Dr. Ardeshir Mehran's Podcast
Not Depressed. Just UnFinished. Hosted by Dr. Ardeshir Mehran, Ph.D.
What if your depression isn't a diagnosis; it's a dare, it's a signal?
Not Depressed. Just UnFinished. is the podcast for leaders, high achievers, and entrepreneurs who have built impressive lives on the outside and sense something is dying on the inside. If you've ever stared at everything you've accomplished and felt strangely empty, this is the show you didn't know you needed.
Dr. Ardeshir Mehran is a Columbia University-trained psychologist, depression and anxiety expert, and bestselling author of You Are Not Depressed. You Are Un-Finished.
This work is personal. Over 30 years of research and clinical work, and his own personal battle with depression at the peak of his leadership career, Dr. Mehran arrived at a truth that upends everything you've been told: depression and anxiety are not broken-brain problems. They are your body's loudest, most insistent signal that you are living an unfulfilling life.
The science is clear: executives and high achievers experience depression, anxiety, and addiction at two to three times the rate of the general population. Status, wealth, and relentless productivity mask the fight, but they don't end it.
Dr. Mehran's pioneering framework, the Bill of Emotional Rights, identifies the seven universal human rights that we are wired to fulfill from birth. When these rights go unmet, we don't fall apart quietly. We achieve loudly, and ache privately.
Each episode brings Dr. Mehran's signature warmth, clinical depth, and zero-nonsense directness to the questions that actually matter: Why do high achievers suffer in silence? What does your anxiety know that you don't? How do you go from managing symptoms to building a life that makes you feel fully alive?
This is not a podcast about coping or reducing symptoms.
It's a podcast about naming and claiming what was always yours.
Website: https://ardeshirmehran.com/
The Bill of Emotional Rights: https://ardeshirmehran.com/copy-of-bio/
See Amazon for Bestselling Book: You Are Not Depressed. You Are Un-Finished. https://ardeshirmehran.com/general-clean/
Dr. Ardeshir Mehran's Podcast
TOUCH: The Body’s Forgotten Language of Healing
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
What if the body remembers what the mind tries to forget?
What if touch is medicine, not just contact? Let’s explore the path back to wholeness.
Somatic Trauma Therapist Barbara Collier on Why the Path to Wholeness Runs Through the Body, Not Around It.
For more than 30 years, Barbara Collier has studied what touch can heal that words cannot.
A Licensed Professional Counselor, certified Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner, and Embodied Psychosexual Practitioner™, she was among the first therapists in Arizona to bring touch into psychotherapy, introducing a massage table into her office.
She is the co-founder of Equinimity Tucson, a longtime collaborator of Dr. Peter Levine, and a trauma survivor whose own trauma recovery shapes her clinical work.
In this podcast, we talk about what happens in the nervous system the moment safe touch occurs, and why so many of us are severed from our own bodies in the first place.
We examine why talk therapy alone often can’t heal a traumatized body, where grief actually lives in the body, and how she knows the difference between touch that heals and touch that re-traumatizes.
Barbara also shares what a horse can teach a nervous system that a human often can’t.
What we learned is that healing isn’t only something we talk our way into. It’s something we feel our way back to.
TIMELINE:
0:30 – Touch as a primary human need
3:20 – Non-verbal communication: the body's language
6:00 – Barbara's path into touch-based therapy
8:50 – Presence as touch & ethics of touch in psychotherapy
11:10 – Somatic experiencing & the business executive case study
17:00 – The original wound: separation from nature
19:30 – CEO loneliness and the autonomy-connection paradox
24:10 – Touch, trauma, and sexual abuse healing
26:30 –The massage table practice & the anesthesiologist case
31:30 – Grief in the body and touch in daily relationships
CONTACT BARBARA COLLIER, LPC:
Website: https://www.barbaracollier.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/headhearthandsjourneyinc/
CONTACT DR. ARDESHIR MEHRAN:
You're not depressed. Just unfinished. This is the podcast for leaders, high achievers, and entrepreneurs who have built impressive lives on the outside. And yet sense something is dying on the inside. If you ever stared at everything you have accomplished and felt strangely empty, this show is for you. Today we are going to talk about touch, the power of touch for emotional healing. For over 30 years, one US-based psychotherapist has been using touch in her practice. Touch is an area of practice that actually the field of psychotherapy does not talk about it enough. And yet, touch has proven to be very powerful for healing, emotional healing, trauma healing, and to bring better, deeper, faster results. We will learn today why is that. We will learn about what is touch and how does it help us and why the field of psychotherapy, even the society, has left it behind. Today we're gonna reverse that. Let's welcome Barbara Collier, my colleague. Barbara is a somatic therapist psychotherapist and a certified somatic experiencing. She will explain what all this means. Somatic experiencing is a very powerful methodology and practice. She is a pioneer, and you will learn why. And she has worked on the edges of somatic healing, touch, sexual trauma, grief, and equine-assisted healing. Barbara, welcome. Welcome. And please tell us if I missed anything about introducing you.
SPEAKER_01You didn't. Thank you. That was beautiful. I appreciate it. It's really nice to be here, Ardishair. Nice to see you again.
SPEAKER_00Nice to see you. And let's get into it. Touch. What is it about touch that people, the listeners, need to know?
SPEAKER_01So much. I think touch is primary to us. We know that we can't survive without touch. Babies can't survive without touch. Appropriate, healthy, attuned, touch. We know that from different studies in orphanages where the children's babies' needs were cared for in terms of the what feeding and eating and but they weren't touched, they weren't related to at this nonverbal level, and they did not thrive. They did not grow. It's quite significant. They literally didn't develop neurological connections because of that. So touch is primary.
SPEAKER_00And touch is interesting, you talked about children. So we grow up typically most of the world is through touch, hugging, and physical contact. Then at a certain point, words come in. I remember at a certain point growing up, I was told, sit there, don't be fidgety, put your hand on your lap. And connections, hugging, and physical contact basically disappeared. It was four or five years old. What is the impact of that?
SPEAKER_01It's massive. That would take a whole other year-long thing, I think, to talk about the fullness of the impact of that, but it goes towards our the fullness of our development. We don't develop our senses fully when we're not touched, when we're not in the nonverbal. One of the things that I've learned so much about working with the horses is that how much communication happens nonverbally. In my world of psychotherapy, we always say communication, 85% of communication is nonverbal. And so yet then as humans, we're communicating in that 15%. So what else is being communicated? What are we missing if we're only focusing on the that 15%? And that's massive. So that's one easy way. We're missing. So what is the implication of non-touch? 85% of the ways that we connect of the ways that we feel and know ourselves, it's missing when we don't when we don't touch, because touch touch is the one of the languages of the body. And when we're acknowledging the body, and when we've acknowledged our bodies and other bodies below the level of words, then we come alive in different ways. We listen differently because this thing is awake now. We have an understanding of where we wherever we bring our attention, that thing flourishes. And if we're bringing our attention to the body and to all the wisdom in the body, then that will flourish. But if we're ignoring the body and we're trying to have not have a body because maybe something happened back then that was not doable for us to live, so we had to ignore the body, not intentionally, then we're missing out on a lot of knowing, a lot of different ways of knowing and locating ourselves relationally and in connection.
SPEAKER_00The question for you the curiosity question. So there are you and I know many psychotherapists. Majority of them don't know about touch. They don't even want to touch the touch. But how did you arrive at this body of knowledge?
SPEAKER_01I'm a very kinesthetic person by nature. So I'm very, I need to engage my deepest learning through contact, through through touch, whether it's standing by a tree and leaning against it or laying on the ground or leaning against a friend. That's how I learn the best. I'm also very experiential. So I don't have my easiest learning environment, it is not book related. It's story related. It's Phelps. If I be fully in it with all of my senses, I can learn it. It's very difficult for me to not have my senses and just have it be intellectual. And so I came into psychotherapy with that. That's how I am. And I also came into psychotherapy working with young children who were birthed to six. So non-verbal. Many, most of my most of the families that I work with had children that were nonverbal. And so if you're working nonverbally, you can't work verbally.
SPEAKER_03That's right. That's right.
SPEAKER_01And so you have to find a way to connect, to relate, to have that really special connection. It's with an infant or a young child who's scared and in a new situation. And then what do I need to do? How do I need to show up such that I can reassure that child that I'm not going to hurt them? And they may not yet, they just know the felt state. And I can't, no matter how I show up, it still may not translate that to them, which it can't, for me, it can't be mandatory that you will connect with me. Can't be. It's just the mandatory thing is how I show up. I'm open, I'm here, I will treat you with the highest regard from my heart. And if that feels safe enough, then we can take the next step. But I will wait until you're ready. So that's what working with children is about. And so children, the children that I worked with had a lot going on in their little short lives on the planet here. And it was quite tragic. And also made the connection that much more precious, very much like connecting with a wild animal or an animal. You're not speaking the same language, and you have to find a different way to communicate. So I came into it like that. And so presence and touch are very similar. We can be touched by presence. We don't have to have actual contact to work with touch. And so that's part of it also.
SPEAKER_00And because I came into two things you mentioned: presence that the other person, a child, an adult, they feel you're there, you're seeing them and touch. They are two different things, but presence also you're seeing is as powerful as touch.
SPEAKER_01Yes, presence can feel like touch because that's probably a different thing, but because of who we are as humans, we don't have to experience touch from actual contact with the body. We can experience touch outside of ourselves because of that electromagnetic seal that comes from our heart. That's a bigger topic, I realize. But and so I came into psychotherapy from a relationship-based somatic approach from the very beginning. And I was at that time, touch was forbidden in psychotherapy. So I did not do it. And I had been trained by Hugh Milne in the craniosaqual realm, and I decided not to go that route. I went into psychotherapy instead. And then in 2011, in the state of Arizona, the ethics changed, and they removed any words that said anything about don't touch. So I was happy about that. And I went to a lawyer and I said, Hey, will you please look this over? Because I'm reading there's no wording in here that says not to touch anymore, but there's not any wording that says go ahead and touch. So the lawyer read it over and said, indeed, that is the case. It's saying there's no wording saying don't. And the implication is then for my profession in the state of Arizona, if you have uh a scope of practice, yeah, to touch, meaning that you've been trained in some touch modality, you can go ahead and yeah, that's right.
SPEAKER_00Let me ask you something I know listeners want to know touch.
SPEAKER_01So give us an example of the clients who worked at what did touch actually looks like so I'm trained in somatic experiencing, and that's a modality that was co-created by Peter Levine, Dr. Peter Levine, and he really, through his observations in nature and wild animals and looking at nervous systems, realized that basically what I'm saying to you now with this language of the body, that something else is needed in terms of how we include ourselves in any therapeutic process. And so he's all about including the body in the process, and he has a whole program around the wisdom of the body and body, and body as healer, and that is true. So when we can connect from a relational place with ourselves, acknowledging our own bodies, everything is different from there. So somatic experiencing soma means body, and somatic experiencing means what is your body experiencing? And how do we know? Not what do we think our body is experiencing, but what is our body experiencing? And that's a beautiful journey that we can all be on. That's relational. Then we're being relationship with ourselves. We can say, My mind is thinking this thing, and then I can look inward and I can say, Hey body, how are you responding to this thing? That's somatic experiencing. And that is an important, that's been a that was a game changer for me to learn about that because it gave me language for the thing that I was already practicing, which is how do I include my whole self?
SPEAKER_03Yes, right.
SPEAKER_01And so when I work with clients that have I work the clients that I work with have pretty significant complex physical health conditions. Part of that is because of my interest, I was a nurse, I was an intensive care nurse before I was a psychotherapist. And so it gave me the capacity to understand complex physical health conditions. And I started to learn pretty early that these complex physical health conditions are most likely related to the way that we needed to navigate our early childhood experiences. Yep, yeah, and that would stay in the body, and so touch can get at those early childhood relational patterns that can cause all kinds of complexity in our adult. Touch can get at that in a very different way than we're we need both.
SPEAKER_00We need both the one of the clients that I worked last year, a business executive, and she came to me for high level of anxiety that she was taking medication. Is that I always feel in business meeting, board meeting, I mean a free fall, just basically there, there are no floors beneath me. In our session, I ask her permission. Can we practice something? And always very gently, I came to her left shoulder, sat side by side next to her right hand gently beating her shoulder blade, and I said, How does it feel? How does it feel to lean back? And she was crying, and she just felt, I feel my feet, I feel my butter, I feel like the ground beneath me. And so that was a game changer, and she then said that she doesn't remember any memories of being held as a child. She was very gifted, professional. But some of that, her body didn't have a sense that you're held, you can lean back and somebody catches you. This is what you talk about, correct? The power of touch very gently to change the dynamic of emotions.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. The to change the dynamic of being present, like you allowed, she was she got the impression from you that she could inhabit that whole moment. And that's one of the things in the somatic experiencing training. There's six modules, and then the last two modules are the advanced ones, and then the very last advanced one, the second advanced one, there's touch that they teach. And that touch is intended to support people with and also coherence. And so you did both for her in that moment, and that's beautiful.
SPEAKER_00So one of the things you mentioned, and you know this very well, that as we become enter the professional world, the business world, there are boundaries, even in their like a manual of employment manual, physical touch, proximity, all of that. So all of that, the legal language about no touching. So, how do we navigate something like that about power of touch and power of being close? How does this settle with professional people?
SPEAKER_01I don't think I can speak to it in terms of in a corporate business, uh, but I can say speak to it in community and in terms of families. My hope for everyone, everyone is that we can develop a consensual, attuned relationship with ourselves, others.
SPEAKER_00You talk in your writings about the original wound and how we enter the world and then something happened, we leave our bodies behind, the original wound. Say more about that.
SPEAKER_01Well, I in my curious mind, I've tried to go back to when did this start? How did we get here? Why is this? And I don't have any answers for that at all, but I do have a sense from what I've read and what I've experienced that whenever that point in time in our history as people on the planet, of the planet, when we decided intellectually we were no, we as humans were no longer part of nature, that we were separate, that's an original wounding because everything, excuse me, everything in nature is relational, everything, everything is connected to everything else, and we're learning more and more about that now, which is very exciting. Because those are the things we knew back in the day, and because we've extracted ourselves from that, we've lost our. That's non-consensual. Outside of relationship, in that, it may very well be that nature in that moment might be very abundant and say, please do whatever you need. But we're not asking and we're not paying attention, we're just seeing and taking that alone is separating ourselves and making this hierarchy when there is not one, actually. Everything in nature is part of the entire ecology equally, no less of a mattering than a tree, and neither are we, and so that's the original wounding. And when we can be in that again, in that relationality again, like this, without it being a hierarchy, it is we behave differently, we receive information differently. So that's the original wounding, and then what we did on top of that after that is we said our mind is separate from the body. That's right, it is not.
SPEAKER_00This is so power, it is so powerful. A report came out from Harvard Business Review three years ago that up to 50 percent of USCOs report being lonely. Not lonely at the top, lonely as a human experience. In a room full of people, they feel lonely. These are people who got to the top, as you mentioned, by taking, by pushing, by dominating, and now they get there and they just feel separate, they are not connected, and the looking at the report, they just report it as facts, deal with it, but there are not many insights. How did they get there and why that emotion persists? That lack of touch can create loneliness, separation that persists through life.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely, absolutely. I and I don't know that all the 50 got there through through dominating and taking. I don't want to make that presumption. And I think it is a lonely road in that way. And so we can find ourselves separate from. I have this shape as a body that makes me an individual, right? I can be an individual in myself, and because of my wiring, just like everyone else is as a human, I have the capacity to be in this individual state, but I also have the capacity to connect deeply.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_01And and especially if my system is open, I can connect very deeply. So in any given moment, I believe as humans, we are supposed to embody both of those experiences, being autonomous and being connected.
SPEAKER_00Autonomous and connective.
SPEAKER_01Yes. And so in the United States of America, we have been focusing on that individuality. Be an individual, be yourself. And there's nothing wrong with that because we do need to develop ourselves. However, when it's the only thing we're developing, it becomes problematic. Because yes, we are an individual, but we also have this capacity to connect deeply with and whether That's another human or nature or the cosmos or whatever. And therefore, if we're only focusing on one pathway to what the expression of being human is, we're missing out on the other half. So if I'm focusing only on this deep interconnected we, I'm missing out on the autonomous me. And if I'm only focusing on the autonomous me, I'm missing out on this interconnected we. And yet we are both. And so in order for us to feel whole, we need to have the capacity to get at that autonomous me alongside that connected we to have an experience of being human. So that's what I would say regarding the CEOs is that they've done their job. They've been doing, they've been listening, they've been doing the thing that the culture has been sharing to do, and they've been focusing on the autonomy.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_01That interconnectedness might be not very present in their lives. It doesn't mean they're broken. We are wired for that. They can get there just with a little focus.
SPEAKER_00That's right. That's right. This is so good. The one of the things that I noticed working with the senior professionals, they can wonderfully talk and analyze feelings, and yet they are not feeling the feelings. As you mentioned, dropping into the bodies, they can describe, I think I'm feeling angry, sad, or yeah, really happy about something. When I ask them, where does it show up in your body? Then the question is, what the heck does that mean? What where do I look at it? And then I should where does it feel in your chest in your belly? And then all this sensation come up. How they see that in the back shoulder, tightness around the neck and the jaw. So this is about bringing the body into the conversation. Something to ask you, your perspective. The power of touch when we deal with trauma and sexual trauma, that how does that uh come into play by bringing touch to healing those those wounds?
SPEAKER_01Anytime there's been physical abuse, whether that's sexual or physical from hitting or anything like that, and it's especially when it's been in early childhood, we need to understand that then the skin is remembering that, particularly with physical abuse. The skin is remembering that. And so that then when the skin receives touch of any kind, it's not going to be necessarily in a ready place for that. And we can see that really clearly through animals who have been abused. They cower, they shiver, they're like, don't come near me. We have that same response in our bodies, but we're not allowed to live that out because of our social rules.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_01And so that's what we need to know first and foremost before touch ever occurs anywhere, whether it's in an office or someplace else. And so with sexual violation, um, it's much more complicated than that because it doesn't only live in the skin, it lives in the sexual organs, it lives in the body, and most importantly, it lives in the flow of aliveness.
SPEAKER_00Yes, yes. And then this is the part that touch the positive experience of touch can rewire and replace that early emotional wounds.
SPEAKER_01Yes, and to that, I would also say sometimes the abuse and neglect and the sexual trauma come in before even words, and so before before it pre-verbally, and so it may not be a rewiring, it may be a wiring, which is different because that means that this organism hasn't had that experience to lay down that neurological network for connection before that's right, that's right.
SPEAKER_00So, in your office, a unique feature of your practice is that you have a sofa, you have a chair for clients, and you have a massage table. So, first of all, that is so fantastic. And I love to learn. So, when your clients come to you, at what point and uh what is the process for massage table? The um that says, Hey, do you want to try that? Or how does it work for clients to experience that massage? And what happens actually?
SPEAKER_01That's a great question. And so I when I work with people, they've either met me out in the world and at a or so they've heard me speaking about touch and this relationship and how we get to be ourselves, and so usually it's already in the field. But for people who I haven't worked with, who I haven't met, I usually offer an 30-minute meet and greet in which I let them know how I come into this work. And I let them know right away that touch can be a part of it. And when they come into my office, they do, like you said, they see a massage table, and we don't, we never start directly there. There needs to be a readiness in order to do that work. And I've learned through my clients what that readiness is. And part of it, a big part of it, is that person needs to be able to have a connection, enough of a connection with themselves. But before we table work, they need to have enough of a connection with themselves that they can report what's happening in their inner world somatically, emotionally. And so they need to, it doesn't need to be like they don't need to have a huge literacy or fluency with it, but they need to have enough of that before we go to the table. And for example, I was working with a man who was an anesthesiologist, and he was quite numb. He reported himself to be quite numb. And we were working together weekly for a while, probably about a year before we did the touch work. And he had pretty severe physical abuse when he was younger that was just for a long period of time in his early years. And so we had done some prep work around that in session, and then it was seemed to be time to do the touch work on the table. And so the touchwork that I do on the table is not massage. People are in their clothes. I don't they're on their back only. I never work with a person face down to each other the whole time. And it's a slow process to even get to the table. And so I he was laying on the table and I did a little, was doing a little work with I had my hand underneath his back at a place area that supports a settling of the autonomic nervous system. And he dropped into this beautiful kind of space of hey, his eyes closed, and he got more body-based than thought based. And so there was a lot of silence and quiet, and his eyes were closed, and I could feel this settling in his body, and then I could also feel this movement towards, okay, we're done. The body was like, okay, we're done. And his mind was not receiving that message. And so it happened a couple of times. The signaling from his body happened a couple of times, and then his mind wasn't picking it up. And so I supported that when the body came in and said, Okay, I also did that, a little more pressure. He did respond to that. And then I realized that I needed to just say his name gently and say it was time to come back out of this because he had gone away somewhere. And that's and so I realized that even though I thought he was ready, he wasn't quite ready enough to stay with the signals from his body with before he went other zone. He loved the zone he was in, however, that's no different than what his chemical addiction had been. And so we don't we want to, it wasn't relational because he was just in this other zone now. He was no longer, and so I learned from that. And I said, okay, we need to not do any tablework again for a while. And then we worked on what we call interoception is his capacity to look inside at what's happening with his body at not the level of emotion, but at the level of what his body language is, and that respond to it, not in a hyper-vigilant way. But so it was probably a good nine months before we went back to the tablework. And we did it, that was great. That was a big learning for me.
SPEAKER_00Barbara, I love listening to your experience. The way you described me that I could literally feel those moments with your client and the sense of presence, body, where the emotions and where the sensations were. You're very you have a very descriptive language. I love it.
SPEAKER_01Thank you.
SPEAKER_00About um grief. Where does grief live in the body? And the reason I asked this the social media is abuzz with uh discussion about grief. That uh and many people talk about uh Elizabeth Kugler Ross that you go through grief five stages, you're done, and then people talk about a different version of grief. How do you uh relate to grief, understand it, and what is the body way of grieving?
SPEAKER_01That's a beautiful question. It's really rich. I don't have a sense of a particular location in everyone where grief lives. I think grief lives where the person experiences it. And so that's a huge part of my work, is not presuming that I know where something lives. I don't even if I'm doing dream work, I don't ascribe to pre-determined symbolic meaning. Those can be useful for sure. But so if somebody comes in and they dreamed about a dragon or something, I'm not gonna look up the symbolic meaning of dragon. I'm gonna explore what that means for them. And as they're describing it, I'm gonna be wondering where that lives in their body. And so, same thing with grief or anything. I'm not going to have an assumption of where grief lives. And grief has a many different faces to it. And so the person whose work that I love the most, that I feel like is the most comprehensive, is a man named Francis Weller. And he has a book called The Wild Edge of Sorrow. And I love it because he's not talking about stages and phases of grief that we move through or that we get stuck, which I appreciate that, because grief has all kinds of different flavors and textures and experiences in our bodies. And just if we've had a loss of a human being in our life that we cared about, nothing will bring that person back. And so it's really about what is my relationship to that loss and how does it shift and change and grow over time where I can be present to that. It may mean that I'm grieving and longing for them for a while, and it may not. And so there's grief of a loss of a person, which is different than the grief of things that didn't happen for us when we came into this world, which is different from excuse me, grief of where the planet is right now and what's happening in the world. That's a very different grief. And my friend, who's very much a naturalist, she said, we don't have even a word or a felt state for the loss of our favorite tree. Yes, and so that's its own thing, also. And so I think it goes down to sorrow. What is it that brings us to sorrow? And to me, grief and sorrow are different. Sorrow to me is like connective tissue, and it's the thing that connects us to everything else in addition to life itself. And if we're touching into sorrow in a way that's not overwhelming or traumatic, it's part of life itself, and it makes life itself more precious.
SPEAKER_00Yes, there are listeners who they're hearing us, they have partners, they have children. What do you wish them to know about power of touch in relationships with their partner, children? How do they bring that into their own connections?
SPEAKER_01I think that what I would love for people to know is that touch matters and presence matters, and taking the time in your day and then your personal practices to connect with yourself in your own presence are as important as food and water.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Because then when we touch from that place or we connect from that place, whether it's through touch or not, it's going to be different. And that's what's needed. And that's the same thing for grief and sorrow, is that I think we need to have personal practices of what we how we get to relate to and be with our grieving, not just stuff it down or stuff it in. We need to have personal and collective practices for this. We need to have personal and collective practices for how do I get to embody myself in this moment? And so I think when we focus on that, our own presence is in the utmost importance, then whatever goal we're going for changes.
SPEAKER_00That's right. That's right.
SPEAKER_01I'm a process person, and so I don't want to get to an end of something having left myself behind. But nursing school, I loved it. It was highly intellectual, and I loved the learning, and it was fabulous. And I went right into the intensive care nursing, and that was great for my love of intensity and excitement and all the things that were going on, but I had lost touch with my body completely and even basic needs. Didn't know when I was hungry, didn't know when I was full, didn't know when I needed to care for myself in terms of toileting and things. And so it was a long journey back home to connect here.
SPEAKER_00Having grown in the Middle East in Iran, we were a very huggy culture. Then when I came to the States, one of the first things I learned, that's not cool, you don't do that. And I didn't realize that what I missed. So later on, I got married, and we have a wonderful son. And so we have a ritual that when we hug, maybe last about five, six seconds. But it's the experience when you hug the person, it's not just you embracing them, you just feel their heart, you feel their soul, and you re you make yourself available to them, and it's so elect electric, it's so rich, and it's so quick. Literally, it's under five seconds. But both of us walk away smiling and beaming that I got you, I'm here for you, you're here for me. And I'm thinking, I missed that for years. And with clients, you don't do that. Handshake is all you do, but there's that whole sense of connecting soul to soul. It just to me is such a gap, such an unlearned, untapped skill.
SPEAKER_01That's true. There's people in the world of psychotherapy who have done a lot of research on the efficacy of touch and whether the the ethics of it, and there's a lot of evidence. So they did a study that long ago where they looked at different cultures and how often people touched in an hour-long conversation around just casual, oh, there's other things, and so the United States, and I think it was the United States, England, and Finland scored the lowest out of all the other countries. And now they've redone it, and now the United States of America is the lowest for touch in a casual conversation, and people are pointing to that now, saying, Wow, that's problematic. That we're missing something with that. And so I think psychotherapists need to know that, just to know that and see if you know that, then what feels different? You don't have to have an embracing hug to do touch. You can hold hands and gently and just gaze in each other's eyes for a moment and have that presence. I see you, I get you. You're all of you is welcome here in this moment. And can have those conversations with people around touch. It has to be consensual. And if there's been sexual abuse or physical abuse, I would say erring on the side of caution that's gonna make it even slower before you do the actual touch and have conversations and have practices where you're making sure that both of you can see when there's activation and pause and stop.
SPEAKER_00Yes, yes. The the in the business world, it always fascinated me that when there's a gathering, why do people love icebreakers so much? This is a time that you hang around, you exercise, you touch, you push, you pull. And when I learned, this is a time that the roles, expectations, project plans are aside is person to person. You and people love it. You see them beaming up, opening up, laughing, new behaviors show up, new emotions. And then you go to the project, and somehow that's all left behind. That there's an element of connectivity, as you mentioned, that is the whole person that people are hungry for it, and there's so much room for that to bring it more as part of continuous uh partnership. Yeah, the as we getting close to the end of our time, what are the recommendations, suggestions you want to give to our listeners?
SPEAKER_01That's a good question. I think the biggest thing is like having practices that allow you to be yourself more fully. And how you show up as yourself, not as a performative self, or I think I should be this way, or my best self, or whatever. It's not that, it's how you let your whole self be in a moment, in any whether that's at work or in relationship or in community or driving your car. It doesn't matter, and they that you matter, the fullness of who you are matters, and the more you get to know who you are, the better for everybody.
SPEAKER_00Wonderful, wonderful. The so the the listeners will get to um, they will have access on the on the uh podcast. There will be links to your website to all your information. People can find you and find about your practice and your writings. And the key message here from Barbara is a better way forward in addition to the world, to the language we have, is bringing your whole self forward, paying attention to and connecting at the much deeper and much more natural ways. Hope this was helpful. Pass it on and follow Barbara online. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. Lovely chat.