Hey, welcome back to what I Learned in Therapy with me Jamie Lang. What I learned in Therapy is a podcast about, well therapy, obviously. Um, it is about storytelling and it's highly philosophical, and it's about healing. It's about telling the stories that make us who we are and telling them over and over and over in different ways so that we can continue to see different aspects of ourselves and accept the way that we change and grow. I am a licensed clinical professional counselor.
I own a healing center called the Vault. I. Run a lot of groups here at the Vault and I just got approved to open up my own yoga teacher training school, which is really cool. And I'm also starting a new program that I'm gonna talk about a little bit today, um, in conjunction with some other things I've been thinking about. So if you'd like to learn more about what's going on at the vault and uh, what I'm gonna talk about today, you can head over to the website. It's located in the show notes.
Um, if you don't wanna do that, just google the Vault, Boise, Idaho, and you'll find me. You can also email at WLIT with jamie@gmail.com. So let's jump in. I'm just gonna take a big, deep breath. There's a certain kind of woman I often sit with in therapy. You'd most likely recognize her. She's the one who never misses a deadline. She's the one who remembers birthdays, who stays late to help clean up.
She's the one who everybody calls when things start to fall apart because she always seems to hold everything and everyone together. On the outside it looks like grace, but on the inside it's something else. It's not ease, it's not freedom. It is a kind of controlled holding, a learned position that comes from years of managing what was never hers to carry. When I say she carries it with grace, I don't mean she floats through life untouched.
I mean, she's learned to metabolize chaos with a calm face. She's learned how to keep others steady, even when she's unraveling inside, and that kind of grace is often misunderstood. It's not effortless. It's very effortful. It's the result of a finely attuned nervous system, one that learned long ago that safety wasn't a given. So it became the source of safety for everyone else, and that's what we so often miss. Hyper independence, hyper effectiveness, hyper efficiency.
It's not a character trait, it's a learned state. It forms in environments where tenderness didn't have a place to land, where chaos became familiar, self-reliance became the only way to feel safe in a world that rarely was. And I know this, not just because I've studied it or because I sit with women every week in my practice. I know it because I've lived it too. There's a story I carry and I'm going to tell it not for shock. I tell it because it demonstrates the beginning of trauma.
And I tell it because it's the wisdom. I now stand inside. My family and I were in a horrific car accident. I was seven years old. We had this, um, light green, maybe even sea green. Scout, it was like a Jeep. Um, they don't make 'em anymore, or if they do, they make 'em quite differently. Um, I don't remember the weather. I remember it was dark outside. What I remember is that my brother and I were sitting in the backseat, no seat belts. We had suckers in our mouths.
We had just had pizza and we were celebrating my dad's new job, a new sense of security, and we were driving out to see his new office. What I remember most is the moment the world split open. Suddenly there was a tractor in the middle of the road, no lights. My dad swerved and swerved again, and that scout rolled like dice three or four times into the front yard of a house along the road, and somehow I landed in the back of the car. Or outside of it.
I can't quite remember, but I remember that everything went black. And then the sound of glass beneath me and my mom screaming our names and my dad silent. We were herded into the house. The house we crashed, almost crashed into, um, and they had a fire going and it was really warm. And the contrast of the heat and the cold outside and the trauma in our bodies, my mom passed out and I thought for sure she died.
And my nervous system was arrested in that moment, I looked at my mom on the floor, and then I heard the police saying that they were gonna have to cut my dad out of the car. With the jaws of life, he was hanging upside down, and so I believed he was dead too. That thought didn't pass. It stayed. It etched something into me and then it was the cops asking questions and I didn't have an answer. Just ringing my hands together, trying to locate the center of my body, and that's how we learn.
Hypervigilance, not through words, but through experience. Nobody told me to become vigilant. My body did it on its own. It wasn't fear exactly. It was kind of alertness that never turned off. Like I had to be ready at all times because everything could fall apart at any moment. That's when my nervous system stopped being a place of rest. That's when it became a scanner. That's when I became a scanner. The day after the accident, I went to school.
I remember my mom saying, don't go, but I, I needed to get away from the wreckage. My dad was. Coming home from the hospital and I don't think I wanted to be there. I needed to find something still and structured to pretend that the world still made sense. And I went to school wearing the jacket I had on the night before during the accident, and my mom's blood was on it when she pulled me in close to her after waking up from passing out.
She left blood on my coat and I wore it like a badge, not like I wanted, you know, Hey, look at me, I'm wearing my mom's blood. But I didn't know what else to do with the rupture because no one told me how to hold it, so I wore it. And I didn't know it then of course, how a moment like that could rearrange an entire nervous system. I just knew that something in me had changed.
The center of myself felt stolen and in its place I learned to orbit around other people's needs, other people's emotions, other people's chaos. My dad's chaos, and that became my gravity. By 16, I had found a new way to survive food. Yes, food is for survival, but I began using food not for nourishment, but for regulation. I had watched my father do the same. It was subtle, quiet. No one named it out loud. But I saw it. My body saw it.
My body felt it binging, felt like an abundance in a world that so often felt scarce. That was so scarce. Like I was trying to feel the absence, not just of safety, but of being held by being located by being attuned, and then the purging. Because when you grow up with internal chaos and. And external unpredictability you find whatever control you can, even if it hurts, even if it disappears you. I didn't know then that this too was a trauma response, that I wasn't weak or broken or vain.
I was brilliantly adapting to a system that never learned how to keep me safe. This wasn't self-destruction, even though it looked like it. It was self-protection in a language I hadn't yet learned to translate. And the irony is, even though it came from survival, it still left its mark. Not in ways that scream, but in quiet imprints in the relationship I have with my body still. With rest, with balance, with fear.
I carry those echoes still, but not as shame, I don't think, but as memory, as evidence of what I lived through and how I brilliantly adapted to stay here. To stay here. And I'm not the only one of course who adapts in ways that seem ridiculous. A while back, I, I sat with my friend Aubrey. I love her. We met as freshmen in high school. I. She watched the whole thing develop. She is one of my most trusted friends. I don't have to speak a word to her.
I can just look at her and we're dancing in language. What surprised me, I. As we spoke about those days, how we both were developing adaptations for our trauma was her willingness to share her own unconventional adaptations, her own ways of coping, of managing and surviving. There was no shame in that conversation. Just two women once, two girls.
Speaking the truth of what has kept us alive, and it was so honest, and even though I know I'm not alone now, I still continue to feel that comfort of feeling less alone. I don't think that ever stops because that's the thing about trauma. It isolates, it convinces you. That your adaptations are strange, even pathological, and maybe they are, but they're survival. But when someone says, I did that too, or I feel that same way too. Something loosens.
The grip of secrecy, softens and the body exhales. We weren't broken girls. We were girls doing the best we could do with what we had, and we made it not without scars, but with an unshakable knowing of what pain can teach. I continued to return to that conversation with Aubrey because it reminded me of why I do this work. The younger version of me didn't have the language, the tools, the safety, to name what was happening in her body. She had no map for what regulation felt like.
No one said, Hey sweetie, this is your nervous system on overload. No one explained that. What I felt like chaos was actually adaptation. And so now I build what I needed. I created girls on the mat to offer a different path, not to fix girls, to be clear. Not to fix them, they don't need fixing, but to equip them. To give them access to safety, not as a concept, but as a felt experience. Girls on the mat is more than yoga. It's more than a summer camp.
It's nervous system literacy, it's trauma prevention. It's a space where breath becomes agency, where movement becomes memory, where self-respect is practiced. Over and over and over. Girls on the Mat is a trauma-informed philosophy rooted program designed to change the future of girlhood through the ethical wisdom of yoga and spirituality and healing. Our mission is to offer girls of all ages.
From infancy to adolescence, tools for inner steadiness, emotional literacy, and embedded and embodied confidence, and the vision is big. Like I said, it's not just a seasonal camp here at the Vault, not just a four day program. We're building scalable, age specific formats from prenatal bonding, all the way to teen leadership and sports based empowerment. Because girlhood, if you know a girl, close your eyes and think of her right now. Think of her. If you're driving, don't close your eyes.
I think of a girl. You know, I'm thinking of my niece. Her name is Abby. She is precious. Because girlhood doesn't need to be something we survive. It can be something. We intentionally grow, something we intentionally cultivate and something we intentionally protect. The world is aching for this, and girls on the mat is ready. And here's something I wanna say. As a therapist, I don't do this work because I figured everything out. That is for sure I know, know, shit.
I do it because I've walked through fire and came out with language because I know what it means to feel alone in a body that doesn't know how to rest. That is learning how to rest because I still carry that little girl inside of me, the one who was scanning for danger when she should have been sleeping peacefully in her bed. Therapists aren't immune to trauma or not immune to maladaptive coping or chronic vigilance in in the body or the ache of being misunderstood.
But what I know now and what I teach now is that healing doesn't require perfection. It requires a presence. And the more I listen, the more I intentionally learn that my nervous system isn't asking me to erase the past. It's asking me to stay here. To stay with the sensations, the memories, the grief, to stay with the parts of me that still flinch and to stay with the knowing that I don't need to be fixed, I need to be met. Buddhism teaches us that everything is interdependent.
That nothing exists in isolation, not trees, not ecosystems, not people. So it makes sense that healing too must be relational. Hyper independence taught me to go it alone, but healing has taught me and will always continue to teach me to come back to the village, to let others hold me, to admit when I'm tired. And to trust softness. Again, One of my favorite authors, mark Nepro, wrote quote, to listen, is to lean in softly with a willingness to be changed by what we hear and quote.
And I have been changed because I listened finally and created space for more listening, not only to myself but my clients, and to the girls. To the girl I was, to the wisdom I carry and to the body that. Never stopped trying to speak and I heard you are here. You are whole and you are love. This is for every girl who never felt safe enough to say what she needed and every woman still carrying her inside. You are here, you are whole. You are love.
Thank you for listening and go spray paint that big old world out there with all of your love.