E8 S2 | Somatic Practitioner Emma Gordon Shares How Regulating the Nervous System is the Key to Healing Trauma Held in the Body

Welcome to Episode 8, Season 2 of the Sick and Seeking Podcast!

In this episode, I sit down with somatic practitioner Emma Gordon from Body As Compass. Emma shares profound insights about healing, trauma, and the wisdom that emerges through deep emotional work. 

Join us as we explore the journey of healing and the transformative power of somatic practices.

Conversation Highlights:

• Personal Healing Journey: Emma discusses her own experiences in healing from trauma.
• Body Wisdom: We explore how the body operates from a place of wisdom for survival.
• Self-Compassion: A starting point for befriending the body.
• Mind-Body Connection: The importance of aligning the mind and body instead of having them work against each other.
• Healing from Safety: Finding external safety before connecting to the body.
• Nervous System Awareness: Understanding the nervous system's role and how dysregulation occurs.
• Neuroaffective Touch: This therapeutic approach can help release trauma patterns stored in the body.
• Importance of Touch: Human connection is essential for overall well-being.
• Joy and Resilience: Stepping into joy and pleasure as a means to heal the body.

Quote:

“You can't think your way through trauma, and there's a lot of shame surrounding being traumatized. This creates negative feedback loops, but we can’t consciously choose to regulate our nervous system.” - Emma Gordon

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Transcript

Leslie Field (00:01.602)

Welcome everyone to the Sick and Seeking podcast. I am so happy to introduce Emma Gordon. Emma, it's so lovely to have you here today.

emma gordon (00:10.653)

Thank you for having me, I'm pleased to be here.

Leslie Field (00:12.91)

So Emma Gordon is a somatic practitioner. Her company is called Body as Compass. And I wanna start off with a beautiful quote that is on her website. Now Emma and I don't know each other well, although we have a very close mutual friend. So of course I had to have her on the podcast when I read this quote of hers. She writes, I believe everyone has the roadmap to their own healing within.

Yes, yes, Emma. I couldn't agree more. And that is one of the reasons why I created the Stick and Seeking podcast. And I wanted to invite you on here today to talk about the work that you do and how it can really help support people. So there's so much to cover. So Emma, tell me a little bit about you and the beautiful work that you do.

emma gordon (01:02.301)

So I'm a somatic practitioner. I've done a lot of different certifications. And so my work is rooted in a lot of science-based certifications. But also I bring in a lot of aspects to my own healing around things that I've learned myself or depending on the client, like maybe some spirituality stuff. And just...

things that I've encountered on my own healing journey. So I've come from a history of deep trauma and kind of dysfunctional living, you know, especially relationally in the world. And through healing my own trauma, which has been a bit of an odyssey, I've learned a lot. And then it...

Leslie Field (01:55.007)

Yeah.

emma gordon (01:56.613)

And it's through my own healing and getting to this kind of wonderful place that I'm in of feeling really happy and grateful and trusting of the universe that led me to want to come into this world as a practitioner and as a healer and to bring this kind of healing out into the world. And it feels really kind of deep work and it feels like my...

purpose, like my life's purpose. And so I find the work really beautiful. And because I have done the work myself, I come at it from this place of knowing that you can heal, and knowing that anyone can actually heal. And everybody is different. And so there's no one prescribed way, I would say, of healing.

Leslie Field (02:27.883)

Yeah.

emma gordon (02:54.117)

And that's why I think it's really important to guide people to their own intuition, which is that. And so, and sometimes when we're so traumatized and we're so frozen, we can't get in touch with our intuition. And PTSD can really mess with our sense of self, especially complex PTSD or developmental trauma. It really becomes part of the fabric of who we are, especially if we're traumatized as children.

Leslie Field (02:58.514)

Oh. Yes.

emma gordon (03:20.497)

So it's really hard for people to recognize what's real and what isn't real and what their own instincts are. And so part of the work that I do is guiding them back to their own body, guiding them back to feeling what they really feel in their body, because even outside of trauma, we live in a very mind-focused culture. And so it's almost like in our culture, if it doesn't come from the mind, it's not seen as being real or important. Whereas in fact, all wisdom is not held in them.

Leslie Field (03:31.008)

you

Leslie Field (03:46.369)

Yes.

emma gordon (03:49.661)

The intellect is held in the mind, but wisdom is held in the body. Wisdom and trauma, feelings, all of that is held in the body. And so the goal of somatics is to get body and mind working together. And so there's so many different ways. Somatics can include so many different things. It can be touch, it can be movement, it can be working with imagery.

Leslie Field (04:19.723)

Mmm.

emma gordon (04:20.902)

like if you could imagine that you are running, the body feels that in the same way as if you were running. You know, it's so, there's all kinds of different ways that you can work somatically. And what I learned the hard way is that talking about your trauma doesn't help trauma. It can actually make trauma worse because it just deepens those neural pathways of trauma.

Leslie Field (04:27.126)

Yeah.

Leslie Field (04:40.302)

Mmm.

Leslie Field (04:47.841)

Yeah.

emma gordon (04:48.289)

If you're repeatedly talking about the trauma without including the body, and without including the body that can process as you're talking about it, then it can make you more traumatized and it can make you, it made me sick. So that's why I got so deep into the somatic work. Because I spent a lot of time in talk therapy and a lot of money. Not only not getting better.

Leslie Field (05:01.611)

Yeah.

Leslie Field (05:11.079)

Mm-hmm.

emma gordon (05:14.897)

But I found myself coming down with all kinds of different chronic illnesses.

Leslie Field (05:21.086)

Yeah, that's probably a great majority of people that you're speaking to right now. So I know this is gonna be a very interesting topic. I think, I'm sure you'll bring this up at some point because I'm so curious about trauma, learning more about trauma, how it can manifest in the body and I'm going down this path right now. And I don't know why this just came in my head right now that...

you know, a lot of people sometimes, oh, it's not one of those other things to sort of beat yourself up with, like, oh, I'm doing this to myself now because I had this traumatic experience, and oh, why can't I just get over it, and look what's happening to my body? Like, I guess, I don't know if I'm saying anything that you're gonna be able to jump onto, I guess I'm saying this because like, it's already so hard to be in a body that's not functioning and the way you might want it to, and then to look back and be like, oh God, I went through all that really horrible stuff.

by body probably recognizes trauma. And then I don't know about people who are listening, but sometimes I jump to, oh God, and one more thing to just beat myself up about. Like, why can't I just get it together? Why can't I just get over this? Yeah.

emma gordon (06:30.889)

Well, it is hard to get over. You know, trauma, we're not in a society, we are talking a lot more about mental health, which is good, but we're not really in a society that cares that much about people healing, I don't think. It's really about, we're in a society that cares about productivity. And so even a lot of the mental health discussions that are happening are based around how can you do better at work, or how can you,

Leslie Field (06:32.686)

Thank you.

emma gordon (07:01.201)

be more productive or how, you know, most of the things you read about mental health is like how much does it cost the workplace or how much does it affect the productivity of society? Yeah, exactly. And so I don't think we are geared up for that and we're most of us completely disembodied, which means that we don't come from this place of operating from the body, which is really a default human

Leslie Field (07:12.586)

The bottom line.

emma gordon (07:31.117)

Space, we are mental, not just human, all mammals, all animals, we operate from the body and the mind is there, but we're not supposed to be solely operating from our mind. And if we're not operating from the body, and then we just, we can't get over it. You can't just get over it. You know, you can't think your way through trauma, and you can't think your way into regulating your nervous system. And so I think there's a lot of shame for people around being traumatized.

Leslie Field (07:51.839)

Hmm.

emma gordon (08:00.493)

and trauma in and of itself creates shame, and then people have shame around having shame, and it becomes this terrible feedback loop for people. But it's not a conscious decision. We can't choose for our nervous system to be in a different place.

Leslie Field (08:07.712)

Yeah.

emma gordon (08:19.345)

Like, you know, if, say for example, if somebody gets assaulted and they don't fight back because their nervous system goes into freeze, that's not a choice they've made. That's their bodies. The body is always operating from a place of wisdom and the body is always operating from a place of, this is the best way for me to survive right now.

Leslie Field (08:39.006)

Yes, that's been a big huge thing that I took away. Absolutely that it will immobilize you under extreme threat or overwhelming something or other. It's really fascinating. I guess. So how do we come back to the body? That's the question.

emma gordon (08:59.045)

You come back to the body slowly and gradually. And we don't, you know, the fact that we've left our bodies, we've left our bodies for a reason. We've left our bodies because it was too stressful to be inside of our bodies or too scary, too painful.

And so when I work with clients, the beginning of the work is really slow because you don't want people to come back into their body really quickly and feel everything that they left their body to avoid, especially for those of us with developmental trauma. And so as a child, when you have trauma, and trauma in children doesn't always look what people think it looks. But you know, people have this idea of sexual abuse, which is definitely trauma, or some kind of really scary event.

But trauma in children can often just be neglect. And neglect doesn't necessarily mean that your needs weren't taken care of, but if you were not emotionally attuned to, if you didn't have somebody there celebrating your feelings with you or just reflecting them back to you, being...

helping you through difficult times, you know, that would be seen as emotional neglect and that is held developmentally in the body as a trauma. And that, along with that kind of trauma comes these feelings of what you were talking about, which is there's something wrong with me, why can't I just be well? It's, it's...

I'm deficient, I'm defective, why is everything so hard for me, why is it hard for other people? But if you didn't have somebody help you through those emotional sticky points as a child, or just reflect back to you, like children don't really know who they are unless it's reflected back to them. And I'm forgetting where I was going with this. Yeah, so that...

Leslie Field (10:53.175)

Hmm.

emma gordon (11:03.133)

Those feelings of I'm not good enough or I'm not, there's just something wrong with me. That is often a sign of emotional neglect and it doesn't necessarily mean that you had bad parents. It just means that you had parents that probably weren't taught that themselves or that weren't equipped to emotionally support children. So we're not here to bash mothers or fathers. It's really just about, okay, I didn't get what I needed then but how can I get it now?

Leslie Field (11:13.518)

Mm-hmm.

Leslie Field (11:17.611)

Mm-hmm.

emma gordon (11:33.113)

And there's all kinds of ways that you start to do that. I use a lot of touch in my work, but some people are not ready for touch. So they can use self-touch or movement. You know, journaling. If you're journaling with a pen, that's somatic. If you're typing, it's not somatic. Yeah, so it's the movement. It's the movement of the body. You can work with imagination and imagery, and that is somatic.

Leslie Field (11:40.866)

Yeah.

Leslie Field (11:44.99)

Mm-hmm.

Leslie Field (11:52.212)

Oh.

emma gordon (12:03.073)

You can do dialoguing between the body and the mind. You can talk to the different parts. You know, we all have different parts of us. We have like the protector. We have the victim. You know, we have the hero. We all have different parts of us. And the goal essentially is eventually to start to integrate all those different parts so there's one whole person.

And so, you know, the work starts out slow, and then it starts, what I find with the healing process is the beginning of this kind of work is really slow, and then at one point there's a tipping point, and then the work just kind of grows in leaps and bounds, exponentially. And there comes a point when you don't really have to consciously regulate your nervous system anymore. It just starts to recalibrate itself.

Leslie Field (12:53.37)

Before we go into the nervous system recalibration, what I'm finding in sort of the support groups that I'm running right now with people who have chronic conditions, so Emma knows this, although she's going to get to know it better when she comes to a class. I'm an embodied movement practitioner, and so I'm starting to introduce people to some really gentle movements when I hold my chronic conditions support group. And there's

Obviously as you would probably think there's a lot of resistance to go back to the body Yeah for many reasons which you had just discussed So I guess I'm curious to know if there's any way that you can help me understand or maybe the people listening understand How do you even start to befriend the body that maybe you've lost the trust of that? That you're frustrated with that you're angry at I'm so curious to know how if you have

emma gordon (13:24.384)

Mm-hmm.

Leslie Field (13:49.098)

some sort of magic words or thoughts, or how do you even get people to start to do that?

emma gordon (13:55.569)

Well, I think you have to tease it out slowly, bit by bit, and you start with maybe some psychoeducation around the fact that the body is always doing, is always in service of our survival, always. The body never does anything to hurt us, to hurt ourselves. Everything it's doing is coming from a place of protection and survival.

Leslie Field (14:09.669)

Hmm.

emma gordon (14:22.117)

And so even if some of those survival strategies have become maladaptive, which means they're not working for us anymore, the first step I would say is starting to understand that at one time they were not only working for us, but essential for our survival. And so if you could imagine like,

a baby or a young child with either an abusive parent or a neglectful parent and either they're afraid or even neglecting a child is terrifying. There's actually not much more terrifying anything to a child than neglect or the fear of abandonment.

Because, you know, biologically, a child cannot survive without its parents. And even though we now live in a different society, we are still biological beings that were once on their prairie or in caves. And so the first step is to really, and it takes a bit of process for people, to start to have more compassion. And I think that's the key, having more compassion around our responses.

Leslie Field (15:21.706)

Yes. Yeah.

Leslie Field (15:30.751)

Yes.

Leslie Field (15:34.528)

Mmm.

Leslie Field (15:38.786)

Hmm.

emma gordon (15:39.685)

having more compassion around what our body is doing, or our behavior patterns, and beginning to understand, okay, I might not be able to change it yet, but at least I can start to understand it, and understand the through line of why my body might be doing this. So the only way a child can really protect itself is to brace.

a young child or a baby. So if you're a baby and you get left in the crib for too long and you feel like no one's coming back for you and I'm just gonna die, all a baby can do is brace its muscles and its organs. So you'll find like, I find people with a lot of developmental trauma have a lot of gut issues because the stomach and the gut are just so frozen. Because when you're young, all you can really do is like squeeze those muscles and those organs.

Leslie Field (16:15.266)

Hmm.

Leslie Field (16:19.161)

Mmm.

emma gordon (16:28.761)

And so that might not be working for you anymore. You know, you might be a 40-year-old woman and with gut issues and unable to feel in your body, and it's not really working anymore. All it's doing from your perspective might be, it's just annoying, why can't I? But if you can start to understand, oh, this is why. And then the compassion, the self-compassion starts to create relationship with the body.

Leslie Field (16:47.959)

Mmm.

emma gordon (16:55.237)

And I think that's the first thing. And quite often in our culture, especially, the body and the mind are at odds at the beginning of the journey. And so the goal is to eventually get them working on the same team, because the body does not trust the mind because all the mind is doing quite often is abusing the body.

Leslie Field (17:01.57)

Hmm. I wouldn't know about that. Yeah.

emma gordon (17:15.709)

with either like, why are you doing this? Why are you so stupid? Why can't I heal? Why am I fat? Why am I, you know, all these things that we tell ourselves in our culture. And so the body is used to taking a ton of abuse from the mind. And then so the body doesn't trust the mind. And the mind doesn't trust the body because the mind is like, oh no, you're gonna get me into trouble here. You know, I'm in control and I'm gonna make sure we're safe.

Leslie Field (17:24.462)

Yeah.

Leslie Field (17:38.826)

Yeah. Oh, that's self-compassion. Wow. That is, that's, that's sounds like a pretty key sparty point. Actually, not that you say it. Yes. Cause that's, that's what you hear a lot of people. And again, every person who's going through their, I call it their medical journey, their journey with their body, they're in a different, everyone's in a different place, whether it's just happening, new information or you're on your way or like you've been around the block a few times and you know, you've done a lot of, whether it's

emma gordon (17:59.193)

Yes.

Leslie Field (18:08.518)

actual work like healing work with different practitioners or maybe just you've been around the block mentally and you've prepared yourself. Man, that self-compassion is definitely, I think, such a beautiful key starting point. So thank you for highlighting that. It seems sometimes so obvious, but we just need to be reminded again that this might be the place to start, right?

emma gordon (18:26.413)

Yes, yeah and then and for some people that's even too hard. So then we would start with working outside of the body and so what that might look like is you know I use a lot of different nervous system tools and so rather than trying to feel inside the body we wouldn't start there we would start with looking outside of the body and finding ourselves in safety in our environment.

Leslie Field (18:30.74)

Yeah.

Hmm.

Leslie Field (18:46.835)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

emma gordon (18:48.997)

So it might be something like I'll have somebody look around the room and find something, like right now I can see a beautiful pink flower. I'm going to find something that's appealing to you. And then we'll turn our head and find something in the opposite direction, like I see a tree. And then I'm looking over there and I see a picture. And even that, just doing that, which took what?

15, 20 seconds, I feel a little bit of relaxation in my body. Because what we're doing is our nervous system is actually scanning, scanning all the time, but it's consciously looking and it's realizing, it's consciously noticing pleasant things. And it brings us into a little bit of safety. And so, and some people can't feel anything in their bodies, like nothing.

And so then we might start with feeling something outside of their body, like it might be like, okay, can you feel this texture? Which most people can do. Or can you clench your fists really tight and feel that? Which they can normally do. And then so we start really with wherever that person is at and we work at that person's, within that person's comfort level. We don't wanna push anybody into anything they're not ready for. And we always start with building resilience, always.

Leslie Field (19:55.925)

Mm-hmm.

Leslie Field (19:59.202)

Yeah.

emma gordon (20:04.433)

So that you can't heal trauma, you can only heal trauma from a place of safety. You can't heal trauma when you're completely in it. If you're in the chaos, if you're in a completely dysregulated place, if your life feels overwhelming, you can't heal trauma from that place.

And so what we do is we start with building enough resilience and safety where it kind of gets a little, you know, you might almost just think of, oh, it's easy now and it's a little boring. And from that place, you can start to explore a little deeper and go into maybe some of the places of discomfort. We don't start there.

Leslie Field (20:37.33)

Ah, that's so beautiful. I'm always curious about in the body, like how it feels. So I think that was a really good reminder to me too, that yeah, even that can be too much to begin with. So I really appreciate you sharing that reminder outside the body, looking, the scanning, feeling safe. And I think this might be the perfect moment to talk about the nervous system.

emma gordon (20:50.362)

Yes.

emma gordon (21:01.646)

Okay.

Leslie Field (21:03.022)

I think it, let's dive in there because something I'm super passionate about, curious about, a little overwhelmed as I mentioned to you before. And I would love for you to tell people, what is this nervous system and why does it matter?

emma gordon (21:16.673)

Okay, so the nervous system, I mean, in a way, I think I like to look at it for simplicity purposes. If you can think of the body as being like the hardware, then the nervous system is the software. Okay, so that's your operating system. And so the body holds everything, but the nervous system operates everything. And that goes from like regulating your heartbeat, your blood pressure, making sure that you breathe.

And it's called the autonomic nervous system because it does all these things automatically, okay? You can't choose not to breathe. Like you can't choose to not have your heart beat. Your body is gonna use, the nervous system does what it needs to do for us to survive. And a well-regulated nervous system is a nimble and agile nervous system, right? So we're not, so first of all, why does it matter before I get into?

what a regulated nervous system means. So it matters because the nervous system is how we operate. So if you find yourself completely going into repetitive dysfunctional relationships or repetitive relationships with narcissists or being really reactive, yelling at your kids, all that is coming from your nervous system. But it also affects our health.

And so if you have a dysregulated nervous system, you will have a dysregulated HPA axis, which is a really complex system of hormones, glands, and the brain. And so which affects your energy metabolism, it affects your hormonal production.

emma gordon (23:01.93)

It affects so many different bodily functions. And then when we are dysregulated for too long, it affects all the organs too. Because when we're in freeze,

Leslie Field (23:12.854)

Thanks for watching!

emma gordon (23:17.917)

those organs are not getting the blood flow that they would normally get, they're constricted. So there are a lot of health implications from a dysregulated nervous system. And so, and the other thing that the nervous system does, in our culture, it can sometimes feel opposite, but biologically it wasn't opposite, is the nervous system has got two main functions. It is survival and connection.

And so originally, of a well-regulated person, they're in alignment. So connection is part of survival. We needed our tribe to survive. And we couldn't, in the olden days of humanity, we could not survive alone. We just couldn't. So you needed that tribe for survival, which is why cultural culture and all these things where you feel othered can be very, very stressful for people.

But in our culture, quite often they're not in alignment, because we don't really have a tribe anymore, most people. And so, or if we have a history of coming from trauma, abusive parents, neglectful parents, traumatic relationships, then for us, connection might really feel unsafe. And so then the nervous system, the survival and the connection are kind of opposing.

Leslie Field (24:35.246)

Thanks for watching!

emma gordon (24:35.993)

And so the work of regulating a nervous system will help to get those working back along side by side where connection feel safe again. And so there are three branches of the nervous system. There's the sympathetic, which we will know as fight flight. Right, so.

And then there's the vagal system. And there are two aspects to the vagal system. There's the dorsal vagal, which is freeze, and which goes from like solar plexus down, touches every single organ in the body and comes all the way down to the genitals. And then it moves up, which is the ventral vagal, which is our social nervous system, which is how we connect. And that comes from the solar plexus and up through to the face. And so...

losing my train of thought. Yes, so there are three branches of the nervous system. And so I'm gonna take a minute because I'm not sure where I was coming from.

Leslie Field (25:43.178)

Yeah.

emma gordon (25:50.461)

Yeah, I'm gonna think about it, what I was trying to say.

emma gordon (26:00.878)

Okay, so in a well-regulated nervous system, we will move agilely through those three branches. And so when we're feeling safe, when we know we're safe, we're hanging out with friends or family, loved ones.

Leslie Field (26:07.73)

Mm. Yeah.

emma gordon (26:18.225)

Then we would be in our, ideally, we would be in our social nervous system, which otherwise known as ventral vagal, and that's where we connect. That's when our body does all of its kind of cleanup. It's when our stomach digests. It's where we are creative. It's where we might be open sexually, sensually, and it's that kind of like feel good place of safety. And...

But we're not meant to be there all the time, right? So in a well-regulated nervous system, we're meant to go into fight, flight, or freeze if necessary. And so fight, flight could be something like, I don't know, like I see a stranger walking into my house right now. And then I wanna go into fight, flight for that, right? So you go into, the nervous system is hierarchical, so you will always go flight, fight, freeze, always. You don't always make it all the way to a-

fight or freeze, but you would always go in that order. Sometimes you do it so quickly that you don't notice, but you do. So the first thing is flight. I might be like, oh, there's someone I don't know, like try and break into my house, I'm gonna run. If that person gets really close to me, I'll fight. And then if I feel like there's no way of me getting away, then my body will just go into a freeze. And that freeze state is, if you can imagine,

Fight flight being you put your foot on the accelerator. Freeze is you putting your foot on the brake. But your foot is still on the accelerator. So it's almost if you can imagine being in a car and putting your foot both on the brake and the accelerator at the same time and you're just burning out that motor. So it's very, it takes a lot of energy and it's very taxing on the body. So we don't wanna be stuck.

We wanna be able to move in and out of those places where need be. And it's not quite as simple as that, if you're really getting deep into the science. I mean, we're moving, we're on a continuum all day long. Like even just to get out of bed in the morning, we need a little bit of sympathetic nervous system action. We need a little bit of your foot on the accelerator. And then we might be like, oh, I'm gonna meditate or just rest for a minute and then you're gonna put your foot on the brake.

Leslie Field (28:28.075)

Mm-hmm.

emma gordon (28:34.777)

And that's how it's meant to be. It's meant to be pretty fluid. But some people just get stuck. Especially people with PTSD or complex PTSD, people tend to habitually get stuck either in fight flight or in freeze. And so if you're somebody who can't really feel anything in your body, you're likely stuck in freeze, which makes it very hard to connect. It makes things very overwhelming. It makes...

Leslie Field (28:40.279)

Yes.

Leslie Field (28:50.903)

Hmm

Leslie Field (28:55.63)

Mm-hmm.

emma gordon (29:03.897)

it really hard to motivate. You might think of that as people that have, you know, they might call themselves procrastinators or lazy or, and none of that's true. It's just that you're stuck in this place. And biologically, you know, wild animals, like a possum playing dead is going into freeze. And you can die from that, you know, animals, you can die from that. It's very, it's shock. Shock is an element of that.

You know, and so, with humans, we're not really generally going to die from it. You know, it tends to be we don't go, but theoretically you could, you know. And so you get stuck there. It's not a pleasant place to be stuck. And people in frieze especially tend to blame themselves. Like, what is wrong with me? Why can't I motivate? Why can't I go anywhere? Why can't, why is it so hard, you know?

Leslie Field (29:46.271)

Yes.

Leslie Field (29:59.118)

Mm-hmm. Mm.

emma gordon (29:59.677)

And then someone else might be stuck in flight flight. And what that might look like is, you know, when I was in my twenties, I just traveled the world. And every time I would get like, I'd just go somewhere for a while and then I would get antsy and have to move. And that was the flight pushing me. And other people might get stuck in flight, which is anger, could be rage, like a rage-o-holic, you know? And it might not be that extreme, it might just be that you find yourself irritated all the time.

Leslie Field (30:15.889)

Mmm.

emma gordon (30:27.961)

everyone annoys you and you just find yourself screaming at your kids all day long, you know? And that's what's letting me know that, oh, you're stuck in this kind of fight-flight place. And so, you want to be able to respond to what's happening in your environment, which includes feeling good, which includes being with loved ones and then being able to enjoy that, being able to feel the support.

Leslie Field (30:38.511)

Hmm.

emma gordon (30:56.517)

And what happens when we are stuck in these nervous system places is our muscles brace. They collapse and they brace. And so if you have raised back muscles, which many of us do, even if someone's offering you support, you can't really feel it. It just kind of bounces off. And so from these dysregulated places, people find it really hard to ask for support. They find it really hard to know what support would look like. They find it really hard to accept support when offered to them, especially if they...

Leslie Field (31:12.162)

Hmm.

emma gordon (31:26.489)

a hyper-independent because they didn't have that kind of support as children. It can be really scary for people to take in support.

Leslie Field (31:34.538)

Mm-hmm.

emma gordon (31:35.225)

And so, regulating the nervous system, it really starts to, and pretty quickly, it can start to change your life.

Leslie Field (31:43.202)

Hmm. Wow. Thank you for that beautiful description of the nervous system. Uh, trust me, I've been reading a lot of books, people, and yes, it can be very complicated down to this part of the brain does this and that's why I did that. But for, um, Emma to come on here and just explain it in those terms that we can all kind of understand that we would move between the brake and, and the gas and, you know, cause that's how we have biologically been created to do these things, but then we get stuck.

is the trauma. That's always been the really fascinating part. And the part that always gets me when I read about it is that it's like your brain might think, oh, I'm fine. No, I'm good. Like, oh, I've gotten over that, right? The body can tell a totally different story.

emma gordon (32:31.217)

Absolutely. Like people don't even know they have trauma, quite often. But you know, they might have like chronic fatigue syndrome, Hashimoto's, all these different health conditions, which I've had a bunch of different health conditions that have just, as I've healed my trauma, they've just rectified by themselves. Because you can't lie to the body.

Leslie Field (32:34.41)

Mm-hmm.

Leslie Field (32:44.609)

Mm-hmm.

Leslie Field (33:00.002)

Mm-mm.

emma gordon (33:01.233)

You know, there's the famous book that so many people have read, The Body Keeps the Score, and the body does keep the score, you know? And so, yes, it's not an option just to tell yourself, convince yourself that it's not happening, or that you're okay when you're really not.

Leslie Field (33:19.094)

Yes, yes, yes.

Leslie Field (33:25.742)

I could speak to that all day long because I've apparently I think a very stubborn mind in this regard Yet my body is often saying oh no, there's a whole other story going on here So that's why I really appreciate this conversation and I would love to get more into The touch aspect so when we were talking Emma and I It just shows you there's always more work to do. I was like, oh the thought of like someone touching me I could get on board with but I'm a little bit like

emma gordon (33:37.083)

Yes.

Leslie Field (33:55.454)

I have feelings about that. But then I was talking to her about like maybe in the future, oh, would I consider actually being a practitioner and touching other people? I was like, no, I don't know if I could ever do that. And then we had a little giggle about like, yeah, that's more of my work to do. But I thought it was so interesting when you were talking about what I believe is called neuro-effective touch, if I have that correct. I want to hear more about this, because I know you said this is one of the main tools that you use in the work that you do when working with people in your body and through trauma. And...

emma gordon (34:14.95)

Yes.

Leslie Field (34:25.551)

Please tell me more about this powerful tool that you use and how yeah

emma gordon (34:33.245)

So new effective touch is a modality that was created by Aline LaPierre, who's one of the pioneers in somatic work. So she started in the 80s. She's a PhD, she's a doctor, she's my mentor, she's amazing. And she's very deep and wise. And so when she started doing, becoming a psychotherapist back in the 80s, you know, you weren't allowed to touch clients. It was just seen as very, very taboo.

And from her perspective, that comes from a very masculine point of view. And most of the teachers of psychotherapy, almost everything comes from the male perspective. And especially when dealing with developmental trauma, with developmental trauma, there's almost always some form of neglect. And so even if it's not abject neglect, like maybe you were fed on time and you picked up from school and you were clean and you had clothing,

Most often when the development is trauma, there's some kind of neglect or emotional neglect. And so part of the work of healing developmental trauma is reparenting the body. Okay? And so that might mean working with imagery of you might have like a three-year-old appear. And often we do. And I talk to all those different parts of myself and take care of them or take them out of the scary situation in my imagination.

And the only way, as I was saying earlier, the only way a child, a young child, can really protect themselves against any feelings of fear, neglect, quite often it's not safe for a child in many families to express anger or rage, so they push everything down, and all they can do is brace the muscles, or collapse the muscles. And so braced muscles are really hard and stiff, and collapsed muscles are really floppy, and they have no feeling.

no life in them, no life force energy. And so when we're working with touch, the first thing we normally do is we quite often start with the back where it's really braced and just start to give the body support. So quite often the body has never experienced that. And it's not like massage. And so it's really working with bracing patterns and collapsed patterns in the body. So it'd be like feeling.

Leslie Field (36:37.25)

Hmm.

emma gordon (36:59.517)

where the body's really braced, and just offering it a little support and encouragement so that it can start to relax and yield those muscles, and then it can really start to feel into that support. And so you might go to a massage therapist and have someone break into those muscles, right, from the outside in, and that can feel good. And I'm all in for body work. You know, I'm all into people getting body work, but when it's done...

when you're just suggesting it to the muscles and the body yields of its own, then it's releasing that pattern. Whereas when you're doing it from the outside in, like just trying to break into the muscles, then it probably will let go, but then it'll just come back again. And so it's really like offering that child, and it doesn't have to be me touching the person, it can be somebody just putting a hand on their own heart, for example, and starting to bring comfort and compassion.

Leslie Field (37:44.758)

Hmm.

emma gordon (37:58.553)

and support to the body. Because we are touch beings. Humans are touch beings. Even if, you know, there might be people that are very touch phobic, and that's very true of a lot of people, especially if there's any kind of history of physical or sexual abuse, then of course touch doesn't feel safe. And so again, the work happens really slowly, and in that case, I would have somebody just work with maybe their own hand on their heart is enough.

Leslie Field (38:00.286)

Mm-hmm.

Leslie Field (38:22.518)

Mm-hmm.

emma gordon (38:25.009)

But if you look at biologically humans, our touch receptors come on at six weeks of gestation, and that's before the brain is developed. And so the touch is just such an integral part of being human. And if you look at like orphanages, say in Romania, et cetera, where babies are not held in touch, those babies will die. A baby that is not held in touch, what they call is failure to thrive.

which means that baby will essentially die. And so it's absolutely essential as a human to have touch. And for those of us that missed out on that as children, which I certainly did, then we bring that back into the body. And then as you start to bring the touch, it encourages life force energy or flow. And so what happens in a traumatized person is the trauma and emotions and stress gets locked in various...

parts of the body. And so you could think of it as like compressing it into a safe, like I'm gonna bury that really deep and never come, never face that again, you know. And that stops the energy flow. Another way of looking at it is like a really well functioning human body or mammalian body, there's energy flow happening all the time, all the way through the body. And if you can imagine like a river, and then all of a sudden there's an eddy, you know, like there might be like.

Leslie Field (39:25.006)

Mm-hmm.

Leslie Field (39:47.146)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

emma gordon (39:51.969)

dam a beaver's bill and all that water gets stuck and just is flowing around and this you know it doesn't it stops flowing and that's what happens to the energy flow in the body which is it which really is the protoplasm

Leslie Field (39:58.292)

Yes.

Leslie Field (40:03.697)

Peace.

emma gordon (40:05.085)

Um, and the flow, the energy flow is really what keeps it. There's a feeling of aliveness. And so if we're not feeling fully alive, we, we're not, we can't be at optimal. We can't operate from a place of, um, you know, just being at our best. Vitality. Yeah. And it can really affect our physical energy levels. And so if you're somebody that's fatigued a lot,

Leslie Field (40:11.948)

Yeah.

Leslie Field (40:23.963)

Vitality. But they, yeah.

Leslie Field (40:30.059)

Yeah.

emma gordon (40:33.589)

You know, there are some, I don't know about this, but there are some psychotherapists or trauma experts that believe that chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, those type of syndromes are all related to trauma. And I can speak for myself, is that all these different things I've done for my own health issues, healing my trauma has been the number one thing. It's given me back my mentality and my energy.

Leslie Field (40:54.764)

Mmm.

Leslie Field (40:59.886)

Wow, and I know that you spoke about this when we were prepping. I'm going to look for my notes right here. You talked about how when you actually do go in, work with the trauma, about how it can be, there's so much magic in there.

emma gordon (41:17.929)

There is so much magic in it, yes. I mean, I wouldn't, it's not the kind of magic I would give to somebody. You know, I wouldn't wish it upon anybody. But we've become in a, we're in a society where we've become emotion phobic, and for the most part. Yes. So we do everything we can not to feel, which is like Instagram.

Leslie Field (41:33.526)

Yes, you could say that again five times, a million times.

Yeah.

emma gordon (41:43.921)

you know, caffeine, we're not allowing ourselves to feel our own fatigue, you know, disassociation, drinking, sex addiction, any kind of addiction, you know. And so we've become quite emotion phobic. And so what was the question you asked me?

Leslie Field (41:47.594)

Yes, yes.

Leslie Field (42:00.75)

Mm-hmm.

Leslie Field (42:05.266)

Well, I guess I was just talking about how there's the magic in trauma. You were building up to it. You were getting there. It's hard. It's hard to be like, trauma, magic. It's hard. I get it. You have to get over there.

emma gordon (42:08.969)

The magic, yeah. So, it's moving up to the magic.

emma gordon (42:15.889)

Yes.

emma gordon (42:19.397)

And so what we do is we go through life just avoiding, and then we get old and we die, essentially. And we don't have these kind of tribal networks anymore where we have rites of passage. We don't have these tribal networks where we have wise elders that we turn to. We don't have a tribe that we turn to. We're not supposed to hold to this stuff alone. We're not supposed to have something terrifying or scary happen to us and us hold it alone. And in fact, that is really the definition of trauma. It's not even the thing that happened to you.

Leslie Field (42:30.41)

Yeah.

emma gordon (42:48.337)

or the things that happened to you, it's how alone you were in it. And so you'll find like a lot of, like Africans who are still in tribe, they don't really have trauma because they're meeting like daily or weekly and they're all like holding each other up and they're working, there's no working through things alone. And so once you start to process the trauma, and if you can have the courage to face it and work with it.

Leslie Field (43:07.553)

Mmm.

emma gordon (43:16.349)

then there is so much magic in it. And I really, I found that for myself and for clients, that as you start to dig into your trauma and process it, you get into this, into touch with your own intuition, your own wisdom, the wisdom of the universe, quite often a much, much deeper spiritual connection comes in, you have a deeper sense of empathy and compassion. And what-

would just call you become kind of what I would say is a wisdom keeper or a wise elder. And we don't have many of them left in our world anymore. And then there's a reason that all of these kinds of origin stories of wise sages or saints, they all had to go through this kind of quest, right? If you look at the Arthur, even Jesus, you know, like all of these stories, all of these wise sages went through a lot.

Leslie Field (44:05.406)

Yeah.

Leslie Field (44:13.902)

Mm-hmm.

emma gordon (44:14.661)

And it's in going through it and the learning of the lessons that turns you into this really kind of wise person where you can draw on not only your own wisdom, but your ancestral wisdom and the wisdom of the universe. Like I feel, really feel like you start to get the universe speaking to you, which you know, might sound really woo to some people and maybe it is, but that's been my experience. So.

And so I don't discount it. You know, and I know that we're in a culture that feels like if you don't, if you can't measure it with a scientific tool and it's irrelevant, I, and maybe once upon a time I might've been like that, but I don't really feel that way anymore. Like you can't measure love, but we know it to be true. And so we do know scientifically that DNA is passed down, so trauma is passed down through the DNA. That's been scientifically proven on both.

Leslie Field (45:02.4)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Leslie Field (45:12.031)

Yep.

emma gordon (45:13.981)

the male side and the female side. So it comes down through the line, both genetically in the DNA, and it comes down the line through behavior, right? And so from my point of view, this is not studied, but of course the wisdom has to come down the line genetically too. Because the body's not choosing what's good and what's bad.

Leslie Field (45:26.6)

Yeah

Leslie Field (45:35.819)

Hmm.

emma gordon (45:41.521)

You know, it just said like if you're in a freeze and you're suppressing all feelings, you don't get to suppress just the bad feelings. You suppress everything, including the joy and the fun and all those other more like so-called positive feelings. And I believe that to be true. So the more that you heal, the more that you become in touch with yourself.

Leslie Field (45:47.196)

Mm. Yeah.

emma gordon (46:07.261)

the more that you can be in touch with others, the more that the connection blooms with other people, and the more magic you just see. You know, I would have said that once upon a time I would have been somebody that was waiting for a fight, that was waiting for the next shitty thing to happen, always like catastrophizing thoughts in my mind, and that is like...

Leslie Field (46:16.11)

Hmm.

Leslie Field (46:21.998)

Hmm.

Leslie Field (46:31.627)

Mm-hmm.

emma gordon (46:36.357)

key signs of a dysregulated nervous system. And now I actually trust everything. And it doesn't mean that bad things don't happen. Bad things happen still, but I trust that I'm gonna be fine. I trust that the universe has my back. I trust that people will show up for me. And because I trust that people will show up for me and I'm open to it, people show up for me. Was when you're not open to it.

Leslie Field (46:39.278)

Mm-hmm.

Leslie Field (46:43.938)

Hmm.

Leslie Field (47:00.991)

Yes.

emma gordon (47:04.517)

they don't show up for you because they can feel that you're not somebody who can accept that. And for myself, I find that my whole kind of, not my whole friend group, but a large part of my friend group changed and I found myself connecting with deeper, more empathic, wiser, more supportive people.

Leslie Field (47:09.92)

Yeah.

Leslie Field (47:25.822)

Yeah, that social connection with people. I think we forget that sometimes, how valuable that is and how necessary.

emma gordon (47:38.301)

how necessary and how essential that is to feel safe in the world.

Leslie Field (47:42.73)

Yeah, absolutely.

emma gordon (47:44.089)

And so if you're not connecting, and if our nervous system says that safety, like connection is dangerous, and if you have a history of abuse, then connection to you is dangerous. Then we will not connect. And then it's also feeding, you know, it becomes like a feedback loop where we don't have connections, and then we don't feel safe. Because as biological humans, we need connection to feel safe. And so there's a lot of kind of biofeedback loops that happen with trauma. And...

Leslie Field (47:53.326)

Mm-hmm.

Leslie Field (48:12.909)

Yeah.

emma gordon (48:14.449)

You know, like what we know from neuroreception, a neuroreception is how our nervous system is scanning outside of us for safety. And interoception is our nervous system scanning inside of ourselves for safety. So if our nervous system is scanning inside of ourselves and it says, oh, this is not a safe place inside of my body, then that affects our neuroreception and our neuroreception is our nervous system then sees danger when there is no danger.

Leslie Field (48:24.606)

Mm-hmm.

emma gordon (48:42.929)

And so it's been, it's very well studied. And so it might be that it could be you and I sitting at a bus stop and there's somebody that walks along and I just see, I don't know, I see a young man walking along, going to work, and you might see a hoodlum, you know, or somebody that's a threat. And so it affects us biologically. And then we get in the, and then, so then we see that threat and our...

Leslie Field (49:00.6)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

emma gordon (49:10.573)

And then our mind says to our body, danger, danger. And then our body sends hormones. Like it sends cortisol when we feel a stress response. And cortisol is supposed to go off for about a minute or two to say danger, danger. Like mobilize, let's get the heart beating faster. Let's get blood to the extremities so we can run. And then cortisol was supposed to send another message to the brain after that. To say, okay, safe now, danger's over, turn off.

Leslie Field (49:23.243)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

emma gordon (49:38.653)

But that becomes its own feedback loop, and the cortisol doesn't know when to say stop. And so it never stops. And so that's why people get burnt out. And they get either high cortisol or very low cortisol when it's tested, because they've just completely depleted of cortisol. And then that has its own cascade of problems in the body. And so part of the work is just kind of interrupting all these different feedback loops that are happening, either...

Leslie Field (49:38.711)

Thank you.

Leslie Field (49:45.29)

Yeah.

Leslie Field (49:53.236)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Leslie Field (50:01.112)

Yeah.

emma gordon (50:08.549)

mentally, biologically, you know, this does, it becomes like...

Leslie Field (50:12.802)

Yeah.

emma gordon (50:19.385)

snowball going in the right direction and then as you interrupt it becomes a snowball going in the so it's a snowball going in the wrong direction, you know into the danger and then as you start to interrupt it in heel the snowball in and of itself starts to go in the right direction and so the healing as you heal healing happens the more you heal more healing happens and so you don't have to heal every single thing that happened to you so if you can imagine like you've got

Leslie Field (50:26.806)

Wrong direction. Yeah.

Leslie Field (50:35.96)

Yeah.

Leslie Field (50:45.066)

Yes.

emma gordon (50:47.905)

A to Z of trauma. You don't have to heal A, B, C, D, E, F, G all the way to Z. You might have to heal like A or B and G and S and then the rest of it kind of takes care of itself. And the nervous system just starts to recalibrate and starts to be like, oh, I'm in safety and I trust the world. And then that creates more safety.

Leslie Field (50:49.625)

Mm-hmm.

Leslie Field (51:08.022)

Such a beautiful way that you described that. And that's, I love to hear that too. So I don't have to maybe tap into all the trauma, but if I just do the work, do the, and the places and the areas that together we can all heal the system. And I think I wanted to just share something for me. I am working with a functional medical doctor right now, just to see more like numbers, labs, data. Cause sometimes I'm like, well, how is the body doing, right? So I want to check on it.

emma gordon (51:33.388)

Mm-hmm.

Leslie Field (51:34.718)

And the one that always seems to get me is checking me for adrenal fatigue. And I believe on my, when you look at my labs, it says, yep, adrenal fatigue, which I think is, if I have this correct, connected to burnout and things of that description. And it's so interesting because I go in my mind, because I just want to give another example of my mind to go, well, I don't think I'm that stressed. Well.

emma gordon (51:48.582)

Yes.

Leslie Field (51:59.35)

You know, I don't work like 50 hours a week and, you know, I have my own versions of stress in my life. And then I just go, it's so fascinating because my brain can talk me out of it all day long. My body is literally saying something completely different. And so that's why sometimes, even though I can sense these things, I can feel these things, I just have also appreciated the data sometimes. It's like, here, you want some hard facts that show you that maybe you're missing something?

emma gordon (52:12.053)

Mm-hmm.

Leslie Field (52:28.878)

They're right in front of you now. And it always, it always, I don't know, impresses me, inspires me, and helps me call almost like, I don't know, my bluff or my bullshit. Like, you have a very stubborn mind. It's gonna convince you for many reasons why it thinks it's okay. But yet your body is telling you all day long in different ways, hey, this isn't right, or ooh, this is a bit out, or what's going on here? So I just wanted to bring up that point that don't get stuck in this head game like I do, because yeah, the body...

emma gordon (52:39.42)

Yeah.

Leslie Field (52:58.706)

If we can do all these beautiful things to get back into touch, back into connection, back into regulation, like Emma said, there's such beauty and magic there. The hard part is actually going there. That is the scariest, sometimes the most courageous act you can do is just to walk this path.

emma gordon (53:20.045)

It is, but it doesn't always have to be drudgery. And so this is one of the things that I really impress upon my clients. Stepping into joy and pleasure is the work. It's a big part of the work. And as traumatized people or just culturally, we feel like guilty for doing something for ourselves. We feel guilty for taking the time to go to a museum or...

whatever it might be, taking a long bath in the middle of the day or whatever it is, you know? And so part of my homework for clients is do what feels good and that will also build resilience. Do what feels good. And that is part of the work. It doesn't all have to be drudgery. And certainly at the beginning, we don't even go into the heavy stuff. We really are working on like making the body feel safe.

and feeling into pleasure and joy and all of that is really important. We as human beings are wired for pleasure. We are pleasure seeking beings. We're not reptiles. We are pleasure sensual and that might mean like, okay, I'm going to go and

Leslie Field (54:17.727)

Mmm. So good. Oh.

emma gordon (54:29.417)

treat myself to a slice of cake. And that doesn't mean like disassociated and eating like two pints of ice cream, but it means like really allowing myself to have pleasure, allowing that and encouraging that.

Leslie Field (54:41.11)

Hmm, I'm so glad you pointed that out because I know that the pleasure of the centrality is such a piece of it But I've never really married it alongside the tougher stuff. So it's so beautiful that you're like, well, you could start there You know that it's

emma gordon (54:54.258)

Yeah.

emma gordon (54:59.041)

Start there. And also if you say that you're telling me that you don't feel stressed, but if you've never known living from a place of social nervous system or ventral vagal, you've never known really what it feels like to have no stress, maybe this is just your baseline because you've never really stepped in. I don't know you well enough to say this is true of you or anything like that, but I'm just saying one. If one has always been

and they've never really had that feeling of safety and joy, you don't have a roadmap for it. And so you might think, yeah, there's nothing wrong with me. I didn't think I was traumatized, and in hindsight, I was extremely traumatized. And so, and it's only in the last few years that I've been able to, oh, this sense of joy that I feel, even just stepping outside and looking at the trees, is part of living from this place of social nervous system.

emma gordon (55:55.869)

And so the more you can step into pleasure, the more you have a roadmap of what it feels like to feel good.

Leslie Field (56:01.306)

Mmm, ooh, ooh. Wow, I think I'm gonna pause it there. I know there's so many more juicy places and wonderful things to talk about, but I hope this has been a fruitful conversation for the listeners to maybe consider a different viewpoint or just to be open to seeing their body differently. And so, thank you for being here, Emma.

emma gordon (56:28.085)

Oh, thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it. It was fun.

Leslie Field (56:30.426)

How would people reach out to you if they wanted to find you?

emma gordon (56:35.681)

My website is probably the easiest way. My website is at bodyascompass.com and there, or I have my Instagram as bodyascompass2. I'm not so active on Instagram, but either of those places.

Leslie Field (56:45.998)

Mm-hmm.

Leslie Field (56:51.306)

wonderful and I will definitely link them in the show notes so that people can easily find that. And so again thank you so much for coming today Emma and wishing you a beautiful week.

emma gordon (57:03.309)

Okay, thank you and you. Step into pleasure.

Leslie Field (57:07.198)

Yes. What? Oh, I.