Coaching Your Family Relationships

How Your Nervous System Shapes Reactions, Relationships, and Resilience with Leah Davidson

• Tina Gosney • Episode 180

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Episode 180: How Your Nervous System Shapes Reactions, Relationships, and Resilience with Leah Davidson

Have you ever wondered why pausing before reacting feels impossible for you? Why do your automatic responses keep hijacking your intentions, especially with the people you love most?

In this powerful conversation, Tina is joined by Leah Davidson, a Nervous System Resilience Coach, life coach, and Speech Language Pathologist with over 26 years working in traumatic brain injury. Leah explains how our nervous system is running the show behind the scenes, shaping our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and relationships – often without us realizing it.

Together, they explore:

  • Why your nervous system reacts as if you’re in danger even when you’re safe
  • How childhood experiences shape your nervous system’s lens today
  • The connection between nervous system regulation, health, and emotional well-being
  • Real-life examples of how dysregulation shows up in families and relationships
  • How to build nervous system resilience so you can pause, respond thoughtfully, and heal intergenerational patterns

“Your nervous system is the lens through which you see the world. If that lens is cloudy, it affects everything you do.” – Leah Davidson

About Today’s Guest – Leah Davidson

Leah Davidson is a Nervous System Resilience Coach and Speech Language Pathologist specializing in brain health, neuroplasticity, emotional well-being, and trauma-informed coaching. She hosts the Building Resilience Podcast and offers Advanced Nervous System Resilience Training, a monthly membership called Connections, and her mini-membership Nervous System Journaling Club that uses journaling and doodling as regulation tools.

Explore Leah’s resources:


Upcoming Training: END FAMILY DISCONNECTION AND REBUILD RELATIONSHIPS THAT LAST

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THE EVENT

Tina Gosney is the Family Conflict Coach. She works with parents who have families in conflict to help them become the grounded, confident leaders their family needs.
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Connect with us:

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Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tinagosneycoaching

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Tina is certified in family relationships and a trauma informed coach.
Visit tinagosney.com for more information on coaching services.

Tina Gosney:

Hey, everyone. You might recognize this next guest if you've listened to this podcast for very long, Leah Davidson has been on here before, and we've had some really great eye opening discussions for many of the listeners. I've heard such great feedback from these discussions that I've had with her, and just in the podcast alone, I talk a lot about pausing before reacting, and some people tell me that that is impossible for them. And if you're one of those people, you want to listen to this episode. You want to hear what Leah says about why it's happening for you, why it feels so impossible, and how you can start making small shifts to make it less impossible and more possible to pause before you react. I hope you enjoy my discussion with my friend, Leah Davidson. I have my friend here today, Leah Davidson, and Leah has recently put together this amazing journal that I bought, and have been working through, and I just wanted to share the the wisdom, the tools, the the wise knowledge that is Leah Davidson with my audience on the podcast. And so you'll see why as we get into this discussion about why this is going to be a really, really helpful, useful podcast episode that you'll probably want to come back to time after time. So Leah, it is so good to have you here, and I know you've been here before, but let's go ahead and do a reintroduction for those because it's been a while. So let's do like an introduction to who is

Leah Davidson:

Perfect. Well, I'm Leah Davidson, and I am from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I am a life coach, and I have specialized in nervous system resilience, but my background is I'm also a speech language pathologist, and I worked in the area of traumatic brain injury for it's going on 26 years now, and I I have since moved more into the coaching world and the nervous system world, but my background in the world of traumatic brain injury is sort of what brought me to have my passion about brain health and nervous system health, the neuroplasticity and everything about mental health, emotional well being. So I'm passionate about the conversation. I'm passionate. That's why I created my journal of helping people to get to know their nervous system, because I believe it is the foundation of pretty much everything that we do. It's the lens through which we view the world. So if that is a cloudy lens, if that is a dark lens, if that's a bright lens, it's going to taint and flavor our thoughts, our feelings, our actions, our behaviors, our relationships, just everything that we do.

Tina Gosney:

That's a great way to introduce that, because I think when we start talking about nervous system or brain health, it can sound kind of technical, and it can sound like maybe to somebody who hasn't studied that and has knows as much as you do that, like, immediate turn off, like, this is not, I'm not going to know what she talks about, but yeah, I guarantee you, you will resonate, yeah, and, and, know, be able to understand some of these things that we're talking about today, because this is the human experience. It is,

Leah Davidson:

it is, and there's no getting away from it. Our nervous system is really responsible for our survival, and it is running. It's running the show. The part I'm we're going to talk specifically about the autonomic nervous system, which is responsible for our survival, breathing, our digestion, our heart rate. Like you don't have to think of any of those things. They just happen behind the scenes for you, but what the nervous system is also running behind the scenes is deciding whether or not you are in a position of danger or a position of safety. And if it feels that you are in a threatened position, it will take action. And that's, that's where the role comes in, that we don't really realize that it's it's playing. And for many of us, we are living in a world where our nervous system thinks that we're in danger and that we're constantly being threatened by unfamiliar things, by difficult conversations, by conflict, by what's going on in the world. And very rarely are we truly in a dangerous situation, but to our nervous system, majority of the time, for many of us, it thinks that we're in danger and blah.

Tina Gosney:

Give me, I understand what you're saying. Let's do a couple of examples of what danger would look like that's not actually dangerous, that our nervous system is interpreting as dangerous, and then what that would what we might see on the outside or feel on the inside when that's happening.

Leah Davidson:

Yeah. So I'll give you a couple of examples, and I'll give you an example of like, the different. Lens, because the nervous system kind of has like, these different lenses too. So really, you know, in the the years past, danger was like a tiger chases me. I know I need to get out of the way, but we don't have those situations today. We have unfamiliar things. So somebody may ask me to give a presentation that's going to be something where I start to feel the energy rising in my body, which is a sign that my nervous system is getting activated. Now, not necessarily a bad thing, because I do need to have energy to perform, but my nervous system can also walk into a room and there's a bunch of unfamiliar people, and somebody looks at me, and they don't smile at me, and right away, my nervous system thinks, You're not wanted here. Why did you come here? You've been excluded. It will pick up on danger, or somebody will do something that just rubs me the wrong way, and I'm not really sure why, and then maybe I'll go and dissect it down the road and I'll realize, like, oh, that person reminded me of this kid who bullied me when I was in grade two. So the nervous system also is scanning. It's looking at all the external resources around us. It's looking at what you see, what you hear, what you can touch. It's listening to what's happening inside your body. So if your breathing starts getting really shallow or your heart starts pounding, the nervous system is like, oh my gosh, she must be in danger, because her heart is pounding and she's breathing and it's also looking relationally, which is really important, like I'm looking at you right now, even though I'm speaking, my nervous system is like, can you trust Tina? She's nodding, so it means she's following. But what if she, you know, gives me a little side eye. Well, what does that mean? What does that so the nervous system is always, always scanning, because it wants to know whether you can connect with the person, or do you need to protect yourself from the person? And the other thing that it doesn't recognize is it doesn't have a time stamp on it. So I might have encountered that bully in grade two who's maybe had the name Tina, who had blonde hair, and my nervous system is always searching and it's like Tina blonde hair. We know about her, she's dangerous, and it could put me in a state of being more protective. So it's not always accurate. It's comparing against past experiences. On a very subconscious level. This is not a cognitive choice. We're not thinking this. This is happening, whether you know it or not, behind the scenes,

Tina Gosney:

and it's happening all the time,

Leah Davidson:

all the time, and then it flavors everything that you do. So sometimes what happens, or often what happens is we get familiar with constantly being in a zone of protection. So maybe I have had experiences my whole life where I have felt threatened. And it could be that, you know, many of us, all of us have experienced trauma in our life. Some of us have had, you know, more explicit trauma, where they look at it as like big T things that we would really identify, but all of us have had it, and that has shaped us. And essentially, trauma is when our nervous system gets stuck in a state of dysregulation, in that state of Protection. So something happened. I did not have the capacity to handle it. There was nobody there to help me through it. So I did what I could, and brilliantly. We're not trying to blame our little selves, but I did what I could in order to survive that environment. Now, as time has gone on, I start seeing the world through that lens, and as I see the world through that lens, I start reading all the situations in that lens. So if I give you the example, if I'm stuck in more of a defensive we call it a hyper aroused state, which is sort of the first, the first activation. Then if you were to ask me a question, something, and the example I always give is, somebody says, Where did you get your hair done? Now, if I'm stuck in a hyper aroused state, I may say, like, why? What's wrong with my hair? You don't like it. Like, you don't have to talk about my hair. I'm not going to tell you where I got it done. You're just that is, like that defensive a little bit of that anger, irritation, the suspicion, there's like a flavor of danger there. Now, if I'm the opposite in another protective zone, which is more of a depressed, suppressed collapse zone, I may be like, I know, oh my gosh, my hair is so horrible. I can't believe I don't want to tell you where I got it that has that lower energy. Now, if I am feeling. Being safe, confident in what I call my zone of resilience, I may be like, Oh, thank you. I got it on Queen Street. Her name is Fiona. Would you like her number? I don't have a threat. And that is the power of the nervous system. And understanding your own nervous system, because you may be perceiving things in your life through a lens of protection. So maybe your child comes to you, and right away, you go in the defense mode, not necessarily because of what your child said, but because of your lens and where you've been for so long. That's just how you see everything.

Tina Gosney:

So these become automatic reactions, to react in a certain way, according to our past that is shaping the lens of today.

Leah Davidson:

That's right, yeah, like our nervous system, it's like a prediction machine, and it's brilliant, right? It's like, I'm doing you a favor. The danger is, is we can, we can start predicting poorly. So for example, if I grew up in an environment that maybe wasn't the healthiest and I witnessed maybe some poor examples of healthy relationships, maybe there was abuse involved. Maybe there was something that really was not healthy, that becomes familiar to me, and even though cognitively, I may know that that is not something I want, my nervous system has become acquainted with it and familiar to it, so that down the road, I may find myself in a relationship that is not necessarily the healthiest relationship, where cognitively, I may even know, but my nervous system is like, Yeah, but that's what's familiar, right? I don't know what it would be like. It's almost unfamiliar and scary for me to be in a relationship that would be healthy, and that's why we want to get to know what is driving some of our predictions based on our past, right? Because we'll start repeating some of those patterns only because the nervous system is like, I don't care if it's not healthy, it's familiar. And familiar to me, is safe,

Tina Gosney:

right, right? You're reminding me of a conversation that my husband I just had a couple of days ago where we we have a really large we both have really large families, and we were talking about some of the spouses of siblings and how the family that they grew up in shaped the way that they then have come into their marriage, and how it doesn't always Jive very well with our individual families, and has caused a lot of friction, but that is what was familiar to them, and coming into a very different Family was not familiar, and so they're trying to override the family that they've come into That's right, their own ways of responding and interacting in the world, and just like the friction that that's caused. So you're saying that that's just normal for them, that feels safe, even though it's a more conflictual that a word? Did I just make up that word? I don't know. No, it's very, like very, very conflictual and causing more problems. But that's where they like to push things. And they get some pushback from the family, and it doesn't work very well. But that's

Leah Davidson:

comfortable. That's their normal. That's they're comfortable. That's how they they think that this is how I should handle things, because this is how I've always handled it, and they don't get those readings. It's what we call neuroception. Is the word that is the unconscious like satellite that we have that scanning all the external cues, the cues between us and internally. And we call it faulty neuroception, where I'm neurocepting things that maybe aren't even there, or that I'm neurocepting safety when it's actually dangerous. If I've grown up in an abusive situation or I don't recognize safety, I don't recognize good things, because I just am so familiar being the other way around, so it can go both ways, where I read danger where I'm safe, or I read safe where I'm danger, simply because it's familiar

Tina Gosney:

and it's so interesting to me, how we are very, very blind to ourselves and our own reactions to people, but other people can see us better than we see ourselves and but it's really hard to receive that feedback. When somebody is saying the way that you're showing up is a problem, or it's, it's not working for me, you that's, that's when your defenses get kicked up,

Leah Davidson:

right? For sure, for sure. And I mean, like, we're, we're not going to change that, per se. Like when somebody comes after you, it is. Normal for you to feel energy rising in your body. It's normal for you to you know all the healthy emotions that we have, none of them are off limits. We just need to learn when it's appropriate and how it's appropriate to express them. So I always say to people like as you learn how to regulate your nervous system, it's not that you're not going to be able or it's not that you're going to be able to not react at all. It's just that you're going to be able to build the capacity for yourself to handle different scenarios, different stressors, different emotions, in a healthy way. Like, I'm still gonna get angry at you, right? But I may, instead of less like going off and losing my cool, which I'm still probably gonna do that at times too, but I will be able to, all right, let me take a pause. Let me just, you know, breathe. Let me think about who I want to be, regulate myself and then decide, okay, what am I going to do with this anger? Because it's it's real, it's there. Do I need to set a healthy boundary? Do I need to express it? Do I need to journal? Do I need to talk to somebody about it? But I can do it within a safe environment, so we're not trying to bypass, right? Possible

Tina Gosney:

to bypass being human, right? No, you're bringing up something that I talk about so often on the podcast, which is, okay, let's stop and pause instead of reacting from automatic programming, let's start responding from a thoughtful place where we can

Leah Davidson:

and you can't. Before that's it. You can't respond from a thoughtful play like it's just biologically, you can't respond from a thoughtful place when you're dysregulated. One of the things that biologically happens when we get dysregulated, so when our nervous system senses we're in danger, it goes offline. Survival Mode is put into place. When we're in survival mode, all resources are pushed towards survival. So that means our thinking skills go offline, and they're meant to go offline. The only way we can access them again is if we learn how to regulate ourselves, bring ourselves back into that calm state. So that's why we're saying pause and think of how you want to respond. Well, it's the pause that allows you access to think, and that's why, when you're going crazy with somebody and you're like, doesn't make sense what you're saying, or maybe you're having a fight with somebody and they're like, you're not even making any sense. Well, you're not, you likely are not, because you don't have access to your thinking skills. So that pause becomes so so important, because not only does it give you time as like a cool down time, but it literally opens up the channel again that now you can bring your thinking skills back online. Otherwise you're doing things without your thinking skills, which means you're probably going to end up acting like a toddler or acting in a way that doesn't, you know, follow adult maturity, right?

Tina Gosney:

What would you say to someone who says, Well, I can't do that. This is just the way that I am. I There's no way I can pause and think about it, I just shoot off whatever comes to my mind and us just the way that I am. I can't control that.

Leah Davidson:

Yeah? I would say, Yeah, you're right. Too bad, in a sense that is that is the case, right? I think the first thing we need to know is that a lot of our personality has come from adaptations that we made throughout our life due to our experiences and our nervous system has had impressions all the way along. So sometimes when we say, this is just the way I am, you know, the slight correction is, this is how I have adapted to be who I am today based on my experience. Now that's not to say that there's no genetics involved, and that there's there's not sort of tendencies that we have, because that's also a role, but our nervous system has been learning all the way along, and like I said, we brilliantly did adapt. So we might have very unconsciously as children. Maybe I saw that I got rewarded when I did really well at school. That's when I got the most attention from my parents. That's when I felt like they loved me and they praised me, and I was rewarded. I would have learned along the way that, oh, you know, being an achiever is a good thing. I need to do things well. I need to do things perfectly. And as we spend so much time in that state trying to achieve, achieve, achieve, it can become a trait that now all of a sudden, this is who I am. So it's a mixture. This is the whole nature. A nurture thing. There is a mixture. Yeah, we have personality there. There's things that are in our DNA. There's there's things genetically, and then there's things that we've learned along the way. But the beauty of the nervous system is we continue learning all the way through. So yes, this may be how you are now, but I always say to people, who would you be if you were regulated and you got to choose who you want to be? And that's what you're saying. Well, the pause introduces regulation, and then I usually say to people, and it's not your fault if you're like, I can't do that. I can't interrupt myself. I can't stop. I can't pause. Well, of course not. You've never practiced it before. You can't expect to be able to deal with a crisis situation if you've never learned the tools outside of a crisis situation. So I will often hear people say, who have, like, a lot of anxiety. Often people will share that, you know, breathing is, is known as a way to help people reduce their anxiety. And I've had many people come and say, like, yeah, I just had like, a panic attack and breathing, it just made it worse. It was horrible. It was just, of course, if you've never been practicing breathing in the crisis moment is not the time to learn how to do it, which is why we need to spend so much time practicing when nothing big is going on, practicing that pause and then breath and that response, and then it just becomes a learning you know, first we'll still respond, but maybe we'll have the afterthought, oh, I probably could have done it this way. And then as we continue growing, we may start responding, and then, oh, pull back and stop when we're doing it. So there's lots of different ways that we can start growing with our nervous system and developing the capacity to handle things, but I think we have to trust that there is a process for that growth, right, right?

Tina Gosney:

And my guess is I, and I already know the answers to this, but I'm going to let you say that we don't practice a couple of times and then we're good. I know how to do this. It's actually a very slow process as we teach our nervous system to to respond differently. Yeah, that can take like, what would it look like if I was going to practice this for a few weeks? What could I expect? Maybe, like, let's say, one month. What could I expect? What kind of, what kind of results could I expect, versus with one month of practice versus one year of practice versus 10 years of practice?

Leah Davidson:

Yeah. I mean, the easiest example is like, go to a gym for a month and see what happens. Go to the gym for the year, and see what happens go to the gym for 10 years and see what happens. Principle it is we're very clear on seeing what happens physically. If I eat well for one week, I'll probably start to feel a little bit better. If I eat well for one month, I'll probably start to feel a little bit better. If I continue doing that, I'll start seeing my body composition change, my energy change, everything changes. 10 years from now, I can be completely transformed. Our nervous system works very much the same way that we and in fact, we can scare it off by going in too hard and too strong. You want to think of it, I talk about it's like dropping little pennies in your bank account. Of nervous system regulation and practicing, we really ideally want to be practicing hundreds of times a day, and that can scare people off when you think of that, but when you learn what it takes to practice, it's not such a big deal, like as I'm sitting here talking to I could easily practice relaxing my body, reminding myself I'm safe, like 20 times, and you wouldn't even know, like, this is how much we want to be. At first you're going to have like, an alarm that goes off to remind you to check in. But eventually, like, I'm constantly regulating myself, and I do lose it on my kids or my partner, still a human being, that's right, that's right. But I also there's a quicker recovery, there's a self compassion, there's a humanness, there's that's all part of regulation, too. I don't think regulation is just like I'm never going to but there's a the there's an understanding of my ease to return, sort of like going to the gym. I know that if I go to the gym, it's going to help me when I carry my groceries. It's going to help me prevent injuries. If I do fall and hurt myself, I'm going to recover much. Quicker. So it's all the same thing with the nervous system, you have to be investing in it over and over, knowing that it will improve. But I'm not necessarily going to be able to look in the mirror and see the improvement the next day.

Tina Gosney:

And it is easier to see in that example, because that's a physical, visual thing that we can take in and see. It's harder to notice when our nervous system is becoming stronger. What are some of the things that someone might want to look for in order for improvement in those areas that we can't see in the mirror?

Leah Davidson:

Yeah, I think one of the ones like you said before is the willingness to pause. The idea that pause comes up in my mind that, oh, this is a situation that I should probably pause on. Or I've had clients say to me, you know, my partner brought something up, and I realized, like I just didn't have the capacity to have the conversation. So I just said to them, I need to have the conversation tomorrow. And so being able to advocate for yourself, I think one of you can have also physical signs that your nervous system is healing. I think what we don't understand is a lot of the illnesses that we are experiencing in the world today are stress related, whether they're 100% stress related, I'm not going to argue with that, but almost every single illness that we have has some degree that stress is going to amplify it. Right? What you start to see when you learn how to regulate your nervous system is you start to see a reduction in in things like chronic pain and chronic illness and all the things, maybe your sleep starts improving. Maybe you feel a little less tense all the time. Those are some physical signs that your nervous system is also healing. So yeah, there's a lot that you can't see, but I think there's some physical things that we can see. We just don't necessarily attribute that it was to dysregulation and that we're getting better to regulation through regulation, right?

Tina Gosney:

Because it's, it's a little, it's, well, actually a lot more abstract between regulating my nervous system and then, oh, I feel better, like we don't usually. Our brain doesn't usually put those two things together. And there's a lot of the things that you're talking about today where working on this is going to help your life in other ways, but our brain doesn't always make that connection.

Leah Davidson:

That's right, yeah, I think it's also the way the nervous system it doesn't work when you force something. It's kind of like a kid, right? Yeah, it doesn't. If you treat your nervous system like you're a child, it doesn't work when you force it. You really have to invite it. I know I work with a lot, with chronic pain, with people, and one of the things we talk about is we do something called somatic tracking, which is really getting in your body and noticing where the pain is and and just observing the pain, witnessing the pain. And a byproduct of that, a byproduct of that, is often pain reduces. But sometimes people go into it and they'll be like, I tried doing somatic tracking, and the pain didn't go away. And there's this intensity, there's this pressure, there's this expectation. And I'm like, when your nervous system feels that there's something wrong and you have to get rid of it, and there's you're broken, it actually is going to amplify things. We need to just let it like it's like with anxiety. The more you fight anxiety, the bigger it's going to get, the more you're like, anxiety is here today. All right, I've got my tools. What am I going to use? How am I going to use it? The more we invite in the nervous system and work with the nervous system, as opposed to trying to force it and problem solve and fix it, because I can't survive if I don't have it fixed this way, that pushes us into greater states of dysregulation,

Tina Gosney:

right? That just doesn't work. Let's I wonder we want to shift into, how is this impacting our families? And so if we have one person in a family that becomes dysregulated, that can be, it can be a lot of energy in a family, and energy. Well, does that affect the other nervous systems of the people that live with that person or around that person? And what would that look like? And let's it's, I think it's easy to see that an example of, like, a lot of anxiety or anger, like, that's a really easy one for all of us to notice. Like someone shows up angry. It's so easy to react angrily and then for that energy to carry throughout the family and the tone of the home, if we go into a different response, okay, like a freeze response or a fawning response, maybe we could even like, talk about what those look like. But how does that kind of. Energy than impact the rest of the family.

Leah Davidson:

Our nervous systems are always communicating with each other, and that's essentially what is called co regulation, is we learn to regulate through each other. So there are things while I'm not responsible for your regulation, I can contribute to you being regulated or dysregulated. I can send you signals unconsciously. I can deliberately do things. We were at a restaurant just last week, and our waiter was so incredible with CO regulation, I said to my husband, like, oh my gosh, I'm gonna have to do a podcast episode on this guy. He just knew, like it was a buzzing place, and he just came over. He's he slowed down. He got down to our level. He was looking right, like you can tell he was so present. His speech was just a little bit slower. And, you know, answered questions, took interest, versus another experience you could have with, like a waiter comes over, just, you know, constantly looking around, yeah, yeah, we got that, yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, move on, all right. And you see, even just like that, that presence, and so you can have that in a family, the speed at which the family functions, the the cadence of how people speak, the energy, the language that is used. And that's also a very fine line, because there are some people who are naturally more energetic. So I don't want to paint the brush. I'm I'm somebody who's like, faster, more energetic, and I need to be aware of that. But it's not always just dysregulation. The same way fawning that we talk about as being people pleasing, not all people pleasing is a bad thing. You just maybe want to be a nice person. It's when it's in response to my survival is at stake. So I think we want to be aware that our nervous systems are feeding each other, parent to child, and then, as your children get older, absolutely child to parent, it's it's going back, and at any moment, if we regulate ourselves, we completely change the dance. We completely change how the other person is going to respond when we come down, chances are they will come down. If we go up, chances are they will go up. Yeah,

Tina Gosney:

because nature likes homeostasis as well, not just our nervous system, but the world that we live in. In fact, I will go and speak sometimes to different groups, and I like to bring metronomes with me. Do you know what a metronome is? Yes. And I bring the one. It's the okay, if no, anybody doesn't know, it's that mechanical musical instrument that keeps a steady beat for you. So I like to bring the ones, because they have digital ones now, but I like to bring the one that has the arm that swings back, because it's a very visual representation of what's happening. And so I'll set them both at the same number, but I will start them at different times. So if you've got two Metro domes that are both beating at 100 beats per minute, but they don't start at the same time. This is a mechanical device. And I always ask people like, do you think that they're ever going to sync up? Are they ever going to be together? And the musicians in the room always say, oh, there is no way. Well, I said, get out your watch or your your phone, and we're going to time how long it takes? It takes less than two minutes for two metronomes to start beating in sync with each other, not just the sound, but the literal direction of the arm that swings back and forth will change. Yeah, and that's our nervous systems, right? Yeah, yes, regulating to who. There's a question there.

Leah Davidson:

Well, that, that is the question of of the more and who's in control of whose regulation? Right? The only regulation you are in control of is your own. And we know that when we change our own regulation, there's no guarantee that somebody else's regulation is going to change, per se, but there is that tendency for people, it's contagious, right? It's kind of like you see that, like you said, with anxiety, I think that's a great example. There's, there's a contagious if you find, you know, an anxious child usually has a parent who has some anxiety not too far away from them, and we don't want to go blaming the parent or anything, because that like, I look at some of my kids out of anxiety. I've definitely had anxiety. I look at, you know, my my parents, I look at you start to see and that's part of that intergenerational we've just passed that on. We've learned. And we've just adapted in those ways. But it does affect the the presence in a home, but it just requires one person to throw it off or to get it back

Tina Gosney:

on track, right, right, to disrupt what is happening and to go in the other direction. Yeah, I like you that teacher trick that you your class is out of control, and you start whispering, right?

Leah Davidson:

That's right, exactly, exactly. And

Tina Gosney:

all of a sudden they calm down because they want to hear and they're regulating, or they're co regulating, yeah? Yeah, I've noticed that it's like we work in this individually, right? So you're working on this all day long, at home or wherever you are, and you get into then you get into a relationship with or you get into a conversation that might be difficult, and you notice yourself become dysregulated. You're like, Okay, I need to do some more work. And you do work over and over again, and like the people that you live around, like, like your spouse or your children or your coworkers, like you get pretty good at doing, regulating yourself among those people that you're with all the time. And then there are times when you go back to your family of origin, so your parents, your siblings, those relationships that you formed at the earliest part of your life, and all of a sudden you turn into a child again. You notice that, like we all, fall back into your traditional family roles that you took on as you were growing up. And you see people, not just yourself, but you see everybody else do the same thing, right, fall into those old traditional roles. So what's happening there with our nervous system? Well,

Leah Davidson:

I mean, that's where our nervous system was formed, like initially. This is where we did a lot of our foundational tools. Now, it's not to say that we haven't, over time, learned and grown. That even when they look at, you know, brain development and child development, they say, by the time a child is at the age of seven, there's a lot that has been formed. So I think it makes sense that we we fall back into those roles, and we spend our whole life trying to complete the cycle and close the loop from those roles. So we maybe have mastered it over here, and then we go back and we reopen some of those old wounds again. And I just think it's a journey like I know that for some people, if you can get the perspective through the lens of the nervous system, introducing some compassion, and not necessarily, compassion is people get a pass for bad behavior, but at least some compassion of understanding why their lens was the way their lens was, and then that compassion for yourself. Oh, of course, when I come back in that environment, this is the role that I go to, and I'm not presented with the same scenarios over and over in my everyday life now, but when I go to my family of origin, it all comes up again. I think it's just having that compassion and normalizing that this is, this is part of our life's work, is to be able to work through some of those stories and learn how to have a different response to them, like learn that we don't have to have that activated response. If we confront things in a more relaxed body, it literally will change what a response can be to things that are very triggering to us.

Tina Gosney:

That, yes, that's great. I love that, that we can even go back into those oldest relationships, those first relationships, where we were formed, yeah, and begin to change those as we work on our own healing.

Leah Davidson:

That's so great, yeah. And I do think the element of compassion is hugely important that. And again, this is not to let people off the hook of bad behavior or certainly not abusive behavior or anything like that, but I think it does help to be able to put things in perspective that people do what their nervous systems are capable of doing at the Time, and we can't go back and change their experience and change their nervous system. We can change our response for ourselves now and decide what we want to do and know that so much is going on unconsciously behind the scenes that we don't even know. We don't even know all the things that our nervous system is reacting to right? A lot of it is pre cognitive or things that we won't ever remember. So having that grace and compassion with ourselves like I don't know why I find this so triggering. I do know that I'm safe and that I'm in the present moment now. That this is not happening what I experienced in the past. And if I change my reaction and relax my body now, that changes the way I interact with that trigger, and so it lessens, it lessens the power of the trigger when I can confront it with safety in my body and acknowledge that I'm in the present moment now,

Tina Gosney:

right? Okay, you said so many things that I want to talk about right now. First I want to I want to talk about compassion, but then let's go back to the safety that you were just talking Okay, yeah, because I've noticed that in myself as well, but so many people that I work with, and just friends and family members in general, self compassion is a really, really tough thing to come by. Yeah, it's, it's something that we talk about and much more difficult to access. What is easily accessible is self judgment, and that will not really help us in this situation, because we're not trying to open up our our perspective, and see, how did I get to this place in the first place? How did I get to how I am today, and why does it make total sense that I'm reacting the way that I am, or seeing another person through that same lens, like I don't know what's happened in that person's life, I don't know their experience. I don't know how they've internalized that, but I know that they're probably doing what they know, how how they know how to handle the situation right now. So I do think that the more we practice trying to just pick apart those little things that we have so much judgment for ourself and for others through the more we practice widening our perspective and talking that way, the more we can access that compassion for ourselves, and we would when we can come, you know, access it for others, we can ask, access it for ourselves as well, absolutely. Yeah, so I love that you brought that self compassion up. Now let's go a little bit more into safety, because safety can be it's kind of like a trigger word for this younger generation, for for us older ones, like, I don't feel safe right now. Or you hear about like the college I was just listening to this book, and they were talking about college students not feeling safe, and so they're boycotting different speakers from coming in and like, what really does safety? What is this safety that you're talking about? And why is it so important?

Leah Davidson:

Yeah, so we need to distinguish safety. And I think this, it gets sort of blurred together, and it's one of the things that I do address in my journal. I call it the safety sequence, because we got to break safety down. The first thing is, there's a difference between physical safety. And then what we talk about of psychological safety people feeling safe physical safety is, are you empirically physically safe in this moment, even if your body doesn't necessarily feel that way. If you ask yourself, Am I safe in this moment, not what could potentially happen, or what has happened in the past majority of the time, unless we're in a situation that is a war like imminent danger, we are safe, right? You're sitting here, you're having this conversation, we're in a restaurant, we're going to school. You're safe. So empirically, you are safe. The next question to really ask yourself is, okay, I know I'm physically safe. Does my body feel safe? And this is where it comes in that No, it doesn't. And what does that even mean? Well, an unsafe body is usually going to communicate to you, through dis, ease, through tension, through butterflies, tightness, nausea, pain, those are all things your body is communicating that I don't feel safe, and the reason it doesn't feel safe is because it is perceiving that there are threats around which we want to come back to to say, well actually we know that we're physically safe, and then we come to all right, but my body doesn't feel safe. So the brain and the body start having this conversation. So the brain is like, but I already told you, I'm safe, and the body's like, Yeah, but I don't feel that way. So what we need to do is we need to acknowledge, where are you feeling? Dis, ease, even not not spend a lot of time, but just like, Yeah, I noticed some tightness. I noticed this. And then we need to relax our bodies, and once we've relaxed our bodies in the presence of a safe environment, we have given ourselves true safety and a relaxed body cannot be the home for stress. You can't be stressed. Rest when you're in relaxed body. Just try, try yelling at your kids. By completely relaxing your body, you won't be able to there needs to be tension. So we want to be able to establish that safety for ourselves. Now, the tricky things, like you said, in this generation, it comes like, I don't feel safe with you, right? And part of that is you don't feel safe with yourself. Now, I don't want to dismiss that if somebody is in imminent danger of there's abuse, but we're not talking about that. We can be in the same environment. I may not like what you're saying. It may be unfamiliar. I may disagree. It may cause me to get upset, which tells me I'm not feeling safe. But you know who has control over the muscles in your own body? You do. So then you get to I'm safe. I feel it. I can relax my body, and I still may choose to leave. But I think that that sometimes we're farming out our safety to others. You need to make me feel safe, right? Very hard for a lot of times for people to make you feel safe, because it comes down to, I can't really make you do anything. Trust me, if I could, I would love to. I would love to make you feel one way or the other. And so safety, it comes down to that as well. I can do things that promote safety, but I still can't force you to feel safe. And you can do things to promote safety, because the other thing I've noticed is sometimes when people talk about like, I don't feel safe with that person, and then they'll go to like a friend or a partner. Did you notice I just don't feel safe around her? I don't like her. I don't like that. You're actually amping up the level of danger. You're telling your nervous system Don't be safe, that person, don't be safe. That person, don't be safe that person. So we always have to be asking, Are we fueling safety or fueling danger? And by relaxing our bodies, we're fueling safety. And healing happens when we are in a relaxed body, and we can have our thinking skills come online and we can be more compassionate with ourselves. That's when healing happens. It's not going to happen when we're constantly on alarm looking out for the threat, because if you look out for the threat, you will find it. That's the way the brain is wired, right? It's wired to find all the negative biases and all the negative threats. So if you're searching for danger, your brain will find it and confirm it for you, right?

Tina Gosney:

I know time is short, and I could talk to you another hour about this. I do want to go into like a real life example, and we talked about this before we hit record. And we'll just go into a hypothetical parent with adult child that your adult child comes to you and says, You caused all these problems in my life because of the way that you raised me. You did this, you did that, and it's all your fault. And the parent is then confronted with this type of conversation from their adult child and seeing most of the time completely clueless as to what this child is saying and the things that they are bringing up, and not seeing this things the same way as that child is. And let's talk about like what's happening in nervous system. How are the different ways that that conversation might be held depending on what type of regulation your nervous system is in, yeah, and what might be going on for the child as well, that adult child.

Leah Davidson:

I mean, the first thing I want to say to parents out there is, if your child comes to you and confronts you with stuff like that, it is 100% normal for you to start to feel activation and for you to start getting your defenses up. So don't feel shame if you're just like, I'm not handling this well, they confronted me, of course. Yeah, it's normal when somebody comes because the majority of parents, I'm going to err on the side of I think the majority of parents do the best that they can. I agree, and nobody, at least in the circles I run, nobody is deliberately out there trying to harm their kids. But the majority of us also have nervous systems, and our nervous systems were shaped by our experiences, by what we went through, and we were raised by people who had nervous systems, who were shaped and and so there's an ancestry there. There's that intergenerational stuff. So we aren't going to be perfect. And, you know, newsflash. Gosh, for the next generation, you have nervous systems, and you're going to be doing stuff for your kids, where one day, your kids are probably going to come to you and say, you know, I really wish you hadn't have done that. I really wish you wouldn't so that. I just want to put that on the table. I don't think like I know the feeling I've had it many times, where there's defensiveness, there's shame, there's anger, there's even parts of me sometimes where I hear my kids will say something, and I'll be like, You have no idea what was going on in my life while I was trying to manage that, or what this situation actually looks like, or what was happening behind the scenes. So this is where I really do give a lot of self compassion and a lot of grace to myself. The second piece I like to acknowledge is so we have a blended family of five kids, and one of the blessings of having a big family is you get to see that every single kid has their own unique nervous system and their own unique interpretation. So part of what I sit back and I look at and I'm like, Isn't it funny how I have one kid who's like, I'm so grateful that you did things this way, and I have another kid who's like, I really wish you hadn't done things that way. And I'm just but I did the same thing, because their nervous systems are shaped completely differently too, not just by me, by their genetics, by the environment, by their teachers and coaches and friends and all the things that they were exposed to. So they're going to have a different nervous system. So I also don't have to take full responsibility as much as I'm involved in raising my child like as they get older, I have come to the realization, I don't really want to take any credit for their amazing accomplishments, because I don't want to take credit for the things that they're struggling with. Because I have this, that's it. I had this realization, oh my gosh, they're completely human. They get to decide things on their own. I did contribute to some things. So when I have that perspective, then I can look and I say that was their experience with their nervous system. It doesn't mean it was the truth. It was true for them. That's how they felt. Your feelings are always valid, but your feelings aren't the be all and end all of truth. So you can feel something, and you could share that you feel that with me, and I can express back to you, and I've had these conversations with my kids, oh my gosh. I'm so sorry that you felt that way. I'm so sorry that you had to experience that I never would have intentionally wanted you to feel that way. At the same time, knowing it's part of your growth, part of your nervous system, part of your perspective, I can contribute to it now by what can I do? But I don't want to jump in and try to rescue it, or try to make sure that I'm giving all the validation I need, because that keeps them kind of in a dysregulated state. I need you to validate that I'm right. I need you to fix this. I need you to my role is to be like, Hey, I'm doing the best I can. What can I do to support you? Because I know that you will be able to figure it out, because you're the creator of your life. Now, even though bad stuff happened to you at some point, bad stuff happened to me, bad stuff is going to happen to your kids. At some point, we become the creators of our own life, and how do you want to move forward with that?

Tina Gosney:

Yeah, such a good, managed nervous system response that you're describing. So that's after you got really, gotten in shape at the gym for a while that you can handle. Yeah,

Leah Davidson:

and I still feel when my kids confront me with stuff, you better believe I feel my energy go up, and I want to, I want to defend myself. I want to, but I also have the channels where I know that, yeah, you know what? Defending this is this kid. And sometimes I will, because I'm human, I'm going to be like, yeah, no, sorry, that didn't happen. That didn't happen the way, and then afterwards, I'm like, hey, if that was their experience, I don't know what their full lived experience. I was only with them for a period of time, right there, their life is shaped by so many other people. So I do want to have that compassion with myself. Did I do things that that hurt them? Or, of course, I did. Did I do it intentionally? No, but that still doesn't change their experience, yeah, and it doesn't change my experience too,

Tina Gosney:

right, right? And I think that that's such a great perspective to look at. There is not one truth. There is my truth. Truth, there's your truth, there's my experience, there's your experience, and even through my own experience, I don't have all the information because you said, like so, much of this is happening unconsciously, internally, and it's coming out, and I'm not understanding how all of my past is shaping my present, the way I'm seeing things right now and the way I've seen things in the past as well. So we need to just hold that truth. I like to say we're going to hold the truth lightly, because it can change over time, the way that we see things and the way that we interpret things, and how we understand things as we grow and we develop and we work on these types of

Leah Davidson:

things, and we're always, constantly growing like one of my favorite things to ask myself is, what does it look like to have my own back in this moment? And sometimes it is taking accountability for things, and sometimes it is just I acknowledge that was your experience, and just ended at that, I acknowledge that was your experience, because it's not up to me to fix something. I think sometimes, as parents, too, we get put in this position if our child comes to us and shares something with us, oh, I got to fix it. I got to make it better. No, no. Like, I don't. I can't, first of all, and I always like to have, you know, hopefully you have us. This is why community, I think, is so important to have of other people who are going through similar things in your life. Because sometimes I do need to, you know, I'll just hold it and say nothing, and then I need to have a sounding board afterwards that that's like, yeah. And you know what the experience was like for me, maybe I don't want to share that with my kid, because they're, you know, they're at different stages. We've got a lot more wisdom. We've got a lot more doesn't necessarily mean we know it, right, but we do have a different perspective that maybe I can, I can sit and listen to theirs and still know. And the reason you did that, Leah, was because you were having your own back with this. This is going on in your life. This is what you felt was right. You can have that self compassion and that grace for yourself too. I just think we have to to carry so much guilt and shame. You did things wrong as a parent.

Tina Gosney:

Okay? Amen, stop, full stop. We did all of us. Did

Leah Davidson:

all of us. And you, my child, will do things wrong if you decide to become a parent. This is the cycle of life. That's right. That's right. Oh, thank

Tina Gosney:

you so much for this. I really do want to spend a couple of minutes having you tell everyone about your awesome journal they created, and then the other things that you have that will help support them in this process of working on their nervous system,

Leah Davidson:

perfect. So my journal, it's available on Amazon, and basically what I did is I pulled together what I see as like a mini course, almost, that goes over some of the basics of what your nervous system is, how to work with your nervous system. And then there's like 90 days where you can start trying to get into the habit of working to befriend your nervous system and learning about what your nervous system is like for you personally. And then I have, there's a QR code inside that will take you to, like, an extra video course that gives you a little bit more depth. And then I just recently opened something called the nervous system journaling club. And it is a mini membership, a very, very low cost membership with community. And there, there's some more information, but we also do some journaling as well as doodling. And doodling is just a creative outlet, no artistic talent required. We do know that things like creativity are ways that we can calm our nervous system, we can access regulation very, very quickly by doing something fun and playful, especially within the community. So that's why I created the community to have like, you know, we always hear about like breathing and go meditate and do the exercise and cold plunge and all those things. And I'm like, Let's do something fun where, like, let's doodle your family. Let's doodle shapes. Let's doodle and we we do that within, within the club. I love

Tina Gosney:

that you're doing that in that way, because you just don't I don't think I've ever heard of a doodling your nervous system club before, but I know I can on the, like, I have a handful of people right now that I know it's super benefit from being in your club. So, yeah, but

Leah Davidson:

it's really, it's amazing the people who have joined, um, I've said, like, I noticed within a few minutes of starting to do it. So I just started to relax, like, yeah, that's what play does. It removes you from your worries and your stress, and it allows you to see things on paper, like, if you were even to doodle, like what goes on in your family. Sometimes you step back and you just you can see, like, I have little we create, like your own little doodle self, and you start to see things from a different perspective, it helps you build that awareness and that playfulness and that lightness. Creativity does a lot of magic for your nervous system. It

Tina Gosney:

really is, and we don't give it nearly as much importance in our life as it should have, but I'm a firm believer, too, in creativity and being able to heal and have us just be, uh, having a more full human experience, rather than trying to like that achievement drive that we the culture that we live in these days. Yeah, um, we're going to include links in all of those into the show notes. And I just thank you so much for being here today, such a wealth of knowledge, such a wealth of knowledge. Always love having Leah here. So thank you so much for sharing that with us today. Thanks for having you.