Health Talk 01: Trauma in our mind and body: How we can learn to acknowledge and then manage it
About Health Talk
Living with a chronic condition can feel isolating. Health Talk by Flowly was born from wanting to bring often isolated voices into the fold, and connecting different ideas, experiences, and tools to your own health journey.
We talk to health practitioners and chronic health patients to deconstruct the chronic condition journey— from how many have managed the challenging diagnosis experience, to new tools and tips that might help you. We cover conditions including chronic pain, anxiety, autoimmune diseases, and more.
Hosted by Celine, the founder of Flowly, this weekly podcast will dive into conversations with world class researchers, practitioners, and even more importantly, chronic condition warriors themselves.
Search “Flowly” on Apple Podcast or Spotify to find our Health Talk!
This week Celine sits down with a world class mind-body practitioner, Pierre-Etienne Vannier. In this wide ranging conversation, they touch on different manifestations of trauma, methods we can employ to begin to acknowledge and manage trauma, and the challenges we still face in recovery.
Pierre is a program development specialist for trauma recovery and resilience building through nervous system regulation. Pierre has done this work at Huntington Memorial Hospital, UCLA Center for East-West Medicine, USC oncology, etc. Pierre has worked with cancer patients, pain patients, and is currently a co-investigator in clinical research focused on fostering post-traumatic growth among cancer survivors.
You can also find Pierre at Healing Studio Online (www.healingstudioonline.com) for live classes for self-healing, using a wide range of approaches and modalities.
*This transcript is auto-generated
Hey y'all, my name is Celine and I'm the
founder of Flowly, your host today
for Health Talk.
As some of you might know Flowly is a
mobile platform for chronic pain and
anxiety
and mental health management. We use
biofeedback for relaxation training and
even virtual reality to teach you how to
manage your nervous system
so in our Health Talk we invite everyone
from chronic pain patients
chronic illness patients, people with
mental health, challenges and
advocates to talk about what tools help
them with their daily living
but we also invite industry
professionals practitioner
health experts to really share with us
what are tools and techniques and their
experiences that could help with this
community
I'm really looking forward today with
our guest
because he is a world-class mind body
practitioner Pierre-Etienne Vannier
Our team has
actually worked with Pierre
in designing some of the intro sessions
you guys have experienced
and we really respect his work in this
field.
Besides being a mind body practitioner
Pierre is a program development
specialist for trauma recovery
and resilience building through
nervous system regulation.
We're going to get into all of like what
that actually means later.
Pierre has done this work at
Huntington Memorial Hospital,
UCLA Center for East-West Medicine,
USC Oncology, etc. And Pierre has
worked with cancer patients,
pain patients and is currently a
co-investigator
in clinical research focused on
fostering
post-traumatic growth among cancer
survivors
Welcome to Flowly's Health Talk, Pierre.
Thank you, Celine. It's good to be here.
So my first question is a little bit
about your background because
I think one thing that really fascinated
me when working with you is how you
came to be working in the trauma space.
Because I remember when we first
spoke, you came from a background
of working with
low-income populations who have been
affected by HIV and AIDS
and then even worked in Cairo in
somewhat of an adjacent field.
So could you share a little bit about
your background and how you came to be
your background and how you came
to be working on this?
A little bit of the background,
long story short,
You mentioned I used to work in
Cairo, Egypt
I lived there for about 10 years
and I used to work for the
United Nations working with people
living with HIV supporting people
living with HIV, through with
Socioeconomic Empowerment
Program with leadership skills, etc etc
About seven eight years into it
I could see that the most profound
transformation that we were seeing
was when people had an opportunity to
really connect
at the emotional level. It was not so
much about the technical information
that was being shared with them rather
than the opportunity
to really feel right, what they were
feeling in a safe space
and so I started to try to understand
how to promote this
and I was hearing a lot people telling
me you know what
this great challenge
in my life is actually one of the best
thing that happened to me which was
very confusing
because that's not what i was expecting
to hear and so I started to look into it
I started to
learn about post traumatic growth the
learning that may occur
when we're dealing with challenging
experiences in life and try to
understand how can I help
people grow from their experiences
from the pain, from the suffering
This is when I started to study
hypnotherapy, this is
when I started to study different type
of somatic practices
which as you mentioned earlier was
really about
bringing our nervous system back into
balance
so 11 years later I finally went into
private practice because I found it
absolutely fascinating, started to work
with different organizations that were
focusing on
helping people to build resilience
and like you said today I'm working
primarily
I'm working with people who are
dealing with trauma which is let's face it
100% of the world population. We're all
dealing with it, right
we may let's not think about trauma as
that big thing that can happen but that
can also be an accumulation of small
things what we call small traumas
so all of us are experiencing
difficulties and all of us have an
experience to learn skills and tools
to learn from it to overcome and
to bounce back
and even to bounce forward, right?
That kind of leads to
one question that we've been grappling
with which is
I think also to do with your work in
managing the nervous system which is
exactly what we want to do under
Flowly as well right
and in the context of what's happening
in the world now
a lot of experiences with trauma are not
necessarily
physical but how can or do we
experience trauma in the body even if
the trauma wasn't
physical to begin with and then how can
it manifest?
To answer this question, I think we need
to understand that the the separation
between
the mind and the body I think is a very
simplistic way to view things because
Yes, the trauma may not
be physical yet there
are physical consequences
and implications to a traumatic
experience
right so if I experience something that
is fearful to me
and we can't even you know at some
point, look into what's going on
right now with
with covid with
uprising with social unrest with
whatever's going on in Washington,
here the question is that may not be
something that bumped or scraped
or hurt my body but the stress the
anxiety
that my nervous system is going in the
stress response
my nervous system is going to trauma
response saying
what do I need to do to keep myself safe
and so I want to say your body
our bodies are always impacted
by what's going on
and there are a lot of literature out
there what i'm saying is not even
closely, you know, close to be
controversial I think right now we
understand
very clearly that when we're going
through
emotional adversity we there are
physical consequences to that
when I will go in a stress response a
fight or flight freeze response there
different types of stress responses
there will be physical implications
I may find myself
having difficulty sleeping having
difficulties to digest, I may find myself
experiencing increased pain increased
anxiety etc etc etc
right
So all of this eventually translates
and manifests
in the body and so it's important for us
to acknowledge that
and to allow ourselves to
and create a container.
Safe container for us to say, okay,
What's going on with me? Let me
connect
to my body because your body is really
just
your body's talking to you. Our bodies
are talking to us and they're saying hey
let's, can we do something about that?
I'm personally dealing with
back pain I've been dealing with back
pain for many years
when I start to get a little tidal
stressed out
I know this back pain will start to
you know
say, hey, should we slow down here?
and the pain maybe
may not be that great but it's there.
If I ignore it
my body will start to talk to me louder
and say hey
okay I told you two days ago we're
getting tired
and I manifested just a little
pain you're not hearing me
you're not doing what needs to be done
right now to come back
to give me an opportunity to heal and
rest so let me
speak to you a little louder and this is
why sometimes I'm like oh this is
becoming you know
so amazingly painful and that's when I
have to listen to my body
so what I'm saying is that here it's
important for us to listen to our bodies
to listen to the cues
of our body so that we can take the
necessary steps and measures
to bring ourselves back to a place where
we can heal we can rest
we can recover and you know
and we can deal with life.
Does that makes sense?
That makes a lot of sense
and I think what I'm
hearing is that
the first step to learning how to manage
the trauma in your body the nervous
system activation is to a
acknowledge it and then to spend the
time and give it the space to listen to
your body.
Am I interpreting that right?
Yes
and having said that there are times
when it's okay for us to connect to the
body and there are times when it's
totally appropriate for us to maybe
just kind of disconnect because we may
not feel safe to process
it may not be the time for us to process
right and i'm saying that as a
as a call for self-compassion to the
people viewing or listening to us
because a lot of people are like how
come you know how come i'm not
able to
relax more and not able to feel better
and sometimes recognizing that well
right now it's just
the situation may be overwhelming and
i'm in a state of overwhelm
and that seems like at times to be a
space that is appropriate
that's normal for us to go there what we
want is not get stuck there for too long
because again otherwise there will be
physical
implications physical mental emotional
you know implications and consequences
so i'm saying let's not judge our
own response when we get stressed out
this is a protective this is a defensive
mechanism to use the words of a
of a mentor of mine that
response is well intentioned
it's just that sometimes the timing may
be a little off
so we want to adjust the timing, right?
Yea that resonates so strongly with me
becasue even remember when we were
first talking to you about designing the
intro sessions for Flowly
like we knew that we had to approach
it in recognizing that not everybody was
ready to confront their bodies or ready
to acknowledge what was happening in
their bodies and
there needs to be a way of
gently kind of coaxing people into like
hey
let's start to listen to it but we don't
definitely don't want to force you into
it
and i think that even leads into my
um and i think that even leads into my
next
quite a few questions because I had
the opportunity to actually ask
people in our Flowly community on
the app in the community but also on
social media
what are some questions they might
have for you and
our community is pretty widespread as
you know like we have people with
severe chronic pain to people that are
just kind of stressed out
and one of the questions that came
kept coming up and up which is
what are some tips techniques
me