Latest / Overwhelmed Working Woman: Boost Productivity, Master Time Management, Overcome Overwhelm & Stop People Pleasing / #85| Breaking Free from Trauma and Overwhelm with Somatic Healing

Transcript

#85| Breaking Free from Trauma and Overwhelm with Somatic Healing · Overwhelmed Working Woman: Boost Productivity, Master Time Management, Overcome Overwhelm & Stop People Pleasing

• 0:00
  Victoria Albina: Trauma is not the thing that happened.
• 0:02
  Victoria Albina: It's how it impacted you and how your body as an organism reacted to it.
• 0:13
  Michelle Gauthier: You're listening to Overwhelmed Working Woman, the podcast that helps you be more calm and more productive by doing less.
• 0:21
  Michelle Gauthier: I'm your host, Michelle Gauthier, a former overwhelmed working woman and current life coach.
• 0:25
  Michelle Gauthier: On this show, we unpack the stress and pressure that today's working woman experiences and in each episode you'll get a strategy to bring more calm, ease and relaxation to your life.
• 0:37
  Michelle Gauthier: Hey friend, thanks for joining today.
• 0:42
  Michelle Gauthier: We've got a great episode for you today and I think it's really fascinating because I'm very into the connection between our mind and our body.
• 0:49
  Michelle Gauthier: So today you're going to learn about ways to reduce overwhelm and trauma by doing exercises with your body.
• 0:58
  Michelle Gauthier: Our guest's name today is Victoria Albina and she is a master certified somatic life coach - somatic being body - life coach and we're going to talk about today the connection between what trauma is.
• 1:10
  Michelle Gauthier: First of all, the connection between trauma and the nervous system and emotional triggers that can get all of that brought back up in your body.
• 1:18
  Michelle Gauthier: And then practical tools that you can easily do without other people, even knowing you're doing them in a public place, to calm your nervous system and find more balance.
• 1:27
  Michelle Gauthier: So I think this will be a great episode for you if you find yourself becoming emotionally triggered based on things that have happened in your past, so take a listen.
• 1:36
  Michelle Gauthier: Meanwhile, this is the very last week that I am accepting new clients for group coaching for the rest of 2024 and well into 2025.
• 1:48
  Michelle Gauthier: In our group coaching, we start at the end of this week and we go all the way through February, so that you will have a nice, easy transition to wrap up this year, make your goals for next year and set yourself in the direction that you want for 2025.
• 2:04
  Michelle Gauthier: Click the link in the show notes to set up a time to talk to me if you're interested in joining group coaching.
• 2:09
  Michelle Gauthier: Okay, here's our episode.
• 2:11
  Michelle Gauthier: Thank you so much, Victoria, for being on the podcast today.
• 2:14
  Michelle Gauthier: I'm excited to talk to you.
• 2:16
  Victoria Albina: It is such a delight to be here, thank you.
• 2:18
  Victoria Albina: Thank you, and for those who are watching your socials, we showed up wearing the same color blue and I think it's kismet.
• 2:26
  Michelle Gauthier: Yes, exactly, exactly, and we both have dark hair and cute earrings on, if I do say so myself here.
• 2:33
  Michelle Gauthier: You know what I need to do.
• 2:34
  Michelle Gauthier: I just need to add these, and then we'll.
• 2:36
  Victoria Albina: Add your glasses.
• 2:36
  Victoria Albina: Wait, I'm going to switch into my clear glasses, and then we'll be there you go.
• 2:41
  Victoria Albina: Okay, there you go.
• 2:41
  Michelle Gauthier: Okay, perfect.
• 2:43
  Michelle Gauthier: Oh my gosh, how can you read?
• 2:44
  Michelle Gauthier: Except I can't actually read my computer with those on, so I'm not going to have to - Okay, great, and I can only see your face with them on.
• 2:51
  Victoria Albina: Okay, perfect, one difference.
• 2:54
  Michelle Gauthier: Okay, so you are an expert on trauma and I feel like trauma is like a popular word to say right now.
• 3:03
  Michelle Gauthier: Like my kids will say, trauma, you know, even when they're just joking about something.
• 3:12
  Michelle Gauthier: Sure.
• 3:12
  Michelle Gauthier: And it seems like people overuse the word in terms of what it actually really means.
• 3:14
  Michelle Gauthier: So could you start off by telling us what trauma is, yeah, and like what effect that that can have on us?
• 3:23
  Victoria Albina: Totally, and I love that we're starting here, because it filters down into the way we understand ourself, our past, our present, what's possible in our future when we're labeling stuff triggers and trauma when it's just not so.
• 3:38
  Victoria Albina: Trauma is too much, too fast, too soon.
• 3:41
  Victoria Albina: It's something that wildly overwhelmed the capacity of the nervous system to stay grounded and present within itself, and so trauma is not the thing that happened.
• 3:54
  Victoria Albina: It's how it impacted you and how your body as an organism reacted to it.
• 4:02
  Michelle Gauthier: Oh my gosh.
• 4:02
  Michelle Gauthier: Okay, I just wrote that down too much, too fast, too soon, so it's not like something that happened to me, let's say, at a certain age.
• 4:11
  Michelle Gauthier: If it happened to me at a later age, when it wasn't too much or too fast or too soon, it would have potentially not been traumatic or just felt different to me.
• 4:20
  Michelle Gauthier: Yeah.
• 4:22
  Victoria Albina: Which makes so much sense when we think about our capacity.
• 4:25
  Victoria Albina: Like, did you have your toddlers do your taxes, just like, curiously, yeah, yeah, okay, great.
• 4:31
  Victoria Albina: So I'm going to take that as a no, right, because they didn't have the capacity right, and demanding that they do your taxes is too much, too fast, too soon.
• 4:41
  Victoria Albina: Yeah, obviously I'm using and I'll just say for listeners, I tend to use really banal, kind of like throwaway examples for the goal of not activating our nervous systems.
• 4:52
  Victoria Albina: That's good.
• 4:53
  Victoria Albina: So could we talk about different kinds of assault?
• 4:56
  Victoria Albina: Sure, but I'm not gonna.
• 4:59
  Victoria Albina: I want you to be able to stay present for the rest of this conversation, so we're going to talk about toddlers doing taxes and hopefully no one will actually get triggered.
• 5:06
  Victoria Albina: Do you know what I mean?
• 5:07
  Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, absolutely yeah, that would be a huge waste of time.
• 5:10
  Michelle Gauthier: Okay, so if someone has a suspicion - because another thing I feel like you hear all the time is triggers and like that's a trauma response or whatever - how do we know when we have had trauma?
• 5:22
  Victoria Albina: So it's interesting.
• 5:23
  Victoria Albina: So my brain said sort of two things, a couple of things.
• 5:26
  Victoria Albina: One, we all have.
• 5:27
  Victoria Albina: Two, why does it matter?
• 5:29
  Victoria Albina: Good question, Right.
• 5:32
  Victoria Albina: So we all have right.
• 5:34
  Victoria Albina: Being a mammal is traumatic.
• 5:36
  Victoria Albina: Being born is traumatic.
• 5:37
  Victoria Albina: And do you have the capacity and resilience in your nervous system to support yourself and to show up and live an authentic life that serves you right now?
• 5:49
  Victoria Albina: Do you need to go digging around in the past, or are there places where you're not functioning in a way that feels optimal for you?
• 5:59
  Victoria Albina: In which case, yeah, maybe go looking around, but asking these broad strokes like, do I have trauma?
• 6:08
  Victoria Albina: I don't know if that serves us.
• 6:10
  Victoria Albina: You know what I'm saying?
• 6:12
  Victoria Albina: Okay, that's interesting.
• 6:14
  Michelle Gauthier: No, I'm glad you're saying that.
• 6:15
  Michelle Gauthier: So I want to just dig into that a little bit, because yeah, totally.
• 6:18
  Michelle Gauthier: I feel like the general I'm just speaking on behalf of people who don't know a lot about trauma, so I feel like the general idea is like if I have trauma, that's something that I need to work through and get over.
• 6:32
  Michelle Gauthier: And what I hear you saying is if you have trauma, okay.
• 6:35
  Michelle Gauthier: Like you know, bummer, sorry that happened.
• 6:38
  Victoria Albina: But also, are you at a place in your life right now where you're okay, right and when you sit in quiet stillness with yourself, you're truly at peace, so you're not buffering, which is when we do activity, activity, activity, activity to not feel the feelings.
• 6:56
  Victoria Albina: We're not in emotional collapse avoidance, where we say, it's fine, it's fine, I just was in Vietnam and whatever happened, we're not pushing it away, we're not suck it up buttercup, we're not doom scrolling to not think about it.
• 7:12
  Victoria Albina: Are you actually okay?
• 7:16
  Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, If you added online shopping to that list you just gave, I would have been like I was doing all of those things about 10 years ago.
• 7:23
  Michelle Gauthier: So what if somebody is?
• 7:25
  Michelle Gauthier: What should they do?
• 7:27
  Michelle Gauthier: Or how does that trauma affect our behaviors?
• 7:31
  Victoria Albina: Yeah.
• 7:31
  Victoria Albina: So to go back to what you were saying, and I'll link it in a second you were talking about how, and I just want to be really clear.
• 7:38
  Victoria Albina: I'm not saying it doesn't matter for us to work on our trauma.
• 7:41
  Victoria Albina: This is literally my life's work is doing somatic, experiencing and helping people to work with their trauma.
• 7:47
  Victoria Albina: But to your point of, are we sometimes sort of digging in the dirt, looking for something that may or may not be there?
• 7:54
  Victoria Albina: Sometimes I think we need to sort of slow our roll, right?
• 7:58
  Victoria Albina: Okay, so there's a lot of things that are getting labeled like quote unquote trauma, responses that are totally normal, natural, human things to do.
• 8:07
  Victoria Albina: Right, like biting your nails doesn't mean you have trauma.
• 8:11
  Victoria Albina: It means you're a little anxious and you maybe had too much coffee or not enough water, or took too much B vitamins or not enough, or - Right.
• 8:21
  Victoria Albina: So I think that's where I wish that, collectively, we would slow things down.
• 8:26
  Victoria Albina: And I think what's really hard is that in this moment of late stage capitalism, there's this demand to make these 90 second reels.
• 8:33
  Victoria Albina: I actually just heard yesterday that now the algorithm likes 60 second reels, right, and so we are pushing ourselves to make complex topics 59 seconds, and so biting your nails as a trauma response is a way to say what's the root cause of your anxiety.
• 8:49
  Victoria Albina: Trauma may be on that list, but buy from me, and so here's my soundbite.
• 8:55
  Victoria Albina: You know what I'm saying?
• 8:56
  Victoria Albina: Yep, so I think it's really important, before we go saying this is trauma, we take a look at our actual selves and what the what is for us.
• 9:06
  Victoria Albina: Okay, that makes sense.
• 9:07
  Victoria Albina: And so then your question was if it's you and you're like, oh yeah, I am in this trauma spin, what do I do?
• 9:16
  Victoria Albina: I think that really depends on how much it's impeding your life.
• 9:19
  Victoria Albina: First of all, are you at the level where you can complete your activities of daily living right, like?
• 9:25
  Victoria Albina: Are you showering, are you brushing your teeth?
• 9:27
  Victoria Albina: Right, like, are we at the level where we need inpatient support?
• 9:31
  Victoria Albina: Or are you at the point where you feel like you know so I can talk about the state of functional freeze which is when our nervous system is both sort of revved up in that panicky fight or flight adrenaline, go go, go, hypervigilant, and we're sort of frozen to our own emotions, right, so we're shut down inside to how we think, like, really think how we feel, what we actually want, what we actually need.
• 9:57
  Victoria Albina: But we're sort of anxiously bouncing around the world getting medical degrees and law degrees and business degrees and we're like creating things and doing things and functional, meaning we're not catatonic, right, we're not shut down and in that state, which is the state most of my clients and most of my patients were in, we look pretty good on the outside.
• 10:20
  Victoria Albina: We get defensive in every conversation with our partners.
• 10:23
  Victoria Albina: We shut down anytime someone doesn't listen the whole way through, like our nervous systems are quick to react, quick to be reactive and big or shut down or bounce from one to the other and we're not able to be present with our emotions.
• 10:39
  Victoria Albina: So like I'm trying to paint like sort of two ends of a spectrum here, right, like not showering and C-suite but not living the life you want to live from your authenticity.
• 10:51
  Michelle Gauthier: Yes, yes.
• 10:52
  Michelle Gauthier: So that latter one is probably the vast majority of listeners, right for this podcast, and I think it's really common for almost every client that I have, and it was for me as well that we figured out how to really succeed and excel in life.
• 11:09
  Michelle Gauthier: But if you were to have said to me 10 years ago can you just sit with your own thoughts and feel peaceful, I would have been like.
• 11:18
  Victoria Albina: I don't millions of things that I needed to do.
• 11:26
  Michelle Gauthier: And so I feel like that description is exactly who you're talking to.
• 11:32
  Victoria Albina: Totally, totally, and just if you are in the former category, where you're not showering, please seek a licensed clinical therapist Right, go to care, absolutely.
• 11:42
  Victoria Albina: Us coaches are, for the other side of the spectrum, exactly, exactly.
• 11:47
  Victoria Albina: Important to say out loud, though yeah, and so that's when we really need to slow things down, right, like you mentioned.
• 11:57
  Victoria Albina: I mean, you hit the nail right on the head.
• 11:59
  Victoria Albina: Again, trauma is too much, too fast, too soon.
• 12:02
  Victoria Albina: So what's the opposite?
• 12:04
  Victoria Albina: Small amounts, really, really slowly, which is so antithetical to how most of us are living, right?
• 12:15
  Michelle Gauthier: Absolutely.
• 12:15
  Michelle Gauthier: I will often, when talking to a new client, say okay, I have found over time I've been doing this for six years I've found over time that working with someone one-on-one for six months is how long it usually takes to make solid, lasting change to how you're feeling.
• 12:31
  Michelle Gauthier: And many times they'll say Does it really take that long?
• 12:35
  Michelle Gauthier: I want it to take three months.
• 12:37
  Michelle Gauthier: And that's exactly what I would have said when it was me, or I would have been just thinking in my head it probably takes most people six months.
• 12:43
  Michelle Gauthier: It'll take me three months.
• 12:48
  Michelle Gauthier: I'm going to do this, yeah, yeah, exactly so I feel like it's the polar opposite of exactly how most women who are overachievers and feeling overwhelmed would want to approach the problem.
• 12:57
  Victoria Albina: Right, because we've found a lot of protection right and a lot of sense of safety in not slowing down.
• 13:05
  Victoria Albina: Because if we slow down, then all those feelings we've been repressing, pushing away, ignoring are going to come to the surface right, and we're going to have to deal with being really angry at our partners and our parents and our siblings and our kids and society and that boss Remember that boss when you were 23, that schmuck, and you're gonna really grieve that breakup when you were 16, but you're 46.
• 13:30
  Victoria Albina: And that you didn't have a dance career and that you know what I mean.
• 13:36
  Victoria Albina: Like it's all gonna come to the surface because it's gonna, because you probably it would serve you if it did and we fear it, in part because we're not fools.
• 13:48
  Victoria Albina: Let me expound on that.
• 13:50
  Victoria Albina: We build all of these walls internally to not feel it, and so we stop flexing the muscle of self-regulation, we stop flexing the muscles that give us the capacity to be with ourselves, support ourselves, attend and attune to our nervous system, our mind, our body, our spirit, our inner children, because we're not doing that.
• 14:15
  Victoria Albina: But we have this long list over here.
• 14:18
  Michelle Gauthier: But all that feelings, stuff nah, yeah, yeah, I used to brag about.
• 14:25
  Michelle Gauthier: I haven't cried in like five years.
• 14:27
  Michelle Gauthier: I can push through anything.
• 14:30
  Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, I'm like oh, poor Michelle, I'm sorry I did that to you.
• 14:34
  Michelle Gauthier: I know so mean.
• 14:35
  Michelle Gauthier: So what should we do if we're in that Wait, wait, wait wait, wait.
• 14:39
  Victoria Albina: Can I stop you, Michelle?
• 14:40
  Victoria Albina: What if it wasn't mean?
• 14:43
  Victoria Albina: What if it was?
• 14:44
  Victoria Albina: All the capacity you had in that moment was to shut it down?
• 14:47
  Victoria Albina: It was.
• 14:49
  Michelle Gauthier: That was Right.
• 14:49
  Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, it was just getting through what I didn't want to feel.
• 14:54
  Victoria Albina: Exactly yeah, thanks, that's nice.
• 14:57
  Victoria Albina: Yeah, it is nice.
• 14:58
  Victoria Albina: Yeah, it feels yeah, right.
• 15:02
  Victoria Albina: And so that's the whole goal of the somatic work I do is for us to feel that compassion for self in our bodies, in our bones, Right, and to step out of this beating ourselves up, pushing ourselves paradigm that we are all just swimming in, especially as overwhelmed working women, right.
• 15:22
  Victoria Albina: So we can slow down and say like, yeah, this has been too much, too fast, too soon.
• 15:28
  Victoria Albina: Yeah, right, managing a household, often without any help, carrying all the emotional labor of the household, being the only one who knows how much toilet paper is in the second floor bathroom never enough, right.
• 15:40
  Victoria Albina: And working a full-time job.
• 15:43
  Victoria Albina: And then you're supposed to go to yoga too.
• 15:45
  Victoria Albina: Like, are you in, freaking?
• 15:47
  Victoria Albina: What are you talking about?
• 15:49
  Victoria Albina: Right?
• 15:50
  Victoria Albina: And so having compassion for these versions of ourselves that we're just doing our level best is a vital place to start.
• 15:59
  Victoria Albina: A while ago, you said that if 10 years ago you'd said to me, sit in silence, I would have been like, okay, bye, gotta go, errands, important meetings with, not that.
• 16:10
  Victoria Albina: And so we can't sit with that unless we feel safe internally and we feel safe internally when we let ourselves have feelings.
• 16:18
  Michelle Gauthier: Okay, let's just like take a second with that?
• 16:22
  Victoria Albina: Yeah, let's slow it down?
• 16:23
  Michelle Gauthier: Yes, because that makes so much sense, I think.
• 16:27
  Michelle Gauthier: First of all, I want you to say that again, but before you do, can you go back and tell everyone, just in case they don't know what a somatic healer is.
• 16:39
  Victoria Albina: I got excited.
• 16:40
  Victoria Albina: Yeah, okay, nerds talking to nerds, exactly so, and nerd is my greatest compliment.
• 16:46
  Victoria Albina: People Worry not, I'm not insulting you, michelle, or myself.
• 16:50
  Victoria Albina: So soma means body in Greek, and somatic is any process, practice, modality that returns to the primacy of the body, the great and never-ending importance of the body as our primary vehicle, yeah, an absolute font of incredible and eternal wisdom, and really is turning the whole.
• 17:17
  Victoria Albina: You know, let's throw Descartes the full way under the bus.
• 17:21
  Victoria Albina: Right, this mind-body dualism, schism.
• 17:24
  Victoria Albina: We are not just a mind and just a body.
• 17:28
  Victoria Albina: Right, the mind is not the most important thing.
• 17:31
  Victoria Albina: Cognition is important.
• 17:32
  Victoria Albina: Thought work is vital.
• 17:34
  Victoria Albina: We have to look at mindset and how we're thinking.
• 17:37
  Victoria Albina: But if that's all we're doing, we're missing a ton of information and stress, distress and trauma that get written into the body and held as tension patterns.
• 17:47
  Victoria Albina: And so somatic practices bring us back to the body so we can hear its wisdom, so the body can guide us and so we can support the renegotiation of any trauma held in the body, so we can complete the stress activation cycle, which is we get stressed out when we are kids, we scream about it.
• 18:05
  Victoria Albina: Right, he bit me, he took my lollipop, and we get it out of their body, or they cry and they cry and they cry.
• 18:13
  Victoria Albina: But as grownups we sit at the boardroom table fuming, wanting to punch Jarrett in the throat.
• 18:19
  Victoria Albina: But he's the VP and so we can't, and that stays in the body.
• 18:23
  Victoria Albina: That stress that like, oh, tension, yeah.
• 18:28
  Michelle Gauthier: Yes, yeah, so that's what somatics does.
• 18:30
  Michelle Gauthier: That makes sense.
• 18:32
  Michelle Gauthier: So one of the ways that people who have been listening to this podcast would be familiar with this is I definitely try to teach people to figure out how they're feeling based on clues in their body.
• 18:45
  Michelle Gauthier: So one thing that I'll talk about for me personally is anxiety.
• 18:49
  Michelle Gauthier: It feels like a tightness in my chest.
• 18:51
  Michelle Gauthier: I also feel a tingling in my fingertips, so we try to use the body for clues for how we feel, so that we can then back up to what we're thinking.
• 19:01
  Michelle Gauthier: So I think that concept in general of our body having information that we can use in order to try to make ourselves feel better will be familiar in that.
• 19:12
  Victoria Albina: That's awesome and I'm so glad you're helping people to reconnect with that, because that's exactly what we lose touch with.
• 19:19
  Michelle Gauthier: Right, yes, and when I first start working with someone, it is very common that they'll be like I actually don't feel my feelings in my body anywhere, or I don't know what feelings I'm having, and so just I feel like it's at a basic level of just teaching people to have awareness.
• 19:35
  Michelle Gauthier: Like, okay, I feel really joyful right now.
• 19:36
  Michelle Gauthier: Where do I feel that?
• 19:37
  Michelle Gauthier: Okay, it's a lightness in my shoulders or whatever it is.
• 19:41
  Michelle Gauthier: So I feel like there could be some familiarity there.
• 19:44
  Michelle Gauthier: But tell me how you then go on to use the body to get information about trauma and healing the nervous system or whatever.
• 19:55
  Michelle Gauthier: I don't want to put words in your mouth because I don't know how you would say it.
• 19:57
  Michelle Gauthier: So you tell me.
• 19:59
  Victoria Albina: Yeah, so I am trained in somatic experiencing, which is Peter Levine's work, and the somatic experiencing practice and process is about helping the body to complete that stress activation cycle we were talking about, so that that's not held inside the body where it impacts literally everything else.
• 20:20
  Victoria Albina: Right, we live life projecting our thoughts and feelings into the world, unless we're conscious and thoughtful and try not to, or we still do it.
• 20:29
  Victoria Albina: Right, that's how being a human with a meaning-making brain is, and through the somatic experiencing process we can be a lot more conscientious and thoughtful and can learn how to slow things down when we feel sensation arising in the body.
• 20:44
  Victoria Albina: Right, so that we don't literally or metaphorically punch anybody in the face in a boardroom.
• 20:50
  Victoria Albina: Right, because what they're saying is activating something old.
• 20:54
  Michelle Gauthier: Okay, okay, that makes sense.
• 20:56
  Michelle Gauthier: So if this Jarrett I think you said his pretend- name was yeah, Really is pissing us off in the boardroom and we have this rage and this anger.
• 21:06
  Michelle Gauthier: If we have awareness in our body that that is happening, then how do we close that?
• 21:13
  Michelle Gauthier: How do we go all the way through that stress cycle so that we can let it go?
• 21:18
  Victoria Albina: Yeah, so we may not be able to in the boardroom in this occasion, right?
• 21:22
  Victoria Albina: So that's when we can excuse ourselves to the loo or calm the nervous system temporarily, so that we can keep our jobs and not face criminal charges, and we can get to a safer space, you know, to our office or to our car, and can then give our nervous system the space to effectively do what it needs to do, either IRL, like in real life, or in the visual cortex.
• 21:50
  Victoria Albina: I'm going to explain what.
• 21:51
  Victoria Albina: So there's a lot of different techniques we use in somatic experiencing, so let's talk about this - I made this - poor Jared.
• 21:58
  Victoria Albina: I don't know a Jared, do you?
• 22:00
  Michelle Gauthier: Well, that's probably a good example, then.
• 22:02
  Michelle Gauthier: W hat if you were talking about a real person?
• 22:04
  Victoria Albina: So it's like my friend's husband, Tim, isn't like, wait a second! Yeah, exactly Right, I don't know what, Tim either, but anyway, in this example there's rage, right, you're so pissed at this guy and that your body needs to move anger through, to move sympathetic activation through.
• 22:20
  Victoria Albina: So what is sympathetic, it's fight or flight, it's adrenaline, it's there's a lion coming and I want to punch it in the nose or book it out of there, and so the body might want to push right, there might be a pushing energy.
• 22:35
  Victoria Albina: So what's safe to push on, if not Jared's face, the wall, or what about your desk?
• 22:38
  Victoria Albina: Right?
• 22:39
  Victoria Albina: So maybe in the boardroom, what you can do is push down on the desk or push on the chair as a way to and really picture that bright red rage moving through your hands and into the chair.
• 22:51
  Victoria Albina: And so then we're bringing in the visual cortex, and so I'm going to nerd real hard.
• 22:56
  Victoria Albina: Are you ready?
• 22:57
  Victoria Albina: I love it.
• 22:57
  Victoria Albina: Yes.
• 22:58
  Victoria Albina: Pocket protector on yes.
• 22:59
  Michelle Gauthier: The more the better.
• 23:00
  Michelle Gauthier: Yes, safety glasses.
• 23:01
  Michelle Gauthier: Okay, great, here we go.
• 23:03
  Victoria Albina: Closed-toe shoes, please.
• 23:04
  Victoria Albina: Okay, so the medial frontal cortex, which is my favorite part of the brain, is your third eye, it's your watcher, it's the part of the brain that watches you as your consciousness.
• 23:17
  Victoria Albina: Can we just pause and say how frigging cool is that?
• 23:20
  Victoria Albina: It's just kind of crazy.
• 23:21
  Victoria Albina: What are you talking about?
• 23:23
  Victoria Albina: That's amazing.
• 23:25
  Victoria Albina: And so what somatic experiencing does is changes, the experience as recorded in the medial frontal cortex of us in the moment of trauma.
• 23:36
  Victoria Albina: And so we effectively I'm going to bring this back to Jared, I promise In a session go back to that moment of trauma.
• 23:43
  Victoria Albina: You don't have to retell the story, you don't have to relive it, except to relive the part where you shut down or you went into a rage, or you weren't able to go into a rage.
• 23:53
  Victoria Albina: And we allow you by either pushing on the wall or punching a pillow within this sort of therapeutic setting of a session, or scream at the top of your lungs, either in real life or in your mind, as a way to rewrite your nervous system's relationship to that moment.
• 24:11
  Victoria Albina: Right, so you wanted to run and scream and punch and throw things.
• 24:16
  Victoria Albina: You couldn't, but now you do.
• 24:18
  Victoria Albina: And so, instead of the nervous system, through the medial frontal cortex.
• 24:22
  Victoria Albina: Having experienced you as shutting down, you now feel powerful.
• 24:27
  Victoria Albina: You now feel strong and so you're completing that stress cycle that got started and then thwarted, and instead your body rolls all the way through it and you emerge victorious right Energetically.
• 24:42
  Michelle Gauthier: Okay, that makes sense, and so then the case is kind of closed in a new way, like you experienced one thing, but you can change it.
• 24:51
  Michelle Gauthier: And then what happens then the next time you're in the boardroom with Jared?
• 24:57
  Victoria Albina: Right.
• 24:57
  Victoria Albina: The hope is and it takes time at task but that you wouldn't go to the kind of rage where you're not able to use your words right.
• 25:06
  Victoria Albina: You can still feel sacred anger if that's called for, but you're not like losing it, as it were, like you're not going so far out of your grounded present self, which is what trauma does.
• 25:20
  Victoria Albina: It takes us out of our grounded present self because when we're grounded we can talk, we can say hey, jarrett, hold up.
• 25:25
  Victoria Albina: What you just said doesn't work for me, because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 25:28
  Victoria Albina: But when we out into rage we can't say anything, right, we can't change the reality.
• 25:37
  Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, I think it's just hard to have a thought that makes sense or would be clear, or that you could articulate, because you're too upset.
• 25:45
  Victoria Albina: Just a rage monkey?
• 25:46
  Victoria Albina: Yeah, right, exactly.
• 25:48
  Victoria Albina: You're just seeing red and you just want to scream and punch.
• 25:50
  Victoria Albina: Instead, your nervous system would be, would have detached from that feeling of like victimhood or thwarted anger that you had before, and instead you could stay calm and grounded and could speak up.
• 26:03
  Victoria Albina: Right, if you needed to speak up or if, like, it's not something where speaking up would help, you can just let it sort of glide on by, instead of going into that old, potentially a trauma pattern.
• 26:16
  Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, which is it's so awesome, because you can then like, be in the situation and still be there, if you can let that rage roll off your back, if that's the right thing to do in that situation, and then you can move on and talk about something else and your whole day sometimes at least if I get really upset my whole day can be focusing back on that, and if you can just let that go in the moment, then amazing Right.
• 26:42
  Victoria Albina: And like how many of us I hear this all the time like oh, why didn't I say something?
• 26:47
  Victoria Albina: Or I wish I'd said something.
• 26:48
  Victoria Albina: You know what I mean?
• 26:49
  Victoria Albina: Yes, and I think that sort of like I wish I could have.
• 26:53
  Victoria Albina: A lot of us keep ruminating.
• 26:55
  Victoria Albina: I hear it from clients constantly and we can't say anything because our nervous system has dysregulated in that moment and we don't have the capacity to think yeah, which is like literally by design.
• 27:07
  Victoria Albina: Michelle, if you were being chased by a lion, would you want to be able to do calculus?
• 27:18
  Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, I mean, I can't do calculus even when I'm not, but I get what you're saying.
• 27:20
  Michelle Gauthier: I get what you're saying.
• 27:20
  Michelle Gauthier: I don't want to have any complex thoughts.
• 27:21
  Michelle Gauthier: I just want to get out of there.
• 27:21
  Victoria Albina: No complex thoughts Run, run, punch, run yeah.
• 27:29
  Michelle Gauthier: So when we can calm and ground the nervous system.
• 27:30
  Michelle Gauthier: You can do proverbial calculus yes, yeah, exactly, okay.
• 27:32
  Michelle Gauthier: That makes so much sense.
• 27:34
  Michelle Gauthier: So I'm going to ask you in just a second how people can work with you if your work is resonating with them In the meantime.
• 27:43
  Michelle Gauthier: Is there like one little For me?
• 27:46
  Michelle Gauthier: What I'm taking away is the pushing idea, like to push on something and to envision that anger.
• 27:53
  Michelle Gauthier: Is there anything else that people can do in the moment that you would recommend just to calm themselves?
• 27:59
  Michelle Gauthier: Maybe not fully, but to go from full-on rage to frustration or some lesser emotion.
• 28:06
  Victoria Albina: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 28:07
  Victoria Albina: So one of my absolute favorite things to do because we can do it pretty much anywhere is changing the rhythm.
• 28:14
  Victoria Albina: So we talked about how trauma is too much, too fast, too soon.
• 28:17
  Victoria Albina: So if we're feeling huge, big feelings and we want to slow them down, we slow our movement, we slow our breathing down, we slow our movement, we slow our breathing and we use our prefrontal cortex, the executive function part of the brain, to bring us out of the limbic brain, the reptile brain or monkey mind, and into a part of the brain that could potentially I can't, I don't remember calculus either.
• 28:39
  Victoria Albina: That was like 1995.
• 28:41
  Victoria Albina: Like, get out of here.
• 28:43
  Victoria Albina: But we slow it down through patterns and simple things like counting, and this is going to sound like ridiculously simple, but trust and believe.
• 28:53
  Victoria Albina: So take your paws, two paws if you want to, one paw, it couldn't matter less.
• 28:58
  Victoria Albina: If you're revved up and going too fast, you're going to take your thumb and you're going to tap it on your first finger and say one, your New first finger, and say one, your New York finger, and say two, your ring finger, and say three, your pinky, and say four.
• 29:17
  Victoria Albina: Then you're going to come back Four, three, two, one, and go even slower if you need to, but really allow the rhythm, breathe in the slow rhythm, the counting and the pattern, the repetitive pattern.
• 29:40
  Victoria Albina: Allow your nervous system to calm down.
• 29:43
  Victoria Albina: If, in a moment of stress or you know Jared's saying something mean at you and you feel yourself shut down like deer in the headlights, possum playing possum, you're just like wait what?
• 29:53
  Victoria Albina: And you know you want to activate your nervous system just a little bit so you can come back like snap into presence.
• 30:00
  Victoria Albina: Do the same thing fast One, two, three, four, four, three.
• 30:03
  Victoria Albina: Two, one, one, two, three, four, four, three, two.
• 30:05
  Victoria Albina: It's like a little shot of espresso, but without the jitters.
• 30:08
  Victoria Albina: You know, and it just starts to wake the body up and really bring the prefrontal cortex back online so you can have a witty retort for Jared right and not just feel like wait what?
• 30:20
  Michelle Gauthier: Yes, yes, okay, oh, I love that.
• 30:22
  Michelle Gauthier: That's two great easy tips and you could do that just under the table Put your hands under the table.
• 30:29
  Victoria Albina: No one knows you're doing it, yeah.
• 30:31
  Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, that's perfect.
• 30:32
  Michelle Gauthier: I love it so much.
• 30:33
  Michelle Gauthier: Okay, I have two questions that I ask every guest, and actually the first question what the answer you just gave might be your answer, but what's something that you do when you're overwhelmed to make yourself feel better right away.
• 30:46
  Victoria Albina: Oh yeah, okay, so the counting one is great.
• 30:52
  Victoria Albina: My other super favorite nervous system exercise is called orienting.
• 30:54
  Victoria Albina: And well, why not?
• 30:55
  Victoria Albina: So I have a little surprise.
• 30:56
  Victoria Albina: Okay, I made a present for your audience.
• 30:59
  Victoria Albina: Yay, oh, my god, it's so exciting.
• 31:02
  Victoria Albina: So my other favorite thing, too, is called orienting, and I recorded an orienting exercise just for them and a couple other.
• 31:09
  Victoria Albina: And I recorded an orienting exercise just for them and a couple other.
• 31:10
  Victoria Albina: I made a whole suite of meditations and nervous system exercises, and if you go to victorialbinacom slash overwhelmedworkingwoman, you can download the whole thing for free.
• 31:22
  Michelle Gauthier: They're yours, I love that.
• 31:24
  Victoria Albina: Yeah, it's not so fun.
• 31:25
  Victoria Albina: So I'll just give you a little foreshadowing.
• 31:28
  Victoria Albina: Orienting is when you effectively just remind your nervous system of when and where you are by just looking around.
• 31:36
  Victoria Albina: Again, most nervous system stuff sounds overly simple, because it is.
• 31:42
  Victoria Albina: It needs to be right.
• 31:45
  Victoria Albina: And so you look around the space you're in and you just notice, because when we're in trauma, like an actual trauma response, we are in the time when it was too much, too fast, too soon.
• 31:56
  Victoria Albina: We're not in this moment where we are a grown-up, overwhelmed working woman with a lot of capacity, with a lot of skills, with you know who is a grown-up, who can use her words, and instead we're four or six or 22 or 32.
• 32:13
  Victoria Albina: And we don't, we can't take care of ourselves, right, we are subjugate.
• 32:19
  Victoria Albina: And so when we look around and take in the space, we can remind our nervous system when, where, who we actually are, which helps us come back from a trauma response.
• 32:30
  Michelle Gauthier: Perfect.
• 32:31
  Michelle Gauthier: I love that.
• 32:32
  Michelle Gauthier: That's so great, and I also love the idea that you have meditations and other things out there.
• 32:38
  Michelle Gauthier: So everybody go get that.
• 32:39
  Michelle Gauthier: We'll put the link in the show notes for sure.
• 32:41
  Michelle Gauthier: And then my second question.
• 32:43
  Michelle Gauthier: I ask everyone, because I'm a big proponent of doing less in order to feel less overwhelmed.
• 32:49
  Michelle Gauthier: So where's somewhere or something that you consistently do in order to feel less overwhelmed?
• 32:50
  Michelle Gauthier: So where's somewhere or something that you consistently do in order to do less or save time?
• 32:56
  Victoria Albina: Delegation has been such a huge thing when I was so deep in a functional freeze.
• 33:02
  Victoria Albina: Of course I had to do it all because I had to have control, because if I didn't have control then everything would just.
• 33:07
  Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, and if you don't do it, who else is going to do it?
• 33:10
  Michelle Gauthier: And it's not going to be as well as you do it, right?
• 33:12
  Michelle Gauthier: Of course not.
• 33:12
  Victoria Albina: Right, and so really just reminding myself, it's okay if it doesn't get done, just that simple reminder.
• 33:20
  Victoria Albina: There's a couple, you know there's a couple true tree things that need to get done.
• 33:24
  Victoria Albina: Like you have to drink water, you have to eat something, right?
• 33:28
  Victoria Albina: You got to pay your taxes if you don't want to go to Alcatraz.
• 33:31
  Victoria Albina: But there's not that many other things that have to get done.
• 33:36
  Victoria Albina: Yeah, right, and if there's dust bunnies in the corner, I'm curious who dies.
• 33:40
  Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, yeah exactly my mother is the answer.
• 33:44
  Michelle Gauthier: Oh, I'm so sorry for your loss.
• 33:46
  Michelle Gauthier: You better not come over here, immedi your loss, you better not come over here, because immediate death.
• 33:58
  Michelle Gauthier: Yes, no, I get exactly what you're saying, Sometimes even just the reminder that, because my mind will always tell me, well, we have to get this all done and we have to do it all right now, somehow at the same time, just all of it, and so just reminding yourself, I don't have to get this all done, someone else could help me get this done.
• 34:10
  Michelle Gauthier: Sure, you know.
• 34:10
  Michelle Gauthier: To your point about delegation.
• 34:11
  Victoria Albina: Okay, that's great, or it?
• 34:13
  Michelle Gauthier: could just not get done, yeah, yeah, or just plain get dropped.
• 34:17
  Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, yeah, those are good.
• 34:19
  Michelle Gauthier: That's very good.
• 34:20
  Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, okay, so I know we're going to put the link to the present that you have for the audience.
• 34:25
  Michelle Gauthier: Yay, tell, tell me more about how people can work with you and, if they're interested, where they should go.
• 34:31
  Victoria Albina: Yeah, so I have a free podcast that's called Feminist Wellness.
• 34:34
  Victoria Albina: It's free in all of the places I give good gram at Victoria Albino Wellness, and you can work with me in one of two ways.
• 34:41
  Victoria Albina: I no longer do one-on-one coaching, but I have a six-month program called Anchored.
• 34:46
  Victoria Albina: You can learn more at victorialbinocom slash anchored and Anchored.
• 34:52
  Victoria Albina: You can learn more at victorialbinacom slash anchored.
• 34:53
  Victoria Albina: And if you're at the top of the show, we were saying six months, whoa, way too much If you're in that camp.
• 34:57
  Victoria Albina: Currently I have a three-month program that I literally created for people who thought six months was way too long.
• 35:03
  Victoria Albina: Seriously, I was like well, I want to help somehow.
• 35:06
  Victoria Albina: It's called the Somatic Studio and it's victorialbinacom.
• 35:09
  Victoria Albina: Slash the Somatic Studio and it's more of the same working on the nervous system, somatics coaching, and my focus in my practice is working with emotional outsourcing, which is the term that I came up for for codependent, perfectionist and people-pleasing habits, and so that's a big focus within Anchored.
• 35:27
  Victoria Albina: So that's you Come join us.
• 35:30
  Michelle Gauthier: Yes, yes, the need to be needed right Is, yeah, like where that comes from and, yes, I feel like all the women who I know were socialized in order to get their enoughness from that need to be needed and undoing that.
• 35:48
  Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, that's a wonderful concept.
• 35:50
  Michelle Gauthier: I love that.
• 35:50
  Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, well, a wonderful concept.
• 35:51
  Michelle Gauthier: I love that.
• 35:51
  Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, well, it's been so fun to talk to you.
• 35:53
  Michelle Gauthier: Thank you so much for a great interview with great information and thank you for wearing matching outfits without us even talking about it Anytime, so funny Fun.
• 36:05
  Michelle Gauthier: Thanks for joining me.
• 36:06
  Michelle Gauthier: Thank you.
• 36:07
  Michelle Gauthier: Okay, that's it for today.
• 36:09
  Michelle Gauthier: Thank you again for joining me.
• 36:13
  Michelle Gauthier: Thank you.
• 36:13
  Michelle Gauthier: Okay, that's it for today.
• 36:13
  Michelle Gauthier: Thank you again for joining.
• 36:14
  Michelle Gauthier: I hope you are taking away some of those practical exercises that you can do to calm your nervous system and your body.
• 36:19
  Michelle Gauthier: Don't forget.
• 36:20
  Michelle Gauthier: If you're interested in group coaching, today is the day to do it.
• 36:23
  Michelle Gauthier: Click on the link in the show notes to set up a time with me.
• 36:26
  Michelle Gauthier: Have a great week.
• 36:27
  Michelle Gauthier: Thank you for listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman Podcast.
• 36:35
  Michelle Gauthier: If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at michellegothiercom.
• 36:40
  Michelle Gauthier: See you next week.