Meghan Riordan Jarvis and Hope Edelman at Zibby's Bookshop
[0:04]Welcome to Moms Don't Have Time to Be Books with Zippy.
[0:07]I'm the host, Zippy Owens.
[0:09]I am an author, my latest is blank, pub date march first and novel.
[0:13]I'm also a podcaster, obviously, a publisher, a bookstore owner, and so much more.
[0:18]If you love books, you're in the right place.
[0:21]In fact, we call it the Zippyverse, or really, the LA Times called it the Zippyverse,
[0:25]and we're going with it.
[0:27]Go to Zippy Owens.com to learn more and follow me on Instagram at Zippy Owens.
[0:33]The following was a conversation held at Zippy's bookshop,
[0:36]overheard at Zippy's bookshop.
[0:38]It's between Megan Reardon Jarvis, who is the author of the end of the hour,
[0:43]which is a grief memoir, and it is a Zippy book.
[0:46]So we're very excited about that.
[0:48]And hope Edelman, who is just the author of Motherless Daughters,
[0:51]but the ultimate grief counselor and expert in the world, basically.
[0:57]Let me give you their bios as well.
[0:59]Megan Reardon Jarvis is a podcast host of grief as my side hustle, two-time TEDx speaker,
[1:04]and psychotherapist specializing in trauma and grief and loss.
[1:07]After experiencing PTSD following the deaths of both of her parents,
[1:11]Jarvis founded talking point partners to help employers address complex emotions,
[1:15]such as grief in the workplace.
[1:16]Jarvis is currently at work on Can Anyone Tell Me Why,
[1:19]25 essential questions about grief and loss, which publishes with sounds to media in 2024.
[1:25]Originally from New England, Jarvis currently lives in Maryland with her husband and their three
[1:28]children, where competing pals of Lego bricks and books cover most surfaces of their house.
[1:33]Hope Edelman is the internationally acclaimed author of eight nonfiction books.
[1:37]She's been on this podcast, by the way, including the bestsellers, motherless daughters,
[1:41]motherless mothers, and the memoir, The Possibility of Everything.
[1:44]Her newest book is The Aftergrief, Finding Your Way, along the long arc of loss.
[1:48]She has lectured widely on the subjects of early mother loss and nonfiction writing
[1:52]in the US Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UAE.
[1:56]Her articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications,
[1:59]including The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post,
[2:03]the Huffington Post, Glamour Child, Seventeen Real Simple, Parents,
[2:06]Writers Digest, and Self, and her original essays have appeared in many anthologies,
[2:10]including The Bitch in the House, The Bitch Is Back,
[2:13]behind the bedroom door, and goodbye to all that.
[2:15]Her work has received a New York Times notable book of the year designation,
[2:18]and a push-cart prize for creative nonfiction.
[2:21]She can be found in Iowa City every July teaching at the Iowa Summer Running Festival.
[2:24]The rest of the year she lives in Los Angeles, where she runs her cheats,
[2:27]workshops, and online courses for motherless women.
[2:30]Welcome, Megan.
[2:31]Thank you.
[2:32]We are here today.
[2:34]We have gathered here today to celebrate Megan, our application of her extraordinary memoir
[2:41]and of the hour.
[2:42]In addition to writing and coaching, I'm also a nonfiction writing instructor.
[2:48]I help people write memoirs.
[2:50]I develop mentally coach, and I'm giving this my double stamp of approval.
[2:55]Megan, I had no idea you were the writer that you are.
[2:58]I've known you as a therapist.
[2:59]I've known you as a colleague, but you're an incredible writer as well.
[3:05]And it's an incredibly brave and honest book.
[3:09]Every page I thought, my God, she's really good for her.
[3:13]She's just what was she thinking.
[3:15]She's all in here.
[3:17]And so I was wondering, I mean, if you can just start by giving us a little background.
[3:21]It's a story for anyone who doesn't know.
[3:23]It is the story of a trauma therapist who experiences PTSD or reactivated PTSD from
[3:30]childhood.
[3:31]I'll let you explain the dynamics of it and it goes to into a treatment program herself.
[3:38]So can you just give us a background about how that came to be?
[3:41]Sure, yeah.
[3:43]Well, first of all, there's so many writers in this audience.
[3:45]You know the surreal thing of having like a person that you deeply might hold your book.
[3:50]So I could just sit here for a minute and just please keep doing that.
[3:54]Yeah, and I haven't, I'm not tired of seeing the cover and seeing people hold it.
[3:58]It's really extraordinary.
[3:59]It's crazy to be here.
[4:00]So thank you everyone for coming.
[4:03]So yeah, so so end of the hour, so end of the hour started as a therapeutic tool for me
[4:09]when I was in the same treatment facility that I send my clinical patients to for trauma.
[4:18]My dad died in 2017 having been diagnosed in 2016 with small cell cancer and his death was predictable
[4:26]and the way that I described it as I participated in it.
[4:29]He knew he was dying.
[4:30]I knew he was dying.
[4:32]The image I use often is like it was little cups of grief.
[4:36]I would go see him on the weekend and he would be smaller and less able.
[4:41]And so I was learning and taking him the fact that he was dying.
[4:47]In 2019, I was on vacation with my mother, my kids, my crappy little dog at her house in Cape Cod
[4:54]and my mom hated that dog.
[4:56]And my mom died suddenly in her sleep unexpectedly after a short illness.
[5:03]And you know, the book really, it just gives you the whole jam of it.
[5:07]You know, it explains what it was like to be somewhat of a caretaker.
[5:13]I'm a social worker.
[5:14]I was a medical social worker.
[5:15]I'm the closest thing my family has to a doctor.
[5:18]My dad spent a lot of time in the hospital.
[5:20]So when I was writing, I was writing every painful vignette of what it was like
[5:25]to be with him in his illness and feel helpless.
[5:29]And for the trauma therapist that are in the audience and I can see you, trauma is born out
[5:34]of helplessness.
[5:35]We have these reactive states, fight, flight, freeze and collapse.
[5:41]And when you can fight and when you can flee, you do better because the energy doesn't land
[5:47]inside of you.
[5:49]And when my mom died, the chapter is there for you to read, but I was ostensibly standing alone
[5:57]in a parking lot with a van full of children.
[6:01]And I couldn't do anything except let it land inside my system.
[6:07]And I had the sort of meta cognition, right?
[6:10]Like the observing ego experience of seeing and beginning to feel and knowing
[6:18]this is going to be bad, what's happening.
[6:21]And having, you know, a couple of master's degrees, 20 of years,
[6:25]experience and not being able to stop it.
[6:27]So the reason I wrote the book is that A, there's so many grief therapists in this room,
[6:33]but we don't do enough to educate the general population about the realities of what grief
[6:40]really is, which is why memoir to me is so important.
[6:43]It's the story.
[6:44]It's our real life story of what that pain really looks like because we don't take a class.
[6:48]There's no class.
[6:50]Even in social work school, I didn't take a class.
[6:52]And most people still don't take classes.
[6:55]I went to social work school a few minutes ago.
[6:58]So part of the reason that I wanted to write the book was to help people understand that
[7:03]even with all the education and the experience, trauma kind of does what it does.
[7:08]It makes its own decisions.
[7:10]What definition of trauma do you use in your practice and in your everyday life?
[7:15]So trauma is any kind of difficult event.
[7:20]Some trauma therapists will tell you that it has to be life.
[7:24]It has to threaten your life.
[7:25]I actually don't believe that.
[7:26]Trauma is anything that lands inside your system and leaves a negative imprint.
[7:31]So the best example that I can say is like COVID was a global trauma.
[7:37]But that doesn't mean we were all traumatized.
[7:40]Trauma-tized is the meaning and the impact that your system then makes of it.
[7:44]For some people, the global trauma of COVID was their best Oprah moment.
[7:48]They were living their best life after that.
[7:51]They were not traumatized.
[7:52]And for other people, it left a tattooed imprint that their life was less than it was to begin with
[7:59]and that they began to feel and believe that life was less good than it was before COVID.
[8:04]So that's my definition.
[8:06]I think of trauma also as a negative event or a distressing event that exceeds your ability
[8:12]to cope with function on your own easily.
[8:14]So that's an important part.
[8:16]It overwhelms your central nervous system.
[8:18]So your brain's ability to cope and your body's ability to sort of manage the energy.
[8:24]So your central nervous system is just your spine and your brain.
[8:27]And different people have different central nervous systems, different operating systems,
[8:31]which is why two siblings can experience that same event.
[8:34]And one can be traumatized.
[8:35]That's right.
[8:36]And one can walk away from the trauma feeling that they've had a growth experience.
[8:40]Exactly right.
[8:41]Right.
[8:41]So it's the meaning that you make of it.
[8:43]It's what does the event then mean to you, which is why I just don't think it has to be
[8:48]something that threatens your life.
[8:50]I think there are plenty of people out there that were traumatized by their lacrosse
[8:55]coach yelling at them.
[8:57]I've sat in the therapist chair long enough to know that trauma is what the meaning
[9:02]that your body makes of it.
[9:03]And that one person may experience that coach is very supportive.
[9:07]And someone else goes to decades of therapy to get their voice out of their head.
[9:12]Thank you for clarifying that.
[9:13]It's the meaning your body makes of it.
[9:15]Not necessarily the story that you create in your mind.
[9:18]Yeah.
[9:19]And so in a sense, it's involuntary.
[9:21]Yeah, right.
[9:23]And so that's sort of the purpose of me writing the book is it's not about how well educated
[9:28]I am or how much experience I've had supporting other people is that I could see my body
[9:33]beginning.
[9:33]So what happened for me was my mom had had a short illness.
[9:37]She and I had been together for 10 days.
[9:39]And we have a dance.
[9:40]We had a dance as a mother and daughter.
[9:42]My mom could be very caustic.
[9:44]She was very private.
[9:45]She didn't like you asking her questions about her health.
[9:48]Her health was in decline.
[9:50]And initially, she sort of let me ask about it.
[9:54]And then as it started, she started to seem less well.
[9:56]She got angry.
[10:00]That was to me, even in my adult age,
[10:01]to do what I would have done when I was 12,
[10:04]which was take several steps back,
[10:06]and then she died in her sleep.
[10:08]And so immediately when I knew that she died,
[10:11]and there's a moment in the book.
[10:13]So the way that I came to understand that my mother died
[10:16]is that I had the sensation of water breaking,
[10:18]like when you're having a baby inside my stomach.
[10:21]And then, and this is what happens to me.
[10:22]I had a clear thought that came sort of from this side
[10:25]of my head that said she died.
[10:27]And I was in my minivan with kids,
[10:29]and I called my husband who was back at the house
[10:32]where my mother was and said, I think, my mom died.
[10:34]And she had died.
[10:36]And he wouldn't tell me, which was insane,
[10:38]because I just told him she died.
[10:39]But I was driving to get back to where they were.
[10:42]And he said, you have to pull over.
[10:44]And I was in Boston.
[10:45]And if anyone is from Boston, Boston's roads are insane.
[10:48]So I ended up on this clover loop,
[10:51]and then in a crazy parking lot.
[10:53]But in that moment in the parking lot,
[10:55]that thought came, which is it's your fault she died.
[10:59]And I knew, because I have sat with so many clients,
[11:02]that that kind of irrational thought
[11:04]becomes a rumination if you don't interrupt it.
[11:07]And that that rumination ends up causing its own kind
[11:11]of trauma.
[11:13]Now, you were diagnosed with PTSD.
[11:16]Yes.
[11:16]And a very significant event happened in your childhood.
[11:19]Significant enough that it's the second chapter in the book.
[11:22]Yeah, yeah.
[11:23]And it is the death of a neighbor's son or your friend's brother,
[11:27]both, you know, both things were true.
[11:30]And I'm really curious about how those dots connected
[11:35]to lead to PTSD in your adult life,
[11:38]because, you know, the conversation around PTSD
[11:41]has changed a lot over the years.
[11:43]10, 15 years ago losing or witnessing,
[11:47]not even witnessing the death of the neighbor,
[11:49]but hearing about it secondhand
[11:51]and watching the responses of people around you
[11:53]might not have been considered a traumatic event
[11:57]for the people in that inner circle.
[11:59]But that was very much you, as you wrote about in the book,
[12:04]an event that set you up for a trauma response later in life.
[12:09]Can you explain sort of how that happens and works
[12:12]and how into place for you?
[12:13]Hope that's the best questions.
[12:15]So when I was nine, a teenager who we considered
[12:20]to be a cousin, right, like all the extended all the kids,
[12:23]I lived in a tiny little village and Massachusetts.
[12:26]And, you know, everybody was at each other's houses on bikes,
[12:29]all that.
[12:30]So a 16 year old went into the water.
[12:33]He did not come out and everyone in the town was on the beach.
[12:37]No one noticed because you didn't watch 16 year olds.
[12:39]You don't pay attention to them the way you do a three year old.
[12:43]And it happened on July 26th.
[12:46]It was a summer community.
[12:48]So the impact of this was utterly devastating to my family.
[12:53]My older brother found his friend in the water.
[12:56]I mean, it was my mother was there when they pulled his body out.
[12:58]I mean, the reverberations across my immediate family
[13:01]were devastating and they extended across this entire town
[13:05]only until August 22nd, when we then went back
[13:09]to where I spent three seasons out of my life,
[13:14]where no one knew that this had happened
[13:16]and no one ever talked about it again.
[13:18]So it was the biggest thing in the world
[13:22]and then also not significant enough for anyone to even talk about.
[13:26]So I actually, when I was cleaning my parents' house
[13:30]after during COVID, after my mother died,
[13:32]I found the report card from my fourth grade year.
[13:37]And every teacher talks about how angry I am
[13:41]and how disruptive I am.
[13:42]And my only memory of myself is like as a good people pleaser.
[13:46]So like here it is in writing.
[13:48]I mean, it was devastating.
[13:49]I spent hours crying over it.
[13:51]But in 1983, the understanding of what
[13:54]to do with children and bad things was to keep them separate.
[13:57]So every one of these adults thought
[13:59]they were doing the right thing.
[14:00]And I am significantly older now
[14:02]than they were at the time trying to manage this.
[14:04]So I have a lot of compassion for the impossibility
[14:07]of the situation that this entire town was put in.
[14:11]But we know a lot now.
[14:14]So there's a study, which is called the ACEs Study,
[14:16]which actually it was put together actually
[14:19]as an obesity study.
[14:20]But the intent was to look at the markers of things
[14:23]in childhood that lead to negative outcomes later in life.
[14:27]And Kaiser Permanente and NIH put it together.
[14:30]And one of the things, so the higher your ACEs score,
[14:35]the more likely you are to have certain negative outcomes,
[14:38]including PTSD.
[14:40]And the things that they're looking at
[14:42]are were you raised in poverty?
[14:44]Did someone die in the home of their drugs,
[14:47]their abuse, things like mental illness,
[14:50]things that you would consider difficult for a child.
[14:53]But what's pretty stunning is that children
[14:55]who are raised in those environments
[14:56]where those things exist go on to have the correlations
[15:01]of negative outcomes are pretty stunning.
[15:03]And so when you look at that, what you now know,
[15:05]and it's research-based, is that we need to support
[15:09]children who have those things going on in their lives.
[15:12]The interesting thing for me is,
[15:13]I went to therapy for the very first time
[15:15]because my heart was so broken.
[15:18]I had been in a relationship that I thought
[15:20]was just gonna be the end of all relationships.
[15:23]This was it, and I was summarily dumped, and I was 26.
[15:27]And the reason I went was I got that.
[15:30]You know when you're talking,
[15:31]and you can see that the people are losing interest
[15:34]in what you're saying, right?
[15:36]So that was what was happening.
[15:38]As I was still talking about this heartbreak,
[15:41]and like just how could this have happened?
[15:43]And let's go over the details again.
[15:45]And I had just moved to DC where I'd still live.
[15:48]And these new friends were kind of like,
[15:50]let's go, let's get another drink.
[15:52]Like let's change the, what movies have you seen?
[15:54]And I really, I was like, crap.
[15:57]If I don't figure this out,
[15:59]I can't figure out how to be more normal about a breakup.
[16:03]I'm not gonna have any friends.
[16:05]So a colleague of mine at this thing
[16:07]that I worked at handed me this note
[16:09]when she saw me like crying in the bathroom
[16:11]that had a therapist's number.
[16:13]And I was like, okay, these are the people
[16:14]that help you get over bad things.
[16:16]And in that very first therapy session,
[16:19]all I talked about was how my life was over,
[16:21]this relationship was over,
[16:23]and nothing was ever gonna be good.
[16:24]And at the end, that therapist said to me,
[16:27]do anything bad ever happened in your childhood?
[16:30]And I said no.
[16:32]Because I didn't even know in a teller
[16:34]that something bad had happened in my childhood.
[16:37]And she was sort of like,
[16:38]you know, we might talk about your family too.
[16:40]And I was like, they're perfect.
[16:41]They're not the problem.
[16:43]And right.
[16:45]And then I went home and thought about it and came back.
[16:47]And I was like, you know, since you asked,
[16:50]actually, I don't think it has anything to do with anything
[16:53]but this teenager died.
[16:55]And she then said, here's the reason I asked,
[16:58]everything that you described,
[16:59]all the behaviors that you were describing,
[17:01]all our hallmarks of children who lived through trauma.
[17:04]And then I cried about that for a month
[17:07]because I felt so abnormal in so many of my reactions
[17:11]to learn that like, A, that wasn't my fault.
[17:14]And B, there were other people like me
[17:16]who struggled in the same kind of positioning
[17:19]was really comforting.
[17:21]It made me feel more normal in my abnormality, right?
[17:25]And so, you know, I went to therapy then for like 10 years.
[17:29]And I thought twice a week and I thought I did it.
[17:33]I have worked through these issues.
[17:35]I, you know, I have five brothers and sisters
[17:38]and at the time I had two parents
[17:40]and every one of them went under the microscope,
[17:42]all the relationships, all the friendships,
[17:43]all the choices I had ever made.
[17:45]And I came out the other side in love with therapy
[17:47]and love with the idea that you could have some agency
[17:49]over how you behaved and felt and thought in your life.
[17:54]And I really thought, this is it.
[17:56]I'm a therapist.
[17:57]And I have figured everything out from my childhood.
[18:02]So it will never come and bite me.
[18:06]Again, how lucky you were to do that in your 20s.
[18:09]I work with women who are not,
[18:11]who don't give themselves permission
[18:14]or don't open themselves up to the possibility
[18:17]or don't feel they deserve it
[18:18]until they're in their 40s or 50s or 60s.
[18:21]I mean, it took me probably almost that long,
[18:24]definitely to 50 to really get it.
[18:27]So you got it early.
[18:29]Yeah.
[18:29]And then we're able to turn it around
[18:31]and use it to help other people.
[18:32]Well, and I definitely would not be married
[18:34]to my sweet husband if I didn't have a therapist
[18:36]because he was not at all.
[18:39]The second thing my husband said to me
[18:41]was that he was moving back to his home in England
[18:43]like at the end of the summer.
[18:45]And I was like, perfect, we can date.
[18:47]Like that works out wonderfully.
[18:48]This won't be serious.
[18:50]And every week I would go to my therapist
[18:52]and list all the problems with him.
[18:54]Everything that he had done wrong,
[18:56]it was superficial, fundamental.
[18:59]And she would walk me to the door and say,
[19:01]and I'd say, so we have to break up.
[19:02]You understand?
[19:03]I should probably just break up.
[19:04]She would say, absolutely, definitely break up with him.
[19:07]There's no reason why you shouldn't.
[19:09]I understand why you want to.
[19:10]But just because you could experiment here,
[19:14]you have someone you could talk to.
[19:16]Why don't you just tell him everything you just told me?
[19:18]Just to see what happens.
[19:21]And then I would say to him,
[19:22]he's not someone who hadn't childed trauma.
[19:25]My therapist told me to tell you all of these things.
[19:27]And then we're going to break up.
[19:29]And his response would be like, that's so interesting.
[19:32]Your perspective is not one
[19:34]that I would have otherwise neatly understood
[19:36]if you hadn't told me.
[19:38]And then I would say, well, I'm not so mad anymore.
[19:43]Maybe we don't.
[19:43]Let's wait a week, we'll wait a week.
[19:46]But he definitely would not have made it
[19:50]if I didn't have someone to bounce my attachment
[19:55]and difficulty off of.
[19:58]Well, this book for those of you who have.
[20:00]read it yet. Follows Megan from that childhood event through her 20s as she gets into therapy
[20:08]through some of her training as a therapist and then into the present closer to the present day
[20:13]as she loses her parents and starts experiencing an active PTSD and then goes to a treatment
[20:22]with young children at home, a month, not easy, clients had to be reshuffled and we go to the
[20:30]treatment center with her and we see what it's like to be there for that month. Now anyone writing
[20:36]a memoir knows that you have to revisit certain times in your life and dial back even to the
[20:43]consciousness in a sense of who you were back then and that can bring up a lot of really strong
[20:48]emotions especially when you're writing about grief and loss that scenes of being at the beach
[20:53]with your mom, her starting to feel poorly, finding her what happened next. How did you manage those
[21:01]emotions? Did Megan the therapist take over or was it Megan the person who's literally the trauma
[21:07]and what kind of self-care did you do? That's a great question because my writing students talk about
[21:12]that all the time. Yeah you know how to manage the emotions when you're revisiting these
[21:18]distressing events in your past. I was just talking to Emma about this today. Emma Gray who's
[21:23]another zippy author Patty Land who's another zippy author Emma's book The Last Love Note is
[21:27]up here and everyone should also buy that Patty's book is also in here. The Emma and I were
[21:32]talking about the energy of grief and where it lands in the body and I was telling her that I'm
[21:36]I have a writing class which is called Process to Product which is like the process of writing out
[21:41]trauma and then how do you sort of polish it up to make it into a product that people can understand
[21:47]and most of the writing that I did in the beginning really was just about the process. The process of
[21:52]taking the story that I didn't want to be inside my head out of my head and writing it down and so
[22:00]sometimes that was writing it you know day after day the same thing but but there is a bunch of
[22:07]that tells us that if you can take your story and the details of it and write it out it actually
[22:14]your mind will release it it's like making a list you don't have to think about it all the time.
[22:19]So part of it was just writing it being willing to write it. I was not a writer before this book
[22:24]I hadn't written since high school. So the writing was and I would wake up at 4 o'clock in the
[22:29]morning with sentences in my head. So I was not doing talk therapy I was not doing somatic or
[22:34]body therapy I was mostly doing you know doing narrative therapy writing but there were some scenes
[22:42]there's a scene the hardest the hardest memories for me in the book are after my mom dies and we
[22:49]have the funeral. I write about and experienced a like losing of the energy inside my body
[22:59]so I couldn't stand up I couldn't hold my torso up and that is really hard to remember because I
[23:08]can viscerally remember it but probably for six months I couldn't remember it at all so I had
[23:15]editors who were working with me on the book who were like so you need to get from Cape Cod back to
[23:20]DC can you write that scene and I just couldn't write the scene because to me it's the slow
[23:28]mechanism where my where my body and my mind betray me right one of the paradoxes of memoir writing
[23:37]too is that when we're in a trauma state we're not storing memories like like we normally do
[23:43]so we can't retrieve them later yeah like we normally would and sometimes those are important
[23:48]pieces of the story so what did you do did you react since the memories somehow or did you
[23:52]write around it I did a whole bunch of things so first of all I have a podcast called grief is my
[23:57]side hustle half of you have been on it thank you for being here I talked to Dr. Lisa Schulman
[24:03]who's a neurologist and I said as I do on the podcast and like this is just a personal question
[24:08]will you answer it I said what about I can't get these memories and she said just keep writing
[24:13]you lived it when your system trusts that you can handle whatever that was it's trying to
[24:17]protect you from the memories will come back and that's exactly I just took that coaching
[24:23]and I leaned on her belief that that was true and really I would go to bed and be like I think
[24:29]I'm okay I think it's okay and I just woke up one morning and the whole all the scenes were there
[24:34]and then when that happened my husband was a part of that a psychiatrist friend was a part of
[24:40]that my best friend was a part of that so I asked them if I could tell them the story of what happened
[24:47]so that they could hold the narrative in case it went away again I didn't trust myself to write it
[24:51]down so I just set it out loud and then I invited them to offer any details that they thought
[24:59]might be salient that I hadn't remembered and it was very delicate it was a very very delicate
[25:07]sort of moment and then you know there's in trauma we have this thing called the window of tolerance
[25:14]which is just sort of like how much energy distress can you tolerate and I have become really good
[25:21]at staying at a five so if ten is I'm having a florid panic attack and you know zero is a sleep
[25:30]I get really careful about if I'm in a six or seven backing off from whatever heat I have
[25:37]and I explained that to my editor and said like there was a deadline and we were pushing and it
[25:44]was the holidays and I was like I'm at an eight when I wake up I'm at an eight when I go to bed I
[25:49]know it's the writing I'm not gonna make the deadline and that was okay so some of it was advocating
[25:57]some of it was writing and I think some of it really was like the thing that I asked my clients
[26:02]to do which is just lean on someone else's belief that it's gonna be okay yeah like to have the
[26:07]courage to let the story come back to you yeah yeah and thank you for bringing that up because I
[26:14]want to just talk a little bit about general trauma in the population you know most
[26:19]people I think when we're talking about the trauma scale or the anxiety scale from zero to ten
[26:25]baseline for most people is about a three or four yeah I mean it's very like you said zero is a sleep
[26:30]yeah I mean we have stress just from everyday life yeah stress to get in the car and get somewhere
[26:36]on time stress to get food on the table for our kids to eat whatever it is and there's a certain
[26:42]amount of optimal stress that keeps us going and helps us meet those deadlines but when we're
[26:46]talking about trauma the way that you described it earlier it strikes me that most people growing up
[26:52]in the society will have experienced trauma and that's a conversation that I don't think we're having
[26:59]in the larger population what do you as a trauma therapist and someone who has struggled with it
[27:05]herself think the culture needs to do can do should do in order to accommodate that because 60
[27:12]something percent of Americans will say they had at least one adverse childhood experience
[27:17]one ace yeah before the age of 18 that's two thirds of Americans yeah and that that was before
[27:23]the list was expanded too to include poverty and community violence and systemic racism well so
[27:30]you know bessel dander coke I'm sure his book is in here the body keeps the score has sort of
[27:35]shifted how we talk about trauma in the general population people have more knowledge and probably
[27:42]use the word for often than ever before but you know if if you said to me I'm hungry I think everyone
[27:51]in this room would assume at some point you were going to go eat something probably sooner rather
[27:55]than later if you are saying I have trauma there is also something that needs to happen and that
[28:03]is not something that most people know what to do with if you're hungry you know what to do
[28:08]if you have trauma what do you do how do you do it what what is it so that when people ask when we
[28:15]start talking in my sessions about trauma I'm not being facetious I gently sort of ask and what
[28:22]have you done about it how have you managed it what are your coping mechanisms I mean you know there
[28:27]are some people that that their coping mechanisms are causing all kinds of trouble and what they
[28:33]want to talk about is how they're coping but what we and I'm happy to talk about that if you're
[28:37]drinking too much we got to talk about it but we can't not talk about that that that that's kind
[28:44]of medication for something that no one has taught you how to otherwise manage and so again part
[28:49]of the reason that I write the book you know the chapters the inpatient chapters are some of my
[28:54]favorite I mean partly because the proudest thing I am in my life of of anything is the fact that
[29:00]I checked myself into this facility and the story that's not in the book but I like to tell people
[29:06]is that the reason that I did that is that my mom had PTSD from when she watched this teenager
[29:14]Chris we pulled out of the water which you could totally understand but it was 1983 we were not calling
[29:20]it anything and so I in my adulthood told her that's what she had and she was super emotional
[29:27]thinking like oh there was a there is a treatment there wasn't a treatment then but there is
[29:31]there are treatments now that would help someone with PTSD and part of what happened for me as my
[29:39]body was betraying me as I was unable to regulate myself back into anything close to a five
[29:48]is I was downstairs I threw my back out pretty epically and I was in the basement in the doorbell
[29:56]rang and my daughter answered the door and it was
[30:00]her best friend, and her best friend said,
[30:02]do you want to ride bikes?
[30:03]And I heard my daughter say, I think I should stay
[30:07]because my mom might need me.
[30:11]And I was like, oh no, I gotta make a phone call.
[30:15]So I was already devastated.
[30:17]I was already in need probably for days.
[30:21]But what I really didn't want was to transfer
[30:25]the history of my trauma and my present trauma
[30:28]onto my child.
[30:30]That was like the sort of seminal moment.
[30:34]So when I'm talking to people about, hey, if you're hungry,
[30:37]do you go eat?
[30:38]How do you eat?
[30:40]There's a lot of, I've said this before,
[30:42]one of the questions I ask as a threshold question
[30:45]is to people, particularly men,
[30:47]is do you go to the bathroom when you need to go to the bathroom?
[30:50]And people look at me like, I'm crazy.
[30:52]I'm like, well, if you have to be do be,
[30:54]because people with trauma do not always
[30:58]get the body cues or do not respond to them.
[31:00]And I work with a lot of CEOs, and they'll
[31:03]get a little smile like it's something they're proud of,
[31:06]that they don't go to the bathroom for the whole day.
[31:08]And it's just a way of sort of like reminding ourselves
[31:12]that we live inside bodies and that those bodies need
[31:14]attention and that there's energy inside the bodies
[31:16]and that we have all these different ways
[31:18]that we separate from it.
[31:19]But if you identify as someone who has trauma,
[31:22]what I want to know is what are you doing
[31:24]to connect to the energy and tend to the energy.
[31:27]I mean, I lived with PTSD.
[31:29]So last night, I was like, oh, really tired.
[31:32]I had a little flash of an image of my mom being dead.
[31:35]And I was like, oh, I'm going to get out of bed
[31:37]and do the things, because if I don't do the things
[31:40]to move that image through my mind,
[31:42]then two, three, four days from now,
[31:45]that it starts to activate other distress.
[31:49]Can you share what some of the things are with us?
[31:51]Yeah.
[31:51]So bilateral stimulation, this is such a theory.
[31:56]But bilateral stimulation, just using both sides
[31:59]of your body.
[32:00]So I get out of bed and I crossbox and I kick.
[32:03]I mean, it sounds ridiculous.
[32:05]But when you are overstimulated,
[32:07]when your brain is dysregulated,
[32:09]you have two sides of your brain.
[32:10]And what it basically means is one of them
[32:14]think of it like two balloons.
[32:15]One of them is inflated too high.
[32:18]And so if you think about the middle of you
[32:21]as being the tip to the scale, if you crossbox,
[32:25]you can even then energy out.
[32:27]So three minutes of crossboxing is what I do
[32:30]when I feel that kind of dysregulated.
[32:32]I mean, you and I use box breathing.
[32:35]That's also, but generally I have to get the energy out
[32:38]in a kind of aggressive way first
[32:41]before I can come, before I can go to comms.
[32:43]So swimming would work.
[32:45]Swimming would work.
[32:46]Yeah, you know what?
[32:47]I wish I'd taken up speed skating.
[32:49]That would be awesome also.
[32:50]So right for bilateral stimulation.
[32:53]I am not graceful in editing.
[32:55]Does knitting do it?
[32:55]Yeah.
[32:56]So yeah, so I have a son who crochets when he feels anxious.
[33:00]Yeah, so basically anything that uses both sides of your body
[33:05]and the retreatments that do the CMDR does it
[33:08]and brain spotting does it.
[33:09]But yeah, so that's when I feel distressed
[33:11]and it's always at night.
[33:12]You guys may know that it's been anxiety increases
[33:14]as the sun goes down.
[33:15]And so my brain will start to get a little fiery.
[33:19]And so it's almost always at night that I mean,
[33:21]my husband is like, what are you doing?
[33:23]Just gonna do some boxing.
[33:24]I'm just gonna press against the wall.
[33:27]He's like, okay, whatever you need.
[33:34]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms.
[33:36]Don't have time to read books.
[33:37]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram,
[33:39]at Zibi Owens and at Moms.
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[33:49]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Textures Sound
[33:52]for the Sound Editing.
[33:53]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[33:55]for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.