How Trauma Rewires Your Nervous System with Psychologist Dr. Arielle Schwartz

Arielle Schwartz 

What we don’t feel doesn’t go away. What we don’t feel, what we suppress gets held in the soma. And so at some point or another, our lower back hurts or we have a heart condition or we’re having inflammation in the joints or there’s some somatic experience that is just banging on the door saying, “Hey, we can’t keep holding this anymore.” And so what’s beautiful about body-centered psychotherapies is that we basically allow the body to talk.

Lorne Brown

By listening to the Coherence Code Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition either in yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guests or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast. To the Coherence Code Podcast. Where we explore how the mind and body work together so you can move from stress and inner conflict to clarity, calm and alignment. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. And through my work, I’ve seen that healing happens when we remove what gets in the way and allow the body and the nervous system to do what they’re designed to do to heal. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.

Welcome back to the Coherence Code Podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Lorne Brown. Now, many people spend years climbing that mountain of success, building careers, businesses, relationships, and accomplishments only to discover that despite achieving so much, they can still feel anxious, maybe burnt out, disconnected, and even restless. Today’s guest helps us understand why. Dr. Arielle Schwartz is a clinical psychologist, internationally recognized teacher, leading voice in trauma recovery, and founder of the Center for Resilience Informed Therapy. She’s the author of numerous books. Is it eight now? Are you up to eight? Okay. At the time of the recording update, I’ll name a few of them. The Complex PTSD Workbook, The Post-Traumatic Growth. I love that term, Post-Traumatic Growth Guidebook, Applied Polyvagal Theory in Yoga. We’ll talk about polyvagal therapy today. The Polyvagal Theory Workbook for Trauma and The Complex PTSD Treatment Manual. Now, what I really appreciate about Dr. Ariel’s work is how she bridges neuroscience, embodiment, polyvagal theory, yoga, and what she beautifully calls the awakening of the spiritual heart.

Today we’re going to explore how trauma shapes our lives, why achievement doesn’t necessarily bring peace, and how healing can become a path toward greater connection, purpose, and of course, coherence. Ariel, welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.

Arielle Schwartz 

Thank you so much and thanks for that lovely introduction.

Lorne Brown 

In my practice, I have observed something and I’d love to see your lens through your polyvagal theory and trauma work, but it used to be somewhere around age 40 plus or minus five years, there was a wake-up call. All the things they used to do no longer work. Their antidepressants aren’t doing what they thought they would do. And now I see a collective awakening. It seems like just everybody’s having this wake-up call. It used to be just individual people. And what I have observed as a practitioner is it seems like around that age, there seems to be a window of tolerance that seems to shorten. And physiologically, we see this a lot in our perimenopause and menopause patients just in general. But I wanted to see if what I’ve observed is something that is a phenomena that you’ve seen in trauma work just with this window of tolerance and what could be happening to those that are in their 40s and beyond and why all of a sudden they’re not able to adapt or deal with the stressors in their life.

Arielle Schwartz 

I think there’s quite a few factors and you’ve named several and I’m going to echo a few of them back. Honestly, one of the first ones that I thought of was the perimenopausal phase and menopausal phase. And of course relevant to the woman’s body or the female gendered body, but the experience of I think other factors that can contribute to this. The quality of what I thought I was building in my life suddenly doesn’t feel as meaningful to me. I want a life that has more of a sense of purpose moving into what we might even call the kind of generative phase of one’s life where I want to feel like I’m making a difference. And somehow once I pass this kind of seeming midpoint of my life, if my life doesn’t have some purpose-driven quality to it, then why am I really here? And those questions, deeper existential questions start to come to the forefront.

If we don’t give space and attention to that, we start to run the risk of burning out in our professions because we’re spinning wheels or working really hard, but there’s this underlying question of, but for what? Why am I doing all of this?

Lorne Brown 

It connects to how Chinese medicine views perimenopause and menopause. The actual term is often called the second spring in a woman’s life. And so is stress then and the things that are happening in their lives, is it because of an accumulation or is there a certain event that happens in this age group?

Arielle Schwartz 

It can be either. If we think about events that might correspond, let’s imagine that you’ve raised your kids and suddenly your kids move out of the house around that same time period. Now what is my life about? Because there was this purpose-driven quality of creating a person who would eventually become a somewhat independent young adult. Let’s hope. Let’s hope we achieve that goal. And so I think that sometimes that midlife shift is, okay, they’re becoming more independent. They’re not needing me in that way and now who am I? There might sometimes be really significant events because if we think about somewhere between 40 and 50, our parents are also aging. And so there’s this bearing witness if we still have parents who are alive at that stage where we’re witnessing them face a later phase of life heading towards ’70s and ’80s where if their health wasn’t attended to, or if there was mental health challenges that they didn’t have support for, we’re going to see all of that really show up in their lives.

And sometimes we get caught in some version of a sandwich generation where we’re caring for our kids and we’re also caring for our parents. And it can pull us in a lot of different directions, let alone just the pure life events. For me as someone who’s been researching trauma recovery for 30 years, the research suggests that about 90% of us have exposure to at least one traumatic event in the course of our lifetimes. And so if you yourself have faced just one event, I almost want to say consider yourself lucky because the norm is actually multiple traumatic event exposure by the time we’re adults.

Lorne Brown 

I’ll go back to what I’ve explored when people are 40 or 45 to connect what you’re saying there because I didn’t share it at the beginning is the reason I think at around 40 to 45 that all of a sudden you have this wake-up call and things aren’t working is there’s things that are buried in the body. Now today the hot topic or the hot word is trauma. In Chinese medicine, it’s just stuck energy, emotions, stuck emotions. So I don’t want to use the word loosely. I may not even be using it correctly. So I’ll just say the stuck energy, what people are calling trauma in the body. And it’s kind of like the body has this wisdom and while you’re young, it’s just trying to adapt and deal with it. So it’s kind of like pushing things into the cells and hiding things away.

And then it seems somewhere in your 40s in the second spring that starts to happen, the body’s wisdom again is like, “Hey, we need our resources for aging. We can’t waste our resources trying to bury all this stuff because although conscious you’re not aware of it unconsciously in the autonomic nervous system, it is dealing with it. ” And somewhere in your forties the body says, “Okay, you’re old enough, you need to deal with this. ” And so when I see people and the approach that I often use in my practice is what I call a bottom up. A lot of people come in from a top-down approach. You do both and I think bidirectional is the key because that’s Chinese medicine again, mind-body. They don’t call it mind and body. They don’t even separate the words mind, body. They’re together. And so as part of that question or discussion, there’s the top-down, so talk therapy, and then there’s the body up, somatic body work.

And I’m wondering even if you can elaborate on that and is it equally bidirectional or is one kind of more we need to address both, but does one need a little bit more attention from what you see in the way we live today?

Arielle Schwartz 

Yeah. So I think that both are important because as humans, we’re very much meaning-making creatures. We are very narrative oriented and we attach ourselves to our stories and we build a sense of identity on our stories. But as you’re naming, that’s not enough. And if the narrative of who we are isn’t actually in sync with the felt sense of who we are, we lose coherence. And it’s one of the reasons why I was really drawn to being on your podcast because I use that word a lot in my work and both a sense of coherency and also congruency, and we can talk a little bit about both of those terms. But one of the things that for me that I was drawn to in becoming a body-centered or a somatic psychotherapist was that we often really do need more support to do that bottom up work because as you named, not only does the body chuck that stuff to the side and maybe not want to deal with it or hold it in the cells or push it into an organ system, but that our psyches kind of do the same thing where whatever emotion we don’t know how to really be with or what we don’t have that window of tolerance for will in some way or another suppress or push down or repress.

And what we don’t feel doesn’t go away. You know this in your field, I know this in my field, what we don’t feel doesn’t just disappear or dissipate. What we don’t feel what we suppress gets held in the soma. And so at some point or another, our lower back hurts or we have a heart condition or we’re having inflammation in the joints or we’re grinding our teeth at night or there’s some somatic experience that is just banging on the door saying, “Hey, we can’t keep holding this anymore.” And so what’s beautiful about body-centered psychotherapies is that we basically allow the body to talk. And the body doesn’t necessarily talk in words, but we make space for paying attention to sensation and we start to listen and trust and allow for the ways that emotions, even emotions that we don’t necessarily have story to help us know why we’re feeling what we’re feeling, but we still give them validation and we allow that feeling that’s held in the chest or in the belly or in the shoulders or in the jaw to finally tell its story, which is often just allowing little bits of sensation or emotion to move through.

But there’s one other part of this whole story that I think you alluded to at the beginning and I really want to make it kind of central in this, that we also have what we would call the body-mind connector. And for me, that’s the nervous system. So when we’re looking through the lens of the nervous system, and particularly a lot of the work that I do with the vagus nerve, the vagus nerve is considered to be this kind of super highway communicator between the brain and the body. I don’t even want to say mind and body, but really between the brain and the brain stem, which is the master regulator of the autonomic nervous system, regulates everything from your temperature and your sleep wake cycles and your digestive system and your respiratory rate.

Lorne Brown 

And the reproductive system. A lot of our listeners are looking to grow their family as well.

Arielle Schwartz

Yeah.

Lorne Brown 

You mentioned that the body talks, but not necessarily in words. So what are some of the messages? And can you share, tie this into the vagus nerve then? Because if it’s this highway, where does it go to? I remember I had Karine Kedar on the Healthy Seminars and she was tying Chinese medicine into Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory. And it was the first time I heard it. This was a few years ago, so I’d like you to confirm this. She said it travels all the way, and I’m going to let you share the journey of it, but it was the first time I heard that she says even some branches go to the cervix, which she was sharing how sexual assault then can impact women. And she was tying it into endometriosis, for example, pelvic pain. Because in Chinese medicine, some of the pelvic pain that we discuss in Chinese medicine we call from chief stagnation turning to blood stasis, which would be from repressed emotions, resentment, anger.

So I thought that was an interesting link that she made and I was hoping you could bring in the science to that as well.

Arielle Schwartz 

So one thing to know about the vagus nerve is that it’s not a single nerve. It’s a set of circuitry. It’s actually many, many extensions from this primary nerve. And the vagus nerve is our 10th cranial nerve. It works very closely with other cranial nerves. And what’s different, what differentiates the vagus, vagus is Latin for wandering. What differentiates the vagus is that other cranial nerves tend to stay around the skull and the head. They go to the sense organs of your eyes, your tongue, your ears, and link all of that sensory information of the head to the brainstem. But the vagus works very closely with these other cranial nerves and we’ll talk a bit more about how it does that and why. And then unlike the other cranial nerves, it has extensive branches that go down into your body. So primarily the vagus will go down through the two sides of your neck, will connect into the larynx and pharynx in the throat, then goes down connecting into the heart and your lungs and plays a very key role, which I’d love to come back around to with the way that the vagus enters into the sinoatrial node of the heart, the heart’s pacemaker.

I love tracing the way that the vagus nerve actually wraps itself around the esophagus, which I think is very important, especially with a lot of esophageal reflux or discomfort and how that connects to our emotions as well. And then the vagus travels right through the diaphragm in the area that we would call the esophageal hiatus or basically the small opening in the diaphragm that it lets the esophagus get to the stomach. But the vagus nerve travels right along through that same opening and pathway innervating into the stomach and all of your digestive organs all the way down as you’ve named already into the reproductive organs. And so everything from imagine your kidneys, which of course are so primary within the TCM system. When you think about the vagus nerve connecting to your kidneys, to your gut, to your pancreas, to your spleen, to your heart, all of these organ systems are communicating via the vagus nerve to your brain and back down from brain to these organ systems.

And the vagus nerve is this conduit of information back and forth.

Lorne Brown 

I could unpack that a bit. Am I understanding it correctly that it is a big part of our perceptor of our nervous system communicating and to use language from your work of polyvagal theory, whether you’re safe or not safe, but it’s not necessarily saying you are safe or not safe. It’s giving you stomach discomfort, back pain, neck tension, insomnia, palpitation. So that is how it can be communicated to you through these signs and symptoms.

Arielle Schwartz 

Exactly. And also here’s an interesting one that’s going to almost flip that script just slightly, which is that because the vagus nerve is 80% sensory, that much of what the vagus nerve is doing is it’s gathering the data from your body and bringing it up to the brain. So rather than your brain being the initiator of that stomach discomfort, what we know about the gut and the gut-brain axis is that the gut is a major producer of neurotransmitters and that we often will have a gut feeling about something before we’ve even consciously registered what it is that we’re experiencing. So I as a body-centered practitioner, and especially because I spend a lot of time around animals and really studying that kind of very instinctual response that animals have to the world, I think it’s really important to recognize that sometimes we have a felt sense response to something before we even have a mental response to it.

And so the vagus nerve prioritizes the felt experience in the body, gathers that data, brings it up to the brain, and then your brain takes in that information and then works to help your body navigate the world.

Lorne Brown 

It gives you a logical explanation, but you actually got your yes or no already almost unconscious from the body and then you justify it, right? It makes sense of it.

Arielle Schwartz 

That’s right. That’s exactly right. And one of the things that you named about just a little bit about how the vagus nerve helps us sense cues of safety or threat, and there’s a fancy term that we use in applied polyvagal theory that we call neuroception. And neuroception basically says that your nervous system is working on your behalf to assess whether you are safe, whether there’s a threat or whether there’s a life danger. And it’s doing this unconsciously in the background all of the time. And it works very, very closely with your sense organs. So if we think about the ways in which our eyes are taking in so many data points, so much information from the world, we only consciously register a relatively small portion of that. Likewise, our ears are gathering information, our olfactory sense, what we’re smelling, what we’re sensing in the room around us.

So when we think about this kind of sixth sense or this way in which we’re intuiting, it’s this gathering of data of all of our sensory information non-consciously and giving us a felt experience about the world. What

Lorne Brown 

About, because I see this often and it’s a practice for myself that I continue to work on, is that gut reaction. So that visceral response where you’re getting safety or not safety or a yes or a no. But if your system’s dysregulated, you may be constantly getting unsafe cues because of the body. So I’d love to unpack that a bit because I like to tell metaphors and stories and I think your gift listening to, as I prep for our interview, you really seem to be able to distill down complex topics and theories. So I need to ramble a bit and then you’ll break it down maybe. But I use the idea of noise. So there’s this noise in the system and the metaphor I use is you’re listening to a radio, but there’s all this static and noise. You can kind of hear the DJ radio, you can kind of hear the song.

And for the younger listeners, a radio is something we used to listen to before there were podcasts and everything was streaming on satellite. But anyways, and rather than trying to… Turning off the radio is not going to help. What we have to do is get rid of the noise. I call that resistance in the body. Chinese medicine calls it qi stagnation. And so that signal’s already there. We’re not needing to add to it. We’re needing to bring down the noise so we can clearly heal that signal. What I call flow and receptivity comes through you and then right action follows right thinking. And this is what I want to say that right action following right thinking, that means the noise, the resistance has to become minimal so you can tap into that intuitive part. I think you might’ve called that the no reception, like filling it in the body.

However, if you have a lot of noise, then how do people feel this? But I was hoping you could talk a little bit about that, and I think your practices actually help us get that noise down so we can tap into it. But it’s not necessarily just because you feel unsafe that it’s really unsafe. Some people may be getting their wires crossed because of their history or even intergenerational history.

Arielle Schwartz 

That’s exactly right. It’s really well said. So sometimes the way we refer to this is that neuroception can be accurate or inaccurate. And based on whether or not the nervous system is accurately tracking the cues and perceiving them correctly as threats or basically the metaphor that I like to use, I love your radio metaphor. My metaphor is around this faulty neuroception is around when we have a false alarm. So you can imagine that you’ve got a house, there’s no smoke, there’s no fire, but there’s alarms going off and that there’s some way in which the nervous system is basically picking up on the felt experience and attributing that as a threat even when there isn’t a current threat. And so for example, what we might be pulling upon is historical memories, even as you said, generational memories that might be loading the nervous system towards a threat bias.

And then there’s another kind of faulty neuroception that can be at play, which is when we’re not getting the threat response and we actually need one. So in this case, there is smoke, there is a fire, but no alarms are going off. And so sometimes actually the body’s inflamed or there’s distress and we’re ignoring our body. We’re pushing past it. We’re just go, go, go. And we’ve been ignoring those smaller fires for a long time and just kind of keeping them at a smoldering discomfort, but I can just keep on pushing on. I’ve got this. And then at some point we’re going to really have a problem if we’re not slowing down and paying attention to the somatic signals that are actually asking us to rebalance ourselves.

Lorne Brown 

This is actually perfect because it ties into how we started our conversation of those in their midlife. I would love for us to chat about that high achiever that has been ignoring their symptoms, the signs from their body. And then somewhere the body just says, “I can’t do this anymore.” And they get louder or you have shut down or wired and tired ideas.

Arielle Schwartz 

Yeah, yeah. So there’s a whole lot that you said in there. I’ll see if I can pull at least a few nuggets from it. So one being that if you are looking at what does coherence mean through the lens of the nervous system, what we’re looking at is actually a really beautiful balance between that sympathetic system and the parasympathetic system. In an ideal world, we have both and we need both. And our sympathetic system, if this language is new to any of our listeners, is your mobilizing system. And it gets, I think, overly lumped or categorized just as our fight-flight system or a survival system. But in truth, the sympathetic system is also our motivating system. It’s what empowers us. It’s what allows us to get exercise or to go to the gym or to dance or to climb a mountain or whatever brings you a lot of joy.

So we need to befriend that sympathetic system. And I think just referring to it as it mobilizes me. It’s not good or bad. It’s not only fight-flight.

Lorne Brown 

Chinese medicine has a great idea, this expression that too little is too little and too much is too much. And if I think of brainwaves, low beta, mid-beta, you’re focused, you’re getting stuff done. High beta brainwaves is overwhelmed, not so good. So it sounds like you’re saying the sympathetic is needed and it can actually let you do things like climb a mountain, do work, get out of bed, but then there is a dysfunction with it. It’s like if you drive across the highway in first gear with the RPMs in red for three minutes passing a car, they say it’s really good for the engine. It cleans it out apparently. I’m not a car guy, but if you drove for an hour, you’d burn out the engine.

Arielle Schwartz 

Yeah, it actually sounds like a really powerful metaphor once again of why we need our sympathetic system and why it’s good for us and why we want to befriend it, but we don’t want to live there all of the time. So this idea of, again, from a nervous system perspective, what coherence looks like is it’s the ability to actually flow, flexibly move between our sympathetic system and our parasympathetic system. And our parasympathetic system most often gets kind of billed as our rest and digest system. And I always say it’s a partially true story. We actually do sometimes really benefit from that deep parasympathetic restorative state because it’s regenerative for the tissues and it lets us sleep really well and it’s great for digestion and so forth. But if we were parasympathetic all of the time, first of all, we would never get out of bed.

We wouldn’t get anything done. But more so when we think about the parasympathetic and the sympathetic, parasympathetic is an immune enhancer and the sympathetic system is a bit of an immunosuppressant. If I were to just keep it super simple, we actually need a little bit of checks and balances on our immune system and that the sympathetic system, which initiates a bit of a cortisol release, that’s going to put a little bit of the brakes on the immune system. So if we were always going for this parasympathetic rest and digest, we’re going to actually be promoting the immune system to be on for longer stretches of time. Now, if we’re trying to recover from a virus, if you’re trying to get over some bacterial infection, you need to rest. That makes sense. You’re going to probably have a fever, you’re going to have some inflammation, you’re going to stay in bed for three or four days.

But without something that you’re actively fighting, if you’re stuck with a foot on the brake pedal, if you think of the sympathetic nervous system as a metaphorical gas pedal, your parasympathetic system are the brakes. And you don’t want to have your foot stuck on the brake because in that case, you’re going to have much more dominant inflammation in your system, much more dominant fatigue, loss of motivation, lethargy, stagnancy, all of the stuff that we’re speaking about here. So when we’re looking at nervous system flexibility as the signal of coherence, as the signal of optimal psychological functioning, it’s this ability to move between my mobilizing go system and my resting brake system.

Lorne Brown 

Love this. And again, the Chinese medicine principles understand this so well. Yin-yang theory. It’s all about balance. If it’s all yang, go, go, go, sympathetic would be a very yang activity. Then yin and yang will become out of relationship and then you have disease and eventually separate death. Same thing if it’s all yin-yin, yin and yang become out of relationship and eventually you get disease and death. So they both will lead to imbalance if it’s all one or the other versus going back and forth. Yang is daytime out movement. It makes sense. Nighttime is yin time, rest and sleep. And we can put it individualized to periods of time. Back in the early, early days when we didn’t have electricity or vehicles, things were more yin. We needed more of a yang culture to build homes, electricity, cars and stuff. Now in 2026 where we’re bombarded by information, have cell phones, we never have quiet time.

I want to highlight something because you’re talking about the parasympathetic sympathetic and it’s all parasympathetic’s not good. My judgment, so it’s my opinion, we We need the yin time now. In our society, we are young. You can see it everywhere politically, in health, in our activities, go, go, go, go. So now is a time to reinforce and learn to engage the parasympathetic. Would you agree with that, that we need a little bit more parasympathetic in our life for the majority of people? I would say

Arielle Schwartz

Collectively and within the majority, yes. And what I would say is that when I work with individuals with complex childhood trauma, when I work with people who have experienced burnout, when we’re working with people who have experienced, let’s say anything in the chronic fatigue families, including long COVID, that we often end up seeing a bit of the opposite where the body got stuck in actually not knowing how to tolerate Yin anymore. And so we need to build more and I know you’re going to relate to this, right? I’m already seeing you nodding. We need to actually build back in healthy mobilization in a way that doesn’t basically lead us to expand and contract right again into that shutdown.

Lorne Brown 

I want to talk on that with you so you can unpack that. And just going back to that healthy sympathetic, the coherence is the going in and out of it. So being able to recover, you have a challenging experience and you’re able to bring in the sympathetic and then come back to recovery is what I’m hearing. And for example, I heard there was a story about Bruce Springsteen. Again, you and I know him for the younger generation go Google and listen to some of his songs. But anyways, he shared once an interview that if he doesn’t feel anxious before a concert, it’s flat. And so if he’s anxious before a concert, he knows it’s going to be a good performance. I would say, and I’ve heard that excitement and anxiety are very similar feelings. So I think he’s interpreted, he’s calling it anxiety, and we give that a bad name.

What I think he had was a healthy sympathetic activation so he’s ready to climb the mountain to give a concert. It wasn’t an over mobilization. And so before you do a speech, I had this conversation with my son when he was a toddler, he’s now in his 20s, but he had butterflies in his stomach. And I shared, I go, “Oh, that’s normal.” So let him know that’s okay, that you’re going to have those butterflies. And if you’re really prepared one to two minutes into doing your speech in front of your classmates, those butterflies will go if you’re prepared. But I go, “That’s a normal thing.” And I said, “That’s your body saying, I’m ready. I’m awake to give a good speech.” So that sympathetic side. Going back to the other part that most people don’t hear about. So this parasympathetic out of balance, the chronic fatigue, the person that can’t do anything, they’re frozen.

Can you talk about that one? Because I think people are hearing about the wired, wired and tired, like the fight or flight. They understand the benefits of the rest and digest time to relax. But we don’t hear much about when the parasympathetic has some dysfunction in the nervous system dysregulation. Can you share what those look like? Because there’s a lot of people walking around in that state.

Arielle Schwartz 

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So when the parasympathetic becomes overly dominant, another way that we could look at this, and Stephen Porges just gives us a lot of language around this within the applied polyvagal theory work, is that the way that he differentiates it is that we have multiple circuits within the vagus nerve itself and that the upper vagal circuit is a very regulating circuit for the whole system. And the upper vagal circuit, which travels primarily above the diaphragm, sits in the heart, the lungs, the throat, and works with other cranial nerves to gather data from your eyes, from your ears, from the feeling of your face, from the sound of your own voice and the sound of other people’s voices. So he terms this upper vagal circuit, the ventral vagal circuit, and also calls it the social engagement system. So this is a parasympathetic vagal circuit that is very much orienting us towards social connection as a source of safety.

Now, why social connection as a source of safety? Primarily because we need each other. And as young children or even infants, we are completely dependent upon our caregivers. And we need our caregivers to basically give us those pro – safety cues through voice tone and facial expressions and eye contact and lullabies and rocking and holding and all of that that helps us go, “Oh, it’s safe for me to relax. And when I relax my body, I can rest in proximity. And if I’m an infant, I can be close enough without arching my spine or without being in tension that I can nurse and I can basically be nourished by my caregiver. It’ll enhance my likelihood of surviving.” So the social engagement system would be one expression of our parasympathetic. And it works with the lower vagus, what he refers to as the dorsal vagus that goes down into the digestive organs and the reproductive organs that when I deem that I’m safe and connected, all of those organ systems can function optimally.

I can rest, I can digest, my reproductive systems are working optimally, my kidneys are working optimally and so forth. So we’ve got this really beautiful integrated parasympathetic system. However, let’s go to the flip story, especially in the work that I do with trauma and childhood trauma. Let’s imagine that there’s very low opportunities for those cues of safety. In fact, what I’m getting instead are cues of threat, even from the very people that were supposed to care for me when I was a child. And so if there’s gruff voice tone, if there’s yelling, if there’s verbal abuse, if there’s witnessing of domestic violence, if there’s substance use and addictions in the home, if there’s chronic experiences of growing up in an unsafe environment, that also begins to shape the nervous system. And even if it’s subtle, so I’m giving some really strong examples of those cues of I’m not safe, but let’s go to a more subtle one where my needs are basically being met.

I’m being fed, I’m being encouraged in my educational journey. It’s a safe enough home. No one’s verbally abusing me, but I just emotionally don’t feel like I belong or I don’t feel safe or I don’t feel that anybody really attunes to my inner emotional world. No one’s really there to listen to me and what it’s like to be me. So those subtle, what I’ll say, cues of threat because I’m not getting the warm, welcoming smile at the door and the hug and the, I love you so much.

It’s an externally more functional, but inside I’m in a kind of freeze or guard or unsafe environment. So those kinds of experiences where there’s the lack of safety or the chronic unsafety also leave their mark on the nervous system. And especially when there’s an experience of it’s not safe for me to be me, the consequence of that is that I might withdraw. I might isolate more. I might just go really quiet and stop trying to communicate how I feel. I might stop trying to say no or I don’t like that. I just kind of give up on trying to assert my boundary. I feel powerless. I feel helpless. Those kinds of scenarios shape the nervous system towards being more parasympathetically dominant. I’m taking up less space. I’m less mobile. I’m more isolatory. These experiences are essentially getting smaller in the world. And in some more extreme cases when I’m just chronically not safe, my nervous system gets retuned or conditioned into this kind of powerless or immobilized state.

Now that parasympathetic dominance is going to show up as stagnancy, fatigue, low energy, and sometimes evolves into a kind of dysautonomia, which we could just translate as dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system. So dysautonomia basically starts to then feed out into, because the nervous system links to every other system of your body. So dysautonomia is going to show up in your endocrine system glands. It’s going to show up in your cardiovascular system. So your heart is lost some of what we call vagal efficiency. Overall, we’re losing some of that joie de vivre or that sense of I can take life on and I can go get whatever I need to do.

Lorne Brown 

We share this approach then and why I’m drawn to your work because my focus is always on the nervous system, regulate the nervous system. And you talked about how these affect so many systems and the research on psychoneuroimmunology, PNI, now they call it PNEI, psychoneuroendocrine immunology. So how your thoughts and your feelings impact your nervous system, your hormonal system, your immune system. And there you have the reproductive issues show up, the digestive issues show up, all the hormonal issues, including what goes on in perimenopause. And why in our practice we use bioidentical hormones plus acupuncture, naturopathy, all these conscious, we call them energy psychology tools. Because if it was the hormones as the issues, then every single woman going through perimenopause, menopause would have symptoms, but they don’t and not everybody has the same symptoms. And so the hormones are like your fire alarm story.

And to use a fire alarm story, it masks the symptoms. It’s not going after the root cause, which is the nervous system, meaning that I share that that second spring that happens for women at this age, it reveals what’s out of balance. So during this stage of your life, these hormones are changing as they should be. It’s part of the normal physiological process when you go into menopause. But if you don’t have resilience and the capacity to adapt, those changing hormones is a form of stress. And because you don’t have the resilience and ability to adapt, you feel symptoms. The body talks to you. For those that have the resilience and adaptability, they’re changing. They’re just not aware of it because it’s a normal process. So our approach in our clinic is often dressing the nervous system because if the nervous system becomes regulated, the immune system comes online nice and balanced, the hormonal system comes online, inflammation goes down, everything just starts to improve in the body’s innate wisdom and innate ability to heal starts to do what it needs to do.

Arielle Schwartz 

That’s brilliant. Yeah.

Lorne Brown 

You said I have more and more questions for you, so hopefully we’ll have time, but you wanted me to remind you, so I don’t want to miss this about the heart and the pacemaker. So I don’t know where you’re going with this, so I wanted to just bring that up because I don’t want to miss that because your eyes lit up when you said we’re going to go back to that.

Arielle Schwartz 

Yeah, perfect. Let’s go right there. So when we look at the anatomy of the vagus nerve and the heart’s pacemaker or the sinoatrial node of the heart, we have basically three circuits that enter the heart’s pacemaker. We’ve got the ventral vagal circuit or that upper circuit that’s using our sense organs of eyes and ears and facial expression and voice tone. We’ve got the lower vagal circuit, the dorsal vagal circuit that connects the vagus nerve all the way down to the digestive organs. And both of those vagal circuits are entering into the heart. We also have the sympathetic innervation of the heart. And so these three systems are coming together right at the heart center. And if we feel safe, if we are receiving those cues of safety through that upper vagal circuit, we’re basically giving the heart permission to know that it’s okay to downregulate out of the gas pedal of the sympathetic system.

We can go into rest and digest and it’s going to initiate a connection down to the digestive organs that it’s okay to go into that deep restorative rest. And so we have basically, I love to think of it as the whole system is kind of lit up at that point in a really good way, in a really healthy restorative way. But if we’re not getting cues of safety, in fact, if we’re neurocepting cues of threat through our eyes, through our ears, through facial expressions, through the body language of the people that we’re around, through our environment, if we have some sense of threat, two things can happen. One is that we lose the vagal brake. We don’t have that brake system and our sympathetic nervous system is going to elevate the heartbeat. It’s going to take us into fight-flight, into mobilization, into a stress response.

We might feel anxious, panicky, something I have to protect myself. Angry, irritable, restless. Or if there is a neuroception of life threat, I cannot escape this. No matter what I do, it’s not going to make a difference. I’m powerless against this. There’s a different kind of vagal break. So we use this metaphor of the vagal break on the sympathetic gas pedal. The soft vagal break takes us into rest and digest. It slows down the heartbeat, right? Sitting at the pacemaker, it’s going to slow down your heartbeat just enough to let you rest. But if we are deeming that there is a threat that I cannot escape, there’s essentially a physiological, very early survival system that we can kick into gear that basically is going to take us into a much metabolically slower, more protective state to hopefully ensure our survival. And sometimes we call this a vasovagal syncope or a faint death or a faint response, but it basically begins to slow everything down, but it does it more rapidly and it can lead us to suddenly feel nauseous or dizzy or disequilibrium, disoriented, foggy.

When people get stuck in this more primitive brake system, you have more brain fog, you have more IBS, more digestive distress, more chronic nausea, more likelihood for things like psychogenic seizures, more postural orthostatic tachycardia that then is followed by these kind of shutdown and malaise kind of symptoms. And so these kind of chronic health symptoms are what we refer to as a loss of vagal efficiency. And vagal efficiency is this smooth ride in the body. Basically, it’s the ability to apply and remove the vagal brake. When we apply the vagal brake with vagal efficiency, our heart rate’s going to slow down. When we lift the vagal brake, our heart rate’s going to speed back up. And ideally the smooth ride ensures that we don’t get these spikes of heart rate, of sympathetic cortisol, adrenaline, blah. And we also don’t get stuck with the brake system on where we can’t get out of bed.

Lorne Brown 

What do we do for those that know now, “Hey, my body’s been telling me I’m dysregulated. And I want to share some of the… I have this process I called notice, accept, choose again.” And I kind of want to apply it against your theories and stuff and get the science behind it. Remember I said at the beginning, I love how you can bridge the science and also still complex theories. So I have this approach I call notice, accept, choose again. And the notice part is just making the unconscious conscious. So notice, like you said, becoming aware of the signs and symptoms. And you talked about the imprinting that we get in the nervous system. I pretend, or I talk from the hypnosis point of view, you have the lens and you see a world through your lens, your nervous system. And you didn’t choose this.

It got imprinted on your intergenerational. And if you’re really sensitive and pathetic, like you mentioned, some things that look like your life was perfect. I have examples of patients that got picked up late from daycare and that’s where we found out that was their traumatic event, abandonment issues. So notice, notice you’re triggered, but it’s neutral. But then we give it meaning through the lens of our subconscious and don’t take it personally. The part where I’d love your input is there’s this accepting phase where I bring in tools like tapping. I don’t do EMDR, but I want you to talk about EMDR. I use the breath, by the way. So we use breath. I have a four in for four, hold for four, out for eight, emphasize on an eight to get the parasympathetic going. They’ll have acupuncture needles in at the same time. And in this, the accepting is not to be resigned or like what’s happening, but just to, with compassion and curiosity, become aware of it, getting really practiced at noticing it.

The term I heard an author say and I love is you’re not trying to feel better, you’re getting better at feeling. And the Buddhists say that light transforms darkness. So light is the awareness. Darks are these uncomfortable feeling or programs. And by accepting that, this is the part I really want to see if you can unpack for me. When you just notice and pay attention to it, often there’s just a sense of relief. You have this terrible fear, terrible sadness, terrible anger, terrible feeling unsafety, and you’re just watching it with curiosity and compassion. We may be tapping. We may use an inner child modality. It’s one of my favorite modalities that I like to use. And what I think is happening or actually what I think is happening and how does this apply to polyvagal theory is when they’re in the acceptance phase, it’s a form of self-love, but you’re being authentic.

When you can say in this moment, I’m not saying that I like it or resign. I’m not saying it’s forever. I’m just saying in this moment, I don’t feel safe. In this moment, I’m afraid. I feel afraid. And I think when you feel authentic, I think the nervous system likes it evidenced by the feelings often dissipate and there’s a sense of relief. And then the choose again part is now that the noise is down, so you’re no longer fighting with reality, you’re no longer fighting it. When the resistance is down, the choose again, our default is gratitude, but we can choose anything because now we are, rather than being reactive, thinking of Viktor Frankl’s quote, situation happens and now you’re habitually unconscious to react, or you can in that situation consciously choose to respond using tools like EMDR, using tools like EFT and this NAC process.

Now you are present. Now you have agency, I believe, and now you get to choose how you want to be. So you get to now create your new reality. Can you put your lens on being authentic? Because they don’t like it, they’re not resigned to it, but the fact that they’re just saying, “Yeah, I’m afraid right now.” I would love for you to unpack that for me because I see it happening. I use this process and I’d love to hear your science behind it if there is any.

Arielle Schwartz 

Yeah. Well, for sure. I completely agree with you. I think it’s brilliant. Your model very much parallels a simple acronym that I use, which is the step approach, which is to basically build self-awareness. The S is self-awareness of triggers. What it that’s activating me or taking me out of my zone and then to tune into your nervous system. Is it taking me up here? Is it taking me down here? So what is the state? What is the emotion, the nervous system state that’s coming out of that trigger? And then engage your resources. The E would be whether it’s tapping, whether it’s inner child work, whether it’s vagal toning practices, whether it’s getting on your yoga mat, whatever it might be, engage your resources. And I love what you’re bringing in around the acceptance-based practices, whether it’s self-compassion, whether it’s simply acknowledge what is because that’s where I go to congruence.

And I’m going to come right back to that. But the P, so if you have self-awareness of triggers, tune into your nervous system, engage your resources, and P would be what your choose something new is. For me, it’s basically plan for a new way of approaching this. What’s your plan? What are you going to try on that’s new? But the piece around congruence, which is really at the heart of your question is how do you attend to what is true in a way that acknowledges it and brings in just enough self-compassion that we can be with what is without resistance against it, without trying to fight it, without making ourselves wrong, without criticizing ourselves for what’s coming up? How do we cultivate this coherency? And from my experience and very much aligned with what you said, the body loves congruency. That there is a way when we simply give words to or acknowledge the truth of what is in the moment, something inside of us goes finally.

Finally, you heard what I’ve been trying to tell you all of this time. That moment of they didn’t come pick me up from preschool, finally God acknowledged for the impact of that.

Lorne Brown 

Gordon Neufeld, our local psychologist here, attachment therapist, he says, “When you feel seen and heard, it equals loved.” And then we got maybe a relative of yours. I think it’s Richard Schwartz who does the internal family systems. Is that his name? Yes, but

Arielle Schwartz 

He’s not my relative, but he’s a good friend.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah. But again, there’s that part that gets heard. And so I think what’s happening, think, I can’t say I know this, is that when you go into accepting congruency, become authentic and you are observing those uncomfortable feelings act as portals to present. So you become very present. And I think present puts you into alpha brainwaves possibly. I think when you’re truly present, you will probably see the vagus nerve, the relationship goes in. And now you have flow and receptivity coming through you as well. The resistance drops because it’s the resistance we call qi-stagnation Chinese medicine that’s blocking the flow and receptivity and keeps you from being present. So as you’re aware of these uncomfortable feelings, I think it’s tuning you into the witness consciousness. And I believe the witness consciousness is nature, it’s a part of ourselves, is peace and joy. And so when you’re focused on the feelings and you’re in the story and you’re in the head and you’re at the effect of it and you suffer, and when you get to observe it, well, if you’re observing these feelings, then what is observing the feelings?

There’s all of a sudden a little bit of space between you and the feeling. And I think going back to my radio analogy of the static, you’re turning the dial as you witness there’s the light to the darkness and you’re turning it into the witness consciousness. And I believe it’s what metabolizes these uncomfortable feelings. So on a spiritual level, not ego Lorne. I use the metaphor of biting an apple. I have to bite the apple and chew, but it’s my autonomic nervous system that releases the enzymes in my mouth that acid in my stomach and absorbs from my intestines. Whether I’m riding a bike, whether I’m sleeping, whatever I’m doing, it doesn’t matter what Lorne Brown ego’s doing, that apple’s going to get digested. I will not die from it. Same thing when we do this trauma work, or I call it energy psychology conscious work.

It’s not ego Lorne that’s letting go of these programs or feelings. I have to choose to bite the apple. I have to choose to bring my awareness to it and hold it and relax into it and be curious and compassionate and get out of my head and get into my feelings. I felt a sense of experience. And when I do that, I tune into the witness consciousness and that aspect of me metabolizes these uncomfortful feelings, which is why I’m feeling fearful, I’m afraid, and the next thing I know I’m in relief.

Arielle Schwartz 

I’m going to say yes to everything with one caveat. Are you ready for this? Okay. The times in which we are actually in an unsafe environment, let’s say I’m working with someone who’s in an unsafe relationship. What I think is happening when we are really acknowledging what is true is that there is this synchronizing of the underlying felt sense, the nervous system state and the present moment that then lets us recognize the action that we need to take that actually helps us keep us safe in the current experience. And it may still be your NAC, but I’m just going to say that sometimes what C is

Or my P, the plan. I’m going to use a personal example for a moment. If I’m going to visit and it’s coming up, I’m traveling in a few weeks going back to where I grew up and I have a particular relative that I really, really struggle with. I’m 53 at this point and I still don’t feel safe there. And they’re always saying, “Oh, but you can stay here and we always have a room in the house for you. ” And my body says, “No, I actually don’t do well. The last time I tried to spend too much time there, my back went out. ” And rather than listening, acknowledging and poof, it all goes away, listening and acknowledging, noticing and acknowledging allowed me to go, “I’m making a different choice. I’m staying in an Airbnb. We’re having dinner and then I’m going to my own safe space.” So what I love about this is that acknowledging what’s true, sometimes if it’s the past and it’s over and there’s no current threat, poof, it dissipates and we’re all good.

And sometimes it allows us to say, “I need a boundary. I need to do this differently.”

Lorne Brown 

We’re aligned, so I’m going to clarify. So on the table, which is a safe place, notice, except when I say poof, it goes away, the resistance goes away, the noise goes away, and now you have flow and receptivity and now you’re getting the clear messages from what you should and should not do. And then the choose again in the choose again, I bring in Eckhart Tolle, the power of now. He says, “When you are now present, you can either remove yourself from the situation consciously.” There you go, that’s what you’re doing. You can change or improve the situation. Default is if you’re in a relationship, be an active listener because everybody wants to be seen and heard. And if you can’t remove yourself or change or improve the situation, continue to accept what is, because he says you can be at peace in an unhappy situation.

And there’s the Buddhist expression. What does that mean? Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. It doesn’t mean you like it. It’s an unhappy situation so you don’t like it, but you’re not having this massive visceral response, but you are having agency and it’s at that moment. So at this moment I’m at peace, but I don’t know. There’s no action to take at this moment. But you’re opting to receive through the superconsciousness or through your nervous system the right action. And when I say remove yourself consciously, is removing yourself consciously is the action for self or against others? So we’re not saying doormat here. If it’s an abusive relationship, you are removing yourself for self-preservation. That is for self. So we are totally lying. So the NA is to get rid of the noise so you can hear your truth and then your action comes from being clear.

And I said Viktor Frankl, he said you either in every situation unconsciously habitually react. That’s you just living based on what got imprinted on you or you consciously choose to respond. So this is why in this moment you get to choose to respond to what’s for your highest good. And if it’s for your highest good, it’s for the highest good of all. We are totally aligned. You’re not a doormat in this work.

Arielle Schwartz 

Exactly.

Lorne Brown 

Does that help when I clarify that part? 

Arielle Schwartz 

Oh no, no, no. I already knew you were there.

I didn’t think that it was that different. I think I’m just clarifying it for our world where there’s a lot of ongoing threat. And it just came up. It was interesting. There was just a podcast with Ezra Klein and Pema Chodron and I was just reading a commentary on it and it was basically we can work with acceptance and we can work with acceptance. And at some point there are also points in which we actually need to recognize the right action. I am not going to sit and be a bystander to people being mistreated. And what in that case is now I’m not even just talking about my own boundary for my own wellbeing, but actually using the information from my nervous system of let’s say what I’m acknowledging is legitimate anger that says this should never happen and should never happen again. And I don’t want to sit here and passively calm down my nervous system in the face of my nervous system actually telling me that I need to stand up and be a protector.

So it’s this beautiful listening that when we can actually tune in, we can enliven ourselves to take action when it’s really necessary for either our wellbeing or the wellbeing of others.

Lorne Brown 

And that action comes from being present, being conscious, having a regulated nervous system because some people think, oh, then everything’s passive and nice. But no, you can consciously set a boundary and the other person may not like it, but you’re doing it. It’s firm and kind. I know with time, I have a few questions I have to ask you because I was curious. So I like to use tapping and EFT, emotional freedom technique. And again, I’m not attached to any of my tools. So the EFT from the Chinese medicine perspective, when I’m tapping on these points, it makes sense because these are at the end of a lot of channels on the face. And when you tap, there’s this reverberation to the channel and emotions, so qi stagnation is stuck energy, stuck emotions, emotion, energy emotion. When we tap, your issues are in your tissues, it starts to help move this energy so these emotions can finally have resolution that got stuck in your ties.

The polyvagal theory I’m aware of, we use ear acupuncture as a big part for stress reduction. So many points we use for stress. There’s ghost points on the neck and up on the face. Is there a polyvagal science behind the inner eye point, the outer eye point, the eye? Is there anything that we’re aware of that is also having an effect on the nervous system when people tap? Because we do have research from Dr. Peta Stapleton and many others, she’s been on my podcast where they’re showing cortisol changes, the amygdala dampening, certain gene expressions. So when we’re tapping on the face, is there some science behind it from your lens again of polyvagal theory and trauma work?

Arielle Schwartz

Yeah. Well, I love that you brought up Dr. Peta Stapleton’s work because I know her from the energy psychology world here in the conferences, the ACEP conferences that happen here and her work of course in Australia. And so I was absolutely going to reference her work and she’s been in conversation with Stephen about whether or not we’re doing some kind of vagus nerve stimulation through these same points. And there’s also a really beautiful book by Dr. Stanley Rosenberg. The book is called Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve. And he works with self-applied massage to these same points under the eye, the inside of the eyebrow here some other additional points. But also when we look at vagus nerve stimulation and the stimulation of the ear and the fact that the auricular branch of the vagus nerve travels into the ear, that we can essentially manually stimulate the vagus nerve through self-applied massage or auricular acupuncture or there are devices that are vagus nerve stimulation devices that will clip onto the tragus of the ear and send a little electro chemical signal in through the transdermis of the ear or on the sides of the neck with some of the vagus nerve stimulators here.

And so all of that, the research on vagus nerve stimulation in those places is robust in terms of its benefits for inflammation and rheumatoid arthritis and seizure activity and so forth. So the question that you’re asking is, can we manually stimulate this and then combine it with an acceptance-based practice like EFT tapping where we’re also doing what we call a psychosensory practice where we’re integrating positive acceptance statements of even though sometimes I have this headache, I can still completely love and accept myself and we can work with those statements as we’re bringing in the stimulation to those points. I mean, there’s a little bit of my excitement with you and do I think that we’re stimulating the vagus nerve with that? Yes.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you. And then EMDR, question for you regarding EMDR. And you may not have heard this before, so I’d love for you to explain what it is and why it works. And I want to share this part that in some of my cabalistic reading and taking some courses, one of the Kabbalistic rabbis I was studying with or listening to, he was talking about how they would use eye gazing to take you out of an emotional state in the Torah and this balancing of left and right. So they didn’t call it EMDR, but my point was that it seems like there’s so many ancient traditional approaches that we now are finding science has shown, oh my God, this makes sense, like the breath and force bathing and all the things that we’re seeing that traditional cultures have done. Now we’re seeing how it regulates our nervous system.

I’m curious about EMDR, if you can just share what that is and how you think it works as well.

Arielle Schwartz 

So EMDR stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, and it’s a form of therapy specific for trauma, although it works for other things beyond just specific incidents of trauma. And it has several key components. One is that there’s bilateral stimulation, most often known with bilateral stimulation and with the eyes of moving the eyes back and forth. And there’s various theories out there about why eye movements work. One of them being that it’s kind of mimicking REM sleep and it’s helping with memory reprocessing. One being that it’s basically cultivating what we call a dual awareness state where I’ve got some part of my consciousness that is so anchored in the present moment because I’m having to follow someone’s fingers with my eyes. And I’m also being asked to think about something that happened a long time ago. And so now I’m having to split my attention between two different experiences.

One is right here and the other was back then and there. And that it’s basically asking the brain to do two things at once, like patting your head and rubbing your belly. And that as a result of the eye movements that we are desensitizing the memory so that it loses its potential, that the parts of the brain, for example, the amygdala, don’t have as much potentiated action now when I think about that memory. So for example, now I can think about that car accident, but I don’t have all of those visceral emotional responses to it anymore. I see it from more distance. It feels like it’s really over now. And reprocessing a memory basically allows us to think about the memory in a different way, to have new core beliefs about ourselves when we think about the memory that are more accurate or more positive about ourselves.

I’m empowered now even though I didn’t have power then. I can make choices now to keep myself safe, so on and so forth. So we’re really integrating the mind and body and nervous system. And the last little bit here about why eye movements work, and I think it ties into your story about the Kabbalistic story of the Torah and so forth. Same thing with yoga. If you look at ancient yoga texts, eye yoga has been a key component of yoga forever and having a drishti and focusing your eyes on one thing and being able to stretch your eyes to the left and to the right and up and down and gazing at the third eye point and so forth. And so this idea of eye movements themselves having a physiological benefit is also something that I really not only see but experience in Stanley Rosenberg’s book Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve.

And then the last little bit on this is that when we’re looking at ocular resets, when you shift your eyes from looking far away like at a horizon versus close up, there’s an ocular motor reflex that ties into the reflexes in the brainstem. And this ability to actually notice that sometimes when we go into shock or fear or fright response, our eyes get kind of locked in and our vision can narrow. We lose that capacity for that panoramic broad gaze. And when we lose that, our nervous system gets narrowed as well. We get more sympathetic. So we want to have this ability to oscillate our visual field, which actually helps to oscillate back into the nervous system range as well.

Lorne Brown 

It made me think, oh no, iPhones, looking at our phones all the time. So we’re changing our brains. Also made me think of when you said you’re holding two things at the same time, chew gum, rub your belly and pat your head. EFT similar, you’re focusing on the feeling while you tap. And even in advanced EFT, we do eye movement and we get you to hum happy birthday and count as part of the desensitization. 100%. Very last thing personally for me as well, I want to talk briefly on ADHD and I want to talk about it because people are coming in self-diagnosed like adult ADHD. It’s just like trauma, everybody’s using it because of social media. Everybody’s coming in with trauma. And not saying that people don’t have it, but it’s just become an easily used word and ADHD as well. But I have that kind of brain.

I see this in my son. I would love your lens again through the work you do on ADHD. And I want to unmedicalize it as in it’s just like you talked about the sympathetic, how do you work with it? And how do you see what people are calling ADHD? And as I said, coming in self-diagnosed, all of a sudden everybody says, “I have ADHD.”

Arielle Schwartz 

I would say that sometimes ADHD where it gets problematic is either because it wasn’t understood when I was a kid and so I was being forced as a round peg into a square hole in my educational environments and not understood by my parents and was frequently punished because I came home and I lost the homework or it was crumpled at the bottom of the backpack and I forgot to turn it in. And the things that we know –

Lorne Brown 

The nutty professor that forgets things later on, where’s my keys? Yes.

Arielle Schwartz 

Exactly. And I think that when we can learn to really deeply understand our nervous system and our thinking differences and to maximize on the gifts that are associated with that, that helps, but also to really differentiate what are the trauma components of this story or the stress components of this story that maybe it was trauma, but I’m interpreting it as ADHD. And actually if I can unload some of that trauma reactivity within my system, what I thought was ADHD begins to settle down as the nervous system has more regulation or really there is ADHD and now that I have a more regulated nervous system, I can use my mind in a way that is more effective in the world.

Lorne Brown 

And some of the body-based work that you do, like the yoga and the MDR can really help people fine-tune it and get that focus. Ariel, I want to say we totally went over. So first of all, thank you. I love your work. Can we let everybody know where to find you? You have books, you have online programs. Can you just let people know how they can find you and what you’re offering so they can continue to heal their nervous systems as well?

Arielle Schwartz 

Yeah, 100%. So I’m at drarielleschwartz.com. I also have a website called resilienceinformedtherapy.com. I have eight books out there. You can find out all about them pretty easily if you just look up Dr. Arielle Schwartz and books, Post-Traumatic Growth Guidebook and Polyvagal Theory Workbook for Trauma. I have a YouTube channel that is at Dr. Arielle Schwartz, and there are hundreds of free nervous system yoga classes and short talks that you can take. I have lots of online training and I run retreats, so it’ll be lovely to get to know you if you heard this and to stay in touch.

Lorne Brown 

Dr. Arielle Schwartz, thank you very much. I think I want to follow up with you eventually to get you maybe to do a little training with our Healthy Seminars group. Thank you for all the books you’ve written, all the programs you offer, and for taking the time with me today. I greatly appreciate it.

Arielle Schwartz 

Thank you so much.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you for spending this time with us on the Coherence Code Podcast. I’m Dr. Lorne Brown and I will see you next week for another conversation on coherence and healing. If this conversation resonated with you, please like, subscribe, or follow the show and also share it with someone who might benefit from it as well. Remember to take a moment to breathe, reflect, and stay connected. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.