Ep 80 with Heidi Stokes

Ailey Jolie: 00:06

Welcome to In This Body, a podcast, where we dive deep into the power of embodiment. I'm your host, Ailey Jolie, a psychotherapist deeply passionate about living life fully from wisdom within your very own body. The podcast In This Body is a love lover to embodiment. A podcast dedicated to asking important questions like how does connecting to your body change your life? How is connecting to your body and have the capacity to love more deeply and live more authentically? And helping collective embodiment all to the core so far. Join me for consciously carated 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 another episode of How to Be in This Body with Me, Ailey Jolie. Today, my guest is Heidi Stokes. Heidi is a registered clinical counselor in Vancouver, British Columbia. Heidi came to the role of therapist through her past experience in yoga and Plotti's experiences that influenced her choice to not only become a therapist, but also a yoga therapist. I first met Heidi while doing my EMDR training. And since that time, we have both gone on to continue our training, and that's one of the things that we bond on. Heidi, like myself, has training in sensory motor psychotherapy, somatic experiencing, internal family systems, the psychobiological approach to couples therapy, but she is also additionally a yoga therapist. In our time together today, we talk about the differences between her traditional training in counseling psychology and her somatic approach today. In this episode, we also talk about the female experience of somatics and embodiment. We get into what does it mean for a woman to spend her life reading someone else's face instead of learning how to feel inside her own body. We also talk about disclosure of trauma and therapy, how to do it safely, what pacing is needed, and the role of co-regulation in ultimately healing and changing. It took me two years to get Heidi onto the podcast, and I'm so excited that she said yes, spending time with me, but also that she agreed to share some of her wisdom with you all today. I hope you enjoyed this episode of How to Be in This Body with me, A. Jolie.

Ailey Jolie: 02:43

What does being in your body mean to you?

Heidi Stokes: 02:46

Yeah, I guess first of all, it means not being out there. So, like my neurosception is not so attuned to out there. And so, second of all, when that happens, it means, oh, my thoughts are more organized towards having my own back. As of like what are what are the reasons why I'm doing the things I'm doing, as opposed to what are the reasons that somebody else might not want me to do the things that I'm doing. So it means that I feel more soft and and supported and um well grounded. And I have this when I'm out, I have this feeling that I'm like this head feeling that I'm out. And when I'm in, I have a head feeling that there's more containment in my head. Yeah.

Ailey Jolie: 03:45

For the listener who's maybe new to the word neuroception, would you mind describing or defining that word for that?

Heidi Stokes:03:53

Yeah, I guess it's just sort of like to put it in more lay terms, I was talking about if my neurosception is out there, it's like if I am trying to perceive, to see out there, to hear out there, to smell out there, to feel the balance of what's going on out there as opposed to orienting more inwardly. What do I think? What do I feel? What's going on in my ears? Ears for me are a big one. Um, sounds can throw me off. So if my ears feel like they are not searching for danger in the dark, then I'm in. But if my ears feel like they're searching for danger in the dark, then I'm out. I think we can all relate to that, sort of like you hear a bang in the night, and that thing happens, right? Your ears change. My ears change. So yeah, for me, it's those things. The neuroception is what's going on in my senses. Are they outwardly oriented or inwardly oriented? And the yogi in me thinks, oh, praty hard withdrawal of the senses from the external world to bring it into my own world.

Ailey Jolie: 05:18

I also heard an answer of kind of having my own back, which at least for me brought forward the idea of actually staying centered in myself, maybe not people pleasing or overextending. And if it's resonant for you or in the work that you've done with clients, I would love to hear maybe how common that pattern is for women and is also a part of leaving our bodies or disembodiment. Because I think that link between going outside ourselves or people pleasing, overextending, being overgenerous, and embodiment isn't often made.

Heidi Stokes:05:47

We're taught to be empathic and and it's an important part of like women are nurturers, and innately, women are more nurturers, so we we come by it honestly, and also society wants us to stay in our lane and be the nurturers. So when my you know neurosception is oriented towards how are you doing over there and watching for your prosody, your um tone of voice, your body language, then it's not tuning into my own. So when I say I have my own back, I'm tuned into that. I'm able to observe what's going on in my body language. Am I talking too fast? Am I way too loud? I'll get loud sometimes. And so, like every now and then one of the things that cues me, oh, I'm not really in, is I'm really loud. I'm really trying to like put on a show for someone else kind of thing. Uh be liked. All those things.

Ailey Jolie: 07:10

I want to pause with something Heidi just said about women being nurturers and coming by it honestly. The part I would hold lightly is the word innate. What the research can tell us is that girls are trained into this early and also relentlessly, and that we're rewarded for reading a room before we learn to read ourselves, and that the training is so thorough that it can feel like temperament or personality. Whether any of it is wired is genuinely unsettled. We don't know because we can't pull them apart. What's important though, and why I really wanted to pause here, is because if you believe self-abandonment is your nature, that can lead to a belief that there's nothing to be done about it. And that is not what Heidi is saying at all. If something can be taught, it can be untaught. And so if you are someone who is naturally nurturing to the point of self-abandonment, that's something that you probably learned at some point in your life. It's also something that you can unlearn. I also want to just take a moment and acknowledge that we are speaking about women. That doesn't mean that men can't have this experience, that doesn't mean non-binary people can have this experience. That doesn't mean that this is an exclusive experience to those who identify as women. I would love to hear from you how both your experience, because you're trained as a counselor, but also trained as a yoga therapist, how either of those modalities can really help us be in the body and maybe confront some of this conditioning that we've received.

Heidi Stokes: 08:42

Yeah. So I'll start with me, and I'll say like I was first trained as a therapist and life coach, and then I took my yoga therapy training. And so when I got yoga therapy training, all that theory stuff became like, oh, I can feel it. And so it made a difference for me to from thinking about something or cognitively understanding something to actually having the space and the intention towards myself to feel it. I didn't know that, you know, before I did any somatics, I didn't know that you could know something in your gut. Like I heard people saying, and I, you know, I probably had gut feelings, but I didn't validate them. And so for me, like there's a difference there in that calling attention to what's going on in your body, making that valid, having somebody curious about it, having somebody curious to the point that they'll sit there and be quiet while I figure out something that I don't know, or that they might give me a prompt or two around like where could I feel it, or how could I, you know, maybe it's not a sensation so much as an image or uh an energy or a color or those things were not part of my like therapy and life coach training, you know, back in the early 2000s.

Ailey Jolie: 10:44

I would love to just pull it apart a little bit more for the listener who is maybe curious or as curious or one's clarification around a somatic approach or even yoga therapy, how it is different than traditional counseling or traditional talk therapy, or even what we kind of can think of when we hear life coach, because oftentimes, or just in the realm of social media, things have become very muddled. And I think that it's really helpful to actually be like, this is kind of the approach that you would get here. This is how we're trained, versus over here we do things this way. And I know that you have training in somatics and yoga therapy and traditional talk therapy. So you're in a unique position to kind of talk, and also as a life coach, so you're in a super unique position to kind of talk about the differences of all four of those practices that have kind of been merged in the online world as into one thing.

Heidi Stokes: 11:40

Yeah, for me, it's a little, it's it's I mean, first of all, it's a little muddled. And for me, it's a little muddled because I see it as a progression. Like when I first got into therapy, there wasn't a lot of somatics going on, but I was doing like I was a yoga teacher and a Pilates teacher, and I was, you know, studying Bonnie Bainbridge and Susanna Potion, and I was I was starting to venture into this, and which is why I did yoga therapy because I was like, I want to bring it into the body. At that point, it wasn't really a part of mainstream therapy. And as the years have gone on, I think it has somatics have become more of a part of like mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, was like just starting back then. And so now I think it's kind of weaved in through a lot of therapy. Although there are people who are strictly focusing on one modality. I think a lot of therapists focus on lots of modalities, and then there are some therapists like you and I who like we know that there's like this cognitive realm, and it's part of our work, but it's not our priority in work. And so I I think that the same thing happens with some cognitive therapists. They know that the somatic stuff's out there, it's just not what they're searching for. Uh, they like their, you know, workbooks or or step-by-step stuff, um, which is great and is really helpful for some people. But for me, like when once I hit the body stuff, it was just like, oh yeah, I'm allowed to be here. And that was like the permission to be allowed to be in my body and um pay attention to having my own back and knowing my I feel like I knew my own thoughts. I was very like cognitively organized person, but being able to like feel into it as well just made me feel more whole.

Ailey Jolie: 14:04

I would love if you feel comfortable disclosing, and it's something that I talk about often is I spent a lot of time in cognitive-based approaches or evidence-based therapy protocols. And I do really honor that that allowed me to find somatics and have the changes that I really wanted. And I would love if you felt comfortable speaking too, if it resonates with your experience or your work with clients of how foundational some of the cognitive may be with the rise of somatics. I oftentimes have clients who just like want to jump in and do the cathartic shaking and the yumminess and the tracking and the contact. And it's like, actually, but the mind doesn't know the story just yet. And if the mind doesn't know the story, being in the body feels really unsafe. And if you feel comfortable kind of speaking to that, because there's there's there can be things we look for in a client, or even speaking to the client's experience who maybe wants to be in the body, has tried somatics and is just absolutely overwhelmed because it's the safety hasn't been built just yet.

Heidi Stokes: 15:02

Yeah, I think what I'm hearing there is like it has my experience been that there is a lot of validity to both. And and yeah, I I think um, like I will when when clients come in and they're like, like, what's the difference between being a somatic therapist and being a cognitive therapist? I'll say, well, like here's my thing is I'm like, okay, so we take the world in through our senses and we take it in real that when it goes into the senses, it's a faster um myelinated system where we have a quick reaction. So before we think something, we feel it. And so I think somatics starts at what are you feeling? And it's an important thing because if we can start at what am I feeling, and we can process through what I'm feeling and allow the feelings to integrate and then change, then what we are thinking will be different than it would have been if we just bypassed the feeling. And so we still have to get to what am I thinking? And and it can go either way. We can know what we're thinking first and then put the feeling to it, or we can pay attention first to what we're feeling and allow the feeling stuff to process and then also talk about like, okay, so that makes me think this, and when I think this, I want to behave this way. Like, we we want to get to changing the behavior either way. So I think that they're they're both necessary, and that psychology as a whole has like this evidence-based stuff, is there's so much more research into the cognitive stuff because it's been around and the mainstream thing for so much longer, and the somatic people haven't done as much, haven't done as many years to have as much research to back them up. So somatics can get um less priority in a mainstream system because there's less years of it being the thing to do.

Ailey Jolie: 17:43

It's newer. I want to sprinkle a small clarification on the biology there because I think it's important to be as accurate as you can be. The thing Heidi is pointing at is absolutely real and well established. Your body reacts before you can have a thought about it. The threat pathways that run through the amygdala move faster than cortical processing that builds an explanation, which is why you've already flinched before you know what the noise was. The wiring itself is a little more tangled than fast nerves for feeling and slow nerves for thinking, though. A lot of what we call interoception, the sense of your own insides, actually travels on some of the slowest fibers you have inside your body. But the order still holds. The response comes first and the story arises afterwards to explain it. It is definitely newer and an approach that you're trained in that is relatively new, I would also say, is yoga therapy.

Heidi Stokes: 18:38

Right. Although it's the oldest. Although it's the oldest, yes, it is. Yes, it's the oldest psychotherapy, but it's becoming valid again. Right. As we, as science has figured out some of this, you know, you know, people like Peter Levine and Stephen Porgis have have like figured out some of the biology that's going on. It maps on to a lot of what yoga and yoga therapy has been doing all along, but there was no validation, there was no research, there was no evidence for those kinds of things because people were just doing the work. They weren't like researching it and writing it in a paper. It was different people doing the stuff. The researchers were at university, the yogis were on their mat. So it's just taking time for it to all become.

Ailey Jolie: 19:40

I want to name what we've already just slowly talked about. When we say that yoga is becoming valid again, we should be really clear about who's doing the validating here because these practices have always been valid, have always been important, and have always been so, so, so helpful. These practices were coherent, tested, and complete within their own tradition for a very long time before anyone in a Western university or from a Western country took these practices or borrowed them and put electrodes on the body to quote unquote validate them. I wanted to give this part of the conversation attention because honoring the lineage of yoga and how it comes from Eastern practices and how it's completely valid without any Western stamp is something I really wanted to be clear about because it's a practice that I deeply have benefited from and have a lot of reverence for. So, to bring us back to what me and Heidi were talking about now that emphasize the validity of yoga practice without a Western lens, it's not that yoga has inherently changed and therefore become more true or more real in the past few years. It's that the particular research culture, which is largely white and largely Western, has finally built instruments sensitive enough to measure what practitioners in South Asia have described for centuries in different language. Heidi is right that the researchers were at the university and that the yogis were on the mat doing their thing. The only thing that I really wanted to add here is that one of these groups was not waiting for the other's permission, and that yoga having Western validation only means that the West is finally becoming aware of something that those who have been practicing yoga for centuries have already known. I love what you said there about yoga therapy being the first form of psychotherapy. And I if and I would really love to hear what is yoga therapy? What is it good for? Where is it best applied? It's an approach that I've benefited a lot from. It's not one that I'm trained in. And even though I know it's not your main thing that you offer, I'm still asking this question. Because I see it present in just so much of who you are and how you move through the world and how you attune to yourself and others. And so I would love to spend some time exploring what is yoga therapy, what are some of the principles and who does it best serve?

Heidi Stokes: 22:15

Yeah. So yes, it's true. I do identify myself as a yogi. The first thing I do in the morning is get onto my mat. Um, and I think that yoga existed as therapy for a long time, as in people, you would you would do your asana practice to still your mind so that you could get to these calm places where you could figure out who am I, kind of thing. Um and yoga teachers guided people, people who had done it longer guided people behind them to do it. Um, yoga therapy uh as a psychotherapy is probably newer. Um the way that I used because I trained yoga therapy before I ever became a mom, and then I took some time away from being a therapist. And when I came back, I was like, okay, I'm back. I've got to take some trainings to get me back into connection with other therapists. And and I that's when I went into sensory motor and somatic experiencing impact. And so then um I kind of moved away from the yoga therapy. The way that I use it now is when I come across somebody who consistently I ask them the question, where do you feel that? And they're like, I don't know. And I guide them, like, okay, so just pay a little more attention and see if you notice anything inside your body or around your body. And they're just like, I don't know. If that can continue to happen, then I take them downstairs into my yoga space of my uh office and lie them on a mat and stretch their hamstring and say, where do you feel that? And now that we can have dialogue in relation to what they're feeling in their body. And and it just helps it, so it's helpful in that way that there is an actual, there can be an actual physical stimulus. I don't necessarily, not everybody wants to be touched in yoga therapy, but even if they are, if they're doing the stretch and I'm just close by holding space, there is an actual something going on in their body to bring their attention to. Whereas in typical therapy, there's not so much. There might be like a hand on their chest or something, but it's not the same as, you know, stretching a quad or something like that.

Ailey Jolie: 25:01

You've named a really good application or person population, which I can relate to of the person who doesn't feel anything in their body when they're asked that question. Are there a group of people or groups of people that you have found really resonate with the practice of yoga therapy, besides those who are maybe experiencing numbness?

Heidi Stokes: 25:22

Yeah, I would think people who are really um fitness oriented and and reluctant to be in therapy. Well, sometimes that's an avenue to bring them in. Um, also sometimes people who have um like physical issues, like being able to have a stimulus that's not got pain to attend to. Those people can also be helped by by it.

Ailey Jolie: 25:57

Thank you. I hadn't even thought of the last group of people you named, and I'm part of that group of people.

Heidi Stokes: 26:03

So and you said that it's been helpful for you to have a practice because it's taught you to attend to your body in different ways.

Ailey Jolie: 26:12

Totally. I would love to just maybe roll back the clock or roll back the process with you. That might be better language, and start by asking you when a woman comes into your practice, as I know that's mostly the population that you support today, and she starts to explain what's going on in her life or the problem that she's come in with. Where do you but start and how is that somatic approach present right from day one?

Heidi Stokes: 26:42

So normally I guess before they come in the first time, we have a quick little Zoom call. And during that Zoom call, I will ask them if they have experienced trauma. And and I tell them this is a yes or no answer. And I say to them, after you answer, I will tell you why it's an yes or no answer. And then they answer and I explain to them because a lot of people think that when you come into therapy, the idea is that you say, blah, here's my trauma. And that I think of therapy as an attachment process, and that if you come in the first time and tell me, blah, this is all your trauma, then you are gonna leave and your brain's gonna do what brains do, which is make associations. And you are gonna walk out of there and you're gonna go, oh my God, I just told that woman all my most deep, deep private things. And now what does she think of me? And your brain's gonna go, well, she thinks what Aunt Margaret said, or she thinks what my uncle Bill said, or whatever. And that's not necessarily what I think. So I tell people that when you first come, we're just gonna talk about what's going on in your life today. What are the struggles that you're having in life today? And let's use those things to help build some resources to find out, like, oh, what do you look like when you are going outside of your window of tolerance? How can I learn what you look like? And how can you learn what you look like when you're going outside of your window of tolerance? And then what can we think of together that are resources to bring you back into your window of tolerance so that you can learn to trust me and feel safe that I'm not going to take you somewhere that's not okay for you. And that then down the line, probably not two or three sessions in, but somewhere further than that, down the line, when you're comfortable to talk to me about the trauma, then I will be able to see what you look like when you've been hijacked by trauma. And so I can say, Oh, let's take a minute here, stop the process, remember that breathing thing we did, or remember that way that you put your hand on your forehead, or that that soft shoulders. Let's do that for a minute. Come back into yourself. Tell me a little bit about who you are today, and then we'll go back into the story.

Ailey Jolie: 29:28

One thing that I really heard in your answer there was the slowness and the pacing that a somatic approach requires. And I think I say requires not because I do believe it's not just a preference, it's like the essential core of how we actually do this because the body does form an attachment to the therapist, and that allows it to actually open and be receptive and all of some of the things that you've named there. But I would love to hear from you why you think slowness is a part of a somatic approach and why sometimes we don't go so slow.

Heidi Stokes: 30:04

I don't always see it first time they come in. First time they come in, they're just gonna talk to me about what's going on in their life today, and I will start picking things up. And so I do need to understand some of the cognitive so that I can see the somatic. Like they need to tell me the cognitive so that I can see the somatic. And once I can see the somatic, then there's like a gentleness about you can't just call people out on it right away. You have to be in relationship with them before you tell them that their shoulders are up around their ears all the time. Because they might be like, they might never have noticed that in their life. And then they're like, oh my god, I do that thing that everybody else sees. Everybody else doesn't see it. You know, not cog not cognitively, like visually, they do see it. But do they track it? Do they do they notice that, oh, that's a sign? Not everybody does. Somatic therapists will, and people who have a lot of that on their feed will start to track it.

Ailey Jolie: 31:23

Why do you think slowness is an important part of the somatic psychotherapy process? And how do you work with maybe potential frustration that comes up in a client or even in yourself when you're like, oh, like here we are, like I know we're building safety, and I know somatics needs to go slow, but like this is really frustrating.

Heidi Stokes: 31:45

Yeah, so I think it needs to go slow for the reason that I just said about calling stuff out too quickly and people feeling awkward about it, because that's not generally the way that people interact. Um, and so that's why I think it needs to go slow. And then what do I do when a client is wanting to get more in there? Most of the time I'll laugh, not at them, but with them. About like, yeah, I get it that you want to go there, but but can we just do this slow thing first and then you can report back to me about the slow thing? Um, and and so then that's a a point for me to go into some sort of guided um relaxation or um noticing some orienting, taking the sounds in the room or whatever, just so that they can have the experience of, you know, like, okay, I just want you to notice the sounds in the room and the sounds outside of the room. And then they can have that experience of oh, that slowed me down. And then, like, oh, that's why we go slow. See what happens in your body when you slow down. Once you study the what happens when you slow down, then people are generally more willing to slow down because they've seen the value.

Ailey Jolie: 33:27

What is the value from maybe a physical physiological or psychological perspective?

Heidi Stokes: 33:32

Yeah, it changes the beats per minute. Like that's so there's the aerobics instructor in me. Changes the beats per minute.

Ailey Jolie: 33:44

So it's like the cadence. When you're going fast, it it can feel fun and exciting, but it's not processable, and that's the whole idea of going to therapy. Like often we don't come to therapy because we have no idea. We come to therapy because I have the idea of what I need to be doing, and I can't make myself do it. You know, I've been trying and I can't get myself to do the thing, and that's where compassion comes in, and like, oh, how do we hold space for that? How do we acknowledge? Well, why do you think your beats per minute are high? What is the felt sense that's different in you when you take your beats per minute down? And and how can we relate to each other different in that space?

I would love to spend a little bit of time talking about the risks and the potential harm that can happen when we do go too fast. This is something that I'm quite passionate about, and you know this from a personal place because you met me in a time in my life when I can't remember if I had just done a bunch of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. Yeah, I think I had just done, and I was like thought that I had processed all these things because I had done all these big somatic interventions, only to find out that I really hadn't done much of anything. And that was just my experience of psychedelics. And I can see that there's a lot of harm that happened to me in those environments. And so I love the emphasis on slowness that you're giving. And if you feel comfortable maybe talking about the risks or some of the things that can go wrong when even we're super well-intended because we want to heal or we want to process that thing, and we can't get that part that wants healing so badly to just slow down.

Heidi Stokes: 35:53

Yeah, I think we're back to that initial question that I ask on the Zoom consult of like a yes or no answer. And the reason being that you're if I push you too fast into that, if you come in and dump all the stuff, then association's gonna happen. That's how our brains work. They're trying to find safety, and that experience of dumping all the stuff is not a safe experience, and it's also a re-experience rather than the idea of processing trauma being, let's just take a little piece and then come back to this moment because trauma is not an inability to be in the present moment, and so when you get hijacked from a trauma by like spilling out too much of the story at once, and you feel like you're there, and your nervous system is reacting like you're there, and your beats per minute are either way up or you're checked out and they're way down below your tolerance, then that's not a place where you can process. And it's not a place that's safe for you. It's about how do we take this little piece and then bring you back to safety so you can be like, oh yeah, that was then. This is now. I'm in this room here, and I can see the texture of the pillows, and I can, you know, feel my feet on the ground, and I know I'm not there anymore. And right now I'm an adult, and right then I was a teenager, or you know, whatever the thing is. Right now I'm here and I'm present, and right then I was in a car on the freeway. I'm not there, and your body can feel that and recognize it, and then go, oh, that there, this here. Now I can start to process. Now I can start to integrate. So it does have to be slow because it's re-it's like it's like this network of tangled yarn that we have to like slowly pull it out, or you're gonna create some knots. It's just gentle work.

Ailey Jolie: 38:27

I want to add something to what I shared a moment ago about my own experience with psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, because I know how a story like mine can be perceived or misinterpreted. I'm not stating that those experiences were not helpful or that they do not help people. There is evidence there, and you can go research that. And I've had podcast guests with people speaking about that research and their experiences as well, and you're welcome to go give those a listen. Why I wanted to pull this out is that I didn't spend time talking about the piece that was really missing for me with those experiences, and that's the integration, that's the slowness that's building the relationship, having the co-regulation and really being able to ground those large states of consciousness or processing that I had done in relationship. That's the piece that was missing for me. And if you've listened to any of the past episodes that I've had on with psychedelic assisted psychotherapy practitioners, you'll absolutely hear me ask question after question after question around the importance of integration and how we really bring the incredible fruits that we can have access to with psychedelic assisted psychotherapy into our daily-to-day life in a way that allows psychedelic assisted psychotherapy to inspire change in our lives. Because the integration wasn't there, ultimately the pace was wrong for me. And that's what hurt me. I started laughing when you use the yarn analogy because I've been in your office and I know that you have like a bingball of yarn. And I have times been it's been naughty and I've been like, what is happening when but then the gentle approach of actually pulling it apart. So I love that you use that piece there. And also what you've named in the slowness ties into something else that I wanted to spend some time talking to you about, which is co-regulation and the importance of co-regulation. So for the listener who's maybe new to the word co-regulation or has heard the word regulation everywhere on their Instagram feed, I would love to just slow down and talk about the importance of co-regulation, how we can receive that from our therapist, and why it is so important, and I would say the foundation of a somatic approach.

Heidi Stokes: 40:48

So co-regulation is the first way that we ever learn to regulate. We learn to regulate in the arms of our caregiver who is rocking us, patting us on the back, changing our diaper if that needs to be done, giving us soft eyes. That's where we learn to regulate. Some people get that. Some people have caregivers who are consistent about that. Some people have caregivers who are erratic about that. Sometimes they know what we need, sometimes they don't know what we need. Sometimes people have caregivers who just aren't very good at teaching us co-regulation. And so if they're always off, then it's hard for us to learn how to co-regulate. First, we learn co-regulation, then we learn self-regulation. And so, same thing in therapy. First, you come in and we co-regulate. I show you that I am safe. I don't say your reactions are poor. I figure out, I ask you about your past and how it makes sense that those reactions may have developed and how those reactions may have been an adaptation. And then and then once there's that safety there, then we can work on is that working for you today? And if not, what might? But if we can't be uh in co-regulation together, then I don't know how the client gets to self-regulation. Even we do a lot of like guided like feel your breath, and if they can't receive the influence of being able to go with the guiding, then we're kind of stuck. Like if they don't feel safe enough to breathe smoothly when it's being guided, then we've got more work to do before we can work on let's breathe a certain breath pattern. We've got more interpersonal, like, okay, maybe you don't feel safe with me yet, and that's it's not your fault or mine. It just means this is a slow process. You haven't learned safety.

Ailey Jolie: 43:30

I love that you put co-regulation before self-regulation, and I love it for the reason that oftentimes when I scroll down my feed, I'll see lots on self regulation or tools to self regulate, or the importance of self regulation. And it is a practice and a tool that we learn first through relationship. And so we've spoken about the therapeutic relationship and how co regulation can fit in there. But I can definitely admit that I learned co regulation through my first dog bell. That was like probably the first animal. I'd had lots of therapies, therapy before then, but it was like the first time I felt safe enough to really let another nervous system hold me and be present for me. So I would love to spend some time around how we can receive co-regulation, maybe in unconventional or unspoken about ways.

Heidi Stokes: 44:20

And so one thing is those seemingly insignificant moments of interaction when you are talking to the barista and she's bubbly and friendly. And instead of looking down at your phone and ignoring her, going, oh, there's some safe eyes there. Let me just say hello to her and be friendly and feel what that's like in myself, to just say, How was your how's your day going? And and have a connection there. Um it can be as simple as walking by somebody in the street and flashing a smile, and then their mirror neurons are gonna read your smile, and probably without even trying, they're gonna smile back. Not 100% of people, but most people will smile back, and then we get to go, huh, smile at me. Right? And that was a moment of we were regulating together. Um, dogs are great. When you are puppying up with a dog, you are regulate regulating towards play, like, oh, I can play with you when you're sitting quietly on the couch with a dog and they're just leaning into you. Like you can go, oh, this is support. They're letting me support them, and I can, or or if you've got a bigger dog and you're leaning into them, oh, they're letting me be supported, right? I get lots of regulation through nature myself. So I go into the forest and I'm aware that um the trees, the mosses, they're sentient, they have ways of perceiving that there is a presence out there, and it's not the same way that we perceive, but there's perception going on, and when I walk into the forest, I go, Oh, they know I'm here. How can I show up as a presence that I would like them to experience? Like I experience nature as beautiful and benevolent, and how can I let them be the alpha and show up that way too? And so I walk into the forest and I'm going at a clip and I'm focused like this, and I'm and then I have this thought, and all of a sudden my peripheral vision opens up, and I'm walking a little softer, and my heart changes a little bit, and I just let nature co-regulate me, and it's about intention. I am intentionally allowing myself to be influenced by something else.

Ailey Jolie: 47:13

There are many things that you said that I wish I could like underline or like post everywhere everywhere, because you really named the the accessibility of co-regulation, of it being an intention, an intention that we can set. And that's one thing that I often see online that's seems a bit muddled or confused for me is people will say, Well, I can't co-regulate because I don't have a relationship. It's like actually we're always in relationship and we always have co-regulation available to us. It's just as you beautifully said at the end, are we intentionally open enough to be influenced by something outside ourselves? And so with that, I would love to just explore a I would love to explore a little bit of self-regulation, what it looks like, when it's important, what it's best for. Is it even possible if we're in relationship to everything? And just to flesh that out a little bit more.

Heidi Stokes: 48:16

Oh wow. Is it even possible if we're in relationship to everything? But it's a question I think about. There's some responsibility uh in there for sure. Um self-regulation is that moment where we recognize that our nervous system is doing something that feels off, and we make the choice to gently guide it to something that feels on. So if I notice in a conversation, like if I have a habit, let's say I'm a fawner, and I feel that I'm like making myself small or pretending that I don't know something that I know, and I catch that, first of all, that's worthy of celebration because nothing changes without, you know, positive reinforcement helps us to make change. So just noticing it and going, yeah, I noticed it, instead of noticing it and going, but I noticed it after the fact, and that sucks that I didn't get it right the first time. It's like, oh, I never used to notice that I was a fauner. And today, after I walked away from that conversation, I noticed that I was a fauner. And what did that feel like? And how would I have rather felt in that conversation? And allowing myself to feel into that so that next time, or you know, this is all an iterative process. It takes a long time to make change. Our nervous system has been doing what it's been doing for a very long time. So when we expect it to correct, like people who've been doing a process for three decades and then come to therapy, and they're like, I'm aware of this process now, I want to fix it in three months. It's probably not gonna fix in three months unless you are super on it several times a day and all never with an eye roll, but always with a oh yeah. It makes sense to me that I'm doing this. What's my breathing doing? Like, if I can lengthen my exhale, I become more grounded. What are my shoulders doing? Like, is my jaw really tense right now? Is my pelvic floor like pulled up into my lungs? Like, can I relax that stuff and and just allow myself to again come around and have my own back? Because often when I'm not regulated, it's because I'm out there neuroscepting somebody else instead of being like, oh wait, I'm valid.

Ailey Jolie: 51:27

One thing that I've heard in this last answer, but also in an answer to an earlier question, was the importance of self-compassion. And I would love to spend some time looking at the link between being in our bodies and the practice of self-compassion. What have you seen that link to be?

Heidi Stokes: 51:45

Well, I think that a and this is here's the cognitive piece, right? Is often people will have patterns, will have learned patterns of being unkind to themselves. We expect ourselves to be kind to other people. Sometimes we're not always kind to other people, but we expect ourselves to be kind to other people, but we don't expect ourselves to be kind to ourselves. And so we are no different than anyone else. And our nervous system is not gonna respond to like if I am a person who fawns and I are, you know, a people pleaser, and I'm like, oh damn it, I was people pleasing again, then that's not gonna give my nervous system the chance to adjust. And so, like, I always use Kirsten Neff, she's got her three steps to self-compassion. The first one being, um, I'm struggling, that's that moment of catching it. The second one being common humanity, I'm struggling because all humans struggle, not because I'm broken. And for me, that step is very much about if I look back at the trajectory of my life and recognize how my nervous system was trained, does it make sense to me that I'm reacting this way? And yeah, all humans who had been through what I have been through, because they have a nervous system and nervous systems are trainable, yes. It makes sense to me. And the third one is kindness, and that's that's the felt sense. So Kirsten would say, What would you say to a friend? And for me, the difference between cognitive and somatic there is sometimes that works. Sometimes what would you say to a friend works. So if I'm like worried about something and I say to myself, you got this. Sometimes you got this works, and sometimes I'm like, No, I don't, right? So then I have to go to, okay, I'm trying to reprogram my nervous system. So what I want to do right now is I want to experience some kindness. So I will find a way to feel kindness in my body. And so I have practices that I teach people that are about what would it be like to feel kindness in your body. And I will just give the the most cognitive of those practices. But here's here's my what does it feel like to feel kindness? Is you're walking down the alley, it's like dusk, you're on your way home, you've taken the alley for a shortcut, you're walking along, and you hear this little and you look to the side, and there in the bush is a kitten, and he's just looking up at you with his big innocent eyes. And you look down at this kitten, you walk over there, and he's got no collar on. He's a little dirty, and he's all by himself, and it's getting to be nighttime. And so you bend down and he's not running away, and he lets you pick him up, and you pick up this kitten, and he's in your hands, and the feeling in your body in that moment is kindness, and that's what we're looking for. We're looking for a feeling of kindness when we've made a mistake, instead of feeling mad and frustrated, if we want to reprogram our nervous system, it's like I'm struggling because I am human, and oh how can I be kind to myself in this moment and train my nervous system to do something different. And that's why compassion is important because if you don't have that, your nervous system's not gonna buy in.

Ailey Jolie: 55:51

The researcher Heidi is drawing on is Kristen Neff at the University of Texas, and her three components of self-compassion are mindfulness, which is the noticing that Heidi describes, then common humanity, which is the recognition that struggling is not evidence that you're broken, and then self-kindness. Everything Heidi has just laid out is exactly that model that comes from Kristen Neff. And I felt it was really important to give her her moment and her time. So if what Heidi described here interests you, you can go look up Kristen Neff and access more of her wisdom. Thank you for the imagery that you just gave with a really detailed answer.

Ailey Jolie: 56:33

And my final question for you today is if there is a woman who has been listening and maybe has been in talk therapy for a really long time and the shift isn't happening, what would you wish she understood or knew or was even willing to try? So there's two questions in there.

Heidi Stokes: 56:52

Um, it would be I would hope for her that she could accept that her body is valid, that exploring the sensations and the inner knowing is integral to understanding the thoughts, that that the the process, the processes belong together. And so how do you like the fact that you're you've created this scaffolding of understanding that hasn't got you haven't made the house yet, you've got the scaffolding, but you need the walls and the comfy couches and the blankets and the all the rest of it to make it feel like a safe place to be in. And that's like the ability to come into your body instead of being out there coming in, feeling that containment and and that safety to explore what why is this important to me? Why does it make sense to me that I'm feeling this way? And what does feeling this way feel like? And if I allow myself to feel this way and pay attention to it, then am I able to also later explore what I would like to feel so that I can start to cultivate, oh, this is how I've been feeling, and this thing that I want to hold out there in front of me, this target of where I want to focus is about the felt sense. It's not about the the goal at the end, it's about how how will I feel when that goal is attained. How how will I know that I'm doing better by what's going on inside of me as opposed to what other people might think of me?

Ailey Jolie: 59:18

Thank you for all of your answers today and our time together. It only took me two years of convincing you to come here and be on the podcast. And I'm so glad that you did. Is there anything that you would like to maybe add to your answer around what does being in the body mean to you, or anything that we didn't get to touch on today that you would like to leave the listener with before we say goodbye?

Heidi Stokes: 59:45

No, just an invitation for people to rest into themselves and go slow, find the sensation, and really validate the internal experience as at least as important as the thought, and um really just a part of validating who you are. I think a lot of what therapy about is about is who am I and how do I be more me? How do I allow myself to be more of who I really am, what my values really are, how much of what I do is somebody else, like the societal stories that are put on me, and how much is what I actually experience in my body as valid.

Ailey Jolie: 01:00:51

Thank you. You're welcome. We will have all of your information in the show notes. So if anyone wants to reach out to you, that's how they'll be able to do it. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Heidi said that co-regulation comes first and self-regulation comes second, and she said it as though it was completely obvious. Although I know that isn't such an obvious piece of information for most of us. The reality that Heidi moves through quite quickly is the truth that a newborn cannot regulate their own arousal, not even partially, not even at all. They need someone else's nervous system to borrow. And there have been lots of studies around this. Ed Tronic showed this in the 1970s with the still face experiments. And those experiments are still hard to watch because this is when a mother plays with her baby, and then the instruction is for her to go blank, and within seconds, you see the baby working, reaching, calling, smiling harder, running through everything they can to try and get that attunement and the facial expression back from the mother. Unfortunately, the experiment is for the mother to not give that attunement, to not give co-regulation. And they did this to really look at what happens when they don't have co-regulation. And if you have been around a child or have been a mother yourself, you probably have seen moments like this where there's a disconnect between newborn and the presence or the parental figure that they're co-regulating off of. And you've probably seen what happens when that person comes back and the small child is able to have that attunement and presence again. Their whole system changes, the tears and maybe the screaming changes as well. This is what Heidi is really speaking about here is that co-regulation, that ability to be with others, to change the state of our nervous system, or for our nervous system to be influenced, is a skill that we learn through being in relationship with others. And that's the foundation in which we then are able to use self-regulation. I know that the word co-regulation can bring up a lot for someone, or you can believe that you are never going to have co-regulation because you're never going to have a safe relationship and that you need that, or you don't receive that from as a parental figure as an adult, and therefore co-regulation, self-regulation will never be available to you, which is why I really loved Heidi's answer here and how she invited us into her experience of nature, being a sentient being, one that can influence us. And so I hope that from this episode today, that you take the idea that your nervous system, the presence you have in your body, your entire relationship to your body can be open to influence of the world around you in ways that you consciously choose, not just in ways that dysregulate you or overwhelm you or take you out of the body, but that you can actually choose to put yourself in environments, let that be nature or class or in relationship with an animal or even a fragrance that you like, and let there be a relationship between the fragrance coming from that flower in nature and how that changes your nervous system and your state and your state of presence in your body. And I offer this so that you don't feel like you need to necessarily go learn another technique or buy another course, that all of this can be applied to your life in small ways that build on each other until self-regulation is possible because that's what self-regulation grows out of. Going back to what Heidi spoke about, a thousand repetitions. If you are interested in learning in community or in a program where we practice co-regulation together, you can find out more information about Embody, which is the online program that I run and have guest teachers like Heidi Teachin at inbodymethod.com. You can also read more of my writing on Substack. You can find that at aileyjolie.substack.com. If you want to co-regulate in person, you can join me this November in Costa Rica. I'll be offering a retreat in Nosara at Blue Spirit, and all of the information is available at aileyjolie.com. Thank you again for listening and for being here, but also for being in the tender, ongoing process of coming home to your body and allowing this podcast, our guest, and also me, Aile Jolie, to be a part of that process with 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. This podcast reaches a larger audience and inspire more and more humans to connect to their bodies too. Thank you for being here and returning the relationship with you with your own.