Dissociation and Codependency: Reclaiming Intimacy and Healing Relational Trauma with Body-Based Therapy
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Show Notes
What’s the difference between top-down (cognitive) and bottom-up (somatic) processing? How can a body based therapy like Brainspotting address deep-seated emotional issues leading to greater self-awareness and healing? This episode dives into why it’s helpful to become more in tune with your body and emotional state.
04:06 Understanding Codependency and Recovery
06:51 The Importance of Body-Based Therapies
10:00 Dissociation and Its Impact
19:34 Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Processing and How to Manage
23:32 Practical Tips for Managing Relationship Triggers
30:06 Exploring Body Awareness and Brainspotting
34:26 Brainspotting for Intimacy and Trauma
44:30 Codependency and Self-Identity
Jessica Parente is a ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach, a Level IV Brainspotting Provider and a Best-Selling Author. As the founder of It Ends With You LLC, she is passionate about helping others identify their own subconscious and codependent patterns so that they can heal, shift and step into a life that is authentic, intentional and true to themselves. Jess pulls from her own journey in becoming a Recovered Codependent to normalize client experiences and to instill hope that codependency is NOT a life sentence.
Connect with Jessica Parente
Website: www.itendswithyouLLC.com
Email: info@generationaljess.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61553460761081
Instagram: @jessmolikewhoa (personal) & @generational.jess (business)
Connect with Paige Bond
Instagram: @stubbornlovepaige
Facebook: @paigebondcoaching
TikTok: @paigebondcoaching
Website: https://paigebond.com
Paige Bond specializes in helping individuals, couples, and intentionally non-monogamous partnerships feel grounded, confident, and connected in their love life. She is also the founder of Sweet Love Counseling providing therapy in CO, FL, SC, and VT. Paige loves educating people about relationships through being the host of the Stubborn Love podcast, hosting workshops, and speaking at conferences.
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Disclaimer: This podcast and communication through our email are not meant to serve as professional advice or therapy. If you are in need of mental health support, you are encouraged to connect with a licensed mental health professional to receive the support needed.
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Transcript
(generated by AI - please excuse errors)
[00:00:00] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: Welcome to the Stubborn Love Podcast. I'm your host, Paige Bond. I'm a Gottman and attachment trained, solution focused marriage and family therapist. I specialize in helping folks design and build their dream relationships through structured therapy and resources. And also use modalities that go beyond traditional talk therapy, like accelerated resolution therapy and psychedelic assisted psychotherapy.
School didn't teach us how to be good at love, so I created the Stubborn Love podcast to help you navigate it. Every episode has actionable tips that will help you create a happier, healthier, and more fulfilling life with the people you love. Join me on this journey of love and learning for the stuff they didn't teach you in relationship school.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Stubborn Love Podcast. This episode is super cool because we have a guest here, Jessica Parente. We've both been guests on our friend Kyira Wackett's podcast of Untethering Shame. And you know, as fate would have it, we are just the perfect like vibing people to get to know.
So Jessica is so amazing. They are certified as a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner. They are accredited in being a somatic trauma informed coach, definitely need those and they are level four brainspotting, which we'll get to talking about what that is later, and a bestselling author as if there's like, how many things can you pile?
I haven't even gotten through your whole bio and I don't think I can, but there's so much and we're gonna be able to talk about so much today. I know that you spoke on Kyira's Podcast about codependency. We might have that pop up a little bit today, just naturally in our. Conversation, but we're gonna talk a little bit about trauma, how it shows up in the body, how you use brain spotting to work with that, and who else knows what we'll get into.
So Jessica, before we dive into all of that, can you just briefly introduce yourself and talk about your journey, how you got into the mental health field?
[00:02:14] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: Firstly, Paige, I just wanna say thanks for having me. I'm so excited for our discussion today. And hi everyone, my name is Jess, and like Paige said, I am a psych nurse practitioner, a trauma informed coach, and a brain spotting provider.
So the short of the long answer of how I got into the mental health field is I. I was a traumatized child, and traumatized people are driven to help other traumatized people. So, you know, I had a fairly challenging upbringing. I have struggled through a lot of grief, a lot of loss, a lot of toxic relationships and friendships and workplaces, and that's where my platform.
Sort of sparked from is, you know, I work a lot with codependency and we could talk about codependency and my version of it, or you could always refer to any of the other podcasts I've been in, including Kira's in how I view codependency. But that kind of became my platform. And once I had had multiple, what I would call nervous breakdowns in my 39 years on this earth, but my most recent one was out of.
A covertly narcissistic, abusive relationship. And when that kind of burned my whole life to the ground, I found this different type of healing, somatic healing, healing in the body, brain spotting ,EMDR, IFS, and all these other modalities that even as a psych nurse practitioner I had never heard of.
And I had been in talk therapy since I was, you know, 25 or so. So, and I remember saying to my one amazing therapist that I'd had over the years, Dr. Doug, that I could think better, but I wasn't feeling better. My body still felt stuck, and it wasn't until out of the absolute most fucked up and horrific situation of my life that I was able to find this new type of healing and really take my recovery to the next level.
So I do consider myself a recovered codependent. I know that that's probably, you know, a loaded term of people who are struggling with codependency say, oh, there's no way that you could be recovered. But I really do feel like I'm in a position that I can call the codependency for what it is and stop it before I get stuck in those spirals.
[00:04:24] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: So many things to talk about, but I just wanna say like, what the hell? Like people saying that you can't be recovered. Like what's that about?
[00:04:31] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: Well, mental health is a business, you know, and so I had experience working for companies that actually didn't want people to graduate from care, right? Because you're the revolving door of like keeping the money coming in.
So there's just a lot of things that I don't necessarily agree with. But I think when people say, you know, it's like a codependency is an addiction, right? When you're a codependent, you're a codependent for life because of the subconscious drives. Codependency was my addiction. Using external things to fill my internal wounds or to make me feel like I have a sense of worth and purpose, that's always there.
It's always like right lingering into underpinnings of my life and the way I engage in life. So I think that because it's a subconscious thing that does, is very intertwined with your identity and how you engage in the world. I think it's hard for people to wrap their head around the fact that you can change that and you don't have to be a victim to those subconscious drives for forever.
I.
[00:05:27] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: I like that hot take a lot. Can we not promote just change? Why is it that we have to have these labels and we're just stuck with it for life, like we're just gonna suffer forever?
[00:05:36] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: Stand on my soapbox about how that makes money being sick, like is for big pharma, right? Is we're in a mutually agreed upon relationship.
I'm no different than them. I just have some letters behind my name and like a lot of educational debt to say that, you know, I'm supposed to be like this. Know-it-all about their lives. No one knows you better than you, I guess is the best way to say it. The world that we live in likes for people to be sick and to feel like they don't have the capacity when probably very scary to people who have liked for things to be the way they are.
If
[00:06:08] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: we grow up in suffering, suffering is normalized, and being in a maybe chaotic society, getting into a healthier state is gonna feel really scary.
[00:06:17] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: We live in a toxic culture. People want to overwork us, and they feed on people who were like me, who felt the need to go out into the world and prove themselves.
And so it just exploits. Like I work with a lot of people in their twenties who are just getting into the working force where I say they're just exploiting like your need to prove yourself. That little codependent drive in you. So we gotta reel that in, baby. It's not, it doesn't make for a good life. So again, there's our soapbox that we stand on about.
Toxic culture and how it keeps us sick.
[00:06:47] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: Yes, we can have many more episodes on that right now. You mentioned talking about you had been in talk therapy for quite some time, and I appreciate you sharing your story so vulnerably, and my question is, why are we not promoting more body-based therapies? And we're still just in this talk, talk, talk mode.
[00:07:08] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: So again, I think a lot of the body-based stuff is really newer, right? Like it's, we're still learning a lot about the brain's capabilities and our ability to heal ourselves. So I think that right. Traditional talk therapy is, it has a time and a place. I was in it for years. It helped me to reframe cognitive distortions that I had in ways that my brain was.
Just so lying to me, right? All the time. And so I really do think that there is a time and a place in my own therapy, but my provider is a gestalt, you know, somatic therapist. So we do a lot of stuff with the inner child, with me developmentally at three, four years old, seven to nine years old. And so I just think that because this is newer and people don't know about it yet, that's my job and people like me to spread the word about how amazing it is to reconnect with your body, even though it's really fucking scary.
Because again, we live in a society that wants us to be all up in our head. We're taught to make decisions so much with our. Pros and cons list and with our logical, rational thinking, but the body is never going to lie to you. So if you've had situations where you've walked into a room or you've met a person and you just feel like an off, an ick vibe, and then you come to find out later down the road that maybe that person is.
Not so nice of a person, right? Your body was giving you all the signs in the beginning, but we are so taught to ignore that and to rationalize everything.
[00:08:36] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: So that's more of a conditioned response.
[00:08:40] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: Absolutely. I mean, think about children and how expressive they are. Like they are emotion a hundred percent, right?
There's this idea that they get in the way of you being able to engage in life or do something. We become conditioned to very much disconnect ourself from our bodies. I. And just be little floating heads that kind of go through everyday life. Right? I call that like a functional, could
[00:09:02] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: you imagine?
[00:09:02] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: Right.
But that's how when I see people, I'm like, Ugh. Or even for myself, I'm like, I'm definitely the floating head today. Right? When you go through these, you get stuck in the everyday monotony of life, and then you wake up one day and it's like 10 years later and you feel like where the hell has everything gone?
And it's because we've become so used to just being disconnected from ourselves and going through our everyday routines. And what I try to do is help people slow it down, start to feel safe in their bodies. I'm still working on that myself. Like there are things that come up that that dissociation for me comes in so quickly.
I don't need them every day. I'm actually like, good. I want to be connected to myself. So I help people try to slow it down and get back to that in the safest way that's possible for them. 'cause it's been very many of us to be disconnected from our bodies. I.
[00:09:51] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: Yeah, I don't know what your training was like, even though we have somewhat similar background to being in mental health.
I come from counseling. You are more of the medical background. I don't know if in your training, if you went over what dissociation was mm-hmm. Or how to identify it. They did not teach us. Any of that in grad school, which with a lot of the population that we're gonna be working with is suffering from that.
Don't you think that should be one of the things that we're taught?
[00:10:18] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: Exactly. And again, I think it's because when things become so medicalized and path. There's a fear around that, right? Don't get me wrong, diagnoses can be very helpful for certain people who want an answer because right, if I have some sort of answer, then there's a solution.
But for me and my personal opinion is when we diagnose and pathologize normal human emotion, you're ostracizing people even more from just feeling. There are so many people that come to me that I say that. What you're feeling is normal for what you're going through. Like you're just having feelings and it's okay.
Right. But that dissociation, to go back to your question, I think it was just a definition, right? In one of the diagnostic criteria of maybe having a manic episode or maybe having a severe dissociative, you know, fugue episode where. It's almost like the most extreme case is a woman is being perpetrated on and she feels separated from her body.
Like she's on the outside looking in of a situation that she is being taken advantage of. Right. That's always like a classic example of what it is to be dissociated and that is how some people experience it. But for me, mine is just a total numbness. Like it's just, I'm so much in my thinking brain. That I just stop feeling anything and I tell you, I'm gonna shout out to my therapist.
What up, Denise? That she calls me on that shit in session. I've done a lot of work and
[00:11:49] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: I
[00:11:49] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: will, she can
[00:11:49] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: notice
[00:11:49] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: it. She, we literally sit across to Zoom just like we're doing now, and she'll bring up something from my childhood or encourage me to. And a heavy grief or something that we know. And I say like, I don't think I've even begin, begun to process that.
And she'll literally ask me, where did you go? And in my head I'm like, it's, I'm either relating it what we're talking about to a client that I have who's always giving us clues. Your body is always you clues.
[00:12:16] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: When we go into the more thought based place, rather than feeling in the body, that's more of going into trying to problem solve.
[00:12:25] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: Yeah. And you know, that's the very left brain, the side of the brain that focuses on problem solving, rational thought. How can I get this done? What can I do to make it. Stop or go away. But shifting from the more right side, the emotional part of the brain, sometimes the irrational part of the brain. 'cause emotions aren't always rational.
So when we shift out of that, that comes back to conditioning. If you have been taught that emotions don't have a place in your life and they make you non-productive, they make you for women, right? They make us crazy or irrational, or we're not as intelligent as a man because we're too emotional, right?
You get all these messages that. By allowing yourself to be emotional, it's not a good thing. Mm-hmm. And so we go right to the thinking brain because, well, if I can figure out what it is, then I can stop it, resolve it in whatever. So there is very much, you know, the brain is always scanning for things to fix, both internally and externally.
So it is like a natural drive and inclination, but allowing yourself to just catch yourself from going into being a problem solver and just allowing yourself to sit in whatever emotion is coming up and it can be very uncomfortable for people.
[00:13:36] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: Well, I wanna talk about sitting in the emotions in just a second, but I also want to glaze over talking about the numbness that comes up.
'cause you even mentioned that how dissociation can. Feel like, huh, nothing's going on in the body. There's nothing there. And sometimes I'll ask the question to my clients of like, how is that emotion showing up for you? Like what physical sensations do you notice? And they're like, nothing. Nothing's there Don't feel anything.
Right. All good. Right. So can you talk about that numbness, how it's so powerful and Yeah. Can you just help us understand that place?
[00:14:11] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: So I like to say that dissociation is really my superpower, right? And this is, based a lot in internal family systems style therapy where we recognize the parts of us.
We're all a compilation of parts, things that show up, little voices that show up. There's survival mechanisms that have helped us at one point in time. So where that dissociation for me was super, super helpful in allowing me to live in a chaotic environment as a little kid. Right. Because if I had no needs, feelings, sensations once, then I didn't have to ask, I didn't have to be disappointed.
I didn't have to, you know, experience that loss or in some cases, right, like deal with emotional reactions from my parents. And so I call my dissociation part as my dodge ball because I can dodge feelings like it's my fucking job so quickly. Right? But it has also really allowed me to live through a lot of.
Super painful, scary, uncertain. You know, events in my life, I've had a lot of death. I have a lot of grief, and when I go into that dissociative dodge ball, you know, filled state, I call that also my nurse brain. It's what made me really good in extreme like stressful situations that I could go straight to the thinking brain and numb myself out and do what I needed to do to help someone else.
So how that they feel nothing. Nothing is still a feeling, right? It allows you to not sit in whatever it is that you're avoiding, right? Where dissociation can happen when you're staying busy, or especially when you're sitting still, but feel anything at all.
[00:15:46] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: Yeah. Which prevents from sitting with the feeling
[00:15:50] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: Exactly.
How that shows up for me now is, you know, intimately is I know that the way that you work in with your clients is working through intimacy things. And that has been a big struggle for me as I continue to process some of my own sexual traumas and ways that I have approached intimacy. 'cause people on the codependency side of the spectrum, a lot of us have used sex as a form of love.
It was something that would give us dopamine hits, something that made us feel that we were seen, that we were important, that we were valued, that we were loved. So a lot of my healing has been forgiving myself for maybe saying yes when I wanted to say no or for, you know, getting something that I work with constantly in having little chats with myself and with that dodge ball part of me that I am safe.
My body is safe. I am making a choice. I am consenting, and then there's my to-do list in my head, or my eyes glaze over and everything goes numb. And I'm thinking about some random ass shit, like they were in the process of buying a house. So it's like what will go in this room and what will fit in this room?
It's the most random stuff. And so it can be very frustrating to keep working with that part of you, but there are no bad parts of us. I love my dodge ball. I love the fact that it's helped me to really live through some stuff that might have taken other people out, and now it just doesn't have a place in my life in certain instances.
So it's working with it rather than fighting against it.
[00:17:18] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: Yeah, it does. And I hear that as such a growth of self-compassion. To be able to know that there's this part of us that maybe challenges us that we struggle with, that we don't always love, that comes to visit us, but knowing that there this kind of function of it, like it's here for a reason.
So let's find it out. Let's get curious. Hmm. Let's be empathic towards that more challenging side.
[00:17:44] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: Absolutely. Because it's there for a reason, right? Like I said earlier, that part of me developed when I was little. It might have developed in my body before I even had cognitive thoughts At three or four years old.
I might have already been numbed out in some way if my parents could not meet my emotional needs or teach me how to be safe in the world. So this is something that it's never going to go away. It's something that is here to protect me. It just is misplaced and so I have to work with it and help it understand that I am okay.
I am safe. I'm wanting to engage in life. I want to be present. 'cause I think what I work with a lot of clients, once they start to realize how disconnected they have been and dissociated they have been, I. There's a lot of grief that comes with that that I had one client that said, she was like, well, I felt that way at my wedding.
And you know how sad that is for me because that's was with the happiest day of my life and I felt just numbed out. So there is a lot of grief processing once you understand how those survival mechanisms have played a role for you. And again, it's a lot of giving and self-compassion. It's not like I wake up in the morning and say, hell yeah, I just wanna be so numb.
I don't wanna connect with my partner. I wanna be so in my head, it's not intentional. And so there is a lot of forgiveness and self-compassion and grace that comes with that. And also you have to process the grief of the losses of the times that you really did wanna be present. And now you're recognizing.
Maybe I wasn't as present as I thought I was
[00:19:14] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: like, life just passed us by and all of a sudden here we are, 10, 20, 30 years later, you talk about how in order to sit with it, we definitely need this safe environment. We've talked a little bit about bottom up processing and and your work and brain spotting.
So is that where we begin that bottom up processing?
[00:19:34] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: So when we talk about top down processing versus bottom up processing. If you think of your brain from the front part where your forehead is, that's where the most highly developed part of your brain. It's your neocortex, right? That's where all our language is.
It's where all our decision making, consequential thinking, problem solving, all that other stuff that separates us, right from like my cat sitting over on the floor. So we have that part of the brain. Then we get move a little bit back and towards the back part of your brain, which is, you know, where your limbic system and your more primitive drives are.
So that's where your fight flight is. Your freeze is down in your brainstem. So when we talk about top-down processing talk therapy is top-down processing because you can only use talk therapy or access areas of the brain where there is language. So talk therapy starts up here and kind of works its way back.
What I do with people, right in the bottom up is starting in the body and working in the opposite direction towards the front of your brain. So this is why if you're in therapy and you also do something that is somatic based, you're getting it from both angles. And then at some point, right, we talk about the meaning and interpretation that you're placing on those feelings.
'cause that's the front part of the brain. It's important to understand. What meaning you're placing on what you're feeling because we could have the same sensations. You could tell me, I have a pit in my stomach and my heart feels heavy, and you say, I feel sad today. Where I say I have a pit in my stomach and my heart feels heavy.
I'm grieving today. I. Lived experiences and how you have placed meaning on those emotions and those sensations that come up in your body. So when we do bottom up processing, that's the little bit of the newer stuff. It's understanding very much what's going on in your primitive instincts. Your body's always working for you, even if it feels like it's working against you.
It's understanding the sensations, how you label them, how you can shift your nervous system states from fight, flight response to going up into feeling safe, ground, and connected, or from a freeze response. A little bit through fight flight response to then getting back to the front part of your brain.
Once you understand how your body works, you have a lot more control over how to shift yourself in and out of those things.
[00:21:45] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: Well, I mean, I know we all could get to that point, but I wish so many more people were aware of this and not only staying in this more cognitive place because there's so much more we can access and grow with if we can get in tune with our bodies.
[00:22:00] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: Right. So I tell people all the time, if you could think yourself out of a feeling, I wouldn't have a job. Right? Yeah. I wouldn't have to go to my own therapy. I would wake up one day and say, I just wanna feel happy today, and engaged and safe and connected, and it would just happen, but no. Mm-hmm. I wake up in the morning and I feel a little unmotivated.
I feel pained. I feel sluggish, right? And so I have to work with how to shift myself out of that because I can. And some mornings I just allow myself. To be in it, but the brain is very well designed to avoid anything that is painful, that could hurt you, that could kill you. Our nervous systems are designed for survival and not for happiness, so if feeling emotion is dangerous to your nervous system.
It's gonna do anything and everything it can to avoid that.
[00:22:47] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: Whoa, so many quotable moments from this MM Chef's Kiss.
I hope you're enjoying this episode. I wanna take a moment to invite you to sign up for my free Attachment Dynamics workshop. I have partners use this as a foundation before we get started in relationship therapy.
By watching this, you'll learn how to recognize negative communication patterns, understand how power dynamics show up in conflict, and most importantly, discover ways to turn conflict into opportunities for deeper emotional connection. And the best part, this is free for you. Make sure to head to paigebond.com or hit the link in the show notes to access it for free.
Now let's get back to the episode.
So what I'm kind of thinking of is, let's give an example. Maybe we're in an argument with our partner and all of a sudden our body goes into like there's this woo. Just some kind of physical sensation feeling taking over us. We're in that more limbic system place.
We're not in that frontal cortex place. We're not able to process and, and think clearly and have a rational conversation. Right. I. So if we're wanting to do that more bottom up processing to come down from a triggered moment, what is it you tell your clients? How do you work with that?
[00:24:07] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: So the first thing is awareness, right?
You cannot change subconscious behaviors and patterns until it becomes conscious, right? And this is where getting more in tune with your body, it feels like I'm just blasted. Like you open the oven and you stick your head down too soon, your body's giving you signals. So the first step is just becoming aware of that.
What are my little red flag signals? How do I know when I'm going into a sympathetic state? How do I know when I'm frozen or I'm dissociated? And the more that you help the individual person understand themselves, it will help them to understand their partner. So when you are feeling triggered, and it is not what that other person is saying or doing to you, it is the meaning and interpretation that you are reflecting back on yourself in that moment.
So the number one question is, what am I saying to me about me in relation to what's going on right now? So a basic example, my partner's name is Joe. If Joe walks in the house and I say something to him as I do from the other room all the time, even though he tells me that he can't fucking hear me. So I'll say something to him and then I don't get a response.
And I feel that little, like that buzzing going on in my chest and that little heat wave in that rush. What am I saying to myself about myself for the fact that he's not responding well, I'm telling myself maybe I'm not important enough for him to listen to me. Maybe he isn't listening to me because something else, he has his earbuds in and something else is more important than me.
It's gonna tell me a lot about my inner child wounds. I'm not important. I'm not heard. I have to work with that within myself. I take that to Joe and hope that Joe fixes that by changing his behavior. That's something that I have to reconcile with younger me. Have a little chat with her and say he didn't hear you, keeps saying stuff for tactics.
So either breathing like cold water, doing like humming and singing is really good for me. There's all these little things that you can do to shift that nervous system state of being in that fight or flight. And so rather than going and being like, what the fuck? Why didn't you answer me? Engaging in that fight response from the limbic system and things that are irrational and don't make sense.
And we say a lot of shit that we don't mean right when we're angry because we're not in the right part of our brain to allow us to communicate effectively. Instead of doing that, I can check in with myself, check in with younger me, shift my state and my body, and then I can go and say, Hey, I said something, did you hear me?
And then he'll be like, no, Jess, I've told you 1,005 times that I can't hear you when you talk to me from the other room.
[00:26:40] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: If I could just have that package it up in, in a little ball, give it to all my clients and say, here,
[00:26:47] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: yep. And then it's the same, right? Because then when you act out of your younger self, so think about it wouldn't have been me reacting in that moment as an adult.
I would've been acting out of that 9-year-old. And so when you act out of that wounded younger self, then more than likely you are also going to accidentally trigger your partner. To acting out of their younger self because of the meaning and interpretation they're placing on your behaviors in response to something that they said or did, and this is how we get stuck in a vicious cycle.
I don't work with couples exclusively, but I try to obviously help people improve their relationships by giving them tools and tactics like this. When you feel that coming up, take five minutes, check in with yourself, check in with your younger self, resolve that within yourself, and then come back. Or have a safe word.
Sometimes Joe and I will just say pause. 'cause we can feel ourselves, right? Dipping back into that younger self, there's something, a wound that's getting hit. There's something that's getting highlighted that maybe we didn't even know was a trigger. You don't know what triggers are until they happen. Was I telling myself about myself?
What wound was that hitting? And so taking space and then coming back is really, really effective for diffusing those moments.
[00:27:58] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: It's a lot of work and it can be so hard to break the habit of wanting to blame your partner, wanting to say that they are the problem and granted likely are some situations where their contributions are not helping.
Right? Right. But there's also a lot of the internal work on yourself
[00:28:19] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: and needing the other person to behave or act in a certain way so that you feel safe. Is codependency.
[00:28:26] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: Yes.
[00:28:26] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: I can only work on what that brings up in me. I can only change control, become aware of, stop fix myself. And so by me taking that and going off and working on my own stuff, either with my therapist or I have a girlfriend who we met in a brain spotting training, I'll have her brain spot me that it's shining a light on something in me that needs a little bit more love and attention.
My partner has to be responsible for his own stuff, and there are things that when I feel politely calling each other out and I'll say, that doesn't have anything to do with me, I think you need to take that to your therapist. That's something that's going on that I think has a deeper meaning and issue.
I think I'm highlighting that, but I don't think that belongs to me. When you have two people who are engaged in their own therapy and have a shared language, it makes it a hell of a lot easier because we talk about things in terms of parts, which diffuses a lot of situations that could blow up that don't need to blow up.
You know, we're in the same arena and now we just recently started couples to make sure, again, there's nothing that's fundamentally wrong. We've gone through some really heavy shit. But it's about making sure that we don't become so siloed in our own self-betterment. And he's over here doing his therapy and I'm over here doing my therapy and no one's taking care of the couple.
And how we continue to engage and relate to each other and not become disconnected from each other in our own self-growth. Mm-hmm. And so there's lots and lots of little skills and tactics and things that you can do and resources out there. If you're willing to do that and if you make it a priority.
[00:29:59] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: I think that's the hard part.
'cause it can be scary to go to this place and explore this realm we've never been to before.
[00:30:06] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: If you have never felt safe in your body in one way or another, it is challenging and it is a long road ahead, but it's not impossible. I remember when I first started doing my own brain spotting sessions and they would ask me, you know, whoever I was working with would say, well, where do you feel that in your body?
And everything stopped at my throat. I feel a lump in my throat and like there's a rod in my chest. I did not have connection to my limbs, to my belly. It was just all concentrated there. And that's okay. And like we said earlier, feeling nothing is still feeling something. Where do you feel that nothingness in your body?
What can you attribute that to? Some people say when they feel heavy. What does that heaviness feel like to you? To me, it feels like a weighted blanket. It's just over all of me. What does that feel like to you? Oh, it feels like a bowling ball in the pit of the right side of your stomach, and so there's nothing that someone is going to say that I will tell them that they're wrong.
You're in your body. It's not my job to tell you how you feel in your body. I'm trusting and I'm allowing you and holding a safe space for you to start to just dip your toe in exploring it. It becomes really scary because a lot of us have lived our whole life in dissociative states or disconnected states and have not even realized it.
That is okay. There was a reason for that, and it goes back to having grace and compassion for yourself. There was an amazing episode with a non-binary person who was talking about the, the phrase that they used was wearing your latent dissociation as a personality. Wow. How many of us have gone through life?
Just doing the things and going through the motions, and we think that that's who we really are, but there's so much more under the surface than that. That hit me
[00:31:50] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: like a shell.
[00:31:51] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: Yeah. We all become little shells of humans and not everyone, but very, very many of us grew up in, for someone to say that they've never had trauma is one a lie, because trauma is not necessarily the event or what happens to you, it's what you say to yourself about yourself during the event.
I'm not enough. I'm powerless, I'm unsafe. I don't matter. I'm not worthy. But it's more so the changes that occur in your body to make sure that that event doesn't happen again.
[00:32:21] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: Whoa. Okay. Which makes sense how, this seems like the, it's a protector part 'cause it's trying to not let it occur, not let the pain show up again.
[00:32:32] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: If you think about, we have something in our amygdala, which is our fear detector. Our fear detector is constantly scanning for cues of safety and cues of danger in the environment. And it's not actual danger. It's not like a hurricane coming towards you or a tiger about to mall you. It's perceived danger.
And so it becomes, it's a negativity bias that our brains will scan for more negative than positive. So when you are in situations now, like we're not hunters and gatherers anymore, we are people in the working force. So our dangers now are rejection, confrontation, feelings of failure, feelings in general.
It's gonna do anything to give you danger, side danger, danger. And then right as soon as we feel it. We'll be like, oh my God, whole shit. Like, that's uncomfortable. I don't like that. And so then we avoid it. If the animal avoids the predator or anything in nature that could eat it, maim it, kill it, whatever the animal will survive.
But these are things that we encounter every day. Rejection, criticism, judgment, confrontation. Those are things that are normal, part of being a human being, but then we become so fearful of them. Because our need to distract, we need to scroll on our phone. We need to find something to fill our time, rather than just sitting in the feeling or acknowledging the feeling.
[00:33:49] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: Yeah, that makes the buzzing. Mm-hmm. Go down for a time. Right. And then the hyper vigilance you get, like whenever you're in a haunted house. Mm-hmm. Well, I get scared in haunted houses. Awful. I love it. But I get terrified and it's like that moment where your whole body goes into that tense, like crunch, crunchy.
Mm-hmm. You get a little tense like this, taking your
[00:34:09] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: body language right now, right. Like, yeah. It's like, oh my God,
[00:34:12] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: I have to protect myself. Right. Small.
[00:34:15] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: So think about hides and you know, because it's hiding to make itself small, so the predator goes away. How many times, especially women, do we make ourselves small so that the predator leaves us alone?
[00:34:26] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: So talking about getting comfortable in your body after trauma, you talked about first step being awareness.
[00:34:32] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: Mm-hmm.
[00:34:33] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: Walk me through the rest of the process here.
[00:34:36] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: So what I do with my clients is typically when they first come to see me, I usually start off with the brain spotting session. In whatever way, your nervous system is not going to allow me to push further than what it feels is safe.
So it's me trusting the process and this is where, right, my western medicine teaching of me knowing all, and I know more than you, than you know about yourself and what it goes completely to the wayside. When you come to a session, you are teaching me, your body is teaching me, and I'm trusting it, and I'm helping you.
So when we start with whatever someone wants to show up with, we can brain spot literally anything under the sun. I've been having intrusive thoughts about losing my job. I have a grief that I haven't resolved. I have this pain in my back that won't go away. I've been having recurring dreams about X, Y, Z.
It's so fluid. There's no right way to do it. I call it being Hermione. I'm being a little witchy that I'm reading your body and I'm helping you to become aware of your body. And I'll say like, did you notice that your eyes keep going in this direction? When you talk about that, did you notice that Now your hands are shaking a little bit more and people will be like, I have no idea that I'm doing that.
All I'm doing is paying attention and holding space for them, and then I'm helping them to learn themselves a little bit more. So Brainspotting was discovered, right? Notice I didn't say developed. 'cause again, it's not this thing that takes multiple steps and we have a right way to do it. And there's all these protocols that traumatic memories are still stuck in the body.
So what he noticed. During a session was that a girl was talking about something that was really troubling to her that she was having a hard time with and she kept looking in the same direction and he said, hold that eye position and just see what you notice in your body. And there was like this amazing, almost walk through her subconscious of things that were loosely connected but didn't seem connected.
Right? Memories from childhood that came up as she held that position. Just allowed herself to feel all of the times that she had felt maybe like a failure or that she wasn't enough. And afterwards she said that she had felt so relieved and she was a skater, and she was able to do the trick that she hadn't been able to do for weeks after that session.
Well, man, I must be onto something. Right? And sitting in that state of curiosity. Allowed this amazing ability to help someone help themselves. I'm not really doing much of anything other than attuning to you and holding space for you, and I'm teaching you how to heal yourself. We all gaze spot when we talk about something.
So really just pay attention when you're stressed and when you talk. Where do your eyes go? They'll go places, they'll go and you'll have repetitive things in your body. So it's almost like the trauma's kind of like stuck in a glitch. And there's some sort of, when we talk about brain spots or access points, where the different places where your eyes go, it's almost like these little knots in your brain that once you just hold on it and you allow yourself to feel that, and you allow yourself to go there.
Safety with someone else who will help bring you back and help you ground. It's almost like untying the knot that is stuck. And then when that knot unties, then other knots that are connected to it will also untie. And there are things that I have brain spot that are just, I will say, are a non-issue for me anymore.
It's really like the most incredible, it seems so witchy and like it's too good to be true, but once you buy in, it's like, I know now when I need a session. I know when there's something that's repetitive that's coming up in my life that I've done some work around, or I've done some parts work, I've done some inner child work, but it's still feels a little trapped somewhere.
So to me, that's telling me it's connected to something deeper. Maybe something that I don't even have cognitive memory of. The body has a lot longer memory than our brains do, at least the language part of our brains. So it's really just teaching people how, how to trust your body, trust your instinct.
Many of us have had panic attacks is not a comfortable place, but what role was that panic part serving for you? Was it keeping you from feeling a deeper pain? Was it keeping you from feeling like a failure? Was it distracting you from feeling that you were not important? So even the things that are uncomfortable in our body are still serving a role.
[00:38:45] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: Very important conversation around that, but I don't think that we go to naturally just because we want to avoid pain and trying to figure out the function of these things. I love how versatile using Brainspotting is. It sounds like there's almost pretty much anything that you could bring to a session and really get a lot of work with.
I know that we've talked a little bit about off. Podcast about how we could use this for like intimacy issues. So thinking about how if someone has been in an abusive relationship, physically, sexually, emotionally, verbally, you name it, right? Any of the above or all of the above, and where sex can kind of be like used as this power play where the other person is using it as a form of control, the other person is.
Put in this less than power position. I mean, that sounds like such a hard thing to face head on. Mm-hmm. So I'm wondering like what that process would look like in like, do you take baby steps in brain spotting? Or like, how does that even work?
[00:39:49] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: So it's about, again, trusting the process. So if I have an agenda for you in a session.
Then it becomes about me. If someone comes to as session and says, I'm having trouble connecting with my partner. I had this sexual trauma. I was in this abusive relationship, and I'm basically just saying everything that I have said in a session before because I was in a relationship where I. Sex I felt is very much used as a means to control me.
There are a lot of times where that dissociation part will come in and they'll say, well, I don't feel anything, and we can still work with that. The thing about brainspotting is it's going to work no matter what. It might not work in the way that you want it to in that moment because your nervous system doesn't feel safe enough to go there.
So I really do, in my experience, feel like there is a almost a hierarchy in your nervous system of things that it's able, ready, and. Willing to tackle tackle. And the best example is I can give of that is I've had clients that I know had sexual trauma in their childhoods or have had abusive relationships and we brain spot other things and they brought it up and it was like kind of like it skimmed a little bit of the cream off the top.
But then two years later, I had a woman that was talking about something completely unrelated. To that, I think it was talking about work and where her subconscious then went was this gigantic purge about the sexual trauma. If I was able to complete trauma responses. And there are things that we do with fighting in slow motion or envisioning fighting your attacker or envisioning what it would be like for you to go back and be able to interject and rescue, you know, previous you or younger you.
So there's a lot of work that we can do with that, but it is a very. Slow and gradual process for some and not for others. And that's where everyone's nervous system is different. So when you come, I work with the, we call it the frame. I work with the frame that you bring and whatever comes out that day is meant to come out.
And it's almost like through your little hierarchy that your body has designated, because your body's job is to keep you safe. So it's really about trusting that process. And you know, are there times where I can feel my imposter syndrome at? That part of me coming up saying, this person's not getting anything out of this session.
This is so useless. And the other thing I have to check myself again. 'cause then it's me making it about me. Because if this person doesn't get anything out of this session, what is that part saying about me? Well, it's saying I'm not a good provider, or maybe I'm full of shit, or maybe this stuff doesn't work.
And that's a painful wound for me to sit in, that I'm not enough in my job and what I do for people. So. It really is a completely different paradigm shift from how I've been educated and trained in the Western medicine model of being a psych nurse practitioner versus being a somatic provider. I try to take little bits and pieces that I love from both and try to combine them to give a holistic process for whoever comes to me, but it's really just about trusting that person that they know what's best for them.
[00:42:51] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: I love the beauty in how brain spotting is like very client led. Like the imagery that comes to mind is like a side by side motorcycle where the client is like. Driving the motorcycle and like you as the therapist or brain spotting practitioner or like in that little carriage on the side.
[00:43:08] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: The client is the comment and I am the tail.
So it's about them. I love a lot of little sayings and brain spotting about like, we don't have to know what it is to know that it is. A lot of times people don't have cognitive reasoning for why, what they're feeling in their body. It's just encouraging them to trust that your body is reliving something that has not been properly processed in the brain, and that's why it's giving you signals right now.
How can we help you to release that or to at least not have fear of that? Yeah, it's so powerful. It really is life changing attribute. A lot of where I'm at today in my own healing due to brain spotting always something that comes up. So it's paying attention to the little patterns in your life or things that you're finding challenging and reflecting back on yourself and saying, okay, how does this tie back into my childhood?
How does this tie back into relationships I've had before? And really just sitting in a state of curiosity, like you said earlier, being very curious.
[00:44:04] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: We've talked a little bit about how we can't change other people and how like if we were to try to have this idea that we could, and that codependency could show up in us trying to force and control a situation, but if we turn the.
Focus back on us. It's empowering. It sounds like this can help you get to a place of like huge acceptance in things that are out of your control, right? Am I right?
[00:44:30] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: Yeah. Everything in life is out of our control except for ourselves, but the basis of codependency is that many of us have grown up in uncertain, chaotic environments, and so that need for control sued the anxiety in us.
And it became reinforcing, but it was false control. Me having everything in my house exactly where I need to be, relieves it in the moment, but it doesn't do anything for the root of why that part needs it to be that way. So much is grounded in control. Right. I. Controlling how your partner behaves.
Controlling how you show up at work, controlling what you want your boss and your friends to think of you controlling your environment. Codependency is in every arena of life, and what I do is try to help people because think about how dangerous it is to put your self-esteem, your self-worth, how you feel about yourself and your emotions in an external thing, whether that's your job, your hobby, your athletic performance, your partner.
Your best friend, your boss, you can't control that external thing. And so if you are always at the beck and call, your emotions are tied to what that person is doing or how, what that person thinks of you or whether or not you get that a or whether or not you get that promotion. And that's not to say that you can't be disappointed by those things.
Codependency is a state of not having your own identity because you have used the external things to formulate an identity, and so you're right when you pull that control back into yourself and we start to understand who is Jess under her survival mechanisms. You know, what do I like? I get to be a kid again.
I get to figure all that stuff out that I didn't get to do when I was younger. So really fucking scary because again, it infiltrates any external factor. It could be, like I said, your hobbies. If you have to be like the best scrapbooker in your scrapbook class, or the best, you know, analysis of the chapter in your book club, there is something, right?
Again, a drive to prove yourself. It's using that. Something that is outside of you to make you feel like you have a place and a purpose. When we can't control any of that and what happens when that goes wrong, what happens when that person doesn't change? What happens when that promotion doesn't, you know, fall through and someone else gets it?
It's like a complete dismantling of how people feel about themselves, and I can only say it because that used to be me. Now, not that it doesn't matter what happens to me and I don't have feelings about it. It's, I know who I am now and I don't need those things for me to understand who I am and what I have to show for the world.
[00:47:04] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: Like I said, so many quotable moments, and I'm gonna take this into my therapy sessions with people and like, Hey, look at this. Listen to this. So eye opening. Just thank you so much. So let's wind down here. Can you tell them more about where they can find you, what you've got going on right now, things like that.
[00:47:22] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: So the easiest way to connect with me is probably through either my website if you wanna talk to me directly, which is it ends with u llc.com. I also have a business Instagram that I said on Kira's podcast is very sad and poor. Because I just can't keep up with everything. It's really tough to have this two separate lives, but my handle for that is at generational.
Jess, if you wanna follow me, get a vibe of me, see pictures of my cats and all the concerts I go to, my personal is at esmo, JESS. My friend Tanya, who I had met on a brain spotting training and talk about serendipity. When you really start to heal yourself, and this will be my last little nugget of wisdom, when you really start to heal yourself and lean into who you are, you will attract that same energy.
And so like meeting you and meeting Kira and. Tanya and I were on an international or so of us from the United States, two of us from Pittsburgh, me and her. And so we became friends and she is the most amazing mother figure to me. So we joined together, her business in part Clarity and my business. It ends with ULLC to provide women's healing retreats for codependency.
So is this a safe. Space. We do small groups, six hits pa, which is in like kind of the middle of Bumfuck nowhere, but it's a really cute town, about four hours from Pittsburgh in the spring of 2025. And so that's the big thing around the corner. And this is a two phase retreat. We do the first phase, which is very much more informational, understanding codependency, how a developer you understanding what boundaries are, why you don't have them.
Teaching assertive communication tactics. And then the phase two in the fall is a follow up for what have you done in that time. And we just held our most recent one a few weeks ago, and it dives a lot deeper into everyone's personal traumas and everyone gets an individual brain spotting session from either Tanya or I.
So we hope that this two phase and this two part retreat will be a comprehensive start to a lot of these women's journeys 'cause. We need a sense of community. Women are very much conditioned to question each other, be weary of each other, hate each other, be competitive with each other. And when you combine in a room full of people that have been through some fucked up shit, and you feel that strength.
And each one of you being so resilient. It's really, really powerful. I'm very proud of what we're doing and that this is just the start. But we've talked about if you have, I know a group of six to eight women and we are willing to travel, we're willing to put it together, and I just love that I have Tanya as I.
Someone here to help foster this in each other.
[00:50:03] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: Absolutely incredible. Thank you. So I'll make sure to have all the links where to find you social, where to find you in your business. You had mentioned it too much and I don't know if I even did. We've talked about so many things on this podcast, but Jess, your also an author.
Can you quickly also talk about your book if we've got some book rooms?
[00:50:24] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: Yes. After my. Abusive relationship coming up on my three year anniversary of being narcissistic abuse free, how I started a lot of my healing was through my now friend Caroline Strasson, who has her own podcast and is the narcissistic abuse expert.
She pulled together a group of women who have all been in narcissistically abusive relationships and have gone through our own difficult childhoods and life experiences and. We did a collaboration book called The Unseen Wounds of Women. My chapter is called Lather Rinse, repeat Until You Don't, which outlines My Childhood and how my childhood and my relationship with my parents influenced and made me honestly susceptible to someone who.
Is narcissistic and who is an abuser and tying that all together. And there are very many chapters on from women all over the world are mothers and who have gone through their own trials and tribulations. So it's, uh, a great piece of insight from a little bit of everything, but thank you for bringing that up.
It's something else that I'm very, very proud of.
[00:51:29] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: Yes. Yes. So I'll make sure to have the link to that if people are wanting to read a little bit more and dive into that realm. So thank you so freaking much. It was great. I feel exhilarating now.
[00:51:42] Jessica Parente, Author, ANCC-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, an ICF Accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach: Again, when you vibe and you vibrate and you find people on your same frequency, it's just been so fun.
Yep. When just show up as yourself and you find people that you just are in sync with. It's been a really great conversation.
[00:51:54] Paige Bond, LMFT and Relationship Educator: Yeah, you're very welcome. So glad you could join in that we were introduced. And again, another shout out to Kyira. Thanks Kyira Wackett. Thank you so much. Alright everyone, we will catch you on the next episode.
Thank you for listening. And that's a wrap for today's episode of Stubborn Love. I hope you gathered some wisdom to bring into your love life and improve your relationships. If you enjoy today's chat, don't forget to subscribe and leave a review. That'll help this episode reach even more listeners, if you have any questions or stories you would like me to cover in the future episodes, drop me a message.
I love hearing from you. If you need extra support in your relationships, check out how we might be able to work together by hopping on my website @ paigebond.com. Until next time, don't let being stubborn keep you from secure love. Catch you in the next episode.
