Podcast Episode 39. Kelly Englemann and Eva Hunter: Resilience, Trauma and Recovery

Craig: Welcome to season four of the Robertson and Easterling podcast. This is Craig Robertson

Matt: and I’m Matt Easterling. We want to thank everyone who has listened to our podcasts so far. If you haven’t already subscribed, please do so on iTunes, Spotify or your favorite podcast player, Craig and I are having lots of fun producing this show and we hope that you’re enjoying it as much as we are. It’s hard to believe we’re already on season four.

Craig: That’s right, Matt, we’ve really enjoyed sharing the life stories of some great people and we have even more in store for you in season four. As you know by now, we are board certified family law specialists with one of the most successful boutique law firms in Mississippi as creative problem solvers, we take a holistic approach to the individual needs of our clients.

Matt: Joining us again this season are licensed professional counselors, Eva. Hunter from LifeWorks counseling, we’re excited to continue our partnership with Eva and Roane. They provide a unique perspective as we help hurting people with the healing process.

Craig: We’re also excited to introduce two new sponsors for season four, Christie Kidwell and Kelly Engleman. Christie is a certified financial planner and the founder of new path planning Christy’s own through divorce. Coupled with 20 years of experience, make her a perfect advocate for others on a similar path and Kelly is the founder of enhanced wellness living. Mississippi’s leading functional medicine. Her team’s food first approach to healing along with a variety of lifestyle and regenerative treatment options sets you on a journey to take control of your health and live life with.

Matt: So now that we’ve told you what to expect this season, sit back, relax, take a deep breath. Everything is going to be okay. You found us and what you’re about to hear is going to help.

Craig: So, I’ve probably thought about this podcast more than I’ve thought about some of the others that we’ve recorded because I think that the subject we’re going to be talking about, resilience, is something that we all need to be reminded of. Resilience is the ability to become strong, healthy, and successful again, after something bad happens, it’s the ability to return to one’s original way of being after a setback. When I’m thinking about resilience, I think about the people in my life. I think about my mom. My mom lost two sons over the course of only six year and shortly after that, her mother had a stroke and she was caring for her every day and when I think of resilience, I think of a mom who showed up at the nursing home and made sure that my grandmother was receiving the care that she needed through the end of her life. Also think about my dad. My dad was an electrician. He was a working man. I have office hands. He had man hands and when he was 80, he was diagnosed with vascular disease, which was creating sores on his foot and he had to have his leg amputated and he was in a nursing home and my dad had always been independent and self-sufficient, and to the day he died, he made plans to live independently away from the nursing home. That’s what I think of when I think of resilience. I think of my wife, Rachel, who I adore. She grew up in a farming town in Southeast Arkansas and she was dyslexic. She didn’t learn like everybody else and so her mom did everything that she could to resource her. She had to live with other family members and she struggled through adversity and went on to receive a master’s degree from South Alabama. That’s what I think about when I think about resilience.

Matt: Craig, when we started talking about this podcast and you and I were going through the, the idea of thinking about moments of resilience in our own lives and things like that. I may have a few, I didn’t feel like any for me actually measured up to my wife and daughter. For those of you out there that don’t know my wife, Kayla and I have a four year old little girl named Parks and while my wife had experienced, in other words, healthy and normal pregnancy. One week before her due date, she suffered a complete placental abruption in the middle of the night. Without getting into the weeds, it’s a critical thing that can happen during a pregnancy that oftentimes can result in death of either the baby and or the mother. We were lucky to get to the hospital pretty quickly and when Parks’ was born, she actually had an Apgar score of one. The only thing that registered on the entire scale is she had a faint pulse when they took Kaylee into the delivery room. What they said to me is if we get in there right now, we might be able to save your wife and they both bounced back and are now thriving. I think about parks in her mama’s belly, just thinking if rationing the resources that are available to her and like, if somebody can just get me out of here, I’ll be fine. And I can tell you over the last four years, she is the toughest little girl that you can imagine and 100% she will not quit when it comes to anything and I know that part of her is why she’s here. So to join us today, to talk about this subject of resilience, we want to welcome back two of our three sponsors and former guest. We have Kelly Engleman, who is the founder of enhanced wellness living, which is based here in the Jackson Ridgeland area. Kelly has dedicated years to researching and developing treatment strategies for her patients using a food first approach for healing. She is equipping her patients with the tools and resources that they need to gain control of their health and live a life of vitality. Kelly joined us formerly on episode 19.I would suggest that you go back and listen to it if you haven’t and if you have, listen to it again. We’ve also got Eva hunter who is one part of the dynamic duo of Roane and Eva hunter, who are the founders of LifeWorks counseling here in the Jackson area. You probably remember Eva from past episodes, three and four, and I believe co-hosted a few other episodes along the way as well, Eva and her husband specialize and individual couples and family therapy. She’s a licensed professional counselor and an international best-selling author of Sex, God and the chaos of betrayal, the couples roadmap of hope and healing from infidelity, affairs, pornography and sexual abuse. Of course, we don’t want to leave out our third sponsor, new path planning owned by Christy Tidwell, who is a certified financial planner. She has also been a guest on our podcast before and has her own stories of resilience. Christie helps people who are coming out of a divorce deal with their finances and figure out a way forward. And you can find her at newpathplanning.com. Again, Kelly, Eva, thanks for being here. And I look forward to hearing what you have to say about this interesting topic.

Kelly: So excited to be here again.

Eva: Yes, me too.

Kelly: This topic has been so near and dear to my heart, really from childhood. And to see more awareness around what is resilience and what that looks like is just exciting.

Craig: Kelly, you heard a little about what resilience means to me and Matt? What about you when you think of resilience?

Kelly: So, when I think about resilience, I think about the capacity that we have. As humans to bounce back from adversity. In my life I’ve had, I call them speed bumps. I’ve had a few speed bumps along the way and opportunities to really dig deep and live out what resilience looks like. So, resilience can be also a stance that you take kind of a decision that you make as you build out your plan for resilience. I actually do write out a plan every year for what resilience is going to look like for me?

Craig: Talk about that a little bit. Be specific.

Kelly: Right. So, when I think about, what is it going to take for me to be resilient?

James Clear, I don’t know if you guys have read his book, The Atomic Habits, he says that will never rise to the level of our goals that will always fall to the level of our systems. Right? That is so powerful because if we don’t have an awareness of what it is to create resilience then how can we have the systems in place to do that? For me, I think about my mindset, you know, what am I going to be putting into my brain every day? What I’m going to be reading, who am I going to be listening to on podcast for me, I really need some things that keep me motivated and focused and connected. I think about my nutrition. How am I going to pull off getting what I feel like I need nutritionally daily and what do I need to recruit to make that happen? So, for our family, a lot of times we’ll use green chef as a way of ordering our food, having it delivered and we prepare it. So that’s just one tool that we oftentimes will use. I think about my sleep and my hormone balance, those go hand in hand. Am I getting enough sleep? Is a good quality sleep? I think about how am I moving my body? You know, am I exercising? Am I overexercising? Sometimes I tend to overdo the physical aspect of that and then I think about, what is it that I’m doing daily that may be adding toxicity to my body? And how could I offset that? Or how could I be eating in a way to allow my body to offload that. So those are the five things I kind of map out and there’s a lot of depth within those things, but those are the components that I’m constantly re-evaluating what’s working for me. What’s not working for me.

Craig: Eva, what about you? What does resilience mean to you?

Eva: For me, it’s really understanding first and foremost, where I came from and I’ve got to know myself and what is stored in the limbic part of my brain, because if I don’t know that I’m going to react instead of respond.

Craig: What do you mean know thyself? I think Socrates said that, know that self, but are you talking about knowing your own story being in touch? Explain that to me and our listeners.

Eva: Absolutely. That’s the first thing is to really know what’s happened to you. What’s happened through you. To understand what set you up right. To react instead of respond and Kelly can tell you more about that when we do react, when we’re in that hypervigilant stage, and let’s say we do have a betrayal trauma, or we do have an angry father or an angry husband that we are in a primary relationship with our safety and security is compromised. So, Kelly has helped me for the last five years to understand to my, my numbers, my internal numbers and how to heal those. Right. And so she and I worked together on that in a path of understanding that. My first thing I did though in my journey to healing was really my trauma. What had happened to me now, what has helped me be resilient over the years is understanding it, but then also sitting in it with other people, as well as doing my own work, hearing hard things and being able to really sit with that. I think that’s made me very resilient.

Craig: Eva, use the word trauma twice. You said betrayal, trauma, and then you use that term again. And I think our listeners, when they think of trauma, they think of a trip to the emergency room. That might be the case. Help our listener understand what trauma is.

Eva: So trauma is any negative life event that leaves you with a sense of helplessness. It can be neglect, childhood neglect, a loss of a parent, a serious childhood illness, whether it’s your own or one of your siblings, a learning disability, too many siblings in the home, a detached, emotionally unavailable, or anxious parent and then your own parents who may have had childhood trauma. Mine did.

Matt: I’ve heard in the work that Matt and I do the concept of a big T trauma and a little T trauma help me and our listener to understand what the difference is.

Eva: So, a big T traumas going to be things like growing up in an addictive family system, alcoholism that can be a big T trauma, a big T trauma can be a parent who died during childhood or a sibling who died during childhood, those are big T traumas. The betrayal of one of the parents. If one of them had an affair, if there was a divorce in the family, those are big T traumas.

Craig: What about the smaller traumas?

Eva: Little T traumas are more of what I had mentioned a minute ago, maybe the parents weren’t really attuned to the child, to you as a child. They may have been emotionally detached. They’re so focused on making ends meet the financial stresses of raising children, the emotional stresses of raising children.

Matt: So the little T are more of your pervasive every day. I don’t want to call them slides, but you know, environment, the way that your life is going on day to day basis, whereas big T might be large events that happen and you see them as a singular instance in your life.

Eva: That’s right. Exactly.

Craig: Well, what’s the correlation then it seems logical, but I would love to talk about that in more detail with you ladies about resilience post-trauma whether it be something small or something huge, how do we put one foot in front of the other and foster resilience?

Kelly: So, you know, when I think about resilience, so we wouldn’t have a need for resilience. If we didn’t have trauma then we wouldn’t have a word. If trauma didn’t exist, we wouldn’t have any need for resilience. Right. We would just be. And so I think that understanding who you are, and that’s what Eva taught me was because I approached resilience strictly from a physical standpoint, for the longest time. Mindset was a part of it. I believe in God and I pray and I do the things from a spiritual perspective that I felt like I needed to be doing, but I didn’t understand the value of knowing myself and also knowing how that trauma affected me and create a default pattern. It’s where I go when I’m upset or I get really triggered for me, my reaction to disappointment or our trauma would be to go run. I would, I would run 50 miles a week at my worst and a lot of people would think that, well, that’s healthy, right? That’s healthy at the expense of other aspects of my life. Where were my children when I was out running training for marathons for hours at a time, you know, I wasn’t necessarily supporting my nutrition at that time either because I had the belief that I could eat whatever I wanted, because I didn’t have a weight problem. So there was a lot of price to pay for that habit. Now I could have been doing worse things, obviously.

Matt: So if resilience is our response to trauma, I’m curious to know, or to hear your opinions about, is resilience something that an individual has to develop or is it something that they have that is innately inside of them that they have to discover. Can you learn how to be resilient?

Kelly: So when I listened to your story about your daughter, I mean, it brought me to tears really when I heard it, but she had an element of resilience that obviously she wanted to fight. Right. She wanted to be here, but I’ll also have a belief that episode that she went through, challenged her in away that changed her genetic expression for resilience. So there are some people that are just born into this world resilient and then there are other people that really have to dig into building those skillsets around what resilience looks like and, you know, I’ll just be honest. I thought I was resilient. I had my strategies in place. I was a runner. That was my only strategy. And that’s what I see in a lot of people is they have one strategy. They have one go-to and they think they’re good and they don’t realize the value in really digging into and that’s what Eva helped me with was really digging into the trauma that I’d had in the past and the defaults that I had set up and the identity around that that were some were serving me in some word.

Matt: For anybody out there that might be listening, that thinks that they’re not resilient or  that everybody has the capacity to show that resilience or to find it or to develop it is inside of you. You just have to figure out how to trigger that response and then develop it in a healthy way.

Eva: And I will say the environment that we are in and what we grew up in, it really does matter and our own self-talk can help us become very resilient.

Craig: That’s a counseling sounding word, Eva. Self-talk, let’s think of crazy people on an elevator talking to themselves about this is the next button I need to push help our listener understand what is self talk?

Eva: Well, I’ll give you an example of our little granddaughter who is now two and a half years old, but she was around 18 months she started learning how to calm the stairs at our house. And she was climbing the stairs and I was right behind her and she would say, be careful, baby, be careful, baby. She had some fear but she’s doing a lot of good self-talk and as a therapist, I knew where she got that from. I mean, that’s probably the way I’m sure I know that’s the way her parents talk to her and so the environment really matters too, whether you’re a child or you’re an adult you’re in that environment matters. If you’re in an abusive relationship as an adult, we can get out of that. We can call a time out. We can say, I’m going to go, I’m going to walk away from this, but when you’re a child, you can’t, you’re stuck.

Craig: I think I’ve spoke about this on the show before, but that I have a men’s group. There’s six of us who meet every Tuesday morning and we talk about what’s going on in our life and so I asked them on Tuesday, what does resilience mean to you? And one of the guys who actually, if you go back and listen to episode one of our show, Matt, he responded that to him, he thinks of resilience as shame resilience and Eva, this is similar to what you’re talking about. It’s the, self-talk the voices in my head and how to reframe that negative self-talk right.

Eva: I am a seven on the Enneagram so that is a skill set I naturally have, is to reframe, but it helps me help others to write how to reframe as well, identifying what are my shame messages, and then the ability to tell myself the truth in my own personal life. After I did a lot of my own therapy work, I realized, oh my goodness one of my fears is the fear of abandonment. So, I can speak into that today. You know what? I’m never going to abandon myself, nor is my father. The Lord, he’s never going to abandon me. So, if I feel abandoned, I can speak truth into that.

Kelly: There’s a reason the Bible says to whole captive, every thought, right?

Eva: Absolutely.

Kelly: So powerful because you know, that is the number one area of abuse that we have direct control over, and I say abuse because sometimes we are abusing ourselves with the words we tell ourselves, the lies we continue to tell ourselves that’s a self abuse. So being able to call that out, reframe it, tell yourself the truth is phenomenal.

Eva: And Kelly mentioned a minute ago, she talked about how she really focused on the physical side. Well, I came from another standpoint. I only focused on the emotional side and when I hit my 50s and I was really just had a lot of fatigue. I was very tired. We were beginning life works and so I sought Kelly out and she helped me on just all my numbers, my internal, my cortisol, all the things and I’ve been with Kelly now for five years, about five years now,

Kelly: We’ve made some tremendous progress in those five years, because, you know, when I looked at Eva on the outside, she was beautiful and you know, she had some pesky symptoms, but then when we got her labs back, I was like, Ooh, we’ve got some challenges here. We’re not headed in a good direction and it’s been phenomenal but it’s taken work. Right.

Eva: All of her things that she talked about a minute, she has coached me how to do that. My mental health, my emotional health and my physical health go hand in hand and so does everyone’s the body.

Craig: I want you ladies to respond to something again, I’ve been doing some research and I’ve listened to Ted talks and read article and one thing that I heard was that the idea of the body’s response to stress. So, let’s say you’re in Yellowstone. You’re camping and you decide to go on an early morning walk to watch the sunrise over a beautiful lake and while you’re there you encounter a bear. So, when you encounter a threat, your body releases, chemicals, your eyes dilate, your heart rate speeds up and you have a physical response to that environment, into that fear that serves you well to either fight or get your tail out of there. But what I would like for you ladies to respond to is the person who the bear comes home every night, it is this chronic struggle and the body’s chronic response to that struggle.

Kelly: So, as you mentioned, initially, when we encounter a stressor in our bodies will respond with all these amazing hormones that prime our body for a response and we can either fight, we can flee, or we can freeze and not many people talk about the freeze response to some type of stress like that, right?

Over time, those amazing hormones that your body produces changes the structure and function of your brain. Your hippocampus actually changes it shrinks and as a result of that, you’re no longer able to produce the hormonal response that you once had and so that shows up as some of the symptoms that Eva described, fatigue, muscle pain, headaches, insomnia, those are common things that we see as downstream effects of chronic stress. When we look at the labs of a person like that, you know, we would expect if they’re still running high stress situation, I’m assuming the person you’re describing they’re still living in that situation, right? So, you would expect the hormones to be really high, their cortisol to be really high, but what will show up is they almost have non-existent cortisol production and it’s not that their adrenal glands can’t produce is the brains not sitting the signal for production.

Craig: So, we’re here with Kelly Engleman and Eva hunter, our sponsors and our guests and along with my partner, Matt Easterling, and we’re talking about resilience. You can’t talk about resilience without talking about setbacks, without talking about trauma, a big trauma that happens in our life. A small, everyday stressors that we respond to and we can respond to that by fighting. We can respond to that by fleeing and avoiding, or we can get stuck. We can freeze and I had used the example of seeing a bear in the woods and our body’s response to that and Kelly, as she always does so eloquently talked about how that plays out in a person’s health in their everyday life. Eva, in your practice in working with many men and women who are suffering betrayal, trauma, meaning that there has been cheating that someone has gone outside of the marriage, speak from a mental health standpoint about that response to stress and distress.

Eva: You know, it does cause a lot of chaos in the relationship and many times the one who has betrayed doesn’t really have the ability to help his partner heal. That person, he’s dealing with his own shame, because he’s gone outside of the marriage. He may still, he or she may still be hiding. So, the partner of betrayal himself or herself are left on their own.

Craig: Right Eva, I’ve heard you talk about that. Talk about that in your own life, because I can remember back to when you told your story for the first time on our show, and you talked about that, that you were ill-equipped to help Roane when the discovery happened in your life.

Eva: and he was ill-equipped to help me. We were both like very, it was chaos. I am a fighter or I was a fighter actually, let me say I was a rager. I had a lot of anger. I really didn’t understand the roots of my anger. So what happened when discovery happened, just more trauma was placed on top of the trauma are already had and so I’m in a fight for my safety, for my security, I’m fighting for that. Not really realizing I’m giving all my power away and I felt really alone. Nobody really understood betrayal trauma then. Today, what is very helpful for a partner of betrayal is to, of course, have therapy be in therapy because we’ve got to be able to process our emotions if we hold them in, it is going to affect all the numbers that Kelly’s talking about. So, we have to process those by talking it out also by allowing ourselves to grieve, to cry, to feel the feelings. That’s just part of the process that a human being has to go through and many times, you know, the partner just wants to feel better so fast. They don’t allow themselves in order to die. I did not allow myself to really grieve. I would just fight it. Right. I fought, fought, fought, but really what was underneath all my anger was a lot of hurt and a lot of fear, and a lot of injustice. So today, when I work with, a partner of betrayal, I quickly try to get him or her into a group where there’s other people in the group that can support her. It also helps her in her own resilience if she’s creating her own safety.

Craig: Across the informal research that I’ve been doing, that’s what I see over and over again, the power of relationships to help foster and develop resiliency. Talk about that, Eva. The importance of, you say, I want to get them in a group that you felt alone and how important is it to have people that are walking alongside of you on the pathway to healing and recovery and fostering and developing resiliency?

Eva: Well, God created us to do life with other people not to do life on our own. So now they’ve got people that are maybe further women or men that are further along in their journey that can come up beside them. We call it Jesus with skin on and comfort. The hurt really validate the hurt, help them to walk through a disclosure like, they’re not alone, they’re on their own. They get lots of support. It’s just a really beautiful the way we’re supposed to live that.

Kelly: We heal healing community. You are never going to heal on an island. Yeah. As much as we want to run away, sometimes from that hurt and the trauma and be an isolate. That’s not where healing happens.

Craig: Well, let’s talk about how to get better because we all face adversity and I think our listeners want to know. Okay, well, I have heard relationship from a health standpoint, you work in functional medicine, and you have a food first approach to health and wellness. Talk about. That person who is moving past trauma or negative life circumstance.

Kelly: Absolutely, I see a lot of that. You know, I see people coming in because they have had some adversity, life traumas, transition of life. Like Eva mentioned hitting about 50 and realizing that. You know, we’re an accumulation of everything we’ve experienced our whole life. We bioaccumulate. Right. And so the first thing that we do is really dig into, you know, what is this person’s goals? What do they want to accomplish with their health? Because I could have the best ideas in the world about what would make them feel better, but if that’s not really their goal, we’re not going to get very far. So, clarifying their goals. What do they want? Then looking at their biomarkers, Eva’s mentioned her numbers, right? Her numbers are her biomarkers. Those are the objective things I can measure looking at hormone balance, nutritional status, that helped me guide that process. So those are the first two steps and then, you know, biggest of all is the willingness to learn. Right? I want you to know you. I want you to understand what’s driving your physiology and what it’s going to be the biggest lever that we can use to get you the best result, because people want to see results quickly, right? They don’t want to wait around five years trying to resolve.

Eva: However, in my own journey with Kelly, it has taken time for me to educate myself and to understand my body and what works for me. I mean, it is a process just like in therapy. It is a not a one and done.

Kelly: and you would say though that you felt better within the first three to six months but feeling better does not mean you’re better and that’s hard for people because once they start feeling better, motivation goes down.

Eva: Yeah, my motivation, because my mother has Alzheimer’s has always been top notch. Yeah. In fact, this year, Kelly encouraged me to go to the amen clinic in Atlanta to have a brain scan. And I said, yes, I’ve been thinking about it for a few years. I went in August of 2021. The best thing that came out of that was there’s a functional doctor with amen clinic too and he’s like Kelly, but in Atlanta, And he said, you know, when I look at your brain, I have brain envy and I did not have a ring of fire. People who have a lot of trauma have a ring of fire. So, what that told me was that my brain has healed, and God created us with brains that can heal.

Kelly: Absolutely. Neuroplasticity. And that’s what people need to hear is that no matter, you know, what created that trauma, you have the capacity to heal.

Craig: Brain envy. So, what I heard you say was we think in terms of the emotional toll, that stress and trauma brings on us but I think that we overlook the fact that the body does keep the score and you described the idea of a ring of fire and just this, this trauma, the brain’s response to ongoing stress and trauma.

 I think that most of our listeners will agree that stress can hijack your brain and we, as human beings want to feel better. So to do that, we medicate, we avoid, that’s a big one. I’m a big avoider. We distract ourselves. We, we work harder. We go on a run, we create busy-ness in our life, or we just suppress. You can think about anything that you want to think about, but don’t think about a polar bear. It’s impossible that which we try to avoid, we end up obsessing over. So Eva, when I think of your work, I think of the, maybe the woman whose husband has been unfaithful, but they just never deal with it. They just say okay, we’re going to stay together and we are just going to move on to the next phase of life and what type of effect does that have on the relationship and the person moving forward, if they simply just avoid these negative things that happen in relationship?

Eva: Well, all of the traumas are stored in the limbic part of the brain, and that is where our fight flight or freeze responses are and so if we’re not dealing with that, if we’re not processing that we’re in a state of hypervigilance, we have lots of intrusive thoughts, even if they’ve tried to move forward without really healing. They both may walk on eggshells. They’re trying to manage the other person. You know, the word trust in scripture literally means that you don’t edit. Right? So, you’ve got to rebuild trust in a relationship so that you’re not in that state. You have freedom to be who you are. You’re able to say, hey, this is how I feel. This is what I think this is. My desire is we move from reacting to responding. Now we’re using our thinking brain, the prefrontal cortex and we can, I mean, I face hard things in the office. I face angry clients, but I have the ability today to be able to respond to it. I don’t ever feel flooded with emotion anymore, but I used to the marriage.

Kelly: So when I heard Eva kind of describing her current response to a major stressor, what she’s doing is she’s giving herself space. She’s created a space where she can have an encounter and then she can activate the part of her brain that would respond in a very healthy way. Where a lot of times, if that work hasn’t been done, we’re triggered and what shows up is not what we want to show up.

Craig: Yeah, for me, it’s a lot easier to not be triggered at work. I’ve been a divorce lawyer now for 20 years and Matt and I have, this what we do all day long every day and it’s easy for me in my life to not be reactive to something that’s happening to someone else, someone I’m talking to. It’s very easy to kind of have a more mindful, methodical, reasoned, rational approach, but you know what, when things happen in my life, that’s really different when things are aligned in my home or my marriage or with my kids or with my finances.

That’s when I feel it.

Matt: I guess, piggybacking off that, it’s interesting because I feel like it almost happens in an opposite way for me dealing with, you know, what we deal with on a daily basis. I think sometimes on an unhealthy level, I marginalize issues that I experienced in my own personal life, thinking that, you know, I really don’t have it that bad or I shouldn’t be this upset about this because of all these other instances that I am encountering on a daily basis and while I think it’s good in any circumstance to have perspective, yes sometimes you are overreacting and maybe something isn’t as big of a deal as you’re making it. It’s probably just as unhealthy to constantly marginalize your own feelings about something because you think, well, you know, I really don’t have enough license to feel this way at this moment.

Craig: Well, let’s wrap up guys with some practical thoughts about building resilience and practicing resiliency. Kelly, give our listeners some just practical steps if they go back and I hope they really will go back and listen to episode 19, where we talked with you about just some basics of fundamental health, about movement, healthy air, good water, good relationship. Just these basic fundamental things that people can do. Can you talk to our listener about the basics of resiliency?

Kelly: Yes. So, from my perspective, I think that the questions that you need to ask yourself, how do you want to show up? You know, who do you want to be? And then when you’re in a situation asking yourself, how would a healthy person handle this situation? And that can be as simple as choosing lunch. Right. You’re out to lunch with friends, everybody’s ordering cocktails and you’re trying to clean it up. Well, what would a healthy person do? So, for me, it’s really helping someone understand themselves better. Like how do they, how would they normally respond to that situation and figuring out hacks to work around those situations?

Matt: So, what you mean is focusing sort of not just on what you want, but the process of how to get there?

Kelly: The process is everything, because we can have all these wonderful goals year after year and at the end of the year, look back and go, what happened to that goal? Why did we get lost in the sauce of life as if we don’t set up some actions, steps, and strategies that are for us, what works for me may not work for Eva?

Matt: Those people, they genuinely want those things when they experience those emotions of, I want this, I want to get in better shape. I want to make these different improvements. They truly want them.

Kelly: There’s no lack of desire.

Matt: It’s just that they’re not implementing the process of how to do it either. They don’t know how, or they’re scared or any number of things. So, what are some ways that people can start to focus on?

Kelly: So, one of the things Eva mentioned to me before that I think is important is, you know, what motivated her was to see her biomarkers, to see her numbers, if she could track and trend her numbers, then she understood why she was doing what she was doing to get better.

Eva: and good mental health lives in reality.

Craig: Eva, talk about that, you mean good mental health lives, explain that to me.

Eva: The reality of what my biomarkers were. And continue and what they are today and the path that I am on. I have not arrived, but I certainly am on a path.

Matt: So, I see that as sort of a tangible way to connect the dots. I recognize today that I feel tired, or I feel a little run down and being able to look at an actual, tangible number and then maybe connect it to something that you did the day before or the night before. Well, I did not get enough sleep, or I had a couple drinks last night or ate fast food or whatever it might happen. I know for me, although I’m terrible at practicing, it is, you know, when you make those connections, it’s almost like the light bulb type moment. You’re like, you know, I know if I just don’t do this, I’m probably not going to feel this way later but it’s very powerful when those little light bulbs go off because a lot of times before the light turns on you just walking around in the dark and you don’t really understand why you feel bad all the time.

Craig: Kelly, what would you say to the person who, I’m not a big scorekeeper. Believe it or not I’m competitive, but as I’ve gotten older, I play golf. I’m not that good. I don’t keep score because I hit some good shots, hit some bad shots. What do you say to the person who’s not into all the numbers?

 Kelly: Some people aren’t into the numbers, I’m into the numbers because I feel obligated to understand it so that I can help you make the change but as a person, if you’re not into the biochemistry, that’s fine. We can just help you make that next step, whatever that next step needs to be. That’s going to give you the biggest impact. So, the numbers help direct that, they’re not the end all be all.

Craig: Eva, as we are in our closing moments, what about you from your perspective, talk to our listener about fostering and developing a resilience.

Eva: I’m going to end with just this phrase. Connection is the cure. Connection with yourself, with God and with others.

Craig: Eva, Kelly, you guys showed up fabulously today and thank you for helping us put this podcast together and thank you for your thoughts. As we close, Kelly, tell our listener how they can get in touch with you.

Kelly: Thank you. The best way to get in touch with us is online. Enhancedwellness.com

Craig: and Eva again, you and Roan are a great friends and great partners in this podcast. Tell our listeners how they can connect with you.

Eva: You can connect with us at LifeWorks counseling and the website is LifeWorks.MS and roanandeva.com.