Annie Brook

In this episode of Just Like Nana, host Amie (Elizabeth) Penny Sayler is joined by psychologist and educator Annie Brook to discuss how the nervous system stores trauma, and what we can do to release those chemicals and emotions and ground back into our bodies.

Together they explore pre-cognitive memories and how we can metabolize emotional distress.

About Annie
Annie Brook is a psychologist, educator, and author whose work focuses on trauma healing, birth imprint therapy, and applied neuroplasticity. Through The Brook Institute she teaches practical body mind tools that help therapists, parents, and individuals heal early developmental trauma and build healthier relationships. For more information visit https://anniebrook.com.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

• While the mind can analyze trauma, the nervous system is what stores it. Healing requires moving into the felt sense to release energy that talk therapy alone often cannot reach.
• How experiences from the womb and birth—moments before we have language—create foundational blueprints in our bodies. Recognizing these early imprints can be helpful in understanding unexplained adult anxiety or shut-down.
• How to identify when your system has entered a freeze or existential shock state. Annie explains how dissociation serves as a survival mechanism and provides tools to safely bring your awareness back into your body.
• How to use sensory feedback and somatic techniques to finish incomplete trauma responses. Whether it’s reclaiming a birth push or moving through ancestral grief, these tools help your body understand that the danger is in the past.
• To develop a compassionate witness within yourself. By replacing self-attack thinking with curious body awareness, you create the internal safety necessary for deep integration and personal growth.

Resources Mentioned

• Annie’s PDF Library: https://www.anniebrook.com/pdf-library
• Annie’s “Blink Blink” video: https://www.instagram.com/p/C35qUqMOZ7T/
• Molecules of Emotion by Candace Pert, PhD
• There’s No Such Thing As a Dragon by Jack Kent

Connect with Annie Brook

Instagram: @anniebrooktherapy

Website: https://www.anniebrook.com

Connect with the Show

• Website: justlikenana.com
• Share Your Story: If you have a family story or trauma you’re exploring, reach out via our website for a chance to be interviewed.

Connect with Just Like Nana's Website.

A proud member of the Feminist Podcasters Collective.

Theme music by Carter Penny.

Transcript

Healing Beyond the Mind: Somatic Tools for Ancestral and Developmental Trauma with Annie Brook

Amie Penny Sayler 0:22

Welcome to Just Like Nana. So thrilled to have you here today. We have the coolest guest. You're gonna love Annie. Annie Brook, she's amazing. Before I jump into Annie's background, would love if you have a grandma or grandma-like person or elder in your life that's part of your family or part of your chosen family or your community, just to take a moment, whether it's today or this weekend, to say, hi, how are you doing? And I'd love to hear a cool story you want to share with me. Because people who've lived decades and decades have cool stories. It is a given. So I hope you're able to connect with someone and enjoy one of those stories. Very excited today to have Annie Brooke with us. Annie is a psychologist, educator, and author. She has decades of experience helping adults, parents, and therapists heal trauma through the body, not just the mind. She specializes in somatic and developmental trauma. She's passionate about making deep healing practical and accessible. And you'll hear that in this episode. She will share insights that help us all understand why we react the way we do and how real embodied healing is always possible at any stage of life. So welcome, Annie.

Annie Brook 1:57

Thank you so much. I'm glad to be here. And I like what you help people figure out.

Amie Penny Sayler 2:03

I love what you help people figure out, and so excited to share that with everyone. If it's okay, we like to start the episode with do you have a favorite or powerful memory of one of your grandmas? And what did you call your grandma?

Annie Brook 2:17

Sure. My grandma, my father's mother, was I called her grandma, and she used to drive from Ohio all the way to Florida to see us kids. And they used to call her, they said she had a lead foot because she would make it in an amazing amount of time, that long drive. And one time she was on a bridge and her little car flipped over on the ice, but she was fine. And the next time she showed up in a big brand new heavy Mercedes. No more little cars for her, huh? No more Super Beetles with she could drive real fast, yeah. But uh my other grandma, my mother's mother, I never got to meet, and yet I feel like there's ways I know her because of the stories my mom told about her. And one of those favorite memories was her name was Frida. And Frida and Georgie, my grandparents, had a little delicatessen in the German ghetto section of New York City. And every Friday my grandma would put out her hand and George would put money in it, and then she'd wait until he put more money in it, and then she'd take my mom, and my mom had two sisters, the girls, and they would go buy groceries for everybody. And then they would just walk around the neighborhood on Friday night and just sort of casually drop off these bags of groceries. And I just loved that, you know, they weren't wealthy, wealthy people. They were just what you do with neighbors, you know, how do you help out your community? So that's another favorite memory of a grandma who came alive for me because of the stories.

Amie Penny Sayler 4:00

That is such a cool story, and how powerful for your grandma

Understanding the Nervous System and Trauma

Amie Penny Sayler 4:06

to be showing her daughters this is what it means to be a neighbor and this is what we do in community.

Annie Brook 4:12

Yeah, it was it really touched my heart.

Amie Penny Sayler 4:22

Annie, I have been so looking forward to talking to you because I will tell you that the nervous system comes up in nearly every conversation. There's kind of a general understanding of okay, we have this nervous system, it has a function, it's incredibly powerful. And what role is that playing in both trauma, how it's transmitted, and in our healing process? So if you don't mind starting, just explain to our listeners what you do and give us sort of the 101 on the nervous system, how you see that interplay with trauma.

Annie Brook 5:03

I'd be happy to do that. I have spent over four decades running a clinical therapy practice, volunteering at children's hospital with trauma children, working with sexually abused foster children. And out of all of that experience, I was a therapist in the public schools and worked with gang youth. And out of all that experience, what I found is people are really people. And how can you learn how to relax and organize your thinking and your perspective so you're not reactive? And really what trauma is, is old stories that were never put to rest. And so the way I like to think about the nervous system, because you have to think about the whole body and you have to think about conscious aspects and subconscious. And so often when people have leftover trauma, it's really body perspective that felt threatened or violated or abandoned or overwhelmed. And it went into a freeze response. Our nervous system is meant to have a real healthy ability to play or move or dance. We call that the sympathetic aspect, which just means it's got healthy movement in it. And then it has healthy rest and digest, and that gives us a chance to recover, enjoy, relax. So we kind of have this little interplay. It's like a figure eight where we can go back and forth between these abilities. Now, what happens when there's just too much chaos or threat or stimulation is we go to the extremes of those abilities. And one extreme is that you try to fight everything or you try to run away. So they call that, you've probably heard, fight or flight. And that's got the movement in it. Now, if you can't do that, you can't run away, you can't fight, so you don't get to move, then the nervous system literally will go into a freeze response. And that means you're not communicating internally very well. You're just frozen. The mental body could be racing along, but you're not using all of that support of your breath, of your ability to look around and reassess. You're just frozen. So that's what we call shock, which is what lives inside of trauma. And so when there's that kind of response, the flip to the other extreme is the parasympathetic side, which now is not rest and digest. It becomes catatonic, meaning you don't move. It's where depression lives, it's where people feel like they're gonna die. It's so heavy, they feel lost in space. And really, Amy, the big thing about all of this is we're not present to assess present time and have creative solutions. We're basically living in past filters. So what I help people do is like find those pictures of the past and sort of look at them and then put them down. It's just part of life. It's not how life has to be forever.

Amie Penny Sayler 8:39

There was so much in that. Thank you for that. There's just so much for all of us to think about. Can you tell me your definition of trauma? Again, you said it's old stories.

Annie Brook 8:49

It seems like it's old stories that they're so heavy in the defensive structure of the brain and the body, but basically we have to rest our cheek against them. It's like read the book and then put it back on the shelf. We want to put those old stories to rest. We don't want to pretend they never happened because that would be lying to ourselves. But we don't want to be rereading a scary novel forever.

Amie Penny Sayler 9:18

And the stories, are they necessarily our stories? Can they come from a pre-verbal time? Is that where something can travel through an ancestral line? What do you see as the origin of those stories? Kind of a mix of all of that?

Annie Brook 9:34

That's a great question. And I would say yes. You know, one of my specialties is helping people get

Defining Trauma and Pre-Cognitive Memory

Annie Brook 9:41

to precognitive memory. That means before the age of three, and it can even go all the way back in terms of ancestor history, ancestral, it can go all the way back to being picked up in utero. And so you have to think of this as the experience of cellular impression almost, or like flay that's getting impressed, you know, and so the nervous system is alive and awake in utero. It's still forming itself, but the part that watches for danger is very alive and awake in the brain. And that part is called the amygdala, it means the security chief, and it's it could get hypervigilant, but it recognizes if you're safe or if you're in danger. And so that's why impressions that happen all the way back to prenatal time can be put to rest if you know how to imagine and listen to the story. It's like, okay, little baby inside of mama, what did you do when mama was so anxious because dad was away, you know, in the military or something like that. It's like, what did you do with those impressions? Another way to think about it, Amy, is that precognitive means

Accessing Pre-Verbal Stories and Sensory Feedback

Annie Brook 11:05

we don't have context. Like we don't know that, oh, if you're left in the nursery for an overnight, that tomorrow they're gonna take you back to your mother. The baby has no idea that tomorrow is gonna happen. And so it has a raw kind of sensory input. And the baby doesn't have the context of time or you know, what season. It doesn't have context. So then that little baby will think it's the whole world forever. Like I will be abandoned forever. And some adults live their life that way.

Amie Penny Sayler 11:44

Yeah. That's what I was thinking when you were saying it, you know, well, gee, I'm 54 and I still sometimes have to remind myself, wait, this isn't forever.

Annie Brook 11:53

Good, yeah. And that's, you know, that's how we get healthy is we can remind ourselves. We can sometimes I like to help people find those stories, discover them, because if you can rest your cheek against your own story with compassion and not self-criticism or judgment or blame, it's so much better. Because the brain, when it understands, oh, that's what this is from, it relaxes.

Amie Penny Sayler 12:24

I want to talk about that because, you know, some of these stories, if they're coming through an ancestral line or they're happening when you in this lifetime are pre-verbal, we have, as you said, sort of the cellular impression or the sense of the story, but sometimes the words for the story are lacking. And just kind of as humans, we tend to think in words and in stories. And so we sometimes feel very frustrated when we don't have words, can't tell a linear story about, oh, I understand that I'm thinking X because Y happened. How do you sort of help people to access those stories? And how can we shift our thinking about? We don't need words for the stories, we can look at this instead.

Annie Brook 13:14

Yeah. What the this is, is actually paying attention to sensory feedback. Like, oh, my heart is racing. Okay, then that means I need to take a breath and slow down and look around. We can use our body as a recalibration. So if we don't know the story, our body knows it. And we don't have to get all the details. What we want to be able to do is readjust our internal state so we are thriving in life, so we're comfortable, so we're not withdrawing under threat. You know, the idea of staying present and being able to tolerate discomfort without getting triggered and going back to default habit behavior.

Amie Penny Sayler 14:10

I love that notion of the body knows and listening to your body. And as a person who, as a kid, I didn't grow up playing sports, I wasn't real athletic, so kind of in my brain. You know, I was the kid at the library reading the books. Oh, yeah. As I've gotten older, I've just more and more appreciated, oh, there's this whole other entity hanging out with me during my entire life. It's my body. And it has a lot of information to share with me. And I think does that kind of disconnect? I mean, I'm oversimplifying it, but that disconnect between brain and body is that sort of when you're in that freeze state and you're not able to kind of access all information that's being presented to you?

Annie Brook 15:00

It sure is. And we call that in psychology dissociation. And I've been studying this for years because I work with children, I work with families, adults, couples, and I've come up with about four or five different ways people dissociate. Like one little kid who was adopted, he was 11 years old. And I know from my work with adoptees how big a wound that abandonment is, because it's got so much in it. You know, you're not, you're usually, in terms of sensory, a baby who lives nine months in utero, it gets very used to the rhythm, the voice, all of the sensory input from their birth mother. And then after birth, all of a sudden they have to readjust to a whole different experience. And they often have a very deep feeling that there's something wrong with them. They did something wrong. So this kid would have high arousal. He'd go into the fight-flight response and he'd have temper tantrums. And then in my office, he was in the waiting room having a temper tantrum, and I came out and his mom, there he was, he couldn't get off the floor now. So he went from the movement side to the rest catatonic side. And so I'm there with him and thinking, huh. I said, Does it feel like you're in a cave? I said, Where are you? Are you in a cave? And he nodded his head, yes. And I said, Well, then I thought to myself, you know, abandonment and being alone is the scariest thing for the adoptive baby. And so I said, Is it okay if I imagine I put my hand in the back of the cave so you're not alone? And so I just kind of energetically thought about that and kept my hand there and stayed connected with this child. And all of a sudden he starts blinking his eyes and I said, What's happening? He says, I'm feeling warm now. And that told me on a very physical level, he was thawing out from the freeze response. Somehow, my hand at the back of the cave was giving him connection, which was giving him a way to come back from being dissociated. And so many people will withdraw into a cave. Some people will like fly up onto the ceiling and watch from above. Some people feel like they get lost in the universe. They don't know where they are. So I have different tools people can use to help bring themselves back. And it is a, it's almost like you're confused and all of a sudden you have clarity again. Or you don't know where you were, but oh, I'm fine, here I am. And that's the goal is to help people not have to dissociate in order to problem solve, but to stay present and use their words, use cognition, which we have now, and use healthy emotions.

Resting Your Cheek Against the Memory

Amie Penny Sayler 18:19

You've said a phrase that I just think is lovely. You've talked about sort of resting your cheek against the memory, the story, the cellular trauma that's in us. Can you talk more about what that means, how we're interacting with it, sort of what the steps are of that?

Annie Brook 18:37

Yeah, this is really the personal work that someone can do to reestablish a healthy nervous system. And resting your cheek against your story to be is the idea of feeling compassion instead of beating yourself up. And then it takes kind of listening. What makes you nervous? What are you afraid of? Is it real? You know, when you feel anxious, is there a reason? Or if there's not a reason, you might be feeling ancestral anxiety that's not really yours in present time. And so having what you're adding with the compassion is a perspective. Like I wonder if I'm carrying the guilt from my ancestors when they didn't have enough food for the babies. Or I wonder if I'm carrying the sense of, oh, we couldn't protect our children if people came from a very horrible, like the Holocaust or something like that. And you see this all the time, and people are able to heal it.

Amie Penny Sayler 19:50

When you have that sort of sense or intuition or a little bit of communication between the cellular sense and feeling and your cognition and kind of your story brain, to your point of, oh, we couldn't feed the babies or couldn't protect. Does the healing come from just hearing that, acknowledging it, holding space for how horrible and hard that must have been, and having that compassion for the situation? Is that what sort of unsticks the story?

Annie Brook 20:27

It does. And it does it in a way that it's both it's awareness, compassion, slowing down enough so that you're right in that middle between movement and rest digest. You're in your body, you have enough breath, you have enough adult self-present. And I remember, you know, there were when I was in my own healing, because I was born premature and I was in the incubator. And so I wasn't touched for 70 days. I was just in this box, you know, I couldn't even see my mom. And when I was deep in my sort of allowing that the reality of that story to process, I would sometimes just wrap in a blanket on my couch. I'd set a little timer and I'd put on soft music. And I would just imagine I was holding that incubator baby against my chest. And when I did that, I could start to feel myself relax. It's like, oh, that's what happened. Oh, that's the story. And as this, the healthy adult, you know that you're alive. You made it. You didn't die. And I think those are the, you know, in the primitive nervous system, the biological imperative is to survive. And so I think babies who have a difficult birth sometimes think They're gonna die. It can be even a birth experience, not necessarily an ancestral experience. And so you want to help integrate the sensory input and remember that when you were a tiny baby, it was overwhelming. But as a grown-up, you have so many more cells that can process. You have so much better ability to have perspective and context. And I think all of those things, it's it's kind of a cognitive support, it's a emotional support, it's a physical staying present with your breath, and it's not getting stuck in the story, it's not avoiding it. Many people run away from their stories because they were so hard. But if you run away, some people are always running or numbed out. But if you can embrace the story without becoming it. So I want to say something important here, Amy. You never want people to get re-traumatized. And sometimes, if therapists aren't careful, when someone's visiting their history, they can just get stuck in how hard it was, or how scary for their mother or their father or whatever. And if you get stuck

Off-Gassing and Metabolizing Emotions

Annie Brook 23:22

in it, it's almost like you're reliving it. And that's what hurts yourself. It hurts your nervous system. You don't want to relive it, you want to off gas it. And that's a different way of processing. You're not running mental pictures, you're just allowing the discomfort to off gas. And you're adding breath and you're letting this sort of wave of discomfort pass through. And the waves might start out really big at first. Like, wow, once you notice, whoa, you know, this happened to me, you might have lots of little fear waves come. But if you stay present, the waves get smaller. I call it staying on the surfboard, having the discomfort, but you also have your cognitive perspective. You can tell yourself, oh, this is my shock trying to heal. And these are memories I don't even kind of remember, but I have the sensory discomfort of it. And so I'm just gonna let that wave pass until I kind of regroup and orient to present time. When you talk about off-gas, what does that mean? That means that literally you allow yourself to feel like maybe the infant vulnerability, you might even feel a little cold or you know, that you just are shaking and you just let it like you don't add to it. You don't try to flatten it and you don't add to it. So I call that off-gassing. And what I really think it is, and I'm, you know, I'm a geeky sort of neuroanatomist. I study all this stuff and explore it. And I've had decades of training in body-mind centering and movement perspective. And what I think happens is that anytime that freeze response happens, we don't process the emotions that are right there with it. And there's a book called Molecules of Emotion, where Candace Purt was the scientist who wrote about this in the 80s. And she said, Well, emotions actually have a chemical component. And so I started thinking about that. And I was like, oh, I bet that component just stores in the body until you're ready for it to integrate and process. And I think the off-gassing is literally those chemicals that were kind of stuffed into the body and frozen are starting to thaw out and express and resolve. So I call it metabolizing. You know, you have to let the body metabolize as well as get perspective mentally. Otherwise, your body will still feel all these weird activations.

Amie Penny Sayler 26:16

And as you're metabolizing, that is then leaving your body on some cellular level.

Annie Brook 26:24

Yeah,

Compassion for Self and Others

Annie Brook 26:25

it is. It's leaving because one, you're integrating it, and the next wave of fear or whatever emotion it is will not be as big. It gets smaller and smaller.

Amie Penny Sayler 26:39

I do want to make one observation, and then I have a question. When you talked about it gets smaller and smaller, you know, you've talked about when we ignore it, we can spend time running away, we can spend time frozen. I also, there's a kid's book where there's a dragon, and the dragon just keeps getting bigger until people acknowledge that the dragon exists. And that's sort of a little bit how I see it too is part of it is just this, and I mean, I realize I'm talking about a chemical or an emotion or a story, but I do think there's on some level an existence there and just a craving for I exist, look at me, acknowledge me. And when that happens, and as you say, things are metabolized, it kind of shrinks and right-sizes itself instead of being, you know, the ginormous dragon that's taken over the house.

Annie Brook 27:36

I love this. This is a wonderful example of what I call existential shock. It's so big and it will take over the house. And oftentimes it's because if something is sort of experienced when it you're before you can think, it's coupled in the brain. We call it neurocoupling. It gets coupled with your view of the world, it gets coupled with all of existence. And so we I call that existential shock. And it's why people run from it is because it does feel bigger than them. It feels like they can't do anything about it. They got to get away. But what I have people do, and if anyone's listening, you can just try this, is that if I'm working with someone and I see that they're in that existential shock and I know it because people say, well, you know, it's too big, or I'm I can't do anything about it. Then I say, okay, I'm gonna go out to the edge of the universe, and I'm gonna put my hands outside of this shock, and we're gonna condense it. And I teach people how they can take this big, big feeling and they can put their hands on the outside of it and start to condense it together. You're kind of pushing it back into a little package that you can hold. You know, you're getting bigger than it. Because if it's bigger than you, it's too much. But if you get bigger than it, by acknowledging it, by understanding a little bit about it, by saying, oh, you know, I'm in charge of my life now. As a child, I wasn't. You know, as an infant, I couldn't get up and go get a drink of water or go get food. And so you keep shrinking it till you have a little package that you can work with. You can put it up on the shelf, you can get it down again, work with it some more, but you're not overtaken by this dragon.

Amie Penny Sayler 29:57

A word I've heard you use a few times is compassion. And I would love if you can just address one, the compassion for ourselves and the story that's in us. And also I hear a little bit of perhaps compassion for others that have been involved in our story. So, for example, you told us about the child who was adopted. So, and life is complicated, right?

Annie Brook 30:24

Things aren't always complicated.

Amie Penny Sayler 30:26

Yeah, things aren't good or bad, black or white. You know, they're not polar opposites. Instead, there's always a lot going on in any situation. So, sort of, and I am not attempting to speak for every person's story. Sometimes we need a healthy distance and a boundary between perhaps people who have been involved in some trauma in the past in our lives. And sometimes we can perhaps find a way to have some compassion around some of those situations. So I would just love if you could kind of talk about that compassion piece, both for ourselves and for others.

Annie Brook 31:05

Yeah. And I think there's a few tools that help us to feel safe enough to stay what I call it as stay relational, like stay in relationship. You don't stay in a relationship if it's life-threatening. But if it's somebody like your parents who, in a way, did the best they could, perhaps. I'm not, you know, I you always have to listen to each person's story, but sometimes parents didn't know how to do anything any different. And if you spend your adult life mad at your parents, that hurts you. It hurts your family sense of family. And so that forgiveness and compassion isn't something you can just try on. You have to actually get to the bottom of it where you can realize you're okay and that you can have a what I call a healthy hula hoop. Like I say to people, imagine you just can have a hula hoop around you that gives you breathing room. So you have enough breathing room so you're not triggered by other people. And sometimes you can have healthy conversations and, you know, solve a solve an experience from the past, get get a dialogue about something that happened that was difficult. And that's always wonderful because it usually brings people closer together. Other times, you can resolve something with your cognitive understanding and tolerate good enough parents so that you're not always or you, I don't mean to be point the finger, but it's like it's like you you don't end up blaming people because blame is is not healthy to be stuck in blame.

Amie Penny Sayler 32:53

I want to just acknowledge, you know, that that blame piece. It can be really hard because I think, and this is me, I am I have not spent four decades studying what you have studied. So I am not professing that this is some sort of expert opinion. It's just my lived experience, is that sometimes when you're in that blame, it's kind of like an armor because you feel deep down, if this happened, it must have somehow been my fault. And that feels too big to hold. So you sort of cover it over with this armor of I'm blaming you, where really, and again, situations are different and complicated, but oftentimes it is no one's fault. Like you said, it is people doing the best job that they can and it not being perfect.

Annie Brook 33:43

Well, that's it. When you can allow life to be good enough, it's a big relief. And I think one of the other pieces, very, very important, is to interrupt what I call self-attack thinking. So someone who's defensively blaming others and might, like you just said, actually be blaming themselves. And that is part of self-attack. And there's a real thing I've woven together to understand why do people beat themselves up internally? You know, some people always blame others, others people blame themselves, or they're always rehashing life and you know, finding things they did wrong. And I think it's just that function of fight, flight, freeze, escape. And what self-attack thinking does in a positive way, though it the outcome isn't positive, but the intent is if you're so if something is so chaotic, a a really young infant or child will look to the adult to see if they're okay. You know, a big dog barks and the baby startles and looks to the mother, and the mom goes, oh, that was a dog. It's all right. And the baby goes, Oh, okay. And it sort of comes back into its body and relaxes. And so what self-attack thinking does is it keeps the fight response alive, meaning, okay, I can fight it, whatever it is, I can fight it. That's the attack part of it. And then the self, the reason you attack yourself is because it helps you know you exist. But it's so damaging to the brain to be under attack all the time. And so I really invite anybody who has self-attack thinking to find the compassion for the positive intent of that protective mechanism, and then really, really interrupt it. I have an Instagram channel called Annie Brook Therapy, and I have a practice on there called Blink Blink. And it's a one-minute little sort of like meditation practice, and the silly thing went viral. It had like 160,000 views. It keeps getting all these views because people like it. And what it is is you take these obsessive thoughts or these bad memories or whatever keeps troubling you, and you put it outside your hula hoop, and you look at it or listen to it just like it's an audiobook or a picture, and then you dynamite it. Literally, you take your breath and you imagine you could disperse all that collected energy. And this is an old Sufi practice from the Sufis, where you dynamite an image or a thought and you disperse the energy and you just let it go. And you breathe back in sort of your sense of self, but you're no longer holding in a part

Practical Steps for Healing

Annie Brook 37:05

of your brain. It's it clears out what I later learned is the file cabinet inside the brain, and we call it the basal ganglia. And it will store file cabinet memories. And you just got to take those pictures and get them out and blow them up so that you have new space because we have associative memory in our brain that will respond to triggers of color or shape or spatial proximity, and we have uh, you know, memory kind of things, and we want to just not be stuck in this emotionally traumatized brain. We want uh our emotions to refresh so we're not leaning so much into the past.

Amie Penny Sayler 37:52

That video sounds amazing. I will be checking it out as a technique. Okay. It sounds a lot like spring cleaning to me, which everyone knows works and brings good energy and new things into your life exactly as you're describing. You know, you've got to open up the space.

Annie Brook 38:10

Yeah.

Amie Penny Sayler 38:18

What do you think are a few first steps that listeners can take if they think, you know, I think I might be stuck. There might be a little bit of what, you know, Annie is talking about here. What are some steps they can take? And then how can people learn more from you? Because obviously, this is the tip of the iceberg of what you have to offer and all of your wisdom.

Annie Brook 38:39

Well, for self, you know, just kind of taking care of yourself throughout the day is learning to pause, learning to slow down a moment. Because under threat, the brain and the nervous system will speed up. And that's the running away or the fighting. So just stopping in your tracks, slowing down, looking around is a great way to start to interrupt reactive thinking, reactive emotional habits, even reactive physical habits. And then if people want to study more with me, I have several trained therapists, I do online sessions, and I have online courses that are throughout the year. And in every course, it's very experiential. We do some real process work where people get to feel themselves change over time. And they're usually like a 10-week course or sometimes a five-week course. But I give people skills. Right now I'm leading one called healing birth trauma. And this is for adults who think that actually they might have had a difficult beginning or a difficult attachment time after they were born. And we just go back and go through it. And I have books that people can read. I have lots of e-books. I have a free PDF library for people who enjoy reading, which has lots of articles about trauma. There's one for mothers who uh gave birth C-section called Finishing Your Birth Push. Or if you were born C-section, all that bottled up energy that didn't get to express. There's a way to move that back through the body in a safe way so that you don't shut down and go just to thinking thinking. I love sharing tools and resources. So my Instagram account and then my online courses. And then if you want help one-on-one, I do have therapists available who have trained for with me for years, and sometimes I'm available myself. I occasionally do in-person workshops, and I lead these very small groups that are giving people the chance to actually go right into the felt sense of this distress and get support to let it go, to integrate it.

Amie Penny Sayler 41:08

That sounds amazing. And we will link all of the, you know, the Instagram and and your website and all of that in the show notes so listeners will be able to access that.

Annie Brook 41:18

Well, thank you so much.

Amie Penny Sayler 41:21

Thank you, Annie.