48. Patriarchy Stress Disorder With Dr. Valerie Rein

by | Mar 1, 2021 | Podcast

LACO 48 | Healing Trauma

🍾🥳 Life After Corporate celebrates its first anniversary! 1:00

👆 What is the correct definition of trauma? 3:50

🥺 As women, we have inherited trauma on a genetic level, and we are deeply and subconsciously interconnected to trauma. 4:57

🚶‍♀️ Trauma within a corporate setting and how Valerie healed her issues. 10:00

🥰 Trauma adaptations: How we can understand that hidden traumas are actually in us and that they affect our lives? 18:56

🤔 How do we reprogram the subconscious mind? 24:13

🌉 The difference between the bridge approach as a trauma adaptation and digging in to heal the trauma. 25:20

🌞 Valerie works with her partner Jeffrey Tambor in healing trauma not only on an emotional level but also in the body. 26:05

🔑 Trauma is in our body, and the body is the key. 30:48

🏃‍♀️The ‘Four-minute mile’ and a story about a woman who really saw herself for the first time when she was in her 40s. 31:42

🔊 Listen in to all the incredible transformations that Valerie’s clients have had. 36:12 ⛓️Knowing you’re in prison doesn’t set you free. 31:11

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Patriarchy Stress Disorder With Dr. Valerie Rein

We are celebrating our podcast’s first anniversary with Dr. Valerie Rein – a psychologist and mental health expert. She is the author of Patriarchy Stress Disorder and the creator of the only science-backed system for helping women achieve their ultimate

If you’re here for the first time, welcome home. This is the place to be if you wanted the unvarnished truth about what it takes to succeed as a woman entrepreneur whether you are replacing your corporate paycheck or building your empire. I’m grateful for you hanging with us and sending us your great comments and reviews. I appreciate you so much. In Life After Corporate, we not only give you the best strategies and advice to succeed in building a sustainable and profitable business. We also share with you the tools and resources for you to step into a bigger version of yourself by removing obstacles like self-doubt, procrastination and imposter syndrome.

You’re in for an amazing conversation. My guest is going to help you dig deeper into what may be holding you back from more fully enjoying your business, your life and being the woman that you longed to be. Dr. Valerie Rein is the author of Patriarchy Stress Disorder and the creator of the only science-backed system for helping women achieve their ultimate success, happiness and fulfillment by healing hidden trauma. You will be blown away by the insights that you’ll learn. Without further delay, welcome Dr. Valerie Rein.

Thank you for having me, Deb. It’s exciting being here.

LACO 48 | Healing Trauma

Healing Trauma: Traumas made you feel unsafe physically or emotionally in your fullest, authentic expression and led to creating trauma adaptations.

 

This is a special conversation because I remember a few years ago where we were in the same conference room at a women entrepreneur’s event in New York City before you made the big move cross country. It’s great to reconnect with you now. I have been binge-reading Patriarchy Stress Disorder on my phone and I’m about 2/3 of the way through. I am blown away by your insights. It’s the mirror that women need to have put in front of them so that they can finally see themselves for the first time and understand what has been holding us back for so long. It connected so many dots for me. I understood some things that were inherited in my past and some experiences that I had in my present. Why don’t we start by you defining trauma for us so that we can all be on the same page. Not everybody sees trauma playing in their lives.

I did not either. I was already a trained therapist with two graduate degrees. For our readers, if you think of combat or some violent events when you hear the word trauma, you’re not alone. That’s how the patriarchal definition is set up. The advances in the field have been broadening the definition because the human experience is full of events that may be minor but they leave some deep grooves in our system. The way I define trauma is any experience that made you feel unsafe physically or emotionally in your fullest authentic expression and led to creating trauma adaptations.

When we heal trauma, we get freedom. Ditching the defenses that trauma creates allows us to value ourselves and be open to relationships.

In your book, you mentioned three different types of traumas. Can you share those with us? That’s what connected the dots between the ancestral, the collective and the individual. What do you mean by that?

We may think about trauma in terms of our own life experiences. The world is a pokey place. If you’re a human, you have trauma. If you think about, “The fullest authentic expression, when did I ever feel safe in that?” Chances are, that experience is due to ancestral and collective trauma. We were already born into this invisible prison of trauma and trauma adaptations. For example, for women, it has never been safe. It has never been safe to be a woman in the world. It has been particularly unsafe to be a visible powerful woman who dared to know her authentic desires, who dared to reach for them.

Women like this have been burned at the stake and locked up in asylums, which by the way is not ancient history at all. That persisted well into the 1960s in the US and the UK, among other places. There’s so much trauma that we have inherited generation after generation. There is exciting eye-opening research that shows that these experiences are genetically transmitted. Speaking of collective trauma, here we’re having this conversation or we’re both in the US. Our readers are maybe in other places in the world but still having access to a device, free speech and enough money to afford an internet connection.

There are women in places in the world that are experiencing dire violations of human rights whose lives are threatened. Sadly and shamefully in the countries where we are, women are suffering from trauma that is quite deep and life-threatening through partner abuse, etc. Every time that we become aware through news or social media that a woman is suffering based on being a woman elsewhere, something in us gets triggered because we’re all interconnected. Something in our deep subconscious gets reminded, “As a woman, I’m not safe.” This is an ancient memory thread. This is not something we may believe consciously at all. All this lives in our subconscious. You may be confident, self-assured and know that you are consciously safe and yet, something in our subconscious signals unsafe at the slightest provocation. We may have no idea what’s going on but we see the result of these triggers.

It’s funny, I sometimes think of it as the minor traumas, the traumas that are the hidden traumas in modern-day women. It’s almost like the story of a frog. You put a frog in the pot and it doesn’t know it’s being cooked because the heat gets turned up gradually. One of the examples in the book that rang true to me was being in a home where there was anger. Anger was an unsafe emotion especially for a child when you need your environment to be safe, growing up with a narcissistic father and a mother that was full of fear. You mentioned similar stories in the book. When you’re in that environment and you grow up in that environment, you think of it as normal. You don’t know that it’s not so then the patterns persist.

To be fully transparent with my readers, I ended up in a marriage with a man who had anger issues, was verbally abusive and was narcissistic. I would love for you to share a little bit about some of the hidden traumas that are not as obvious. When therapists were saying to me, “You’ve experienced trauma.” I said, “What are you talking about? I’ve never been raped or physically abused.” We tend to discount the emotional abuse, the microaggressions and things like that, that happened in the workplace. Tell us more about the hidden traumas that we might not be thinking of as traumas.

LACO 48 | Healing Trauma

Healing Trauma: I want to live in a world where a woman carries her beauty, and that’s one expression of her worth.

 

Thank you for bringing this up and being candid and open. I experienced replaying of my trauma in a corporate setting. Here’s the thing about trauma. When we experience something, it may be in our personal experience growing up, it may be ancestral in nature, maybe inherited adaptations playing out, it has a way of showing up in our life again and again. The events and circumstances are giving us an opportunity to uncover and heal it. Now that we’re older, we have more resources. To cut to the chase, we can heal trauma. There’s a preview of the coming attractions.

At that time, I didn’t know that it was my trauma being triggered because like you, I didn’t think I had any. I had a “normal childhood.” I had an ordinary life. I got a boss who was emotionally abusive and she would berate me in her office again and again, day after day, week after week in deeply cutting ways. My embodied reaction was going into fight, flight, freeze trauma responses, which I didn’t know what that was at the time. I would either collapse and start crying, the same reaction I would have as a child when my dad was yelling at me. I would freeze, sit there, check out and get out of my body or I would start fighting back, arguing and defending myself. All the same reactions that I experienced as a child with my dad yelling were playing out in my adult life unbeknownst to me.

What happened was I went away for a week-long training, which I thought I was going for purely professional purposes to learn some mind-body techniques for healing anxiety and depression. I had no idea that these techniques were trauma-release techniques. By going through this training, I released trauma out of my body I didn’t even know was there. When I came back, I was sitting in my boss’s office and she unleashed her abusive tirade once again but this time, I was not triggered. I did not go into fight, flight or freeze. I sat there and I listened. I was like, “This is not okay.”

I let her finish and I got up, put my hand on the door handle, turned it, stepped over the threshold, went to my office, packed my stuff, emailed HR and I never went back. That freedom is what becomes possible when we heal trauma. In terms of relationships, that plays out all the time. I’m thinking about one of my clients whose story is in the book and how she wanted to attract an equal partner into her life. She kept dating guys who were not on her level but she didn’t see it. Her mind was interpreting her heartbreaks as, “I couldn’t make it work with this guy who was already not at my level, wasn’t as ambitious and wasn’t as connected emotionally and spiritually. I need to lower my bar even more.” It was her conclusion. You can imagine the train wreck that ensued.

When we got together and started working on uncovering and healing trauma, outside of PSD, that affects us all but in her family as well, she did not have that mirroring of her worth growing up. Her mom was disconnected emotionally and she never got that reflection that she is worthy and beautiful. All of that stuff that we need, we pick it up from others growing up. She would have never interpreted it as traumatic. Nobody overtly abused her body but they didn’t reflect her worth either. She grew up with that empty space inside. She did not know her worth. Her work situation reflected that as you could imagine. They dumped all the work on her. She never heard the word of praise and she was underpaid.

As we started uncovering and healing this trauma, everything changed for her. She met a guy who saw her beauty and worth completely unconditionally. She tried to sabotage that relationship many times. Thankfully, we kept on working on those trauma defenses that are terrified to go there because it contradicts that early childhood experience or inherited experience but we kept working through that. They’re in a beautiful partnership and they ended up getting together and getting married. Her work situation transformed in kind as well. She found a job where she’s valued, well-paid and her worth is reflected back to her.

This is why we need to understand that if something is not working in our lives and we’re scratching our heads or maybe banging our heads against the wall in therapy, self-help and reading books, it is not you and it is not your fault. Chances are, there’s trauma in the system that lives in the subconscious. According to neuroscience, our subconscious calls the shots. It makes the decisions for us. The conscious mind catches up later to rationalize why we’re going for this versus that. That awareness and subsequent healing open up the life of freedom and unlimited possibility.

I’m glad you told that story because when we do have these hidden traumas, they do play out in all aspects of our lives, how we treat ourselves, how we treat our bodies, our relationships with significant others and our relationships with power forces at work. It’s funny that is you said that too because I had gone away on a silent meditation retreat for ten days. I was working for a man who was data-oriented and I’m creative. I was also older than him and he was having trouble controlling me. He would put me on these performance improvement plans.

I’m a top performer and I’ve been at this company for many years. Finally, I looked at him and I called him by name. I said, “At my age, fear is not a motivator.” It was shortly after that I made my exit and started my own business. The women that I work with who are launching their businesses so they’re making the leap from corporate whether they’ve aged out, they’ve burned out or they have a passion to do more on this journey to entrepreneurship, it kicks up all your stuff.

If you have a hidden trauma, it will express itself. I loved in the book how you called this worthlessness. It comes out in how much we allow ourselves to receive financially and how much you charge for your services. In the book, you used the metaphor that this keeps us in prison. What are some of the manifestations of being in this prison? How do you recognize that your hidden traumas have been triggered?

Freedom is what becomes possible when we heal trauma.

Some of those you have mentioned when a woman transitions from an environment where patriarchy issues her a paycheck and decides her worth, “This is how we evaluate your gifts and your time.” “I’m out of there. I’m technically free to set whatever bar I decided to set for the monetary expression of my worth.” Also, it shows up in time. Not only money but how much time freedom I can allow myself to have. It goes a step further, how much I can allow myself to enjoy the fruits of my labor and my good life? What I’m seeing often with women we work with is they have good lives and they have built beautiful things either in their careers and in their businesses. Oftentimes, they are tremendously capable. They’ve proven and beyond the shadow of the doubt.

It manifests in a couple of big overarching ways. One is that they feel there is more to what they desire to express in the world but they can’t quite get there. Sometimes, they don’t even know what it is exactly but they have this nagging feeling there is more that they want to authentically express in the world. Another way is that they are in touch with their mission. They are showing up and playing big. They have good lives but they’re not able to fully enjoy them. They find themselves on that emotional hamster wheel and feeling disconnected from their partner or maybe they’re not in a partnership. They have trouble even imagining how they would be in a partnership with somebody who is their true equal.

If they have kids, feeling challenged there too in terms of connecting, being playful and in their relationship with themselves. Looking in the mirror and experiencing their beauty unconditionally. The inner critic is strong with women we work with and it is an expression of PSD. All these things I’m calling out are trauma adaptations. If we think of PSD, it’s this condition where women are traumatized because it’s never been safe to play big and make a lot of money. That was not even on the menu or love who we love and be visible in our fullest authentic expression sexually, emotionally and professionally in every way. It has never been safe.

These trauma adaptations are designed to keep us safe. The inner critic and the imposter syndrome are trauma adaptations. Sometimes they show up on the physical plain through hormonal imbalances, energy issues, trouble sleeping or trouble relaxing without a glass of wine or a pill. They can manifest as adrenal fatigue, autoimmune issues, PMS, PMDD, perimenopause and menopause. Everything around the feminine system is hit hard because that war against women has been turned within and we carry that burden and stress in our bodies.

I call these trauma adaptations as prison guards. They manifest also in our choices and our actions or inactions. We may have been exposed to this paradigm around, “You’re holding yourself back or you’re getting in your own way.” I’d like to reframe that with a lot of compassion. We’re not holding ourselves back. We’re not getting in our own way. We’re brilliant. Why would we do that? What’s at play here is our subconscious keeping us safe because our subconscious has a different agenda from our conscious mind as long as we have trauma in our system.

The agenda is survival and it’s going to drive the bus oftentimes away from what we truly authentically desire, not toward it, for the reasons of survival. At the core, that is what healing looks like, that shift from survival to thriving. That becomes possible when we rewire the nervous system, heal this trauma using mind-body energy tools and we reprogram our subconscious mind to move toward what we authentically desire because that now feel safe and not away from it.

How do we do that? How do we reprogram the subconscious mind? I was having dinner with my brother-in-law and sister-in-law. We have a pod so we get together every once in a while during the pandemic. Each one of us at the table had experienced trauma. It was interesting that two of the people at the table had gone through our healing process or are in a healing process by experiencing the anger. It was interesting that my brother-in-law and I never went through the anger. I’ve had therapists who have said, “You have to get angry about this.” I always bridge right over to forgiveness but our ancestors know not what they did. It was their own conditioning and own experience. They didn’t mean to inflict trauma. Talk to us about how you work with your clients to reprogram this conscious mind because if I understand you correctly, the bridge approach doesn’t work.

Thank you for being clear and transparent, Deb. The bridge approach is something that does work because it enables us to function in the world. It is a trauma adaptation that is effective. In the healing process, we are invited to dig in versus taking the bridge over. A huge shout-out to the bridge approach. We all have used the bridge to accomplish the things we have accomplished. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to do that.

We’d be in a fetal position not doing anything.

Big compassion and huge shout-out for the bridge that we’ve all built to one point or another. Now, the invitation to healing. The work that we do differs dramatically from the work that happens in therapy and coaching approaches. I work with my life partner, Jeffrey Tambor. We met on this journey of bringing this healing to people and we had been on our own journeys for many years. We bring together many years collectively between the two of us of experience in seeking out, practicing, teaching, refining modalities for healing trauma that bring together the mind, body and energy.

This is key. We cannot tap into these areas from the level of talking about them or even feeling them emotionally. We need to get into the body and that is protected so we need a toolset for that. Another key component in healing is PSD is collective trauma. It requires a collective to heal it. Women do it in an intimate and safe group environment. They discover oftentimes for the first time in their lives not theoretically but quite experientially, that they truly are not alone. Something that they have felt was wrong with them their entire lives, turns out it’s not even them. It’s not even theirs.

Women from all over the world who are in our programs experienced the same things. These are all symptoms of PSD, something that we might have been in individual therapy for years. That’s most of our clients because they have done years and years of work. They are all seekers and deep divers and it has brought some good results to them. They often find themselves in this place where, “I understand what’s going on. I’m clear but I can’t get there and it’s frustrating.” That bridge from understanding to getting there lies through the body and a safe community that gets you.

I talked about those mirrors that we all need growing up. We need our unconditional worth reflected to us. None of us get that. It’s a rare outlier. It’s truly making space for all of my emotions including anger. Anger has always been forbidden and punishable for women. For your brother-in-law, it may be easier to get in touch with his anger than for you and for most women because if we go to our anger then we’re automatically labeled the B-word, the angry B. There is so much prohibition generation after generation in our system to go there.

One of the things that happen on this healing journey is we create a safe environment for women to go there gradually, incrementally. One of the key principles in trauma healing is what’s called titration and pendulation. We move in a little bit. We move out to safety. Safety is key. We always want to feel safe. It’s not about, “Blow the lid open.” That is not how healing happens. Oftentimes, some approaches go like, “You need to express.” That’s BS. People go into expression and they spin for years. They make them feel better but it doesn’t heal trauma.

There are a lot of layers. Safety is key. Community is key. Having the tools that bring together mind, body and energy so that we can move beyond the level of the mind and the story. We don’t always have a story about trauma. There are a lot of traumatic memories stored in the body. We have no awareness of them, not only from our lifetime but also inherit it. We do experience the symptoms. We get triggered. The body is holding the key to accessing them all. In our approach, we use that communication with the body directly. We bypass the level of the story. That’s how it’s different from what may be our readers have been exposed to before. That’s what we’re finding with our clients.

LACO 48 | Healing Trauma

Patriarchy Stress Disorder: The Invisible Inner Barrier to Women’s Happiness and Fulfillment

What I felt too when I read the book is that this is different. This is not the typical approach to self-sabotage, inner critic work or anything like that. It does go so much deeper. Tell us a story and share with us what’s available on the other side. What is the value of going through the deep inner work and digging deep?

There are many stories. Our thrivers surprise us every day by showing us what’s possible. I call these shifts and transformations that they create jailbreak moments. I sometimes call them a four-minute mile. The story behind it is Sir Roger Bannister who broke that record for the first time, before he did, it was considered humanly impossible to run that fast. After he did then a lot of other humans broke that record. In our community, when we break that four-minute mile, let’s say a woman experiences her beauty for the first time, not intellectually. It’s not like, “Look in the mirror and say I love you 100 times until you’re blue in the face.”

She looked in the mirror and she’s in her 40s. She saw her beauty and it makes me emotional. She has a small daughter. I remember seeing my mom growing up look in the mirror and I have never seen her look satisfied with what she saw. She would start adjusting things and fixing things. Maybe she would get a brief glimpse of satisfaction with her makeup and her dress. Still, she was like, “I need to lose weight.” For me, seeing women experience that breakthrough is everything, experiencing our own unconditional beauty.

Later that day when she had that breakthrough, she went out to have dinner at a restaurant by herself. There was this couple and the woman was looking at her. After the dinner was over, the woman came up to our thriver and she said, “I have to ask you this. What is it that you do? How do you do that? You are so beautiful.” That gives me chills. I want every woman to experience that. I want every woman to be a role model for my daughter. I want to live in a world where a woman carries her beauty and that’s one expression of her worth. There are so many others on the business level, which is exciting.

We have a year-long program where we go into four core areas affected by PSD for women. The one we start with is reclaiming and healing our relationship with money then we go into the body, relationships, visibility and mission in the world. This woman joined our program. That was a big stretch for her financially and was a leap of faith. In five days, she made more money in her business than she had in the previous three years. We did not teach her any business tools and strategies. She came equipped. She was already brilliant. We didn’t teach her any of that. What we did do is help her get to the place where she felt safe. Her subconscious was a green light to showing up, getting paid and attracting her soulmate clients who she adored working with.

That didn’t end there. She had her bucket list trip with her partner and their relationship improved dramatically. Now they’re getting married and she’s like, “I have everything I ever wanted. Now my system is freaking out,” which is the core of the work that we do. In this particular program, we’re together for a year and we also have an intro program, which is shorter. In this one, we are prepared that every big breakthrough in a woman’s life will trigger deeper layers of trauma and will make her feel unsafe.

A big part of this journey is making it safe with each breakthrough so that self-sabotage doesn’t happen. What Gay Hendricks refers to in his book, The Big Leap, is the upper limit problem. I explain it through the lens of trauma because we see that healing trauma gets rid of that upper limit problem or it resolves that. It still comes up but we have an effective way of resolving it by feeling safe. There is no self-sabotage and you can feel as amazing as what you are accomplishing and creating out there in the world and your relationship. Also, how much money you’re inviting into your life, your business and the great experiences.

There are many stories. My entire life has transformed as I share in the book and it goes on and on. Health transformations, women who have autoimmune conditions seeing same shifts from theirs and getting in touch with their sexuality, feeling vital, turned-on, having orgasms and all of these toe-curling experiences. It’s turning up the volume of your life. It’s turning up the color, saturation and resolution. That’s how I can describe my experience and our thrivers’ experiences with this trauma healing work.

It’s like turning up the volume on receiving. You have to shift because women are focused on giving pleasure, giving compliments and taking care of others. What you’re talking about is opening up to receiving a reflection of your real worth and value, experiencing that and feeling it fully. How can our readers keep in touch with you? How can they work with you if they feel ready to get to that level of experiencing that level of vitality and receiving?

A great place to start is DrValerie.com/book. That’s where you can download the first chapter of my book as a gift and dip your toes in. There are also book resources right there on that same page, some practices and meditations that you can start playing with and having that experience. Speaking of experiences, from time to time, we have this fantastic legendary retreat that we’re holding virtually. It’s called The Thriving Experience. TheThrivingExperience.com is where you can learn more and register. This is where the theory of what we talked about and what you’ll read about in the book becomes practice. Having this conversation or reading the great conversation that Deb and I are having is not going to set you free. Knowing you’re in prison doesn’t set you free. It’s in the work.

The human experience is full of events that may be minor but leave some deep traumas in our system.

The Thriving Experience is that opportunity to come together with other powerful women from all over the world and have an experience in your body, off shifting from survival to thriving and see what it can open up for you. I hope that we get to play together in one of those. Follow me on Instagram and Facebook, Dr. Valerie Rein on both. I adore DMs. You can always DM me. It’s my secret pleasure. I love being in conversation with women. Thank you for letting me join in this conversation. It is life-changing but more than that, it is world-changing. Thank you for being willing to look at it.

Thank you, Valerie. It’s such a pleasure to reconnect with you on this new plane and hear what you’ve been up to. This book is a seminal work of transformation for women. I’m thinking about that Thriving Experience retreat. It sounds like a great experience.

It will be fun to play.

Dr. Valerie, thank you. I am deeply grateful for your time here. That’s it for this episode. See you next time.

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About Dr. Valerie Rein

Dr. Valerie Rein has discovered Patriarchy Stress Disorder (PSD) and created the only science-backed system for helping women achieve their ultimate success, happiness, and fulfillment by healing the collective, inherited trauma of oppression.

She holds an EdM in Psychological Counseling from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology.

Her bestselling book, “Patriarchy Stress Disorder: The Invisible Inner Barrier to Women’s Happiness and Fulfillment” and cutting-edge mind-body healing programs have helped thousands of women ditch the game of survival, of “how much can I bear?” and master the game of thriving, of “how good can it get?”

Dr. Valerie is a sought-after speaker and trainer at conferences and companies committed to setting new standards of excellence in their industry in diversity, equity, and inclusion, employee satisfaction and physical and mental health, and creativity and innovation.