Burnout, Motherhood & Nervous System Regulation with Craniosacral Therapist Suzanne Ducharme-McFarlane

If you're dealing with burnout, chronic stress, postpartum overwhelm, or nervous system dysregulation, this conversation will change how you think about healing.

This week on Hustle Rebels Toolbox Tuesday, Renae sits down with Suzanne Ducharme-McFarlane, an integrative clinician with more than 30 years of experience in speech pathology and craniosacral therapy, to explore how the nervous system shapes everything from motherhood and burnout to healing and resilience.

Together, they unpack why so many women — especially new moms and high achievers — feel like they're barely holding everything together. You'll learn why your body eventually forces you to slow down, why "pushing through" isn't resilience, and how nervous system regulation creates the foundation for healing.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• What craniosacral therapy is and how it supports nervous system regulation
• Why burnout isn't just mental—it's physiological
• The hidden connection between motherhood, perfectionism, and chronic stress
• Why babies co-regulate through your nervous system
• Simple nervous system regulation tools you can use in everyday moments
• What "putting yourself first" actually looks like when life feels overwhelming

Connect with Suzanne using the links below to learn more about her work supporting postpartum women, working moms, and families.

👇 Connect with Suzanne:

https://www.suzanne-ducharme.com

suzanne.ducharme44@gmail.com

📩 Join my free Weekly Recharge newsletter: https://wayward-wellness-coaching.kit.com

🌐 Learn more about Wayward Wellness Coaching: https://waywardwellnesscoaching.carrd.co

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

It just really difficult for women to prioritize themselves. Plus, there's just pressure on women to not do that. That's selfish or indulgent when you've got a husband who's navigating the shift in your relationship and a baby in crisis. Women are just taught be nice, suck it up, keep going, get it done, make it look good. And I just have felt more and more, as these women have taught me in the practice, that they need help too. And there's something I can offer in that realm.

SPEAKER_00 0:29

Welcome back to Hustle Rebels. I'm Renee, your host. And today is Toolbox Partnership. The toolbox is the space on this show where I bring in people I have personally vetted, practitioners, strategists, and guides who are doing real work to help people like you untangle themselves from the patterns that we talk about pretty much every single week here. So today's guest is Suzanne Ducharme McFarlane. Suzanne is an integrative clinician with a background in speech pathology and craniosacral therapy. And she spent her career working with children, infants, and caregivers, especially moms, who are holding everything together. Her work has always lived at the intersection of the body and the nervous system. More recently, Suzanne has been developing something new, a resource specifically for women and new moms, navigating the impossible pressure of postpartum life, then returning to work and the particular kind of burnout that happens when you're pouring out everything that you have while quietly ignoring every single that your body is sending to you. She believes, and I agree, that the nervous system doesn't lie and that tuning back into the body is the most radical counter-cultural thing that you can do in a world that keeps telling you to push through. So, Suzanne, welcome to the toolbox, and I'm very excited to have you here. Hi, Renee. Thanks so much for having me. Absolutely. So I would love for you to tell us a little bit about where you started, where you're coming from, and how you ended up here, because honestly, your background is pretty specific and very interesting.

SPEAKER_01 2:04

I started out in 1994. I got my master's in speech pathology and went into my residency. So we do a nine-month residency. And I thought I was going to work with adults when I went through graduate school. I never thought I would be working with children. And through a twist of fate, I wound up at an outpatient pediatric center on the South Shore. And it really changed the whole course of my life and career, taking that phone call and starting out in that particular space. There were so many therapists. There were so many OTs and PTs and SLPs. It was working with medically involved kids. It's where I really developed my love of working with feeding and with complex kinds of disorders, the kids with syndromes, the kids with tubes. I learned so much about collaboration and got cross-trained in so many areas related to sensory integration. And it was the beginning of nervous system learning. I didn't know it at the time. And that led to working with early intervention, which is birth to three, and then going out on my own in private practice and shaping over the last 25 years a practice that focuses more and more on infants and very young children and their parents and helping supporting their parents. When I look back at the trajectory of my career, I feel like it was like getting breadcrumbs. At different points, I would get a signal or a sign to sort of move in this direction or that direction. It wasn't necessarily a plan that I had from the beginning. It very much unfolded. After a certain number of years doing that speech pathology work and working with OTs and sensory integration and starting to understand the nervous system more, it led me to craniosacral therapy. The idea that children who have the kinds of issues that they have when they're working with me as a speech pathologist, their nervous systems are always jacked, they're always amped, they're not settled, they're not organized, and stressed systems don't strengthen. They don't learn as well when their nervous systems are all over the place. And so craniosacral therapy was a piece of the puzzle that said, okay, this is work that I can do that helps children's nervous systems get into a better place so that the work that I do as an SLP lands and sticks and stays and kids get better. And it took me a long time, probably eight or 10 years, to realize where I wanted to go with it as a combination to the practice that I have now, which is almost exclusively infants, including newborns and children under five. I used to work with a much broader range of disorders and ages. I'm really focused with children under five because I feel like that's where you can make the most impact on their nervous systems and getting them on the right track. So it's really been sort of an evolution.

SPEAKER_00 5:15

Yeah. And it's so interesting too because I feel like a lot of the times those dysregulated children, as they're growing older, they tend to just get medicated, right? And a lot of the times that obviously we all know is just a band-aid. And then they grow into adults that are more heavily medicated, and they're never getting to the root of what's actually doing the damage within their nervous system. And that's what we're trying to uncover now on this podcast is all the nervous system dysregulation. And I've been on your table as an adult, and it's hard for me to really explain what you're really doing with craniosacral therapy. Can you explain exactly what is happening when you're doing that?

SPEAKER_01 5:59

So craniosacral therapy is what you would call a light touch modality, meaning we use pressure equivalent to the weight of a nickel. So about five grams. It's a very light touch. We're not moving over the skin like in massage. We're not cracking anything like traditional chiropractic. We are working within the fascia, the fascial system. And the fascia is the connective tissue that underlies and surrounds every bone, every muscle, every tendon, every organ. And the way that the fascia sits and moves in the body determines our movement capacity. It determines so many things about how our brain and body work. And so craniosacral therapy works within the fascial system to release patterns of tension and restriction, to optimize the nervous system and bring it to a place where it is more relaxed and can either map something new, release trauma, injury. For the babies that I work with, it's a lot of times releasing birth trauma for the moms as well, whatever trauma happened around birth. But at its core, it's about working in the fascial system to really unlock patterns of tension and restriction. And those patterns might show up as tension on a suture line in the head, it might show up in the hips, like a bony issue. But at its core, it has to do with how the fascia lies in the body. And the example that I always give is when you're making your bed and you're pulling the sheet up and there's a kink, a wrinkle over in that other corner. Do you always have to go to that corner to straighten it out, or can you sometimes straighten it out from further away? Which demonstrates the nature of how interconnected the fascia is because it's everywhere in the body. You can impact something right under your hands, or you can be impacting something further away from your hands just because of the way that the fascia is connected. So we're looking for the wrinkles and the bunches and the places where that fascia is not smooth, where it's not hydrated, where it's not moving appropriately, that allows us to bring down pain, bring down restriction, any of those things. Does that resonate with your experience?

SPEAKER_00 8:23

Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I really love that metaphor too, because it makes so much sense when you put it into that context of the sheet. It puts it into a full context of our bodies, too, because just because you have shoulder pain in your right shoulder doesn't mean it's your shoulder. It could be the referred pain from like your oblique on your left side because you pulled something over there, you know. So it makes a lot of sense in that way.

SPEAKER_01 8:47

Where people have pain is rarely where the dysfunction is. That's just the weakest link in the chain where it shows up.

SPEAKER_00 8:54

Right.

SPEAKER_01 8:55

The other thing that you can do for yourself, but if you take a sheet or a piece of material, like a cloth napkin, and you take your fingers and twist, right? You have a knot right there. But if you look at the material, you see all the tendrils coming off of that twist. So there's the initial issue is the twist, but there's all these pieces, which is talking about what you're talking about, and how the connection is all over the body.

SPEAKER_00 9:28

Right.

SPEAKER_01 9:28

So it's a whole body treatment that helps to just unwind the places where we're stuck, you know, where we hold injury, where we hold trauma, where we hold tension or restriction. And opening that up increases your movement capacity, increases your respiratory capacity, for example, increases your digestive capacity, all different kinds of systems can be impacted by craniosacral.

SPEAKER_00 10:00

We've had conversations before about how you work with infants and children, but you're also working with the moms too, because it's interconnected. So you work with these children and the infants and the caregivers every single day, but what is the thing that you keep seeing that makes you want to work specifically building something for the moms because of that interconnection with their children?

SPEAKER_01 10:25

I have a super skewed sample because all the babies that I see are babies in crisis of some sort, which translates to moms are in crisis too. And so many times I see moms come in, although more and more I see moms and dads coming in together, but more often than not, it's mom that I'm working with. And they're moving very quickly through a postpartum period where there is no focus on their physical or mental healing because the baby is in crisis. So not only are you dealing with typical newborn stuff, but you're dealing with a baby who can't soothe, a baby who's not eating well, a baby who's constipated and not pooping, they're not sleeping well. All the systems are off, which means that mom has even less bandwidth for healing her own stuff. And in a lot of the cases of the babies that I work with, there was some piece of birth trauma for both mom and baby. And I see women reaching for connection with their babies who are more difficult than a typical newborn because they're dysregulated, they're harder to connect with. A lot of times the things that work for a baby that is full-term and neurotypic don't work for a baby who's dysregulated. So a lot of the things that we as adults sort of intuitively do for babies don't work. And the feelings of rejection that moms express a lot of the time about not being able to make those connections have really increased the work, even though it's peripheral to the work with the baby. It's critical because in order for the work that I'm doing with the baby to be successful, they have to be able to embed that within an attachment and a connection that's working 24-7, not just when they're in my office. So I see women moving through postpartum, navigating return to work, trying to connect with a baby who's having issues. There's lots of appointments, there's lots of professionals, everybody's giving their opinion. There's just a lot of noise and static. And it's, as I said earlier, stress systems don't strengthen. So now you have a mom, especially if she's a new mom, with a steep learning curve, right? How do I do this mom thing? And then it's not really working, and now I've got to go back to work, and there's been no time to think about my own physical healing. Do I have a diastasis recti? Do I have, you know, migraines or hip pain or an epidural headache that never resolves, like whatever it is on the physical level, plus the emotional stuff, plus the identity shifts, plus all the things and the hormone storm and everything else that makes it just really difficult for women to prioritize themselves. Plus, there's just pressure on women to not do that. That's selfish or indulgent when you've got a husband who's navigating the shift in your relationship and a baby in crisis. Women are just taught be nice, suck it up, keep going, get it done, make it look good. Right. And I just have felt more and more, as these women have taught me in the practice that they need help too. And there's something I can offer in that realm. So that's what brings me.

SPEAKER_00 13:54

And realizing that the mom being dysregulated is affecting the infant and the children as well.

SPEAKER_01 14:01

The entire household.

SPEAKER_00 14:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:03

I think in most cases, women are the hub of the home. And they are the nervous system that everybody looks to. And women aren't necessarily taught what's going on with their hormones and why they feel physically the way that they feel after birth, and how caring for their own nervous system benefits everybody, not just themselves.

SPEAKER_00 14:30

Yeah. I mean, I had to go through this whole journey of myself about burnout and losing my own identity, truly realizing what burnout is. Because a lot of us think that burnout is overproductivity, and then you just need to have rest or find more optimal ways of doing things, right? Or you're mismanaging your time and you need to find a way to manage properly. When I actually found out that burnout is basically you're not aligned with your life, right? You're really living a life that's misaligned. And a lot of the times, like with moms, with women in general, like what you were saying, we're putting everyone else in front of us and before us, and we're carrying a lot of burdens. There's a lot of times, especially with moms, moms do have to carry a lot of burdens, but at the same time, we tend to overburden ourselves. So one thing that you have mentioned before is how burnout isn't hardcorness, right? We can't just push through burnout. It's a lot of muting who we are. Do you want to say more about that?

SPEAKER_01 15:34

Yeah, I think that this is sort of a pattern of overall pressure on women. It's political, it's workforce, it's societal pressure, it's social media pressure, that it's somehow sexy to run on caffeine and sarcasm. And it's not. And I think we just keep going. And you know from your own experience that the body is forgiving until it's not. Right. The body and the nervous system keep going until they don't, until they just shut down, create a medical crisis. It can look different for different people, but I really think that there's this pressure, I see it all the time, on women to entertain family members all the time who want to meet the new baby, people telling you how to mother. And there's a piece of this that I've seen over and over again. Women who become mothers are also playing out all of their issues around how they were parented. And even if they were well and in a loving and attached way, there's still stuff that comes up about how do I want to do this thing? For a lot of people, they weren't necessarily mothered in the way that they want to mother. And so that is another conflict that's running in the background of their system that doesn't often get voice, doesn't often get space to breathe and to be unpacked so that they can move into their motherhood with confidence and the way that they want to mother. And they're also dealing with a spouse who is either parenting the way they were parented or parenting in opposition to the way that they were parented, and they're often not on the same page. So there's all kinds of pressures in addition to the physical changes after birth. And I think that sometimes women just kind of go into shutdown, but on the surface, that looks like holding it all together. They're moving through the motions, they're getting shit done, they're the master of their to-do list, but they're exhausted and they're not present in their own lives. And that's what I was saying about being muted. I can certainly talk about my own experiences of those times when I felt those dips that it literally felt like my volume was down. I wasn't checked in to anything joyful or fun or pleasant because it was just about getting through to the next time that I could lay down and sleep, if I could sleep. I think, especially as women, we just kind of go into get it done logistication mode and we turn off the possibility of other things just because there's no room.

SPEAKER_00 18:28

I love that you had mentioned about how the lot of the things that the women are carrying out when they become mothers, is how that they were parented. I listened to this guy, David Bayer, and some of the things that he says is the limiting beliefs that are keeping us stuck where we are as adults are majority of the ways that we have absorbed from our parents or just anything as children under the age of seven, typically, that we have just absorbed at that age, little T trauma stuff. And we don't consider a lot of it trauma because we think of trauma as big trauma stuff. But it's really just anything that doesn't bring peace, joy, love, and freedom to our lives is just anything as small as the way that we thought that something could be done as a child, and our parent was like, oh, it doesn't happen like that. And they crushed our spirit in that moment. And that's just how we absorbed it as a four-year-old, thinking, oh, this is just how the world works. So the next time something happens like that, we get discouraged because someone told us we can't do that. And now we're all of a sudden telling ourselves we're not good at X, Y, and Z.

SPEAKER_01 19:38

I just want to say this isn't about dissing on anybody's parent or the way that they were raised. We all have all of those things in our history. It's about acknowledging where we are limiting ourselves and that we can make a different choice.

SPEAKER_00 19:56

Right.

SPEAKER_01 19:57

To decide whether we want to still carry that or leave it.

SPEAKER_00 20:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:03

These are the arcs of being human, deciding, especially as an adult, what you want to keep and what you want to jettison.

SPEAKER_00 20:10

Well, I think the most important thing is that that's just what happens when you're young. Well, your parents are doing the best they can as an adult. And sometimes it just doesn't translate because we are sponges as children. Your eyes are wide open and you don't know any better. And also, you might not absorb it in the way that it was intended, right? We even do that as adults now. We're always going to perceive something different than the person next to us because of our own filters. So, as a child, someone could say a sarcastic comment that's funny to another adult, but the child could easily absorb it as something serious because they just don't know any better. So it's interesting how we just absorb things as children. That just becomes truth to them as an adult. But it's really interesting. You talk about this dual pressure of achieving and hustling and being like a perfect mom. What does that actually do to the nervous system of these moms? And what are we not seeing as women?

SPEAKER_01 21:11

Well, I think those kinds of pressures, whether they're driven internally or externally, and in most cases it's both, I think they sort of turn the nervous system into a pressure cooker and amp up the tension in the body. The more tense and anxious you are, the less you sleep, the less you sleep. It's like all of those circular patterns that happen that just continue to degrade the system. And it's also that we know that the nervous system is responding to the physical environment, like whatever your neurochemistry is, that would be the hormone piece, and what you're physically seeing. But it's also that your nervous system is responding to perceived threats. Your mind's eye doesn't know the difference between what You're seeing with your physical eye on the outside, and what you're seeing with your mind's eye, which is why visualization can be so powerful as a tool to move you forward, but it can also keep you stuck in fight or flight or shutdown. And so over time, I think that those changes in the nervous system and your set point, like you were talking about the reticular activating system, which is sort of the warehouse that all the information gets relayed through to determine the response that we're going to make to our world. I think over time you just end up living in that really jacked up place and it becomes the lens through which you see everything. So everything becomes a threat, everything becomes a big deal, everything becomes a burden, a problem. And I think resilience goes down. And what I'm always teaching parents about babies is that they're going to get upset. They're going to cry, they're going to scream, they're going to have big emotions. But what's critical is being able to recognize and co-regulate and give them resilience to come back down and recover to a better place. And that applies for when they're a baby, when they're two, when they're five, when they're 15, when they're 25, when they're adults. You're training the nervous system to be more resilient. And I feel like over time, as we exhaust the resources and we don't replenish them, we get closer and closer to the point where the body creates some sort of medical crisis or physical crisis that forces a hard reset instead of taking the opportunities that present themselves for the softer resets that allow resilience to come back in.

SPEAKER_00 23:44

Yeah, it's like the false sense of resilience. We think that we're building up resilience for our nervous system by pushing through when in reality it's just crashing our system. And I do think about like as a paramedic working with children, we were always taught that they compensate really well until they don't. And then it's scary when they're decompensating because then they can go down really fast. And I feel like our nervous systems are very similar.

SPEAKER_01 24:09

I feel like I see women all the time who are just one cry away. And when those tears come up in my office, they always apologize. Sorry, I'm crying. And they always take like five seconds and then they like suck it back up, put it somewhere like in the tissue, you know. I'm always encouraging them to like vent it, get it out. You're in a space where that's completely allowed. And honestly, when that happens, most of the time the baby will exhale and go, thank God, you're finally letting some of that stuff go. Because babies try to hold all of it for us, they reflect all of our stuff, and they're always trying to hold for us, even though they're infants, their emotional savvy is beyond what you would think. Oftentimes, I've seen several situations where babies would not do anything but a contact nap. So they won't sleep during the day unless they're on the mother. And sometimes that's because they want you to stop, they want you to put your phone down, they don't want you to go empty the dishwasher and try to do 15 things while they're napping because they know that you need rest too. And so they will create a situation where they can only settle if they're skin to skin. And it's because they're creating that opportunity that you won't give yourself.

SPEAKER_00 25:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:38

And so that's an example of something we can uncover about how a baby is communicating and how you can reframe it's not that they're driving me crazy and they won't do anything but a contact nap. They're giving me a gift.

SPEAKER_00 25:52

Yeah. We do forget that we are energetic beings and we joke all the time that, oh, the energy is off in this room. But it could truly be like the energy could be off in something, and the energy could be off in humans. If you were to tell me five years ago that I would be into energy work and this is what I'm doing, I would probably laugh at you because I just wasn't in that state of mind to really believe into that. But there's nothing to believe in because it's a literal truth of metaphysics. And it's so interesting that you talk about that.

SPEAKER_01 26:25

I think that there's examples of this everywhere. Okay. You're in the store, you're in, you know, Target or whatever, and you go to the cash register, and you instantly, without a word being exchanged, know exactly where that person's nervous system is at. You can tell by the way they look at you or don't look at you. You can tell by their tone of voice. You can tell by the way they're carrying themselves. Our nervous systems are always broadcasting that information. You know exactly what your partner, where they're at before a word is exchanged, right? And it's either, yeah, my partner's homework. Oh crap. You know, that I can tell that they're super dysregulated and now I got to deal with it. And it's the same way for spouses, it's the same way for babies and the way that they read us and the way that we read the baby. Within the past couple of weeks, I had a baby come in who was sound asleep when they came in. It was a first visit, and they woke up screaming. Like that was their transition from being blissfully asleep. Like every single time they just woke up. Being awake. I don't know that it was every single time a lot of the times in my office. Yep. And I was like, okay, you know, so that gives you a window into when they're sleeping. Are they sleeping deeply or are they in shutdown? And then they come out of shutdown and they're right in that elevated place. So when you said like the whole idea of energy and whatever, it's really you can boil it down to personal dynamics and how people present themselves. Or, you know, have you ever been in a super bad mood, but trying to mask it because you were in a professional situation or you were in a situation where it wasn't feasible for you to be authentic in that moment for whatever reason. And we are communicating our our how am I doings all the time. Yeah. To each other. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:26

Yeah. And there's so much truth in the people that are negative in the things that they attract in their life versus the people that are positive in the things that they attract in their life.

SPEAKER_01 28:34

Yeah.

unknown 28:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:36

It does blow my mind too because I'm also a very scientific person. The more I even look into it, because I needed to prove to myself a lot of the times, mostly it's because society has told us you're crazy. Oh, well, I did feel that with the cashier, but no, I'm crazy. I didn't feel that. That's insane. My brain is making that up. So then you convince yourself that that didn't actually happen. So you kind of bury that deep. But as I'm getting more into this and just training myself to look for real prime examples and evidence of things to prove things, it's just like Nikola Tesla has already proven back in the late 1800s that everything, even inanimate objects, have frequencies that they can give off and vibrations. So just the fact that those things and that you can even create that he had created a tool that can find the same frequency, give off that frequency back, and literally destroy that object, that's insane. Because just because you can't see that frequency, then you can destroy a building with that same frequency and it's like demolished.

SPEAKER_01 29:45

I would bring it back to the nervous system and say that our nervous system is taking in millions and millions of pieces of data all the time, but only a select small percentage actually float their way up to consciousness. A lot of it gets filtered out by our nervous system. And each person's nervous system has different ability to do that. And a lot of times, one of the core issues with people who have ADHD or executive function difficulty is they don't screen, they don't filter. Everything comes in at the same level. So for those people, sitting in the movie theater and the person opening a butterscotch eight rows back comes in just as loud in the ear as the movie in IMAX on the screen. And you can imagine how exhausting that can be and how difficult it is to find signal in noise to be able to focus. So we are getting all of these data points, other people's stuff coming at us all the time. And some people are very sensitive to that, and other people are not as sensitive to that. But those dynamics are definitely playing themselves out in homes and families and relationships for sure. Yeah. Whether they're explicitly talked about or not, they're playing out.

SPEAKER_00 31:11

It's funny that you mentioned the auditory thing because I thought that I was actually losing my hearing from the band and I'm just getting tinnitus. But as I was getting more stressed, I even took a little vacation when I was getting really stressed. I rented this airstream up in New Hampshire. My tinnitus, which I thought it was, was so bad that I couldn't even sit in the middle of the mountains of New Hampshire because it was like ringing so bad. I ended up having to cancel the trip because I was like, I can't even sleep in this thing yet. I need noise. And I needed to have my one year thing for the fire department. I scored so high on the hearing test that I maxed out the hearing test. So it wasn't my hearing. I literally have more than perfect hearing because she couldn't go any lower. So then I realized that the more stressed I am, my auditory response becomes incredibly heightened. So I hear literally everything around me. And I noticed it mostly when I was in a brain spotting session during a recent training that when I was getting super stressed during the brain spotting session, I started to hear literally everyone's conversation. I thought people were talking incredibly loud. When in reality, everyone was very quiet, but my auditory response became super heightened. And it's really incredible how our bodies can just change like that.

SPEAKER_01 32:30

The example that I give, or the metaphor that I give back in the 80s when we had our big stereo systems and we had the graphic equalizers where you could play with different levels of different things, that's how our sensory systems are. So there's one knob for auditory, one for visual, one for smell, one for touch, one for proprioception, which is our perception of pressure, vestibular, our movement, sense where head is in space, interoception, our internal landscape. They each have a set point. And we are all different. Like for me, I'm super sensitive to smell. So something that seems very neutral to my husband can be so noxious for me that I can't breathe. I feel like my airway is closing. It's too much input for you. Your auditory system is really sensitive. Your threshold is really low. And that's a vulnerability for you that you can learn how to manage to mitigate the fact that that can also amp up your nervous system because when that happens, it adds to the stress that you're already feeling.

SPEAKER_00 33:37

I want to talk about what you're building right now because I feel like it's super important to reach these moms, especially postpartum, and they're trying to get back into just a normal lifestyle. And there's so much right now that's coming out about how the hormones just live in a radical state after we have a baby. And it's not really taken seriously in many different ways, and especially a mom that's trying to get back into a normal life, but also handling a new different type of life. So you have described it in a few different ways, but I want to hear more about it from you.

SPEAKER_01 34:16

So, in addition to the work that I already do as a craniosacral therapist, I've worked with several moms who've seen the results that happen with their baby and said, I want some of that and have gotten on the table themselves to actually release birth trauma, put their pelvis back in place, get their sacrum to release, get better alignment and comfort in the body. Just because so many women are nursing and doing things that are very physically, metabolically demanding, they need their body to be in a good place. So that is always available. But what's happened for me over the last three to six months, I've worked with a number of families, a number of mom and dad pairs, and I've seen these same challenges getting louder in my awareness. And it led me to want to make something that was more specific and structured and supportive for their process, coming from my understanding of the nervous system, coming from the input that I've gotten from moms over and over again about what the challenges are and watching their nervous systems change as I work with the baby, because as I said, they're so interconnected that working on one is working on the other. So it's led me to want to develop something that is a little bit more structured. And I'm doing a little bit of market research and it feels like a combination of some education about hormones or at least where to go to learn about those hormone changes to understand why I feel the way that I feel. Some reflection pieces about identifying the challenges that are coming up. Is it identity shift? Is it mom guilt? Is it birth trauma? So sort of giving a voice to what are the issues that are happening for a particular woman, some specific nervous system things to try, whether it's breath, movement, rest, just some specific strategies that you can use. And all of the nervous system work that I do is like you don't need any equipment, you don't need to set aside special time, you can do it when you're changing a diaper or sitting at a red light or in a meeting. A lot of those things you can do in very short increments. This is not a program that's like you need to carve out 60 minutes a day for yourself, but it will involve simple strategies that allow you to get back in touch with your nervous system and start doing those soft resets and start bringing resilience back in before you have a crisis. Things that can empower you to partner with your nervous system, to feel better, to be the best mom, the best wife, the best person that you are able to be, and also to recognize is it possible that you need to activate some resources for yourself? Do you need to work with a postnatal therapist? Do you need mental health support? Do you need physical therapy to help put your body back together? Do you need a mom group, like helping you identify where are the things that you can bring into your experience in addition to these little nuggets of things to help you? And then, of course, you always have the option to come in for one-on-one support, craniocral therapy support that's always available.

SPEAKER_00 37:57

And it's so great to be able to work with you one-on-one too, because your knowledge and all of this and your experience is the most vital aspect of everything and being able to help these women navigate not only their bodies and their work with their children, but giving them a roadmap of what that looks like while staying engaged in their life. Because you can't just step away, right? And why does that feel important for you to help them navigate their own life while they're going through it, instead of just being like, I just need to step away from my entire life right now.

SPEAKER_01 38:34

Because, as you said, moms rarely have that luxury of carving out these long windows of time. That feels like just one more pressure on top of all the other pressures. Oh, you should be able to find time to go work out for an hour. Those things are luxuries that women don't have. So I feel like the while is the state of women, right? We are always in while. We're always in, I'm doing this while I'm doing that. I'm tending to the family while I'm working. That's just our nature as women is to handle everything in the while. So, as I was saying, to create something that requires no fancy equipment, no long periods of time, not hours of reflecting and journaling and all of that stuff, but it's bite-sized tools that you can use in the moment when you feel yourself getting elevated to help you kind of come back down, but not in a way where you're just masking it or stuffing it. You're acknowledging that you're escalated and why you're escalated, but then you're bringing that resilience in over and over again, especially in a newborn phase or when they're newly back to work and they have even less bandwidth for adding things into their life, that you can do things in short increments and still have an impact.

SPEAKER_00 39:56

Someone who's truly in the thick of it, running on fumes and convinced that they don't have any time. It's hard enough if you're already a woman that's juggling everything in her life to find time. I mean, I don't even have kids, and sometimes I feel like I don't have enough time in the day. I could only imagine if I had a newborn and raging hormones and all this other stuff. So to have to take the time out to then prioritize myself is such a difficult thing to do. What would you say to that mom that's just like, Suzanne, I literally have no time and I don't even know how to prioritize myself in that.

SPEAKER_01 40:37

Well, I think circling back to something that we said at the beginning of this, which is that the body and the nervous system keep going until they don't, you can keep pushing, you can keep going until you come to a crisis point. And that will happen. It might be in six days or six months, but it will happen that the system just crashes. At a certain point, we run out of resilience and you end up in a situation where you really can't be there for the people in your life because maybe you're in the hospital, maybe you're dehydrated, maybe you're exhausted, maybe you get a bad flu, whatever it is. As women, we just really need to learn, we need to internalize the importance of self-care as basic fuel, like your morning coffee or your protein shake, or whatever supplements you're taking, those choices that you make of things to fuel your body, to support your body, this kind of work can be like that. And that's why it's designed to be in bite-sized nuggets that are no more than a minute or two at a time, that you're not actually carving it out. You can start by doing these things while you're engaged in something else. And over time, as your nervous system feels the difference and remembers what it's like to be more rested and more organized and more peaceful, you want more and more of that. And so you'll reach for more and more. It's like you have to get your toes wet in the water to understand how good it feels. And then your natural inclination is to reach for that more and more.

SPEAKER_00 42:22

Yeah, and it's just gonna be a domino effect, which is I'm glad that you mentioned feeling that aspect because that's what I was gonna ask you next is what did you want them to feel if they were to engage in working one-on-one with you or whatever this program ended up might being? Because a lot of the times people sell this outcome, right, of whatever it might be. But in reality, it's really just this feeling of what they are desiring, especially as a mom who's feeling super overwhelmed and burdened. And what would that feeling necessarily be?

SPEAKER_01 42:57

Well, over and over again, when I talk to moms about this, whether it's over a baby that I'm working on or women that I meet in my life, they all sort of express the same thing. I want to feel competent, I want to feel empowered, that I know what I need to do, that I know how I need to do it, that I can feel good in my body. And that includes the nervous system, you know, because for some people, if they're particularly aware of their internal landscape, they feel that when they're elevated, they're jittery or they're sweaty or they're flighty or they can't focus. And when they are in that more integrated place, when they're in that more relaxed place, they just feel more present, they feel more capable, they feel more tuned in to everything instead of watching it like through a frosted window that they're actually a part of their life. And I think for the women that I've worked with, it shows up. Most visibly in their very empowered state of I know exactly how to co-regulate my baby. Whatever happens, I know I can get them to calm down. I know I can get them to a better place. And that feeling of confidence and competence just makes them so empowered that it spills over into other things and it leads to looking for that feeling in other areas. So I think what I want women to feel is that they're fully in their bodies, that they're present in their lives. It's not about toxic positivity and feeling smiley all the time. It's not that at all. It's about honestly recognizing where you are and activating the resources that you need to get back to a better place to activate that resilience, no matter what that looks like, because it looks different for different people. What their love language is, what their sensory system seeks when it's trying to regulate, down regulate. You know, for some people, it's going for a run. For other people, it's a bubble bath. For other people, it's a long contact hug. For other people, it might be a cup of coffee. So helping women really understand their own system and what feels good and what doesn't feel good and how to amp up the things that are soothing for their nervous system and to try to avoid as much as possible their triggers and the things that set them off.

SPEAKER_00 45:37

I feel like the empoweredment is a huge one these days with women, feeling finally aligned and empowered. Speaking of which, I just have one last question for you. If you could put anything on a billboard that every woman in the hustle and grind culture could see, what would that say? There's so many things that I would want to tell women.

SPEAKER_01 45:59

But I feel like it kind of goes back to a session that you and I had recently where I was in your care. And I was raised just like everybody else to think that caring for yourself is selfish. And it was that realization that self-care is not actually selfish, it's necessary, and that that is actually wise woman wisdom. So I guess I would put, I'm trying to think, is it a cheeky billboard or is it a serious one?

SPEAKER_00 46:36

Whatever you want it to be.

SPEAKER_01 46:37

A lot of us are cheeky, so yeah, put yourself first. Like it's necessary, and it's not about putting yourself first in perpetuity, but it's about recognizing your role in co-re regulating everyone around you, in your family, especially, but in the workplace too. And that if you are not in an organized place, it's very hard to access any of your other skills or gifts. And so putting yourself first in those moments, moment to moment, is wisdom. And it's okay.

unknown 47:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:17

Because once you're organized, you can go back to doing and being whatever you are to the people around you. But if you don't, it's a cascade in a direction that most women really don't want to go toward a medical crisis or toward a shutdown. That's not really where we want to be.

SPEAKER_00 47:36

Yeah. So yeah, it's the little things. It's the whole airplane thing, right? You have to put the mask on yourself before you can help anyone else. You're no good to anyone if you're already fucked. It could be the billboard.

SPEAKER_01 47:48

I asked the question about being cheeky because I feel like sometimes as women, we do sort of have to bring it down to that level. But at the same time, it's really serious because I feel like so many people in general, but women especially, are running around on the planet with their long to-do lists and they're putting so much pressure on themselves, and they always feel less than. No matter what they do, no matter how amazing they are, they always feel like they're not quite measuring up. And social media, of course, amplifies that because those beautiful posts on Instagram or Facebook don't show the ducky paddle that's going on underneath and what had to happen in order to curate that perfect photo.

SPEAKER_00 48:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 48:32

But what we take in is the photo instead of the ducky paddle. And so we compare and think, like, oh crape, I couldn't curate that if I wanted to right now. And that's okay. You don't have to. My hope moving through time and as I get older and older is that women just continue to realize how much of the ick that we feel is self-imposed. And that you can shift it and change it and feel better in your body and in your brain, in your nervous system. And it will help you to be so much more present in your life and to be cheeky again if that's what you want, or that you can still be things for other people. You can still do for other people. It's not about living on the side of a mountain by yourself and not having any thought for another person. You can actually do more and be more by caring deeply for your own nervous system.

SPEAKER_00 49:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 49:35

And that it really is an act of love and wisdom to do so.

SPEAKER_00 49:39

Well, Suzanne, thank you so much. This conversation has been exactly why I built the toolbox and the work that you're doing, meeting women in the most vulnerable, overwhelmed moments of their life and helping them actually listen to themselves again. It really matters, especially during this time period. And I'm grateful that you're here. If anyone wants to work with you, especially your upcoming program that you're building right now, how can they find you?

SPEAKER_01 50:05

So they can find me. Um, my website is www.suzan su z A-N-N-E-Doucharm D-U-C-H-A-R-M-E. There will be a dedicated page on the website for the new program that's being built. It'll be probably under the services for adults page that already exists. We'll put some things in the show notes, some links and whatever to the website. I also have a page on Facebook for parenting's sort of advice and ideas for supporting communication feeding development. And then you can put my email and contact information as well in the show notes.

SPEAKER_00 50:47

If any of this conversation landed for you, if you heard yourself in what Suzanne has described, please do not scroll past and definitely go find her. Like Suzanne had mentioned, all of her information is going to be found in the description in the show notes. And then while you're at it, if the show has ever helped you slow down, question something, or just feel a little less alone and trying to do things differently, please take the 30 seconds to leave a review. Share it with someone who needs it and follow so you don't miss what's coming. And if you want to support the Hustle Rebels, keep the conversations like this episode possible, you can find the link in the show notes. Every bit of support goes directly back into the work. And then one more thing, because this is the toolbox Tuesday. If you are a vetted professional, a practitioner, a strategist, or a guide doing real work with real people, and you think that your tool or resource belongs in the toolbox, just reach out to me. I personally vet every single toolbox partner. This is not a pay to play situation or an ad just to throw in. It's an actual curation. So I would love to hear from you. So links for everything that we talked about is going to be in the show notes, and I will see you on Thursday.