need him, and postparms really fucking hard, and I just I I treated them unfairly, I treated him specifically unfairly because he was a Little bit naughty in the house, wonderful in the clinic. Huge pain in my ass in the house. But all that to say, I was like, this is great. Now I'm just sad, but I've gotten all of this writing and emotions, and I feel like I'm not anxious anymore, and I'm just sad, and that's okay. And we can be sad and we can keep on going with life. That was a fun thought because I couldn't. I know logically there's nothing I can do, and I know all the things that are healthy and I should do, but right now I am just existing like at the bare minimum. If we're thinking like flight, fight, or freeze, I'm in freeze. And if if I was talking about it in energy terms, I refer to it as there's no timelines. Like if someone comes in for Reiki and they're really low, we go through all the reasons, like why they're low, what they can do about it, and have to move forward. But the biggest takeaway point from that session on any of those things is like you can do it on your own timeline. You're in a pause right now. And when you want to hit play, that's up to you. Because the work's already been done. You've identified the emotion, you've created steps to move forward. We know where we're headed, but there is no timeline on taking that first step. Because the nervous system doesn't want to just jump right into movement. It doesn't. It takes a while for the nervous system to catch up with like what your brain has just recently comprehended. And often it slows things down to protect you. The body and the nervous system know that something needs to move, but that it's not time yet. And that's when you're in the pause, and that's okay. You know, we say healing takes time, and that's true, but I think where that can be harmful is when we're in avoidance. Like avoidance of even identifying and facing what we want to heal, that's the hard part, right? That's the yucky, uncomfortable part. But if you've done that and you're just simply not ready to pick life back up, that's okay. And I don't think we talk about that enough. I actually tried to just like push through with intense workouts, and listen to me, I ended up getting deathly ill. And I think that's funny. My body's like, Alana, girl, you need to chill. And I think it's even more funny. I mean, not funny, but totally tracks for the body, is that it attacked my lungs. It's like you're grieving. Your lungs are weak. Your sickness is going to your lungs because you need to grieve and chill. So that's what I'm doing. I'm chilling, friends. I'm not participating in any self-destructive behaviors or anything like that. I'm I'm honestly just doing the bare minimum and really focusing on being present in my family. And this is new for me. I am typically like the show must go on. Business cannot slow down. My life can be burning to the ground, and I will not miss a second of work. But if I'm out here teaching and sharing ways we truly heal, what fucking type of practitioner would I be if I can't practice what I preach? And like this is uncomfortable for me because more so like in this pause, like beyond my sad feelings, in this pause I've created, I've left space to just slow down and think. And I'm realizing I need to do things differently. I need to change my priorities. One of the hardest pieces is things that I used to equate success just don't do it for me anymore. And now I feel like I'm going through a grieving process of like, I worked my ass off to get this thing or get to this point, and now I'm like, it doesn't even matter, like that is not what success is. So it's like heavy and liberating at the same time. And again, like I don't think we talk about this enough. It's okay to just be here and not have any answers or move forward and just be in your feels, know what you gotta do, and it's okay that we're not doing it. My husband, however, does not get the chance to be in the pause. Um, for his job, the show really must go on, and I do I feel for him, I really, really do. Tucker was his soul dog, like they slept together every night. Those guys were thickest thieves. Literally, when we started the mediumship call last night, Tucker was like, I am his favorite. So we're gonna go. You did hear that on the call, though, buddy. Um, so I wanted to do this mediumship call for him with him because I I truly thought it that it was going to help him. I thought we were gonna get some concrete answers, but I was wrong. Also, apologize, there is like somebody cutting down a tree behind me, and I really hope you guys can't hear that. Um, yeah, we didn't really get concrete answers, but energy work is a really interesting realm to be in. Not only do you have to be actually like a very skilled intuitive, but you have to be a good communicator to those you are working for, the for the clients who have hired you. And I'm saying this as a medium. For listeners who don't who do not know, I am a medium. I practice mediumship. It is part of the ways I pay my mortgage. It's a very real service I offer. Um, so I am speaking as a trained medium. Uh, the woman I hired, she's a trade, she by trade, she's an animal communicator. Um, she was recommended to me by a client who worked with her when their dog was sick. So, right off the bat, there's a bit of a difference there. She typically does a live animal sessions. Like if there's something going on with your pet, she will communicate with your living pet um to try to help you decipher like decisions you have to make or like maybe vibes are off, that kind of thing. Um, but there was a small section on her website that said she does do animals that have past, um, like mediumship readings for closure. So I thought I'd give it a world to recommendation. So she told me right off the bat, she's like, Do you understand how these things work? And I was like, Yep. And she's like, Okay. So she told me she's mainly just a clairvoyant. So that means she mainly just sees. She was she receives images. She's like, sometimes I might get the odd word, but I mainly just see an image and then I have to decipher. Um, she has to translate and just and and ascribe that image a meaning. And right away I had immense respect for her because a purely clairvoyant intuitive, that is hard business. Like I would say clairvoyancy is my weakest clair, and I find it the hard, especially if you're communicating, if it's a mediumship, clairvoyancy is very, very hard to interpret a session. Um, and especially if you're dealing with grief. So when we started, some of the things she said were pretty bang on. Other things I actually think she was picking up Argo. Um, but the cause of his of Tucker's death, she sent us on a wild goose chase. And it really left us more hurt and angry. In that moment, it was, I felt I was like, oh my god, poor Jay. I've just like broken his heart all over again. His crazy wife made him do something crazy he would have never done on his own. But it's all good, we're good. But um in in one of the instances, she brought in something that had happened to her own pet, and you could tell she was very angry about it. And I felt like she was kind of casting that same same fate onto Tucker, like what happened to her cat happened to Tucker. And like, not out of malice or anything. It's just like that's what we call bringing ego into a reading. You can't let your own beliefs, your feelings, your emotions, those things cannot seep into a reading. As soon as you let your ego get involved, it kind of becomes tarnished. And I've I've spoken before about like what ego is. Ego doesn't mean like egotistical, ego means like your thinking brain. So she, I just I know she saw how much like we were hurting, and her ego wanted to give us a definitive answer. And I think she has some heartbreak around a similar instance with her cat, and it kind of seeped into it. Um, and and I'm I'm we're not mad at it or anything, and like this is exactly why I don't advertise as a medium. You just kind of like find out when you're in session with me. Um, and it's because I don't ever want to guarantee someone an answer. And if you come from energy work first, like I always think that energy work is the foundation for any sort of deviation you're gonna use. Energy work is only ever for your highest and best. So when mediumship enters the chat, at least in my sessions, it has to be in a healing capacity. So that doesn't mean it has to be good news or happy things, but it has to be for the highest and best on your healing journey, or else it doesn't matter. And this experience was honestly just a really good reminder of how grateful I am for my training and my lineage of energy work. I've honestly like prior to Tucker, I think in the last couple of months, I've been feeling a little bit lost. And this was kind of like a North Star, like pulling me back home. Yes, I'm passionate about offering good sessions, but I'm really passionate about teaching energy work as the base of everything, like egoless energy work. And so that session really just relit a fire under me about this importance of this work. I don't want to leave it on a bad note though. She did tell us some really beautiful things, some confusing things. I honestly think a lot of Argo came through too, and that was really helpful for us in hearing. She told us one really beautiful message that, like hopefully down the road, I can happily share with everybody, but it was it was learning. Jay did say he after we talked it to death, also consulted my friend Ashley. Um he did say he was happy that we did it. Um, and for me, it just means like Reiki training's coming soon. But yeah. Anywho, can I tie this up in a bow? I don't know. I I don't think I want to. Life is messy and it doesn't always feel good. But I think if you can sit in it and take a pause and reflect, and you don't even have to act, my friends, you are crushing it, and it's gonna be okay. We're gonna be okay. I love you all. I'll see you next Wednesday.