In this episode of Adult Child of Dysfunction, I sit down with Dr. Karen Parker, founder of Quantum Human Design, to talk about something that impacts all of us more than we realize… the stories we carry.
So many of the patterns we struggle with today, whether it’s burnout, feeling stuck, or constantly falling into the same cycles, are rooted in the narratives we formed earlier in life. And the powerful part is… those stories are not fixed.
Dr. Karen shares how her work blends science and spirituality, bringing together concepts like human design, epigenetics, and narrative coaching to help people understand themselves on a deeper level and begin rewriting the story they’ve been living.
We talk about how your past experiences shape your identity, how those patterns can show up emotionally and physically, and what it really looks like to start shifting out of survival mode and into a more authentic, empowered way of living.
If you’ve ever felt like you’re stuck in the same patterns or wondering why healing hasn’t fully clicked yet, this conversation will give you a new way to look at it.
Your story isn’t set in stone… and you have more power than you think to change it.
✨ Connect with Dr. Karen Parker:
Website: https://quantumhumandesign.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drkarenparker22/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@drkarenparker
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrKarenParker22/
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I work with people who are ready to heal from the inside out — especially those dealing with chronic stress, anxiety, inflammation, gut issues, or burnout. If you’ve been struggling with symptoms your doctors can’t fully explain, it may be that your past is still living in your body. Unhealed emotional wounds and nervous system dysregulation often show up as physical and mental health challenges — and I’m here to help you break that cycle. If you are curious about where you stand energetically, or just need a frequency boost, book your FREE biofrequency voice scan here: https://calendly.com/tammyvincent/complimentary-scan-demo
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Well, hello everybody.
Speaker A:Welcome back to another episode of Adult Child of Dysfunction.
Speaker A:Today we have with us Dr. Karen Parker.
Speaker A:She's a leading voice in the field of human design and the founder of Quantum Human Design, a revolutionary system that blends science and spirituality to help people heal from burnout and reclaim their vitality.
Speaker A:With over three decades of experience as a human design educator, TEDx speaker and best selling authority, she has guided thousands worldwide to realign with their authentic selves and rediscover their creative powers.
Speaker A:Her work integrates insights from quantum physics, epigenetics and narrative coaching to empower lasting transformation and resilience.
Speaker A:Welcome, Dr. Karen.
Speaker B:Thank you.
Speaker B:Thank you for having me.
Speaker A:Oh yeah, you're very welcome.
Speaker A:So I wanted to ask you, I was actually looking over this before, and before we even jump in, we're going to jump right in because your story is going to be sprinkled right all throughout this whole thing, how you got where you are and all that good stuff.
Speaker A:But I wanted to ask you, it says you're the founder of Quantum Human Design.
Speaker A:Is that your company?
Speaker B:That is my company, yes.
Speaker A:Okay, okay.
Speaker A:Because I was like, I haven't heard that exact term as far, you know, as far as, like I've heard of human design, I've heard of quantum physics.
Speaker A:So I guess you just kind of encapsulated it all in one.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:So talk about, let's, let's jump right in and talk about how you got interested in this field.
Speaker B:Well, it's a, it's a long story because I've been here for a while, so I'm old.
Speaker B:But you know, I'll say it really, it started my journey, started in the very beginning of my career.
Speaker B:I was a nurse by training.
Speaker B:I was a midwife.
Speaker B:And at that time, this was in the early 90s, late age, early 90s, I was doing home birth.
Speaker B:I had a home birth practice which was not on trend at that time.
Speaker B:And when I was working with my clients, I started to realize that I could almost predict who was going to have complications during the birth process and who was going to have a good birth.
Speaker B:And it kind of boiled down to I could hear in people's narrative, in their story that they were telling that certain aspects of their belief systems and their personal narrative was kind of predisposing them to having challenges during labor.
Speaker B:I, that, that just sort of sparked my attention.
Speaker B:And then I, I sort of stopped having a midwifery practice because I ended up having four, eventually five kids of my own.
Speaker B:And that was hard to balance.
Speaker B:That But.
Speaker B: at and became a Life coach in: Speaker B:Excuse me, Also applied to coaching.
Speaker B:I could hear in people's stories.
Speaker B:Excuse me, I could hear in people's stories what was going on with their relationship with money, their relationship with their work, or with their people in their lives that they loved, what was going on with their body.
Speaker B:You could tell in the story that they were telling about who they are and how they are, where there was a glitch in the program, if you will, a place where some aspect of their narrative was keeping them in a victim story of some kind.
Speaker B:So, again, that kind of stuck in my mind.
Speaker B: And somewhere around: Speaker B:And, you know, human design is a synthesis of Eastern and Western astrology, the Chinese I Ching, the Hindu chakra system system, Judea Kabbalah, and quantum physics.
Speaker B:Really what it is, it's a.
Speaker B:It's a synthesis of ancient and modern archetypes or ancient and modern parts of the human story.
Speaker B:And what I really loved about it was that it gave me a very systematic way to start hearing people's stories and to begin to see where was the glitch in the story.
Speaker B:And so I started really experimenting with using it as a storytelling tool and using it as a tool to really help people dive into.
Speaker B:Where are you holding yourself back?
Speaker A:Where are.
Speaker B:Is your story of what's happened to you from the past caused you to interpret that story in a specific way?
Speaker B:Where has the way you've experienced energy and where have your own lived experience causes have caused you to internalize the message that somehow or in some way it's not okay or safe for you to be who you are or how you are in the world.
Speaker B:Eventually, over time, I started thinking that I started really exploring that it was great to look at the parts of the story that weren't working.
Speaker B:And that was, of course, always an important entry point into decoding the story that you're telling.
Speaker B:But I also started to see that my clients started shifting some.
Speaker B: Around: Speaker B:They'd done a lot of healing, or they'd gone to therapy, or they'd Done a lot of personal growth and development, and they were telling me that.
Speaker B:I love this idea of decoding the story.
Speaker B:I feel like I've already kind of done that.
Speaker B:I know there's something more here with human design, but I don't quite know what it was, what it is.
Speaker B:And so I began to take the human design system apart and look at all of those ancient and modern archetypes or story parts, and started to really explore the question, if.
Speaker B:If this.
Speaker B:If these story parts are the baseline, how do we go from decoding the story to actually recoding it towards optimization and thriving rather than just surviving in life?
Speaker B:That's the short version.
Speaker A:And I mean, it takes a long.
Speaker A:I can only imagine it takes a long time because I know I saw my human design chart, and I have a lady that I deal with, and she's a dear friend, but she will literally say to me, oh, well, you're a five, two.
Speaker A:This, that.
Speaker A:That's why you do this, and that's why you do that.
Speaker A:And.
Speaker A:And I always kind of wondered that, like, okay, so if I'm born and it's astrological, it's, you know, where the stars were on that moment, that time, that day, where, you know, where I was born.
Speaker A:Because I remember setting up my chart.
Speaker A:I think she only needed my birth location, my date, my time.
Speaker A:Like, there was only a few things she needed.
Speaker A:And I thought, well, how does that play into the fact that.
Speaker A:How does that play into what my experience experiences?
Speaker A:How did that change that?
Speaker A:Because, like, I look at me and I'm like, oh, I like this and I like that.
Speaker A:But I'm like, but I'm afraid of this because of my human experiences.
Speaker A:So how do they.
Speaker A:How does that work together?
Speaker B:I.
Speaker B:That's.
Speaker B:That is the question, right?
Speaker B:Because.
Speaker B:Because this is probably the part where I'm a little bit of a renegade in the human design community.
Speaker B:And I don't teach that the chart explains everything, because when we look at the synthesis of the story that makes us who we are, there's so much more than just your astrology or whatever else you want to put into that.
Speaker B:Right?
Speaker B:That's an aspect of it.
Speaker B:But we can't not look at lived experiences.
Speaker B:We can't look at our conditioning that comes from our.
Speaker B:Our.
Speaker B:Our familiar, you know, our family lineage or our ancestral lineage.
Speaker B:Because we always have to go back and think about, you know, our nervous systems are inherited from our parents, and so we already are born predisposed to react to life in certain ways.
Speaker B:You know, so you integrate that with lived experiences and how your energy works.
Speaker B:And then of course, the places where as a result of our lived experiences, maybe we did not get our developmental needs met in an appropriate way.
Speaker B:So, for example, if we look at child development and we see that children go through two distinctly different cycles in their maturation from birth to adulthood, where they're here to learn about power, right?
Speaker B:Two year olds will say, no, I won't.
Speaker B:You can't make me.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker B:And.
Speaker B:And then as young teens, we go through a second cycle and if we don't learn in those seasons of development how to appropriately get power, then we carry disempowerment, or the theme of disempowerment with us into our adulthood.
Speaker B:So I think there's a danger of looking at a tool like human design or any other kind of personality assessment system system as a standalone explanation.
Speaker B:But here's where it gets interesting.
Speaker B:And I think this is where it can be a really powerful tool.
Speaker B:You know, do you have any siblings?
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker B:So you may or may not have this experience.
Speaker B:But I certainly would say in my family, when my siblings and I get around and talk to each other, it's almost sometimes as if we've been raised by different parents, even though technically we have the same parents, right?
Speaker B:There's a different version of the story, there's a different internalization of the experience.
Speaker B:And part of what happens is we can have the same experience, but because of the way in which our energy works, it causes us to interpret the experience and react to the experience differently.
Speaker B:So for example, in human design, because human design really isn't a what, it's a how, it gives you a map for how your energy works.
Speaker B:If in human design we can see through your chart that you are an emotional empath, and that's maybe about half of us, half of us walk into a room and we feel the emotional energy of the room.
Speaker B:Now if you have that emotional empathy as part of your structural, energetic, structural framework, and you walk into a room, and let's say in addition to that, you have experiences, lived experiences that maybe were traumatic, and you walk into the room with not only just being an empath, but also now having a heightened sense, a hyper vigilance, right, because of trauma, you walk into that room, now you're an amplified empath, you may have learned to interpret that information in that room as a cue for you to adjust to the idea of, okay, what do I need to do?
Speaker B:How do I need to manage myself, my behavior, my energy, so that I'm operating below the radar I'm not going to trigger anybody else in the room.
Speaker B:I'm going to make nice.
Speaker B:I'm going to be the people pleaser.
Speaker B:I'm going to be the one that takes care of, of everybody in the room.
Speaker B:And that becomes, not just, you know, not.
Speaker B:That becomes a trauma response that is influenced by the way your energy works as well as your lived experiences.
Speaker B:And I think when we interpret any kind of personality assessment system, we can't just look at the system.
Speaker B:We have to look at the system within the context of somebody's lived experiences, for sure.
Speaker A:Oh, absolutely.
Speaker A:And it's funny that you mentioned that, because my brother and sister and I, we don't talk.
Speaker A:I mean, I do podcasts, I'm void, I'm vocal, I speak everywhere.
Speaker A:We don't talk about our past because I always say that, like, I'll talk about my younger sister, and I'm like, where was she when all this was happening?
Speaker A:Like, I mean, like, and I'll talk to my brother.
Speaker A:And I'm like, if you put us in three different rooms and ask the same question, there is no way you could convince anybody that we grew up in the same house.
Speaker A:There's just no way.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:And there's so many factors that go into that.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:And some of it is the way in which you experienced it energetically.
Speaker B:Some of it has to do with.
Speaker B:With birth order, some it has to do with gender.
Speaker B:There's so many factors that influence how we interpret things.
Speaker B:But again, going back to the idea that when we step away into our adult lives and we begin to discover who we are independent of our families and grow into our own, our own story, sometimes when we hit those hiccups, those places where the story is kicking us into a reactive pattern instead of equipping us with what do we need to do to be able to navigate and adapt to this situation?
Speaker B:How can we be intentional rather than reactive in this situation?
Speaker B:Having a tool like human design is really powerful because it starts to give us again that systematic way to say, okay, I have this story.
Speaker B:And maybe in this story it's, I'm the oldest daughter and I'm the one that made sure everybody was okay.
Speaker B:And, and now I'm in my adult life and I'm living the story out again.
Speaker B:And now I'm burned out and I'm depleted.
Speaker B:I'm feeling resentful and exhausted.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:That, that understanding your chart starts to give you a very tactical, strategic, systematic way to look at, okay, how can I decode the story?
Speaker B:And then ultimately, how can I recode my story so that I'm not playing this role anymore and I'm not living out this reactive pattern anymore.
Speaker A:So how do you start to identify that unhealed story?
Speaker A:Like, how do you.
Speaker A:I mean, is it just the people that are on this podcast going, I just don't get it.
Speaker A:Like, I am the people.
Speaker A:Please.
Speaker A:Like, when you listen to these things and you have those 150 aha moments, like, oh, that sounds like me.
Speaker A:That sounds like me.
Speaker A:I mean, you just literally listed off when you said, you know, walking into a room and what your mind immediately circles to and how you become small and all that.
Speaker A:That is my audience, you know, that is.
Speaker A:So how do you start to heal that?
Speaker B:That's a great question.
Speaker B:And of course, I always have to tread on this question very carefully, because first of all, there is no one way to heal it.
Speaker B:And I think that's an important piece to recognize that we all have a different healing path.
Speaker B:And I really encourage whoever you know, if you're listening and you really are wanting to take a healing path to make sure that it's a healing path that feels honoring and safe and effective for you, because there are lots of different approaches.
Speaker B:One of the things that I. I really like to focus on, and let's be clear, my background is in coaching, and it's not in therapy.
Speaker B:And I think that that's an important line to pay attention to, because when we talk about these factor these issues that we are talking about, the difference between processing and understanding and decoding at a therapeutic level, which for many people, many of your listeners, is an essential first step.
Speaker B:And I think we can't bypass sometimes that piece of really looking at how do I engineer for myself a way to respond to life that keeps me feeling safe and allows me to, in a safe way, reinterpret what's happening.
Speaker B:And when we.
Speaker B:Even after therapy, once we've processed it, sometimes what happens is we get stuck in what I'll call a tape loop narrative.
Speaker B:And one of the ways that you can sometimes identify what that tape loop narrative is to start exploring in your story, what have you defined yourself as having survived?
Speaker B:And.
Speaker B:And we.
Speaker B:And it's a very interesting and kind of insidious word, survivor, because it's a word that we use in our culture and even in our therapeutic and coaching culture with.
Speaker B:With kind of pride, right?
Speaker B:I'm in a. I'm a survivor of whatever, right?
Speaker B:I'm a breast cancer survivor.
Speaker B:I'm a.
Speaker B:And.
Speaker B:And I want to just break that down for A minute.
Speaker B:Because when we go into the process of decoding, which is the first step of your story, right, we're literally exploring how did I cultivate the story that I have about who I am.
Speaker B:When we're decoding that story, we have to sometimes really look at what labels or how are we defining ourselves in our story?
Speaker B:And survival is a very common label.
Speaker B:Let's break that down, and I'll break it down through Harry Potter, because I think Harry Potter is a really great way to talk about survival, right?
Speaker B:When you read the Harry Potter books, if you've read those Harry Potter books, oftentimes in the magical community, Harry Potter is referred to as the boy who lived, right?
Speaker B:And we call him the Boy who Lived well.
Speaker B:If we go back to, okay, who was the boy who lived well, that takes us all the way back to the beginning of Harry Potter story, where he is assaulted by Voldemort, right?
Speaker B:And has the lightning bolt scar on his forehead.
Speaker B:And his mother dies and he survives.
Speaker B:Well, that's not where Harry Potter's story ends.
Speaker B:That's actually where his story begins.
Speaker B:And if we look at Harry Potter's life, there's a massive redemption arc that comes after being the boy who Lived, right?
Speaker B:He goes, he has to survive the Dursleys.
Speaker B:He has to go to Magical School.
Speaker B:He has to fight Voldemort God knows how many times, right?
Speaker B:And eventually he grows up and he marries and becomes, like a leader in his community.
Speaker B:But if we keep defining him as the boy who Lived, right, we stick him in a place in the story where there's no redemption arc.
Speaker B:The same thing happens to us when we define ourselves as a survivor.
Speaker B:When you define yourself as a survivor, you're basically stopping your story at the climax or the cliffhanger, and you are not looking at the redemption arc of, well, what happened next.
Speaker B:And what happens is when we program our story or we program ourselves, or eventually when we tell a story, we're programming our biology to think and explore our narrative through the lens of I am a survivor, then what we do is we program ourselves to pay attention to opportunities and experiences that cause us to draw on that survival identity.
Speaker B:And if our identity revolves around surviving, then we're going to continue to recreate unconsciously.
Speaker B:And let me be clear, that's unconscious.
Speaker B:Not like you're doing it on purpose, but you're going to unconsciously keep recreating opportunities to survive again and again and again.
Speaker B:And that's like the bare minimum, right?
Speaker B:Survive I lived is a pretty low standard, right?
Speaker B:We deserve a better standard than that, right?
Speaker B:When you have lived, then what's next?
Speaker B:Because that sovereignty over what's next, that sovereignty over taking back your story so that you're no longer a victim of the story, that you instead walk away from that story with a sense of empowerment, with the capacity to divine for yourself, well, hey, these things happened that they don't define who I am.
Speaker B:And maybe because these things happened, I internalized some key lessons about what I'm capable of and what my gifts are and that I can walk away from this story and say, I had this experience, but that's not who I am.
Speaker B:I am now thriving because I have transcended this experience and I'm now way in my redemption arc.
Speaker B:So step one is looking at the story and really looking at how are you defining yourself?
Speaker B:If you drew a line in a piece of paper and you know the left hand side of that line was your birth and the right hand side of that line was where you are right now, and you make hashtags on that line, your lifeline of major events that happened in your life.
Speaker B:Get really honest with yourself and ask yourselves, have you stopped your story at one of those hash marks on the line?
Speaker B:Most of us to a certain degree have because our culture celebrates the survivor.
Speaker B:But I would challenge any of us to say, okay, what happens beyond surviving?
Speaker B:How do we transform the story?
Speaker B:How do we take back control over the stories that we're not just surviving now, we're moving into the thriving piece.
Speaker A:Yeah, it's funny because I always say, you know, if you're standing here right now, you're a warrior.
Speaker A:I mean, you've done it, you, you've done the hard, like you got there.
Speaker A:Now let's see what's ahead of us.
Speaker A:Let's see what's going down the road.
Speaker A:And it makes it so.
Speaker A:You make such a good point with the just staying in that victim mode.
Speaker A:I mean, there's nothing worse.
Speaker A:You, you are, you're wired.
Speaker A:And when you grow up like that, it's understandable.
Speaker A:And like you said, no fault of your own or no fault of anybody's.
Speaker A:When you grow up in that, your brain is wired to look for opportunities that you have to survive.
Speaker A:Or so you're always looking for the bad or you're always expecting the bad to come.
Speaker A:Even when it's a joyous moment, you're like, okay, what's going to happen next?
Speaker A:And that keeps.
Speaker A:That's 100% victim.
Speaker A:Like, oh God, it's always me.
Speaker A:Or what is, oh, you know, and it's such a hard place to be in, but it's.
Speaker A:The good news is for the people out there listening is you can get out of that.
Speaker A:I mean, what.
Speaker A:What are some small steps you suggest to start getting yourself out of that victim mode?
Speaker B:So I. I am a big fan of using creativity as a tool to escape from limiting narratives.
Speaker B:So when we look at intentional storytelling, meaning actually literally sitting down and writing out the story from a different.
Speaker B:Through a different lens and from a different perspective, that process of rewriting the story actually can begin the process of rewiring the body and the brain.
Speaker B:So let's say, for example, you have an experience that left you feeling in some way victimized or disempowered or like you're stuck at a cliffhanger.
Speaker B:If you sit down and you actually rewrite that story and rewrite it from the lens of this thing happened to me, but it doesn't define who I am.
Speaker B:I'm going to rewrite this story in such a way so that at the end of this story, I emerge either the victor, not the victim, or I walk away from this event internalizing an important lesson that I learned from this experience.
Speaker B:And I'm going to use that lesson then as a catalyst for me to define myself in a whole new way as an empowered person.
Speaker B:Person.
Speaker B:Now, I. I want to be clear.
Speaker B:If you do this process, this is not a process to do in the moment of trauma, right?
Speaker B:This is a process to do when you find yourself stuck in that tape loop.
Speaker B:And when I'm saying tape loop, let me explain what that is, because I think that's really important because I don't want.
Speaker B:I don't want to sound like I'm an advocating bypassing, because I'm not.
Speaker B:Sometimes, again, we have to process the narrative for a while before we can get to that place.
Speaker B:But if you're identifying with that aspects of your victimhood that happened, and you are no longer threatened and you have been safe physically, emotionally for a while, and you have gotten to a point in the retelling of the story where.
Speaker B:And this is hard because it requires us to be a little honest with ourselves, right where we're almost kind of practiced and scripted in the retelling, right?
Speaker B:Where you kind of know, oh, this is the point of the story where I'm gonna cry.
Speaker B:And this is the point of the story where I use these words in sequence every time.
Speaker B:This is the part of the story that I know is kind of shocking to people.
Speaker B:So I'm gonna, like, you know, we, if we're really honest with ourselves, we have patterns in the retelling and when.
Speaker B:And just informing that whenever we are retelling, we're re anchoring this programming into
Speaker A:the brain every time.
Speaker B:Yeah, if you're in that place, I, I went, oh my God, the worst.
Speaker B:I went just to illuminate.
Speaker B:When I got divorced from my, my first husband, I had, oh my God, I had like a three year long tape loop where I would tell the story of my divorce again and again.
Speaker B:It was so internally scripted.
Speaker B:Like this is the part where I cry and this is the part where I take my glass of wine and drink a little sip away.
Speaker B:And recognizing at a certain point, like, oh man, I have just told the story to the point where I'm sick of hearing it coming out of my own mouth and I'm living it right.
Speaker B:That when we hit that space, first of all, acknowledge that that's actually a really good, good space to be in.
Speaker B:Because that does mean that you've actually done quite a bit of healing.
Speaker B:Because to be able to share that, to not repress that, to, to talk it through and to have it be part of your dialogue with your friends or people, you know, that's a really good sign that you've processed a lot of it.
Speaker B:But it's not the stopping point.
Speaker B:That's the point where you have to take back control of the story and say, okay, timeout, I can't retell this anymore because every time I retell this, I'm actually re anchoring it into my nervous system system.
Speaker B:And that's not helping.
Speaker B:And to really start looking at, okay, if I actually sat down and rewrote this story and I rewrote it, and you can be super creative with this, you can rewrite it with fantasy, you can call in angels, you can call in fairies and unicorns.
Speaker B:It doesn't matter.
Speaker B:When we rewrite it creatively, what happens is we take it out of the logical reasoning part of the body.
Speaker B:And when we take it out of the logical reasoning part of the body, one of the things that we remove is self doubt and protective reactions.
Speaker B:Because the logical, reasonable part of the body is all about patterns.
Speaker B:And when we're reacting, which is a logical, reasonable word, right, we're reacting out a pattern.
Speaker B:When we're reacting, we're basically telling the story again and again because it's anchored in the pattern part of our body.
Speaker B:When we move our, our narrative out of that part of the body and take an hour and sit down and engage in this creative writing, process.
Speaker B:We move us out of doubt and suspicion, we move us out of self doubt and suspicion and we move ourselves over into this wild potential filled creative space of our brain and our nervous system.
Speaker B:And the beautiful part about that is, first of all, the brain doesn't know the difference between reality and fantasy.
Speaker B:To a certain degree even.
Speaker B:And again, even if you've had trauma, if you can rework that trauma over here in this part of your brain, in this your of part part of your nervous system, your brain is going, oh, well, this is fantasy and it's fun and creative.
Speaker B:So it's not doubting it, right?
Speaker B:It's not going well.
Speaker B:That would never happen or he would never say that.
Speaker B:Right?
Speaker B:It's over here playing basically in this very creative part of the nervous system.
Speaker B:The brain is a meaning making machine.
Speaker B:And really what it does is it actually thinks in metaphors and stories.
Speaker B:Which is why again, paying attention to the stories we tell are so important because we're translating those stories into every aspect of your life.
Speaker B:If you've ever heard the phrase how you do anything is how you do everything.
Speaker B:Well, part of what we're really saying is that if you have a story that says, I am a victim of some kind, that story is like a meme.
Speaker B:It's duplicating itself in every aspect of your life.
Speaker B:It's probably duplicating in your money, it's probably duplicating in your health and your body.
Speaker B:It's probably duplicating in your relationships.
Speaker B:It's probably duplicating at work because the brain is interpreting everything through that story.
Speaker B:If you start feeding the brain a different story, and in this story you are suddenly cultivating superpowers and, or you are walking away going, okay, this was a hero's journey.
Speaker B:I got to, you know, confront the dragon.
Speaker B:I won, the dragon lost.
Speaker B:And now I'm over here and this is, I'm now the hero in the story and not the victim in the story, your brain is going to start reworking that narrative.
Speaker B:Not only that, in the research that I did, when you do go through this process of intentionally taking back control over the story story through creative writing processes, when you actually retell that story, that new creative story, you actually improve your immune function.
Speaker B:You have a.
Speaker B:You increases your capacity to be more resilient and you start to reinterpret your life through a whole different lens of meaning.
Speaker B:So it sounds silly in a way because I think we are as a culture, very logical.
Speaker B:You know, we're trained logically.
Speaker B:We go to schools and school systems that are logical and linear.
Speaker B:We.
Speaker B:We kind of discount to a certain degree the power of creativity.
Speaker B:But really, creativity has an enormous capacity to shift our immune response, to shift our biology, to shift our nervous system, and start to give us a reframe and maybe even a little refresh on the old narrative where we stop the story at the cliffhanger.
Speaker A:Yep.
Speaker A:I love it.
Speaker A:And just like you said, the fact of rewriting it, and then all of a sudden, you're this powerful person.
Speaker A:Eventually your brain is.
Speaker A:You keep doing that, your brain is going to kick in.
Speaker A:And that's, like you said, your new identity.
Speaker A:Now you.
Speaker A:You're a little more empowered, you're a little more confident, you're a little more.
Speaker A:And you will start to act out in every single way that way.
Speaker A:It's like I talk about when people, when they first start setting boundaries.
Speaker A:It's scary.
Speaker A:It's.
Speaker A:It's not going to work.
Speaker A:It's.
Speaker A:I don't.
Speaker A:I don't deserve this.
Speaker A:And then you set one and you get a good reaction, and then you're like, that's kind of.
Speaker A:I can walk a little taller, spread my chest a little wider.
Speaker A:Like, imagine that my boundaries are listened to.
Speaker A:And.
Speaker A:But then your brain is saying, yeah, boundaries are safe for you.
Speaker A:They're good.
Speaker A:They're good.
Speaker A:You know, you just.
Speaker A:People really, I think, don't give the brain enough credit.
Speaker A:And I tell people like me, I can.
Speaker A:All the affirmations in the world, it's great.
Speaker A:You can do them all day long.
Speaker A:But until your subconscious is up to that level and actually believes that story that you're telling, it, it's.
Speaker A:It's.
Speaker A:It's like a. I don't want to say it's a wasted time, because it's not.
Speaker A:It's never a waste of time to do any kind of positive affirmation.
Speaker A:But you have to go through, like you said, of making your body believe that story.
Speaker A:You know, feel yourself as that superhero.
Speaker A:Like, really feel it in your body.
Speaker B:Well, and that's the piece with affirmations.
Speaker B:Your affirmations are logical and reasonable.
Speaker B:Right?
Speaker B:We, I'm now, blah, blah, blah, I am.
Speaker B:And we put it in sort of present tense with our current narrative.
Speaker B:And there is a believability gap oftentimes with affirmations.
Speaker B:And this is where, again, if you want to shift the narrative, take that affirmation and write a story about it and put it over here in this creative part of your being, because that allows you to jump over the believability gap.
Speaker B:Especially if, especially if, as ironic as it is, if you add fantasy and other, you know, other creative aspects to it and transcend, you know, the brain's natural, that can't be true.
Speaker B:Part of the brain, you actually can help the brain integrate a new perspective and a new narrative.
Speaker B:And the other thing that's really kind of cool is we look at how the brain works developmentally.
Speaker B:We learn about values and we learn about life and ourselves through storytelling.
Speaker B:In a healthy family system, children are supposed to be swept up and scooped onto some, you know, a lap and have a book read to them as part of their everyday process, Right.
Speaker B:They need that, that cuddly connection that's rooted in storytelling.
Speaker B:Storytelling is such an essential part of our brain.
Speaker B:And in fact, in more traditional cultures, even as adults, right, we sit around the fire and we tell stories because it's a way to connect us and to bond us.
Speaker B:It's also a way to soothe the nervous system.
Speaker B:And our brains integrate new information through storytelling better than anything else.
Speaker B:So tell a better story.
Speaker A:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And it's hard.
Speaker A:Again, I'm going back to some of the people that I deal with and even myself, I was never read to.
Speaker A:I was never coddled.
Speaker A:I was never got to.
Speaker A:I never got to play out these fantasy stories.
Speaker A:And I did it with my children.
Speaker A:And what a.
Speaker A:You know, I just look at the.
Speaker A:My daughter is living out in a camper in negative 10 degree weather right now.
Speaker A:But it's so funny, she sent me a picture of that where the wild things are booked and she's, you know, and she said, when I, when I'm feeling not strong, I pull that book out because you read that book to me almost every other day and we roared and we, you know, and it makes her feel powerful.
Speaker A:And she's 28 years old now, but what about the kids that didn't get
Speaker B:that, that didn't get the.
Speaker B:That doesn't mean you can't do storytelling.
Speaker B:It just may mean that you have to stretch yourself a little bit to learn it as a skill.
Speaker B:And in fact, the, the art of sitting down and recapturing and reclaiming that part of yourself can be immensely healing it.
Speaker B:You know, your inner child wants to have a better story and needs you to tell it a better story because nobody else is going to come tell it a better story, right?
Speaker B:So you, when you take back control over the story and engage in that storytelling process with creativity and, you know, reframe it, then you're really signaling that aspect of yourself, that inner Child part of yourself that.
Speaker B:Hey, I got, I got you.
Speaker B:I'm going to hold this space for you where we are going to re engineer the story in a way that is loving and nurturing and creative.
Speaker B:And you know, I will metaphorically sweep you into my lap into this safe space and we will recode the story.
Speaker A:And yes, and I love that.
Speaker A:And don't.
Speaker A:For the people out there listening, it doesn't have to be good, it doesn't have to be perfect.
Speaker A:It doesn't have to be a best seller.
Speaker A:I tell people, just get out a piece of paper.
Speaker A:I like to do it right before I go to bed or right when I wake up because that's when you're kind of at that most receptive.
Speaker A:Whatever I write is going to stick a little bit better because you're in those brain waves.
Speaker A:But just write.
Speaker A:Just.
Speaker A:It starts out when I started doing.
Speaker A:It started out as word.
Speaker A:I called it word vomiting.
Speaker A:You know, it's just like I just wrote.
Speaker A:And what a neat exercise though, to just pick something, like pick something during the day and rewrite it.
Speaker A:Just rewrite the situation is.
Speaker A:And then more like you said, creative, empowered, whatever you want it to be fantasy.
Speaker A:I love that.
Speaker A:That's great.
Speaker B:As I said, the brain doesn't know the difference.
Speaker B:The brain is actually not very smart.
Speaker B:Um, so you can kind of feed it whatever you want.
Speaker A:So, yeah, I always say, I said the brain can be tricked, body can't.
Speaker A:So you, you can trick your brain, like I said, doesn't know the difference between reality and not reality and everything else.
Speaker A:Your body, like your body, you, you.
Speaker A:It's very hard to trick your body.
Speaker A:You can say something and logically it sounds really good, but your body will still clench or squeeze or do something.
Speaker B:And again, when we look at it through the lens of nervous system, how the nervous system works when we rewrite that story on that creative piece.
Speaker B:Because it so again, reactivity is linear and logical.
Speaker B:Even though it doesn't seem reasonable or logical, it is actually logical in the sense that it is a repeated pattern.
Speaker B:Right when we experience trauma and we develop PTSD patterns or reactive patterns.
Speaker B:Those are patterns.
Speaker B:And pattern reasoning and logic are all about patterns.
Speaker B:And when we move over to this other side of the brain, we actually can soothe the brain and then soothe the nervous system because we're not triggering that old pattern anymore.
Speaker B:We're taking back control over that pattern and we're engaging in this place of possibility instead of reacting out of the old triggers and the old.
Speaker B:The old patterns.
Speaker A:Absolutely.
Speaker A:So if you had to give a suggestion, like, just one thing.
Speaker A:Like, will you just say, pick a story from that day?
Speaker A:Pick a story from a long time ago.
Speaker A:Like, what would be your suggestion for people that want to get started and go, okay, I want to start trying to do this.
Speaker B:So I would probably start with either.
Speaker B:I mean, you can.
Speaker B:It's kind of up to you in terms of where you want to start.
Speaker B:There are two places where I would recommend either pick a story that you've got on.
Speaker B:On remote, like a tape loop story, and start with a tape loop story and look at.
Speaker B:Okay.
Speaker B:If I retold the story from an empowered perspective, or if I retold the story from the lens of here's this thing that happened and I'm now going to reinterpret it so that I'm walking away with a treasure or some kind of gift that I'm going to use to make my life better.
Speaker B:Pick.
Speaker B:Pick that tape loop story and start with that.
Speaker B:Or you might want to start with just a very broad story that end and it's not deep in the specifics of any particular event, but start first really far out away from the story.
Speaker B:Like, once upon a time, there was a little, little girl who grew up in a family where, you know, everybody told her, be quiet, sit down, you don't matter.
Speaker B:And one day she learned, right.
Speaker B:Take it from a very, very abstract perspective and begin there.
Speaker B:Don't pick a story that is still deeply activating or triggering to you.
Speaker A:I was going to say that would be not.
Speaker A:That's what I was kind of getting at.
Speaker A:That would make sense to me not to pick something that's going to come.
Speaker A:Don't go too.
Speaker A:Your worst, deepest, darkest secret or whatever it is that's.
Speaker A:You're holding all kinds of guilt, shame, trauma.
Speaker A:Like, you don't want to do that.
Speaker A:You want.
Speaker A:I like the idea of the big abstract picture to get started.
Speaker A:I like that.
Speaker A:Perfect.
Speaker A:I love this.
Speaker A:This is fun.
Speaker A:Okay, so people, I know you do a lot of work.
Speaker A:You've been doing this for over 30 years.
Speaker A:Talk about your business, how you work with people and where they can find you.
Speaker B:So we.
Speaker B:I don't actually work personally with people anymore.
Speaker B:I do a lot of research and writing.
Speaker B:Okay.
Speaker B:I do have a book that I've written recently, came out last August about this process.
Speaker B:It's called Quantum Wellness.
Speaker B:So it's a process that actually allows you to again, systematically start exploring the layers in your story and consciously begin to rewrite your story using human design as sort of the entrance Point into the story.
Speaker B:I do train people professionally on how to use this process process in our school.
Speaker B:And you can find information about our school or you can find practitioners on our website quantum human design.com and you can of course find us on Instagram Dr. Karen Parker, 22.
Speaker B:And of course you can find any of my books on any major book retail outlet online or in some stores.
Speaker A:So perfect.
Speaker A:I love this.
Speaker A:I like the.
Speaker A:I mean I'm fascinated with human design.
Speaker A:It just seems like it's a lot to learn.
Speaker A:You can go down rabbit holes and I'll start going, oh, I really want to learn this.
Speaker A:And I'll take like a basic course and then I will just.
Speaker A:It's so much information for me.
Speaker A:I'm like, oh, I just need to have a friend that's like, well you like hot food because of this.
Speaker A:And you moved to Florida up and just left your life and moved to Florida because you have natural shores tendencies so you got to be by the ocean or the mountains.
Speaker A:I'm like, yeah, all that makes sense.
Speaker A:But.
Speaker A:And then I get stuck when they say why don't you pull your husband's chart and see why?
Speaker A:Like I'm like, oh yeah, I'm sure I could probably with some stuff there.
Speaker A:But yeah.
Speaker B:Well as I said, it's a great entrance point into your story.
Speaker B:It explains a lot.
Speaker B:It doesn't always explain everything.
Speaker B:So you have to look at, look at it in the context of the whole person of who you are.
Speaker A:Exactly, exactly.
Speaker A:So thank you so much Dr. Karen for coming on.
Speaker A:But before you go, can you give the listeners your best piece of advice or words of wisdom, Something to take with them to make their day a little brighter today?
Speaker B:Yes, I can.
Speaker B:And it's actually, it's a strange story, but I'll share it with you.
Speaker B:So I have five kids, mostly adults now.
Speaker B:And when I was, I was raising them as a full time single parent for a lot of years.
Speaker B:So we had five kids.
Speaker B:We had several dogs and cats and puzzles were really hard in our family and they were hard in our family because either dogs or cats ate the pieces and they disappeared.
Speaker B:Or I had one kid who, who was always ripping off the little pieces of the puzzles and trying to jam them into another a place where they didn't go because he got very frustrated with puzzles.
Speaker B:You know, sometimes we are told or we learn to hide ourselves or we learn to try to fit into some expectation or norm that we're taught that we should follow to stay safe.
Speaker B:If you look at a puzzle a puzzle is only as beautiful as the sum total of his pieces.
Speaker B:So if you've got a piece of the puzzle that's missing and off the table and gone under a couch or in a dog's tummy somewhere, or if you've taken pieces of that puzzle and tried to jam them into the wrong place, it affects the entire face of the puzzle.
Speaker B:Every one of us is like a piece of the human puzzle.
Speaker B:And sometimes we grow up and we think, well, who am I to?
Speaker B:And I say, who are you not to?
Speaker B:You have a unique and vital and irreplaceable part in the tapestry of the human story.
Speaker B:And when you try to place yourself somewhere where you shouldn't be, or you try to jam yourself somewhere where you don't fit, or you completely disappear off the face of the puzzle, it's not just you.
Speaker B:You're actually affecting the entire human story.
Speaker B:You deserve to be in your right place, filling it up to the fullest amount of potential that you can, and to know that you have a place that is vital and important, and you literally make all of us be who we are.
Speaker A:Wow.
Speaker A:I love that.
Speaker A:Thank you so much, Dr. Karen.
Speaker B:Thank you.
Speaker B:Thank you for having me.
Speaker A:Tammy, you are very welcome.
Speaker A:For everybody else out there listening, go back and listen to that again.
Speaker A:That literally sums up everything that we're all about.
Speaker A:You are uniquely you.
Speaker A:And you're right, that one piece missing or one piece out of alignment or ripped and torn or whatever it is changes the whole trajectory of you and the people around you.
Speaker A:And remember, your energy, your love, everything that you put out into the world is vitally important.
Speaker A:Important and necessary for the rest of the world to be as joyous as we all deserve.
Speaker A:So thank you and you all have a blessed day.