#431: Mandy Harvey is an inspirational speaker and trauma healing and somatic specialist. Her extraordinary story of transforming her life from devastating childhood trauma and a near death experience to courageously choosing to face the past, heal, own her impact, and design the life and business of her dreams is the inspiration behind her bold mission to teach others that it is possible to do the same.
Heart her story: https://mandylharvey.com/media/
Follow: https://www.instagram.com/mandylharvey/
Balanced Bites Podcast #431 with Mandy Harvey
Welcome to the new Balanced Bites Podcast! I’m your host, Liz, a nutritional therapy practitioner and best selling author bringing you candid, up-front, myth-busting and thought-provoking conversations about food, fitness, and life. Remember: The information in this podcast should not be considered personal, individual, or medical advice.
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About today’s episode, I’m talking to Mandy Harvey today. Mandy is such a dynamic and fascinating individual. She’s a leader in the field of trauma healing, as well as an in-demand inspirational speaker. And she’s certainly inspired me today. And I haven’t, I mean, inspired, calmed all, all of the things for me in this interview. And this is why I love the podcast so much because. I can speak to people that actually help me in the process of recording a podcast.
Mandy specializes as a healing guide for high achieving chronically stressed and perfectionist leaders who are ready to release their feelings of inadequacy. And thrive as their authentic selves. So from a chronically sick and stressed woman, living her adult life through her childhood trauma patterns to a healed and thriving entrepreneur, Mandy’s courage and determination has inspired people worldwide and helped countless audiences breakthrough to discover their own untapped, personal power and infinite potential to heal and create their dream life. So she’s on a mission to guide purpose-driven leaders, which I like to think that I am sometimes I struggle a little bit, but I like to think that I am that way. To live a life free from unresolved trauma, stress, chronic health issues and the perfectionist trap, which I don’t know that I fall into as much for who am I kidding? Of course I do for work. But in a very different way, I fall into the perfectionist trap with parenting and some of his conversation with Mandy really showed me that.
Perfectionism can manifest in so many different ways. My perfectionist trap in parenting is an entirely different thing than the perfectionist trap of my work. My work, it can look like. Procrastinating not actually putting anything out there because it’s not perfect. Or I don’t think it can be done perfectly with parenting. It’s more the rage and all of those feelings bubbling up because. It is a fruitless impossible task to do this parenting thing perfectly. And it is massively triggering for me. So what Mandy does is she gently leads us through her unique four step process, which by the way, I don’t even know that we got to that today. This interview was so, so dense. I love it so much, but I’m definitely going to have her back on. But we’re reprogramming our relationship with our pasts, our bodies healing and just our core purpose. So the trauma healing process that Mandy shares helps us clear past trauma from the body. And we talk about that and the experience that convinced me that these types of experiences. Really really do take up residence in our tissues. It’s really, really fascinating and replace chronic fatigue and stress with energy to show up more powerfully for our clients and communities, our families. We talk about a ton today, so we can really create the impact that we’re meant to make. Now Mandy’s personal story of transforming her own life from devastating childhood trauma and a near death experience to. Choosing to face the paths to heal. I own her impact and design the life of her dreams. It’s it’s the inspiration behind her whole mission to teach others that it’s possible to do the same. So when Mandy’s not helping clients and giving talks, she can be found hanging out with her family spending as much time as she can in the outdoors where she reconnects to herself. Daley. And I want to just give a little window into what we talk about.
This is a really intense interview for me and I get very emotional. At one point, I got emotional again in reviewing it and going through edits, which by the way, my voice today is a little nasally. It’s like ragweed allergy, allergy explosion, but we recorded this interview when my voice was totally normal.
So you’ll hear two different Liz’s here today. We talked a ton about mom, rage, about kids and family and all of that. And one of the things we touched on that I really wanted to pull out for the introduction is talking about something happens when you’re, maybe it’s in your forties or, you know, as a parent at a certain point, maybe later into your thirties, but there’s, there’s like this threshold where you realize. This is your one chance. We have this one beautiful life and it is. It is not passing us by, but when you realize that you could be halfway done, You start to realize that there is a lot, you don’t want to leave in complete that there’s a lot. You don’t want to leave unhealed. And one of the things that Mandy says is like, we realized that we would be best served by living this whole and complete healed life. And we want that there are things that we stop wanting to just put to the side.
There are things that we realize are going to keep coming up until we handle them. And that is when my favorite epiphany’s that I really had because of this interview. And I just, I appreciate Mandy so much for being so raw and for holding so much space for me in this interview, I think it probably felt like it should have been a one-on-one session. One-on-one healing session of some kind, but she was so gracious and so wonderful.
And I appreciated it so much. And before we jump in, the other thing I wanted to pull out from this interview is when we talked about the ease with which we can access distraction. We’re talking about like smartphones technology, all of these tools that we have to make our lives in so many ways better, but that also end up sucking up so much, not just time that could be spent elsewhere. But it also ends up being this compulsive seeking of distraction. So what I’m trying to bring my awareness to now is when I’m pulling up the phone and it’s just like tap, tap into Instagram or tap, tap into my email for no real good reason. It’s not necessarily my working hours. It’s not necessarily something that I need to figure out right now.
It’s just that mindless checking your email, checking your social, checking your texts, that looking at that as a potential. Impulse of distraction when perhaps there’s some deeper work that needs to be done. So if I’m really needing to get into a moment with my kids or when I’m really needing to dig into something with work or with my marriage or with my house, Whatever. And I get that impulse to open up my phone or open up email, realizing that that in some ways is a sort of a strange way. At a fork in the road for lack of a better idea. And there are multiple forks in the road each day, but it’s that fork in the road where we can take a beat and ask ourselves if there’s something deeper we need to engage with in our lives, in that moment. Or if it really is a moment where you can just, you know, one-off checks and email.
And I never thought of it that way before I always. You know, I understand this idea of, we need more boundaries around technology for the betterment of our own lives. But looking at these distractions is not just distractions from life, but actual. Our bodies actively rejecting the act of engaging in deeper patterns and processes. And so I’m really trying to bring my awareness, my attention to that now, especially as it relates to parenthood, but just in general. And if anyone follows my social media a while back, I posted a story about walking and how there was this article in some paper about this new trend, this trending thing on Tik TOK called like meditative walking or something, which was basically. Going for a walk and not bringing your technology along with you. And I totally scoffed at it because I was like, uh, it’s called walking. Yeah. It’s called walking. But realizing that there are really beautiful opportunities that we can carve out for ourselves. Very intentionally. It’s kind of hard to moderate the day-to-day distractions, those forks in the road where we can do go one way or go the other. And it’s a lot easier to go. The path of least resistance, which is probably checking the email, checking the social. Versus engaged more deeply on something. That we don’t even necessarily know what exactly it is. But actually carving out time intentionally. And I think the perfect opportunity is walking where you are actually very intentionally leaving the technology behind and setting the stage for those wheels to turn into your, in your head for the processing to happen in those moments, I think could be really, really powerful.
So that’s something I’m going to play with. Now as long as we’ve got this beautiful fall weather outside. Okay. You can find mandy@mandyharvey.com. You can find her on Facebook, Mandy Harvey, you can find her Mandy L Harvey on Instagram. We give all of these details at the end of the interview, and you can also go to the show notes to navigate directly over to her accounts. So let’s jump into the interview with Mandy Harvey.
Liz Wolfe: So, like I said, nice to meet you.
Mandy Harvey: Nice to meet you too.
Mandy Harvey: Although I feel like I know you because I have your book in my library, and I went to the NTA program, just like you did. So,
Liz Wolfe: such a good program. You know, when I went through that, I think it was 2011 and I was like, well, this sounds really good, but I have just been so pleased and impressed with how they have.
Liz Wolfe: I mean, they’ve weathered some storms they’ve built over time and they just continue to improve upon the program. And I don’t know, it’s, it’s something that I’m still really proud to associate myself with. And there have been a lot of things that I’ve, you know, stepped into and stepped back out of and been like, ah, maybe not so much anymore.
Liz Wolfe: Yeah, that’s one that’s kind of stuck around. So I’ve been grateful for that. How have you used your, , nutritional
Mandy Harvey: therapy training? Yeah. You know, at first I went right into coaching as a nutritionist. I was even spending some time working at a nature path, like doctor’s office. And I was seeing primarily people who had chronic health issues who were stuck in the chronic fatigue, stuck in the stress, mostly women.
Mandy Harvey: Yeah. And I loved it. And then COVID hit, and the office, you know, closed for a period of time, and it really, , gave me a chance to reflect and ask, you know, is this still what I really am feeling passionate about? Or is there an expansion to this? And, there was. So for me, the tie into that, to what I’m doing today, which is more trauma focused, is that when I was working with people who had these chronic health issues, I was seeing them able to make these behavioral changes in their diet and in their lifestyle, but there was a moment in time when they started to fall off or they would start to come into sessions and be like, I’m struggling because my family isn’t eating this way, or I’m struggling because of, you know, this feels too hard and overwhelming and all these things.
Mandy Harvey: And it was more emotional based than it was. You know, actual just doing the act of making food and changing our diet. And it got me really curious about what impacts your behavior. , and when I started to dive deeper into their health issues in the past, it was like, they all had experienced some major traumatic event as a child.
Mandy Harvey: And it really, in my opinion, set in motion, how they believed that they deserved to be nourished. And that meant through food, through relationships. Through self loves through self care or self abandonment. And once I started to see this connection that really in 2020 shifted my desire to better understand the connection between the experiences we have as a child and how they influence us.
Mandy Harvey: As adults, and how they impact our health and our behavior and our desires and all these things and so I really sent me down a path of getting certified and educated in trauma healing, and I became a somatic experiencing practitioner and learned all about somatic experiencing and the connection between that and nervous system regulation and.
Mandy Harvey: All the things. And I just was like, okay, this is kind of the, I’m going to marry these two together. So now when I work with someone one on one, I really am pulling in concepts from the NTA NTP program, as well as concepts of like trauma healing to help the body holistically really release stuff that’s stuck there.
Liz Wolfe: Okay. I have a question and this Might make me sound like an asshole. And so apologies in advance. , okay. Open my Instagram feed. And I see, I mean, at this point people are joking about their trauma, you know, which might be like a healthy thing, or maybe not joking about their trauma, but joking about trauma in general.
Liz Wolfe: And there’s this other side of it where people, it feels like people are assigning themselves trauma. That was really just kind of like a hard thing that they went through. And it’s really not my place to judge whether someone is traumatized by something or not, but it has almost become like a buzzword in society where it’s like, I know people who have been through some true trauma that I would never compare my experience with.
Liz Wolfe: So I guess my question is like, how do you know something’s like real true trauma? And when something is like, yeah, that was a hard time, but we can expect you to be resilient.
Mandy Harvey: Yeah, totally. I think just like with many things there’s a spectrum and on one side of the spectrum there are the big events that we think about when we think of trauma, you know, abuse, neglect.
Mandy Harvey: Suicide, you know, alcoholism, incarceration of a parent, racial traumas you know, those sorts of things feel very big and impactful, , you know, they all kind of fit in that, that end of the spectrum. And then I think there’s, you know, some gray area between that. And on the other side being, I grew up in a home that I had well meaning parents.
Mandy Harvey: And they did the best they could, but maybe they weren’t able to meet my needs fully. Maybe there were, maybe I felt like I was an outsider or I didn’t belong or, , the way my father interacted with me or the way my mother interacted with me felt very upsetting to me. And I wanted to shut down and close off, but there was no physical, you know, abuse.
Mandy Harvey: There was no sexual abuse. There was no, you know, overt. trauma, those moments are still impacting our nervous system and still creating some memory, some response in our body that tells us either we’re not safe or we feel safe and that That delineation really can determine whether we feel traumatized.
Mandy Harvey: Traumatized is just a word that means wound. So we were wounded in some way. That wound can be like a small paper cut or that wound can be like a surgery. So I really feel like trauma, yes, is this really big buzzword right now. And, it’s hard to really determine have I experienced trauma? Where does my experience fit into this?
Mandy Harvey: but what I always direct people to is how does, how did it feel in your system and your nervous system and your body when you were in that experience? Did you feel safe? Did you feel heard seeing love? Did you feel the opposite of that? And then that will tell you if there was a wound there that was created by that experience.
Liz Wolfe: I probably should back up. Perhaps now and maybe even before that question would have been a good time to ask you about your background with not just personal trauma, if you’re open to sharing, but also how you How you dealt with that trauma that brought you to where you are now.
Mandy Harvey: Yeah. Yeah. So you’re spot on. I did experience some childhood trauma that brought me to this place I experienced, ongoing sexual abuse. From the men in my mother’s life. My mother was a single parent and, that meant that I was kind of on my own. I grew up in the eighties, which meant I was a lot, you know, I was the child that took care of themselves while she was at work and doing her thing and, you know, made myself dinners and all the stuff.
Mandy Harvey: , but that she was also, as I mentioned, single. So she had men in her life. She was married a couple of times and many of those men, , sexually abused mean, and the last man that she was married to was very abusive, very manipulative, he was a police officer and had this outward exterior of being someone safe and respected.
Mandy Harvey: But behind closed doors, he was very abusive, very sexually abusive, manipulative, just all the things. And at a point in my teenage years, when I was 14, I had told someone at school, I was in eighth grade, I told someone at school what was going on. So social workers got involved. He was pulled out of the home.
Mandy Harvey: and My mom, who had known about it, I had told her a couple of times what was going on and she really did not have the mental capacity really to take care of the situation, you know, my mom was someone who I think was living in her own traumas. Having that knowledge today, I can see how she just wasn’t able to see anything other than what she, her lens was, which was the trauma she had experienced as a child herself.
Mandy Harvey: And so she wasn’t able to be a protective parent and take me out of that environment. But there was one day in particular when I came home from school, and I came home to suicide letters. He had been released. They had gotten together, even though there wasn’t a restraining order. And they wrote out suicide letters and I disappeared.
Mandy Harvey: And so at that time I had a social worker and called my social worker, called my sister, called family, you know, all the, all the things, and I moved in with family and we waited. Until they surfaced again. And, even though they surfaced social workers and the whole structure of the process was like, Mandy can’t go back home.
Mandy Harvey: You need to get your help. You need to get support. Here are some resources for you. And. I think at that point, my mom was very delusional in thinking, just thinking like, we’re back, he’s going to be fine. Mandy will be okay. Can we just bring her home? We’ll just operate as normal. of course there was nothing normal about that, but, , I continued to see with family and, you know, a week or so later they were found and they had taken their life.
Mandy Harvey: So that was kind of the, the moments when my whole life imploded. Really the, you know, I had known, I had known trauma my whole life and thought it was normal. So I missed my mom. I wanted her back. I, even though she was not able to be what a healthy mom should have been, I wanted her. To be back. I wanted to be with her.
Mandy Harvey: And so it was very hard. It was very hard to go through that process of watching it on the news and hearing the stories and trying to process all the while also getting ready to go to high school, which is in of itself a hard thing. , so it was about a year and a half timing is a little, , shady there cause I don’t remember fully, but about a year or so into, , into high school, I was in therapy, I was doing EMDR going every week processing, and it was mostly processing the grief and the loss.
Mandy Harvey: And the feelings of guilt, like I felt guilty. I felt like if I had not said anything, they would still be alive. My mom would still be alive. So I felt like I was the one that pulled the trigger that killed them. And so we were really working on that, that trauma. , and it got to a point where I was like, I just, I can’t talk about this anymore.
Mandy Harvey: I can’t operate in this way. I got to a point where I was. In the black hole of grief and loss and was like, I can’t do this anymore. I don’t want to be here. My body hurts. I had pain from my head to my toes waking up every day. It was just like, I can’t do this. And so one day at school, I went and bought a whole bottle of sleeping pills and on the way back to school, I swallowed every one of those.
Mandy Harvey: And, but the only thing I could think of was, I just want to be with my mom. I want the suffering to end. And I just want to be with her. I feel like I would be better off. I couldn’t see past that grief. I couldn’t see what my life would be like today. You know, it was just grief. And so I don’t remember making it back to school.
Mandy Harvey: But I did wake up and right before waking up, I had a experience where I feel like I was waking up in heaven around God, whatever language you want to use. , but I woke up, I can remember waking up and it was golden, like this beautiful golden warm light all around me. And I remember thinking, I’ve made it.
Mandy Harvey: I’m going to get to see my mom. I’m so happy. I was elated. I was joyful. And it just was like the most amount of love that you can imagine. It was like a gazillion percent more. It just was like this loving experience and I can, it got bigger and brighter and brighter. And then all of a sudden I remember feeling a hand on my chest and I started being pushed away and I heard the words, it’s not your time.
Mandy Harvey: And I woke up and I was like. What just happened? The school bell was ringing. It was the end of the day. Kids were rushing out, you know, leaving the school. And I was just sitting there in shock. Like, what just happened? I was right there. I made it home. I had a friend drive me home, but I started to hallucinate.
Mandy Harvey: I started to have major problems. I was shaking violently. I just couldn’t control my body. I couldn’t control my experience. And so I called 9 1 1 and they took me to the hospital, took me to ICU. I spent some time there, spent some time in a mental institution where they diagnosed me with PTSD. And I spent many Weeks there in therapy in, you know, restricted experiences, trying to really process, they put me on medication and that started to work.
Mandy Harvey: I was able to leave that at a certain point and re emerge into daily life. And, you know, by the time I was 18, I graduated high school, I graduated from therapy and I thought, Ooh, all right, done with this. But it actually wasn’t, it was just the beginning of the, the healing work, you know, every decade. I feel like in my twenties, I did a lot of processing around the sexual abuse.
Mandy Harvey: I started having flashbacks. And really started to process and heal that. And in my thirties, I started to process and realize I was holding all this anger and fear and rage in my body. And it was an emotion. I never let myself feel. And all of a sudden I was getting angry and I was having outbursts of my kids and I’m screaming at them.
Mandy Harvey: And it was like, I’m not that mom. I don’t want to be that mom. Why would I yell at my kids? What’s happening here? , and you know, over, over decades worth of therapy, I had mostly been in talk therapy, except very early on. And when that anger came up, I, it was like visceral. It was like something was taking over my body.
Mandy Harvey: And I thought, Oh my gosh. I can’t just go to talk therapy for this. They’re like, I have talked my story to death. I’ve intellectualized it. I can tell it backwards and forwards and, you know, not have a problem, but this felt different. And so I sought out body based therapy and what I came into was somatic experiencing.
Mandy Harvey: And that really helped me. Spent two and a half years and process more than I had done in 20 years of talk therapy, all of a sudden I realized how to understand why my nervous system, why I was so anxious all the time, why my health was such a disaster, why my, you know, why I was fearful, the self negative talk, but why it was so strong for me.
Mandy Harvey: And as I learned my nervous system and learned how to heal it and start to process all that energy I had stored up in there, it was like I woke up a new person, confident, you know, more capable than I was able to even imagine when I was 14 and 15. So that really kind of propelled me into health. You know, functional nutrition as well as trauma.
Liz Wolfe: I literally feel like I am inadequate to do this interview because I
Liz Wolfe: I mean, I want to ask you what somatic experiencing is and the value in that process. I want to ask you about. People that don’t maybe know whether they have trauma or not, that are experiencing that kind of rage and their daily life as a parent. I want to talk about whether these types of modalities can be useful to people who may or may not be healing trauma, but are certainly experiencing some of the same symptoms of something in their life as a parent.
Liz Wolfe: Yeah. What qualifies as trauma? I mean, the generational effects of trauma, you can take us in, in whatever direction you think is
Mandy Harvey: best. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I love talking about all of those. There’s so many, , strings. I think you really could pull there. Um, do I have trauma or not?
Mandy Harvey: I don’t remember anything. You know, I work with many people who say I am anxious all the time. I talk about myself negatively all the time. I people please all the time. I know I’m doing this stuff, but I don’t have any memories of Major trauma. I know my childhood wasn’t good, but I don’t have any memories and that’s okay. And the reason why is because when we experience life, we’re experiencing it through our nervous system first. And then our head gets involved and we intellectualize what’s going on. And then we respond. So when we process our nervous system, when we go in and try and regulate our nervous system, it doesn’t necessarily matter the story that we have in our head.
Mandy Harvey: What matters is the story in our body. So if I am in a room around someone in particular, and all of a sudden I notice I’m like, I start getting kind of shaky and jittery and uncomfortable or feeling a little off. That’s a sign that there’s something’s getting triggered in your body. There’s a memory, an implicit memory in your body that is responding.
Mandy Harvey: And so it’s our body story that really is the, the way to healing, whatever we are holding in our body. And it doesn’t have to be major trauma. It could be being bullied as a child. It could be, you know, being, ignored from a parent, you know, Maybe being dismissed, maybe your feelings weren’t validated.
Mandy Harvey: That’s just as enough to have a response in your nervous system that makes you feel unsafe. Like there’s something, I don’t feel like I’m enough. I don’t feel like I’m right. I hold shame. I’m guilt. I have guilt about that. That’s enough to create a response in your body just as a major traumatic event is.
Mandy Harvey: So you don’t have to have. Trauma in order to have sensations in your nervous system where you don’t feel comfortable or you don’t feel safe or you have anxiety or you, you know, are struggling to speak your truth. All of those things are, , just signs that there’s something we’re holding on in our body that needs some attention, needs some healing, needs some love.
Liz Wolfe: Do you find that there are people, a lot of people out there that like me, who are like Mandy, you went through something I can validate you, but I just, yeah, on the blank, I Joanna Kirby told me to stop picking boogers in kindergarten and eating them. And I’ve never 40 years later. Sorry, Joanna Kirby. If you listen to this podcast, but,
Liz Wolfe: do you hold space for people who have not gone through anything near what you’ve been through? You were so like, you just ooze compassion and empathy. And I think it’s amazing.
Mandy Harvey: Thank you. That’s just who I am at the end of the day. I mean, I, I don’t hold compassion or judgment for anybody. I hold judgment maybe for my abuser.
Mandy Harvey: I mean, yeah, I think that’s okay. , and you know, if we have experiences that are traumatic, you know, it’s okay to hold judgment, , you know, that’s part of the process of healing. , but for me, I know we all have our own experiences. We’re all going through something. What you are going through what Joanne is going through what my friends are going through is very different.
Mandy Harvey: We’re all going through something different, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not valid because it’s not this big, huge thing. We’re all trying to just be humans and live this life and love our families and, you know, create experiences that we’re happy about. And. When we are being held back or when we feel like we are struggling with anxiety or depression or not good enough or unhealed trauma, to me, it doesn’t make any difference what it is.
Mandy Harvey: I just see the person within, I see the light within that is It Asking for help.
Liz Wolfe: One of the things I wanted to be sure to talk about today was the symptoms that we see in the body that we can look for that might actually represent something emotional or mental that needs to be addressed. Folks have probably heard me talk about how after my C section, which was an unexpected and unwanted C section about eight plus years ago, how I was experiencing really.
Liz Wolfe: Significant heart palpitations in the couple of years after that, which I’d never had before. And the only thing that convinced me that those were related to my mental and emotional health and mental and emotional state was doing some expressive writing and using some, I wouldn’t call them healing modalities, but modalities to address that part of me.
Liz Wolfe: And the fact that they stopped the heart palpitations in their tracks within about 24 hours. And that’s a small. Microcosm of what many people are dealing with, with regards to trauma. This was something that happened. I knew it happened. It was very difficult for me. And I, over those next, you know, five ish years was on a path to recognizing with it, recognizing it, reckoning with it, showing some resilience and some willingness to do the work to recover from it.
Liz Wolfe: Again, small microcosm, but that’s what really convinced me that we do store for lack of a better term trauma in our tissues. And I’m such a believer in that. So can you explain a little bit and expand on what we might look for physically when we are hanging on to something emotional, mental, traumatic.
Mandy Harvey: Yeah. So if you think about it and look at it through the lens of the nervous system, so we have two branches in our nervous system. We have the parasympathetic, which is the rest and digest. And we have the sympathetic, which is the fight, flight or freeze. When we’ve, when we have a imbalance in our nervous system, when we are.
Mandy Harvey: Triggered in a way or we’re holding on to some energy that’s trauma related or emotional wounds related. Our nervous system can get either stuck can get stuck in either of those states so we can get stuck in the sympathetic nervous system state where we are in that fight flight free so we might find that we are on the train of like constant go go go go go go and then we crash.
Mandy Harvey: Or we might find that we are, , having emotional outbursts or we’re having, , we’re not feeling like we ever get sick. We’re just like constantly on this like hamster wheel. Going, going, going our, our body. If you think about it, it’s kind of like burning all of its energy all the time in the state.
Mandy Harvey: So we might feel like, okay, I’m not getting sick. I’m able to do all this, but all of a sudden we’re starting to get tired more frequently, or we crash and burn the moment we’ve stopped doing that process. I see that a lot with like, the type a corporate employees who are, you this perfect. Employee and so they’re constantly going, going, going.
Mandy Harvey: So perfectionism is an outward sign. If I’m constantly trying to be perfect in my work, in my life, as a parent, that’s also a sign, if I’m struggling to speak my voice and stand up for myself, if I’m feeling anxious in my body, if I am starting to have imbalances in my gut. So maybe I have diarrhea or I’m constipated, or there’s a cycling back and forth.
Mandy Harvey: if I’m developing allergies, skin issues, headaches, heart palpitations, to your point, we, you know, all of those, there’s a range of what, what those might start to show up as, and they’re all different. They’re different for everybody. We can also get stuck in the parasympathetic state of our nervous system.
Mandy Harvey: So we can start to feel low energy, low motivation. We can feel like we’re constantly fatigued. Like we just can’t get out the door. We can feel depressed. We can feel like we’re sick all the time. We’re just like constantly in this like low state, whether it’s with our mental health or physical health. maybe we are.
Mandy Harvey: You know, experiencing. The cycle between back and forth. So we could also go from one side of the spectrum to the other where I’m constant energy and then drained energy, constant energy, drained energy. So we might see, , this like movement, , back and forth in our physical symptoms, like, , I’m anxious, but I’m also, you know, Depressed or I’m, you know, not able to speak my truth or I’m having emotional outbursts and I’m yelling at people.
Mandy Harvey: So it really, it can be on either scale, depending on how long you’ve operated in a state of kind of imbalance in your nervous system. So the longer you stay in an imbalanced state in your nervous system, you will start out in the fight flight freeze. And eventually you will fall into getting stuck in the off position of like fatigue, exhaustion.
Mandy Harvey: chronic stress, chronic health issues, not able to recover, not able to, kind of balance out your, your life. You feel like you’re just constantly stuck or in this high state. One of the other things I’ll mention is, , people who have experienced a lot of stress as a child, whether that’s stress from trauma or feeling like they’re not enough, you know, whatever that range is, they can get into a position called a global high activation in their body.
Mandy Harvey: and what that really is. means is that if you were to characterize those people, they’re kind of like the risk takers. They’re the ones that jump out of the plane. They’re constantly seeking the adrenaline rush. They’re constantly seeking that. And that’s because their nervous most often, if it’s related to trauma, your nervous system is imbalanced.
Mandy Harvey: And so it’s seeking those as a, as a comfort because it knows what that’s like, , rather than calming down and relaxing, which feels very uncomfortable. So there, there’s a range and everyone is different, but it can look like any of that. So
Liz Wolfe: what is somatic experiencing and how is that distinct from conventional therapy?
Liz Wolfe: What does that look like? Is, is skydiving like somatic experiencing gone wrong?
Mandy Harvey: I mean, I’m not going to like poo poo on the people who want to do the skydive. I’m not that person, but if you like it, go for it. But what we want in our nervous system is resilience. We want to be able to, , act, turn on our system, activate our hearts, our muscles, our, the energy we want to, you know, activate the energy we need when we’re going through something stressful, but then when that stress ends, we want to see that the body is able to come back to a state of rest and relaxation.
Mandy Harvey:and. Oftentimes we are kind of like in this kind of like the blood sugar range, right? We have the nice wavy blood sugar and when we’re dysregulated, it’s kind of all over the place. So, , skydiving. No, it’s not necessarily somatic experiencing gone wrong, but it is an extreme, you’re putting your body into an extreme state.
Mandy Harvey: So if we’re able to restore and our balance and great, , somatic experiencing really is just simply a body based technique that helps you tune into your nervous system and what you’re holding. So a very simple process of this is like. I, I use the acronym love. So oftentimes let’s say we have a thought of like, I’m not good enough.
Mandy Harvey: I’m not good enough. I’m not a good mom. I’m not a good spouse. I can’t get this right at work. Say that’s your thought. , what somatic experiencing does is it helps you get out of your head and into your body. So we ask you really to start to connect with where are you holding that thought in your body?
Mandy Harvey: If you were to put your attention on that thought and just let it be there. What sensations start to show up in your body. Oftentimes that might be like a tight chest. Like, Oh, when I think about not being good enough, Oh, my chest hurts really bad. Great. Let’s sit with that feeling in your, in your chest.
Mandy Harvey: Let’s just let it be there for a minute. Let’s see what happens. And oftentimes our when we give attention to what’s in our body, it starts to kind of shift and open up and evolve and we might start to hear or have a vision of like, Oh, I can remember being a child and doing something wrong and I didn’t feel like I was good enough.
Mandy Harvey: And then that starts to open up ways in which we can hold the body as that memory starts to surface, and we can start to really allow that memory to be there and and help the body navigate that sensation. So, often, sometimes. What I’ve seen happen with my clients is they’ll, they’ll say, Oh, my chest is really hurting.
Mandy Harvey: And I remember having this moment as a child and we’ll say, okay, let’s let that be there for a minute and let’s just see what happens once, just give it some attention, what does it, what is what happens and it’ll evolve. And, and there’ll be like, Oh, now my arms are really hurting. And I just, I feel like the sensation of like punching, I just am so mad that.
Mandy Harvey: I couldn’t do that, right. Or I’m mad that my mom yelled at me and we’re like, great, let’s use that energy in your body. Let’s slow down this movement of like hitting a pillow or something. And we’re going to hit it. We’re going to allow your body to feel that energy to, as we feel it, it starts to move and move and move, and eventually we can come back to a state of, Oh, my chest isn’t hurting as much anymore.
Mandy Harvey: Now what happens when I think about not being good enough? Well, my chest doesn’t hurt as bad. And I actually don’t really think that that’s true. Like I know that was my story then, but now I’m feeling a little different about it. So somatic experiencing, what it does is it’s this very gentle, like pendulation process in the body.
Mandy Harvey: And when we process trauma, when we process emotional wounds, we can only process as much as our nervous system is able to open up. So if we are. Stressed. If we are overwhelmed, our nervous system is tight. It doesn’t have the capacity to go deep into our traumas. It may not even have the capacity to hold calm and peace.
Mandy Harvey: So we have to let that nervous system settle and sit in something that feels opposite to what it knows. So we might spend time saying, what’s your favorite calming memory. Let’s feel what that feels like. What does this sound? What did that, what does it sound like? What does it smell like? What does it feel like?
Mandy Harvey: Feel that in your body. And let your nervous system just settle there. And the more we can build resilience in the nervous system to hold both positive and negative feeling, the more we can go into the stories of what’s held in our body and slowly start to tap into something that’s really stressful and anxious.
Mandy Harvey: And we sit with it and we let it be there. And then we let it come back to a state of calm. And then we might go a little bit deeper. Okay. What’s a little bit, something a little bit more, scary or overwhelming or traumatic. And we go a little, we hold that we hold space for calm and we come back and it’s this pendulation back and forth that trains the nervous system to expand and to hold space for more and more.
Mandy Harvey: And when we hold space for more and more, we can hold space and heal more and more.
Mandy Harvey: I will say what’s different about it than other like talk therapy, for example, at least for me, you know, I was able to talk about my story over and over and over again, but it wasn’t healing anything.
Mandy Harvey: I may have gotten tools and resources to process my anxiety to hand to manage my anxiety when it came up, but I was never given tools to actually heal it. From my body. And so that’s what I love about somatic experiencing because we, when we learn this process, we can do it on our own in our, in the, in our world.
Mandy Harvey: When we are engaging with our children and they’re having a massive temper tantrum, we can learn how to regulate our own first before then we interact with our children. Rather than having that massive outburst and that’s what I love about it and then the more you learn how to do it, the more you get faster and quicker and doing it so that it just becomes a part of your
Mandy Harvey: Um, so. I think talk therapy is great. Sometimes we just do need to talk about what, what we went through, what we experienced, but for me, I really believe we can only truly heal it when we turn to our bodies and we start to heal that story that we hold within.
Liz Wolfe: What intimidates me about this idea is, and probably the reason I would have that avoidance to engaging with a process like this is because.
Liz Wolfe: Talking feels easy, right? You can dump stuff out. You can respond to questions. You can offer answers. And at times, you know, even in the therapist relationship, You start to cultivate like things that you probably don’t want to tell your therapist and things that, you know, you feel good talking about are things that may be as you, you know, envelop like the personality is you don’t want to disappoint somebody or whatever that can get complicated.
Liz Wolfe: So. This is compelling because it’s something that you participate in versus what you’re actually speaking to another human being, but what’s intimidating about it and what avoidance comes up for me is like, I don’t know, not what if I do it wrong, but is there, is there something you’re trying to do right or wrong in that moment?
Liz Wolfe: Or is it just. A, a practice, a thing that you step through, and then you can anticipate that things will begin to shift and change sort of of their own accord after you set that stage.
Mandy Harvey: Totally. Absolutely. A hundred percent. There is no perfect way to do it. There is no right or wrong because what we’re doing is we’re following the nervous system and what’s coming up in the nervous system.
Mandy Harvey: So just by giving your body some attention. Just by placing your hand on your chest, you start to send signals to your body that it’s okay to calm down. And when you stay in that space of stillness and with the intention of, I just want to listen. I’m just curious what’s here for me today that is ready to be witnessed.
Mandy Harvey: That is, that needs a little bit of love. And when we just sit there in curiosity and stillness, something will come up. Or if we have a pain in our body, say my chest is hurting or my stomach. Oh, I’m so stressed. My stomach is so bloated right now. That was my story, placing your hand on your belly and just sitting there with that stress saying it’s okay to be stressed.
Mandy Harvey: It’s okay. I get it. It’s like this process of just like talking to your body. So our body listens, our cells are receptive to what we tell our, you know, tell our body. So if we’re just talking to it, Hey, it’s okay to feel stressed. All of a sudden I start to feel a little bit more calm. All of a sudden I start to settle.
Mandy Harvey: Hey, what, is there something here? What do I need to know? What needs more love? I might hear something like, Oh, I just need to go on a walk or need to get outside in nature. I need a hug. You know, whatever it is, I can give that to myself in that moment. And I’m just meeting the needs of my nervous system in that moment.
Mandy Harvey: And the more we do that in little moments, incrementally, the more our nervous system is willing and builds up the resilience to open up. To the things that we are wanting to really heal and, you know, let go of, I’m tired of feeling like I’m not good enough, tired of feeling like I have to be this perfect mom.
Mandy Harvey: Okay, great. Let’s work on that. But if our nervous system is so stressed and anxious, and we’re telling it stop being that way, you know, why is my body like this all the time? Why can’t I just do that? We’re going against our body’s nature of wanting to heal and thrive healing and thriving is just all about listening and honoring what we need in the moment.
Liz Wolfe: So this is a distinction from my own life, and I hope it will resonate with other people. It became easier to commit. To working through the heart palpitations because they were a physiological manifestation that was, that was constant and unpredictable. And maybe you can liken that to gut issues or, you know, chronic pain.
Liz Wolfe: These are things that you have to confront because they’re not moving. What’s difficult for me to imagine is, for example, the symptoms of. Rage directed at your children outbursts, just an inability to handle something in a moment where you just are so filled with anger or rage or frustration that you just lose it.
Liz Wolfe: And it’s so, it’s so disappointing. It’s so difficult. I kind of get choked up even talking about it, but those moments with your kids are so hard that you just want to close the door right away. Yes. You don’t want to go back. And say, I need to process through what caused that outburst when your gut hurts or your heart hurts.
Liz Wolfe: It’s like, okay, I’m going to sit down and we’ll work through this because in those situations, it also doesn’t feel like something that you’re doing wrong. It’s something that, that you’re responsible for, you’re accountable for. And that’s where the emotional side. It’s so, it’s just so hard and it’s so easy to become very avoidant around those things because when it’s a physiological symptom, it doesn’t feel like your fault.
Liz Wolfe: And it feels like I’m going to sit down and I’m going to tackle this, but when it does feel like your fault and you’re hurting somebody else, it’s painful.
Mandy Harvey: Yeah, it
Liz Wolfe: is. So if you’d like to respond to that while I get my shit together, that’d be great.
Mandy Harvey: Yes, I can totally relate. I mean, the, the story that I experienced, you know, right before I sought somatic experiencing was I was washing the dishes and my youngest daughter, I think, was a blessing to teach me how to hold emotion.
Mandy Harvey: Because she has this beautiful range where she would feel your joy and bliss and you, it was just like emanating from her body. And then in a second later, she could be in the rage and the anger. And it was just like, Oh my God, like who are you? And to someone who was never allowed to be angry, who had to hide the, the anger about.
Mandy Harvey: Boundaries being broken and being violated and never being cared for. It was very triggering for me. So triggering. I would try to get her to not feel her anger, be like, Ooh, what can I do? Like, no, no, no, no. Let’s redirect redirect. Let me just, you know, shiny stuff over here. Let’s not, let’s not feel that anger.
Mandy Harvey: Um, and it was so, it was like fingernails on a chalkboard. Oh, I couldn’t stand it. And she was having an epic temper tantrum. She was probably four, four or five, somewhere around there, you know, yelling and screaming and crying about who knows what. And I’m, my back is to her and I’m washing the dishes. And I was like, It was like a wave of fire running through my body.
Mandy Harvey: I could feel it in my toes and it just, the more she screamed, the more it started to move up my body. And it was just like, I was having this out of body experience almost like, Oh my, like, I can remember feeling like, what is this in my body? I was so hot and I was angry and I never got angry. Like, who is this?
Mandy Harvey: And I’m. I’m scrubbing the dishes and I have this glass in my hand and she’s screaming at the top of her lungs and I turned around and I had a glass in my hand and I threw it on the ground at her feet and I said,
Mandy Harvey: and it was like time stood still and I could see every piece of glass like fall to the ground. And I looked at her face and she just had this sheer panic of like, oh my God. What did I just do? And she started crying and then I started crying and she was like, I’m so bad. I I’m sorry, mom. I didn’t mean to upset you.
Mandy Harvey: And that’s when I lost it. Cause I was like, I don’t want her to feel like she’s done something wrong. Like I should be able to handle her stuff. Like. I’m mom, like what the heck is wrong with me? You know, so all this judgment started and I’m hugging her. I’m like, I’m so sorry. Like, you know, I’m sorry. You know, she’s crying, I’m crying and we, you know, get it all cleaned up and stuff.
Mandy Harvey: , but sitting afterwards I can, that’s when I was like, I need to work on, on something inside me. Something is here to come up. And I had been in therapy long enough to know that something was there because that wasn’t who I was. I knew at my core. I wasn’t that parent. I wasn’t that person who just yells at their kids and throws glasses.
Mandy Harvey: Like that’s, that’s like, I was having a temper tantrum in that moment, just as she was, so I understand that, that feeling. I understand that, that shock and that guilt and that shame. I also understand what’s on the other side of facing that and healing it. Because now, now that I know how to manage my emotions and I know when my nervous, like if that was to happen now and I would feel that rage coming up, I would know, okay, this is a sign that something is getting triggered in me and I need to step away.
Mandy Harvey: I would leave the room, I would find, you know, a place I could go quietly and just sit there and hold myself and listen to what. That little screaming Mandy was saying inside of me and what she needed. But when we learn how to do that, we can then sit with our children and not get so triggered. And we can sit with them and let them process their emotions and teach them how to move through the process.
Mandy Harvey: Just like we’re learning how to do it.
Liz Wolfe: How do you, how do you give yourself that runway? Because it feels when you threw that glass, it wasn’t like you were holding the glass and thinking, I feel really angry. I might throw this glass now that might make me feel better. It’s literally like, I understand now the meaning of pop off.
Liz Wolfe: Like I popped off. I tipped over a chair a couple of months or weeks ago. I can’t remember. And I was like, who is the person that just did that? I cannot believe. And if I had had a little bit of a runway, if I wasn’t up to here already, maybe I could have kept myself from doing that. Is that what that work
Mandy Harvey: is doing?
Mandy Harvey: Yes, absolutely. It’s practice. It’s like building muscle. You know, you don’t go to the gym once and all of a sudden have like defined biceps. You know, this is a practice just like anything. So the more you do it, the more you build that runway and are able to notice the response in your body faster. Yeah.
Mandy Harvey: So part of the work as a somatic experiencing practitioners to help people find the, we call it the T zero moment, which is before anything happened. How are you feeling? What was going on in your head, you know, and then kind of slowly tiptoe into the story where, oh, she’s screaming and I can feel like anxiety in my, like my stomach feels all tense and like, you know, jagged.
Mandy Harvey: Okay, let’s sit with that. We’re not going to go any further. We’re just going to allow your body to feel what that feels like. Notice what comes up as we do so. And so it’s building awareness into what is my tendency? What is my response in these moments? And as we practice it, we can find and recognize those faster and be like, Oh, okay.
Mandy Harvey: I’m feeling that anxiety in my stomach. I need to step away. I know something’s going to happen here. So it is definitely building that runway.
Liz Wolfe: I totally lost my train of thought listening to that because I was thinking of every parenting moment in the last like, I don’t know, three years. It’s been a tough road.
Liz Wolfe: I guess my question, my question now is. Is it important to have a guide, someone, oh my gosh, there’s children upstairs stomping. I’m sorry. Hold on. See if that’ll stop. Is it important to have a guide doing this work? Is this something I can sit down and do for myself or is this something where I need someone to walk me through it?
Mandy Harvey: I think there are things we can do on our own to start to become aware of our nervous system and how we respond and you know what we’re doing in our life and what experiences create certain responses in our body. But I do think it’s important to have someone guiding us into the deeper levels of we can’t see.
Mandy Harvey: What they can, and we may not, we may not have the skill yet to be able to hold a compassionate space for ourself and for our responses. And you really need that. You need that co regulation with someone who’s very grounded, someone who’s very confident and can see your brilliance, who can hold space for you, because then that helps your nervous system start to regulate into a different state.
Mandy Harvey: Thank you. And we can’t do that on our own.
Liz Wolfe: So if any of the folks listening who are resonating with my experience or with your experience, is there anything that people can start doing? Like Now before they find their coach or they find a therapist or they find somebody that, you know, provides the healing modality that they feel like might work best for them.
Liz Wolfe: What’s what’s like ground zero.
Mandy Harvey: Yeah. I think ground zero really is just creating awareness. So just asking yourself, or you could do it every day. You could do it once a week, just asking yourself, you know, for this week, what were the times when I felt like I was outside of my nervous system, where were the times where I had outbursts, where were the times where when I said yes, when I really wanted to say no.
Mandy Harvey: , what were the times when I felt exhausted, what What, , created more exhaustion for me, what created more energy for me, if I was able to tap into that, I think just starting to build awareness of how you’re operating just without being very curious. I love the quote by Walt Whitman, be curious, not judgmental.
Mandy Harvey: So taking a very compassionate, curious practice of just assessing your week, it doesn’t have to be something formal where you write it down, although I really do think there’s power in writing things down so you can reflect back on it later, but just getting awareness. What was I like this week? When did I feel like myself when didn’t I feel like myself speaking of
Liz Wolfe: what we brought up a little bit earlier generational trauma?
Liz Wolfe: Yeah Number one, can we repair these things with our kids or are we actually setting themselves up for 30 years down the road? Going I need help my mom threw a glass My mom tipped over a chair and screamed at me and it was so traumatizing I can’t forget it and now I have to Deal with it. That’s my question.
Liz Wolfe: Number one around generational trauma. I know we actually have scientific literature around this, the multi generational effects of trauma, but in that case, you’re thinking like world war two veterans coming home or Korean war veterans coming home, things like that. And things that just seem really, really large and major, but what about repairing with our children and setting the stage for them to be able to process some of these experiences that.
Liz Wolfe: You know, people like me are, are foisting upon them at a young age.
Mandy Harvey: I do believe that we can repair generational trauma. You know, my mom never had any type of repair conversation with me. She wasn’t present physically and emotionally and mentally most of the time. I was left to figure it out on my own. I know that it’s possible because I have done so much healing.
Mandy Harvey: I know I am a different person than she is. I am a different mom than she is. I’m not perfect. I make mistakes. Even to this day, I will yell at my daughter. She mostly gets the brunt because she’s so vocal and You know, just expressive and there are times where I still yell at her and she’ll be like, I know it can change because of this experience.
Mandy Harvey: The other day we were in the car and she was upset about something. I didn’t want to go get ice cream for the kids, they’d had enough treats, and she got upset, she’s, you know, crying and you know, really upset. And I said something to her like, can you just, you know. Not be so loud. Something like that. Can you just, you know, calm down.
Mandy Harvey: It’s just ice cream. You’ll be fine. And she said to me, mom, am I not allowed to just be angry?
Mandy Harvey: No, not about
Liz Wolfe: ice cream. Actually. No,
Mandy Harvey: I was like, Oh, shoot. Yes, honey. You can be angry. I’m sorry. Your experience was triggering me. It was making me feel uncomfortable. I know the more we do this for ourselves, the more we impact our children. And it’s, it’s what’s important is the repair process. It’s having that.
Mandy Harvey: Interaction with them to help them feel safe. After we may have had an encounter, so there are times where I’ve yelled at her and I’ve gotten upset and she’s gone to her room and she’s screaming and crying and I realized, Oh, shoot, that wasn’t about her. That was about something I was stressed about the day and I just let my stress overwhelm me and I will go up to her in her room, and I will have a conversation with her and say hey honey, you know, I didn’t like your behavior.
Mandy Harvey: Okay. And I was also very stressed and overwhelmed and your, I felt uncomfortable and I had this outburst and I’m sorry that I did that to you. Doesn’t make you, you’re not bad. You’re not wrong. You have a, you, you have a right just like me to feel our emotions, but I’m sorry that I had that outburst. We will hug.
Mandy Harvey: And, you know, we’ll, we’ll process it together and we’ll move on, but I feel like the repair is the most important part, because if there’s no repair, then they’re left feeling. Like they’re wrong that they need to do just something different that they are, you know, whatever, whatever story they create because of it.
Mandy Harvey: And so when we learn how to process our emotions, we’re learning how to make that repair for ourselves. Then we can use that with our children. And I know that they listen, I know they’re resilient, maybe they end up in therapy, but it probably won’t be for what we think they’re going to end up in therapy for.
Mandy Harvey: So
Liz Wolfe: I think that makes me feel better. I’m not a hundred percent sure. I’m going to have to process that one for a second. I want to ask you about resources because I know you’ve dipped a little bit into what this actually looks like in practice, but if you feel like we need to leave people with a little bit more than that, wonderful. I would also love if we have time to ask a semi related question. And the question right now for me is, we’ve talked about parenthood, we’ve talked about what’s probably one of the most intense triggering environments that one can be in who is grappling with any kind of trauma or any kind of, , unprocessed emotions or, or anything like that.
Liz Wolfe: But. Is there more in this adult life that all of a sudden I find myself in, I wasn’t an adult until like five minutes ago. You know, it’s like, it just kind of snuck up on me. I was fully on my own. And then all of a sudden I have an eight year old and a three year old and I’m trying to figure out where this rage is coming from.
Liz Wolfe: Yeah. Is there anything else that’s happening at this stage of life for any of us that’s, that’s complicating this or that’s laying it bare for us? So we can’t ignore it anymore.
Mandy Harvey: Yeah. You know, I truly believe that when we reach a certain age, when we reach our forties, , or, you know, when we get further into adulthood, I really do feel like, you know, our children, the experiences we have are activating some sort of innate wisdom that we hold within us on how is it’s waking us up to living more of a whole complete healed life.
Mandy Harvey: So, like I said, I think my children, especially my daughter, really are teachers for me and teaching me how to process the things that I didn’t get to process as a child to, you know, learn how to be a child because I never got to be a child, you know, they, they’re giving me examples and showing me things that I need to process and heal.
Mandy Harvey: And I think that’s true for, as we continue as an adult. Into our journey, I feel like we are all meant to be these healed people, these healed humans offering support, creating our community, whatever our community means to us, and we’re being asked and presented with opportunities. Uh, to reconcile and to process and heal some of the things and experiences that we need to, in order for us to be in that space of community and support and loving one, you know, loving ourselves, loving our community.
Mandy Harvey: , I feel like it’s this innate wisdom that wakes up within us that asks us to be more Liz Wolfe: whole. It’s definitely, , it’s definitely a threshold. That feels like something that’s suddenly a sudden awareness of something that needs to be shifted. And that can feel really overwhelming at moments, especially when you’re dealing with little people and a big life with a million different things going on, but it doesn’t go away.
Liz Wolfe: It doesn’t, um, it doesn’t leave you alone.
Mandy Harvey: No, but I, I really, I agree with you. It doesn’t. And sometimes it is very overwhelming. I know I have moments where I’m like, who am I and what am I doing? Yes. Yes. Who am I on this planet? Who am I in this family and what am I doing with my life? and then I have to, then I sit outside and put my feet in the grass and get my head in the sun and just come back to what are my values, what’s important to me.
Mandy Harvey: And then, you know, I, that’s my guiding light. You know, my values are having a home for my children that feels safe and loving and, , a home that has experiences that feel joyful and, you know, being able to offer healthy food choices and, you know, all the things that are important and valuable to me, I remember what those are and those aren’t, you know, being on Instagram and, you know, Having a website and all that, you know, that’s all like super cool, but that’s not, that’s not what’s important on the day to day, the day to day is creating a safe environment for my children to thrive and for me to thrive.
Mandy Harvey: And so when I remember that, then it doesn’t feel so big because I can, I can say, yeah, I can do that today.
Liz Wolfe: Undoubtedly. Undoubtedly our, the ease with which we can access distraction, Instagram, phone, news app, scrolling, all of that absolutely has to have an impact on our ability to also access that relaxed state, that place where healing
Mandy Harvey: takes place.
Mandy Harvey: Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah. You know, I think sometimes when we start down the process of healing, I hear from women, sometimes like they feel guilty or they feel shame that like, Oh, I just want to like watch movies and I don’t want to do anything. And, you know, I just scrolled on Instagram for. Two hours or whatever.
Mandy Harvey: And all of those, for me, I see them as, um, responses to an overly stressed and taxed nervous system. And they’re coping strategies in a way, and I think they are valid in Okay. Like I wouldn’t diss them because it’s not them. That is the problem per se. It’s the nervous system that needs to find is seeking balance.
Mandy Harvey: It’s seeking healing. So. We can do those things and we can enjoy them, but it’s not gonna fix the ache inside of us that needs the support and the love. So as we slowly shift, we can slowly shift from scrolling on Instagram and Netflixing and all the things to spending more time with ourself. And just tuning in to our nervous system and saying, okay, what’s going on today and that shifts, but shifts that coping strategy.
Mandy Harvey: So then instead of the external focus, now we’re turning in, you know, we’re focusing on the internal resources to rebuild our resilience, to rebuild our energy, to rebalance, then the scrolling and the things don’t necessarily mean as much.
Liz Wolfe: Before I let you go, are there any resources, tips or tricks?
Liz Wolfe: That type of thing that we haven’t covered yet.
Mandy Harvey: Yeah, you know, I love, um, the book, The Body Keeps the Score. , the other book is The Myth of Normal, , by Dr. Gabor Mate. I think those are two big, , books that really,
Mandy Harvey: can be impactful and eye opening into our experiences physically and how they connect to us, , emotionally.
Liz Wolfe: Mandy Harvey, I can’t thank you enough for wadding through this conversation with me. I appreciate you and your willingness to share. So very much. Can you tell folks where to find you or any resources
Mandy Harvey: that you provide?
Mandy Harvey: Yeah, so I am on Instagram. I’m Mandy l Harvey, and , I’m on Facebook as well, Mandy Harvey. And my website is mandy l harvey.com. On my website you’ll find, , some free gifts. There is a gift on there about how to process emotions and heal from any trauma as well as decoding fatigue and, , how to create success in your life from an emotional standpoint.
Mandy Harvey: So feel free to check those out, but you can also engage with me on Instagram. Perfect.
Liz Wolfe: That was like an emotional journey for me. I don’t know if you noticed that.
Mandy Harvey: I get it.
Mandy Harvey: I totally get it.
Liz Wolfe: That was really, really helpful. And I’m sure off the air, I’ll come up with 27 questions that I wish I’d asked.
Liz Wolfe: So if you’re open to a volume two, then we’ll do that.
Mandy Harvey: I would love a volume two. Yes.
Liz Wolfe: Let’s do it.
Mandy Harvey: Thank you so much.
Liz Wolfe: Thank you.
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