Ep 62 with Rebekah Ballagh

Ailey Jolie: 00:06

Welcome to In This Body a podcast where we dive deep into the potent power of embodiment. I'm your host, Ailey Jolie, a psychotherapist deeply passionate about living life fully from the wisdom within your very own body. The podcast In This Body is a love letter to embodiment, a podcast dedicated to asking important questions like how does connecting to your body change your life? How does connecting to your body enhance your capacity to love more deeply and live more authentically? And how can collective embodiment alter the course of our shared world? Join me for consciously curated conversations with leading experts. Each episode is intended to support you in reconnecting to your very own body. This podcast will be available for free wherever you get your podcast, making it easy for you to stay connected to In This Body, the podcast with me, Ailey Jolie. Welcome back to How to Be in This Body. I'm your host, Ailey Jolie. And today I'm in conversation with Rebekah Ballagh, counselor, somatic, and nervous system coach, illustrator, and seven-time best-selling author. Rebekah is the creator of Journey to Wellness, a community that began as a set of hand-drawn illustrations for high school students she was counseling and has since reached over 350,000 people worldwide. Her books, including No to Self, Big Feelings, and her most recent 100 Ways to Find Calm, take the most complex terrain of nervous system work and make it genuinely accessible without flattening it at all. What I didn't expect from this conversation was how much of it would be about what I didn't expect from this conversation was how much of it would be about the people who already know the language, the ones who've read the books, done the therapy, can tell you exactly what's happening in their nervous system and are still feeling stuck. Rebekah works a lot with intellectualizers, and so do I, probably because I am one as well. During my time with Rebekah, we also explore parts work, the oscillation between anxiety and freeze that so many people live inside without knowing, and what it actually means to regulate, because it doesn't mean calm. This is a rich episode, and I hope that you enjoy every moment of my time with Rebekah on how to be in this body with me, Haley Jolie. My first question for you today that I ask every guest right at the start of our time together is what does being in your body mean to you?

Rebekah Ballagh: 02:36

What a lovely question. So for me, I think of this as almost this dance or this interplay of brain and body being in my body. And I think this may be my experience of that probably comes from having a history of panic and of you know trauma and fawning where being in my body wasn't a comfortable place to be. And so I love to intellectualize, and my head is a place that I'm happy to inhabit. And so being in my body for me now is about the dance between the two, between the head and the body, and about being able to tap into those layers of the unconscious by getting to be in your body in a safe way. So for me, that might mean like I feel connected to my my physical sensations and like the felt sense of being in my body. And sometimes that's really boring and really uncomfortable, and it's just as simple as recognizing when I'm tired or when I'm hungry or thirsty, and being able to listen to those bodies, my body's cues. So it's not only just being connected to it in the sense of I can feel them now, but I can be guided by them too. And I think that's what embodiment and being in my body has become was recognizing that my body is gonna generate things that um will really point me to my inner wisdom and solution. So, you know, my emotions that I feel in my body will point me actually to needs and my the impulses that I might have are they'll often be the things that show me how I need to process and experience or process stress and my intuition will signal alignment. But previously I wasn't able to feel and connect to any of those things. So yeah, it's it's this direct inroad to the unconscious and to needs and to wounds, but also to desires.

Ailey Jolie: 04:36

You mentioned an experience there that I would actually really love to kind of ground our time together in because it sounds quite influential for you as I've engaged in your material and I heard you on other podcasts speak about it. I would love to kind of speak or bring the listener into your experience of panic and now how it has informed the work that you do today, how you support others, how you attend to your own body. You can that question is quite open-ended because I would love to hear a little bit of your journey.

Rebekah Ballagh: 05:05

Yeah, I think um not actually realized that I actually had anxiety and different protective patterns and hypervigilance for my whole life, but I didn't have the language for that, and I didn't know that that's what that was. And a part of that was because in my family of origin, my upbringing was there was a lot of like mental health stuff going on. And so, you know, I was raised with someone who was agoraphobic and have panic and depression and anxiety, and you know, had had OCD tendencies in the past and all kinds of things, but that was really masked and came from an era where that there was shame attached to those experiences. And so when I look back, I recognize that actually I've had anxiety and those kind of tendencies to fawn and be hyper-vigilant my whole life. But for me, when I started having panic attacks at the time, it felt like it kind of came out of nowhere. But I was in my mid-20s and I was facing a diagnosis of a pituitary tumor. So this is a um tumor in the pituitary gland of your brain. And it sort of started this cascade of I was no longer able to ignore my body because it was not well and it was not a comfortable place to be. And I was actually ironically a counselor at the time. So I worked with purely cognitive methods, and I was in a situation where I was speaking in my work about anxiety and started having a panic attack. And it was all very ironic when I looked back that I was talking about this whilst panicking and realizing I was panicking because I had, you know, enough kind of knowledge and training behind me to recognize that was what was happening. But for me, what it did was it started off this snowball effect of having more panic attacks because my brain obviously had so strongly linked that emotional experience of being seen was being to be under threat. And so every time I would public speak or be in a situation where I felt I could be judged or seen, I would have these big panic attacks. And initially I did what I think probably most people do is try to avoid it. And I developed a really strong fear of the fear, and I tried to use all my CBT tools and you know, all of my reframes and some behavioral stuff, and nothing was landing. And I actually look back now and I'm so thankful that it got to the point of the um having the health problems and the panic, because that's sort of what led me to there is something missing in this. And starting to see, of course, with clients too, that there'd be things missing in our work, like I would be coming up against walls that I couldn't seem to get around. And it was because we just cannot purely work at the level of the head. And panic attacks don't happen at the level of the head. And so it was a very interesting wake-up call to realize that I was lacking some things in my toolkit. And that's sort of what really drew me down. Nervous system work, somatic work, and parts work, like you know, internal family systems. And those have been the things that have freed me in the end.

Ailey Jolie: 08:19

Can you share a little bit more around having training and experience as a counselor? Maybe helped your experience of getting a medical diagnosis, but maybe in some ways also hindered it because it can go both ways. It can be really helpful because maybe you know how to kind of do the mental reframing, but then also you can use that mental reframing. And I may just be projecting on you, so please correct me if I'm wrong. Very open to that. Also, that framing can be used to minimize things or deflect or kind of push it away. And so I would love to hear from you how maybe that experience, having the knowledge that you had, was helpful or maybe not so helpful.

Rebekah Ballagh: 08:57

I have all always found this a really interesting battle because the further and deeper. I got into the training outside of the counseling degree, so the training that was more somatic and parts-based, I could see it having these profound effects on clients and the people that were in the client's seat in trainings and using it. And I was always actually really resistant to being in the client's seat of these practices. All I wanted to know was the why. Like, give me the science behind it so I can understand it and then it'll work for me. Like, let me read about it and let me study it, but I don't want to do it. I don't want to practice it. So I found that really an interesting resistance of almost having to learn to trust that my body actually had some wisdom or some experiences that I wasn't able to access through my mind. Um, so it was, it was obviously having that training has been helpful in that I feel I've been able to be really reflective on myself and kind of, you know, we can almost psychoanalyze ourselves and figure out the why and the what's wrong. But it can also be a hindrance because we want to intellectualize everything. That has been the greatest gift was being in these trainings and having to be in the client seat and then actually getting to form a relationship with my body again, and one that wasn't built on trying to fix things or pathologize things or see everything as symptomology. So I'm I'm very kind of the opposite of um diagnosis and you know, pathology, and rather everything is kind of protective and adaptive and functional, especially at the time. It may not be serving anymore. But yeah, it was definitely um a blessing and a curse being in that world and having that knowledge and trying to apply it to yourself. How do you feel like it's changed you as a clinician? So I have I feel like I've developed this complete and utter trust in the process, more so. So I don't feel stuck with people now having done the training in somatics and in IEFS, because in the past, had I worked with someone who maybe had resistant or didn't want to do homework, and of course, that's what we used the word resistant in the original training was if a client's resistant, how do you work with it when they won't do, you know, X, Y, and Z? When you go through the trainings and you recognize that your body is doing things to protect you and that it has all these um layers of wisdom, those types of things when you meet them in the room, they're actually really excited. It's exciting when there's resistance or it's like, oh, this is beautiful, potent wisdom that somebody has. And so actually, rather than resistance, it's like, how is this protective thing showing up in your life? So I think it's really informed my work of being able to truly have faith that we all have access at the end of the day to this in in a in IFS you call it self, or you know, we all have access to this sort of whole organicity, this this beautiful place. And it gets, we get to help clients uncover it. So we're less focused on what are the distortions and the resisting patterns and the things to fix and change, but more about what's the wisdom that's here and how can we help um you organically kind of complete that and find safety again. And it feels like a more compassionate and hopeful kind of mix of modalities to use and work.

Ailey Jolie: 12:38

What type of clients do you find are most drawn to the work that you offer today?

Rebekah Ballagh: 12:42

I think I typically work with what's typically women who come into the space who are intellectualizers. You know, they often understand their patterns and they've often done talk therapy and they've tried lots of things and they're still feeling this sense of stuckness in some of their patterns. And I I guess I can maybe thank social media for this because a lot of them also come in with the language of like they know that there's dysregulation in the nervous system, or they come in with quite a lot of that language, um, which social media has been, again, a blessing and a and a curse for in our work. So it's a lot of um, yeah, it's a lot of women who have uh either are stuck in the overfunctioning or have done that for so long that they're now more so in the collapse and in the burnout. And that's probably one of the patterns I would see the most is people who like they sort of sway between the two of everything's all go, the stress is high, um, they're intelligent, they're working, they're getting it all done, and then they get completely stuck and they can't get up and they can't get going, and um, you know, they feel really frozen and they they can spend every day swinging between those two patterns and wondering what on earth is kind of wrong with them. That's that's a a pattern as well that's really common. And I think a lot of people who even work in this space feel this initially too. This like I feel like everybody else kind of knows something I don't or has it together more than me, but there's something in me that's just fundamentally broken or off or isn't responsive to change or these other modalities. And I think a lot of us have come into the work, or a lot of my clients will come in with that sense, this underlying part of them that's just really afraid that they're gonna be stuck in the same place in 10 years' time still. And actually that part's really it's a beautiful little uh part that's wounded, right, and has that fear for a reason, but often ends up being kind of the handbrake on the healing.

Ailey Jolie: 14:51

How do you work with someone who does intellectualize if you kind of break down that process or give the listener a few tidbits of like, okay, what do we do when we are someone who's intellectualized things? We've picked up some therapy language, we kind of have a sense of what's going on. I would love to hear from you around how you support that person, because I'm imagining that there's one or two listeners who might identify with that.

Rebekah Ballagh: 15:17

Yeah, it's it's those of us who read the self-help books and then we get to the exercise and we go, no, no, I'll come back to that and we keep reading. And then I think it's about approaching that uh this is how I would work with it is approaching that part of a person or that part of me when I when it pops up. What we would do is look at that as a protective pattern. So, okay, this person or I have developed this pattern of being up in my head. And does that mean maybe I'm underfeeling as well, like I'm disconnected from my body? And getting to get really curious about why it is that we um have such an activation of wanting to be in our heads? What is it that this part of us is afraid would happen if we were to drop into body, whatever, whatever that means. What would it mean if we did the exercise or we felt our feelings or recognized the cues and the sensations and the needs inside? What would what's the fear around doing that? And often it is that people have this real, um, they might have a fear that it'll totally overwhelm them. If they were to start to cry, they may never stop. If they were to start to feel something, they may be flooded by that thing. It might be that the intellectualizing, they discover that it's about meaning making. And so there's a part of them maybe that felt like there was no control. Their life was chaotic, or they had to be hyper-vigilant and scanning and always kind of thinking and being two steps ahead all the time. So usually the intellectualizing overthinking part has been doing this beautiful, amazing job in our lives of keeping us safe. And that's certainly what mine was doing. It was about always reading the room and scanning all the time and trying to think through scenarios so that I could plan out every what if, make sure that didn't happen, or adjust myself to please others. And I was always trying to just figure out why. And it was also because, yeah, my body wasn't a comfortable place to be. There was all kinds of anxious sensations in it, and I didn't really want to be there. So I'd much rather read about, you know, how to get out of these patterns than actually do the bodywork that it requires to get out of them. So I think that's the first step is just getting really curious and compassionate with the part of you that intellectualizes. Because when we can kind of understand it more and where it's come from, usually we're able to drop out of a place of judgment and shame. So when it comes up for me now, I mean I must look so bizarre, but I'll talk out loud to it. Like so my hand will be on my heart and I'll and I'll be saying something like, Oh, okay, I know you just don't want to feel this, and all you want to do is worry and think. And I get it. I get it, my love. You've had to do that in your life. But do you know what? We are gonna go, we're gonna slow down, we're gonna see what this feels like. Oh, we're gonna process this differently, and that's gonna be okay, and I'm with you. It's gonna be uncomfortable, but I'm with you. So that would be how I would talk to it. And then I guess the second piece for people who intellectualize is just starting to tentatively dip the toes in to the water of what it feels like to be in the body. And so depending on the person, there might be only 30 seconds worth of just checking out what sensations are drawing my attention the most, or is there a where do I actually feel that? Oh yes, my chest is tight. Okay, I'm just gonna be with that for 30 seconds. Whereas others would be able to fully drop into a process for a long time. So it would depend on the person's like safety and resources and and trauma, if they have a lot of trauma there, that may be very intelligent not to be in the body. So we would sort of titrate and dip in really slowly and just start to feel what does it feel like when my body is trying to tell me something? And so often that's not going straight to feelings or discomfort. It's just, oh, well, how do I know if I'm hungry? Or how do I know if I'm thirsty? Not in my mind because I've said it's 12 p.m., it's lunch, and I should probably eat now. But is there a sensation in my gut that tells me that? So we're just starting to kind of bridge that gap of communication.

Ailey Jolie: 19:34

You've used a lot of language that comes from internal family system, which I've been able to pick up because I'm certified in internal family systems. I spent my time there, but aware that the listener may not know where some of this language is coming from or may not know parts. And because you've used the language, I would love if we could spend some time exploring internal family systems, how it's also maybe really impacted your clinical practice and how you've seen it impact clients as well. Yeah, beautiful.

Rebekah Ballagh: 20:01

Isn't it the most exciting modality? I just absolutely adore it. And I love using it in combination with things. So I'll I'll often use somatics in combination with it, or I like to work in a really eclectic way. So I might not in a session with a client do a full kind of parts exploration immersion. Sometimes I do, but recognizing often that clients will use the language as well without knowing it. They'll often say, you know, there's this part of me that like really wants to do something, but another part of me is constantly holding me back or is really afraid. And I guess that we actually talk like that quite a lot. That's ultimately what parts work in IFS is recognizing that we are not actually one mind and one personality, but that we're made up of these layers and these multitudes of parts of us. And the parts of us have their own little personalities with needs and wants and fears. And to break it down, like the most simple way that I tend to break it down for clients is that we have protective parts and then we have wounded parts or exiles. And that's the stuff that carries the pain that our protective parts are trying to kind of manage and keep us away from in different ways, keep us away from feeling. And so the protective parts might be things like anxiety, that's a protective part, or perfectionism, or an imposter syndrome part. And I tend to see like these particular parts come up over and over again. So I kind of named them archetypes and created programs suited to each archetype, but it's things like one's called the suppressor, and that's the part of us that does shut us down and detach us from our body, and it feels like depression sometimes or a lack of motivation and disconnect that we experience. And then one's called the critic, and we all know that one. And then one is called the achiever, and we have this part that is kind of pushing and striving. And wanting to take all the courses and always be doing the best and trying to kind of work and constantly strive and do. And then we have the anticipator, and that is the part of us that carries anxiety and hypervigilance and scanning and worry. The appeaser, who I'm very familiar with, who likes to fawn and people please and read others and maybe self-abandon. And so those just as a few examples of some parts that we might work with in our clients and in ourselves as clinicians. And they pop up and they we don't just have one, we have lots of them, and they kind of sometimes have little arguments within themselves, and they're all protecting something. And they all come from somewhere, sometime in our life where things were really difficult, um, or we went through trauma or repeated relational ruptures. And so we have these parts of us that form and then they kind of get stuck and they end up a bit outdated. And so when we do parts work with clients, it's actually about well, okay, how can we come into a really compassionate and curious relationship with these parts, but also help them to soften and give them a new job and help the person to become call it more self-led. So you're in a seat of what what a self is just curious and compassionate and connected and all of those lovely things where you feel kind of regulated and centered. And that's what we get to help people do with um with parts work. And I think for me, on a personal level, it's been pretty much a game changer with how I kind of operate in in the world and how I relate to myself.

Ailey Jolie: 23:43

I would love to hear from you. You named a few there, but if there are parts or core beliefs that are behind parts that you find yourself working with most often, because all of us probably have a suppressor or an overachiever or a part that maybe fawns, I think these can be quite archetypal in a way or quite common. And so I would love to explore with you what are some of those parts that you see quite commonly and how do you support them?

Rebekah Ballagh: 24:10

So it's really interesting. I was really interested to find out what people fell into more so. And obviously, most people have all of those parts and then and then a few more in the mixer as well. But I recently ran this um this workshop. Uh, it was called Healing the Shadow, and we explored parts work, and then we took this quiz that helped people to determine what is their kind of most dominant part out of those five. I was working through at the time with my most dominant part is the achiever part. It's the part that I think maybe comes with being an entrepreneur as well. It's like you just you can't stop working sometimes. And it's about that balance of worth being tied up with it. So in my mind, I was thinking we might have lots of people in there, lots of people in the appeaser. And I was really curious. And so afterwards, they sign themselves up to take a five-week journey through this. Is on this is what's on my membership, and they go through these five weeks. So they sign up to their most dominant archetype, and it delivers them to their inbox, like little cognitive practices, somatic practices, resources, and things, and they follow it. And I was really surprised to see by far the most dominant archetypes were the anticipator and the suppressor. That's what I am seeing at the moment is the most dominant pieces are the part of us that kind of tends to preservation and conservation and freeze, kind of shutting down. And then the part that pulls us out into hypervigilance and anxiety and stress and worry and scanning. And initially, when you think about those things, they feel like opposite ends of a spectrum. You know, one is is highly sympathetic in its charge, and one is so much more of a shutdown state. Actually, it makes total sense to experience them both in your life at different times as your nervous system kind of tries to help you survive a day. And sometimes it just absolutely slams on the gas and sends people into go, go, go mode. And then naturally, because yes, we've finally got going and got moving and got motivated, but it's not coming from a place of feeling safe in doing that. And so then at the end of the day, we slam on that the brake again or rip up the handbrake and the freeze takes over again. And both of them are, you know, protective. Both of them are trying to, like maybe our anticipated part is saying, like, I um, unless I am busy, unless I am always kind of checking and moving and in control, I'm not safe. You know, the world in at one point in that person's life might have been chaotic, or things may have happened that felt totally um derailing or outside of your control, or there might have been people in your life that you had to always be vigilant around so that you knew how to act. So that part is serving that purpose. And then naturally we go into freeze because it's exhausting to have that amount of like activation and mobilization all the time. So the other protective part says, I just need to shut this all down because it's too much to feel all of this. And I'm trying to keep us safe by literally not allowing you to move and keep engaging in the world and with people. And you know, so when people when we can frame them up and understand them like that, they actually make complete and total sense as to why people are feeling that. And maybe more so as well, I don't know, the world feels pretty chaotic at the moment as well. I think there's a lot of things that are really bubbling uh to the surface and a lot of really big existential issues and big power dynamics, and people have that natural flux in that too, of sometimes being really activated and wanting to engage in it and feeling, you know, really stressed and hurt by it and feeling anger or feeling angst and anxiety. But then the natural kind of pendulum swing to that is I can't look at this anymore. I can't engage with this anymore. I I don't want to see this anymore. I feel like there's nothing I can do to change it. And so then we get that other protective suppressing part that comes online.

Ailey Jolie: 28:24

Thank you for bringing in some of the existential pieces and that like lens of how these parts respond to the culture, but also what's occurring in our world right now. And I would love to hear from you how you have maybe noticed the culture of therapy online or mental health care culture change in response to how our world has shifted over the last five years or 10 years.

Rebekah Ballagh: 28:52

I've been really like heartened and loving seeing the nervous system work and trauma work and somatic work has become way more popular and talked about. Like I think about even just on my own little journey through social media. I think I started my page maybe seven or eight years ago now, and that wasn't out there in the space uh at that time at all. Certainly not in a really kind of mainstream way in the way that it is now. It's like every second kind of reel and post on my feed at the moment is that. And I realize that's also because I follow a lot of it. And that's been really beautiful to see, but then there's been this um distilling of some of it, or people I think have often because the nature of social media, right, is that we have to have really interesting hooks and headlines. We have to catch people's attention, we have to say something is a hack, or that something that can be distilled into five steps. And so a lot of the somatic practices became prescriptive in the world of psychology or social media therapists and things. So it was always like we do this exact practice when we feel anxious, or and I've absolutely um, you know, done those things too and given people here's five movements for people pleasing or things. And there can be real validity to that because it's opening so many amazing conversations and getting people to experience it. But then I think on the flip side, what started to happen was someone would say, I have trauma in this part of my body, how do I get it out? Or you know, I'm experiencing this emotion, how do I release it? And it became very prescriptive. And I saw a lot of people make courses that sold here's a practice to do, you do this and you'll have released all of your trauma in five weeks and things like that. And it lost the nuance, I think, of what real somatic therapy looks like, which is often working with a person's kind of impulses and their incomplete and sorted um threat responses, and working with their unique body and you know, pendulating that or titrating that in really gentle and safe ways. And then regulation became about calm. And so in the face of what's going on in our world, in our cultures, and in our lives today, everyone wants to learn how to what's the hacks to regulate so that I can be calm in the face of all of that. But then now it's really beautiful seeing uh lots of clinicians, and I know you're absolutely one of those people, and I've seen your writing about it, getting people to start to realize actually it's really adaptive to feel rage in the face of this or to feel freeze when something really overwhelming is going on in your life. And maybe in those moments, regulation is not calm at all. Regulation is capacity. It's like I can be with this feeling and I can safely express something, and I can hold faith and trust that it's okay for me to be deep in a really difficult emotion, and that I will also be able to then come back to more capacity or spaciousness after I've been able to sit with it. And so I think like everything in life, um, it's a pendulum and I think it swings constantly. Yeah. So it's I'm I'm again heartened to see again how the nuance is starting to come back in in a really big way now, and it's really beautiful.

Ailey Jolie: 32:39

I would love to hear from you maybe to pick this apart a little bit more. What are some of the ways that you have seen, if you have and maybe you haven't, how the lack of nuance has maybe hurt or minimized or made the journey of healing maybe a little bit harder in some ways if you have picked up somatics and haven't actually encountered it in, you know, I would say one of its basic premises is that it's unique and it wasn't intended for everybody in a unilateral way. It was intended to be a deep self-inquiry of your body, which is not anyone else's. And so when if someone has encountered that kind of more unilateral, you know, it's all the same, more homogenous, how you work with that and how you maybe support kind of moving out of that frame because it can be a bit challenging if you're like, oh, but these are the things that I always do for anxiety. And it's like, well, actually, these things are the things that would be really helpful for you. And it can be genuinely very confusing. I I look online and I'm like, I'm confused and I have a master's degree, and that's like, what is going on?

Rebekah Ballagh: 33:44

Yeah. That'll even feel really reassuring for people to hear, even you hear you say that is to go. We're confused too with some of the stuff. And it is, it's trial and error, and it's uncomfortable. And but yes, you're right, and it's such an important thing to name. And I feel really honored and so um blessed and privileged when someone comes into my space having maybe done some of this work before and it and it's not gone well, and they'll share that with me. And it I feel so privileged to get to help them maybe normalize some of that and validate their experience and explain why and maybe unpick some of the harms. Because you're absolutely right. A practice that works for someone is not going to work for the person beside them. So I often teach about how is it then that we kind of test our practices if we're gonna use them, if we're gonna use them in a way that is more prescriptive. So rather than say someone going into like a therapy session where there's somatic tracking and parts work and impulse completion, say a person is just gonna sit down and do a course or a class that does lead them through practices, then it's about how does that person get really informed with is it, is this sitting okay for me? Is this working for me? Testing practices for that individual person, what feels okay in their nervous system. How do I know if my nervous system is responding to this practice in a positive way or not? And like a perfect example is for anxiety, lots of times people will um recommend a certain practice. And it might be that they might, you you might count the certain amount of breaths in and a certain amount of breaths out. And that's like a really simple somatic practice that you see everywhere. If I do that when I'm really anxious, it makes me feel so much worse because my breathing has gone way out and I can't do it to the rate that I'm being prescribed. And so then I get ear hunger and that panics me more, and I don't like it. So I don't do those breath practices. Same thing when we do like classes and I'll teach a practice and get people to test it before and after. Some will come back and say, man, that felt amazing. Like I just feel spacious and settled and I'm yawning, and someone else has just gotten totally agitated by it. And so it's not about that being right or wrong. It's about is this right for me? And at this point in my journey, because it might be okay for them down the line. And that I suppose is the real trauma-informed piece that a lot of professionals who are in the work as coaches or a lot of courses will miss, as really, we've got to teach people how do you do any of these practices in a trauma-informed way. And so it's important that people learn about titration and pendulation and minimum effective dose and all of those things when they're doing the practices. A lot of people respond really well as well if they have had those kind of experiences with somatic work is just to um understanding kind of maybe a little bit of the neurobiology behind why they haven't responded well to it. Like sometimes if you're doing vagal drills, which became a really big thing, right? Sometimes they're so beautiful, but other times people feel like really nauseous from it or they start to feel dizzy. And so understanding, oh, okay, there's actually something going on in my nervous system here that isn't responding well to this because I'm having too much vagal activation. And it's activating a part of my nervous system that's, you know, conserving some things where it shouldn't. And this is not a practice that is useful for me. So getting a little bit of that science and understanding behind it. Also, people I think need to know sometimes a somatic practice might make, or doing somatic therapy say, might make you feel quote unquote worse in the beginning because you're actually starting to feel things maybe that you've never felt in your body before. And then as your body starts to feel safer, sometimes things that are starting to be ready to process will begin to bubble up. And that can be really alarming to people and catch them off guard. And so even a recognition that yes, we might start to feel things that feel really uncomfortable, but then what's the limit there? Are we still within our kind of window of tolerance and able to hold the discomfort, or are we going too fast and we're flooding and we're recreating conditions of trauma? So, yeah, there's a lot of nuance to it and to somatic work, which I think is probably why some people do get harmed by it if they follow someone who maybe doesn't have the training in that nuance.

Ailey Jolie: 38:15

You said some words that I would love for you to explore so that the listener knows what they are. You said pendulation, titration, and minima, minimum effective dose. Could you explain what those are and and how they play into the practice of somatics as well?

Rebekah Ballagh: 38:29

Yeah. So pendulation, you can literally imagine a pendulum swinging in your mind. It's a term that was coined by Peter Levine, and it basically means about how do we move between something that feels activating or distressing, and then move back, swing back to resourcing and safety. So it's a really beautiful tool to help people process things, like maybe memory or a sensation, um, something that feels a bit stark. And so you might sort of step into okay, I'm just gonna feel some of this anxiety, or I'm just gonna play a little piece of this memory or whatever it is. I'm going into the charge, I sometimes call it, like into some of the activation or the emotion, the distress. I'm with that for a little bit, as long as I'm still kind of within my capacity. I'm not totally dysregulating myself. And then after it could be 30 seconds or it could be five minutes, you kind of shift your focus and shift yourself to a resource of some kind. So often I'll get people to physically stand up and move around their space and touch things, or sometimes we come into a specific movement or whatever it is that helps that person feel kind of resourced and build a bit more safety back. And then you would go back, back into the charge, and then you swing back out again. And that's actually the nature of trauma work in general as well, is that we kind of go out into the sticky, icky, tricky stuff, and then we come back back into the safety, back to base camp, stock up our resources, use our tools, and flow back and forth between the two, and it helps us to kind of process things because rather than being out and flooded by an experience, our nervous system gets the the felt experience of, oh, I can be out here and then I can feel safe again and resourced and I can move between the two. So it really develops this sense of agency and safety alongside something that might have felt quite distressing or unsafe initially. So that's pendulation. Titration is just about doing things in little bite-sized doses so that again we're not flooded. And so I think of it like the analogy would be if you know that you've got uh a whopper of a headache coming on, and you know that when you take two panodol, we call them, I don't know what we call them in America, Advil or something. I don't know. We take two painkillers, that's perfect, that's gonna work. You know, if you take three or four, that is too much for your system, that's you're overdosing, it's not helpful. But if you took one, it mightn't work. And so we're kind of finding that dose and taking just enough of it. And that's kind of minimum effective dose too, to be honest, is that kind of blend together a bit. So titration is yeah, just about little steps. So again, if someone um is finding it really hard to be in their body, well, I I would never ask them to do like an embodiment practice that was 20 minutes long. I might just say, can you feel your feet on the floor at the moment? No, you can, and then that's it. And we've just done a tiny bit in and we'll come back and do a bit more next time. Minimum effective dose probably actually worked better for that Panadou analogy, is just what is it, what's the minimum amount I can do something, do our practice or spend um uh, you know, resourcing myself that's gonna work, that's gonna create maybe some capacity without flooding and doing too much or without doing too little of the thing. And so we actually get to do the bare minimum in this work, which is really nice. It's like, oh, I get a permission slip to do just enough that it it works and creates some change. And I don't have to spend hours and hours a day doing it because that would be too much of a dose.

Ailey Jolie: 42:21

Thank you for slowing down and explaining those terms for the listener who may not have known what those were or how they apply. I would love to hear from you if there are other terms or concepts in the realm of somatics that you maybe often find yourself explaining or teaching to those that you work with one-on-one, but also in your community as well.

Rebekah Ballagh: 42:44

I think we do a lot of things around um impulses and tracking. So um, when we do somatic tracking, it would just be about how we would follow sensations and let them organically kind of unfold into the next thing. That tracking is a process of organicity. So it's sort of trusting that your body kind of quite organically knows often how to process something, and we stop that organic process when it feels uncomfortable or we don't like being in our body and in our sensations, or we try to come up into our heads. And so we do somatic tracking quite a bit with okay, so where is this in the like what is my attention drawn to as I talk about this experience? Is there somewhere in my body that I can feel that? And then we really just create a lot of space for it. So rather than trying to rush it through or make meaning out of it, it might just be can we simply sit and witness something for a bit and see what happens next, see where the sensation moves to, how we might describe a sensation. And that in itself, that process of kind of unfolding, can really teach us quite a lot and in itself can be quite healing. So, you know, when for example, you experience Experience anxiety or maybe a bit of self-doubt. Usually we kind of we feel that and it's uncomfortable. And so we move straight away into avoidance or we might move into trying to fix it. So straight into like a regulation practice to kind of move it through and feel calm again at the end. If we have that capacity and that ability, which is a muscle that we work out, we don't immediately, you know, have that. But if we start to actually just let that be and let it unfold organically for a little while, often it sort of moves itself through. And we also then get this new learning, this brain kind of reconsolidation of, oh, I can be kind of with something and that not flood me or that not feel like a threat to fix. And we so we start to teach our body that these things aren't threats. So our sensations and our emotions aren't threats and that they'll often just move themselves through. So probably do quite a bit of that. And um, we might talk about impulses and intuition as well quite often with somatics. So what is it that, you know, is this as you talk about this, I'm noticing you do this particular movement, or is there something that there's an impulse that needs to be followed here? What is it that your body wants to do in this moment as you remember this or think about this or feel this? And kind of connecting people into that intuitive knowledge the body has that it will it will often find its own ways to complete um our stress responses and move things through. But we are often really conditioned into thwarting our impulses and our intuition. Um, I think as women or as people who have maybe been fawn or people pleasers in our life, we get really disconnected from what intuition and impulse feel like. So that journey back to connecting to those things is a really healing and beautiful one.

Ailey Jolie: 45:58

Before our time ends today, I would love to ask you what is one thing about the body that you wish the listener knew or felt?

Rebekah Ballagh: 46:10

That's a lovely question. That there's nothing wrong with you. There are no bad parts of you, and nothing is broken. And so if you are able to turn toward your body with curiosity and with compassion, you'll often find that a lot of ease and healing can begin to organically unfold when you approach your body from a place of thinking that it is wise and protective rather than broken and burdensome.

Ailey Jolie: 46:42

Thank you for all of your wisdom, the way that you share online and how you have metabolized your own personal experiences into professional wisdom. It's very evident to you. I wanted to ask you: do you have anything upcoming that you would like the listener to know about? Um, anything that's you have?

Rebekah Ballagh: 47:02

So there are lots of ways to work with me, and I have a free course that people can take. Um, and then my main beautiful offering is my membership. And so we have a gorgeous community of people who come together and do this work, and we have lots of self-paced resources, but also live workshops and somatic classes and offerings every month. Um, the archetype journeys are inside the membership as well. And I'm also offering facilitated trainings. Um, so we have one coming up, but it's all full up. So if people who are professionals want to learn how to use this work and incorporate it into professional lives, they can get on a wait list and join the next training.

Ailey Jolie: 47:51

Something Rebekah said toward the end of our conversation is still with me that nothing is wrong with you, that nothing is broken, that if you can turn toward your body with curiosity instead of suspicion, healing starts to unfold organically. I think that sounds simple until you actually try to do it, because most of us have spent years, sometimes decades, treating the body as the problem rather than the place where the answers lie. What I kept thinking about as we talked was how many people are walking around with a working clinical vocabulary for what's happening to them, and yet they still can't find change. They know about the nervous system, they know about parts, they know about the window of tolerance even, and yet they're still stuck in the same loop. Rebekah names that group of people, the intellectualizers, she calls it. And I think she names something really important when she does. Because understanding something and being able to feel your way through it are not the same thing, not even close. The knowing lives in the head, the healing lives somewhere else. There's a clinical observation underneath this that I want to sit with for a moment. When someone intellectualizes their experience, it's not resistance in the way the word is usually meant, as if the person is being difficult or withholding. It's protection. The head became safer than the body at some point, probably quite early on, probably for good reasons. And the job isn't to argue them out of the head, it's to make the body safe enough to come back slowly, partially, with absolutely no pressure to arrive all at once. That's what pendulation is really about. And I love that Rebekah took the time to explain it so clearly today. Not diving in and staying in, moving towards something activating and then coming back out, teaching the nervous system that can go there and return, that it won't be swallowed. The oscillation itself is the medicine and titrations starting with 30 seconds, starting with your feet on the floor is not a lesser version of the work. It's the work done correctly. The piece about the anticipator and the suppressor being the most common archetypes her community identifies with is something that stayed with me because on the surface they can look like opposites. One is in charge, one is shut down, one is the gas pedal, one is the break, but they're actually not opposites at all. They're the same nervous system in two different phases of the same exhausting cycle. High activation that has nowhere to go, followed by a collapse that isn't real. And most people caught in that cycle think something is fundamentally wrong with them, and there isn't. It's the body doing exactly what it was designed to do in conditions that were never designed to be permanent. I also want to name a thread in this conversation about regulation and what the word has come to mean in wellness culture today. Rebekah was clear about this, and I agree with her completely. Regulation does not mean calm. Calm is one possible state, but regulation means capacity, the ability to feel what's here without being taken over by it, to be in the charge without flooding, to be in the grief or the anger, the fear, and know that you will also be able to come back. That is a very different goal than the one a lot of somatic content on social media is pointing towards. And the gap between those two goals matters clinically, especially for people who've been harmed by practices that were too fast, too big, too prescriptive for their particular body and history. If this conversation opens something up for you, if you recognize yourself in the intellectualizer, in the oscillation, in the person who knows everything and still can't quite get in the body, you can find me in Inbody. That's where I take this off the page and into the body with real practice, real community, and the nuance this work actually requires. You can find out more at inbodymethod.com. Again, thank you for listening and for being in the tender, ongoing process of coming home to your body and allowing this podcast, our guest, and me, Ailey Jolie, to be a part of that process for you. If you found value in this episode, it would mean so much to me for you to share the podcast with friends, a loved one, or on your social platform. If you have the time, please rate and review the podcast so that this podcast reaches a larger audience and can inspire more and more humans to connect to their bodies too. Thank you for being here and nurturing the relationship you have with your various body.