Ep 71 with Jordan Dann

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, Aile 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 more 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. Today I'm in conversation with Jordan Dann, a psychoanalysis, somatic experiencing practitioner, and certified Gestalt and Imago relationship therapist in private practice in New York City. She's the author of Somatic Therapy for Healing Trauma, co-editor of Experiential Therapies for Treating Trauma, and she's a teacher at the Gestalt Associates for Psychotherapy. She trained as a theater artist, and that legacy of knowledge is deeply infused into our time together today, but also how she practices as a clinician. Our conversation moved into territory. I didn't necessarily expect it to. We spend time exploring voice, what it reveals diagnostically about where the body is held. This led us into exploring her integrative approach to couples' therapy, where she doesn't impose a model on a couple but enters the system as it already is. We also spend time speaking about rupture and repair as physiology rather than technique, about why the therapeutic relationship itself is a laboratory for this work and about the seasons of therapy when cognitive work is the right fit, when somatic work becomes possible, and what it's like to do the long structural work of genuine change. Jordan holds psychoanalytic depth, somatic literacy, and the relational field in the same hand without flattening any of them. And I really enjoyed our time together. I hope you enjoy this episode of How to Be in This Body with Me, Ailey Jolie. So my first question for you today is one that I always start the podcast with. And I would love to hear from you. What does being in your body mean?

Jordan Dann: 02:43

Being in my body has been the way that I have found my way home. And it continues to be the way uh the most immediate source of wisdom for me to keep evolving and growing and also continuing to notice where what remains unattended to. I was writing this morning about boundaries and somatic boundaries. And um, the more and more I have attended to the way my history lives in my body, the more intimately connected I have sensations of those states and the echoes of how my history lives inside me, the more I am able to really, really determine what remains unfinished from the past that I need to keep um excavating and attending to. And also has increasingly helped me understand what I am being offered in the present that is uh indication of what I need to move towards or move away from. And beyond that, like I just want to highlight the delight of being embodied. The more at home I have become in my body, the more uh yeah, the more that feeling of inter not only connectedness to myself and to all the parts of myself, but the intimacy of interconnectedness with people, with the larger field, with nature, um, to be able to sense all of the ways my body is responding and attuning and meeting. Um that the the endless joy of that um is just the only way I can really imagine looking.

Ailey Jolie: 04:55

Thank you for providing a very robust and quite inclusive understanding of how you hold that phrase, being kind of being in your body. There's one line that really stood out that I think is a quite a beautiful thread for the listener to get to know you and your work and why I wanted to spend this time with you and have the opportunity for the listener to learn from you. And you said in there a line of how my history was influencing my present moment, something to that kind of effect. And so I would love for the listener who's new to you, what history of yours led you to the somatic practice that you offer today? Yes, you are a trained clinician, but you have sprinkled on lots of somatic processes and training that you didn't necessarily have to. So I would love to kind of hear a bit of your process to somatic work and what you offer today.

Jordan Dann: 05:52

Yeah, so um before I became a therapist, I was a theater artist. There's a lot of us out there. And so from being a young child, I pursued musical theater training, dance, um, and then went more and more deeply into training in physical theater and voice work for the actor. And, you know, I for many years I I performed. Voice and singing were such a really strong aspect of my identity as an artist. And um so for me, the voice is so central to my somatic practices. Um the voice as a mechanism, a vehicle for embodiment to not only diagnostically to hear um and understand uh where tension lives in the body, but also the more freedom there is from tension in the body, the more vocal expression we have, the more we are able to use our voice in dynamic ways. Um and for me, really singing was like this radical relational practice to sing with other people, to harmonize, to feel it was like an embodied practice of finding other voices. That moved me towards graduate work. I got a um did an MFA in theater education, and I started teaching young actors and performers. And it was really teaching young actors and performers that being on the other side, um, you know, for so many years, being in acting classes where it was really an intersection of psychodrama and catharsis in uh with the justification of that being necessary in order to become a better performer. You know, looking back now as a trauma-informed practitioner, I really can see how problematic that was on so many levels. But when I was inside of it as a performer doing the doing the catharsis, you know, there were aspects of it that felt so great. It felt very um it felt very healing to be in a container of other people speaking to moments of trauma in my life and feeling um witnessed. And and so it wasn't until I actually got on the other side and I was holding the space for other artists to do that that I started to go, no, this doesn't feel right. And where's the discernment about when you're working with an a body and at some point it stops being about the piece of text that we're working on and actually is an intersection with implicit somatic material and um unprocessed trauma, and how do how do you hold that frame for for a young artist and and what is the what is my responsibility essentially as an educator to be able to psychoeducate here around the discernment process about you know what's vo voice work and what's clinical work. And as a certain point, you know, where when I as I kept encountering these moments when I would be coaching or working with a student, and I was like, oh, oh, we're not in the theater hall anymore. Um we're not in the rehearsal room, we're in this person's childhood, we're in this person's memory in ways that feel really um vulnerable and very tender. And at a certain point, I just stopped being interested in training actors, and I really felt called to move into just the healing work. Um but and I first trained as a gestall therapist, and so gestall felt like the OG of somatic therapy to move towards, and um also the focus on working in the here and now also felt very resonant with a lot of the way in which theater training occurs, which is about attending to recreating spontaneous experience in the here and now. And then at a certain point, just clinically and theoretically, I I kind of encountered uh the end of what Gestalt can offer in terms of somatic um theory, and then that moved me towards somatic experiencing. And um, but I very much see my somatic roots in creative practice, and um I very much see my somatic roots within the the understanding that the more we become embodied, the more um we have access to our vitality, the more we have access to self-expression, and the more we have access to our creativity, and that that is the most joyful aspect. You know, self is a creative process.

Ailey Jolie: 11:19

And if we have freedom, if we have access to our ability to be in the present, um, then the more creative we feel, the more related we become, the more embodied we're there are many things in your answer there that I could have jumped in, or I was like, the listener can't see us nodding along and smiling at several points. But I want to well, maybe move through all of them. But one of the things that you spoke about right at the start was voice and the power of voice. And this has been something that I have been uh quite transfixed by, because my voice, even definitely a decade ago, but we could go back further than that, has changed so much. And I see that as a real reflection of the schematic practices I've done, some types of therapy, other healing modalities. And there's actually been some like stark shifts in my voice between practices that I've engaged in. And so I would love to just hear a little bit more from you on this because singing has become a deeply kind of embodied experience for me. For me, it feels like a time when I'm like, oh, the energy can actually move through my body. I can't even actually hear the sounds that I'm making with my vocal coach. I'm just like more interested in having that type of release and having that must-flecture kind of vibration, which I know sounds a little bit maybe strange, but I know you're gonna be able to dive into this more. So I would love to hear about the role of somatics and voice, how you work with those two things together. And you said something there that like really piqued my curiosity because we have a little bit of research on this, but definitely not enough, around how voice can be a diagnostic kind of marker for where the nervous system is, which again, a little bit of research, not a lot. So I just love to kind of hear a little bit more about this really niche area that I think is quite special, and it sounds like you've got a deep well of wisdom on.

Jordan Dann: 13:12

Well, first I'm curious how you would describe the change that you Yeah, definitely.

Ailey Jolie: 13:19

I have more depth and texture to my voice. There's a more robust quality to it, and I it really pendulates, so it can be very low and earthy, but then I can still reach that really, I would say, quite socially conditioned, high-tone, pageant voice that I had that is just like super high. It's very I can move now and have this range I didn't have before.

Jordan Dann: 13:45

Yeah, so the specific form of voice work that I um studied is Linklater voice technique. And the whole premise of Linklader voice technique, started by Kristen Linklater, who is the she's since passed away, but she used to be the head of acting at Columbia University, is all about freeing the body from extraneous tension to provide maximum freedom for self-expression. And so it's there's so much incorporation of Feldenkrais and Alexander technique and yoga, and you're really working um methodically, first starting with the breath, because um our breathing patterns uh habituate in relationship to our environment. And so that means the and also dependent upon our environment, our whole our whole there's no separation between physiology and environment. And so our somas are a direct reflection of that environment. And so where we have chronically and habitually held tension, um, you know, if there's chronic tension through the through the pelvis and even in the um in the sphincter, there's going to be less space for the bottom of the channel to resonate. Um, everyone's, you know, our our body is an instrument for our voice. So the more relaxation we have access to, the less chronic tension, the more our instrument has space, and the more space we have, you know, the more resonance there is in the voice. If you think about vibrations, vibrations die with constriction and they thrive with freedom and with from tension and relaxation. So, you know, often I when I'm talking about the voice, I'm thinking about like vibration as bees in a hive. And if you have a really tight, dry hive, there's no place for the bees to move. But if you have a you know, supple, spacious honey, lots of honeycomb in there, then the bees can move around and and and they just amplify, and there's more honey. Where we hear, if we really understand the vocal channel, which is the at the bottom of the pelvis, even through the legs is the base of the voice. And then we're moving up through the channel into the chest and up into the mouth and up into the nasal and up into the eyes, and even up into the heavens. And so you can start to hear once you once you feel, and back to what you said before about you don't pay attention to the sound of your voice, you're paying attention to the felt experience, and that's absolutely right. Um, similarly to your work around interreception and that externalized gaze, the same is true when we're trying to listen to our voice, we're bypassing the felt experience of vibrations moving through our body. And where we can feel those vibrations, that's we can send our awareness and amplify resonance in those areas. So diagnostically, similarly to somatic resonance as a practitioner or just as another human being, if you have felt awareness and and to your own body, you can feel where someone's voice is located, where it's coming from and where it's not going to. So we hear a lot of like culturally vocal fry for a long time was like really, you know, a popular way that mainly women spoke or baby voice. Like there are all these kind of um ways in which voices adapt that sometimes reflect the wider social field and sometimes actually are diagnostically relevant to understand where someone might have kind of gotten stuck developmentally. Um we can hear when someone's voice isn't actually embodied. There are a lot of voices that just like come right straight out of the mouth, and you can hear that someone's actually not having access to the rest of their body. A lot of men force their voice down to be held at this position, and inside of that, we lose all actually not allowing the voice to move to other parts of the register is actually a way of cutting off from vulnerability because actually when our voice moves up here, that's where vulnerability lies. And that's when we suddenly uh are in touch with that felt experience in our own body with the affective experience. So when you force your voice to habituate a certain level, you're cutting off parts of yourself and parts of your self-experience.

Ailey Jolie: 19:17

How does the role of voice play into the work that you do with couples today?

Jordan Dann: 19:23

Well, so much of my work with couples is well, I think a couple of ways. One is sensitizing them to their vocal prosody, how tone is often a immediate threat response for an individual, how often what can feel like a totally um appropriate, non-critical voice to the person speaking can organize for the other as threatening. So it's a lot of sensitizing and deepening um attunement to the quality of voice that creates feelings of safety and receptivity and the the tones and qualities of voice that send a message of threat. And also, you know, just like I'm always doing with eye contact or body language when I'm tracking that in real time in a couple session, I'm also modeling and inviting each partner to get much more attuned to their co-creation of the relational field. And you know, voice, just like body, it's like this orchestration and understanding all of those dynamics and how we play our voice and how we play our body and how we play our words. Um the more we understand how our instruments are playing, um, the more choiceful we get about what melodies we want to play, and the more we start to actually begin to play with our partner and create music together that's much more melodic with range, as opposed to dissonant and something that we don't really listen to.

Ailey Jolie: 21:29

I know I just asked you quite a specific question around voice and how that plays into somatic work, specifically when that work is being done in a couple. I would love to kind of rewind us back and just even hear from you how somatic couples therapy is maybe different or similar to kind of regular couples therapy, whatever that is. I'm not exactly sure what regular couples therapy would be, but that kind of that conception that we get that two people come in and they they chat, they have a chat, you know, they have a chat, they receive support. How somatic work is different in your office?

Jordan Dann: 22:04

Well, there's so many different kinds of couples therapy. A lot of couples therapy is very concrete skill building or um or impos uh applying a model, whether that's Gottman or Among O relationship therapy, where you where the therapist is kind of imposing a system on the already existing system of the of the couple. And the way I work is really integrative in nature, which is actually as the third, I'm enter, I'm entering into the system as it already is. And from a psychoanalytic standpoint, I'm really like listening and feeling to understand how the system is already self-organizing and beginning to make that much more explicit for the couple. So rather than teaching relationship skills or imposing a structure for communication, um, I'm really allowing myself to enter into the system and see what's already happening. And then I'm tracking that in real time. I'm kind of again, I'll just pull keep pulling this music metaphor, which if if if I'm just listening to what music the couple is playing, I'm often pausing, pausing the music and bringing awareness what's happening inside, what's happening inside your body, what are you noticing, and dependent upon the couple's capacity and their respective observing egos, a lot of the time I'm naming what I'm seeing because my explicit naming of what I'm seeing in time allows them to become much more aware of the instrumentation that they're playing. And I'm really helping each individual in terms of the somatic work. I'm really helping them to befriend their nervous systems. I know that things are headed in a negative direction before the couple knows. And so I'm I'm trying to pause before that cascade of the pattern takes off. And I'm and that's that intersection and working that intersection over time that awareness enhances, and then over in time, choicefulness can emerge. Um, it's that moment where threat activation takes, it gets triggered before that escalation, which is this extraordinary pattern from the past that was so protective at one point. That's the moment I'm really trying to work, and then working in a multitude of different ways. Sometimes it becomes individual work where I'm working with that individual's intrapsychic system, bringing in the young parts, enhancing the felt experience of the defensive strategy, helping them move back into some more regulated, integrated state so they have their adult capacities online and they can see their partner in a more reality-based way safer, more with more goodwill. So, and some so a lot of early work with couples is moving between pausing so they can notice the music they're playing together, working with the respective instrumentation that each individual has that enhances their capacity to understand what's music that's playing from the past versus what is the music being played in the present or could be played in the present. And helping them make new moves, play their instrument with a little more finesse, bring in a little less percussion, a little more flute. Um, and to really over time help them more and more to actually start to feel this third entity in or fourth entity, I guess, in the room, which is the relationship. Um, and that's the thing that they're co-creating. That's a little bit that, a little bit each of them. Um and the more differentiated each person becomes as a result of understanding what their inner system is orchestrating, the more able they are to, with more immediacy, take responsibility for what's theirs without being defensive and choose to play a different harmony.

Ailey Jolie: 26:56

What are some common melodies that people bring in with them into the couple's therapy room that maybe they don't hear that they're playing again with their metaphorical flute from childhood?

Jordan Dann: 27:08

It's all your fault. Is a song I hear a lot? It's all my fault. If you could only X, then I would be Y. Let's see. Um, why do you want so much? Why do you give me so little? I'm the one who's taking care of the relationship. I do all the work. Are we even are we even here? Are you even here? I mean, I think those are the most common top hits.

Ailey Jolie: 27:35

All of those, at least to my ear, sound like a form of relational rupture. They could lead to relational rupture. And so I would love to spend some time hearing from you. What happens in the body when we have a relational rupture with someone we love and care about or or are in partnership with?

Jordan Dann: 27:54

Well, it depends on your nervous system, but there's some initial impact, some like tension, some feeling of threat. And now, dependent upon your nervous system, that threat will manifest in different ways. Sometimes it'll be a kind of freeze that takes over. Sometimes the rupture will then become extra outward, so the the rupture will move quite quickly from some disconnection or feeling of threat to defensive response. But it feels like, I mean, the best the image that's coming to mind as you ask that is like when you crack a lightstick. It's that initial feeling of charge that happens internally and uh a feeling of threat that follows.

Ailey Jolie: 28:49

I would love to hear from you a little bit more about rupture and how that plays out in relationship and why repair is so essential and why repair maybe needs to include the body to be to bring back that co-relation, co-regulation, but also the integrity of the relationship.

Jordan Dann: 29:09

So, yeah, rupture and repair is the breaking and restoration of relationships. And you know, rupture's I think to really understand rupture, you have we have to kind of hold uh like even thinking about uh early developmental, these moments of that we move, um we're we're in connection, and then something occurs. It can be for a baby, it can be the mother turning away, or it can be the mother being too close. There are these moments where some experience of threat occurs in the body, and then the work is about staying with staying in the relationship long enough for safety to be re-established. And in our adult relationships, um, ruptures run uh run the gamut. It can be I've sighed from across the room and my partner doesn't respond. You know, this is where Gottman's bids for connection are really helpful because we make explicit bids and we make implicit bids. And it's any moment where we feel missed, misattuned to, or actually hurt. Um and what matters most is our ability to track that first and foremost in our own system, um, and to be able to start to orient towards the wound. Um, and that's the hardest thing to do, and that's such an essential aspect of couples therapy, is to move to individuals more and more towards feeling safe enough to be able to attend to the vulnerability as opposed to the defensive structures that override vulnerability. The more we're able to be with the vulnerability to say, Oh, that I felt so disappointed when you didn't respond when I sighed, the more likely it is that the other person will move towards repair, move towards understanding. Um, but that's not usually how it goes. Often we if we don't have real practice, both feeling the embodied experience of the wound, um, then we're gonna more quickly move into stories and projections and defensive strategies that ultimately then start to criticize our partner or we withdraw from our partner and we extend that experience of a lack of safety and distort our ability to feel understood and felt and seen and also responded to. So the the more the more practice, the more competent couples get, or and you know that we that we get, we get this opportunity in therapy too. And a therapeutic relationship is all about rupture and repair. And the more we're able to dance in those moments to say, oh, something happened, what what what's going on? What what what what happened inside of the stimulus I took in from you, and how is that organizing inside me? And the beauty is especially in a therapeutic relationship, we're getting to sort that out in real time and be able to actually differentiate the projections and narratives that we are being driven from the past versus the reality of what's happening in the present.

Ailey Jolie: 33:14

This may take us down a different path, but I would love to hear from you, knowing your clinical training, just elaborating a little bit more on something that you said around how therapeutic relationships, and these are my words, just interpreting yours, is a practice of relational rupture and repair. And I'm bringing you this question because in the age of social media and how influencer culture and therapists just somehow merged into something I often discuss with my supervisor, sometimes this just feeling that clients are coming more for validation than anything else. And this actual principle of what you just mean there, therapeutic relationships really being about rupture and repair. I've noticed in just my short time being a therapist, just under a decade, that my clients are kind of less willing or they're more interested in like that stuff they see on social media, which is a little bit more validating that doesn't really talk about some of this undercurrent stuff. And I know that you have a psychoanalytic background. So I would love to hear a little bit more about this, also to bring up a conversation that potentially goes into kind of uh demystifying like what is actually going on in therapy. Like, yes, you receive validation. That is an important part, but there's also other stuff that we're doing there that I think sometimes doesn't get on social media because it doesn't fit into like acute, you know, reel or post. And I'm glumping myself in with all of this as well.

Jordan Dann: 34:44

Well, I guess I'd start by saying part of what I really appreciate about you as a writer is your capacity to really hold nuance. And I think you you you do that very well in your writing and your teaching. And I also think that um, you know, people want quick fixes. They want something simple. Fritz Pearls, the innovator of Gestalt Therapy, said that people don't come to therapy to get better, they come to get better at their games. And I think with what you're saying about validation, people want to well, I don't know. I mean, I think I I think I would say that on some level they they want to be found out. Maybe on the surface level or the more conscious level, they're they are looking for validation in the turn in the form of um yeah, there's nothing for you to be responsible for. Everybody else is the problem, and you're doing fine. Um but true liberation and um psychological wholeness comes from doing the really hard and I would say long-term work of excavating your interiority and taking radical responsibility for everything. The world is a mirror. I think that's the I mean, this is why I love psychoanalysis. And I've I I have been in therapy consistently since I was in my late 20s. Um and for many, many years I wasn't even really doing the work. Um, and some of that I think was a result of not working with very skillful practitioners, some of it was a result of the layers of my own trauma that I was not yet actually willing to look at. Some of it was a result that my prefrontal cortex was still developing. I mean, there were so many factors. Um but even that, you know, good enough mediocre therapy then was an important ground to allow me to stay curious and actually get ready for some of the much harder work that I needed to do. Um, it's not finished, like there's still new dimensions and edges I'm encountering around my own early developmental trauma. Um there of like I've worked through a lot, and yet I'm still paying attention to the very subtle ways in which my system still organizes and constitutes itself around stimulus that reminds me of my past. I I really feel like psychoanalysis while while our lineage has some real issues, while Freud left a traumatic legacy that I think the the field and the larger society is still sorting through. What what it did offer is a deep, deep commitment to an exam living an examined life, metabolizing everything that is unmetabolized, both from your own lived experience and intergenerationally. And the more that that occurs, the greater potential for love and work. And that kind of commitment to doing that messy long-term work of relationships is what leads to a great life, and that great life leads to enhanced capacity to contribute. I have a have a supervisor who used to say um like if I want to know, if I want to know about how you well you understand yourself, I'm gonna ask you what kind of therapy you've done. Um I think different modalities speak to different people. I think um that for many people uh and uh entering a kind of cognitive-based therapy is a safer way to begin to be in a relational process. It's a safer way to start to let someone in on your inner world. Um but and and I think cogn cognitive work was certainly plays an important part in my own treatment um in how I w work with patients, but it's gotta it's gotta the you know, in being an experiential therapist, I'm usually building a cognitive tree in order to hold hang experiential fruit upon. Um and so there's a lot of utility to cognitive work insofar as I think there's a lot of safety involved. I think there's a lot of um utility that many people benefit from in terms of structure in starting to think about thinking. Um I think there are a lot of people who enjoy worksheets and um homework and having uh a process that feels much more short-term and true and goal-oriented. And so I think for many people, at least what I see uh in my practice, is that's how a lot of people start therapy and they benefit from that, and then they go back into the world, and then they notice the next kind of limit that that has meant for them. And sometimes that's behavioral, and then they want to kind of get more understanding around their behavior and get another program that focuses on behavior. And then at a certain point, what ends up happening is people go, okay, I have a lot of insight, I've acquired a lot of tools from my tool belt, but I'm still not experiencing like a fundamental structural change to who I am. The places where I get stuff, which are ultimately always in relationship, are still happening, and I can't break out of that. And that's when I feel like the work is about doing somatic work, and usually at that point, people have uh a foundation and have developed much more trust in a therapeutic process, there's more openness to starting to do some of that work that is much, much more about trauma processing. I think to do the kind of treatment that I do, it requires quite a lot of courage. Um and while I try to really be thoughtful in terms of scaffolding treatment around building safety, even in that, to show up in a room where someone's observing you and heightened awareness to pointing out those ruptures and repairs and what's happening in real time, it takes a real courageous willingness to to look inside and to trust someone to be in that kind of intimate process. So I think in terms of what what what therapy when, it's like what do I feel like I'm I have capacity for right now? And when does that shift that I have more capacity for something that feels a little more depthful, a little more challenging? Um, and then you know, I'm so much uh in I love when patients leave. I love when they feel like, you know what, I got what I came here for, and I got something a little extra. And I'm like, yes, go out and live your life and know that the door is always open, and that you know, I think that's so so vital is that we start to understand that in the moments throughout life, developmentally, when we Move into different phases that we can always come back to therapy and be in a healing relationship again. You know, stuckness is a result of a lack of external support. Relationship is how we move from where we are to where we want to go next.

Ailey Jolie: 44:17

Thank you for naming the capacity piece because I definitely one thing I've experienced in being kind of more embedded in somatic psychotherapy or body-centered psychotherapy is sometimes a little bit of shade being passed on cognitive therapy. And there have been many moments in my life, specifically going through illness, where I had to go back to a CBT therapist to just be like, this is where we're at. This is the exact right frame. And I think it's so important to know that there are different modalities for different seasons of life and that it's okay, and one isn't better or worse or higher on this spectrum. It's just like actually, it's all about learning, about relating and learning what you need, and only you know if you can kind of tap into that inner voice. And this ties into what will be our final question today. I've really enjoyed spending time with you and have learned little pieces. Is I would love to hear from you if there's anything that you would like to leave the listener with, maybe a piece of wisdom or guidance around how they can connect to their own inner voice or the voice of their body.

Jordan Dann: 45:26

There's no one way to become embodied. There's no right way. Your body is the home for your experience of the world. And whether that's starting by placing a hand on your chest or extrasoception, starting to notice how the temperature of the air feels on your skin, or what happens inside is you look at the plants in your room. Like there's just as there are so many different forms of therapy, there's so many different paths to coming home to the body.

Ailey Jolie: 46:16

A few things I want to stay with before we close. Jordan brings something rare to voice work, the marriage of the link later technique with clinical nervous system literacy. And I want to name for you what's underneath the diagnostic claim she made about voice, because it's not mystical, it's physiological. Stephen Porges' polyvagal research on the social engagement system shows that vocal porosity, the melody range, and the warmth of human voice is one of the most immediate signals the nervous system uses to determine whether another person is safe. When Jordan talks about the voice collapsing into the chest or forcing down to a flat register or staying locked in the upper register without ever descending, she's describing the somatic residue of a nervous system that has been in sustain protection. If this landed for you, the place to begin isn't a vocal exercise, it's breath, where your voice lives when you're with different people, with your partner, mother, stranger. That data is your nervous system speaking. I also want to take some time to return to something Jordan said that I think deserves really careful handling. She spoke about taking radical responsibility for everything. The world is a mirror, the inner state drawing in the outer. There's something here true clinically. Our nervous systems do shape what we perceive, which dynamics feel familiar enough to enter, which relationships our bodies recognize as home, even when they hurt us. Repetition compulsion is real, nervous system patterning is real. And I don't want anyone listening who has been hurt by a partner, a parent, a system to hear this as what happened to you is because of your inner state. That is not what Jordan meant. And it's not what I'm saying either. The work of examining interiority sits alongside another truth that much of what has happened to us is not ours to claim responsibility for. It belongs to the people and the structures and the histories that shape the conditions we survive. Holding both is the work. I also want to speak about the question of validation I raised with Jordan. I'll say what I didn't quite say in the conversation with her. What concerns me about the validation, heavy therapy content online is not that validation is wrong. Validation is often exactly what someone needs, particularly early in the work, particularly when they've never been met or honored or held. What concerns me is that validation without rupture and repair can become a closed loop. It can teach a nervous system that's only safe when it gets agreed with, that it's not that that is not the same thing as being well. The practice Jordan described, that being able to stay in relationship long enough for a wound to be tracked, named, and repaired, that capacity is what actually changes life. Validation is a beginning, it's not a destination. And one last thing while I have you here that I want to offer, because Jordan didn't exactly have time to get there. She spoke beautifully about rupture, the light stick, crack, the threat, the defensive cascade, what repair feels like in the body is the other half of that signature. And I think it's so worth naming. In the body of the person, there's often a softening at the jaw and throat, the breath deepening, a willingness to meet the other person's eyes again. In the body receiving repair, there's sometimes a small, involuntary exhale, a settling in the shoulders, the nervous system registering. I'm not alone with this anymore. Repair is not the words, the words are the vehicle. Repair is what happens in two bodies after the words are spoken. Whether the nervous system of the person hurt actually registers being met, that registration is a real thing. And without it, the repair has not happened, regardless of what words were said. If this conversation opens something for you, my work at embodymethod.com is built around exactly this territory. It's all about the embodied work of coming home to yourself. You can also find me on Substack at AileJolie.com where I write long form essays on embodiment, relational healing, and the clinical depth underneath it all. Both are paid and free offerings, and I'd love to have you there. Again, thank you so much for joining me and for allowing me to be a part of your process of coming home to your one and only body. 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 that you have with your very body.