She's Brave Podcast - Kristina Driscoll
She's Brave Podcast - Kristina Driscoll
Ep 100: Exploring Women's Nutrition, Somatics, and the Nervous System with Kymber Maulden
Welcome Brave Friends,
You are listening to episode 100! It's been an unbelievable journey to achieve this milestone full of Phenomenal Woman and heart-opening stories. Thank you for faithfully tuning in, sharing your feedback and sharing with your friends and family. I am so grateful to each and every one of you.
Love, Kristina
In this enriching and eye-opening episode of the "She's Brave" podcast, Host Kristina Driscoll sits down with the captivating Kymber Maulden, a nutritional consultant and women's health coach. Kymber delves into her trauma-informed, somatic health approach, shedding light on the pivotal role of the nervous system in our overall well-being.
Inside This Episode:
- Kymber opens up about the profound impact of understanding the nervous system, revealing the interconnectedness of our health, behavior, and daily functioning.
- Discover Kymber’s wisdom on the significance of nutrition, especially for women under stress, outlining how proper dietary choices can lead to profound energy and mental health benefits.
- Learn about somatic therapy, a transformative practice that combines body awareness and mental health techniques to heal trauma and improve physical and emotional regulation.
- Dive deep into complex topics such as the effects of loneliness, key dietary recommendations, and how modern stressors impact women's health.
- Kymber provides actionable insights on how to incorporate more nutrient-rich foods into your diet to support your body's needs, emphasizing the importance of animal proteins, diverse carbs, and critical nutrients often overlooked.
🌟 Subscribe and Stay Tuned:
Get ready for a Part Two! We're just scratching the surface. Kristina and Kimber have so much more to share next Tuesday!
Kymber Maulden Bio:
Kymber Maulden is a women's nutrition consultant and Somatic trauma coach who takes a dynamic approach to women's health. She integrates somatic parts work and attachment coaching, NARM principles for addressing CPTSD, and applied neurology into her private nutrition work to offer women a well-rounded and deep set of tools for addressing their long-term health & lifestyle needs. Her healing philosophy also caters to women as biologically distinct from men, which she believes to be crucially important in today's climate, which lacks female-driven research in health sciences and, in the name of equality, often pressure women into behaviors and lifestyles that don't serve their unique female physiology or psycho-spiritual needs.
Connect with Kymber Maulden:
https://www.instagram.com/kymbermaulden/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kymber-maulden-346a4578/
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It's Kristina Driscoll, host of the She's Brave podcast. I'm so glad you're here with me. I did not start out brave at all, but I learned that we can do brave things one small step at a time. After caregiving for my husband and young son for 12 years, it was definitely time for my next chapter. I want to get brave women's.
Voices out there in the world and inspire women to find their own bravery within themselves. A year later, I'm in the top 2 percent of all podcasts globally. I've interviewed amazing women who have overcome and accomplished so much to live the life of their dreams. If they can do it, you can do it too.
And so can I. Let's go. Hey everyone. It's Kristina with the She's Brave podcast. Boy, do I have a treat for you guys today. We are all going to be learning a lot of new stuff today. Today's guest is Kimber Malden. She's a nutritional consultant and a woman's health coach who takes a somatic and trauma informed approach to women's health.
She's come to view everything in health and behavior through the lens of nervous system functions. Here's what's next! I'm going to quote her now, but I'm going to say hello first. Hey, Kimber. How are you? Hello. I'm good. I'm happy to be here. So glad to have you. You are such an interesting human and I'm learning so much and I cannot wait for my guests to learn so much more about you.
I want to quote you right off the bat and then talk about some of the things that we're going to learn today. You said, from an energetic and nervous system lens, I was never taught to sustainably manage my own energy or acknowledge my own limitations. My caregivers were two very unstable people who didn't live in alignment with their own limitations.
So I never learned to self regulate. You also have had a lot of mental health issues. Yes. Yes. Today, you guys, we're going to be diving so deep into a lot of topics that a lot of us don't know very much about at all. Number one, why is the nervous system so important? Kimber is really passionate about this and we're going to talk more about the nervous system.
Number two. Why What are some of the applicable ways the nervous system ties in with nutritional healing? So those things are really tied together. Kimber's going to tell us more about that. Number three, what the heck is somatic therapy? Even I'm not sure. So I'm excited to dive deep in with you, Kimber, on that.
Number four, what are the four key factors you should consider when choosing which foods to eat? And then number five, what I'd really like to get into, Kimber. is you talk a lot about loneliness and how to heal the effects of loneliness and how this impacts us so greatly. So these are all the powerful, powerful topics.
So I want to start out with number one, why is the nervous system so important? Yeah, that's such a big question. I guess the simple answer would be that it's our operating system, right? So it ties into every metabolic function in our bodies. So it's linked to our survival. It's linked to our ability to regulate basic things like temperature, energy, circadian rhythms.
And so obviously it ties into our mood. It ties into our mental health. The pace at which we move about in life. our personality even. Once I started studying the nervous system, I realized that we don't really have like a fixed personality in the ways that we think we do. We have patterns that we've set up from a young age, tied in with the ways that we regulate.
And that kind of forms the basis of the patterns of thoughts that we tend to think, the things that we tend to be more likely to believe about ourselves, about other people. Um, Maybe you've heard of like the five main personality traits. I think Jordan Peterson talks about them. It's like spectrum for each of them.
Extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and I always forget the last one. But anyways, I think those are mitigated. By our early life experiences and how we're taught to regulate and how much stress we have in our bodies and how safe we feel. And that ties in as well with our metabolism.
It's important for all humans, but I think as women, it's even more important because we're more sensitive to stress. And so we're more likely to get dysregulated and I have like a whole tangent or soapbox I could go on around like this culture in the way that it teaches women to behave and The stress, the sympathetic dominance in the culture at large and how that can like affect a woman's ability to regulate throughout her life, starting really early in life.
Totally agree with you, Kimber. Totally agree. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And I also just want to mention when I use the word regulate a lot, which I kind of use that without explaining or anything is that when I use the word regulate, it means like not to calm ourselves down necessarily. Regulation is how do we Adapt to new environments.
How does our system handle a shift in the demands that the environment or internal or external is placing on us? Like, how do we handle stress? Are we able to go from a sympathetic state, which is a natural state that humans are able to go into back down to a parasympathetic state? What is our baseline?
And are we able to self soothe and calm down when needed? And so being regulated means like being able to ride the waves of life in a sustainable fashion, like the energy output matches the energy input, but dysregulation is not being able to shift gears. It's getting stuck in a sympathetic state for an extended period of time, which is really common and burning through your resources and not really ever knowing how to calm yourself back down.
And then you end up eventually you end up burnt out and then you're locked into more of a parasympathetic, which just means you're in like a freeze collapse and we can talk more about these different states. Yeah. Related to the nervous system. Mm hmm. And then lastly, I'll say that I went through a program called Neurosomatic Intelligence where we went through, it's a lot of neuroscience and like looking at the nervous system from all of these different lenses and different senses.
And the nervous system really is everything. Like you take in information through your eyes, through your lungs, through your ears, through gravity, and that tells the brain whether you're safe or not. And so if you're not taking any clear information from these places, or you're taking in too much, or the information you're taking in is being interpreted by the brain as a threat, then you're going to be walking around with a lot more stress and it's going to be harder to regulate.
Wow, I love this so much. I think in trying to prepare for this interview, what I realized, Kimber, was that you go deep, like you, you have extensive knowledge and there is so much to this that we're, we're Barely going to touch the tip of the iceberg today, but we're still going to try to get through at least some of this amazing information that you're sharing that you just shared.
Like, it's just like, I I'm learning already. So I want to just go a little bit into nutritional healing, because I know that That's one of the tools that you use in your practice. So, so tell us a little bit more about that. Yeah, I would say that's been like the low hanging fruit for me, meaning like throughout my life, I've dealt with a lot of stress and no mental struggles.
And I think that's a really common factor for a lot of women is that controlling our food is something that we feel like we have access to in some way, or at least like if nothing else, we could just choose what we're going to eat or not eat, or at least understand Why we want certain foods or why certain foods make us feel a certain way.
And so using food to regulate has become something that I'm very passionate about because it's basic. It's like foundations. You know, I think a lot of us are raised with like a very, very minimal nutrition education. I would even go as far as to say like, Vast majority of like doctors and people with their letters after their name have a minimal level of education around nutrition.
And so the way we're taught to think of it is like nutrition is something that is important, but it's kind of like in this modern world. If you're healthy, it's not that important. It can help you with like maybe your looks. I just don't think we understand fully like how deep it can go. For instance, like essential nutrients means we have to get them from chemicals we have to get from the external world in order for the internal world to function properly.
So when we are, to go back to the nervous system piece, when we're moving fast a lot, when we're in a sympathetic dominant state, a lot of the time we are burning through our resources faster. Therefore we need to be replacing them. We need to be replenishing. So a lot of the. Illnesses and like more like solid patterns that we call diseases and disorders.
What's happening there is that we don't have the resources to meet the demands of our life and of our bodies. Right. So nutrition is actually giving us the tools to meet the demands internally and externally of our life and nothing in our bodies is. Produced for free, like nothing. This ties in with why I have such a hard time with like under eating, fasting, extreme dieting, because everything neurotransmitters, neurohormones, enzymes, um, everything is produced out of something.
And so we can definitely recycle certain things, but we do have to replace. And I actually think that a lot of us live with deficits, like even in the modern world, we have so much access to so much, we often live with deficits because of the stress, the increased like stress that goes on for too long.
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I just, I have to ask you this, like give us maybe one to three foods. Like you're talking about, we live with deficits nutritionally. So give us some example, like maybe one, two, three examples of types of foods that maybe we should be eating more of. I think protein is a big one, like dense protein.
And this is controversial. I mean, when you get into nutrition, you realize like, foods are controversial in general. There's like macro wars. People, some people say, don't eat this particular food or don't eat a lot of this food group or, and then you could say that for any macro. Macro is a macronutrient.
It's like what we need in large amounts. And so I would say protein from animals is actually a big one that I'm a big advocate of because I'm an ex vegan myself. Women are more likely to be vegan. They're more likely to diet and try to like eat an ethical diet. The problem with that past a certain point.
Is that we often under nourish ourselves in an attempt to be good and like to be, you know, morally better or, um, vector clean or pure or whatever. And so what tends to happen is we under eat protein and because protein is such a huge part of our survival, it's like the one macronutrient we can't live without.
It really is like the building blocks of life are produced out of protein. So we have some pretty rigorous research looking at protein quality of different sources of protein. And like, The lowest scoring animal protein scores higher than the highest scoring plant protein. So I'm not like anti plant proteins, but they do tend to be harder to digest, harder to like, I'm spacing on the word right now, but like, A similar, or just like digest and assimilate into your system.
Into our system. Yeah. So, so I tend to see that more obviously in women than men, women are more likely to be vegetarians, vegan, or just again to under eat. So I would say eating more protein consistently. Eating more carbs, like I would even say simple carbs or complex carbs because those get demonized a lot and from my perspective, like from the bioenergetic lens.
Our energy production within our cell and our cells capacity to produce energy. And then our body's ability to use that energy well is mitigated by a lot of things. And one of those things is just like, how well can the cell get glucose? And so if we're just living off of salads, like that's, I tell clients like salad is not a meal.
It's like cellulose and water. So it will fill you up because it's got fiber in it. And so it expands your stomach. But these are just like things that we've learned over the years. You look at like the eighties and the nineties and when we're all eating like salads with like fat free dressing. And like we're full and we're thin and we're like severely malnourished because like the brain is not getting the glucose.
Right. So you can actually push yourself into kind of like a chronically crazy state when you're under eating and you're not getting enough glucose. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I want to just go back slightly and share a personal experience about, you know, the whole vegetarian vegan thing. I really wish that I could be a vegetarian slash vegan.
And I tried to be a vegetarian in my twenties, after six months, my body didn't feel well. And so I was literally kind of forced to go back to eating meat. So at least I was able to like, kind of sense that and feel that and be like, I mean, yes, I gave this a good effort, but I can't seem to function as well.
And then when I was 40, I was like, I mean, just kind of like piggybacking and reinforcing what you said. And I really believe it's true. I, cause I've seen it happen. I, when I was 40, I met a woman who was 60 and she had been a vegetarian. I don't remember if it was vegetarian or vegan her whole life. She was 60 years old and she had massive health issues.
And the doctor said to her. I'm sorry to tell you this, but the only thing that's going to fix you is for you to start eating real meat again. I remember being at her house and she was roasting a leg of lamb. Awesome. And she told me, please never. Become a vegetarian or a vegan because I'm dealing with so many health issues and it may not happen right away, but it catches up with you.
And I also used to do caregiving for elderly people. And I saw that pattern a lot, like women who had long history of vegetarianism or veganism, even if you don't have a history of. Vegetarianism or veganism, just from chronic stress and not having enough just general protein or minerals, you can still end up with osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, severe back pain, higher chances of injury.
Those are things that tend to cause low immunity. And so I saw that quite a bit. And there was even a few, I did hospice work briefly, and there was a few of them that like their official. Diagnosis on their death certificate was protein malnourishment. Yeah. I mean, that's not like there was other things that they had going on, but when the hospice providers would fill out the form to say, this is what's happening, they're getting such little protein because what happens is the less protein you eat, the more your enzymes go down because enzymes are partially produced by protein.
And then you have less appetite and less capacity to handle food. So you slowly start to eat less and less. And so any, any number of things can happen to you when you don't have the resources to produce basic stuff. The body steals things from other places and then you just, and muscle it will eat you, but your body will eat itself.
Right. That's a really common pattern that I see. And even women in their thirties and forties is like, you're in a higher catabolic state, which means your anabolic is building up. Catabolic is breaking down. So your body's breaking down its own tissue for use of those resources. And it will do that with like the vanity muscles first, but then it that with internal organs.
Wow. Yeah. And so, but your point about like the long term effects, we don't have any data. Like historically, no one would have been a vegan or vegetarian unless they were just poor and they didn't have the option, right? Like consuming animals was not as direct and easy as it is in the developed countries now.
And so people that were vegan were just peasants. Like that's what, yeah, that's what, or, or they were like intentionally like, Starving themselves for religious reasons, fasting or abstaining. And in which case they weren't thinking about their body at all. They were putting themselves into like altered states by having low energy to get closer to God.
Yeah. Yeah. Just reminded me, like my brother lives in Canada and he works in a lab at a hospital, he has a degree in microbiology and. He has talked about actually children because of like religious beliefs and the whole family is vegetarian and or vegan and the children actually can develop really serious health.
Issues. Yeah. And it breaks his heart. Yeah. Yeah. It's really sad. I heard a while back. I don't like quote me on this verbatim, but that like Italy made it like illegal for people to raise their children vegan or something. I don't know how you would enforce that, but I remember an article being passed around or maybe it's like, it's probably not that black and white, right?
Like there's like something written into policy that says that that's like, neglect or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people that I know that tout vegan diets, their parents weren't vegan. So again, you want to look at like longitudinal, like we're being produced out of the resources of our parents.
So there's like so much nuance there around how much we can handle deprivation if certain foods or nutrients come from a really solid background. And if you have less trauma, like I do think that if you have more nervous dysregulation or a higher ACE score. Which I'm more than happy to go into that at some point if you want, which is adverse child experiences.
So the more of those you have, the more likely you are to have health issues or predisposed to certain things, including lots of stress. And so choosing to abstain from foods can actually heighten that all the effects of those things. Wow. I totally agree with you a hundred percent. This is so freaking fascinating, Amber.
My gosh. I'm loving this. Okay. So we said meat was one of them. Maybe give us one or two more like foods. Just give us like a couple more tips on this because this, this topic is so good. Yeah. So meat's important and I said animal food. So I guess that meant like. Um, eggs, dairy is a big one and that's one that's very controversial, but I actually feel very strongly that dairy is interesting.
I didn't know that. Yeah. I guess, I guess eggs and dairy are kind of considered, well, they're animal foods. So I mean, I think if you're, you're vegetarian, you probably eat them, but if you're vegan, you don't. Yeah. Yeah. And the reason for that being that like, I do think that you can eat too much muscle meat and I think there's like this.
Unrealistic binary that we create in this culture sometimes of like everyone's eating way too much meat and then someone's vegan and they don't really see the opposite. They don't really see, like, vegans will say everyone's just eating too many hamburgers and bacon. And I actually might agree with them in that sense.
Like, if that's all you're getting your protein from, it's better than nothing. And since we're looking at people on budgets and what people have access to, but I do think that like you're getting amino acids of various kinds from different foods. And if you just eat one food all the time, then you're going to be getting specific amino acids and that's it.
And good point. So like, not just me, but we're talking meat, dirt, but you know, also like we said, the different kinds of meat and then the dairy and then the eggs that I'll provide different forms of nutrition. I love it. And then like collagen and gelatin and things that like are the connective tissues that provide you with things like glycine, which is an amino acid that like calms you down.
Really? Helps lower stress levels. Bounces blood sugar. Oh my gosh. Yeah. So I do think that like humans have been eating the whole animal wasn't necessarily this like romantic thing that we did because we chose to, we had to because that was our only option, but we've been doing that for a really long time.
So when you just, when you change something dramatically in a short amount of time, the body doesn't have the capacity to really adjust to that. And I think that's kind of what's happened a little bit with like the mass amounts of muscle meat that everyone's eating is they're getting too much like methionine and tryptophan, which can be inflammatory into large of quantities when they're not.
Okay. So break that down into lay woman's terms, like give us the name of what the average American is eating too much of this kind of meat and maybe not enough of this other kind of meat. Protein. And again, I'm not going to say that the average American is eating too much meat. I think that they're eating too much meat out of context.
So I think that we're going to be eating more like connective tissues, bone broth. So like eating things with other parts of the animal because you do get a variety. I love using bone broth for the base of all my soups and stews. Nice. Yeah. Okay. That's a great example. Yeah. And then again, dairy gets a bad rep, but it's the highest, if you're looking at like protein scoring, it's the highest converting protein across all, both the animal and the plant kingdom is dairy protein.
Okay. So it's also a great source of calcium, of phosphorus. It's the only food that contains all three macros. So it has protein, fat, and carbs in it. It tends to calm us down. I think that a lot of people have a hard time with dairy for metabolic reasons. Like they don't have the enzymes to break it down.
They have a hard time with the alcohol. Pasteurized dairy. So I do think that there's a lot of metabolic issues in the developed world that make dairy potentially harder to break down. Or even just like if you're potentially like Asian background and you've had less exposure to it. So there's real, there, there are real reasons that people have a hard time with dairy, but I do think this black and white, like I don't handle dairy or I'm abstaining from dairy because of most of the time that's not necessary.
I help clients develop tolerance to dairy and start consuming dairy again. And I did that with myself. Yeah. It's not, and it's not BFFs, she, she doesn't do dairy at all because she's completely intolerant. Yeah. And we've been consuming dairy for like, 10, 000 years and you know, maybe even more. And, and so this idea that like, none of us can handle it anymore.
Like, I don't think it's that black and white. Like, I think there's a lot of reasons that we can't tolerate it. And again, depending on your history and where in the world you are, it might be harder for you, but like even lactose intolerance, like lactase is an enzyme, enzymes require resources. Like, are you getting the things you need to produce that enzyme?
And so it's like, it's important. I think that's the thing with nutrition is it's important that we get so much misinformation or incomplete information. So a lot of people put foods into black or white categories and that's like can cause a lot of cognitive distortions around eating for women. And I see a lot of the things that women are opting for in replacement not to be very good.
Not to provide the same nutrients and then they'll become like this self fulfilling prophecy where you don't eat these foods and then you don't have the enzymes for them. So then when you eat them, you feel like shit or you eat them in like a situation where like, say you never eat cheese and then you have pizza at some random pizzeria.
And it's like, where did that cheese come from? It's all processed. It's combined with gluten and all these things. Right. So then you're like, Oh, I feel bad. And, and it must be the dairy. Yeah. But it's, yeah, it's not that black and white. So yeah, so I would say like animal foods expanded beyond muscle meat and then carbs.
This is another one. Like I see a lot of low carb dieting or just under eating carbs. If you're someone who has chronic stress patterns and your stomach acid might be low and your enzymes may be low and you may have some dysbiosis as a result of that. So break that down again. What's dysbiosis? Yeah, so we have like an ecological system in our bodies and there's more like bacterial and fungal and like there's more of those cells than there are actually human cells in the human body.
Like we are regulated by a lot of different living things inside of us. And What keeps everything in check and keeps the pH of different parts of the body in the right space and is managing our stress because again, stress is a nonspecific demand on us to use our resources up. And so if we have chronic stress, we're burning through our resources, which means that we're going to have less ability to regulate different things.
Therefore, the pH in different areas gets thrown off. So the microbes that naturally live there either like go down or different opportunistic ones show up. And so we can end up with an inability to digest food properly. And one of the first things that we're going to see is a difficulty with carbs because carbs, more or less fibers, sugars tend to feed the sugar feeds everything.
So I do think this like obsession with cutting out sugar to heal your gut is incredibly damaging. It's like not sustainable because when you're cutting out the sugar and you're starving out. The yeast or bacteria or whatever, you're starving your own cells. So you're basically placing more stress on your brain to try to regulate that rebalance your ecological system while simultaneously stressing yourself out.
But I do think that like consuming fibers and excess carbs, resistant starch, like those things can be really, really hard for people who have any kind of dysbiosis and dysbiosis is regulated not just by your diet, but like how you're breathing. You're sleeping. Um, yeah. So how stressed your body is. And so, yeah.
So a lot of women cut carbs, they get into a place and I've been in, I've been in all of these spaces. I totally get it. Like when you're stressed, your appetite goes down because your stress hormones kick up to get you out of danger. Some perceived danger. And then since your appetite goes down, you eat a little bit less.
And then when you eat a little bit less, you have a little bit of less resources and your blood sugar goes down. So then stress hormones bring your blood sugar back up. And so it becomes this vicious cycle and then you don't necessarily feel as good cause you're eating while you're running from a tiger.
So you just eat a little bit less. Yeah. Eating while you run from a tiger because that's what it is. If you're really in a high stress mode and you eat, that's just like, In the caveman times that was eating while you were running from a tiger. Wow. Yeah. That's, your brain thinks, I love that expression that, that's so amazing.
Yeah. Yeah. So the carbs is a big one, I think. Like, just making sure that, I think like a lot of people focus on calories and I don't Mm-Hmm. think that's super helpful. Mm-Hmm. . I think that, first of all, a lot of us have like. Pretty negative associations and patterning with calories in general. Like we were brought up, you know, thinking that calories matter and if you eat too many calories and, but also it's not really helpful because the body uses different calories differently.
And a lot of really nutrient dense foods that we need to nourish ourselves and regulate our high calorie foods. So I don't think that. Focusing on calories, but I do think focusing on macros is important. So like, again, making sure you're getting enough and that you're not eating like an extraordinary amount of one with less of another, which is kind of what these extreme diets that are so popular online tell us to do.
Like a vegan diet. Tends to be really high in carbs. I've had friends that are vegan long after I stopped being vegan. And I'd go to like one of their potlucks and I'm like, well, I need to go home and like have some yogurt or something. Cause I'm just like, I mean, everyone here is just eating sugar and you can't only do that for so long before your body doesn't have the ability to regulate its glucose.
Well, cause it's just getting a mass amounts of it all the time without the resources to manage it. And then the flip side is like high fat diets where people are eating mass amounts of fat and like trying to rely on that for energy. The body can handle that much fat. We're not meant to eat like mass amounts of fat all the time.
Right. Right. Yeah. Wow. So much good stuff. I'm just like, wow, I could listen to you for hours and hours and hours. I want to touch a little bit on a big part of what you do is something called somatic therapy. And I really Don't know anything about that other than I had to literally like Google it to prepare for this interview.
Yeah. It's interesting because since I started working as a somatic practitioner, like presenting myself as such, I started following people online. And so I feel like saturated by the term. So I forget that like a large majority of the world, this is reassuring, right? Like a large majority of the world are not familiar with this concept.
So somatic soma means the living body. So somatic therapies means we are working with the living body and it kind of ties into these terms, top down and bottom up. So top down is what we're used to in this culture. It's like how we learn didactic learning, being in school, being taught conversation, talk therapy, even mindfulness meditation tends to be top down because you're kind of going through your awareness and like upper corticoid functions to regulate your body.
And so somatic means we're actually just going to go straight into the body and we're going to potentially even help the mind shift through the body. So that would be like breath work is a somatic practice because you're just going straight to one of the ways the body regulates like a essential function of the body to get information through the respiratory tract to the brain.
So get oxygen into the cells to respirate. But there are other tools as well, things that I've learned in the different programs that I. Went through that I now use with clients and I use a combination of top down and bottom up because you can go to a practitioner that's like purely somatic. I did a lot of somatic experiencing, which is a specific form of somatic therapy that was developed to support PTSD.
So that was my first experience of it. It was like in my early twenties, I started working with a practitioner and I worked with a few different practitioners. That's really, really powerful work. And I definitely use some of those tools and took those with me in my own life. However, I would say that's more helpful for people with PTSD and not as much CPTSD, which is what I work with now.
And so a lot of people don't feel completely safe to just drop into their bodies. Like we're in our heads for a reason. Most of the time we spend 90 percent of our lives there. We store a lot in our bodies that we're not aware of. There's a loss of control during somatic sessions. Takes a lot of trust.
It can be very slow. Like we have a term called titration, which is like allowing the nervous system to kind of titrate. We open, we close, we expand, we retract. And so helping my clients. Use their intellect to make sense of what's happening to them and being able to share stories while also like bringing them back to the present moment and bringing them back to what they're feeling in their bodies in the moment, a big part of the work.
And then helping them develop tools to work with the cognitive distortions. So, like, the thoughts, the ways that the mind uses distorted beliefs. So, I think we understand that, like, cognitive behavioral therapy, a lot of people have heard of that, to work with those cognitive distortions and use the mind to kind of reframe things, um, and challenge those thoughts.
But also, there's an element of being dysregulated feeds cognitive distortions. So a lot of times we don't feel physically safe in our bodies. We don't know that. We don't know how to put our finger on it. It's just something's not right. So then the mind is racing, trying to figure out why something's not right.
And we create stories and beliefs out of that something's not right feeling. So yeah, so helping my clients just like come back to the present moment, you know, connect with their bodies. There's a term called felt sense, which is like your felt experience of life. So we have our narratives running all the time.
Like I'm in a room, it's warm, it's cold, the lights, you know, this person said this to me yesterday. And then there's everything that we're feeling in our bodies all the time. So it's like the climate underneath the thoughts. And that's kind of something that I teach them to consistently come back to every day.
It's like, what is your emotional affect telling you about your felt sense? What is like the emotional and physical tone of your life? What brings you up? What takes you down? What speeds you up? What slows you down? Um, what, okay. You mentioned a few minutes ago, and I think almost everybody knows what PTSD is.
Everybody knows, but you said CPTSD, what, what is that? Yeah. So PTSD post traumatic stress disorder is, we see that as like shock trauma. That's like you have an experience or a series of experiences, but it's usually a little bit later in life after you've developed. And you have a car accident or an assault or you go to war or something happens that threatens your survival.
And that you don't have the resources to manage that in the moment. So you store it. And that's what PTSD is. You have this stored trauma in your body and it gets triggered in certain circumstances, but you carry that around and it keeps you in a dysregulated state all the time, usually a pretty contracted state.
So it's based around survival. CPTSD. It's developmental. It's complex. That's what the C stands for. Complex post traumatic stress disorder. And that starts early in life. That's usually something goes on for too long, too much for too long. It's developmental and it's attachment based because it happens when brains are developing and we're developing our sense of self.
It's usually, you know, Based on my trainings, we refer to it as like environmental failure because humans are one of the few species that come into the world and have this like extended period of time where we're 100 percent reliant on our external world for everything. And so if that environment, that external world fails us in some way to meet very crucial needs during developmental phases, then we have to kind of adapt to having those needs not met.
And we adapt by internalizing everything. And so, CPTSD is relational, and whereas PTSD tends to be more survival based, CPTSD is shame based. Interesting. It's like walking around like there's something wrong with me. I actually personally think it's more common. Like my background is in child development, early child development, and so I used to work with children.
I was a birth worker. I was focused on my studies on attachment and spent like years over a decade working with small children and babies, like helping them form healthy, secure attachments. And I actually think CPTSD is a failure of that. And it can happen at different levels, it obviously it's a spectrum, but the ACE scoring that like adverse child experience, that was a big study that put CPTSD on the map, I think it was like in the 80s, where they realized that adverse, the higher amounts of adverse child experiences you have, the more likely you are to have all these illnesses and disorders, and that people often don't realize.
Even if they want to get better, they want to get healthier, they want to lose weight, they're quote unquote sabotaging themselves, and it's really like they're trying to protect themselves from something that happened really early in life. Wow. Okay. So, Kimber, I feel like we have covered so much information in such a short amount of time.
I'm, I absolutely love everything that we are unpacking and I don't think we're done. I think we need to have a part two. Are you, are you down for that girlfriend? For sure. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. I always feel like because this stuff is so fun to talk about, even if it's like kind of heavy, but I always feel like I conscious of not overwhelming people with too much information.
Absolutely. So that being said, girlfriends out there, stay tuned because we're going to continue this with a part two. We're going to talk more about the CPTSD, which is shame based. We're going to talk about the PTSD, which is like survival based. And I really, really want to unpack this concept of loneliness and how that all fits into.
And then I want to talk more about how you serve and help others. And I know not everybody can afford to work with you one on one, but I'm sure you have some group therapies and things like that. And I think the work that you're doing is so incredibly important, so important that we need to do a part two.
So stay tuned, you guys. Hey, brave friends. Thanks so much for taking time out of your busy life to listen to today's episode. I love learning about what makes you brave. I'm here with you, I see you, I hear you, and I want to hear from you. I want to know how you are showing up as brave and resilient and authentic.
Connect with me on Instagram at she's brave podcast, or check out my website at www. she'sbravepodcast. com. If you're interested in learning more about podcasting, join my Facebook group, www. facebook. com slash groups slash podcast mastery journey. I'm sending you guys so much love until next time. Keep being brave.
