THE INSPIRATION PLACE PODCAST
Miriam Schulman:
Well, hello, passion-makers. This is Miriam Schulman, Chief Inspiration Officer and host of The Inspiration Place Podcast. I’m here to help you profit from your passion. You’re listening to episode number 124. I’m so grateful that you’re here. Shout-outs to my new listeners in Slovakia, South Korea, Spain, and Switzerland.
Today, we’re talking all about authentic expression. In this episode, you’ll discover why you’ll thrive as an artist when you remove barriers that are blocking your fullest authentic expression; how trauma shuts down our willingness to be vulnerable, which is critical for our creative practice; and we’ll also explore some exercises to start reclaiming your birthright to be a thriving artist.
Today’s guest has discovered Patriarchy Stress Disorder, which she calls PSD, and created the only science-backed system for helping women achieve their ultimate success, happiness, and fulfillment by healing the intergenerational trauma of oppression. She holds an EdM in psychology counseling from Columbia University and a PhD in psychology from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. Her bestselling book, Patriarchy Stress Disorder: The Invisible Inner Barrier to Women’s Happiness and Fulfillment, has been heralded by Amazon reviewers as the most important body of literary work in our modern times, and perhaps the most important book of the century for women. Her cutting-edge programs have helped thousands of women shift from “How much can I bear?” to “How good can it get?” in their work and personal lives. Please welcome to The Inspiration Place Dr. Valerie Rein. Hello, Valerie. Welcome to the show.
Dr. Valerie Rein:
Hi, Miriam. Thank you for the beautiful intro. I’m so excited to go into the topics you’ve outlined for our conversation today. They’re very juicy.
Miriam Schulman:
I want to help set the stage, because as we discussed right before I hit record, your book may not seem at first as though it’s really meant for artists, and I think it absolutely has a message that needs to be heard by artists right now in 2021, even the men in my audience.
Dr. Valerie Rein:
Oh, yes.
Miriam Schulman:
Because of all the trauma that we’ve gone through, that we’re still going through, this past year.
Dr. Valerie Rein:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Miriam Schulman:
So, I want to start off by reading a quote from your book. This comes from chapter five, called Savoring Freedom, which, by the way, when I speak to artists, that tends to be over and over again one of the highest value of a lot of artists who I speak to. They say to me they want freedom, they want creative freedom in their life. That is very much on the top of their values list.
Dr. Valerie Rein:
So happy to hear that.
Miriam Schulman:
All right, so here’s the quote: “Thriving is not the absence of anxiety and depression, or restoring a normal sleep pattern and stress levels. This is neutral. Thriving happens when we remove the invisible barriers to our fullest authentic expression.” End of quote. Let’s unpack that. What are the invisible barriers that you’re talking about?
Dr. Valerie Rein:
All right, so let’s zoom out a little bit and name some things. I start my book with a quote, and the source of the quote I could not trace, but the quote goes like this: “We must see the invisible to do the impossible.” So, let’s make some invisible things visible in the conversation today, and the first of those I’d like to call out is trauma, and what I mean when I say trauma, because usually what gets conjured up in people’s minds is life-threatening experiences, and then people automatically go, “Well, I don’t have any trauma. I’ve had a normal life, normal childhood, nothing out of the ordinary.” And actually, trauma is any experience that made you feel unsafe, physically or emotionally, physically or emotionally unsafe in your fullest authentic expression, and led to creating trauma adaptations that are meant to keep you safe by holding back your fullest authentic expression going forward.
And hearing that quote, for our listeners, I encourage you to just notice what you feel in your body when you hear, well, “unsafe in your fullest authentic expression.” When was the last time you felt safe in your fullest authentic expression, and how many experiences you’ve had not feeling safe emotionally or otherwise? The aspect of trauma that I write about in my book is intergenerational trauma, intergenerational trauma, and these are experiences that we have not even had in our lifetime, but we have inherited from the previous generations. For women, when I’m talking about Patriarchy Stress Disorder, that’s the history of oppression. It’s never been safe to be a woman in the world, especially unsafe if you were a visible woman reaching for her desires, reaching for that fullest authentic expression. That has been severely punishable. Women who reached for that were locked up in asylums, burned at the stake, et cetera, et cetera. And so, we have inherited a lot of trauma, and looking at research in epigenetics, it’s very clear that those experiences are genetically transmitted.
Miriam Schulman:
What I see, Valerie, show up so much with women artists especially, women of color even more so-
Dr. Valerie Rein:
Yes.
Miriam Schulman:
…yes, is the fear of being visible. And how this plays out as artists is they’re afraid to paint big, they’re afraid to show their art, they’re afraid to ask higher prices. All these things are damaging their career, and it’s damaging their creative process, because you’re afraid of being visible, whether that means you don’t want to show up on Facebook Live, whether it means you’re afraid of doing an art show. All of these things are so important for expressing ourselves as creative people.
Dr. Valerie Rein:
Yeah, I love that. Thank you for that, for grounding this in the actual day-to-day experience of an artist. It does not correlate really with your confidence or how you mentally or intellectually assess your abilities. I mean, that’s affected by PSD too, but even the women who are confident and they do show up, they do show up with their art, they do show up with that authentic expression, the nervous system still runs that program that it’s not safe. And so, for them, the fallout that happens may be in another area. Maybe it’s their health that shows that their nervous system is constantly in overdrive, reading or translating visibility as unsafe.
So, it shows up in so many ways that I’m hoping we, as we unpack them today for our listeners, just try them on for resonance, the takeaway that I would love for you to get out of the conversation today, that none of these things are your fault or your shortcoming or your failing in any way. There is nothing wrong with you, you are not holding yourself back, you are not getting in your own way. This is a natural response of the nervous system to the perceived threat. And the perceived threat is perceived by your subconscious, not by your conscious mind. It’s not like you’re consciously sitting there and thinking, “Oh, if I do a Facebook Live, I’m going to end up dead.” No, but your nervous system and your subconscious, that’s actually what drives the bus, according to neuroscience.
So, you originally asked me about those invisible inner barriers. So, the barriers that show up, these are those trauma defenses that are designed to keep us safe, safe from visibility, safe from making money, safe from vulnerability, safe from all ways in which we authentically express ourselves, because that has never been safe for women specifically, and as you pointed out, for women of color particularly. And we all have those different trauma adaptations, and some of them show up as stories in the mind, “Oh, who do I think I am?” or “It’s not important,” or “Nobody would like it anyway,” the imposter syndrome, the upper limit problem, all of that stuff. And again, that does not correlate with the level of achievement.
Miriam Schulman:
There’s something you said that was so important that reminded me of this beautiful quote I wrote down from your book. Even if you’re listening now, “This doesn’t apply to me, I have no problem going on Facebook, I paint large, I ask a lot of money for my art,” one of the things that you talked about earlier, and what you said in the book, is, “Sometimes these challenging emotions are going to leak into other areas of your life.” So, could you explain how they’re pushing through these barriers just through brute force, but if it’s not resolved, how this shows up in other places?
Dr. Valerie Rein:
Ooh, that is such a great question, and I got to say this is primarily the kind of woman who we get to work with, because this woman has figured out a way to push through it all. She has worked on her mindset, she has worked on her craft, she shows up, she delivers. But how that emotional strain and her nervous system feeling unsafe is showing up? It’s showing up in her relationship, for example, she’s not fully in touch with her sexuality, she struggles with arousal, with being able to relax, with being able to experience orgasms, intimacy with her partner, emotional vulnerability, et cetera. Or maybe she struggles finding that partner who is her equal, who is her emotional, spiritual, financial equal in every way. Or perhaps if she’s a mom, it shows up in her parenting, she can’t fully relax and be playful, and just switch gears and be present in the moment. She may have trouble sleeping, she may have trouble just relaxing.
One of my clients said, “All I want is just to wake up and feel happy, instead of waking up and feeling anxious with a to-do list running through the mind, and all that pressure of being all things to all people.” Again, that goes deeper than what we think, or what we believe. It goes into the subconscious wiring and the nervous system that is constantly in overdrive as we’re doing things and being things and experiencing things that historically have been forbidden for women and punishable. So, ironically, the more successful a woman is becoming, the more her nervous system is in trouble, unless she specifically works on that. So, we see a lot of women, successful women, with adrenal fatigue, with all sorts of hormonal imbalances. There’s increase in hysterectomies; there is a spike, a real pandemic of autoimmune conditions, and 70% to 90% of those cases are women, and predominantly women of color.
So, it makes you pause and wonder if there is something else perhaps going on, and there is a lot of unprocessed trauma in our systems. And for me, this is really that invisible inner barrier that we now have a chance to see, thanks to the discoveries from the field of epigenetics and the field of neuroscience that tells about how the subconscious is really the one making decisions, and not the conscious mind, all that fascinating stuff. Even better, we have the tools, we have that inner work technology that brings together the mind, body, and energy to heal that trauma. Just as research shows that trauma is genetically transmitted, so is healing. Research is also clear on that. We can interrupt that cycle of transmission in one generation. My passion, my field is really, my mission is I want us to be that generation that heals and opens the gates to how good can it get for everyone around us and who come after us.
One thing that I did really appreciate that you said is how therapy, when it doesn’t really have specific trauma healing as a component, can actually re-wound the patient, and I’ve experienced that myself, where I’ve gone to therapy and just felt so much worse.
Oh, yeah, Miriam, and thank you so much for sharing about your experience. I feel we need to talk more about what actually happens behind closed doors, because there is a lot of re-traumatization that happens in the environment that is supposed to be healing in therapy, and because it happens behind closed doors, we don’t know. Like, we go to see an expert, and so, the unfortunate takeaway is, “Well, something is so wrong with me even therapy doesn’t work.” And so, we need to talk about why those backlashes happen. It’s not the malice of the therapist, unless he or she is problematic in those ways. Some are.
Miriam Schulman:
I want to be clear, that’s not what we’re talking about here at all; it’s just traditional talk therapy without dealing with the trauma, that you can’t just talk your way through it. There needs to be something else.
Dr. Valerie Rein:
You can’t. Trauma lives in the body. It lives in the body, and even when the mind does not remember or creates a different story, or is not even aware of trauma, such as the case with intergenerational trauma. We may have no awareness at all of how things are wired in that genetic transmission, yet our bodies know exactly what’s up. So, talking about it does not really get to the embodied level of trauma, but what happens, unfortunately, because talking about it gets us to relive it, but we still don’t have the tools, we don’t have the capacity, the physical capacity to process the experience, which is a huge part of trauma healing. We got to cultivate that capacity.
The whole reason trauma got imprinted is because in the moment, whenever that happened, whatever happened, we did not have capacity to process it, and so it got lodged as trauma. And so, we go to see a therapist, and a well-meaning therapist, doing exactly what we’re taught to do in therapy school, asks questions, right? “Tell me about this, tell me about that.” So we go there, we relive the experience, we still don’t have capacity, so we get re-triggered, we feel worse, and we don’t go anywhere, really. And it’s tragic, because here is a well-meaning person seeking to get better, a well-meaning therapist seeking to help, but the tools are not right, and then it backfires. So we need to work with the body directly in order to move trauma out of our system, to process or reprocess it, and there are a lot of great techniques out there, and there are therapists who specifically are trained in those techniques. It’s just important to know that you need more than talk when working with and through trauma.
Miriam Schulman:
Okay, and I’m just going to insert a plug for your book right here. We’ll talk about that again. So, it’s in the show notes of schulmanart.com, forward slash, this is episode 124. Valerie includes a lot of meditations when you get the book, and I’ve shared it with my entire team. They absolutely loved it. My 23-year-old daughter, she loved the breath exercise, she loved it. So, the book is Patriarchy Stress Disorder, and you can also go to drvalerie.com/book for all those resources. I want to make sure, since we have so much to talk about, I want to make sure I hit on some of these highlights.
Dr. Valerie Rein:
Right.
Miriam Schulman:
One of the things I loved that you talked about was imprinting the win. So, you just talked about how trauma imprints itself, and one of the tools that you suggest is actually taking the time to imprint your wins.
Dr. Valerie Rein:
I just want to give a little sidebar on that. I’ll share this tool and how this works, and a note that in order to imprint a different experience, or process trauma, or get into that healing journey, the first and foremost condition is feeling safe. So, before we do any of these practices, the first practice that I teach, that you can download, as Miriam mentioned, drvalerie.com/book, is the so-called re-power tool. It gets you into your body, it starts to orient your system to the experience of safety right here in the moment, because that is what makes everything work.
And in this practice that you just mentioned, imprinting the wins, I love that. Our brain is conditioned to track threat. That’s just a survival adaptation, survival of the anxious, and we’ll all have intergenerational experiences that add to that, depending on what our lineage has been through. Because that is such strong wiring, we have a tendency of bypassing things that are going well and that are giving us joy and pleasure. And so, it takes a conscious effort to rewire that and train our attention and our whole system to register and imprint positive experiences.
Neuroscience has figured out that it takes the threshold of about 10 seconds for a full-bodied sensory experience for the good to sink in, whereas a negative experience takes no time at all. You just glance at the first line of that upsetting email, and you have the cascade of all the ways in which you have been rejected, misunderstood, you have failed, and you can spin in that for a long time, whereas something positive, you’re like, “Oh, yeah, yeah, nice, next. What next do I have to worry about?” So, that 10-second practice, I feel, these 10 seconds are well, well invested.
Just slow down whenever you notice anything pleasurable, good is going on. It can be as simple as stepping outside, and if it’s a nice, pleasant day, just looking around, you’re all visual geniuses, and taking in the pleasure in what you see, allowing that to imprint, allowing the pleasure of the sunshine to imprint. If you’re having a cup of coffee or tea, whatever your beverage of choice is, just feel the pleasure in holding that cup, the pleasure of it touching your lips, the pleasure of the taste buds being activated, the pleasure of it going into your system and the relaxation that ripples through your system. And you can do it with anything throughout the day, and you are practicing that muscle, you’re working that muscle, growing that muscle, and it’s like a snowball effect. The more you retrain to notice the wins and the positive and pleasure moments, the more of those you’ll experience.
Miriam Schulman:
I love the way you describe it in the book as being like a pleasure mindfulness practice.
Dr. Valerie Rein:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Miriam Schulman:
This is a beautiful way of putting it. But then, we also have to be careful of the pleasure police. Tell us more about that.
Dr. Valerie Rein:
We have a certain speed limit on pleasure that is set in our system. It’s intergenerational; we have not created that. But given that, for women, pleasure has not even been on the menu. Come on, women have never existed, well, under patriarchy, for pleasure, they haven’t existed. We have existed to serve and give and sacrifice. And so, that speed limit is set up pretty low, pretty low, and when we start inviting more pleasure into our lives, it starts glitching. We may notice ourselves self-sabotaging, like one area of life may be going well, maybe you’re selling a lot of art, and you’re very excited, and then something happens. Something else happens in another area of your life, maybe in your relationship, or with something else, or you just start feeling unhappy for whatever reason, no reason at all, but something else coming up.
The fact of the matter is that this is your system trying to recalibrate to that speed limit of pleasure that you’re allowed to have. And in order for us to raise that speed limit, we have practices that we teach our clients in our programs, and that becomes a big focus of this work, as women keep moving toward their desires, making more money, expressing themselves more in the world, working with clients or collectors who they want, really want to attract, and all of that bumps up against that pleasure speed limit. And the practices that we employ here to rewire the nervous system and create safety, and create capacity to have more… That is also something that has shrunk and shriveled over thousands of years of patriarchy, is our capacity to run joy, pleasure, abundance. And that is totally restorable and expandable; it just requires practice.
Miriam Schulman:
That’s so important. I’m actually going to read another quote from your book, and just play along with me. I’m actually thinking about, I should read this quote twice. So, first I’m going to read it exactly how it’s written, and then I’m going to replace some words.
Dr. Valerie Rein:
All right.
Miriam Schulman:
“Many traumatic experiences, feeling unsafe in our fullest authentic expression, have formed the protective barriers that inhibit our ability to deeply connect with ourselves and others. The depth and richness of our sex life,” this is the word that I would replace, “is dependent on the depth and richness of our embodied connection. How turned on we are and how attracted we are to our partner is dependent on how emotionally safe we feel. The same trauma adaptions that are keeping us safe by blocking our access to vulnerability and prohibiting us from getting emotionally naked with our partner also block our access to authentic arousal and sexual bliss.”
Okay, so that’s the quote, and I am going to reread just the end of it. “The same trauma adaptions that are keeping us safe by blocking our access to vulnerability and prohibiting us from getting emotionally naked with our art block our access to authentic expression.”
Dr. Valerie Rein:
I got chills, Miriam.
Miriam Schulman:
It’s so important, what we’re talking about. Right before we hit record, saying, “What is it you want to make sure that your audience knows?” This is it. This is the most important work you can do, as women and as artists, is to unlock those barriers that are keeping us stuck. We haven’t even gone into the metaphor that you use throughout the book, which I absolutely loved, was those prison guards that are of our own creation. We’re holding ourselves back in some way. So, let’s start there and unpack some of those things.
Dr. Valerie Rein:
Yes, they are those trauma adaptations that were created at the point where we or our ancestors experienced, had a traumatic experience, and their function is to keep us safe from going there again. And so, they show up as that self-talk; that’s the mind arena. They show up in the body by creating anxiety, depression, certain numbness, disconnection, imbalances that are rooted in stress. And they also show up in our actions and choices. Our subconscious really drives the bus; that’s something that we know from neuroscience. Our actions are decided in our subconscious. So, when you have, for example, you have this important opportunity, maybe you’re pitching yourself… I don’t know, what would an artist pitch themselves for, Miriam?
Miriam Schulman:
Well, yeah, pitching themselves to be in a gallery show if they want to go, any of these things, or showing their art to a collector.
Dr. Valerie Rein:
Yeah. Exactly, exactly.
Miriam Schulman:
But for some of us, it’s not even getting to that point, it’s staring at the easel and being afraid of expressing your own style for fear that’s not good enough.
Dr. Valerie Rein:
Oh, yeah.
Miriam Schulman:
So, either artists are relying very heavily on their influences, or they are continuing repeating themselves instead of stepping into more original expression.
Dr. Valerie Rein:
There is so much pain in that, right, in that original contribution that the world will never have if you don’t tap into that and put that out there. Yeah, and that choice is made in the subconscious; it’s not a conscious choice to stay safe, or in that safe zone of relying on the influences or painting small, or whatever that safe zone is, or not sharing your art. And the more we heal, the more… In the methodology that we use, the Thriving Method, and I describe the five steps of the process in the book, and in this methodology, we really rewire the nervous system so that our subconscious can actually catch up to the fact that everything has flipped. Your visibility is not as much as a threat to you and your wellbeing right now as your invisibility. You’re actually… Yeah. Because if you are invisible, nothing happens at all, and it’s not a good thing.
And so, we need to rewire the nervous system so that perception can shift. It’s not just saying to myself, “Yeah, I’m safe”; there are actually studies that show that just saying affirmations that contradict what our subconscious has imprinted can backfire.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah.
Dr. Valerie Rein:
And I know people who have developed panic attacks by going, “Yes, I’m safe, I’m safe,” and doing things that actually feel deeply unsafe to their subconscious. So, those are prison guards. They’re actually designed to keep us safe, like when you are just feeling yourself paralyzed instead of expressing yourself artistically, you may find yourself holding a pint of ice cream in your hand and a spoon instead of a brush, or opening 15 tabs on your browser to do some “research,” right? Your subconscious is making those choices. And I’m saying that not to let you off the hook and say, “Oh, well, that, there’s nothing you can do about it.” There’s actually everything you can do about it once you know what’s going on, because it’s absolutely something that we all can heal. We can feel safe in our fullest authentic expression, we can feel safe in our body, comfortable in our skin. We can experience unconditional love for our own beauty. How about that?
So, all these things, we see women in our programs be able to experience, be, and have, and it keeps on blowing my mind. We keep learning from our clients to see what’s possible, you know? Some of them release or rewire autoimmune conditions. Some of them just take their business from where they have been just treading water to where they are at ease financially and in terms of their expression. They have more time as a result, because things just flow. We spend so much time and energy in the battle with prison guards, who just keep blocking us, right? And it’s insane, it’s an insane amount of time and energy and consequently money. And once we remove the prison guards… We actually evolve them to bodyguards in our system; we don’t work against our biology, we work with it. As we do this rewiring, then we have all this capacity all of a sudden, we have all this time, we are in the flow, and things just begin unfolding with grace and ease.
Miriam Schulman:
You said something very important that I just want to rewind to.
Dr. Valerie Rein:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Miriam Schulman:
So, share with us what is the gift of unconditional self-approval, because I know that was a very big step in healing.
Dr. Valerie Rein:
I don’t even have words to express it. I recently had an experience where one of our Thrivers, well, actually, more than one has had that experience, she’s in her late 40s now, and she had this experiencing seeing her beauty, unconditional beauty for the first time in her life. And really, not just all up here, like, “I look good, I’m wearing this, I lost weight, whatever, I look good.” No. Unconditional, completely. She actually took a picture and posted it in our private group, and she looked so strikingly, just so gorgeous. Right? Nothing physically has changed, and everything has changed in the way that she looks and she shows up. She actually went out that same evening by herself to eat a restaurant, and there was this couple, and the woman kept staring at her and staring at her throughout the night, and then she came up to her and she said, “Please, I need to know, what is it that you do and how do you do it? Because you are so beautiful.”
This story really strikes me because, growing up, I have never seen my mother look in the mirror and be satisfied with what she saw. I always saw her being critical, you know, just changing outfits and tugging at her waistline and everything. And this is the gift that I want every woman to have and pass it along to their daughters and everyone in their lives. Because once we have that within ourselves, we give that subconscious permission for others to approve of themselves unconditionally too, of their art, of the way they look or the way they act, everything unconditionally.
Miriam Schulman:
I love that. This is, I think, a good place for us to wrap up. I just want to remind everybody, Patriarchy Stress Disorder: The Invisible Barrier to Women’s Happiness and Fulfillment by Dr. Valerie Rein. We’ve included a link to her book in the show notes, or you can go to drvalerie.com/book. All right, Valerie, do you have any last words for my listeners before we call this podcast complete?
Dr. Valerie Rein:
I would love for you to take away from this conversation that there is nothing wrong with you, and that there is pretty much an unlimited and untapped potential in the realm of “How good can it get?” versus “How much can we bear?” that we get to tap into with this healing work. And if what we talked about resonates with you and you check out the book, you can actually download the first chapter at that same URL, drvalerie.com/book, that Miriam mentioned. Or we also have regular live events that are virtual, and they’re free to attend, where you can be with other women from all over the world who are exploring this shift from survival to thriving and actually experience it firsthand, because there’s only so much that we can get from reading words on the page. Collective trauma requires collective healing, and that is why we come together for these events. They’re called The Thriving Experience, and you’ll find the info on my website as well. Thank you so much for letting in this revolutionary discovery, and I hope we’ll get to play together on this path.
Miriam Schulman:
All right, well, thank you so much. We’ll include links to everything we mentioned in the show notes, schulmanart.com/124. And don’t forget to check out the free portrait painting masterclass. Imagine what you can do with this time if you are painting your loved ones, and there’s no better way to de-stress than with the magic of watercolor. You can find that at schulmanart.com/masterclass. All right, thank you so much for being with me here today. If you enjoyed the show, please share it on the ‘gram, or you can leave a leave a review. We’ve made that so much easier for you: schulmanart.com/review-podcast. Thank you so much for being with me here today. I’ll see you same time, same place next week. Stay inspired.
Thank you for listening to The Inspiration Place Podcast. Connect with us on Facebook at Facebook.com/schulmanart, on Instagram at @schulmanart, and of course, on schulmanart.com.
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