154: Somatic Healing: How to Heal Your Relationships By Healing Your Trauma | Diane Poole Heller PhD

There's researchers like Alan Short, I think 95% of what's going on in your adult relationship is influenced by your attachment histories. Healing the early relational imprints can have a really deep impact on how you function in a healthy way in an adult relationship. I have even had assistants in my trainings actually remarry someone they divorced because they finally understood their attachment style. What is the role of coming into your body in the shifts relationally that you can expect when you do this kind of work? The body has natural physiological sequences of how to move and complete a threat response. It has natural physiological sequences to move from shutdown and dissociation. What's so great is that they have learned to map these sequences so we can align ourselves with our natural capacity to heal. It's shocking how quickly the body will reclaim itself. Maybe you're doing a lot right. You're working out, you're eating decently, and still your body feels puffy, your hair feels thinner, and your skin feels crepey. You were taught to call that aging, but I am choosing not to. I don't believe that beauty is vanity. I believe it's a hobby. It's a skill. It's something that you can practice and learn at any age. So I'm hosting a free beauty backroom livestream event for midlife women who are ready to glow up and feel leaner, stronger, and more radiant than they have perhaps in their entire life. I will be sharing exactly what I've done over the past couple of months to do just that. So if 2026 is your rebrand year, come play with me, kellybroganmd.com forward slash BB. Why there is hope, actually, for attachment-related trauma, why it is that she believes so passionately that you can heal, integrate, and evolve your patterns, no matter how ingrained and potentially early-rooted they may seem. We also talk about one of the reasons why I cry so much when I am feeling vulnerable in a relational moment. I actually was picking her brain about my own experience. We talk about what shame looks like in the body and how to intervene somatically. And we talk about what it actually means to get in your body, this phrase and even suggestion, get in your body. What does that mean? What does it look like? And how can you begin to baby step your way back home into your vessel? Enjoy. Welcome, Diane, to the show. I'm so excited to be here. I'm learning more about your work, and I'm very excited about what you're doing, and it's great to be here. Thanks for inviting me. It's so funny to interact with you because I've watched so many hours of your very generous content, live streams, and I see you in the same background, except now you're talking to me. It's like a surreal virtual experience. experience. So I'm really delighted to have you on as such a pioneer in the somatics space. And we will unpack what that means because I make a lot of assumptions, maybe you do too, about the general collective understanding around attachment theory and these kinds of relational patterns and what it even means to, quote unquote, heal them. So I wanted to start, Diane, though, really just this is a question that comes from my own curiosity at this point. having explored so many different entry points into the healing and specifically the relational trauma journey. So there are beliefs that we carry, right? And associated thoughts and even speech patterns. There are different kinds of biological phenomenon that you can come at through everything from biohacking to nutrition and lifestyle change. There are emotional tools that we can acquire around how to work with the sensations of our emotions. And then there's specifically the somatic realm, if I could just generalize and say there's this conceptualization about the way that trauma lives in the body over time. And I would even add sort of the shape that a body takes, right? And not only in day-to-day life, but specifically in response to perceived danger. and I'd love to hear about how it is that you, knowing what you do about attachment theory and trauma, intergenerational trauma, why it is that you feel the somatic portal is the most powerful way in and what that even actually means so that we don't assume everybody's on the same page when we bandy about this word that's now in the zeitgeist, which is somatic work, somatic healing. Okay. Well, I started in working with somatic and orientation before anybody was really interested in it a long time ago. I'm sort of a dinosaur. This is like 40 years ago. It's so weird to be saying things like 40 years ago, but I am that old now. So, but I found that personally, I have a quite strong trauma history. And when I found somatic work, I was trying everything else that was available back then, which wasn't very much, actually. I was even going to the Yellow Pages trying to find resources. I mean, I was sort of desperate. But when I finally landed on Dr. Peter Levine's work, Somatic Experiencing, I really noticed a big shift in how my body was releasing trauma. And it was just such a gift. It was a godsend, really. And it actually, I think I had not inhabited my body up until that point. I think I was like beside it or something. And I think some of us can relate to that. I was probably quite dissociated, even though I didn't know I was dissociated. I mean, I was functioning, I was driving, I was balancing my checkbook, I was working, I was doing everything. But when I started to work with nervous system regulation and understanding how trauma can live in the body, that's a really big piece of healing work, definitely biased in this direction, because it was so powerful for me personally. And then, of course, I taught that work, I mean, all around the world, everywhere, pretty much, I mean, half of everywhere anyway, and brought that understanding through trainings and that sort of thing to so many people. And they also were having remarkable kind of feeling like it was sort of a missing link between the value of emotional work, talk therapy. I mean, all the different things that were available at the time and really learning how to what I find so helpful is learning how to align with our suffering. I mean, all of us are carrying something. I mean, the human journey includes suffering. I don't think there's a way around that. And of course, the degree is different. But what I found so useful about working somatically was it gave me a way to align with my suffering and work with it in little pieces or pieces that were the size of my nervousness could manage to handle the arousal and actually move towards integration. You kind of integrate as you go along in somatic work, you know, and you're very careful not to give the body or yourself too much difficulty at one time. So it has a very strong orientation to being resourced, like building your resiliency so that your nervous system can get a little stronger, like working out a muscle at the gym, you know, and it can manage more high arousal states that are usually left behind with unresolved trauma. So that's one point I want to give you a chance to respond, but we could talk about this for a long time. Absolutely. I'd love to zoom in a little bit on that shift that you described in your own life, because I wonder how you could perceive. First of all, I sort of envision you looking through the yellow pages, like for what, like healing body better, right? There was nothing. I mean, I was looking under trauma. I mean, I was desperate. I really had gone to so many people and I just felt like, to quote Pia Melody, I was speaking Italian and they were answering in Greek. I mean, I just didn't feel like anybody got it to the level of your relationships that you felt were suffering primarily. Oh, yeah. Oh, definitely. With myself, with my body, with, you know, the ground grounding. You know, you really once you have trauma sort of overtake, there's a lot of losses there. And but they can come back. I mean, this is a very hopeful message and we can heal this. It's very healable. So what were some of the early shifts that led you to believe that somatic work was was going to be your bag? It was going to be. It's really funny. I'm going to say this. I don't usually say this, but when I met Peter Levine, I only knew him four hours. I was in a training, you know, introductory lecture or something training, and he was doing some demos. And within four hours, I just got this sort of, I always think of it as like a telegram from God or something. It sounds really funny. But I got this insight, like, and I didn't even know why I got this message. It was really loud. I've only had this happen twice in my life. And it was like, you're going to be working with this person for 30 years and you're going to design their training program because he had no training program. He had no, he didn't have one handout. I mean, he was, you know, he was just off the cuff all the time, which he did really well, but it helps to have a structure, you know, for people to learn it. And I was like, what? It was like brand new. I mean, like it just has been there four hours. I'm like, really? That's crazy. But it kept persisting. And it actually turned out to be true. In fact, it's been 40 years instead of 30. So we have a strong collaboration. Now I'm teaching, you know, trauma work really married to attachment, early attachment history, because what I discovered, even as I learned to regulate my nervous system, I got my body back. I wasn't triggered by certain things I had earlier been triggered by. I was more inhabiting myself, you know, physically and emotionally and all in all ways, spiritually. I found that one of the toughest results of unresolved trauma or early attachment injury is in relationship, like the relationship deeply to your authentic self, you know, who you really are, not the persona you might have learned that you're supposed to present. And also this desire and ability to be in connection with another person in an intimate and authentic way. And so I just, and I kept nudging Peter to include that in the training. And he's like, yeah, we're covering all this. And you know, you can't cover everything, right? But I had this, that was my second telegram. I was like, You have to teach it. You have to understand the very beginning of relationships. That's why I went to attachment theory, because that's when our relationship template is actually being formed in utero. And I mean, it's really early, you know, and then there's different people have different ideas about this. But it seems very evident to me through my clinical work. I'm not a researcher that these early imprints are underneath a lot of what might become less than useful later on in our adult relationships. It's interesting because there's research that says there's no correlation. And I think Amir Levine falls in that camp. And there's researchers like Alan Shore, for example, that think 95% of what's going on in your adult relationship is influenced by your attachment history. So if you would just cut it in the middle and make it 50%, it's still a big deal. So I think healing the early relational imprints, which can be healed. This is a very hopeful, hopeful, hopeful message. I just want people to understand that. can have a really deep impact on how you function in a healthy way in an adult relationship. Because trauma kind of puts a kibosh on everything. Trauma makes us, you know, withdrawn or we get flooded with emotion. We're not regulated. I mean, it's very difficult to be in a healthy relationship when you have a lot of unresolved trauma unless you have a, you know, just really unique situation. It just helps a lot for me to add the attachment piece. I wouldn't know how to do work anymore now without the trauma somatic approach and also the relational approach that I interweave together in the in the DARE work, the dynamic attachment repatterning experience. That's what that sounds stands for. It's just because we work very experientially. We really work through feeling things in the body and moving things through the body and also relationally what's happening between you and me. It was happening between myself and another person. Relationally is a very important focus for healing. And as far as I'm concerned, I mean, it's almost anathema. to everything I understand about reality to imagine that it wouldn't start with your early attachment. I can't even believe that's a perspective. Other than that, I'm very familiar with a lot of more conventional perspectives on how it is that we become who we are. The other thing I just don't want to forget to say is in some of the writing on attachment, you have pretty major players saying that if you miss the developmental window when you're developing as a child, that that's too bad. It's time, you know, it's time related and developmentally related, and then you kind of don't have that capacity, whatever that is. And I don't agree with that either. I think, I mean, there are, of course, we're never going to come out 100% of anything. We're human beings, a work in progress to begin with. But so much of what we might have suffered through neglect or abuse or whatever can be, in my opinion and in my clinical experience, can be recovered in almost a largely healthy way. So that's another thing that I feel a misconception in the field about attachment. So it's this hopeful plasticity that you subscribe to. And certainly I concur. I've seen it not only in my own experience, but in pretty much everybody I've ever worked with. And I remember that there was a time not too long ago in my own life where I would have told myself I was doing fine in relationships. and when I first started to work with a somatic therapist, I remember recognizing that I felt pretty much nothing from the neck down. I mean, there was only this sort of vivified energy in my head and everything else was totally numb, which is kind of what you described way back when. So what is the role of coming into your body? I suppose with your attention, with your awareness, in the shifts relationally that you can expect when you do this kind of work? There's a couple ways to answer that question. First of all, you can't obviously tell someone to go into their body if they're not. It's not like a conscious choice, obviously. And then the other thing that people say to trauma survivors is just relax. I mean, you would relax if you could, but your nervous system is so dysregulated. You're either shut down or you're, you know, hypervigilant or overly emotional or flooding inside. You know, you're dealing with so many things that are happening. It's not a big mystery why people sometimes turn to self-medication through things that, you know, they try to regulate through sometimes prescribed drugs, sometimes illicit drugs. I mean, it's a horrible state to live in when your nervous system is really dysregulated. I mean, you're prone to panic attacks, rage outbursts. You feel like you can't control them. You know, a little thing can set you off. You're subject to triggers that have some relationship to threat that is still unresolved and still active in your body. I mean, there's just so many reasons that it's complicated, but there's so many ways to work with it. Like learning how to extinguish a threat response for someone, for yourself or someone else. It's like when we are triggered into a threat response, our body is going to do everything that everybody else's body does. We share this in common with our physiology. You'll be hypervigilant. You'll have an either a scanning kind of focus where you're just looking for threat because you haven't located it or you have a tunnel vision kind of like looking down a tube because you're still perceiving something as threatening that may have been long gone in the past from like 30 years ago, but it's still active in your system. So the best way for me that I have ever found is to move that through physiological sequences. The body has natural physiological sequences of how to move and complete a threat response. It has natural physiological sequences to move from shutdown and dissociation back to active versus passive responses, back to the prefrontal cortex for social engagement that Dr. Stephen Borges talks about in his polyvagal theory. There are all these ways the body is actually biologically and I think spiritually and emotionally and everything physically designed to heal. And what's so great about these people that have studied this or come across it, whether it's John Bowlby with attachment theory or Peter Levine with somatic experiencing or many other people in the field could list names and names. What's so great is that they have learned to map these sequences so we can align ourselves with our natural capacity to heal. And then it's shocking how quickly the body will reclaim itself if we follow the natural tendencies we already have inherently biologically. I wonder if you can share, because I know that there are so many cases that you have borne witness to. I wonder if you can share an example of what might be a pattern in someone's life and maybe even invoke some of the attachment language in the event that anybody listening isn't familiar with the different attachment styles. and what would a completion typically look like in a session, let's say, and how that might translate into their lived experience post-treatment? Well, when I think about the attachment styles, first of all, one of John Bowlby's contributions is the understanding that we have secure attachment, our healthy attachment, it lives in our bodies, and we come with that equipment installed. You know, it's part of us. And so if you have a brain and a nervous system, you can regulate. Right. But if you you come with an inherent secure attachment. But of course, things can interfere with it depending on what happens in your family. If you have a pro social family, then that secure attachment will flourish. And that'll be the parts of the brain that really support neurobiologically secure attachment will be enhanced. But if you like many people you come into maybe an environment that has neglect or parents that have unresolved trauma because they humans in process too Or you coming into in worst case scenarios abusive or really violent or really chaotic environments And then the parts of the brain and the nervous system get primed to look for threats, scan for threat, defend against threat, because that's what helps you survive a childhood like that. So what in terms of working with anyone, I'm trying to think of a specific example, but in working with anyone, their attachment injury might go in different directions. And I'll be very brief on this, but you can get more information on my website easily. But if your parents were neglectful or they just weren't present, maybe they were associated from their own history, then you're a baby reaching out and there's nobody there. That's terrifying because we're very dependent when we're little. Right. And then you'll tend to shut down. You'll tend to stop gesturing and stop cooing and stop looking for, you know, loving eyes and all that because it does not working. Right. And actually, it seems that you have a better relationship with your parent by not having a relationship with your parent, which sounds really weird. You just suppress your own needs. You go into this kind of isolation. Your sense of self isn't developed through reflection. So a lot of times your right brain isn't very stimulated. So you don't develop in a range of emotion. you tend to you know basically live in more of a isolated sense of things the other way that can happen is your parents are pretty harsh and rejecting or one parent is you know they're really invested in you learning things so they really feed your left brain like how to read how to write how to do math how to ride a bike that sort of thing but they aren't there emotionally so that would tend a person to move towards avoidant attachment style and then later as an adult it's called dismissive and there's all sorts of qualities about that but and then we can go into that if we want later. Another way that we adapt to not having secure is somebody, a parent is there and they're loving, but then they're really unpredictable. Like they're there and as soon as you start to relax into it, they're distracted and they kind of drop you energetically and you're, and you see you're yet anxious. Like I, you know, I want that and I want more of it, but where are they, you know? So you sort of knew a really good situation, but it was so unpredictable that it creates anxiety instead of regulation. That's anxious, ambivalent. And so people tend to have a pressure to speak. They get flooded emotionally easily. Their right brain is on overdrive. So they have almost too overly activated attachment system, whereas the avoidant has an under or shut down attachment system. But both are trying the same thing to adjust to the situation that they came into for caregiving. It's not always caregiving. Sometimes there's medical procedures where, you know, there's a birth trauma and either the baby or the mom have to be in medical under medical care and they can't bond in the very early days. And there's all sorts of different situations, but we're going to just for the sake of time focus more on the caregiving ones. And then disorganized is a mix of the extremes of avoid and or ambivalent. But when there's enough threat or extreme chaos mixed in with the attachment system so that the person is trying to connect. But things are so scary with the person they're trying to connect with that they get very dysregulated and they can, you know, move into defending, like hitting the person instead of hugging them because they're dealing with the threat response. like fight, flight, or freeze. You'll see a kid run towards a parent and just collapse in the middle before they get to the parent. Or they'll go up to the parent and hit them on the face, which is normal behavior. Or they'll run towards the parent and then turn around and run the other direction. You can see videos of this on YouTube, and it's heartbreaking. So what I'm trying to do is first to get an understanding of what somebody's attachment history is and then do all sorts of exercises and interventions that help them heal the particular challenge that they faced individually. And then secure attachment will arise on its own. And what I'm trying to help people understand is to see the markers for secure attachment. Like sometimes you're working with someone and they're deep inside and all of a sudden they look at you and they look at you with such contact, you know. And it's like you see them for the first time like, oh, you're here, you know. and they are really truly present. That's secure attachment, that they're back into their prefrontal cortex and they're able to really make a deep connection. And when that's not there, then we're looking at the specifics of which attachment wound is present in the treatment depending on what's going on. Because we can have a mix of attachment styles. You might have one parent who was void and one parent who was ambivalent or another caregiver that was disorganized, And you're going to have relational dynamics with all different attachment challenges. And then however you internalize all of that becomes sort of your default attachment mix. And very often, I mean, we have people take this free quiz on our website and they can sort of get a pie chart of based on their answers. What seems to be their mix of attachment styles, you know? So that's a little bit of an information. We have had I have even had assistants in my trainings actually remarry someone they divorced because they finally understood their attachment style. So what I love about understanding attachment and not just labeling, it's not about labeling for me at all. It's just like learning how to be more precise with what I'm suggesting for healing. And if I understand the pattern, then I can understand what will help, you know, move it more towards secure attachment, which we all have the capacity to do. But there's, you know, we're trying to basically what I've been really maniacally focused on is coming up with ways to trigger that implicit memory because attachment happens so early. You don't have a ego structure even to make a story about it. You know, a lot of it's just in your tissues and your bones and your nervous system and your brain and your body. So we have to tap into that. So I'll have people do exercises, you know, like looking out in the world to see kind eyes. and what because for an avoidant person well this could happen in any of them but for an avoidant person especially a lot of times when they looked out into the world for eye contact they saw either contempt or criticism or hatred or anger so they learn to not make eye contact a lot of times they'll look at your chin when they're talking to you because eye contact's too threatening and that's not based on you in the present moment most likely it's based on their history with eye contact. So looking out into the world with kind eyes will sounds like a very benign exercise. But for some people, it's really enjoyable. It's, oh, yeah, I remember the picture of the Dalai Lama or gosh, I remember my Uncle Joe. He was a really cool guy. I really loved hanging out with him. Or I remember looking at my dog, you know, and I just feel this warmth and my heart expands and all that. So great. Sometimes the resource expansion can come up first, but sometimes it triggers a deep wound. I mean, I had to recover from that because I had a projection. I would see my mother's, you know, she occasionally would go into this very hateful look. And I would see that before I would actually get through the projection to see the person I was talking to. So I had to do a lot of work on eye contact myself. So now it doesn't even come up. But that can be a big, I did a podcast radio interview with someone, oh, years ago, 10 years ago. And we did this exercise in the um which i just kind of did with everyone here and she said she went home and cried for two days because what she what came up for her was all these memories of how unkind she was looked at as a child and it's just this huge grief came up so you know these are sound very simple but they can evoke a lot of this you know early wounding that this you know very tender and very vulnerable so we want to make sure people have support and you know with peers or with therapists or however they have support to go through the healing journey, but they can go through it. And on the other side, I mean, there's just so many gifts that come with it that last a lifetime. So you've probably heard about diversifying investments and saving for the future. But what about becoming your own bank and opting out of high interest loans and difficult decisions about whether to sell off an asset? As a single woman and a mother, my whole system exhaled when I learned about the specific and unique whole life insurance policies that my now friends Josh and Ken offer. So unlike crypto stocks and even gold, you can borrow the money that you invest in this policy even days after you deposit it. You can actually choose never to pay it back because it comes off of the death benefit, which is exponentially more than you put in over the years. And your policy keeps compounding and growing as if you didn't touch it. There's nothing else, based on my research, not one other type of investment that allows for that. Every other investment or asset depreciates the minute you liquidate it. And by the way, try not paying back your home loan or HELOC. The strategy is super flexible and it's super low stress. These guys go above and beyond to make sure that you and your family are set up with the best policy. And I've now referred them hundreds of folks who have given me the same feedback. I'm pretty skilled, I think, at attracting sleeper resources that are game-changing, so I am delighted to put you on. Go listen to episode 153 of Reclamation Radio. We unpack the whole thing in a way that makes sense. And if you want someone to run the numbers of your specific situation, book a free call with my friends Josh and Ken over at kellybroganmd.com forward slash whole. So it sounds like a lot of the integration that starts to happen isn't just acknowledging what it must have been like to be parented without full security. Right. And I have had on the podcast, Erica Commissar, who wrote Being There. And I don't know if you're familiar with her work, but it was one of the harder books I've read as an adult of now teenage daughters because I was, you know, an irrecoverable, apparently at the time, workaholic. And I was back at work, you know, three weeks postpartum, all the rest. So a lot of the research that she curates and analyzes is around the specific role biologically of the mother, first three years, not to be replaced by any other warm hands. So I have extended family and my parents who supported me. And so it was tough to recognize what I didn't know at the time. So I wonder what you believe is the specific role of the mother, physiologically even, let alone psycho-emotionally, when it comes to early attachment imprints. Well, it's interesting because I don't usually give advice when I'm doing therapy with people. I don't like, but the only advice I do give is when people have young children is if they have the financial means to stay at home, you know, for the first several, you know, like you said, three to four years, that's invaluable. I mean, the results of that can be just giant at the other end. I mean, as you form relationships along the way. But that's not possible for a lot of people. And I mean, we have single moms that are like way more people managing single households than there was before. I think in the 50s, it was like 5%. I heard on a podcast recently, it was like 50%. That's like astonishing. I have to check that again to see if that's still current. But I think you do the best with your circumstances. And the other thing I would say, I do think having supportive extended family is really helpful. I mean, I had a grandmother that was really loving and that's part of why I can do what I do. I mean, she was a big influence on me. So I think that any warm, loving environment is helpful. I think as a mothering presence, you know, I like that, borrowing that term, I think it's from Bonnie Bedanock, that sometimes mothering presence isn't actually as much the mom, you know, it certainly happens with adoption or, you know, different circumstances. But I find the attachment system to be quite forgiving and resilient when it's introduced to the right circumstances for secure attachment, like, you know, obviously safety, connection, presence, love, you know, being able to repair or miss attunement. Repair is really, really powerful. If you look to John Gottman's research, which is mostly adult relationships, as you know, he says that you have an 85% percent more chance of sustainability of well-being in your relationships if you learn to initiate and receive repair. I mean, that's gigantic returns. If you got that much money, much return on your money in the bank, you wouldn't even go to Starbucks. You'd put every penny in the bank because you get 85 percent return on it. Right. So if you think about learning repair and really coming back into alignment after there's been a disruption, you know, when I interview my students or participants in my events, I always ask how many of you had good modeling for repair in your families. And I mean, usually it's like 5%. So it's something that seems to be that we need to learn how to do on our own if we didn't have that modeled in childhood. Like, how do you initiate an apology? What's the formula for that? How do you allow someone to apologize to you, even when you've been really hurt by them, you know, and allow that reconciliation to happen? And that's a big piece of what I think people can recover their secure attachment, even if they didn't have the ideal scenario. I mean, most people don't have ideal scenario childhoods. I mean, how many people do you know? Right. I just like some are much better than others. Right. But learning this capacity to repair, I think, helps a lot to build relational resiliency, even if you didn't have the ideal circumstances as a younger person. So I find the attachment system, it is definitely benefits hugely from having a secure attachment situation in the beginning and for having parents that are involved and present. And that's gigantic. And the repair function is also really available because a lot of times when I'm doing repair work with people that have attachment injury caused by a parental deficiency, I'll say, well, let's bring in someone that you feel like has the capacity to be protective or the capacity to be loving. And they go, oh, well, my aunt or, oh, well, my first grade teacher or, oh, my spiritual teacher that I'm still hanging out with. And I go, OK, let's bring them in. Let's just notice what happens in your body, what happens in your heart, what happens in you when you have this need for connection and somebody is actually there that can give it to you. The results, that's a very quick example, but the results can be quite profound. I feel like sometimes mothers take the brunt of a lot of blame. And I don't want to add to that because I really think that it is such an important role. And it's such an almost impossible role in a way because, you know, if you overprotect, then you're in trouble for that. If you underprotect, you know, it's very difficult to match perfectly what each child needs. But I think understanding attachment, like what is healthy attachment? We have this idea that we should just understand how to be in healthy relationships. Like it should just be a given. Well, I don't experience that at all. I mean, I think they should be teaching this stuff in high school and grade school and middle school. You know, I think it would be so valuable for for children to have an orientation to what is secure attachment, how to practice secure attachment skills, even if they didn't come from a secure attachment environment. It's interesting because my eldest has been in a relationship actually for several years and I have watched them. Right. So she came from the conditions of arguably insecure attachment because I was just absent a lot of her childhood and my parents were around, super loving and present. But nonetheless, I am pretty convinced that the biological role of a mother's body and her specific co-regulatory offerings are very special. And I sort of wonder, like, oh, what could somebody have said to me to drive home the relevance at the time to really give me pause around, you know, like shooting back to my practice and research? and I'm not sure there's such a thing other than if you prioritize your role as mother, you will set your kids up for healthy relationships. But then fast forward 15, 16 years, and I watch her in her relationship and their capacity to navigate emotionally the repair that is so readily available to them in the few conflicts that they ever have lead me to believe in the resiliency that you're referencing, even if it's not directly taught. And I wonder sometimes if it's because I started to do, as the mother of tweens, let's say, somatic work at just the right time, right? Like for myself, for my own system. Like maybe it's never too late to offer your kids as they're growing, let's say, for 18 years, that regulation. And I've come to, I don't know, I guess, hang my hope on that because I see the living proof. I mean, either, you know, that's the most important thing. I mean, you see it happening. And, you know, when we choose to work on ourselves, I think it spreads to everyone around us, especially people in our families. I think it has a major, major impact. There's so many gifts besides what you feeling better yourself. The ripple effect is huge and intergenerationally too. Like what you, I feel like when we do healing for ourselves. We actually help heal a blind, even if people have passed, and we definitely help heal our progeny going forward. And healing can happen in so many ways. I mean, in an ideal world, which it isn't, everybody would have enough money and enough orientation to be, you know, really present moms that, you know, through childhood, right? And especially in the early years in an ideal world, that's not possible for a lot of people. And I think in terms of what you said about would I be convinced to have made it more a priority. I think when like even for you only know what you know when you know it. Right. When I started doing this work, I started looking backwards and all the different ways I could have been in relationships, all the different mistakes I made, all the ways I cut people off or, you know, you see all this, but you don't see it till you do the work, you know. So I always encourage, especially therapists, actually to do personal work because if you in a caregiving role whether it nursing or whatever it is your ability to transmit that healing is amplified So you know I think if maybe if you been doing that personal work when you were having babies, you know, then you would have naturally seen, okay, that's a really important, that's a really valuable piece of what I am bringing into the world with these children. But you can't know that till you know that, you know, so. We're here having this conversation. Exactly. I mean, that's why I'm in my work, too. A lot of it came from, you know, taking wrong turns. So I feel like we learn a lot of wisdom from what we don't do. But it seems like your children, at least the one you referenced to, is doing really well. So, you know, kudos to her and her partner and kudos to you and the family all together. So that's a huge win. So I would take that win. Yeah. Well, I sometimes even think generationally that there's something about their generation, Gen Z or whatever you want to call it, that actually if you get out of the way, they have extraordinary emotional intelligence. And that's what I've witnessed anyway with my daughters and their friends even. So I wonder if we can talk a little bit more about repair because to my mind, this is the holy grail. If there's ever a relational goal, it is to repair well. And that's romantic relationship, familial, platonic, even business, right? And so I wonder how much you see this as a solo versus a dynamic endeavor. My sense is that your emphasis is on the solo work, right? Getting to know what your body's cues feel like, getting to recognize opportunities that you have to attend to those completions that you were describing. Does it at some point become more behavioral, more dynamic that it's important to practice in the relationship what it looks like for an anxiously attached person to lean back and an avoidant to lean in? Yes. Yes. Those are all part of it. Yes. learning those expanding secure what i call secure attachment skills because if we didn't get them reinforced in childhood we can learn them now so you can practice them like one of the things in my own life when i was married my husband said to me one day you know i really love you and what i'm loving towards you or you know i'm affectionate or i say loving words you just deflect it and at first of course i got angry i was like what i do not how dare you say that you know, my whole thing. And then I woke up in the middle of the night. I went, oh, no, I'm busted. I do do that. I don't know how to handle. I don't know what to do. I get uncomfortable with love because I didn't grow up in a loving environment. It brings up all this vulnerability. Like somebody loves me. I just like didn't know what to do with it. So I really had to make it a practice. I like a spiritual practice for about it. It took me like a year and a half to two years of just having the intention to stay present when anyone said anything kind and I didn't deflect it, You know, and he would do something loving. I would acknowledge the loving and I was uncomfortable and vulnerable as it made me feel. I would try to stay with it. But I had to practice that. And now it's easy. But that but for that year and a half, it was very uncomfortable. And it sounds so funny to be uncomfortable about love. But if you haven't had it, it brings up all the wound of not having had it, you know. So I had to I had to navigate that. So it's like giving people appropriate awareness and then maybe helping them cultivate a practice. or I have several suggestions too, where they can develop a capacity that maybe their family didn't have or embody. Because do you encounter this gulf between knowing better and not being able to physiologically on a nervous system level, do better relationally, right? Because if you, let's say what you just described, if you know that it serves you and the dynamic and the connection to be open and calm and soft in your body as somebody expresses love and appreciation. But then you get to that next opportunity and you feel constriction and collapse and you can't maintain eye contact. There's this, I call it like kind of this hellish terrain of being aware that there's a more connected way to be and your system doesn't allow for it. Is that where the solo work comes in. That's where I feel that solo work is really valuable. I like to really micro track those reactions. And then you like, I'll say to people, okay, so you have this knee jerk reaction to withdraw whenever there's, you know, conflict or whenever there's something. So let's just see, you know, what happens if, can you remember a time, for instance, that you were in the presence of someone that was accepting that you could disagree with them, but it was okay. I mean, they could honor, they could stay connected to you, even though you were not agreeing on a particular whatever it was. And, you know, they may remember that or if they can't remember that, I might just say, well, what would that be like to have someone like that? You know, and then to feel like really embody a presence, maybe it's you as the therapist, right? Yeah, a presence that is different, contradictory to the injurious one that you experienced before. I had a really good example of this. I had a guy that was a hockey player and he was really good. He was just incredible. And he was playing his last game before he was going to become an Olympic or professional or something like that. And the other team just went after him and they basically took out both of his knees and he would never be able to play hockey again. He came in for session, which is a horrible thing that they did. And I mean, he lost his whole future. And he was, of course, very upset. And I said, I said, well, I learned about his family history. There's a lot of victim perpetrator dynamics. It's like whoever fought harder and whoever won the physical fight was the king, right? You know, that sort of thing in his family dynamic. And he said that he and his hockey player friends would go to bars on weekends and pick fights and they would have these brawls and they would get drunk and they would do this. It was their normal weekend activity. And I was like, wow. OK. And so I said to him, it seems like you've always known only might makes right and this sort of victim perpetrator power dynamic. And I said, I see it in your family and I see it in the way the hockey situation happened. And I said, have you ever experienced someone who's empowered themselves, but also is can empower you that there's a there's an empowerment dynamic between you? And so he's at first, he's like really confused by that question. He went and he lit up and he goes, oh, my coach, my coach is really great at he's very powerful guy. is super, you know, full of, you know, his own wisdom and everything. But he's very empowering to me. He wants me to be my best. He does everything he can to help me be my best. He definitely like that. And I said, well, I want you to feel the difference between empowerment versus power over or power overpowering, right? And he goes, oh my God, it's so different. And he started to feel what I would call essential strength. He started to feel soft instead of hard, you know, that kind of strength. And he started to feel really open, his heart opened. He started to feel this kind of sweet strength. And he was like, I've never felt this before. And I'm like, yeah, well, that's really, you know, part of who you really are. And so he was kind of like, I think I could go into coaching, you know, so I'm like, well, maybe we'll see, you know. And he went back to his life, you know, session ended. And then he got to the bar that weekend. And as life would have it, this bully that had just, just overpowered him and humiliated him constantly as a little boy came into the bar. And all of his buddies are there. Oh, that's that guy. that's that guy let's get him and um he said it's so weird i stopped them i said we don't need to do that and they're like yeah but that's that guy that did all these horrible things to you goes yeah yeah i let's just let's just not did not go there and he came back and he the next session he says what's wrong with me i didn't want to beat this guy up i said because you've healed that you know what empowerment is now you have it in your body and your soul and your spirit it's in you and that is not a dynamic that you were willing to activate even though this person had been egregious to you in the past and he was like wow you know but he had had that deep that deep healing and then it was evidenced by his change in behavior so i don't know if that's a good example for you absolutely i love that example it's the the translation over that gulf from awareness to actual experience you know sometimes it just takes one you know it just takes one cycle-breaking moment dynamically and relationally. It's interesting because maybe I am always looking through the anxious attachment lens and even you referenced Pia Melody and this sort of deep covert fear that the anxiously, or she would call like a love addict has, let's say, is actual intimacy, right? So it seems like we're the ones always clinging and gripping for more connection, communication, and actually the deep fear, and you could say dysfunctional compensation is of intimacy. And so when you talk about the challenges of receiving that safety in this last example, or in your own personal receiving safety, receiving the cues of appreciation, love, and connection, I think about how, as I have started to come into my own body, however, Or how do we phrase that? More embodied, right. Yeah, or like here, I'm here, more home, more present. And it tracks actually with my memories, you know, my memories starting to consolidate as, you know, I would say even over the past 15, 16 years. Prior to that, it's like such a blur my whole life. That's a very good indication of trauma resolution. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, and I and I look at, you know, I also have a lot of programming around psychiatric diagnosis, you know, all of my years of study. And I think about, like, let's say histrionic personality disorder and the patterns of that. And I I look at what it is to express emotion as a means of deflecting connection. Right. That's sort of the picture of a histrionic personality type. And I reflect on how when I feel most appreciative of somebody, like let's say my daughters or a friend or an employee or whatever, and I really want to share that. I want to open my heart and share that. Or when somebody is spontaneously expressing appreciation or love towards me, everybody in my life knows that I am the most immediate crier that there ever was. But I never used to be this way. So I don't think I cried. I don't know ever up until this more recent window. But now I wonder, I wonder what you think. So I'm just asking a personal question. I wonder what you think about that response, right? Because it's almost like when I'm in that vulnerability, where I am in my journey now, it's I immediately have to discharge whatever that is, some energy, because to just be calm and present and receive, which I probably can only access really if I'm working with a client, which is pretty rare these days, where I can really ground myself, feel my spine and come into a relaxed body, even as I want to cry, even empathically, just share tears. These days, the best I can do is to tear up and maybe even cry in that moment of vulnerability. But I imagine that the real connection is, I don't know, it somehow doesn't include that. Do you understand what I'm saying? Like it's almost more present. The tears are part of a feeling of being touched or do you have a sense of what the tears would say? I think they are a response to the vulnerability, right? So it's like somehow my body says connection is happening here and it feels good, but it's also I don't know what to do with it. It's overwhelming emotionally. And so on some level, again, it could be my training in the conventional world, but I experienced this as like on some level is a deflection from what it would be like to just be present and calm and open receiving that. Does that make sense? Yeah. So I'll tell you a little bit of a story about receiving. I think receiving sounds great. Like you're getting what you want, right? Except that it's really challenging. Just like with me getting love. I was like, we're doing incredible vulnerability. because there was an absence of that in my family. So just to be compassionate with ourselves about that. But I had this lovely woman in Germany that I worked with. Oh, gosh, it must be 10 years ago now, more maybe. But she came in and she goes, oh, I'm with this guy and he's never available. And I'm always in these relations about two years. And men are not, I always have, you know, I just picked the wrong man. They're just not available. And I thought, well, okay, this sounds like could be. I mean, that could be true. But it also could be that she has an ambivalent history. And I asked a little bit about her childhood. it and it was pretty clear it was ambivalent and I just said well you know you've been with this guy because I'm going to break up with this man because he's never around he travels for work he's never there and I said well you know you've been with him for two years is there anything he's done that you feel you know was good for you and she's like no no he's not available and I'm like and I said no really I mean you've been in two years there must be something that he's done that's actually been not you know comfortable or kind or something and I'm kind of holding her feet to the fire and she's going to get mad at me sort of, you know, and I said, well, I just really want you to consider this. And she goes, well, you know, even when he travels, he calls me every night to see how I'm doing. And we talk and, you know, we, you know, he calls me every night and she goes, is there anything else? And she goes, well, yeah, it's kind of nice. He calls me every night. Well, because he travels, he always brings me these really cool things from these different countries and there are always things I like. So you must be paying attention to, you know, who I am and what I wear and what I like. Well, that's pretty, that's pretty nice. You know, she goes, yeah, yeah. And she's like shocking herself now. And I said, well, anything else? And she goes, well, because he's gone like, you know, three weeks out of the month, he always, he always takes me on this like three or four day vacation when we're together so we can go someplace special and have a lot of time together. And she goes, yeah, that's kind of nice. She's like, that's actually really nice. She's like surprising herself because she has not been dismissing all these caring behaviors. So the first thing is noticing caring behaviors. Like I had to notice my husband's loving gestures and stay present for them, you know? And I said, okay, cool. So it sounds like he's doing some stuff. I'm sure he has his issues too, but he is actually pretty engaged and you're finding out. And she's like, yeah, that actually is weird. I said, so now I want you to do is do this love feast. I want you to put everything on the table that you as, and I'm thinking ambivalent in my head, anything you would want, kind words, loving gestures, the right touch. I mean, everything you can think of that you would want in a relationship and just pile it up like a smorgasbord on the table in front of you. And so she does that and goes through that exercise. And then she and everybody can do that while they're listening if they want to. And I said, so let's just see what happens if you just take all that in. And immediately she contracted and her stomach got really tight. Oh, my God, I'm contracting. My stomach really hurts. And, you know, I said, OK, so the reason I do it this way is because if I just said to somebody they have trouble receiving, they would be mad like I was. But if they feel the rejection, then they know, oh, I said, well, so let's back off a little bit. I didn't say she had trouble receiving. I just said, let's see what happens if you just decide to take 1% of that pile of good stuff or whatever amount you want, like a molecule or a quark or whatever the smallest amount is. She goes, oh, oh, I can do that. And she said, oh, and my stomach relaxes. Oh, that's really, but I want more. I'm like, well, of course you do. I said, well, what's the right amount of more though? So like maybe 3% or 4%. She goes, okay, I can do 4%. She goes, oh yeah, my stomach stays relaxed and I feel open and I'm actually starting to feel satisfied and fulfillment. I never feel that. That's another hallmark challenge for someone who tilts towards ambivalent. I said, great. So just notice that satisfaction. So you allowed yourself to receive. And she goes, well, now I want more. I'm like, cool, that's great. But you did it sequentially. Now I want 10%. I'm like, great. We get up to, I don't know, maybe 30% by the end of the session. But she could stay uncontracted and she could stay present and she could stay enjoying and feeling satisfied and fulfilled as we did this very gradually. So we did it at her pace. And then when she left, she goes, you know, my boyfriend's going to be really happy I did this session because at the beginning of the session, I was going to break up with him. And now I'm going to go home and give him lots of love because he does all these wonderful things for me that I just didn't pay attention to. Amazing. I mean, it's such a shift in perspective, but also the awareness of one's accountability for the limitations in connection, which, like you said, is so much more profound when you feel it in real experiential time than when you're told. The telling thing I find not helpful, generally speaking. I feel like if I can find a way to create an experience where a person can feel it themselves, their dynamic, and then they can feel the possibility of something different that might be closer to secure attachment, that's where the juice is. That's where the, I don't know, the secret sauce or something. That's what really seems to evoke change. That's why I called my model dynamic attachment repatterning experience, because you really need, in my opinion, to really deeply learn it, to experience it. Not I mean, you can read a book on attachment. You can read. I mean, there's tons of information out there. But how do you clinicalize it? How do you embody it? How do you have it be transformative instead of just another? Oh, yeah, I should be like that. You don't want to accept that I'm not. You know, so how do I get from here to there? You know, so I'm a here to there person. I just trying to figure out a pathway. And sometimes my clients create it. You know, I say, well, what do you think would, you know, they're also instrumental in me learning about this, of course, because they share their experience and I learn from them and we find our way, you know, so that's important. So if you have a parent or an aging loved one who is struggling with balance, joint stiffness, or simply getting around, you may have wondered what you can possibly do to support them. And I believe that I have found the solution for our parents if you are in my generation. So Juvent micro impact platform is one of the most effective and science backed ways to improve mobility because it delivers precise low low vibrations through the soles of the feet that improve circulation and help maintain stability There's no sweating. There's no strain. You literally just stand on it for 10 minutes a day. I speak to the Juvent CEO, Rush Simonson, in episode 114, and I learned that his own mother, who was in her 90s, went from bed-bound to fully mobile with this simple daily routine. So if you want to be sure that somebody that you love stays healthy and independent, go to juvent.com forward slash Kelly Brogan and use the code Kelly300 for $300 off at checkout. You can bring this incredible science-backed tool into their lives. And I think it's one of the most thoughtful and powerful investments that you can make in their wellbeing. So again, it's Juvent.com forward slash Kelly Brogan and the code is Kelly 300. So before we get into a little bit more, I'd love to hear a bit more and share. I know because I have actually participated in your program, but I want to know about one specific topic. So before we get into that, which is probably could be a weekend seminar, which is the topic of shame, because there is an experience that we have labeled that makes attunement to self and other and sort of bridging that awareness relationally. difficult, it's shame, right? It's like the most consuming and energetically expensive and perceptually warping, I think, of probably all emotional experiences. So I wonder if you could just share a little bit about your take on the root of this, what it looks like in the body typically, and what is a powerful point of entry. Okay. Well, we have a whole program on this in our store on our website because it's a very important topic. I agree. So it's about two and a half hours of going to that. We won't have that much time today. But first of all, how it shows in the body, typical shame expression physically is if you think of your body as a C-shape, like a collapse, and sometimes the shoulders go up, there's sort of a collapse response. Another part of a shame in a way is a gaze aversion. So people can't make eye contact when they often gaze avert. They look away or look down or away when they're feeling shame. So if you're dealing with a teenager that's dealing with shame, you say, look at me when I'm talking to you. That's like the worst thing you can say to somebody if they're in a shame response because they can't do it. I mean, it's horrible for them to try to do that. So there's different ways to even process, even if we just generically don't even talk about a particular incident of shame. And you see somebody in that position, you can say, I just wonder if you could exaggerate that a little bit and really feel that. that and sometimes I give people a pillow to kind of crouch over to feel that and I sit next to them and I go into the same position so it's like we're doing it together you know which I think helps instead of sitting across from I sit next to them and I go let's kind of just play with this and then I said no what happens if you just come back out of that and just let your spine extend a little bit and then some of that shame will start to release it's really interesting because the body position has a lot to do with emotion and then that's so then we could tap into it again a little bit deeper and then very slowly coming back out and being more elongated in the spine. This is one way to start to process just the body's held shame, even if you're not even working with content and very helpful. This is something that I learned partially from Peter Levine. So this is a helpful exercise. And then I think I feel that shame inhabits the body much like unresolved trauma does so one of the things i do with unresolved trauma is like like i had this experience when i was a kid i had a terrible voice i mean singing i sounded like a frog i mean seriously like i was singing for the church and they'd say honey you're cute just mouth the words just don't make any noise like okay so i mean i just i sounded like literally like a frog so it was not good for singing but one of my uh teachers in first grade made me get up and sing the star Spangled Banner by myself was the most humiliating thing. So anytime you think about it, even now, I don't have as much shame response as I used to. But you take whatever that is, and someone who's done something and you felt very shaming, and I have a person put it as far away from them as their body needs it to be. Some people need to be in the corner so they can see it. Some people need it to be on the edge of the ever-expanding universe, but they have to locate it. It's like working with the threat response. So they locate the shaming behavior. And I try to, if it's a parent, I always try to say, well, the love part's not a problem. Let's keep the love intact. But the troublesome behavior, the shaming behavior, let's put that as far away as you need it to be. And then locate it. And then I want you to freeze frame it there so it can't say anything, make any noise, make any movement. It can't do anything harmful. You just have this threat immobilized. So you're reversing the immobilization you're reversing the collapse in a sense so if the if the shaming element is immobilized then physiologically it's much easier for a person to move from a passive shame response to an active defensive response so i just say so what is it you want to say to that person who was shaming what is it you want to do and maybe they were so young when it happened they feel like they can't do anything else well let's bring in someone who's a competent protector that can say or do something for you? Who would you want to be? And sometimes we go to Marvel characters. It could be Wonder Woman with a lasso of truth or it can be whatever. It doesn't matter. They feel some protective energy that does exist in the world, right? The archetype. And so whether it's their uncle or their dog or their grandmother, what is it you want that person to do or say for you? Because sometimes we learn self-protection by people actually enacting it and we experience it. And then like make your own movie, like just see what maybe maybe this person wants to take your parent to anger management classes or shame reduction classes or, you know, or maybe they want to duke them in the nose. You're not hurting anybody in the session. Right. Whatever it is, let yourself have that. And moving from passive to active responses is much more empowering. and also you're completing part of the threat response by evoking and completing defensive responses whether they're physical like pushing away and saying back off or whether they're verbal like saying back off or don't ever treat this child like this again or stop that or you know that sort of thing that helps the person move through the threat response in a way where they feel more empowered and then can move out of a shame response so this is partly there's a i feel an interplay between unresolved trauma and the way we hold shame so that has been very effective for me and working with strong shame dynamics with people. There's lots of ways into that. I mean, it's a very big topic. But I think as practitioners, I mean, David Wallen shares this story publicly. He wrote the wonderful book, Attachment and Psychotherapy. But he said that he's doing all this clinical work and more cognitive than I am. He's not less a little less. He's not so so somatically or we have a different style. But what he said for himself was when his own therapy, he hit shame after several years of therapy he realized that it was a disowned emotion for him you know he he wasn't allowing any of that in that consciously of course it was ruling him underneath and he said when he finally started to work with shame and outed the shame and worked with it being clinically that all of a sudden all of his clients were moving into shame were able to process shame because he had that disowned emotion they couldn't go there either because he couldn't hold it. I mean, they just sensed he couldn't go there, so they didn't go there. So it's a very powerful experience. And the thing I want to remember to say is shame is different than guilt. Guilt is usually you made a mistake, but usually you're like, okay, I screwed up. I ran that red light. I was distracted on my cell phone. I shouldn't have been doing that. And I caused an accident. Oops, you know, I'm going to do everything I can to repair that, you know, within my power insurance or whatever. Or I made this mistake with a friend and I'm going to try to rectify it, you're seeing the mistake as a mistake, you know, just an anomaly. Okay, you screwed up and you can usually fix it. Hopefully most of the time you can fix it. But shame is more debilitating. It's more I am damaged versus I did something that I can that I made a mistake. It's why I am bad. I am horrible. I am a terrible person. I am evil. I am whatever. And that's what makes shame so incredibly debilitating. It becomes an identity. So there's different ways to sort of to help dissolve that. And it's a big topic. So I'm just... Absolutely. No, it's an amazing treatment you've offered of it. And it's such a powerful point that you make, which is also what I've observed in my own clinical experience, is that you can only help somebody as much as you have reclaimed your own badness, right? That's the language I It's like the permission to be all of these very colors is what you offer to your clients. So it's such an example of why this is so critical for anybody in the clinical arts or any practitioner to consider exploring. So I'd love to share, Diane, a bit about your model and your training and how you offer this work, which you're saying even in Peter's career, you brought this sort of packaged experiential offering to the theoretical work and maybe in real life experience work that he was offering. And that's why you're such great collaborators. It's really wonderful to witness. So, yeah, I'd love to hear more about what that looks like these days. Well, one of the missions I had, this kind of came out of a sort of near-death surgery I had, like, gosh, 2011 now, 2012, a long time ago. But when I came out of that situation over time, I really realized that I wanted to support anything life-affirming, any work that was life-affirming, regardless of which model it was. So we do in our teachings, we involve a lot of collaborating. We collaborate with a lot of people from different models. And we kind of like it. I think you're like this, too. You've got a gem collect. We're collecting gems from all these different wisdoms that are in our field. And I find that really nourishing. I love doing that. It's really fun. So I find that just a really thrilling part of my work. But the other part is, and this has been true since the beginning of when I started, the attachment work was now probably about 15 years. of a really strong focus, I really felt like it was important for therapists to have a place where they could do some personal work in a very accepting and nourishing and structured environment. So we really have a very strong, safe container in our model, in our way of working with ourselves and working with each other. And so the trainings really become more than learning, you know, cognitive, you know, here's what you do when we have some cognitive structure, obviously. but it's a lot about how do we support each other and also how do we work our own material in a kind caring environment it like in a community you know and it's it's not a place where people feel like oh gosh i can't expose my own you know concerns because i'm a professional and i have to have my professional hat on it's not like that i mean i really love that about it that it's a place where we can let our hair down and look at our own stuff and and have some kind and hopefully very helpful responses. And so, you know, the core training is initially we look at caregiving history, you know, like what happened to us when we were younger, what helps everybody, you know, adapt to a certain attachment style or certain attachment pattern. And that's natural. That's not anybody making a mistake. That's just we adapt it to our environment to try to survive it. And, you know, it's a very positive way of understanding our instinct to protect ourselves and to try to relate to what was available to us when we're little. And then the next training moves into how does that those imprints that we have in childhood really deeply affect our adult relationships. And that goes into, you know, what patterns we see arising in our current relationships, whether they're, you know, most commonly they're accentuated in our primary intimate relationship, our primary relationship. But even if you're single, you're looking at, you know, your work relationships or your friendships or your relationships of the past. You're just looking at taking a deep look at that. And in that in that training, really looking at how do we ask for our needs to be met? Do we even acknowledge we have needs? Is it OK to have needs? Do we become a target if we have needs? Do we do we ask for need to expect to be rejected? I mean, we're looking at all these different elements of what is common in adult relationships. And then the third module is on the neurobiology of loving relationships. And that's looking at how science can help us understand why these certain interventions work or why we want to emphasize certain ways of relating or how people use language because it's intertwined with how their attachment style developed early on because you're developing your relational blueprint at the same time you're learning language. So it reflects it's reflected in how you communicate. And then we're looking at intergenerational trauma as part of that training. I'm actually thinking about separating that out and doing a whole training in intergenerational trauma because there's so much to that. and, you know, different elements of what usually come up in adult relationships. Like what is a healthy adult relationship? How do you manage that? And then the fourth one, because disorganized attachment is so devastating with trauma intermixed with attachment. So you're trying to connect with any trauma threat response to shuts, you know, interferes with it in a major way. A lot of dysregulation, a lot of outbursts, a lot of panic, a lot of shutdown, a lot of more extreme states. we do a whole three or four day training on how to work with wounds to wisdom, how to work through support ourselves, but also how to work with other people on victim perpetrator dynamics, being overpowered versus empowerment, all sorts of different elements to how to work through the challenges of disorganized. That's a major piece, too. So that's the core level. We have some additional programs on sensuality and attachment and presence and attachment that I used to do a little bit more in Europe, but we're planning on bringing back in the United States. And then I do a lot of courses. We have therapy mastermind circle that we do every month on topics that therapists often have a hand in choosing, but with other professionals on how they're working with specific things that we feel people are really deeply interested in. And that runs monthly. It's like a subscription program people can be part of. I love that program. And then I do a lot of, you know, collaborative work I'm doing coming up. We have I'm really into this topic right now, intergenerational trauma and adult estrangement coming up with Alex Howard. We're doing it together starting in November and all the way through, you know, December and January, especially over the holidays, because a lot of the estrangement issues come up for families over holidays. And I don't know if you're aware of this. I just looked this up on Google that 39 percent of adults in the United States are cut off from someone important in their family. And that's unbelievable. That's a 39 percent. I just feel like people are learning to quickly cut off in the culture we have right now versus how do we reconcile? reconcile. Of course, there's certain situations where you're better off separate, right? But there's a lot of room, I think, for relationship resiliency. And Murray Bowen ages ago said that a healthy family can be discerned by having differences, but being able to stay connected. And I feel like we're sort of moving away from that, which saddens me, hurts my heart. So I'm hoping that we can help. You know, I think there's a big cost to losing generations, to losing the input from generations. And then, of course, sometimes things are so toxic, that's the only way to go. I want to acknowledge that too, but I do feel like there could be more room for repair. And like you said, repair is the Holy Grail. That's so powerful. I come from an Italian lineage, and I mean, estrangement can span generations where there are people that you're not allowed, these feuds that go on. I mean, it's real culturally, and I absolutely see what, you know, I can scan my own life scape and see how many folks I know who are estranged from their families. It's such an important topic, and I will be tuning in. So I'm so grateful for your work, Diane, and your decades of devotional commitment to healing the healers, you know, and really providing this, not only the resources, but the resources to feel resource, you know? Like that's really what so many of the folks who come through your work walk around experiencing. and we will have the links and show notes, including to the quiz that you referenced earlier and make sure that people know where to find you and your extraordinary library of information and opportunities. So thank you. I should mention that we are expanding our offerings to the public because we get so many requests from the public. So we do have programming coming out more and more to help folks. I mean, it's a human journey issue, right? It's just something that we all need help with. So we're expanding in the non-professional orientation to the normal people. Well, what happens is you're a normal person. You go to heal yourself and then you want to pay it forward. And you become a therapist, clinician, practitioner anyway. True. The career calls you. I mean, you're chosen by your history in a way. I have that experience myself. So it's been a delight to talk to you. Thank you so much. Thank you.