Latest / System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation / Guest: Rachel Lewis-Marlow

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Guest: Rachel Lewis-Marlow · System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the System Speak podcast. If you would like to support our efforts at sharing our story, fighting stigma about dissociative identity disorder, and educating the community and the world about trauma, please go to our website at www.systemspeak.org, and there is a button for donations where you can offer a one time donation to support the podcast or become an ongoing subscriber. We so appreciate the support, the positive feedback, and you sharing our podcast with others. We are all learning together. Thank you.
• 1:12
  Rachel Lewis Marlowe is a somatically integrative psychotherapist, duly licensed as a licensed professional counselor, and a massage and bodywork therapist. Rachel is also a certified advanced practitioner in sensory motor psychotherapy and has advanced training and more than thirty years of experience in diverse somatic therapies. She is the co founder of Embodied Recovery Institute, which provides training in a trauma informed, relationally oriented, and somatically integrative model for eating disorders treatment. In her private practice, Rachel specializes in working with people recovering from trauma, eating disorders, and dissociative disorders. She has extensive experience as a teacher and presenter, focusing on accessing the body's unique capacity to give voice to the subconscious and to lay the foundation for healing and maintaining psychological and physical health.
• 2:16
  She authored a chapter on the application of sensory motor psychotherapy to eating disorders treatment in the recently published book Trauma Informed Approaches to Eating Disorders. Welcome Rachel Lewis Marlowe. Hello.
• 2:34
  Speaker 2: Hello.
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: Thank you for talking to me today.
• 2:38
  Speaker 2: Oh, you're so welcome. Thank you so much for inviting me to talk with you.
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: I'm I'm thrilled. I was I listened to you on the other podcast. Of course, my podcast is cooler. No. I'm I I was listening to the other podcast while I was walking actually, And I heard you two talking about this, and I literally had to sit down and listen and process what you were saying because it was so powerful to me.
• 3:09
  And then as I listened, I was like, no. No. No. I can't sit down. I have to move.
• 3:13
  That's the point. Wonderful. And so I had this visceral reaction, and so I just had to email you and ask if you were willing, and I so appreciate you coming on.
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. Well, I'm I as I said, I'm thrilled. I'm so glad that that what we we were offering landed in some way that really resonated clearly with you on a on a real visceral truth level. And and and I'm thrilled to have you contact me and then be able to discover your podcast and the work that you're doing. So it's really been a a gift.
• 3:50
  So thank you.
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: I'm so grateful. Thank you. For the listeners, go ahead and introduce yourself a little bit and an introduction to your work maybe.
• 3:59
  Speaker 2: I'm Rachel Lewis Marlowe and I am a somatically integrative psychotherapist. I'm also a licensed and certified massage and bodywork therapist. And I have developed a model for working with eating disorders from a bottom up body based approach that's really weaving together a lot of models and maps from Steven Porges, Pat Ogden, Bonnie Branbridge Cohen, Alan Shore, Dan Siegel, who I know was just on your podcast. And so I've done this with my colleague Paula Scataloni. And so we do a training for all providers who work with eating disorders, everything from sort of program administrators to outpatient providers, dietitians, therapists, family therapists, etc.
• 5:04
  And in my private practice, I work with people who have a variety of trauma and developmental concerns and issues and dissociation. And I'm just really excited to be here and be able to share some of the ways that we try and make sense of what's going on and
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: what the change process is and how to That was amazing. Thank you.
• 5:32
  Speaker 2: You're welcome. You're welcome. And, again, thank you for having me. It's really an honor.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: Oh, sure. I do wanna give a shout out to Paula. I did hear her on the podcast. The reason I contacted you specifically was because you did say dissociation specifically on your website. Yes.
• 5:50
  And because I have cochlear implants, I just can't interview two people at the same time. It's too hard
• 5:56
  Speaker 2: for I understand. Yeah. Well, and I have been kind of sussing this out together. She comes from a slightly different background than I do, and so we've been kind of bridging our models. I I also should mention Peter Levine's work is also another, you know, body of work that we're just integrating and adding our own our own vocabulary and our own observations as well.
• 6:21
  So
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: I wanna even before I jump into the questions I thought I had for you, I want to back up to what you just said about the kind of therapy you're doing. Tell me what is a somatic therapist and what is a bodywork special what did you say?
• 6:38
  Speaker 2: I said, so I'm a massage and bodywork therapist, which is the title that is given to us in North Carolina where I practice. Okay. So maybe I should kind of back up a little bit and talk about my background, how I got to it and that might explain what I do. Does that work?
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: Yes, let's do that.
• 7:01
  Speaker 2: Okay, so I have been kind of weaving body and mind approaches to facilitating healing and change. Like, I think almost all of my life that I've been I've been in a body, studying my body, studying kind of how I experience the world and how I experience other people and what works and what doesn't. And so I have a background in dance and also background in psychology. Those were my two undergraduate concentrations. And then after I graduated from undergraduate, I was dancing and I then went in and studied massage and bodywork therapy.
• 7:53
  So that is hands on ways of working with the body to facilitate change and did some of the sort of standard Swedish massage deep tissue, myofascial work, then also began to do more craniosacral therapy, body mind centering work and more energy work, energy and fascia work. And I I noticed that I was able to help facilitate change on a body level. Oh, the other big piece of work that I that I studied that was very influential was something called energetic osteopathy. And I think the important pieces that I took from that work is that there's a difference between treating illness and amplifying health and the osteopathic perspective of how do we contact the health to support it and bring that forward as a way of facilitating change rather than just sort of identifying a problem and somehow trying to attack the problem, you know? And that was big, very influential.
• 9:06
  And the other thing was that there were these three basic ways that you could facilitate change on a body level. One would be to take a a system in your body, a a a way your your cells are organized, and you can kind of amplify that pattern and bring energy in that amplifies it, and that kind of changes the pattern. You can contradict the pattern so you could go against the tension and that can change the pattern or you can hold the pattern in what they called balanced membranous tension, which was to just be there completely with it in this beautiful, just right there way. And that would change the pattern too and take you into a deeper state of neutral. And so I practiced these three different ways of entering a system and facilitating change and I thought, okay.
• 10:15
  So this works on a body level, but I'm only helping people change a certain amount because those changes didn't always stay. Right? They didn't they didn't change sort of the whole way in which they were in their body. I could change the container, but if the way they were in the container didn't shift, the container shifted back. And I thought, okay.
• 10:41
  There must be a way of taking these same principles and applying it to the other aspects of being a human being. And that's when I went back to graduate school and got my master's in counseling and kind of was curious about how do you take these three different dynamics and apply it on cognitive level or an emotional level. And so I went to graduate school and that gave me some information but didn't really help me blend the two. And so after graduate school, I found the sensory motor psychotherapy, which is Pat Ogden's work. And what that gave me was a language and a way to leave what was happening in the body with what was happening in cognition and with affect and helped me understand that in order to change a person's truth, we have to work on all of those levels, cognition, affect, and body, because the truth is for somebody is when there is congruency on all three levels.
• 11:56
  That's when something is really true for somebody.
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: I know this sounds silly. Like, I feel silly saying it, but I don't think I even realized I was in my body until I interviewed Pat Ogden. Yeah.
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Wow.
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: I it really like, I it was shocking to me to realize. Mhmm. Not and I don't I'm not just talking about depersonalization or something. I mean, like, literally not present in my body did not at all philosophically consider my body as a part of myself.
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: Mhmm. Yeah. I think the the the way in which she articulates that as a human being, we organize around experience, not just with our thoughts or our feelings, but our bodies actually are part of that, being a human being and how we organize in in relationship to our experiences, that it just invites that curiosity, you know, about it. It's like, Oh, wow. Like, this is really a part of being a human being, isn't it?
• 13:12
  It's not just a thing that's there. It's dynamic, and it's intelligent, and and it matters.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: Yes. She talked about using that your body. She talked about your body being an ally. And I was like, I haven't even met my body yet. I don't know how to make my body an ally.
• 13:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And there's this beautiful language that helps you identify how to start to to to hear its language because the body's native language is not verbal. It's not it's not words. It's not cognition. The body's native language is five sense perception, internal sensation, and movement.
• 14:03
  Movement is our language. And so for me, where I've always known that that was my native tongue, you know, as a as a mover since, you know, I've been studying movement all my life. It was really liberating and empowering to get some verbal language to correspond with the native language of the body. That's amazing. Yeah.
• 14:31
  And so back to that first question of, you know, what is a somatically integrative therapist? For me, it is that I'm able to use the soma, the body container, as a as a a primary access point for communication and change, but also I can weave it in. You know, it's integrated. It it's not just this this other thing. It's part of our intelligence.
• 15:03
  And I I was listening to to Dan Siegel, the podcast you did with him, and how he's talking about the, you know, that they're starting to get the scientific understanding of the mind of the body that it's not just in the brain, but it's everywhere. I think I first got that studying the body mind centering work of Bonnie Brainbridge Cohen, where we were exploring the state of mind of the lymph system or skeletal system or the fascia and even into structures of the cells themselves or the just the fluid quality of the body. When we embody those aspects of our soma, it makes space for different cognition and different perception of both self and the world.
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: I love that explanation because so often in I've worked a lot in hospitals and in ER triages and, you know, as the person to refer people out and get them in hospitals when they need hospitals for psychiatric stuff. And so often in that environment, somatic symptoms have this negative connotation and are even almost dismissed.
• 16:28
  Speaker 2: Yes. Yes.
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: And this is the opposite of that. You're saying that all of that is real and all of that is information and all of that is telling us something about what we need and how to care for ourselves.
• 16:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And that really brings us to the field of eating disorders. And I think the mission that Paula and I are on to help almost take the way we we conceptualize of eating disorders and flip it around a 80 degrees. The embodied recovery model that we've developed has four, principles. One is that we have to start looking at eating disorder behaviors not as a commentary on the body.
• 17:22
  You know, it's not that something that people do because of what they think or feel about the body. It is actually the body talking about what it means to be alive, to thrive, and it's telling us how we make sense of the world. And in that, we're talking about the body expressing the defense system, the attachment system, and the sensory processing system. And so if we're just trying to get people to stop eating disorder behaviors, kind of what we're saying is this this really wise voice that you have, we just want it to shut up and go away and stop saying those things rather than listening to what it's saying. And, you know, to to understand that the field of of psychology hasn't really been very separate from the body and understanding the language of the body.
• 18:31
  We understand the language of cognition and beginning to understand the language of emotion. So we have to learn how does the body speak, right? Like what is the language? What is it speaking? And then from the medical perspective, we have such an allopathic perspective of treating pathology rather than an osteopathic about amplifying health.
• 18:57
  So that's really what Paula and I are trying to do is to help people understand the languages of sensation, five sense perception and movement so that we can discern what an eating disorder behavior is telling us about what it needs in order to bring forth the health of those systems.
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: How does that apply to trauma specifically? What is the body saying when it's dissociating, even when we're dissociating from the body itself?
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. So so dissociation, I think, is alright. Let's slow down for a second because I I can get a little overwhelmed by the vastness of it and trying to get it into simple linear language without having hand gestures to help me is challenging. Yes.
• 19:54
  Right. Because I speak with my native tongue is movement. So it's very hard for me to speak without my hands.
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: That's okay. I'm a deaf person doing a podcast. So God. I hear you.
• 20:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. So the question was how does that that translate into trauma and dissociation? I think about dissociation in a couple of different ways, and I think it's it can sometimes be helpful to think about this idea of embodiment and that dissociation starts with a disembodiment. Okay?
• 20:35
  But in order to understand what disembodiment is, we have to understand what embodiment is. And one of the the concepts that we have included in our model is a sort of a working definition of embodiment. That embodiment is this intersection of consciousness, of awareness, and energy, matter, body. Right? So it's where our awareness and our physical form intersect.
• 21:16
  And that awareness has two components. It has what we're aware of and then it has what we're aware from. It's both the object of awareness and the seat of awareness. And so we can intersect with the body in both of those ways. Okay?
• 21:40
  So when we are not aware of our body, there's a level of dissociation, right? And we can be not aware of our bodies because of a lack of integration of what we call our near senses. This is the neurology that gives us sensory input of our, through our proprioception, our vestibular organization, and our interoception. Right? It tells us actually information coming from our body up into our brain.
• 22:24
  And if we aren't getting that information in an organized way, right, we aren't gonna know we have a body and we aren't gonna know where our body our body ends and something else begins. That's part of what proprioception does. It gives us a sense of boundaries. The other other way that we can be aware of our body is more from what we call our far senses. Right?
• 22:54
  And so our far senses are our vision, our smell, our taste, hearing, and touch that tell us about the world outside of us. And so if I look at my hand, I can see that it's there. Right? But if I'm not getting an internal sensation, appropriate reception or an interoception of my body, then it doesn't it doesn't look like my hand. It's just a hand.
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: Right? That just happened to us, like, a week or two ago.
• 23:33
  Speaker 2: Heard on your podcast. I heard about that.
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: It's like I didn't know that was a thing, that there's a word for it.
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. So if we if these, like, near senses and far senses don't link up in a congruent way, then we're gonna have sort of this confusion. And sometimes there's a lot of body dysmorphia that can result. Right?
• 24:00
  If I don't know where my body ends, like, if I don't have if I don't have reliable, consistent, organizing proprioceptive feedback, which is comes from this experience of pushing against something and having this nice, steady feedback coming back, then I'm gonna have a disorganized sense of self. Right? I'm I'm not gonna know where I am in space, where I stop and someone begins.
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: So that's where the trauma piece comes in because it violates all of that.
• 24:40
  Speaker 2: Exactly. Exactly. And and that's part of what Dan Siegel was talking about in that, like, does someone come in too much or not enough? Right? That neglect can be as disorganizing and violating of boundaries because it doesn't help you know where you are.
• 25:01
  As as as assault, as something coming into you too far. Right? I'm processing. Yeah. Yeah.
• 25:12
  Let's be slow enough that it doesn't overwhelm your system.
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: Well, it's it's interesting to me because they these are things I don't know if I'm just learning because it's not this is this becomes so personal, not just clinical. Right? And so I don't know if it's just that I'm at a new place of learning or a new place of awareness or if it's just really been that good. But these last few interviews, I feel like have given me words for things that all this time, I thought I was wrong for feeling. Right.
• 25:50
  Yes. But now all three of you, the last three interviews that we've done have are like, no. Actually, that's science and biology and this is how it works and have given me words to it and it is just mind blowing.
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: Oh, well, I I was really excited. I was thinking there's there's something magical about your timing because as I was listening to the mother hunger and then Dan Siegel, I thought, well, this is all of a of a theme. This is all of a theme. And I love also that you're using this language of, you know, when we have words that match our sensory, motor, physical experience, it makes sense. And it it's because it actually is congruent with our sensory experiences, our near sensory experiences, and our far sensory experiences.
• 26:45
  You know, it lines up and there's congruency there. And so often, people who have, I think, who actually may be very in their bodies, who have a lot of interoceptive capacity or a lot of particularly energetic sensitivity, which I can talk about a little bit more. We don't, in our culture, have a lot of language to describe that experience. And because it isn't as visual, visually oriented, people who are are often picking up a bunch of stuff are are first told that it's not there, you know, and that they're overreacting to something that's not there. And that can make you feel crazy and wrong.
• 27:48
  Like, why am I reacting to something that everybody is saying doesn't exist? And what we're saying is, no. It does. It really does. Energy is a thing, and there are people who are sensitive to that.
• 28:04
  I mean, it's just everything is energy. Light is energy. Sound is energy. Smell is energy. It's just different, you know, levels of vibration.
• 28:15
  And for people who are energetically sensitive, the way in which that that information comes through the body is through the fascia. It comes through the hair follicles, through the fascia, into the deep viscera of our being and then what can be really confusing with that is that we feel it inside but it may be coming from outside. And so we unless we are someone helps us make meaning of that in an accurate way, we don't know if what we're feeling is us or someone else. Right? It's it's it's can be really confusing.
• 29:07
  And so and often there's so much information coming that we just shut it down. We disassociate from it because it's so much and we don't know what it means.
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: So that can even look like I'm not to limit it to this, but that would include some people who are diagnosed or miss diagnosed as things like attention disorders or even personality disorders or other things that in a negative way where people see it as an acting out rather than the person just seeking congruence.
• 29:45
  Speaker 2: Right. Seeking congruence and regulation. You know? Because we we don't come into the world being able to self regulate. We need others.
• 29:58
  Right? We think we've talked about that in terms of being mammals. I mean, we just we need others, and we come into the into being with wiring to connect, right, so that we can regulate. And if we don't have a regulated other around us, we don't build the ability to self regulate. We learn how to cope.
• 30:32
  We learn coping strategies, but they aren't actually regulated. And so
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: That's why we feel so exhausted or worn out or helpless or hopeless because we're still coping rather than actually dealing with it.
• 30:49
  Speaker 2: Right. Exactly. I worked with I was working with somebody who had a lot of trauma and one of the things that we we needed to unpack is that being calm is not the same as being regulated.
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: Oh, that's interesting because I had a group and they recommended that we use the Calm app. And Uh-huh. And so I was actually talking to my friend, Peter Barish, about this and he was like, of course, you need to talk to the therapist about it, but also I can tell you this. And because the more that we tried to use the Calm app, the worse everything backfired.
• 31:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: It was not helpful. Like, I understand what we were supposed to do, but we could not do it. We are not there yet.
• 31:43
  Speaker 2: Right. I think I think we we can be calm when we're regulated, but just because we don't you know, we're kind of not reacting to things doesn't mean we're regulated. You know? And you can a person can be very excited and animated and be regulated. Right?
• 32:07
  Someone can even be angry and regulated, which is different than being rageful. Rage would be anger not regulated. And I think this is a place where we can pull in polyvagal theory because what polyvagal theory helps us understand from a neurological level is that when our sympathetic system is sort of dominant or parasympathetic system is is more dominant. As long as we have that ventral vagal engagement, right, then that excited state is in a regulated state or that that that more calm state or or slower state is in is still in regulation. When we can do it in the context of our attachment system, like, belong in the world.
• 33:10
  The world resonates with me enough that I feel like there's a connectedness, then I can be excited and and calm and regulated. But when that ventral vagal system is giving is organizing to I actually need to separate from my environment, then then our our sympathetic and our parasympathetic is gonna be less regulated. You know? It's it's gonna be they aren't gonna work together in as much. And so in in order to gain any regulation, they're kind of it's the brakes and the gas at the same time instead of just actually slowing down or speeding up.
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: Sometimes dissociation is actually just that incongruence between systems being able to work together.
• 34:06
  Speaker 2: Right. Exactly. Exactly. And I would say that, you know, on that level, most of us are dissociated most of the time. You know?
• 34:15
  Like, we do a lot of just kind of overriding our our systems in order to get through our days. Right? You know, how often do we wake up before we really want to?
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 34:33
  Speaker 2: You know, that that doesn't mean that we're completely dissociated, but, you know, we're often our our systems are are kind of overriding, and it's a matter of degrees. You know, like how much do I have to override? So there's there's this idea of of the the window of tolerance, but there's also this idea of the full window, which Steve Torell and Kathy Keene talk about, and I've heard other people talk about as well. And and when we When I started developing the Embody of Recovery model, I used to talk about eating disorder symptoms. A lot of times people would say, well, these are things that people do when they're dysregulated as a way of of like coping and or and I would say no.
• 35:19
  These are actually things people do to try and stay regulated. You know, they do this to not go way out of the window, but to stay inside the window. You know, they're trying they're doing their best not to further dissociate. When we understand that, we can see how eating disorder behaviors are expressions of a very conditional attachment system.
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: So that means even mindfulness that doctor Siegel was talking about, when that does not feel good, it's in part because part of what's becoming what you're becoming aware of is how dysregulated or how incongruent or how dissociated or disassociated the way he explained it. You are from what you're actually needing or what's actually happening because you're becoming in tune with what's off, and it's the off part that doesn't feel good.
• 36:20
  Speaker 2: Right. Right. Right. And that gets to that second part of embodiment, which is the seat of of your awareness. That to increase where you're aware from is what we need in order to be more fully embodied.
• 36:41
  A lot of times, mind fullness is about increasing what you're aware of, right, and how you're aware of it. Being able to to kind of expand your consciousness through being nonjudgmental, being in the present moment, and so that you can include more in your field of awareness of what you're aware of. I've coined this term called it's called full mindedness as opposed to mindfulness, which is expanding the seat of your consciousness where you're aware from. So just to give a little bit of a of a of an example of what that mean is that I I can look at an object, right, and I can see it, and I can be aware of it maybe from my eyes. And I will know certain things about that object because my seat of my my awareness is in my eyes.
• 37:46
  But if I touch that object and I bring my awareness into my fingertips, I know something different. I've expanded the seat of my awareness. Right? And part
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: of
• 38:03
  Speaker 2: building embodiment is increasing where we can be aware from. So often, where people are aware from is a truncated attachment system. They don't have access to all of the ways that we are in relationship with our world or they are aware from a nervous system and a posture and a movement pattern that is in a defensive strategy. So for people who've experienced, you know, trauma, and trauma can be can be either this presence of danger or this absence of safety that puts us into a very limited seat of consciousness. And part of the organization of that where where there's less ventral vagal engagement, so you're not being able to sit in a an organized ventral vagal system.
• 39:19
  You're sitting in a very defensively oriented system. Part of that is that our digestive system is shut down because when the ventral vagal system goes offline, so does the digestive system.
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: How did you put all of that together?
• 39:41
  Speaker 2: That's just the way my brain works. I'm a weaver, and I've always been a weaver. And, you know, I just have always seen threads. And one of the most rewarding things that's happened for me in the last few years is being able to weave these threads together to create kind of this tapestry and share it with other people and not feel crazy. Because a lot of my life, I was seeing these connections and people were like, I don't know what you're talking about, Rachel.
• 40:18
  So it's been really you know, and part of it is that I have a very strong interoceptive capacity. I can feel everything. And so I've been I've been gathering these these ways that people talk about human experiences and and weaving the language together to describe my sensory motor system and experience.
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: What is that like for you to have the science catching up to what you've been trying to explain?
• 40:59
  Speaker 2: Oh, what a lovely question. It it is, in some ways, very liberating, very validating. Sometimes it's frustrating because it's like I think it you know, it's sort of like, you know, saying Columbus discovered America. It's like, no. There were people here the whole time.
• 41:20
  You know? Right. Right. Oh, That so much of of what science is is describing is ancient knowledge. I mean, we've known this and we do know it.
• 41:34
  We know it in our body. It's but it's also nice to be able to speak to people who speak different languages. Right? You know, that place where, oh, you know, you call this, you know, a house. I call it, you know, something, you know, casa.
• 41:57
  It's a different word for the same thing. And that's really lovely to be able to say, oh, you call this, you know, ventral vagal. We call it attachment. I call it connectedness. Someone else just calls it home.
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: It's fascinating because it's kind of an acting out of the content. I mean, it's the process of the same content that we're talking about because it's getting information from other ways that brings congruence amongst the systems.
• 42:35
  Speaker 2: Yes. And I'm not sure if this is where where you're going or or speaking from, but I think when we talk about this idea of integration, it's weaving. You know, it's it's taking these different ways of knowing and weaving it into the center of who we are so that so that things aren't parallel processes but radiant processes, that these aren't competing parts of self. They are radiating out of a of a central truth. Right?
• 43:22
  They're just different
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: parts
• 43:25
  Speaker 2: of the globe in in a central core, and they're they're also held outside with, you know, like, a an organized embrace.
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: That's a beautiful description. It feels very wolf woman from that book that I like, the Clarissa Pancola Estes book. Mhmm. There's something very deep and old and
• 43:52
  Speaker 2: authentic about that. One of the things that I really is very meaningful and helpful to me is understanding the language of movement and how movement is this way in which the our inside world and our outside world relate. Right? We we can't we can't move through space into the world without bringing our insides with us. Right?
• 44:23
  So so this idea that if we can understand the basic language of movement, we understand we understand the relationship between self and other and that movement has in it a a directional component, either it's expansive or it's contractive, but it has also a relational component, which is I'm either seeking connection or I'm seeking disconnection. And those things can combine in lots of different ways. I can expand to connect, but I can also expand to disconnect, to push someone away or to press into them. Right? And that those movements build our capacity for attachment and defense.
• 45:23
  They build our way of of of knowing our outside world and our inside world. And they have they are dynamics that exist molecularly, cellularly, on a reflexive level, on a on a developmental movement level, but they also exist emotionally and cognitively and socially and politically and spiritually and, you know, theoretically these ways in which we're in relationship. And that all of those those dynamics either support or get in the way of us taking action in our lives in particular ways. And when we look at eating disorders and eating disorder behaviors, we're looking at where people are having difficulty taking action. The action of nourishment, of ingestion, of digestion, of elimination.
• 46:43
  And so when we learn the language of movement and we pair that with the challenges of action, we can see this is what's missing. This is what's missing relationally. This is what's missing in the defense system. This is what's missing in the sensory system in order to bring forth help and and and integration, association, embodiment, that embodiment is association. So I guess, you know, that's really the hope of of adding this this perspective to everything we're already doing.
• 47:26
  It's not one of the things I I say is that recovery is an additive process. It's always about what we're adding, not what we're taking away. But what else can we bring? It's so empowering
• 47:43
  Speaker 1: because it kind of has this assumption that who we are is already enough, and it's more about adding the connections or adding the supports or adding the new ways of receiving information so that everyone has what they need and so that there's congruence internally and externally and amongst each other internally or externally. Mhmm. And that's powerful.
• 48:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I think it's so important, especially in the fields of eating disorders, that as providers, we understand that our embodiment is essential to helping facilitate embodiment for the people that we are working with because it's it is relational. And if we're just talking about it, but we aren't actually there, then we're we we're asking somebody to do something that they can tell we're all we're afraid of. And they're gonna be like, I don't think so. Right?
• 49:05
  So and and also that if we can't sit in our hearts and see have the seat of our consciousness in our hearts, that's where we're seeing from, then we aren't seeing somebody clearly. We're see we're looking for the problem, not the health, not the beauty. We aren't amplifying what's there.
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: That's amazing. I'll have to sit with that some and keep reflecting on it. Wow. Thank you so much for talking to us today.
• 49:43
  Speaker 2: Oh, thank you. Thank you so much for having having me be a part of of of your podcast and your journey and and all the great work that you're bringing into the world. I really appreciate it.
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: It's so well done, and I so appreciate the work that you're doing and what you're sharing. And I'm glad that word is getting out a little bit more about it. Thank you.
• 50:05
  Speaker 2: Well, thank you very much.
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us with System Speak, a podcast about dissociative identity disorder. You can listen to the podcast on Spotify, Google Play, and iTunes, or follow along on our website, www.systemspeak.org. Thanks for listening.