with Trisha Wolfe

Are you stuck in your head, overthinking and trying to “figure it all out,” yet still feeling disconnected from your body? In this powerful episode, Mitch Webb sits down with trauma therapist Trisha Wolfe to explore how intellectualization becomes a hidden survival strategy and how awareness, nervous system work, and embodiment can help you truly heal.

MitchSo, some of the biggest turning points in my journey, uh, it started by saying, “Nope.” Taking a look and saying, “Nope, that’s not me. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.” And today I have Trisha Wolf on the podcast. Welcome, Trisha. And when I got introduced to her, it was no different. Uh, I was doing the Irene Lions smart body, smart mind program with a couple of people and uh, I think it’s when your your first TikTok went viral and you kind of blew up and it was about intellectualization. We’re going to be talking about that today. And somebody sent me a video and said, “Oh man, Trisha is cooking.” And if you hadn’t seen Trisha’s video, she’s she’s really good at ed educating and that’s such a big part of this work. But I remember getting exposed to intellectualization and I’m like, “Nope, that’s not me. No way. Uh-uh.” But by the time uh the third video came around, I was like, “Oh my god.” I was reaching out to Trisha to to work with somebody in her office um and could see that I was stuck in therapy. The thing that got me was um I felt like I was hanging on to my therapist because um I I would feel bad to leave her or something like that. and I felt like I was outpacing her in therapy to where I was teaching is what it kind of felt like. Um, but anyways, I love the intellectualation conversation. I’m so excited to share this with you guys. Uh, Trisha, welcome to the show. I would love to start by sharing how did you come to this work? like what what got you to recognize what it is to be

Trishaa intellectualizer in these different predictive patterns and and to where you are now now sharing and educating on this work. Absolutely. Yeah. So it often surprises people that I actually started my career working in finance. So I worked for a major multinational bank and I worked there for about nine years and always just kind of felt like a little dissatisfied. I was thinking about becoming a teacher. And then I went through a really big traumatic loss in my life. And there was a lot of grief and pain and anger and things that came up that I honestly had no idea how to be with because who knew? I had never felt a feeling before. I didn’t. But when this happened and I was going through all of this, a couple of months went by and my doctor at the time said, “I don’t know that you’re doing so well. You know, do you think you might want to consider going to therapy?” And I’m like, “No, you know, my family thinks shrinks, right? like what are you going to do with them? But I said I’ll do it as a favor to the doctor. So I ended up going to see this wonderful, wonderful practitioner who was a somatic experiencing person. And gosh, after like six sessions, I was surprised to find out that I had a body. I had no idea. Really thought my body existed to kind of carry around my brain. And I’d say like, you know, a couple months after that, I was like, “This is actually life-changing.” you know, I mean, it was big. It was hard. It was scary. But no one in my life had ever taught me how to feel emotions, how to be connected to my body. And I really wasn’t sure that I liked it. There were many times I begged my therapist to give me back my freeze. Please give me back she wouldn’t. Um, no. And yeah, not too long into my own initial journey, I said, “This is something that I really want to do.” And I went full steam ahead with it. and was able to start the somatic experiencing training pretty quickly and then NARM shortly after that and went back to graduate school to become a therapist and you know all of my learning since then has been cobbled together by all kinds of different trainings and reading books you know there is a way to use our intellect for good as well and just kind of like my own curiosity you know I think one of the strengths of people who are intellectualizers is we have very strong minds very strong abilities to synthesize information. And one of the best parts of doing this work, there are many, but is that we can start to access the strength side of that part of us instead of kind of the shadow side of it. And so, you know, all of I’m constantly learning. I’m looking up research. I’m reading. I’m listening to podcasts and doing all of these things. And what’s really important to me is to figure out how to teach that information to people in a way that is accessible because it’s either really dense research that really hard to understand or it’s sort of like the self-help genre which has its place but it’s not very specific and it’s a little it’s like sanitized, right? Like they try to make it super sexy which I understand they want to sell books, they want to sell these things but that also doesn’t help you make long-lasting change. And so that’s kind of how I got into making content of like I think a strength of mine is synthesizing information and teaching it in sort of a metaphorical way and it’s something I’ve always enjoyed with my clients and so I just put myself out there which was a little bit scary but have found such a wonderful community and forming so many connections with people like you you know who

Mitchreally resonate with my work and I get to learn from their work too. Oh, it was super inspiring to to watch you blow up and to see your your journey with it and to see how much more comfortable you are with it now and and uh you know so grateful for you sharing it in the way that you do because I mean I would say a big percentage of this work is education uh to be able to to normalize and to uh allow whatever is going on to be here as it is instead of Um, you know, kind of we were

Trishatalking about before, trying to figure out and fix everything. That was my ammo. That’s what kept me stuck for so long. Yeah, absolutely. Education really is the biggest part of it. And it is sometimes confusing for folks like isn’t that people always say, I’m intellectualizing your video about intellectualizing. It’s like totally I but there is anational component to it as well, right? where sure you might be intellectualizing it, but eventually you hit upon something that makes you go, “Oh,” or think about something in a different way, and that introduces a little something in your brain that shifts you out of that purely analytical place into a more self-aware embodied place. And I always say to my clients, it doesn’t matter if it’s 1% or 0.01% or 0.001% 0 oh 1% of you if you can access that tiny piece of embodiment in an educational video even if it’s 1 minute long that send your neuron in a different direction like that starts forming a new neural pathway which I think is pretty incredible. Yeah that I was going to save this for later but When intellectualization becomes a trauma response

Mitchit it kind of seems like intellectualization is a superpower. when does it become, you know, like

Trishathe shadow side or when does it become trauma? It’s a great question, you know, and I like to to tease apart even the term intellectualization and start to pull out like what are the strengths? What is the the adult side of intellectualization, which is analysis and self-awareness and pattern recognition and all of the strengths that kind of go along with just being a person who has a really strong brain and the capacity to access that. You know, where it starts to go into trauma is none of us really get to choose our survival strategies, of course, right? But all of us have things that are easier doorways to enter our experience and those are often the things that build up that protective side. So when you’re a child, if you’re a person who is really good at analyzing things and recognizing patterns and observing what’s happening around them and synthesizing it, doesn’t it make sense that that very same thing could become protective? So if you notice whenever your parent footsteps sound a certain way, they’re going to be in a really bad mood and that could lead to like scary yelling or you getting punished or your parents fighting. What do you learn from that? Oh, analyzing what’s happening around me and staying hypervigilantly attuned to the environment all of the time helps prevent me from getting caught up in this thing that’s really big and scary to me. And so that’s where the process starts of saying this is what keeps me safe. Now I’m not only talking about physical safety because sometimes people confuse it for that. Of course sometimes physical safety is a risk but it’s about that felt sense of safety. Right? We’re wired as humans to stay in connection to our caregivers, our peers. We’re very packoriented. Makes sense, right? Previously we have relied entirely on a community to keep us alive. We’re much more individualized now. But if you think about, you know, Neanderthalss and way back when, they relied entirely on their pack to keep them alive. Who’s going to watch for danger while you’re sleeping? You rely on that. So, biologically, we’re wired to stay in connection to people around us at all costs. As adults, we have our strong prefrontal cortex to help us analyze, is this person someone I really want to maintain a connection with at all costs? As children, we don’t. And so that happens very young where that shifts and it’s subconscious, right? It shifts into the overanalysis, the over functioning, the overinking where you Safety, childhood patterns, and “thinking my way to safety”

Mitchcan never just be present or rest or be at ease. Yeah, that makes so much sense. And I I remember early on working with Shout out to Irene if she’s listening. um really learning about a big part of these predictive patterns coming up for me and and my superpower of coming from a lack of safety uh and a lack of uncertainty. So if there’s a lot of uncertainty out there and I can’t predict it, that’s scary as hell. So I’m going to control everything I can and it’s not that I to feel safe. Um so it’s not that I won’t control, it’s what I’m really after is safety here, but it’s just this early environment that’s now affecting me. I’m in my childhood consciousness in my adult life and these predictive patterns start to get in the way of life. Right. You’re so

Trishaspot on about that, right? It’s never about being a control freak or whatever your strategy is. It’s always always always about safety. That’s one of the hardest things for people to accept because to accept that it’s about safety means they have to accept that at some point in their lives people that they loved made them feel unsafe. M and and that I love the word uh environmental failure.

MitchIs that did that come from you? Did I hear that from you or else do you talk about probably heard it from me? I talk about it often yet. It’s out in the psychology field. And it and it’s saying like,

Trishahey, as a a kid, I can’t accept that my parents failed me or the environment failed me. And so instead of turning that anger onto the the outside, that’s impossible. I can’t do that. That’s means life or death. So I’m going to turn on myself. And that’s kind of where some of these patterns start to show up of I’m gonna beat myself up. I’m gonna be perfect or I’m gonna

MitchI love this this quote that you say, think my way to safety. That’s what got me. I’m like,

Trishaoh, I’m doing that all the time. 100%. Right. It doesn’t feel safe at all to turn those behaviors toward the very people that are keeping us alive. It’s not part of a child’s world to think about doing that. Now, there are times where behaviors turn to externalizing, right? Like we’ve we’ve seen children, for example, who have those externalizing behavioral problems, quote unquote, who might grow up to be adults who have a difficult time maintaining relationships or jobs or something like that. We don’t get to choose whether our strategies are externalizing or internalizing. But the internalizing ones are often what we think of as like the perfectionism, people pleasing, intellectualization, right? Versus the people who we might see act out. It’s much more obvious. And acting out could still include harming yourself. For example, like you might think of someone who has substance use issues. There can be a lot of acting out with someone who’s using substances harming other people, but they’re also harming themselves. Internalizing vs. externalizing survival strategies

MitchSo you mentioned internal patterns would be the people pleasing, the intellectual. What are the external patterns? You know, they they don’t have as easy of names to them often, right?

TrishaBut you might see people who have anger management problems, right? That’s an externalizing problem. people who struggle with getting into fights with people, whether physical or otherwise. People who have substance use issues, people like like kind of I was saying, people who have a hard time maintaining jobs, people who steal, like all of these behaviors that are more putting the energy outward, right? So maybe if you think about a relationship between two adults, like if you were an intellectualizer, maybe in terms of a disagreement, you might go into debating mode, right? Like kind of proving your point or you might go into Yeah. Right. Or you might go into freeze mode where you back away. But a person who’s an externalizer might go into anger mode or even physical violence like punching walls or throwing things or something like that because all of that energy is just so intolerable. There’s nowhere for it to go. Plus, genetics play a role and so it kind of goes out in that vitriolic violent. It it looks much more antisocial versus internalizing behaviors often appear pro-social. They aren’t actually, but they appear pro-social. We get we get lauded for them, right? Oh, yeah. That’s such a tricky

Mitchthing is is society rewarding some of these behaviors. And so that’s how we don’t ever get help and and how we get past in therapy. Um maybe maybe talk about some other things that um h how Why intellectualizers can get stuck in therapy do intellectualizers get stuck in therapy? I think that’s such a cool topic cuz that’s what initially got me to to see your work and to go oo I need some help here. Totally. And this is actually

Trishasuch a huge problem. You know, when you go into therapy, you have to think about how therapists are trained. therapists which could include counselors, marriage and family therapists, social workers, psychologists. They’re typically trained as generalist. So they’re given a broad training about a lot of things so that they can pass a lensure test and have general knowledge of diagnosis, basic interventions, things like that. But they’re not trained deeply in trauma. Now programs are changing. They’re moving more toward teaching trauma. But even developmental trauma, we don’t even have a diagnostic code for complex PTSD in the United States. So therapists are coming out of graduate school. And here’s what they are taught. Yes, you need to build a relationship with your client, but you also need to make sure that they’re getting better. That’s your job. You need to make sure that they’re getting better. And if you take insurance, you should probably make sure they’re getting better in 12 sessions or less. So, you get this person coming into therapy thinking, I don’t know what’s going on. I’ve analyzed myself endlessly, or maybe I know exactly what I think is going on, but I present as very intelligent, very well spoken. Maybe I even present as quite regulated. It varies, of course. And here’s this therapist saying, “Wow, here’s this client coming in. They’re telling me about their week. They’re accurately analyzing every single thing that happened. Why are they here? I don’t know what to do with this person in front of me.” Right? And so that could push on the therapist pattern of like my job is to help them. It could push on a systemic pattern, which is I need to have an intervention to help every client who’s in front of me. And honestly, it’s just very easy to miss if you don’t have the training. Because if you think of people coming into therapy who are depressed, they can’t hold a job, they can’t get out of bed, or they’re so anxious, they’re having panic attacks, as strange as it sounds, you know what to do with that. But if you want someone coming in who walks like an adult, talks like an adult, does adult things, and is very self-aware, they often get told that, “Why are you here? You’re so self-aware. You could do my job.” Right? And so it’s another experience for that intellectualizer of being missed. And that’s actually deeply painful for us. Yeah. It’s going right into the pattern of not being seen. Correct. Right. Like we’ve spent our whole lives not being seen. And here’s another person who can’t see that I’m in so much pain internally, even if I don’t know I am. But I feel that something’s wrong. And this person is telling me again, there’s nothing wrong with you. So what does that mean about me then? If I don’t feel good and this expert is telling me there’s something wrong with me. So you might bounce from therapist to therapist, from modality to modality, right? Even things like EMDR, EMDR is, in my opinion, can be quite a quagmire for intellectualizers. They can just get stuck in the endless processing without really getting to the depth. It almost feels like a like a make this go away thing, too. And and that’s what oftentimes what people try to use it for, right? If you have a highly skilled practitioner who understands how to work with complex trauma, it can be a feasible modality. by when you’re just bumping from therapist to therapist so desperately trying to figure out. What are you trying to figure out? I don’t know. I just know I don’t feel right or I know I’m dissatisfied or I know I feel anxious and I can’t stop thinking. Therapists just aren’t trained in how to respond to that. So, I often times end up working with people who have, you know, kind of failed therapy. Like they’ve gone from therapist to therapist and they still they still can’t quite find their way. They don’t want another cognitive or behavioral intervention. And frankly, they don’t really even want another intervention like mindfulness or something that could be more embodied because what good is mindfulness to an intellectualizer? No offense to mindfulness

Mitchpeople out there. It’s a wonderful thing. Yeah. But it’s good for an intellectualizer. Oh yeah. I mean a couple things a couple funny stories that I can say from my journey as you’re describing that so well like one in the beginning um when I was hair on fire anxiety and I I was the person that went from place to place presenting is fine. I got kicked out of therapist therapy twice before I actually found a good therapist. They’re like, “I don’t know why you’re here, you know.” Um, and just learning to overexlain and and um uh constantly being told like, “Why are you here?” You know, and and it’s it’s that I’m not being seen. It goes into all the patterns, but it also hearing about a a a therapist having to heal someone in 12 sessions. Like number one, a lot of pressure for the therapist, a lot of pressure, a lot of pressure for the nervous system that’s sitting in that chair. And then also this thing that I see a lot that we’ve talked about in my mentorship with Irene and you talk it makes me think of the general knowledge thing that you said and it’s having people that have a PhD that are prescribing medicine potentially that have never done therapy themselves and and met themselves and so they’re just meeting all this stuff all these different people but they have met themselves so how can they even understand you know what that and many therapists by the way are intellectualizers Intellectualizers would be drawn to becoming a therapist. It might be a little bit of how I became a therapist. It all worked out thankfully because I’ve done a lot of my own work. But what could be better than endless analyzing of other people’s problems? Oh, that I was a health coach before I became more of a I call myself like a sematic coach now, but I love somebody to sit down and tell me what’s going on and let me piece it all together and tell you how to fix yourself like that. I could do that in my sleep. Here’s the supplements. Here’s the food. Here’s this. Here’s that. Go do that. You’re healing. What? Why are

Trishayou here? Well, exactly. Right. So, you one thing I really appreciate about NARM as a modality, which is neuroeffective relational model, is they spend a lot of the training actually emphasizing you being aware of yourself in response to what’s happening in the client. So, if you feel like, why is this person here? I don’t know what to do with them. That would be part of an internal process, right? That would be a clue for you that you’re feeling pressure or you’re feeling like not knowing what to do is creating a survival response in you. And it can also be a clue what’s happening within this person that is making me feel stuck or stonewalled. So it really gives much better clues to therapists of like a spade is never a spade in therapy, right? It’s not just that like someone’s too self-aware for therapy that doesn’t exist. It’s like there’s something else happening in the room. And as you said, it requires the therapists being aware of their patterns as well. And many very rare for graduate schools to require therapists to go to therapy anymore. Yeah. Observation: the missing piece in therapy And that ultimately becomes like the the magic sauce is being in this quantum environment and allowing whatever is going to happen to show up. Um, and and I find myself, like we kind of talked about before, if I try to figure it out and fix it and I bring that old pattern because I feel maybe uncomfortable with where to start. It was a first session. Well, then that’s when um I’m putting pressure on the on the client. I’m going into my patterns and I’m missing the moment that is is all the be all the doors that you would say the the mind, the the body, the the emotions,

Mitchthe sensations. Absolutely. 100%. Right. Because a lot of times they talk about how therapy is

Trishaabout the relationship and therapy is very much about the relationship. But speaking of quantum right quantum physics, what is one of the really important pieces of this idea of quantum physics is that the idea that an observation can change an outcome. Okay? Right? When you are in therapy, it’s not just about the relationship. It’s about being observed, being reflected to, being attuned to from a person who can see what’s happening and reflect it back to you so that you can see. That’s the like mirror of therapy, right? And we know like the really famous experience in quantum physics is the little photons or I don’t know exactly what they were observing, but when they were observed, they behaved differently than when they weren’t. Right? So that’s why in all of my work, if there were one clue to everything, it’s observation is the answer. Noticing is the work. Tricky for intellectualizers because we’re not talking about analytical noticing, but observation is what allows us to change our brain in the therapist and in the client. I love

Mitchthat. So, how do we how do we how do we notice that we’re analyzing and and how do we go into

Trishabeing the observer? It’s a great question. You know, to to answer it back, there’s to start many people aren’t safe enough. They might not have a strong enough felt sense of safety to even get to the analyzing or to the observing, which is why therapy is a great spot for that, right? Because you have someone who can lend their nervous system and lend their brain to reflect back to you. Like, you know, I noticed when you just told me that thing that happened last week, it seemed like something was really upsetting in that. You told me the story. I felt a strong reaction to it and you kind of glossed it over. I went back to this next thing or or what was really happening in the moment. You started analyzing it. Did you notice that? You know, and they might say, “Oh, it wasn’t that big of a deal.” And I I might reflect back to them like it seems like it’s a big deal because you’re here telling me about it, right? So, ideally, you have someone to kind of lend that to you. But if you don’t, it’s okay. You can still do this, but often times you start doing it retroactively after the fact. The more you do it after the fact, the closer and closer you can get to doing it in the moment because you start building that pathway in your brain of self-awareness observation versus intellectualization. So, let’s say I’m going through my day or even my week and I get to the weekend and I’m like, I am actually extremely exhausted. And as I sit down, I’m realizing I think I might also be like really tense. My chest is tense. My shoulders are tense. I’m feeling so burned out. All I want to do is lay in bed all weekend. Clues. Clues. Those aren’t ways to feel when you’re feeling good. Right. So,

Mitchif I were to notice those clues, and maybe you don’t notice your body. Maybe you just say, “I’m stressed out. I want to cancel all my weekend plans and rot in bed on TikTok.” Also clues. Yeah.

TrishaPause and look back and say, “What was really happening this week?” You know, and you might say, “Oh, nothing. It was a typical week.” If this was my client, I’d say, “A typical week.” Okay. Well, start me out then. You know, kind of start me out on Monday. Tell me what you did this week. And you might be telling about your week. Oh, I did this. I did that. Oh, and then on Tuesday night, you know, it was my birthday. Oh, it was your birthday. What did you do for your birthday? Oh, my partner and I went out to dinner. Oh, wow. How was that? Well, we went to this restaurant that he’s really been wanting to try, you know, and we had dinner and then we came home and it’s like, okay, you know, did you like did you have a nice time? And it’s like, well, you know, it just the restaurant I wasn’t that keen about it. It’s like that might seem really simple. It might not seem like a big deal, but I’m kind of thinking, “Oh, huh. You said it was just a normal week, but it was your birthday.” Like, that’s kind of a big thing to happen in a week. You went to dinner with your partner. Your partner took you to this restaurant that he really wanted to try in the past. You’ve kind of said some things to me about how you get stressed in those moments. I wonder if like really was there something happening there. And it and it’s like an invitation, right? So, you’re looking back and you’re thinking, you know, I’m looking back and the only thing I would have wanted this week was my birthday. Wow, I realize since my birthday, I think I’ve been holding all of this tension because some part of me is feeling really angry about what happened in that moment, but I don’t want to start a fight with my partner, right? And so this whole week, I’ve been analyzing subconsciously or consciously, I’ve been endlessly tearing it apart with friends. Why would he choose an apartment like this that he likes? You know, like he knew I wanted to try this other place or he didn’t even bring me flowers. Whatever the thing might be, you’re tearing it apart with friends. You’re trying to figure it all out, but you’re not really sitting with what happened, which is a moment where you didn’t feel seen. So, actively after the fact, when we get clues in our body or in our behaviors that something has happened, we kind of want to back our way through and say, “What happened?” Now, I kind of blew up an example here, right? But like, was there a moment when you had a disagreement? Was there a moment when something made you anxious? Did you have a big presentation at work? Like, and sometimes it can be something even smaller than that. Like maybe in the morning, this is an example I always use, you went to get a coffee, you watched the barista make your drink with oat milk instead of dairy milk, you want dairy milk. Dilemma. What do you stand there and analyze for 15 minutes? What’s going to happen if I ask for this? Do I have time to get to work or not? Is the barista going to be upset? Are they going to be mad at me? I come to this coffee shop every day. Are they going to remember me as a girl who complained about her drink? Am I going to get in my food next time I go? Correct. Do I have to change my coffee shop and never come back here again? Right? Like, and all this is happening in the 10 minutes that you’re waiting for your drink, but what’s happening isn’t just the drink. It’s an old pattern getting set off where your nervous system is saying fight orflight, basically, right? Like, what do I do in this moment? What do I do in this moment? And that’s enough to set us off on this pattern of tension for the whole weekend. And it’s like we’re something I’ve heard you say many times. It’s like we’re burning off the emotion that we’re afraid to feel or it’s not safe to feel by thinking our way through it. And so it’s like just this storm of repetitive thinking that doesn’t go away that feels like that’s who we are. It feels like that’s who we are, right? It’s become part of our identity. It’s become over coupled essentially with our identity where we might people say to me all the time well if I’m not doing that then who am I you know and the wonderful wonderful news is you are still you we can start to think about things like intellectualization as an a suit of armor or many suits of armor so you would say well who am I without the suits of armor you’re still you underneath all of that armor you’ll still be wonderfully analytical and probably have a great mind for understanding things when you want to not all of the time. And so that’s right. The intellectualization is a strategy that helps us feel like we’re doing something. It helps us feel like we have control and it does help do something with that survival energy. You’re spinning your wheels or you’re on the treadmill, right? You’re like, I’m not actually going anywhere, but I am getting rid of some of that survival energy. Yeah,

Mitchthat makes so much sense. And and it’s it’s like it’s so adaptive. It’s so um protective until it becomes uh a bigger problem like thank God we had that ability to escape into our book into our uh our head into our thoughts into whatever it may be because the environment was scary. But now we’re completely checked out from life. We’ve got no depth to our relationships. we’re we’re constantly in our head and we don’t even know. I I remember going to therapy for the one of my first I saw like a yoga therapy person and it’s like I had um we did tapping you know and it was just to really help me identify the emotions because I came into it and I think we kind of come both ways. It’s either you feel too much, that was me, um or we don’t feel anything at all. And that’s more of the freeze now, which is, you know, gas sympathetic on um with the brakes on as well. And so for me, I was feeling all the sympathetic. So I was also very surprised to see the freeze. I thought it was a horrible thing. You know, of course that makes so much sense now is protecting me from feeling so much. But is is is intellectualization both a freeze response and a a sympathetic response Intellectualization, freeze, and sympathetic charge

Trishaor is it one or the other? That’s a really good question. So when you think about freeze, I don’t know if you ever seen the kind of poly bagel ladder. The thing about freeze is at the very base of the ladder and the top of the ladder is like our best adult cells. We’re in the window of tolerance. We’re connecting. We’re co-regulating. When survival responses happen, we kind of climb down the ladder. It’s hierarchical. So the first question is often like, can I run from this? If I can’t run from this, then can I fight this? If I can’t fight this, then can I make it okay by making everyone around me happy? And if I can’t do that, I will freeze. Your question is wonderful because it’s like it’s both. When you think of freeze, functional freeze and fawn, those are all freeze responses. And all freeze responses are sympathetic at their core because all freeze responses are in pursuit of what? Holding down that sympathetic charge so that we can feel a faux sense of safety. So when it’s it’s actually very important to know that because when you’re coming out of an intellectual intellectualization response, you cannot avoid the sympathetic charge. It must come back out. You must climb back up the ladder through the sympathetic charge. So it’s not atypical that you can be in freeze or be in a functional freeze and feel a heck of a lot of sympathetic charge. I know I did. Right? So that oftentimes makes people think, well, I must not be in freeze. functional freezers over functioners. They’re feeling sympathetic charge all of the time, right? But they have learned to just function through it. In fact, sometimes they kind of like the sympathetic charge because it’s something to

Mitchfeel. It’s something to do. That’s why Exactly. Right. Like intellectualizers are very very often

Trishaoverfunctioners. They’re the people doing the most because and I I always say I have to watch out for myself because if I don’t pay attention, I will schedule myself into oblivion because my nervous system still has a learned pattern of like that feels so nice. It doesn’t feel nice anymore, right? But some nervous system is still like, wouldn’t it be nice if we scheduled something

Mitchelse? And I’m like, no, you have to watch out for the overfunctioning, right? Oh, it’s so sneaky. It’s so sneaky. My overfunctioning looked like biohacking, like right energing, learning all the tricks, all the tools, and I would love sharing that with other people. Sit down in front of me, tell me what you got going on, and we’ll hack that son of [ __ ] to death, and you’ll be feeling good. Which ends up being an avoidance pattern, uh, just at the absolute best, uh, a mood shift. And what I found eventually was that it hurt my nervous system so bad because I was doing the same thing that was done to me. I was dismissing myself and trying to fix myself and it just kept me in this pattern. And uh and and like you said, it is so sneaky and so quick to do that. And I think that’s the brilliance of learning to really slow things down to build capacity to be with intense sensations. And it’s like I wrote this down as you were talking about coming out of freeze, man. Dill if we’ve had sympathetic charge and anxiety has been scary. I think of like the duck uh floating on the water with the little little legs going underneath. So maybe we’ve done everything that we can to push down this sympathetic charge that feels like too much. And so we start recognizing our patterns. we start getting into our body and we start coming out of this freeze and now we got to deal with that activation again. And I feel like so many people uh because of the a fear of that we get stuck in this loop of like in and out of freeze in and out Coming out of freeze and building new emotional pathways of freeze. It is freeze what’s the process for an intellectualizer coming out and does that make

Trishasense what I described? It makes perfect sense because that is the exact moment in my therapy where I was in my own journey where I was like I don’t know if I want to do this anymore, you know, because like all of a sudden and I I would always be a person who identified as anxious, you know, so I always had the like tension, the draw, the jaw gritting, you know, the really pronounced S muscle, right? But I was never a person who like felt unpleasant bodily sensations in that besides those tension things. And so that moment when I started feeling feelings and body sensations and the feelings weren’t ones I liked. Like I started getting angry at people. What? I don’t know what to do with that. Right? Like I mean sadness is tolerable, you know, because sadness for me was like a safe default emotion. If you’re sad, people will comfort you. But angry, not safe at all. So that’s a really common experience. It’s why it’s incredibly important, I think, to titrate this work, right? one little drop at a time and to know it’s not going to take the rest of your life, but it is going to take some time to allow your brain. It’s just like exposure therapy. If you said, “I’m terrified of flying and I want to fly to Beijing,” I’d say, “Cool. Well, we can do that.” But the first thing we do isn’t going to be get on a plane to Beijing. It’s going to be to look at a picture of a plane, right? So when you start coming out of that intellectualization, it’s very normal that feeling things in a different and new way will feel very bad to you and also scary because you don’t have roadways for that in your brain. You didn’t get a chance to develop them. We would ideally develop them as children with our parents reflecting back to us. You’re feeling mad right now. That’s okay. Oh, I know you’re sad. That really hurt your feelings. Oh, we’re so excited. We’re having a great time. That’s how we form those neural pathways in the brain of how to feel feelings because by the way to intellectualizers even excitement can feel scary when you’re coming out of it. So we have to build those roadways. We have to construct those roadways. You wouldn’t expect them to construct like a new interstate highway overnight. You would expect they have to do it little steps at a time. So it would be normal. You might have a expansion where you’re like the birthday example. I got angry at my partner about the restaurant

Mitchand I communicated it to him and he scheduled a new Exactly. Right. an expansion. Felt so good,

Trishayou know. And then all of a sudden you’re like coming in and you’re like, I’m really anxious all the time and I feel panicky and I don’t know why. And it’s like that’s right. Yeah. Because your brain said, I don’t have a pathway for this. The only pathway I have says feeling this kind of emotion leads to something dangerous. I predict something impacting your survival will happen. So a lot of times people in therapy like we can feel things together and watch the contraction. Feel together, watch the contraction. This is where the observation comes in big, right? If you feel the emotion and you go right back into the contraction, the freeze, just observing that process actually still fires your neurons in a different direction. Right? If you can say, you know, I think I feel angry with my partner about how he treated my birthday and you you say, I feel angry and you feel a little blip of anger and then you watch the collapse come in. Just observing it, it’s just like the quantum physics, right? Just observing it changes the outcome. Observing it fires your neurons in a different direction. Like that’s the coolest thing in the world, but I don’t mean to make it so simple, but all we have to do is observe over and over and over again, and we can change our brain. neurons that fire together wire together. So, a little bit of a long-winded answer, which is my specialty, but how we handle that is through the observation over and over and over again. And with with your thing showing the contraction and expansion, we also must know contractions will always come. They will always come. It’s not a matter of if one will come, it’s when. Because contractions are in breath and out breath. They’re the ocean. You wouldn’t go to the doctor and say, you know, I’m really sick of breathing out. I love breathing in, but I don’t want to breathe out anymore. Like that. The doctor would be like, well, good luck. You have to breathe out the carbon dioxide. The trees will breathe it in. Right? That that that’s part of the process, too, is building up our capacity, our adult self who can feel, I get angry and I contract, and that’s okay. And that’s what leads back into another expansion. We spend a lot of time survival mode resisting contractions. Yes. A lot of time. And that just puts us right back into Titration, capacity, and learning to trust yourself

Mitchthe pattern. Oh, yeah. I mean, that makes so much because I that’s what I’ve been uh working through here recently is I was so afraid I’d learned so much about titration, about doing too much, and I was so afraid to do too much. And it’s like when I learned a process of just kind of hanging out and observing, I learned that my brain had a couple of like routes that it’s used to. And it’s basically, you know, like you would talk about the the major highways coming out of the big cities. It went, hey, this is overwhelming. Stop, turn around, or it’s going to end in doom, doom, doom. Pick pick pick which flavor of doom you want for today. But it’s interesting when you have education and you learn, hey, there’s a there’s going to be a protector in there, it’s going to have a typical way of scaring the [ __ ] out of you. And once you knock on that door enough times and it’s the same thing, you get to go, okay, so what happens if you just you don’t do it and you get to watch like what happens if you don’t stop, you don’t run away, and you just kind of go, hey, you know what? Um because I learned what I really wanted was for for somebody to be there for me. Okay. Well, if nobody was there for me and I’m scared this is going to be too much and ain’t nobody gonna come to save me other than me. Well, guess who gets to be the superhero? That’s kind of way I’ve been doing it is having these superhero stories. Well, adult Mitch is here and he’s going to swoop in and I’m gonna pick you up and I’m going to go, “Hey, we got this. We’re going to do it together.” And then you see you get to the other side of that and the body shakes. It It moves. You have you scream, you yell, you had weird quirky stuff that comes out. And you see that arc go up that we’ve learned about for so long that I’ve been looking forward to for three or four years. Here’s education again. I see my I’m going up the thing. I’m going to the top of it. Boom. And when you come down that first time, that’s that seeing that basket go through for the first you just scored your first touchdown. You’ve been trying to figure out how to do a touchdown for forever and you didn’t analyze your way there. You felt your way there. you trusted your body and you showed up for yourself and oh my god once that clicked for the first time and you see that ball go through that’s the most amazing moment in the world but so much safety happens in that because what that did for me is like okay maybe I don’t have to trust every thought and maybe I’m going to be okay because I’ve I’ve felt this scary thing come on that tells me I’m going to go backwards and when I don’t trust that and I go into trusting more myself and I show up for myself, man, this amazing thing happens. And now that’s the becoming your own medicine that I’ve been hearing about for three or four years. Like, who would have known this thing is actually possible? And three months before that, I was going, if I don’t see one go through the hoop pretty quick, I’m done. I don’t

Trishabelieve in this stuff anymore. That’s right. Well, and that’s the beauty of neuroplasticity, right? Like, you get to watch it unfold in real time your mapping of new pathways. And I’m actually building my own model for teaching people how to do these things. And it’s all based on this idea that our brain is made up of roadways and our brain is like an atlas. And so when we flip to the parts of our brain that say, “Hey, how do I show up for myself when we’re angry?” It’s just a blank page, right? So you’re trying to go somewhere that doesn’t even exist. So you flip back to the other maps and you’re like, “Oh, I I have a map of what to do with when I’m angry and it says shut down.” Yeah. Yeah. Oh, maybe I’ll try that one. And and you’re kind of driving it again and again. and you’re like, I’m not loving this road anymore. It’s really not getting me where I want to go. But the page is blank. We for new roadways by doing the process of exactly what you’re saying. And just as you’re saying, like kind of imagining the superhero part of you come in. That’s not actually happening necessarily, right? You’re not turning into a superhero, but just visualizing that shifts you into that adult part of your brain, the self-awareness part of your brain that lets you observe yourself in a different way. And and I mean that is how we make change. We could get even deeper into the process of like memory reconsolidation which is how we can repattern these old learnings. But neuroplasticity and those things mashed up over and over and over again is how it happens. It’s really common that the practitioner will see changes before you do. Right? And so people will often say to me, especially because in my work I’m very big about emphasizing we don’t do homework. We don’t do a lot of work outside of sessions at least first half is really big part of my work and so people will say is it working is it working I need to do something I need to do something I said just wait this way just trust me just keep coming back you know and then there’s a time few months in you know where they come back and they’re like I did this and I’m like oh hell yeah right like I I knew it was working cuz I could see it happening I could see the subtle shifts in them and then they can see it and that’s because it’s just little tiny firings over over and over and over again. You don’t really have to try that hard, like effort that hard to do this work. It’s more about frequency over and over and over again. That’s the titration of somatic work, right? Like in somatic work, in my opinion, grounded embodied somatic work, you should not be efforting very hard. You should be doing very small titrations frequently. That’s the same in working with the brain. And that makes me think

Mitchof this this try and efforting. I want to know what’s the gap because that’s what I was doing for so long. And just as I say that it’s like a lack of safety, a lack of trust of moving through this. But if I am I it’s like I would I was ver vor vaciously is that the word learning so much like I I did all the courses all the books all the things and I would show up and do the work and it would blow me out of my socks and I would be so fatigued and in collapse for months at a time. So the only explanation actually Irene sent me something shout out to Irene again over the weekend explaining to that from her SC I’m not remembering it now but it’s kind of like global high sensitization and something I said to you before which we got on which was like learning past my capacity. Yes. My nervous capacity to experience and feel these big boulders coming out of my nervous system. Why learning is not the same as rewiring

TrishaWhat’s what’s going on there? Is that common? Oh my gosh. Yes, absolutely. Right. So, going back to my Atlas analogy for just a moment. So, imagine you’re doing all this learning, you’re efforting, you’re doing all these things. Well, sure, you’re building neural pathways. That’s the way the brain works, right? So, there’s maps in there. There’s roads in there that say here’s all these learnings. The problem is you have theoretically built them on the map, right? You’ve drawn them, but they don’t exist to drive down. So, when you get in your car and you’re like, I I I see look look here’s this highway that goes to this place I want to go. Feel better. you get in your place where the feel better road should be and your brain says absolutely not. We’ll be putting you on a detour. That road isn’t built and it’s tigers. Like, do you not see all the tigers? And so that’s when like collapse, fatigue, self-criticism. Somehow you just magically get too busy, right? Like all of those things are detours from the brain saying, “No, that road is dangerous. The bridge is out. You may have drawn it on your map, but we’re not letting you go there.” Okay. And then that gets that hasn’t happened in a little while. And it’s like I think that is improving because there’s more safety on board because I’ve had other experiences and roadways that are being built that say, “Hey, if we get over here in a Shitzville hole, we can get back.” 100%. It is. It’s through building that felt sense of safety. And what’s coupled alongside building a felt sense of safety is as you’re doing that, you’re subconsciously, unconsciously rewiring old learnings as well. So not only are you building safety, you’re rewiring the learning that says that roadway isn’t safe. As you rewire that memory, then your brain will no longer throw up the need for a detour. And all of that comes through safety and through shifting some of those learnings which is conscious but unconscious at the same time. It’s so cool. This it’s it’s amazing. I mean this work has been the the best gift of my life for someone who chronic disease um

MitchI mean anxiety. I hadn’t slept in 20 years. I just started sleeping again. Wow. 20 years man. And and I I love the um the thing you were talking about too kind of back up of like we as practitioners we see that before the therapist and I’ve been told or before the client and I’ve been told hey don’t point that out because that may be like I have and I’ve seen this in clients where I’m like oh my god this person has vocal proity now. Oh my god this person is looking at the screen now. Oh my god this person uh is has emotion. So why would we not point that out is because there’s a tiger on that Prediction error and noticing change in real time

Trisharoute? That’s a good question, you know, and so it’s so it’s so nuanced and the reason for that is is because it actually can be very useful for you to point that out in a titrated way. I could, right? Why is it useful to point that out? No, let me respond to your question first. Yes, reflecting that to someone whose system still feels like it’s dangerous to be online can have a tie response of saying, “Oh my god, this person sees that I’m more online. That’s not safe. I’ll shut myself down.” That often can happen. And actually, I always kind of joke about this, but I had to learn early on in my work. I’m a big personality person. Like, I’m excited. I’m so stoked on this work. Like, I just love getting to see people shift. But I had to learn when I noticed shifts to actually stay very centered and grounded within myself. Even though I’m like, “Holy [ __ ] this is the coolest thing in the world. This person is changing a lifelong pattern and I want to shout, right?” But I have to stay really grounded in myself and say, “Oh, yeah. I noticed I noticed that maybe when you named that, it seemed like your face got a little bit brighter. Did you notice anything in this calm and gentle way?” Then sometimes they can see a little piece of it. Not always. But why is it important to actually do that? Sometimes, you and I were talking about this a little bit earlier, it introduces a prediction error in the model. So, if that person hasn’t yet been able to see in themselves that, wow, my tone of voice is a little like more online, like I’m a little more engaged because their brain is still looking at things through the old model, the old lenses, right? We’re seeing like I think you need to update your prescription. You might not even more, right? Like we’re seeing that that their brain is still like these are my lenses. You’re not taking them from me. Yeah. But when we introduce that in that really calm, grounded, connected, titrated way, what happens is the brain can throw up a flag and say, “Uhoh, she’s seen that I’m shifting in some in some way. I’m more online.” And together we can say, and I would say to them, I would say, “I really noticed when you told me that. It seemed like you got a little bit brighter in your face. Did you notice anything?” And they might say, “No, I didn’t notice anything.” And I say, “Oh, yeah. Well, that’s all right.” What do you notice as I point that out to you? Ah, there it is. That’s the prediction error where they might say, “Oh, I don’t know. I just like, you know, I don’t know. Let’s just move on to the next topic.” And I’m like, “Oh, it seems like you’re really ready to move on to the next topic.” Like, and we will, but I wonder like, was there a little bit of something happening when you noticed me noticing you? And that might be an opportunity to say, “Yeah, I started to feel anxious.” And it’s like, “Oh, I wonder what you learned in your life about someone seeing you or about someone or about being more online or about being a little more engaged. That is actually the opportunity to update a really key learning live in person because it’s happening between you and the client. What could be more live than that, right? Mhm. So something’s happening between you and that client where their brain is projecting an old learning onto you, right? You reflect this thing back to them and you become the dangerous parent who can’t it’s not safe to let the parent see you being online engaged, happy, right? So their brain is saying, “What’s the probability that this person is going to criticize me now because I’m feeling a little bit better?” Very, very high. And so we want to come in and say, “Oh, you’re noticing that that you’re feeling a little anxious. Yeah, I wonder like what you learned about that. And they might say, I don’t know, you know, I just I I think it’s always been safer for me to just stay a little more disconnected. It’s like, yeah, that makes sense. I wonder what some part of you worries might happen as you get more online or if I notice you’re more online. And now this this would happen in a much longer drawn out way, right? The person might say, “Well, I worry that if if I’m feeling better, you might not want to work with me anymore, or it might be time for me to go, and I I’m not ready for that.” I’d say, “Wow, what an interesting learning.” So, you noticed in some way that if you felt like you were doing well, and when you were doing well, no one would show up for you, no one would support you, no one would take care of you. So, that that makes a lot of sense. That’s a pattern we’ve really seen in your life where you had to learn to overfunction and be so self-sufficient because no one was showing up for you, right? So like it’s actually such a wonderful learning opportunity to get to that deeper learning. And I I think that’s what you said

Mitchis like talking about these beliefs is such a good um illustration. You know, we we always get told um you know, you gota you got to feel it. You got to feel your stuff to to move through it. And and then we we point to animals and go look the the deer runs away from the the cheetah and then it shakes it off like shake it off, dude. And I was meeting with Simona Irwin when she was on the podcast and she said, “Yeah, but these animals don’t have beliefs.” So those beliefs get in the way. And so it’s not just always a a bottom up, which is sematic. There’s also the top down that has to come in because if we don’t aren’t able to feel our needs and our our beliefs, then we’re con then there’s constantly like a subconscious tiger that’s in the way of us getting to what we want. And so I I love kind I always ask people like what’s your experience with the war between bottom Top-down and bottom-up work

Trishaup and top down and how do you feel about all that? Wow. you introduce one of my favorite topics because I feel really really passionately about this. I I dislike so strongly the divide that has been created. You know, when I first started doing somatic work, it was not the thing. It was not it. Everyone looked at me like I was cuckoo bananas, right? Like I mean there were people who were in the sematic world of course, but in modern everyday work, no one knew about the nervous system. No one knew about any of these things. And so I got a lot of pretty negative comments from colleagues who were like this is woo woo whatever you know despite of course me presenting all the research then but it’s neither here nor there where they were this sense of like no and this is post ACES study where everyone in the world should know that the mind impacts the body but something has taken off in the last five or so years where the nervous system has become the thing. Yeah. in everything. And so now the divide actually goes the opposite way where there’s this idea and rhetoric that somatic work is the only way. Yep. I was I’m sorry to whoever I said that to over the past year. I’m learning too. I I’ve been there myself. I’ve been there myself in my early work where I thought a heck with the top down stuff, right? But what I’ve come to learn through all of my research, both read and conducted, is that it’s not enough to only approach the body and it’s not enough to only approach the mind. They are both enacting things on us all of the time. And so we must we must address both of them. I have to admit, and I hope this doesn’t offend anyone who listens to your podcast, but I get quite triggered when I see videos and podcasts of people saying, “All you have to do is stretch your hips to release your trauma.” Like it makes me want to scream because it is so untrue. It is so untrue, you know, and it’s so predatory because people who have a lot of trauma are going to think, “Okay, this is all I have to do.” And then maybe they do it and they sobb and they have this katharsis. Does that change your pattern in any way? I doubt it. I doubt it. Now, I’m a somatic practitioner. I deeply love somatics, but it is impossible to address one without the other. And to be honest with you, for intellectualizers, starting with the top down, the brain doorway, I kind of think of it as a trinity, we have thoughts, emotions, and body sensations. And sitting in the middle is behaviors. Those affect all three. Coming in who is an intellectualizer to try to start with the body sensation doorway is going to be beyond activating for them. Now, I’m speaking broadly. It’s different for beyond activating. Beyond

Mitchactivating. Yeah. Right. like they’re coming in and they’re thinking, I don’t know what this person wants me to do. And of course, you can do all the coaching in the world. You know,

Trishait’s like learning a new language. It’s okay if it feels weird or clunky. But I will tell you, I have some people who I’ve worked with for years and years and years and years and years before they could ever track their body. I adore them. They’re some of my favorite people to work with. But I used to use this exercise a lot when I first started working where I was if people couldn’t really track their body, I would ask them, “Okay, imagine you go to the grocery store. You get your two favorite ice creams or whatever it is you like to eat. Take them home, sit down with the two of them. Which one do you want to eat and how do you know? Love it. Or restaurant, right? Like which restaurant? And and I would literally have people who say, “I don’t know. I would choose the one that’s closer. I would choose the one that’s cheaper.” like they have no access to their body whatsoever because they are so deeply in protection and so deeply in freeze and because they never got reflected to them from people of like how to be with their body and emotions that it took years and I I will tell you I have wonderful like success stories of people who left my work living so fully in their life and so embodied who I never

Mitchdid satic work with. Really? That’s interesting. Yeah. Right. Somatic work is wonderful and it

Trishachanged my life but honestly it doesn’t have to be for everyone and other the other thing is it kind of goes you can do somatic work without doing somatic work right like I I will always say and this shocks people who know me from the sematic world I’m cognitive till the day I die like that’s how I understand the world that’s how I make sense out of things and guess what I still know my body’s there I still track my body but I’m going to tell you the truth which is in times of regulation I’m never going body First, that was just not the way I remember. The thought comes, the way I think about it now is I’m about to say it comes from the brain and you feel it in the body, but the emotional body is going to feel it for the brain does. No, which one feels it first? A lot of theories about that. Yeah, there’s a lot of theories about that. Now, in fact, I just wrote my dissertation on this topic, right? So like I have a lot of thoughts on this information that it’s actually critically important to not ignore the body because there are theories that say the body feels it first and then the mind gets it. There are theories that say the mind gets it and sent it to the body. The fact is the communication between the mind and body is birectional. And so we must eventually in some way address the intraceptive system which is the system that lets us track our sensations because that’s the line of communication. You know, it’s like the party line between the mind and the body. But we don’t always have to address it strictly through doing what you might think of as traditional somatic work. There are other ways of getting curious about it that can invoke that intraceptive system without making people feel like they have to process their trauma somatically, which is valid for a lot of people. Mhm. So it’s really fascinating to think about Moving beyond black-and-white healing approaches

Mitchbecause you can actually teach people how to do sematic reappraisal which means reframing the experience that is happening without like really saying where do you feel that in your body right which can be really triggering for people like really really triggering and I love I love like this we this kind we talked about this before it’s moving from this black or white has to be this way to it’s multi-dimensional and and I and I love like your your doorways deal because I’m it’s less pressure. I’m coming in. I got all these doorways and let’s see which one you go through before instead of me trying to intellectualize and figure out and have these I need to validate myself and prove my worth and show you I’m good and get you to see me instead of just going like hey let’s trust what’s going to come up because ultimately how relaxing is it when we learn and safety providing is it when we learn oh your nervous system’s the map. You just got to kind of do that and and it is a multi-dimensional top down and bottom up approach that the more we have those things aligned the more we can make a a clear better decision. But on the way through you’re saying this I’m thinking well which part of the mind is online right now. Is it the adult self or is it the child? That happened to me this morning as I was processing some stuff that happened yesterday with my wife because I have done so much. I I know so much about myself now that I went I noticed that I’m saying I don’t want to do this thing because it’s too much. It was I in a trigger and and and the the wound is opening up and I’m going to my default or is this truly overwhelming and it’s not something I want to engage with and that takes some freaking time I feel like. 100% in such good learning because you know something I’ve noticed is that people

Trishawho are intellectualizers can even intellectualize tracking the body if you can believe it right it can become as you’re naming just another strategy which by the way is really hard if you have autoimmune or auto-inflammatory or any kind of body stuff going on and then this happened to me honestly you know you learn track the body nervous system regulation track the body nervous system regulation what do I do when my body is constantly in pain and I say to myself I’m incredibly disreg regulated. My body is so out of whack. I have tension everywhere. I’m doing damage to myself every single day. Boy, that’s not helping me get a lot more regulated, is it? You know, so instead, you know, you look at programs like Primal Trust and like pain reprocessing therapy and things like that. It’s all about cha changing what? Not just tracking the body, but how you relate to what’s happening in your body. And so there are many I mean I’ve worked with a lot of people who have done the primal trust program who don’t dig doing one-on-one somatic work with me. But what they appreciate is learning how to change the way they relate. That’s somatic reappraisal. Change the way they relate to what’s happening in their body. And cognitive reappraisal where you change the way you relate to what’s happening in your mind. So you could notice, wow, I I do this with myself all the time. Like you said, overwhelm, right? I’ll say to myself, I’m feeling really anxious right now. That’s a story. Yeah. With my body and I see what’s actually happening. It’s like, oh, I have a I have a lot of sensation in my chest. And that’s a place historically I felt a lot of anxiety. Really good at tracking my body. I must be feeling anxious. Wait a second. I’m am I feeling anxious? Is something happening right now that I’m actively feeling anxious about? And it’s like, no, not really. And it’s like, whoa, could I be feeling excited? Yeah. Yeah. Be feeling vitality or life force or could I just be feeling general every day like something going on? Right. So, and I’m not saying that’s not part of somatic work, but it’s so important to look at the story alongside. So, it’s very much not black or white. However, black or white sells,

Mitchright? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s it’s way easier to say like this is it. You know, I always say if you’ve got an illness, and this is the the mfer of this work, is if you’ve got an illness, people are taking this work and watering it down, and they got something to show it, sh sell you, and next thing you know, you’re doing lymphatic work and jumping around doing Tai Chi thinking you’re going to get healed and then you go into your and then you don’t see that happen and you go in your pattern and you and you’re the person that quits or walks away because this is supposed to be the answer. You know, I don’t know how it took me 20 years of going through personal development to

Trishafind this work. It’s like the hardest thing to find. I feel like it is. It is the hardest thing to find because there’s good this work. Right. That’s fine. It’s it’s really hard. I mean, and I agree because I I I have spent a lot of time and energy to get to this place where I can offer this work and am so thankful that I have found someone who can offer this work to me. But that was a long road to find the person who could offer this work to me. Like I’ve also gone through like plenty of therapists, you know, because it’s just not I feel like you have to do the work to be able to do this work. I know that sounds sort of like one and then the other, but it’s not possible to hold the nuance in this way and show up in this way if you haven’t done your own healing work. Back to therapists who haven’t gone to therapy, right? Like it’s something that I frankly get very activated about on social media. And I don’t mean activated as a problem, but that we live in a world that makes us need to like we’re hooked in all the time. And so we want to hook people in. The algorithm rewards black and white thinking on all sides of every spectrum. And so if you know we get scared, our patterns come up and we feel like if I want to make a living, if I want people to see my work, I have to make it sound big and extreme and important, right? And so I I really think it creates further like isolation and individual individualization and people end up in this way where they’re so collapsed and they’re like, I’ve spent money on all these programs. I feel worse than ever. What do I do? I I really feel so strongly about the content that I make. I spend so much time thinking about what I want to say really intentionally because I want people to feel the hope. My gosh, there’s so much hope in neuroplasticity and in repatterning the way our nervous system works. But I don’t want to give the idea that it’s simple. I don’t want to give the idea that it’s impossible, but I want people to understand like you can do this work. There are actually clear steps to do this work, but you must be willing to be in the process. And that is so hard for that child part of us that is just longing and longing and longing for someone or something to fix us and help us. Oh, it’s it’s going against everything that we’ve

Mitchever learned. I mean, and it it starts with this nervous system. It goes out to the community and the relationships and the family and the and and society. And it’s the ultimate red pill because listen, Neo, what you thought was real isn’t. and you’re going to take this red pill and you’re going to see things for what it is. I told Irene Lion when we were talking I said um it’s like waking up and being covered trauma is like waking up and maybe this is just like uh when you’re finally aware of it like maybe you’re sensing the freeze or or all the scary stuff that comes up when we start to come out of that but we wake up one day and we’ve got dog poo all over smeared on our entire body and the conventional route of let me hop in the shower and scrub this thing to death that doesn’t work anymore and and So you got to learn to love that thing. You got to learn to see why. You got to see, hey, your body is protecting you. It’s working exactly like it should for what happened. And so if I have to back up and I have to learn to love it and I have to learn to to trust it. And and a lot of that trust too, you know, talking about you mentioned primal trust. I think that’s the program that I’m doing with Simona. And it’s basically what I had to do with my intellectual. I think you’ll like this if and I’m sure you maybe even know the program, but it’s it’s it’s bringing the top down and the bottom up. The thing that I didn’t think would help, but it’s going, hey, I’m always I’m always in my head. So, what’s it saying? It’s like, okay, it’s it’s terrified. It’s scaring me to death. It’s making me look for everything that’s wrong and bad. And then my my thing that’s keeping that’s what stopped me in my tracks when I did a podcast with her. She said, “Trying to fix it and figure it out is what keeps us stuck.” And I was couldn’t continue. I was like, “That is my Emma.” It’s funny coming to your work uh these last couple days and researching and I’m like, “Oh, Trisha was saying it the whole time, but you know, we’re not ready to hear it until we hear it.” And so what I was able to do, okay, I’m scaring myself. So the next thing is I got all these compulsive fixing behaviors that I’m doing. So what are those? How do I avoid feeling the the the emotion and the scary things? Oh, well, I for me it was supplements. I’m I’m I’m I thought I had this belief that my body’s broken and I have to supplement my way through the day, you know, and and fix myself. And that was constantly scaring the crap out of me. And so I’m like, “Okay, so we’re going to organize this and we’re going to we’re going to we’re going to we’re going to put it in the uh calendar or the pill container and I’m going to take it based on what it says.” And I’ve heard you say this as well. So that’s when my body freaked out and I had to but with the education I go hey I know this is going to come and so when that fear comes comes then I’m going to go sit with it and I’m going to work with it and that’s how I finally got to the other side or started to get more safety on board. But it’s Changing the relationship to symptoms so funny that the top down came in and became what really helped and allowed me to feel safe feeling again. Yes, that no that you’re spot on it. I mean that’s that’s something I really really love about the Primal Trust program. I’ve done the program and work with people who do the program is they do integrate both components because personally I would say I don’t think you can do a full healing whatever that means if that’s possible right without addressing both components. And you know, I’ve had I’ve struggled with an auto-inflammatory disease for like the last 3 years or maybe several things at one time. And I was really stuck in that myself too of like get the test and analyze the test and look for the supplements and is it this, is it this, is it this, is it this? And you so obsessive about like what food should I eat and then if that food makes me sick, is it, you know, there’s just so much and even obsessing about the nervous system regulation and thinking I might be disregulated, right? And it wasn’t until I could come into recognizing like maybe there is something happening in my nervous system and in the environment and in my body, but there’s also a way that I’m relating to the symptoms, right? I’m relating to the symptoms as this problem to

Trishabe controlled. Yes. And instead I can start to understand there’s something happening but I can notice what’s happening and I can be with it and I don’t have to be terrified about it and I can trust myself that I can be with whatever is happening that I can titrate my own experience and I just want to be crystal clear like I don’t want to act like this is a magic trick because as I said that’s something that really triggers me when people do that but it was a key piece in my ongoing work of being well in this world is how I relate to things and I I use this example a lot because part of my um problem is a digestive problem like MCASD if you’re familiar right where it’s like your body rejects all foods like you can just be allergic to anything and have no rhyme or reason for it that chocolate I guess is that what you’re saying massel activation like histamines kind of stuff big nervous system components in that right so like I chocolate is a huge trigger for me and I was using this example of this was before I had put this all together. I went to dinner for my birthday at one of my favorite restaurants back home with my friends and everyone I love and they just have this flowerless chocolate cake that is like a standard in my life through high school, like you know, just like like an important place for me, an important food for like celebrating. And I was like, I’m going to get the chocolate cake. It’s my birthday. I’m here with everyone I love. And I I enjoyed the cake so much and everyone else enjoyed the cake, too. I didn’t get sick at all. Right. And I just think that’s so demonstrative of what happens when Neuroplastic symptoms and the brain’s role in pain

Mitchwe’re relating to things in a different way. Well, that’s exactly what I wanted to freaking ask you. Like, so let’s talk about and we’ll we’ll try to wrap this thing up because I know me and you could go for a day. Love nerding out with you. And thank you so much for everything you share. It’s been freaking awesome. Um, what’s the difference between a neuroplastic symptom and a real symptom?

TrishaIt’s it’s sort of question it’s a question for the ages, right? Like it’s a question for the ages. I love thinking about this and not necessarily in an intellectualization way, but genuinely being curious about this because I think it’s a both and, right? Like we can’t we may never know the answer to things like that. There are people on the far extremes that say everything is from like it’s all because of the way you’re relating to it. You know, people who might think you could heal any disease or disorder from changing the way you relate to it in your body. And people on the far end of the spectrum that will hear what I say about chocolate cake and say, “You’re crazy, right?” But what I can say is the way we relate to things always plays a role. The science bears this out. Um, I don’t know if you know Allan, I think his name is Alan Gordon. He he he does some cool stuff on Instagram. Um, and his work is all around pain. and it’s all about he has a type of therapy called pain reprocessing therapy that’s for treating chronic pain and I I’m going to totally butcher this but he has a book called the way out too but basically what he talks about is like pain is not necessarily just the body it’s how the brain is relating to what’s happening in the body right that’s what pain is your your brain is saying fear and adrenaline that comes in washes through the system when that symptom comes up so it’s it’s like um I can’t remember the lady that that the promo trust is based on. She’s from like the 30s, 40s, but she says there’s a fear that happens with the initial thing and the the secondary fear is what keeps us stuck in the lude and that’s what creates neuroplastic symptom. I was going to say which is the neural pathway. Right. Right. So you can’t take the brain out of it. The brain is if we didn’t have a brain, we wouldn’t be able to process pain. So we wouldn’t feel it. Right. The brain is what is telling us that we feel the pain. as as wild as that is to kind of think about like this is mind-blowing. Your brain changes your reality. I’m sorry to tell you, but your brain changes your reality. Have you ever seen that video? They often show it in like psychology classes where they want you to I think they’re asking you to count how many times they dribble the basketball and then at the end they’re like, “Did you see the gorilla?” Because like in the middle of the video, a gorilla like goes through and you almost never recognize it. Boy, if that’s not proof that your brain is changing your reality, I don’t know what is. And so we know our brain changes everything, but our specific lens. You and I could watch the exact same whatever and have two totally different experiences of it. Why? Because the way our brain relates to it. So I’m so sensitive to never want to make anyone who has chronic pain or chronic health issues feel like it’s their fault. It’s not. It’s not your fault at all. I will be honest with you. I was quite threatened by the idea that the way I relate to my symptoms could be making the symptoms worse. Frankly, a little bit offended because I’m like, you don’t know how bad I feel. Like, you don’t know how sick I feel and it’s impossible to get through. And so, if you would dain to tell me that I’m making

Mitchthis all worse, I was pretty offended. That’s a part of me that I had to work with. Right. Well, I feel that too. It’s worse. And also there’s a little bit of like, oh, maybe I can use this. And that’s the adult consciousness, right? Yeah. We know this. Like for example, I’ve worked with people who have uh PNES, which is basically like seizures that don’t have any explanations and and they’ve totally resolved their seizures through doing therapy. That’s awesome, right? Like, so we all resolve our symptoms if we just did a little bit more therapy. Honestly, if we all could just do a little bit more therapy, the world would be a better place. Can you help like like brushing your teeth? It’s just something you do like we need to learn that like hey you go to the can do the yoga class like go to the 30 minute even group sematic or group whatever class it doesn’t have to be sematic whatever you whatever doorways open for you. Yeah and that’s that’s actually something that I’m working on is trying to release mini learnings that people can use in their real life for people who can’t access for whatever reason like therapy like this because it’s so important.

TrishaChronic illness is what it’s basically it’s basically a survival strategy in our body. So intellectualization is a survival strategy of the mind. Chronic pain can be a survival strategy of the body. Right? So part of the treatment of chronic health issues I think is looking at the neuroplastic symptoms the way the brain relates to those symptoms. And it’s kind of funny because I’m getting ready to defend my dissertation next week. This is and it’s been a really like wonderful but high stress summer for me. I mentioned to you I’m in Spain. Like I’ve been traveling since March. So I haven’t been at home. I haven’t been around my normal food. I haven’t been in a normal bed. I’ve been in a lot of countries where they don’t speak the language which could be really high stress things on my nervous system. I’ve been working on my dissertation. Haven’t really been feeling very well in the month of September. And a couple weeks go I was like I’m I’m done, you know, like I I’m done with this. I’m tired of feeling like this. I want to enjoy my time here. I want to feel well for my dissertation. And so, as silly as it sounds, I just decided that I was like, I’m not doing this. And so, every time a symptom came up, I would just kind of sit with myself and say, I know, I know, I know something’s happening right now and it feels scary and it feels like you need to respond to the symptom and go get a supplement, but maybe we can just sit with it for a moment, you know, and maybe we can add a little grounding and like look out the window together and just notice. And I’ve done a lot of work for my system to get to a place where that has actually shifted my experience so much in the last few weeks. And like I’m just a human, right? So even I forget that I have that power. But that’s how I want this to really land for people. Not as belittling that like you should just change your symptoms by changing your mind. That’s not true. But when you learn to work with your brain and with your body instead of against them, it’s as close to magic as A real-life experiment with fear, symptoms, and safety

Mitchyou get. Yeah. Yeah. that what you’re talking about is exactly what I’ve been doing as well with the neuroplastic symptoms. And I got a really funny story from like when it first happened and we’re talking about these because I could see myself just oh I’m a I’m a I’m a professional fixer. Like I know how to I know all the tools, you know, and like and those things can come in handy too. I can still use them and they’re great, but I have to notice when I’m trying to fix what’s going on by avoiding it. And so we’re talking about, hey, we’re just going to kind of sit with the fear just exactly. And I’m going to say, hey, I feel you. I know you’re scared as [ __ ] And and uh that’s allowed to be here. And I’m here with you. I’m not going anywhere, but I’m going to go back to my day and keep going. You don’t have to go anywhere. You’re allowed to be here. I want you to be here. Thank you for opening up this pathway. I’m going to work with you later because during the day, I’m going to build safety that I’m okay and I’m not going to go to my old compulsive stuff. And so, uh, the funny story is I went over to a friend’s house and as someone who’s had chronic disease for forever and has not has done everything perfect, you know, alcohol was a no no, right? And so, um, when I went over to a friend’s house, I when I had had alcohol, I would have like I’m waking up at 2 a.m. and I can I I can look on the Chinese meridian counter and I can see that that’s my liver and I’m like, “Oh, yeah, that makes perfect sense.” and now I can’t enjoy alcohol with a friend because um cuz it’s bad for me and you’re going down this rabbit hole. And then I I was just like, you know what, whatever. I don’t need alcohol. I’m not going to do it and it’s not really that big a deal for me anyways cuz I don’t drink that much. But I went over to a friend’s house and they were having non-alcoholic beers. And I’m like, “Yeah, I’ll have a non-alcoholic beer.” And I but I felt that fear of like, “Will this be too much?” That the stuff started to come in. So I’m like, “This is really interesting.” I had a full-on placebo effect. I had a buzz from drinking one non-alcohol non-alcoholic beer, but I’m telling myself like, oh, you know, the the the middle of the night wake up’s not gonna happen. And damn sure it did. And I just woke up at 2:00 in the morning and I’m learning about this work and I just started laughing out loud and I’m like, “Oh, now this is an opportunity to show myself that I’m safe, you know? So, instead of going to the typical compulsive, I’m going to feel that and I’m going to sit here and we’re just going to we’re just going to hang out. Maybe eventually I’ll get out of bed and do whatever I need to do and I’ll come back and fall. And that’s where and that’s where fast forward to the last couple of days or week I guess last couple weeks I’ve had that happen a couple times where I wake up and my adrenaline’s telling me to go fix it and I’m like, “Hey, we don’t have to do that.” And going back to sleep and waking up the next day and and feeling good instead of like this whole neuroplastic cascade happening, like you said, Sleep, prediction error, and memory reconsolidation

Trishait it it does feel like a miracle. So it feels like a magic trick. Totally. Because what you just described in a nutshell is neuroplasticity and memory reconsolidation. Like that is how we change these learnings just and that’s the prediction error that I was talking about earlier, right? Like you have to come in and say, “Oh, I’m feeling so urgent that I have to go fix this. Is this actually an emergency?” And then you get to say, “It’s not an emergency.” Right? I I play this I play around with this with myself all the time. There’s a really cool therapist on TikTok who talks about sleep. Who is it? Um, I’ll have to look up their name and I’ll send it to you because I can’t remember their name, but they talk about like this obsessiveness we get about have to get my eight hours or like I didn’t go to bed on time or whatever, you know? And I realized, oh, I have some of that. So, you know, I just play around with that and like mine is really silly, but what I’ll say to myself is like eyes close and people sleep. Like I just tell myself that. I’m like if I start feeling anxious, I’m like eyes close and people sleep. Doesn’t matter how many hours. eyes close and people sleep. And it’s just this way for me of accessing my adult consciousness

Mitchbecause well, I should add in when I imagine saying that I’m imagining my younger self, right? And she’s so so scared of like the bad feelings that come from not sleeping in bad feelings. Oh yeah. This same the same doctor that I just heard about that helped me so much because basically what he said was was like, “Hey, think about your mind and throw in the nervous system as well. When you wake up in the middle of the night, whatever woke us up, whatever jarred you,” and I don’t know if you I’m sure you’ve experienced this with the ripping out of sleep, you know. Oh, yeah. The freeze stuff coming up. Um, well, what happened is out of our control. Um, and we know that if we don’t get sleep tonight, the body resets. Now, that was a big belief that I had to overcome for 20 years. I thought that was possible, you know. So, I’m like, okay. He said, but what he said is, hey, the snow globe got shaken up. And the more you’re going to feed those thoughts of fear with what’s going to happen, I don’t want to feel good. I don’t wake feeling bad. Blah blah blah. I got to control everything. That’s just shaking the glove back up. But I’m learning to, hey, that’s a thought. Let it go. That’s a story. let it go. And that’s what’s kind of kept me uh feeling okay and able to go back to sleep for the first time in 20 freaking years is going kind of the similar thing you said eyes closing people sleep. Mine is, hey, don’t shake this globe. And if we shake the globe, we’re going to go out and and sit on the couch and I I’ll let the globe just do I I’ll sit there and watch you and I’ll go, hey, I can feel you getting hot and sweating and I got education. I know this is what the nervous system does. I know this is a I know that the the the the pathway for healing is open, you know, and I’m like this is a huge opportunity for healing now instead of this this scary moment. And it actually happened last night. I felt like um so I I woke up, felt the urgency, went on the couch, had all the sweat and different things coming out, eventually felt tired, went and laid down, woke up, did my practice, and what I and what was there, and I can feel the heat going in my body right now. What was there, what I thought was there was this fear of sleep, was this whole other thing of all these memories of sleep throughout my life. If it was like a daisy chain like boom boom boom boom it kept taking you down down down down and I have not cried. I mean I love to cry. I know that it’s stress hormones come out of the body. I’m cheering myself on but that was a big one you know and it’s like it feels like most of them are pretty small. Most of them are pretty titrated. But this was like a big thing coming out of my system. That’s why we got on the call in the beginning and I’m like what did I just say? cuz I’m spaced out and my system’s kind of reorganizing itself a little bit. That’s right. And and you never know like what’s going to

Trishacome up, but if the globe gets shaken, the globe will settle again, right? Like I’m excited because like unwittingly I don’t mean unwittingly because you don’t. What I mean is you probably don’t know this is what you’re talking about, but everything you’re saying is about mismatches and prediction errors. That’s exactly like I really think you could reduce down the the big portion of all of this transformational work to this process where you’re creating prediction errors for yourself, right? And and that’s as silly as my saying is, that’s a prediction error for me. My prediction is I won’t sleep and I’ll feel very bad tomorrow. There’s a 99% probability of that per my brain. But when I say eyes closed and people sleep, what I mean is there’s also a chance I will. I’ll sleep again. Sleep always comes. It doesn’t always come when I want it to come. But trying to get it there isn’t going to get it there any faster. Right? So what happens is if my brain says, “Uhoh, I woke up at 2 a.m. my favorite time as well. Right? 99.9% probability that I will not go back to sleep. I’ll be up for the day and I’m going to be anxious and in a bad mood and cranky.” When I say, “Boy, that makes sense that I feel that way.” You know, there’s a part of me that gets really scared that I’m not going to be feeling good tomorrow. And when I don’t feel good, that’s a trigger for me. Okay. Well, what I know to be true self is it makes sense that you’re scared, but eyes do close and people do sleep and will sleep again. The brain says, “Wait a second.” It kind of holds both up and it says 99.9% chance we’re not going to sleep and feel really bad tomorrow. But you’re telling me people sleep. Yeah. And so when you give yourself that active inference where you’re watching it, your brain will literally reorganize the data and it will say, “Put this into the data model.” Oh, well now there’s only a 99.2% chance that we won’t see and feel really bad tomorrow.

MitchIt reminds me of Byron Katie’s work fits in there nicely, too. So it’s like when you’re doing this and you’re you’re you’re questioning these two things, it’s like, well, now we bring in a little bottom up. How does it feel when I believe that? lights. You’re like, “Oh god, okay, that’s really good information. Well, what if I like trust that I’m going to be okay?” And and we went with that instead. Even if I’m not going to sleep, I’ll trust that I’ll get it again. It’s like tears, grief, I’m like, “Okay, so we’re on to something here.” And so now we’re using both systems like we’re talking about 100%. Who would I be without that thought is the opportunity for a prediction

Trishain Byron Katie’s work, right? Like who would I be without that thought? That’s like I’m so we’re reading unlocking the emotional based brain right now in the book club as you know and that book is all about memory reconsolidation. It doesn’t fully go into the prediction model. If I were to write my book I would talk about the prediction model and memory reconsolidation is a part of that. You don’t really need to understand all of these terms to understand that allowing your brain to see the old thing and the new thing at the same time and feel safe when you do it is the mechanism. The It’s like the Ohio State University. You know, they train trademarked the that’s where I go to school. They trademarked the and I’m trademarking the the transformational method of all therapy. And the book actually goes into in detail at the end IFS, somatic experiencing, AEDP, all of those things, the process by which they make change is this. And it’s true for the body, too. So maybe I’m sure you know through somatic work, pendulation, right? So pendulation is like one of my favorite things to do with people who are seeing me to do somatic work. Pulilation is a prediction error. When you say, “Wow, you’re feeling anxious all over your body. Is there any place where you might notice it like 1% less?” And they say, you know, and I’m always joking. I’m like, “Look at the tip of your pinky. Look at your baby toe.” And they say, “Well, maybe maybe my feet feel it just like 1% less.” And it’s like, “Oh, okay. Is it okay if we just hang out just for a moment in your feet?” And even if you get drawn back into the anxiety, it’s all right. Just see if you can find your way back. That’s literally a prediction error. What you’re literally doing is allowing the brain to say, “Oh, I’m not 100% anxious. I’m 92% anxious. That’s not as an emergency as I thought.” And so it updates the data model. Like that’s what pendulation is. The brain as a prediction model

MitchIt’s the same thing as sitting with something long enough like the pain in your neck to go, you know, maybe it’s not pain, maybe it’s just diet. 100%. There’s like multiple percentage tak coming off of there. That’s right. The brain is a probability model. And so you don’t want your brain to be making probability like predictions without your input, right? Because the brain left unchecked only cares about survival. If you want to live a life of a fulfilled embodied person, you have to be the one noticing the brain and changing the model. Otherwise, you know, there’s a saying and it’s like it’s not a 100% accurate saying, but the idea comes across that Young said until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you’ll call it fate. It’s

Trishalike saying whether you believe it’s true or not, it is. That’s right. And we act like, oh, this happened to me. It’s fate. I can’t do anything about this. And it’s like, no, it is a data model. It is all the past things that you have experienced synthesized into data that your brain uses to predict what’s going to happen. There’s a whole model around this. It’s called a Beijian model. John Bae, a very famous statistician, if you can believe, created this model of how we predict things in probability and statistics. That also we found out is how the brain works. It doesn’t and that came in so so handy in prime primitive times when you know I I the bear chased me away when I went to this side of the woods but now you know and so and so I avoid that at that area of and I feel like that’s who I am is the the bear avoider and now we had something scary that that freaked us out and now that’s constantly in our awareness triggering opening up this pathway that the bear is chasing me all the time and so we have to really bring in education and awareness to question that to show that hey that’s just your brain uh trying to keep you safe that it it it came up with the wrong decision and we got to teach the brain and it sounds like man this work seems so hard because we’re literally rewiring the brain and nervous system and that seems so impossible and now the more I get into it I’m like it’s actually pretty innate and pretty simple like I was explaining to my mom you know she’s 65 years old with this work and she’s saying I’m 65 years Oh, I’m like and this is the most human thing that we do and you can learn like you just people are always doing and I’ve seen this in myself so many times the thing that they’re asking for they’re doing little bits of it and it’s like that’s where it just hey actually you’re doing it here here and here and here’s some tools to bring in some more awareness and let’s let’s teach the brain that it doesn’t have to do this. You just name something so important, which is every single person I’ve ever worked with and every single person I ever know is already doing the thing they want to do. They just don’t realize it because the brain is filtering it out, right? The brain is only focused on the bears and the tigers. They’re not noticing like, “Oh, so you’re coming into therapy and you’re telling me if you have a need, the whole world will implode and everyone will abandon you.” Okay, interesting. Is there ever a moment where you’ve had a need and the world hasn’t imploded? And they’re like, “No.” I’m like, “Never. Never. Oh, interesting. Well, you did reach out to me and indicated that you would like to see me, which is kind of expressing the need. And then we met together and you also indicated you would like to work with me. You told me the days that you needed to meet and the times. I don’t know. It’s kind of seeming like maybe you expressed a couple of needs and what are you thinking? I’m still here. And and people will say, “That’s so small. It doesn’t count.” I’m like, “No, actually, babe. It counts huge. It’s huge because you’re having so many more of those moments than you realize. But because your brain is so focused on looking for the tigers and the bears, it doesn’t let you realize it. You’ve got to come in and say, I just made a TikTok yesterday. I don’t think it’s made its way to Instagram yet. The way I was talking about like, do you want to do something right now? Write down your core belief that you think you can never change. And then look for a moment in your life where it wasn’t true. No matter how small it was. It doesn’t matter if it’s the example I just gave. But notice if you can find a moment where the world didn’t collapse, the world didn’t implode, no one hated you, no one screamed at you, no one criticized you, and you did. You had a need. You set a boundary. You Because what does setting a boundary really mean? Setting a boundary could be setting a boundary with yourself. Yeah. So, it’s so cool because exactly what you said is true. We’re already doing it, but when you observe it, that’s Glimmers, resourcing, and micro-doses of safety

Mitchhow you build the pathway, right? The glimmer, is that a glimmer? Glimmer is a perfect example of that. Why are glimmers so useful? Because you’re basically micro doing safety. Yeah, that’s I think

Trishathat’s it’s always a micro dose. That that makes the most sense to me. That’s right. Everything is mic is a micro dose, right? So when you’re like glimmerous, people will kind of brush off and say, “Oh, it’s not a big deal.” It’s like you can micro dose safety all day long and your brain is eventually going to learn that it is safe to be safe. That is one of the most titrated ways to allow that pathway to form. So actually it’s really impactful. The same as resourcing in somatic work. Intellectualizers always want to come at me and say that’s just a distraction. Absolutely not. Resourcing is helping to build a neural pathway of safety around feeling good. This

Mitchis the witness intense sensation. That’s exactly right. Yeah. And it’s like so quick to shame those

Trishaas well. Oh, very quick. Very quick, you know. So, and that’s just clues, right? Like if I do resourcing with someone and they jump to something shame, which is very common, or they jump to like, well, it feels good, but it’s just a distraction. I know that somewhere in their system they learned it wasn’t safe to feel good. It wasn’t safe to be online. It wasn’t safe to enjoy. wasn’t safe to be

Mitchunprotected. So, it’s so much more revealing than you could ever imagine. Yeah. And that’s me with cannabis. Like I I shamed myself for that for so long. Um that and I would hear even mentors say, you know, people who smoke cannabis cannot heal. And that pissed me off so bad. And then I’ve I’ve learned enough times I’m like, it helps me feel my body, helps me feel more comfortable with my body. Some of my best connections with myself have been uh through that. And I know I don’t need it all the time now. I know that it’s a that it’s a tool that I can use at the end of the day to relax and I can take the shame out of it. And it’s like that’s why I love this work so much is

Trishabecause when we’re sick and we’re healing, we’re so dependent on everybody to tell us what to do. Here’s the perfect I was that dude and I realize I can’t tell you what to do anymore. I don’t want to tell you what to do. And man, that takes the pressure off me, too. But it’s it’s more about how do you feel about it? Is that something that’s a resource for you? We’re different. let them have it. So, I’m less about absolutes becoming more accepting. Who would ever have thought that? Uh, and being multi-dimensional instead of this black or white, it’s got to be this one way. Like, that’s that was a big that’s one that’s a whole another conversation, but I guess to Closing thoughts and what’s next

MitchI’m starting to come to a little bit of a a close here because me and you would go all day long. So, let’s just thank you so much for coming on. This has been an incredible conversation. I know people are going to love it. Um, tell us other than being in Spain and taking a little sbatical, um, what

Trishaare you up to? What’s on the horizon? What are you interested in right now? And where can people find you? Absolutely. Yes. Well, um, I’m leading my book club on Substack, which is just always an ongoing thing. And so, what I do is I take these big clinical or self-help books and I read them and create a podcast for people to translate it. So, you don’t even have to read the book really, but it’s a way of just making it so much more accessible because you might read a self-help book, but are you actually integrating it? Are you actually applying it and using it in your life? Most of the time, no. So, that’s one place I really love putting my energy because it’s kind of taking the intellectualization out of self-help and making it more applicable. So, that’s that’s one of my big ones. I also have a couple classes I’m doing. And I’ve got my five steps to change, which if you enjoyed the things we talked about today, it’s basically that model, the prediction error model in a in a simple way to apply. So I’ve got that coming up in a little mini retreat for um women who are intellectualizers, which is one of my favorite groups to work with to just really get unstuck together and move forward. So those are the main things coming up in 2025. I am excited to 2026 though because I had a dream long time ago about something called the trauma school and it was going to be this place where people could come and learn and engage in a way that made sense for them that was accessible and affordable but but really nuanced and important and realistic and I I feel so passionately about it because I love my work but also it’s not accessible for everyone, right? like it’s just for time, for money, for all these reasons, one-on-one individual work isn’t accessible or you’re doing individual work, but what are you doing for the rest of the week or weeks when you’re outside of that? So, I’m building my trauma school and that’s where I’m going to be releasing all of these mini learnings and my model that I’m building. Um, and you know, a lot of the content that I make on TikTok is sort of it’s sound bites for for social media, right? Like people’s attention span isn’t isn’t much over 90 seconds. But that’s where I’m going to be doing a little more long form how to apply it content. So I’m really excited about that. Oh,

MitchI can’t wait for that. I can I can vouch for your your book club and your educ one of my favorite people to learn from in the space for sure. Um if you if you watch some uh um Trisha’s stuff and you feel like that’s not you at first, you want to turn away from it, that’s okay. You know, just come back and and watch it a second time. And uh as those lenses change and our perception change, it’s so crazy how um we can digest this this this work a little bit more and you certainly make that easy for people. Um thank you so much for coming on, Miss Trisha. This has been awesome. Um would love to get you on again next year and and talk about some of this stuff as you’re getting further down the line in the retreats and the classes, the book clubs and the trauma school. That sounds really awesome. Um, so just thank you so much for the information that you shared. Thanks for joining me today and um, good luck out there. Good luck in Spain. Absolutely. Thank you so

Trishamuch. It was such a joy to be here and thanks for nerding out with me. Absolutely. Anytime.