Why Conventional Trauma Work Fails – And What Works Instead

IRENE

Not everybody is supposed to do nervous system work. It will open up stuff that we historically aren’t used to, nor do we have the infrastructure in our system to deal with it. If you unearthed the stuff that I unearthed in my SE training, honest to God, if it wasn’t for my husband at the time,

KELLY

I probably would’ve killed myself.

Now in the commodification of this. Industry. There are tons of influencers who want to give little hacks and tips. How might you introduce the folks listening to the nuances that you think are often lacking from the conversation? Those

IRENE

who are teaching these very simplified versions of movement Somatic, if you don’t understand the cascade of what can occur, it will most likely impact the physiological regulatory processes that we don’t wanna mess with too quickly.

We have to remember that meditation is about consciousness training. I think a lot of people that meditate, they’re getting really good at [00:01:00] managing what’s inside, but they’re not unpacking the thing that’s inside. You

KELLY

have to know how to. Hi, and welcome back to Reclamation Radio. I am Dr. Kelly Brogan, and today I sit down with Irene Lyon, who is a nervous system expert and multiply trained in modalities ranging from Feldenkrais to physical therapy to somatic experiencing.

And what I enjoy most about Irene is not only her personal demeanor and countenance, uh, but her nuanced approach to the zeitgeist that is body-based trauma healing. So in our conversation today, we look at the shadowy underbelly of the trauma healing movement, and we talk about weather cold plunging or even meditating.

Could be driving you deeper into [00:02:00] a freeze response or giving you the impression that you’re actually regulating yourself when you’re just expanding your tolerance for undesired sensations in the body. So we talk about who should and shouldn’t meditate, for example, who should and shouldn’t engage in cathartic experiences of trauma healing, and why certain influencers may be giving you trauma tips, hacks, and advice that is actually potentially dangerous.

We also talk about her area of expertise, which is pre-verbal trauma, and why reprimanding your infant’s son for biting your nipple? While breastfeeding may be the origins of a lot of complex adult struggles that that boy may grow up to have. And we also touch on why healthy shame. Is important for development.

[00:03:00] So it’s a whirlwind of a conversation. I plan to have her back for a part two, and I hope that this allows you to really exhale and get back to the basics of human embodiment and how simple, honestly it can be. Welcome Irene, to the show. Hey, Kelly. Thank you. You are and have been for many years now, one of my favorite practitioners to learn from, and I think it’s because the medium is the message and the way that I feel in my body when I talk to you, even just chatting with you before I press record and when I listen to your videos or explore your work and offerings.

I feel a relaxed woman. And that is in fact the name of the, the system that I, I offer the world, the relaxed woman system because I think that is the most aspirational, valuable quality in a woman [00:04:00] that there is. And you know, when I, when I listen to you, I sort of think, oh wow, she’s really well-regulated in her ventral, vagal because your, your tone, your posity, your, your relatability is to me one of the great testaments of your work and the journey that you’ve been on, which I know could be in entire podcast in and of itself.

But I wanted to start with what it is at this point that you believe yourself to be living proof of, right. So, ’cause I think of, right, those of us who have a microphone and an opportunity to inspire, I believe a lot of what we. Offer is just an expansion of what’s possible. And if you’re living proof of something, it means that anyone who comes into contact with you knows that that thing is possible.

Right? So I talk a lot about, uh, reversing slash transforming my, uh, [00:05:00] diagnosis of Hashimoto’s thyroiditis some 15 years ago. And if no one had ever met somebody who had done that, they might not know to even have that yearning right in their heart to, to move in that direction, to take that journey to, you know, make the first step in that direction.

So I know that you have moved through, uh, diagnoses, injuries, and through that have become in many ways, you know, the archetypal wounded healer, right. That many of us find ourselves to be so. What do you think?

IRENE

What do you think about that? Well, if I piggyback on what you just shared, that you’ve healed, I would say, I mean there’s many pieces, but you named it, I was that kid that was always sick, eczema, autoimmune.

I mean, it wasn’t really called that then allergies, skin problems, which is a whole other story. My exposure to chemicals was vast from in [00:06:00] utero through childhood, into my teens and early twenties. Uh, due to being in, um, an animal hospital, my parents were both veterinarians and I mentioned before we started recording, so I was literally like elbow deep, inhaling chemicals, anesthesia, bleach, formaldehyde, x-ray fluids, hands, and corticosteroids, filling up bottles.

And then just rubbing them in my hands, not washing my hands. ’cause it’s like lotion. I mean there’s so many things. Allergy shots for two years that I don’t think really did anything. So I was just this walking toxic mess. There’s pictures of what I looked at like on my site when it was good and it got much worse.

And so a lot of my healing really started to happen at the nervous system level when I started my training in somatic experiencing. But my system blew up because I went too fast too soon, [00:07:00] went into all the traumas. ’cause I don’t just have that, I have history of sport injury. So that’s a whole other story.

And so I found myself, it would’ve been 20, 10, 11. Now I don’t wanna say bedridden ’cause I could, I could walk, I can move, but I was just unwell with these body. It looked like body burns. I could hardly take a shower. Um, anyway, so that obviously has shifted. My skin has healed. Um, and I tried to go the medical route and what I will say is I did use, um, I did use some corticosteroids, almost homeopathically when it was so bad.

I’m like, okay, this is like a rollercoaster freight train out of control. I’ve not put any of that stuff on my skin for years. I’m just gonna experiment with a little bit. And so I just dabbed a little on my, you know, hand, even though the dermatologist was like, put it all for [00:08:00] your body. I am like, screw that.

I’m not doing that. But what was interesting, I woke up the next morning and everything was 10% less inflamed. I was like, interesting. So I, I kind of, because I know there’s a time and a place I, I needed relief. Then I shifted out of that, did a whole bunch of work, somatically, dowsing frequency, diet, sunlight, circadian stuff, quantum stuff, and here we are.

So I think I was brought up in a medical world. I looked at diet. I mean, we’re so similar in that way, right? It’s kind of good and spooky and fun. And I remember my Dr. Kelly, when I was maybe 10 years old, I had rashes like I was itchy. And she said, Irene, you were born. You were born with rashes. And I was like, I was covered in rashes as a baby.

You’re always going to have this. I’ll never forget her saying that to me. [00:09:00] And then I kind of believed it until I’m like, I can’t keep living like this. So it was kind of that shift of its mentality, but it’s was also Kelly really understanding why is my skin doing this? Why do I have these autoimmune reactions?

This isn’t my genetics. Because my parents don’t have it if we wanna go down that route. So it was my exposure and so I cleaned up my body. You know, I’m by no means perfect, but, and here I am. So I can’t remember the exact question, but it was sort of, oh, living proof. So that was what it was, is if anything, living proof that those things that you’re given, you can shift, but you have to want it bad and you have to work at it.

KELLY

And it’s in the wanting and the working that I think you’ve probably agreed, there’s also the opportunity to attach to the outcome, to an extent that rejects what’s actually happening, right? So you get into that taboo dynamic, that tension [00:10:00] that is saying like a big fuck no to what’s right in front of you and insisting that it be different.

So when I hear you talk about wanting. To heal. I also feel like this open curiosity that that took you on your heroin’s journey to explore and I, I would say advance the field that you studied of somatic experiencing.

IRENE

I think, you know, the other memory that’s coming to my mind right now, which I haven’t thought of in a while, was I would’ve been my first university stint doing my undergrad.

I’d had these flares on my arms. I think it was due to a bad breakup, right? Stress, all this, and I was just desperate. It was the first time I read a book on holistic healing. It was Andrew Wild’s book, spontaneous Healing. I still have that book ’cause it’s such a good book. I don’t agree with everything in it now, but um, it was still a good entry point and I like, okay, I [00:11:00] gotta find something, find something.

I was trying all these diet things, nothing worked. I tried, Chinese medicine definitely didn’t work. I even went to a progressive muscle relaxation class at the local community college. This is not something I would ever do typically. I was like, I’m looking oddly. It wasn’t until just recently, and by just recently, I mean in the last kind of f 10 ish years, actually more like eight years that I uncovered, it was chemical trauma that I was dealing with by fluids were traumatized, which is a whole other story and that opened up so much information, but it took me from age, let’s say 25 to age 42.

I’m 50 this year to figure that out. Most would’ve stopped. And so the other thing that’s interesting ’cause my colleagues and I talk about this all the time, like what makes it such that a person gets through these hell points? I mean, you could [00:12:00] look at all the factors and I keep thinking and, and looking at its soul age.

It’s the only thing I can think of the, it’s the only thing that makes the most sense. ’cause you’ll have people with the exact same trauma history, for example, horrific shit that’s happened to them. One person, I’m thinking about one of my best friend’s, colleagues right now, she should not have survived her history and she’s thriving.

Whereas you have another person with the same history and they’re just bedridden, unable. Mindset is terrible. The my life is screwed. I’m never gonna heal. It’s like, yeah, what do they say? If you think you can or if you think you can’t, you, you’re probably right. I think that’s a Feldenkrais saying. So that’s the other piece is not everyone is really true.

I’ve started to really say this to my students in training. Not everybody is supposed to do nervous system work at the level I am teaching because man, it will open up stuff that we historically [00:13:00] aren’t used to, nor do we have the infrastructure in our system to deal with it. Someone has a car accident and they’re disabled.

They can get money from the government or the local, whatever to help them sort of live. If you unearthed the stuff that I unearthed in my SE training, which led me not able to work, thank God I had money and parents that were there to help and a place to live, I don’t know what would’ve occurred to me if I didn’t have, honest to God, like I I, there was a point, Kelly, when I was covered in these rashes, if it wasn’t for my husband at the time, I probably would’ve killed myself.

It was that painful. And I met a woman, a dowser, who had an uncle who took his life due to his skin condition. And I’m like, I know it. And so these things that we start to uncover when we go through these layers of trapped trauma, which is, you know, my, my field now, [00:14:00] they, they don’t make sense sometimes.

Like, what? All of a sudden your joints are flaring for no reason. Oh, you must have rheumatoid arthritis, right? Oh, you have psychotic set like, uh, visions of things coming at you and getting you and your sleep. It’s like, oh, you must be psychotic. Go to this psychiatrist. Really? It’s probably old surgical trauma.

Right? But again, the system can’t, um, adapt. For what might come out of a person. And so I’m very, I’m a little more tempered now in how I try to engage people into this work. And I say to my students, do not push people to do this. They have to come to you, and they have to want it really bad because the consequence of them starting to heal might mean that their life is gonna look very different in two years, five years, 10 years.

Doesn’t mean you’re not gonna heal, but you gotta work at it really hard. I hope that makes sense. [00:15:00]

KELLY

Absolutely. I mean, it’s the, it’s the archetypal journey of individuation, you know, it’s like walking into the dark, into the wildness of your unexplored life. And I, I think that’s a big part of why. You know, even in my own work with my own health program, it’s just a, it’s the first six weeks like, I’d like to claim the first six weeks of anyone’s journey.

I got that. The rest, like, I just trust that everyone will find exactly what they need. Because especially when it comes to this, I like to, I don’t know if I made up this word or what, but I, I like to think of it as insolvement. It’s like, it’s like your soul starting to rest back into your, your vessel.

There is so much nuance required and now in the commodification of this industry, you know, the wellness, trauma based informed industry, there are. [00:16:00] Tons of influencers who want to give little hacks and tips. And I love hacks and tips, so no shade, but it’s, there is a nuance, lacking a depth, and I’m a big outcomes girl, right?

So I’d like to see the testimonials, the potentially published literature. Like I want to know the foundation of claims just because it’s a way to cut through the noise, right? So I know that, that you probably also experienced the world as a bunch of individuals, like walking around in their, um, variously dysregulated systems with their mountains of, of trauma, of various forms.

And you encounter folks who end up, as you were suggesting, labeling the overt manifestation of these compensations as diseases, right? And I know how passionate you are about. The root, [00:17:00] right? Like the, the root, root, root causes that are as individual as a fingerprint. So how might you introduce the folks listening to the nuances that you think are often lacking from the conversation about embodiment and somatic healing work and, you know, trauma based therapies and all of these efforts that we seem to be making to come into our bodies and to stop fleeing into our, our mental caverns.

Like what are some of the missing pieces of the conversation that, that you bring to bear?

IRENE

So that’s a loaded question, but I accept the challenge. Yeah. Well, so before I go into that. My training is vast. So I think this is also why, I guess I see the, the complexity of it, because of my medical upbringing with my parents.[00:18:00]

I studied exercise science at a high level sport, rehab, fitness, nutrition, Feldenkrais training, which is kind of the gold standard of somatic movement therapy work, which is totally being bastardized right now. So that’s a whole other issue. And then somatic experiencing with Peter Levine, and then the offshoots of that, the work with early and preverbal trauma.

And so when you have that mix together and you see someone showing a pelvis movement on the floor saying, do this movement for 60 seconds and you’re gonna open up the stored trauma in your pelvis, I just go. Says who like, and the thing is, is there’s, uh, being an exercise physiologist, yeah, move that fucking pelvis.

Like you gotta get it moving. The joints need to move, you need to squat. You know, I have best friends who do chew, go and Tai chi work with high performance athletes. Like I know all the people. [00:19:00] And the thing that’s missing in that, and then I’m gonna go back to the root in a second, is if you can move your pelvis, I can go there and manip and mo as a physical therapist, w would ’cause I have that training.

But if that person doing the work is not sensing the intraceptive changes. And so someone’s taking notes, write this down interceptive and how you connect with the extra receptive how you feel the touch. Like for anyone listening right now, have you been feeling your pelvis on the chair that you’re sitting on?

Or you just listening to me and Kelly talk, right? This isn’t to like call anyone out and say bad that you’re not feeling your pelvis. But this just shows how disconnected we are from the connection of our internal with external and at the same time. And then with that, it’s like, are you tensing your jaw?

Are you tensing your pelvic floors? Are you even breathing into your full chest cavity, [00:20:00] into your hip joints? Do we even know that your breath can go to the crown of the head and to the roots of the feet? And that’s osteopathic tradition, right? Craniosacral chakra stuff. And so to say, just move this pelvis and you’re gonna open up and release all this trauma is so dangerous because someone might just do it and be like, eh, I don’t feel anything.

In my opinion, that’s like a good outcome because someone might do that. And go, whoa, I didn’t even know I had a pelvis. True story. I had a call from someone, this was ages ago how they got my phone number. I have no idea. They had just attended a Feldenkrais class in New York City. They were calling me from their apartment, afraid to leave, and they hadn’t been able to leave for a week because they went to this Feldenkrais class.

And Feldenkrais is great, by the way.

KELLY

You wanna give people like a one-liner about what Feldenkrais is?

IRENE

Yeah. So if he was a person, he is long gone. Um, people think [00:21:00] it’s about movement. It is about movement. You can fix a lot of orthopedic, structural, muscular, musculoskeletal issues. That’s why I got into it.

But the core is it’s about teaching humans how to learn again through their body, by listening to the body, by feeling. How the peripheral nervous system activates the sensing, the motor, the execution, how you hold your breath, how you don’t hold your breath, how your eyes go one way but not the other. Oh, isn’t that interesting?

And then you work at opening up differentiation through the musculoskeletal system, in relationship to the environment while listening to your physiology. So it’s a very big practice. There’s a reason why Feldenkrais can be taught in physical therapy settings, but also to orchestra singers on stage, right?

’cause it’s about human learning through the body. So this woman, uh, calls me and she’s freaking out. So what happened? [00:22:00] She went to this class. They taught developmental movement patterns. Baby rolling is a very common thing that we might do in a Feldenkrais class. I mean, I think you’ve had children or a child, you know, babies roll.

They find their spines. They, they look at their fingers, they hold their toes, they touch and roll and move. That’s how you develop spinal curves and all these things. She had a flashback to being, uh, abused as a child in a satanic cult. And she knew she was in this. But you, you take this woman who thinks she’s fine.

Yes, I had a screwed up child and I know that happened. Who has no idea that that trauma is stored in the peripheral nervous system and the motor memory? Maybe it’s in the fascia. We really don’t know where it is. It’s somewhere in the system. Um, and then she opens up this infant developmental rolling process that’s so [00:23:00] slow and so gentle being tender probably with herself.

’cause that’s how we’d like to teach it and. All the stored survival stress started to move out and she was in absolute terror and panic. So this is an example you mentioned preverbal trauma. Before we started recording this woman had had severe, clearly preverbal trauma, doesn’t matter the the, the type, but something happened to her that wasn’t good when she was an infant.

This then opens up, probably something happened at the level of her pelvis, probably, and here she is not knowing what to do with the unpacking of all of the, not just the movement, but the survival stress that goes with it, the racing heart that goes with it. The flipping of going into shutdown of the vagus nerve that would’ve went into it as an infant to survive.

Right? We know when a baby is put under [00:24:00] extreme stress, they can just, they can die. Because they can’t, they can’t self-regulate their heart rate. And so this is why when I see these movements of just rule your pelvis for a minute this way while humming to, to activate the vagus nerve, I go, no, no. And again, like I said, some people will be fine.

Others that’s, that is an extreme example. Not everybody is gonna have that. But those who are teaching these very simplified versions of movement somatics, if you don’t understand the cascade of what can occur, ’cause we have to remember the autonomic nervous system. Yes, it’s fight, flight, freeze, and dorsal vagal shutdown.

But it also governs our digestion, our immune system. Our cardiovascular system, our respiratory system, our ability to sense, feel, connect, all the things. And so you [00:25:00] unpack that portion of the autonomic nervous system that is helping that person stay safe. It will most likely impact the physiological regulatory processes that we don’t wanna mess with too quickly.

And so this unfolding of people trying to understand somatics trauma, healing, nervous system, rewiring trauma release. You know, I know David Burelli has done some great work. He invented what’s called A TRE, but again, that does not work on a population that is currently dysregulated, not able to feel that interception.

Even E-M-D-R-I know of people who’ve gone into psychosis after a session. Because it’s too much stimulus for this system that is so unable to process quick enough what’s happening at that brain level. Does that make sense? Absolutely.

KELLY

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So it sounds like in, in a best case scenario, it’s ineffective. And in a potential worst case scenario, there is an insufficient stability of the system to contain and, uh, offer like the, as you’re describing, the interceptive awareness, even through the sensation. So when you talk about these stored traumas.

You know, I think back to Candace PERTs work, if you remember molecules of emotion and, [00:28:00] and this idea, you know, that our, our emotions are in our body was like quite revolutionary when she started to, to talk about that and write about it and research it. And I, I know that through those somatic experiencing lens procedural memory and the, the movement encoded stress is a big part of this idea of how it could be beyond just sort of like the, you know, almost like magical thinking of like, oh, our traumas are somewhere in our, you know, it’s like a, it can get very new agey very quickly if we lose the thread of, of understanding how it is that we develop and grow, right?

So when you understand how we develop and grow that as, as an acute stressor, maybe. Trapped, so to speak, in a certain movement or an incompleted movement or you know, something that is verging on a [00:29:00] movement does make a lot of sense. And I wonder if you could do a better job than I just did explaining how it is that procedural movement and or memory rather, could be how and why and where even, uh, trauma is stored.

IRENE

Yeah, totally. So I like to think of, there’s sort of two categories. These are not all of them, but we can think of trauma as stored at this. You said procedural level. Just for those that don’t understand that like, when we’re little, we learn motor skills, like tying our shoes, uh, riding a bike, uh, older, drive a car.

Those are procedural motor skills in our memory. We need that. We can’t think of that each time and relearn it. So we need those procedures in our system. Then there are. Procedural memories that wanna come out. Um, we call them threat based. So the best example that is simple is, I’m on a soccer field and a ball is coming towards my head, and I’m not a soccer player.

I don’t [00:30:00] know how to hit it with my head or do whatever. And I go, uhoh And my like, hands come up to protect, right? It’s like you drop a knife when you’re cutting your carrots at night and you pull your feet back without even thinking about it. Now, for example, let’s just say you see that that ball coming, and let’s just say you’re holding your baby or your dog, or a pile of groceries.

It, it doesn’t have to be an animal as your kitty shows up right here. That’s great. I love it. Perfect timing. So let’s say you’re holding something and you can’t drop whatever it is, and so you feel the desire to bring your hands up to protect your brain, essentially in your eyes. That’s what you’re doing.

You can’t. And so that procedure that your nervous system wrote really quickly, automatically autonomic nervous system doesn’t get too complete. You might then later that day or night or the next day, go, why am [00:31:00] I? Why is this trap so tight? Why are my deltoids all of a sudden feeling a bit stiff? I better go get a massage.

I better stretch. Why isn’t this working? And so what’s happened is that procedure told the upper traps, and really it’s the deltoids, more so work to protect head brain. So that is an incomplete procedural memory. Now, we could say traumatic, but that’s pretty loose in terms of a trauma. It just sucks if a ball hits your head.

Now, a more extreme example would be if someone is attacked. And you know, this is the common thing we hear. I was attacked. I couldn’t fight. I wasn’t strong enough. I wanted to, but I was held down. We also see this with surgery. Surgical procedures gotta hold that kid down. Dental, hold that kid down, hold that person down.

So we want to amusing my hands right now. We wanna break, we wanna hit, we wanna scratch, we wanna [00:32:00] run. Um, but if we can’t, we go into the next survival, stress level, which is freeze. Freeze has sympathetic also in it fight flight. It’s a combo deal with part of the vagus nerves, high tone, dorsal response, and the sympathetic fight flight that’s freeze if the person.

Is like, I can’t do this. I’m gonna collapse. I’m just gonna let what’s happening happen to me. And this is what occurs with infants specifically. Like, very much so when they have a lot of trauma, when they’re young. Um, we then go into the collapse state, the shutdown state, which is full Vegas, quick shutdown, collapse, uh, preservation of life.

I think I’m going to die. I better bring everything into the core. Now, let’s just say that occurs to someone they’re attacked when they’re young or at any age. They don’t, if they don’t realize that there is that trapped, incomplete procedure, [00:33:00] they will go through their life. And we’ve seen this with folks with chronic illness.

Those living in deep toxic shame. They have a. A posture that is very collapsed, very sunken. You may have felt this in working with people. The skin is kind of doey. There’s no elasticity to it. That is a very strong sign of this system being highly shut down. And so when you start to work with that, you can’t just say to that person, I need you to get this baseball bat and hit your assailant over the head to feel that you’ve conquered and triumphed them.

Because if that person has this internal physiology that is shut down, sure they can take, here’s my pen, the baseball bat, and do that movement. And maybe they feel a little more energy and we know with exercise what happens, endorphins, blood. But then after that, the system goes. Back to that collapse. And so you had mentioned, you know, the cathartic release of just [00:34:00] shaking streaming.

I’m seeing this a lot in group breath work classes where people are just like going for it. I’m like, Hmm, that looks nice. And you might feel really good because you created a state shift in the cardiorespiratory capacities. Lymph is going. So yeah, of course you’re gonna feel better afterwards, but does your system then revert back to its combos of freeze collapse?

Maybe a fight flight in there? And so this concept, to go back to original question, procedural memory, um, it is, it is complex. It’s more than just I need to get my emotions out. I need to hit, I need to run. Um, now we add in early trauma. This is shock trauma I’m talking about. If you then add in growing up unsafe.

Mother was always stressed, war zone, maybe lots of surgical procedures. You know, I’ve met people who had to have spinal [00:35:00] surgeries as babies due to a defect. You’re in this ringer of constant extreme stress. That little one starts to think everything outside is dangerous. I have to protect. I have to be on vigilance, or I have to just shut down.

You can’t take a person who has survived that kind of early trauma and just work on their incomplete procedural memories from when the ball hit them on the head or when they were attacked at college. You then have to go back to what I said a while ago. Can this person even feel their gut? Does this person even know they have a digestive system?

You’d be surprised, Kelly. A lot of people couldn’t point to where their liver or stomach is, or kidneys. Or any of these things that their lungs go up to, you know, the shoulders and all this. Because when you start to unpack these procedural memories, these stored traumatic procedural memories, the internal physiology will [00:36:00] also go, Hey, what about me?

I’ve been clamped down and working in this way since age five. I’m, I’m using my hands to depict like the flow of valves, say in the digestive system, and I know how to go really fast or really slow, and this is IBS, chronic diarrhea or constipation. You are telling me now that I have to shift that, oh, and now you’re gonna cry and get rid of that.

Now my, now the heart is open. I don’t know what to do about that. I better clap down over here. These things move. And so this is a very long way of saying it’s actually quite complex in this current day and age with humans who have been raised so differently, with so many traumas without lineage or teaching, that we have this body that we have to listen to and take care of.

You know, there’s a reason why Peter called his book Waking the Tiger. [00:37:00] His original book is because he realized in the late sixties in Berkeley doing his work that animals in the wild don’t really get PTSD. You know, it’s a simplification. You put them in a zoo, they don’t do so well, right? They’re not, they’re not hunting, they’re not running, they’re not doing their stuff.

Humans, on the other hand, we do get PTSD, even if we are running and eating good food because of this higher brain that traps us in these cycles. And so Peter’s work really put that part on the map. But then you also have to look at the early trauma, lack of dysregulation from the beginning and decide as a, at least at the level that my, my colleagues and I work at.

Okay. It’s like triage in er. Do we have to work with this big boulder of survival stress? ’cause this person just cannot sit still ’cause they’re waiting for someone to attack them again. Or are they so [00:38:00] darn afraid of everything that we have to work at establishing safety and regulation at the barest bones level, almost the way you would raise a baby at the beginning.

It’s very simple what they need, but when you didn’t get that at the very beginning, your system doesn’t actually know that it can work in a certain way that it’s meant to work. So, um, that’s a very long verbal essay to, to take you down this path of procedural memory, incomplete procedural memory, survival, stress, but also that it’s not cut and dry.

How you start with a person and you have to consider all of this, these physiological and psychological factors. If someone is terrified at the thought of expressing an emotion, then we’re not gonna push them to try to express an emotion. ’cause it could be that when they were young, when they cried, they got hit or [00:39:00] put into their bed to sleep train, for example.

Right? And so these are all these little like levels that a person who does real somatic trauma healing work should be able to sit here and talk about it at this level. Kelly. I can almost bet you that if you were to take some of the influencers who are just showing these 62nd pelvis things and you were to quiz them on all of these different branches of the vagus, these connections with procedural memory, with early trauma in utero and how that comes out physiologically, they wouldn’t know what to say.

I’m making a big assumption there, but you know, I’ve. I’ve been around long enough to know that most of that detail does not get taught to people, nor are people seeking it out. ’cause they think it’s just about the movement and the release. Right.

KELLY

And, and nor is the, the information readily available. I mean, as I was a, a [00:40:00] neuroscience bench researcher and then went on to become a psychiatrist, and you would think that I would’ve encountered even one of the concepts that you, that you’re describing here, right?

So even where somebody might turn to understand these nuances from preverbal development to the sensory apparatus from interceptive. You know, I don’t, I don’t think it’s clear, and I do think that’s a part of the vanguard that you. You embody is to help really legitimize this very complex, um, field of right human

IRENE

physical experience.

To be fair, if, uh, you know, to be fair, this work is so embryonic, like Peter, discovering incomplete procedural memories, being trapped in a person’s system causing fibromyalgia like symptoms. ’cause that’s what it was. And fear and panic. [00:41:00] That was just late sixties. That’s not that long ago. And I always make this, I think you’ll like this parallel.

You know, I don’t know how long medicine in terms of say surgery has been around, but it’s been thousands of years, right? In terms of when people started experimenting with cutting people open and dealing with that kind of stuff. I also, I always like to use surgery ’cause that has a time and a place or orthopedics.

So if we think about that. Like when you say you gotta go see an orthopedic surgeon, you don’t say you gotta go see someone who does this, the, the, this method. And so that surgeon has been taught, granted, you know, they go to a decent school, the whole zeitgeist of not just orthopedics, but medicine, what you would’ve gone through.

And then they specialize. And there you have a great profession that is pretty darn solid and standard that I look at. And then I look at where my profession, like we don’t actually have a profession. [00:42:00] A profession isn’t a bunch of people doing their own thing, making money. And again, I’m all for good capitalism and, and I’m an entrepreneur.

But to take this work to the next level, the trainings cannot be entrepreneurial. And there needs to be collaboration. Like a surgical procedure might have one person offer a little bit of a tweak to that procedure, but it’s been brought up with all these other things. And then everybody goes, well, of course that’s how you repair an ACL.

We’ve just, we’ve figured it out through the research and trial and error. You want this kind of a graph, this kind of a rehab process, and boom, with this somatic trauma healing work, we don’t even have a name for it at this point. We’re still at that level of figuring out the basics. So I think that’s also why you wouldn’t have learned this.

I mean, I was just listening to Andrew Huberman talk about the vagus nerve. I’m like, okay, I’m gonna listen to it and see what he says. [00:43:00]

KELLY

I’m regulated enough to listen.

IRENE

And so his neuroanatomy was great. Like I actually learned something and I’m like, that’s wonderful. But he still, Andrew is talking about the autonomic nervous system being reciprocal, where the parasympathetic and the sympathetic have a reciprocal innervation situation going on, and that is not accurate.

And it happens to a certain degree, but you can have sympathetic high and high parasympathetic shutdown on at the same time. That’s what creates a chronic illness. And so it’s okay, like I don’t expect him to know everything, but there’s like this peace that’s being missed that, you know, you kind of say, well, how come he’s not getting that?

But then he did mention something. He did mention Steven Porges. I was just gonna say yes. Yep. He mentioned it. But what he said, it was fascinating. I wrote it down somewhere. He said, because his work is so new, [00:44:00] there’s not enough evidence or data. To show that this is actually what’s happening. So it’s considered a theory, but there’s been enough working evidence through myself, my colleagues, Peter, and the others within this new traumatology world that of course there is an, there is not a reciprocal, uh, relationship between these two nervous systems.

And this is why you can have someone that has these mysterious symptoms that flip, and that’s why these people go get labs and everything looks okay on paper because this system has kind of like got multiple personality disorder as a, you know, metaphor. So I don’t know where I went with where, how I got to that one,

KELLY

but, uh, it’s, yeah, just sort of, um, a peek into the nascent stage, you know, that, that we’re in and developing this.

So, so when we talk about these scaled interventions. That are, uh, very supported [00:45:00] by a lot of the, the new age cultural agenda. We, we can think about meditation and breath work. We can think about catharsis, you know, the kind of shaking, screaming you’re referencing, or then just, you know, basic observed movements.

The simple movements like the pelvic rolling. I’m gonna, I’m gonna push you probably where you don’t wanna be pushed, which is to try to distill down like a little, a little cautionary message for like, who is the person who may not benefit from meditation? Who is the person who probably wouldn’t sign up for the rage?

Catharsis, which is like a big, you know, sort of goddess, uh, you know, feminine movement kind of a thing. Who is the person who, who maybe. Shouldn’t start with, you know, releasing sexual trauma through pelvic rolling. I’m laughing ’cause it’s like Yeah. The promise of some [00:46:00] of these interventions are so, it’s so grand.

Yeah. So, so is there any sort of like, cautionary, just based on your experience, any sort of cautionary words that you want to offer? Because I, I then wanna talk a little bit about like what you see as some of the very basic entry points for different kinds of folks.

IRENE

Yeah. So let’s start with meditation.

So I am not someone who meditates, uh, traditionally I know many people who do, I know many people who were monks, Catholic monks, also Buddhist monks. And we have to remember that meditation is about consciousness training technically. And, and consciousness is a very strong technology. So if you have got nervous system physiology and, and there’s a trick, there’s a, there’s a bit of a tricky one to this.

You have dysregulation [00:47:00] within your nervous system, which I have not met anybody who has not had that to a certain degree. You have to know how to maneuver. And b, with the sensations, the emotions, the behaviors that might come through when you do say a classic vipasana sit, we’ll use Vipassana as an example.

Now, if someone goes into that and they have pretty good wind, like they actually have a real window of tolerance, which is a whole other story ’cause people keep talking about that without understanding what it really means. Um, if you have like even a little bit of a window of tolerance, you, you can maybe manage some strong emotions that come up, some discomfort.

Be with it, feel it, and move it through and integrate it. That’s great. Most people go into these sits and they bypass, and this is where that topic, spiritual bypass comes in. I actually like somatic bypass because you can actually go into the happy place in your brain [00:48:00] and go into more dorsal shutdown through the vagus in your belly, and you feel fine and you, but you see it, you know, from an observatory point of view, the, the eyes get glassy.

It kind of looks like you’re anesthetized. There’s no life in the, in the system. And so what happens sadly is a lot of people have been told ’cause of the research, the research meditation shows when da, da da, when these monks who don’t have any responsibility or or university students sit and do this for X amount of time, we see all these variables change, heart rate variability, you know, exposure to stress is, is greater or the, the ability to take in stress is greater, blah, blah, blah.

But the thing is, is that most people aren’t like that and they’re living in a world that has a lot of demands. So when it comes to meditation, it depends on the person. What I have also found is that those who [00:49:00] stick with working with the basics, and we can go over that, as you mentioned, simple things, they naturally start to go into a space of meditative practice naturally.

It just happens because you’re connecting and you’re recycling this focus of attention on your interception, on your extra ception, on your breath. Oh, this is tight. That’s loose. Ah, I, oh, I’m having this thought. So the speed at which you can take care of these somatic experiences, you need to be able to slow that down.

But again, if you’ve got this big boulder of survival energy living in your system, or you think the whole world is out to get you, you’re basically like you’re trying to keep yourself contained, like you’re white knuckling that meditation session. And I think a lot of people that meditate, this is just from observation, are actually training more so they’re, [00:50:00] how do I say this?

They’re training their tolerance for feeling stuff they don’t wanna feel, but they’re not feeling the actual thing that’s there. So they’re getting really good at managing what’s inside, but they’re not unpacking the thing that’s inside, you know? And so a student of mine a long time ago said she was doing my course, and this just shows how, how far a lot of people are from integrating even the work I offer.

She said, why? You know, I was, I was, I’m doing your course, but I’m also meditating. I’m like, okay, great. And she said, but whenever I meditate, I just, I just have this feeling like I wanna like flail my arms, but I know I’m not supposed to because I’m supposed to sit still in like belows position. I’m like, flail your fucking arms.

Like you’ve just learned through me that it’s important to get these procedural memories out. This, and this is where we compartmentalize, right? I’m [00:51:00] meditating, I’m doing my exercise routine now I’m doing my yoga, now I’m doing my spiritual practice. A person can just go for a walk and do all those things at once.

But instead we listen to Andrew Huberman in our earbuds, right? So it’s kind, we’re thinking about things as we’re walking and we’re not noticing all the things around us. So that’s the meditation piece. The breath work one is really interesting because people say, and I hear this, I do my breath work, so I’m taking care of my nervous system regulation.

The trouble with that is that when we are regulated, we do not need to do breath work to regulate our nervous system. So I’ll say that again. When we’re regulated, like true big window of tolerance, our nervous system knows how to react and come down, activate, deactivate. Our, our capacity, lung capacity is just shifting, just like our heart rate and blood pressure shifts [00:52:00] based on movement.

You know, I’m here with you. I’ve got a little bit of energy, but I’m also not flying all over the place, constantly looking around. Right. Um, so if we need breath work to regulate, then I say leave the breath work. ’cause there’s a therapeutic aspect to breath work that I do appreciate, but I’m more interested in can you just sense your breath and not change it?

Because when you work at some of these old procedural memory, the preverbal say stuff, you actually have to allow a person to go to the, where they’re almost not breathing. And what happens when I was in private practice, people would do this when they start to feel the energy. So I’ll kind of demonstrate it.

They’ll go, so they’ll, they’ll focus on the exhale, which again, Huberman was talking about on this vagus nerve thing. The trouble with that is if we really want to do any form of. [00:53:00] Cleaning up of the survival patterns in our system, we have to build the capacity to feel that, that tiger reaction and activate and explode in a contained way that is safe.

Raise our heart rate as if we were fighting or running, but if we just keep, it’s just keeping the tiger trapped. So that’s the breath work piece. That’s interesting. One of my students who’s learning with me to be a practitioner, she teaches breath work, but she has seen that. Yeah. Like we can’t use it just as a tool to keep us calm.

Um, and so I often say if you’re gonna do some breath work, re you got, again, interception if you’re just doing the behavior of, but you’re forcing it into fascia that’s tight around your mediastinum, which is that heart space. It’s like you’re just. I don’t know the metaphor right now, but it’s like you’re trying to go through a brick wall [00:54:00] with like a straw that you’re blowing through.

It’s like you need to work first on can you open up the organs? The diaphragms is the DA lot of people’s diaphragms are stuck, and so you’re trying to force this breathing in and it’s kind of just trapped in this upper quadrant. So breath work, I think has a time and a place therapeutically. I could add in cold plunging to that one because, uh, hydrotherapy wonderful for therapeutic benefit.

Hot, cold, sweat tolerance to cold, all the, I mean, I get the hormesis pieces, I get it. But if you have someone who goes into a cold plunge and they’re like, Ugh, and they’re going into more survival, it’s like, that’s not the point. And then the timer, stop timing yourself in the cold plunges, what will occur is if you’re going by the timer, you are disconnecting from your physiological need to get out of water, [00:55:00] right?

People say, just put some ice on your face, or, you know, this will put you into rest digest. No, it does not. The dive reflex, which gets activated and cold is the part of the vagus nerve that shuts us down. It’s what puts us into shock. And so if you have someone who can’t feel the physiology shifting, and if you’re really good at listening, you feel your heart rate then drop.

And that is not rest digest that’s actually going into shutdown. So, you know, you see this with meditation, breath work. Um, cold plunging is if the physiology is being forced and forced and it can’t handle the activation, it will shut down. And that’s not good. And then the worst case scenario of that is passing out in a cold plunge and then what happens?

Not good. Right. And we’ve seen this, we’ve seen cases where people have died in cools because they pass out with the combo of breath and [00:56:00] cold and the system says, time out. We can’t handle this out. Totally. I mean, what,

KELLY

what I’m hearing is, is really just an affirmation of the wisdom of the body’s, like homeostatic mechanisms.

Right? Because I, I have explored a lot. The very many needs that are met through what we call sym symptoms and, and illness and the wisdom of these expressions. And so what I hear you saying is that it’s imperative to meet yourself where you are. You know, I, um, I worked with a, a somatic coach for years and that was, I can’t tell you how annoying that message is because all I wanted to do, right, because I have this like spiritual thrill seeker, you know, in me.

And all I wanted to do was push myself past my discomfort and be the brave, you know, um, cycle breaker and everything else. And she would always [00:57:00] bring me back to developing a kind of trust between my. My will, I guess, and my body, right? So that if I’m really listening to my body, and then, you know, I, I started to talk about what I now jokingly call urinary reclamation, right?

Like how simple it is to just develop a relationship to your own urinary impulse, honor it and enjoy it, right? Like that there’s even pleasure in, in the relief there. It’s, it’s simple biological thing that, um, if you’re not oriented towards that imperative to meet yourself where you are, instead of pushing yourself and being a brave patient or client, right?

Or, or social media consumer, then you could end up inducing just another, another, uh, flavor of stress, physiology, and even interpret it as progress, right? So are [00:58:00] you relaxed or are you in. In, in freeze, in shut down. So that’s a very profound,

IRENE

yeah, that, that impulse, what you just said, that is actually one of the first things I teach students.

I call it following biological impulse. You’d be surprised how tough that is for people at the beginning. Thirst, hunger, urination, defecation, cold, um, rest. Now of course there’s a weird balance because those that have been chronically ill and shut down, they’re really good at resting. But we also don’t want them to go out and run a marathon, but they gotta do a little bit of something.

And so this is where, um, Peter kind of co-opted the word titration from organic chemistry of these little tiny doses. And it will drive a person who is functionally frozen and a high achiever, which I think you and I share this common trait. It’s like, what you want me to do five minutes of that? And that’s it.[00:59:00]

I can climb a mountain with a backpack on my back and fly off of it, you know, true story. It’s like, and I gotta just listen to what my feet are doing right now and the sensation of them, you know, when I was in my se training and this, just to give like more subtle example to people, I was unpacking all this stuff and I was at the beach in SoCal and I, I, I don’t know, I like, am I having a stroke?

Like, what’s going on? I just felt these, like energy is going down my calves and then I’m driving to La Jolla to see, uh, my se um, assistant for a session and they just keep happening. And I had just unpacked a massive piece in that training the week before. And I went into her office and I, I dunno what’s going on, drew?

Like, I’ve just got all these things, like these weird energies, like what the F is this? And she just looks at me and she’s so therapist based, like honey. You’ve been in functional freeze your entire life. [01:00:00] And I went, oh, that’s what’s going on. And she’s like, Uhhuh. And you’re now finally feeling, which is so strange ’cause I was an athlete up to that point.

And so I say that because there might be a lot of people that are like, well, I’m fine. Like I can work out and, but like, is there something else in the, in the body? That is not good. Like are you chronically constipated? Are you always getting sick? Are you having trouble with keeping your home clean?

Motivation, relationships, thinking, um, brain fog, all these sort of laundry list of things. And the ACE study showed this so beautifully adverse childhood experiences study. Like if we don’t work on this stuff, and I don’t mean to scare people, but we will get sick. Yeah, absolutely. Like we don’t, you know, how many people do you just hear who just go to sleep at age 99 and just never wake up without having any problems?[01:01:00]

It’s like, well that’s unheard of, but that actually is, I think, how we’re supposed to be. And so I share that little bit of a vignette because the layers that we have in us are massive and vast. But to uncover them and unearth them, we need to go quite slow. And a lot of people will stop. Because it just seems insurmountable, all these pieces.

But I have seen so many people move through this stuff. When you do go in a titrated way, and what I think is happening with the meditators, the, the breath workers, the cold plungers, the rage, cathartic folk, that’s fine. That’s your prerogative. But inevitably, and I know this from hearing accounts of it, they fall back, okay, I need to go to another retreat.

I need to pay this guru another 10 grand. I need to be in, in conscious community, you know, all this stuff. It’s like, actually you just need to sit at home and like, make food, [01:02:00] do your work, maybe be in your relationship, deal with that stuff, and listen to when you have to go pee. I mean, it seems so silly, but, but it’s like, that’s what animals do, right?

That’s what animals do. If you look at animals in the wild, they’re just looking for food. They’re taking a piss. They’re, they’re, you know. Having sex making babies and sheltering themselves when they need to. And the, but again, we’re not just that and I get that. So to, I mean, humans have a lot to work with right now because now we do know that this stuff exists in the fifties and forties.

It was just all survival and a lot of cocktails, right? Like, at least for the US post-war, it’s like, oh yeah, we got all these beautiful things and let’s just keep it all inside, you know? And now it’s like we can’t keep that inside. We have to work with this stuff. So I just went on a bit of a [01:03:00] tangent there, but

KELLY

Absolutely.

No, I mean, it’s, it’s amazing. I, I, because I would even, exactly what you described is, I would say like the past four years I have been titrating into bored. Truly from, you know, sort of righteous, angry activist, drama addicted, you know, state of adaptation, right? So it was absolutely working for me. And, you know, my mentor, Dr.

Nicholas Gonzalez, I mean, he would talk about his, the, the premise of his work was the autonomic nervous system. And he would talk about how some folks, the Paris, he would call them Paris, that they need to go on rollercoasters and watch horror movies, right? Whereas the sympathetic dominance need to learn to sit still.

Uh, and, and I am a sympathetic dominant for, according to his rubric, you know, for a few minutes and just. Be with myself, unstimulated, right? Or stimulated only by the, the [01:04:00] simplicity of what actually is in my environment and is in my body. And it took me out of the activism game. It also took me out of my then relationship because in order to prioritize regulating, I guess in the ways that I deeply desired, there was a change in environment that was needed.

And yeah, it’s, it’s amazing to, to consider the simplicity. I, I couldn’t, I couldn’t agree. I couldn’t agree more. I wanna talk just a little bit, like double click on the functional freeze concept. Uh, and then I want to just touch a bit on the role of, um, healthy aggression in, in men and infant voids. Even the functional freeze concept, I think has begun to permeate the, the zeitgeist.

And I think if anything it is, it is having. It’s conferring some benefit, right? Because women are now, I think, particularly women able to resolve the [01:05:00] gaslight on some level that says, I should be happy, I should be feeling fulfilled. I should be, you know, in having arrived at a place in my life where I feel, feel deeply, okay, in my own skin, I am running a business.

I’m mothering, you know, a couple kids. I am getting things checked off of my to-do list, but something feels amiss. I call it the sensation of like living behind a glass wall, right? But it can obviously be variously described. What do you think of as being the, the physiologic underpinnings and the most common manifestation of what we’re calling functional freeze?

IRENE

Yeah, it’s a good question. I mean, I only heard that term in my trainings, you know, in the SE training, I believe, and don’t quote me on this, it was. Coined more so by my mentor Kathy Kane when we were working with preverbal trauma at the somatic [01:06:00] level using touch work. And the other thing that she coined, and I know she did coin, this is the foe window of tolerance.

So false. And so someone has this representation of functional freeze, which is basically what built western civilization. If we just go really macro, what makes it such that a person gets up in the dead of winter to go work out and then go to work and constantly be in this, you know, rat race of, of going against biological needs.

Right? So that’s one part. But the faux window. Means that there’s this disconnection to that introception, it has to like you, and that then of course is wise that, well, there can be lots of reasons. Trauma, I think overachievers, I see it, I saw it obviously in myself, but it’s got common. Like you, you, you go to [01:07:00] kindergarten, you go to elementary school, you gotta get good grades, you gotta be a good kid.

You gotta sit still, you gotta be on the sports team, you gotta get to college or university. You gotta get good grades. You get a job. Like there’s never this like moment of pause of reflection. Some cultures have rites of pass passage where they’re young, but even those can sometimes be wrought with toxicity around showcasing, you know, this little human that just probably wants to have fun and play and hang out with their friends.

So there’s all these layers of functional freeze that get popped on due to culture, but then there’s also injuries, right? Going to medical procedures that we’re never prepared for. And rather than like feeling the terror of doing this thing, we just, oops. Be a strong boy. I, I saw this at the ER ages ago, this [01:08:00] little kid, I forget what it was.

He was looking fine with his mom, but his mother was clearly like stoic and like not being comforting with her boy. And then the doctor came and he had to do something. I think he had to get into the er, up into the nose. I don’t know what it was. And the poor thing, I washed his legs. My husband and I were sitting there and his little legs were just like this.

But his mother was like, don’t cry, don’t cry. Um, and if that’s normal, right? That’s completely normal. And then he got up and he walked away and you could just see his energy, just get a little smaller. But this is common. And so this is, I share that because it’s not functional. Freeze isn’t just from abuse and it’s from these everyday little things.

You know, it’s from needing to drive five hours and there’s no rest stop. So you just hold it in. You don’t drink. I know friends who will not drink on airplanes ’cause they don’t wanna be bothered to get up. And by, by drink I mean water. Right? I’m like, [01:09:00] what? You didn’t get up for nine hours? That’s insane.

That’s functional Freeze. So it’s this big, the Heth, I think of just what we’ve accepted is civilization, at least in the west. But I also think, I don’t know if it’s the millennials, I’m not good with my, my eras, but it’s like this whole, uh, they don’t wanna do anything. They’re so, you know, self-serving.

It’s like, yeah, I get that. But I also think it’s ’cause they’re just, they, they, we can’t continue with the numbing. I think they’re taking a little too far. Like I, we still have to, you know, clean up shit. Learn how to cook and all these things, but I, I think that like, we’re trying to find this happy medium so that we’re not going into this complete shutdown.

So yeah, functional freeze is interesting because it often serves you, Kelly until it doesn’t. And what I often [01:10:00] see, and you’ve probably seen this in your practices, and, and knowing people, a person will be fine rocking it and then they get a car accident or they lose a loved one or they, um, whatever, some kind of massive big event.

Um, and then one day they’re fine and the next day so they can’t get outta bed. And that is a clear thing that I see is the system has been holding it all together with like scaffolding and duct tape. And it’s been Jerry Rigg and MacGyver to keep going, keep going. And this is also why that classic thing will hear a person will like work til 65, like this is the old story.

Then they stop their job, but they get their pension and then in a year they have a heart attack and die. I mean, I’m being very, you know, general with that. But we know these stories and so that person has just been pushing to do the thing that they’re supposed to [01:11:00] do and then it just cracks. Um, the movie Revolutionary Road is fabulous with, um, Kate Winslet and Leo DiCaprio.

Did you see that? Oh my gosh. You have to watch that and let me know what you think. It’s like the epitome of what functional freeze was in the fifties. At least in America, in New York suits, you know, this is what we do. And then of course, spoil the lurk. The outcome isn’t good because they, we can’t live like that.

So I think, ah, yeah, there’s this functional freeze piece that I, people also get a little too attached to it. It still is nervous system dysregulation, but with a very clever mask. Of, um, being really great at everything.

KELLY

Yeah. Ate enough to, to get things done.

IRENE

Yeah, totally. You’re not listening

KELLY

to the symptoms.

You might have a sense that supporting your energetic and subtle body is important, but how exactly does one do that? Like short of scheduling regular sessions with an energy [01:12:00] healer, how do you do that? Most of the time I find that when we take supplements, it’s from the energy of fixing ourselves, and honestly, it’s really no different than taking a medication at that point.

That’s why I love flower remedies and specifically my girl Katie Hess’s elixirs from Lotus Way. The formulations that she creates are so nuanced that sometimes it feels like I wrote the descriptions myself. The last one I took was designed to dissolve. Go, go, go mentality as well as fatigue, weakness, apathy, and resistance to self-care.

Relatable. Okay. I have a monthly membership called Flower Revolution, where I get a new and super powerful on point remedy sent to me every month. And it blows my mind how resonant each one is with exactly where I am in my process. I think of this as a truly feminine investment that harmonizes my process and allows me to walk, talk, and interact with grace.

You can try it for months or [01:13:00] six at the link below, and if you just wanna dip a toe into learn more about how flowers heal, you can take their quiz. I love that phrase, faux tolerance. Yeah. ’cause it really gives you a sense of the, that’s where the, the, this, this gaslight arises. Amazing. So, okay. So to shift gears a little bit, because I, I think this is such an important nuance to contribute to conversations around.

Men and their nervous system regulation, uh, because, you know, I, I speak to a lot of colleagues about what would shift in our collective experience if men were regulated, right? Like, that’s simple, that simple aspiration. And I don’t think a lot of folks are talking about the pre-verbal origins and specifically the role of healthy aggression in a man’s voice development.

Right? And what happens not only on a physiologic level to with and [01:14:00] from that man’s system, but also on a relational level, like, you know, to zoom out to the seemingly, you know, peripheral concerns and considerations of. Healthy polarized romance and erotic connection, right? Like, what is it to be in a world where men don’t have a relationship to their own yang energy, to their own sexuality, to their own predatorial claim on, you know, what it is that they rightly desire.

Perfect. So, and the perversion and inversion of that. So I, I’ve, I’ve heard you talk about, you know, what it is for a mother to respond in one way versus another way to an infant boy. Nursing Right. And biting your nipple. Right. Could could it start there? Well, girls do it too, so, right, of course. Of course.

But you know, what is it to mother? Right? Because I, I don’t work with, with men and so I don’t, I don’t pretend to have any real [01:15:00] advice, guidance, or, um, insight into what it is that they need. But I do work with the mothers and the mothers of sons, right? And I see this opportunity that we have as women, as mothers to mother with an eye toward supporting healthy aggression.

And I extrapolate that on a cultural and collective level to what a gift that is to future women, you know, to be in a place where men have this open channel. Of shameless right. Connection to their, their aggression. So yeah, I’d love to just talk a bit about that.

IRENE

Yeah, I mean, I, I think, I always like to go back to the baby, so you’ve heard my example with that, but I hate to say it ladies, it still comes back to you because you are the one modeling the okayness of that little animal.

And so, and it’s the same, it’s, it’s women and men, you know, women have to have the healthy aggression too. [01:16:00] And so I’ll never forget, uh, Peter in class saying, we were talking about, I think it was a masterclass on depression, healthy aggression, and life force energy. ’cause they all go together. We know that many men have severe, we’re in a mental health crisis, if we wanna call it that with suicide up, depression, chronic illness.

Like I work with men in my work and I’ve got three students that are guys and you know, they’re to me just as equal as the women in terms of the stuff they’re dealing with. But what’s interesting is when we’re little, when we’re starting to find that sympathetic fight, and it’s when we’re still a baby and we’re feeding, we will do things like, we’ll scratch and we’ll pull the hair.

If mom has long hair, um, we’ll bite. You know, and we’ll have like, we start to get energy. And I’ll never forget Peter saying, yeah. So you have a mother that doesn’t know anything about animal physiology and that they’re a mammal. And that this [01:17:00] little one needs to be met. Now, this doesn’t mean that he hurt her or she hurt her, but if mom is like, Ooh, appalled by this natural biological energy, she’ll think that this little one is a monster and hurting her deliberately.

And he’s, he, she is not like no little baby is not trying to hurt. They’re feeling their life force energy kick in. And there’s neurotransmitters involved that I don’t keep in my head, but they’re there. And so you want to meet that little one with some play, right? So often, um, a, a friend of mine talked about this little one.

Her little guy was punching or hitting, I can’t remember, and she came to me one day. She’s like, I dunno what to do. Like this is kind of weird. They don’t tell you what to do. You know, in mother school. And I said, well, what, what do you think? And she said, well, Google told me that if my [01:18:00] baby is hitting me, hit them back.

I was like, and I knew that wasn’t right. I’m like, good for you. So that’s good. I said, well, the moment those little, those little hands start to activate, grab them and pull play, you know, get a little feisty with him and work with that rather than you’re a monster. Stop it. And um,

KELLY

and so she right. It’s like all these tropes, like, oh, we don’t hit stop that.

You know?

IRENE

Yes. So it’s like this, like, whoa, look how strong you are. Like let’s play with that strength. So it’s matching that strength. And so she did that and he never hit her again. So that is like a perfect little morsel of here’s this little dude who’s feeling his health. The aggression, I don’t even like to call it that.

It’s just healthy life force energy. Mom. Respects it plays, meets him. And it’s like an activation deactivation cycle. The [01:19:00] trauma release. It’s like, ah, thank God. It’s like, it’s like the, the, the crying out stuff is so interesting to me because if I was in distress and crying due to an injury or pain and my husband came up to me and said, you need to go to your room, Irene, and just cry it out.

And I want like a hug. I’d be like, fuck you. Like what? Like, meet me. I don’t need to fix it. ’cause guys like to try to fix it. I’m like, I just need you to sit. And so, so many kiddos and babies are abandoned in their aggression, emotional pain, f silliness, fun. You know how many little kids. Um, did mate believe when you’re like four, five and you bring this really screwed up thing to your parent, it makes no sense and the parent’s like, that doesn’t [01:20:00] mean anything to me.

Like what a, what a hit to that little person’s creativity as opposed to, whoa, that’s cool. Can you tell me what that is? Right. It, it’s, again, it’s a social engagement, back to polyvagal connection. And then you mentioned a second ago shame. I think the shame piece is, that’s a whole other thing because

KELLY

I was thinking that’s a part two.

I mean, that’s like so much to unpack there.

IRENE

I’ll just give you this much and I’ll come back to the male, the men piece, the male thing. We need healthy shame. We will not learn right from wrong if we don’t have that. It’s very different than guilt. Brene Brown messed that one up. Sorry. Brene, like with the, it’s guilt, it’s, it’s like no, guilt is more advanced.

Guilt is moral. Shame. I really did something wrong. Whereas you need some healthy shame so that little person doesn’t keep putting their hand on the stove. And if it’s just a like, [01:21:00] oh, it’s okay, take your hand off, you’ll be okay. Like that isn’t enough of a, a hit to the physiology. You have to feel it. Oof.

I mean, you know this, you have an animal like, oh, tail between the legs. You have to feel a little bit of that. And that teaches you okay not right, but you don’t do that with toxicity. Where I often will say, you know, and many of my students have heard this being told that they’re worthless, they’re stupid, they’re a big fuck up.

All these sorts of things that is toxic, right? So that’s a whole other piece. But if someone, and people will be like, oh no, Irene, you’re wrong. All shame is bad. Then I say, you gotta go back to your own childhood wounds. ’cause chances are there’s still stickiness in toxic shame that was dosed out to you.

And this is what we’re seeing in a lot of the more recent generations of parents where they’re letting kids get away with everything and no boundaries, no rules. And it’s, [01:22:00] it’s, we’re seeing a mess because they haven’t learned structure. But we also need play, right? We also need creativity. So it’s like a bit of both.

But to go back to the healthy aggression, I mean, to me, honestly, it’s really quite simple when that part gets met and then it keeps getting met and getting met. As each developmental milestone happens, you just create this little being who knows that they can be strong, but also sensitive and nurtured.

But what often occurs. As it goes, one or the two ways. We only reward it when you’re really aggressive and showing off. But if you need a hug, when you have a booboo, ’cause you fall off your bike, be a big man. Be a big, be a big boy. That’s what we would hear, right? Be a big boy, don’t cry. And that little one, there’s the start of functional freeze.

I [01:23:00] feel this, it’s like my mom’s telling me this doesn’t hurt, but I feel hurt. I mean, you know what it’s like if you, if you’ve scraped a knee as an adult, it hurts, right? Like, you’re fine. It’s like, no, I’m not. But then you, you, you trust your caregiver. Oh, I must be fine. And then starts the psyche confusion.

But I, I feel pain, but she’s saying I shouldn’t feel pain. And there you start the inability to feel interceptive and then not be so sure should I trust this person because they’re telling me that I should be okay, but I don’t feel okay, but I must be okay. The flip side is the mother where the kid falls off the bike and they freak out because the look of fear on a parent’s face is worse than what’s going on typically in the kid because they look at the face and they go, oh, this must be really bad, and maybe it’s not so bad.

And then you, uh, the fancy word is you over couple with [01:24:00] something that’s kind of minor. It’s like, oh my God, I’m, this is terrible. You know? There’s so many good social memes on that out there with, with people being a bit too extravagant with their reaction with something really small. This making sense?

Yes, absolutely.

KELLY

Yeah. And, and again, it, it’s almost like this, it all comes back to what we were discussing with adult clients or, or patients, which is how can you meet yourself where you are? Well, you can only. Really easily do that if you were raised by somebody who could meet you where you were.

IRENE

Right.

That’s simple. You got it. And many of us didn’t get that, right. Many of us didn’t get that. And so a lot of times there’s confusion. You hear inner child work and re-parenting and of course, um, Schwartz’s work with IFS and all these things are good and fine, but I mean, I kind of always come back to the [01:25:00] biological safety of that nervous system.

And if it didn’t get some solid co-regulation, which builds that portion of our vagus nerve, that calms us down naturally through the heart, through the, um, sa node, through the pacemaker. We gotta work that, that. So, and then, you know my list here of meditation, rage work, breath work that we talked about, like that stuff is nice, but like, can we just teach this person to connect to the ground under them and even just feel their own touch without doing anything?

Because if you were touched with hands that were either vacant or anxious, that’s gonna infuse this is what the world is, right? And so that you cannot reparent yourself and go back in time, but you can work with yourself as an adult with this adult brain and this knowledge. And of course the practices that I [01:26:00] bring people through to connect internally and to the environment, you need both.

’cause the environment feeds us information. And so a lot of people will get really good and perfect at doing these somatic things in the comfort of their own home, but then they’re in a supermarket and they lose it when someone’s being rude. Right? It’s like, well, if that can’t, has to integrate, right?

Just like a human, that’s little that goes, grows into an adult. If they can’t integrate and be on their own and be in good life force energy and good vitality and be certain in what they want and don’t want, then something got missed in that apprenticeship, which as we know is rampant. And that’s okay.

That’s the other thing. I’m always like, I talk about this as if it’s like everybody, everything is terrible. But the thing is, is we’re at a point right now where we know this stuff. Uh, even Gabor Mate said not too long ago. We don’t need to do any more [01:27:00] research around chronic illness. We just need to come back to what we do with babies.

And how we raise children. The good news for those that are like, oh my God, I raised my babies totally wrong. I’ve screwed them up. Don’t worry. Because if you do your work as a parent, I have seen this. It trickles out to your adult children. Yes, I’ve seen it as

KELLY

well. Yeah. It’s super cool. So beautiful.

Irene, I’m so. So inspired by this conversation, how many more paths we can go down. I would love to have you back on, which I almost never suggest because I’m very interested in, you know, just being the bridge to some glorious folks out there doing amazing work. But I, I really just find this, I mean, it’s, it’s so profound and so fascinating and I’ve come to such similar conclusions through very different paths.

So I’d love for you to share the resources that you have available for folks who, who do wanna study with you both, uh, what, whatever you wanna call them, lay people and practitioners, and to make sure, [01:28:00] you know, the people know where to go in the show notes. Of course, from this conversation,

IRENE

it’s pretty simple.

My name is my site, uh, lion, no s and there you’ll find. A rabbit hole that some people will go down for many years in terms of open resources and education. YouTube is the best place. There’s like 600 plus videos there, so there’s a lot if that is overwhelming. Um, and you don’t wanna weed through that.

We’ve got little things on my site that package some of that education up. And then the two courses, one is 21 day nervous system tuneup, not a reset tuneup. And then the, the longer curriculum that teaches how to work with the early trauma, the pre-verbal trauma, the healthy aggression, the healthy shame more Feldenkrais is uh, called Smart Body, smart Mind.

That’s a 12 week curriculum. One thing I will say is this is not stuff that you just do once and then you’re done and everything’s perfect. I like [01:29:00] to say that relearning as an adult, how to have true window of tolerance and regulation. And have all the systems come along for the ride. It’s like learning a second language as an adult.

You aren’t gonna learn Italian in 12 weeks and you certainly aren’t gonna learn it if you don’t go to Italy and immerse yourself. So there’s a, an immersion that has to occur and at the end of the day, Kelly, it’s lifestyle. Like, you can’t do this. And then when your husband comes home, you drop it all and go back into fawn.

Like, and this will challenge people’s relationships. It’ll challenge their career, how they connect with family. It’ll challenge everything, but that’s kind of what we want. If we don’t wanna use harmonizing, I would even say, yeah. And then it’s, it’s challenging the conditioning, but I’m also not this activist, use that word a little while ago of screw all the centralized stuff and, and leave [01:30:00] everything behind and screw the, the, it’s like people need to make money.

So if you know you need to like put food on a table and work. Then do that, but do this in little bits, right? The, the all or none approach in my experience doesn’t work with this stuff. Like you gotta integrate it into your life or else what will occur. And I’ve seen this is you’ll do this massive swing and then you don’t know where you are.

And then what do you do? You go back into shutdown or functional freeze. So it’s a cliche, but like that onion peeling analogy, you wanna peel it ever so slowly and then just let the peel sit there until it decomposes and it’s food for the worms again. And then you do the other peel, right? And it’s that slow.

But the cool thing is, is that the nervous system a wants to be regulated. [01:31:00] It doesn’t wanna be stuck. Um, but the brain will challenge that. So you also have to make a conscious effort and decision. Like, yeah, I wanna do this, but I’m not gonna punish myself by trying to get this all done in a year. So slow titration and a willingness to do it and just be interested in your body and in your physiology.

So that would be, that’s my speech.

KELLY

Beautiful. Irene, I’m so grateful for and to you. Thank you so much. Thank you.

IRENE

You’re welcome.