What happens after survival?

If you grew up in dysfunction, emotional neglect, abuse, addiction, or chaos, chances are you learned how to survive. But what happens when survival mode becomes emotional numbness? What happens when you no longer feel the pain… but you also can’t fully feel the joy?

In this deeply powerful and validating conversation, Tammy sits down with trauma-informed embodiment coach, speaker, and author Megan Margherio to talk about healing trauma through the body, reconnecting with safety, and learning how to feel alive again.

Together, they unpack how childhood dysfunction shapes the nervous system, why so many adult children of dysfunction struggle with numbness, hypervigilance, anxiety, and emotional shutdown, and why healing is about so much more than “thinking positive.”

Megan vulnerably shares her own healing journey and explains why survival is only half the story. The real work comes in learning how to trust yourself again, reconnect with your body, and create enough emotional safety to let joy, peace, delight, and goodness back in.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Why dysfunction impacts us even without addiction in the home

• Emotional numbness and feeling like a shell of yourself

• Why trauma survivors often struggle to feel joy

• How trauma gets stored in the body

• Nervous system regulation and survival mode

• Somatic healing, trauma-sensitive yoga, and body awareness

• Why talk therapy sometimes isn’t enough

• EMDR, breathwork, and healing stored trauma

• Learning to feel safe enough to receive good things

• Why healing is not about perfection — it’s about becoming more alive

One of the biggest takeaways from this episode: you did not survive everything you survived just to exist. You survived to experience joy, connection, peace, and a life that feels safe to live.

Connect with Megan Margherio:

Website: MeganMargherio.com

Instagram: @megan_margherio on Instagram

TikTok: @megan_margherio on TikTok

Grab Megan’s book: Everwoven: A Memoir, A Reckoning

If this episode resonated with you, share it with someone who needs the reminder that survival is only half the story.

Healing is possible. And you deserve all good things

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As an international inspirational speaker, NLP Practitioner, Trauma-Informed Coach, Neurofit Trainer, and Best-Selling Author, I bring both deep personal experience and professional training to the work I do. I believe in prevention, not just intervention — and use a body, mind, and spirit approach to guide others toward becoming the happiest, healthiest versions of themselves.

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Welcome back, everybody.

Today we have with us Megan Margario.

She is a speaker, a trauma informed embodiment coach, and author of Everwoven a memoir, A Reckoning.

Certified in somatics and trauma sensitive yoga, she helps survivors reconnect with safety, joy and self trust.

Welcome, Megan.

Thank you.

It's nice to be here.

Yeah, I love, I was just saying before we got on here that I love actually digging into who the guests are going to be and really looking through their stuff.

It was fun.

But it's also eye opening as to the fact that so many people went through the, the exact same things.

They had the same history.

And I know when I started working with people, I started working with primarily adult children of alcoholics.

That was my niche.

I was in addiction and recovery specialists and I did all of that.

And then the more people started coming to me and saying, wow, all of that resonates with me.

But I didn't have an alcoholic in the family.

It was like, cha Ching.

Dysfunction is dysfunction and struggle is struggle.

And it has the same effect, right?

Oh, absolutely.

And it's one of these things that when you been raised in a dysfunctional family, we don't talk about our dirty laundry kind of situation.

So you've been told to keep it quiet.

Right.

And so that isolates you.

And so then you think, I'm the only one that's going through this.

It's because the world has gotten so small and so narrow that we think that we are the only people that are going through it without realizing how, how just pervasive it is.

Because there's so many people who don't know how, who are not emotionally mature themselves, that are then raising children from a wounded place.

Exactly.

And it's like when you try to bring it to the world.

I remember when I was like, oh, I'm going to write a book.

And it was literally a guide for children of alcoholics.

It was called Surviving Alcoholic Parents.

It was all the things that I wish they had told me when I was 12 or 13 years old and I wrote this book.

And then I'm like, okay, how do I get this to the kids?

Because I can imagine me coming home at 10 years old being like, hey mom, can I have eight bucks?

Because there's this lady coming into the school to talk about surviving alcoholic parents.

I would have gotten beaten.

So you're right.

There's so much of that shame and everything.

But what's important for people to know is that when you look at the statistics, just take one dysfunction.

Let's just take alcoholism.

That's one, one of the very many.

And they say it's one in four children.

But like you said, if that's one in four children, then that's also one in four teachers.

How do you change the stigma so that there's not that shame or so that people understand that their story, although it's unique to them, is widespread?

Yeah, I think there's this, this is for all of the awfulness of social media.

Right.

And there is a lot to.

To complain about.

One of the things that is really nice is that we, to realize that we weren't growing up in isolation.

I'm from a town of 55.

It felt like no one in my town of 55 was experiencing what I was experiencing.

But what happens behind closed doors, we don't know.

But what you realize is that so many people across the world are experiencing something similar or they're recovering from and feeling the long term fallout of growing up and dysfunctional families and what that looks like like and how that changes you as a person and your sense of self worth.

You start to see these common through lines and you see them show up in other people's stories.

And so that's where the power of the Internet has been so profound.

And being able to create a community, but also within that community is to create this safe space of people going, I get it, I get what it feels like.

I understand even without having gone through the things that someone else has gone through, you understand the emotional impact because you can relate to that.

You can feel it.

Because even though it's different, it feels familiar.

Absolutely.

And I, I love when I wake up and I check my messages, usually it's Facebook messenger.

People will reach out to me on, even though they see me on TikTok or Instagram or whatever.

But I love when people like, girl, you hit it.

You nailed it.

That's me.

And it's, it's almost sad.

People don't realize until they're in their sometimes 40s, 50s, 60s.

I want to talk about something that you mentioned and you said you mentioned numbness.

And I think that is so profound because so many people are in numbness.

Explain how that manifests and what it looks like to you.

Yeah, so I'll obviously explain it from my perspective, but it's so I am the survivor of childhood sexual abuse, that my family looked the other way.

They knew it was going on and ignored it.

And a very also common experience, unfortunately.

And, and so as I was moving through my life dealing with the fallout of that it's the way that you protect yourself.

Right.

Whether you go through something deeply traumatic like that or you just have a really hard family, is that you hide parts of yourself away.

The parts that you don't think are going to be accepted or welcome or that are going to create an issue with your belonging.

You keep hiding those parts away and you hide them away and hide them away until all that's left is this shel of who you once were.

Right.

And so you can look back, this little human that you used to be that was alive and delighted in whatever they delighted in.

And you feel like, wait a minute, that person feels miles away.

How is that possible?

And then you look around and you think, like, at least for me, I looked around and I thought, when was the last time I was delighted by life?

When was the last time I was excited by things and I couldn't remember and.

And then it was like, oh, my God.

That's when it landed on me.

I didn't even realize I had slipped into numbness.

It just was there.

It.

When it's this heavy blanket that shadows over everything and it's.

There's no point in getting excited about something or.

Numbness is a protector because I don't have to feel as sad if I am numb.

If I can numb myself out from something internally, then I don't have to feel the full weight of it.

And so if I'm carrying around a bunch of unprocessed things, that's a way to navigate that.

And so numbness is this thing that just sneaks up slowly and becomes both a protector from the hard things that we're not ready to face, but also this thing that prevents us from being able to feel the full expression of our life.

And I understand why we do it.

It makes so much sense why we are protecting ourselves.

But then one day you wake up and you feel half alive and you don't understand why.

Absolutely.

And numbness is the best way to put it, because I can remember walking into a therapist.

I don't even remember what the occasion was or what this circumstance was that happened.

But she said to me, how do you feel?

And that was such a foreign concept to me.

I'm like, feel.

She said, you're not mad?

Said, no.

You're not angry.

You're, like, sad?

No.

And you said it perfectly when you said, you become a shell of a person that you used to be.

So, yeah, it's such a fascinating thing.

Like when you were saying, like, you don't register the emotions or maybe you do, logically, right?

And so maybe it's, oh, that's sad that happened.

You can hear a sad story that happened in the news or even something that happens personally to you, and you're like, oh, that's really sad.

And then you're thinking about how it's sad.

So you're intellectualizing the idea of what it.

Of what feeling you should be experiencing, but you're not actually letting yourself feel it.

It's like it stays in the head.

If it enters in at all, it stays in the head instead of ever traveling down to the heart where it actually has the ability to be felt.

And then it becomes a situation where, at least for me, I thought, something's wrong with me, that I can't feel sad, I can't feel happy, I can't feel I'm broken.

Right.

I've got to be broken.

Because what is this?

And it's a protective layer of numbness that you put on as a shield against the world.

And again, it makes so much sense why we do it.

But one day you just wake up and you realize your life isn't what it could be or what you thought it would be.

And you're like, why is it like this?

And you don't even realize when or how it happened.

Exactly.

And the part that people miss sometimes is if you don't feel the pain and you don't feel the sadness and you don't feel.

Feel anything because you're numb.

You also don't feel the joy and the fun and the great things that life has to offer.

You're numb to everything.

You don't just selectively go, I'm going to be numb to the bad things.

You just become numb, period.

Yeah.

Because your body doesn't recognize, oh, okay.

We're only filtering these emotions out.

It's like we're filtering all emotions out.

Because when we put on this protective barrier of numbness, the reason is because we did, there was so much intensity of pain that was coming through that we couldn't handle it all.

So we numb up and we just be like, nope, not feeling that.

And so we keep that guard up and our brain goes, oh, this is an effective method.

Okay, we're getting what we needed here.

Cool.

Let's keep doing this.

And so it.

It does it for everything.

Any emotion that comes in, it's just like one big, giant shield against that.

And so you can't feel the good things in your life.

And then your life becomes half full because you're like, I don't understand what's going on here.

And it's so, so confusing.

And it feels like you're broken.

Because when there is something that you want to feel and you can't feel it, and then you're like, I don't understand what's going on, because it's no longer a conscious choice to prevent the pain from coming through.

It's now just nothing is coming through.

And so then it feels like something internally has been broken, but it's that your system is working exactly the way that it has been working all this time to keep you protected.

Exactly.

And going to some different forms of therapy, and they're like, it's all about, get in your head and rewrite this story and redo that.

But I 100 agree with you and why you do what you do.

It's not in your mind.

You can trick your mind.

My mind is very easily tricked, but my body is not.

No.

And you're with the adage, your body keeps the score.

Right.

So the thing.

The pain that you are not wanting to feel and you're numbing yourself out from feeling, it's still there.

It's just going to show up in other places, in inflammation in the body, in stress, in anxiety, in depression.

It comes in all of these different ways because somehow, some way, it has to come out.

And rage.

It comes out, however, for people.

And when we numb ourselves to it and we keep shoving it down and shoving it down and shoving it down, it has to find other alternate routes out.

And so eventually you're screaming in the grocery store and you don't know why, and it's because things that you weren't willing to process, that you had numbed yourself to, are finding their ways out.

And they're not finding their way out in rational or logical ways.

They're finding their way out because their pressure is too intense that your body needs a break or it's going to just collapse.

And so then fatigue, all of these kinds of things.

Right.

The science is so clear on how the body holds on to emotional tension.

And when we don't release it, we also don't make room for other things to be able to come in.

So we don't make room for delight and joy and goodness and all of these things to come in when our system is trying so hard to maintain the status quo that we're telling it we want to hold on to, which is numbness.

Absolutely.

So talk about with your people that you.

With your clients that you work with.

How do you start bringing in?

What is your biggest concept.

Is it the fact that you need to not only just get rid of the pain, but you also need to replace it with the joy and the delight and the laughter and the love?

Yeah, it's interesting.

For trauma survivors, it's going to sound backwards, but the.

The pain is not as scary because they know how to navigate pain.

When you've survived something traumatic, you've had to pick up your pieces from a life that has just been, like, radically altered and a brain that has been radically altered by horrific events.

And so the pain and the hard things aren't what scares them the most.

What scares them the most is actually welcoming in goodness again, is learning how to live on the other side of what happened to them.

And too often, we stay stuck in survival mode and we don't even realize that's what we're doing, is that we're just trying to keep one foot in front of the other and keep going in whatever way without realizing.

No, we can be more in control of our life.

We can slow down.

We can notice the goodness that's already happening in the present moment.

And when you are someone who's living in survival mode, you're not thinking about the present moment.

You're thinking about the future, because you're thinking about, what are the plans I need to have in place in order to be able to be safe if xyz, all of these things happen.

Right?

So your mind is spinning about all the possible outcomes so that you can have all the possible solutions for what to do and how to prepare yourself for those things.

And so for me, working with trauma survivors, it's about bringing them back to the present moment and saying, hey, where you are right now, what is good?

What is good?

What could you label as good right here in this moment?

And maybe it's, I can see a tree, or it's, I'm in Seattle and it's raining or something.

That.

What feels good right now?

My dog is sitting next to me.

I have my.

My son is safe.

My husband is healthy, whatever the case might be.

Right?

You name those things.

Okay?

And then let's build from there.

Because goodness has already found its way to you.

You just hadn't recognized it yet.

So let's start by recognizing what we see in front of us.

And it's important to know, for the people listening again, is that when you start to do that, when you start to consciously look for the good around you, it's.

It trains your brain to start doing that because you're so wired to scan for everything negative you go out, like you said, you go out on a rainy day in Seattle, and instead of being like, I think there's a sun out there, you're like, oh, my God, this is miserable.

You're trained to scan for bad, where eventually, if you can just take an.

Especially even in an anxious moment where you're pretty heightened, sitting there and just looking around and being like, oh, this is cool.

Like, I'm looking at a picture of my children.

That is good, that is safe.

That is something right now.

Like, I love my kids, and you could snowball that way.

But it does take some conscious effort.

And I think in healing, everything needs to be intentional.

Oh, yeah.

And it's easy to label looking for the good as, like, this, like, toxic positivity, right?

It often gets associated with that.

And so I want to clarify, like, it's not just, oh, ignore all the things that are, like, falling apart in your life and just be happy, right?

Like, it's not that.

Like, just be happy is the language of toxic positivity, right?

Because that's not realistic.

But positivity in and of itself is not toxic.

And so telling someone when they're going through something hard to just be happy, that's toxic positivity, right?

To always look on the bright side, that everything always has a bright side.

That might be true, but in the moment, it's not always easy to do that.

And our brain does have a negativity bias.

It is always going to look for what could possibly go wrong.

Because what could possibly go wrong is what keeps us safe, right?

If I'm always looking for how things are going to go, right?

From an evolutionary standpoint, that does nothing for helping me to be able to survive.

But if I know all the ways it can go wrong, that is going to protect me from potential danger.

And so it makes sense why our brain does that.

But what we need to be able to tell ourselves and why, like, what separates this from toxic positivity is the fact that we're telling ourselves that we're safe enough to see both.

Like, I can notice the ways that things are going wrong, and I can also notice the way that things are going, right?

And because I can hold two things at the exact same time, because I'm capable of that, right?

I can hold the complexity of, yeah, there's a lot that could be going wrong here, but there's also things that are going right, Then I can remind my mind that every time that I think that everything is falling apart and everything is terrible and everything is wrong, that's not true.

Because I can now disrupt that by saying, but these are the things that are going, right?

And so life is more complex in any given moment than just, oh, think happy, or everything sucks.

Right?

There's an in between that we have to keep an eye out for.

That is where true safety is, that knowing, yes, there are some things that I don't love about this experience, and yes, there are some things that I do.

And I'm okay in both.

I'm holding myself steady in both.

Absolutely.

And that is a balancing act every day, and especially when you grew up in that negativity, because you're so wired, you don't want to be like, oh, everything's good.

Just think happy.

It's like having somebody.

It's like telling somebody just to calm down when they're having an anxiety attack.

Like, the worst thing you can say.

To someone, you might as well hit them with a T4.

It's that easy.

Why didn't I think of that?

It was that easy.

We'd all do it, right?

And that's why I think it's so important.

Again, going back to what do is you need those pattern disconnects or those pattern interrupts when you're going through that.

Maybe it's not a slow, deep breath, maybe it's shaking, Maybe it's whatever you need at the moment, but it's changing that pattern real quickly and being able to shift in the moment.

Talk a little bit about that.

How do you help your people do that?

Shifting in the moment.

Yeah.

So the first thing.

So when we bring ourselves into the present moment, that's always first and foremost.

Because generally speaking, I don't do this work with people when they're in immediate chaos.

Right?

And so, generally speaking, coming into the present moment, life isn't falling apart.

It might feel like it is, but it isn't.

And it's an important distinction that what we feel and what is fact is not always the same thing.

And it helps us to come into the present moment and go, okay, no, right now, in this very second, the world is not burning down.

Okay, so we're gonna start there so we know it's not burning down.

We know that we're okay right here in this present moment.

Now, if we know that we're okay and everything is, we know we're safe right now, let's start to think about what does our body need?

And so it's safe enough to listen to our body, Because a lot of times we don't think that we can listen to Our body, because that requires too much effort, time, whatever.

And our mind is just spinning and spinning.

And so let's listen to our body.

What does our body need?

Would it feel good to lift our arms up over our head?

Would it feel good to stretch?

Would it feel good to run?

Would it feel good to sit and lie down?

What.

What are we looking for here?

And a lot of times people don't know the answer to that because they've never listened to their body.

And so they're like, I have no idea.

How would I know what that feels like?

And I was like, so then we try it.

All right?

Try these things.

So we'll do a few different kinds of activities.

So it might be shaking, it might be running in place.

It might be that we bring our knees into our chest and curl up into a tight little ball.

It might be humming.

And so it's like, let's just play around.

Let's play and see what actually feels interesting or where we create sensations.

So we'll shake our hands out for a minute straight, right?

Like, you just sit here and do this and then stop.

And then you realize how much sensation you create in your fingertips and just feel that.

Because we oftentimes stay so far in our head that we're so disconnected from our bodies that we don't even know what sensation even truly feels like in the body.

And so depending on where a person is, where we will make those kinds of decisions about what?

How fluent are they in their own body?

Do you understand the language of your body?

And so what your body is asking for?

Stretching always feels good in the body, right?

Because we're so tight and tense, anxious all the time that we're constantly tense.

And so stretching and doing yoga, very gentle yoga, kind of things generally feel really good.

But then some people will go, oh, my God, I can't do this.

It's so slow.

And I'm like, ah, that's information.

So you need to move faster.

So the fact that you're getting frustrated by the speed in which we're moving means your body is asking for more movement, faster movement.

So let's give it that.

And so then they start to understand it and then they start to pay attention.

And that's really.

That's the start, right?

It's what does your body want?

And let's listen to it and let's respond.

And then some people will be like, oh, my God, I just want to scream.

Scream.

Yes.

Grab a pillow and scream into that pillow and.

Or whatever.

Let's do that.

Yes, I love that.

Or I want to squeeze something.

And you're like, okay, yes, let's make fists and let's squeeze things.

Absolutely.

You just find the things because people, the language will come up for them, but they won't necessarily connect it to the body.

And so then it's about.

No, your body has been communicating the ways that it wants to move energy out of it.

So let's really look at what that way is and explore it.

And what worked for you 5 minutes ago May not be what your body needs now.

And so this is an ongoing conversation that we're going to have with our bodies.

And it's not going to be something that, like, where you think, oh, this is my list of things that I do every single day for my body.

There are things that your body will prefer that you'll notice over time, like patterns that you know of, things that are preference.

But no, it's an ongoing language.

So it's always, what am I feeling like I need to do for my body today?

I'm going back to where you said, first discern whether or not you're in a safe place.

That's very important too, because like you said, you don't just want to be like, oh, danger, no, no, I got this.

I'm just going to shake.

No, but because a lot of people, I know it sounds crazy, but a lot of people are black and white, and especially people that came from those traumatic backgrounds, they are black and white thinkers.

So it's, it's balance in everything.

And learning to listen to your body when you first start doing is very foreign, Very foreign.

And I always say when you've gotten along a little farther along in the process, do some, I call them gut checks.

When someone says to me, oh, Tammy, I've forgiven him.

Okay, that's cool.

Let's wait.

Five minutes later, I'm like, oh, what about your brother?

And then they're like, oh, you just watch their, their shoulders go up.

And then I'm like, okay, let's go back to that.

Where did you feel that?

Oh, my gosh, my stomach.

I got this gut punch feeling.

Okay, so logically, you've forgiven him.

Your body has not gone through that process.

So it's, you have to constantly, it's constant of checking in.

I don't want to say analyzing because then you're going back to your mind again, but just feeling, feeling.

Tell me about the first time someone ever told you that.

Do you remember?

First time someone told you where, like, where do you feel it?

Or oh, gosh yeah, no, therapy was the first time, right?

Those aren't conversations you really have, at least not in my world.

It's not things that I'd had conversations with people about with my casual friends in day to day life.

So in therapy.

And she was like, okay, but where does that register in your body?

And I was like, how in the hell am I supposed to know that?

What a weird question.

Then she was like, it's your body, you're living inside it.

And I just, the fact that she reminded me you're living inside it, I was like, oh God, I am.

Because when you go through life in survival mode, you feel like a floating head.

You forget that the neck down exists and you just do.

And so I was like, oh my God, I don't know.

And so then it was a lot of the same kinds of things.

Let's have a conversation with your body.

Let's have a conversation.

And like you said, it feels very foreign.

It is very much touch like learning a foreign language because you're paying attention to the nuance of kind of behavior almost and feeling and sensation.

And then you're using that to create a language that you can logically understand to be like, oh, my body's calling for this now.

And it takes a lot, it takes a lot of conscious effort to do.

But for me, it's my jaw.

So much lives in my jaw.

And so the second that something is stressful or that I'm thinking about something that's stressful or I'm future planning or whatever the case might be, clamping immediately happens and then doing jaw releases, right?

So massaging the jaws and noticing being like, oh my gosh, the tension I hold here because I've never paid attention to my jaw, right?

And so then you start doing these.

I do them daily now, these massages on my jaw where I realize I'm like, like, oh my gosh, like how much tension you build up in the strongest muscle in the body.

And then also a lot of another trick for people listening for the jaw.

If you hold that tension in your jaw and your neck and that's your throat chakra, that's every, that's your voice, that's your stifled voice really is manifesting in that whole area.

A lot of people, I tell you the guppy move, where you're just looking like a guppy, it looks stupid.

But after a while doing that, and after someone told me to do that for a while, I remember all of a sudden I would start yawning, my eyes would start watering.

And I'm like, wow, I didn't even know it was.

It's amazing.

I remember going to a doctor or when I went to a therapist at one point, and she's, where do you feel it?

And I'm like, I feel it really in my sternum, always in my.

The gut, my gut punch.

And she's.

So you think that might have something to do with you having bleeding ulcers at 18?

I'm like, yeah, maybe.

Maybe the two might be connected.

Yeah, might be a little body mind connection there, maybe.

But it is funny, though, because it's.

We speak a different language now.

Thirty years ago, when I went to the doctor with bleeding ulcers, they never said, what was your child?

Look, how was growing up?

What kind of stresses did you have?

That wasn't a thing.

It just wasn't a thing.

It was.

Take 15 Tagamets for however long, 15 years, and let's see if we can move on past this.

Treat the symptoms, not the root cause.

Yeah.

And I love that we're in that language now where a lot of the words are, like you said, this toxic positivity or just these cliche words that are running around.

And I caution people not to believe everything they read, not to go down these rabbit holes every time they hear something, because that's just as damaging.

But there's a lot of good information out there.

There really is.

And I think the especially.

I keep going back to what you do, but working with the body is so vitally important.

That's when I really started to have my breakthroughs, when I could stop.

And I do it with my clients.

Now it's just body before story exercise.

Where do you feel it in your body?

And then when your mind starts trying to explain it away, oh, no.

What does it feel like?

Does it have a shape?

Does it have a size?

Does it have a texture?

What does that feel like?

And then.

Oh, this is why.

Nope.

How big is it?

How little?

It just keep going back to that and keep.

Because your mind wants to take over and protect you again, always.

And breath work also is an incredible kind of pathway in for people that feel safe with the breath.

Sometimes breath work is a good entry point for people before the body.

Right.

So depending on what your body has experienced, the breath might be an easier entry point.

For someone who's experienced any kind of violence around their breath, then that would obviously be a no go.

But if you haven't experienced that breath work.

I've had breath work processes where I've literally been sitting and Stuff and things will fly out of your mind, and you're like, whoa, what is that?

Where did that come from?

And it's.

And.

But it's.

Oh, my gosh, I didn't realize.

And it's like light bulbs go off and it makes sense.

Something makes sense.

But then also the way your body releases in a breath work is so fascinating to me.

So sometimes you get.

Have you seen the lobster hands or the claw hands that happen when people do breath work?

Yeah, it's fascinating.

Like where they literally can't move their hands for a moment because their hands get frozen like this.

It's happened to me before where your hands get frozen in this lobster claw because the of CO2 oxygen ratio that's happening in the body, it freezes your hands for a moment.

But then what happens is then your body relaxes and it releases, and there's massive tension releases that are coming out of you from stored pain and stored emotion that's been held in the body that your body is now finally able to let go of.

And it's a really beautiful release that happens.

And like I said, I've had facilitations, like where that's happened where I've had the lobster claws, but also just times where you lay.

I lay down, and my muscles will spasm.

And not in like a. I don't know, like an overuse kind of way, but more like they just tense and release.

And sometimes it'll go on for an hour.

And you're like, what is happening here?

And it's something that was stored in the body is letting itself go because you've created an environment where it feels safe enough to be released.

And I just.

And then there's this moment, at least for me, of just pride in the fact that it's like, yeah, yeah, body.

We did this.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And always.

Thank you.

And give it grace.

Absolutely.

People spend so much time complaining about what their body is doing.

And your body is always and always will be and always has been there to protect you.

But it's.

Everything it does is a message.

It's telling you something.

So it's telling you to slow down or speed up or move or release.

But I talk about the.

The imaginary backpack a lot.

And every single.

Every single thing that's suppressed and not dealt.

Anything not dealt with, let's just put that anything not properly processed and released is in the backpack.

And I kind of do that.

I kind of have this visual in my mind when I have one of those releases.

And it.

And it's Ah, the backpack, it's lighter.

And it doesn't matter what you have to think.

I like metaphors.

I like visualization.

I just like that of going, oh, my backpack.

It's lighter.

And in a lot of ways, your body afterwards, because you get that release of endorphins that come after those.

Those trauma releases or just emotional releases of some kind, you feel physically, mentally lighter.

It's almost like you're just like, oh, you know, that was something real.

You know, that something just left you and you don't.

The language of the body, we don't get to know what it was.

Right.

But we know whatever that was.

Like, I'm lighter now.

And that is so beautiful.

It is.

And it brings up a very good point about the fact that you don't need to know what it was.

So when you do the somatic work like that and you have these releases, you don't have to go back and relive that trauma that just released.

You don't have to.

Your body is letting it go for you, like you said, because you've opened up this space.

I always say you start with this little safety bubble about this big, and as you do more things and increase that capacity for safety, that's where it's going to start branching out and you will start to have those releases.

But the theory, if you're out there listening and you're not going for help, because I don't know how many times I hear people say, I can't go through that again, or I can't have that brought up.

You don't have to.

I feel like the old way of hypnotizing used to be barbaric almost, but in a way I don't feel.

Let's go back and relive that 18 times until you get.

Process it.

No, you can have those releases without putting yourself back in that moment.

That's what's so beautiful about it.

Yeah, I think so.

For talk therapy, you kind of circle around.

Talk therapy is really beautiful.

If you need to understand.

If you want to understand something, right.

If you're still going, I don't understand why this happened.

I don't understand it.

It doesn't make sense.

And you're trying to make sense of the senseless.

Right.

Talk therapy is really helpful for that because what that's saying is your mind is trying to understand it.

So you need to verbally process it.

You need to have someone reframe it.

You need to be able to have context and all of these things applied to a situation.

To help you have a better understanding where you can make peace.

If you're saying, I don't, I don't need that, I don't want to go back and revisit it.

It's too painful for me to revisit or it, but it hurts in a way that I don't want or I've tried to understand it.

And there's no understanding the senseless.

Right?

You can't make sense of the senseless.

The language you're using is saying it's not that your mind needs to release it, it's that your body does.

And so I think that when we are describing what do you need for this to be able to address this?

Is it that you need to understand what happened to you or you need to have a different way of looking at what happened to you, or do you need to just be able to get it out of you right then those are two different things.

And that's giving you a clue as to which path you might want to pursue.

Whether that's talk therapy, whether that's somatic therapy, because both are helpful and both can get you to the same place.

You can have body releases in talk therapy because what your body was waiting on was your mind to understand.

Or alternatively, you can have the same releases where you never know what you're actually letting go of in somatic therapy, because it's your body that was the hold up.

Your body was the one that was needing to let go of something, not your mind.

And I've used, and I say that all the time, most people, I feel like in my experience, at least in my generation, I think I'm a lot older than you.

But talk therapy is where you started.

That was really the modality that was offered and no judgment on it because it's, it is a great combination.

It's a comprehensive healing system.

There's no one way, there just isn't.

And it's unique to every individual.

It's unique to every single person.

But absolutely.

But I also encourage people to go out and try whatever, go out and hit all the things I used to say.

I was like this damaged person throwing spaghetti at a wall.

It's like, whoops, that one didn't stick.

Oop, that one kind of stuck for a minute.

Oh, that one's falling down.

Nope, didn't stick.

And then all of a sudden like, oh, that one stuck.

Let's try that some more.

But you have to see what works for you.

There is no A to Z path in healing.

Absolutely.

And I, oh my Gosh, I agree.

And I also think when we, when you try something and it doesn't stick, it doesn't mean that it won't stick forever.

And so it may just be that that moment in time where you were, where your circumstances is, whatever, it didn't stick.

And so maybe it's that I tried that, and then it's.

Maybe it was the practitioner, maybe it was the.

Where you were at the time or whatever the case might be, but just because, like, using somatic therapy, right?

Oh, I tried it.

I didn't really feel anything.

I don't know what everybody's talking about.

Maybe it wasn't the right time then for you, but maybe try it again when you're ready kind of thing.

Because sometimes it's fresh eyes, fresh hands, or different people or different experience kind of things where we're more ready.

Right?

And.

And I say that about talk therapy, too, because I started this whole journey through talk therapy, and I'll always be an advocate for talk therapy because I don't think that I would have felt brave enough to try any other kind of modality without having gone and had a relationship with my therapist where my therapist was encouraging me to go and try all these different things because exactly, like you said, try them.

Because what's the worst that's going to happen?

Because I was terrified.

Like, I'll use EMDR as an example.

I was absolutely terrified to do EMDR because I was like, oh, my gosh, it's going to pull out all these memories that I have, all these gaps in my mind.

And so it's going to pull out all these things.

And what if it pulls out things that are worse than.

And then I just have to go down that road.

And that's not.

That wasn't my experience with emdr.

My, My experience with EMDR was that it accelerated my healing rapidly because I was finally, when I finally agreed to do emdr, I was finally in a place that I was willing and accepting of what, like, was going to come from it.

And I also was, like, willing to trust that if something negative did come out of it, like, if I did uncover cover, a deeply hidden memory that I could.

That I was at a place now that I was going to be able to hold myself for it.

Through it, I was going to say, you were at a safer place in your own being and in your own healings, that you could handle what was thrown at you.

And I always say that of the universe or God or however you look at it in general, I'm like, You're not going to be given more than you can handle at the moment.

So that's why you have it's.

And it's unveiling in layers what you can handle and what you can't.

I use that, I use that example, used emdr.

I use EFT tapping as that example.

A lot of people like, that doesn't work for me.

Okay, that's fine, I get it.

And then I'm like, but just for fun, try it again in a month.

But I've had so many people that are like, wow, it took me like a good month of doing these five minute tapping things to where all of a sudden.

But it was disbelief.

That's what it was.

This isn't going to work.

It's the same thing that people that go and they get.

Go to a hypnotherapist.

If you go in with a closed mind and a negative mind.

And like you said EMDR when you were scared to death of it, that's a closed mind that is not open to.

Okay, this could potentially actually work for me.

Yeah.

And when I wasn't open to it because I didn't have the emotional safety.

Right.

I didn't feel grounded in myself at the time to be able to do it.

And so I did.

I've done a lot of different therapeutic modalities.

And so I'll use.

I did ketamine assisted therapy as well.

And that one I was much more open to being like, we'll see where this goes.

But it's the same possibility, right.

That you could uncover hidden memories or whatever the case might be.

You have that same possibility with it.

But for whatever reason, I was less afraid of it than I was of emdr.

And, and I will just say having gone through both and ketamine helped me to get to a place, get past a place that I was stuck.

I had hit a point where I couldn't go any further and talk therapy.

And she was like, we have to do something because you're just circling mentally.

You are so blocked.

We've got to get past this.

And ketamine is what moved me past it.

I think ketamine in a lot of ways helped me to become more safe within myself to be able to then go and do emdr.

But EMDR is the single thing.

It really accelerated all of the healing that was happening inside my mind.

And then trauma sensitive yoga really helped to facilitate a lot of what was going on in my body.

And so I think doing the two in tandem also just continued to build that stability and that strength within myself to where I was like, oh, my gosh, I can feel.

I can feel in my body.

I can feel in my mind how I am healing.

And oh, gosh, I was gonna say,.

That was the look I was looking for that.

And when people are like, I don't believe any of this is gonna help me, I don't see how it's gonna help.

I'm like, I'm living proof I was right there with you.

Six years ago, I would have said the same thing.

I don't know how I'm gonna get out of numbness.

And yet here I am.

And I can let joy and delight and goodness into my world, and I can hold them and I can see them as precious and powerful, and they themselves are healing.

And so, yeah, it's incredible.

That's awesome.

So tell us about your book real quick.

The book is titled Ever Woven.

A Memoir, A Reckoning.

And so as part of kind of this healing journey, I wrote the book as a conversation between present me and the past me who lived through the hell that they had to go through.

And it was a silent one.

And so really, for me, this was an opportunity to let them say the things that they kept unspoken for the need of safety, whatever the case may be, but also to face myself and my own self abandonment, the ways in which I was always eyeballs looking outward and always planning for what was coming next and never really tending to the me that was existing inside this body.

And so this was an opportunity for me to sit down with those past versions and say the things that they needed to hear that they didn't deserve what happened to them, that someone should have protected them, to be the one that then goes back and protects them and says, I've got us now.

And so it's really a story about that process of me facing myself and allowing myself to just show up in the ways that I never allowed myself to before.

And in.

In doing so, to say, this is what it's like to be in the in between, to have survived something, to have lived in survival mode and to be working my way out of it.

And.

And here's what that looks like.

Because so many books are about either how to survive trauma, or they're like, if they're trauma memoirs, they're oftentimes, this is what happens, and this is how I survived it.

And then that's where it ends, is that it ends with the I survived it.

But that is, I think, the first part of a trauma story, because the second part is now how do you survive what's happening internally?

And how do you move beyond and heal from what's happening internally?

And so for me, that's really the point of writing the book.

That's awesome.

I'm gonna have to get that one.

And I will put it in the show notes for the listeners.

If you want to grab the book, I will put the link in there.

I think that's so important because the trauma part of it is just the beginning of the story, if you want it to, or it is.

It's just the beginning section.

And you can either die in your mind and in your body and in your soul at that moment, or at the.

At that stage, or you can start walking forward.

And I think you're right.

It's like people just identify them with themselves as, I'm a survivor.

How about now we become a thriver?

How about now we.

We bring the joy and the love and the.

And all of the things that we were bringing born with back into us, because they were never gone.

They were just buried so, so deep.

Under layers and layers of pain and protection and.

Yeah, absolutely.

And so it's really important, I think, to know that you don't survive.

You don't survive awfulness, to just let numbness be the end, right?

And so for so many people, that is.

That's where that.

Where they end, right?

They're like, I got through the hard thing, and now this is just what my life is.

And I guess this book is also a testament to the fact it doesn't have to be.

And here's the things.

So I go into detail about the things that I did on my healing journey to get to where I am now, but also a very honest conversation about what I'm still struggling with, because there's no such thing as healed.

There is an ongoing evolution of self, and that is really, for me, that's what's going on.

And so you're going to see in the book, I talk very honestly about now.

My.

My fear isn't what if it all goes wrong?

My fear is what if it all goes right?

And so fear of success, fear of.

Fear of the good.

Like, how do you navigate those things and how do you let them in ways that feel sustainable for a nervous system that is still wired to expect danger and stuff?

And so how do you transition away from always expecting danger to allowing life to just unfold in front of you and know that you're okay to be able to handle whatever comes?

And that's the mystery.

That is absolutely the mystery.

Because when you start on this journey and all of a sudden it's like you have this openness to this joy that feels more uncomfortable sitting with.

That feels more, you know, you finally get that good relationship and you can't sit still and you're like, oh, this is not good.

Or what's the catch?

Wait, it's all going right.

What's the catch?

Or waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Or all of the things.

Yeah, absolute.

Absolutely.

It's very hard.

And that's the part you would think everybody be like, oh, good, I got this great guy now.

And it's, oh, no, that does not feel comfortable at all.

When you spent your entire life with bad relationships, and all of a sudden you're like, okay, what's wrong?

What's.

And then it's, okay, I must.

I'm gonna do something wrong to mess this up.

And then it's that shame spiral.

It's a whole thing.

We could literally talk forever about all the different kind, you know, the different parts of this.

But this has been super fun.

Yeah.

And if people want to work with you, how do they get hold of you?

Yeah.

So going to my website, MeganMargario.com will be the easiest way.

There's a form that you can fill out on there that you can connect.

You can also subscribe to my newsletter.

And when you do, I send out a.

Just a quick little thing for you, like a PDF about just little ways to let goodness find its way into your world so that you can start noticing the delight that's around you without having to look for it, without having to do anything for it.

Just allowing little ways that you can let it in.

Very cool.

Very cool.

Thank you so much, Megan, for coming.

Before you leave, though, give the listeners, if you had to give them one big message, and I think you just started giving it.

But what would that message be to people?

That survival is only half the story.

I think that's a really important part of it, is that we are aliveness.

Our aliveness includes our ability to hold the shadow and the light.

And so letting the good find its way into our world is so important because we don't survive to be numb.

We survive to be alive.

And our aliveness includes the delight, the joy, the goodness, the peace, the ease, the comfort, all of those things.

And every single person, just by the mere fact that they exist is deserving of all of it.

Amen.

Love that.

Absolutely love that.

Thank you so much for Megan for coming on.

Thank you so much for having me.

It's been an absolute pleasure.

Yes, I absolutely adored the conversation and for everybody else out there listening, you heard it.

You did not get through, go through and survive everything you did just to exist.

You survived it so that you could have a better life and more joy and everything you deserve.

And if you're feeling unworthy, go talk to someone, reach out to Megan, reach out to me if you don't think you deserve it in your heart and ask yourself that.

Say I deserve all good things and then sit with that and see what that feels like.

Because if you get that flinch in your belly or your jaw gets a little tight or your shoulders go up when you say to yourself I deserve all things or I deserve all good things, then you might not truly believe it and you deserve to explore that and you deserve every single second you spend giving yourself a better life.

So thank you all.

You have a blessed week and we will see you back soon.