March 4, 2021 • 41 mins
Jennifer Burton Flier is a licensed marriage and family therapist in private practice and a senior faculty member with Trauma Resource Institute (TRI). She is also certified in Brene Brown’s Daring Way and Rising Strong models. The Community Resiliency Model she teaches with TRI focuses on stabilizing the nervous system when we are under stress or triggered by traumatic events. Jennifer says learning some simple concepts about the body and brain can reduce our stress responses, creating more balance and ease in our daily lives. //
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to the Laverne Cox Show of Reduction of shondaland
Audio in partnership with My Heart Radio. I can certainly
tell you of somebody who used to suffer from panic
attacks that if somebody said to me, calm down, don't
you think I would have done that already? I would
(00:24):
have already done that if I knew how to do it.
But I don't know how to do it because my
body is like on fire right now and I feel
like I'm gonna die, And so it really becomes how
do I intervene at the somatic, at the body level,
so that I can unhook that. Toronto Burke, the founder
(00:48):
of the Me Too movement, in her two thousand eighteen
Ted Talk, declared that we as a society were collectively
traumatized by the reckoning we were having around sexual harassment
and assault. At the time, I'm that declaration felt like
the truth to me and got me thinking about the
other potential collective traumas we might be experiencing as a society.
(01:11):
I am deeply aware of the collective trauma of repeatedly
seeing black bodies murdered on camera. For me, as a
black trans woman, the violence against trans folks that is
often also captured on camera repeatedly. I found also deeply
traumatizing a global pandemic, the greatest economic downturn America has
(01:35):
experienced since the Great Depression. Collectively, we are experiencing trauma
on top of trauma. My own work in therapy over
the past four years has focused specifically on trauma resilience
and if we are indeed collectively traumatized, how do we
collectively heal? So to have this conversation, I wanted to
(01:57):
talk to my very own therapist, Jennifer Burton Fly. I mean,
I taught her all the time, but I wanted to
have that conversation here publicly to talk about how we
can build trauma resilience individually and collectively. I really believe
it's one of the most important skills we can develop
right now. Jennifer is a licensed marriage and Family therapist.
(02:19):
She is certified in Expressive Arts Therapy. She has also
certified in Burnet Brown's Daring Way and Rising Strong Models
as well as E M d R. She has a
senior faculty member with the Trauma Resource Institute and has
traveled extensively in the US as well as Northern Ireland.
To share wellness skills with various groups and cultures. Please
enjoy my conversation with Jennifer Burdenfly Hi, Jennifer, Welcome to
(02:49):
the podcast. How are you failing today? I'm feeling pretty grounded.
I was using all my skills before we got on today,
so feeling okay now I of it. I can't wait
to tell everyone about the tools and the skills. So
about four years ago, I had moved to Los Angeles.
I really didn't want to move here. I came here
kicking and screaming, and my showrunners, Joan Raider and Tony
(03:13):
Phalon invited me to a barbecue at their house in Pasadena,
and invariably, the subject of therapy came up, because of
course it always does, right, And one of the partygoers
named Krista, said that somatic therapy is the only therapy
that worked, and I was like, okay, this is the
second time that the topic of semantic therapy has come
(03:33):
up in the past year. A doctor of mine in
New York City had told me about somatic therapy about
a year earlier and said, you really should try it.
It is the best thing, and so I said, okay.
The universe is trying to tell me something. So I
reached out to Christa. She suggested you, and four years later,
here we are. So can we start by you telling
(03:56):
everyone what somatic therapy is. Yeah. I think it's really
important for people to understand that there are many different
modalities that use somatic therapy. And the word for somatic
actually derives from the Greek word soma, which means living body,
and the therapy is really grounded in the relationship between
(04:18):
mind and body. So the overview really of thematic therapy
is that it uses the body as the entry point
for healing versus the thinking part of the brain. We've
all been impacted by things in our lives, and the
point of using the body is to tap into our
innate resiliency that really lives in us. We are built
(04:42):
for survival, but we're also built to cultivate resiliency, and
we do have to work at cultivating it, and that's
really the purpose of thematic therapy. And by cultivating the resiliency,
what happens is we often uncouple or take out the
glue of the traumatic, stressful responses that we have. We
can extinguish those cues, whether they're external or internal, cues
(05:05):
for trauma and stress. The way that it kind of
crystallized to me was talking about the stress response when
we feel where we're under threat. We are hardwired as
human beings to have a fight response, a freeze response,
or a flee response, and so the body releases adrenaline, cortisol,
(05:25):
releases hormones, stress hormones, so we can either fight that bear,
flee that bear, or freeze. But then that's not sustainable
to constantly be in this place. A fight flighter freeze
is not sustainable to always be sort of living with
these stress hormones. And it became very clear to me
after we started doing our work together that my whole
life was fite flighter freeze, and then my whole life
(05:48):
was bears in the woods and I didn't have other
ways of existing. Do you want to talk a little
bit about that. Yeah. I also want to highlight that
there's several different responses. We do have fights freeze, there's
also below a freeze response collapse in the nervous system
where we just everything shuts down, and that's when we
(06:09):
really are under extreme life threat. And then there's also
tend and be friend or some people call it some
schools call it fawning that when we move toward a
threat to deescalate and oxytocin, which is a bonding hormone,
is also released along with the adrenaline and corsol, so
it actually a quiet the system so that we can
(06:30):
actually stay in some kind of social engagement and then
my chances of being attacked might be lessened in those circumstances.
But oftentimes, in any of these survival responses, what we
see a lot is we pathologize ourselves, or we blame
ourselves or shame ourselves for whatever the survival response was
in a given moment or in a given situation, or
(06:51):
like what you're talking about, I'm always failing, like the
bear is coming after me. Nothing is safe, if everything
is dangerous, nothing is safe. For my colleague Jen Click
calls it the ability to distinguish between a forced fire
and a match. And when we can't make that distinction,
it really doesnt number yes on the mind and body.
(07:12):
It causes illness in the body. It causes a constant
state of stress. It causes us to misread our environment
to the point where we also can misread social cues.
We could get into fights or altercations with our partner.
I mean, we're on top of each other all the
time now, and we can misread the situation if we're
in a survival response, especially if it's firing all the time.
(07:33):
What really resonated from me, and it's one of our
early sessions, is when you define trauma as too much,
too fast, too soon. And you said to me that
the nervous system can experience good things as too much,
too fast, too soon, as well as things that can
be challenging or feel like a threat. And so much
of the work of somatic therapy is I understand, it's
(07:54):
really about resetting and regulating their nervous system in relationship distressors. Correct. Seeah,
so again when I said earlier, there's all these different
schools of somatic therapy. The primary one that I practiced
through the Trauma Resource Institute, and that's the community resiliency
model and trauma resiliency models. One is a clinical model,
(08:14):
the other one is really meant for the wider community.
And we've taught all over the world. So the definition
of trauma in that vein is too much, too fast,
too soon, or too little or too much for too long,
too little, or too much for too long? Can you
explain that? So? I would say that the too little
or too much for too long can be from the
(08:36):
developmental perspective of developmental trauma and stress. But I think
also of right now that the time that we're in
we've had too much for too long and too little
for too long. We're so disconnected now from each other,
from being able to see one another. I think this
is why we see people chomping at the bit to
get back together or to have family gatherings, even though
(08:56):
we know it might not be safe to do. Because
it's been too little for too long. That sense of
isolation and disconnect becomes almost unbearable, and that is what
we would call cumulatives. So a sort of deprivation of
human contact can also be traumatic. Yes their childhood neglect,
for example, if there's been a neglectful parent or caregiver,
(09:18):
that can absolutely stimulate that trauma response in the body.
Because we are hard wired to connect to each other.
This is how we come into the world, ready to connect.
And if we don't get that, what we call an attachment,
it makes it very hard for us to self soothe
or self regulate throughout our lives. The truth of it is,
we do need coregulation in our lives. We're wired to
(09:40):
be in community, in connection for the most part. Some
people might feel connection when they're in nature, or connection
when they're with a pet. Different aspects of being able
to have that regulation happen. But I would say also
that when we get that coregulation, like let's say within
a therapy office or with a loved on, we're going
(10:01):
to have a deeper capacity to self regulate or do
that kind of self soothing on our own when we
aren't with someone. We just have a deeper capacity to
be able to do that when we get that coregulation.
So I think in context of a global pandemic that
this is literally traumatizing what we're going through in this
(10:21):
isolation right absolute, And the piece that you always bring
up with me is how do we sense that in
our bodies? And I think that should lead us into
krim or the community resiliency model, which I think is
amazing and everyone should know about because the tools are
in a way very simple, but they're really complicated to
(10:43):
put into practice to police, tell us about the community
resiliency model. What is it and what are the tenants
of it. Yeah, it's a set of six wellness skills.
This is a model we've taken all over the world
and we've also brought it into marginalized communities to increase
and enhanced resilience resilience there. And basically it's about helping
people understand the biology of traumatic stress reactions to restore
(11:08):
a sense of well being in the body, mind, and spirit.
And when we increase our resiliency, we have an increased
sense of hope. And basically it's a skills based model,
and we can use it individually and collectively. So going
back to the attachment piece, we can share it with
one another, we can do it in community, but we
can also do it for our own self care, which
(11:29):
I absolutely love. That's so beautiful because I believe we
are collectively traumatized now and the question for me that
always comes up as if we're collectively traumatized, how do
we collectively heal. Let's take a short break. When we
come back, we'll talk about the six skills we can
all learn to reset and regulate our nervous systems. Welcome back,
(12:03):
let's break down we can all do to help build
stress and trauma resilience. Can you talk to us about
UM those six skills of the community Resiliency Model, Clay,
and I think we should also talk about resilien zone,
high zone and low zone as well. Yeah. This was
developed by Elaine Miller Cares and essentially, as Elaine says,
(12:24):
it's about chasing the resilience in your nervous system UM.
And so there's six skills. Of the six skills, I'm
just going to list them is tracking, resourcing, grounding, gesturing,
help now, and shift and stay And a lot of
those skills are actually available, and there's an app called
eye Chill. It's available for free. It's also available in Spanish.
(12:47):
Our materials have been translated into a lot of different languages.
But essentially, the primary cornerstone of the model is the
resilient zone, as we keep mentioning it, but let's talk
about it for a moment, the resilient sea zone or
the resilient zone. Yeah, so the resilient zone. If you
picture like two lines, horizontal lines with a wave going
(13:08):
through those lines, that would be what we call our
resilient zone, and that is where we are our best self,
and the wave would represent our nervous system or the
gas pedal and break of the body, our nervous system.
The gas pedal or the break pedal. I love these
metaphors because they really kind of helped this. So so
it's like it's about modulating this speed there we're going
(13:28):
out if we're thinking about a gas pedal or break pedal. Yeah, body,
mind and spirit. Right, So if I'm in my resilience zone,
I'm my best self. I actually am in a securely
attached place. I can read my environment around me. I
can socially engage with those around me. I'm going to
perceive things better. I can problem solve there. I can
(13:49):
be creative there. I can have my feelings and it's
not a flat line. It is a wave. So I
could have different feelings throughout my day, but I can
handle of them. If I'm in my resilien zone, I
can manage them. So I can have my sense of humor.
I could actually be sad, mad, frustrated, content, happy, whatever
it is, but I can communicate it. I can feel it.
(14:10):
I can tell you I can feel it. And that
is that is really where we're our best self. And
so I think what is so important and useful for
me thinking about the resilience zone is thinking about that
versus the higher the low zone. Because I've had several
moments when I've come into a therapy session or be
a zoom or in person where I was not in
(14:32):
my resilience zone. So it was very difficult for me
to actually be able to hear what you were saying.
I was triggered by some kind of what I've come
to understand too. It's another phrase, when it's hysterical's historical, right,
so that when I'm hysterical, but when I satically, when
the vernus hysterical, that is something historical, and usually that
is about some kind of trauma that's come up for me.
(14:54):
I'm trying to think of an example from my life
that I want to share. You know what, I'll share this.
I'll share this. So over a year ago, when I
was going through my breakup. God, I can't believe my
mestion this in front of people, but hey, it's a
good example, I think when it's going through my breakup
and my most recent boyfriend, over a year ago, I
had a day I was doing pretty well and we
broke up in June and it was September and I
(15:16):
woke up and I was a wreck. I was just
like in this grieving process, like missing the relationship, and
it just made no sense because I was very aware
that like adult Lavern understood why this breakup needed to happen.
An adult Lavern understood that we needed to separate, and
that was all good because I was hysteric, hysterical. I
(15:36):
was like, okay, I'm hysterical, so there's something historical going on.
So then I was like, okay, but little girl of
her inner child felt abandoned. The inner child I didn't understand,
and the inner child needed to scream and yell and
get it out, and I I was like, okay, and
I think I texted you I think that day and
(15:58):
it was like I felt like I needed to take
it to this source, so I needed to take it
to the X. And so I texted him and I
was like, can I see you later? This is a
few minus if you broke up? And he was lovely
and he said yes, and he comes over and I said,
little girl of Verney still yell at you right now,
she needs to get this out. Can I yell at you?
And he was very generous and said yes, and so
I have my moment screamed a yell. He like, you
(16:19):
want to hear me? I was like, not only hear that?
I hit him with a pillow um with permission. Then
I was able to after getting that out physically. What
I understand about the somatic work now is that I
had to get that out through my body. I had
to speak it, I had to like sense into it
in my body. There was a grieving, there was something
that was triggered in that moment that needed to be
(16:39):
worked out so that I can get back into my zone.
That was an extreme example. It's not always that extreme.
There's so much that comes up for me. Was there
something that came up for you from that story that
you want to address or well, a couple of different things.
One is that your ex was in his resilient zone
enough when he came over to be able to hold
that space and hold his own sense of groundedness while
(17:03):
you got out what you needed to get out. And
then the other pieces around, is what we're getting out
embodied or not? Is it metabolizing, is it digesting or
is it not right? Can you clarify embodied? Is what
we're getting out embodied? Yeah? So, And I'm just gonna
go with relationship to the story that you were telling,
Like you're telling the story of what happens, you remember
(17:25):
exactly the sequence of events, right, you're also able to
articulate I get this, and I also get this. Maybe
you weren't exactly fully in your zone, but you weren't
like all the ceiling at that point. Because sometimes we're
out of our zone so high in the high zone
or so low in the low zone, we don't integrate anything,
and we also often won't remember what happened, so then
(17:48):
it doesn't actually process, that doesn't actually land, and we're
left looping around with the same material. You would wake
up the next morning and being the same angry up
that place and not have really worked that through and out.
Guess the question is how do we get embodied? So
I was embodied enough to know that I was hysterical,
that this was historical, and that I needed to go
(18:10):
to the source. So I wasn't bumped out so much
that I couldn't see straight exactly. So there was a
certain level of resiliency that I was working with. So
maybe that wasn't the best example about being out of
my resilient zund well, and you might have been at
the edges. So I think it's important to talk about
a range. So when we go into let's say we're
going to talk about the high zone and low zones.
(18:30):
So let's say the resilient zone. For those out there
who like to number things, four through seven is in
the resilient zone. Eight to ten is in the high zone.
Three to one is in the low zone. So if
you're at a ten or you're at a one, it's
much harder to manage and integrate. And so the high
(18:52):
zone is like when we get really hyper vigilant, when
we have panic attacks and we have rage attacks, we
have those kinds of things, will always braced, being around
for what's bad, the other shoe to drop, and we
live in that state or we get bumped into that
state for periods of time and then come back into
our resiliency. Conversely, the low zone is that sluggish, depressed, disconnected, dissociated,
(19:15):
very despairing, hopeless, helpless place. I have another client who
kind of looks at the resilient high low zone like
a house, and when she's in the resilient zone, she's
in the living room space. She can hang out on
the couch or in the kitchen or whatever. When she
goes to the high zone, she's in the attic, she
can't hear what's happening in the living room at all.
And when she's in the basement and really despairing, she's
(19:37):
really low. If she's on the floor of the basement,
then she's having suicidal thoughts and she's having really extreme
depressed thoughts. And we talk about actually walking up the
stairs of the basement. Right, So those six tools that
you outlined earlier are the ways to get us to
walk up the stairs of the basement or to come
down from the attic, right, to come down, to go
(19:59):
up into the resilient own. And tracking. I want to
start with tracking because I feel like tracking it's probably
the most important one, because tracking allows us to know
when we're in our resilience and we were in high
zone and when we're in low zone. Can you just
break down tracking for us? Well, first of all, can
I just say that my heart right now feels really
warm and full and I have this like bubbly excitement
(20:21):
hearing you teach me about tracking as a resilient zone.
It's very exciting. Thank you. I appreciate exactly right, that's
exactly what we want to do. Tracking is used with
all the skills. If we aren't tracking and paying attention
to the body, then we are not actually doing thematic work.
Client of mine who's called tracking the GPS of the body,
(20:44):
and she said, if I know where I'm at at
any given time, and I can't get lost, Oh, tracking
is the GPS of the body. If I know where
I'm at at any time, I can't get lost. Oh.
I love that. I love that. Often when I when
I come into a session and I'm feeling just I've
given this example a lot publicly. I'm feeling anxious, and
you'll ask me where in your body do you feel that?
(21:05):
Most often it's in the pit of my stomach. And
then you'll ask me where does it feel positive or neutral?
And you know, right now, it's kind of my ankles,
And then you'll invite me to focus my attention on
my ankles. The specificity of that getting really specific about
where we feel anxiety, joy, whatever it is. Where that
(21:26):
we get specific about where that is in our bodies,
I think it's really really an important component of this work.
I think it's actually the essential cornerstone of this model
and of this work and of our being able to
tap into our wellness. Another piece I can share is
that we years ago did a training for Children's hospital,
and one of those folks, when they were teaching back
(21:47):
to us, said, my body has always been talking to me,
but now I have a way to talk back. Now
I have a way to have a conversation with my body. Oh, Jennifer, Okay,
can we just pause? Can we just pause on that?
My body's all it's been talking to me, but now
I have a way to talk back. I think this
is what I would love people to really understand and
(22:07):
take away from this that right now, with everything that's
going on in the world, with all the stressors, all
the traumas, our bodies are talking to us constantly and
telling us what we need to know. Can we listen
and then can we talk back and have a dialogue
with our bodies and then begin to regulate. I think
that this works about having that dialogue. Yes, that's exactly right.
(22:30):
We might be accustomed to naming feelings or not, but
tracking is the feeling of the feelings, the feeling of
the feeling. Can you explain that? So it's it's if
I name something happy, sad, mad, or otherwise The reason
why my thinking brain knows to call it that feeling
word is because my body is sending cues that let
(22:53):
me know to call it that eight of our information
is delivered body up only going in the other directions
of our information is delivered body up only. Twenty is
the other way around. So our bodies are crucial. Yes,
so we can sense things away that maybe we can't
(23:13):
think away. Only slow that one down to We can
sense things away that maybe we can't think away. We
can sense Can you just talk about that a little bit?
I think you know. I'm not knocking cognitive behavioral strategies
or thought stopping techniques like things that people might already use.
But I can certainly tell you with somebody who used
to suffer from panic attacks, that if somebody said to
(23:34):
me calm down, or if I tried to tell myself
calm down, don't you think I would have done that already?
I would have already done that if I knew how
to do it. But I don't know how to do
it because my body is like on fire right now
and I feel like I'm gonna die, And so it
really becomes how do I intervene at the thematic at
(23:55):
the body level so that I can unhook that because
I cannot just tell all myself to calm down when
my body thinks it's under threat. And we do, honestly, Lavern.
We track all the time. Maybe we can sense when
we're hot or cold, or we can sense maybe whether
we're hungry or thirsty, or needs use the restroom, things
like that. But typically one of those entry points is
(24:17):
a way to know that we're already doing this all
day long, every day, and if I can take a
moment and go back to the resilient zone. We have
a resilient zone within us. But then when we are together,
we have a collective resilient zone. So you and I
together as we're sitting together, have a collective zone between us.
And when you talk about what's going on in the
(24:39):
world today, whether it is the pandemic or our socio
political landscape right now, our collective zone is pretty narrow.
Yes it is. It is paper sin for most of us.
And so not only my individual zone be narrow, but
I'm also now faced with when I'm taking in the
world and knowing that collect actively, it also feels pretty narrow.
(25:02):
How can we widen that zone? So I think oftentimes
when we have these things that happen in our world,
I often see that Mr. Rogers quote that comes in
about how his mother used to tell him to look
to the helpers when things feel bleak, look to the helpers.
That is part of tracking and part of our awareness
is not only looking for the threats, but also cultivating
(25:23):
and chasing the resiliency. Where are people coming together? When
you see people marching together for common causes, when you
see healthcare workers come into the aid of ailing people,
when you see people reaching out for social justice and
for dismantling and addressing structural racism. Like, if we look
for those moments and we tap into that, then we're
(25:46):
tapping into the collective resiliency of one another, and we're
actually strengthening that, and we have to sense into that.
That feels like the truth to me on a really
deep level. This feels like a good time to take
a short break for our sponsor friends. Welcome back. Now
(26:12):
we're going to talk about one of my favorite tools.
I really want to talk about, shift in Stay. Shift
in Stay it is one of the six tools you
listed earlier of the community resiliency model. I'm feeling anxiety
and I'm feeling that in my guard and then you'll
invite me to focus on where in my body isn't
neutral and positive, right, and sometimes it's my ankles, not always,
and then you'll invite me to focus my attention there.
(26:34):
The invitation is to not be in denial about the anxiety,
but the question becomes the both and peace. And so
can you talk a little bit about shift and stay? Yeah,
so when I noticed what where my distress is, then
I can actually actively move my awareness to someplace where
it's less or where it's not. And we forget that
(26:55):
we have a whole body while walking around with because
our tendency is to dive into the middle distress again
because we're wired for survival, so we're looking for the
source of threats to get outside or inside. And so
this is the job of shift and stay is to
be able to look around and go where is it not?
Because sometimes it might be the tip of my nose,
it might be my ear low of it might be
(27:16):
my toes or you know, ankles like what you're referring to.
And if I can bring enough of my awareness to
those parts of my body that are less, that are
pleasant or neutral and I can stay there. Typically what
happens is it lessons what's going on. May not erase
it fully, but it may lessen it. And so even
when we have chronic stress or illness or things like that,
(27:38):
sometimes we'll actually get better medical attention because I can
more accurately pinpoint where the trouble is rather than going
my whole body or everything hurd's all over. And also
when I self regulate and get back into my resilient zone,
then I can do more connecting with others than I
can problem solve, and I can know what the next
thing I want to do is. Versus if I get
(27:58):
stuck in the loop of the distress of the anxiety.
What just came up for me is that we all
sort of become what we focus on. So if I
just focus on this anxiety, all I can sense and
feel is the anxiety. I'm not going to be in
my zone. But if I can focus on something else energetically,
then maybe that energy can shift, maybe my nervous system
can shift, And I think that's just such a beautiful thing.
(28:21):
And and the other tools like resourcing, like gesturing, grounding,
the help now skills all of the six components. I
invite everyone to go to the I Chill app to
look at all of these tools and see how you
can integrate them into your lives and practice. Maybe find
a health care professional who can help you with this
model if it resonates for you. There's something else, though,
that I want to I have to talk about because
(28:43):
I thought the first time you said it to me,
and it's in a therapysition, there's so many aspects of
this that I'm utterly intrigued by. But you used a
phrase called completion of the survival response, and we were
working on some really like childhood stuff that was really
intense for me. Can you talk about completion of the
survival response in relationship to everything that we've been talking about. Sure,
(29:06):
And this is again I'm just gonna highlight that is
definitely something more that needs to happen within the context
of a therapeutic environment, and it's not something I would
encourage people to just tap into on their own. But essentially,
we're we've got a survival response continuum, and what happens
is that if I hear something novel or something happens
(29:28):
in my environment, my first response is to orient to
the source. Of the threat or the sound or whatever.
As I'm doing that, I'm mobilizing all the energy and
my body, so cortisol and adrenaline is now coursing starting
to course through my system, preparing me to fight or flee.
And if I can complete a survival response, I'm going
(29:49):
to then execute that in the form of running, fighting, yelling, gesturing,
whatever I'm going to do. And once I do that,
I return to a state of equilibrium. And the truth
of it is, we can get thwarted at any of
those places along the survival response continuum, and oftentimes we
don't allow that survival response to come through and out.
(30:12):
And that can even be with small things. If I'm
having an issue with a boss and I feel really
piste off at my boss, but I can't just yell
at my box, and so I might damp in or
thwart that energy. And then that might also tap into,
like you said, hysterical historical, it might happen to tap
into other times in my life that's happened, and we
(30:34):
can get stuck. When we do get stuck in those states,
we can sometimes have this perpetual fight response on board,
or perpetually wanting to flee when stress happens. And because
I didn't get to execute those things at the time
that they occurred, what we can do now is try
to offload in the moment and then come back into
my resilient zone. I feel like the tools of the
(30:55):
community resiliency model are a lot of them are about
regulating in the moment right when we have a stressful
moment or we're traumatized in a moment's about regulating that.
But then when there are historical traumas and it were
they were that require deeper work, right, and this is
something that has to be done with a professional based
on my own experience that this with you is that
for the deeper things that in terms of really building
(31:17):
trauma resilience and and Burnet Brown and one of her
taxes with a goal of trauma resilience is to put
it in its place, and it's in its timeline. The
body doesn't know if a trauma happened twenty years ago.
Once we are triggered, the body experiences the trauma as
if it's happening right now. That to me is really deep.
And so the completion of the survival response piece we
(31:38):
were dealing with um in therapy when I bought my
when I bought this condo, I was remember I was
having like crazy panic attacks like I was. I hadn't
had panic attacks like this ever in my life. And
we kind of talked through it and figured out what
the source of that was, right, And it was a
childhood thing around sort of fear of being homeless that
I've had my whole life. And when we went back
(32:00):
into that memory, their childhood memory, and I didn't say
or do what I wanted to say in that moment,
I did it. In that moment, I yelled and I punched,
and I kind of got what I needed to say.
And as I did it, I felt my nervous system ship.
It feels like it's in the past now. It doesn't
feel like it's happening right now. The work of building
(32:21):
trauma resilience is like putting it sort of in the
right timeline in my life, right, that's right. The interesting
thing is that the more we practice tools of resilience,
and this is about practicing right. We have neural plasticity,
but it's neural plasticity, can you just define that really quickly?
Neural plasticity is the ability of the brains to be
(32:42):
able to make new pathways to create new cell growth.
And we used to think back in the day, but
that might not be possible, but we know now that
that's just simply not true. And the more we actually
tap into and cultivate resiliency, the more we strengthen ourselves,
the more we widen and deepen our resilience zone, the
less things bumped me into the higher low zone, and
(33:04):
the more I'm me in the world, the more you're
using the world. Ultimately, that is about creating new neuro
pathways that are not trauma informed, that are not stress informed,
and so repeatedly practicing these skills and something that we
do on a daily basis, multiple times a day, over
a period of time, we create new neuro pathways exactly.
(33:25):
And as we create those new neuronal pathways, what ends
up happening Over time My zone gets deeper and actually
sometimes it has its own trauma reprocessing element to it,
in that the stuff of my history starts to fade
away a little bit, the glue there starts to unstick
a little bit, and so when I start to think
(33:46):
into what happened to me in the past, I feel
so much more meat in the here and now so
much more myself. That's lovely. I think that it's a
great place to end. Obviously, I could talk to you
all day about this. So can you tell people where
else they can get resources to do this work? Yes?
So again, you can go and download the eye Show app. Also,
(34:06):
if people don't have smartphones, they can go to www.
Dot eye Show app dot com and they can actually
it's its own little website landing. You can go to
Trauma Resource Institute website and look at their offerings and training.
And my website is Jennifer Burton MST dot com. And uh,
(34:27):
I think there's a beating list on my website as well.
I wanted to end our conversation with the question that
you often ask me in our sessions, what else is true?
Can you talk a little bit about how that sort
of relates to everything we've been talking about, And then
I want to ask you what else is true for you? Yeah?
So the what else is true is that both and place.
(34:49):
It's that if I can chase the resiliency, it's not
a denial that there's other things going on. To say
that our landscape isn't what it is politically and culturally
would be bananas, and to say we're not in the
middle of a pandemic would also be crazy. But it's
so what else is going on? What else can we
tap into? That's true? And so I don't want to
(35:10):
deny somebody's sadness, anger, feeling, frustration. I also want to
see what else is available, what else, what helps us
get through? What helps us get through hard times? You know,
we've all been through difficult times, whether it's the ones
that we're in right now were ones that we've been
in the past. And how do we get through? How
do we tap into our innate against strength and resiliency?
(35:32):
And I guess if if you're going to ask me
about it personally, So I I lost my grandmother about
a week ago, and she was one of my primary
attachment figures and I feel blessed to have had her
for fifty one years of my life. But I have
found myself in this kind of see of grief and
feeling as sometimes really piste off at the pandemic for
(35:56):
robbing me of seven months I could have been with her,
even though it wasn't um COVID that took her from me,
I feel like the pandemic took those months and those
times of connecting away from me, and when I feel
myself pulled in that direction, I actually tap into the
connection with her of how she's still with me. You
know what she would want for me now, how she
(36:18):
would be with me, and what she would say. And
so I do have the grief, and I have the love,
and I have that she'll be with me in infinite,
myriad ways for the rest of my life. And I
have pictures and I have all this other stuff and
memories that no one can take from me. And it
helps with the sadness so that I don't get so
(36:39):
swept away by that river, because I can just feel
so sad so much of the time around this and
and I let the tears come when they will, and
I can also do the other So I feel, really
that is my what else is true right now? And
that's the most present what else is true? Thank you
for sharing that. Um. I think it was a few
(37:01):
weeks ago you texted me and said you had to
reschedule because your grandmother died, and it was I was like,
what do I, how do I? What do I say
to Jennifer? And how do I? How do I? It
just felt so completely inadequate in that moment, and so
sort of I thought it thinking about the one sided
it's of our relationship. Um, when it's something like this happens,
is that there's I don't know if there's anything that
(37:21):
we can really say. I'm so grateful that you're in
my life. I do you want to say that. I'm
so grateful you're in my life. I'm so grateful for
our work. I'm so sad that you had this loss.
It's I'm so sad, but I'm pardoned by your what
else is true? And I think everything you're saying right
now is that testament to our connection and our relationship,
because yes it's in a therapeutic context, but make no mistake,
(37:43):
it's a relationship and it is a connection. And I'm
just so touched by what you're saying to me right now,
and I'm going to hold that as my other what
else is true? And it's secure attachment, which I a
lot of issues with in my life, and many times
sessions you'd be like, well and you sense into like
the connection we have, and I'm like, no, not really,
(38:03):
but I can sense into it right now and I'm
very grateful for it. So I thank you so much,
Jennifer for four years of work together. I thank you
for sharing your expertise and everything that you share today.
Thank you listening back to this conversation. What always hits
(38:25):
me when I talked to Jennifer is when she talks
about something being embodied. As a trauma survivor, as an
abuse survivor, and probably also as a transperson, my default
response is to leave my body right, to not be
present in my body because it's just too painful to
be there. And if we can use a resource. Resourcing
(38:48):
is another tool of the community resiliency model for me,
often a resource sometimes even singing opera for me when
I'm in an airport, I'm often insanely anxious and airports
and if you see a person walking through the airport
in advisor and um um COVID mask singing opera, it's
probably me. Do not approach, But I am singing to
(39:11):
self soothed. I'm singing to regulate my system. It's a
resource for me to help me get through the anxiety
of being in the airport. But singing connects me to
my breath, something that gets me in my body. Dancing
is something that gets me in my body, and I
can tap into those resources to turn the volume down
(39:32):
on the anxiety that I have in the airport and
turn the volume up on the things that are neutral, positive,
the things that helped me get through the what else
is true? So I encourage you to check out the
Eye Chill app to explore UM the components of the
community resiliency model. And even though I do it very imperfectly,
(39:52):
the day we recorded this, I was very much in
high zone. I was totally freaked out. I was the
first day we recorded UM the Verne Cox Show. But
this has really really helped me a lot. It's a
work in progress, and here's to widening your resilient zone
individually and all of us widening our resilient zones collectively.
(40:23):
Thank you so much for listening to The Laverne Cox Show.
Feel free to subscribe, rate and share. Join me next
week when I'll be talking to Kimberly Foster, the founder
of the online black feminist community for Harriet, about beauty
as capital. Is it a good investment? Kimberly has thoughts.
You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Laverne
(40:45):
Cox and on Facebook at Laverne Cox for Real until
next time, stay in the love. The Laverne Cox Show
is the production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with I
Heart Radio. For more podcast from Chondaland Audio, visit the
I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen
(41:05):
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to the Laverne Cox Show of Reduction of shondaland
Audio in partnership with My Heart Radio. I can certainly
tell you of somebody who used to suffer from panic
attacks that if somebody said to me, calm down, don't
you think I would have done that already? I would
(00:24):
have already done that if I knew how to do it.
But I don't know how to do it because my
body is like on fire right now and I feel
like I'm gonna die, And so it really becomes how
do I intervene at the somatic, at the body level,
so that I can unhook that. Toronto Burke, the founder
(00:48):
of the Me Too movement, in her two thousand eighteen
Ted Talk, declared that we as a society were collectively
traumatized by the reckoning we were having around sexual harassment
and assault. At the time, I'm that declaration felt like
the truth to me and got me thinking about the
other potential collective traumas we might be experiencing as a society.
(01:11):
I am deeply aware of the collective trauma of repeatedly
seeing black bodies murdered on camera. For me, as a
black trans woman, the violence against trans folks that is
often also captured on camera repeatedly. I found also deeply
traumatizing a global pandemic, the greatest economic downturn America has
(01:35):
experienced since the Great Depression. Collectively, we are experiencing trauma
on top of trauma. My own work in therapy over
the past four years has focused specifically on trauma resilience
and if we are indeed collectively traumatized, how do we
collectively heal? So to have this conversation, I wanted to
(01:57):
talk to my very own therapist, Jennifer Burton Fly. I mean,
I taught her all the time, but I wanted to
have that conversation here publicly to talk about how we
can build trauma resilience individually and collectively. I really believe
it's one of the most important skills we can develop
right now. Jennifer is a licensed marriage and Family therapist.
(02:19):
She is certified in Expressive Arts Therapy. She has also
certified in Burnet Brown's Daring Way and Rising Strong Models
as well as E M d R. She has a
senior faculty member with the Trauma Resource Institute and has
traveled extensively in the US as well as Northern Ireland.
To share wellness skills with various groups and cultures. Please
enjoy my conversation with Jennifer Burdenfly Hi, Jennifer, Welcome to
(02:49):
the podcast. How are you failing today? I'm feeling pretty grounded.
I was using all my skills before we got on today,
so feeling okay now I of it. I can't wait
to tell everyone about the tools and the skills. So
about four years ago, I had moved to Los Angeles.
I really didn't want to move here. I came here
kicking and screaming, and my showrunners, Joan Raider and Tony
(03:13):
Phalon invited me to a barbecue at their house in Pasadena,
and invariably, the subject of therapy came up, because of
course it always does, right, And one of the partygoers
named Krista, said that somatic therapy is the only therapy
that worked, and I was like, okay, this is the
second time that the topic of semantic therapy has come
(03:33):
up in the past year. A doctor of mine in
New York City had told me about somatic therapy about
a year earlier and said, you really should try it.
It is the best thing, and so I said, okay.
The universe is trying to tell me something. So I
reached out to Christa. She suggested you, and four years later,
here we are. So can we start by you telling
(03:56):
everyone what somatic therapy is. Yeah. I think it's really
important for people to understand that there are many different
modalities that use somatic therapy. And the word for somatic
actually derives from the Greek word soma, which means living body,
and the therapy is really grounded in the relationship between
(04:18):
mind and body. So the overview really of thematic therapy
is that it uses the body as the entry point
for healing versus the thinking part of the brain. We've
all been impacted by things in our lives, and the
point of using the body is to tap into our
innate resiliency that really lives in us. We are built
(04:42):
for survival, but we're also built to cultivate resiliency, and
we do have to work at cultivating it, and that's
really the purpose of thematic therapy. And by cultivating the resiliency,
what happens is we often uncouple or take out the
glue of the traumatic, stressful responses that we have. We
can extinguish those cues, whether they're external or internal, cues
(05:05):
for trauma and stress. The way that it kind of
crystallized to me was talking about the stress response when
we feel where we're under threat. We are hardwired as
human beings to have a fight response, a freeze response,
or a flee response, and so the body releases adrenaline, cortisol,
(05:25):
releases hormones, stress hormones, so we can either fight that bear,
flee that bear, or freeze. But then that's not sustainable
to constantly be in this place. A fight flighter freeze
is not sustainable to always be sort of living with
these stress hormones. And it became very clear to me
after we started doing our work together that my whole
life was fite flighter freeze, and then my whole life
(05:48):
was bears in the woods and I didn't have other
ways of existing. Do you want to talk a little
bit about that. Yeah. I also want to highlight that
there's several different responses. We do have fights freeze, there's
also below a freeze response collapse in the nervous system
where we just everything shuts down, and that's when we
(06:09):
really are under extreme life threat. And then there's also
tend and be friend or some people call it some
schools call it fawning that when we move toward a
threat to deescalate and oxytocin, which is a bonding hormone,
is also released along with the adrenaline and corsol, so
it actually a quiet the system so that we can
(06:30):
actually stay in some kind of social engagement and then
my chances of being attacked might be lessened in those circumstances.
But oftentimes, in any of these survival responses, what we
see a lot is we pathologize ourselves, or we blame
ourselves or shame ourselves for whatever the survival response was
in a given moment or in a given situation, or
(06:51):
like what you're talking about, I'm always failing, like the
bear is coming after me. Nothing is safe, if everything
is dangerous, nothing is safe. For my colleague Jen Click
calls it the ability to distinguish between a forced fire
and a match. And when we can't make that distinction,
it really doesnt number yes on the mind and body.
(07:12):
It causes illness in the body. It causes a constant
state of stress. It causes us to misread our environment
to the point where we also can misread social cues.
We could get into fights or altercations with our partner.
I mean, we're on top of each other all the
time now, and we can misread the situation if we're
in a survival response, especially if it's firing all the time.
(07:33):
What really resonated from me, and it's one of our
early sessions, is when you define trauma as too much,
too fast, too soon. And you said to me that
the nervous system can experience good things as too much,
too fast, too soon, as well as things that can
be challenging or feel like a threat. And so much
of the work of somatic therapy is I understand, it's
(07:54):
really about resetting and regulating their nervous system in relationship distressors. Correct. Seeah,
so again when I said earlier, there's all these different
schools of somatic therapy. The primary one that I practiced
through the Trauma Resource Institute, and that's the community resiliency
model and trauma resiliency models. One is a clinical model,
(08:14):
the other one is really meant for the wider community.
And we've taught all over the world. So the definition
of trauma in that vein is too much, too fast,
too soon, or too little or too much for too long,
too little, or too much for too long? Can you
explain that? So? I would say that the too little
or too much for too long can be from the
(08:36):
developmental perspective of developmental trauma and stress. But I think
also of right now that the time that we're in
we've had too much for too long and too little
for too long. We're so disconnected now from each other,
from being able to see one another. I think this
is why we see people chomping at the bit to
get back together or to have family gatherings, even though
(08:56):
we know it might not be safe to do. Because
it's been too little for too long. That sense of
isolation and disconnect becomes almost unbearable, and that is what
we would call cumulatives. So a sort of deprivation of
human contact can also be traumatic. Yes their childhood neglect,
for example, if there's been a neglectful parent or caregiver,
(09:18):
that can absolutely stimulate that trauma response in the body.
Because we are hard wired to connect to each other.
This is how we come into the world, ready to connect.
And if we don't get that, what we call an attachment,
it makes it very hard for us to self soothe
or self regulate throughout our lives. The truth of it is,
we do need coregulation in our lives. We're wired to
(09:40):
be in community, in connection for the most part. Some
people might feel connection when they're in nature, or connection
when they're with a pet. Different aspects of being able
to have that regulation happen. But I would say also
that when we get that coregulation, like let's say within
a therapy office or with a loved on, we're going
(10:01):
to have a deeper capacity to self regulate or do
that kind of self soothing on our own when we
aren't with someone. We just have a deeper capacity to
be able to do that when we get that coregulation.
So I think in context of a global pandemic that
this is literally traumatizing what we're going through in this
(10:21):
isolation right absolute, And the piece that you always bring
up with me is how do we sense that in
our bodies? And I think that should lead us into
krim or the community resiliency model, which I think is
amazing and everyone should know about because the tools are
in a way very simple, but they're really complicated to
(10:43):
put into practice to police, tell us about the community
resiliency model. What is it and what are the tenants
of it. Yeah, it's a set of six wellness skills.
This is a model we've taken all over the world
and we've also brought it into marginalized communities to increase
and enhanced resilience resilience there. And basically it's about helping
people understand the biology of traumatic stress reactions to restore
(11:08):
a sense of well being in the body, mind, and spirit.
And when we increase our resiliency, we have an increased
sense of hope. And basically it's a skills based model,
and we can use it individually and collectively. So going
back to the attachment piece, we can share it with
one another, we can do it in community, but we
can also do it for our own self care, which
(11:29):
I absolutely love. That's so beautiful because I believe we
are collectively traumatized now and the question for me that
always comes up as if we're collectively traumatized, how do
we collectively heal. Let's take a short break. When we
come back, we'll talk about the six skills we can
all learn to reset and regulate our nervous systems. Welcome back,
(12:03):
let's break down we can all do to help build
stress and trauma resilience. Can you talk to us about
UM those six skills of the community Resiliency Model, Clay,
and I think we should also talk about resilien zone,
high zone and low zone as well. Yeah. This was
developed by Elaine Miller Cares and essentially, as Elaine says,
(12:24):
it's about chasing the resilience in your nervous system UM.
And so there's six skills. Of the six skills, I'm
just going to list them is tracking, resourcing, grounding, gesturing,
help now, and shift and stay And a lot of
those skills are actually available, and there's an app called
eye Chill. It's available for free. It's also available in Spanish.
(12:47):
Our materials have been translated into a lot of different languages.
But essentially, the primary cornerstone of the model is the
resilient zone, as we keep mentioning it, but let's talk
about it for a moment, the resilient sea zone or
the resilient zone. Yeah, so the resilient zone. If you
picture like two lines, horizontal lines with a wave going
(13:08):
through those lines, that would be what we call our
resilient zone, and that is where we are our best self,
and the wave would represent our nervous system or the
gas pedal and break of the body, our nervous system.
The gas pedal or the break pedal. I love these
metaphors because they really kind of helped this. So so
it's like it's about modulating this speed there we're going
(13:28):
out if we're thinking about a gas pedal or break pedal. Yeah, body,
mind and spirit. Right, So if I'm in my resilience zone,
I'm my best self. I actually am in a securely
attached place. I can read my environment around me. I
can socially engage with those around me. I'm going to
perceive things better. I can problem solve there. I can
(13:49):
be creative there. I can have my feelings and it's
not a flat line. It is a wave. So I
could have different feelings throughout my day, but I can
handle of them. If I'm in my resilien zone, I
can manage them. So I can have my sense of humor.
I could actually be sad, mad, frustrated, content, happy, whatever
it is, but I can communicate it. I can feel it.
(14:10):
I can tell you I can feel it. And that
is that is really where we're our best self. And
so I think what is so important and useful for
me thinking about the resilience zone is thinking about that
versus the higher the low zone. Because I've had several
moments when I've come into a therapy session or be
a zoom or in person where I was not in
(14:32):
my resilience zone. So it was very difficult for me
to actually be able to hear what you were saying.
I was triggered by some kind of what I've come
to understand too. It's another phrase, when it's hysterical's historical, right,
so that when I'm hysterical, but when I satically, when
the vernus hysterical, that is something historical, and usually that
is about some kind of trauma that's come up for me.
(14:54):
I'm trying to think of an example from my life
that I want to share. You know what, I'll share this.
I'll share this. So over a year ago, when I
was going through my breakup. God, I can't believe my
mestion this in front of people, but hey, it's a
good example, I think when it's going through my breakup
and my most recent boyfriend, over a year ago, I
had a day I was doing pretty well and we
broke up in June and it was September and I
(15:16):
woke up and I was a wreck. I was just
like in this grieving process, like missing the relationship, and
it just made no sense because I was very aware
that like adult Lavern understood why this breakup needed to happen.
An adult Lavern understood that we needed to separate, and
that was all good because I was hysteric, hysterical. I
(15:36):
was like, okay, I'm hysterical, so there's something historical going on.
So then I was like, okay, but little girl of
her inner child felt abandoned. The inner child I didn't understand,
and the inner child needed to scream and yell and
get it out, and I I was like, okay, and
I think I texted you I think that day and
(15:58):
it was like I felt like I needed to take
it to this source, so I needed to take it
to the X. And so I texted him and I
was like, can I see you later? This is a
few minus if you broke up? And he was lovely
and he said yes, and he comes over and I said,
little girl of Verney still yell at you right now,
she needs to get this out. Can I yell at you?
And he was very generous and said yes, and so
I have my moment screamed a yell. He like, you
(16:19):
want to hear me? I was like, not only hear that?
I hit him with a pillow um with permission. Then
I was able to after getting that out physically. What
I understand about the somatic work now is that I
had to get that out through my body. I had
to speak it, I had to like sense into it
in my body. There was a grieving, there was something
that was triggered in that moment that needed to be
(16:39):
worked out so that I can get back into my zone.
That was an extreme example. It's not always that extreme.
There's so much that comes up for me. Was there
something that came up for you from that story that
you want to address or well, a couple of different things.
One is that your ex was in his resilient zone
enough when he came over to be able to hold
that space and hold his own sense of groundedness while
(17:03):
you got out what you needed to get out. And
then the other pieces around, is what we're getting out
embodied or not? Is it metabolizing, is it digesting or
is it not right? Can you clarify embodied? Is what
we're getting out embodied? Yeah? So, And I'm just gonna
go with relationship to the story that you were telling,
Like you're telling the story of what happens, you remember
(17:25):
exactly the sequence of events, right, you're also able to
articulate I get this, and I also get this. Maybe
you weren't exactly fully in your zone, but you weren't
like all the ceiling at that point. Because sometimes we're
out of our zone so high in the high zone
or so low in the low zone, we don't integrate anything,
and we also often won't remember what happened, so then
(17:48):
it doesn't actually process, that doesn't actually land, and we're
left looping around with the same material. You would wake
up the next morning and being the same angry up
that place and not have really worked that through and out.
Guess the question is how do we get embodied? So
I was embodied enough to know that I was hysterical,
that this was historical, and that I needed to go
(18:10):
to the source. So I wasn't bumped out so much
that I couldn't see straight exactly. So there was a
certain level of resiliency that I was working with. So
maybe that wasn't the best example about being out of
my resilient zund well, and you might have been at
the edges. So I think it's important to talk about
a range. So when we go into let's say we're
going to talk about the high zone and low zones.
(18:30):
So let's say the resilient zone. For those out there
who like to number things, four through seven is in
the resilient zone. Eight to ten is in the high zone.
Three to one is in the low zone. So if
you're at a ten or you're at a one, it's
much harder to manage and integrate. And so the high
(18:52):
zone is like when we get really hyper vigilant, when
we have panic attacks and we have rage attacks, we
have those kinds of things, will always braced, being around
for what's bad, the other shoe to drop, and we
live in that state or we get bumped into that
state for periods of time and then come back into
our resiliency. Conversely, the low zone is that sluggish, depressed, disconnected, dissociated,
(19:15):
very despairing, hopeless, helpless place. I have another client who
kind of looks at the resilient high low zone like
a house, and when she's in the resilient zone, she's
in the living room space. She can hang out on
the couch or in the kitchen or whatever. When she
goes to the high zone, she's in the attic, she
can't hear what's happening in the living room at all.
And when she's in the basement and really despairing, she's
(19:37):
really low. If she's on the floor of the basement,
then she's having suicidal thoughts and she's having really extreme
depressed thoughts. And we talk about actually walking up the
stairs of the basement. Right, So those six tools that
you outlined earlier are the ways to get us to
walk up the stairs of the basement or to come
down from the attic, right, to come down, to go
(19:59):
up into the resilient own. And tracking. I want to
start with tracking because I feel like tracking it's probably
the most important one, because tracking allows us to know
when we're in our resilience and we were in high
zone and when we're in low zone. Can you just
break down tracking for us? Well, first of all, can
I just say that my heart right now feels really
warm and full and I have this like bubbly excitement
(20:21):
hearing you teach me about tracking as a resilient zone.
It's very exciting. Thank you. I appreciate exactly right, that's
exactly what we want to do. Tracking is used with
all the skills. If we aren't tracking and paying attention
to the body, then we are not actually doing thematic work.
Client of mine who's called tracking the GPS of the body,
(20:44):
and she said, if I know where I'm at at
any given time, and I can't get lost, Oh, tracking
is the GPS of the body. If I know where
I'm at at any time, I can't get lost. Oh.
I love that. I love that. Often when I when
I come into a session and I'm feeling just I've
given this example a lot publicly. I'm feeling anxious, and
you'll ask me where in your body do you feel that?
(21:05):
Most often it's in the pit of my stomach. And
then you'll ask me where does it feel positive or neutral?
And you know, right now, it's kind of my ankles,
And then you'll invite me to focus my attention on
my ankles. The specificity of that getting really specific about
where we feel anxiety, joy, whatever it is. Where that
(21:26):
we get specific about where that is in our bodies,
I think it's really really an important component of this work.
I think it's actually the essential cornerstone of this model
and of this work and of our being able to
tap into our wellness. Another piece I can share is
that we years ago did a training for Children's hospital,
and one of those folks, when they were teaching back
(21:47):
to us, said, my body has always been talking to me,
but now I have a way to talk back. Now
I have a way to have a conversation with my body. Oh, Jennifer, Okay,
can we just pause? Can we just pause on that?
My body's all it's been talking to me, but now
I have a way to talk back. I think this
is what I would love people to really understand and
(22:07):
take away from this that right now, with everything that's
going on in the world, with all the stressors, all
the traumas, our bodies are talking to us constantly and
telling us what we need to know. Can we listen
and then can we talk back and have a dialogue
with our bodies and then begin to regulate. I think
that this works about having that dialogue. Yes, that's exactly right.
(22:30):
We might be accustomed to naming feelings or not, but
tracking is the feeling of the feelings, the feeling of
the feeling. Can you explain that? So it's it's if
I name something happy, sad, mad, or otherwise The reason
why my thinking brain knows to call it that feeling
word is because my body is sending cues that let
(22:53):
me know to call it that eight of our information
is delivered body up only going in the other directions
of our information is delivered body up only. Twenty is
the other way around. So our bodies are crucial. Yes,
so we can sense things away that maybe we can't
(23:13):
think away. Only slow that one down to We can
sense things away that maybe we can't think away. We
can sense Can you just talk about that a little bit?
I think you know. I'm not knocking cognitive behavioral strategies
or thought stopping techniques like things that people might already use.
But I can certainly tell you with somebody who used
to suffer from panic attacks, that if somebody said to
(23:34):
me calm down, or if I tried to tell myself
calm down, don't you think I would have done that already?
I would have already done that if I knew how
to do it. But I don't know how to do
it because my body is like on fire right now
and I feel like I'm gonna die, And so it
really becomes how do I intervene at the thematic at
(23:55):
the body level so that I can unhook that because
I cannot just tell all myself to calm down when
my body thinks it's under threat. And we do, honestly, Lavern.
We track all the time. Maybe we can sense when
we're hot or cold, or we can sense maybe whether
we're hungry or thirsty, or needs use the restroom, things
like that. But typically one of those entry points is
(24:17):
a way to know that we're already doing this all
day long, every day, and if I can take a
moment and go back to the resilient zone. We have
a resilient zone within us. But then when we are together,
we have a collective resilient zone. So you and I
together as we're sitting together, have a collective zone between us.
And when you talk about what's going on in the
(24:39):
world today, whether it is the pandemic or our socio
political landscape right now, our collective zone is pretty narrow.
Yes it is. It is paper sin for most of us.
And so not only my individual zone be narrow, but
I'm also now faced with when I'm taking in the
world and knowing that collect actively, it also feels pretty narrow.
(25:02):
How can we widen that zone? So I think oftentimes
when we have these things that happen in our world,
I often see that Mr. Rogers quote that comes in
about how his mother used to tell him to look
to the helpers when things feel bleak, look to the helpers.
That is part of tracking and part of our awareness
is not only looking for the threats, but also cultivating
(25:23):
and chasing the resiliency. Where are people coming together? When
you see people marching together for common causes, when you
see healthcare workers come into the aid of ailing people,
when you see people reaching out for social justice and
for dismantling and addressing structural racism. Like, if we look
for those moments and we tap into that, then we're
(25:46):
tapping into the collective resiliency of one another, and we're
actually strengthening that, and we have to sense into that.
That feels like the truth to me on a really
deep level. This feels like a good time to take
a short break for our sponsor friends. Welcome back. Now
(26:12):
we're going to talk about one of my favorite tools.
I really want to talk about, shift in Stay. Shift
in Stay it is one of the six tools you
listed earlier of the community resiliency model. I'm feeling anxiety
and I'm feeling that in my guard and then you'll
invite me to focus on where in my body isn't
neutral and positive, right, and sometimes it's my ankles, not always,
and then you'll invite me to focus my attention there.
(26:34):
The invitation is to not be in denial about the anxiety,
but the question becomes the both and peace. And so
can you talk a little bit about shift and stay? Yeah,
so when I noticed what where my distress is, then
I can actually actively move my awareness to someplace where
it's less or where it's not. And we forget that
(26:55):
we have a whole body while walking around with because
our tendency is to dive into the middle distress again
because we're wired for survival, so we're looking for the
source of threats to get outside or inside. And so
this is the job of shift and stay is to
be able to look around and go where is it not?
Because sometimes it might be the tip of my nose,
it might be my ear low of it might be
(27:16):
my toes or you know, ankles like what you're referring to.
And if I can bring enough of my awareness to
those parts of my body that are less, that are
pleasant or neutral and I can stay there. Typically what
happens is it lessons what's going on. May not erase
it fully, but it may lessen it. And so even
when we have chronic stress or illness or things like that,
(27:38):
sometimes we'll actually get better medical attention because I can
more accurately pinpoint where the trouble is rather than going
my whole body or everything hurd's all over. And also
when I self regulate and get back into my resilient zone,
then I can do more connecting with others than I
can problem solve, and I can know what the next
thing I want to do is. Versus if I get
(27:58):
stuck in the loop of the distress of the anxiety.
What just came up for me is that we all
sort of become what we focus on. So if I
just focus on this anxiety, all I can sense and
feel is the anxiety. I'm not going to be in
my zone. But if I can focus on something else energetically,
then maybe that energy can shift, maybe my nervous system
can shift, And I think that's just such a beautiful thing.
(28:21):
And and the other tools like resourcing, like gesturing, grounding,
the help now skills all of the six components. I
invite everyone to go to the I Chill app to
look at all of these tools and see how you
can integrate them into your lives and practice. Maybe find
a health care professional who can help you with this
model if it resonates for you. There's something else, though,
that I want to I have to talk about because
(28:43):
I thought the first time you said it to me,
and it's in a therapysition, there's so many aspects of
this that I'm utterly intrigued by. But you used a
phrase called completion of the survival response, and we were
working on some really like childhood stuff that was really
intense for me. Can you talk about completion of the
survival response in relationship to everything that we've been talking about. Sure,
(29:06):
And this is again I'm just gonna highlight that is
definitely something more that needs to happen within the context
of a therapeutic environment, and it's not something I would
encourage people to just tap into on their own. But essentially,
we're we've got a survival response continuum, and what happens
is that if I hear something novel or something happens
(29:28):
in my environment, my first response is to orient to
the source. Of the threat or the sound or whatever.
As I'm doing that, I'm mobilizing all the energy and
my body, so cortisol and adrenaline is now coursing starting
to course through my system, preparing me to fight or flee.
And if I can complete a survival response, I'm going
(29:49):
to then execute that in the form of running, fighting, yelling, gesturing,
whatever I'm going to do. And once I do that,
I return to a state of equilibrium. And the truth
of it is, we can get thwarted at any of
those places along the survival response continuum, and oftentimes we
don't allow that survival response to come through and out.
(30:12):
And that can even be with small things. If I'm
having an issue with a boss and I feel really
piste off at my boss, but I can't just yell
at my box, and so I might damp in or
thwart that energy. And then that might also tap into,
like you said, hysterical historical, it might happen to tap
into other times in my life that's happened, and we
(30:34):
can get stuck. When we do get stuck in those states,
we can sometimes have this perpetual fight response on board,
or perpetually wanting to flee when stress happens. And because
I didn't get to execute those things at the time
that they occurred, what we can do now is try
to offload in the moment and then come back into
my resilient zone. I feel like the tools of the
(30:55):
community resiliency model are a lot of them are about
regulating in the moment right when we have a stressful
moment or we're traumatized in a moment's about regulating that.
But then when there are historical traumas and it were
they were that require deeper work, right, and this is
something that has to be done with a professional based
on my own experience that this with you is that
for the deeper things that in terms of really building
(31:17):
trauma resilience and and Burnet Brown and one of her
taxes with a goal of trauma resilience is to put
it in its place, and it's in its timeline. The
body doesn't know if a trauma happened twenty years ago.
Once we are triggered, the body experiences the trauma as
if it's happening right now. That to me is really deep.
And so the completion of the survival response piece we
(31:38):
were dealing with um in therapy when I bought my
when I bought this condo, I was remember I was
having like crazy panic attacks like I was. I hadn't
had panic attacks like this ever in my life. And
we kind of talked through it and figured out what
the source of that was, right, And it was a
childhood thing around sort of fear of being homeless that
I've had my whole life. And when we went back
(32:00):
into that memory, their childhood memory, and I didn't say
or do what I wanted to say in that moment,
I did it. In that moment, I yelled and I punched,
and I kind of got what I needed to say.
And as I did it, I felt my nervous system ship.
It feels like it's in the past now. It doesn't
feel like it's happening right now. The work of building
(32:21):
trauma resilience is like putting it sort of in the
right timeline in my life, right, that's right. The interesting
thing is that the more we practice tools of resilience,
and this is about practicing right. We have neural plasticity,
but it's neural plasticity, can you just define that really quickly?
Neural plasticity is the ability of the brains to be
(32:42):
able to make new pathways to create new cell growth.
And we used to think back in the day, but
that might not be possible, but we know now that
that's just simply not true. And the more we actually
tap into and cultivate resiliency, the more we strengthen ourselves,
the more we widen and deepen our resilience zone, the
less things bumped me into the higher low zone, and
(33:04):
the more I'm me in the world, the more you're
using the world. Ultimately, that is about creating new neuro
pathways that are not trauma informed, that are not stress informed,
and so repeatedly practicing these skills and something that we
do on a daily basis, multiple times a day, over
a period of time, we create new neuro pathways exactly.
(33:25):
And as we create those new neuronal pathways, what ends
up happening Over time My zone gets deeper and actually
sometimes it has its own trauma reprocessing element to it,
in that the stuff of my history starts to fade
away a little bit, the glue there starts to unstick
a little bit, and so when I start to think
(33:46):
into what happened to me in the past, I feel
so much more meat in the here and now so
much more myself. That's lovely. I think that it's a
great place to end. Obviously, I could talk to you
all day about this. So can you tell people where
else they can get resources to do this work? Yes?
So again, you can go and download the eye Show app. Also,
(34:06):
if people don't have smartphones, they can go to www.
Dot eye Show app dot com and they can actually
it's its own little website landing. You can go to
Trauma Resource Institute website and look at their offerings and training.
And my website is Jennifer Burton MST dot com. And uh,
(34:27):
I think there's a beating list on my website as well.
I wanted to end our conversation with the question that
you often ask me in our sessions, what else is true?
Can you talk a little bit about how that sort
of relates to everything we've been talking about, And then
I want to ask you what else is true for you? Yeah?
So the what else is true is that both and place.
(34:49):
It's that if I can chase the resiliency, it's not
a denial that there's other things going on. To say
that our landscape isn't what it is politically and culturally
would be bananas, and to say we're not in the
middle of a pandemic would also be crazy. But it's
so what else is going on? What else can we
tap into? That's true? And so I don't want to
(35:10):
deny somebody's sadness, anger, feeling, frustration. I also want to
see what else is available, what else, what helps us
get through? What helps us get through hard times? You know,
we've all been through difficult times, whether it's the ones
that we're in right now were ones that we've been
in the past. And how do we get through? How
do we tap into our innate against strength and resiliency?
(35:32):
And I guess if if you're going to ask me
about it personally, So I I lost my grandmother about
a week ago, and she was one of my primary
attachment figures and I feel blessed to have had her
for fifty one years of my life. But I have
found myself in this kind of see of grief and
feeling as sometimes really piste off at the pandemic for
(35:56):
robbing me of seven months I could have been with her,
even though it wasn't um COVID that took her from me,
I feel like the pandemic took those months and those
times of connecting away from me, and when I feel
myself pulled in that direction, I actually tap into the
connection with her of how she's still with me. You
know what she would want for me now, how she
(36:18):
would be with me, and what she would say. And
so I do have the grief, and I have the love,
and I have that she'll be with me in infinite,
myriad ways for the rest of my life. And I
have pictures and I have all this other stuff and
memories that no one can take from me. And it
helps with the sadness so that I don't get so
(36:39):
swept away by that river, because I can just feel
so sad so much of the time around this and
and I let the tears come when they will, and
I can also do the other So I feel, really
that is my what else is true right now? And
that's the most present what else is true? Thank you
for sharing that. Um. I think it was a few
(37:01):
weeks ago you texted me and said you had to
reschedule because your grandmother died, and it was I was like,
what do I, how do I? What do I say
to Jennifer? And how do I? How do I? It
just felt so completely inadequate in that moment, and so
sort of I thought it thinking about the one sided
it's of our relationship. Um, when it's something like this happens,
is that there's I don't know if there's anything that
(37:21):
we can really say. I'm so grateful that you're in
my life. I do you want to say that. I'm
so grateful you're in my life. I'm so grateful for
our work. I'm so sad that you had this loss.
It's I'm so sad, but I'm pardoned by your what
else is true? And I think everything you're saying right
now is that testament to our connection and our relationship,
because yes it's in a therapeutic context, but make no mistake,
(37:43):
it's a relationship and it is a connection. And I'm
just so touched by what you're saying to me right now,
and I'm going to hold that as my other what
else is true? And it's secure attachment, which I a
lot of issues with in my life, and many times
sessions you'd be like, well and you sense into like
the connection we have, and I'm like, no, not really,
(38:03):
but I can sense into it right now and I'm
very grateful for it. So I thank you so much,
Jennifer for four years of work together. I thank you
for sharing your expertise and everything that you share today.
Thank you listening back to this conversation. What always hits
(38:25):
me when I talked to Jennifer is when she talks
about something being embodied. As a trauma survivor, as an
abuse survivor, and probably also as a transperson, my default
response is to leave my body right, to not be
present in my body because it's just too painful to
be there. And if we can use a resource. Resourcing
(38:48):
is another tool of the community resiliency model for me,
often a resource sometimes even singing opera for me when
I'm in an airport, I'm often insanely anxious and airports
and if you see a person walking through the airport
in advisor and um um COVID mask singing opera, it's
probably me. Do not approach, But I am singing to
(39:11):
self soothed. I'm singing to regulate my system. It's a
resource for me to help me get through the anxiety
of being in the airport. But singing connects me to
my breath, something that gets me in my body. Dancing
is something that gets me in my body, and I
can tap into those resources to turn the volume down
(39:32):
on the anxiety that I have in the airport and
turn the volume up on the things that are neutral, positive,
the things that helped me get through the what else
is true? So I encourage you to check out the
Eye Chill app to explore UM the components of the
community resiliency model. And even though I do it very imperfectly,
(39:52):
the day we recorded this, I was very much in
high zone. I was totally freaked out. I was the
first day we recorded UM the Verne Cox Show. But
this has really really helped me a lot. It's a
work in progress, and here's to widening your resilient zone
individually and all of us widening our resilient zones collectively.
(40:23):
Thank you so much for listening to The Laverne Cox Show.
Feel free to subscribe, rate and share. Join me next
week when I'll be talking to Kimberly Foster, the founder
of the online black feminist community for Harriet, about beauty
as capital. Is it a good investment? Kimberly has thoughts.
You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Laverne
(40:45):
Cox and on Facebook at Laverne Cox for Real until
next time, stay in the love. The Laverne Cox Show
is the production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with I
Heart Radio. For more podcast from Chondaland Audio, visit the
I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen
(41:05):
to your favorite shows.
Host
Laverne Cox
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