Why High Performers Burn Out with Irene Lyon

All right, Irene, welcome to the Man Talk Show. How are you doing today? I'm good, Connor. I'm doing really well. How are you on this? Whatever day it is. This wonderful Tuesday. Yeah, that's Tuesday. We're rocking the Tuesday. Um well listen, I wanted to kind of cut through the pop psych. nonsense and clarify what regulation actually is, what nervous system regulation actually is, and kind of get more direct into the role that the nervous system plays, what the misconceptions are.

And um as I was mentioning to you before we hit record, one of the guys in the Alliance actually recommended your work and has found it really, really um helpful. And after checking out some of your content, I thought that it would be great for us to dive in. So You know, yeah, people hear nervous system regulation everywhere now. It's like it seems to be uh regurgitated through the the echo chambers of the therapeutic industrial complex of Instagram and TikTok.

Um, but most still don't have a clue of what the hell it actually is or what it means. So why don't we just start with that? What is nervous system regulation? And maybe you can sort of define some of the myths and misconceptions. So the best way for me to start that, Connor, is to if I can define what the nervous system is. Is that a cool way to start?

So you're and you're right. I mean I've been doing this work um since oh four, um, and I've been studying and working with humans since ninety-seven. And The nervous system is now being thrown out, kind of like my body was a while ago. Um and We have to understand that there's more than one nervous system. It's not this like you know, one thing. There's many. And so I like to do a simple anatomy lesson usually when I start these talks. And we've got essentially um a central nervous system.

And a peripheral nervous system. And I when I talk just FYI, I use my hands, so get ready for some gestures. Uh and I like to point to my body parts. That's the best part. We'll we'll we'll just we'll label the parts that you're pointing to just in case. There's some people but you'd be surprised. Like the majority of people either watch now on YouTube or watch on Spotify'cause we upload the video. Okay. So you'll you'll be surprised. Most people will will they'll watch your cheerleading.

Perfect. And you can like mime with me too, you know, like Simon says. So we've got a central nervous system and a peripheral nervous system. Central just means center, which is the brain and the spinal cord. Real simple. Then we have the peripheral, which means you know, peripheral vision vision, which most people know it's what's out to the side. And that that's all the nerves that come out of the brain and out of the spinal cord. You can find a picture of this instantly on the internet.

Everyone knows the vagus nerve. It's that's the other one that's getting thrown around like a baseball these days. And the vagus nerve is a cranial nerve. It's one of the cranial nerves that comes out of the brain, but there's a lot of other nerves that come out of the brain. And then there's the nerves that come out of the spinal cord. And these nerves are

diverse. Um, you just picked up your your jug of water there, you know, you did that, yep. You do did that with your nervous system, but specifically the peripheral nervous system is activating things that you don't have to think about. you know, you're reaching, you're using your muscles, you're sensing it's not a hot boiling thing of water. So there's this sensory motor.

connection going on. Now you just swallowed that water and it's probably trickling through your uh we call it the esophagus or the food pipe into your stomach. Right? And you don't have to think about that. It's just gonna keep going. And if you need the hydration, your kidneys And your bowel essentially is going to do what it has to do to either excrete that water, that excess, or suck it in and then give it to your cells for hydration. You don't have to think about that.

That is all occurring because of the peripheral nervous system, specifically the autonomic nervous system. Same with food. If it gets really, you know, uh cold in here, I might start to shiver, probably not right now, but I might feel it. Or if it was like August in my office and I've got lots of sun, I would start sweating, right? That is the autonomic nervous system cooling me. So The autonomic nervous system is under or branches out from the peripheral and it does all these basic needs.

Right? I'll give another one. I don't know if you're home alone right now, but if someone were to knock on your door and you weren't expecting it, you would maybe what would you do? Tell me, Connor. If somebody knocked at my door and I wasn't expecting it. Yeah. What would be your first reaction? Uh maybe a little surprise. So yeah, and you might look, right? Or if you hear a crash outside, you might orient. That's also your autonomic nervous system.

But it's bringing in the movements of the muscles, your hearing, your sensing, but then you're also judging, oh, that's just the neighbor's dog, you know, doing that thing it does every day at three o'clock, right? Because the owners are home. And so you go, oh, that's fine. If I use a fancy word, your neurosception, your perception of danger or safety is like

That's cool. But if you hear something that's not familiar, you actually might say, Hey, Irene, I gotta go check this out. So you're assessing danger. All of that stuff is occurring in our system as a result of this blending of our central nervous system, peripheral nervous system, and the autonomic nervous system. Now The thing that regulation where this comes in, and this is a long story, so I'm not going to go into all the pieces because we'll probably talk about this.

When we're born, we do not have a fully functioning autonomic nervous system. I could say if you were premi, not premi, let's just say you have a full-term human, everything's healthy, they come out, some of their autonomic needs are set. Right. So they can hopefully they can they can suckle, they can bring in mother's milk, they produce They produce poop, as you know, as a father. They pee, you know, so their their kidneys are working, their digestion is working.

But they're not all working, right? So a little infant, especially humans, super dependent and vulnerable. They can't get up and run. They can't fight. Right. But they can shut down. And so our regulation, I'm really shortening this and we can get into detail, but our regulation is governed by how we are essentially grown in mom, right? Was it full term? Was there stress? in her life. Um what happens when we are coming out.

So people are always talking about peri and prenatal trauma and birth trauma. So were there complications? Did baby go under distress? And then what's occurring like right after that little one comes out? Or did that little one come out out of C-section? And that's a whole other environment because you have a very unnatural medicalized birth.

So those are some pieces and then of course let's say baby comes out, how that baby connects with primary caregiver, usually it's mother, determines whether or not you as a human get a good start at what we would call securely attaching, throwing out all the words. And then once that happens, and let's just say in a perfect situation, baby is attuned to, baby is uh held when they need to be held, fed when they're hungry, soothed when they need to be soothed, when they want to play.

and be fun, you know, or or like they're like, oh, they're engaged with every little drop of attunement, secure attachment and connection that helps that baby's needs be met and it soothes them. This what we would call their learning self regulation through co regulation. You gotta do that for like three years at a minimum.

really more like five and as you know I don't know how old your kids are but um you keep teaching and you keep protecting and you keep engaging and playing and there's routine, but those first three year li three years of life are kind of like the golden years of creating this secure attachment, this co-regulation.

And then to get to your original question, what is nervous system regulation? In that context, if we leave trauma and accidents out, you're building solid autonomic nervous system regulation. So that human can understand how to be with their discomforts, feel them, and then come out of them. So I'll stop there.

Um, I'll add too, like again, when you have an infant, you can't just have them there laying in a crib. Like they need to move, they need to learn how to crawl, eventually they learn how to crouch and walk. They learn motor skills. Right. So they're using their peripheral nervous system. Infants that are neglected, left um in cribs, you know, the classic studies come from orphanages sort of post-World War Two, I believe. Um

I think it's Poland, right? From Poland. From Poland. Romania was another big one. Um and the work of Renee Spitz really looked into this. And a lot of those babies didn't make it because while they were given food and shelter, they weren't connected to they weren't having that connection with another human.

And that's what builds up the part of our nervous system. And I didn't go into the branches of the autonomic nervous system. We could do that if you want, but we they they're not getting that that connection, that social engagement, which actually calms the heart. And lets them know, world's kind of cool. It's safe out here. Right? Um, I recently read something, I'm not sure how accurate this is, so don't totally quote me, but they studied babies that were in orphanages.

um in that situation versus babies that were born uh into prison because their mothers were incarcerated and the babies in prison were actually healthier because they were with their mothers. All the time, versus isolated. And so that's just an example of how that human connection is important. And of course, as you know um through your work and and the the work that your wife does.

not everyone gets what they need um when they're infants. So to go back to what is nervous system regulation, it starts with understanding how does it start? Is it done well? Is it done good enough? Or is there a ton of neglect and other factors? Because you can have really loving parents and real good

security, but a baby can be born with a medical problem. They might need to go into surgeries, they might be born premature, and then that also disrupts their ability to grow their regulation from that early point. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think the the main piece that you were uh that I just wanna sort of circle back on and double click on is this ability to

experience discomfort in the vessel of the body and to be with it and come out of it. Mm-hmm. And I think that that's such an important distinction. Um because I think for many people it's like, well, I'm gonna be so regulated that I never experience discomfort. Probably not gonna happen. You know, I'm pretty sure like Gandhi and the Dalai Lama and whoever it is, like they still experience some discomfort internally. Um

So it's not that we're trying to aim for never experiencing discomfort. It's that it's okay for us to have discomfort internally, but we have the capacity to come out of it. Um Uh I think we'll we'll probably touch on a whole bunch of different things. I wanna try and'cause this conversation can get very um medical, it can get very sort of um

pathologized, but I want to try and make this sort of practical and tactical for the individual to understand. And I think y uh already what you've done is amazing. Uh I think one of the things that people kind of get stuck on is that they believe

that they're dysregulated because they're depressed or because they feel anxious. And so I'd like for you to maybe distinguish or how do you distinguish between a symptom Oh w and and the state of the nervous system underneath it.'Cause I think a lot of the times people are looking at the the symptomology of like oh I feel this I feel depressed, I feel anxious, and so that must mean that I'm dysregulated.

Can you just speak to that? I will. And what I'll do is I'll piggyback on something that you just said a a moment or two ago is that um how shall I set this up? I'm gonna start with an analogy. Okay, this is in some of my videos, but it's really important. So when I was in private practice and I I I'm not, but I work online with folks.

You'll have people that come in and they have let's say been in a car accident. It's like a classic motor vehicle accident, or add in broken leg, ski accident, big life event that was really scary. And they're there because they don't know why they're still not okay, even though they didn't have, you know, a life-threatening thing. It was just a bit of a shake-up. And I often say, let's consider person A and person B.

So person A gets into a minor fender bender, which many of us maybe have had. You know, it's a little bit of a shake, it's a nuisance, but you're not hurt, your car is not hurt. And you walk away a little ticked because you gotta do the insurance thing regardless of, you know, all the things.

But you're fine, like you sleep fine that night, you have no trouble getting in your car the next day. It literally is like out of your memory. Person B has that little fender bender exactly the same, and they're a mess. They can't sleep that night. They have they're shaking. Um, they can't stop thinking about it, they they have dreams about it, they start flinching, they start to have a gut that goes a bit funny.

They start to have pain that doesn't make any sense. I worked with people like this, Connor. And You go, well, this doesn't add up. This tiny little accident doesn't add up. What's happening with that person B? is there's a very high probability, I'm gonna say a hundred percent, that they had a nervous system that was already dysregulated, but they didn't know it. And they didn't know it because typically society doesn't showcase when we have these little you mentioned symptoms and signs.

Like, oh yeah, I just have this skin rash or yeah, I always have diarrhea, or you know, I I can't seem to sleep at night, or I'm waking up in cold sweats for no reason. So person B most likely had this dysregulation to begin with, and it goes back to the baby piece I was talking about. When I start to talk to those people, and sadly a lot of the times

their work, their therapy doesn't continue usually out of monetary inability. Cause when someone has had insecure attachment, maybe some kind of trauma growing up. That is not something you fix in twelve sessions. That takes, and this is gonna sound scary to some, but it's true. But don't be scared, it can take years. It took my husband seven years to finally feel safe with me, even though I wasn't a threat. It was his upbringing with violence and abuse and emotional.

stuff that we don't have to get into. He knew I was safe, but there was that autonomic nervous system, like that defense, like I mentioned the thing at your door. Imagine that in a person's body, but they don't even know they're doing that. Because it's so repressed, because they've had to. So person B, unwell, symptoms, pain, what's wrong with me.

We then have to look at that and go, okay, your system was actually dysregulated before. You had no what we would call window of tolerance actually. You were living in what's called a false or a faux window of tolerance, which was a term coined by one of my teachers. And so you've just been hanging on and then this was the straw that broke the camel's back.

I've met people who have had um mold exposure and this occurs in their system. I've met people who have had their job, you know, money, you know, when there's been financial crisis. That can be it. uh death, losing a pet that you love so much cause that What that shows, and nothing wrong with pets, but if we're so dependent on an animal for our safety, that shows that we don't have actual safety at the cellular level.

Because of the early trauma. And then we have this car accident, car accident or something else, and it just it like explodes our system. Whereas person A, they feel these things, but because they had that secure attachment from a good mom or a good dad, they know, oh, something's wrong. You know, your baby cries, something's wrong. You pick up.

And it like a baby doesn't just soothe typically right away. You have to give a little bit of care and then it comes out of its activation cycle. When you get that learning early on, that transfers and that strengthens. what we call the autonomic nervous system, specifically the the ventral branch or the parasympathetic nervous system. But it also, when that strengthens, we also are good at going into rest digest.

And then that recovers the tissue. And so we don't get that chronic illness as person A, whereas person B, they actually didn't have it. It's like their wires were kind of tattered to begin with. And then they have this event and it's like they can't keep up. Now, one thing I will say, because I know maybe a lot of the people in your group who watch this and listen are healthy. They exercise. They do sauna.

They have good relationship. Yeah, cold I have a cold plunge. It's good, good for some things. Um, they do all the things. They do Tai Chi and Breath and eat so well and they do all the detoxing. And they're like hanging on a bit better because of all these really good healthcare practices. But inevitably what I hear from these folks is like, yeah, something still isn't right. I still have these ruminating thoughts, this anxiety, which really is survival physiology running the show.

And so I don't exactly remember what your question was, but I wanted to give that context where our ability to handle stress that comes at us, let's say as an adult or as a older teenager, young adult, is very much dependent on what the heck happened to us when we were young and were we taught also adversity. Like right now there's a situation, and I'm sure you know this as a dad.

Where a lot of kids are being given too much uh leniency and they're not being given important discipline and right from wrong and sh and what we might call chores. I don't love that word, but it's like They're not being tested to feel a little discomfort, right? But can that discomfort happen in connection? So that's another layer that I wanted to put down because

This is the depth, I think, and the detail that often doesn't get talked about when people throw out the term nervous system. Your nervous system is either regulated or it's not. And if it's not regulated and you're throwing on technique

to control the activation or the shutdown or the dissociation, those are good. Like I always say to my clients, Connor, if you need to take a deep breath and have a cold plunge and meditate so that you don't hit your kids, But the question is, can you feel the activation that your kids are offering you, probably because of your own childhood trauma that hasn't been resolved?

Have it come through, feel the energy, feel the anger or the whatever it might be, and still connect with them and drop into a more embodied, we could say calm state. But when we have regulation, it doesn't mean we don't feel intensity. It's how we're integrating that intensity. And I think a lot of folks are feeling intensity And they're finding ways to cope and manage, but they're actually not integrating that and metabolizing it. Does that make sense?

Makes total sense. Yeah. I mean the way that I've kind of learned this is through my mentor Dewey. Um he specializes in gestalt therapy and developmental psychology and attachment.

And he's actually he's created his own attachment system and model. And I remember uh sort of hearing it and and What I found fascinating is f again from my understanding of this, um that which creates a regulated nervous system creates secure attachment. Yes. Like the behavioral patterns and he he puts it in a very simple way, which is like

In order to create secure attachment, you have to go through a hard time in relationship with somebody and come out the other side okay. You got it. And when you're little, that hard time is like you're hungry. You shit yourself. You know? You want some movement. You want to be bounced. You want to be burped. Like it's that type of stuff. But then as you grow up, the the what you need just becomes different.

Right. And and so but when you have a need, that becomes a hard time, right? Expressing that need becomes a hard time. And so I I think that's the very interesting thing. And so the the attachment um insecurities and dysregulated systems

from the men that I've worked with always go hand in hand. You know, the guys that have in disorganized attachment or any type of insecure attachment, whether it's avoided or anxious or whatever, you know, the the pathology is um underneath that is always a very dysregulated nervous system that never got to really adjust and then there's just variants. Of the symptomology externally that gets expressed, right? Because some men will learn, I need to shut down and pull away aka avoidance.

And other men or people,'cause this is not just guys, but you know, other guys will learn, Oh, I need to frantically try and figure out what it is that you need and make sure that you're okay and you know, and so that's that's Um, that's the variant. But I I do think that what you're saying is is really important that there's needing to go through some type of hardship.

with somebody else. So it's not that we need to avoid those intense emotions with the kids, with the partner, with whoever. It's that we need to be able to integrate them differently, maybe vo vocalize them, talk about them, etc. So Can you maybe just go into that a little bit deeper? Like what for the average man that's listening to this and he and he's hearing us and he's saying, Yeah, I I'm dysregulated, you know, I'm angry, I'm withdrawn, I'm shut down, I'm you know, I stonewalled.

Where does he start? Because I like the notion of it's not that you're dysregulated in that moment, it's that you're you you're underlying system physiological. Which just dysregulated. And then you have these sort of tools that support you in the moment, which is which is great. How does he begin to shift that nervous system to build those pathways to actually become more regulated on a regular basis?

So the first I've changed the way I answer this over the last few years. So it's this is good that we're practicing this now. Um I used to say you gotta start with education, and that's kind of what we're we're like just tip of the iceberg with what we're talking about today. And that's fine'cause there's a lot to it. But uh so I used to say first you really need to learn about this stuff at a fairly deep level. But now what I'm saying, Connor, is you need to want

to do the work at this deep level. And it's not always easy. And I don't say that to discourage. I say that to say like this is a level of work that humanity hasn't really done yet until like the last decade. Um, and that's just the truth. You know, we we think that this somatic trauma healing work. has been around for a while. And if we compare it to say the history of I always like to say general surgery, like medicine, we're like in the Stone Ages.

And we're competing against, oh, that theory doesn't make sense. This theory makes sense. Um, oh, but that doesn't because of this. And we're just, we're like laying the foundations right now of what this work even means. But I like to make it even simpler. So let's just say you've got someone here, like you said, they're they know they've got dysregulation. I on oddly, when I do my work with folks, even though I know about all the attachment styles, we don't even talk about that stuff.

And the reason why it's not that I don't believe that that's a thing, it can confuse a person into overthinking. Okay, how am I to? I mean, I'm sure there's some funny memes out there that that describe like, Oh, the anxious and bivalent person with the disorganized person with the person who's secure and it's it's like a party, right? Yeah. But the thing that you said something a second ago about feeling the symptoms I'm gonna go back to the baby. I always go back to the baby.

Their cries and their emotions, especially in the first year or two years of life, are not emotional in nature. It's physiological distress. Or Coolness, like I'm I'm chill, you know. I'm just sitting here feeling good, and then all of a sudden, you know, that gas comes up. or that burp comes up or the diaper is wet and then it's right. It's not, okay, I think I'm gonna be emotional now and tell mama or dad that that I'm feeling unwell. It's just complete distress.

So let's just take that little one who maybe didn't have the right connection. And I'm also gonna add, Connor, some people will go, Oh, I didn't have any trauma. I know my parents didn't beat me, I wasn't raped, and that's true. There are, believe it or not, people who were not abused that way. However If the mom or the dad still has their own dysregulation and they pick you up with a shaky hand, have you ever like hugged someone and you feel they're like anxious? All the time.

Or I leave uh Of course you do. Sorry. It's my cheeks are coming out. You should see how I start men's weekends. Okay. Yeah. I mean it's like the one of the first things that That I'll do it on men's weekend. Is we have this whole like initiation experience for them to come in, but part of it is physical contact. So I can literally feel that man's body. Right.

And I can feel like what's happening within him somatically. But yes, absolutely. So you've you've felt that hug that's nervous, you've felt that hug that's like limp or the handshake. You felt the people who don't want to c touch their chest to you. Um, you felt the people that are gonna go, you're gonna hug them, and then they just do like a a forearm handshake. Um, and then you'll also have the people that that they hold you and they don't want to let go. Right.

So that is showcasing a person's physiology. And To unpack that, I would never say to someone when they hug me, Oh, by the way, did you notice that you were like a little shaky? Right. You're not gonna say that. But you notice it, you observe. But that baby, go back to the baby who's feeling the mother with the shaky hands or the father who's defeated and just has no life in them, they're gonna they pick up that energy. They're we're energetic electric beings.

And then that's gonna ping, it's the word I use, it's like kind of comes through the system to say, this is life, this is this is your environment. The baby isn't saying, oh, this must be wrong. That's just what they know. And so you get that over your first year, second year, third year. If mom and dad happen to be there and they have their own issues, the baby will feel that. And then that shows relational dynamic, you know, and again.

If there was a lot of violence and a lot of arguing, they feel that. But if there was like none of it, no emotion. Stone Cold, which was kind of classic post World War II. Um, I was married to a Brit for eight years. Um And that whole stiff British upper lip. And come on, son, you know, you can do this. Like everything is fine. that is not good either. So there's this spectrum. So when it comes back to the question, how does a person start, do they want to go back

to these places and spaces, knowing that you actually can't like I'm not a big fan of um reparenting. I don't love that term, because we're adults. Right. Like we are not babies anymore. So we have to navigate life, but we also are like, are we willing to feel the stored sensations? This goes back to good old Bessel in his book, The Body Keeps the Score. Um or gabor mate when the body says no. Are we ready to go into our physiology? Because we have to.

to work on our nervous system and start to pick apart these little tiny signals of distress or maybe the big balls of distress from abuse that are clouding our judgment as an adult. to not only make decisions and have good relationships, but to feel okay in our body when we're making food, when we're chilling out, when we're engaging in work. Um, and so for me That desire is super important.

education. And then there's like a whole avenue of how I teach and work with the methods that I've learned from. The biggest one would be growing what we call somatic capacity. um, tracking, being able to sense what's inside at a very detailed level, um, which I won't go into that detail now, but we can later if you want to.

um detailed level and working with the stress physiology in the way that I would if I was in private practice. So when a baby is under distress, their kidneys and their adrenal glands are on fire. Because they're wailing, they're crying. If we were left to cry ourselves to sleep, which so many of us were, um the system does one of two things. It can collapse.

Because it can't handle the abandonment. Nobody's here, no one's coming, or a system can actually stay in an agitated, armored state as an infant. And stay kind of, this is where we get colic. This is where we get the babies that are rigid, right? So you either have the rigidity in the arm ring or the collapsed baby that's just always sleeping and doesn't bother the parents.

So I share that because w as adults, we need to go back to working with the stress. This is the key word, stress chemistry. that was imprinted from a very young age that we know really well. And so let's just say there's a human here, a guy listening to this, and they are the go getter. They're the type A. We see this in the entrepreneurial world. We see this in the I can do anything.

And I'm gonna show you how good I am at this. That would be the baby that had the armoring, right? And who's trying to make themselves basically safe.

through lots of connections and interactions. The other end of that spectrum, Connor, would be um the collapse. And when we have more collapsed nervous system physiology, that's what tends to lead to chronic illness. Um, autoimmune troubles, pain, brain fog. What often occurs is you have a little bit of both of those connecting.

So the the type A go go go person goes and they're king of the world, but under there's like the system is like the gas, it's just not getting refueled. And then eventually the system just goes. And then they can't keep going. I mean, again, back to Gabor's book, When the Body Says No. Do you know his history of how he wrote that book?

Not that one specifically, no. It's quick. He was basically head of palliative care at VGH, Vancouver General, and he started and this was I think in the eighties, he saw a trend of all these really quite young People, and by young I mean you know 30, 40, 50 having insane autoimmune neurodegenerative conditions like MS, ALS, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus. And when he looked at their history, um, they were the people pleasers.

They were the people who did everything for everyone else and not themselves. This is very common in a lot of cancer. And he could just see this trend. Um Lou Gehrig's story is quite prominent for this one. Um I actually read an account that Ryan Holliday did not too long ago, whom I'm sure you know of. And he talked about the amazingness of Lou Gehrig. And I actually couldn't keep reading this chapter because it just showed how.

driven he was to the point of essentially um degenerating his nervous system because it could not repair and recover is my sense and a lot of physical injury. So I've gone on a bit of a tangent there, but you know, these are the pieces where I say this isn't cut and dry. Um, the process of restoring regulation to your nervous system, it works. I've seen it.

over and over and over again, but you can't go into it like I'm gonna fix this one thing and then go to the next thing. You really have to look at it from this vantage point of early nervous system development. You might not know exactly what happened when you were young and that's okay. But as an adult, we teach you or I teach you how to find those impulses again. To feel the physiological distress, to listen to it, but then to deactivate it or to restore safety.

Like there's also a difference between working with shock trauma and early trauma. They're completely different. And then you have to ask the question, okay, if I have a client who's a thirty five year old male and they have complex PTSD and all these health problems.

And then I look at their history and I go and I ask them, you know, any accidents, any surgeries, like, Oh yeah, I almost died in a motorcycle accident when I was twenty and I had like two broken bones and all these things and I'm like, ah. And if I watch them talk about that and they start to kind of quiver or shut down or go a little glassy-eyed, then I go, Okay, that shock trauma is such a big boulder. of stress in their system until we get that out.

We cannot work at restoring the base level regulation that maybe didn't occur when they were an infant. And then this is where the person has to be interested in really learning about themselves at this physiological level. It's impossible to know all of the things that occurred to us that could have put us into a bit of survival stress. But typically the big ones Are there?

Um, and sometimes we have to work with them. And then sometimes people, uh, Connor don't have the capacity to work on that big boulder. And so we have to know, okay, that we're just gonna put that boulder to the side. And we're gonna work on some of this attachment stuff and some of this basic capacity building stuff, hoping that that boulder can just stay over there for a while. Um, because sometimes what happens is people try to get these things out with catharsis.

We know this through retreats where people hit things and scream and And it might feel good, but if the system didn't have enough, I'm using my hands here to depict resiliency and vibrancy, you can actually fracture not just the physiology, but as you might know, the psyche. This is where we have splits and personalities.

where we're doing something that's inherently good. We're in a group, we're doing these things, we're feeling good, but then the group tribal effect, it's like, I gotta push through this, but my body's saying no, but I wanna do this, my body's saying no, and then we do it. And then it's like kind of game over. And then a person can get pretty harmed by trying to get that boulder out if that shell, if that body physiology isn't ready for it. So

I'll stop talking for that moment. No, no, no. It's great. I mean I've had so many men Come into my work, our work, um Having done exactly that. Okay. You know, push push themselves, whether it's within work or within their life, beyond what their system is capable of handling, or you know, they've gone to uh retreat or some type of process or done sub type of psych psychedelic and you know their system just wasn't able to hold the intensity of the

Energetic charge that came up. Yes. And you know, it it does something inside of them. And it's funny because I just started working with a client who's Very, very, very well known. Uh and that has been exactly what's been happening, is that he, you know, he went through some stuff that

basically pushed his system beyond its limits and brought up all of the stuff that happened in his childhood. And, you know, his what's happening now is just a mirror for what happened in his childhood within his nervous system. And it's just been I mean it is interesting that high performing men Seem to and I'm focusing on men because I'm sure it's women as well, but high-performing men really seem to approach.

healing in the same way that they approach success and business. And I know I fell prey to this in the beginning, right? It's like optimized push, override. Uh and that kind of can backfire. You know, and so for and and this is something that I really I I actually would love for you to speak to this because I see this all the time, regardless of how financially successful a man is, is that when a man starts to do the work We seem to have this like

switch that flips inside of us and it's like, okay, let me consume every piece of content known to man. Let me read all the books. Let me do all the courses. I'm gonna go at this in a sort of ferocious way. Uh, and I think it can be very frustrating for a lot of men. They can also overwhelm their systems. But what would you say for the guy that That does that and that knows that he does that? What are some alternatives to trying to do everything under the sun all at once?

I'm thinking how I want to answer that question. Cause I I was that person. So I I understand this really well. Um, there's something in the rubric right now of the nervous system somatic healing space called functional freeze. If you heard this term, functional threat. Interesting. Oh, interesting. Okay. So I think it's kind of more in the women's space. But it's being defined absolutely wrong. So functional freeze is what you've just mentioned. It's this ability to keep going.

and consuming and being perfect. And for women, it would be three kids. A house, a job, on all the committees, baking cookies until two in the morning and then making the Halloween costume at six AM, right? So that everything looks perfect. And that human actually never feels tired. Like they just keep going. Um they might be really fit. Um I was a ski racer and did all the things, mountaineering up in my older my younger years and push, never felt fear. Nothing.

And guys are more typical, you know, they're the ones that skydive and paraglide. I was paragliding with those guys and just like, I'm fine. I'm jumping off running off of this hill. No problem. Right. That's functional freeze, but what occurs, Connor, is that eventually unfortunately this is this is the case is they go and then it's just there's this drop.

Like into bad health problems, fatigue. I can't get out of bed. And they are trying and so but they're trying to figure it out. A common thing that I've also seen, um And I've I've kind of scrutinized people in the public eye that I see where I'm like, that's why they need to know everything. So when we've had any type of abuse um where we're not cared for, not necessarily again, physically abused, but like

People aren't listening to us. They're not seeing us. They're not noticing us. Our spur, our crookiness is little. I mean, you've got again, you've got kids. personality uh like there's a soul there that's so probably different, right, between them. Would you agree? Mm-hmm. Oh definitely. Yeah. To Foster the development of that authentic human requires a level of skill that we're still figuring out as humans. They're not like animals in the wild where you have a litter of cubs.

And they're all kind of the same, and you got to teach them the same thing. Humans are different. So back to the question: why do these uh men, or and I'm gonna say females too, acquire so much information? One way that we've seen is that they do it so that They are always ahead of the next person. So if I know every if I'm like a polymath and I know everything about psychology and medicine and engineering and social sciences.

astrology, whatever, you know, um, I'll always have something to say and I'll always be smarter than that other person. And It's like therapeutic status acquisition. It's in it is. Um and there comes a point where you don't need all the information. You can go ask someone else. Right. Tim Ferris kind of comes to mind in his, you know, um need to have so much information. Right. And I do know a little bit about his story because it's public now. Um, the abuse that he went through.

Um, and so it's like that's one of the reasons why I think that occurs. I mean we there's so much down here. I'm thinking of the movie Fight Club. And that classic scene that Brad Pitt did with his shirt off, of course, looking all good, about how, you know, we're angry. You know, we're not doing what we're supposed to do, jobs that we hate, you know, things that we aren't s you we don't want to be doing. It's such a classic scene. And so that fuel that can fuel us to like really be driven.

To hunt, but it's not hunting.

I think it's cool that a lot of um people are getting back into hunting. And archery. and being with the land and knowing how to do more we would classically call it husbandry work, right? Like that sort of stuff that is in our genetics. I'm very much someone that believes that there is a role.

You know, I might get in trouble for saying that in my female female areas, but it's like, yeah, I I have a husband, we have a great relationship, and there's certain things that he's better at and there's certain things that I'm better at. And then we come together and we connect and we discuss. Um, but when someone is kind of trying to do it all, again, I speak more from the female point of view, that burns you out, but the men get burned out just as much.

Um I don't know if that answered your question. Mm-hmm. Okay. Well let's let's just shift'cause I I do want to at the

sort of towards the tail end of this start to give more um like ta'cause, you know, has been more tactical. So it's like a lot of the tactical things. And I do know that a lot of this is like developing um More inner awareness, more interoception of like what's actually happening inside of you, which is a which is a skill which I think is good for a lot of men because there is a certain level of mastery that

I think most men desire and and want. Um and this is something that I've noticed within like, you know, within the alliance of w the the community that we have is that we we really move away from pathology. It's like we're not gonna this is not about pathology. This is about giving you tactical, tangible tools that can actually help you understand what's happening inside of you more effectively.

So that you can start to move the needle. Um but let's just define a little bit more what is a nervous system that never really learned safety and childhood look like in an adulthood. That was my husband. So I'll actually I'm allowed to speak about him for case of reference. So a nervous system as an adult that didn't have that safety, um

One of the common ones is, you know how people say introvert, extrovert, that that that theory. I don't love it. But One of them is kind of being a recluse hiding, but that doesn't mean that you're not engaged with things. So like my man was really into reading. Like and and this is actually something that's come out a little bit more is people will say, oh, that's why I was always in my room with a book. It was safe.

Um, I'm gonna just spout out some things that I've heard through him and clients. I always did my homework at midnight. I was a night owl because when it was night, everyone was asleep. So there was no threat that I would be screamed at or I would have to change myself. My husband talks about being uh raised he ra was raised with divorced parents, so one house was one way and one house was another way. And the moment he heard the garage door open after school meant that his dad was coming home.

And as soon as he heard that garage door, his relaxation of being at home by himself out the window. So he was in fear. He was a f afraid of other people. And it started with his father. Um, and then dad comes home and what do I have to do with this person to stay safe today? And then I go to school and what do I have to do so that I don't get in trouble?

Because if I get in trouble, you know what's gonna happen. The teacher calls the parent and then I get uh spanking or I get beaten or I get sh shouted at at night. And so one of the common things is we will change ourselves depending on who we're with. But the thing that's so tricky is that if you haven't unpacked this, you don't even know you're doing it.

You just don't. And but what you realize, this is why I can't go out into public spaces for very long. Because as soon as there's more than a a um four people, I can't keep tabs. on all the ways I have to change myself when I turn to talk to that person at the bar versus the restaurant versus the restroom. So you become exhausted. And what tends to happen with that, Connor, and this is just more a generalization, A lot of people will just start disconnecting from their body.

So they'll live in their head and then it makes sense to be very intellectual about everything. Right. And so a person can start to go gung-ho with working on their physiology by over-scrutinizing everything that's occurring, also over-scrutinizing their thoughts. Um, as we know when we've had this kind of dysregulation, talk therapy can be a wonderful resource, but you gotta get into the physiological elements of the somatic system.

So that's kind of one overarching one of how we interact with people. And then what can start to happen is we s we might call it social anxiety. That's kind of what you would classify that as. And then we start interacting. We stop, start, we stop interacting, I should say. We stop going out, or the way we go out is very planned. Um, my husband says when he used to go out into the world, he lived in the woods at a resort, Hot Springs resort, for like five years because it was safe.

you know, um, hippie living as he called it. And it and and it really was an amazing spot that he lived at. It was called Brighton Bush Brightonbush Hot Springs, which is outside of Portland. And It was like as idyllic as you could get. Raging river, you know, you could be naked in the hot springs, organic food, you know, it was no no grid, you know, no internet. But he'd have to go into Salem to get groceries every now and again and he had to like plan it.

I have to have this in my car. I gotta smoke the joint. I gotta have this music set list to keep me calm. And then as soon as he started to feel his physiology get more scared, that's when he knew he'd have to come home. So that's just one of the common traits we see. Addiction is a whole other element, um, whether it's substance abuse, um Uh I find that cannabis is

highly overused, at least here where I live, in in um good old B C but it's I think B C Bud is B C Bud world famous. Sure is. I grew up with that. B C Bud is world famous. Yep. Yep. Um, so you know, that's another thing that is, you know, not I don't I'm not someone that says never do anything, but the relationship we have with it is really important. Um You know, I think for for guys

Some of the things that I teach, the tactical are gonna sound really strange. So I'll just can I name some of them? Yeah, well let's let's go into like functional functional regulation and what that actually looks like and what actually works. Yeah, so this is gonna sound super odd, but I have uh exercise in both of my courses called Follow Your Biological Impulse.

And it's just that. It is can you tell when you have to urinate? I'll be descript. Can you feel when there's pressure in your bowels? And you might need to have a bowel movement. Can you sense when your tummy is tight because you're nervous? Are you holding in your perennium? You know, are you clenching your jaw? Um

these biological elements are what again the baby I always go back to the baby. We keep it really simple because all of us had to do this when we were babies. And if we didn't have that right relationship with our caregiver, Um, you know, when they go to touch to change us, to clean us. And that touch is not with care and connection, that whole area is going to be um imprinted with fear or harshness. Like this is how far back I go with my students and it's like

Can you be gentle with yourself? Can you sense the pressure and stop working for two minutes to go and relieve yourself? Granted, of course, that it's safe to do so. Right, this is where animals are super different. Anyone that's been to a cow pasture knows like when When cattle have to go, they just go, right? Yeah. So because of um human domestication, we're so far from being out. in the planes and we have to go and we just go. Right?

So that is one of the basic biological things. And here's how this connects the nervous system. Cause when you're holding that in, when you're holding pressure, tension, Holding in gasped. Women are a bit worse with this. I think guys are okay with passing gas typically.

Unless you're around a new uh you know, a new girlfriend. I know you know, and that's not what we're used to. I know, I know, no. So I applaud the men that have fun with that, but Um what happens is when that is not moving, if you think about that autonomic nervous system I was talking about, those nerves, specifically the vagus nerve that I talked about, goes to the gut. Goes to the lungs, goes to the heart, the throat, the some of the areas of the face and ear.

When we're repressing, suppressing, or ignoring the need to do these things, it's actually sending this sort of signal to the nervous system saying something's wrong. Over time, over decades, that com it's like compound interest interest, right? It adds up. And so then the question is, how many times when you feel the need to have a little cry, is that being held? How many times when you feel like you need to go, ah, is that being held? Um feeling uh

Sensations in the body. Um, I'll actually, this is really timely, so I'm gonna mention this. I don't know if you follow the Olympics. Mm-hmm. Okay. I don't follow it intensely, but there was a recent situation where a top level athlete

was airlifted off of the downhill course, the female skier, Lindsay Vaughn. Yeah. Um, as a former very amateur ski racer in my high school years, I understand what it is to push and push and be injured and keep going, but then the universe has this weird way, and I don't know if you've ever had this happen, of dropping you another problem or another accident. That it is the same but worse than the

So when I heard she was skiing without an ACL, like, okay, power to her, you know, and I asked one of my friends who works with the ski teams, you think that's a good idea? He's like, Oh it it happens. People race without ACLs. I have tried to ski without an ACL and I got worse. Like I reinjured myself. I'm like, okay, we'll see what happens. And then what happened was she crashed and she severely um broke her tibia.

And she's off. Like it's probably she'll never ski race again. If you watch the press conference, if you find the press conference after her first race, Before the race that she had with the torn ACL, you can see the repression of her tears. And she even says, I'm not gonna cry. Like she was so stoic. And I saw that, and as soon as I saw that, Connor, and I'm not like perfect in my psychic prediction, but I'm like, that girl is n is holding.

So much tension. in her eyes, in her mouth, in her throat, in her heart. She's probably devastated that she just tore her ACL. That's devastating for a ski racer. And then to have to be pretty in front of the press and say, I got this. And then everyone, this is important for people who are in the public eye. Everyone is like, you got this. You're resilient. And I'm like, I get it. But like that poor girl is suffering. She doesn't want to show it. And then look what happened, right?

And the amount of times I've worked with people, Connor, where they've had an accident or something occurred and they're like, just one more. I'll just do one more, one more run, one more this, one more that, and then smack. So this following impulse, that's all in service of if you feel that that cry, if you've ever held back tears and you let your throat burns. It's really tough, right? That's a lot of suppression. That baby isn't going to suppress when they're feeling distressed.

But they'll start to stop the expression of that distress when they realize nobody is coming. And so this is the this is like what I'm gonna say is the linchpin. So if you know you were that kid that couldn't be authentic when you were little, and again, it doesn't have to be due to abuse. But you couldn't be yourself because of the repression post-World War Two, whatever it is, in your family system. You have to, as an adult, realize how important it is to listen to that interceptive quality.

Because if you can't do that, it is gonna be very hard to know how to be aggressive in a healthy way. How to parent your kids and give them healthy shame. That's a whole other topic. Right. How to talk to your partner and express boundaries because you're terrified. of what they might do because you're asking for something that's maybe whatever it is.

And so that r this is where the relational comes in, the physiological, and then essentially being like, I gotta feel this stuff, but I have to feel it in a way that is t the fancy word is titrated. Because like you said, if we try to cathartis cathartic get catharsis and get all the emotions out like I'll just go to this retreat and I'll do the bro way of doing it and get it all out in one weekend.

Then I don't have to look at this again. Right. And it's like the the system isn't work doesn't work like that. It's like you couldn't take your infant who's six, six months old and say, we're gonna teach this infant everything they need to know about self-soothing this week. it wouldn't work that way. And so, um, this ability to follow biological impulse is like one tiny portion of how we start to do this. Um

And then learning little things. If I go back to my say husband, when I met him, he had a very strong um I can't mimic it, Connor, but a defensive orienting response with his eyes where you it like he would be sitting stone cold. at the dinner table we're eating, not in a like threatening way, and I catch his eyes darting. And it's like he's looking for his dad'cause his dad would always scream at him and hit him at the kitchen table.

It was unconscious. And what I had to do is I had to say to him, and we had a we have a very open relationship with this, you just did that thing. And he's like, He would always do it when we were at restaurants when we first started um seeing each other and he would stare He would stare at people because he thought that they were gonna come over and like hurt him. And so I I had to not be frustrated with that, be like, hey Seth.

You're staring at that couple, like what and he like, Oh and he wasn't even aware. So behavior, that's a behavior aspect, that quick darting of the eyes completely unconscious. But these are the things that you as a human start to, oh, I just did that thing. But before that thing, I got a little tight.

One more thing I'll say about that, because some people do have symptoms, right? I know you said that we don't want to pathologize, but I'll use a couple examples because I think it's important. A lot of people have migraine headaches. This is a thing that happens, tension headaches. In the work that I've studied, namely somatic experiencing with Peter Levine, we work with those symptoms by feeling what's happening before the symptom hits.

So this is true for people that have seizures, this is true for people who have migraines, even um autoimmune flares. When you get really good at sensing the introsphen and you get better at monitoring yourself, You can actually pick up, it's called the prodromal, the pre prodromal. It means before the symptom. But we want to find before, before, before the symptom.

And if you can start to sense that, and this is where it actually can become almost like a bit of a game, bit of a tactic, if you can oh, oh, when I t when I tighten my perennium That's what happens before I stop breathing and then the breathing restriction is what creates the migraine. But if we just focus on let's just breathe deep, this is where the breath work thing, it it doesn't it it's okay, but it's not gonna get to that initial root.

physiological element that's completely unconscious that's making the breath stop. And then that restricts oxygen and all the things. The diaphragm shut down and then all of the brain structures are like and then that's where we get fascial tension and then we get the migraine. Um so this is kind of my uh selling point as to why it is important to feel and get really good with our introspective capacities.

But then we also Connor don't want to scrutinize them to the point where then we're hypochondriacs around what we're feeling. Right. Because that can also that can swing um the other way as well. Yeah. Excuse me. That's okay. I'm getting over my son's cold. Oh he's almost five, you know. They're wonderful, beautiful little germ bags. Um my daughter is is a year and a half old. But yeah, I mean it's it's interesting because when I

Like my degree was in music and I was a singer. Okay. And uh it was really interesting because time singing from like eighteen to twenty-eight, twenty-nine. Um and I was fortunate enough to like sing professionally overseas and like China and Europe and stuff like that. But the all of that time singing was spent developing um A more robust

awareness of what was happening inside of my body. Because a huge part of singing, especially opera, is it's I had a teacher describe it to me once is that it's basically controlled yelling. And controlled, sustained yelling. And so you're literally trying to yell as loud as you possibly can, but you're trying to control it and sustain it. And when I started singing I had so much tension from working construction and playing hockey and bar fights and smoking and drinking and partying. And so

And I had no body awareness. I had zero body awareness outside of I'm hungry, uh you know, morning, like those were that was the spectrum, you know. Most people are but then I s you know, then I spent four years in well, I more than that. I spent s you know, probably about six to eight years really training and then a couple more years just performing.

And uh all of that I remember just systematically learning like where's tension in the body. And so part of part of when I started to work in psychology and Um, you know, get training around developmental work and the nervous system, all these pieces. I was like, oh, I've kind of been doing this for a long time, you know. And so, but it is the you know, it really is a rigorous practice. And I think for men.

Um what might be helpful which I think you you were pointing to a couple of things there. One is where are the tension points in the body and be starting starting to become very aware of what are the tension points, whether they're in the jaw or in the perineum or in the you know in the abdomen, there are certain places in the diaphragm. I know a lot of men hold in there and the shoulders, stuff like that. And then

And then the second is being able to identify uh I call it charge and intensity. Like where are where's the charge in the body, the sort of electrical charge in the body and what's the intensity of that? And then being able to be with that, expand your tolerance for it and then

uh and then be able to sit with it to a point where it can actually begin to dissipate somewhat. And that might require you to share that with somebody or, you know, breathe breathe a little bit more, et cetera, et cetera. But Um all of that I think is extremely helpful, but it is to your point. It is uh It is a it is a sort of a commitment in practice to developing a deeper awareness of what's happening inside.

I think, if I'm not mistaken though, that in part, like this is what the Stoics were actually talking about, is that, you know, stoicism is is not a negation uh or a neglect of what's happening inside of you. It's a very, very, very deep, robust understanding of what's taking place and then responding despite what might be happening, or responding instead of reacting from that tightness, that tension, that, you know, intensity.

I kinda wanna close off so that people have an understanding of this, but I'd love for you to maybe define a little bit of like what does real progress actually look like in in nervous system work. Right. Um and Might it get worse before it gets better? I'm sure you want me to go there. Um I'm gonna I um hold that thought because I want to go back to what you mentioned.

about uh the stoics, but also the feeling, sensing the activation and letting it dissipate. Um, I agree. I think th there's a n need to have a disciplined behavior around this this nervous system stuff because it's not something, as I said, that you can figure out in a couple of months or even a couple of years. I'll be very honest. Um so discipline is important.

I often say it is important to be a scholar of your nervous system. Like the the students I've worked with who have healed immense traumas, complex PTSD, autoimmune issues, all this stuff. Like they are studious.

with with at least reading and going through my stuff and the way I've presented it, um, they're forever students. They are always looking at things with a beginner's mind. But the one thing that has kind of been um forgotten and I don't think it's on purpose, but in the sort of nervous system influencer world, which I will name as usually those who are not properly trained, we leave out specific releases

that might have to occur as a result of say a traumatic event. So I'm just gonna name it because this gets forgotten. So for example, if one had a car accident, let's just say we'll use that example. And they needed to turn the steering wheel quick, but they couldn't, because doing that would have made it more dangerous. There is a written, it's called procedural memory. in the motor nervous system, the sensory nervous system, that wants to complete that movement.

It's the same with people who have been attacked. They want to push, they want to kick, they want to scream. Medical procedures where you're held down, even if you want them. There is a part of you when that dentist goes in your mouth, you don't want to be there. Right. And so this this part of this nervous system healing isn't just being with the impulse, it's part of it. And it isn't just attuning to self and the environment. That is part of it.

Sometimes and often we have to specifically work on what we would call completing procedural memories that are stored and trapped. because I've seen people kind of go in circles not getting to that. And they'll do um say tremoring exercises, which have become very popular. But if that if that shaking isn't organically coming from within If it's being imprinted or put upon the person to shake, you're not actually going to

get rid of, get rid of. You're not going to release the core trauma that was attached to a specific event. And that's something that I think is really important for me to mention because what comes out, Connor and everyone here, isn't textbooks. It's not just this like perfect shaking, you know, people are doing qigong exercises, shaking. That's great. I lots of my friends teach qigong and and and martial arts, do those practices, but you have to

work at finding the actual organic release that's unique to your system and what occurred to you throughout your life. So I wanted to make sure I put that out there. Yeah, I've I've found that there's like a There's like a trauma resolution that's waiting to happen. Yeah. You know. There's like a resolution from the experience from the traumatic event.

Yeah. And I think uh sometimes these like you're saying, the blanket exercises don't actually allow for that resolution to happen. And this is where, you know, I do think that what I think what you're saying is very important, you know, that there there is kind of um You can do these blanket exercises and they can be helpful, but there is individual experiences that probably need to be gone through. Tip yeah, typically what occurs is a person feels better because circulation

And blood flow has increased. And that's important, right? We need to have that happen. But a person, you know when it's not resolving when that tremor keeps happening in the same way. So I've worked with people where they'll come in and they'll just their leg will start shaking and it's like this repetitive It's like it's like on on cue it starts to happen. And I often will ignore it. It's like we need to figure out what's what's the before before before that is occurring.

And typically it has nothing to do with this sort of tremor that might always occur. Um, I forgot what your other question was. I wanted to ha have that piece in there. Yeah. What was the last thing you would ask?

Oh good. What does real progress look like in the nervous system? So as people are doing this work and again I think you were talking about the the possibility of regression, like you know, that that part happening. But yeah, if it if it gets worse before it gets better, but what does real progress look like? So um I'll be I'll put little pockets of generality. So if somebody has been kind of that even keel, functional freeze, nothing bothers you ever archetype.

Real progress progress means that you might actually start to feel anxiety for the first time. you actually might just start to feel a little irritated. about what you're doing. You might start snapping at people. You might start not always wanting to people please. And when that starts to unpack, you might that could Bring in shame. It's like, what's wrong with me?

I'm like the dude. And now I wanna Yeah What's happening? I'm not a I'm not an emotionless robot anymore. And now I'm like checking the locks on my house at night to you know, like what's going on? So that thing I just said is an example of like if you're all of a sudden feeling a little afraid, that is probably very early fear. That got swallowed because you couldn't show your fear when you were four or five or in school when you were being bullied or whatever. I'm fine.

But inside you're like terrified and want to break down crying. But you know, if you do that, you'll be called, you know, a little wimp or whatever like that. So I often say to people, um You might find another thing that I teach people, Connor, is like if you hurt yourself, and by hurt I don't mean like a massive injury, but let's say you stub your toe on the coffee table, which happens, you know, you're buying your elbow. That hurts.

That is a perfect opportunity to practice what I call your own medicine. Feel the hurt. Don't rush, because people will rush and be like, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine. But you stop, you pause, you maybe sit down, you feel the pain, you feel the sting. I would say nine times out of ten, if someone's never done that and they actually do that, they might break down crying. Cause they've never stopped to feel pain, to feel ah, I just I just fucked up. Right. So that's another thing to to mention.

Other things that start to happen. Um, I have to set this up with a little bit of a visual. It's important. So as I mentioned at the top of our talk, this nervous system goes everywhere. We have many nervous systems: digestion, sleep. temperature regulation, immune system relation, um, energy.

So if I think of all these things, and there's more than what I just said, but you line them up on a table like little marbles, you know you're getting better when all those marbles are moving forward a little bit. So huh my digestion's a little bit better, said Oh, I kind of want to like talk to my best friend. I actually feel like talking to my parents, who I used to hate, right? Um I actually want to go outside and like move my body.

Wow, I'm actually fine feeling tired at ten o'clock and I'm actually gonna go to sleep as opposed to push and watch another show and override that fatigue. Wow, I really don't want that junk food that I always had. I'm craving like Some meat and rice or whatever, right? So if you think of all these little signs of dysregulation lined up on a table as marbles. progress occurs when in my opinion and from experience, when all those kind of move forward a little bit.

What I've seen in working with people who just am like, oh, my gut's off. I'm just gonna focus on my nutrition. But we know a lot of gut troubles are are a result of dysregulation at that autonomic level. So they'll fix their diet, which maybe they had to do, and everything improves for six months, but then it goes back. And all the other things aren't moving forward. And so progress to me is when the whole system is inching forward little bits by little bit.

The difficulty with that though, Connor, is you don't see this big result. But it's like your five-year-old and your one and a half year old. You're not gonna see your one and a half year old if if that's your age, all of a sudden like cook a three course meal in the next year, like she's learn how to hold a cup and all these things and it's going really slowly. But when we actually work at our system in this slower, more titrated way.

What occurs is that sends signal to that autonomic nervous system, but also to all the elements of our spine. our bone structure, because as you change that, the body changes, the posture changes, how we see the world changes. And so it's like this, they say it takes what seven years for the human body to fully have a new human body, but the organs actually um change over a lot faster because of the way that that that tissue is.

Um, so that's my way of saying the progress happens, I think, in these little little small um inches forward. What often gets worse, so I mentioned the anxiety we might feel. Sleep can get disrupted. If we were that person who slept like dead to the world. Nothing bothered us. We might feel when we go to sleep our heart

is a little more racy because we're actually sensing the underlying unsafety in our system. Um our digestion, if we've been stuck in a more collapsed let's say parasympathetic state, like very deep shutdown, and we're s we start to get more sympathetic, fight, flight on, we actually might find that we get more constipated. Because our system is revving and feeling that stored fight-flight energy that's coming up.

People who've had a lot of accidents, I fall into this camp where you've had injuries and surgeries and whiplashes and concussions and you've frozen that all in time, as you start to gain more regulation, you might start to feel pain. That you've never felt before. This is where the fascia comes in, and then that's where you might need to complement that work with some tissue work.

This is where hydrotherapy is beautiful because then you can heat up the body, you know, get some cold, get the the circulation going. Um, the immune system, I mean you just said you had a cold, but you know, people who have been stuck often in a functional freeze will say this, I never get sick, ever. Right. There's two ends, like the never get six and I'm always sick.

If you get sick, that's fine. It's how can you recover out of it? But what I've found is when people come out of their deep functional freeze, they're more susceptible because they're more sensitive. And then they're feeling things like, wow, I actually feel what it's like to have a fever Whereas before you would just push through it and ignore the symptoms or you'd like take Benadryl or something to just keep going.

So those are some of the those are sprinkles of the elements that can happen. Um one more thing I'll say, because mental the mental part I haven't talked about much. If we've been really good at compartmentalizing, when we start to get into this dysregulation, we might start to have really weird thoughts. And this is where I think and I I can't verify this, but in working with people, this is where someone might say, Why do I just want to let go on a killing spree?

Not literally, but like, I just want to like take this knife. Like I've heard people like, why do I want to take this knife and chop off my hand? This doesn't make any sense. Why when I'm driving down this road, I'm like, I just want to go off that cliff. This doesn't make sense. But that is the underlying make-no-sense survival energy that maybe wanted to die. When we were infants hooked up to the

to life-saving devices. That might be the anger, rage, kill instinct of wanting to get that knife and harm our abuser, but we couldn't because we were eight. And so because of our complex human brain, our mammalian physiology We're it's like this really complex situation when we start to unpack these survival strategies that are inherently there to protect us.

And because we're humans, we just don't have our hands and our mouth and our legs. We have all these other devices and things at our fingertips. to get out that energy and sometimes they're not very good. And then of course this is where violence occurs. Um, and that's a whole other story as well. So I wanna say if you start to have weird thoughts, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going crazy. And that's where can you come back to the sensations?

Oh, that desire to kill, there's a deep ache in my heart. I'm devastated by the fact that I didn't have that connection when that happened to me when I was young. Right. And when you're really little, you can't make sense of these differentiating factors. But as an adult, you slow it down, you come to the physiology, you connect to where you are, you ask for help, you can start to unpack a lot of these things.

Um, at that neurobiological level, but we also have to be like, yep, we're also human, and our brains are so complex. I've also seen and heard a lot of men talk about when they start to unthaw. Like when they start to thaw.

And uh there's a big connection to the body. Um sometimes it's the violence that you're talking about, but the other part that I've seen is just the like escape. Like I just I wanna burn everything down or like why do I wanna run away from absolutely everything? How come I want to Shut down the business and disappear in, you know, Central Asia. Like what is happening?

Um so that's a that's another one. But well listen, thank you so much for your time. This has been wonderful and you know, there's so much more that we could have gone into. Um, but maybe just give people insight into where they can find you and your work if they want to check you out a little bit further. It's just my name, just Irene Lion.com, no S with the Lion and like the town in France.

Everything is there. I'm on, you know, all the socials. YouTube's been around for over 15 years. There are hundreds of videos there. I would say don't get overwhelmed. You can definitely binge a lot of them. And then of course I've got online programs that I created. Um, when I saw in private practice that it wasn't enough for someone to see me once a week. for five years'cause I was in that kind of practice.

And it didn't feel empowering to those I was working with that they had to rely on coming and seeing me once a week. Um, I still think that private work is really important. Um, my husband does that. I have many colleagues that do. Um, but my bulk of work now is teaching people how to relearn how to be in their systems at a very deep uh strategy-based way because we're working with not just emotion and sensation, but the body, the movement.

the anger, the toxic shame, um, and really the physiology. Like that's my that's my focus is we must work on the survival physiology because when that is driving the show. Everything is sort of tethered to that. Um, as well as, you know, our brain. Our brain, as my one of my teachers said, is an end organ. It's still being impacted by the nervous system physiology. So

That's where all my stuff is. Um, and yeah, I'm starting to also train practitioners now. So that's a new endeavor and venture, which has been rewarding and very challenging and very good. So that's my next ten ten years or so, I think. Awesome. Well, we'll have the links for all that in the show notes. As always, don't forget to man it forward, share the episode with somebody that you think would enjoy it.

Maybe a significant other, maybe a friend to have some conversations about what uh you know, what stood out to you and what lessons you got. Um and as always, until next week, Connor Beaton signing off. We'll see you next week.