How to Heal Your Nervous System Impacted by Your Parents' Divorce| Sr. Mary Stephen
Growing up with divorced parents or a dysfunctional family does not just shape your childhood. It shapes your nervous system. Many young people from broken homes live with chronic anxiety, shutdown, emotional overwhelm, or conflict avoidance without ever knowing why.
In this episode, Sr. Mary Stephen explains how childhood chaos trains your brain and body to stay on high alert and how to finally regulate your emotions instead of feeling controlled by them. You will learn simple, practical tools to calm your nervous system, process stored trauma, build internal safety, and integrate all of this with your spiritual life.
In this episode:
Why your body still reacts like your parents are fighting
How trauma gets stored in the nervous system
Fight, flight, freeze, and shutdown explained
Why talk therapy is not enough for many children of divorce
Somatic exercises you can start using today
How to feel safe, grounded, and present again
If you’re tired of feeling anxious, reactive, or stuck because of your family’s dysfunction, this episode is for you.
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TRANSCRIPT
Transcript produced by artificial intelligence. Please pardon any errors!
Joey Pontarelli (00:42)
Welcome to the Restored Podcast. I'm Joey Pantarelli. If you come from a divorced or dysfunctional family, this show is for you. We mentor you through the pain and help you heal so you can avoid repeating your family's dysfunction and instead build strong, healthy relationships. What if your body still thinks that you're in danger even when nothing's wrong? What if it still thinks that you're reliving your parents' divorce or your family crisis even years later? Most people think that trauma is about the moment everything fell apart, but the truth is,
It's also about what your nervous system learned to expect during those years. Chaos, tension, emotional whiplash, walking on eggshells, the list goes on. And your body can keep reacting to that long after you've moved on. And this might explain why you feel anxious for no clear reason, why you maybe shut down when someone raises their voice, or why conflict in relationship feels terrifying even when the other person...
is safe. In this episode, we explore how growing up with divorced parents or a dysfunctional family shapes your nervous system and what to do about it. You'll learn really practical tips that you can use like co-regulation, boundaries, grounding, and naming what's happening inside your body, plus how to integrate all of this with your spiritual life. My guest is Sister Mary Stephen. She's a religious sister with a deep background in training and trauma-informed care, neuroscience, and theology of the body. She grew up in a Catholic home, but it was emotionally unsafe and for years,
She just hit her pain. But after experiencing a ton of healing herself, today she helps others heal by combining body-based tools, therapy, and deep spiritual truth. And so if you've ever wondered, you know, why am I so reactive? Why does my parents' divorce still affect me? Or maybe why doesn't prayer fix the way that I feel? This episode is for you. And with that, here's our conversation.
sister, welcome to the show. great to have you here. And happy birthday. I recently learned that it's your birthday. I hope it's a good one and hope we can be a good part of that. I'm really glad you're here and I'm excited to learn from you alongside my audience. First off, I'm just curious, why is it that you care about helping people heal?
Sister Mary Stephen (02:31)
So good to be here, Joey.
I
would have to say it's very tied into my vocation when I started discerning. In college, I was like, yeah, I just want to help people. My mom would say, you need a career. What are you going to do? What do you want to study? And I was studying psychology. And I'm like, I don't want a career. I just want to help people. And all through religious life, you know, I'm a spiritual mother and I see everyone as like a spiritual son or daughter or brother or sister.
The world needs healing and whatever I learned for healing, I'm always wanting to pass on. So yeah.
Joey Pontarelli (03:24)
So good. Okay. So you saw the need and I love that. And I'm curious what wounds and healing have you personally experienced?
Sister Mary Stephen (03:32)
think most of us come from dysfunctional homes. Our home was quite chaotic. We had a lot of crises in my family. My brother had cancer. My dad has multiple sclerosis. Just like all of us kids, there's four kids, and we were just all over the place. ⁓ my parents dealing with that, there was a lot of fighting going on growing up, especially I remember since ⁓
maybe like fifth grade on, remember a lot of just a lot of fighting and me just going, you know, I up in the eighties, so we were not at home. We, you know, just leave, just go to the friend's house because it was just chaotic. just not having that always wanted that close bonding with the family. But with all that we were going through, it was just really chaotic. And so definitely since I was 14, I've been working on like healing.
Because it usually comes up in your teenage years like, yeah, I'm depressed or things like that. And so even in the monastery, always working on my healing from that.
Joey Pontarelli (04:42)
And I'm curious, were there any particular wounds that obviously the kind of dysfunction you grew up in that impacts you in so many ways, but was there anything in particular that you noticed that you had this particular wound or you at least had this symptom that came out of it, like you said, an emotional problem like depression or something else that you saw like, man, I'm dealing with all these things that are related to my dysfunctional family and I need to heal. Like, was there a moment that you could take me to that was this kind of wake up of like, yeah, I need healing.
Sister Mary Stephen (05:09)
I think it was, I had a conversion when I was 14. I grew up Catholic and we went to mass every Sunday and I wasn't taking it in. I was just thinking, whatever, it's what my mom and dad care about, but I find mass boring and I just want to have fun. But when I was 14, I went to a camp, a youth camp, and just our Lord really showed me his love for me. And then,
It was in that, working in this youth group and just seeing, wow, I need a lot of healing. I need a lot of healing from our Lord. So yeah, I guess it was mainly like depression. Like I had fun as a kid, but when I would sit still and be with myself, I was going, yeah, I'm sad and I'm depressed. And so I think that was my turning point.
Joey Pontarelli (06:05)
Yeah, I can relate with that too. I've never had chronic depression, thankfully, but I've certainly gone through situational depression and anxiety in different cases where something's happening and it's maybe in my family and in the past, especially when I lived at home, I'd feel the weight of it for sure. So I totally relate with you and I think a lot of people even listening right now can relate with us too that especially when you kind of face yourself or slow down a little bit like you described.
A lot of that brokenness catches up with you and it can be a tough place to be. So you had this experience though at camp and that I'm assuming led to kind of deeper experiences. What would you say was like the most helpful healing thing that you experienced maybe in high school or college?
Sister Mary Stephen (06:48)
I She was ⁓ one of the youth leaders. She was about, you know, in her early 20s and she really took me under her wing and she had a young family so I would babysit for her and just hang out at her house because since there was so much chaos at home, I loved to be in other people's houses. And so I just hang out with her and she really helped me to put language to what I was feeling. So that was just transformational.
the love that she showed me and the compassion and just being a friend and mentoring me. And she even said, hey, you need to apply for colleges, go away for college, you know? And so going away to college was very helpful. So she really helped me like move. Cause a lot of times with trauma, we kind of freeze, become small. So she helped me to kind of get out of that and make something, make something of myself. ⁓
Yeah, and was in college that I discovered I had a vocation. So it was just such a blessing to have such a beautiful friend like that.
Joey Pontarelli (07:56)
I it. And I know we're going to get into the particular type of healing that you help people experience and then some transformations. We'll talk about that a little bit later, but I'm curious, why is it so helpful when it comes to healing to be able to just like put things into words? Like it seems so simplistic, maybe even too simplistic to be helpful or effective. So I'm just curious what you've learned there. Like you said, she helped you put things into words. Why, like why, why is that so helpful? Why is that even like validation that comes along with it? So helpful in healing.
Sister Mary Stephen (08:25)
I think because it relates to our nervous system, and I do help people reset their nervous system, when life becomes too much, we could only be in fight or flight or stress mode for so long, and then you reach a point where you just shut down. So I think I was definitely shut down in my high school when I started the youth group with her. I mean, when I was going to youth group with her and she saw that, she saw how shut down I was. So when you're shut down,
You just are kind of a half person and you're just going along and you don't even know really. Like I didn't even know that I was shut down. But when she would ask me questions, like, how do you feel? How are you doing? And I was like, what? Like, I don't know. I don't know how I'm feeling. And she would like just dig it out of me and it helped me. So when you're shut down, you're immobilized. So it helped me to start to mobilize. And part of it is just talking.
and ⁓ learning about what you're actually feeling. And that helps get you out of shutdown and to then you could get into fight or flight. And now I'm angry. I'm angry. Why didn't I have a better family life? And I was angry with my parents. so that may be like anger, it's ugly, but that is a step in the right direction. then once you could start to admit the anger, then you could start to...
let that go and work on that part of your nervous system and get that out of you. And then I woke up. Like when I first started youth group, I was quiet, total wallflower. But that's not me. I'm sanguine, I'm full of life and bubbly. And then like from the first year I was at camp, I was just a wallflower. And the second year at camp, I was like one of the leaders and getting up on stage and
doing a lot of stuff like the skits and just having a lot of fun. And they're like, what happened to Carolyn? My name is Carolyn. And ⁓ so I just came to life, but only through that love and her like helping me to come out of myself, come out of that shutdown.
Joey Pontarelli (10:31)
so good. You mentioned the nervous system and just kind of the role that that plays. If you would give us kind of a one-on-one and a basic explanation of like the nervous system and how that all works.
Sister Mary Stephen (10:39)
Okay, ⁓ great question. So the nervous system, you know, God designed our body, He designed it to help us heal, He wants us to heal, our body wants to feel safe. So our nervous system, when we feel threatened, we don't feel safe. And we go into fight or flight. Or when that's too much, we shut down, like I was saying. So it's built into our system, and it's operated by the vagus nerve.
our vagus nerve starts at our cranial here in our brain and it comes down and it goes to all of our face like when you're shut down you're like
And like, where did, where did Carolyn go?
Joey Pontarelli (11:19)
And for everyone who's only listening, she's like slumping over, her face is kind of like long and drawn and like lifeless. So, okay. Wow.
Sister Mary Stephen (11:27)
Yeah, like where did Carolyn go or where does Sister Me Steven go? So your nervous system shuts you down and when you're sick, your nervous system shuts you down. That's why when you start to get sick, you're like, wow, I feel it. My body is starting to shut down. So your nervous system, you could think about it like the wiring in the walls. Like I have, we have wiring in the walls in the room, your end right now. And trauma could be seen as a rat gets in the wall and chews through the wire. So if a rat chews through the wire and I go to the light switch to turn it on,
It's not going to turn on and I could go to the light switch and come on and maybe if I bang on it or do it really gently or do it real fast. no, cause the answer is not in that light switch. The answer to our trauma is not in our brain. It's in our body. It's in the wiring in our body. We need to go to our body. We store trauma in our body so we can rewire. We can go into the wall and rewire with that rat. So, ⁓ eight through. So trauma is a break.
There's a real break and we need to rewire and we can do that with working with our body. So the answer is there. So I don't know if that helps.
Joey Pontarelli (12:37)
Yeah, no, it makes sense. And the way that's super helpful, and I'm just thinking of something I learned from from a neurobiologist that I've learned of like your nervous system is kind of on a scale where at the top of the scale is like hyper arousal, which is like the most afraid or terrified that you can be. And at the bottom, that's like a 10 out of 10 at the bottom would be like hypo arousal. And that's like a one out of 10 where you're the most
depressed or numb, you can be lifeless like you said. And what he was explaining at least is that you want to be in like the five or six range typically. And that's like proper regulation of your emotion where you feel calm, you feel at peace, but then you feel maybe a little bit of excitement to like tackle life, to, you know, tackle your day. Would you agree with that? Would you tweak that at all? I'm curious if that's a decent explanation of kind of how your nervous system like.
goes up and down and how we, know, regulation, essentially what he was saying, regulating your emotions means bringing you back into that five or six range. And when you get out of, you know, the five or six range, typically that's like dysregulation, which can happen when you're triggered or when, you know, something in life kind of throws you, there's pain, there's winning something like that. Would you agree with that or would you tweak it at all?
Sister Mary Stephen (13:40)
Yeah, that I could I could explain it a little different way, but that's totally that's perfect Joey. And so the fight or flight is up top if you you know, when we go into fight or flight, we're triggered or we actually have a danger that we need to tackle. ⁓ So that's way up there. And then when that becomes too much, we go way down into dorsal vagal shutdown, we're depressed, we're, I just want to lay in bed all day.
So, ⁓ unhealthy nervous system is ping ponging in between those two. You're going way up and then way down, up and down. A healthy nervous system would be more in the middle. We need to go into fight or flight. Like you gotta clean the house before someone comes in, comes over, they're coming over in 10 minutes. Like you are in fight or flight or you have work to do. Sometimes it's okay to go into fight or flight. And can you come back down to being regulated?
Or are you going to bed at night and you're still your mind's going going going and that's where insomnia comes because you are still in fight-and-flight when you're laying in bed and You are able to get yourself back down. So I work with people to get more of a healthy nervous system You're more in the middle and it's the ventral vagal or it's called parasympathetic also where you're calm you're grounded you're your best self and you could
Be relaxed and go to sleep at night or pray or have a good conversation with someone You're not a lot of times you're talking to someone and they're not there They're in their head and they're not really present. So the healthy nervous system you can be present to the person you're with, okay?
Joey Pontarelli (15:22)
That makes so much sense. Gosh, I have so many questions, but I guess one of the things that you had mentioned about like trauma that it's stored in the body and for some people maybe that's new language that they've heard. For others, maybe they're familiar with Bessel van der Kolk and the book The Body Keeps the Score. But for anyone who's not familiar, what does that mean exactly? Do you have an example that can maybe show how the body stores trauma? you're from a divorced or broken family, the holidays can be so stressful and challenging, you know that.
pressure to choose between parents, being reminded of your family's brokenness, especially if you've been living out of the house or at school, and just feeling a bit lost and alone and navigating it all. Thankfully, you're not alone. Our free guide, Five Tips to Navigate the Holidays in a Broken Family, offers really practical advice that you won't hear anywhere else, a worksheet to plan out your time with your parents, super helpful, and even a copy paste template you can edit for communicating with your parents through messages or even a call. Most of all, the guide helps you feel less alone and more in control when the holidays hit.
You can get the free guide at restoredministry.com slash holidays, or just click the link in the show notes.
Sister Mary Stephen (16:24)
There's
a quote from his book, the body remembers long after the trauma happened. Long after you think you've worked on it, the body still remembers it. So you could even have trauma from when you were a baby, like maybe your mom let you let your cry yourself to sleep too much, too many times. And it gets wired into your body that it's not safe to relax. ⁓ If a baby has a perfect, perfect connection with their mom, they will grow up.
thinking the world is safe. And when the trauma comes, they go, okay, I could get through this because the world is safe. But many of us, we come through early childhood, the world is not safe. And I have to fight, I have to protect myself. And it's wired in your body. if you even just notice your shoulders, how tight are your shoulders? Yeah, how tight your neck and that is stored trauma that stored stress. So when there's a stress, if you think about it, something happens.
Maybe people are fighting in the household and you're like, no, what's gonna happen next? What do you do? You brace. You bring your shoulders up, you're tightening your shoulders, your neck, your back, your hips. You're like protecting your organs. You come in and you're bracing and that bracing gets wired in us and that's why many people have back pain and there's stored anger there. So when...
stress happens, toxic stress or trauma. ⁓ If you didn't get to process it out of your body, you're storing it. And you also know you're storing it because you have triggers, know, something happens. A trigger is a time portal. It's bringing you back to the past. And if you take a little moment to notice when you're triggered what's happening in your body, and if you, when you start to do the work and learn about your body, learn the language of your body,
the wisdom in your body, you'll start to go, whoa, wow, I'm feeling it. I'm feeling it in my heart or my stomach, or ⁓ many people clench at night and they wear guards in their mouth because when we have all that tension in our jaw, that is because there was a time when I couldn't speak, you know, in a dysfunctional family, only one person's allowed to be angry. It's usually not the kid, you know, only one person's allowed.
So you had to, you wanted to say, hey dad, shut up, stop it. But you couldn't, you just had to go, maybe. I'm not allowed to be angry, it's a sin. I'm not allowed to, it's disrespectful or whatever. So we store it until we have tightness, all different places in our body.
Joey Pontarelli (19:07)
No, it's fascinating. And it's something if you guys want to learn more, I know with the Basil Van der Krook book, the body keeps the scores kind of dense, but would you recommend that or is there any other resources that people want to know more about this whole idea that the body source trauma?
Sister Mary Stephen (19:20)
It is pretty dense. When I first read it, before I started taking classes on this and teaching it, I was like, whoa. But you you just push through. Like if you find something a little difficult, just keep reading because he does give a lot of good examples. And there's also Dr. Amy Apigen, she's with Trauma Healing Accelerated. That's where I first started taking classes. She actually just wrote a book, so you could Google her.
So she's a, that's the biology of trauma is her book. So that's a great book to, to read, to understand. She, she brings it more into simple terms.
Joey Pontarelli (19:59)
Great title by the way for that. That's a trauma healing accelerator. I love that. ⁓ one example that came to mind when you were talking about kind of the body keeping the score, maybe it's not a perfect example, but is, you know, kind of an extreme. if a soldier who went to war, so I remember hearing the story of a special operator who came home, I think it was a Navy seal or something. He, you know, it was very vigilant. Like a lot of those guys are a lot of them. Actually, I learned later to have problems with like their cortisol being off the charts. Like they're always in fight or flight mode that they like actually have hormonal problems.
with that. So anyway, this guy comes home and I think he was at like a gas station with like his wife and there was a mechanic shop attached to the gas station and one of the engines like backfired when they were like at the gas station. They were like walking out of the convenience store back to their car. And as soon as he heard that like pop, he took his wife and he like threw her to the ground, you know, thinking that he, there's gunshots and back in the middle East and like, need to protect her and like shield her and then, you know, fight and it hurt her.
And, you know, of course he wasn't intending to hurt her. He was just trying to protect her, but he had that like response to that trigger and his body, his mind was still stuck in, you know, Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever he was. So yeah, so I think it's so interesting to see kind of how, you know, our bodies can just like, that wasn't a conscious thing. That was a subconscious like instinctual reaction that he had. It's not like he sat there and thought, I'm going to throw my wife to the ground to protect her from this engine that's back front. That sounds like a gun. It's like, no, no, no, it sounds like we're at war. So yeah, I'm curious, any comments on?
that.
Sister Mary Stephen (21:25)
Yeah, that is a great one. I know someone also who every night and when he's in bed, he is running in bed during the night. Yeah, because he's still on in combat and that's definitely true. So it's in his body and the beautiful thing about this because it's in our body, we can rewire it. We can process it to we kind of like recreate the story and when it comes up in your body, there is a way.
to tap into the story of it. because when it happened, usually you were powerless, but you could change the story. ⁓ I know this boy, Dr. Peter Levine, who does somatic experiencing, he has a story in one of his books of a little boy who had his tonsils taken out. And after that, he was not the same four year old. And so Peter Levine worked with the family.
And he was tied down to get his tonsils taken out because they had to shoot, put him under or whatever. And it was complete trauma for him. So they recreated the story by putting a teddy bear in the bed and okay, now escape from the hospital. So the teddy bear escaped and then, okay, who's turn next? And the boy was like, I don't want to do it. So mom did it. She escaped and the dad was in the bed and he escaped. And then the little boy was like, it's my turn. And then, he was in the bed and then he escaped like,
before the doctors came and he was running and they all ran and he was so happy. So he rewrote that in his nervous system and then he was fine. He was able to process that trauma. And the beautiful thing is he had, know, his parents were friends with Dr. Peter Levine. We didn't have that when we were growing up. So that story, if he didn't have that, little boy, when he's 20, 30, 40, he's gonna be like, I don't wanna go to the hospital.
Like, ⁓ so whenever we react more strongly to a situation, we know it's cause it's stored in our body. And we, we could still like, you could go back if that happened to you, you could go back and rewrite that.
Joey Pontarelli (23:35)
Well, And one of my friends, Eddie, who came in the podcast, he was saying, he had this great line, said, you know, the past lives in the present. So true. And that's what I hear you saying basically is that unless we kind of convince or show, demonstrate to our brain that this trauma is like finished, it's in the past, it's done, it's closed. Then we can, if triggered, just act out of that like that little boy.
Sister Mary Stephen (23:57)
Right. when I was working with a psychologist, I was taking a class with him and he was saying, okay, you need to bring in safety because you you practice therapy when you're taking classes. You we run online and he said to the guy in class, says, can you tell your little boy that we're now grown up, bring in safety. Just tell him we're now grown up. We're not a...
We're not 10 years old or four years old anymore. And I was just kind of laughing and going, that doesn't work, because that's in your head. We need to actually do it in our body. We need to do the somatic exercises in the body. I mean, if you want, I could do a little exercise to demonstrate.
Joey Pontarelli (24:44)
That would be great. Yeah, I would love that. Let's get into it. ⁓ well, first, what is somatic healing and how is it maybe different from other sorts of healings? Let's maybe set that framework. And then had one other question before we dive into the, ⁓ and I know we've talked a lot about it, but if you can just kind of make some summarize, like this is what somatic healing is, and this is how it differs from, ⁓ other methods of healing.
Sister Mary Stephen (25:06)
Yeah,
totally. So somatic, soma is Greek for body, but it's more than just body, it's to be embodied. So with trauma, we go to our head, because it's more safe to be in our head. So ⁓ we cut ourself, our nervous system does that, cuts our body off, because that's where you feel it. We don't want to feel. So when somatic work is, okay, we are going to slowly and gently start to see what's there.
start to learn your own nervous system. Where am I? Many people don't even know. Am I in fight or flight? Am I shut down? I didn't know. I didn't know where I was. And then when you start to work with your body, you start to learn, okay, I'm always in fight or flight, or I'm shut down, or I'm going between those a lot. I rarely am in that middle state where I'm calm and grounded and present. So we do exercises to learn about
to come into our body, drop from your head down into your body, not that your head's bad, it's just let's focus the attention of your head in your body and also process it. So stress does not just go away magically. Like if you look at deer in the wild, they're being traumatized all the time. And so what happens, they hear something and the deer, they're looking around and you see their ears moving and then they,
They orient to it, they look to the danger where the sounds coming to and they go, oh, it was nothing. It was a bird. And then they shake it off. That's a real embodied thing. So we can actually learn to work with our body to shake it off, get that adrenaline out of you. Cause if you don't process the stress, just keeps building. So I have this little cup here. We only have so much capacity for stress and it just builds. It'll just keep building if you don't process.
keep building and building and building. And then you end up living up here and any little thing sets you off. And that's like the source of probably why my parents would yell at each other because they were living up here and any little thing would set them off and us kids were like, why you yelling at each other over lost keys? know, because that's when it becomes too much people rage or they shut down or they act, they act out.
So we need to process the stress in our body just like that deer that shakes it off working with the body.
Joey Pontarelli (27:33)
So it differs in the sense from other therapies which are more like mind-based. Is that the basic thing?
Sister Mary Stephen (27:39)
is a bottom-up approach. So cognitive behavioral therapy is what most therapists will do right now. Or just talking it through with your friend. You could, ⁓ with trauma, there is actually a break in your brain. So you really need to work with the bottom half of your brain, which is more connected with the body. So if you're just doing cognitive behavioral therapy, you're just up here in your frontal cortex. But the answer to rewiring is in your body.
So we need it's so the bottom up approach is let's start with the body because that's actually where the trauma is stored.
Joey Pontarelli (28:17)
I love it. Okay, so let's get into this. And just before we jump in, some people are thinking, this sounds a little woo woo, this sounds a little new agey. What would you say to someone who's maybe thinking that we're going down that path, which according to what you said, we're not, right?
Sister Mary Stephen (28:31)
Okay, yeah, totally. ⁓ So somatic therapy is a neutral tool, just like massage therapy or even physical therapy. When you Google about massage therapy or physical therapy or somatic, you're gonna have a lot of like, you're gonna see a lot of new age and things like that out there. But because these are neutral tools that are working with the body, it really depends on the therapist. What
the therapist, spirituality is going to shine through. So if your therapist is a new age, it's going to come out. If your therapist does reiki, you you might get a massage with someone doing other things on you. so because it's a neutral tool and it's based on science, it is safe. It's safe for Christians, Catholics, because God, he's really the author of somatic work because
He gave us these tools to work with stress in the body. So it's just working with God's design, totally.
Joey Pontarelli (29:33)
Love it. With that then, now that everyone's not freaking out, let us, ⁓ let's get into it. So yeah, what's this exercise like? This episode is sponsored by Blackstone Films. They just released a new documentary called Kenny. It's about an ordinary.
Denver priest who lived like a true father and transformed families and inspired vocations. He would actually wake up at 4.30 every day to do an hour of adoration. His parishioners would ask him to pray for them and they actually got those prayers answered. Some even call them miracles. He had to shepherd his people through the Columbine shooting, if you guys remember that horrible, horrible event. He ate with the families in his parish every night of the week. He hiked with groups of young adults in the Rocky Mountains on Colorado.
and he sat with couples on the brink of divorce, even saving a marriage, which they talk about in the documentary. And so if you want a hopeful model of leadership and fatherhood, something worth watching with maybe your spouse or your small group, watch Kenny. The trailer and the full film are now streaming on formed.org. You could just tap the link in the show notes to watch the full documentary or just the trailer. Again, thanks to Blackstone Films for sponsoring this episode and for telling such an inspiring story that I myself watched and really appreciate it.
Sister Mary Stephen (30:47)
Okay, so I want to first, a good way to get in your body. So we've been talking in our head, so working with our frontal cortex. So let's go ahead and drop into our bodies. And I just invite you, you don't have to do it, just listen and do it later. One easiest way to come into your body is to just move. And so I invite you to do this little exercise, a little silly. I'm gonna have my hands go up and down.
30 times and I will count and then after that and breathe in and out as you're going up and down.
Joey Pontarelli (31:24)
So up and down it's almost like a jumping jack, like you're your hands over your head.
Sister Mary Stephen (31:28)
we're gonna, after 30, we're gonna watch ourself come into our body. So here we go.
And then I invite you to put your hands in your lap. You can close your eyes if that feels safe to you even. And you're just noticing your body. You're coming down. Maybe you feel your heart rates coming up. And just notice your breathing.
Is your breathing a little labored? Are you breathing in your chest or is it deep breathing? You're just noticing. And you feel your feet on the floor.
Maybe you can move your hips even in the chair.
and you're just noticing your body.
And then how do you feel? Like are your shoulders up or are you relaxed? Are they coming down?
And if you notice yourself having a sigh or a yawn or a deep spontaneous breath that's telling you, wow, you're shifting, you're shifting into that middle state of parasympathetic where you're calm, where you're alive and present.
And do you notice any tension in your body? And this is another thing. You could just, and I invite you just to tense up your shoulders. You could even tense your back. I'm clenching my fist and arms and just feel the tension. You're creating all this tension in all your muscles or your upper body and my shoulders are up.
And I'm actually kind of in a fight or flight stance, like I could really fight you right now. And I'm feeling the tension all in my body and we're gonna release it. I invite you to release it very slowly. So just start right now to go ahead and release it. Release those muscles, let them slowly release and get soft. And just let it go, let all that tension go.
And now my shoulders are coming down. And I just got a deep, spontaneous breath. And my shoulders, I've noticed like, wow, my shoulders are even down lower than they were before. And I feel more relaxed. I feel more present. And more myself. And well, that was nice. And just notice your body. Notice how you feel now. So the whole idea is we're focusing.
our attention of our head on our body and getting ourselves in that kind of grounded where you're present and you feel alive.
And another one is we were talking about the vagus nerve which is in charge of your nervous system Just even moving your ears because your vagus nerve is very connected to your ears It's the closest place where you could kind of connect with it. It's very close to the surface of your skin And if you just move your ears like it's circles And you kind of go with it like someone's giving you a massage You don't want to overthink it
Just let your body relax as you're moving that vagus nerve. Because when you stimulate the vagus nerve, it's telling your brain like you're safe.
and it's gonna be okay. I got you. And you could even massage behind your ears, on your neck, because that gets your vagus nerve right under your skull, behind your neck. You kind of just massage it, and you're releasing stress. You're turning off that danger signal in your brain, the amygdala. But yeah, I am safe. And it's gonna be okay.
or even just like putting a hand on your shoulder and feel the tightness. You squeeze that tightness in your shoulders if you have that. Just squeeze it. And then you let it go slowly. I'm slowly letting that grip on my shoulder go. And you could even use language like I got you and it's gonna be okay. You could let go.
I just got a deep spontaneous breath, so I really like my body like that. And I do my other shoulder, I'm just squeezing it. That tightness, I'm squeezing my shoulder there. Just that tight muscle there, trap. And then you let that grip go slowly. And it's gonna be okay, and you can let go. Wow, that felt nice. So that's like a little simple... ⁓
little simple exercise to let things go. And ⁓ if you have any questions, I have one more little one I could do, but maybe you have a thought on.
Joey Pontarelli (37:01)
Yeah, no, it's saying the first thing I was gonna say to anyone. I wasn't participating because sister encouraged me before the show to do it separately because I'm conducting the interview. So I'm in my head and it would be hard for me to switch through. So in case everyone was wondering, but I think sister that's, if anyone's stuck in maybe that fight or flight mode, tense, is that a good time to maybe re-listen to that part of the episode and help them calm down? Like if they can't sleep or I don't know, like.
What you just did was really interesting and it has like such a calming effect. So I'm just curious, like what particular like scenarios would you recommend someone do what you just did and.
Sister Mary Stephen (37:40)
Yes, you could definitely redo that ⁓ when you are tense and definitely before you go to bed because when you go to bed you want to be in that middle state and parasympathetic. That's where you get the most the best sleep, you know, because if you're the fight-or-flight you're gonna have insomnia, shut down. It's not good for your body to be shut down because then you're just gonna wake up really groggy. So definitely doing those exercises and I do have
on my website, a startup kit, where I have three exercises that I go through with people. So that's a great thing, ⁓ a resource. You could do an exercise with me on that too.
Joey Pontarelli (38:20)
No, I love it. And one of the struggles I just remember going through at the end of high school, beginning of college for me was that I would get caught in my head. I would deal with some form of OCD. I was dealing with anxiety. There was a lot happening at that point in my life. And I remember, I think it was the girl I was dating at the time saying something, we always heard that phrase, mind over matter, just kind of mind over matter, push through it or whatever. But that whole idea of like,
body over mind, like get out of your head. Like there's a place for that too. And that was really helpful. That helped me calm down in the midst of that. remember learning a little bit about like grounding exercises. And if you guys aren't familiar, what I'm talking about is like using your senses such as touch to kind of take you out of maybe getting stuck in the loop and a loop in your head or feeling super anxious and kind of toning into like the moment, your environment and
being able to calm your nervous system down. So that was really helpful for me and it sounds like what you just did kind of reminds me of something like that.
Sister Mary Stephen (39:20)
Totally really getting you in your body and calming you down, getting you out of that loop, yeah, totally resonates. That's what this is.
Joey Pontarelli (39:30)
Good
stuff, and I guess we would say too, and correct me if I'm wrong here, that consistent exercise or any sort of movement we would say kind of work towards a similar goal too. Is that right? Because I know when I exercise I feel great afterward. And so is that kind of a similar mechanism?
Sister Mary Stephen (39:47)
Right, exercise is gonna work even with your hormones, getting that cortisol out and giving your whole body message of that you, you're safe. You are not going all in your head. So definitely when you're working with your body, even just taking a walk and getting the sun, being with the trees, the trees give you those ⁓ negative ions that are so healthy for your body and.
So all these systems are connected and so anything that you do to help on a biological level, because if you have a lot going on on a biological level, lot of toxins, even just that puts you in fight or flight. ⁓ but definitely like firefighters, they do a lot of exercise when they're not fighting fires because they're first responders, you know, they have a lot of stress and trauma.
So they're working that out with exercise too.
Joey Pontarelli (40:45)
No, that's so good. Anyway, I love this approach, but you said there was another exercise Did you want to go into that or is it better maybe that people pick that up on your website if they want to do that? It's
Sister Mary Stephen (40:53)
Real quick, think it would be a fun one to do. So whenever you're completely stressed, I'm just backing up a little so you can see. So the stress is built up in our body, all the adrenaline and all our muscles. So if you, I you just to imagine there's a huge stone and that could be your stress. And maybe you're even like super anxious, even a panic attack, you're really feeling it. Just allow.
yourself to feel it in your body. Where are you feeling it? And now let's go ahead and push it. And imagine you're like pushing a huge stone and just go real slow and I invite you to do that. I have my hands at my shoulders and I get there's a huge stone in front of me and you just push real slowly. I'm pushing out forward. I'm going to get rid of that stone. Just push it away.
And maybe it sounds like I'm pushing it on, sweeping it under the carpet. No, I'm working with my body. And it's like a boundary. Like you are not invited in my safe space here. Just push it away. And even if you're like standing, bringing in more movement and when you exercise, you know, you could be lifting weights and just imagine I'm pushing away all that stress and you could push it away, but still hold on to it. No.
Just let it go. Just let it go all the way through and I'm just pushing my arms all the way out and just letting it completely go out of me. then after you do that, even after you exercise, then you sit down and go, okay, like how do I feel? And then come into your body and you kind of ride that release all the way to the end and just let it go.
So when you do it intentionally like that, when you exercise with intention, if you have a lot, and many of us store a lot of stress, that's making it go all the way out your body and out of you like that deer that shakes it off.
Joey Pontarelli (43:04)
Good stuff. And I wanted to mention that, the sympathetic nervous system is the fight or flight mode, or you can be shut down as well, or is, I misunderstand that? And then the parasympathetic is the rest and digest where you're calm and you're able to, yeah, just be without needing to like, yeah, I guess you're just, you're resting. So is that right? The distinction is shut down technically under the sympathetic or what does that fit?
Sister Mary Stephen (43:28)
So there's sympathetic and parasympathetic. And in parasympathetic, you have ventral vagal and dorsal vagal. So the dorsal vagal is you're completely shut down. the ventral vagal, which people also call just parasympathetic. So it's a little confusing. But the more technical term, it's Dr. Steve Porges and the polyvagal theory, is we have sympathetic, which is fight or flight, and parasympathetic.
is your that middle state where you're calm, you're present, and I'm connected, connected to myself, to you, to God. And then dorsal vagal shutdown is the also a part of the parasympathetic. So it's kind of like sympathetic is your engagement to the world. And parasympathetic like I'm going to fight or flight, I'm going to fight you or I'm going to flee. That's or I got to get a lot stuff done. That's my engagement with the world.
And then parasympathetic is me. Like, I'm calm, I'm my best self, or gosh, I really need to shut down. That was a really hard day, and I need a nap today. So I'm gonna shut down, and it's like a healthy shut down. I'm just gonna take a nap, because that was really stressful today. So it's like taking care of yourself, the parasympathetic.
Joey Pontarelli (44:48)
Okay, real talk. you've been trying to get in shape so you feel better physically and emotionally, but nothing is working, you're not crazy. I've been there myself. I recently read a free guide by Dakota Lane, a certified personal trainer who we've partnered with that's helped about a thousand people. And it was really helpful for me personally in the guide. He breaks down the biggest fitness mistakes that we all make like under eating.
overstressing or focusing too much on the scale and it gives really simple practical tips that you could actually use, you can implement today. And so if you're tired of feeling like you're never going to get in shape, just click on the link in the show notes and grab the guide today. It's totally free and it might just be the thing you need to start feeling healthier physically and emotionally. want to touch on briefly. we, did a series a little while back called healing sexual broke.
And the reason we did that is because I saw the stat that said from Dr. Carnes, who's an expert on treating sexual addiction, he said that 87 % of people who are struggling with a sexual addiction come from a broken family, what he calls a disengaged family. And ⁓ that is wild to me, like nine, almost nine out of 10. And so curious, like with your approach to healing, how you would understand that and how there need to be healing brought to that compulsion, that addiction.
a little bit of a story. So in my past, that was my way of coping. When I was a kid, after my parents separated and later got divorced, the kind of sexual compulsion, like pornography, masturbation, things like that, that was my way of coping with the pain. And I think a lot of young people, a lot of people in general are there because probably what started was some sort of adaptive response. was some sort of coping mechanism that they had.
which then continued and became so destructive. And so I'm curious, kind of your thoughts on that whole idea and maybe anything that you can offer to someone who's dealing with that to maybe begin to heal.
Sister Mary Stephen (46:37)
love that question and ⁓ I do work with people with addiction and ⁓ sexual addiction too and like let's just take the shame away from that because yeah it's a sin and I think it's a sin that Jesus just forgives so easily because it's so easy for people to fall into that and it's very tied with your nervous system so with trauma and definitely parents splitting up
super traumatizing for kids and all that's surrounding that. We do go to addictions because it works. It's helpful, like whether it's binge eating, binge watching TV or on your phone or the sexual sins, like it works. It's comforting. It brings comfort. It helps you to ⁓ not feel. So with trauma, we have this inability to be present. It's too hard. It's too hard for a kid to deal with all those emotions.
So when we start to work with our nervous system, we are building capacity to be present. so just notice if you do have addiction or friends who have addiction, like be curious, like what happened before you went into that pattern? Like yesterday, I was super stressed at work, say, and then...
It was too much. Like I was in fight or flight all day. I was so stressed. And then I come home and I'm going to shut down. And then when I go to shut down, that parasympathetic dorsal vagal shut down, that's when the temptation comes because it doesn't feel nice. When you go to shut down, you also get depressed. Like, why bother? I'm so done. I don't, I don't even want, sometimes I could go. don't even want to live anymore. We go to,
And then we go to these addictive behaviors, because it helps. It's comforting. In ⁓ my program, I help people to de-stress, to bring it down. So how about, okay, you have a job that's super stressful. Take pauses during the day and process that stress. Do some push-aways, like I was just showing you. And ⁓ process it in your body, get it out of you, so you bring it down. That way you don't get to overwhelm.
Because when you get to that overwhelmed state, it's so easy to ⁓ go to that pattern of the addiction. Because I cannot, I can't be present. It's too hard. And I need to numb out. I need to do something that's comforting.
Joey Pontarelli (49:15)
No, that makes sense. And I know you have a lot more tools that people can use in those sort of situations. And I know one of them is one of your offerings is the somatic pilgrimages. So I'm curious. That's such a unique term phrase. Explain what is that exactly?
Sister Mary Stephen (49:30)
So I ⁓ offer throughout the year somatic pilgrimages and their virtual Zoom classes. And so that's the intro class. And it's a foundational journey. We meet four times a week for an hour for ⁓ a month, like four weeks. So I teach you a new exercise every day. So you're learning these skills of body awareness and where my nervous system's at and all these different tools so that
whatever journey you go on after that, you have these tools to make you feel safe. So many of us do not feel safe and we don't even realize we don't feel safe. And so because we don't even give ourselves time to think, we have all these coping mechanisms and addictions that help us to not feel that, doesn't our body wants to feel safe? And if it doesn't, we will do things and even acting out the ⁓
will give us some form of safety, but it's sad because often those behaviors make you feel bad after and then you don't feel safe again. So it's like a vicious cycle. So we're learning to build safety in our body and that safety gives you space to do ⁓ deeper work. And then, so that's the first journey, getting that safety in the body and learning about your body for one month.
And that gives you the tools to do my eight month program where we only meet once a week and that we still continue doing somatic exercises because we meet for like an hour, 15 minutes and we start with somatic exercises so we really feel safe. And then we touch in to the deeper healing. We're touching into stories, younger parts of us that are coming up that store the trauma, working with those triggers and also a little
IFS, internal family systems, but in a very somatic embodied way because internal family systems can be all in the head. You're just trying to figure it out. But the answer isn't so there. The answer is in your body. It's stored in the body just like that little four year old. He needed to watch his teddy bear escape from the hospital bed and he had to escape. So we're doing things with our body like the push away and there's many tools.
even movement, like I bring a lot of movement, like it's kind of like a dance therapy where just moving your body helps you to process the trauma like exercise.
Joey Pontarelli (52:04)
Okay, so you have multiple programs and yeah, I'm curious like what sort of transformations have you seen in people's lives? So obviously I imagine there's like the immediate transformation of them maybe feeling more calm but I'm curious if there's been any bigger ones that you've seen in their lives or your life and yeah, that's one question. The other one would be like why might this be particularly helpful for someone listening right now who comes from a really dysfunctional or a divorced family?
Sister Mary Stephen (52:29)
Great
question. Yes, I have people, I have therapists who recommend their own clients to come to me, people who have been stuck for like years, like even ⁓ eight years of talk therapy and they're stuck. And so this work has helped them to realize what's going on, like where is it? And so sometimes they have shared with me that, wow, this has been the missing link.
I've been doing therapy for even 30 years and what I did with you in three weeks has just been transformational. I've been able to get off my anxiety meds, they say, and just be normal again and move on with life. And some of them I see the growth, I see them on Zoom, they're completely shut down. And ⁓ after that nine month program, they're like, wow.
they're a completely different person. Like they come to life and they're able, whereas in the beginning they may have disassociated when we're working with younger parts of them in the class and ⁓ they're like, wow, I was able to work with my younger part and not shut down. I was able to do this, do this work and I feel like even with the movement, bringing in movement and ⁓ the dance, it's kind of dance but kind of like just expressing your body. need to
move our body to get it out. They're like, wow, I felt such a release. I've never had such a release. just completely transforming their lives. I've seen so many. Yeah. Thank you, Joey.
Joey Pontarelli (54:06)
I can see how this would be helpful for so many people, but I'm curious in particular for young people who come from divorced or highly dysfunctional families, or maybe mom and dad do stay together, but things are really tense and hard at home. Is there anything you'd say in particular why it would be helpful for them in that situation?
Sister Mary Stephen (54:25)
Yes,
I think in doing this journey, we start to, ⁓ and focusing on your own body and where you're at, you will start to see, wow, what I see in my parents, I have those same problems too. I think when we're young and in the family, the focus is more on them and why can't my parents be better or whatever. But then we start to see when we do this work, we see like, wow, we all have stuff
We all have trauma and this is just my nervous system. It's not because my parents are broken. Like no one's broken, no one needs to be fixed. We just have stress that we need to process. We need to get that cup coming down. And wow, my parents have not done their work and they're just acting out because their cup is full. And it's not, cause I think a lot of the problem is we kind of internalize it, especially like
It's my fault that my parents got divorced. think everyone whose parents are divorced, there's a little kid inside that if I was better, or if, and it's never, it's never the kid's fault. It's just, you know, we were in a broken world and everyone has things that they need to process and our parents weren't taught that. And maybe with me going through this journey,
they will see a change in me and they'll be curious like, yeah, maybe I should do that. I could have compassion on my parents and yeah, maybe they weren't taught this and they have a lot of trauma. So it of like brings down the bar and you start to see like, be more like compassionate and understanding of others and that can go a long way. More peace in the family.
Joey Pontarelli (56:15)
Yeah, no.
Totally, which I'm sure can lead to so many other things because the three buckets of problems we see young people from broken families facing is that they deal with a lot of emotional problems, right? They're dysregulated and they struggle to deal with all those difficult emotions. That often leads them into bad habits, like you said, addictions, compulsions to kind of feel better.
And then that will result in so often relationship struggles where they really struggle to hold down a relationship to have a healthy relationship. And if they go on and get married, they might take that unhealthy relationship, which then becomes a really struggling or broken marriage, which then becomes a weak broken family. And so if you want to change that story, you can, but you need to heal. And this is one way you could do it. So I'm really grateful for the work you're doing sister. And I'm interested to learn more myself and
even get involved if I can. so, ⁓ go through it myself is what I mean. I'm curious, you know, is there anything else you wanted to mention that you offer and then how can people get what it is that you offer like the Pilgrim Regis and other things?
Sister Mary Stephen (57:22)
a website, restorativecatholic.com. so it's funny, it's similar to yours, restored. Good word. So yeah, definitely we need restoration. so you could go on my website and it has the different classes I offer. I also offer one-to-one coaching and you could just go on my website and get paid for a strategy call and I will talk with you.
to see, how could we strategize this and what do you need? So just getting that individual one-on-one is very helpful. And just to get to know me, like, wow, can I work with her and can this benefit me? And seeing how that could play out is so helpful. So I've even had people ask CHAP GPT, like, who should I go to for embodied healing who's faithful?
And Sister Ray Steven comes up. So yeah, and then she booked a call with me and it was great just to talk with someone and to see like, is this right for you? And yeah, so that's the best way. And also I do have the resources, like the startup kit where I have three, like about 25 minute exercises. And if it feels like, yeah, that's helpful, then definitely you're totally welcome.
to come on a somatic pilgrimage or to do just the one-on-one coaching with me.
Joey Pontarelli (58:51)
No, it's awesome. And just to clarify the startup kit and the initial console, are those free at this time? I know maybe they'll change in the future, but the
Sister Mary Stephen (59:00)
The
start up kit is free and the initial coaching is $27.
Joey Pontarelli (59:07)
Okay, that could change in the future everyone. don't, this, if you're listening to this years in the future, don't be surprised if that changes, but okay, good to know. And that totally makes sense. Great sister. So good to have you. And I hope I wish you much success in your work. And we share the same passion to just help people heal and grow and thrive and live life to the fullest. So I wanted to give you the last word.
What final advice or encouragement would you offer to everyone listening, especially maybe a young person who comes from a really broken family, who maybe feels hopeless and really needs to heal, what final encouragement would you give them?
Sister Mary Stephen (59:40)
I think I'd say that, like I said before, really you are not broken and you don't need to be fixed and there's no label we need to put on you. We don't label in this mode of healing that, wow, I'm like everyone else. I have things I need to process and let's just do it. Let's do it together. And then...
You could become your best self, live your best life and break the cycle like you always say, Joey. Totally, we can break the cycle. so it starts with us and we can rewire. There is hope. There is hope, so much
Joey Pontarelli (1:00:25)
That wraps up this episode of this podcast. If this helped you, feel free to subscribe and rate or review the show. You avoid missing future episodes and help us reach more people too. In closing, always remember you are not doomed to repeat your family's dysfunction. You can break that cycle and build a better life. And we are here to help. And keep in mind the words of CSU who said, you can go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.
