Stuck in Survival Mode? How to Make Your Body Feel Safe Again

[0:00] You're not supposed to have headaches every day. Your body's not supposed to hurt every day. You're supposed to sleep well at night. What would you tell a parent like me? Because it is hard sometimes to tease out like... Yeah. And I don't want to say it's not real, because there's probably real things, right? Yeah. That I'm not aware of. I was a teenager and everything was like super intense when I was, right? How do you navigate that? Emotions are tourists. They're not meant to live here. You want to let them into your body and let them out of your body. Anything that supports... A human being,

[0:32] and feeling safe in their humanness, that to me is so aligned with who God is. Health and wellness is confusing. There's a new trend every week. Everyone's got an opinion, and half the time, you can't tell what's legit and what's just good marketing. And we get it. We're in it too. Welcome to Dialed In Health. I'm Melissa Goodwin. Every episode, we bring in the people who actually do this work. Providers, practitioners, the experts who seek clients and patients every day. We ask the questions you'd ask if you were sitting across from them so you can find the right people, make better decisions, and feel confident about what's out there. Whether it's peptides, gut health, water quality, ADHD, biohacking, or something you've never heard of, we're covering it. So let's get into it. Let's get Dialed In.

[1:20] Welcome to Dialed In Health. You are in for a treat today. I am sitting here with Jada Dobesh, the owner of Selah Space and Jada Dobesh Healing. So Jada, she is a spiritual healer. So we're going to learn a little bit more about what that means. I'm super interested. I'm sure you all are too. And you do a lot of things in this space. It's a beautiful space. Thank you very much. Yes. I take great pride in that. We live on vibes around here. Well, I very much appreciate you being on the show. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. So first of all, tell us when you say spiritual healer. That's a loaded statement. So tell us what that means. Break it down for us. Well, it has gone through multiple iterations. What do you call yourself when you have a background? Someone's staring on the grocery store. Yes. What do you call yourself when you do a little bit of everything? But I settled on spiritual healer because my background is actually spiritual direction. And so I am a certified spiritual director.

[2:27] And then we added in all of these other things that promote healing. And so I have called myself a spiritual director, a spiritual healing facilitator.

[2:37] Nobody ever knows what that means. Most of my clients call me their therapist because it's easier to explain to people, even though I'm not at all a therapist. And so what we landed on was the simplicity of spiritual healing. So what does that mean? What happens when you sit down with a spiritual healer? Yes.

[2:58] Everything I do is led by the Holy Spirit. And because of that, there is not one formula for the work that I do with clients. But women come into my office and I listen first. That is always rule number one. And we will do whatever she needs in order to feel more holy herself, to feel healed, to feel aligned with who she's meant to be. And that might include spiritual direction, which is holy listening is what it is. And so it's a lot of what would look like your typical therapy session in that sense. We're sitting across from each other. They're sharing about their life. I'm listening, asking questions. Something I say all the time is in spiritual direction, one of us gets to feel and the other gets to analyze. And you're not paying me to feel for you. Okay. So I am analyzing what they're feeling. And so it's a lot of where do you feel that in your body? That's the semantics of it all. Okay. It's a lot of who taught you that?

[4:06] How old is the version of you that learned that? How old is the version of you in charge of that belief system?

[4:15] And kind of doing what therapists would call parts work in that. And then we also might at a certain point realize this is stuck in the body. This is energy stuck in the body. And then we'll get on the Reiki table, not we. They'll get on the Reiki table. I'll stand near it. And we will work on that energetically in a Reiki session. We also sometimes do what's called brain spotting. Which is similar to EMDR, but more gentle. And so where EMDR is the movement, the eye movement, brain spotting is focusing on one spot. So tell me, you said you were a spiritual director. How did you get into that work? How were you called to that work? And what does that training look like?

[5:03] I was so determined as a freshman in college to be a family and marriage therapist. Okay.

[5:12] Going to USF, a Christian liberal arts university, you have to take a couple of Bible classes. And I was sitting waiting for intro to the Bible to start. And the professor was talking to some football player about football and stopped mid sentence and said, Jada, what's your major? And I said, Sykesosh. And he said, you should do youth ministry. I went down to the registrar after class and I added youth ministry to the docket. And ended up being a youth pastor for four years. Okay. Well, technically youth and young adults ministry director. But then while doing that, I found that what I loved most about being a youth pastor was when moms would come in to drop off a check or a form and they'd end up on my couch talking to me and crying for an hour on a random Tuesday. And so my mentor said, I think you should do the spiritual direction certification program at Kairos. And so next thing I knew that's what I was doing. And the woman in charge of that program, Susan Reese said, you're already here. You might as well get a master's in Christian leadership since you're here. Just tack it on. Just add it on. (Laughing) It's not a big deal. And so that's where I ended up with things. And from there, I was seeing a guardian of one of my youth ministry kids. And she was dying of some health complications. And I just said, God, I need to get my hands on her. Sitting and listening is not aligned with who I am. I can't just sit back and provide minimal comfort. And a couple of days later, I heard about Reiki from another spiritual director. And I was like, sign me up for that.

[7:00] And we've just sort of, whatever my clients need, I'll go get certified in that. That's fine. I've never heard of this before. This is fascinating to me. So I've heard people say, trying to figure out what their faith, what their experience, trying to make sense of their childhood experience and how they wanna go forward as an adult. But I didn't know there were people certified and guiding in that. That's fascinating. Yeah, it's very mystic in nature. And actually, its roots are more in that space of nuns in the Catholic church. And so the Catholic church is very used to spiritual direction. You go sit with a nun and pray together and work on your faith life together.

[7:51] There's so many, we don't have to get into all of that, but it is less common in that Midwest Protestant Bible Belt of things.

[8:03] But we're very comfortable with the idea of the pastor sitting down and answering our questions and that sort of thing. This is just more of a companionship than a teacher student. Sure, yeah. So tell me about a person that has come in here that sticks with you, without saying names or any description, but what's something that's sticking with you that you've worked with recently and maybe help make it real for us. Can you describe an experience that someone might be going through, that you're helping them? Yeah, so spiritual director and all of this talk about that makes it sound like I mostly help you deconstruct faith work through questions you might have in scripture. What I'm actually working with most is women who are wrestling with what they believe because of the way they were raised. And so I do a lot of daughter wound healing work. And you would be so surprised how much their relationship with God is impacted by their relationship with their mom.

[9:04] And their relationship with their dad, but we always experience things through mom first. That is what we work through most often here is this, I know what I was taught and I feel guilty about going a different way, but this doesn't feel aligned with me and this hurt me in some way.

[9:24] And I don't know how to wrestle with that and feel like a good girl still. And so we work through, it's so multi-layered, right? We're complicated beings, we're body, mind, spirit beings. And all of those pieces of us experience different things and are trying to line everything up together and make it make sense. And being a human is just more complicated than that. Do men have the same sort of struggles? I don't work with men for their benefit.

[10:01] It's just not my strong suit. And anytime I have tried to work with men, it has been really hard on me or really hard on them. I have let men into the office whose wives really need their husband to be healed in some capacity, their mental health, their childhood coming to the forefront in their parenthood, those sorts of things. And because I want to help her, I try to help him. And I'm just not the person for that. And so I send them to other providers in town instead. Yeah, when a person walks in here, what do you typically, do you feel or enter, like do you feel what they're carrying? What do they, without, obviously like every case is unique, but what are some patterns that you see people walking in with? The women who walk through the doors at Selah Space are carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders. We talk with all of our providers often about how most women coming to see us are technically fine. They are not risking homelessness. They are not terminally ill. They are not the women who are in immediate, imminent physical danger, right? They are the women who are getting their kids to school and they are surviving and they are taking care of aging parents and they are trying to figure out how to help their sister through her new bipolar diagnosis and all of these things. And they carry such a sense of responsibility about all of those things that they have denied themselves care for so long. And now they're coming in here and it's such a relief to be held and supported by somebody else. Man, that makes me emotional.

[11:51] It's such a relief for them to be held and supported by somebody who believes them and takes them seriously and says, "No, this isn't okay. "You're not supposed to have headaches every day. "Your body's not supposed to hurt every day.

[12:06] "You're supposed to sleep well at night." Those are very real problems and concerns that we wanna help you with. There is a, especially as you get, you have kids and your parents are aging, there is this entanglement of hormones, cortisol, spirit. There's all the things and it's hard to untangle. Am I just super stressed out? Do I need to quit my job? Do I need to get a divorce? Do I need to move to a new city? Do I need to quit my church? Do I need to, there's like, Do I need hormone therapy? Do I need, Do I need to go on a bunch of testosterone? And sometimes it's a number of things. It's hard to untangle. It's hard to know what is at the root of it because you're just carrying all the stuff. How do you help people through that? So in my work, the root of all of this is a lack of safety in the body. And until we treat that, nothing else will actually take hold. It'll help, it'll band-aid, it will get you through until Christmas or until that busy season, you promise yourself is almost at the end and it never is because we jump into the next one. But if our body does not experience a sense of safety, it can't regulate and it can't recover. And that's where we're not really sleeping. And then our cortisol is screwed up. And then we're mad at our husbands and we don't know if we should be married to them anymore. And then we're not sure we should have been moms in the first place. And then we question everything because the stress mounts. And I always say that stress management, really the only cure is stress elimination. We have to eliminate things. But quitting your job is not going to create safety in your body necessarily. And so in my office, and I would say, Being an entrepreneur will not create safety in your body. It will not create safety in your body.

[14:00] (Laughs) But what will is being held and witnessed in your pain. And so that's what we're always aiming to do, at least in this office. And I would say most of the women in the clinic, in the Selah Space would agree. It's a different space than therapy. It's different than going to your pastor. So how do you carve that space out when you talk to people about what you do? How do they describe it to their friends? Do they just say I go to therapy, like you said? My clients either say I go to therapy or they say I'm seeing Jada. And I've actually heard stories of a group of women took a pottery class, went out to dinner one night after pottery class, they were new to each other. And one was talking about her experience of seeing a spiritual director, the other one said, oh my gosh, who do you see? And they said Jada and three other women at the table had seen me or heard of me before and they were talking about their experience of working with me. And so it's a, A secret club. It's a secret club.

[15:09] It's not so secret anymore, but it was for quite a long time. So you started in 2020, you said you moved in here. What a time to start a business. Yeah, why not? And had a baby. And I had a baby. Yeah, the pandemic hit at the same time I took a positive pregnancy test. And at the time I was working an evening shift as a med aid at a nursing or assisted living in town so that we didn't have to pay for daycare because we were house poor and fresh out of college and all of these things. I had left working at the church. And so we said, I'll work this job so that I can work on finishing my master's, all of those things. And when you're pregnant, you just live at a warmer temperature because you're cooking a human. And the pandemic hit and we had to take temperatures before we started our shift. And so I wasn't able to work for a while. And so my husband said, you might as well just do this thing. I had a little tiny office that I shared with three other spiritual directors at the time. Downtown on Main Avenue was not going to be a big enough space for Selah Space. And so I started looking for a place and had a lot of men tell me that I could do a lot with LED lighting and I could use this basement space and a lot of really horrible realtor experiences. But we found this place and kind of in the nick of time because we signed paperwork on September 30 and my son was born on October 10. Oh my gosh. What was meant to be? Yes. It is interesting trying to find the right space and timing and all of that. But it was obviously meant to be. It's a gorgeous space. Thank you. What do you think is one of the most common mindsets or thoughts that people come in that you have to help them walk back or understand? Yeah. That's a great question. I think there are lots of different ways I could take this. But the first that comes to mind is that this has to be my fault. Or there's something wrong with me. And if I could just fix that thing that's wrong with me, then my life would be what I want it to be and it would all work out. And that's actually a very core daughter wound

[17:34] that once we are able to rework that, they're able to see, actually, I have authority in my life.

[17:43] Some things just don't work out and it's not your fault. Some things aren't meant to be. The mystery of life gets to take up space and everything doesn't have to be fixed anymore. We stop performing morning routines and evening routines and lists and all of the expectations. We stop trying to fix ourselves.

[18:09] Or others. Or things. Or others. Yeah. Things aren't fixable, which is hard to reckon with sometimes. It is. Yeah. You mentioned that we store a lot of these emotions in our body. What can you sense, like if you feel like someone might be storing a lot? Do you feel or see? I've had a client who when she first started to come see me,

[18:31] she didn't have a neck. OK. She literally, No, I'm thinking about my neck. This was her resting position.

[18:38] This was her resting state. Yeah. And I think it was session six, I finally got her up on the table and her shoulders started to drop a little bit at a time each session. Now she has a neck. And now when she does come in to see me things are a little bit up. I know exactly what's going on. We're bracing. We don't have that safety in our body. And so watching that space begin to take place, now you can speak from the heart. Now you can speak your truth. Now things move more freely in your body. And you feel more at ease. You're showing your body that you feel safe. That's changing so much for you. I also see a lot of women who don't feel their feelings out loud, right? We store them. We throw them behind us into shoulder and neck tension. Or we blow, Because we're not digesting what we're feeling. And so women who have extreme painful bloating need an emotional release. And they probably need a daily emotional release until that bloating recedes. I noticed when we were setting up, I was looking at your books. You got books on hormones and all kinds of things. And I was like, I don't know what she does. But now it's making more sense that you're saying that. So you might be drinking all the teas, taking all the supplements, doing all the things. But you're still feeling it in your body. Yes, exactly. And like I said earlier, I will learn what I need to learn to help my client through things. So I spent seven years studying the Enneagram. I'm big into human design right now. I taught whole courses on menstrual cycle healing.

[20:18] I will learn what I need to learn. We might have to come back and do another episode on these. I don't know anything. I obviously have had them, but I don't know what you're talking about. How crazy is that? It's so common. It's so common. Anyway, OK, there's all kinds of things I don't know. So I'm learning a lot through, I'm selfishly, Oh, good. I get to learn a lot through this show. Good. I'm so glad.

[20:38] So when we store pain in the body,

[20:42] and maybe we're tight, do you feel like sometimes people are scared to let that go? Oh, yeah. Women are afraid of how much damage they can do. Oh, tell me more about that. That sounds interesting. This one's juicy. So this, we're afraid, many of us grew up with aggressive parents. So anger equaled unsafety, right? It equaled broken glass. It equaled broken dishes. It equaled a hole in the wall. And that caused them to look at it and go, I can't do that. Anger's bad. Don't be angry. Similarly, we were taught, don't cry. I'll give you something to cry about.

[21:30] And it's the same sensation as women who struggle to orgasm.

[21:37] It feels like if I let go, everything's going to shatter. Everything's going to break. I don't know if my body can take it. And the longer this builds up, the more afraid of that emotion being expressed women become. And so we hold on because we don't want to hurt anybody. We don't want to cause any drama. We were taught to be good girls. We were taught to be seen, not heard. We were taught to make things better, not worse. And that causes us to downplay the emotion. But that energy has to go somewhere. Right. Every time that energy has to go somewhere. So if you're not going to release it with tears or a scream in the car or throwing pillows down as hard as you can, going for a jog, whatever it is,

[22:29] that is a healthy emotional release for you. It has to stay trapped in your body. And your body is finite. There's only so much of it. So that fear that it's going to break your body is not unfounded. You're not going to shatter into a million pieces, but you will start to fragment.

[22:48] You will start. What does that mean? Yeah. When I ask clients, they're sharing a story, I can tell they're starting to get kind of emotional. That tension is coming up or the twitching starts or the, yeah, we got to play with our hair or pick at the things. Right. I will say, where do you feel that in your body? And the first six to eight sessions, she's going to say in my chest. As if she doesn't have a lower half of her body. OK. And then she'll also tell me she doesn't know when her next period is or she doesn't know how she's feeling. She doesn't remember if she's constipated or not. The whole lower half of her body is shut off to her because it doesn't feel safe. And then we start to fragment out physically, mentally, spiritually. Right. I don't feel spiritually connected. I'm trapped in my brain all the time. I can't do anything but analyze because I'm trapped way up here. I can't notice a sensation in my body. I don't even know what you mean when you ask me what I'm feeling. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. So how do you help someone who has that kind of fragmentation reconnect? What are the things that you do? That's where I love to do Reiki because there is a safer space where somebody's holding you.

[24:11] And so I will get women up on the table. They relax for a little while. We have an eye pillow over their eyes. I truly have the comfiest bed. You'll have to try it before you leave.

[24:22] It's a duvet. It's got the best pillow on the market. It's amazing. But they start to relax. And they start to feel safe to let emotions out. And then somebody who doesn't know them touches the spot that hurts all the time. And the shock of being seen in that way allows for an emotional release. OK. So I've only done Reiki once. And honestly, the thing that was crazy to me was what happens when you close your eyes for 45 minutes or whatever. Yes. And you don't do anything. Yes. It was almost terrifying. Yes. The crazy thoughts that went through my mind, I was like, I don't know if I want to do this again. Yes. Yes. And I didn't get touched at all. No. It was literally, Yes. I'm a big believer in the touch. The oxytocin lack in our culture is so extreme. And so we need to be held. We need to be supported. I think that got so much worse with the pandemic. Yeah. We got afraid to shake each other's hands, to hug when you greet people, those kinds of things. And we lost another opportunity to connect on that physical level. So worst case scenario, you're getting a little bit of oxytocin. You're getting a quiet 45, 50 minutes. And you are getting a little bit of relaxation. That's the worst case scenario in my office. Best case scenario is you leave without pain. The bloating goes away. Your rib cage evens out. I've had women come in with concussion symptoms, extreme headaches to light and sound, and leave without any of those symptoms. Those are miracles. And that's really, really beautiful. But worst case scenario, you get to relax and you get a little bit of oxytocin. It is really uncomfortable for high functioning women though, because you're not doing anything. Yeah. I hate yoga too. Yeah. I don't want to sit, I don't want to sit and scratch for an hour. Oh, get me out of there. Absolutely not.

[26:18] I know it's good for me. Oh, totally. I just hate it. Yes. I get it. I get it. So tell me, I didn't realize there was different kinds of Reiki. Like touch, no touch. There's different forms. It all depends on the different practitioner.

[26:33] Reiki can be done without laying hands.

[26:37] It can be done from a distance. It can be done in a lot of different ways. And there are different certification programs. There's Angelic Reiki, there's I'm Certified in Holy Fire Reiki.

[26:50] There's Karuna Reiki. There's a whole bunch of different types. And it's really important to find a practitioner that you align with, just like in therapy. Sure. So what are the questions you should ask if you're like, hey, you know, I feel like I might have something stored in my body. I don't know. I'm curious. What are the questions you should ask to make sure that you're a good match with a spiritual director? If you have a religious affiliation with a certain denomination or a certain religion, asking their approach to that. And if they shy away from that, they're probably not the person for you. You want somebody who feels comfortable with different forms of spirituality, different experiences of that inner life. And you're going to want to know, you know, I have some women who experienced a lot of physical trauma, a lot of sexual trauma, where touch is not an option at the beginning of things. And so if that's something you're really, truly not comfortable with, you're going to want if that person is comfortable not touching or if they do that at all, those kinds of things. I'm the type of practitioner where we'll do what you need to do. So if you don't want to be touched, you don't have to be touched. You don't have to lay down. You can stay seated. We can do all kinds of different things. You mentioned something earlier. You said it's almost like a mystical, which when sometimes people, that makes them nervous if they're a Christian. This sounds a little out there for me. How do you help them reconcile that? Or how do you reconcile that? Yeah. I firmly believe that God can handle what we're working with.

[28:38] He's a big boy. He's not offended that I offer Reiki. Because Reiki, in and of itself, Reiki is a Japanese technique for stress reduction and relaxation. And it can promote healing. That's the definition of Reiki. So it is not affiliated with any denomination, any religion. It doesn't disagree with any of those things. It's not getting in the way of any of those things.

[29:08] In all of my years of studying scripture for school,

[29:13] I read about Jesus performing miracles. I read about Jesus telling his disciples to go perform miracles. I read about him saying, you're going to do bigger miracles than I did. I read in the Old Testament that we're supposed to anoint each other with oils. And the Hebrew word for anoint is "massach," which is very similar to the English word "massage." It's the laying on of hands in a loving way. And so anything that supports a human being and feeling safe in their humanness, that to me is so aligned with who God is, this loving, ever-present, ever-powerful being who is here for us. And so I don't see any contradiction. I have been confronted with it on the internet and at speaking events many times. And I, in my younger years, loved to debate about it. That's not something I feel I need to do anymore, because I feel safe in my experience of it. My clients feel safe and held in their experience of it. However, I know where their concern is coming from. And I understand that. And the way that I always approach it is, does Reiki feel spiritually safe for you? If not, it's not for you. Let's do spiritual direction. Let's sit and talk. Sure. If it feels spiritually safe for you, great. I love it. Yeah. One of the books that's really popular, The Body Keeps the Score. I'm curious, what does that book in your mind get right? Is there anything that you feel like you would push back on or any concept in there that you feel is maybe not quite right or there's nuance to?

[31:02] I think the book gets it right. I think we stop at the beginning of the research as readers, as a lot of therapists, that the brain shuts off when it's triggered. That's what the MRIs show, right? The prefrontal cortex shuts off. We don't have it anymore. Alligator brain. Yeah. And so it kind of gives this understanding of what's happening, but then we don't do anything with it. My goal in this office is not to help you understand that, but rather to help you get to a place where your brain doesn't shut off. Okay.

[31:37] I wanna take you further than just understanding why you're triggered. I want you to become unbothered by what happened. That you have to become extremely bothered because you have to witness that. You have to tend to the younger version of yourself that experienced that trauma. And you have to do that in such a way that is equal in measure to what happened to you. And that takes a lot longer than people are comfortable with. And it's a lot more obnoxious. And it's a lot more, there are so many tears and that causes so many headaches. And it causes discomfort in marriage and in family life because you have to tend to that little girl who's triggered until she believes that you are gonna show up for her. So you don't seem like an obnoxious person. (Laughing) Thank you.

[32:32] But you said this work can be obnoxious. It can be. And you're helping people go through probably a pretty gnarly process. Yes. People that probably aren't comfortable crying in public or on a massage table.

[32:45] Tell us a little bit about, why is that so important to have, that it's obnoxious, do you think?

[32:52] Because the little girl inside of you is the one who's in charge of your nervous system response. The four or five year old that got told to quit crying in the grocery store over that box of cereal, it's not gonna happen. Learned something about tears that day. And that may not have been what your parents meant to teach you. But it is what you picked up on. That tears are unacceptable. Especially in public. So we learn to cry in the shower, and in the car by ourselves, and in the dark. And to be as unbothered some as possible. But that's still abandoning the little girl inside of you. Even if you cry during every shower you take. If you cry daily in the shower, great for you. You are abandoning that little girl. Who needs to cry in the moment? Who needs to cry in the present to what is upsetting her. Yeah.

[33:44] You're probably too young, but Seinfeld, the George Costanza where he always has the moment afterwards. He's like, "I should have said this." There's a lot of people that probably, after the event happens you're like, "Oh, that's why I was so mad." But you get so red hot in the moment, you can't think of the right comeback, or the right thing, or even cry. Or be upset when you are more connected in your body. Are you able to do that better? Maybe not come back with the best one-liners. Well, sometimes that's what's needed. I'm not opposed to that at all. I don't think we say what we should say often enough. But what's happening in those moments where you're so red hot that you can't think clearly, is you flipped your lid. Your prefrontal cortex has shut off, and you are running on nervous system response. We know about fight or flight. We don't necessarily know as much about freeze and fawn. And that's often what women tend to move into.

[34:46] So tell me, what is that, freeze and fawn? Freeze is, I can't even respond to this. I'm dumbfounded, I don't know what to say in this moment. I'm stuck. And so I'm just gonna hold still until the threat passes.

[35:00] So until the conversation's over. Then the brain will come back online. You'll regulate, and then you'll think of everything you should have said. And another thing is what keeps coming up in the shower. And notice when it happens, it's when you're warming yourself. It's when you are in the shower or on a walk talking to somebody or you're doing the dishes. There's a warming activity. You are thawing. With fawn, you're just trying to keep the peace. You're trying to stay friends with this person. You're trying not to upset mom. Nobody upset mom.

[35:34] And so we just keep the peace. We don't say what we need to say

[35:39] because that would cause greater harm down the road. Then the other thing that happens often in fight mode is not that you have the perfect comeback, but you start to, you fight yourself. And so if you're mean to yourself, I shouldn't have even gone there. That shouldn't have come out of my mouth. I shouldn't be here. Why did I do that? That was so stupid. That's fight turned inward. And we become really, really hard on ourselves. So those are three of the ways that a woman might respond to that type of conversation. And then we don't come out of that until we become regulated again and reconnect with ourselves, get back into the present moment. So you have children now. You talked about the mother-daughter wound. What do you do? Make sure that you're, I mean, we're all gonna do stuff, right? Unintentionally, because we're human and we're imperfect. But what do you pay really close attention to with your kids? Yeah, I think the biggest thing for me is that I apologize. Not that I apologize for having emotions, but I apologize when I have caused harm.

[36:50] I think we take the gentle parenting movement. I've watched women. I have to do a lot of unlearning with clients in here because they'll say, "I'm sorry, Mommy was upset. "She shouldn't have been upset." No, that kid ticked you off. (Laughs) You're upset, right? We can't abandon that little girl in favor of this little girl, right? And so we need to say things like, "Wow, I am so frustrated right now. "I feel like I'm unheard. "I need to go take a minute." And I go, "Take a minute." And then we can go talk about this together. And I encourage her, all three of them, to do the same thing, right? To take care of themselves so that we can come back and we can do this well, right? We've gotta get that prefrontal cortex back online before we can address anything correctly. 80% of connection happens in repair. So being able to apologize, being able to work through something, being able to sit through the discomfort of their absolute meltdown because they're the only kid in the house without a dragon book, we have to be willing to sit in that and then repair the experience and come back into connection. If we're connected, it'll be okay. And my hope is not that they won't need therapy, it's that they will go to therapy and they'll tell me about it. Okay, I love that. That's great. I'm gonna screw them up. We all do. We're all so human. But I want you to not hide the fact that you're in therapy from me. I want you to tell me when you're upset with me. So I have teenagers now and I look at the generation because I'll hear things from them saying my mental health isn't good today. And I'm like, I'm a Gen X-er so I'm just like, are you serious? The singer.

[38:40] Give me a break. Yes. Like get up and go do the thing. And so what would you tell a parent like me? Because it is hard sometimes to tease out. And I don't wanna say it's not real because there's probably real things that I'm not aware of. I was a teenager and everything was super intense when I was. So how do you navigate that? I try to be in awe of their emotional intelligence. Okay.

[39:10] That's way nicer than what I'm doing. It is, it's very nice. What you're doing is great. Don't get me wrong.

[39:16] I was raised by a Gen X-er, I know.

[39:20] What you are doing is not inherently wrong as long as they feel safe to say that with you.

[39:28] But I try to be in awe when they know how to articulate how they're feeling. Do you know how many 40 year old women have no idea what they're feeling? And for your, almost all of them. Almost every single one of them. So for your teenager to be like, I'm having a hard mental health day. Wow, good for you for knowing that and for noticing that. That tells me that you are online. Okay. And that you are regulated. So even if you're having a hard day, you're still in your body and that is amazing work. Great job. What are we gonna do now to improve your mental health so you can go get the thing done? So the one thing that I struggle with a little bit because maybe again, this is probably the Gen X-er in me is I feel like I grew up with this,

[40:17] maybe didn't grow up with the grit idea, but as I got older, I hear about grit. I'm like, yeah, that's right. That's what I have. It's grit, right? The Angela Duckworths work. And resilience and you have to be resilient. So it's like you just keep getting up. You can get punched and you get up and you get up. And that's really, really beautiful physical resilience. But what about spiritual resilience? What about emotional resilience? What about mental? I don't know. I don't know anything about that.

[40:45] Right? And what your kids are showing you is that grit and resilience can come in different forms. Okay. And so it's that parts work of it. You're having big feels. Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah. I just want you to know everybody cries here. So go ahead, let it out. No, I always have big feels. So I think overwhelm is sort of, and it's the midlife thing, right? It's like all the things. So it's intense, yeah. But I think the interesting part about what you're saying is I never looked at that as grit. I just saw that as like weakness. Like you don't have the mental stamina to say like, I'll keep pushing through. See, and to me that says, and this is a very common teaching, that you can mind over matter this, right? And what you mean is my mental strength has to be stronger than any emotion I encounter so that it can overpower it. And if we were to unfragment you. We'll save that for another episode. Oh yeah, totally. I'm sure I've got plenty. But for anybody who isn't doing an interview right now, if we were gonna unfragment that, it could look like I am going to still finish this task or go to this event. And my emotions are incredibly valid and I can feel them and let them leave my body. Emotions are tourists, they're not meant to live here. You wanna let them into your body and let them out of your body. That is like a great quote. You should put that up on the wall. I love it, it's true. Like I haven't thought about that. And sometimes there are some of us that have lots of them, and I think it made my kids, because my daughter's in art school and I was an artist. There's no shortage of emotions in our house. And my partner is also a highly emotional person. What a learning experience for you. It is a tornado of emotions wrapped in emotional wrapping paper all the time. So it's a lot, right? And so I think it's interesting.

[42:54] Yeah, I guess I never looked at that as a strength, but that's a good way of thinking about it is awe and that they're tourists. Yeah, the emotions are just tourists. They're gonna leave the mental health status of things. That's temporary. And the question isn't how do we make that never happen again? It's how quickly can we return to kind of that homeostasis where the mental health is good? So what are the things if you were to give guidance to folks in terms of things you should do? Because we hear about, there's lots of wounds, lots of emotions. What are the things if you were to say,

[43:33] things are gonna happen, you're gonna have slip ups, do these couple of things on a regular basis? What would you guide people to do? First of all, we're gonna be done with shoulds. It's not helpful. And the last thing every woman listening to this podcast needs is another task to complete, another expectation on herself. Instead, what I want to invite you to is called the hug. And this takes 30 seconds to a minute. You can do it in the car, you can do it in the bathroom, you can do it at any point in the day, and it's gonna help reset your nervous system. All you do is take your left hand, put it in your right armpit, which is always funny to people because everybody's always a little bit sweaty.

[44:17] And then your right hand goes over your left shoulder. And you sit here until, this always happens to me really quickly when I'm teaching it, until you tear up, shiver, or yawn. Okay. And that is a nervous system regulating somatic experience of coming back into your body. You are literally giving yourself a hug. Okay, and how often do we need to do this? As many times as you want. I have clients that do it countless times a day, and I have clients who just try to do it before bed. And all of that is great. You can do this before a meeting, you can do this before soccer practice, you can do this at any point, you can do this while your child is screaming on the floor because they want another snack and dinner in five minutes. Like, you can do this at any point. Because this causes no harm. It doesn't look that weird.

[45:08] I do like to, if it's not working after 30 seconds to a minute, I like to have you stand up and add the mom's sway. You know, like we get in church and other situations. That is another regulating. We are showing our body, hey, you're safe. We're just swaying. Yeah, I find myself doing that sometimes with a dog. I'm like, what am I doing? It's so weird. You are regulating. That's somatic healing. Okay, interesting. It is the regulation. It's what your body needs to be present. Oh, interesting. That's really cool. All right, so anything else that you would tell outside of the hug? Any other good advice you have? Find connection. We need connection with people. We need people to talk to. We need people to hug us. So tell us a little bit. You have Jada Dobesh healing, and then there's Selah Space. Yes. Help us understand the structure. Help me understand what's happening. No, it started off as Selah Space, one LLC totally uncomplicated, and it has just continued to explode. And now there are two LLCs in a nonprofit corporation, and all of it really does boil down to let me create space for people. Okay. And so with Jada Dobesh healing, I create space for women to heal in one-on-one and group settings because relationship wounds, all daughter wounds, all mother wounds, they're relationship wounds. So they have to heal in relationship. And so many women are afraid of community. We were taught that girls aren't safe people, that they're catty and they're mean and they're jealous and they don't want what's best for you. We have to heal that too, because then we can be held and we can be hugged and supported and encouraged, and you need to go see Jada and you need to go do this thing to take care of yourself. People to check in on you and make sure that you're taking care of yourself, because it's really easy in our culture not to, and to just do them scroll until we numb out and then get back to it with our grit, right? That's right. And so that's Jada Dobesh healing. The Selah Space, the place, the holistic wellness cooperative, I'm a glorified landlord for eight other providers in the space. And then we have the provider network, which is a greater collection of providers that we're constantly referring to and collaborating with to create multidisciplinary care. And then Circles of Care is the nonprofit. And that's where we help get women the healing that they need, which is often multidisciplinary,

[47:42] without financially draining them, because self-care that's financially exhausting is self-careless. Yeah, I would agree. Yeah, that's amazing. You've created a whole infrastructure around, It's an ecosystem, chat GPT tells me. Ecosystem, I like that. Yes, very good. Well, that's beautiful. I mean, obviously you've got an amazing gift. Thank you. And I'm sure your other providers here do as well. They really do. So just thanks for all the, this was such a fun conversation and terrifying, if I'm honest. If I'm honest. I'm so glad you told me. I do have that effect on people. You're like, oh, I might have some work to do. Okay, this is interesting. No, but this is so great. Thank you so much for being on the show and sharing your gifts and all this great information. Last question is, how do people find you? Where can they locate you if they're interested in connecting? Please don't find me on Facebook. It's technically there, but I never check it.

[48:35] Jada Dobesh healing Co on Instagram and Selah Space SD on Instagram. Both are also websites.

[48:45] You can come down and see me. I'm behind the Hy-Vee on Phillips. That's right. So that's great. All right, so if you are watching this on YouTube, we'll make sure to include those links in the description. So if you click on the description, you can find Jada and all of the locations and links through that description as well. Thanks again for being on the show. Really appreciate having you on. Hey, that's our show. If someone came to mind while you were listening to this, if you thought, hey, my sister needs to hear this or I should send this to my mom or my buddy would get a lot out of this, please share it with them. Just hit the share button and send it their way. You never know what one conversation, one episode or one piece of information can do for someone who's been looking for answers. And if you haven't subscribed yet, please do it now. It takes two seconds, it's free and it means you won't miss an episode. We've got incredible stuff coming up and I don't want you to miss any of it. And if you're a health or wellness provider and you want to be on the show, we'd love to hear from you. There's a link in the show notes to get in touch. We're always looking for people doing interesting work who want to share what they know. And one last thing, I get asked all the time about the products and brands I actually use. So I've put together a list of sponsors and favorite products that have worked for me and my family. If you're curious, that link is in the show notes too. Thank you for being here and I really mean that. I'm Melissa Goodwin, the line is open. See you next time.