Today's women have impacts ticket to life was far from an admission into Disneyland, but instead a first-class ticket to the Fun House. She found herself going from the merry go round of abuse to the mirrors of self-distortion to the rooms of warped perspectives, and the exit sign was nowhere in sight. From bullying to panic attacks to anxiety to domestic violence, this woman was spinning faster than the teacup ride. But instead of allowing it to break her, she used it as a tool and as a result, earned her resilience from her adversity and learned her courage from her fears. Now creator of Primal Yoga, she leads trauma-informed yoga retreats and workshops all around the world, teaching other trauma survivors how to reclaim themselves through movement. Quickly understand, though, that the body is just one part of the equation. She went on to author the incredibly empowering book The Courage to Rise, a tool guide, if you will, on how we can use movement, mindfulness and healing foods to triumph over trauma. So please, help me in welcoming a certified domestic violence advocate counselor, a martial artist, a mum, an author, a teacher, and the host of the upcoming podcast, Falling Up. The woman that is showing the world what it takes to rise. The courageous Liz Arch. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for that introduction. Well, actually the show, pleasure, my dear. I want to start the way you've structured your book is so incredible. And so I actually wanted to structure this episode like you did your book. Perfect. So you've got four parts to it. The first part is discussing what trauma is and the backstory of how we all have developed trauma in some way shape form and then breaking it down into three parts, the body, the mind and the gut. So, let's start with trauma. Talk to me about trauma. In fact, I actually have a quote from you that I'm going to start with. So you said, trauma began shaping me in early age, slowly grooming me into a person I didn't like or recognize. My trauma was a masterful shapeshifter that clots itself into many disguises, a devastating natural disaster when I was five years old, bullying when I was a teenager and a domestic violence when I was an adult. I thought that post-traumatic stress only came with war, and since I had no combat experience to my name, I declared myself the enemy. Yeah. Yeah, so I didn't even have a context or a framework for what trauma was. I didn't know that I had experienced trauma. So I was experiencing all these different symptoms, like debilitating anxiety. I was later diagnosed with panic disorder and agoraphobia, where I felt this afraid to even leave my house to go to the grocery store to get on an airplane. So it's just my world dramatically started to shrink. I would have rage responses, hypervigilance, and all of this I would have since I was a little girl. And I just had no context of what I was experiencing until I understood.

I started to, I picked up a book by Bessel Vanderkulk called The Body Keeps to Score and it's all about trauma. And basically one of the premises is and the premise of my book is that everyone experiences trauma in some degree to varying degrees and it can shape our lives in in varying, city-as-ways. And so just that piece of understanding that we've been through trauma can be deeply, deeply healing. And that was really the first part of my healing was understanding that I had been through trauma. And so I started researching also trauma-informed yoga. And then when I started learning about trauma-informed yoga, even though I had any yoga teacher for years, but I didn't even know what trauma-informed yoga was. Then I started, you know, encountering and learning about and reading all of these really amazing pioneers that are in the trauma field and looking at trauma and how it impacts our bodies. How do we identify the tumor in the first place? So for you, it was the book you were doing yoga, but let's say someone doesn't have that frame of reference or no yoga or what are a few things that you would say to them to identify that they have trauma that they haven't dealt with? Yeah. And then second of all, how do we start to unravel it when it's so sometimes deep-seated into who we believe we all today. Yeah. Well, first day say that trauma is not necessarily an event itself, but it's how our nervous system organizes around an event. So there's kind of a big misconception that trauma has to be these really big catastrophic events. So something like a natural disaster, a plane crash, war, or a sexual assault, which all, of course, are incredibly traumatic, but trauma can also be smaller, less obvious things. So it can be bullying. It can be really everyday life events that happen to almost all of it, that happen to all of us. So divorce of death, of a loved one, death of a parent, a family member, a friend, even a pet can be really traumatic, can register as traumatic in your nervous system, hospitalizations, any kind of illness. And so it's just understanding that it's not the event itself, but it's how our nervous system organizes around it. And then there's different risk and resiliency factors. So, someone experience the exact same traumatic event and someone else, but they'll respond differently. And so that depends on things like how old you are. So for me, one of my first traumas was the flood. And when I was five years old, it was New Year's Eve. My parents woke us up really frantic and just said,

we have to get out of the house now.

And flood waters were rising when we walked out of the room.

There was water up to our knees and then it was a wrap at the rising. My dad had to put me on his shoulders, carry me out of the house, waiting through water, put me on the roof of our car, and then we had to be rescued by a boat. But my sister was three years older and so she had in a nervous system level and a brain level, because she was a little more developed than I was. And so it impacted her differently than it impacted me. For me, it started creating this sense of chronic unsafety and unpredictability of like nothing in my environment is safe. And this could happen again at any time. So things like how old you are, what kind of support system you have. So even if you're not a child, but your trauma happens when you're an adult. Are you isolated or do you have a big community of support around you can kind of be the gauge of how deep your symptoms will end up being? And there's always a natural period of when we've been through something traumatic of these are, it's natural for anxiety to occur or for fear, but then if those symptoms start to last longer, then three months in your feeling that it's just, you can't shake it and we go through that kind of negative feedback loop of thoughts and we can't get out of it. Then it's time to really start looking at how can I do some trauma resolution in the future. So let's take then the flood for instance, because because that's fascinating, especially because you're so young. Yeah. So how did you identify that that was one thing that actually had affected you? And then what tips can people take from that to do it themselves? So it wasn't until years, years later, until I was in the adult that I really realized the impact that the flood had on me. I would always have nightmares about floods. I mean, that just made sense to me. But I kept having them for years and years and years into my 20s and to my 30s. And then I was having all of these symptoms like hypervigilance where I was constantly on high alert. I was always scanning my environment for danger. So even the slightest noise would jolt me out of sleep at night. I would sleep with a hammer under my bed because I just felt so unsafe. And so that was one of the main traumas, but there was secondary traumatic stress on the periphery of my family tree. So I was exposed to not within my immediate family, my mom and dad were wonderful. But all around me on the periphery of my family tree was domestic violence, was molestation, was addiction issues. And so as a child, you're not consciously aware of it, but unconsciously you're picking up on a lot of those cues. But it wasn't until I was working with a trauma therapist that had me kind of go back and list out. She said, right out all the things in your life that had an impact on you. And so I started listing everything out and I started finding that every New Year's Eve something would happen. And for me, the flood happened on New Year's Eve. And then I was when I was in a domestic violence situation, I would, you know, ended up in jail on New Year's Eve. I would would have fights with whoever the partner I was when I was in a domestic violence situation, I would end it up in jail on New Year's Eve. I would have fights with whoever the partner I was with each New Year's Eve, I would end up like recreating some kind of trauma because my body was just wired for trauma. And Bessel Vanderkulk actually talks about this in his book about reenactment and trauma reenactment and how literally to the day we can unconsciously reenact trauma. What do I think we do that? It's so fascinating because again, it's on a neurobiological level. So he shared that there was a war veteran who had kind of a nervous tick and would kind of look, you know, always look over its decide. I thought it was Tourette Syndrome, but when he started kind of unwinding and going deeper, it was the motion of when he would throw grenades and so it would be this kind of grenade-throwing. And so there's just things that our body stores. Our body really stores. Wow. So you were reenacting it every new year, not really consciously realizing that you were doing it until you had to unpack everything. Yes. Yeah. So again, I was just on a nervous system level because what happens when we've been through trauma is our higher thinking brain, our neocortex, essentially goes offline. So we're living from our primal fight or flight brain. So we have our reptilian brain and then our mammalian brain and then our neocortex, which forms last. And when we're under traumatic stress, that higher brain just kind of flips its lid. And we can't process rational thought. So it doesn't live on that rational level. It lives on the deepest, deepest level. And do you find the understanding it from that type of like, you know, scientific level allows you to like kind of get through it? Or for me, it was huge. Just having that piece of awareness of this is because it's beyond your conscious control. But once you understand that it's beyond your conscious control, then you can start consciously controlling it. And that makes sense. Because you have to have that awareness. If the awareness is not there, then the healing can't really begin. Okay, so that was huge for me. So, okay, you'd been in an abusive relationship, you've broken out of it, you spent years working in yourself,

and then you found yourself back in that same situation.

So talk to me about that because I think that that's

what a lot of people fear just in general,

when you're making a change,

when you're overcoming something,

you're so fear going backwards.

Yes.

And that can really be detrimental,

I think, to any then future progress.

So talk to me about that evolution and then how you found yourself backing that and how you got out of it. Yeah. So it's kind of like that idea of hitting rock bottom. And once you hit rock bottom, you're like, okay, this is it. And that's what I thought I had hit. And then just a few years later, I was right back there and my bottom had bottomed out even further. So what I always like to say to people that I work with is

healing's not linear. And part of the biggest obstacle to healing is shame. And so when we feel like we've taken one step forward and then two steps back or 10 steps back, that can feel really, really detrimental, really harmful, and it can just create this cloud of shame. And shame, what it does is it shuts us down, it shuts us up, it collapses us into a freeze response, into kind of wanting to shut off and hide from the world. And that's where I went. And so it's just understanding that because trauma reenacts itself and that's essentially what was happening, because I

understood what domestic violence was, but I didn't understand it within the context of trauma. So I didn't understand that unconsciously, I was seeking out the same type of person who had harmed me. What felt safe to me in my nervous system was actually very unsafe situations, because that's what I was used to. I was going back to these dangerous situations,

these toxic relationships without really knowing that that's what I was doing. So just having the awareness of this is what's happening enabled me to start to break that cycle. Yeah. Yeah. It's got that's powerful. Yeah. Okay. So let's take it into the three sections now of the book Yeah, hey take me through what made you break into these three components Yeah, and then let's start from the body. Yes So it really is just a guide for healing and resolve manifestations of trauma So I really wanted to look at where does it live and it starts for me with the body We're a fully integrated hole so looking at the body and then looking at bringing our neocortex, bringing our higher thinking brain back online, starting to integrate the two. And then the last piece of my healing was the gut. And there was no kind of trauma resources out there that I had read that addressed how the foods that we could be eating could be exacerbating some of the symptoms that I was feeling like anxiety, like panic, like depression, and how the foods were eating can be our greatest medicine. So I hadn't seen that in the context of trauma before, and that was my own healing journey. And so that's just what I outlined. And it's just one healing path. So for me, the book is Take What Works for You you and some of these things are going to really,

really work for you as an individual and some things you might say, I'm going to pass on that one. So it's not the only path, it's one path of many paths, but it's really empowering and important for me to empower people to be their own best healer and to say this works, this doesn't. I love it so much because that's what you've done to yourself. Yeah, is that you've taken elements of what is work for you?

How do I heal myself? Oh, it's the you've done to yourself is that you've taken elements

of what is work for you.

How do I heal myself?

...