Latest / Healing Her Story with Riva Jean-Paul / How Do I Heal at the Root, Not the Surface?

Transcript

How Do I Heal at the Root, Not the Surface? · Healing Her Story with Riva Jean-Paul

• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome to today's episode of the Healing Her Story Podcast.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Today we are gathering for a solo episode.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: So you've got just me today.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I feel like it's been a while since we've had some one-on-one time.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: We've had some incredible guests over the last few months.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I was feeling like it was time to come and do a solo episode.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I chose this topic specifically, one, because it's come up recently in a consultation I had in the last month.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: And two, it's something that I see happen or something that I think we're all really trying or working towards in our healing journeys.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I also believe that there's a lot of misinformation about what it means to truly get to the root of whatever it is that we are struggling with, whatever it is that we are being challenged by.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: I see this all the time in women's healing journeys.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: We want to get rid of our symptoms.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: We want to get rid of our anxiety, get rid of our depression, get rid of our emotional dysregulation, get rid of the grief, the overwhelm, the numbness, burnout.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I get it.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, we want to feel better.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, we want relief.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: And the truth is that most of us weren't taught that our symptoms aren't the problem.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, they are quite the opposite.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: They are a messenger.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: And with them, they bring good information.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: And our culture, especially the clinical medical model, doesn't teach us to listen to the messenger.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: It teaches it, teaches us to silence it.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: You get a label, you get a prescription, you get a diagnosis, sometimes, often within a 15-minute appointment, with little to no curiosity about why your body might be responding the way that it is.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: When I was taking abnormal psychology, I really struggled with this class, the only psychology class I got to be in, because it really went against so much of what I have come to understand through my own studying as a trauma-informed somatic practitioner.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: I found myself as we were going through the DSM 5, which, if you're unfamiliar with that, it's it's a book essentially written by privileged white men, I may add, that um basically breaks down all of the different um psychological diseases, disorders, etc.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: And in the book, it has a description of each disorder, disease, it has the etymology, it has um how much it occurs in populations, it also includes treatment plans as well.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of these treatment plans include medication or talk therapy.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's usually what it is, some some form of talk therapy, um, and very little, very little actual real solutions.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: So for me, I found this incredibly frustrating.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I found myself kept thinking, I kept thinking, why are we treating the anxiety instead of asking why the nervous system is alarmed?
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: Why are we treating depression instead of asking why the system is shut down?
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Why are we treating disorders, air quotes there, that look exactly like trauma responses?
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: I laugh just because it blows my mind that we're not already attuned to this level of understanding.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: And we wonder why so many of us are anxious and depressed and overwhelmed and burnt out.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: So many of these diagnoses are really trauma wearing different outfits.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: Anxiety equals hypervigilance, depression equals shutdown or collapse, perfectionism is essentially fawning or people pleasing.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: Difficulty regulating emotions often comes from attachment wounds.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: And burnout, more often than not, comes from chronic sympathetic activation.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: So we call these all disorders, and what I believe is that they are actually intelligent survival strategies.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: Our bodies are so incredibly wise.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I do not believe that when we experience symptoms, that it's our body malfunctioning.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: I believe that it's the body doing what it feels it needs to do to protect you and to keep you safe.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Science shows us that the thinking brain, your prefrontal cortex, can't override the survival brain.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's made up of amygdala and your nervous system.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: When the nervous system perceives a threat, even an emotional one, cortisol spikes, digestion slows, muscles tense, blood goes to your limbs to prepare for protection and escape.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: And all this happens before you even have a conscious thought about it.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: How incredibly wise are our bodies.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: So you don't decide to be anxious just the way, the same way you don't decide to not be anxious.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: Your body reacts or responds to something that feels unsafe.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: Your body responds first.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, your body, I believe, is the biggest truth barometer that we have.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: The mind will try to make sense of it later.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: And this is often why mindset affirmations and logic, they can only get you so far and they don't ever actually help us to heal traumatic imprints or attachment wounds.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: And this is why so many women feel like they're quote unquote failing at healing.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: I don't believe they're failing though.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: I believe that they are trying to think their way out of a body problem, or maybe not a body problem, but they're trying to think their way out of something that can only really be solved with the body.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're wondering about getting to the root, your body holds the root.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: Trauma is not stored as a memory the same way a normal event is.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's stored as sensation, tension, tightness, breath patterns, muscle guarding, shutdown.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: All of this is implicit memory.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: And often these memories are created before we had the language to describe these experiences or situations that we went through.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: So a lot of these early memories that are at the root of our anxiety, of our depression, our dysregulation, more often than not, we don't even have words to actually describe them because they happened at a time before this part of our brain was fully formed.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: So if something that happened early, which again is more often than not, which is at the root of what you are experiencing, it almost always comes from what happened in those developmental years.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: So if that's the case for you specifically, I'm not saying this is the case every time, but why would you think you would be able to talk your way out of that problem?
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: You can't talk your way through that.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: You can't talk your way through something that lives in the body system that existed before language evolved.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I will say that again: you cannot heal a survival response with a strategy meant for thinking.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: And this is where the brilliance of internal family systems or IFS can come in.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Internal family systems teaches there are no bad parts.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: Every part of you is doing something on purpose.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of these things, as I've already named, they're they're survival strategies.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: All of our parts, through the lens of IFS, have the best intentions.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: Your anxiety, it's it's trying to protect you from something.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: Your shutdown, it's trying to shield you from something.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: Your perfectionism is just trying to keep you safe, making sure that you get loved and accepted.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: Your burnout kept you from collapsing sooner.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: Your numbness helped you survive what you couldn't emotionally process.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: So is your body betraying you or is your body prioritizing you?
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that part of you that you've been fighting that's the one keeping you alive.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: So the work is not to get rid, air quotes, of the symptom.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: The work is to understand the purpose.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: What is this trying so hard to protect me from?
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: What danger did my nervous system once experience?
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: What has my body holding for me until I was ready to feel it?
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: This is why somatic work, and specifically through the work that I offer, breath work, trauma-informed embodiment, it really can change people's lives.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: Because somatic work takes healing out of the mind and into the body, into the breath, into the unconscious memory networks, into the limbic system, into the felt sense.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: And when you drop into an altered state through breath work or maybe through plant medicine, the thinking brain begins to soften.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of the barriers and blocks that are keeping us safe all day, they begin to soften.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: And that's when we can start to access the deepest layers of our psyche, where our identity lives, where our early childhood experiences live.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: And when we're in a safe and sacred container with someone who is calm and grounded and present, these stories, these deeper layers can slowly begin to reveal themselves.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not because we force it.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's because that the body finally feels safe enough to show us what's underneath.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: Getting to the root, it's it's not about force.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's about creating safety.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: Healing doesn't come from I need to fix this.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: It comes from I'm willing to listen.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: Listening to the body, listening to the protector parts, listening to what your system has been holding.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: When you understand why your body created the symptom, you can stop fighting it and you can start partnering with it.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that is the moment everything begins to change.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: So as we move through this waning moon, as we move through the end of Scorpio season, this is your invitation to slow down, to turn inward, to get curious, and maybe ask yourself what symptoms are trying to speak?
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: What emotions are asking to be felt?
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: What part of you is asking to be seen?
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: You don't need to fix yourself.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: You just need to meet yourself.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: And if you want support going deeper, I've got a free trauma recovery mini course for you in the show notes.