Somatic Therapy for Trauma Recovery: Jill Howell on The Fearless Love Forum

Watch the full interview on Youtube here or on our website here.

In the sixth episode of the Fearless Love Forum, I am speaking with Jill Howell, a somatic therapy trauma recovery coach. Jill shares her expertise on how the body-mind connection is integral to healing from traumatic experiences. She explains the significance of somatic therapy, which involves accessing the wisdom held in the body, distinct from traditional cognitive talk therapy. Jill highlights the role of the vagus nerve, central to the polyvagal theory, in regulating the body’s response to stress and trauma. 

Through her personal journey of overcoming trauma, Jill illustrates how reconnecting with the body can create safety and ease, helping individuals move beyond trauma responses like fight, flight, or freeze. She emphasizes the importance of emotional healing and nervous system regulation, offering insights into how trauma affects relationships and the importance of co-regulation in healing. This episode provides a deep dive into the transformative power of somatic trauma recovery and the holistic approach to trauma healing.

Transcript for Somatic Therapy for Trauma Recovery: Jill Howell on The Fearless Love Forum

**David:**

Well, hello everyone. Welcome back to the Fearless Love Forum. My name is David W. Stock and today I’m talking with Jill Howell who is a somatic trauma recovery coach. Jill, welcome to the Fearless Love Forum.

**Jill:**

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

**David:**

Jill, tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do and kind of your story, and what is a somatic trauma recovery coach?

**Jill:**

Yeah, so I’m a somatic trauma recovery coach. I would say that I’m a coach who specializes in helping people to recover after traumatic experiences, but also just an emotional healing coach, an emotional health coach. The somatic part comes from the Greek word soma, which means body. And so everything that I am doing with my clients is body-led and integrative with the body. So it’s different than just traditional cognitive talk therapy, because it’s not just processing and talking. It’s actually going to the body and really accessing the wisdom that is being held in the body and accessing all that’s being held in the body that’s keeping us stuck in trauma responses, after traumatic things that have happened, after chronic stress or prolonged periods of stress. It’s about coming back to the body and creating that safety and that connection so that we can live with ease in the world, so that we can live at peace within ourselves and not be living from such a trauma response of that fight, flight, or freeze.

**David:**

That’s excellent, excellent. I’m just starting to learn about how connected the body is to the mind and how important, how the emotions are stored in the body.

**Jill:**

Yes.

**David:**

Do you wanna kind of expand on that a little bit? Just the, like the body-mind connection.

**Jill:**

Yeah. So, you know, I believe that we, you know, our bodies really honestly are holding more of the emotions than even our mind is. I believe that I believe in the polyvagal theory, you know, and that the vagus nerve is this long cranial nerve. It’s the 10th cranial nerve. It’s the longest wandering nerve. It goes from the base of our skull, like back here, all the way down the sides of our neck and all the way through our body and all the way down into our gut. It’s like a wandering nerve that just interconnects with all of our organs and it’s dictating whether or not the body is responding to a threat or danger. It’s really acknowledging just the energy that the body is holding when it starts to feel fear, when it starts to feel panic, anxiety, overwhelm, any of these things, the body is actually 80% of the time sending information up to the brain and the brain’s just interpreting it. So only 20% of it is vice versa where it started in the mind and going down. And this is just in a newer science that’s really becoming more known. But it makes sense to me because really the body is responding. Oftentimes the body on a cellular level has the ability to keep memories of experiences that we’ve had in the past. So that’s where that threat detector comes in. It’s like we sense a little bit of threat or we sense an emotion that maybe we felt often as a child or in the past and in a really stressful situation. And then if the body starts to feel any indication of that again, coming up, then it’s like, oh, the body responds and then the brain tries to interpret it. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay, this is a threat. Let’s respond. So it’s there’s this, this intersection, it’s a highway of communication between the body and the brain. It’s brilliant. It’s just how the nervous system works.

**David:**

Yeah. And I think, uh, with Western medicine, just massive, massive advances in Western medicine, but sometimes it’s kind of compartmentalized. And I think maybe that’s why this is like one of the last things that kind of figuring out is that it’s all connected. Like, Like you’re an organism, a very advanced and complex organism. So I want to ask you about, how do you get interested in something like that? What led you to be like, I have to learn about, you know, trauma recovery and how the body and the mind works?

**Jill:**

Yeah, unfortunately, my story is one of experiencing trauma repeatedly throughout my life. I would say that I came into the world with a dysregulated nervous system, meaning my mom was in a moment of crisis herself when I came into the world. And I believe that my body was just always like not at ease. I always was hypersensitive and just really emotionally overwhelmed by a lot of things that happened in the world. And then I feel like as an adult, I had a couple major traumatic happenings that happened that really harmed my nervous system. It made my nervous system collapse, meaning I no longer had capacity to do all of the basic things and the normal things, the day-to-day things with ease, it became hard. It became a real struggle for me. So back in 2019, 2020, I had a situation happen in my personal life that actually triggered a lot of my own childhood trauma. And because of it opening up all of these emotions that I felt often as a child, I found myself in almost a complete nervous system collapse. I was struggling with chronic pain. So I had neck pain in my shoulders, in my neck that was like debilitating to the point where some days I was on the couch with ice packs and I couldn’t do anything. I would just take medicine and I was pretty much out of commission. And finally, at that point I was like, okay, I’ve done two decades worth of talk therapy, traditional talk therapy. And here I am finding myself at 40 years old in a place where I am not able to function very well. And at that time I tried so hard just to address, like you said, we compartmentalize, okay, I’m going to go to the people that can help with the pain, right? The physical pain. So I went to an acupuncturist. I went to a physical therapist. I went to, you know, I did massage. I did a chiropractor. I spent thousands of dollars trying to get rid of the neck pain that actually was very much emotional pain. It wasn’t anything more than that. And I knew it was connected to stress. I always indicated that, oh, I’m having some discomfort in my neck, I’m stressed, I can feel it, I can feel the tension. But once it got to a debilitating state to where I wasn’t able to really function then I was like, okay, none of these things are working. And I know I have a lot of emotional distress inside too, and it was all intertwined. And so I decided I was not gonna go back to traditional talk therapy. I would never do it again. And not that it was bad. It helped me through moments and there were good aspects of it, but I was like, I need something different. I need something more. And it catapulted me on this journey of figuring out what are alternative ways to really heal my body and in my mind and my soul and like reconnect in a way that makes me feel less threat in the world. Like I just felt overwhelmed. I felt anxious. I felt depressed. My body was kind of going in and out of fight, flight and freeze all the time. And I just knew at that point I had to learn something different.

**David:**

Yeah, for sure. That’s amazing. I’m really excited to have you on here because you’re the first person I’ve talked to who can really speak to this. Would you say that you, as a result of some of that trauma, that you have a more sensitive nervous system than the average person?

**Jill:**

Yes, I always felt growing up like I was too much, that people didn’t get me, that there was parts of me that I had to hide because nobody could handle dealing with the emotions. I had to do a lot of emotional suppression because I experienced the world in a very sensitive manner. I could see things, I could feel things, I felt energy, I emotionally held a lot of it and I didn’t know what to do with it as a kid. And so a lot of my healing journey the last few years has really been about getting to a place of having the skills and the resources to guide my own self back to a place of regulation and to a place of safety and ease and really loving myself and supporting myself in such a way that I don’t need somebody else to be that for me. I used to be sad and I grieved a lot that I didn’t have parents who were able to do that for me. I didn’t really have a safe space growing up where I could really process all of the things I was taking in and feeling and experiencing. So I hid in my closet, honestly, and I cried because that’s the only thing I knew what to do. But now it’s like I’ve discovered this whole new way of relating to myself and I can guide myself through every emotional experience with confidence, with ease. And it’s allowed me to expand in a way that now like I realized being on the other side of it, like I lived so much in a hidden turtle shell and people might not have always seen it, but there was so much of me that I felt like I had to hide. And now I don’t let, I don’t let that be the truth anymore. I don’t have to hide from myself. I don’t have to hide from other people either. Like I’m truly stable and at peace with myself.

**David:**

Yeah, that’s amazing. That’s so good. So what I want to know is because I do a lot of boundary work and healthy boundaries consist of actually four separate boundaries. And so the first boundary

 is the nervous system where the information is coming in. The second boundary is in the mind where you give that information some kind of meaning. The third part of the boundary is where you make a decision, what am I going to do about it? And the fourth part is actually executing on the decision or sometimes not executing on the decision that you made, which kind of goes to like, there seems like there’s always this conflict between integrity and fear. So, you know, I should behave a certain way or take a certain action when someone says a certain set of words to me, but I don’t, because I’m afraid to. Or I do, because I want to have integrity with myself. But so the question that I want to get to is because it sounds like you have a lot of experience with the first part of the boundary and the fourth part of the boundary, which is where the information is coming in and where the action is going out. Or, or do I have that wrong?

**Jill:**

Um, I don’t know. I mean, I,

**David:**

Was that too complicated of an explanation? So, so somebody says something to you, you receive it through your eyes, ears, nose, mouth. Like there’s a lot of like things like, what am I going to focus on today and those kind of things and that directs what you hear and what you see. But then you have to give it some kind of meaning once the information comes in. So that’s like psychological right? Is it about me? Um, and the third part is what am I going to do about it? And the fourth part is actually do, you know, taking the physical action, just speaking, I’m not going to hear that you can’t say those things to me or, or whatever. Does that make sense?

**Jill:**

Yeah. I feel like I do an integrative approach, honestly. So that’s why I’m kind of like struggling to answer the question specifically about me. And like, because I feel like part of the healing journey is being able to do all four of those. So what I’m doing is integrating a lot of somatic healing work. But I should say that I actually in my coaching integrate a lot of inner child healing work too. And so a lot of this is a very integrative approach of doing all of it, but starting, you know, building, like you said, like there’s just these different phases right of like getting to the point where you can speak out loud to others and set those those tangible physical boundaries with others in a in a very active way but we have to do a lot of the inner work first to really create that safety for ourselves and to make new meaning of the stories that we have to to really assess the stories that we have going on and, and then be able to create new stories. That’s the two, you know, two different things in two different phases. And I think that it’s very cohesive. I think all of what you just said is beautiful and very much needed and very much a part of my trauma recovery process.

**David:**

Yeah, absolutely. 100%. Yeah. It’s very seamless when it happens in a, in a, in a health, in a healthy way. It’s also pretty seamless when it happens in an unhealthy way, now that I think about it. So we’re starting to touch into how traumatic stress sort of affects our relationship with ourselves and with others. You talked about inner child healing. And then, of course, boundaries are just all about relational interactions. So, like, how does traumatic stress change relationships with ourselves?

**Jill:**

Yeah. You know, I feel like for me personally, I’m going to be real honest and raw here and say that I, as an adult, at two very distinctive times in my life, I wanted to die. One of them was in that phase that I told you about in 2019, 2020. These were my two, like, dark moments of the soul or dark nights of the soul, whatever you want to frame them. But, like, I feel like we get there when we’re turning against ourself. I felt a lot of shame for who I was growing up. I didn’t know what to do with all of the things I was feeling and experiencing in the world, All of the emotional intel and insight that I had about people and things that were happening around me was very, very much a lot for my nervous system to hold without knowing what to do with it. But then I also felt a lot of emotions in a very big way and I didn’t know what to do with it. So I really have had to come to a place of this healing journey becoming more about healing and restoring the relationship I’ve had with myself. I think when I really felt that chronic pain in my neck, I genuinely got to a place of I don’t like myself. I’m disgusted. I feel shame and guilt for all of these ways I’ve responded from trauma responses really in these situations or I don’t like where my life is right now. This feels like too much. I want out. I want to go away to an island. Actually, no, I don’t even think I want to be alone by myself in an island. Like I don’t want to live because it just, the disgust towards myself was so thick. So I feel like in trauma, in any chronic stress experience, it’s very easy for us to turn away from ourself, to turn against ourself, to shut down from ourself, to disconnect. I know the mind and the body scientifically disconnect from each other. And so that information highway through the vagus nerve is not always firing accurately because there’s such a disconnect between our brain and our body. Like people will try to mantra their way through affirmations to think differently. And some people that might work and be enough. For other people with really sensitive nervous systems or nervous systems that have gone through traumatic experiences, the body is still feeling a different way than what the brain is trying to think and process and feel. And so the body is sitting here saying, ah, heck no, I can’t do that. I don’t know how to do that. That’s too much. That’s scary. Oh my gosh. And then it will either live in that fight or flight of panic and, you know, fear, or it will just shut down because it’s over capacity and exhausted. And it just is holding so much, it doesn’t know what to do with. So I feel like we disconnect in so many different ways from ourselves, which then is a domino effect of us ending up disconnecting from people. When we can’t connect with ourself, when we can’t really be present with ourself and for ourself in every emotional experience, then everything outside of us feels dangerous too because we don’t even have this grounded sense of safety here within us. So everything around us feels like a danger zone. So it then becomes a disconnection with people in the world. And sometimes people like to think the disconnection comes from the things that have happened with other people first and that that’s the trauma, which it can. It can be a traumatic thing to the nervous system and to our mind and our body. But what happens is it’s just like this domino effect of like, well, I am not safe inside of myself. So no matter what happens out here, it’s always going to feel overwhelming and like too much to my system. Right. And so now being on the other side of it, it’s like, Oh, my home base, my baseline is not of safe, like unsafety. It’s not a place of feeling how I felt for the first 40 years of my life. I actually have the capacity to really feel at home in my own body and to be at peace and to really love myself and to guide myself. And that means that even when there’s chaos or traumatic happenings outside of me or things that are happening around me, I actually know how to guide myself through those moments and support myself so well that I don’t turn against myself anymore. I don’t allow those things to energetically have that power to do that because I have skills and resources.

**David:**

Yeah, excellent. Do you have any experience with how relationships can heal trauma and or do you think that that’s something that can happen or should happen and how does it happen?

**Jill:**

Yeah, that’s a great question because I do feel like it is an integral part of healing, which is why I do what I do as a coach. Because when a human who has gone through a lot of trauma connects with safety and ease with another human, and we can co-regulate our nervous systems together, and we can feel safe in the world with one person, it opens up the possibility of creating safety in other relationships as well. And so I do believe that it’s a necessary part of the process because I think that the nervous system, it mirrors sometimes other nervous systems, especially when we haven’t done a lot of the deep inner healing work that needs to be done. We can either mirror or reflect like other people’s energy and their nervous systems and where their nervous system states are. And so I love to be able to be in a position now where I can create that safe space for people to learn how to regulate their nervous systems and to feel supported in doing it. And then they get to actually turn towards other people and guide their other peoples in their home. I like to talk to moms because moms, actually, I teach them like, if you are regulated within yourself, if you’re grounded and centered within yourself, you get to teach that and model that and guide your kids’ nervous systems. Their nervous systems actually will see and meet the energy of yours and learn to respond in a new way. And that’s the beauty of being in relationship and connection with other people. We need each other. We just need more bodies moving together towards this healing and expansion so that we’re not just all triggering each other and our nervous systems just aren’t on fire whenever we’re around people.

**David:**

Right, for sure, yeah

. Yeah, two of the biggest topics that I have, which is boundaries and triggers. So if you’re a healthily regulated individual and your partner is not always, how do you prevent your partner from the dysregulated partner from being the one that influences you instead of the other way around?

**Jill:**

Yeah. So really why my nervous system collapsed was because not of my partner, but somebody else in our world who was living extremely dysregulated and that energy was coming at me and I didn’t know how to create a safe enough space of my own and energetically I allowed my energy to enmesh with other energies and I absorbed other people’s energies. And so when their nervous systems are dysregulated, I would take it on almost as my own, you know, like it would just become me inside and I would not know what to do with the other dysregulation. And so now I would say that I come at it from a space of right here is my safety bubble. My safety bubble is my best friend. And I literally guide people through visualizations and I guide myself through the visualization. Anytime that I’m starting to feel alarmed by somebody else’s energy, even if they’re not in the same room, I’m visualizing my space, my bubble, my realm of control is within here. Like this is, this is all that I really have control over. And so, you know, I think the cool thing is that with doing the work that I’m doing and using the language that I use now in everyday life, you know, my husband has learned a lot of this and we have different conversations now than we ever had before. I mean, if I’m feeling dysregulated, I have the open conversation. If I sense dysregulation in him, I can’t control whether or not he does something to actively address his dysregulation or even our kids, you know? But I can say, hey, I’m sensing that you are feeling really overwhelmed or I’m sensing that you’re really anxious about this. Like, what are you doing to guide yourself through this so that it doesn’t spiral and get bigger because I’m feeling a lot of this. And so I just kind of call out what I feel and what I sense now with people around me as much as I can and as much as it feels safe in that relationship to do that. But, you know, I’m honest about my dysregulation, and I’m trying to open up the other people in the home to be able to communicate their own dysregulated moments too because we will have them. We are, you know, our nervous systems are going like this on a wave all day long. We’re activated, we’re deactivated. We’re activating, we’re deactivating. And so it’s just being open and honest about it and really, you know, asking how can I support you through this moment of dysregulation? Like I notice, I feel, and I don’t use that word dysregulation necessarily with other people, but it’s like, I notice you’re feeling anxious. I notice you’re feeling overwhelmed. Like, what can I do to help support you right now? but I don’t enmesh with the energy, I keep their separate. They have their bubble, I have my bubble. We’re touching up against each other, but I’m not receiving it. I’m not taking it on as my issue or my problem. I’m seeing it, but I’m empathetically and compassionately engaging in it in a way that feels good for me. Or sometimes it’s just creating that awareness hey it’s going on and then they can take care of it themselves, you know?

**David:**

Yeah, yeah, yeah that’s really great because I always say that I think it’s counterintuitive but healthy boundaries bring us closer together. What do you think needs to happen? So someone has a trauma in their life, in their experience. Like I always say it’s no accident that trauma and transformation sounds so much alike because trauma is it changes you it changed like it literally it transforms you it’s not the transformation maybe that you want what has to happen for that to heal and recover that that wound i mean if i were to say the basic in one line or sentence, it would be, we have to go back and support ourselves through these emotions, revisiting these emotions in the ways that we weren’t supported back then. Whatever resources we didn’t have available, we provide those now. Like whatever core needs were not met through that traumatic experience, those are the needs that are crying out within us as adults now. And so part of the inner child healing work that I do is going back to that child and into that age range that that trauma experience happened and allowing us to really befriend that little girl. Like really at age 40, when I realized my disgust with myself, my anger, my frustration, all of the feelings against myself were really me being mad at that little girl inside because she felt that way for decades and didn’t know what to do with it. And I was sick of her. I was done with her. I was overwhelmed by her. I didn’t like her. Honestly, she was robbing so much joy for me. So I saw her as not a good thing. And now I hold her. I, I just, I love her. I have a picture of her right here by my desk. Like I have a picture of her where all of the separation really started. And I embrace her with love and tenderness and gentleness. And I speak to her because she’s still part of me. And it’s just a beautiful recovery journey of reparenting that little girl. and supporting her.

**David:**

Yeah, yeah yeah that is so good because i i used to look at pictures of myself when i was a kid and i hated i hated looking at those old pictures because it was like that is the stupidest looking kid i’ve ever seen like i didn’t i just what what is the deal with that kid anyways and then so I sort of went through a similar process that you just described and today I’m I like take my photo albums out and show them off to people like I used to be embarrassed by my own by my own pictures of me when I was a little kid I think a lot of people have that probably and uh not anymore I’m super proud of of that little boy and he comes out every in a while. You’ve probably seen him there just for a second. And yeah, he just pops out every once in a while, especially when Henny’s around and he knows how to get them out. And so it’s so good. It’s so, so good. And I’m so fully connected with that little boy now. The other thing too, the other side of it is like not even just like reconciling that relationship with these parts of us, because I mean, honestly, I’ve had to reconcile not just the younger version of me, but like, you know, middle school, high school version of me, young adult version of me. It’s like not just an inner child. It’s really like inner children. There’s all of these different parts of me that I’m trying to really restore relationship with and reconcile and find out what brings that part of me peace, because that part of me still feels, had felt a lot of, you know, unsafety and lack of peace and just felt chaos and or felt pressure. And that’s where part of my perfectionism, you know, came in, but that’s a different part of me. That’s not this little girl version of me, you know? So there’s just these different parts of us that need seen and heard and held safely and being like just treated with a lot of compassion and love. But then the cool part is once we really begin doing that, then we can open ourselves up to start playing with that part of us. That part isn’t a threat anymore. That part isn’t a thorn in our side anymore. That part actually can be a tremendous source of our transformation. And now it’s like, I try to intentionally play and release myself through like just silliness, like all of the things that I had to repress as a kid or that I did repress even just out of trauma responses, I’m allowing and giving permission to be seen and heard and to expand. And it’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful place.

**David:**

Yeah, that’s so good. Yeah, you said a lot there. And it really is a journey. It’s not… You shouldn’t stop at just that one moment where there was a trauma or where there was a humiliation or where there was an embarrassment in your childhood because it’s a journey. Life is a journey and things are happening to you all the time. And I know that psychologists talk about big T and small T, I don’t really believe in that, but they’re all different form and shapes and sizes of traumatic events. And it’s a lot more insidious than the definition that’s in the DSM manual. And so one thing that I like to do is I just go back to who I was one year ago. And I just go back and I give myself thanks for like, you kind of messed up a few things, but on the other hand, you did some really amazing things and there’s no way, there’s no way that I could be where I am today if it wasn’t for you. I just wanna shake your hand and give you a pat on the back and say, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

**Jill:**

So important. So important. I want to, I don’t know if you know that much about my and Annie’s story, but Annie had repressed memories from the age of six for about 40 years of some horrifying events that happened in her childhood. And through a hundred and some hypnosis sessions, we did a lot of different kinds of methodologies, but the main like modality was hypnosis because she was super susceptible to it. But hypnosis really was just the vehicle. So we did like some inner child work and and some all kinds of different things. Today she does EFT tapping on herself and she she does a lot of meditation and visualization on like on her own and but we went we went through a lot with releasing all of that and

 healing it. And there were some moments that I didn’t know if I was going to make it through. I don’t know how she did it. She, she was just amazing, but she made a decision like immediately early, early on, as soon as she realized that there was something there, she made a decision that this is not going to define me. And so that was a big part of the process, but I’m just wondering if you have like, I know that you do a lot of different kind of techniques and modalities and, and methodologies and do you, do you want to touch on some of those or like, is there some that really are like, that you love?

**Jill:**

Yeah. So I would say I’m, gosh, I intertwine, intertwine a lot of different modalities, but I would say EFT tapping is most definitely one of my very favorites because it is both somatic tapping on the body and through these, you know, meridian points where it allows the energy to flow through the body while we’re actually processing out loud as well. And so that has been one of my most favorite and most powerful. I feel like it’s a power punch tool that people can use on themselves to kind of guide themselves like through every emotional experience they’re having. Because it gives permission for us, the very first stage of EFT tapping is stating how we feel and what is present, what is going on in putting voice to it, which is something that most of us, I would say possibly 99% of population of 30 years old or higher has like learned to repress and suppress all of these, you know, emotional states that we’ve had. So just that in itself is so powerful. But then adding the tapping is like so releasing of that stored stress in the body too at the same time. So it’s amazing. Visualization.

**David:**

Because it’s sort of, it’s sort of, um so you mentioned the meridians and the pathways and it’s sort of like if there’s a lot coming it sort of comes in chunks I guess is that a good way to describe it but it sort of blocks the channels where it comes in chunks I don’t know if that’s a good way to describe it or not

**Jill:**

yeah you know I mean I think of it as like emotion that we don’t know what to do with that feels like a lot gets stuck in the body. And so we tense up. I mean, our body itself, the response of the body is to always constrict when it’s feeling overwhelmed by something, and tense up. And so this is a way of communicating to the body, like, okay, we can release like what’s here. So we’re not only releasing it in a psychological manner by processing cognitively but we’re also inviting the body to release. And the energy that flows through these meridian points is just a mechanism of allowing that energy to like actually flow through the body instead of just sitting there stuck, not being able to do anything. Um, I’m a very firm like believer in physical movement to move through emotional experiences. So somatic, you know, is body led. So I actually even move my body on a lot of different other ways to release what’s what’s stuck. So I believe in a lot of myofascial releases, a lot of physical stress releases of the in these key areas that we’re holding that tension and that stress, you know, our hips are the emotional storehouse of our body. And so doing hip releases isn’t is one thing that I really, really love and I encourage a lot of my clients do hip releases and face, you know, different parts of our face our job job releases and shoulders and next and backs and like letting the energy actually flow through the body through these releases. But I also am a firm believer in visualization and meditation and that’s been another layer of my healing journey of coming back to peace. And so for me, my favorite experience of responding to myself is intertwining a variety of these elements. I don’t like just one, my body has been so sensitive and I feel like my nervous system has been on fire for a lot of my life. And so I feel like every different type of modality actually brings a different kind of calm and ease to my body. And so when I’m feeling something in a really big way, I need a hybrid approach. I need the journaling and the cognitive processing. I need the physical releases just from a physical standpoint. I need to visualize and see myself beyond this moment and see beyond and in in moving towards where I’m really wanting to move towards to help my brain and those new neural pathways be built as I visualize you know what it is that I’m moving towards and and claiming as my own. So, yeah, I got some training in somatic parts work, which is basically body-led inner child healing and connecting to the body and really seeing what is being held in my body, what emotions are being stored here and stuck here. And it’s crazy how simple it is if we just ask the body, like my chest is tight and And I stop and I pause and I put my hand on my chest and I connect on a physical, like a physical, tangible way to my body and just be like, okay, what are you holding here? And I just talk to my body and to some people it might seem a little crazy, but I’m like, I asked my body and my body knows it. If I stop and I listen and I’m empathetically and compassionately just kind of coming in with kindness, I open this channel like I can I can like my body will just be like, yeah, a lot of fear, a lot of shame or a lot of this or a lot of that, you know, and and then I can respond to that with these other modalities too and if my shoulder if I’m holding it in my shoulders, I can do physical stress releases just to create space in my neck and in my shoulders And then I can continue to intertwine in, you know, modalities and speak that safety and that connection and show the body it’s safe.

**David:**

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s excellent. Yeah, definitely with any one thing that we really noticed is that. And because this was such a an extreme case of that the memories were repressed so deeply that. So first they come out of the mind, and then they’re released from the mind into the body. And that’s kind of how it goes.

**David:**

So, wow, that was a pretty spirited back and forth we just had there. I really enjoyed this talk. We brought a lot of things out. And I believe that this will be super valuable for the people who are going to see it. So, I wanna thank you so much for taking the time to come and chat with me today. And I sure hope we get to do this again sometime.

**Jill:**

Yeah, me too. Thank you so much for having me.