Healing Trauma to Reclaim Your Power - Episode 109
In today's episode, I talk with Dr. Lorre Laws, an amazing nurse, teacher, and healer. Dr. Lorre shares how stress and trauma affect our bodies and minds, and why burnout isn’t the full story. She explains how we can heal using simple steps like being aware of our feelings, calming our bodies, and finding balance in our lives. We also talk about how trauma can affect how we think about money and our jobs.
About our guest
Dr. Lorre Laws, or "Dr. Lorre," is an author, nurse scientist, and trauma-burnout expert known for her integrative approach to healing. In her book, Nursing Our Healer's Heart: A Recovery Guide for Nurse Trauma & Burnout, she explores the systemic challenges faced by healthcare professionals, offering practical, research-based tools like her "Your Innate Care Plan" for addressing trauma and burnout. Her work emphasizes the connection between healing and financial sovereignty, helping professionals reclaim their power in every aspect of life.
As the founder of The Haelan Academy, a nonprofit providing educational and healing services to health professionals, and the host of the Nurse Trauma Healing podcast, Dr. Lorre shines a light on healthcare system inadequacies while empowering others with tools for resilience and well-being.
Nursing Our Healer's Heart by Dr. Lorre Laws
Email team@drlorrelaws.com with proof of order and you'll be entered into a raffle with a chance to win a 12-week scholarship to the Trauma Healing Academy.
Dr. Lorre Laws Website
Dr. Lorre Laws Podcast
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TRANSCRIPT:
Naseema: [00:00:00] Dr. Lorre Laws, or Dr. Lorre, is an author, nurse scientist, and trauma burnout expert known for her heart centered, integrative approaches to healing. While her work focuses on nurse trauma healing, she has considerable financial expertise in real estate, mortgages, and escrow.
Trauma healing and financial sovereignty are two sides of the same coin. In her book, nursing, our healers heart, a recovery guide for nurse trauma and burnout.
Dr. Laurie presents her research as though you're having a friendly conversation over a cup of tea. She discusses the impact of nurse specific and healthcare worker of traumatization and how it's frequently misdiagnosed as just burnout or resilience challenges, she shines a spotlight on the systemic gaslighting and marginalization of nurses and healthcare professionals worldwide.
Dr. Laurie offers that your innate care plan for step [00:01:00] healing process for nurse specific traumatization and burnout. This 4 step process, including the essential micro dose matter practice, helps nurses to insulate themselves from the effects of a broken health care system, toxic workplaces, and difficult patients and colleagues.
She founded the Halin Academy, a non profit organization that provides educational And healing services to health professionals worldwide. Her podcast, Nurse Trauma Healing, shines a spotlight on health care system inadequacies as relates to health care professional safety and professional well being.
What's up, my financially intentional people. I'm excited to be joined by Lorre Laws today. We're going to have a very interesting conversation. And this one is specific to my nurses, but I think pertains to everyone. So welcome Lorre. So happy to have you on the podcast.
Lorre Laws: I am [00:02:00] so happy. I've waited a long time to just have this moment. So I'm just like a little bit fangirling right now. So thank you. Thank you for having me.
Naseema: Of course, of course. And let's just talk a little bit about your background and your areas expertise. We all want to know how you became a nurse. Of course.
Lorre Laws: It's a long story. I was but I'm gonna make it short for y'all. But I started at the bedside at, 14 and 15 as a CNA at a skilled nursing facility. And before I had a driver's license or was eligible to vote, I was facilitating end of life transitions. I think it was in those super early formative years, what I call my healer's heart, was forged there.
And I was headed in that direction. And I sustained while I was going to university, a massive back injury and was advised by. Every person I spoke to, like the profession is not for you, like, when you herniate three discs, L3, L4, and L5 in the [00:03:00] manor, because we didn't have the right, the right equipment.
Same old story, right? And so I, I had a whole different career until I was 50, I went back to school, my life went upside down after a life threatening illness and a marriage didn't survive. And, one of those chapters in life that really maybe positions you better for your dharma and your purpose.
It didn't feel like that at the time, but I see that as a necessary and perhaps divine correction that was made. And so I got my RN at the age of 51. And then continued on to get my PhD, which I completed at 58. And so I am an integrative professor of nursing at an R1 university here in the U. S.,
and I teach in a BSN program. And what I notice is that Nothing had changed in the profession. And not only was it just nursing, but it's helping professions. Whether you're a [00:04:00] teacher or, in law enforcement or a first responder, any of us who are in the helping professions, we get told a lot that we're burned out, and we just need to do better self care, and we need to work on our resilience, and,
Naseema: Wait a minute, were you sitting in my staff meeting a couple weeks ago? Right there.
Lorre Laws: So I say, okay, hold! I've been around since the mid 1970s, to just transparently date myself and we're still having The same narrative. And so that got me curious because I'm a nurse scientist is is what my clinical specialty is. And so I conduct research and I teach and that's kind of the professor gig, when you're a nurse professor, that's that's how it rolls.
And and so I get very curious about this because as. I was seeing this cycle over a half of a century that we're still having these same conversations. I'm like [00:05:00] when was the last time we updated the burnout literature? Let's just start with the evidence base, right? Because after all, that's where scientists usually start is at the evidence base, and also I'm also a spiritual teacher and healer.
And so I have one foot in either realm at all times, which is a real, gives me a really unique. Perspective. And so I'm looking at all this. I'm like, it does, it feels like there's more here, after. So I started looking at the evidence and found out that the burnout syndrome was coined in 1970 and hasn't materially been updated.
And I was like what does the world health organization have to say about this? Surely. Surely, we have made some progress. Let me just Google that up. And it is occupational stress, this is who's definition, occupational stress that is not effectively managed. Are we gaslighting the entire planet right now?
And that it's not, it's not [00:06:00] covered in the ICD 11 so nobody can get compensated, reimbursed, insurance won't pay for, so I started now. Now I started getting a little mad, but anger properly focused can be, useful as long as you aren't carrying it in an unhealthy ways.
And about the time, so I started doing my own research and I started working. My clinical practice specialty is an integrative nurse coach, and so I was already working with nurses who were refractory to the traditional self caring. approaches to healing. I'm like everybody's hitting the wall here and all of the things that nurses already know how to do and helping professionals, we already know how to do this.
We have state licenses that said we know how to take care of people, including ourselves. And so I started digging into polyvagal theory and relational neuroscience. I started going out of discipline because at the time I was [00:07:00] teaching for the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. So I have this really Unusual multidisciplinary approach and also multiple ways of knowing, intuition was guiding me and it all harmonized and so I really started looking at this and I was like, I think what we have here, if it smells like, looks like, and acts like trauma, I wonder if there's more to this burnout narrative yeah.
Naseema: an external thing. It couldn't be. It's just, we're not, we're just not managing it.
Well, we need to meditate more
Lorre Laws: right, we're just somehow deficient, all of you. All 18 million of you on the planet have the same deficiency. No, I just wasn't buying it. And so I started I published a few articles on this in peer reviewed journals, which again is part of my day job, and what I was finding is that ain't no nurse on the floor, a [00:08:00] single mama trying to put food on her table, or a single dad.
Ain't nobody gonna spend 35 and spend an evening cozying up to my peer reviewed journal article. I wouldn't!
Naseema: thing to do. Mm
Lorre Laws: Said, said no one on their day off ever. And so, I was fired up about this because, you keep hearing all of these and just you yourself in the staff meetings like everywhere nurses are turning and it's not just nurses.
It's health professionals, it's helping professionals, so this is, this is a societal challenge that we're facing. I just happen to be a nurse scholar, but you can fill in your professional role and it will all, it'll all align for you. And so I was like, how, the question I kept asking, this is me being in my spiritual way of being.
And so the question I asked is, how can I get this evidence and a healing framework? And this education [00:09:00] that none of us are getting in nursing school. I'm a BSN educator. We are not teaching this. I just audited the AACN essentials. This is not going to be in the curriculum for the next decade. It's not there. It's the same old yada, yada, yada. Nurses need to do better. And no accountability for the organization, no accountability for the healthcare system, and none of that. I was like, okay nobody's reading my peer reviewed articles on this, which is understandable. I did not take that personally, but I took it as, I need to do something different.
How can I meet you, in your living room, when you're on your last frayed nerve? Exhausted, dread, you got the Sunday scaries, you don't want to go back, every cell in your body is depleted beyond measure, like how can I do, how can I help my colleagues in that way, and so I was like I guess you're going to go to author school and you're going to learn how to write [00:10:00] a book.
Which is, this book is written as though you and I are hanging out right now. It's like we're in a nurse coaching session. We're hanging out, we're like expLorreng this together and through that there's, frameworks and a hundred practices, and all sorts of things that, can guide anyone, whether you're a nurse any kind of helping professional.
So I went to author school. Which is a whole different way of writing than the scientific writing that I've been trained to do, because nobody wants to cozy up to that work at the end of their day, either, it's a different type of reader experience. And I was more interested in facilitating healing than I was, doing something from the.
The left hemisphere, analytical, logical, scientific, I really was like, my mission was to bring healing. And so I wrote the book and I somehow, somehow managed to get it published without an agent as a debut author. So I think there was, I think there might have been some divine assistance in that one because that's like unheard of.
And I only [00:11:00] submitted a proposal to three publishers. Yeah, JK Rowlings, had to submit to hundreds, so it was just really, a lot of synchronicity around that. And so here we are, and then what we find out with the book is out and it's I'm just so blessed because people are reaching out and sharing their stories and how it is affecting them.
And and so they, they wanted more. It's do you have any programs? I'm like I started a non profit, and I have a, I have a 12 week program that either hospitals can, that can use, and I also have one for helping professionals who, want to be facilitated in the healing.
Because that's the thing about healing, is that you can get some healing done from a book, but what we, what I learned through my research, and it's relational neuroscience we are genetically and evolutionarily hardwired for co healing and co regulation. And so that's when really the quantum [00:12:00] leap is made, is when we are facilitated in our healing.
Just like we don't give a cancer patient a bucket of chemo and some adjuvants and say, go heal yourself, right? We are with them and we are present and we are facilitating as any helping professional does in their role. So it has become this this beautiful thing.
And what we noticed over time is that, cause all the proceeds of this go to the nonprofits. So I, this is light work for me. So this is all for y'all. This is from my healer's heart to yours is what this is. And and so what we started looking is we started looking at the traditional wellness domains.
The usual things that we all know. You need to eat right and exercise and be hydrated and be in healthy relationships that are supportive. And your environment, your physical environment needs to be set, your relational environment. And then there's the financial piece. And then this is where and I, to be honest with you I didn't see [00:13:00] it coming, it was one of those beautiful unintended consequences, as they say, is that, as the people I was working with, which is now not limited to nurses it's, this is, we've opened it to everyone, I was getting as many requests from nurses as I was members of the general public, because I think it was landing.
It's Oh maybe I'm not just burned out. Maybe there's something more I could do besides this gaslighting narrative to reclaim my power, to reclaim my wholeness. And so I can thrive in just, instead of just surviving, in my life. How about that? How about that, and so we found that as all of the wellness domains, including because if you think about it, people have a lot of trauma around money,
Naseema: Tell me about it.
Lorre Laws: hi, it's a highly I myself, and I think every single one of us can tell our personal story and they all matter.
And they all have value. And they all affected us in ways, then the way that [00:14:00] trauma works is that whatever doesn't get healed at the time that the trauma happens. And that's usually because we don't have the people that we perceive that we need before, during, and after. The event or the hardship, it doesn't always have to be an event and that doesn't mean we didn't have people who loved us.
That didn't mean we didn't have people who were trying their absolute best on our behalf. It just means they themselves, weren't equipped or educated or not. And this cycle of embodied trauma gets transmitted from 1 culture to the next from 1 family, generation to the next ancestral trauma.
Naseema: can you briefly just explain embodied trauma? Break that down for us because I love that term.
Lorre Laws: Yeah and we often don't know what it is because it often gets misattributed to a lot of chronic conditions. Let's just start with what is trauma. It's just kind of like, just a cliff note. And I love Gabor Matei's [00:15:00] definition, which is, it's what happens inside of us.
As a result to what happens outside, so if something happens in our external world, it, it affects our body, mind, essence, our body, mind, spirit. Right. And in some way, if it doesn't get completely integrated which is most of the time, we don't have the exact people we need before, during and after, which is why this is such a prevalent situation, especially in the wake of events in recent years.
So we have a lot of people who. Have been through some really hard times, whether it's financially or in their childhood or in recent years, or, in a relationship. And so if that stressful event, that hardship exceeds the organism, the physiology, now I'm going to get a little nerdy here, if it exceeds our capacity.
to process and integrate, which is also a social relational thing, right? So it's the physiology and it's the relational [00:16:00] neurophysiology piece of it. And the work of Vanderkolk, Vessel Vanderkolk, the body keeps score. I always mess up his name. Please forgive me. I quote you all the time and I stumble every time,
Naseema: Which is an excellent book for people to read by the
way. The Body Keeps the Score is game changing.
Lorre Laws: Yeah. And so what happens is that trauma financial related or otherwise. Whatever doesn't get processed, wholly, fully integrated gets stored. It gets stored in the body, and it gets stored primarily in our muscles, our fascia, that's a big one for me personally, our skin, and our neuroplexies, which are, hello, everywhere.
All right. And so each of us will hold that trauma. It gets in my work, I call it unhealed bits of wisdom because the unintegrated trauma is really, it's stored in our body until such time that conditions [00:17:00] are favorable for healing, and then it'll bubble up to the surface where we can really do the integration on it and the healing.
So the point was really that, the unintegrated trauma or what I call unhealed bits of wisdom, they're stored in our body until conditions are favorable.
And the challenge with this whole burnout narrative is because it's gaslighting, it's a culture of blame, it assumes some deficiency. Or deficit, or that there is something wrong with the person who is experiencing very legitimate physiological responses. And so this is the kind of the gap that my research and my work is trying to fill.
And so when these unhealed bits of wisdom come up, this unintegrated trauma, it's almost always, that's how we embody it. But when it's like a dormant volcano. Okay, we got some under the surface, some lava that's getting a little hot, getting a little steamy, but on the outside, it looks [00:18:00] like everything's fine, but then sometimes when we have a trauma response, usually there's a big overshoot.
In terms of the reaction or the response to the situation, and that's your first clue that maybe you have some unintegrated trauma that's at play. But we, until recently, haven't had the science or the language or the tools to know how to navigate that not only in our own personal. being, but then how do you and I, if we're at the workplace and it's super stressful as most workplaces are and you or I have some sort of unhealed bits, some unintegrated trauma that kind of gets.
liberated and it's about the cabin, right? We're so now this person, myself, let's say for, I'll give some examples. So I don't want to make assumptions about how this works for you, but I can share what that works for me is that sometimes in my nervous system, I get overwhelmed and I [00:19:00] start externally processing and I'm, and not at work, but at home.
I'm a cupboard slammer and I did not know I was a cupboard slammer. I did not, I swear to you, I did not know this was a thing. And my adult daughter who was going to nursing school at the time, she's mom, she's studying, right? She's mom, could you not? I was like, could I not what I'm just like, she's you're slamming everything.
I said, I am. She pulls out her phone. She goes, I knew you would say that watch what you're doing. I was like, Oh,
Naseema: She got,
Lorre Laws: I'm like, honey, I am so sorry. I was not even, I was like, because I was. Because what happens is when for the nurses and health professionals out there, what happens is that when we do experience kind of this embodied trauma, this unhealed bit comes to the surface in the way that I, for me, that was one example.
What's often the case is that at that point, our limbic system. is in the driver's seat. And our prefrontal, what Dan [00:20:00] Siegel calls our frontal prefrontal cortex, he calls that the upstairs brain. It goes offline for just a minute there because the limbic system and the unintegrated trauma comes up.
And so that's why if you and I were in the same workplace and a very stressful or even traumatic thing happened, you might have one completely different. trauma response than I would, and the wild card is because people are like how come so and so reacted this way and you reacted that way?
The wild card is that each of us. In our own bodies have different trauma that is unintegrated or unhealed that's lingering or stuck in the body. And so when we start, this was the other unintended consequence that is beautiful. When I started working with people in the academy as they started.
To really liberate themselves from the trauma, knowing how to navigate it. Knowing how to navigate their [00:21:00] coworkers when they recognize a pattern in one of their coworkers. 'cause they, there's kinda like 10 archetypes that I identified in my book. And these archetypes are intended to be helpful so that we can have a very compassionate.
I wonder what happened in their life story that is underpinning this behavior rather than what's wrong with you,
Naseema: That hard? Mm-hmm
Lorre Laws: Well, which is a natural, but, if we can make it an archetype that this is a nervous system adaptation in their physiology. That is different from how my physiology, it brings, it opens up a really wide door for compassion.
And so what we found over time and the program that I have happens to be 12 weeks. And so I can speak to a 12 week program is that not only did people have started having a better relationship with their money, because a lot of the. trauma that was coming up was around things that were related
either directly or [00:22:00] indirectly to financial hardships or challenges and then also a lot of the chronic symptoms surrounding things like depression and anxiety and IBS and chronic fatigue and sleep.
appetite alterations. All, now I'm not saying it's trauma underpinning, all of these things, I, who knows. But when I did this symptom cluster analysis, when I did this symptom cluster analysis and I, Deep dove the evidence base looking for what are the symptoms of burnout and what are the symptoms of immediate and delayed responses to trauma using SAMHSA criteria.
Let's just let's do a symptom cluster analysis and I found starking overlap and so I've come to the conclusion, not I have come to the conclusion, I mean it's not when you put a book out. It's, I have concluded that Our current burnout narrative [00:23:00] and science is not trauma informed.
And that's why it's not working. Who knew? We, we didn't have language for this in the 70s when the term was coined, and if, even if you were to go look at the evidence base today and pull some articles, like what the, give me a systematic review on our meta analysis on burnout and all the self care things, you're going to get the same story.
Over and over and over. And that's why we haven't really progressed in 50 years in terms of this quote unquote burnout phenomenon. And I contend that it's because it's not just burnout.
Naseema: How do you incorporate this, as a nursing professor into coursework?
Lorre Laws: nursing professors are every bit as challenged. In our practices as clinicians and educators, and, that it's the same story different setting. We're understaffed. We have too many students that, that we can really [00:24:00] serve in the highest and best manners as we've been trained to, is that sounding familiar? And we're taking them out into healthcare settings that are difficult and challenging and then they get their students get out there and they're understandably working with nurses who are experiencing, and we now have a middle range theory for this. As I was writing this book, believe it or not, talk about another divine synchronicity I was thinking that I was going to be writing a middle range theory because we didn't have anything in the nursing.
Scholarly, theoretical base about this. And then Dr. Karen Foley. I had just finished the first draft of my book, and Dr. Karen Foley at Purdue University published the Middle Range Theory for Nurse Psychological Trauma. And so I rewrote a big chunk of the book to just have the most current theoretical framework in there.
And she does a beautiful job of explaining what is individual trauma versus what it is. What is nurse specific [00:25:00] trauma? And I feature all of that in my work. And so this is the challenge not only for nurse educators, but for nurses or helping professionals, is that we are all.
Being overworked, right? And so how do you, how do you bring healing into a nurse or an educator or fill in the blank role, helping professional role, that there isn't even time. There isn't even time. To use the restroom or grab some nutrition in many cases for not even 10 minutes. So what I'm doing at the university and what I'm doing with nurses worldwide, I'm working with nurses in Europe and Canada and in Australia and in the United States.
States. And we all got, we have all different have different health care systems, but it's not about the health care system so much as it is. It's about the universal common denominator of that. There's this [00:26:00] avoidable occupational related trauma that's occurring in the workplace that is being pushed aside and let's just call it that they're burnout and, go have a piece of pizza, meditate and go to the lavender room.
Naseema: Yes. Ours is, ours is a zen room.
Lorre Laws: I've created a framework and it's called the innate care plan that each reader can tailor to their own unique situation and it's got 4 steps to it and it really starts with the nervous system. As the autonomic nervous system and vagus nerve as where we start, it's our most ancient primal successful system that has evolved over the millennia to keep us safe and innervates everything.
And so why wouldn't we start there? Let's start there. And so the formula is 3 A's plus a B leads you to the [00:27:00] 3 R's. And I have over 100 practices in the book that can be done in 30 seconds or less.
Naseema: I like
Lorre Laws: Even if you're walking to a code.
Naseema: Oh, wow. Mm-hmm
Lorre Laws: You can, even then, you can do what I call a microdose to support your nervous system.
So the three A's are awareness, first of all, being aware of how your physiology is working and they aren't teaching us this. This is because this is off over in mental health and over in neurophysiology doesn't make its way into the curriculum. It's like mission critical that we're aware of how our nervous system is working.
Where trauma is concerned. We all know how it works. But now we're not we're. Trauma is concerned, not in a polyvagal informed relational neuroscience informed sense of the word. So we need to have that awareness and how does it, how is it, how does it work in my body? Which is going to be different than your body and his body and their body, right?[00:28:00]
How is this? So the first step is awareness and then there's the attending to the nervous system first. We're always so focused on the outside trying to take care of the external things. Oh, I just need to eat right. Oh, I should just go to the gym. Oh, I need to meditate, oh, I need to go, fill in the blank instead of who I wonder what's going on. I wonder what's going on. And where am I? Am I in my ventral vagal state? Am I in sympathetic overdrive? Is my dorsal vagal circuit online? Am I in play? Am I in stillness? Am I in freeze? Am I in fawn? Like understanding where you are in the circuits and hybrids of how your nervous system works and then having the right practices and tools to help you navigate that.
So that's the attending piece. And then the alignment piece is where we connect what's going on there with our outer world. We look at how is that affecting my outer world, or how is my outer world affecting my inner world? Like because a lot of times those two [00:29:00] things are very different.
And it creates a lot of dissonance cognitively and physiologically. So those are the three A's, and that's like the foundation of the house.
Naseema: Mhm,
Lorre Laws: You want to build your day, your financial abundance, your health, your wellbeing on a strong foundation. And then we look at the B, which, which is for balance.
And that's all the normal self care things. All the normal wellness things, hydration, sleep, exercise, nutrition. Healthy relationships financial wellness, financial abundance environmental, all of those things. And so what we found is that if people start with working with their autonomic nervous system and vagus nerve first, and got the unintegrated traumas processed and released out of the body, transmuted, transcended, that the other symptoms fell away.
I'm not saying it's a cure all, but I'm saying that all of a [00:30:00] sudden it's you know what, I'm not overspending. I'm not overeating because a lot of times we're self medicating. Because we don't have another option that's working for us. It's not a deficit, it's not anything, anybody's doing anything wrong, it's this is new science, it's just hot off the press.
So getting to that, and that leads you then to the three R's, which is where we all want to be. We all want to be in the three R's. The first of which is we want to be regulated in our nervous system. That's probably the single most important thing, aside from maybe quitting smoking. It's right up there as like the, if I could name the top two things I would recommend for anyone who's trying to improve their health and overall wellbeing and quality of life.
If you're smoking, and I was a smoker, so I know how hard this is , if any of you are out there. It is a journey, but boy, that is a game changer in terms of your baseline health and wellness and quality of life. A as is addressing. The trauma that you may not even be aware is wreaking [00:31:00] havoc at that foundation that, like underneath that volcano or beneath that glacier.
There's all this that we can't see, but that doesn't because we can't see it on the surface doesn't mean it's not there. And then, so that's the first one is regulation. The second one is reconnection. So what happens is when we embody a lot of trauma that is stored in the body, we get a sense of inner disconnection.
With, we feel we've tried everything. We're doing all the right things. I'm not getting better and I'm feeling some kind of way or ways and we start to lose our connection with our deeper layers and true essence of ourself. And it also, when we are in trauma responses, we're not able to optimally commune, socially engage with others.
So you could be sitting in a room of your besties. Celebrating a birthday. It's a joyous occasion. Everybody's in their best mood and you could still be sitting there feeling utterly alone, right? [00:32:00] So we want the reconnection. So it's regulation, reconnection, and then restoration of the healer's heart.
And the healer's heart, for me, was forged early. For many of us, it was forged early. But that's really, it's our why for what matters most to us. Not just professionally, it may include professionally, but our why for whatever we hold dear. And sometimes that gets just gets steamrolled by the system, by our jobs, by our competing demands, by fill in the blank.
And so this is just really a very trauma. Informed holistic integrative approach to bringing healing into the lives of helping professionals, nurses and others. That's in a way that's approachable. Here's what you can do in 30 seconds.
Naseema: Yeah, I love that approachability, but I wanted to get back to the attendance piece because I feel like that's a piece that I struggle with. And I think that a lot of people will struggle with [00:33:00] identifying. That like what you're feeling, where you're at, like where that is coming from, because I wasn't necessarily taught how to identify my feelings.
And so in order to like, work on that part, I would need that language. Does your book help with that?
Lorre Laws: it does. So what I do is I present and in a very like we're hanging out kind of way.
Naseema: Mm
Lorre Laws: Um, I present all the things that none of us are getting in our education and training. It's you know what, here's what happens in using polyvagal therapy. There is as one, I go into cell danger response theory a little bit about how our mitochondria are affected.
If you are exhausted, and all you can do on your day off is grab your remote and your cell phone for Netflix and take out, that's not a you're lazy thing. That's a my mitochondria. are shot. They cannot produce anymore.
Naseema: breaking it down to that
Lorre Laws: Yeah, it's a physiological [00:34:00] thing, but that's another way we, in which we get gaslighted.
Is that, oh, you're just lazy. Oh, you should just, you should just go to bed earlier. Oh, you should, no. How about the physiology? Is to the point where it cannot produce the energy to keep up with the trauma exposure and the
Naseema: Mm
Lorre Laws: because that's really what's happening.
So yes, we go into the language. So the first thing I do is let's first learn the language of our autonomic nervous system and vagus nerve. Let's learn that. Okay. Cause that's what we're not getting in school. And then let's learn how to navigate it. Like you're saying if it's feeling this way in my body, then here's the 10 tools that I can use to help.
If I'm feeling, let's just go through the circuit. So there's 3 circuits. There's ventral vagal, which is the one you and I are in right now. We're relaxed, we're open, we're socially engaged, we're curious, we're asking questions, we're expLorreng. If we had 10 other people, we'd be having a party right
Naseema: Right?
Lorre Laws: Like life is good. And this [00:35:00] is ventral vagal is this state and that refers to the ventral aspect of the vagus nerve. Okay, so ventral vagal for short. That's where helping professionals need to be. That's where we are heart centered.
That's where we can be optimally engaged in a meaningful way with our patients, or those in our care, or our colleagues, right?
Because not everyone's a direct care provider. Nurses are everywhere, and a myriad of roles and but our work conditions are such that we aren't in ventral vagal because we go into the next circuit which is called sympathetic response which we're supposed to be so we're supposed to be by design we're supposed to be ventral vagal and then we're supposed to go into a little bit of sympathetic response to meet life's stressors
And then we go
right back into ventral vagal. Then what's happened is everybody's living there, right? And so then it goes, we're not returning to [00:36:00] ventral vagal. And so now we go into what I call. Sympathetic overdrive, and this is most of us. Oh, my God. I have so many things. I can't. You're on the hamster wheel all day. I can't. I can't use the restroom.
I can't eat. I can't. I can't. And it's real. I'm not saying it's not real. It is real. And there's a physiological basis for it. And there's something you can do about it. All right, there's something we can do. Don't buy in to the narrative, right? But then what happens is, and this is what's happening to so many people, is that if we stay in sympathetic overdrive too long, right?
So now you remember, now our body systems are starting to decompensate a little bit. Like the mitochondria can't keep up, can't produce the energy. We're not built to have 14 hours of high alert stress, for five years. Even military combat personnel, they rotate them in and out to make sure that the, but that's not happening for nurses, healthcare professionals, teachers, or helping
Naseema: Nope, it's just [00:37:00] hey, you just got done, coding this person, guess what? Somebody else is coding in the next room, you get another code, you're gonna go to surgery, you're going to the OR.
Lorre Laws: oh no, and my favorite one, you got an admit and it's 10 minutes before shift change.
Naseema: Fun times. Mm hmm.
Lorre Laws: most people now are in what's called the dorsal vagal circuit, and this is when the dorsal aspect of the vagus nerve is assessing the situation all through the midbrain, which Dr. Steven Porges calls this phenomenon like the threat detector, right? So in our midbrain, it's not a literal structure function, to describe the process, the threat detector is always Surveying our internal conditions and our external conditions.
And so when the threat detector is whoo, the mitochondria can't keep up, and the stress on the outside, and you've been in here too long like the body is starting to not be able to [00:38:00] withstand this. And so the dorsal vagal circuit comes online and it shuts us down. to conserve energy for vital organs and processes.
So if you're on the couch on your day off, you're like, I want to go play with my kids. We have a picnic planned. We have date night tonight. And I like, I got nothing in my tank and I want to do. So this is a real fit. So you're not lazy. There's nothing wrong with you. And there's something we can do about that too.
So those are like the three circuits, the three primary circuits. So it's ventral vagal sympathetic and dorsal vagal. And from that are hybrids. So each of those are, can be, I have a little mixology in my book, that you can mix and match that gets you into either stillness, play, fawning or freezing, which is where it most.
People are responding and freezing and sympathetic overdrive. That's what the vast majority of people are at work. Learning how to navigate that and then [00:39:00] learning how not only to navigate for yourself, but how to translate that in your workplace setting so that you can stay regulated. In what's called the window of tolerance, and that's a term that describes that kind of being in your ventral vagal tone where we should all be with a little bit of sympathetic coming online to meet the, the stressors.
Yeah, I got to go do a code, but now I'm going to have a minute. I'm going to be able to decompress. I'm going to go back to homeostasis. I'm going to get back into my ventral vagal tongue. That just isn't provided for and in the workplace and so people are having to stay in this. Sympathetic overdrive until dorsal vagal comes in and literally shuts them down.
And learning how to navigate all of that and then how to stay regulated first at home, right? Where it's a little. More manageable for most people, not
Naseema: of this. Ha ha ha
Lorre Laws: Uh, I've been through some stuff at home that was traumatic as well, wherever, but start where it's easy. We start where this, because we're learning.
We're learning the language of our nervous system. [00:40:00] We're learning how does my body, what does my body feel like? When I'm in sympathetic overdrive, what does my body feel like when I'm in ventral vagal tone? What does it feel like when I'm fawning? What does it feel like when I'm freezing? What should I look for?
And then what practices can I do to support myself to bring me back into regulation if I'm out of regulation? So we start there and I have this micro doses matters practice and that's the one you can do in under 30 seconds which starts with having a safe place. And if you're not in a safe physical space, the restroom is usually available. The stairwell, an empty conference or patient room, dip out, whatever your setting is. But find a place where you can be relatively private for 30 seconds. And then ground and center. I almost always have grounding stones somewhere on me, but if that's not how you roll, your feet are always on the ground.
And so you can ground right, [00:41:00] with your feet into the earth, into the floor and just like kind of bring it down,
Naseema: mhmm
Lorre Laws: bring it down. And then the next step is to signal safety. And this is the most important thing. It's the most, it's so simple. Isn't everything that really works so simple? At the end of the day.
And ways that we can signal safety. One of my favorites is just to give myself a little bear hug. And nobody's go ahead and do it with me right now.
Naseema: that. I love that.
Lorre Laws: Now you could, now notice that. Notice how you just gave a container for your nervous system. Now if another thing that you can do is a little round of breathing.
And then, and the last step is putting hands over your heart. Go ahead and do that with me. And notice with that, remember your why.
Naseema: Yeah.
Lorre Laws: connect with the love that you are. Connect with the love that is always here for you. Yeah.
Naseema: you are safe, does something, [00:42:00] 'cause that immediately did something to me like, wait a minute, you're safe. Just stop, pause. Everything's gonna be okay.
Lorre Laws: Yeah. But it needs to be a gesture in addition to the words, because here's the thing that's tricky about that. You're right. You're right. That is helpful. And I encourage that. And we have to remember that the midbrain, And the vagus nerve and the autonomic nervous system cannot process language.
Thought or spoken, and so it, it needs a signal. And so it needs that's why it's called signal safety. So whether you know whether it's. This sometimes, I have all sorts of little things that I can do in a meeting. I just might adjust my earring. Sometimes I just adjust my necklace.
I always have some sort of, and it's a kind of a grounding stone, but just a touch point for myself, just to send a message, a nonverbal message to my midbrain and my autonomic nervous system. So we can go, Oh I [00:43:00] thought we were having a 911 alert here. I see that you're okay.
Let me just bring it down a notch.
You know, so it's really important to be able to do that. And then once you figure out this process, how to navigate your own nervous system and stay regulated now in your personal and professional life then you start seeing the patterns in your colleagues.
And how
Naseema: Mmhmm.
Lorre Laws: we compassionately, because we don't have to, we don't have to know anybody's story, nor should we, we don't have to fix anybody. There's nobody's broken. No, there's not one person that's broken. These are all nervous system adaptations to the trauma that that person has experienced. It's an adaptation.
And so how can I compassionately keep myself regulated while this person is dysregulated? Because the only thing that needs to happen is that each of us stay regulated because evolutionarily speaking, we already co regulate.
Naseema: Mmhmm. Haha.
Lorre Laws: know, like when you were growing [00:44:00] up, if you went into your family home, I don't know about you, but before I would open up the door, if my parents were having an argument, I knew it when I was coming up the driveway,
Naseema: feel it. Yep. You
Lorre Laws: You can feel it. Conversely when, things are harmonious in the family home and you open the door and it's like getting, a warm hug and a cookie and a glass of milk. And so none of that was verbal but. That is how our body will co regulate, so the job when we're working with co workers and colleagues is to like, oh, they are experiencing a trauma response right now.
This is out of character behavior for them. It's an overshoot. It's an over or under reaction is usually how it manifests. Either somebody shutting down because their dorsal vagal came online, or they got ramped up into sympathetic overdrive. It's usually one or the other, but they're acting, their behavior is some kind of way that's a little bit overblown to the situation.
Oh, I recognize this. I recognize that could be that person's sympathetic overdrive. [00:45:00] I'm going to hold compassion for them. I'm going to stay regulated in my own nervous system because I know their nervous system is looking for mine for help. I don't have to say anything. I don't have to do anything.
I don't have to fix anything. I just have to be. Now, that's perfection. That's, that's perfect healing. And that's how we're supposed to be. But we are working in, many of us, in contexts and settings that are not supportive of our physiology, that are not supportive of stress. And we gotta flip the script on this whole burnout thing because it's not burnout.
I've worked with thousands of people and almost always. I don't want to make it, a universal statement, but almost always. The AACM, the American Association of the Colleges of Nursing, who set the parameters for nursing education in the entire country, their position statement on trauma is that we should assume that every person on this planet has experienced [00:46:00] trauma.
And then I went like this. And nurses too, right? How, how, how, how come nurses are a subset of everybody? How come we're not talking about this? And, and you could say the same for teachers and, my, the legal profession and law enforcement. There's so many helping professions that are in a similar boat.
And yeah, I feel it's so important for all of us to understand that we really do have within us the agency and the empowerment to opt out of narratives that would otherwise keep us feeling deficient, marginalized, or somehow oppressed and to, Look for resources like my book or my academy or, there's plenty of if my vibe isn't your vibe, there's other things out there but find what is your vibe and hope is available and a pathway forward is available and it's doable.
It's not something you have to wait until, oh I don't have vacation for six more months. I'll work on it then. No, you, how [00:47:00] about on your way to the restroom? You got 30 seconds? How about when you're in the restroom? You got 30 seconds? Yeah. And one of my favorite things is I was, I presented for the National League of Nurses and last, a couple months ago in San Antonio.
I had a couple hundred nurses in my audience and you ask any of them, they're like, I, cause I asked them, raise your hand, raise your hand. If you have, 30 seconds that you could find in your very busy day and I'm not being trivial, trivializing that. It's extremely busy,
Naseema: Uh huh,
Lorre Laws: do you have 15 seconds?
A few hands went up. Do you have 10 seconds? A few more hands went up. I said, okay, so now, everybody, let's just take a moment. Join me in this. Let's just all take one big conscious breath. A mindful moment. Now, you're breathing anyway, so don't tell me you don't have time for that. Ha ha ha! You just sent [00:48:00] a signal of safety to your nervous system. It's a perspective shift. We're breathing anyway. So if you only have Three seconds, take that deep breath, because guess what, when we're running from the saber toothed tiger from a genetic evolutionary perspective, you aren't deep breathing.
And so when you take that big, deep, diaphragmatic, and even if you can do a little vocalization on the exhale, if it's appropriate where you are, that sends a signal to your nervous system, your midbrain, autonomic nervous system, that you're safe.
Naseema: but I just want to emphasize that a lot of the conditioning that we have a lot of the responses and the built up trauma are things that have happened and have affected us for a very long time. But when people look for solutions, even financial solutions they think that if it doesn't immediately work, it's not working [00:49:00] for them.
And I just want to remind people that these shifts are things that have to. Happen over you have to do them repeatedly before you can see major impacts. Sure. You can slow down and you know what I'm saying? You could take those breaths. But in order to heal physically physiologically.
And mentally things take time and, we're always looking for quick solutions for things. That's why, we turn to drugs and alcohol to numb our problems, but not to gaslight anybody and to play into this whole self care thing of are you not doing yourself care properly? But just understand that.
Change, especially when it comes to things that are, a known trauma response are going to take time. These are things that I have to remind myself to practice. These are things that, like I said sometimes we didn't even have, we don't even [00:50:00] have the language around it 1st.
Yeah I love this conversation and I think it's going to open up. A lot of people's eyes to look within to see how they can utilize these tools in order to just show up in and like you said, it transcends. Pretty much every part of your life and people in every profession, especially the healing and helping professions can benefit from this, but I really think these are some powerful tools, but also a lot of validation for things that we have been feeling and haven't had the words to describe.
And since we have the words to describe it giving us actual tools to cope and deal with it, I think is extraordinary. So I appreciate the work that you have done and I like that divine guidance that it's brought you there because I feel like you. Maybe [00:51:00] being a nurse at 18, when you were supposed to be a nurse wouldn't have led you down this path.
And I don't think that anything is accidental. And I think your story is truly incredible, but the work that you have done is very, very deep on so many levels. And I know it's going to benefit a lot of people. I encourage people to pick up this book, listen to your podcast. You're interested, go through this 12 week course, because we're looking for answers and until the system implodes in, which needs to happen.
Yeah.
Lorre Laws: need to happen. And, just to leave your beautiful audience with just a couple little things. So eloquently spoken is that, this type of healing, it's an unwinding. And that's why 12 weeks. This is, we didn't get here overnight and also for people out there who feel like, oh, I don't want to relive all that's happened to me.
That is not trauma healing. [00:52:00] You do not go back and do and have to relive. that's, that's, that actually is counterproductive. So for some, cause sometimes people think they have to go back and relive everything. No, no, no, no, no. That's not what it is. It's just, we start today and we just reframe and we navigate and we get some more tools and then we give our body the time that it needs because our body's always working towards optimal health, always.
Always, even, my mother's at end stage life right now in hospice care and her body every day is working towards to do the best that it can, even at end of life. And giving ourselves the time and space as you so beautifully described to really, understand that it's a lifestyle change that I am deciding, I'm deciding that I don't want to live with all this trauma in my body. I want to feel better. I want to live better. I want to live my highest and best life as I define it. [00:53:00] And keeping that instead of some of these, these other things that might be, a little more harder to manage. It's not always comfortable, but it's always worthwhile.
Naseema: I just can feel like in my soul how it helps me to show up as a better person, as a better mother, as a better nurse. Just have like how I can show up better in my everyday relationships. And yeah, I love that deciding not to let that trauma dictate your life. So I hope my listeners walk away with the same insight and tools and really just like it, it really hit home to me especially like that safety piece.
And I'm definitely going to be incorporating that. Going forward, so I definitely appreciate you, Lorre, I'll have all the links to your book, your show notes, your program. Your books your program, your podcast in the show notes. If people want to [00:54:00] reach out to Lorre, you can, but again, you can let them know where they can find you as well.
Lorre Laws: Everything's on my website, which is always a work in progress. And I'm going to spell my name because my mom got a little creative. So it's DrLorreLaws. com and that's D R L. O. R. R. E. L. A. W. S. dot com. And there's a contact form there and just oodles of free resources, including if you do get the book, the activities, there's PDFs for the exercises at the end of each chapter that are much easier to navigate.
Then, then, the limitations of the traditional book. So those free resources are there for everyone. There's a trauma assessment questionnaire and just however I can be of service and bring healing light into your life. I am here for it.
Naseema: love it. Thank you so much. Dr. Lorre. We appreciate you.
Lorre Laws: Thank you.
Hey there I’m Naseema
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