Amber: I would love to. I am a crazy person in the sense that I have always done a million things, pushed myself too hard, and it’s so obvious now, but for many years I didn’t realize how my tendency to overwork and to self-sabotage, right? That those were really rooted in a lot of life experiences that made me think I had to earn my worth.

And several years ago, when I was really at the height of trying to achieve and especially prove myself as a mother and particularly a working mother. Lots of backstory there, but I was struggling to quote unquote balance it all, and I sought out all of this productivity advice, time management strategy stuff, and I thought, okay, this is working. This is great. Let me. Start a coaching business and share all of these helpful tips with everyone else who needs them.

Only to then keep hitting other obstacles and hurdles and never be able to get away from this perpetual feeling like a failure. And then we had a lot of kind of hard personal things going on for several years that made it that much harder for me to keep up with work and motherhood.

And all the while I was implementing these strategies, I was doing, as the experts say, and trying to keep a positive mindset. And I couldn’t understand why those tips were no longer working, why it wasn’t as simple as just thinking positively.

And I imagine a lot of your listeners can relate where they know what to do, right? They’ve scoured the internet, they’ve watched the videos, they’ve binged all the free content they can find, and it’s not even that complicated, right? We know so much now about what health and wellness really entail?

The difficulty is in actually getting ourselves to do it. And even if we build up the willpower to start, it is so hard to stay consistent and then come all the emotions of feeling like a failure when we can’t stay on track.

And even if my situation wasn’t weight related, although I’ve had, my own weight journey as well. For me, it was these habits of constantly wanting to achieve and then feeling like I wasn’t performing up to my old standards, and the standard tips weren’t working so long. Story long, I learned about the nervous system and it has changed everything for me.

And now I am a neuro somatic coach. I help women better understand your brain and your body so that we can finally. Better handle the stress that is inevitable in our lives. And the real punchline that I have learned, and that is making such a difference in my life, is realizing that stress is not bad. It is definitely not going anywhere.

But each of us. Has then been pre-programmed with these default beliefs and tendencies that are so subconscious and are always going to keep sabotaging us until we learn to re-pattern our nervous system for greater safety and capacity. So there’s a lot to dive into and I just can’t wait to share as much as we can get to today.

Denise: Okay, so to relate this, my friend Amber’s story is this. She thought to get her worth, she had to go more, be more, do more, be more, do more. And I know a lot of you can relate to that. And then she thought the best way to do that is to become even more productive.

And I can relate that to my own journey of having so much food noise in my brain and just constantly thinking about food. And I thought the answer. Would be to just follow a certain food plan.

And I just want you guys to all see that we believe that the answer is outside of us. So we think if we get more information and learn how to do it, the quote right way, whether it’s Amber trying to be more productive, or Denise trying to quiet the food noise, or maybe somebody who’s trying to get outta healthy weight.

We believe the obstacles outside of us and we believe the answer is outside of us. And what Amber is saying is, whoa. Hey y’all, let’s take a look at our own nervous systems, our own brains, our own patterns that we’ve developed. Let’s slow down. Let’s look inside and understand the humans that we’re living as, and that is a key to one of our solutions. Awesome.

Amber: It aligns so well with what you teach as well, Denise, in surrender and just all about calmness and safety. But again, even when we know that is the answer, it’s not easy to just flip that switch and feel calm or feel safe around food or be able to resist the temptation to eat, especially in social situations or any number of circumstances.

And again, this was the real missing link for me is how to learn to sit with discomfort but not feel stressed and threatened to the point that then these default tendencies kick in and take over.

Denise: Yeah. Okay. Great. Great. So why don’t you teach us what you think we need to know and any other questions that I feel need to come in? I’ll just interject my questions.

Amber: So perfect. It turns out we all have a nervous system, which is our brain and our peripheral nervous system all down our brainstem, all the nerves that run through our bodies. We know this, but many of us, especially if you are a highly analytical, intellectual person like me. We have very often ignored and neglected our body, and we were never trained to listen to the inner signals that it sends us.

Even physical sensations like I’m hungry or thirsty or tired, we have often learned to either drown out because they are inconvenient or not maybe socially acceptable in the moment, or they have gotten louder and overemphasized because when we respond to them, they help us restore our sense of safety when threatened.

Denise: Okay. Can I just pause for just a second? So what you’re saying, and I see it all the time in the women that I’m working with, I say something like, what sensation are you getting in your body? They’re like, I don’t know. Or What do you feel? What emotion is coming up? I don’t know. Or, they recognize that they don’t know their own hunger cues.

Amber: Yes.

Denise: And so you’re saying that all of those signals. From your nervous systems are things like that feeling an emotion or feeling a sensation in your body or your hunger cues, or how many of us hold going to the bathroom because it’s inconvenient?

Amber: Especially yes, when you’re working or with kids in so many situations. So the nervous system is very complex. But for simplicity’s sake, we have this natural kind of alert system that is constantly scanning the world at all times. It is called neuroception, and it’s our ability to take in information both externally but also internally.

And orient ourselves and figure out, based on all of this input, are we safe? Are we good? What do we need to do to make sure that we are safe in this moment? I know that you speak a lot about how the brain is designed, first and foremost for survival. Secondly, to conserve energy, and thirdly, to seek pleasure and avoid pain.

But again, this gets wired into our nervous system. From the moment of conception, we are always taking in input about whether we are safe. And as young children, we were surely born into environments beyond our control, and we learn. Before we could even verbalize what we were feeling, our body learned whether we were safe in the presence of our caretakers.

And again, we often felt our caretaker’s emotions. And we then learned how we needed to adapt ourselves, our behavior in order to please those around us so that they could feel good or safe, and therefore we could feel safe.

So we have this pattern of X interoception, which is taking in information from the outside, but in interoception, which is then those internal sensations. We might feel like butterflies in your stomach. The hunger cues, a tightening in your chest or your throat as you might think about, say, public speaking or something like that.

But so many women have learned, not even consciously, but subconsciously, they have learned to drown out those internal signals because they have always prioritized others emotions and changing how they needed to behave or perform in order for others to be stable and happy around them, so that, again, your nervous system could stay safe.

Denise: Yeah, let me just summarize what you said you that was really fantastic if anyone’s taking notes on this. Essentially we learn as very young infants, and I can relate to this ’cause both my boys are adopted and both of them didn’t come into my arms until they were 18 months old. So they had 18 months of their beginning that they had to relate to a caretaker in a way to try to get their needs met.

So on a basic level, an infant learns what will get the attention of the caretaker and. If there’s any interruption in the normal like ways are we cry and then the baby realizes, oh, when I cry, I get my needs met. Okay, that’s great.

So for my adopted boys, I can clearly see that they learned not to because it didn’t matter how much they would cry. They would be picked up on a schedule, they would be cared for on a schedule. I like, don’t even wanna think about that. That makes me so sad.

Amber: It is. It’s so sad.

Denise: But I want every human and every woman who’s hearing this to know how she didn’t even consciously understand this and that it was already forming. She was already learning that her safety was dependent on other people, other people caring for her. And then you get up to the, so that’s in the infancy. And then as you go through your toddler years, at what point do we somewhat come out of that? Do we ever.

Amber: I don’t know that we ever do. I love all of this research, but the punchline is that then our nervous system really develops a chronic stress response. I’m sure a lot of your listeners have heard of the classic stress responses of fight, flight, or freeze. But there’s so much more to this. Okay.

And also, so many of the things that we might think of as personality traits are actually these nervous system responses that we take on subconsciously as a way of adapting and trying to protect ourself in the midst of an uncertain environment.

It doesn’t even have to be. A traumatic experience or a horrible home. Really, it’s just the nervous system trying to figure out how to work with the context you are in and get your needs met and again, stay connected to those on whom you are dependent for your wellbeing.

Denise: Yeah, I was just thinking that, there’s this point where we become adults and we are no longer dependent on other people for our caretaking and our wellbeing, but our nervous systems like haven’t caught up yet.

Amber: No, because you’re well familiar with the concept of neuroplasticity, I’m sure, which is the brain’s ability to make new neural connections, but because the brain prioritizes survival and conserving energy. It always defaults to the neural connections that have proven successful in the past.

Denise: So what’s worked? What’s worked before?

Amber: Yes. And so this means again, that we have over time. Had very strongly myelinated pathways created throughout our whole nervous system where this protein has wrapped around the neural connections that have proven to help us restore safety or stay connected to those we need to. And then now it’s all automatic.

We don’t even consciously think to respond this way. It is a trigger followed by an automatic reaction. And so the five stress responses then. And yes, there are five, whereas most people only know three, maybe four. These really explain how someone’s nervous system has learned to feel safe.

And my big message to the world is that we don’t even have to know what happened. We don’t have to dive back into your past trauma. Again, so many people would probably say, I didn’t have a traumatic childhood. Everything was fine or good or normal, right?

But the nervous system learns through intensity, which might be a big T trauma event or frequency, which could be a very low kind of dull situation that just occurred over and over. There are so many ways in which the nervous system gets patterned and learns over time what it needs to do. Very unique for every person, but we all have a default stress response.

These stress responses are not just for the moments. We get stressed now, and I want everyone to know that. Again, we don’t have to know the past experience. We can just identify present day behaviors and realize.

That is the nervous system’s protective output. That is not your personality. That is not something wrong with you. That is a sign that somewhere along the line, your brain and body learned that this was what kept you safe.

Denise: So. Great. So we are gonna dive into the five stress responses, but all we need to know from all of that science, which I’m geeking out on and I love it, but for somebody who’s just their eyes are glazing over right now, you’re saying, Hey, we’re going to look at your five stress responses to inform you of how you’re living your life now.

And just so you know, it totally makes sense that you’re living this way. Because in your past you had patterns that you learned kept you safe, and the more you practiced those patterns, the more ingrained they became, the more well worn they became, the more they became automatic default. You don’t even know you’re doing it.

Amber: Exactly.

Denise: That’s why, you like end up with your hand in a bag of chips and you’re like, how, what? How did that even happen?

Amber: Or these things are easier to see in other people, right? You surely recognize that other people get triggered and respond in these ways that rub you wrong, but we all have them.

Denise: So all we have to know is that in our past, whatever we did, over and over and over and over. Is going to be really ingrained and myelinated, as you say, more proteins wrapped around that pathway. And if it was an intense or a big T trauma or something that really brought up strong emotions for you, that gets ingrained in your brain too.

So ladies, something may have only happened to you one time. Say you’re standing on a stage and you accidentally wet your pants and you’re five years old. It only happened once, but it could have been that traumatic, that now you’re like, I don’t wanna ever stand on a stage.
Am I getting that right, Amber?

Amber: Absolutely. But I would also offer that the more common scenario for most people is that they didn’t have a Big T trauma event per se, but they were in an environment that was chronically stressful. Whether it was household financial stress, parents overworking or addictive issues, anger, marital problems with your parents. Sibling dynamics.

There’s so much that happens in our families of origin when we are little and we don’t have any concept of what is normal or again, like whether our family is good or bad. Of course we wanna believe that it is good and so our brains always do what we need to do to stay. Connected to belong, to be part of the tribe, which means that then when we’re living in yeah, what is called complex stress, right? Complex trauma.

We don’t even realize that it is traumatic because it’s not the big T trauma, it is this low level. Highly frequent inescapable kind of stress that has just as if not more of a long-term impact on our nervous system.

Denise: Okay? And that term, complex trauma simply means like low grade, but frequently and like chronic.

Amber: And inescapable. Yes.

Denise: Inescapable. So, let me run a scenario past you that came up that I hear from our women often is they are put on a diet in their preteen years by a parent and then they are chronic dieters for the rest of their life, and I’m wondering if that pattern of being chronically, being a chronic dieter, keeping my food in this safe boundary that creates safety for them and gains pleasure from their parents, and they now are in the tribe.

Amber: Yes. Although it undoubtedly had to start earlier than that. If a parent is insisting that their child get on a diet plan, then the household environment was probably one in which. A parent was overly preoccupied with their appearance or weight, hundred percent.

Or there was a lot of pressure put on the children to conform and be aware of what others outside the family might think. Maybe a very critical and even verbally abusive family and you might not resonate with those terms.

We hate to think of ourselves as a victim or to identify as someone that might have had a traumatic childhood, but it doesn’t have to be a big instance of abuse or neglect or something like that. To still leave a mark on a little nervous system.

It could be an environment that was overly critical, or one where the parent was extremely concerned with what others outside the home thought, and there was great pressure to conform, or again, a lot of reiterating that you needed to look a certain way in order to be good or beautiful.

And so there are any number of ways that each of us gets just born into a home that infuses our nervous system with all these beliefs about what is good, who we are, what it takes to be enough and to belong, to earn our worth. All we want is just that love and connection.

But sadly, for most of us, it is not freely and easily given because our human love is inherently conditional and the nervous system picks up on those conditions that are probably more implicit than explicit. But these things we learn we need to do in order to be loved and to get recognized, get attention, maybe get praise from our caretakers.

Denise: That makes a lot of sense. Okay, so tell us the five stress responses and this is what we would be looking for in ourselves today.

Amber: Exactly, yeah.

Denise: As grown women.

Amber: So the first three are quite well known. The first two were developed in the early 19 hundreds. And then anyway, there’s a lot of research about these first three. Number one is the fight response, where someone really learns. To attack a threat head on. Right? And it doesn’t have to be a real threat.

I’m sure you have conveyed this to your listeners in the past, but the brain perceives everything as a threat. And it is those perceptions that can be just as if not more powerful than facing a real saber tooth tiger. Okay.

And so even the littlest situation, someone cutting you off in traffic or bumping into you in the grocery store, those can trigger a stress response. But again, we have these default ones where we tend to then respond to any kind of perceived threat in the same way.

First one is the fight response where you are flooded with adrenaline and you’re going to physically or verbally take on the threat. This is the person that might be very. Physically active. Hopefully not abusive, but even just very expressive. And then especially people that like to yell or shout, maybe they don’t like to do that, but it is their natural response, right?

This tends to be more common among men than women, but there are plenty of us moms who end up like yelling and screaming at our kids. Right? And we might hate that about ourself, but it is a sign that our nervous system has been so overstimulated to the point that we feel we need to fight back and overpower the threat, right? Take back control of the situation. Through our rage.

The second stress response is the flight or flee response, which is where the nervous system very quickly calculates that we are no match for this threat. We are not strong enough to dominate, so we better get the heck out of there and run far away to restore our sense of safety.

Obviously in the modern world, we are not usually being chased by something that is threatening our survival, but anytime we experience emotional discomfort, it is again, a perceived threat and we often develop a tendency to buffer or cope with that emotional discomfort by turning to something that is going to distract us or numb us so that we don’t have to sit with the hard feelings.

This would likely be a very common response for someone that turns to food or alcohol or. Scrolling or online shopping, or even workaholism, which was truly me for quite a while, right? But it’s like, what are the deep, hard things that you don’t wanna feel that are made better by escaping into whatever it is we do?

Denise: I’m so glad you used that word, escape. I used to talk to women about escape eating. It’s just, you wanna escape life. You wanna escape the situation and I think that is so we can see it so much more when we use that word escape.

Amber: Yes.

Denise: ‘m doing this. Yes. So I don’t have to face whatever it is.

Amber: Here, this is where our hormones have been so beautifully designed, but often to our detriment I imagine many women are very familiar with the dopamine pleasure, reward that we get from engaging in something that feels good.

And so in the moment, yes. Eating food, having chocolate whatever it is, right? We all have our addictions. We all have our escapes. So please, again, the big message is there is nothing wrong with you. You are not bad for doing these things. These are the ways that your nervous system has offered a way out for you.

And so those get reinforced, not just by dopamine. Because then when we get pleasure, we want more of that thing to feel the same high. And as all addictions go, we end up needing more and more to reach the same level of dopamine activation. But women are actually even more motivated by oxytocin than by dopamine.

And so what is almost inevitably ingrained into women’s nervous systems is this hyper vigilance for what others think of them and what they need to do in order to stay bonded, stay part of the tribe to make other people happy, to fit in. And it really gets. So vicious because we might want to stop a behavior, for instance. Right?

But if that was socially reinforced, or even if it is something that we think others dislike in us, we then are not necessarily sure how to replace that behavior with something that is gonna keep us connected. There’s just so much going on hormonally.

Denise: If I can just pause for a second. Oxytocin is our bonding hormone. Is that how you would describe it?

Amber: Yes.

Denise: So we are reinforced and Bodies more than dopamine. Women are more motivated by the release of oxytocin, which comes from believing that we’re bonding, that we’re part of the tribe, that we’re included.

Amber: Yes. That we are doing something that is going to maintain connection with those we love.

Denise: Which I can totally see. With food and with celebration and oh gosh.

Amber: Because so many of our childhood memories or so many of the moments, even in modern day where we connect with others, there’s food around, right? It’s a social environment.

Denise: But I think what I want people to hear is. We’re not talking about that being a bad thing about celebrating with food or having family gatherings with food, or bonding with food, or anything with food. What Amber is saying is that when it’s a stress response, that we’re doing it just to create safety in our body.

We’re not doing it from an I’m choosing to do this. This is what I want. This is getting me the results that I want, but when it comes from a stressed place. It then has bad fruits. We end up gaining weight. We feel guilt, we feel regret, and she’s saying Hey, let’s just understand this is one thing that our bodies have adapted to knowing that this is what creates safety for us.

I think we can see the difference between the motivation. One is coming from a place of stress in creating safety, and I’m not okay unless I fill in the blank. And the other one is coming from a place of peace and love and connection.

Amber: And intention? Yes.

Denise:Intention, yes. Okay.

Amber: So the flight response would be, I think, very key for someone who struggles to control what they eat, when they eat, how much they eat. And again, the question would then be. What is the source of perceived threat or the discomfort that leads someone to automatically escape into food?

Denise: Yeah, we call tornado thinking.

Amber: Yes. The third stress response is the freeze response. Where biochemically, it’s really cool. It’s both aspects of the autonomic nervous system getting activated at once, where the sympathetic nervous system that is like the fight response goes full activation mode.

We gotta combat the threat, but the parasympathetic nervous system also puts on the brakes and then the body is just stuck in this kind of overwhelmed, paralyzed, don’t know how to move forward state, and. This leads to a lot of fatigue kind of immobility. Very common for those of us who procrastinate.

And again, it’s all because something triggered us to be stressed. And then we don’t know what is gonna help us restore our sense of safety. So the brain tells us that if we just don’t move, if we just let ourselves shut down, then maybe the threat will pass by.

The fourth stress response, and these last two are much newer. They have gotten far less attention in the literature. The fourth one is the fawn response, or sometimes called the appease response.

So flight. Excuse me, fight flight, freeze, or fawn or appease. But this is more of a learned behavior where the first three stress responses might not have gotten very positive results for us in our childhood.

And so the nervous system believes that the best way to accommodate the threat is to basically roll over on our belly, put our hands up, and try and befriend the threat. Right? Like a little puppy that knows it’s not the alphas. So it’s just gonna roll over and try and do whatever the threat wants so that the threat will stop seeing the person as the enemy. This is your classic people pleasing and what so many of us moms wrestle with, where we just naturally kind of become martyrs, putting everyone else’s needs above our own.

And in truth, it is simply because our nervous system. Does not feel safe amidst anyone else’s discomfort. And so we have this protective belief that if we can make everyone else happy and meet all their needs and make sure everyone else is okay around us, then again we will feel good and safe. But that’s such a vicious never ending cycle, isn’t it?

Denise: That was a really beautiful quote when you said, we don’t feel safe with other people’s discomfort.

Amber: Yeah.

Denise: And so we try to make them comfortable and happy and then we feel safe. But this, every woman listening can totally relate to that.

Amber: Yes, it’s so natural and to such an extent. It is beautiful, right? This is so common with women, but when we. Learn to prioritize, if not privilege, other people’s needs above our own. We become disconnected from our own self and our own body.

Denise: At our own expense.

And then we often feel this internal conflict that builds over time and then either comes out as rage and more of a fight response. Or it leads to self neglect. And then you know, this real loss of identity.

And because we have suppressed our own needs for so long, it has shown that it can turn into chronic illness, autoimmune disease. We are not allowing ourselves to feel our true, authentic emotions and honor our own needs and desires because we inevitably put them second or last.

Denise:Yes. The fifth stress response is, I think, so fascinating. It’s personally the one that I resonate with

Amber: A lot. It is called the fix response. This is the person who basically tries to bypass our nervous system and. Is very, very smart and capable, but thinks that if I can just solve the threat, if I can just make this problem go away, then everything will be fine.

And so we go to town, we are constantly searching for the thing that is gonna fix everything so that our safety and normalcy resume. But this again, is that never ending cycle because there are infinite solutions and very rarely, one right way to do things. But we can drive ourselves crazy trying to. Trying to find it instead of getting to the real root of the problem.

And I would wonder if this stress response is very common in women that might wrestle with their weight, where then again, they’re constantly thinking that some new diet or some new exercise or some new fad is the solution instead of realizing that.

There are these maybe inevitable wounds that were pre-patterned into your nervous system, leading you to turn to food for comfort or to again engage in behaviors that you want to stop but don’t realize how they are your go-to for safety in the present moment.

Denise: Yeah. It’s like the woman who just believes if I am thin, all of the problems go away.

Amber: Yes. Or if I don’t make mistakes, would this be also be the perfectionist?

Denise: Very much the perfectionist kind of overlaps with the fawn response as well. ’cause we’re trying to make sure that we appear perfect on the outside and our life is just so based on how we think others want it to be.

But yes, I think the fixed response is all about control. That we just need to control the environment and then we’ll be safe. But life is inevitably unpredictable. And so this is a very challenging reality to accept. But again, all five of these responses, they are. So beautiful at their core, none is better or worse than another.

We just wanna get curious about how your nervous system may have learned to respond to perceived threat and the behaviors, right? The output are then what must have proved successful for you in the past.

But the real opportunity for growth is learning to build safety and capacity to handle. The perceived threat and allow discomfort without resorting to that automatic response and just build in more and more resilience to feel the hard thing.

We haven’t wanted to feel long enough to prove to our brain build evidence that we do actually survive this, right? We are physically safe and we can stay socially connected even in the midst of. Very difficult emotions or others’ discomfort, all of these things. It’s such a big growth opportunity, but it’s the journey that has been making a tremendous difference for me, and I love raising awareness of this.

Denise: So being able to create safety in their bodies, which we talk a lot about by being able to calm ourselves down when our dog is barking, which means we’re having our stress response.

So for the woman who’s listening who could probably relate to all of those and might feel a little overwhelmed by everything that we just shared, what is one small step that she can take and what do you want her to know? What would you want somebody to have told you when you started this journey?

The big takeaway is that our worth is innate and unchanging. We are so loved. God designed each of us so perfectly, and he gave us our past for a reason, right? Even if we had really hard or hurtful things happen. We all have our wounds.

We all have wounds, and I firmly believe those wounds are there to lead us to God because he is the only one that can fully fill and heal them. Right? But we have been taught and conditioned by the world to think we are the problem, and then we’re on this.

Endless search to heal the wounds ourselves, except that the way we’ve been taught to do that is through these unhelpful coping mechanisms like food or other addictive behaviors, or any of the other stress responses where we are reacting to threat in a way that isn’t. In our best interest and doesn’t actually build our safety and capacity, but is just perpetuating more stress over the long term.

Denise: So what’s one small step you would have a woman take?

Amber: Thank you. Yes,

Denise: Amber, where do

I know I would love for her to just be so much more aware of when she engages in the behaviors she doesn’t like.

What is going on in those moments? What is the context? Because the behavior suggests she is stressed and then having this default stress response, but we want to identify. What is it that triggers the stress response and ideally, of course, try and reduce or eliminate that situation.

But even when that is not possible, the work is really increasing the time, the pause that we take between recognizing that we are triggered and noticing how our body wants us to respond out of habit, but then allowing the emotion and the discomfort to process through us long enough to then maybe choose something else and be so much more intentional with how we respond to stress. Recognizing that stress is not bad, stress is often not even real.

But our beautiful nervous system is offering us this behavior as a way out, and that’s not necessarily true, and it’s likely not for our highest good.

Denise: Yeah. You know, Amber, I’m so glad you said that. It sounds like a big task to undertake, but it is actually built into our 63 surrendered program. The whole concept of the pause. We have that in our food where we make an easy to stick to meal plan, but if you wanna make a change, it’s not a problem. We just give you something to do instead of changing right away.

We have you say, Jesus, I surrender this change to you. You write it down and then you eat the food. But that is giving your brain something to focus on so it can have that space and you can go ahead and change what you want to eat, but it’s creating a new pathway, creating safety.

So it isn’t that automatic like impulse of eating. The other thing is, I love how you said notice when you’re having the stress response. In the program, we teach women how to identify what’s called chaos eating. And they’ll notice their chaos eating in like four or five different habits. Probably. Mine is, if I’m standing up, I’m chaos eating.

If I’m eating off someone else’s plate, I’m chaos eating. If I’m eating while I’m preparing a meal, I’m chaos eating. So they get to start to without saying, oh, I’m stressed. They notice when they do these patterns, oh, this is when I’m in K. Oh, okay. I actually I’m in chaos eating, and it becomes that neon red sign that’s like. You need support here.

Amber: Yes.

Your body’s feeling unsafe, so I just wanted to offer that encouragement to women who are listening who say, yes, I want to practice this. I want to stop stress eating. I want to stop escape eating, and they can just join 63 surrendered so that they can practice this like over 5,000 other Catholic women have.

So thank you. I love that so much for that.

Rowena: The work you are doing is so important, and I love that it infuses faith into all of this. I think so often faith-filled women are the first ones to berate ourselves. Yeah. For our. Quote unquote, bad behavior and our inability to change, and it’s not for lack of desire.

It’s not for lack of will. It really is also more than just a habit. This is a very deeply ingrained nervous system pattern, and if someone had a lot more time. The real work, right, is to get to the root of where your stress responses came from so that you can really heal the past. And I’ve spoken pretty much exclusively about early childhood experiences being our formative experience, but.

You know, there is so much in our adult life that sends us into these stress responses, whether it is relationship conflict or birth trauma, or any experience where we feel helpless and we are trying so hard to make our life the way that we think it should be. But hard things are happening. To us. Right? That’s our perception.

And it’s so important to work with a trauma-informed expert that can really help resource you and give you the somatic tools the body work and the breath work and all these other things that can work with the nervous system in the present moment before diving back into the past.

I imagine a lot of women are very familiar with talk therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy, and I’ve benefited from that too, but you might resonate with the idea that like sometimes you go and you think of experiences, you talk them out, but you don’t really feel any real resolution. And it, if anything, sometimes feels like it makes it worse.

And that’s because as we now know, all of that gets stored in the body and there is a physical memory. There is still a stuck emotion that needs to be processed and released. And, this is what I love working with women on to really get to the, so

Denise: Yeah. So tell us a little bit more about specifically the work that you are doing with women and how women can find you.

Amber: I love working one-on-one with women. I have a six month coaching program where we meet weekly. It’s highly personalized, and then we very gently try and figure out where your nervous system is starting out. I help you cultivate a daily practice of these neuro somatic tools that are simple ways to create. Safety in the present moment.

And then we start unpacking the past, getting to the root of your stress, but again, doing so in these very microdose moments where we don’t overwhelm the nervous system and perpetuate a stress response.

Then I also have a group program that is a six weeks, six sessions that teaches you the kind of basics of the nervous system and how to really work with instead of against your brain and body.

That’s called Moms Made New, and it’s a great introduction for someone that wants like the quick overview and kind of the DIY tools instead of the personalized support or before the personalized support because often women. Get great results in the program and then realize like, oh, there’s so much more that I’d like to know and to personalize.

And so women can find [email protected]. I have a podcast called More Time for Mom that goes really deep into all of this nervous system and neuro somatic work. Neuro Somatic is just fancy language for brain and body. And then I am off Instagram for Lent, but I will be back at solutions for Simplicity here coming up shortly.

Denise: Thanks Amber. It has just been so fun. It’s going to be fun to re-listen to this and take all the notes. You have really taught me a lot, so thank you so much.

Amber: Thank you. And Denise, if I may I do have a free quiz to help women identify their default stress response, which of cool those five Fs. Fight, flight, freeze fawn or fix Yeah, they might tend towards, and then some preliminary steps to be more aware and overcome them so we could put that link in the description.

Denise: Welcome. Thanks Amber.

Amber. Thank you so much, Denise. This was wonderful. This was awesome.