In this episode Lisa Dawn discusses the journey of transforming trauma and improving relationships through self-awareness, body connection, and redefining self-perception.
She explores the importance of building high self-regard, trusting one’s intuition, and allowing the body to guide in healing. Practical advice and poignant quotes inspire listeners to confront fears, embrace growth in relationships, and understand the profound signals from their bodies.
The episode touches on the resistance often faced in relationships, the significance of personal choice and responsibility, and the deep connection between nervous system health and relational wellness.
In this episode Lisa Dawn discusses the journey of transforming trauma and improving relationships through self-awareness, body connection, and redefining self-perception.
She explores the importance of building high self-regard, trusting one’s intuition, and allowing the body to guide in healing. Practical advice and poignant quotes inspire listeners to confront fears, embrace growth in relationships, and understand the profound signals from their bodies.
The episode touches on the resistance often faced in relationships, the significance of personal choice and responsibility, and the deep connection between nervous system health and relational wellness.
01:21 Building High Self Regard and Reclaiming Intuition
03:18 Understanding Resistance in Relationships
06:02 The Fear of Growth and Change
11:50 Listening to Our Bodies
16:23 The Role of Relationships in Self-Discovery
20:54 Embracing Healing and Personal Growth
24:58 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Lisa:
Greetings, my friends, and welcome to another episode of Healed Now What? A podcast where we discuss life, relationships, connection, and trauma through the lens of somatic and attachment psychology, nervous system health, relationships, and self discovery. I'm Lisa Dawn, and I'm on a mission to teach people how to transform their deepest wounds into their greatest strengths by first transforming the relationship they have with themselves. So whether you've had trauma, years of failed partnerships, or just want a better relationship with your body, I've got you covered. I am a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, Educator, Relationship Mentor, and Trauma Survivor. With a lifetime of experience helping not only myself, but countless others transform their lives by learning how to become the fullest versions of themselves. Learn more at www. somatic. com We do this through self awareness, connecting with their bodies and changing the way they perceive themselves and others. I have coached innumerous people how to heal their wounds and create lasting change so they can live a more joyous, passionate and fulfilling life. Thank you so much for tuning in and enjoy the show. Hello, dearest listeners, Lisa Dawn here, and welcome back to this week's episode. So today we are going to get into the idea and the concept of building a high self regard, reclaiming your own intuition and how to let your body assist you in all of this. But first, a few sweet quotes. When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart. And it is very easy to miss it. Boris Pasternak. People grow when they are loved well. If you want to help others heal, love them without agenda. Mike McCardew. If you want a new beginning to be part of a new beginning, you sometimes have to allow the tower moment that sparks life within you. Undergo the tower and let life upheave you. Don't resist. Keep going. And as you do, include your body. It is here to assist you. It is here to help you. There's actually no point in resisting. It only furthers the suffering that will come from avoiding your inner knowing. So this leads into my next thought. It's kind of fascinating that Sometimes when we invite others to move towards more healthy ways of relating to each other, we are sometimes met with what can often be incredible resistance. Sometimes it can be running away and in some circumstances it can be absolute rejection and anger. And sometimes The consequence of this response or rejection is that it can cause us to internalize the idea that our desires, our standards, or our values are the problem. We can develop the belief that what we want and how we are is the issue. And what I want to say to that is that a desire to be better and to do better is not too much. It's actually the price of admission for being in your life. And this is all part of the process of honoring where we've been, the work we've done and allowing people to have their own experience of us. This, in and of itself, is a huge, huge, huge act of self love and it is steps towards building a strong self regard. It takes so much courage to allow someone to have their own experience, especially when that experience is hurting you. And when we can build this container of self support and self love, you now have something that holds you when others refuse to, and that is you. Remember that when you invite others to improve their relationship with you, You're inviting one another to relate from wellness and not from your wounds and we've touched on this before but when we do this for ourselves first, it becomes easier to invite each other to be better and support each other's growth and often what I see with so many couples and friendships is that one person is eager to grow and expand and the other is complacent or resisting their the other person's growth You And I promise you, if you resist the other person's growth, it is probably one of the quickest paths to the relationship imploding or ending. And so there are a number of things, there's a number of things that I invite you to consider when we're the one resisting the change, because Lord knows I've been there too, many, many times. And there's some questions that go along with that. What is the fear we have of our partner, friends, and family? Or friends growing and expanding. What is the fear we have of our partner or friends growing and expanding? Are we afraid that someone else will love and appreciate them more? So we try and dim their fire. Is our response to their growth, a reflection of the choices we're not making? Yee. Are we afraid that they will leave us and move on to greener pastures? So the invitation when we feel caught up in whether or not someone will keep choosing us is to consider this. When we grow, we feel alive. We step towards our fears and we challenge our comfort zones. When we're the complacent one within a relationship, we smother desire. We seek to put out our partners or friendships flame because their growth often sparks a fear that someone will outgrow us. We fear uncertainty, so we try to control the relationship. We try and control them, and in turn, try and control love. And this is the path to Nowhere Land. And the magic here is that when we decide, make the choice to grow together, we dive into the deeper parts of ourselves and our love for one another. Any relationship, in order to deepen, requires we individually deepen and vice versa. What we often fail to see when we act from a place of fear in response to someone's expansion is that we usually don't realize that this, in and of itself, can cause the relationship to crumble. And the solution is to realize that we all have choice. The choice to grow, the choice to stay the same, the choice to leave, the choice to keep looking at our shit, the choice to keep speaking our needs. And that choice always begins with looking at ourselves. And along with this idea comes with taking responsibility for our choices. What are we choosing in any given moment? Do we run away from responsibility, whether that be in partnership or in our life's work? Are we so afraid of commitment that we choose to leave? Do we give our power away to others for fear that we are making the wrong choice? Do we lack self awareness and trust? Man, this was so big for me for years. Personally, I gave my power away to everyone. If there was an astrologer, a psychic, a tarot reader, a guru, a guru, a medium, I had them all on speed dial. Oh, how nice it was to allow others to make all the choices for me. I give you all of my power. But listen, I am a huge fan of astrology, human design, and all of the other modalities and any other tools that can help bring us clarity and confirm things that we already somewhat know about ourselves. But where we can get into trouble is when we stop taking personal responsibility for the choices that we're making and we start to rely on all of these external sources for our navigational system. And that typically happens when we are confused or don't trust ourselves. So it can be easy to let other people dictate our lives for us. And a really great example of this is, you know, say we make a decision that we're feeling really good about for ourselves and then we share it. But maybe with some family or for some friends and suddenly they're trying to persuade us to do something other than what feels best for us. And of course, this is all done in love. And oftentimes, you know, our people can see our blind spots and reveal some things that we may be missing in the bigger picture. And while it is so important and necessary to have solid counsel, we still have to make the final call and take responsibility for our final call. I was actually just chatting about this with a nearest and dearest friend on the stoop as he hung some laundry, which is, you know, where many great conversations happen. And he is about to embark on a new journey himself. And as we chatted, we were speaking to how hard it is to leave the things that we love Behind so we can explore our calling our inner knowing to revisit our spark because also let me tell you when we make choices that are against our inner knowing and our inner truth, they often end up detouring us from the path that could have been more easeful, more peaceful and better in general for our lives and relationships and those decisions often lead to mental, physical and emotional baggage. And I also want to add that we have these incredible resources that are living with us the entire time. This resource loves us unconditionally and will carry us through life as long as it can. What is it? You guessed it, our bodies. If you've been on this journey with me for a while, I often talk about including our body in our decisions as it gives so much feedback when we are available to listen. And by listening, we can determine some of the ways that our bodies may be saying no. Now, I want to remind you that this isn't a definitive list, nor is this an invitation to self diagnose. But these are, and these are some of the ways our body is saying no when we are unable to say it or truly feel it. These are our body's way of trying to communicate boundaries. So the first one that I want to talk about is exhaustion. What is that saying? Well, the body is worn out from producing excess adrenaline that needs repair and to revitalize itself through rest. Exhaustion is the body telling us to pause, to slow down and even sleep, take a bunch of naps, get more rest. The next one is digestive issues. And this can often be a fight response. When our gut is constantly bracing, it becomes inflamed and we are unable to digest our food easily. So the body is asking for a bit of a break. Meaning, less input, less information to digest, simple foods. Another way that this shows up is through headaches. So, the muscles in the face, head, and neck, and shoulders get inflamed from, again, this chronic bracing. They also need a break. Sometimes they don't want to talk. Sometimes they don't want to help others or be seen. And they're asking also for rest, closing of the eyes, and taking a break from socializing. Or being there for other people. And then the other one that I wanted to mention, and there's many more to this list, um, I just wanted to give a few examples, but the other one is dissociation. So this is when the body numbs out, the mind goes elsewhere, and we don't really quite feel all there. So in this case, the body is showing us that we're either disinterested, or we're in or overwhelmed by what we are doing. So what can we do to remedy this? Perhaps the body is asking for some fun. Again, a break and maybe an infusion of joy and pleasure. So our bodies show us through sensations. which become symptoms, which become illness over time. And I've seen this time and time again with enough people, myself included, and we can begin to recover by beginning to listen to the symptoms instead of ignoring them or trying to get rid of them. It is a gift to feel how deeply we feel. I saw a meme on Instagram the other day and it went something like, Hey, sorry I didn't respond to your text. I'm trying to process a non stop 24 7 onslaught of information with a brain designed to collect nuts in a forest. It's actually hilarious, but there's also truth in this. We absolutely require downtime. So away from our screens, creating art, making love, being in nature, meditation, hugging friends closely, laughing, and just enjoying life so that our intelligent brains can access the places that contain everything that we need to thrive. And we do that by signaling safety to the body. All of those activities. And we do that by listening. We do this by becoming a midwife to our soul, which is this idea of birthing ourselves, ushering in who we truly are into our lives. And we can't do that until we begin to understand ourselves. And we can start to do that with our bodies and our everyday experiences. We can begin to observe with curiosity and compassion the way that our bodies show us our capacity, our triggers, our longstanding beliefs and judgments. And I just want to give a few examples of this because I love, I love a good example. So I'll give a few that are specific to relationships. So our relationships will show us how we either confront. Conflict, avoid it, or shut down based on how conflict was experienced or perceived by us in our childhood home. Our relationships will show us how much we are willing to commit and be vulnerable based on how emotionally available our families were to us. Our relationships will trigger our need for constant reassurance or external validation based on how good enough we felt as children. Our relationships will show us how much we are willing to take accountability for and apologize based on how our caregivers reacted when we made a mistake. Our relationships will show us how we create power dynamics such as self sabotage, mothering, chaser, and pursuer dynamics based on the needs that were not. And I always talk about nervous system health and relationships together because they actually do go hand in hand. We need people that feel like a warm bath on a cold day. We need people in our lives that we cannot help but smile when we see them. We need people in our lives that inspire us and light us up and show us that we are something so fucking special. They would choose us over and over and over again, regardless of what we are going through. Sometimes we need people to mirror back to us, our greatness, especially when we forget. And alongside that, we have to confront the things within us that make it hard for these kinds of people to find us. And when we do, we gain the courage and ease to be up front about what we are feeling when our relationships are not going the way that we want. Love can be super scary. And to love what death can touch could possibly be the hardest thing for us to do. And yet, it is the very fabric of our existence. That death touches what contains life. So what I'm speaking to is loss of all kinds in relationships, heartbreak, breakups, yearning for something that may seem unavailable to us. We may want to shut down to these kinds of experiences, but these are the juice of life. because loss is a necessary part of the human experience. And while we may think it is escapable by avoiding relationships, that is an illusion. If we avoid love to avoid losing it, we are inevitably losing out on the opportunity to share love. We are losing out on what our souls are always calling us towards. Now, I'm not going to tell you to just willy nilly give your heart to people who haven't shown you they can hold it. That's bullshit. Don't do that. I'm going to tell you to learn from where you have experienced loss. To ask your pain what things you can learn by honoring your losses. I'm going to ask you to fucking feel it, all of it, in manageable chunks over time, if you have to. But please don't close because avoiding pain isn't worth it. is what has you avoiding love. We want to develop the skills to run towards love that runs towards us, not away from love that is trying its best to embrace you. So do not let your losses rob you of the life force that is still pumping through your veins. Use them as a reason to come fully alive so that you are available to all of the things life is trying to give you and share with you. Use them as fuel to propel you into the next season of your life. And the only way to do that is to be present with them, to feel them, and to allow those tower moments that I spoke to in the beginning. So we're exploring self awareness and self compassion. No matter where we go, there we are. And when we take ownership of and commit to what we want to create in our lives, everything changes. Embracing self responsibility and continual personal growth is the key to navigating life's challenges with resilience and creating the life that we love. So living authentically and in integrity means finding or trying to find harmony between our inner truths and how we express ourselves outwardly. Integrating all the lessons we learn along the journey to make aligned choices. It's putting what you know into practice. Love your choices, love your life, and finding that alignment within ourselves is a brave journey towards being real and discovering more about who we are. It leads to incredible growth and fulfillment in life, something that What always seems to be on my mind is the power of the human body and the mind, and how no healing is really complete without the nervous system. And when I say that, what I mean is releasing, integrating, and digesting the patterns and memories that are embedded into our tissues. And often these memories are pre verbal. Sometimes not, but often times they are. And they occurred before we spoke words. Therefore, talk therapy and or coaching are often not enough to allow us to move through and let go of behaviors and patterns that have lasted for years or maybe even decades. And in some cases, it's also my belief that some of these patterns are actually inherited. And it is our responsibility and duty to heal these things from our lineage. You know what I'm talking about here. If you have these patterns that actually don't make sense logically, like, you know better, but still can't do something different, like, who doesn't experience that? When that's present, Often there is something going on beyond what the mind can resolve. And this also just happens to be where this critical work of connecting to our bodies, our hearts, and the entire cosmos of our nervous system comes into play. This is part of why this work is so dang magical. You don't have to know where your stuff comes from in order to change it. However, you do need to want to change it. You do need to create the time to do the healing and the transforming. So I'll finish with some beautiful words from an epic writer and human. Healing is about being fully alive. Healing also looks like laughing until you cannot breathe and talking too long with those you love. Last minute dance parties or vacations to nowhere in particular, like choosing to fall in love, like conversations in the dark, drawing boundaries or closing doors to painful places. Healing is about believing that you can trust your own self again. Don't practice living. Don't withhold yourself. Be in it. Be healed. Healing is about asking for what you want and knowing you're worthy of receiving. Like a long walk on the beach, leaving no footprints behind. Like leaning in, taking a step, and then another, and then another, yet again, and not asking how much further, but giving yourself to the journey, wherever it leads. Like loving the sunrise, or learning how to love the storm. Healing looks like us. It looks like love. And those beautiful words are from Rainier Wild. Well, there you have it. Another week, another episode. Thank you so much for being here and we will see you again next Wednesday. As always, thank you so much for listening. Life is busy. So it means even more that you're carving out time in your day to be here. Listen, we've got so many great episodes coming up, so please make sure you subscribe to follow along on Apple podcasts or Spotify. And for those of you who like to watch your podcasts, we are now uploading them to YouTube. And if you appreciate these episodes, please do us a favor and leave a rating or a review and share it with anyone you think could benefit. See you again next Wednesday.
