Resilient & Radiant: For women navigating towards their True North
Resilient & Radiant is a podcast for women navigating toward their True North — healing, growing, and reclaiming their inner light. Hosted by coach and guide Ellen Wyoming DeLoy, each episode offers deep conversations, reflections, and practical tools to support your journey through life's transitions, recover from burnout, strengthen boundaries, and reconnect with your intuition and vitality.
Whether you're healing from toxic systems, building resilience after hardship, or simply ready to align more fully with who you really are, Resilient & Radiant is your companion on the path home to yourself.
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Resilient & Radiant: For women navigating towards their True North
Trauma Recovery & Storytelling with Dr. Meredith Shepard, PhD
Welcome back!
Dive in with me as we talk trauma, recovery, and support with Dr. Meredith Shepard.
Dr. Meredith Shepard is a trauma coach who helps women find recovery from trauma in just twelve sessions through evidence-based methods. She holds a Ph.D. in the literature of trauma and recovery from Columbia University and taught at Yale University until becoming a trauma coach.
You can find her here: https://www.drmeredithshepard.com/
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Want to know more about my work at Inner Light Coaching?
Go here: www.ellenwyomingdeloy.com
Then book your free 45-minute strategy session: ellenwyomingdeloy.as.me
Hi, everyone. Welcome back. I am very excited to bring you this interview with Dr. Meredith Shepherd. Um, she is a PTSD coach, a trauma recovery coach. She is somebody I have personally worked with and benefited from and have been thinking of having her as an interview for quite a while now. So I'm very excited. This is one of those episodes where you might want to make the time to kind of find yourself in a quiet spot, grab a pen and paper, perhaps even take some notes, but just give yourself, give yourself the space to really listen and kind of just take in the conversation. It was so enjoyable. I even enjoyed listening again as I was editing the episode. And I just really hope you get a lot out of it. There is a lot of really great value here and I'm just excited to introduce you to Dr. Meredith. Welcome to Resilient and Radiant, the podcast that supports women navigating toward their true north. I'm Ellen Wyoming Deloitte, coach guide and fellow traveler on the path of becoming. Here we explore resilience, intuition, boundaries, healing, and the everyday practices that help you align with your most radiant, authentic self. Whether you're reinventing, healing, or simply finding your way forward, this space is for you. Let's dive in. Welcome. Good morning. I'm so glad you're here today. I am very excited to bring to you my special guest, Dr. Meredith Shepherd, a trauma coach based in Boulder, Colorado. But I have worked with her. She works all around the world and she specializes in swift and evidence based trauma treatment for women. Meredith, welcome.
Meredith:Thanks so much, Ellen. I'm so excited to be here and speak with you today.
Ellen:Yes. Okay, so everyone, I. As you know, I recently relaunched this podcast. We're on episode two, but I had a different one and I was uncertain what I would do with it. And I actually worked with Meredith personally about a year ago and ever since we finished and wrapped and I had such a powerful, transformative experience, I have been wanting to interview her, but I didn't have a vehicle to do it in until I started a new show. And so we're finally here and I'm very excited that she's my first interview. I asked her about this like maybe eight months ago. So we've just been waiting. Um, but yeah, let's see. I wanna, I wanna start. So, Meredith, I feel like you have a really fascinating origin story for how you became a trauma coach. Would you mind diving in and sharing that a little bit with us?
Meredith:Sure. Thanks so much for having me. Ellen, it's always such a treat to speak with you on this exciting New launch of your podcast. I do have a strange origin story into the trauma coaching world. I would say that my introduction to my interest in trauma began when I started working as a volunteer in Rwanda in my late teens. And at that point, the country was only 13 years after the 1994 genocide, which I won't go into details here, but those of you old enough to remember will recall it was a horrific global event. And I was absolutely stunned, moved, and fascinated by how quickly the country had recovered, because I was used to kind of World War II stories where nations took decades to recover. And Rwanda is a place where it's as though you had Poland, Israel and Germany all living within the same borders. And just within a few years after the genocide, they were. They were doing that. So that sparked, at a very young age, my interest in trauma. What is trauma? What does it do to people? I certainly. I was working at an orphanage. I certainly encountered a lot of people with trauma. And what is recovery? And what is the kind of turning point between when trauma ends and how recovery begins? And I always loved stories. And I would say my, you know, if I came into the world with a gift, it. It's a gift to hear stories and hear the story behind the story and to listen for the points where the plot might be suspiciously too clear. And I want to ask more questions about that or where a character might be able to imagine something else when I'm excited to see a different future for them. And trauma and recovery are so much about storytelling. It's so much about what story do we tell about what happened to us and how can we retell that story so that our own. Own future is not dictated by the past? So I have these two really deep interests.
Ellen:Okay. I have to pause you, though.
Meredith:Yes.
Ellen:I'm not going to interrupt you.
Meredith:Maybe I will.
Ellen:But two things that you said that just really hit me really quickly, and I. I want to just emphasize them a little bit. The first one you said was about where does the trauma end and where does the recovery begin? Begin. And I. I feel like I have been experiencing that personally in terms of, like, my work with you and to you into. In sort of like a pivot point where I was probably. I was ready to process. I was ready to process a lot. And I originally came to you for, like, acute PTSD related trauma, but we really went to this older, deeper stuff that I hadn't fully addressed. And that was a surprise, but then also so liberating because I got to really have a container to work on it with. You and get into that sensation of what does it look like? Cuz trauma can perpetuate for so long because of, as you said, the stories that we tell about it or the narrative that we've constructed around that experience. And so it's just really profound to kind of hear your take on it. Because obviously when I met you in our first conversation, you did a lot of listening for me, not so much telling me your process. And I could feel like that benefit and knew that I wanted to work with you. And that brings me to the second point, which is the storytelling piece and stopping when the story feels a little bit too clear or you know. You know what? That seems like a little bit of a pat answer. Can we go a little deeper? And is when I said to myself, I found a me for me. And it's not that I'm a trauma coach, but it's the way that you listen and the way that you pause and can really hear what's happening in the energy underneath. Something which resonates so strongly with how I personally work that I understood immediately what you were doing. And you were gonna catch my blind spots, help me go deeper in places that I wasn't ready to look. And so I just wanna. Those two pieces that you said in that intro, I really wanted to pause and kind of highlight a little further. Cause they're so powerful. And I think that that nuance and the intention that you have in helping people walk through those paths with a really graceful and compassionate lens. But with me you were even firm sometimes, like, okay, come on, Ellen, let's pause here a little bit and go a little deeper. I can hear you wanting to skip over something and it's like, oh my God, I am.
Meredith:I think you're one of the many people I work with who probably self identify as too smart for their own good.
Ellen:I don't recall a few through my own system.
Meredith:Yeah. So I think I love working with highly intelligent people and highly intelligent and highly verbal people like you are so good at telling stories that they sound seamless, I think to like an unaccustomed ear. And so I love kind of looking for those seams and sort of teasing them open. And I do want to thank you for bringing up this, this really important point that you came in as many, as many of my clients do with something more acute and recent. But actually the roots of it were in the past. And I'll just say a little bit about why that's usually the case. So when we have a trauma in our childhood or even in our adolescence, the beliefs that we develop about that trauma become stories that are the storytelling frame that then fits the rest of our life unless we manage to break it. So, for instance, if you are told that you are unlovable as a child, every rejection in the rest of your life is going to fit the story that you are unlovable. Whereas if you were told that you were lovable as a child and somebody rejects you, you might think, oh, well, I guess they didn't have time for me, or maybe they didn't like me. Interesting. So the, the storytelling component is so powerful, but also this is really the silver lining of a trauma diagnosis. It's so malleable. Our stories are so malleable. And that actually is incredibly hopeful because even though the bad side of that means that a trauma, particularly an early trauma, can really shape and mold the stories we tell about ourselves and our future healing processes are actually quite effective and swift at remolding our stories to fit a life that is generative and, and hopeful. So I often tell people who are like kind of bummed to have trauma and have to deal with it, like nobody wants to have to deal with that. Trauma's horrible. And it often has a lot of co. Morbidities with things like depression and anxiety. The good news is that trauma is actually quite easy to work with from a clinical perspective because there are a lot of evidence based modalities that, that work through it fairly quickly and effectively and have, have really great rates of success. Don't just take my word for it. I think if, if people are curious about this, you can listen to the podcast 10 sessions, which is this American Life podcast, where a journalist, this American Life journalist who was assaulted, I believe, at age 13 and kind of carried this trauma and all of the belief systems that accompanied it into her 40s and had had therapy on and off and just couldn't really get over it, couldn't move past the stories she was telling about how dangerous the world was and how it wasn't safe to be intimate. She goes and on air, goes through cognitive processing therapy, which is what a lot of my work is based on. And you get to hear in the course of 10 sessions how her story about herself changes and it, it completely changes her life.
Ellen:I have listened to that episode and I did not, I did not remember it while I was working with you, but that's exactly what we did. I think we got to have 12, but yes, yes.
Meredith:Yeah.
Ellen:Oh, that's amazing. Okay. I had interrupted you earlier and you were going to talk about two main areas. So let's go back to that.
Meredith:Okay.
Ellen:Okay.
Meredith:So returning a bit to the origin story, I'll just briefly say to set up, um, I think this will help set up the rest of the conversation with themes rather than just being an origin story.
Ellen:Yeah.
Meredith:For the sake of a background, um, I pursued a bachelor's degree in literature and human rights due to this kind of concomitant interest in trauma and recovery and in storytelling. Then I went on and did a doctorate in African literature at Columbia University and got to do a lot of in depth field work in Rwanda at memorial sites and widow organizations, and started down a path that I really thought I was going to be a professor for the rest of my life. I was very fortunate. My first job out of grad school was teaching at Yale. I got to teach these really, you know, brilliant students, lots of African students, really kind of a dream come true. And then I had a baby. And then Covid hit and I felt very vulnerable myself. I experienced a near death childbirth and was undergoing PTSD myself without knowing what was happening. And nobody was really tracking me because it was Covid and it was locked down and there was no childcare available and there weren't really doctors available to see in person in any kind of a safe way. And suddenly this whole sort of scaffolded Ivy tower life that had felt very meaningful to me suddenly felt kind of frivolous and silly because it was so disconnected from the experience of vulnerable bodies. Like I was in a vulnerable body because I was postpartum, because I was depressed, because I had trauma that I didn't even know about. I was taking care of a baby who, of course any mother will know that is, it makes you vulnerable. It makes you aware of your baby's vulnerability. And I wanted to connect with trauma and recovery in a way that felt like I was actually connecting with bodies. And so I did. I made a. You know, it was considered by my mentors and peers a fairly rash decision. And I decided to leave academia and turn down a tenure track position and kind of go out on my own. And I started doing clinical trainings in trauma work. And it was listening to that 10 sessions podcast that inspired me to do training in cognitive processing therapy and then in brain spotting, um, which is kind of like maybe an updated version of EMDR for those who know the term emdr, but not brainspotting. Several years of training later found myself setting up shop as a, as a one woman business. Trauma coaching, focusing on women who bright and motivated and want to bring their gifts into the world, but who are shackled by something that's not their fault. And that thing is trauma. And it's just the most beautiful job to walk women through this process because I get to see somebody who is very contained, like kind of clipped wings, then go through this process of unfurling, and then I just get to watch them fly away.
Ellen:Oh, that's such a. Oh, that's so beautiful. And then. So how does this key into the two key focus areas?
Meredith:The two key focus areas are trauma and recovery and storytelling. And they're actually. I realized over the, over the years of training and clinical trauma work that they're not separate, that the process of recovery from trauma is an exercise in storytelling. I want to be careful in naming storytelling as such because I think it's the way we use storytelling in our culture is kind of a fit all term. And it's not the same as traditional talk therapy. Research shows that kind of traditional, somewhat unguided talk therapy can actually make PTSD worse rather than better.
Ellen:Say a little bit more about that piece of it right there, because you have to. People will, you know, dabble. Like the person in the podcast on 10 sessions, she went to therapy on and off. I also, for the specific childhood stuff, had gone to therapy on and off over the years, like cbt, cognitive behavioral therapy, other modalities as well. And it wasn't until I found you that I hit some, some ground to be able to grab purchase. And so what is different about this process versus, like unguided, normal. Normal therapy? I don't know how to call it, but yeah, yeah.
Meredith:So I want to be really clear as I, as I say this, that I am not presenting myself as like a magic healer. It is not me. Like, I am not the reason that so many of my clients who had therapy for years, if not decades, and then see me for like 10 to 12 sessions get better. It's not because I'm such a great person. It's because I'm using an evidence based modality. And I think. Let me just take a quick detour to say, when you're in the position of really feeling desperate for help, it's pretty easy to be lured into. Um, I would say there's like a couple different typologies of false healers or false promises. There's like the fake magician kind of the, the coach who promises everything and can, you know, turn your life around in 10 days or, you know, whatever it is. New body, new life, new love, Anything. Exactly. Yeah. Like those things are so tempting and they, they look like they have such beautiful magical lives. And when you're desperate, you really, really want a fantasy to be true. I certainly found myself attracted to those kinds of, those kinds of like false promises when I was feeling desperate and postpartum and PTSD and depressed. Um, there's also the. I, I think more often than not people fall into seeing what I would call this is going to sound mean, but I think it is true. Sort of like a well meaning dud of a therapist who, or coach who offers a lot of affirmation. So unfortunately, one of the unintended consequences of traditional talk therapy with a, with a therapist or a coach who isn't trained in more recent evidence based trauma work is to validate feelings. And feelings are always valid. If you are feeling scared of men because of previous bad experiences, like of course, of course that feeling makes sense. But the problem is that just telling somebody that their feelings are valid, it can help, you know, in the hour that you're in the session, but it doesn't actually change your life. And so there can be this kind of like hope depression where you're, you're hoping for help and then you get depressed because you're not getting help from the person who had promised it. And that's where, you know, the cognitive behavioral umbrella, which CPT cognitive processing therapy falls under, comes in, says yes, that feeling is valid, but what thought is that based on? And if you dig deep and kind of tear open the seams of somebody's story, you can see, well, they had a bad experience and there's the story that they're telling themselves is all men are bad. If I get close to a man, I will be hurt. Let's look at that, let's look for exceptions. Did your brother hurt you? You know, do you have a good brother? Do you have a good relationship with your boss who's a man? Let's look at all these different exceptions in the world and slowly as the rigidity of the thought lessens, the feelings start to change. So if the thought becomes I had a bad experience with that man, I now know what to look out for in dangerous people. But there are many good men out there and I can trust a lot of them. The feeling might actually be one of like pride or excitement and, or liberation.
Ellen:Or inspiration or liberation. Because you're, you're reminding me, actually I remember these are stuck points, right?
Meredith:Yes.
Ellen:So from my, my 12 weeks with you, you're reminding me in that example. And this is actually poignant because I'VE shared this publicly, so it's something I can talk about a little bit deeper. So about a week and a half ago, we're recording this in early May. May 1st. Happy May 1st.
Meredith:Oh, happy May 1st.
Ellen:Yeah. Um, but we're. I record. Set up a blog post about feeling shame and vulnerability, like, about a week ago. And then I was kind of sitting there observing my shame and going, where is this coming from? And able to just kind of dive down. And so I was like, oh, it was still from my father's voice, and I could. It's still there. So I just want to make, like, this little note in here. Right. Like, going through trauma therapy, it wasn't something that would eradicate the past or necessarily, like, change all aspects of how I still sometimes will feel, but I have so much more resilience and cadence and ability to sit with those really uncomfortable feelings and ask them questions. So that's what I did. And I found those, and it's in the blog post. But it was just things like, you're arrogant, you're selfish, you're manipulative. I love you because you're my daughter, but I do not like the person you are. Things like that that my dad said to me often, very, very often when I was young and in adolescence, and I had sort of shaped my worldview that any action of me presenting myself or kind of being my. My bubbly, characteristic self or talking a lot or energetic was going to be met with that kind of feedback. And so it caused me to shrink. And people. People will laugh because, like, Ellen, you've been podcasting and talking about all these things for five years. You're not shrinking, girl. But I. There are definitely aspects where I would shrink in many areas of my life, right. And you would stop me and go, okay, so here are these statements, and they're applicable to this person in this situation who's dealing with, like, whatever he's going on with. But where's the other evidence of this in your life with other. With other male figures or other female figures? Where's the evidence of these thoughts about these things about yourself? And it was really, really difficult because I expected to find more. More than I did. But really, the root of it was this long time ago, period. And it was so helpful to have you make me look around and disprove my belief.
Meredith:I just want to point out to listeners how Ellen is articulating. I would say, probably the best part of this process, which is that she became her own trauma coach. And this protocol essentially teaches people the skills to become the questioner of their own story. And I don't think there's anything more valuable than that because you have the whole rest of your life where inevitably everybody is going to face more suffering and more triggers. And to be able to go like, oh, wow, I'm feeling shame. Instead of going like, oh, okay, well, let me validate that shame, or let me comfort that shame, which is kind of like the psychological equivalent of, like, stroking the wound. Yeah.
Ellen:That's where I go eat everything and watch Netflix all night.
Meredith:Right, right.
Ellen:Which is what I did not do in that moment. Yeah. Yeah.
Meredith:So instead of doing that, you go, but what is the thought that led to this? And then once you hear the thought, you go, oh, well, let me question that thought.
Ellen:Yeah.
Meredith:My dad isn't the, you know, the authority.
Ellen:Oh, he's definitely not. And I did want to say, and there's a blog post that'll eventually have to follow from this, that I'm in a much, much better place with him, probably because of this work. I was able to reconnect with him after being estranged. Oh, maybe you don't even know that. Yeah, it was in process when we.
Meredith:Were working, but I'm so.
Ellen:And it. It's gotten better. He is still who he is, and that is okay. And I recently reread Educated by Tara Westover. And even though did not grow up in an extremist Mormon family off the grid in the hills of Idaho, the mentality of some of the ways that her family dynamics were, were. Were very familiar to me. And her phrase, I'm not the man my father raised, but he's the man who raised me. And there's a. A touch of love in there because he, he cared, he loved, he raised, he did not abandon. And there were a lot of good qualities in there, but his own unresolved really played a lot of the parenting roles. And so that was really difficult as a child. But as an adult who's gone through some work, I can see that now. I would not say that that would be a safe or healthy environment for any child. That person, that parent would need therapy in order to be a better parent. But, yeah, I just want to say that mostly because I'm like, ah, I threw my dad under the bus a little bit. But it's part of my story and it's. It's better now, and we have a better communicative relationship now. We're also quite far apart, and it's still quite limited and boundaried, but it's present which makes me feel better because I do love him when you say.
Meredith:That he's still who he is and that's okay. Like, why is that okay now?
Ellen:Because I used to want him to change and I would kind of re. Engage so much and I would actually activate. I realized, worse outcomes because I would be trying to change him in the same ways that he ideally was probably trying to get me to accommodate his needs as, like, you know, I need to be a subservient, docile daughter kind of role. And even though he always loved my independence, it's like that thing like, you ask for one, but then you hate it when you get it. It was sort of what my parents have always lauded. Been so proud of my independence, but then really castigating me for it. Um, yeah. And so I accept him for who he is now because it's not changeable. It's not going to change. I can definitely shake my head a lot at the things he'll say or the actions that he takes, but I am no longer invested in a active role. I've never. I've not assigned myself a role anymore in trying to make him a better person. Right. He never asked me to do that. I put it on myself because I was like, if I can help make him see my point of view, he can learn some tools and then we can have that father daughter relationship I've always, always wanted. And there was like this. And reading all of Lindsay Gibson's books on adult children of emotionally immature parents really, really helped me kind of break up with the idea that I had a role to do that as a child, an adult child of a. Of parents like this. And that acceptance, while hard and its own sort of necessary grieving process associated with it is a much more liberating way. I can love them and let them go. And it's much easier to let them go and to love them from afar because I would always be getting burned if I were close.
Meredith:I have a lot of clients who wrestle with this dialectic between at the same time understanding that what their parents did was wrong and that, you know, it wasn't the child's fault. That's. That's a really big step to not take personally their parents bad behavior, to recognize what the parents did was wrong, but to then accept them as they are, as someone who has not changed or still is who they are, and to do that with boundaries. How do you navigate that?
Ellen:Oh, I don't know. It's happened over time through different work, my own work. Like I mentioned, Lindsay Gibson's books, which I recommend to everybody who's dealing with sort of these emotionally immature, narcissistic or borderline type style parents and then work with you was really pivotal. Coming at the right time. So the reason for folks to understand, I think people who've been with me for a while will recall that like my daughter got sick and my son got sick and actually my son wasn't quite where he was when I met Meredith. But it doesn't matter. It was just a lot happening all at once. And I was so exhausted because I actually hadn't been sleeping for like months and I was. I knew I needed to crawl out of the trauma of my family. Acute family experience with my kids and needing them healthy and healed and everything to be in line again. And then we dove in deeper. Um, and so I have been building so many supports for myself over the past probably 15 years. And it was a really slow extrication process because I knew my parents did not make me in walk in wellness. I would tend to walk away from them in stress hives or in deep anxiety or extreme guilt over our interactions. And so maintaining those boundaries now is actually the culmination of like multiple processes that I had to go through probably over 15 years. Yeah. And now it's very resonant because I, I know what I'm gonna get. And I don't tell myself the stories anymore that I used to of a healing fantasy between myself and my parents. I won't lie. There's probably still like, I will hold out for a miracle any day. There's a 5% part me that's like, maybe it could get better. But I immediately am reminded that it probably won't happen. Cuz in those actually had a gushing warm mo moment. I saw an older man at the cafe yesterday and I was like, oh, he's like my dad's age. And so I like texted my dad and you can hear me getting emotional and asked him how he was doing and what was going on. And oh, I got two paragraphs of like really negative vitriol. Not at me, but just all of these complaints about things that he's taking zero responsibility for. And he's in that exact situation he's in right now because he made choices five months ago discarding any of the choices that he and I. He asked. He likes to call and ask what he should do. So sometimes I'll entertain him with that thought. And I realized, oh, nothing, nothing that we talked about that he thought was so. And it, it happens like this about every six months to a year. So I now know that it's just sort of like merry go round conversations and he's on his merry go round and I'm not able to, I mean, I know I'm not able to get in, but I'll still connect with him because I like connecting with him. But I know that outside of the 5 1% chance of him making a different choice, he will not change. He's very fixed and rooted in his, his pathologies and I feel for him. I have a lot of compassion for the pain that he. But again, the way that I'm talking, I don't think I could be talking. I would not be talking like this. Ten years ago, in 2015, I was in active panic crisis with my parents all the time because they were dragging me into their messy divorce. I had a one year old baby and they were, I, I would get called to mediate or to help with just stuff that a child should not be doing. But these people do not have community. They have isolated themselves from the world. They have cut off most family on their own parts. So. And my brother left the family 13 years ago. I haven't seen him since 2012 or 2011, since my wedding actually. And so boundaries were all warped.
Meredith:Like they.
Ellen:Boundaries were all warped. Yeah. So this is a very complicated, I'm just talking about my messy family history now. But today your question was how do I maintain that? And I just maintained that through very solid, clear, articulated boundaries. They have never responded well to them. They will tell me that I'm cold hearted. They'll tell me that I'm unforgiving. They'll tell me that I can't let go of the past. And they don't ever see that. They continue to just repeat their painful patterns and harm if they don't get their needs met in the way that they want. Which is out of line. And my husband for a while had to tell me it was out of line because I thought it was reasonable because I was raised that way.
Meredith:Right.
Ellen:You know, with a very balanced husband, thank God, and support of his family. I have gotten to experience a different dynamic and understand how communication can be. It's not to say his family is also perfect or anything. Like everyone has their own like family dynamic issues and quirks. But I know what real authentic patient love looks like because his family is filled with that which is so lovely. And I'm like, oh, that's patience and understanding. Oh, that's listening without taking over and giving advice. Oh, that, that is just what support looks like, Right. Unquestioning yeses. If I ask for help, you know, with my dad, it's transactional. It's kind of like, well, you're gonna have to pay me back or you're gonna have to do this, or, you know, or I'm not. Like, my son had hand, foot, and mouth. And my dad was like, well, I'll go to the store and get what you need, but you're gonna need to pay me back. And I'm like, you're a man who made six figures in the 90s. Your retirement plan is fine. What is going on here? This is ice cream. Or whatever he was buying was like $20 worth of stuff, you know, and so I was just. I remember that incident. I was pregnant with my second. My son was sick, and my dad was complaining that his grandson didn't like him. And I was like, he's sick, dad.
Meredith:So I'm glad that you shared about your messy family here. And I think implicitly, you also answered by showing that you're able to maintain boundaries because, you know, if your parents get mad at you or insult you, that you have enough differentiation of self now. Oh, yes, you're okay. Yeah. It doesn't mean that they're awful because you are okay on your own, because you are a separate self. And, you know, one of the worst woundings of that trauma inflicts is that one sense of self becomes entangled with, you know, the. The perpetrators, responsible figures and identity.
Ellen:That's actually really important. Can you say even more about that?
Meredith:I mean, I could. I could use a lot of different examples here. A really extreme version from my work in Rwanda is that many, many survivors of the genocide forgave the people who killed their family because it brought them psychological relief. It brought the survivors psychological relief to forgive because it was a way of disentangling their whole sense of themselves and the world from the person who committed harm. Examples that are more frequent here are people with, you know, narcissistic parents or emotionally abusive parents who instill in children who then grow up to be adults a sense of worthlessness. And that if they create a boundary with those parents and those parents push at it, they're so frightened of being told yet again that they're bad, that they. They can't suffer that wounding, and so that they can't maintain a boundary, and then the parent gets what they want again.
Ellen:Yeah, this is really key because not being able to tolerate being told that they're bad again, to hear the wounding so that they Just get the psychological relief of relieving the boundaries so that the old pattern can re emerge. Which is comforting but toxic. Yep. Is so poignant. And the work that I did with you to realize that I had to discount their belief systems about me so much. Not that they were the a hundred percent truth of me because they were my parents, but really that they were about the 10% truth of me because they were viewing me through their own trauma lens gave me a lot of that liberation to hold very firmly the lines. And now when they push back on it and I say, I'll just remind you that I've asked not to be spoken in this manner and if this is how this is going to be, we're just going to have to take a break. And I'll say also clearly, I'm actually only in communication with my dad because honestly, of the two of them, he's the far more reasonable one. Right. And my mom is completely cut off. And he started to. He hates her, but yet he advocates for her. He's like, your, your mom loves you, you just need to talk to her. And I'm like, oh no. She has honored zero of my requests and is incapable of even. She still spams my husband daily. And he hasn't changed his email. I did. And it's just like there's no capacity there for reasoning or conversation or connection. She's very much in her own. It's mental illness. But it's very, it's very difficult. And I tried when she was better, not so deep into her where she is now for 10 years to get her seen and get her help or get her treatment of any kind. And was. It's the type of course, of mental capacity illness or capacity or challenge that lets you believe everyone else is wrong and you are right and everyone would just accommodate to your worldview. Everything would be fine. So it's not possible.
Meredith:Wow. And how liberating to be able to just acknowledge it's not possible. She doesn't have the capacity.
Ellen:No.
Meredith:That's very sad. I think actually.
Ellen:And everyone's hearing me talk about it very calmly. But believe me, I've cried thousands of nights of tears over this like past. It's, It's a, it's a, it's a point I'm at now and stable at now and still going through aspects of a grieving process as well, because I can feel a little bit in myself this resistance to my mom that kind of keeps the presence of the energy of her needs closer.
Meredith:Yes.
Ellen:And I am, I'm working. This is kind of. This navigation space, coaching myself, kind of. Of going, okay, how do I get to a place where I can have the same kind of acceptance. Acceptance and compassion that I have for my dad, for her? So it's not as. It's not as springy. There's like, a springiness to the resistance I have for her. So. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if that makes sense.
Meredith:Yeah. Springiness is a great word I have. You know, I feel like words like trigger are so overused. They're almost, like, meaningless now. But springiness gives a sense of, like. Yeah, there's like, this friction or this kind of texture.
Ellen:Yeah, the. Yeah, it's still. It. It's still kind of corded a little bit too tightly for my comfort. And I'm a part of that role because I haven't let parts of stuff go yet. And I just. I can tell that I'm ready for that next step.
Meredith:Well, then it's good that you. You have really strong boundaries.
Ellen:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you were gonna say something else earlier, and I interrupted it. I'm trying to think of where we might have been. Um, you had been talking about in Rwanda, the forgiveness and the inner. The enmeshment with the perpetrator and how difficult that is to separate out. Was there anything more you had wanted to say about that?
Meredith:I don't think so about that. I do. I do want to return to the notion that our stories are very malleable.
Ellen:Yes.
Meredith:And maybe get in a little bit more about how exactly effective trauma work can mold our stories and reframe them. So I think, you know, I'll just start again with the. The basics that it's. It's not enough to find a healer practitioner who, you know, is just, say, trauma informed or will hold a space for the trauma or will help you, you know, talk out the trauma. Because trauma. Let me. Let me just actually define what trauma is in a clinical sense. So trauma is not the traumatic event that happens. Let's use, say, like, a bus crash as an example. 10 people are on a bus. It crashes. That's a stressful, traumatic event. But trauma in a clinical sense is what happens in the brain of the 2 to 3 of the 10 people who will. Who are statistically likely to develop PTSD. So why is it that 10 people experience a same bus crash, and 7 to 8 of them are going to walk away and within about 12 weeks, a couple of months are no longer going to have ptsd, like, symptoms? So almost everybody has ptsd like symptoms after a traumatic event. So nightmares, feeling triggered when they see a bus, being extra careful crossing the road, maybe having some physical responses like, like night sweats or heart racing or hyperventilating, feeling distracted, feeling depressed. Seven to eight people. So like 70 to 80% of any given population, this is true worldwide. Even with really, really extreme traumatic events like wars will, their brain will naturally return to a point of regulation where they're no longer being triggered by things that remind them of the traumatic event. Two to three people will. And we don't know entirely what causes that. We know there's a genetic component, that there's a chromosome, and if you literally draw the short straw and you. You have a shorter chromosome, you're more likely to develop PTSD after a traumatic event. Another really big predictor is your perception of the support you receive after a traumatic event. So if somebody is assaulted and a police officer doubts their story or puts them on the stand in front of the, you know, accused rapist, that is going to be somebody who's much more likely to develop PTSD because they did not receive or certainly did not perceive that they received sufficient support after the traumatic event. Somebody who receives sufficient support is much less likely to develop ptsd. So the trauma is. Again, this is like more in clinical terms. I can talk in a moment about how we use the term trauma in cultural discourse, which I find really fascinating and impactful. But in clinical terms, the trauma is the experience of the brain that cannot move away or beyond the traumatic event. So it's always hyper alert.
Ellen:It's stuck and sympathetic. Nervous. Stuck.
Meredith:Yes. It's. It's the. It's the veteran who is patrolling his suburban house perimeter every night with a gun. It's the woman who is checking the closets every night before she goes to bed. It's the teenager who has a really hard time leaving the house. It's. And then it's also. So those are more extreme versions. There's. It's also the, like, the person who just doesn't want to speak up in a meeting for fear of being labeled too talkative or too bossy. It's. I mean, it's so many different manifestations of ourselves presenting in the world in ways that are not really us. To me, that's the greatest tragedy of trauma. It's like it robs you of being your true self.
Ellen:And if so, I have like, oh, I have a few questions. I actually have a. Another answer that as you were talking, you reminded me of the other ways that I hold these Boundaries and kind of manage. I feel like that's kind of a caveat right now. I'll just say it. Really?
Meredith:Yeah.
Ellen:You asked how I hold the boundaries after going through sort of like my trauma recovery work with you, mindfulness based stress reduction training. And then on top of it, you know, in the midst of when I was working with you, really diving in on what does it mean to have nervous system support. So because as you're talking, it's really activating for me. Not only are there, you know, the thoughts wiring and perpetuating, but it's because their body's in a trauma response still. When I learned about polyvagal theory and nervous system supports, finally I understood that 80% of the information is coming from our body and then informing our brain's thoughts. And if I could tap into healing my body's responses to sounds, sensations, perceptions, my husband walking heavy footed on the stairs, you know, I could remind myself my husband wasn't the sound that I would hear when I was a kid and somebody was angry. It was just him walking heavy footed up the stairs because he's tired and it has nothing to do with me. Right. And so energy management came a really big focus in that container. Boundaries. And then I dove in in 2017, 18, 19, 20, into a lot of psychic meditation work, clairvoyant training, intuitive development, which helped me really get deeper and on exactly what you do, and I think you do very intuitively all the time, is the energy under the story.
Meredith:Yes.
Ellen:And so helping me to see that better for both myself, taught me how to see it even better for others as well.
Meredith:I wanna ask you about this, I'm gonna just call it like physiological reasoning and how you kind of unwire that. So this, this 80% of the input coming from your body's responses. So you hear heavy footsteps and you have a physiological response.
Ellen:Yeah.
Meredith:And you, your, your brain reverse engineers from that and reasons like, oh, I should be frightened or I should be anxious because angry men are dangerous and, but really the thought itself. And this is again where, you know, my, where I go is, is language. Because that's my, my training is in, is in stories. So it's like, yes, once you hit the language point in the, in the prefrontal cortex, the, the conscious part of the brain that, that can work with language. And you get this story of like angry men are bad. I need to be afraid, I need to be wary, I need to be on guard. That story can really take off and it can guide your moment, it can guide the rest of your life. But, but you're saying like actually that story itself doesn't even have legitimacy because it's based not on a conscious, logical, objectively verifiable plot point. It's based on how my heart was racing.
Ellen:It's based on like a somatic memory.
Meredith:It's based on a somatic memory rather than what I think a lot of people assume is because men are dangerous. My heart is racing. Really, it's like my heart is racing. So I think men are dangerous.
Ellen:It makes me think of the phrase from Descartes. I think therefore I am.
Meredith:Huh.
Ellen:And I'm like, I think it's the other way around. I think it's I am, I am in this body. And then therefore I think through the inputs I get from this body.
Meredith:Right?
Ellen:That's, that's sort of like how I have shifted some of my thinking around this. And you help with unpacking the thought train and discredit. Getting to the discrediting points. Because people, what I know to be very true is that a lot of people that I have worked with, they're not yeti. They're not ready to work with the body. And I'm not working with people who are in active trauma. I don't, I can't take coaching clients that way because I'm not trained the way that you are.
Meredith:Well. And the body can be a really frightening. Yeah, first entry point.
Ellen:Exactly. And so my sort of scaffolding is these gentler sort of nervous system practices with very neutral sort of targets. Or if I call. I just finished an eight week series of nervous system supports and polyvagal theory group coaching sessions I just finished a couple days ago. But in that workshop series, one of the exercises we go through is practicing intentionally moving from parasympathetic to sympathetic from like. Well, I'll actually different layers beyond just the two of them. Cuz sympathetic can split and so does parasympathetic sort of. So from rest and digest or shut down and freeze into sympathetic activation which could be fight or flight or, or it could also be just healthy action because you have to be in sympathetic to take healthy action as well.
Meredith:Right.
Ellen:And then moving into ventral vagal, which is that co regulatory connection space. You and I are in like a co regulatory space right now. It's very positive dynamic. We feel safe with one another. And I will walk them through each of those somatic states to practice experiencing the power that they have to transition. But you can't jump from shutdown into ventral vagal. You have to move through the sympathetic nervous system to do it. And you have to do it really gently and with intention. And we created different.
Meredith:Can you say that again, Alan? That progression?
Ellen:Yeah. So, and this is, I need, like, I, I both need a story and a diagram. So it'll be a little bit trickier in a podcast. Quick once over. So imagine your, your nervous system as a system on a ladder. And the lowest part of the ladder, let's just put it towards our gut. The oldest part of our nervous system is where we have rest and digest because that's what formed first. However, 600 million years ago, when we were all little whatever microbes or something. That's not accurate. I don't know, some, some small organism, right? So rest and digest was the thing, but the other thing was if there's a predator, the only thing we really could do was freeze and just play dead so that the thing didn't eat me. So those are the basis points. And then, you know, a few hundred million later, years later, we got like legs and we could run, right? And so you go up and so that's our sympathetic nervous system evolution coming into play. So go up, like to the ladder. And now you're at the place of your solar plexus, let's say, right? And you're up here now. And you have two options. You can fight, you can run, you can fawn as well, which is like people pleasing or pleasing, so they love you and accommodate you and don't eat you. Or you can have healthy sympathetic activation and be like, I'm gonna actually scaffold myself a house so that I have shelter and protection so this bear can't come inside and eat me. And it's proactive, but you need to have sympathetic movement to be able to take those kinds of actions. And a healthy way that's not flooding your system with cortisol. It's like proactive, probably giving you positive endorphins. So that's sympathetic.
Meredith:You have to pace yourself with that as well.
Ellen:You have to pace yourself where you'll burn out, right? And then going up from there. Let's go to our heart center, right? This is the most recent part. This is like mammalian evolution. This is ventral vagal in the polyvagal system. So the vagus, it's, it's all aligned with the vagus nerve and so ventral, meaning the front. So think about being open hearted, connecting, vulnerable, love, companionship. It's that person that you know when you're having a hard time and they see you and they just come Sit next to you and put their hand on your shoulder, and you start to sigh a relief a little bit. That is your nervous system responding to the calming welcome signals of their nervous system.
Meredith:Right?
Ellen:So we can think about polyvagal theory really in a sense of sensation. Sense our body perceiving warm and welcome or fear and not safe.
Meredith:Right.
Ellen:That is sort of the, the triggers of how our body will just respond without our thought. We're perceiving so many things per second that our mind is not processing on a body level so that we could survive on the planet. And teaching myself about how to work through the nervous system and then practices that support moving from shutdown to maybe rest and digest, which is easy because it's both in the lower part, it's in the dorsal, um, part of the parasympathetic nervous system. It like, it's the old one. So if I'm in shutdown and freeze and I'm on the couch paralyzed, I can very gently do like a couple small nourishing practices of self care. Like, I can get a cup of tea, I can move to take a hot bath. I can ask a very safe and trusted person to just come sit with me and give me a hug and hold me and don't ask me to talk. That can move me from shutdown to rest and digest, right? But then let's say I've had that for a day and I need to like, I. I want to be in the world again. Then I can be like, well, I'm gonna take a walk around the block. I'm gonna activate off this couch or out of my bed, and I'm gonna take a walk around the block and just get the energy moving. Because you have. The body wants to be in movement, Energy wants to be in movement. Polyvagal theory asks us to be in some kind of light movement, and we go into that place. And then from there it's much easier to be like, I'm gonna call my best friend and have a good chat. I now have energy for that. And then you can go into ventral vagal, right? But it's why when someone is kind of in a collapse or a freeze or even a rest and digest and they're exhausted, it's not the time for that deep heart to heart. Because it's just physically very difficult to get there without them having the rest that they needed. And then something activating to get them sort of in the mood. And depending on who the person is and how they work through it, they can be pretty quick and responsive. And moving through those steps or depending on what happened, it may take a few days or a couple weeks. But knowing this, my sort of responses around when I get hit because like you'll still get hit with something and surprised by it and you'll have an automatic knee jerk reaction. I'm not saying any of all of these practices and work that I do makes me non reactive. I will still have a reactive moment. But my recovery from reaction into response is so much faster because like this is where mindfulness comes in. I can be very, I almost watch myself doing things. I'm like, oh Ellen, you're now doing this. Okay, so we need to do this to support the body and then come back. And my, my watchful self might not turn on for 15 to 20 minutes after an event, but after I give myself a little bit of time, oh, that's what's happening. Okay, here's the shame story that's playing out. I can now write a blog post about it and talk about shame on my on to the Internet. Like, you know, that's fine, let's go do it. Because I've been able to distance and then respond and assess and analyze. It's so, it's so many steps but after a while it starts to be a lot more intuitive and you can feel intuitive and you, and you may need to like sit with it a little bit every now and then and just be like confused because I still sit there confused for you know, maybe one or two hours sometimes. But then it's like, oh, yep, my body's doing its thing. And also to be grateful for the body because the body does this because it's wired to care for us and protect us. And so that's another thing that I work with my participants in the nervous system workshop is like never punish yourself for not being where you think you should be. Because your body is programmed to do this exact thing. And boy has it protected you in such beautiful ways your whole life. And now if your body just happens to be a little hypervigilant with a sound or a sensation, here are the practices you can slowly bring in to renourish yourself into a healthier alignment with your nervous system. And I think it can come very powerfully from where you are, especially if the body is over triggered because you have to work through the mind sometime first to unwire the thinking, like through the stuck point sort of evidence based protocols you do to get under the, the truth, under the story. But then they can also very quickly dive in and start doing nervous system supports From a neutral lens to practice it. Before you think about the most whole thing as an experiment, we always do something very light touch, like a small disagreement.
Meredith:Right.
Ellen:Frustration you had with your child, like, things like that.
Meredith:Yeah. I think it's the. The nature of. Or the. The art and science of discerning actual danger.
Ellen:Yeah.
Meredith:Is probably, you know, maybe in a nutshell, what trauma work, whether from a cognitive or whether from a nervous system perspective or modality approach does. Because somebody with PTSD has lost, by no fault of their own, has lost the ability to objectively discern whether somebody else or something else is a threat.
Ellen:Yeah.
Meredith:And therefore their nervous system must always be on high alert to be protecting itself against a threat. And in no way does your work or mine say, like, trust in the universe. The universe will take care of you. Like, you know, that is like, one of the least comforting things that somebody with PTSD could carry be like, no, the universe does not take care of you.
Ellen:Yeah. Or this was meant to be. Like, come on now. No, don't say that.
Meredith:One of the most horrible. Yeah. Like, this was meant to be is like, an unforgivable thing to say to somebody. I think discerning when is it dangerous and when is it not is at the heart. I mean, you're helping me understand how that's at the heart of our. Our very evolutionary process into becoming human beings. Like, without the ability to discern danger and run away or play dead, we wouldn't have evolved or survived as a species or as individuals. But also without the ability to discern when it's safe and it's time to rest and digest, when it's time to connect and to, you know, copulate and raise children, like, without that, we also wouldn't have survived. And so I think there's a way of. Of honoring the. Honoring all the hard work that a trauma survivor does to stay alive and helping them. See, actually, staying alive also requires rest, and to do that, you need to be able to discern when. That's. When it's appropriate to let your guard down.
Ellen:Yeah. I think the other part of what is so beautiful about this conversation is that healing is possible because our systems are wired to protect us, but they're also wired to heal. But we might need help, and it's okay to ask for help.
Meredith:Yes.
Ellen:So I. That's brings me to another question I had wanted to ask you, which is, if they can't find you or they want to see somebody in person and they don't live in Boulder, what are the kind of key terms or words that they should be looking for on a provider's like website or bio or ask specific questions in an interview or a consult with them to know that they're using a process that's going to be not just trauma informed on paper, but really resonant with caring for what they're about to be going through so that they can heal.
Meredith:That's such a great and such a helpful, generous question. So there are about three evidence based modes of treating trauma that are proven to be highly efficacious. So when you decide you find somebody that you like the look of, they say that they're trauma informed. These are some of the things that you can ask for. You can, you can start out by saying like, what modalities do you use to work with trauma? Prolonged exposure is one of the proven modalities. I don't use it. It can be really, really hard for some people and it can also be really, really incredible. So prolonged exposure is essentially like repeatedly reliving the traumatic event. So a therapist or a coach may have you record a narrative like yourself telling it, and then they have you re listen, you know, listen to that. And I'm not trained in prolonged exposure, so I'm not sure everything that they do, but it is evidence based. The vet, the VA uses that a lot. Cpt, my favorite cognitive processing therapy, also used by the VA and incredibly effective. It was designed for sexual assault survivors, but it also works so effectively for combat veterans and really kind of any kind of trauma that it's used and often widely covered by insurance, at least you know, for, for veterans associations, folks. Brain spotting and EMDR are also extremely efficacious. I do an integrative approach in my work where I sometimes will go straight into brain spotting. But often we do a mixture of cpt, cognitive processing and the brain spotting work. So brain spotting, or EMDR, if you're not familiar with it, I'll just give a brief definition. It works. It accesses the trauma through the limbic system. So not through the prefrontal cortex, not through the conscious cognitive part of the brain. Brain spotting was designed by a psychologist who was working with athletes who after an injury that they sustained while in athletic performance, were up to snuff with their, you know, their fitness and everything. But they just couldn't, they had this, this the stuck point around returning to performing that particular move. And when they talked about it in a therapeutic session, their eyes would sort of fixate at this particular point when they were talking about the memory of the injury. And he, Richard Schwartz, the clinical psychologist, speculated that the rigidity of the eyes in that point was corresponding with the point in the brain where the trauma was located. And so the therapist will have you find that spot. They go through an exercise to help you find that spot as you're starting to storytell. And then they'll have a pointer where you can, you can stare at that point on the screen or in person and you tell the story and go into that memory. And it's much more effective processing it by locating your, your, that particular spot than it is without it and brain spotting the way I do it. And that is just so amazing and effective. Again, it just, it uses the power of our malleable storytelling. So we go in, we go back into the event, but then we also go in in a, in separate sessions, subsequent sessions, to kind of redo the event. So for instance, after I had very traumatic childbirth experience, I processed that with brainspotting and then brought in this beautiful fairy woman who came into the hospital and lifted me up and brought me to this forest where I was able to give birth kind of in peace and without the near death experience that.
Ellen:I, this is the visualization exercise. I just want to caveat. Cause I was like, wait, you invited in a fairy?
Meredith:She invited in a fairy woman, invited.
Ellen:In a hippie who came in hospital?
Meredith:No, I was not a doula, okay? It was my imagination. But the thing about the imagination is we can do anything with it. And in these particular containers that, you know, therapy and coaching offer, these active imagination exercises can restructure our brains, patterns of thinking. So that in real life, even though we know there wasn't actually a fairy woman, even though we know our mother didn't actually take good care of us after we were injured or whatever, the, the, the sore point. Even though we know that you, you know, never got to find the body of the loved one in Rwanda, in the, in the imaginative retelling, this amazing ability, our brains have to be malleable. We can imagine that we got to care for the body. We imagine that our body got to be cared for. And our brain, in imagining that, then gets to kind of live that in real life. It starts choosing different pathways in its thinking and response to triggers.
Ellen:And you're offering. So two things. One, I'm the most woo woo person out there. So if you did have a hippie fairy woman come into the hospital, it would have been great. I didn't mean to make that sound like a hippie woman came in. What? No. So that not at all. Clear that up. And you are allowing, when you do the imaginative piece and the revisualization, you're actually allowing the body to have an experience. Yes, to feel it. Because this is why I loved kinesthetic like learning so much. So I used to be an experiential educator with environmental science and education in my 20s. And the, the leaps and bounds forward I saw in students because I was like at a science school and we would visit regular schools and the kids would have us for a week for these like great outdoor field trips based out of actually Vail, Colorado, so close to you. And the, the learning that I would see through kinesthetic exercise just by hiking in the woods and also like hiking in the woods. How can you not have a better experience?
Meredith:Yeah.
Ellen:In. In education. And so I just really believe in it. And you're making me think of two things. One, in my nervous system supports class, we experimented with having a cold plunge in our mind and watched our bodies respond. And it was incredible. Everybody try it. It's so fascinating because your mind is incredibly powerful, which is what you're saying. And I want to just nail this point home. Just because we retell the story in a, in a different way doesn't mean it's wrong or lying. We can know what happened, but we can still give our bodies the gift of having that beneficial and beautiful experience so that we can give our bodies permission to move forward and heal. And that's what the power of our mind can do. Because I said 80% body to mind. There's this 20% of our mind that can help heal the body and have it the information go the other direction. And that's what that is. When you use the power of your imagination and visualization to create something that your body can experience. Experience that is truly profound.
Meredith:Yeah, no story is over. Like, I think probably the most useful thing I take from my decade of literary training is that when you read a novel, and I'm going to bring this up, not because it's a hobby horse of mine, but because I think it is actually easier for us as beings who are in search of healing to see how something works in a novel than how it works in ourselves. When you read a book and you see a character headed in a certain direction and maybe the book ends with a tragedy and the character, this beloved character dies or something horrible happens, you can, you know that there were other ways that book could have ended. Like the author made decisions and the character made decisions. And every story has a million possible different outcomes. And endings. And there are so many forks in the road. Like, the road of our life has so many forks. And there's no. Like, somebody could have been struggling with PTSD for the last 60 years and have comorbidities up the wazoo. From alcoholism to self harm to suicidal ideation to, you know, domestic abuse. Whatever it is, it's actually never too late because we are ultimately the authors of our own lives. That means we need help when stories are really impacted to change course. But it's never too late. And the change that can occur is as small or as big as we can imagine.
Ellen:Yeah.
Meredith:And I think that's why working with active imagination, with just how far our brain can go in seeing what could be possible is worth enacting. It's not. It's not a pie in the sky exercise. It's actually the gift that our brains were born with as humans, that they are so malleable.
Ellen:Absolutely. And makes me just think how, if the stories are impacted and you don't know yet that you get to be the author of an alternative creation. It's important to have permission and give yourself permission to ask for help or to receive help if it's offered, because we're a social species and we really weren't meant to go through everything alone. There's a whole narrative, especially in our country, of bootstrapping it and independence and not burdening others with our troubles, but really healing. And I'm. I feel certain that this happened in Rwanda. Healing happens in community.
Meredith:Yes.
Ellen:And so it's just a phrase that's really been in my mind lately around healing. Happening in community. Could be a community of two people. Like when you and I got to work together. Excuse me. And you got to help me heal. Or it can be in. In larger spaces and places. So amazing. Is there anything else that you would like to add? We've had such a rich and robust conversation. Share really quickly where people can find you if they want to connect with you.
Meredith:Uh, the best place is my website, Dr. Meredithshepherd.com I'll spell it because some people mistake me or. Or think it's funny that I have the same name as a prominent character in Grey's Anatomy. Oh. Yeah.
Ellen:I. Yes.
Meredith:So if you Google my name one way you'll definitely find her. She's.
Ellen:You'll find Meredith Gray.
Meredith:You'll find Meredith Gray who actually took Dr. Shepherd's name.
Ellen:But. Yeah, but we all know. Everyone knows about MER. Okay. Right. Yeah.
Meredith:So it's Dr. M E R E D T-H S H-E-P A R D.com so. Dr. Meredithshepherd.com and as to what else to say, I just, I feel so filled with gratitude for you, Ellen, for your journey, and also for everyone. I have been there myself. For everyone who needs and wants healing and feels vulnerable and small and feels trapped by their own story. Those are the people I love. Like, those are my people.
Ellen:And I mean, again, like you, we mentioned a number of like, kind of like war veterans or assault victims and situations like that. But like, let's not forget, like, I think, I think especially postpartum women sometimes don't think that their thing is, but.
Meredith:That they have trauma because we don't have many cultural narratives that even acknowledge that as trauma.
Ellen:I had to.
Meredith:I only found that out through my own experience. But that is, there's really high rates of childbirth, PTSD and also parenting trauma. And oftentimes when we are parenting, and parenting is so darn hard, a lot of the time that brings up triggers from our own childhood. So the majority of my clients are not veterans or sexual assault victims or genocide survivors. They are everyday high functioning people who were unloved as children or, you know, have things in the past that still haunt them and, and are impacting their lives in ways that they no longer want to continue.
Ellen:Yeah. Okay. Amazing. And so I will put your website address in the show notes and more information about how to find Meredith. But I want to thank everyone for listening today. It has been such a privilege to finally have this conversation with you, Meredith. I'm sorry. Uh, I'm just so glad. What a beautiful way to start the day. The first conversation of May. Thank you so much.
Meredith:Yes. Happy Spring. On that note of new growth and possibility. Happy spring, Ellen. Thank you.
Ellen:Thank you. Thank you for joining me today on Resilient and Radiant. If today's conversation spoke to your heart, I invite you to subscribe, leave a review, and share this space with the women in your life life who are also finding their way toward their true north. And if you're ready for deeper support, come visit me@Ellen wyomingdeloy.com I'd be honored to walk this path with you. Until next time, stay resilient, stay radiant.