Speaker 1: 0:36

Welcome back to Speak Out. Stand Out. I'm Elizabeth Green and today's guest is Carla Shohet. Carla is a trauma and narcissistic abuse recovery psychologist with lots of different focuses on somatic therapy, brain spotting, trauma, positive psychology lots of different focuses meaning, basically, that she is a psychologist who specializes in root cause resolution, not just symptom management. So, Carla, you have a ton of expertise under your belt. Glad to have you here today.

Speaker 2: 1:05

Thank you so much for having me, Elizabeth. It's a real honor. Thank you.

Speaker 1: 1:10

And so, carla, how did you? Today, we're particularly talking about dealing with trauma and, in the ways that you recommend, that we deal with this so that we create a healthy environment for our children and the future generations and our families. But how did you get to this place, where this is your focus?

Speaker 2: 1:28

So I started off excuse me as a professional in psychology, as a typical talk therapist, and I was that for 22 years until I accidentally stumbled upon my own somatic inner healing journey, which means that I was working in a contract as a support therapist for someone else and that's when I discovered I actually was suffering with trauma myself, from narcissistic abuse specifically, and that's what got me intrigued into the whole somatic piece of healing ourselves, because before, as a talk therapist, I was using very much, you know, all the common CBT type of symptom management type things which are very valid and very helpful, but unfortunately that now I see them more like a band-aid, because I was dealing with clients a lot of the time and even myself with things like depression and not feeling good enough, all those kind of things that kept coming back and there was, there never seemed to be a real kind of resolution to the issues, which is something that I've really never understood myself, if I have to be honest, because, believe it or not, even at high level psychologists, even a seasoned psychologist like myself, would just don't get taught about the nervous system. Don't ask me why, because this information has been around long enough now. It's still fairly new, about 30 to 40 years, but it doesn't get taught unless you specialize. And without going into too long of my own personal story, I started to think maybe I'm carrying store trauma and maybe I have been through abuse. And you know what is this? I didn't even know the word narcissistic abuse really. I mean, I'd heard of narcissism, but not really. You know, delve deep into it and that's how I discovered somatic healing, which is very, very different because it works. Somatic means in the body and actually we do store stress in the body and stress can be anything, uh, but specifically I I now focus on working with parents, because what I discovered through this, my own personal journey and then working with clients as I specialized in this area of trauma, trauma recovery um, is that a lot, if not all, of us tend to carry um adverse childhood experiences, you know, and when I talk about trauma there's a lot of misconceptions around the word A lot of people think of you know sexual abuse, or you know war zone type traumas, or you know PTSD. That happens because you know something big happened, but actually that's not what trauma is. Trauma is just another way of saying.

Speaker 2: 3:57

At some point in our development, even as adults, we have a stressful experience that in that particular moment, our nervous system hasn't got the capacity to cope with and process. So it gets stuck literally physically in our body, in our fascia, which is that fiber that holds all of our organs and muscles and everything. It kind of goes everywhere in our body. Hence why, when we hold a lot of stress, that you see a lot of people kind of hunched over and you know we get tension in our shoulders and neck and lots of different other parts of the body, and and what that does is it actually disconnects us from our body and we end up kind of just using our thinking mind, the prefrontal cortex part of our brain, um, which is what then people go to therapy for come to, you know, you know talking therapy and that's the part that you work with, but actually the trauma, the stress, the unprocessed stuff that we all tend to carry to different levels is actually stored in the deeper parts of the brain, the brainstem and the limbic system, which are connected into our body, which is then why, you know, if we don't work in the body, we end up kind of, you know, going to therapy.

Speaker 2: 5:00

This is a very common experience, especially for parents. You know the amount of you know expectations on parents. Now there is a huge expectations. Families have changed society. Pressure, financial pressures means that we just, you know, the family unit isn't what it used to be. We don't have a village to raise our children, pressures right, left and centers. And then we end up carrying all this stuff in our bodies, not even knowing that we are, and we try and seek help and go to psychologists, therapists. It can help temporarily.

Speaker 2: 5:31

Cognitive behavioral therapy certainly helps with changing certain behaviors and certain habits, but unfortunately, if you're not dealing with the root causes of the problems, you end up stuck in the cycle of having kind of stressful times and then brief relief and then stressful times, and it affects how you are as a human and, as we're here today, it really does affect our parenting and for me personally, the reason why I specialize in working with parents is because I'm a parent of three myself.

Speaker 2: 5:59

I specialize in working with parents is because I'm a parent of three myself and when I came to this discovery that I was holding a lot of trauma and unprocessed stress and started to realize how it affected me over my life, but especially my parenting, I knew I had to do something about that because, as a lot of your audience will relate, I'm sure, as parents, we're always more willing to do something for our children than we are for ourselves.

Speaker 2: 6:25

So, and to me, working with parents is really the real root cause of how we can change the future generations. And it's not just a responsibility, but it's also a power that we have if we know how to heal ourselves so that we can parent and raise our children in a much healthier way, in a happier way, in a more harmonious way that maybe we were raised um, so they don't have to do this work themselves, and that affects you know, not just our children, but their children, their children's children and so on, because epigenetic research shows us that now you know, whatever we, whatever we're holding, it can be ancestral.

Speaker 2: 7:03

And you know, I feel like we have we are creating life and therefore, if we can create healthy life, that just makes our world a better place. So I've gone off on a tangent, but I hope that kind of explains a little bit how I've come to this, to this work that I now do. It's really my mission and my passion to help parents so they can heal themselves and be happier and be more present in their life, but also and especially for the future generations who come into this world completely innocent and, you know, deserving of the best parent, like we all do.

Speaker 1: 7:37

Right, well, and I love that you explained what trauma actually is, because I, you know, hear the word trauma all the time and think, oh, that doesn't apply to me, that doesn't apply to me, but the way you said it does, it does apply to all of us in some way, and obviously some are much more severe forms of trauma than others. But there's something for everybody to take from this, even if we were not a victim of abuse or something like that. So I think that that's interesting that you said that.

Speaker 2: 8:04

Yeah, and, as I said, you know, as a seasoned psychologist myself, I didn't have, you know, I wasn't sure Do I have trauma. I had to go to a specialist myself to kind of figure it out. So, because it is this word that is associated with, you know, big shock traumas, and actually you know the, the way that all the therapies that I now do have kind of educated me to look at trauma in a very different way. There are no big traumas and little trauma. Trauma's trauma, you know, it's just. You know we, we don't know what's going on inside anyone's container and how much they can handle. So you know we, we can.

Speaker 2: 8:35

If we start to judge and label things from the outside or that's trauma, that that's not trauma. Well, we don't know, because it's just dependent on you know what amount of stress in any one point of time is our nervous system able to cope with and process or not? So when you can process it as just a stressful experience, and then you move on, when you can't process it, for whatever reason, maybe accumulated stress that you haven't processed it becomes like a snowball effect that becomes stuck as trauma and and it has become a bit of a trendy word, but unfortunately, with every trendy word there's a lot of misconceptions. You know. Narcissistic abuse is another word that you know has become very, very popular, very misunderstood and, um, yeah, but yeah, I, I definitely would dare to say that all of us carry some unresolved trauma of some level, for sure and so this may be way too simplified of a question, but how do we fix this with your approach of, you know, focusing on the semantic system?

Speaker 1: 9:31

how do we resolve this in ourselves?

Speaker 2: 9:33

yeah, there are loads of different somatic therapies available. I think for me, having, you know, delved into internal family systems, um brain spotting you've mentioned some of the therapies that I offer trauma hypnotherapy there is. There are so somatic experiencing it's you know. You start to google, you know trauma therapies who come at emdr. There are lots of different therapies that you can do. But for me and it's actually a good question, a really good question, because I think we can get very easily kind of um attracted to all these fancy things that are coming out.

Speaker 2: 10:09

But actually the bottom line for for anybody to to to live a good, healthy life and to have um to be able to be fully ourselves, comfortable in our skin, which then leads us to be a really good parent, a safe parent, a consistent parent, a parent that can set boundaries, that can be nurturing and loving, it has to come down to our nervous system. When we have stress that's accumulated that we haven't been able to process, for whatever reason, we have a dysregulated nervous system. It just means like an overwhelmed nervous system. So if you imagine it as a swimming pool, for example, every time something stressful happens that we're not able to process, imagine a beach ball going into that swimming pool of different sizes, you know different things that get stuck in it, and then the capacity that we have gets further and further reduced. And of course, you know, as I mentioned, financial stresses. You know job things and you know deaths. Or you know friendships or relationship, marital relationship problem or difficult kids that's a whole other subject. There is no such thing. But we only have a restricted amount of time. Anything that that you find stressful, that you don't have the capacity in that moment to deal with, adds to this invisible backpack that we carry and it makes us, you know our fuse, if you like, shorter and shorter and smaller and smaller. And our swimming pool, our container, our capacity, our nervous system becomes, you know, less and less, and so any other things that get added on to our, you know, stresses, you know that we can't, you, it becomes more and more difficult, if you like to, you know, to release the stuff. You know, as I said earlier, it's a snowball effect. So you know it just renders us almost incapable.

Speaker 2: 11:56

And then the nervous system plays a part in how we are in life. You know, if we are there, are you can think of the nervous system also like a traffic light system and we're born with two parts of this traffic lights. The red part, which means stop, is when we go into our utmost survival part of the system. There is the amber or yellow light, which is what's also known as sympathetic fight-flight situation, when we are kind of, you know, that adrenaline-releasing kind of state which all of these states are good. It's just that unfortunately those are survival states. That's why we're born with them.

Speaker 2: 12:30

Either they kind of go or stop. You know, if you imagine us as an animal, for example in the wild, if there is a predator trying to chase us, we go into this yellow light, sympathetic fight-flight, and we either run away from the danger or fight the danger. And if the danger, you know, if the stressors keep coming and you keep feeling more and more overwhelmed and you stay in this kind of sympathetic part of your nervous system too long, the nervous system eventually goes right. This is no longer just a danger, this is now a life-threatening danger. So it switches to the next to the red traffic lights. It says stop and it actually now immobilizes you. It tries to stop. It's a metabolic shutdown of our nervous system to try and shrink us down and make us invisible, immobile, keep us small so that we don't, you know, attract the predator, and we kind of stay safe by being small and being shut down. And I think, from my experience personally and professionally, there's a huge amount of people especially parents, sadly that are in that red top part of our survival system, completely frozen, shut down. It's also known as dorsal vagal and it's a functional freeze.

Speaker 2: 13:38

It's that feeling of you know you're on autopilot, you're doing things, you're doing things for the kids, but you're actually not present in your life. You know your kids are telling you something and you're like yeah, yeah, yeah, and you have no idea what they said. Or you're reading a book and you're flicking back to the same two lines because you just can't take them in. Or you're watching and you're laughing, because I've been there myself. You know and this is a very common, it's exactly right, we're just not present and it's also a protective mechanism of our nervous system. By the way and I don't say this with any judgment, because I'm a parent myself and you know it's not like life is perfect. I still have my moments when I'm not present, but I'm much more self-aware.

Speaker 2: 14:24

But the way to to work on this is to work on ourselves and our nervous system. The only way that we can create harmony in our life with our families, to to to really nurture our children, is to look after ourselves. And we've heard it, you know, self-care is not selfish and you've got to put your own oxygen mask on all those kind of things. You know they're, they're, they're sayings, but they come from somewhere and and they come from truth actually. But it isn't. To me, self-care isn't about, you know, having a spa day or a massage or, you know, a cup of tea. All those things are lovely, but actually it's, it's learning how you as an adult can learn what. The last part of the nervous system, that green light that we all should be taught in childhood.

Speaker 2: 15:07

But you know, maybe our parent, a lot of our parents, did, first of all, more than 40 years ago, this information was just not available. You know, science, scientific advances have taught us that there is something called the polyvagal theory and the vagus nerve. I won't go into lots of detail because there's not enough time here. But this part of our nervous system where we feel safe, calm, connected, curious, creative, playful, where we feel joy, where we can breathe and expand and just be comfortable with who we are, be comfortable and feel safe in just being who we are, our true self. A lot of us don't even know what that truly is because, you know, as we develop we have these experiences that are stressful. We don't know how to cope, and these protection mechanisms come up, these masks that we all wear, again all unintentional, the guilt piece that I was mentioning. I don't want anyone listening to this to feel guilty.

Speaker 2: 16:03

You know, when I talk about the nervous system, what I'm talking about in particular here is the autonomic part of the nervous system, which is that part of this, of our body, of our brain, that works involuntarily for us, that's responsible for our breathing, our heartbeat, our immunity, our digestive system, all those things that happen without our thinking brain involved. So you know, it's not like any one of us chooses to stay in this stuck state of you know, go, go, go, run I've got to rush and you can't be present with my kids or in that state of functional freeze where you're like a rabbit in headlights and you just do things but you actually don't know. You know, a bit like when you drive home and you don't from the office and you don't know how you got. We live a bit like that right time, and that's not actually living, that's existing and we all deserve to live in present, not missing our life, not missing our children growing. And it is possible. We just have to learn how to, you know, create or build on this part of the it's called ventral vagal part of our nervous system, that green, where we can take a deep breath and expand, you know, and have moments of clarity, of connection with ourselves first. We can't be like that with anyone else if we can't be like that with ourselves, if we can't be in our own self.

Speaker 2: 17:19

And if, you know, if we've been through lots of stressful events, adverse childhood experiences, if we've been through lots of stressful events, adverse childhood experiences, you know, and these things are not, as I said, not necessarily abuse. Of course there is also trauma, but it could be very little things. You know parents arguing all the time, conflict with a sibling that was never, you know, you never had help with. Or parents that were working really damn hard but they couldn't be present with you because they were always away, um, it could be a medical intervention. Like you know, you had to have an anesthetic for an operation. Um, there are so many things that our body just stores as stressful adverse experiences that we don't even know. And that's why I say all of us carry some level of trauma and resolve trauma because there is.

Speaker 2: 18:07

So it's just so easy, especially as a kid when our nervous system is still forming, unless you are extremely lucky and I'm yet to meet someone like this, unfortunately that has a parent, you know, that has not just my knowledge, but can embody this stuff okay, and I'm still a work in progress myself. It's very, very rare that we get the opportunity from very young to have, um, a very flexible and a big capacity in our nervous system, because someone, usually our main caregiver was one very regulated in their nervous system themselves, because maybe their parents had taught them how to do that. We have to be taught. This is not the part of the nervous system we're born with. This central, vagal part. The green light has to be taught to us and we have to mirror it from our parents, and a lot of us didn't have that and a lot of us still don't know this stuff. So that's why my mission is to work with parents, because we have so much potential to impact the next generations Eventually. I would love to teach this in schools and in hospitals and with anyone that has a ripple effect on people, because it really does ripple, whether we know it or not.

Speaker 2: 19:17

Even unspoken, nonverbal stuff gets passed down the generations and we have the opportunity, as I said, as well as the responsibility, once we get to hear about this stuff, to do something about it, which is amazing, and actually it really once you have the education piece on, you know basic education around how the nervous system works and how it affects you, not just in parenting, by the way, but in every area of your life. You know because if you're, if you're living in one of those kind of survival states, you're not living in your true self, you're not living. You know we're all born with the true self qualities that are curiosity, creativity, as I mentioned earlier, playfulness. But a lot of us, as we kind of you know, put more rocks in our invisible backpacks and more beach ballers in the in that swimming pool. We almost forget to be what is our true self?

Speaker 2: 20:11

And when we can't be connected to our true self, we also can't be the parent the best parent that we can with we can absolutely be for our children when we learn how to regulate our nervous system, how to build that kind of um, ventral, vagal part of the nervous system that allows us to feel calm, to, to it allows us. It's not as if you build it and then you're like living in fairyland and everything's calm. You know, people will still trigger you, your kids especially, because that's what they're meant to do. They're meant to test boundaries and we're meant to set boundaries, and often we don't know how to set boundaries or be consistent because we've got our own stuff that's unresolved.

Speaker 2: 20:47

Um, but yeah, it's. It's about learning. Basically, when you boil it right down, it's about learning small little ways to um, to regulate your nervous system so that then you can parent better. And you know it's actually very basic. There are lots of different ways, but we just need to understand the education behind it. As to to, to help us do the stuff that we need to do, does that make sense?

Speaker 1: 21:19

It does Well. So, carla, I think that you have talked about you know the why of things and why this is important and how this affects everybody. Can you give us some strategies of how we deal with our nervous system? I mean, does it require intense therapy, or are there some things that we can start doing on our own at home and maybe even talking to our kids about ways to handle their nervous systems whenever so we're not getting so backed up or that pool is not overflowing?

Speaker 2: 21:46

Yeah, I mean, there are lots of things that I could explain them here. However, it probably wouldn't make too much sense to people, so you do need some education. I think there are different things that people can do. I used to do them myself. I used to do things like yoga and I used to try meditation, and I you know we've heard of a lot of these things like breath work, but it's actually more basic than that and and I think it's very, very difficult to start this work yourself.

Speaker 2: 22:12

Because how do you explain this briefly when we have, um, when we, when our nervous system builds coping mechanisms, when we're really young? I'll make a really simple example. Um, you were a kid, you were five, and you were doing your own thing, you were playing, you were dancing, you were laughing, you were being loud, you were being happy, and your mom, who was very overworked and overtired, came home and saw you doing this and it was dinner time and she got stressed and she turned around and she said just stop it, just stop it, go to your room. I've told you to stop being loud. Now, that can be a trauma to a child, because in that moment, that little nervous system that's still developing it's understanding that if I myself being happy, I'm not good enough or I'm not lovable, and that is actually a danger to a child. Because if your main caregiver, who is essential to your survival, thinks that you being yourself and having fun is not good because that's the only, it's all about perception, at the end of the day and a child's perception is very self-centered at that stage up to a certain age, for quite a long time as humans that can get stuck as a trauma and then a coping mechanism might turn up for that child.

Speaker 2: 23:32

It could be anything. It could be, uh, they're like sub-personalities, ego states. I call them parts because I look at it from an internal family systems perspective, and there are no bad parts that are all there to keep us safe and survive. Uh, it might be a a part that up, as you know, you being shy or you being rebellious, or you being really, really a good girl, because you're never going to get told off by your mum ever again as you develop these coping mechanisms that served you when you were five because you absolutely needed your mum or your dad. Usually it's the mum, but whoever the main? Usually it's the mom, but whoever the main care could be a teacher, could be a grandparent, whoever's looking after you most of the time and you had that experience with you need them for your survival. You have to feed you to, to clothe you, to give you a roof over your head. So you your nervous system had to do something to make sure that these people that were important to your survival saw you as absolutely more than lovable, good enough so that they would continue to nourish you and nurture you so you can survive and thrive and reproduce, which is what we're meant to do as humans.

Speaker 2: 24:36

However, those coping mechanisms don't go away, and as we develop into adults, what then happens is that we show up, as you know, the good girl, becomes the people pleaser, and and, instead of being a coping mechanism that served you when you were five, it's now a maladaptive coping mechanism. That means you're not your true self because you're scared to show your true self. You've probably even forgotten what that even feels like or looks like. You don't know how to be your true self, and now you're killing yourself to please everyone else and you don't take care of yourself.

Speaker 2: 25:09

There's what I'm trying to say is, in a more simplified ways, that it isn't just about me saying, okay, do this breath work or, um, do this grounding exercise or do this orienting exercise. I can tell you that. But why? Why are you doing that? You know that there is it's. It's not quite we're. We're humans and we're complex beings and there is so much you understand to understand. Uh, before you start even going to do the work, if that makes sense, so you've got to gain some education around the nervous system first, which absolutely. There's loads and tons of reasons of resources online, for free even.

Speaker 2: 25:47

But even as a seasoned psychologist myself, I needed to get help, because these parts of us that have been trying to keep us safe our whole life, they don't want us to change. They still see us as that five-year-old because if they didn't, then you would just stop people pleasing if it meant that you weren't unhappy. But we don't, because they are survival, coping mechanisms. So at least at the very beginning, you do need, I believe, some support and I've definitely tried, as a perfectionist, people pleasing, high achieving, academic psychologist with all those parts working really, really hard for me. I really did try to do this on my own because I I really had a, a core in a window of not being good enough, because if I can't do this myself, what kind of a psychologist am I? But I just couldn't and the truth of it.

Speaker 2: 26:39

I need it. I still. I still have my own support. You know, I have my own brain spotting sessions, and you know, and it doesn't mean that you have to be in therapy forever. You just need someone to kind of guide you at the beginning, to take you through the education piece first and foremost. In kind of layman terms, you understand what it means. You don't have to have a degree and specialize, like I have, but I think it's really, really important to have that basic understanding of how we operate so we can upgrade our operating system. We're constantly upgrading our operating systems on our phones, our computers, but when's the last time we all you know this is this the brain is our operating system, but it's outdated because it was programmed by our parents from, you know, with the knowledge they had when we were very little. But we're now adults and in order to upgrade that, sometimes we do need someone to help us and then to empower us, which is the work I do with my clients is. It's not, um, it's very different from regular therapy where you're almost reliant on the therapist. Every time you've got a problem, you go back. This is not the kind of work we do.

Speaker 2: 27:39

Uh, as a somatic therapist, your, or my, intention is always to empower, to give my clients the education and the tools to be able to regulate themselves, so they can go off and teach their children and their friends and whoever they come in contact with. Because the truth is, when we have a regulated nervous system, there is something that's called limbic countertransference. It's basically non-verbal communication. Our nervous systems communicate with each other. So when you are regulated and you're healing yourself, you're automatically rippling. Just by being you a more regulated you, your nervous system is regulating, co-regulating it's called with other people around you. And it's very simple to understand.

Speaker 2: 28:25

If I make this analogy, you know when you walk into a room and you get a sense of there's an atmosphere. Well, how do you know that? No one said anything, no one's even looked, but you've walked in and you've sensed an atmosphere. Because our body, you know the way thatters that travel from our gut to our brain, predominantly 80 from the gut up to the brain and 20 from the brain to the gut. And neuroception is about, you know, using the senses to to detect and understand our environment.

Speaker 2: 29:02

But again, trauma stops us connecting and understanding all those messages. You know when people say oh, what does your gut say? And you know, as parents, one of the best tools that we can have is go with our gut instincts. But we self-doubt. That's a part, that's a coping mechanism. I'm not sure, shall I follow my gut? What does that even mean? Because you know, a lot of us think I'm not sure what my instinct is saying and I don't want to be impulsive and stuff, but that's all to do with healing your nervous system. I don't want to be impulsive and stuff, but that's all to do with healing your nervous system. So, in short, there is lots of information out there in education and, yeah, absolutely, I've put a guide together for your audience as well, to help you, predominantly, start to understand a little bit more in depth about what I'm saying and the kind of tools that you can start to put into place in your family with your children, you know, opening communication and being more trauma-informed, empowering yourself to be more of a trauma-informed adult as a nurturing parent to your children. But I would say, even ahead of this, you know, for anyone who downloads my guidebook, it's great and it does have practical strategies and tips that you can implement straight away. However, I want to preempt that. The caveat is, if you're struggling to implement any of those things, or if you're getting frustrated because you start doing it and you see the improvements because some of them really do give quite quick oh my gosh, I can't believe how easy that was. And you know, your difficult child now suddenly changes and they become better behaved Well, but then you can't be consistently doing that and you feel like you go back to your old ways. Don't shame yourself, don't blame yourself. It's very common. That is just a sign that you need to work on yourself, because none of this is kind of, you know, a Band-Aid magic trick, unfortunately. I wish I had a magic wand and I'm sure a lot of your audience might have heard of positive parenting.

Speaker 2: 30:56

It's fantastic, but unless you are healed yourself in your nervous system, it's extremely. It feels almost like another job to be positive, giving positive reinforcement to your children. You have to be positive inside before you can be positive with other people. So, yeah, the work starts with you. Unfortunately, it's another part of being a another parents, but it can be a real gift eventually. You know you might start and it might feel heavy, but actually once you start this journey, it's like someone giving you a different pair of you know spectacles and you see everybody differently. You have more compassion for your children, for yourself, for everybody. You see everyone in as parts rather than kind of judge the behavior in any way. And there are a ton of tools and strategies that can be applied to make things better temporarily. And I'll go into kind of healing trauma together in the family in the guidebook as well.

Speaker 2: 31:56

But it starts with you. It starts with you healing yourself and kind of just really getting a bit of understanding. It doesn't have to be a mass. It is a lifelong journey, but the bit where you work on yourself and your nervous system doesn't have to be long. If you find the right person that can teach you so you can understand why you then go and do the tools that you know, the somatic tools that you're given, then it's very, very easy. It shouldn't, it shouldn't be difficult to implement. Otherwise it just it doesn't work. No one's going to do it. You know no busy parent wants another task to add to their daily thing that is difficult to implement. So does that answer the question?

Speaker 1: 32:35

It does. Yeah, and I think I mean this has been really insightful and I am very eager to download your guidebook and learn more about it because, just like you said, we don't, as moms, we very rarely do things for ourselves. Like you said earlier, we put ourselves last, and in this case we have to focus on ourselves if we want we don't want our kids to grow up to be the people pleasers and things like that that we may be. So I think this was super insightful and so, Carla, we will make sure we link to the guidebook and you're also on social media everywhere We'll put all the links and then, if people are interested in doing more with you after downloading your guidebook, tell us just quickly a little bit about what you offer. Is it private coaching? Do you do group things?

Speaker 2: 33:20

Yeah, so I do work with people one-to-one. Yeah, sure, I work with people one-to-one and I also have group programs, I would say, and I also have some kind of tools to guide, you know, kind of self-study tools as well, I would say, depending on where the person is in their in their nervous system, you know how stressed they feel, how desperate they are, how you know difficult they're finding life in general. Um, then we can have a conversation around what, what the best first step would be. But I think the first step is just kind of download the guide, see if it feels like it aligns with you, have a look at my social media and what the kind of things that I talk about, and then you can just get in touch. Um, my details will be in the guidebook and we can drop them in the show notes afterwards. I'm always happy to have a conversation and, you know, guide people to where the next best step is. Um, I would just say, you know, be kind to yourself.

Speaker 2: 34:14

I know it's hard sometimes, but but I think I really truly think, with very few exceptions, I think all parents really do try their best. I don't think any of us have a, you know, give, give birth to a child to then be horrible to them or not do our best. You know we, we can only do what we know until we know better, and then hopefully we'll do better, right? So I hope that this listening to this has really given you an insight into whatever it is that you might feel. A lot of the people I work with come to me feeling like, oh, they're really bad parents. Unless you're doing something intentionally to harm your child, I really don't think there is a bad parent.

Speaker 2: 34:55

You know, even when people come with severe, you know, history of early developmental trauma, we never, you know, look at this and and to blame the parents. Okay, um, we're all trying to do our best is what I'm trying to say, and you know, we can only do more when we know more, um. But the point that I'd like to conclude with is you know, it really is true that you have to look after yourself before you can be better for anybody else, and this isn't about, you know, looking after yourself by, as I said, having a massage. This is actually looking after yourself so that you can change long term, so you can enjoy your life more and the ripple effect that that has on your parenting, on your business, on your career, on your relationship with your, your husband and wife, or with your colleagues, your friendships. You know it, the nerve, just like the nervous system, affects every part of our body.

Speaker 1: 35:58

You know, healing your nervous system will affects every part of our body you know, healing your nervous system will affect every part of your life too. Well, you have definitely piqued my interest in this, for sure, and I, like I said, I'm very interested to read the guidebook and pursue this more, because I felt like many of the things you said. You were speaking directly to me. Even though we don't know each other personally, I feel like you were talking to me and I'm sure other people are going to feel like this as well. So, thank you for taking the time to share all of this information with us and, again, we'll make sure for everybody listening. We'll make it super easy for you to hop over and grab that free guidebook and learn a little bit more, because what, what more do we want than to have happy, healthy lives, happy, healthy kids, you know Absolutely.

Speaker 2: 36:38

Thank you so much, Elizabeth, for having me. It's been a real pleasure to meet you.

Speaker 1: 36:42

Thank you, Carla. We appreciate you Take care.