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Moving Out of Survival Mode. Irene Lyon: from the archives · The Trauma Therapist

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Or Today we even another episode from the archives with one of my incredible guests,
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enjoy or Welcome back to the Trauma Therapist Podcast. My name is Gaming
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Person. My mission is to help trauma therapist be their incredible selves, to
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be human, to be real, not just a clinician. I'm a big
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believer in who we are is more important than what we know, and this
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requires cultivating authenticity, genuineness, and vulnerability, and that requires intention. Can
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learn more about my courses and workshops by going to the Trauma Therapist project dot
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com. That's the Trauma Therapist Project dot com. Let's get started, our
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guys. Welcome back to the Trauma Therapist Podcast. My name is Gammick Person
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and very excited to have as my guest today Irene Lyon. Irene Welcome,
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Hi, Thank you, Thank you so much so. Irene is a nervous
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system specialist who helps people release their deepest traumas from their nervous system, allowing
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them to finally heal from chronic mental, physical, and emotional conditions they've tried
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everything to fix. Arenia has intensively studied and practices the work of Felding,
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Cross, Peter Levine, Kathy Kane. She has a master's degree in research
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in the fields of biomedical and health science, and regularly appears on podcasts and
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online summits, teaching all things nervous system health, healing, trauma, and
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neuroplasticity. Awesome, Before we dive in, where are you calling from and
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where are you from? Yeah, yeah, I am. Yeah, it's
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easy. I'm originally from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and I've lived
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a few spots in my life up in the mountains of Whistler, British Columbia.
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I don't know if you know Whistler. It's a big ski resort,
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so I was there for a while that's part of my story, and then
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lived in Australia for a few years. That's where I did my research.
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And now full circle, I've come back to my hometown and I live literally
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a fifteen minute walk from the hospital I was born at back in nineteen seventy
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five. So yeah, I walked by that hospital almost every day. And
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this is Vancouver is truly home. Yeah. Yeah, It's just interesting experience
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to be living place that you were born in. So we start usually with
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a quote or a mantra. Do you have something you want to share.
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Yeah, it's it's interesting. I picked this quote up back in two thousand
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when I was doing my research, doing a lot of reading Einstein and alchemy,
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like lots of more mystic sciences, if you will. And I don't
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know if you call this a quote, but it's something that the alchemists,
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and not the book that Paulo Quella wrote, but like the true alchemists,
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what they lived by. And I will say it in Latin. I may
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not do the Latin justice, but it is aura le laboraveni, and that
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means Aura is prey leja is, read is reread, labora work aveny is
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and you shall find. So I remember when I found that I was still
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deep in my studies doing health sciences and and at the time actually recovering from
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some physical injuries due to ski accidents I had had in my early twenties,
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and so I was doing a lot of searching and a lot of trying to
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figure out things and how come my initial bachelor degree, which was in health
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science and exercise science, why that work actually wasn't helping me heal. I
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was trying to heal these orthopedic injuries, and about seven years of education and
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rehabilitative education, and I still didn't know how to help myself, and so
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there was this element of what am I missing and that I kind of got
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first piece into kind of the more somatic world, if we want to call
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it, That was with the work of doctor Feldon Christ, Moshe Feldon Christ,
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and so that's kind of that was sort of the launchpad to me going
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into what some people might call alternative healing methods. And yet if you really
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look at the people that I have studied with over the last eighteen years,
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they were all really hardcore scientists, Feldon Christ being one, Peter Levine being
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one, and then my more recent member is Kathy Kane. So yeah,
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that was where the alchemist really got me. And I still to this day
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think of that when I work with my online clients. I always make sure
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they know of that, saying if you will, because the one thing I've
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really learned in this healing world is we have to keep learning and we have
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to keep working at it, and if we keep putting those pieces together,
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we eventually find what we're looking for. If that makes sense, it does.
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Yeah, So once again in English, so it's prey re re rework
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and you shall find Yeah, yeah, I love that. So you touched
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a little bit about your skiing accidents. Was was that? How did that
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start the engine into getting you into into this field with the trauma and so
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forth? No, it wasn't. Okay, it's weird, So quick story.
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So I was a big active kid in my teens, and long story
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short, had a whole bunch of knee ski accidents, so common things or
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the acl cruise shit ligaments. But the big one was I fractured my kneecap
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my patella, of all things, which was a complication from another surgeon three.
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And that threw me into a bit of a tailspin more physically because my
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body was all crooked. I was on crutches for a long time, so
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I was physically kind of twisted, and yet I was strong, and so
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I got into the Feldon Christ work, and the Feldon Christ work pretty much
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fixed all of the physicality problems. And it was so miraculous to me at
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the time that I decided to study doctor feldon Christ's work. I did that,
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and I started private practice. This is when I was still living in
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Whistler, British Columbia, but at about about two thousand and eight. This
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is where the trauma piece came in. I was doing my private practice,
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doing mainly Feldon christ and I would say about forty This is a rough estimate,
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but maybe about forty percent of the people I was working with were getting
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better and the way I had. But there was sort of this sixty ish
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percent if I'm really honest, to be honest guy, maybe seventy if I
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think about it, that weren't getting better. And they might have a nice
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experience, they might increase the range of motion, but there was like something
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that didn't stick. And it's as if they weren't really there. They couldn't
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sense their bodies, they couldn't take the work on their own. And when
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I started to look at the histories of these people that weren't getting better,
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they all had some kind of either highly traumatic experience injury wise, accident accident
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wise, or they had had some fairly big abusive adverse adversity when they were
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young, and not just you know, physical sexual kinds of abuse, but
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emotional abuse. Always having to be perfect, always having to be top of
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the class, which is a high strain on a lot of kids. And
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so I was looking at this spectrum and I was like, well, what
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am I missing here? And luckily when you go back and go back to
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the alchemy quote, I asked questions that I just talked to some of my
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mentors in the Feldon Christ world and one actually said you might want to look
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into Peter Levine's work, and I was like, okay, so I did.
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And so I got into Peter's work and Somatic Experiencing in about two thousand
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and eight, which is about ten years now, isn't it. And I
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went in knowing I needed to do it because it was really clear that this
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underlying dysregulation of the nervous system was why these people weren't physically getting better,
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because their system was essentially in some kind of survival mode. And I got
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into that work, I fell in love with it, and then realized,
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lo and behold, oh, maybe I do have some traumas in my system
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that I didn't know about. That we're more, that we're deeper than even
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my physical injuries. And I grew up in a very loving, caring household.
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It was just the societal pressures and the expectations, the things that we
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kind of take as common rule in our Western society. But when you really
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unpack them. You really see how they stunt an individual's authenticity and their growth
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and their ability to be real and emotional. Right, I'm raising my hand.
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Yeah, everybody good. And I really stressed that because a lot of
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people get scared by the word trauma, and really trauma isn't It doesn't have
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to be some big thing. It really is in our If I define it
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in Peter Levine's terms, it's dysregulation of our autonomic nervous system. And right
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now I have yet to have met anybody and this is the truth in my
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life who is fully regulated in their nervous system before they get into this work.
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Our society just doesn't allow for it. So that's kind of how I
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got into the trauma work. At most, A lot of the folks I
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know in that field get into it for themselves. I was kind of the
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opposite. I got into it for my clients and then through that went oh
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wow, this is this is important, or not just my clients, but
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myself. What do you What was it about or what is it about you
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that wanted to do this work? I mean, initially when you were studying
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the Fielding christ A method, why did you make that jump from having your
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own experience to saying, you know what, I want to work with people?
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What was it about or is it? If I'm really honest, I
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didn't want to be a hypocrite, I could, you know, much to
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my parents' dismay. They had just put me through almost seven years of university
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that's not including my master's degree to become highly trained to work with humans at
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the rehab level, the nutrition I was trained to nutrition exercise science level,
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and I was watching my own body not get better with all that, And
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I was trained by some good teachers in university, and I was like,
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what is going on here? And I was actually raised in a medical family.
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My parents are both veterinarians, both animal doctors, So I think there
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was always a this essence of finding the solution. And I knew darnwell that
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if I didn't keep searching for the thing that would help me, at least
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in that primary moment in my feldon Christ years, if I didn't figure out
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what that was that was missing, I wouldn't have to be simple job satisfaction,
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right, And I was already kind of getting a bit frustrated with the
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classic way of training people and doing exercise rehab you know, all the core
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work and stretching and strengthening, and while exercise and staying strong is essential,
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the way in which we physically rehabilitate people is quite primitive. And so I
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just knew there was something more to it. And so that's kind of one
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of the reasons why I kept pursuing that. And you know, I've been
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asked this question before, you know, what drives you? What makes you
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want to do this? And it's interesting. I was just with my team.
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I have a team of about ten people that helped me with my online
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work, and I said, you know, there's really I never woke up
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one day and said this is what I want to do. You know,
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I don't want to work with you know, I want to work with trauma.
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I want to do this. It was never it was never a choice.
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I would say that the choice kind of found me. The work found
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me, and then I just chose to make the decisions that brought me to
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you know, you and I sitting here and having these convos with your study,
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you know, and just study with Peter Levian's work and so forth,
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and quote unquote trauma, How did things shift for you and the way you
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interacted with your clients or post your clients. Yeah, that's a big one.
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Well are you familiar with Norman Deutsch. He's a Canadian author, psychologist,
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psychiatrists. He wrote one of the first book right yeah, yeah,
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yeah. His first book was called UM, The Brain That Changes Itself right
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right yeah Deutsch, Yes, thousand and four ish and um that was sort
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of one of the best, if not the best books on neuroplastic neuroplasticity.
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So the fact that we can change patterns that are deeply deeply wired. You
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know, we used to think if someone had a stroke, that was it.
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You know, you can rehabilitate anything, and we now know that's not
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true. Same even with spinal cord injuries, Parkinson's and all these things.
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And so he wrote that book in the mid two thousands, and then he
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recently wrote his latest book, which I actually prefer is called The Brain's Way
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of Healing. And in that book he actually talks about Feldon Christ, doctor
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Feldon Christ's work. So if anybody listening wants to learn more about Moche Feldon
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Christ, I would say that the two he has two chapters on him in
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that book is probably the best account of his work. But what he also
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has in that book is a chapter on what he calls neuroplastic healing, and
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he dubs it the five Stages of Neuroplastic Healing. And when I read that
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chapter, I would say that a light bulb really went on in that he
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outlines the importance of sequencing how we heal. So I'll give you an example.
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So, when I was doing my Feldon Christ work with my clients and
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my private practice, the people that weren't getting better with the physical Feldon Chrisian
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work, which is quite complex. I'm not sure if you've ever done any
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Feldon Christ work, but it requires higher brain functioning because you're listening to an
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instruction, you have to feel it in your body. You have to process
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that movement pattern and then you move. So it's high level and in the
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sequencing of how we work for higher function to be one hundred percent sort of
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on if we are living in survival physiology, So if our nervous system,
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if our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems are kind of chaotic and in disarray,
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our brain and not just our brain, but our entire physiology will be consumed
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by survival. And when we're consumed by survival. We can't think with our
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higher brain, or we can, but it's kind of half ass. And
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so when he outlined like, before you do more what he calls neurodifferentiation,
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that's the fifth stage of neuroplastic healing, which is feld in Christ's work.
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So before you could do this higher level neuroplastic healing, that's neurodifferentiation, you
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must you must work at the lower levels. And he calls it neuromodulation,
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which is where you're basically learning how to regulate your nervous system and not be
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living in a state of threat all the time. And so what I realized
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was like, oh, this is why out of a class of ten,
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five people leave feeling lovely and they keep it and the other five are confused.
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They think they might have got something, they might have a little better
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flexibility, but they come back the next week and nothing has changed, right,
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nothing has stuck. Am I making sense? Yeah? It makes great
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sense. I think it's a great illustration too. So these folks, you
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know, well meaning you know, and this is where if you talk to
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a lot of people now, and I'm being very general, they've tried diets,
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they've tried yoga, they've tried meditation, they've tried self you know,
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positive thinking, so positive psychology, gratitude, all these very high we would
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call them higher brain behavioral modifications, and they come up short. They might
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get better for a little bit, it might help them strategize, cope,
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and manage. But if they're underlying stress physiology, it's more than the brain.
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It's actually how our neurophysiology responds to our internal state and to our environment.
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If that's still on fire due to past adversity, trauma, stress,
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never being able to be yourself and having to protect your system, if that's
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still running the front of the bus, we can't be higher brain. And
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so when I really when I read that chapter, what made sense to me
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was this is why now when we work, when I work with my clients
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and we take the time to teach them how to regulate, how to become
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more safe in their system, they then can take on the higher brain stuff
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with ease. It just kind of comes like easy, whereas before with that
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stress physiology running the front of the bus. It really is indicative to that
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kid in school who's labeled add or learning disabled, it's not that they're stupid
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it's that they are struggling with survival energy and they can't focus, they can't
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constantly. And this is same with adults. You know, if you have
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an adult that is highly stressed or is still stressed from you know, past
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early traumas, they'll struggle in life. You know, it'll be hard to
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get things done, to get motivated. We hear the word resistance all the
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time. Right, I've got all this resistance and often that resistance, that
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lack of motivation, that malaise, that fatigue, that anxiety. It is,
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and I'm pretty confident now because I've done this enough, it is that
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unresolved traumatic response, or to be more appropriate, traumatic responses that are still
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sort of sitting in there in their cellular system. You will, I mean,
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you can just imagine people going through UH, you know, trying different
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things to heal themselves and things not working and then turning to you know,
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addiction or getting to pressed and so forth, and and the other side of
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this coin too. I mean, thank you so much for that explanation.
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This is such a great argument, if you will, for you know,
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new clinicians, people just starting out to learn trauma, to learn trauma informed
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UH interventions, and modalities and so forth. Let's share with us an early
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clinical error and early because everyone has them. I'm sure you've had some screwed
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up one one yeah, yeah, yeah, you know I because you you
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know I'll be transparent. You sent me this question, so I was like
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pondering that, um, and it's almost um. It isn't one person per
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se, because I can think of some people that, yeah, they could
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have done this better, that better. It's more of a kind of a
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it's a theme. So this is a theme, and that's that you get
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people coming in, whether it's my private practice or my colleagues private practices,
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or my online work that I do. And if someone thinks that just showing
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up at my office or someone's office or doing an audio exercise is enough,
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so they do it and then they leave. But then they don't integrate that
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into their life. If they if they don't integrate it into their life and
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have their entire life be a mirror by which they can work on their physiology,
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their responses, their stress. It's hard to heal. And by that
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I mean it's kind of like this all or nothing thing. And the when
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I was young in my career, I think I was I think, I
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know, I was a little more afraid to say it. How it is
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like to be a bit more of that hard nosed you know, like if
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you don't change these elements in all of your life, it really isn't.
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It's not that it's not going to make a difference, but in essence,
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it kind of isn't. And some of the more primary examples I'll get is,
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you know, we'll have someone come in who is chronically ill. Let's
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just say, let's say they have fibromyalgia, and which is, as we're
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learning, basically a dysregulation of the nervous system, and which is due to
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early traumatic stress that was never treated. And so you have this individual,
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and so we do really good work together. We might work on their stress
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physiology, bringing their survival energy down, teaching them how to feel that in
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their body. Maybe there's some specific events, you know, maybe a car
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accident, maybe it was abuse, and we work on that in the office.
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If they then go back to their current life that has been set up
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based on their wiring, meaning they have let's just say, an emotionally shut
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down partner, or their children who are say adults walk all over them.
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You know, they don't know how to set boundaries. Maybe they have kept
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a job that is soul sucking and doesn't give them enough time to rest all
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these things. Maybe their their dietary changes don't change so many things, so
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they just go back into that world that was created as a result of their
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early traumatic patterns. If that world doesn't change, And this is going to
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sound harsh, but it's kind of true, there's almost no point in doing
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the work. And the reason why I say that, and I'm coming more
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comfortable saying it, is is we want people want to I want people to
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do their best, and I want to give them the benefit of the doubt
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that they can take that that tough love, if you will, that harsh
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reality. And it's hard, you know, it's hard if you're a person
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in your sixties or seventies and you're sick and you have a very set way
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of living and to extricate yourself from that might be financially impossible, let's say,
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or you have children, these sorts of things. So it's kind of
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like this all or nothing, And if you go into this work, it
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really requires an entire lifestyle change. And then the other one that I'll speak
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to is I'm starting to mentor more colleagues, and because I think a lot
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of people that listen to your podcasts are in the therapy realms. And what
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I've seen too, and I'm getting a bit more brave at speaking out about
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is if you are in the work, if you're doing this work with your
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clients, right, it is essential that you yourself are in the work too,
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you know. And I'm blessed that my current husband is also trained in
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somatic experiencing. He got into it after me. So our way of living
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in our environment is very much open in terms of being emotionally vulnerable, supporting
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each other when we're having a hard time, you know, all these elements
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that we would do with a client such that we're living that life, that
25:45
world, if you will. So to go back to your original question about
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an error a mistake, I don't know if that's a mistake, but more
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in retrospect, I wish back in my younger years I could have been a
25:59
bit more into really almost having an intake with my clients to say, if
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you want to do this work, this is what's going to be important,
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and if you know that this isn't something that you're going to change then either
26:14
a we might not be the right fit or be would you be willing to
26:19
consider changing these things because it's like I, you know, I don't want
26:25
people to feel that that there. You know, it really comes down to
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people have to pay for this work, and so there's I don't know if
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this is making any sense. It's it's not like a specific but it's this
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need to really convey to people this isn't just one hour that you come in,
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we do work, and then you leave and you forget about it.
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Like it really needs to be this one hundred percent green light. And it
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might mean that every now and again the person pauses from the work, but
26:56
there's still in it in a sense if that if that makes sense, it
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does. I mean what came up for me as you were sharing at Irene
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was this, um uh, you know a lot of times I think when
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people are starting out, there can be there often is, and certainly with
27:15
myself, there were a lot of hesitancies around certain things, and it almost
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brings up this idea of you know, people get into this field oftentimes because
27:25
they want to help, and one can mean fixing and curing and stopping the
27:29
pain and but yeah, what happens when you know you you said there something
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happened where you uh, there was a hesitancy about you know, you use
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I think you used the phrase kind of tough love. To me, there
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was there's something very open and straightforward in expressing that. That to me is
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a very interesting kind of transition that a lot of us made. And you
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said you got to that point where you were able to just speak more openly
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about that, and I found that very empowering. And it's interesting because on
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the other end of that, oftentimes there is someone, you know, if
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we're talking about trauma here, people who've been impacted by trauma, who you
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know, how are they receiving what you're not saying versus when you're able to
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explain and open up to them and you know, the lands differently in a
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sense, I find it very empowering. I don't know, I just so
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I appreciate it, which you shared. Yeah, and I'll add to that
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it kind of um, it's very adult, right, It's kind of this
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when we've got trauma in the picture, we're working with a physiology and a
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brain that is infantile or in a child state or you know, adolescent,
28:51
like there isn't full maturity. And this is actually something that doctor Felton Christ
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was very interested in, is what what is a full sure human being?
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And does that even exist yet? You know, he died a long time
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ago. He was doing his writings in the fifties. And you know,
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one of the why is one of my big desires and this is I've sort
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of borrowed this from Peter Levine, so I'm going to credit him, is
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that we as a species, as a human species, stop living in survival.
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And in order to do that, some very tough discussions and tough healing
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regiments have to occur. And what you said a second ago about like the
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danger I see a lot of people getting into when they're doing this work and
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they want to help people, is getting into the avenue or the road,
29:51
if you will, or the track where you're helping people so that you feel
29:55
good as a therapist or a practitioner or a massage person or whatever. And
30:02
it's a very fine line because when you are doing your work so that you
30:07
feel good about yourself, it kind of poisons things a bit, as opposed
30:15
to doing your work with your client and being proud of their accomplishments it's very
30:23
much. You know, the in the university we learned something called the sick
30:27
model of health. And there's this great image of this man like in a
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ditch and they can't get out of the ditch, and someone's throwing him pills,
30:37
like here you go, you know, here's here's another pill. Try
30:41
this, and then then it's superimposed with another image with the man in the
30:45
ditch and the guy above is like giving him a hand and helping him get
30:51
out of the ditch as opposed to just throwing him stuff. And I think,
30:56
as at least as I'm mature and I'm still consider myself still young in
31:00
this work. But as I look at how do you sustain this work and
31:06
how do you keep going, you really have to, I believe, this
31:11
is my opinion, see the work as you're kind of a catalyst, and
31:17
there has to be very little ego involved. And to do that means being
31:22
sometimes the tough love person, still being empathetic and giving people the benefit of
31:30
the doubt, like hoping and desiring and having the intention that they will take
31:36
the tougher path that will actually probably give them more ability to become as I
31:41
like to say, their own medicine, Like, I don't want to be
31:44
the crutch for someone. It gets tricky when clients need to see you every
31:49
single week, and some people do need that because their systems are so disregulated.
31:56
But even in that case, there needs to be a good boundary and
31:59
a good separation that they are also doing their own work when they're not with
32:05
me or with their therapist. And that's kind of how I actually see very
32:10
few people one on one anymore. I do mainly group work because I saw
32:15
how powerful it was when people took the learning and the healing into their own
32:20
hands and they had more peer support as opposed to me being that single person
32:24
that's quote unquote fixing them. If that makes sense, I think, you
32:30
know, and I think there's there's a place in the rooms for fixers.
32:32
Like if I had a broken bone, I want to go to a fixer,
32:36
you know, I want to go to a surgeon that's going to,
32:37
you know, fix my bone. But for a lot of the stuff around
32:42
trauma and healing the psyche and chronic illness, the approach I'm seeing is very
32:50
different, and it's more than just working with people and helping them feel better.
32:57
It's getting them to learn how they can make themselves feel better. If
33:00
that makes sense. It does. Yeah, I mean, yeah, we
33:06
can go on and on with this now, and I really enjoy talking with
33:08
you. I just want to want to remind everyone that I'm speaking with Irene
33:12
Lion. Her website is Irene Lion dot com. That's I R E N
33:16
E L y o n dot com. Let's talk about let's kind of segue
33:21
into what it is you do. I mean, I'm looking at website now,
33:25
which I love. By the way, you have programs, you have
33:28
free resources, you have events. Let's talk about let's pick kind of pick
33:31
something out that you can share with our audience. Yeah. Well, um,
33:36
like I said, I don't do very much private work anymore. If
33:38
I do, it's mainly with practitioners who are, you know, needing consultation
33:45
and their own sessions. And what I'm mainly focused on now are my online
33:51
programs. So that kind of came out. When I was with my private
33:57
practice people, I would send them home with audio like audio lessons that I
34:06
had recorded, just guiding them through their nervous systems being able to sense feel
34:14
and at the same time, I was also doing a lot of lectures and
34:17
talks teaching people like detailed information about their nervous systems and how stress comes in
34:24
and how the biology responds. And so over the course of about i'd say
34:30
three years, give or take a few months, I started to amass all
34:36
that content into an online program. Okay, just to be sure the programs
34:43
for what for clients people? Okay, yeah, yeah, so yeah,
34:49
so I was. So it was kind of like when I was first starting
34:52
it, it was just an experiment, you know, I didn't really know
34:54
what I was doing, but I knew that people needed something when they weren't
35:00
with me, like they needed to learn and they needed to study. And
35:04
so I started creating these audios, these handouts, articles, videos, and
35:09
then over the course of about three years, I put them into a more
35:14
formal online program that is now a twelve week program. It's called Smart Body,
35:21
Smart Mind, and we just finished actually around it's the seventh time I've
35:28
run this twelve week program, and people basically go through it. It's really
35:32
like going to a university course in some ways, and that you show up
35:36
each week for an online lecture. There's Q and A calls, so it's
35:40
like going to your tutorial. There's breadings, there's video trainings, and then
35:45
there's the practical where they listen to an audio I call them neurosensory exercise,
35:52
and then they do that lesson, and that that work is really a unique
35:59
blend of Peter Levine's work, my other mentor, Kathy Kane, who is
36:07
well steeped in early developmental trauma, and then felt in Christ's work. So
36:12
to describe it in words can be maybe confusing, but essentially I've curated and
36:17
amalgamated those three pieces of work into this program, and so far we've had
36:27
well over I should know the numbers, well over a thousand plus people go
36:32
through it in over forty countries worldwide, so it's yeah. And then the
36:40
people in that are a mix of people. Some folks have severe chronic illness.
36:46
Others are like myself, like you, who want to learn a bit
36:52
more about the nervous system trauma. Some people are practitioners who are still healing
37:00
their own wounds and so they're in there. But all sorts of folks have
37:05
come in and really benefited from kind of that amalgamation of the work that I've
37:09
been kind of piecing together for the last twenty years. Really so that again
37:15
is called smart Body, Smart Mind. Okay, I'll have this linked up
37:19
at the show of Beach at the Trauma Thanks podcast dot com Awesome. When
37:23
is your When's the next the next weapon take? Yeah? Yeah, so
37:29
we do that right now. I run it once a year until up until
37:34
twenty seventeen it was twice a year. But I'm wanting to get back into
37:37
do into doing more mentorship and live events where I'm teaching more feldon Christ sort
37:44
of movement. So we run that every spring. So it's going to go
37:49
again in spring twenty nineteen, most likely around the first week of April last
37:54
Arch. Yeah. And then the other aside is that because I know there
37:59
might be folks who want to get started right away, we do have a
38:02
smaller self study course that was curated from the twelve weeks that's a twenty one
38:08
day kind of tune up. We call it nervous system tune up, and
38:13
that could be started at anytime, So someone who wants to start that could
38:16
do it today if they wanted to. Irene. How about a go to
38:21
book recommendations up here? Yeah, Yeah, Deutsche's are great, They're very
38:30
great stories. He's a great writer. I had two books in mind,
38:35
so one and of course Peter Levine's books are given because he's one of my
38:38
mentors. But the two books that are less known or maybe not one would
38:44
be When the Body Says No. That is a book written by doctor Gabor
38:50
Matte, and he's a physician based in Vancouver actually, but he's become quite
38:57
well known for his work on addiction, add and chronic illness. So When
39:01
the Body Says No it's a wonderful read. It's a hard read for someone
39:07
who might be living with or trying to heal a chronic illness, but it
39:10
really goes into the stress interactions and the emotional the consequences of emotional repression on
39:21
our physiology. So that one's a good one and again beautifully written with lots
39:25
of stories, which I always like. And then the other book is called
39:30
Scared Sick, Scared Sick, Okay, Scared Sick, and that's written by
39:37
a science writer named Robin car Morse. And we didn't talk about this,
39:44
but there's so much information online and I have articles on this, but that
39:47
book dives into something called the Ace Study. I'm not sure if you've had
39:52
anybody talk about the a study So that's the adverse childhood experience is study,
39:55
and that really is the seminal piece of research. It's kind of like the
40:01
framing and heart study that showed connections with heart disease back in the eighties.
40:07
This is like the study that has really shown without a question that early childhood
40:14
stress, when that is left untreated, will cause mental, physical, and
40:19
emotional illness later in life, addiction, cancers, arthritis. It's that book,
40:25
I think is probably one of the better books to break that study down
40:30
in a way that isn't too scary. It has the science, but it
40:34
also has lots of stories. It's just a really well written book for someone
40:39
who wants to learn more about these interactions of childhood stress, adversity and illness
40:46
later in life. Awesome, So that talks again when the body says no
40:51
understanding the stress disease connection. Previous guests on this podcast and then Scared Sick
40:59
the role of cherality trauma in adult disease I Robin car Morse, But Irene,
41:05
what's the best way for people to get in contact with you? My
41:07
website really, I rely on dot com. All my social feeds are there.
41:13
We have a pretty robust Facebook community too. It's called Healthy Nervous System
41:19
Revolution. I think we've got about twenty thousand people in that group, and
41:22
so that's moderated by my team of about eight people. People can ask questions
41:29
related to the nervous system. It's about education. It is not group therapy,
41:34
but it's where you can get a lot of good resources. I've got
41:37
I've got a YouTube channel that you can find on my website that's been called
41:40
binge worthy, which is always funny to me that trauma videos to be binge
41:45
worthy, but apparently they are. And then I've got a blog also,
41:50
and I'm kind of all over the place. I'm on Instagrams, I'm doing
41:52
all that stuff. Okay, Irene, has been a pleasure speaking with you.
41:57
Thank you so much for taking the time to do this. It has
42:00
been a long time coming and I appreciate it. Thank you.