Episode 9

The Missing Piece of "Healing Trauma"

the fully nourished podcast | Episode 09

Listen on Apple
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Youtube
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen on Google Podcasts

Transcript

Welcome back to the Fully Nourished podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Ash, Functional Nutritionist and Integrative Health Coach, coming to you with a scientific and spiritual exploration of what it looks like to awaken our feminine radiance by becoming deeply and fully nourished in a world that wants to dull us down. You ready?

As a reminder, everything in this podcast is for education and inspiration only and is not intended as medical advice. Please talk to the appropriate professional when necessary, and please use common sense before making any changes to your diet and lifestyle. 

I thought I would start this episode just by calling myself out and say I'm going to be bringing something I like to call BLE today, which is Big Luteal Energy. It's been a running joke for years amongst a lot of you that you can tell when I'm in my luteal phase based on how snarky and feisty I am, because I just show up in quite a different way when I'm in my luteal phase, and you are normally correct. I mean, nine times out of 10, you guys call me out on when I'm in my luteal phase, so much as I don't really ever have to announce to the world what phase of my cycle I'm in, you just you just guess it very, very successfully. So I thought I would just give you the BLE warning just so that, you know, if I get a little feisty or a little snarky, there's a reason why. 

And today's episode is inspired by this story. There was this story I did a good amount of time ago. I think it's definitely over a year ago now, where I talked about a few aspects of our physiology as we begin to nourish our physiology, and our fight or flight state begins to shift. And I want to talk about that today, in regards to trauma a little bit because I feel like healing trauma and this kind of focus on trauma has gotten really, really popular over the past couple of years. And for some reason, it feels like we're just becoming more and more un-resilient as a society. Is it possible that our focus on our trauma is making us less resilient? I want to talk about some real tangible reasons why that could be. So it is inspired by The Journey highlight, but we're gonna dive a little bit deeper in regards to what people are experiencing, physiologically. 

But before we dive in, you probably noticed but today is Tuesday, or when this episode is coming out. It's Tuesday, we're trying something a little bit new, trying to do some shorter episodes twice a week, versus doing without one long episode on Thursdays. So I am doing it this week. We'll probably do it next week. And let us know how you like it. Obviously, we love feedback. And I really love to know what you like and how you like to listen to the podcast. So if you prefer this format, let us know because I'm happy to do it for you. 

Q&A: My Morning Routine

I've been getting so many questions about my teeth and why they're so white and those exact words. And I wish I had a better answer for you besides just I think it's because I've just been oil pulling for so long now. It's almost been a decade since I've started consistently oil pulling and I do it almost every single morning. So every day, when I wake up without fail, I make my jug of water, which I don't it is a jug. It's this. I saw this really cool Italian mason jar one day at TJ Maxx. And I have to say, I am a TJ Maxx fan. I just thought, I love TJ Maxx. 

But there was this Italian mason jar jug thing that I was just like I love it. I don't know if it's a liter or what, it's pretty big, but I don't know, I feel like a liter would be a little too large. But anyways, every morning without fail, I put like two big pinches of salt at the bottom of this jug. And then I fill it with very very warm water about halfway, maybe a little less than halfway and then I fill the rest with room temperature water until it hits a very nice, warm, drinkable temperature and then I'll put like a squeeze of lime or squeeze of lemon in there. And I drink that every morning without fail and I don't really sip on it but like I do, I don't want to say a chug it. But I definitely get it down pretty quickly because what I'm after with that is not only hydration, which I think is really important and I feel like people in the pro metabolic space have completely lost sight of how important it is to stay hydrated. Yes, I feel like we as a wellness community are moving towards understanding that it is important to be mineralized. Of course, we don't want to be chugging gallons of water with absolutely no minerals in them. There's more to hydration than just the water or the h2o itself. There's many aspects of hydration. But heavens like, did we forget that water is important to drink and we do need to stay hydrated? 

There is a fine line between chugging gallons of water a day that has had no minerals in it and like not drinking any water and what I'm after in the morning is not only hydrating, and I like to use warm water to wake up the digestive tract but also, when your stomach fills up, it stretches, and it stimulates something called the gastro colic reflex. And a lot of people don't realize, but there's this like ligament, and fascia, there's tissue that's connected throughout the whole digestive tract. So when the stomach stretches, it almost sends a signal all the way down the digestive tract to stimulate peristalsis, or a bowel movement. And so the jug of water, my beautiful jug of water, is doing a few different things. For me, it's hydrating me, it's waking up my digestive tract with that nice warm water, it's giving me some nice salt that has other minerals in it as well. I'm getting some nice kidney flushing from the citrus juice. But I'm also getting that gastro colic reflex to stimulate the whole digestive tract to start moving, and I really, really like it. 

But not to get too off track. After I do that simple jug of water, I will put a spoonful of coconut oil in my mouth and swish it. Now I think people sometimes treat coconut oil pulling as swishing mouthwash. And that's not actually the way that it's supposed to be done. I like to actually practice the pulling, which is the pushing and pulling through the crevices of the teeth to keep the coconut oil kind of at the front of the mouth. I know it has a really nice impact on the oral microbiome. But in fact, I actually like to keep it more towards my teeth. And I will actually push and pull and push and pull, keeping it kind of on my gums and in between my lips and into my teeth. And I have done that now for a really long time. I remember when I first started doing it and how sore my mouth and my cheeks and my lips would get. I think it's just because it's almost like this nice little little workout for the mouth. But that's the primary thing I can think of. 

I do water flossing, just with normal regular warm water, I'll either use an electric toothbrush or just a regular toothbrush. For brands of toothpaste I like to use either like Uncle Harry's or Boka or something like that. But I tend to use Uncle Harry's a lot. I do use Xylitol based mouthwash and choose Xylitol based gum. So that's kind of like my oral routine in a nutshell. 

The Missing Piece 

But today's episode is about what I think is the missing piece to a lot of people being stuck in this vicious cycle of healing their trauma. And I think it's having a chain reaction on us specifically as women. I know, I'm not discounting men's part in this as well. I just think that there are some unique aspects to women that we sometimes forget. And it's just creating an overall lack of resilience, lack of stress resilience, we are almost becoming more un-resilient as a society rather than less. And there's a reason why. 

So if we actually look at this kind of rise in trauma awareness and rise of this idea of “nervous system healing” we can call it. I feel like it really started to pick up when 2020 hit, I feel like a lot of us were living in a state of constant fight or flight. But we were kind of in this autopilot mode. It felt like we were just hustle, hustle, go, go go, it was just a cycle over and over again, it was like, just keep moving, or you'll fall down. Whereas then once we all had to slow down and kind of everything came to a halt, we became much more aware of our patterns of behavior. And recognizing like, Here I am, I'm slowing down, my stress is a lot lower. Yet internally, I just feel such immense amounts of stress and pressure. I'm stuck in these survival patterns. I'm stuck in these anxious and stressful patterns. And it feels like I can't get out of them. And so then it led to us realizing like, oh, wow, I have some patterns of behavior that really aren't serving me and are actually probably something that I developed from a long time ago that I don't really need to have anymore. I've had some experiences that have shifted and shaped me. 

But that kind of started to metamorphosize and turn into this obsession with trauma. I feel like over the years, almost every hard experience we've ever had is now being referred to as “trauma,” that going through an experience that is difficult, or brings painful feelings or is hard, is now being considered trauma. And I went through this too where at first the idea of trauma almost validated the experience and was like yeah, that was hard. That was traumatic, like yeah, of course that shaped me. But over time what I've realized and this is something that I have personally had to go through because part of my hermit chapter, as you ladies have so lovingly called it - I'm gonna just stick with that term because I really liked it. I talked about that in last week's episode, where I went through this burnout. And it was just, it was more of like a spiritual and creative burnout that really flowed over into the physical. I had been nourishing for so many years and kind of dealing with small little patterns of behavior. But then what I tried to do was to just like, dig into all my experiences, and take this approach that so many people are taking right now, which is just like, I'm just going to dig deep, just rip the parts of myself out that have shaped me. And it very quickly became physically impactful. I think that's what a lot of people underestimate, even when we become extremely nourished. 

I think a lot of us go through that journey where we start to just focus on meeting our basic biological needs, we start to basically nourish ourselves, we start to focus on biologically appropriate nutrition. We start to understand our own nature and our own physiology, and start nourishing from that place. That allows us to start really changing on a cellular level, because once our body can create enough energy, it's really game over, it becomes an almost momentum like approach that our cells become able to generate energy much better and much better. And over time, the cells really begin to shift the structure of the body. I think that leads to a natural type of processing that the body goes through over time where the body often will put things into what I almost see as dormancy or put things away for later, until the body has enough energy to process that thing. 

And so I think a lot of us have these stored experiences where we don't really, we go through them at the time, it's almost like going through the motions, but we don't really fully accept how they've impacted us from a physical level, a spiritual level, an emotional level, or even just a personality level. They're sitting there kind of just stored in our tissue waiting to be worked through. And so you kind of see this process over time as women begin to focus on their physical nourishment. And this happened to me as well, over time, you start to see like, wow, these experiences and processes are just kind of bubbling up, like I'm almost becoming more and more of my behavior patterns that are keeping me in this survival state in this fight or flight state. It's almost like my body is asking me or giving me the opportunity to deal with them. But that is interesting to me, because that's more of a body-led situation where the body starts to bring things up. And then it's like, Okay, it's time to start working through these things. This is kind of my next step on my healing journey, if we want to call it that. 

But what we're seeing right now is people are recognizing their patterns of behavior that are holding them back. And they're kind of diving into this idea of like, I have to heal my trauma. It's almost like a surgery-esque approach, where we go from sometimes really, truly being a victim. At one point, I'm not denying that some of us go through extremely traumatic experiences. But what happens is we go from being a victim at one point, and then taking that one experience that shifted and shaped us and kind of formed some patterns of behavior that we still have and we carry to this day, and we go from that, to then becoming a victim of our own trauma. You see this a lot with awareness, right? And this doesn't just happen with trauma, this happens with anything. We become hyper focused on something and it almost becomes our whole reality. And we go from having that be just a part of us or an experience we're going through to that thing becoming a part of our identity. 

A Victim OF Our Trauma

So many of us right now are walking around because we're so hyper fixated on our trauma, now we become a victim to our trauma. We went from being a victim at one time, we had one experience that has shaped us and shifted us and I'm not downplaying that. But then what has happened is we now are carrying that physiologically as we're in this constant state of fight or flight because we're constantly marinating on something and it's constantly a part of our awareness, and it's shaping our reality. Then if we're not careful, it actually will become a part of our identity. And like I said, this doesn’t just happen with trauma, you see this happen with people who get diagnosed with diseases, or I have been guilty of this so many times where, you know, I made PCOS a part of my identity, or I made Hashimotos a part of my identity, or you see people make their dietary choices a part of their identity. Humans are very susceptible to doing this. 

But to me, it's a symptom of such a bigger problem. And the problem is that we don't have a strong sense of self. We don't know who we are at the very core of us. There's no confidence in who we are, what we stand for, what drives us, what our purpose is, what our nature is. We have a very weak sense of self and so we operate and move through life in that way. And part our being healthy and part of healing is establishing a strong sense of self. That is why I teach you guys your nature, right? I think of it as kind of the three ends, which is nature, nourish, nurture, which is like you have to learn your feminine nature to be able to appreciate it and honor it, then it's really important to nourish yourself towards something and to that nature. And then once you have nourished yourself, you're able to now nurture and not just nurture yourself, but nurture your family and nurture the people around you nurture your community, it's kind of things that are constantly playing into one another. It's not like a three step process, it's just, these are all things that are kind of a part of creating and establishing a strong sense of self. If we don't understand ourselves, or who we are, or what we're created to do or be like, I'm not gonna have a strong sense of self. If I don't know how to take care of myself, and I don't have good routines and patterns and don't know how to support my own body, like, I'm not going to have a strong sense of self. If I don't nurture something else, I'm not gonna have a strong sense of self, because in part, that's what gives our feminine energy purpose. In nurturing something, we are utilizing our feminine energy. And it feeds our sense of self. But so many of us feel like that's so far away from our reality, because so many of us are operating in this constant state of survival. 

I do think that that's why so many of us do find when we start to heal our trauma, there's a reason there's like an aha, like, oh, finally, I figured out what's “wrong” with me. And we attach ourselves to it because it explains something about our reality that we weren't aware of before. But what we have to understand about ourselves is that being stuck in a state of survival goes so much deeper. And whether we're stuck in fight or flight or fawn or freeze mode, you know, whether you kind of subscribe to the polyvagal theory, which if you've seen the polyvagal chart, at the bottom, you have this green place where it's like safety and stability. This is where we as women, if we're operating in a balanced nervous system, you know, will be present, will be grounded, will be open minded, will be curious, will be mindful, will have good time perception, right? It won't feel like we're rushed constantly, or like, there's never enough time in the day. In this place we're not overly concerned with others' opinions, right? We're not constantly thinking like, what are they thinking of me? We're a little bit calmer, we're connected with others, we're just at peace. And that's really where if we're in a balanced nervous system state, that's the parasympathetic state, that's where we're going to operate most of our time in that kind of rest and digest mode. 

And then a healthy body is able to jump into fight or flight whenever is necessary. That's really what we're typically taught is like our adrenal glands are pumping out stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. And it's a whole physiological shift, because our blood flow changes, what we're focused on changes. But if we stay in that place for too long, that sympathetic nervous system state, that's really where a lot of us will find ourselves operating from, if we're stuck in a state of survival, whether we're in that fight mode, where we're kind of constantly frustrated, constantly angry, constantly ragey, right? Rage is a huge part of the fight, we're irritable, we are addicted to drama, we constantly are just all about the fight. I find it so funny, like women love reality TV, where there's so much drama all the time. And I feel like sometimes we want to feel those feelings so bad. So it feeds us in some way. 

We'll have poor digestion in this state too, because our blood flow is flowing away from our digestive system, while also you know, so that was the fight part of it. But we can also be in the flight part of it right where we just like, avoid constantly, you know, it takes months to text someone back, it's just too stressful, or we just can't relax, we have to keep moving, we feel a lot of fear or worry or overwhelm or panic or concern. And, obviously, if we're jumping into that state to protect ourselves, that's important, right? Because then we can jump back out and go right back into our parasympathetic balanced nervous system state. For a lot of us, we're not doing that. We're staying in a constant state of fight or flight, and then we'll move into what is called within the polyvagal theory, the dorsal vagal, which is that freeze or shutdown mode. That's when our body has become so exhausted from staying in fight or flight or that state of hyper vigilance that our body starts to suppress itself and conserve energy. We have expended so many resources that now we're in a place of being checked out, hopeless, you know, constipated obviously, because our gut is frozen. We maybe feel crippled over overwhelmed, confused, cold hands and feet, we're maybe numb, we feel helpless. Or maybe we would consider ourselves depressed or we're really disassociated, we feel a lot of shame, we feel that burned out feeling right, like we just have expended so much energy, it's like I have nothing left to give you. And that is where a majority of ourselves find ourselves, right? So if we get some type of answer for why we feel this way, and it's something as simple as trauma, and all I have to do is heal my trauma. Of course, we feel like oh, I'll jump on that train. No problem. 

And it's interesting, because when you look at the polyvagal theory, it really aligns with Hans Selye’s GAS theory, which is the General Adaptation Syndrome theory, this idea that people when they're in a stress response, they first go into this alarm phase, right, which would be similar to jumping into your sympathetic nervous system. You go into that fight or flight state, where your body's trying to expend resources to just survive, and then eventually go to a place of resistance, where your body's like trying to get back into a place of homeostasis, trying to get back to balance, trying to get back to the place feeling good, the vortex of feeling good, but it can't. And so you get to a place of exhaustion, which would balance out similarly to the freeze shutdown mode, or the dorsal vagal, part of the polyvagal theory. So both Hans Selye’s GAS theory, or the General Adaptation Syndrome, and the polyvagal theory really, really align, to bring us to where a majority of people are today. 

I would say everyone is there, right? Both men and women, but women especially, are just so physiologically burned out, and a lot of them are showing the physiological signs a little bit more than men. Men are burned out as well, men are overwhelmed as well, men are experiencing this as well, but their bodies are just a little bit more resilient to stress. They also tend to be a little less vocal about their struggles. And so it seems that they kind of just like, suck it up, suck it up, until it becomes too excruciating to deal with. 

But what we have to realize is when we're actively trying to “heal trauma,” we're trying to bring balance back to the patterns of our nervous system. We're, in a way, retraining our patterns of behavior to respond properly to stressors. A lot of us are in such a state that we continuously react to stressors. Our body reacts before our mind can even catch up. And by the time our mind is there, our bodies are already responding as if it's a life or death situation, right? Because our patterns of behavior are trained in reaction due to our experiences, and our previous experiences that have shaped us. But as we retrain our brains, we need to remember that our brains consume huge amounts of glucose, our brains are consuming huge amounts of energy, and sometimes to bring ourselves back to a state of balance, you know, psychologically, nervous-system wise, you know, our brain and our spinal cord and our enteric nervous system, which relies in our gut are very physical systems. 

The Physical Side of Healing Trauma

I think people sometimes forget that, like, they know that, but they don't always remember how energy consuming these systems are. And so when we're trying to bring balance and stability back to these systems, and we're trying to almost in a way, force our body to process previous experiences before it's ready, which is what a lot of people are doing, which is why it feels like they're spinning their wheels, or almost feels like they're getting worse and worse and worse. And it's because their nervous systems require energy, require fuel, require nutrients, and a lot of us are in the state of fight or flight, in part because then our bodies are not getting those things already. Then we try to force our body to process through things that it's maybe not capable of yet or it hasn't. It doesn't have the fuel or the nutrients to process through them. And then we're left wondering why we're feeling so burned out why we're feeling so low energy, why we're feeling like we're almost on this roller coaster, this emotional roller coaster, if the end goal of healing our trauma, or processing our experiences, as I like to call it processing our experiences facing our experiences, coming to terms and acceptance with our experiences. If that is really the end goal, then it's really important to remember that the whole goal is to create safety and stability within the body and within the system. And if we are doing only the mental and emotional work, but we're not doing the nourishment work. We're not providing our body the fuel it needs to be able to physically process through the experiences and the stored things. A lot of times, it's interesting when you look at fascia research, a lot of people think that all of our experiences are stored in our brain. But that's not true. Science has been showing more and more that we actually hold our experiences within our tissues and different places within our body store different experiences. And this actually shows up physically as fascia, that web-like tissue that connects all of our muscles, it almost shows up physically as fascial adhesions. And these fascial adhesions aren't just physical adhesions that store memories and experiences, they actually store up other things like junk, toxins we’re exposed to, and chemicals we're exposed to that our body maybe doesn't have the energy to process at the time and heavy metals and hormones and different things that as they are released, they actually release that stuff into the lymphatic system, release that into the system to be detoxified and metabolized appropriately. 

There's a reason why when we're emotionally or spiritually working through our past experiences, there's a reason why we physically feel it. And it's not just because it's energetically intense, which it is, but our body is actually processing physical things. Even when we cry. As we process those experiences, there are certain types of neuropeptides that are being released in our tears, no tears we cry are molecularly, or structurally the same. They all have different types of peptides that are reflective of experiences that we've had. Our body is actually releasing proteins within our tears, that is physically releasing the experience. And so I wanted to go over this before we dive into Thursday's episode, which is a really interesting episode that I've been working on for a while now. I've been working on it for quite a few weeks, it is a very touchy topic. And it's something that I think I've been trying to approach delicately. But it's just a conversation that I think we need to have woman to woman. And I think as a community, you know, I think we really are trying to help each other rise, and really come to the next place of nourishment. So we're gonna really talk about nurturance, and dive really deep into why we as a generation are so starving for nurture, it's almost like we don't know how to nurture ourselves. I've been really thinking deeply about the reasons why. 

But as we “heal our trauma,” or work through our experiences, it's so important for us to not become a victim of our own trauma, or identify ourselves through our trauma, make it a part of our identity. Because then physically, we're going to want to hang on to it, it's so important to reframe our trauma as experiences that we've gone through, that have shifted and shaped our current behaviors and have stored very physically within our system. And so as we bring these things up, and as we rewrite these patterns, it is so important for us to nurture ourselves through the process. 

Three Action Steps

I just feel like people are just needlessly suffering. And it's because they really do need to be nourishing themselves through the process. It's so important to be eating regularly, at least having three meals a day. If we can't nurture ourselves on a basic level, we have no business dredging up deep, deep experiences that have shaped us and shifted us as a human being, because it's just going to be absolute hell when we're trying to process those things. We absolutely need fuel, we need nutrients, we need movement, we need motion to be able to process those things. And if we don't have those things, it's gonna be very difficult for those experiences to process through our bodies appropriately. 

Another thing that I like to bring up is that it's so important to remove ourselves from really toxic environments. You know, we, as women, we really learn to see ourselves through the eyes of other women, it is so imperative for us to have a community of women that we can rely on that can help us see ourselves clearly and help us really, like hold on to our sense of reality about ourselves. Because when we are processing our experiences and rewriting our brain's patterns, we have to be able to have a grip on reality because we don't always see ourselves clearly. Our human nature is to not see ourselves very clearly. That's why having women that have our back and are like minded in some ways is so important. And if we don't have that, it's okay, it's gonna make it much harder to go through the process, but we at least need to remove ourselves from women and environments that are very clearly not helping us see ourselves clearly. 

So I think a lot of times, we try to heal from things that we haven't removed ourselves from. And it's so difficult to heal in toxic environments. I think a lot of us hang on to friendships and relationships that are not serving us and are in fact hurting us. But we do it anyways, because we don't want to be alone. But it's so important to find, to create space in our lives. So we can find a community that does help us rise and does help us see ourselves clearly and can help us establish a strong sense of self. Because at the end of the day, when we're trying to heal from our experiences, and rewrite our brain's patterns, we need to do our utmost job of creating as much safety and stability in our environment as possible. Because if some of us have had really, really chaotic, stressful fight or flight type experiences our whole life.

Let's say, if we grew up in a really stressful environment where we were in a constant state of fight or flight, it's gonna feel really natural for us to be in a state of chaos. And it's gonna feel really awkward to be in a state of peace or calm. So we need to do whatever we can to create safety and stability. And this is why I think that nourishment is such an important aspect of that. It's such a basic way to nurture ourselves. Yet so many of us forget how important it is. It's a way to create some routine as a way to just give a little kindness to yourself. And it's just a basic biological need that we can really praise ourselves for meeting, you know. When we feed ourselves, well, it's like, wow, like you did such a good job in feeding yourself today and feeding yourself showing up for every meal. There's something about it, that is a small sense of accomplishment. When we're having a hard time or we're feeling really burned out or we're in that state of freeze or we're in a constant state of fight or flight, it can provide some anchoring, to get us to a better place where we can do more things that are on our list to do but the basic, the basic first step is sometimes just nourishing ourselves. 

And that can be the most basic form of nurturance. But I don't mean basic in the sense of it's just unimportant, because it can be some of the most important things that we can do. So if I was going to say what the missing piece to healing our trauma is, it's really that we're forgetting to nourish ourselves through it. We're forgetting the amount of energy that it takes to process our past experiences. I hope that today's small mini episode on the missing piece of healing trauma really resonated with you. If you're ready to dive deeper into this topic, and really have a discussion on what it means to nurture and why nurturing is so important, check out this Thursday's episode. 

Episode Links

Connect with Jessica:

Have Sunday tea with me! Sign-up for my Sunday newsletter where I share what’s on my brain from the nutritional to spiritual: https://www.jessicaashwellness.com/email-subscribe.

Join the Fully Nourished community! Follow me @jessicaashwellness on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jessicaashwellness/