Ep 72 with Sara Hirsh Bordo

Ailey Jolie: 00:06

Welcome to In This Body, a podcast where we dive deep into the pop power of embodiment. I'm your host, Ailey Jolie, a psychotherapist deeply passionate about living life away 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, Alais Jolie. Before we begin today's episode, I want to share something with you directly. I know that you may have become accustomed to each month starting with a solo episode, but for the next few months, I'm going to be pausing my solo episodes. Instead, the guest conversations will still be released each Thursday, and I'm glad that you will because I have so many amazing voices, episodes full of wisdoms to release for you. But the solo episodes where it's just you and me are going to be put on pause for a little while while I put my full attention on my own health. If you've been listening for a while, you know that this isn't the first time I've had to put the podcast on pause so that I could focus on my very own body. I hope that when I fully return and am back to offering solo episodes, that you are still here listening to the podcast, and that in the meantime, you truly enjoy all of the guests that I've spent time recording with over the past few months. I'm not disappearing. I'll still be around on social media, and there'll still be an opportunity to spend time with me in the fall in my In Body program, or you can spend time with me in person in November in Costa Rica. I truly hope that you enjoy the next few months of guest episodes, but also that you really enjoy the episode I have for you today. It's a special one. Welcome back to How to Be in This Body. I'm Ailie Jolie, and today I'm with Sarah Hirsch. Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux. Sarah spent years as a documentary filmmaker before she became an author, and her first book, Autoimmunity and the Good Girls, carries that documentarian's instinct into the most personal territory there is, her own body. This book goes through not only her own story of illness and recovery, but the stories of thousands of American women living with autoimmune diagnoses, whose voices she gathered and sat with and let shape the book alongside the research she completed. In our conversation, Sarah and I moved between her story and the science beneath and all. I wanted to bring you this conversation because I know how many of you are living inside in conditions similar to the ones Sarah names. The ones where being good has quietly become the thing making you unwell. I've also had my own autoimmune diagnosis, and I know how much that profoundly changed how I related to my body, to others, and the way that I show up in the world. If you are someone who's struggled to let go of the binds of being the good girl, or someone who's lived with an autoimmune condition, or are simply in our shared world, there's something in this episode for you. I hope you enjoy this episode of How to Be in This Body with me, Ailey Jolie. So, my first question for you is one that I always start the podcast with. And I would love to hear from you and your perspective. What does being in your body mean?

Sara Hirsh Bordo: 03:56

What a beautiful question and way to ground. I believe that being in my body means being in an authentic, sovereign relationship with myself. I believe that so many of us have been raised to have a relationship with our body that might be more of a character played instead of an identity embodied. And I believe that for a really long time I was operating in a body, but I wasn't in my body. And that's changed.

Ailey Jolie: 04:38

I'm imagining, and this might also be a little bit projecting, that some of your lived experience is behind how you came to just describe being in the body. And so for the listener who's new to you or is just getting to know you, I would love if you could share a little bit about maybe some of the experiences that you have had that have shaped your belief or your perspective that you just beautifully articulated for us.

Sara Hirsh Bordo: 05:05

Well, I just turned 50 years old, which is such a delicious age. And it's also one that numerically I haven't aligned with yet. But when I think about my journey of 50 years and my experiences and my environments and the stories that I was told and then adopted and then absorbed and then lived from, I feel like, wow, that's a lot in 50 years. I think so many of us, I think if you're alive right now and you have a just a sense of maybe having lived before, you have a resonance with just how much life we're living so quickly. And for me, I feel, beloved, that my experiences as Sarah, probably before the age of three and a half, was very much authentic and true to me as a as a little as a little me, as a little girl. And then a catalyst occurred, as does for so many of us. And I my twin brothers were born. And I went from feeling, I have this sense, I can still feel the warmth of my parents' hands, one on my left and one on my right. And then I remember that changing. And I think that if you're a fan and a member of your community, then you're likely very empathic and sensitive and present. And I do remember this overnight going from having two warm hands to having no hands. And I think at that point, my identity and the story that I began to tell myself was, you know, for three and a half years, I felt really loved for just being. And now I'm starting to learn that I feel loved for my doing. And in creating safety within my body and within my experience, the stories began to shift and they began to almost be rewritten in real time. But no one beloved was telling me those stories from the outside. That was the experience that I was living that was writing the stories. And then I began to intimately and cellularly feel I'm safer when I'm good. I'm safer when I don't need anything. I'm safer when I can take care of myself and be in service of my family. And that identity shape shift, I believe, is the most, it almost had the most amount of power until I reclaimed that power for myself.

Ailey Jolie: 08:10

I love that you already brought in the elements of being and doing and the divide that can happen there. And for the listener who's maybe their curiosity has been piqued by that, um, if we could slow down and I want to invite you to explore like how we can notice in our lives if we have a belief of like to be in a relationship, I need to do versus a belief that's maybe to be in relationship, I just need to be how that can kind of show up maybe in subtle ways from the time that you've spent hearing other people's stories or maybe even sharing a little bit about your own story and discerning that and really acknowledging it. And then maybe we'll get into a little bit of like, what do you do with that if that is your experience right now and you're stuck in at doing instead of being.

Sara Hirsh Bordo: 08:55

I would love your and I would love your expertise because you know, I'm a documentary filmmaker turned author now. There are so many experts that I interviewed for the book because I just really wanted a delicious landscape from science to soul of validating and supporting what I felt was a hunch that then I validated with research, and then I heard echoes in my conversations with other women. It's so interesting, isn't it? Because I wonder what stories feel like in your body. I know what stories feel like in mine, and I know that there is very much a sense of inauthenticity for me that used to feel almost held captive, sister, by a feeling of fear. I believe that my fear of disappointing other people, catalyzed by my girlhood, almost had this experience of the story that I was telling that wasn't mine, but that was to please, had almost like an owner on the outside. It didn't resonate as Sarah's truth. It felt like a narrative that was being driven and increased in volume from the outside. It was almost performative without knowing it was performative. It was again this character that I began to play, which I mastered quite quickly. And then when we master something, and then the mastery feels good inside, almost like it's an achievement, but it isn't for us. It's almost held as truth and need and belief and pleasing on the outside. I talk about how I believe that before I could be built upon the stone that was me, I began to build myself on quicksand that was in response to what was needed of me on the outside. And I believe that when we hold ourselves almost in relationship, completely reliant on outside admission, outside approvals, our identity is never built on something sturdy that is self-defined. It's built on something that is fragile and wobbly and completely in dependence with an outside source. I guess that would be my answer to your question.

Ailey Jolie: 12:13

What I would love to hear a little bit more around, because I know that this is in the book and what you get into, but I would love to hear a little bit more about how you started to challenge that in your own experience to give the listener a little bit more of if they're hearing things. I love the image of building yourself on a stone instead of quicksand. Um, definitely really resonates with my lived experience. I think I'm now just at the place of being like, oh, we're putting stones on top of the actual stone that is me, which is which is different. Um, so I would love to just hear a little bit more about that experience that you do a beautiful job of sharing bits and pieces of in your book. Blessings.

Sara Hirsh Bordo: 12:51

I would say that the reclamation wasn't catalyzed until a crisis was very clear. I think so many of us that are raised caring very deeply about comforting other people, caring very deeply about being the caretaker in our family, feeling very deeply about not wanting to cause anyone any trouble and being very careful that we don't take up too much space. That real estate wasn't really rocked until I became very, very sick. And what I have seen in my conversations and heard and really felt is that there is this lack of self-permission that is missing for many of us until it's granted by ourselves or by illness. What both a tragic reckoning as well as this masterful threshold to step into and beyond. For me, I was chronically sick as a little girl. I share in the book that I was molested as a at a friend's house at eight years old, and then I was raped at 28. And both traumas, and I believe that there are as critical little T traumas as big T traumas in a body. And I can't, and and I I write this in the book because I feel so passionately about it that I do not believe that our traumas are competitive. And I believe that sometimes we see that, oh, my trauma's not as bad as hers. What happened to me isn't as dramatic. And, you know, I think if we were all here playing out the same stories with the same wounds and the same opportunities to heal and the same clarities of our own power, we wouldn't be able to help each other. And I feel so strongly and passionately about the moment that we're in and women talking about their lived experiences, whether they're patients or whether they're trauma survivors. I mean, even just right now, the amount of former patients-turned authors that are coming out with books right now, women have never been published at this rate. This is a thrilling time of reclamation of voice and sovereignty and you leading the way with your exquisite community, which I'm a very proud member. And I believe that what happened to me in these experiences, it's like there's that glorious adage that I'm gonna attribute it to Lady Oprah, but I it might have come from someone prior to her. But I believe this is especially true as it relates to girls that were raised to be good or girls that are raised to be caretakers that are now living in a woman's body. I believe so deeply that there are whispers until there are taps, and then there are taps until there are light shoves, and then there are light shoves until there are ass kicks, and then there are ass kicks until there are diagnoses that scare the shit out of you enough to make a change. And each of us, I believe, have thresholds that are different along those milestones. Don't you agree? And that, you know, some of us might have had 10 whispers before the taps, and then some of us have had the, you know, 50 taps before we get the ass kick, and some people go from a whisper to an ass kick. And and and again, none of it is competitive or worse or better or more dramatic. It's all just ways that our body, I believe, is working very hard to be in concert and harmony and coherence with us. But sometimes we don't understand that relationship early enough to be able to live from it. Sometimes we live against it until we say yes to living with it.

Ailey Jolie: 17:32

There's two things that really stood out to me and to the listener who can't see there were moments, definitely when you were speaking about illness and kind of the nudges that we may get, and they're different for absolutely every person where my eyes start to tear up. So I'll circle back to that embodied kind of thing that arose. But I wanted to circle back and really spend some time on this element that you named of just how entrenched patriarchal conditioning is that we compare and contrast and compete with our trauma. And because in this space, I'm not a therapist, I can speak more candidly. It's been really interesting to work with so many individuals who have that.

Ailey Jolie: 18:15

Yes. And to be someone who has probably what you would think of as a big T trauma story, and for me to go, actually, the comparison you're putting on my story doesn't resonate at all. It was so big and violent and bad that I never separated from the truth of what was happening to me was wrong. And so there's just we can never know someone else's experience. And that's why the comparing and the competing that very sadly, I don't think Peter Levine meant it when the, you know, little T and Big T, but unfortunately that is what it became was this kind of vicious cycle that then patriarchy really adapted to compare and compete with. A quick correction from me here. I named this a moment ago and I want to get it right for you. The language of big T and little T trauma did not come from Peter Levine, although it's often used in somatic experience in containers. It actually comes from Francine Shapiro, the psychologist who developed EMDR, another modality that I'm trained in. And I want to slow this down so that there's a distinction here, but also so that we give credit where credit is due. It's also worth saying that plenty of clinicians, myself among them, have real reservations about the distinction because it slides so easily into the very rankings Sarah and I are describing. The my trauma is not as bad as theirs keeps people from their own healing. Shapiro's intention was exactly the opposite, which is why I wanted to slow down and pause this. They were intending to make room for the quieter, subtler wounds that happen, but instead our culture's obsession with comparison often gets in the way and tains what was a really beautiful intention. And so I would love to just even spend a little bit of time there of like how in your own process you unpicked that and let that go. Because for me, that was there are things that there are many things my experiences of trauma have left me with, but one of them was n was a clear, unshakable belief that what happened to me was bad and wrong and should have never happened. And that never really got questioned because there's no narrative in society for me to to cling to, which is not everyone's experience. So I'd love to spend a little bit of time, slow it down here and just like how you unmaybe picked yourself a little bit, as much as you want to share, from that comparison or competing place that can really rob us and rob us of honoring our stories and close doors on um I won't I'll use the word healing, but I could probably find a better word if I spent a little bit more time there.

Sara Hirsh Bordo: 20:48

I love that word because I think it's a a spectrum and an experience. I don't think it's a destination per se. I come from a very large southern Texas Lebanese family. I come from generations of women who always cooked all day and served themselves last. I come from a long line ancestrally of um some generations of arranged marriage. I come from a long line of exquisitely genius caretakers in joyful magenta wearing plump bodies. And I also come from a very long line of a massive amount of female cancer and female autoimmune. My mom is the eldest daughter, like I am. My grandmother was the eldest daughter. um all three of us cancer and autoimmune. And I feel very strongly that in growing up, I was shown exactly what a good woman looks like to the comfort of my patriarchal Lebanese family. And again, I believe that experience, and I talk about this in the book around this beautiful um exploration called epigenetics and the way that our environments shape who we are, what we absorb, the stories that we tell, and scientifically it shapes what's happening inside of our DNA. What turns on, what turns off, depending upon who we're around, what's happening to us, how good we feel, how safe we feel, or how unsafe we feel. And for me, I not only saw that as the eldest granddaughter of a very big Lebanese family, my goodness very much upped the stake of my value because that's what my family valued. I also come from being raised in the South in Texas. And there are also very powerful layers of expectations around what makes a young woman or a woman valuable. I think that for me and I I actually lived in London in college in my junior year. And I my appetite for travel was the first aperture I had into seeing that other women weren't quite raised how I was, other girls weren't quite raised. There was this element, this texture of freedom that was happening. And it was an introduction that I believe it must have been a part of my own sense of adventure, but also my deep curiosity. I'm very curious by nature. I know you are as well. And um I was always the one who was asking why until I was told that asking why wasn't very ladylike. So I believe that I had multiple layers of patriarchal influence that were absolutely affecting not only the stories that I was told about who I needed to be, but the stories that I was telling myself of what we must be. And again, I believe that these permissions that we are given or not given, granted or not granted, claimed or unclaimed, are absolutely shaping the way in which we operate in our body and in our home and in our town and in our world. And I think that when it came time to coming home at eight years old from my quote friend's house, I had no tools. I had no tools I had no understanding or skills on how to say something just happened to me. Can it be my turn? And that makes me emotional because I felt that exact same way when I was 28 when I woke up the next morning in a stranger's home with pains in places that I didn't remember. And I also see that across the women that I've spoken with around even a diagnosis of something incurable isn't the absolute permission they have been waiting for. And that makes me enraged sister that makes me enraged um and I can say that it makes me angry because I have claimed that healing for myself because it came to the point of you family you systems don't get to tell me what to do, choose, be anymore.

Ailey Jolie: 26:29

There's so much that you just shared that I absolutely loved and would just love to just pick apart but I oftentimes don't share much of my own lived experience here but I will in this instance because I have read the book and I think there's more places we can go. I had been sick previously but it was almost two years ago where I had two scary diagnoses had to have surgery right away surgery didn't go well ended up in A and E. They couldn't figure out what was wrong with me had to have another surgery and I find myself so messed up on drugs in the MRI machine and I just had this like whole and it was the same day I got my book contract and I just had this whole body my body was like we are only going to heal if you stop absorbing stories. Like we just want we just want your story. We don't we don't want any more stories and I I'm one of those people who like even diagnoses before then that should have absolutely led me to be like break didn't and then even after that moment it took like a few years for me to be like oh actually this is how we slow down this is how we put ourselves first and that I want to so this is the piece I would love to explore with you is oftentimes we can hear that like or hear it or maybe have an expectation that we get the scary diagnosis or the thing happens or we have symptoms and then like it's like voila we stopped it's all gone. Not my experience at all. So I would love to just spend a little bit of time just fleshing that out because I know that you're so generous in sharing the experience of your body and what you've been through with your health and I would love to just hear what that process was like for maybe the listener who hasn't had like an incurable diagnosis like either of us have had but has had something else and is maybe expecting they just somehow press the off button right away and just giving a little bit of a more nuanced and honest look into what that's actually like when thinking conditioning is so deep to be of service or to be good or to care for others.

Sara Hirsh Bordo: 28:35

First of all thank you for sharing that with me it's really beautiful to be in conversation it's a very different feeling than being interviewed. So I really appreciate you and now being having doing this for a few weeks um I've had both and I much prefer this so thank you thank you isn't it fascinating how how a layer of fear of what a new story could activate how that fear can really keep us in paralysis. And I say that from experience it sounds like you know you can identify with that as well beloved. And um in my research of the thousand American women I asked women many questions about their girlhoods and I also asked them questions about their womanhoods. They were all autoimmune diagnosed and one of the questions that I asked was did your diagnosis change the way that you care for yourself or allow yourself to be cared for less than it was 56% said yes. 56% is is not a lot when we're talking about these kinds of experiences. And so I really wanted to peel that back to understand the story that's being told about the story that's being almost sequestering our power from a place that maybe we haven't been in touch with or can't access comfortably I think all of that is true at the same time can be true at the same time. I know it was for me. One of the things that I believe is that and I I was at a book signing yesterday and it was a lovely group of people and it was actually I had more questions from men than I had questions from women. And the men were asking me questions because they don't know how to help their female loved one. And so I first want to say that I believe that having allies regardless of gender is extremely important to this human experience. It's also I believe tell me if you agree very important to the healing experience. So many of us are have been raised to be much more comfortable with giving than receiving and for those of us that really don't have a super healthy receptivity muscle hands up there's almost this fear of what if I'm not good at receiving because I'm really good at giving and being really good makes me feel successful and powerful and loved. But the hardest and most critical part of this is when we are only in our giving we are in a very masculine energy when we are in our receptivity we are in our feminine energy and the mastery I believe is finding our way to the middle we feel so steeped in a story of being a caretaker and that that is where our value and our power and our belonging and our safety lives. And I believe that all of that can be true at the same time as being able to receive care when you need it. I just don't think a lot of us have ever been taught a set of skills about how we start receiving and we build up a system in us that says just because I need help doesn't mean I'm not strong anymore or this very false narrative of needing is weakness what a load of shit. And I also feel that this receptivity muscle in my family I just never saw that modeled for me. I didn't have you know I mean except for the women and my family going on Fridays to the hair salon or in I mean we called it the beauty parlor. So it's like they received a really good hair setting and curling on a Friday morning. But when they were struggling after breast cancer and they said no I'm fine I don't need help and you're watching the women and your family limp down a hallway or eat cold food because no one has emboldened them to serve first. I just wrote about this in an article that um what a a very um humbled invitation. I was invited to write something for Oprah daily and so it ran last week and I really reflected beloved on this feeling of why couldn't I help my mom go through the buffet line first? I wish I had been able to do that for her. But now that I have reckoned with my own receptivity and taught myself how to be cared for without feeling weak and how to ask for help without feeling needy and how to stand up for myself in a doctor's office without feeling that I'm too much trouble. I'm able to almost through my own remothering myself, I'm able to actually help my mom remother herself and now she and I both are in remission. So I feel very just lovingly and compassionately for so many of us who weren't able to self-prioritize because we didn't know how. And when it's time for us to learn how, I really hope that our conversation and your incredible work and many, many, many, many, many others who are speaking the same the same song as we are I just want it to be a new paradigm shift with one clumsy compassionate step at a time of making it okay that it can be our turn.

Ailey Jolie: 35:49

I would love to spend a little bit of time here with you. As I named it's been almost two years uh since that diagnosis and I definitely it's been a journey one thing that I've noticed is how differently the world responds to me now that I am a sort of I do go into the doctor's office and I'm like and this, this, this and I need XYZ and I need it before A B C. And it's been really interesting to see how kind of shocked people are and I am also in the UK so it's it is a different cultural context in many ways. I do have an accent so there's other pieces at play which I am aware of but I would love to spend a little bit of time just exploring maybe even some of your experience or some of the stories that you've heard around how the world responds differently to those who identify as a woman when they do assert themselves or when they do go first at the buffet table because it's not only your own internal this has been my experience at least it's not only my internal self that's saying oh don't send the email to the hospital that you know made the whoops and really injured you. There's also like so many systems that never expect the 30 something woman to complain or to to do to assert themselves and that's been really interesting to play with so I would love to spend some time here because we oftentimes talk about the inner but not really how the outer responds to that shift.

Sara Hirsh Bordo: 37:22

Can I ask you a question though before I answer your beautiful question I'm assuming that you have experienced this differently with let's say members of the medical community that are meeting you for the first time in your sovereignty and in your vocal power versus members of the medical community that might have known the before and then you're just introducing them to the now is that fair that is fair.

Ailey Jolie: 37:56

And I can say that the ones that meet me now I've actually had amazing experiences. The piece that's tricky is when you go from A to X and they're like we're not here for X.

Sara Hirsh Bordo: 38:08

Yes. Okay I I thank you for because I think this is really I think this is important because I feel like the rules of engagement of the let's just take the members of my family and the members in my medical community or team the Sarah that they knew as Sarah was passive and she was pleasing and she was easy to treat because she always said yes and she was easy to have at a dinner table because she always laughed at the jokes. Those relationships whereby I have changed the rules of engagement on our relationship because I have changed the relationship that I have with myself. I wish I could say and promise women listening that it's always going to be received championed and welcomed with a parade and I will say that about 25% of the time it has been a very quick adjustment and an easy loving adjustment but I have lost relationships when I gained myself you might also have that experience I was told by a male family member when I began to really work on my advocacy my self-advocacy and my permission to set boundaries and my self-permission to say no and my embracing of more alone time and my you know sovereignty around my energy system and really understanding how my body speaks. But for decades I didn't have a relationship or a good listening device to my own intuition and my own body. I just didn't know how to communicate with it or listen so intently that we were in harmony. I never did that until I chose that I had to but I had a male member of my family who told me that my newfound feminism was putting our family in distress and that I needed to apologize. I did not apologize. I got a worldwide book deal with HarperCollins instead and started writing this book. I wish I could say that he and I are in great shape and I'm getting texts of you're crushing it with the book release or I'm so proud of you. I'm not getting those I actually don't even think he bought a copy. And that has to be okay I have to be okay with that. I wish that we could control how other people treat us but we can't we can only control how we treat ourselves in relationships. And I very much feel that it is okay to give yourself the space to disappoint other people and that is terrifying. But it also is where the freedom lives and I don't believe that a healing landscape journey experience happens or can happen when we are locked into some proverbial cage that we do not have the key to I believe that we are in a time however where we're all sitting in a cage with an open door but we have to be the ones that are brave enough to start walking out of it. And the safety lives in the containers of stories that we have been told and absorbed. And we also have come in with stories that are in that are in our female DNA and in our ancestral experience that we are carrying until we decide what we need to let go because we have to make space for the truth and that truth is where healing lives this leads me to a topic that I would love to spend a little bit of time on and that is the healing power if we so call it that the healing power of storytelling and of narrative you have written a book so you've been through that process.

Ailey Jolie: 42:58

So I would love to spend a little bit of time here not to soft sell anyone into journaling even though I'm a huge fan but just to spend some time around the potency of actually the practice of writing and sharing our stories even if they don't go anywhere else just even sharing them with ourselves and being honest with what we've lived on the page.

Sara Hirsh Bordo: 43:20

I will see your page writing and I will raise you that I believe that it's about expression in any form. I think that some people are more connected to color than they are word. I think that some people are more connected to shapes instead of lines. I think that it is the emptying that is part of this vital stepping into the freedom of the stories that we don't want to care anymore, carry anymore. I don't think that it's it just must be in words However, I do believe that witnessing ourselves in language can be exquisitely comforting. Do you know the story of Inana?

Ailey Jolie: 44:20

No.

Sara Hirsh Bordo: 44:21

I write about it in the book. I wove a lot of divine feminine mythology into the book because I feel very strongly that sometimes we need proof that transformation is essential. I don't believe we are here to stay the same. I don't believe we came here for that. I believe we came here to transform and to heal and to rise into the next levels, layers, ages, generations, souls, heart of ourselves. And I believe that identities are made to be reckoned with. And in a in a body's language of autoimmune, when the body is attacking itself and it can't recognize its own healthy cells from its unhealthy ones, its safe cells from its dangerous cells, it's in essence having an identity crisis, which so many of us have been living in identity crisis because we've been playing out a character instead of a truth of self. So the thesis of the book is a self and compromise is creating immunity in compromise. So with that in mind, I would say that I actually had to write out the story of my body and the story of my health and the story of my diagnoses and the story of these milestones of my life. And I wouldn't have gotten to the truth of me if I hadn't written it and basically papered a wall with the timeline of my life and my diagnoses and these relationships that I silenced myself and suppressed myself because I wanted to stay safe in my family or loved by a man or adored by a teacher or cared for by brothers. I have shape-shifted for decades before I recognized myself. And so much of that has been born, birthed, reckoned with, reclaimed, rebelled because I have written it out.

Ailey Jolie: 46:58

Thank you so much for sharing that piece and for also opening it up to others who maybe words are not their first impulse, or that's not how life force energy, if we use Carl Jung, moves through their body, it can express in so many different ways. I would love while I still have you to just hear I it's a big question, it's quite vague. One thing that you maybe wish you had known earlier in your life to leave the listener with.

Sara Hirsh Bordo: 47:27

Golly, that's a big one. That's so big. Oh dear. I think what's coming forward for me to share is that I wish I had known the word anyway more. I wish I had been able to frame it's gonna be hard to say no, but I'm gonna do it anyway. It's gonna be uncomfortable for me to leave the table early, but I'm overstimulated and I need to go to my room anyway. And I wish that I could have not laughed anyway. I wish that the heartbeat of anyway and knowing that the bravery comes when we give ourselves permission to go against, but really at the end of the day, if we're making the decision to do something anyway, it's because our voice and body and being are asking to be listened to before we're listening to the outside. And I think that the framing of I'm gonna say it anyway, do it anyway, choose it anyway is a way of self-prioritizing. And I think that that's the fast track of what gets us well.

Ailey Jolie: 49:07

Thank you so much for sharing and being here and for all of your words. It's so generous for you to share your lived experience and also to invest in the time into learning the stories of other women. Um, before we close, I always ask: is there anything upcoming that you would like the listener to know about?

Sara Hirsh Bordo: 49:29

Oh, golly. Um I if anything that I've said opens the door to curiosity, I would love for you to consider the book. My book is Autoimmunity and the Good Girls, and it's a literary documentary that uses my life as the arc, but it is so much more than mine. And I also would love if you're facing a threshold, but you're not sure if you're ready, keep listening to that, but also know that the self-permission that you give yourself, whether it's through my book or another book, I think we're here in this time to transform. And hopefully, whether it's my podcast or the book or um the materials that I'm giving for free on the website, I just hope that it meets you where you need. I hope that something I've created can be in service.

Ailey Jolie: 50:41

I want to stay with what Sarah shared with us today because there's a thread going through all of it. For her, she described an overnight shift, the twin brothers arriving, two warm hands becoming no hands, and a little girl deciding in her body that she was safer when she was good. I think a lot of us know that reorganization from the inside, even if our particular version of it looked nothing like hers or we don't have a distinct memory. The reality is that our body's always doing the math of safety. It works out very young and very fast what it has to become to stay in connection, and then it becomes that faithfully for years. Where Sarah calls the character we play so well, we often forget is not us. I would call that an adaptation, a brilliant one to be exact. The good girl is not a personality flaw. She was and is a survival strategy that works, and the trouble only begins much later in life when the strategy outlives the danger and starts costing us the very aliveness that the good girl was once protecting. Now I want to go back to a part of the conversation that I stated I would go back to earlier. And this is the piece where Sarah talks about how her submission made her sick and her reclamation made her well. There is a genuine science linking chronic stress and trauma to autoimmune illness. The largest study we now have has followed more than 100,000 people in Sweden and found that those with stress-related disorders went on to develop autoimmune disease at a meaningfully higher rate. This link held even when researchers compared siblings raised in the same family. The proposed mechanisms are real and physiological. The stress response, the HBA access, the prolonged activation shapes inflammation in the body. So when we talk about the body holding the history of what happened to us, we're not speaking in metaphor alone. There is biology underneath all of this. And what the research describes is also an association, a pattern across very large groups of people. It's not a verdict on your life or anyone else's life. This matters enormously because the good girl, the one we've been describing for the last hour, is exactly the person who will hear all of this and quietly conclude that she gave herself an illness, that her diagnosis is one more thing she failed at. And I want to say this as clearly as I can. You didn't think your way into an autoimmune disease, and you can't will your way out of it either. Trauma can raise the risk without being a cause you should have prevented. Reclamation can change how you live inside an illness, how you advocate, how you rest, how you let yourself be cared for, all of which is real and all of which matters without it being a moral test that you passed or failed. Holding both of those at once, the biology and the absence of blame is the whole of this work. The other thing that I keep returning to is receiving. Sarah named it beautifully. That so many of us have a strong, well-trained giving muscle and also an almost no capacity to receive at all. And I see this constantly, even in myself. The capacity to receive care is not a fixed trait you either have or you don't have. It's a nervous system skill and it's one that can be practiced and slowly built in relationship, often with a good deal of discomfort at first. Because being received can feel far more exposing than being needed ever did. If this conversation has moved anything in you, I hope that you check out the embody program that I offer online. The doors are open for the autumn season, and you can find everything at inbodymethod.com. My Substack is where I write more personally and more often, and you can find that at aileyjolie.substack.com. There is both free and paid writing there for you. 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, Alicia Lee, to be a part of that process for you. I hope that you keep listening while I take this break to fully receive and tend to my own 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 hair and body.