How do our bodies store trauma and what does that even mean? Why does getting triggered hijack our capacity to think straight? And what the heck can we do to heal from our past and nurture a well-regulated nervous system so we’re not freaking out all the time?!
Well, listen in my love! In the second part of this two-part series, coach extraordinaire Marjorie Schreurs answers all those questions and more – including a conversation about how and why psychedelics help with healing trauma.
While this episode *can* stand on its own (mostly), I’d recommend going back and listening to part one (last week’s episode) first – as it sets the context for a lot of the vocabulary we use and the way we talk about levels of activation through a color-coded analogy.
Or listen wherever you listen to podcasts!
Connect with Marjorie:
Marjorie’s coaching website
Follow Marjorie on LinkedIn
Follow Marjorie on Instagram @SoulsticeCoaching
Resources, References, and Links:
EMDR. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. One of many excellent, somatic approaches to healing trauma, and the one I have several years of experience with as a client.
Deb Dana. “A clinician, consultant, author, and international lecturer on polyvagal theory-informed work with trauma survivors” – who has a bunch of books and is a great resource for diving into nervous system work.
Polyvagal Theory. The Polyvagal Institute’s website is a great resource for more information.
Vagus Nerve Resets. All sorts of resources available on this. Here’s a video/instructor we like:
Goldfish – “This Is Water” by David Foster Wallace.
Transcript
Note: this transcript was generated by AI and lightly edited by me. Please forgive any malapropisms and misspellings. It’s the robot’s fault!
[00:00] Cate Blouke: Something I’ve been doing lately is like getting up and doing a one song dance party and just like moving my body.
[00:06] Marjorie Schreurs: Yes, you are shifting the sensory input so that your nervous system is getting a different signal, right? You are doing something that is in that stay in play green yellow zone and you are sending a message of safety to your system, which then allows it to come back into a different nervous system place, which then allows you to think differently.
[00:33] Cate Blouke: Welcome to Settling is bullshit a sweary podcast about claiming your joy. If you are an adult human craving healthier boundaries, a greater sense of purpose, or an increased capacity to feel at ease in your own skin, then you are in the right place, my friend. I’m your host, Cate Blouke, and I’m here to offer you practical tools and playful encouragement to help you step forward and be your most awesome self. My hope is that each episode will leave you feeling a bit more empowered to make brave choices and claim your joy.
Hello my darling dear. Welcome to part two of befriending your nervous system. This part of the conversation doesn’t have a subtitle because I learned that a whole bunch of different technologies don’t like super long podcast titles. But if I was going to give this one a subtitle, it would be trauma and downshifting. If you haven’t already listened to part one of this two part series, I would gently suggest that you go back to last week’s episode and listen to that first. I would never tell you what to do, but I think that it would be supportive of fully understanding this conversation if you had all of the context of the first half.
But for those of you who did listen to it, to recap a little bit, we mostly spent last episode working through the analogy of Green Zone, yellow zone, orange zone, red zone for the levels of activation of our nervous system. And in this part of the conversation, we’re moving into a discussion of trauma and some of the different modalities for healing trauma and why they work, and also how to get ourselves back into the green zone. I’ve heard from a number of you about how helpful you found the first half of this conversation, so hooray! Thank you for waiting around. Here is the second half of the conversation. I know I found the kind of color coding analogy incredibly helpful for my own understanding, and the analogy that Marjorie offers in this part of the conversation about how trauma works or doesn’t work has also been incredibly helpful for my own understanding and for the conversations that I’ve been having with clients and friends since recording this episode. So I hope you get at least half as much out of it as I did. Thanks for listening, and I hope you’re having a lovely day!
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Okay, I want us to talk a little bit about trauma. Cause I think. I think I want us to get to, like, let’s talk about how we, like, downshift responsibly and appropriately. But, like, let’s. I’d love to hear, like, how trauma plays into this and then also how neurodivergence plays into this.
[03:23] Marjorie Schreurs: Yeah.
[03:23] Cate Blouke: And then for all you neurotypicals listening, you gotta stick around through that so you can understand the people in your lives. And at the end, we’re gonna get to, like, how to, like, take care of ourselves.
[03:32] Marjorie Schreurs: Yeah. So I think of trauma as in terms of the data bank of the nervous system. They are, like, really big chunks that have a deep impression. So they. It’s sort of like, it’s a really big crater that it creates. Whereas there might be little things that happen on the daily that create lots of small little craters. And they collectively, when you have enough small little craters, they also have a big impact, both in the positive and in the harmful or hurtful side of things. So both in safety and in threat. So trauma would be in the threat zone.
[04:15] Cate Blouke: Okay.
[04:15] Marjorie Schreurs: And would be, like a big crater, whereas, like, a peak experience would be a big crater in the safe zone. You know when you’ve done something that’s, like, super, amazingly, awesomely cool.
[04:30] Cate Blouke: Yeah. Okay. So what’s happening for me, in the little land of motoring analogy that we’ve been playing in this whole time, is that you were talking about little divots or whatever. So it’s like, oh, like potholes versus a sinkhole is what happens when it’s trauma. And then peak experiences are like speed bumps. So slowing you down. Yeah.
[04:51] Marjorie Schreurs: Or, like, we could talk about it in terms of weight, too. Like, on the sort of, like, safety and threat side of the spectrum, some experiences have more weight because they just are bigger.
Trauma, by definition, is a really big experience that we were unable to really integrate. That is a big piece of what makes it traumatic is the fact that we weren’t able to process in the moment or shortly thereafter what was happening and understand what was going on and to not get overwhelmed by it. So the survival response that we tend to have when something traumatic happens is that we then either put it away, or cover it over, or dissociate from it, or don’t recognize it as trauma, or try to “understand it.” And I’ve done this a lot where I try to understand the other person’s experience and point of view so that I can make sense of it. Almost like absolving the other person or the other, the traumatic thing from any sense of blame. But that was my way of trying to make it okay.
[06:07] Cate Blouke: Yeah, no, totally. And the image that’s coming for me is like throwing some plywood on top of that giant fucking pothole and you can still drive down the road. And. Yeah, for me, it took me a really long time to recognize that I had trauma. And the inroad for me was, oh, I was suicidal in 8th grade. That’s probably an indicator. But I didn’t claim that as trauma because there wasn’t, like, one inciting event that I could point to. And I did the thing that you were just talking about, like, I put some plywood on and I was like, I didn’t kill myself. It’s fine. Like, I move on. I got over it. What are you talking about? And it wasn’t until my thirties and, like, talking to some friends who had done EMDR. And, like, I would say in the last ten years is when I feel like this conversation has been opening up more about what trauma really is.
[07:02] Marjorie Schreurs: Yeah.
[07:03] Cate Blouke: And then I was like, oh, yeah. Like, when I was a kid and, like, got bullied mercilessly by my older brother. And at school, like, oh, yeah, that had an impact on my fucking capacity to show up in the world.
[07:16] Marjorie Schreurs: Yep, same here. I was bullied pretty furiously too. Didn’t even recognize it as such until maybe eight years ago where I first put the name to it, where it’s like, no, wait, that was bullying. Hold on a minute. That was actually really traumatic. The nature of trauma also is such that for the sake of survival, we typically. We often become really forward oriented or can’t really acknowledge as such because it’s a too big of a thing. So we put it away, or we just, you know, whatever we do with it, whatever the plywood looks like, and then it isn’t. It’s often not until we’ve come to a certain relative level of safety where there is enough, like, let down enough, like, coming down into a level of presence and ability that we can start to even recognize it as something, which is part of why people keep getting. If you are in an abusive situation and that’s become your norm, you typically won’t even recognize it as such until you’ve had enough distance from it or things happen or there’s something that helps you have a certain level of perspective on it or distance from it so that you can start to see it for what it is.
[08:42] Cate Blouke: Right. And if. Yeah. If we’re in that orange. If we’re living in the orange zone.
[08:48] Marjorie Schreurs: Yeah.
[08:49] Cate Blouke: Then it makes sense to me that, of course, we can’t look at the thing that is in the orange zone also. Right?
[08:57] Marjorie Schreurs: No, no.
[08:59] Cate Blouke: Yeah, yeah.
[09:00] Marjorie Schreurs: And this is where things like all these different practices that people do, or a yoga class or walking in the woods or having a therapist or a friend or a coach, why those kinds of safe spaces are so key and important to start processing those things, because it’s often hard to do that in isolation. Anyway. That’s a whole nother conversation of, great.
[09:30] Cate Blouke: We’Ll have you back on. But, yeah. So what I’m hearing in that is that in order to be able to remove the plywood and start filling the hole in this imperfect analogy, we have to be able to access a sense of safety first in order to even be able to go there.
[09:47] Marjorie Schreurs: Yeah, I think oftentimes, yeah. I mean, again, none of this is black and white, and we’re talking about it in very oversimplified terms. But I think the bottom line of healing, when we talk about healing trauma, it’s about recognizing the crater that it created or the collection of creators that it created, and the impact that that had in the data bank of our nervous system. Like the amount of gigabytes. We can talk about gigabytes. Traumatic experiences take up, like, a lot of gigabytes. And so they become a big piece of the data. So they have a really. They have a lot of weight when the nervous system references that data.
[10:31] Cate Blouke: Right. Okay.
[10:33] Marjorie Schreurs: And how it then influences how we think we need to be on alert or how safe we can be.
[10:38] Cate Blouke: Right.
[10:39] Marjorie Schreurs: And that when we talk about nervous system reshaping, it’s about recognizing and learning about what are these big creators that I have? Like, the things that had a big impact that took up a lot of gigabytes in my nervous system. And how can I work with healing some of the pain and the open woundedness? Because that’s the other nature of trauma, is that it tends to be an open wound that maybe gets covered over a little bit, but as soon as there’s any kind of inkling of something even remotely similar, it typically touches that nerve or touches that open wound. And because the brain with one of the natures of trauma in particular, not just difficult experience, but trauma and, like PTSD, is that the way that it gets stored in the memory bank? It’s a different cabinet than the cabinet that says, this was an event in the past and this happened, and it’s not happening right now. It’s typically a cabinet that says, this was a really difficult and scary thing, and this is happening right now. So each time that wound gets touched, our body experiences it as if it’s happening in this moment.
[11:59] Cate Blouke: Right.
[12:00] Marjorie Schreurs: Which is why it goes back into that activation that it felt it needed to go into in the first place in order to protect you, because all of this is an effort of your nervous system to try to protect you and keep you safe.
[12:17] Cate Blouke: Right.
[12:18] Marjorie Schreurs: All of the things that we’re talking about – all the anger, all the depression, all of the collapse, all of the coping mechanisms – they are all an effort of your nervous system and your brain to try to keep you safe. Maybe misguided sometimes or maladaptive, but it’s an effort to try to keep you safe.
[12:37] Cate Blouke: Right.
[12:38] Marjorie Schreurs: So, what EMDR does is by doing that bilateral stimulation and going into the memory of the thing, is that you open it up and take it out of that file cabinet that says, this is actually still happening right now, and you integrate it through the bilateral stimulation or the cross hammer.
[12:58] Cate Blouke: Oh, yeah, yeah. And so, kind of moving it into the other cabinet.
[13:01] Marjorie Schreurs: Moves it into the cabinet that says, this happened in the past. This is not happening right now, which is how it removes the emotional and physiological charge that it can have.
[13:13] Cate Blouke: Oh, my God. You just, like, explained that in a way that I did three years of EMDR, and, like, I was like, I don’t know. It was wacky. It works. It’s great. I’m a big fan. But, yeah, like, okay, cool. It takes the thing, and, like, helps my system learn that it is. That that thing is not happening right now. Exactly. Into the past. Oh, beautiful. And, like, I know you’re also a certified microdosing coach and psychedelic integration coach. Is that what kind of psychedelics do? Something similar.
[13:46] Marjorie Schreurs: So, I think it’s interesting. There’s lots of different ways in which psychedelics help these kinds of healing processes.
[13:53] Cate Blouke: Okay.
[13:54] Marjorie Schreurs: The microdosing side of things, the way I typically describe it, is as microdosing, when done correctly, with a well calibrated dose that isn’t too stimulating to the system, but that actually helps you downshift. It is a very, very effective support to help our nervous system to downshift into the green zone, like training wheels that help you exist more and more in the green zone while giving you extra capacity and activation up in your brain, in the higher brain regions, so that you have more capacity to meet your stuff. But also process what’s going on and start seeing connections and relationships that maybe otherwise you wouldn’t be able to see.
[14:46] Cate Blouke: Okay.
[14:47] Marjorie Schreurs: And so what microdosing can do, the way I use it a lot, is for people who feel really stuck in that sort of anxious, depressed, overwhelmed, burned out, you know, orange and red zone. And they’re like, it becomes almost like a vicious cycle that just keeps feeding itself. And it can be a tool that can help you shift tracks or, like, start reversing the cycle or start building a new cycle that is more connected to the green zone. So what it does is it’s like training wheels to help you find your way back home to the green zone. And the more time you spend there, the more resilience you have, the more capacity you have, the more anchor you build in the green zone. So maybe even when you still elevate into these orange places, you might not be unanchored. You might actually still have a thread going back, an anchor going back to green, which helps you find your way back more easily.
[15:51] Cate Blouke: Okay.
[15:52] Marjorie Schreurs: Over time, for a lot of people, it means that they just don’t elevate quite as high anymore because they’re able to smoothly move up and down more easily, so they never quite get stuck as much. Or even if they do go up really high, the pathway is familiar, and you find your way back.
[16:15] Cate Blouke: So what is it about, like, psilocybin, or psychedelic medicines in particular, that facilitates that or facilitates sort of trauma processing.
[16:27] Marjorie Schreurs: So well, neurobiologically, one of the things that happens to when you take either smaller or larger amounts of psilocybin is that the amygdala, which is the danger sensing tower in your brain, the blood flow is reduced, so it doesn’t work as hard, which means it doesn’t notice as much danger, which means you don’t get quite as anxious or easily activated. So it turns down the volume on that. It turns down the volume on the default mode network, which is a network in the brain that has some really healthy expressions and some expressions that are less helpful but very normal to happen when we’re under a lot of stress. The healthy expression is you’re washing your dishes and you’re sort of processing your day and you’re thinking about your stuff when you’re getting a little bit bored or you’re doing a boring task and you start to ruminate and just process through the things that have happened. That’s an excellent example of the healthy, very helpful expression of the default mode network. It helps us process our experience when we are in more of a fight or flight activated place in our body.
The default mode network tends to function more in ruminating thought, self critical thinking, thinking about the future, what might happen, or ruminating about the past of what happened. It is the barrier or the guard. It’s the part of the, it’s the system in the brain that decides what comes to conscious awareness and what doesn’t.
So this is a really key thing because when you’re talking about large dose journeying, so taking a large amount of psilocybin, that default mode network gets turned off in a pretty substantial, vague way, which is why we then. One of the reasons why we then have access to more of the subconscious of what’s going on. So much of we often think that we are consciously choosing everything in our world, but the subconscious, which is where our body is a voice for the subconscious, which is another plug for somatic work. It’s like this is another way of tapping into the parts that we normally can’t. We can’t will our way into our subconscious. We can’t say, hey, default mode network, I’m just going to turn you off right now. I just want to kind of take a look and see what’s over there, what I’m not aware of, but it’s kind of really stuff.
[19:07] Cate Blouke: Yeah, one of my favorite, like that is so true for me. Like I was just thinking of like, oh, like when I’m in catastrophizing or in rumination, that is one of the various potential signals that, like, I’m activated.
[19:20] Marjorie Schreurs: Yes.
[19:21] Cate Blouke: And something that I picked up in recovery that I’ve been saying for a really long time is that I can’t think myself into right action. I have to act myself into right thinking. Yes. And that’s why, like, when I catch myself doing that, something I’ve been doing lately is like getting up and doing a one song dance party. And just like moving my body.
[19:41] Marjorie Schreurs: Yes. You are shifting the sensory input so that your nervous system is getting a different sense of signal. You are doing something that is in that stay and play green yellow zone. And you are sending a message of safety to your system, which then allows it to come back into a different nervous system place, which then allows you to think differently.
[20:06] Cate Blouke: I love that. Okay, I want to get to how. So good.
[20:13] Marjorie Schreurs: Let me take just a moment to talk about the large dose journeying and that default mode network because, well, the default mode network is one little piece of it. The other piece that psychedelics do is dissolving our sense of self. This part of the brain temporarily dissolving, I should say, or reducing it scrambles temporarily the part of the brain that is basically saying, this is who I am. You could call it ego, you could call it sense of self. You can call it, I don’t know what other words are that people have for it, but this is like the definitions of like, this is who I am, this is how I act, this is what I like, this is my sense of self in the world. Large dose journeying will scramble that temporarily, which means we have less of a sort of identification with who we think we are. This is where like mystical experiences start to happen. When that part of the brain really.
[21:11] Cate Blouke: Gets very scrambled, we become one with the universe. Exactly like what I’m hearing in that. Is that like. Yes, that is literally what is happening, really what’s happening. Our sense of self, the dissolves temporary.
[21:25] Marjorie Schreurs: And like little kids, like little babies, that sense of self is not developed yet. So they have this much more. They don’t make a distinction between their body and their mother’s body or the rest of the world. It’s all sort of all flowing into one another. And then as we get older, we develop more of that sense of self. But one of the powerful things about psychedelics is that it can help us reduce that sense of self and bring things up from the sub and unconscious that are actually really influential in how we see the world, how we subconsciously believe about our place in the world. Orlando, what is safe and not safe, and start to bring those things forward, but with a level of safety so that we can meet those and reprocess them in a different way. That is very difficult to do without the help of psychedelics.
The other piece when you were asking about the nervous system and the impact on the nervous system, talk about the data bank. Again, one of the powers of psychedelics, whether that’s big journey or microdosing, which is lots of little doses over time, big crater, little craters, is that it? Because it tends to bring us way more in tune with this moment, because it changes our perception of time, it reduces that default mode network. So we become present in the moment and much more absorbed in our sensory experience. The way that the sensory experience then impacts us is very deeply, particularly large dose journey. And because it’s such a sensory immersive experience, it can become a counterweight or an equally large sensory experience, but maybe without the overwhelm, as maybe our trauma was, and we’re able to meet that trauma with an equally or similarly powerfully immersive experience in the moment. That can then help facilitate redefining our relationship to it. Healing, processing, finding different ways forward.
[23:39] Cate Blouke: Yeah. So it can also help move the trauma from this is happening now to this has happening in the past.
[23:46] Marjorie Schreurs: Yeah, it helps us integrate. It helps us integrate experiences that in the moment were un-integratable because they were too overwhelming. And it gives us an opportunity to have a redo, if you will, in some ways, and integrate it so that it can find a different place that is more at peace and isn’t, like, over time, doesn’t hold maybe quite as much weight in our nervous system or we’re creating. The weight is still there, but you’re creating other experiences within the data bank that are actually positive or with resource ness and capacity.
[24:25] Cate Blouke: Yeah, totally. I mean, if I think about, like, some of my EMDR experiences, which is doing something similar, we would. I would call up the memory and then would be able, like, bring my current adult self to my younger self and, like, give her the comfort that she needed. Yeah. And, like, basically sort of. I mean, I don’t know how the brains work, but, like, form a new memory or, like, de escalate the experience so that then that stuff can happen in the past. And so what I’m hearing is, like, psychedelics also do that.
[24:56] Marjorie Schreurs: They have the potential to do that. It doesn’t happen by definition, and it requires, you know, taking a mushroom journey by yourself at a party isn’t necessarily going to do that. We’re talking about a little bit more intentional, supported use with integration support afterwards, whether that’s a therapist or a coach or whatever it might be. But that medicine has the potential to offer that kind of container similarly to somatic work and EMDR.
[25:26] Cate Blouke: Yeah, yeah. So for folks who don’t live in Oregon, where psychedelic therapy is legal now, what are some of the pathways to improving one’s capacity to downregulate? Obviously trauma, let’s go to professionals, everybody. Therapy is beautiful, but sort of general nervous system enhancing capacity to move from orange to yellow to green. Yeah. What are some of your…
[25:52] Marjorie Schreurs: So let me. Yeah, let me define a well-regulated nervous system for you, because I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding about that actually out there. A common sort of understanding out there at the moment that I notice a lot is the belief that a well-regulated nervous system means that you never get upset, that you always stay calm.
[26:18] Cate Blouke: Sorry, I’m just laughing at, like, the, like, oh, getting sober doesn’t mean that we, like, never have a hard time anymore. Right? Yeah.
[26:29] Marjorie Schreurs: So a well-regulated nervous system doesn’t mean that you don’t get upset. It doesn’t mean that you don’t lose your shit. It doesn’t mean that in the face of, you know, fuckery, fuckery, abuse like, or injustice, that you don’t stand up. It means that your nervous system is able to regulate up and down smoothly to meet the demands of your life.
[27:01] Cate Blouke: Yeah.
[27:02] Marjorie Schreurs: That’s what a well-regulated nervous system means to me.
[27:06] Cate Blouke: I like it. I’ll take that definition.
[27:08] Marjorie Schreurs: And I learned that from Deb Dana, who’s the queen of nervous system work. She was actually the main person who has taken the polyvagal theory in the past 30 years and has applied that knowledge into therapy and has been at the forefront of developing, helping us understand how do we work with this in ourselves and with other people.
[27:33] Cate Blouke: Yeah.
[27:33] Marjorie Schreurs: And so I would say that the 101 version of nervous system regulation is like, you learn a couple tools, maybe you learn a couple of vagus nerve resets, and you learn some basic skills in order to, like, help yourself calm down when you get really elevated. So there’s ways that you. There’s exercises you can do different things you can do. Like, you know, it’s like a side bend with the eyes going a certain direction or like, things like humming or gargling or.
[28:05] Cate Blouke: Yeah, and we’ll put some actual resources in the. In the show notes on that. Yeah, but it’s like, somatic things you can do. Yeah.
[28:15] Marjorie Schreurs: There’s exercises or certain things that you can do that literally stimulate that vagus nerve. And when we stimulate that vagus nerve, it gets encouraged to downshift into parasympathetic safety, into the green zone, the higher the tone. So the vagus nerve has a certain level of tone. And the way that we can measure that is through heart rate variability, the way that your heart rate can. The spaces between your heartbeats basically means if you were like, every time we breathe in, it’s kind of like a stimulation to the sympathetic system. And every time we exhale, there’s a stimulation of the parasympathetic nervous system. So that green zone and the red zone, because the red zone isn’t necessarily all bad. It’s actually just, it has some really important functions, and it can be existing in a regulated way also, as does the orange and yellow. The term that, for me, really describes the essence of the process is about befriending your nervous system.
[29:27] Cate Blouke: Okay?
[29:28] Marjorie Schreurs: And it is a process over time. And that can take, you know, you can dive as deep as you want into this, but it’s the process of learning to recognize what you feel like when you’re in different. These different zones. Starting to recognize the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that show up when you’re in these different zones. And then learning to partner with your system to either respect where it’s at so that you can do an activity that can actually help it process where it’s at. Like, if you’re in a really. That’s like, the completing the stress cycle that you mentioned, you are in a. A pretty anxiously activated place. Like, trying to just tell your system to, like, calm down. Calm down is not particularly respectful, but if you were to go for a little run or do some dance party, you would meet the needs of your nervous system in that moment, as well as bring you back down to the place where you would rather be, which is maybe in a little calmer, more regulated, or a more easeful place, more safe place, we should say.
[30:34] Cate Blouke: Yeah, right. Like, just thinking about earlier when we were talking about, like, you know, like, it’ll be okay or just calm down, or don’t worry about it. Like, I see you and that’s hard.
[30:46] Marjorie Schreurs: Yeah.
[30:47] Cate Blouke: Right. So, yeah, like, if I’m doing that to my nervous system, of course it’s like, fuck you, Kate. Like, you’re not listening. Right? You’re not listening to me.
[30:57] Marjorie Schreurs: Yeah.
[30:58] Cate Blouke: We’re a little nervous system.
[31:00] Marjorie Schreurs: It just. Well, and it’s like, we have these two brains, basically. There’s the brain brain, our thinking brain, and then there’s our body brain. I mean, some people are like, we have multiple, you know, we have six brains. But for this purpose of this conversation, we’re going to say, let’s focus on these two brains. Our body brain and our head brain, our cognitive brain. And that starting to learn to listen to the signals in your body that your body is sending you, that is alerting you or pointing you towards recognizing the state that you’re in in the beginning. So much of this process is about learning to notice and attune to what you’re actually sensing and feeling in your body.
[31:49] Cate Blouke: Yeah.
[31:49] Marjorie Schreurs: And that is a language and a neural pathway that has to build. So please be patient with yourself.
[31:56] Cate Blouke: Yeah. Like, my own experience, it takes time, and especially when we’re in a state of, like, chronic stress. Chronic anxiety. Yeah, I know. For me, like, you know, the analogy is, like, I didn’t know how miserable I was until after I got sober.
[32:12] Marjorie Schreurs: Yeah.
[32:13] Cate Blouke: And so it’s like, it wasn’t until I have, like, come down from the anxiety that I can even recognize how anxious I was. Yep. Right. It hasn’t been since, like, recent years when I’ve done a lot of the work and. And realized, like, oh, man, like, I was so activated all the time.
[32:30] Marjorie Schreurs: All the time. Yep.
[32:31] Cate Blouke: But when you’re living there and it’s what you’re used to, it’s the, like, thing with the, like, two goldfish and, like, one swims by and is like, hey, boys, how’s the water? And they’re like, what’s water? What are you talking about?
[32:45] Marjorie Schreurs: Totally. Yeah. And I think, like, as we’re talking about sort of the process of learning to understand your autonomic nervous system, because that’s what we’re talking about here. Learning to befriend and. And communicate with, and build a relationship with your autonomic nervous system is that over time, especially if you spend a lot of time in those elevated places, stressed out or numbed or collapsed or whatever, is that, you know, your baseline idol is typically set pretty high. And what can happen over time with doing this kind of work is that you adjust your idol down to a lower RpM.
[33:26] Cate Blouke: Right. And that is by idle there, you mean, like. You mean kind of where our, like, level of activation is on the sort of, like, daily basis of our starting point, right?
[33:38] Marjorie Schreurs: Yeah, sort of like the default place. Like, just like your car has a certain idle, you know, like, if your foot’s not on the gas pedal or on the brake, it just sort of hovers in a certain place. Well, for people with PTSD, that idol is typically way up in rpms because the system through these intense experiences has made it precautious, is trying to take precautions to make sure that you’re sort of always on alert so that you can, you know, save yourself if you need to.
[34:10] Cate Blouke: Right.
[34:10] Marjorie Schreurs: And for a lot of neurodivergent people, that’s the same because whether it’s one experience, multiple little experiences, or a nervous system that’s really sensitive, that has less filters, that takes in more information anyways, tends to be more easily activated because it more easily gets overwhelmed.
[34:31] Cate Blouke: Yeah.
[34:31] Marjorie Schreurs: And so that’s where a lot of those connect. Plus, for a lot of folks, there’s a little of both going on. There’s some traumatic stuff, and there’s some neurodivergence. This is really common. Right. The statistics are pretty clear around that nervous system work and reshaping the patterns of your nervous system and how it moves between these different states, it’s very rewarding work to, at least in my experience, to spend some time there and to get to know your system, because one of the things that I see happening that I’ve experienced in myself and that I see out there and with clients is that so often our head, our cognitive, knowing, wants one thing, but our body is in a totally different place. It’s like my head is like, I want to relax and enjoy this vacation. And my body’s like, I’m still in the orange zone, and I don’t really know how to get out. And I’m not going to be able to get very comfortable in this lounge chair because, oh, my God. I got to just keep busy because there’s all this stuff, you know?
[35:38] Cate Blouke: Oh, my God. Yes. We’re both solopreneurs, and like, absolutely. That describes my very first vacation as a solopreneur. I was. I took time off, and my body was just like, no, there’s 8 million things you should be doing. What are you talking with your fucking relaxation? And I was like, buddy, buddy, we need a break.
[35:58] Marjorie Schreurs: And that’s such a great example of where our mind and our body are not aligned.
[36:03] Cate Blouke: Yeah.
[36:04] Marjorie Schreurs: And what you can do through more of this, befriending your nervous system, getting to know yourself in that way, and building skills and ability and capacity and resilience, is that you start to align the mind and the body, and you come into a place of alignment and resonance. And when our mind and our body can be in the same place, that is when we can be at peace. That’s when we can have a sense of ease and joyous and presence and congruence. Yeah. Like, all the things that we all want more of, all the yummy, juicy.
[36:42] Cate Blouke: Shit that we can’t just think our into, is what I’m hearing.
[36:45] Marjorie Schreurs: We can’t? No. It’s like, I had this quote that I found recently as I was cleaning up my. My office. I was like, oh, I don’t know. I can’t remember if I came up with it or if it came from something else. But if there’s someone who deserves credit for this, we’ll find you.
[37:01] Cate Blouke: Yeah.
[37:02] Marjorie Schreurs: If you could have thought your way out of this, you would have done that a long time ago. It’s not for lack of cognitive capacity. It’s an embodied experience.
[37:15] Cate Blouke: Yeah. And I just. I really like that befriending word. Right. And that certainly describes my experience with all of this, is like, because I feel like a lot of it was just so combative for a really long time. I was like, why can’t I just learn?
[37:32] Marjorie Schreurs: Yeah.
[37:33] Cate Blouke: I’m thinking. I’m thinking real hard. Like, why is this happening? What’s going on, you know, and I’m trying so hard.
[37:40] Marjorie Schreurs: Like, I’m trying my best. I’m trying so hard, and yet my body isn’t cooperating or.
[37:47] Cate Blouke: And if I think about, you know, like, relationships, you know, like, relationships where one person is just, like, calling the shots all the time. Yeah, you aren’t great, right? So no wonder my body’s like, fuck you. I’m not listening. Like, you’re not listening to me. Like, I don’t want, like, fuck your dictatorial bullshit. Like, you need to listen to me, bro.
[38:13] Marjorie Schreurs: But it’s like, I think I was listening to Deb Dana’s book, and she made this. She gave this example of, like, what sort of attuning with your nervous system and your. And your brain can look like. And she was like, you know, I had this plan this one day to, like, have a slow morning and just sit down and have my coffee and, you know, do some writing. Like, just, you know, that sort of writing practice. And then I woke up, and I had a certain level of, like, anxiety activation that was there. Like, there was a level of mobilization in my system that was not aligned with the plan that I had for myself that morning. And she’s like. And then I just sort of took a moment to tune in and came up with a compromise that I would still have my slow morning, but I would write a to do list of what I was going to do that day because that helped me, like, respect and work with the energy that was there. Like, the need that was there to do a little bit of planning and then move on into my day. So that’s a really beautiful example of how partnering with your nervous system and your body and your brain, how that can start to become this respectful conversation back and forth.
[39:34] Cate Blouke: That exact example, I have absolutely, 100% had that experience of waking up anxious and being like, okay, let me write the to do list so that it’s not spinning, and then I can do a thing, and then we’ll start, and then we’ll pick up with. With the to do list. I like that. I like that respective collaborative relationship. Oh, my gosh, this has been so good. And I can’t wait to have you back on to talk about neurodivergence, because we only like, yeah, yeah. And that’s fine. That’s totally fine. We’ll do this again. So, where do people find you if they are interested in working with you on all of this yummy shit?
[40:17] Marjorie Schreurs: Yeah. Solsticecoaching.com. that’s sol, as in soul solsticecoaching.com. i’m on instagram under solsticecoaching under my personal name on LinkedIn and Facebook. So mayori Schrehrs or Marjorie Schurs.
[40:40] Cate Blouke: Marjorie. Marjorie. Shirt.
[40:42] Marjorie Schreurs: You know, I have an ally, or I have, like, a part of me inside that’s like, Marge. Marjorie. It’s part of the work I do, too, is the parts work. And it’s like, yeah, there’s definitely a Marjorie in there somewhere, so I don’t mind if that’s used.
[41:00] Cate Blouke: Yeah.
[41:01] Marjorie Schreurs: You know, I do one on one work with people just because so much of this work is so individual and specific. And it’s really about taking, you know, zooming in on. In each session to start peeling away the layers of all of these, this very intricate patchwork of construction that our ways of being are a lot of the time, and sort of looking at one patch at a time and resourcing and understanding and, you know, meeting with compassion and love and safety and holding so we can find our way into more relaxed and open ways of being.
[41:43] Cate Blouke: Yay. Final question. What brings you joy?
[41:49] Marjorie Schreurs: Dancing and horse riding. Yep. Those are my two refuges of joy. Like, they. It is the way I can tap in at the drop of a hat, put on some good music, and have me dance. It immediately drops me into the deepest, most pure joy that I can experience.
[42:13] Cate Blouke: Beautiful. Thank you so much, my friend. This has been glorious.
[42:19] Marjorie Schreurs: Thank you for the opportunity to come on and just to have this incredibly fun and inspiring conversation. I’m feeling all tangly, so thank you for the opportunity.
[42:30] Cate Blouke: So welcome. Okay, say your name for me one more time.
[42:40] Marjorie Schreurs: Mayoris Hrirz.
[42:42] Cate Blouke: Okay, and it is Dutch.
[42:44] Marjorie Schreurs: Yes.
[42:45] Cate Blouke: And what are all the sounds that are involved in that?
[42:49] Marjorie Schreurs: Okay, so there’s. Okay, it’s like the ch is in Dutch, and then the r is rolling, and then the EU is an, which is like a combination vowel sound. So it’s. You stick those all together and it’s. Oh, my God, that’s so good.
[43:15] Cate Blouke: I did it! Okay. Amazing.
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