Shownotes
Cora Rennie was a good girl who did everything “right.” Military. Marriage. Motherhood. Long-term partnership. From the outside, her life looked good. Inside, though, something felt off. Cora shares how divorce, a passionate but painful second relationship, and the looming reality of an empty nest forced her to confront the fact that her nervous system, not her conscious mind, had been choosing her partners. As she learned about people pleasing, the fawning response, and what safety really feels like in the body, she started making choices from a different place. If you have ever wondered why you keep repeating patterns in love, or why midlife feels like a blank slate you did not ask for, this episode will land.
Guest Bio
Cora is a recovering people-pleaser, and identifies as a highly sensitive deep-feeler. Through her training to become a biodynamic craniosacral therapist, Cora gained profound insights into the body's innate wisdom, and learned directly in her own body, the importance of a felt-sense of safety.
Cora incorporates the foundations of the cranio modality with her personal gifts and own lifelong healing experiences, to support others in their recovery-of-self processes. She believes there are key components to true, deep, lasting healing that communicate directly to the physiological wiring of our systems, and providing those elements allows for us to cultivate a deep sense of self, resilience, and trust.
Her work combines an understanding of natural body responses with deeply attuned presence, for those navigating complex emotional landscapes.
Turning 40 and choosing safety over chemistry
When Cora Rennie divorced her husband at 36 after 18 years together, it shocked everyone around her. From the outside, their marriage looked steady and intact. Inside, they were two conflict-avoidant people growing further apart through miscarriage, postpartum struggles, military deployments, and years of emotional disconnection. What followed was a fast, passionate relationship filled with chemistry, red flags, financial strain, betrayal, and hard-earned clarity. But beneath the relationship drama was a woman beginning to understand how a lifetime of living by “the next step” had shaped her choices. In her early 40s, staring down the reality of becoming an empty nester, Cora finally made a choice that felt like her own. And that changed everything.
In This Episode, We Talk About:
- How a “good girl” identity can quietly become a people-pleasing pattern that runs your life
- The moment Cora realized she could not stay in a marriage where emotions were unwelcome but intimacy was expected
- Why intense chemistry can cloud discernment, and how oxytocin plays a role in bonding
- Overlooking red flags, merging finances, and losing herself in a relationship that felt like a “love story” but not a “life story”
- Reconnecting with creativity, sensuality, and art as part of reclaiming her identity
- Discovering the fawning response and how the nervous system can unconsciously choose our partners
- Facing the empty nest transition and asking, “Who am I now?”
- The difference between living by default and making a conscious, heart-led choice
- How biodynamic cranio psychotherapy and nervous system regulation reshaped her healing
Cora’s story is not just about divorce, dating, or even people pleasing. It is about the shift from living by internalized programming to living by conscious choice. For most of her life, each step she took felt predetermined, like the next logical box to check. Military. Marriage. Motherhood. Partnership. Even divorce felt like the inevitable next move. But in midlife, she looked at a blank slate. In the stillness before her youngest left home, she realized this was the first time she could choose without reacting, without fawning, without following a script. When the external noise quieted enough that she could hear something internal speak up, she found the heartbeat of this midlife transition so many of us experience.
If this episode resonated with you, please take a moment to rate, follow, and share The Big Four Oh. It helps more people find these conversations and realize they are not alone in their own turning-40 transition.
Guest Resources
Cora’s offer for listeners: $40 OFF the Understanding People Pleasing Summit VIP All Access Pass
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Recovering people pleaser? Same here.
From Pleasing to Peace is a free guide based on real stories from this podcast: people who’ve done the brave work of untangling people pleasing at midlife. www.thebigfouroh.com/peoplepleaser
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Transcripts
Cora: Hi Cora. Welcome to the show. Hi. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Stephanie: I am excited to have you here. You and I first met through your podcast where you were doing a whole series on understanding people pleasing, which I was so thrilled to be a part of. So thank you first for having me on that. But also, oh my goodness, what important work.
Cora: Thank you. Thank you.
Stephanie: The people pleasing, comes up, occasionally, but regularly enough in some of these conversations about the messy middle and this midlife transition somewhere around age 40. I feel like this is a time where people finally realize that about themselves, that they're saying yes to things they don't wanna say yes to, that they're trying to make people happy and not making anyone happy, and things like that. That seems to be something that happens at this time of life.
Cora: Yeah.
Stephanie: Yeah. But today, and, I don't know if that's foreshadowing or not, if this has a place in your story, but, today I wanna talk a little bit about you and about your midlife transition, which has a couple of really interesting parts. So let's start at the beginning where we always do. Tell me a little bit about your background and kind of the forces that shaped you into who you were when our story begins, which for you is in your mid thirties.
Cora: Yeah, so the forces that shaped me. Well, I have a lot of ideas about that now that I've gone through it. But, so who wa who was I? I was a, a people pleaser, but I didn't know it at the time. I just thought I was, you know, very nice and, a really good student, a really good employee. I was in the military, which is kind of, yeah, nobody would've guessed. But that's, that's how I met my husband. So when you talk about the story beginning in my mid thirties, he and I divorced when I was 36. And, and it.
Stephanie: And you'd been together a long time at that point.
Cora: Yeah, because we were babies in college when we met, so we had been together for 18 years. And I think looking back at it, the way I frame it now, is that we both had this ideal of what life and marriage and partnership was gonna be, and we both fit the picture of each other's ideal really well. But then real life happened and neither of us had the self-awareness or the ability to communicate. We were both conflict avoiders, like to the max. So I ended up leaving the military, but he was still in the military, so we lived the military lifestyle. So moving around so uprooting every four years. And relocating and all of what that entails, like losing an identity and refinding family and just all of those things. We had, a miscarriage and struggled to really relate to each other through that experience. And then two other babies and the postpartum and all of the things that entails.
He did a tour in Afghanistan and I ended up being a single mom for two years and a city that I was brand new in. So just lots of life happen to us in that time, and we just kept plowing on these parallel paths, but not connecting together. So in circumstances that, you know, could potentially allow people to grow closer together, we ended up just growing further and further apart.
And so when our marriage ended, it surprised everybody. Everybody was shocked. And I think a lot of people, relate to that story. There's so much that happensunder the roof, and within your partnership and relationship that from the outside, like nobody really knows what's going on. But we were definitely not the couple that ever showed, like we just never argued in front of our kids or anybody. Nobody really understood how alone we each were in our marriage. And so when we did try the couples counseling and just too little, too late, right? Like it, it allowed us to bring some closure and some understanding, but it still didn't allow us to come back together.
So ultimately our relationship changed. It didn't end because then we were co-parents of our two children. They were seven and 11 when we divorced. And we've always been fantastic co-parents, like we thrived in that capacity. We just didn't thrive and didn't figure out how to thrive as an intimate couple.
Stephanie: Let me ask you, if you don't mind to dig in a little further. So one of the things that I hear over and over again, and one of the real consistent themes about this transition somewhere around our 40th birthday is that the sound of all of the shoulds in the world that we hear and we bear and we, adhere to, starts to go down. It starts to get quieter, and the sound of our internal voices and our true inner voice and inner knowing starts to turn up a little bit. And for a lot of us, this is a, a big, you know, trial and error. This is a big, which do I trust? This is a big shift in trust from outside to inside.
Was that part of your story in those mid thirties and those couple of years, kind of before the end of your marriage and as your marriage was ending? Were there things that you were finally admitting to yourself or hearing from sort of inside your ribcage that you were paying attention to now that you hadn't been paying attention to?
Cora: I mean, yes and no. Definitely I was living a life of shoulds, but I didn't have the awareness of that. I think ultimately for me it was the pain of, the pain of staying in that relationship became more than, you know, the hardship and the pain of the moving on to something else. So it's, it is interesting that, when I looking back, I'm like, yeah, I definitely was just living a life of shoulds, but I didn't have the awareness of it in that way that you're describing.
Yeah.
Stephanie: Okay. So you left that marriage and you became successful co-parents, which is a lovely story, but then you got into another long relationship. Tell me a little bit about that.
Cora: Holy man. Yeah, I jumped real quick into that one. So in hindsight I'm like, wow. But anyways, yes, I, within a couple months of us separating, I ended up in another relationship where we ended up living common law for five years together. And yeah, so I, I mean I, yeah, we may go into TMI information here, but, so in my marriage, yeah.
And I think a lot of people can relate to this too. My marriage was pretty much a sexless marriage for many years. And I am understanding now thatthat was me driving that. So I was not wanting to be physically intimate with my husband. And I understand now that it has to do with how safe I felt with him emotionally, and that we were just so emotionally disconnected that I couldn't go there physically. And, but, and that was ultimately what drove the ending of that relationship.
So as I said, we were in couples counseling and when we started the couples counseling, our counselor had us agree that there would be zero physical intimacy while we were in that process.
And so up until that point it was just a lot of him asking and me saying no in a million different ways. And sometimes me saying yes when my whole system was saying no. So that's also a really dangerous vibe. But I think a lot of women can relate. So ultimately then we were having all of these conversations around our emotional experiences for our entire marriage. And there was one conversation in particular where I was just like in the depths of the emotion of it. I believe it was when I was talking about my experience of the miscarriage and his reaction to it, and I was just really baring my soul and he was kind of actually kind of going like this. You should be talking about that with your therapist, which I had been, 'cause we each had our own individual counselor and then our couple's counselor. But he really was like, put that away and go fix your problems somewhere else. And he's I don't wanna see that. Not in so many words, but almost.
And, And it was shortly after that he kind of made an advance on me and was kinda like, Hey. And I was like, excuse me, what is this all about? And he's well, we've been, the vibe between us has been so good. We're more relaxed around each other. We've been having all these conversations and the counseling. I thought we were good.
And in that moment I knew that I couldn't be with a man who was like, put away your emotions, but take off all your clothes, please. And I'm like, those two don't go together. And I knew that I would never want to have sex with him again. And that was the clarity for me, that this was not a marriage.
So that clarity came. But then I also had an understanding that there was a whole side of me that had been very unexpressed for years. Like just my sensual, sexual side. And I wanted to reconnect with that. And so part of me jumping into this other relationship was that there was a whole lot of that and it was tons of fun.
And, so I was re-exploring that side of it. And, but there were, there was also, there were so many red flags, and just so many other issues and other like really big pieces of stress and other like really big reasons to not dive into a partnership with this man, but I ended up doing it. And then, yeah, later I learned that, the oxytocin after orgasm is a real thing and that women need to be careful.
Like honestly the bonding and the feelings that flood your entire system, that make you think that this person is so great and all that you need ever, forever. That really happens in our systems when we're experiencing orgasm. And so,that really clouded my ability to really discern, is this person a good partner?
And it's a whole, I love listening to Esther Perel 'cause she's got a, a talk on the difference between who you choose, like the people that you can have a love story with versus the people you can have a life story with. And so I had a great love story with this guy, but shouldn't have created a life story out of it, but I did.
So yeah, five years with him, that ended in lots of ouchiness.
Stephanie: That, So that's interesting how you just explained that about the oxytocin and the connection and the the thought that went through my head was, well, that explains all of my thirties and all of my twenties.
Cora: I don't think women really get it, but also it's like, how do you really just not enjoy another person and wait the three months or whatever it is that they recommend waiting. I still, even with that knowledge, I still, I'm like, I still don't know how to withhold. I don't know how to do that.
Stephanie: But you're right. Being able to discern, and that's such a great word, discern the difference between that high, that oxytocin and, are you a good person? Are you a good match? Are you good for me? Are you safe? Are you right? That's interesting. I haven't heard that put that way before, which is why I love having these conversations.
Wow.
Wow. That's, thank you for sharing that. And so you said the ending of this relationship was pretty bumpy. Do you know, at the beginning though of this relationship, you said you saw that there were red flags. Can you, figure out now, or in the rear view, do you know why you overlooked the red flags? Were you just, again, prioritizing that, sexual connection over
Cora: For sure.
Stephanie: Other things? Yeah. Yeah.
Cora: Well, and I think that, yeah, I created this story. And I told myself this story that, the reason that he and I were so good together in the bedroom was that I felt emotionally connected to, and I, what I was able to bear my heart and soul. And he just never blinked at anything. And it wasn't until a couple years in that I was like, every time I ask about him, he's, he doesn't say any. Like he wasn't, there was no, there's nothing really reciprocal there. And then also the whole, like his whole vibe around women and women's bodies wasn't just for me, but I created this story that it was. And so he ended up being just a complete flirt and cheater. So I ended up being cheated on and then caught him with his messages on his phone and confronted him about it. And then we had the whole thing, and then I even was still so caught up in, okay, but we're soulmates and like we are meant to be and all of this that I'm like, I'm going to, you know, go the path of forgiveness.
And he looked me in the eyes and told me that he's choosing me and only me and. And then I caught him again cheating. And in the middle of all this, there was, his ex was a complete bully and bullied both of us. And his kids were so volatile because of the way, just all of that. Like when it's bad between the parents, the kids are just caught in the middle, and then they have all these behaviors. And I was trying to come in and figure out that blended family thing.
Our finances, we. This is so strange. I didn't know until that relationship that you don't have to merge your finances with your partner. Isn't that the silliest thing? But that's the way my parents were. That's how I was in my marriage. And,
Stephanie: You just thought this is the way you do it.
Cora: I just never thought anything of it. But he came into the relationship with tons of debt and I was just like, oh well, now it's our problem. But it became our problem. Our problem, more and more and more. Like I thought, you know? And so we just kept digging deeper and deeper and I ended up losing a lot of equity. Like I just, yeah, it was really rough on a lot of different levels and,
Stephanie: But there were some good things that were happening in your life at this time as well. You told me that you were kind of reconnecting to yourself as an artist.
Cora: So, and I,
Stephanie: sort of feels connected to that sort of sexual awakening. Those creative part, the, this blooming piece. Tell me a little bit about that.
Cora: Well, and that is so interesting because, it is great to be able to tell one's story over and over again, because I hadn't, until I was doing the synopsis for you. I hadn't really pieced all those pieces together, because part of me was really like, oh, I was with this man, and it's so shitty that I ended up in this situation, and I should have known, I should have. But when I look at what else was going on in my life and the whole context of it. Yeah. Like I started drawing again. So way back in grade school, I I was so interested in art. I was coloring and drawing and everything all the time, and my parents put me in an art by correspondence course. So that's, 'cause that's how old I am. I sent it in snail mail and got my lessons through snail mail. So they helped me kind of foster that and that all kind of disappeared when I joined the military. But then, yeah, in this period of my life, like you said, it really was a part of just reconnecting to my sensuality and and just expressing myself in different ways. And, and yeah, so I really treasure that. And also, And I can also see connections to how, my daughter's artful expression was also being fostered in that time. And she's artistic in a million different ways, way beyond the way I'm artistic.
And I also, because of all of our money struggles, it was, Imperative for me to find employment that would have a different kind of level of income than what I had been as a, you know, single mom kind of half time with my kids. And I ended up working in a veterinary clinic with this group of women that they became my family in a lot of different ways. Like it, it was a job I loved. So I had these other areas of my life that were building up and becoming more resourceful and fulfilling and, and honestly I feel like all of that ultimately when I left that relationship was, what do I wanna say about that? Yeah, I guess that I just had this understanding that there was more to me than, my partnership. And I feel like my whole life I don't know, somehow had that program running that I was just meant to be somebody's partner and a mother, and that was what life was all about.
Stephanie: Yeah. One of the things you said to me when we were corresponding was, and this was so beautiful, so it was about this period of time in your life, you said, life has a funny way of being all shades of color and never just black and white. And I love that.
Cora: Yeah. And you know what, that was kind of my thought about myself when I left my marriage. So he was a man that was very, everything's black and white, right or wrong. People are either smart and logical, or they're a complete idiot. That was just how he saw life. And,and when we were first together, I think that's what, so as a people pleaser, I think that's what I found really attractive about him, is that he just had such clear opinions on everything. And when somebody's like that, it's really easy to know where you stand and it's really easy to fit into what, what's gonna be accepted.
Stephanie: It's probably really easy to figure out how to make them happy too.
Cora: Yeah.
Stephanie: How to please them. You don't have to wonder. They've made it very clear.
So, talking about the people pleasing, do you know where it comes from? Is that something you picked up in childhood? Is, where do you think that, where do you think that seed got planted and why?
Cora: Yeah. Yeah. So doing the summit, I became really clear on that just because of all the amazing people I was able to interview. And, yeah, it's really a nervous system response that happens probably even like when you think about attachment theory and bonding, to our caregivers. I believe it starts then.
It has to do with being a wee little mammal baby with our little social, animal nervous systems that require connection to a caregiver for survival. And so if there's any sense of disconnect that's not then repaired, our little nervous systems just start spiking in distress and overwhelm. So that's where it starts is my understanding.
So even my birth story, for example, in the seventies, my mom, there was some difficulty during birth where she was hemorrhaging and they whisked me away off into a nursery, which is even a different floor of the hospital, which I think is normal anyway. But, I think I was there for an extra amount of time before she held me because she had all kinds of blood transfusions and all kinds of things. So she actually told the nurses, she's I don't want my baby with all these things attached to me. Wait till all this is done. So yeah, just in those moments, I think not being held gives some kind of feedback to our nervous system.
And so the one of our survival responses is the fawning response where we just, kind of go out of our way to be or do or behave in the way that's gonna be accepted by somebody else. So it's like we, we try all these things to figure out what's gonna work to have the caregiver want us around. And that just keeps running in our systems.
And it's something that gets reinforced because of some of our culturaland societal influences. Just behaving and being quiet and being nice and like, all of those behaviors get really rewarded so that gets rewarded. But also in our nervous system, whatever defense mechanism works is what the nervous system will default to again in the future. So if fawning worked before, it's gonna work again. And if it's something that you're never, aware of or never able to tend to what's actually happening in your nervous system in terms of how we feel safe with other people, it just perpetuates.
And yeah. fast forward then at some point in my dating life, I'm in therapy and my therapist is like, your partners are being chosen by your nervous system. Your fawning response is choosing your partners for you. And I was just like, what? Because I really thought I was being conscious about making different choices. Yeah. Yeah. It's tricky.
Stephanie: So that fawning response is really, so to your point, just following up on that, our systems, our little, you know, lizard brains try different things to reconnect, to create that connection. And whichever ones create the connection are the ones that end up turning into patterns. And so whether it's acting out or whether it's being a good girl whichever version of it.
And those patterns become, they are so subconscious, they are so out of our awareness that we don't even know we're doing these things, which makes it hard to find them, to identify them, and to change them. To fix them. Because it because they are so ingrained and you know, just baked into our programming, we don't even know we're doing it. Right.
It's like, the old thing, your, silly uncle, or like takes your hand, it says, stop hitting your head. Stop hitting your head. Stop hitting your head. But he keeps hitting your head with your hand. I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it. But it just keeps happening. Yeah.
Cora: So you come out of this relationship, you're in your early forties, you're like 42, and you spend like the next five years, and you've just kind of touched on that dating, getting into therapy, learning some of these things about yourself,and then coming into your late forties, your youngest was, going into the last year of high school.
Yeah.
Stephanie: Yeah? Which also probably sets off alarms, right?
Cora: It totally did. And for me, that was my awareness of, oh, I have a big transition coming up. So for me it was that impending, oh, I'm gonna be an empty nester in less than a year. And whoa, what does that mean? So for all intents and purposes, I had gone from being a full-time mom up until like my kids were seven and 11, and then it was like I was a mom half of the time, but not really. Like you still always have mom-brain. But I just had this awareness that, when he graduated and left to go do his life. My daughter was already off university. I would just, I just, I knew there was gonna be this sort ofwhat now? Like panic was starting to set in. What now? something else needs to take the place of that energy. But it was also just a sense of not just now I'm gonna be a mom of something else like it. I knew it wasn't that, but it was almost like, who am I? Well now it's, now I have to live my life, which I'm like, well, maybe I'm a little bit too codependent in my parenting that I was living my kids' life. But yeah, like totally, like now there's gotta be something like this whole new chapter of life in front of me that what was I gonna do? Who am I now, is what it felt like. and yeah, so then. That was what I was tackling in therapy.
Stephanie: It's a real blank slate moment.
Cora: Yes.
Stephanie: Where from the time you were 20, there were always pieces on the board that were part of what you were doing. A husband young, and you had kids young and you know, had a divorce and you were co-parenting. There were always pieces on the board that you could build around. And yet at this point in time, you're looking down the road and seeing. all the pieces swept off the board. And I understand right, the kids are still on the side of the board. You're always gonna be a mom, but they're on their own. They're, you know, mostly self-sufficient.
So this is another thing that I see all the time in these conversations, is that conversations of identity come up. Whether it's I'm leaving the job I've been at for 25 years, or my kids are graduating, or you know, coming up to 40, there are some people who think, I always thought I'd have kids, but it just doesn't look like it's gonna happen, right? So the things that we think about ourselves start to shift.
The other piece about this is that for most of this time, we place our identity in things that are outside of us versus things that are inside of us. And that means that things can be taken away. They can go without our consent, right.
You were a wife and then you were divorced. You were a mom, and then you were only a part-time mom. Identity is a big piece in this midlife shift of figuring out who am I...without.
Cora:
And you're right with the whole that blank slate piece because, and I hadn't thought of it this way, but it really did feel like the first time in my life that I made a choice. Which is kind of silly, like clearly I chose to go into the military, but not really. It just felt like the next step. I was in Army Cadets and then found out there were military colleges where the military pays for your education. I didn't have the funds to pay for university. It just seemed like a normal next thing.
And then met the guy there and then he proposed and I said yes. But it just felt like the next thing. Like all of these things felt like, yeah, even the divorce, it felt like, it wasn't a choice. It was the next step.
I don't, yeah, it's very interesting, but this was a place where it's definitely like there's something here for me to make a choice, not just follow a step. It felt very different.
Stephanie: And I just wanna pause and point out how profound that statement is, because you said earlier that you didn't really feel like your life was necessarily run by the shoulds. But the way that you've just said it is, it was just the next step. You were performing to a plan or a, a roadmap almost again, like the fawning response. It was subconscious, it was you didn't have a part in.
Cora: I mean, you played a part, but you weren't controlling it. And so this piece of where you just said, this is the first time I felt like I made a choice is profound.
Yeah. That's a big deal. Yeah.
Stephanie: How did it feel to make a choice?
Cora: Uh, so what I chose to do was take two years of study to become a biodynamic cranio psychotherapist. And so that's a modality that had kind of come in and out of my, what do I wanna say? Anyway, I had been aware of it like years previous. But when I actually sat down and had the question, okay, what am I gonna do now?
The first thought that came to mind was cranio sacral therapy. I'm like, oh, interesting. Yeah, maybe I could be interested in that. And so I started googling and looking things up, and there was an information webinar like just that weekend. And I was like, oh, that's great timing. Imagine that. And then, after that, I committed to go to the first seminar.
And while I was there in the first day of the first seminar, I'm like, this is what I need to do. This feels like home to me. And so I think, I guess what I wanna say about that is I, I feel like there was something in me that was open up to Like a calling to come forward and, and call me forward.
So it wasn't like I had to sit with lists of pros and cons and what do I think I might decide to do? There was something that chose me. So even though I was making a choice, like it opened up this other, this other way of kind of being and interacting and having something else come and express through me in a completely different way. Like it wasn't cerebral really.
Stephanie: Well, and I just wanna go back because, earlier I mentioned that one of the things we see at this time of life is the volume on the external and the shoulds and the check boxes being turned down, and the volume on our internal voices being turned up. And you didn't use the same language, but you just said exactly the same thing.
Right?
You, you cleared everything else away and made space for. The way you described it as you were being called to it. I'm sure you could also describe it as you finally listening and trusting when something grabbed your heart and soul and said, we need to do this. Where 15 years before you might have said, well, I can't because, because, because, because, because. So you, you did just illustrate that magnificently.The way that you said, you know, it was a calling and it's something that you couldn't not do. That's amazing. It's beautiful.
Cora: Yeah. Yeah. And it's definitely also the difference between. When you, yeah. So when your nervous system has like threat responses running that, that's where it's like the no brainer. You just kind of fall into what, I guess that is, that's the feeling of your nervous system choosing things for you. And then, versus what you were just about heart and soul.
There's a difference when you're heart is actually leading you. Even though I thought my heart was leading me, 'cause I was looking for love like the whole time. But,there's a different, yeah, the actual heart of your like purpose and your just self-expression. Yeah. It's different.
Stephanie: Okay.
So. I wanna talk a little bit about this. This has only come up in a handful of conversations. Let's talk about the nervous system a little bit, because this is something that is bubbling up online. We're seeing more of it, we're seeing more people on Instagram talking about, nervous system healing. But there are experts in the field. There are people who've been doing it for a long time, and there is realness to this area of thought and study and exploration. Peter Levine is one of the sort of OG nervous system people. I founded a couple of years ago through a woman by the name of Irene Lyon who,who was a somatic therapist and then put a course online that is very well, thought of. And she's been doing it for 10 or 15 years now, sort of before the trend. But
Cora: Yes,
Stephanie: Five years ago, none of us thought about our nervous systems. We never uttered the word. We didn't know that it had any place in our lives. And I think there's a, a sort of burgeoning understanding in a sort of common cultural way of the fact that nervous system can at least affect us.
Some people believe more, believe less, it's fine. But tell me a little bit about those years when you were in therapy and learning about your nervous system. Tell me how that kind of dawned for you, your understanding of it, your understanding of the role it played in your life. What kind of, and I'm not asking for nitty gritty, but like what kind of things were you doing with your therapist that, that were a part of that?
Cora: Yes. So it's two separate things that were happening at the same time in my life that were supporting my healing. So I had my therapist that I was working with and she was the one that introduced me to the idea of the fawning response. And we were talking a little bit about manifesting, but I was like, wait, because I'm like, but I know I have trauma. And she's like, oh. She's like, yeah, you can't manifest anything unless your nervous system's regulated. And I was like, Hmm. Like all of these little, I'm like, that's interesting. And so at the same time I had started the training in biodynamic cranio psychotherapy, and it's a modality that's really about nervous systems talking to nervous systems.
So as the nervous system of the practitioner, is really regulated and grounded, and then you're touching into the client's body on the table and their nervous system is able to co-regulate. And that's how we're designed as human beings. The other thing about that therapy is that the practitioner is really listening to what the body is expressing in that moment. There are many modalities out there that of course are also beneficial, but are, making adjustments to the body, or like using certain protocols. Like, oh, you have migraines, the protocol is we do this, this, this, this to your body. And not really acknowledging that every individual is so unique and complex and that there might be different priorities for their specific body in that moment of time with that particular practitioner. All of those things.
So there's a whole other level of safety that gets communicated to a person's system when the person touching does not have an agenda or intention of making anything change. So there's no intention of fixing or getting rid of. It's really just meeting whatever stories in the body that hasn't yet been met or expressed. And often the person in the body has never met what hasn't been expressed. Like how just that element of how we're pushing away, our own experiences or parts of our experiences that we've been taught are too overwhelming or just aren't acceptable. And so we dissociate within ourselves from our own actual lived experience. So anyway, that's a lot to say.
What I learned about the nervous system was more about what I learned about safety. But that's the important part is that our, the easy way to say it is to talk about it in terms of nervous system because people are understanding it now that a nervous system under threat or that's perceiving a threat or feels it's in danger, is going to go into fight or flight or freeze or fawn.
Like we have all these things. But there's an understanding that if the body is feeling that there's danger, it's doing something. And, the other side of that equation that doesn't always get talked about is that when the body is geared up for fight or flight, it is using, it's devoting its resources to the things that might help it deal with the threat.
And so in like, in the real physiology of it, and I'm not a nervous system expert, but that means that blood is now flowing to your external muscles so you can run or fight, and it's flowing away from your digestive system, for example. Like just different things are happening. But the, in the big picture context of it, if our system has energy devoted to deal to a threat, that energy is not available for healing.And we're meant to flow in and out of all of those nervous system states really responsibly, like just in response to what's happening in our environment moment to moment. Just to be like, to feel, oh, there was a weird noise. There's agitation. Oh, I can turn and see that, oh, that now I'm safe. And then your system comes back down. And our systems, unfortunately, are almost always in threat response and um,
Stephanie: Yeah, there's a great, there's a couple of, well, there's a great video and I think this is one of the Peter Levine videos, of the, I'm sure you've seen it. There's a video of a polar bear who was, shot with a tranquilizer because they were gonna, they were measuring him or tagging him or something. And so the scientists went and did what they needed to do, and they had a video camera on him the whole time. And then as he woke up, he shook and sort of like vibrated and then calmed. And it was, it was the expression of the fight or flight that he was feeling when the dart hit him and he completed that expression and he could continue on. And that is the thing that we as humans don't do well and that we are, I think,programmed and,there's a word I'm looking for,oh shoot. I can't think of the word I'm looking for.
For example, a little kid starts to cry and the mom says, don't cry. Don't cry. Stop crying. Stop crying. And so the kid has to swallow whatever response they're having, which is a natural response for a child or a baby, right? And if they're never able to then complete that response, it gets stuck in the body. And that is some of the trauma that we hold.
Many of us, most of us, even those of us who didn't experience the capital T traumas of abuse and neglect and violence and harm. But, even those moments of disconnection, like you were talking about earlier, as a baby, as a child, as a pre-verbal human being, moments of disconnection where you were crying and nobody came to pick you up, or you were crying and somebody, you know, yelled at you to stop crying. Those moments become stored in the body. And that is again, sort of the basis of, Peter Levine's work with somatic experiencing and Bessel VanDerKolk with The Body Keeps The Score and some of those things.
There's a burgeoning awareness of these things and being called,complex trauma and complex, PTSD, and these are the things that weren't a car accident. They were things that happened on an ongoing basis through our our childhoods because our parents, even when they did their best, sometimes were not able to meet all our needs. Or maybe they didn't even know they weren't meeting a need and, you know, things like that.
So this is a, this is such a burgeoning, area of awareness and knowledge building these days. I love that you're bringing all of this to me today.
Cora: Yeah. Yeah. So it just to tie it together, it was the hearing the word fawning, and then having the experience of safety while I was on the table receiving a session that kind of clicked it all together for me. Yeah, and that the other piece I wanna say, 'cause the, the other thing that's kind of new in terms of the nervous system talk is the, the understanding of the social nervous system.
And sowhen there's stored trauma, and a lot of us go into freeze response. So ifI don't know how much to get into it, but that, yeah.
So you're, you're fighting against the threat or you're fleeing from the threat and then your body decides all of this for you. If you, if your system perceives that you aren't strong enough or fast enough to successfully fight, flee or, or fight back, then you'll go into a freeze, which is more of a shutdown. And fawning is also, Yeah, so freeze is more like a collapse, and then fawning is more like a approximating yourself to the threat. This is specifically socially, so the appease and please. But when our systems are frozen, there's a part of our social nervous system that actually shuts down.
There's a whole lot of, a lot of talk these days about functional freeze, how we're actually carrying a lot of freeze in our systems, but we can still function in society. Like our systems are kind of amazing and brilliant that we can still do that even though it's pain causing. But that impacts like when we have our, our, our little babies and they're learning social cues and our systems are in freeze, there's less happening in our face that they're able to respond to, and their systems don't quite know what to do with that. And so that disconnect happens even from that. Even a well-intentioned mama that really loves her baby might not have the ability to really be expressive in her face to really make that bonding happen. So
Stephanie: Yeah,
Cora: Yeah, I mean, that's kind of a lot to think about, but that's a part of it too.
Stephanie: There's another, element, when you said social that made me think of something else. So there was a couple of folks that I did the, Irene Lyon class with who actually are past guests and friends, and one of them, shared an example with us where she walked out of her house one day and there was a bunch of deer out in the yard. And one of them, I think she was bringing out a, a bag of gr, a bag of, gr uh, garage, garage garbage. And one of the deer kind of went like, ha.And the rest of the deer looked up and went oh no, it's just her putting out the garbage. We're okay. Like you, Mr. Ha, you can calm down now because as a group we've identified the threat and it's really not a threat, so you can go ahead and finish your response and go back to eating some grass. And that really stuck with me because it also can sort of exemplify how the people around us cancontribute to our existence. Meaning if that whole group of deer had then gone ha ha, ha ha, and everybody had like, started running in different directions and like, you can see that, if you're with a bunch of people who are dysregulated, and who are, you know, dealing with their own issues, it can create kind of a waterfall effect, whereas the rest of that pack could say no, you're okay. I see it. I see it too. and it's okay. You're okay. And so that to me, when you talked about,the social piece of this, it reminded me of that example. And we, we talked about being the deer pack.
Cora: Yeah. yeah, we sure are right. Because, when people talk about, hurt people hurt people, and trauma begets trauma. But then the rest of the equation is just as that story explains is like a regulated nervous system begets a regulated nervous system. And that also speaks to, my group of people pleasers, like there's, there is a system running and we're like, well, we just care so much about the experience of others, but, honestly, to have the best and greatest and deepest impact on another human being is really tend to your own sense of safety and resource and resilience.
And, yeah, working through the big t little t traumas and all the things that are held in your system and held in your body, that's honestly the quickest, fastest, most effective way to be a really positive impact on the people around you that you care about. The more okay you are with life and the way life is dealing with you and, and showing up, then the more you can help the others around you just be okay with whatever shows up in them and their lives.
So that's really the key I think.
Stephanie: Oh, Cora, this is so great, such good stuff. I love that we really dove into a nervous system talk and helped, put some language around that for people who, who it may be new to. I've enjoyed this so much and I just wanna say thank you so much for being with me today and for being so generous with your story.
I, I just, I think it's been great. Thank you so much.
Cora: Thank you so much. Just thank you for the invitation to be here and to be able to share my story and, yeah. And it is great to be able to share it and even just to have you kind of reflecting different pieces back to me, help me even have a few more ahas about my own narrative and my own past. So thank you for that.
Stephanie: Oh, you're welcome.
