Breaking Free: How to Get Unstuck from Trauma and Reclaim Your Life (Podcast #52)

On behalf of me and Marianne Michaelis, I'd like to thank you for being a listener of our Human Intimacy podcast this year. It's always a privilege to spend time with you and I want to express my deep gratitude. If you are ready to take your healing and recovery to the next level, you're ready to deepen your healing and strengthen your connection and gain real tools for meaningful change. I invite you to join us and other Experts at the 2nd Annual Human Intimacy Conference where myself, Marianne and many other leading experts will come together for powerful teaching, live question and answer sessions and provide insightful pre conference conversations to help you get the most out of your conference experience. And right now, you can save 50% when you register before December 31st. Please don't miss this opportunity. Visit human intimacy.com and reserve your spot today.

Something about you that I can't help but smile when you smile and laugh.

When you laugh something surrounds. Welcome to the human intimacy podcast, Dr. Kevin Skinner with my friend and colleague, Marianne Michaelis. Marianne, how are you doing?

Hi, Dr. Skinner. I'm glad to be here again. This is an exciting episode and I'll let you talk about it because I know this is yours. But I'm really excited, excited to be here today. It's such an honor to be able to show up in this space, to be able to talk about things that are really important and meaningful.

And so what Marianne's referring to here, this is officially, this is our 52nd episode, which means that we will have done this episode every week for one year. Yes, it's a celebration, right? It's, it's like, holy cow. But my intent, I look forward to being with you when we can say this is our 500th episode. And the reason why I say that is it is an honor. It is a privilege to be with you, our listeners, and to share our experiences and share our thoughts. But I want to also acknowledge the questions that we get, the topics that we've been discussing, the feedback, I mean, interestingly enough, Marianne, simultaneously to hitting our 52nd episode, we will probably hit our 20,000 month download.

Oh my goodness. Wow.

So it would, it would be the, it would be, you know, almost simultaneously in a year. And, and so no, we're not big. I mean, we're not like one of these major podcasters. But over the last year, I think about, we've had great guests, we've had just topics that have, we've. I mean, we've seen great feedback from. It's just absolutely exciting. I love it. Just being able to Share some thoughts and experiences. And, Marianne, you've been a big part of this. I just want to say thanks to you.

Yeah, it's been such an honor to be here. And I'll say. I remember last year when you were starting this, and even when you invited me to join you for the first time, I was so nervous and scared. I'd never done this before. So it's been such a learning, growing experience to be here, you know, And.

I get the privilege of going through. And I do my own editing, right? So once it's recorded, I do the. I do my own editing. I don't hire it out. I don't pay anybody because it actually helps me understand how to be better. So I learn from my own listening to myself. And I'm absolutely just excited to be with everybody today. Today's topic, and let's jump into that, I want to address. We're going to be talking about when we get stuck in trauma. And as a clinician, I can tell you that when people come to my office. I've had people come to my office, and you probably have as well, Marianne. They've been to multiple therapists. They've been reaching out for help for years, and yet they feel like they're still recycling the old issues. They can't get past the past, metaphorically. And so they feel stuck. They don't know where to go. So, Marianne, what's your initial experience, your initial thoughts on individuals? They're coming. They're stuck in trauma, and they don't know where to go.

I think my first. First of all, I'm so glad we're talking about this, because I do see this show up in my office so often. And the first thing that I always want my clients to understand is that trauma is not logical. That is what trauma, in essence, is. It's what our brain doesn't have a framework for. Doesn't have any idea how do I even process or make sense of this. And so it gets stuck, unresolved, because our brain has no idea what to do with it. And so things, we get bumped. We'll have memories, smell, sight, sounds, touch that come up and they resurface because our brain says, oh, I've seen this before, and it's still kind of floating out there. And so starting out, I, for me, foundationally, is just making sure we understand trauma is not logical. So when my clients are trying to think, well, why? Why do I do this? Well, it doesn't make sense. It's not logical. We can't think our way through. And that is where we can spend so much time talking about it. And it doesn't resolve just by talking.

And we should also say that when we experience trauma, and let's just talk about how trauma influences our thoughts, our emotions and our and our physical sensations. So when I'm in a state of trauma, one of my favorite definitions of trauma in and of itself is trauma is something that separates us from self. And what we're talking about here is I am no longer feeling attuned to myself, aware of myself. So when I'm in a state of trauma, I'm actually in a fight or flight response, or I'm in a shutdown response. While I'm in that mindset, I'm not necessarily attuned to my own thoughts or feelings because I'm surviving. And so when trauma is manifesting itself, you typically are going to see someone who's fighting, angry, somebody who's fleeing, getting away from or in worst case scenario, somebody who's completely shut down because they don't want to feel. And so if it was an animal, you would see them faint. If it's a human, you see us really curl up in a ball and just feel completely shut down. That's what we're referring to here in this concept of being shut down.

When I talk with my clients about trauma, and I know that some of my clients know more about the brain than I do, so I acknowledge that. And this is going to be a very simplified explanation. But if we understand that there's like the right side of our brain really is in charge of our experiences. So that's where all of our taste, touch, smell, sight, vision, everything is there. That that right side of the brain is, is that's where it's holding the experience. So we're in there when we are having a traumatic experience, our body goes into that fight or flight stage that you're talking about, the logic, the reasoning, the judgment that goes out the back door, that that's like the main thing that's important is surviving right here. So there's a part of the brain, There are certain parts of the brain. It's kind of like a breaker box that switches get flipped, turn off, shut down right now. This is not the most important thing. So if I'm running for my life, I don't really need my digestion system right now. I don't really need my productive system right now. So my body is wired and created to give me the most energy where I need it the most. And so one part of my brain that shuts down is called the broca area. That's the speech and language area of my brain. And so when we're trying to describe what that looked or felt like, or we're trying to put it into words, that experience that we had, it's like trying to just describe the flavor of salt. I know what it is, but I can't describe to you how it is. I don't maybe have words for it. And that part of the brain shuts down. Part of our long term memory even shuts down because my body is conserving and using its resources where it needs to. And that is part of this fight or flight process, which makes it so much harder than to. Especially if we're frozen. I, I don't know the words. I, I don't know. I, I know what it feels like. I can see it in my mind, but I can't find the words to get it out.

So from trauma, in a traumatic event, we always have to respond to it. It's not optional. From every event that we experience in life, we have to respond to it. So if you think about an event occurs, Dr. Dan Siegel, in his book the Developing Mind, he talks about traumatic experiences that we actually create two memories, what is called an implicit memory and an explicit memory. And when we have an implicit memory, we feel something, but we don't necessarily have the story that goes with that specific memory. An implicit memory, again, it's felt. But I don't understand an explicit memory. I have the story, I can share my thoughts, the dialogue, I can tell what happened. The deeper the level of trauma going back from childhood or even during a discour, discovery of some difficult experience. I remember talking with clients who, who had traumatic childhood experiences and they discovered something, say a parent, you know, abusing another parent or drinking or hiding even into adult years. When we see traumatic or experience traumatic things, if we have the language, it means that we are telling ourselves the story. It's going into our long term memory banks. But sometimes the trauma is so elevated and that literally it shuts off from going into our long term memory bank. And so we just feel it, but we don't have the memory recall.

Yeah, Pia Melody talks about this in her book. I believe it's facing codependency. I remember when I first learned about this, she talked about, you can be sitting in a conference and somebody's speaking and all of a sudden you have just this blaring, striking, stunning headache that just hits you out of nowhere. And she talks about, there's often times where this might be an implicit memory. I don't know why, but something was said. Something got bumped up against that. My body responds. I remember when I was getting trained in emdr, that the thing about some of these modalities we get trained in is we train on each other and we get to do our own work as we're being trained. And as we were doing emdr and I was the client. Yeah. I had a headache here. Then my shoulder hurt, then my face. I felt like I'd just been. I felt super congested, like I'd just been crying for a long time. And just the sensation moved around my. You know, it was just tracking. Here's a sensation here. I didn't have any memory. I couldn't say this came from this or this is when this happened. But my body, as Bessel van der Kolk talks about, our body keeps a score. Our body holds onto it. It knows. And so when we have reminders, our body says, oh, here this is. And that's trauma. That. That's when we're bumping up against old trauma.

And when we get stuck in it, sometimes it's because we don't have. Or we can't recall the experience or the language. And so we have these feelings. So I've had a lot of clients that have had fear, but they can't put our finger on why am I so afraid. Why. What. What is. What is this thing that just keeps running in my background? And then when we bump into it and we don't know what to do with it, it kind of goes back down. It's like, I don't know what to do with you. Don't know what to do with you. So I think one of the reasons, Marianne, that people get stuck is in. In traumatic experiences or even in addictive behaviors or in even anxiety patterns. They get stuck because they don't know how to deal with those feelings. And so they typically will shove them back down because we don't have. We. I don't know. I haven't learned how to go through this.

Yeah. And. And I think that going through part is so important. I had a client recently who said, okay, so what do I do? Like, what are the tools that I do? But how do I get the inside? Because I can breathe. I can do deep breathing, or I can go work in my garden or I can go exercise. And those are good coping tools, but those aren't necessarily going to work the trauma out. And what you're talking about, too, is that going deep inside, I think, is Being able to say, let me go find that fear, let me sit with that fear, and let me actually let my body really focus, my mind really focus and feel the fear, if I can notice it, sit in it, learn from it, not run away, not avoid.

And really important point here before, and this is to all of our listeners, never would we recommend that you go into trauma not prepared. Because trauma can bring up emotions, feelings, thoughts, physical sensations that can overwhelm your system. So the thing that we learn about treating trauma as a professional is we don't go into it without what we refer to as resources. So to our listeners, if you're going to do trauma work even with a therapist, the therapist should invite you to, for example, find a mentally safe or calm place to your mind and your body. For some people, that might be a beach, it might be in the mountains, it might be in their bedroom, wherever you're safe and your calm place is. And then you go through some exercises to create that space where you can go into that memory, into that experience that Marianne was referring to. Because if we lead into any traumatic experience and we don't have enough resources, it literally can overwhelm your system.

Yeah. And let me, if I can add on to that. People, resources. We need safe support. People. We need people that when we bump up against things and say, oh, my goodness, I just read this, or I just realized this, this thing that, like, I hadn't even remembered or my brain had purposefully not let me remember because it was too big for me to handle. We've got to have people, resources that we can turn to, to talk to, to make sense of. And this is where talk is really important. So I, I know that I'm almost negating what I said earlier, but when we can, when we do find the words and we can start to tell if we can do it in a safe place, where we're held, where we're going through it again, this can be really reparative because then as we're being held in a reparative, safe, comfortable place, then our brain can say, oh, okay, now I do have a place to restore this. This is part of how our memory works. It's. We're bringing up the memory, we're going through it, and it's being let down in a safe place.

Yeah. So again, we're talking about when we get stuck in trauma, or maybe we could even say not just trauma by itself. Sometimes we just get stuck and we don't know where to go with an experience. We don't know how to make sense of it. I find this when couples fight, that they get stuck in patterns. I think as human beings, when, as individuals, we get stuck in our own thought patterns, we think the same thoughts, we feel the same emotions. And because we're patternistic, we. I think. Dr. Penza. Joe Dispenza, his way of saying it, right. We. About 90 to 95% of the time, we. We do the same patterns, we think the same thoughts. We're patternistic. Right. So if we think the same thoughts 95%. 90 to 95% of the time. Well, of course, if I'm in trauma, I'm. I'm repeating things. But let's talk about then how it influences how I interact with people, the people around me, because I see the world through that lens. So all of a sudden, if I've grown up in an environment, let's say that my needs weren't met. And so I coped with unhealthy behaviors. Marianne. And. And it was drinking and it was drugs and it was sex. And now I'm in this committed relationship, and I've given that up. But my pattern from the past, when I was in stress, was to do those things to drink or to. To. To smoke or to do drugs or to have sex. Then I go back to the old coping mechanisms, which in my mind is also a version of trauma, because you're coping in ways that take you away from yourself. And when we do it that way, we TR that trauma, the cycle, the pattern, and we don't even recognize it. It's our coping mechanism. Now we're in a relationship, and my partner's not meeting my needs because they're hurt by my behaviors. I can easily be the victim of my partner. I could easily say, well, why don't. What about me?

Yeah. So we're in a stuck, wounded space with our trauma that we're carrying and needing to be held, supported, loved. And when we've hurt someone else or they're in theirs, it's really tricky to see the other person from a wounded state. You think about an animal who's kind of, you know, backed into a corner. That's not a place where compassion usually shows up. If I can add to that just a little bit, in the body keeps the score. Dr. Vandelkolk talks about a state of learned helplessness, which I think is also important to talk about in this context of trauma. He talks about some experiments they did, or they had some dogs in some. Some cages in Russia, I believe. And the river came up and flooded and they were trying to get the animals out. But what they. Some of the animals got stuck in the back of their cages. It didn't matter what they did. They couldn't get them to come out because they were comfortable there. Others would. Would run right out. But understanding, we. We do have different responses to trauma as well. And so not everybody is going to look the same. And so sometimes we get really frustrated. Well, why don't they just get out of there? Why don't they just leave? Like, what's wrong with them? Just grow up. And once again, because of the experiences that we've had with our trauma, we may have learned helplessness. Dr. Edith Eager also talks about this. She was a Holocaust survivor. And we know that individuals who were in the concentration camps, they opened the doors and said, great, you're free. You can leave. And people walked out, and then they turned around and came back in because they didn't know what to do. And so recognizing we can get stuck in, as you're talking about this traumatic state that we get stuck in, how do we get out of it? Because it can feel so frustrating. My partner has his trauma and I have. I've got betrayal trauma, and he reacted this way. I think that's what you're talking about. Earlier, he acted this way as a coping tool for his trauma. And it hurt me, and I want him to help me because I'm hurt. But he's stuck in his trauma and I'm stuck in mine.

And rarely do we have enough insight to recognize that my partner's in trauma, the acting out person or the betrayed, because I'm seeing only through my lens. And I. So it's hard for me to see. See this other person.

It's like we have these blinders on.

And. And so you used an interesting phrase here. When we're talking about people who are stuck in trauma or we feel like we can't get out of it. The concept of learned helplessness. Martin Seligman, the original person who used that term, actually, you did it with dogs back in the late 60s. Martin Seligman's work, very similar. They were working with depressed dogs and seeing, you know, what triggered that. And every since then, what we know is when an individual, an animal, any of us are in the state of helplessness, we don't think there's a solution for us. And so if there's not a solution. I remember reading Peter Levine's work in An Unspoken Voice, and he's referring to a story where they took a guinea pig, and it wasn't his research, but it was other researchers. They took the guinea pig. And this is just. To me, it's. It's. So I tell the story often because when you take an animal in their situation and they turn it over on its back, it would get up and then would turn itself over and run away and then grab it and then turn it back. And they did this over and to the point where the guinea pig would stop turning over and getting away. At one point, they shared a story of they turned it over on its back, they went to lunch. An hour and a half later, they came back and the guinea pig was still on its back. That stuck.

And as you're saying that, I don't know if you shared this here before, I'm going out on a limb here, because I don't know the whole exact part of this story, but there's something about. I think it's crickets or grasshoppers, how high they jump. Does that sound familiar to you?

Not to me, but I like the story. Go.

I think maybe it's fleas. I remember being back in Florida years ago and somebody talking about fleas. Like, the. The height that they can jump is. Is incredibly high. But they. They put them like in a cup with a barrier or some container with a barrier, and. And then they would jump, and then they take it off and they wouldn't jump. Like, they don't. Yeah, yeah. And so we learn we can be conditioned to stay in these states.

And. And so that's when we get stuck. And to our listeners, if you feel stuck, in fact, at the upcoming Human Intimacy Conference, this is one of my core topics is how do we get unstuck? And. And I'm going to be addressing it for individuals who've been betrayed. I'm going to be talking for those who've been acting out. Because when we get unstuck, something has to change. In other words, we can't think the way we've thought, we can't feel the way we've felt, we can't act the way we've acted, and we can't believe the things that we've believed. Like, if you were to look at those crickets or whatever it was, the reality is, is they probably just trained themselves to jump at a certain level and they couldn't jump anymore. Yeah, they become conditioned for that. As humans, we become conditioned for things. So here's a quick tidbit. If we want to create a new pattern, if we want to work through trauma, behavioral shift might be the. One of the things I've got to act different. But sometimes, Marianne, it's not the behaviors first. Sometimes it's actually the actions that follow, the thoughts, the emotions, and. And ultimately that changes our core beliefs. Let me give an example of that. If you think you can't do something, you can't. That's. As a man think. If. We've thought that for years, but that's true. If I don't think I can, I can't. So imagine with me, and this is an imagination exercise that I often do, but I want you to imagine with me that the problem didn't exist. Whatever the problem is you're dealing with, I want you just to just do me a favor. Imagine that. Whatever the problem is, imagine that it's not there. What would you be thinking and what would you be feeling? I bring this up because that's what Dr. Martin Seligman found. Initially, when we talked about learned helplessness, they really believed that those German shepherds, that they were just going to be that way. But subsequent research, and this is in Dr. Martin Seligman's most recent book, the Circuit of Hope is what he calls it and what he found inside of all of our brains is this place of hope. If I think something can happen, if I start to visually see it as a possibility, my brain starts to work towards that solution. So if I feel stuck in something, my ability to see something in a new or a different way and can be incredibly helpful in getting unstuck.

You know, I love that you share that, because I think one of the biggest predictors for my clients who are dealing with betrayal, trauma in staying in a relationship is hope. If they can find a ray or a shred of hope, they'll. They'll go through a lot. They'll. They'll usually say, I'm not ready to call it quits yet. There. There's still some hope. They still hold on. And so that. That hope is so important. Just before we started talking about the hope, though, I think it's important for us to also make sure that we address generational trauma, because we're talking about doing things differently, changing things. And it can be really tricky when I don't have. If I have, you know, four generations in my family tree of betrayal and addiction and abuse. First of all, it's going to be tricky for me to find a template. I don't have a template because that's the water I've been swimming in. And so finding really good supports. Finding really good. We haven't talked about this yet. I know we will talk about it, but therapy is usually going to be really important in working through trauma, finding some really helpful therapeutic tools. And as you talked about earlier, we've got to identify what is it that needs to change. What I often see happen for my clients as they're doing trauma work is there's a discovery stage. There's the discovery stage of, oh, my goodness, I didn't put two. I didn't realize. I had no idea that this happened. I didn't recognize this is something that had been going on. I didn't realize how unhealthy it was, or I didn't even see that, that, that there was abuse there. I didn't realize that this was abuse. And now, as my clients are realizing, oh, that wasn't just a sexual experience I had. I was groomed and I was assaulted. The whole world feels like it drops out. Like, I don't even know how to make sense of this. My whole world, everything that I thought, my whole foundation of everything that I thought and believed feels like it just drops out from underneath.

So, Marianne, let me just emphasize a couple core points here. There is a time when we get stuck and we don't understand it because it's not necessarily ours. What you're describing there is really important for everybody to understand. Sometimes we're carrying generational trauma, as you say, as you were saying there. And that that means that I can be feeling feelings, having thoughts, physical sensations that aren't necessarily mine. I've, I. I've seen people generational anxiety. And we actually now know third and fourth generation of Holocaust survivors. We know that their chemicals in their body are dampened, Especially the cortisol levels are lower, which was a surprise to everybody. How can that possibly be? Because cortisol is normally a fight or flight. Well, it was so overwhelming that their cortisol levels have been lower. So we experience generational trauma that's passed down. And I think there's a lot of scientific evidence for that now, which means that there might be things that you feel that you feel stuck in, like, why do I feel this way? What happened to me? And then you put it into the context of your life. I did this a few years ago. I typically do this in the intensives that I do. And I'll do a genogram. A genogram is looking at family history over time. Right. So we'll look at mom and dad, Grandma and grandpa, great Grandma and grandpa. And we'll do that for multiple generations, probably up to three or four generations. And I'll Start to look at patterns like, okay, let's talk about mental health, depression and anxiety. Let's talk about key events in their lives. And it was so amazing. One person, after looking at her family story, she's like, there is not a single person on here who wasn't cheated on. My mom, my grandma, my great grandma. I don't know about my great great grandma, but at least three. That means four generations of us have all. So how did she see men? How did she see relationships? And again, generational trauma. It's just the mindset, it's just the way life is.

And you look at the PTSD of reactions that that individual grew up in, right? Hyper vigilant, a lot of self doubt, probably isolation and avoidance. You look at that and say, oh, that's what was normal. That was normal in my family. That's what was learned and repeated over the generations. And so I, I do love understanding. Sometimes I don't know why this is going on. I don't know why this isn't. And that's once again why I come back to, it's not logical, it doesn't make sense. And sometimes I can't think my way through it, but I can put it on a paper and go, oh, that, that part makes sense. Okay, maybe this isn't mine.

And so as we look at the generational trauma and that, and I'm going to segue this into that concept of hope when I start to realize this is beyond just me. This is, this is maybe generational. I can be the chain breaker. I can be the person who shifts into, through awareness and through change. I can break out of these patterns. No time in this life have we had more hope for change than we do now. And I say that because, you know, this is interesting, the concept of neuroplasticity, meaning they used to believe that the, the brain was fixed after a certain age. In other words, it. Change was very, very literally something that would not happen today. We now know that we can create new neural pathways literally hours before we die. We can think new thoughts, we can have new things, we can learn new things. And so there is no point where we are fixed in any emotion or thought pattern. We can shift it through life experiences and through opportunities that we create and are created around us. And that to me is probably the most hopeful thing that I've ever learned about getting unstuck, unstuck from trauma.

I'm going to get a little bit personal here, but as you bring that up, part of my why in my own healing journey There was a period of time wherein probably less than 24 hours, maybe 48 hours, I came across a concept I'd never heard of before. And I read it in like two or three different non related articles. And so when I hear the same concept multiple times in a very short period of time, I go, pay attention, Marianne. There's a reason why you're hearing and learning this. And it was the concept, it was three words cleansing the lineage. And it's a. It's an interesting combination of three words, but I read it in three different places and went, what. What am I hearing here? But when I heard those words, it became my why. For me, it was the moment of. A moment of change, of saying, I can't change what happened before me, but I can change what happens after me. I can be a stop place, I can do healing, I can do work, and I can help make it better for those who go after me. And so when we have these moments of understanding, these are moments that we can say, hold on a second. Now that I understand. Now that I understand the generational patterns, I can now start to figure out how to change that moving forward. And those are really great unsticking moments.

And that is that circuit of hope that where we've been doesn't have to stay. And. And I want to be really granular here for a second. When I say granular, I want to be detailed, like in a specific situation. When we work with individuals who have been stuck, whether that's in their relationship or in their own lives. When you start to break out of the channel and the channel is. Imagine with me that we're. I used to live by Snake River. Snake river, big body of water, starts up in Wyoming and heads down through Idaho into Oregon and the Snake River. Absolutely. It's a big river. And yet the farmers where I lived, they farmed and watered their crops from the river. They built their canals that then they built ditches from those canals that would go into the fields that I grew up on. And my grandpa, when we would go on rides, my grandpa would say, hey, this is the lifeblood of our lives. And, and it was because it was the flow of life. I mean, I mean, our farms, our crops, our. The horses and the cattle and the pigs. I mean, it was the lifeblood. It was what fed it. And it was absolutely beautiful. I mean, it was just a beautiful. It is a beautiful river. The canal is when you create a new pattern, a new thought, a new offshoot. Is it possible? Maybe the way I've been doing This. I could do it different. And so you begin to channel off. And when you create change, you get out of the routine and the pattern, and you develop new neural pathways. And as you create them, the water begins to flow, and it flows more freely and abundantly because there's now a new channel, a new place for it to go. Go. So when you think new thoughts, when you even ask yourself the question, is it possible that that thought's not accurate, when you start to see yourself in a new way, you're changing the old thought patterns. When you start to feel new feelings, you're starting to feel in ways that you haven't maybe felt in long, long periods of time.

Oh, I. I love what you said. I. I work with my clients using art, which is accelerated resolution therapy. And one of the things that I love as, as we. We use bilateral stimulation, and my clients go back into. It's not talk therapy, but they go back into the. The traumatic incident or the core. Core experiences they've had that have created a belief system that's damaging. But they. They see it like a movie in their mind. And the first time that they go through it, they're not speaking, they're not telling me about it, because they're. They're. It's like watching a movie and trying to tell somebody what the movie looks like. You just never get it. And so it's actually pretty quiet therapy because it's so internal. But what's fascinating about it is the first time through, as they're watching it in these little teeny slices, they are seeing and feeling like there's all the emote. They're seeing it there, but oftentimes it's almost like they've got blinders on. And then after they've gone through it the first time, and we're doing a lot of body work and a lot of working with the emotions and all the triggers and everything else that comes with it. When they go through it the second time, more often than not, they say, oh, oh, it's like the blinders came off and they can see. Oh, there were actually people there that were helpful. Oh, there were actually. Oh, wait a second. But because of the trauma, they got stuck in this very narrow tunnel vision where they couldn't see what was going on around. They couldn't see the outside stuff. And the second time through, they see it. They're just noticing what. What's. What's different this time. And then the third time, then they go through and they rewrite it. They change the story. And so as we're talking about the new thoughts, as we do trauma work, part of trauma work is seeing things differently. Letting our body let go of the sensations and the emotional energy that it carries related to the trauma and reshaping the thoughts and saying, hold on a second. How can I see that differently? How can I understand that differently? And that is where beautiful healing comes. It is that shaping and changing of how we see and understand.

And. And what's interesting about what you've just said is you just described the change process as it happens as we witness it, which is absolute privilege. We have the opportunity to witness the transformation. That's what happens in our offices.

And.

And usually we started this off when. When you get stuck in trauma, more often than not, when people feel stuck, period, they don't know how to do this. And that's why therapy can be so effective. Interestingly enough, as I've seen people do this, they think, will it last? I mean, how can that possibly work? And yet what we find over and over and over again is they rewrite that script. It used to be powerful, now it isn't. It used to be emotionally disturbing, now it's not. And I don't understand it, but it's not the way it was.

I have such a great example of that. When I first started my art training, we were just working on a body sensation, and I get motion sick, usually really, really quickly, Even sometimes with my own driving, but especially on airplanes. I'm the person you don't want to sit next to because I vomit. And working on that sensation. And as we were working, learning how to use art, I visualized like a pressure cooker and I was blowing out steam. Every time that sensation came up, I'm just gonna blow because it's in my head. It's always this feeling I get in my head, and I just blow it out. And I just. Yesterday I was flying and I just thought, how many times have I flown since then? And I have not vomited and I haven't felt sick. And before it was such a big, big deal. And so it does stay. It does change because we've created, like you said, a canal. We've let our mind have a new way to go that it doesn't have to stay where it was before.

The beauty of change. We don't have to be stuck in trauma. We can create new neural pathways. There is hope, and there's plenty of research that suggests that hope is there. And we just have to get the knowledge, the information in the right environment that healing is Real and possible for us. So I want to give one other thing. We've talked and you've said this a couple times. I would just want to reinforce this. We're talk therapists. You and I are, but we're way more than talk therapists because as you said, we don't talk trauma out. A phrase Peter Levine uses. You don't talk it out. Your body releases the trauma. And one of the ways that I know that the work that we're doing is effective is the body is in a calmer state when we've worked through the trauma. And that's a really important thing to be aware of. Trauma is not talked out. It's usually released and relieved from the body, which means the body needs to be a part of the solution.

Because we are spiritually, mentally, emotionally and physically all one system. It's not just the trauma over there, it's the whole system. Yeah. As we wrap up, I want to make sure for our listeners that you might be sitting there thinking, okay, yeah, great, so now what do I do? And I want to make sure there's some re. We share some resources with you. EMDR desensitization reprocessing uses bilateral stimulation. Once again, it's not talk. It's. It's going back in and seeing it and letting your body. I think what's important with. In my mind, some of the best trauma modalities are the ones that include the body work. Noticing in your body where you have the sensation and allowing your body to feel that and allowing your body to release that. Usually when we're using the bilateral stimulation, the. It's really important because that keeps both parts, both sides of our brain online. So part of it isn't shutting down when we go into seeing that traumatic experience again. So we want that. So making sure that we're. That as you're looking for somebody to work through trauma with, I'd encourage you to find somebody that does accelerated resolution therapy. I know brain spotting can be. I'm not trained in brain spotty, but I know that can be helpful as well. Look for somebody who has some modalities that will use bilateral stimulation that will use your body, that will let you release the emotions because we. Our body stores the emotions with the experience and that's what.

And if we follow up that up, a couple additional strategies. Trauma informed yoga. Bessel Van der Kolk's work on yoga, Trauma informed Yoga can be very effective. And because it's body movement which also fits with the somatic experience of the work of Pat Ogden, Peter Levine and the Somatic Traumatic specialists. So there are multiple modalities that help us can get get unstuck from trauma. Find, if you find you're stuck, find a therapist who understands how to do one of these types of therapy. And based upon the research, you're going to see significant progress over time to help release and resolve some of the traumas that you've been stuck in. So, Marianne, final thoughts before we close up today.

It's been a fantastic year to have spent with our listeners and I hope that it's been beneficial and helpful and you are worth taking the time to look a little bit deeper, to look a bit closer and to step into really looking at what do I need to change? Is there something that I've been avoiding or not wanting to address or not knowing how to address? So I'd encourage you to look for support and help and also, once again, really just to have compassion on yourself, especially in this realm of trauma as we're talking about today. I know this can be triggering trauma, talking about our experiences and feeling stuck and like, I don't know where to go, what to do. It can be really hard. And so having compassion also and recognizing maybe this didn't start with me, and recognizing there is hope ahead and giving yourself a lot of time and patience. Thank you for being with us this year.

Thank, yes, thank you so much to our listeners. And I want to give you a year of listening. Those who've been listening a gift, the upcoming Human Intimacy Conference, March 14th and 15th. I invite you to join us. Marianne and I will be there. We'll be there with many of our friends. Michelle Mays, Dr. Sherry Kafer, Dr. David Robinson. Next week's podcast guest Jeff Stewer, phenomenal discussion on attachment and relationships. Again, we have just so many incredible experts who are going to be with us to our listeners. If you go to the Show Notes, you'll see a coupon code. It's going to say 50 off. Get 50% off the registration for a limited time. So it will expire on February 8th. So 50 off expires February 8th. It's an incredible opportunity. So if you're listening, please join us. It's going to be a phenomenal conference, great experts, and it's going to be recorded. So if you have any, you know, you can't make some of the sessions, you're going to have access to them. One of the other interesting things that we're going to be doing, Marianne, we're going to be doing what I'm going to call an evening with and we're going to have a group of U.S. experts. This is going to be pre conference, post conference where we're just going to invite those who are registered to come join us for a conversation. And we're going to have a variety of of topics, how to rebuild trust, how to get unstuck. Common topic that we're talking about. We're going to be talking about those things. So it's an evening with us. You come join us. And in addition to the conference, that's in addition to the conference and I needed to add one other component here. And this is something I mentioned previously. When you sign up, you can get a hundred dollars gift from my 100 day course. In other words, you can get that course for free when you sign up for the conference. And my, my desire is to have as many people at the conference to learn to grow from these incredible experts. Over 400 years of clinical experience of these experts. So please come join us and thank you to our listeners. Just from my heart, the bottom of my heart, thank you for being a listener. Thank you for being with us. Our hope is that we can continue to add to your life through this podcast. Marianne, thank you for being a big part of it.

Yeah, thank you so much. It's like you're shining, you're staring.