Ep.19 You're Not Stuck In Your Patterns - Your Ancestors Were (Epigenetics and Body-Level Pattern Work)

You've done the therapy. Read the books. You can name the pattern, trace it back, explain exactly where it started. And you're still doing it. 

This episode is about why - and it's not what most people tell you. We get into the difference between understanding a pattern and actually completing it, why you can't think your way out of body-level encoding, and what epigenetics tells us about the patterns you may have inherited before you were even born. This work is bigger than you've been told.

Book 1:1 here

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey, I'm Leslie Turner. I'm a mom, a somatic practitioner, and an intuitive coach. This is the Intuitive Drop. Short conversations about emotional truth, the nervous system, and living from your intuition in real life without losing your mind along the way. Let's drop in. Hi, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Intuitive Drop. I'm trying the video thing for my solo episodes to see how it goes. We'll play around with it. So today's episode, I want to tell you about something about the work that you've been doing on you. So maybe you're in therapy. Maybe you're reading self-help books. Maybe you're attending the workshops, journaling, pattern recognition, even, maybe all of it to some extent. And it's not wasted work necessarily. Don't get me wrong, but there's a very good chance that it's not complete. And you are going deep enough, I promise you. But maybe you've been working on the wrong floor of the building. And here's what I mean by that. So imagine the ground floor, even the basement, if you want, of your house is your nervous system, your baseline, the settings that got installed in your body very early about what's safe, what's possible, what love feels like, what you're worth. That floor got built before you had a concept or a language for it. Now, the next floor, the second floor, that's the story about yourself, your patterns, your history, your understanding of why you are the way you are. And most personal development, most of it, it happens here. So you're moving around furniture, you're repainting the walls, you're getting really clear on why the old layout wasn't working. And it looks better up here, genuinely. But if the ground floor is still running a program that says, you're not safe, you're not enough, love is conditional, then that second floor will keep reorganizing itself around the signal from the first floor. It has to, because everything is built on top of this foundation. The foundational work and the decorating are not the same job. And most personal development, even the good stuff, operates at this level of the story. You find the pattern, you name it, you trace it back, you understand where it came from. And that understanding feels like progress because it is partially, but understanding a pattern and completing it are two very different things happening in two very different parts of your nervous system. So your thinking brain, your prefrontal cortex, the logic-driven brain, is doing an excellent analysis. It cannot reach the part of your brain, the amygdala, the brainstem, where the original encoding of these patterns actually happened. Now, it's this is not to do with the fact that you're not smart enough, you're brilliant, don't get me wrong. But this is genuinely not how the system works. So if you've ever heard of Stephen Borges or the polyvagel theory, it gives us a bit of a language for this without diving into the validity of the polyvagel theory. Your nervous system is constantly scanning for safety, but it's below your conscious level, conscious awareness. It's before thought, before language, before your very capable brain gets a vote. And he calls this scanning neurosception. And the survival responses that got encoded quite early in childhood, the ones that decided that visibility was dangerous, or love had conditions, or rest wasn't allowed, those didn't get stored in the story. They got stored in your body's baseline setting. You can't think your way out of that body level encoding. That's not you failing at the personal development work. That's just anatomy. And there's a bigger layer to this. And this is bigger than most people realize. Some of what you're working with isn't yours. So let's talk epigenetics for a second. Epigenetics is a study of how our genes get expressed, not whether we have a gene, but whether it gets switched on or off. So think of your DNA as like the finite hardware. It's fixed. Epigenetics is the software layer sitting on top of it. And that layer is responsive to your environment, what you're experiencing, your stress levels, and it can change. And it can be inherited. So there's a gentleman named Bruce Lipton who works on exactly this. And a researcher, when I was researching this podcast episode, named Rachel Yehuda, who studies intergenerational trauma. And then she tells us that survival responses can be passed down. So Yehuda's research was on the descendants of Holocaust victims or Holocaust survivors. And she found that there was a measurable distance in stress hormone regulation in the kids, children who had never experienced the original trauma, but their mom's body had passed that stress response forward, mom and dad. It's encoded. So when you notice in your own family that the women in your family all carry anxiety, or that money has always felt scarce no matter how much comes in, or that relationships follow the same painful arc that your mothers did or your grandmothers did, that might not be a learned behavior you watched and absorbed as a kid. That might be biological inheritance. A nervous system that was handed to you already calibrated to a threat that predates you. I don't want you to miss this though. Epigenetic changes are reversible. Your DNA doesn't necessarily change, but the layer sitting on top of it, that layer that decides what genes get expressed, which stress responses stay activated, or which survival settings stay on, that layer is responsive. It updates, it responds to the safety in your world, to new experiences, to the body finally being allowed to complete what it started. Now, I want to pause here for a second because I know this can feel a little like heavy, sciencey, and bring something up in you. So something's coming up, whether it's a memory, a tightness in your chest, a name, a face. It's not really a coincidence right now. That's your system recognizing that something is true here. So take a breath. A real one. Pause for now. And I want to tell you a little bit of my own story with regards to this. So, as you know, if you're listening to this podcast for a while, one of my core patterns, the one I talked about last week, is not enoughness. And when I trace it back, I can clearly see it in my mom. I can make an educated guess that my grandmother carried something similar. And there were things that happened early in my mom's life that set the tone. She learned to move through the world from this place. And I learned to respond to the world based on that same patterning. And there's something about how it showed up in my house growing up. So, for instance, mistakes weren't inherently labeled as bad. Nobody sat me down and said, hey, you're not good enough. It was so much subtler than that, slightly insidious, because it was dressed up as encouragement. So when I didn't get the good grades or I didn't nail the piano performance, the message was, oh, I think you could have done better. And maybe on the surface, that sounds motivating. But what was quietly installed was that my best on that particular day wasn't actually my best. That there was actually a better version of me available that I just hadn't accessed yet. That the effort I gave, which genuinely I think was my best that day, wasn't quite enough to land as good enough. Now, my mom wasn't doing this from cruelty or my parents in general. She was doing it from her own not enough program that nobody had helped ever helped her complete. She was passing it forward, the only map she had. Now, let's be clear, I am not blaming my parents. The patterns they broke, I didn't have to deal with. I'm already healed from those. And that's the gift of the work they did, even if it was unconscious, because they didn't have a narrative or a words for this back then. But there were patterns that now perpetuated into me regardless. And I've spent years actually moving through them, not just naming them, but like crying them out, feeling the weight of what that younger version of me was still carrying. And now I'm doing the same for my kid, for Tyson. I'm healing some big conditioning. Some of it is going to stop with me. And I'll be honest with you, some of it will slide right through anyway, despite my best intentions, because that's how it works. It's not a perfect clean break that suddenly the next generation is completely healed from everything. It's a gradual interruption. Each generation gets a little more free. But what I know is that the patterns that I actually complete, not just understand, but actually move through my body from that level, have changed the field that my son is growing up inside. And it's he's only six. So it's not because I'm sitting down and telling him about my healing journey. It's because something in my baseline has shifted. What feels normal in our house is different from what felt normal in my house growing up. And he will never experience that level of normal. And that's what this is all about. Which means when you do this work, that real work, body level work, not just narrating the pattern, but actually moving through it, you're not just changing your own experience. You are interrupting a transmission. Your kids inherit a different baseline. Your relationships operate inside a different field of what's possible. The stories that were told to you about what women could do, what health allows, what money means, what love looks like, all of it starts to rewrite quietly, like under at the level of your truth, what's true for you, not what was true 50 years ago. Now, we frame this work as self-improvement, as getting unstuck, as finally figuring yourself out, but it's so much bigger than that. It always has been, because you're not just redecorating that second floor anymore, you're rebuilding the foundation. And when the foundation shifts and solidifies, everything built on top gets to be something new. And that's available to you. And it's always been available to you. I want to say something, and I want to say it carefully. This kind of work, the ground floor work, the nervous system work, the stuff that actually completes a pattern rather than just describes it, it's not exclusive to me. There are hundreds of coaches and practitioners out there who go here, who go deeper, who know how to hold someone in that felt sense of something rather than just circling the story. But not all of them do. And some approaches, even the good ones, even the ones that genuinely help you, have a ceiling. Therapy can name a wound beautifully and never actually touch it. Coaching can reframe the story without reaching what's underneath it. So when you're choosing who to work with at this level, just ask yourself whether the work you're doing is staying in your head or landing in your body. Whether you're getting clearer or freer. Those aren't always the same thing. So please choose accordingly. If this is landing and you want a place to actually do the work, not just understand it, but practice dropping below the narrative into what's ready to move for you. You can work with me one-on-one. If you're really focused on the kids' aspect, not perpetuating these patterns into your children. I have a container called Parenting the Pattern. Or if you just want to touch on it, that's what the Intuitive Circle is for, where we meet live twice a month. It's $33 a month. And I'll put the links of everything in my show notes. We'll see you next week.