Use Tapping For Chronic Illness & Lead A Life Of Purpose

Introduction to Trauma in the Body 0:00

Welcome to this interview on the Biology of Trauma Summit 3.0 I'm your host, Dr. Aimie. And this interview is gonna be a special and unique one. I'm excited for this one because we're talking about literally how trauma gets stored in the body and specifically in the autonomic nervous system. And so how we can use different modalities. And in this interview, we'll be talking about touching on the acupuncture points, meridian points and the somatic work using tapping. And we're gonna hear the story of Jennifer Partridge who used this for her colitis and excited for that. But first of all, just this idea of trauma being stored in the body.

When we talk about that, when we say that this is not just a hypothetical theoretical idea. This is not just a saying, oh, trauma gets stored in the body, literally the patterns get wired into our autonomic nervous system so that it becomes our default operating system. So if you think of the autonomic nervous system, its role, its job is to keep us alive, specifically to keep our kidneys functioning, our digestive system, working our heart, beating our lungs, breathing. But there's so much more to that.

Because if that's all you understand of the autonomic nervous system, you're going to miss the fact that it, the autonomic nervous system tells our body how to live. So it's not just telling our heart to beat, it's telling it how fast to beat, how hard to beat. It's not just telling our lungs to breathe. It's telling our lungs how fast to breathe, how slow to breathe, how shallow to breathe in order to keep us alive and keep everything, what we call homeostatic in our system, in terms of the, the blood pressure and the even the electrolyte levels and the CO2 levels and the oxygen levels.

So it is constantly monitoring this and it's telling our body how to live, how to operate. So then here you have trauma and what does that mean? Trauma actually changes the messages of how our body is to live and operate so that our autonomic nervous system when it is in that trauma response is getting a very different message that it's passing on the body and how the body is to live than when it's in a not trauma state. And so when trauma gets stored in the body, that's why it will drive disease, illness, physical health issues because it is literally telling our body how to live, how to survive, not just to survive.

So this is why I've developed this biology of trauma lens that we can truly understand and

Jennifer's Colitis and Tapping Journey 3:03

get more of a grasp of how trauma becomes our biology, not just psychology and it's so helpful. Sometimes they have a one on one health coaching session through this lens of trauma is my autonomic nervous system driving disease because it's in a chronic trauma response. What does that even mean? And so this sounds like it might be helpful to you to have a one on one health coaching session with a biology of trauma health coach, someone who has trained with me, seeing clients with me. And I still see actually most review most of these, most of the the cases that come in, but being able to have a health coaching session through the lens of trauma, then you can have that.

You can actually go to my website. In fact, let me just share that with you right now. If you go to my website trauma healing accelerated dot com over here in the top right corner, you will see biology of trauma professionals and a trauma focussed health coaching session. And that is where you can come and have a trauma focussed health coaching session through the lens of trauma. Let me see what is my autonomic nervous system doing and tell me what are the recommendations that I can do to get it into a different operating system so that it's feeding health to my system, not trauma and disease.

And with that, we are gonna go into this interview on how trauma gets stored in the body and how tapping can help with this. And to do that, I've invited my good friend Jennifer Partridge and she is a world renowned tapping, expert author, speaker, and facilitator of what she says is human potential. And so she has in this interview, she'll actually explain how she uses tapping, not just to relax the system, but actually to enliven the system and help you tap into your, your purpose, you what, what you are supposed to be living, what, what you're supposed to be doing with your time and your life.

So coming back from a background of deep trauma herself, Jennifer first started exploring tapping as a way to heal her own wounds. We talk a little bit about inner child wounds and the colitis that she experienced. The outcome was so profound that she has made it her life's purpose to empower others through tapping and the gift of emotional mastery that it brings. So with that, let's jump into this interview on tapping and store trauma in the body. Jen, thank you so much for joining me and you have quite the interesting story.

One that I am very curious about as well. I've met you in person, but to hear your story and specifically then how you've been able to use tapping and and and your healing process to help colitis. So tell me, tell me about that. When did you get diagnosed with colitis? What what happened? Yes. So about seven or six years ago, I was in a stressful time in my life. Um It was, there was a lot of stress happening with my partner around his business. And uh I realized that I was also processing a lot of his stress through my body and being an empath and many healers can probably relate. Um Often the tendency if you are new to healing is to process it through your body without even realizing it.

Because often that's what we do as Children. And that's what I did as a child. I would process my father's stress through my body. And so when my partner started going through a very stressful time, I also started to physically have symptoms and I developed a lot of pain in my intestinal tract. And then maybe this was happening for about four weeks before it started bleeding. And I had a lot of blood when I was going to the toilet and a lot of inflammation, a lot of intensity. And so all of that combined with the stress around me.

And luckily I knew tapping and I was like, ok, well, I'm gonna try tapping, I'm gonna use it on this. And what I realized through the process was, although I was having a lot of physical symptoms and the doctors were wanting to put me on a lot of prescription medications and a lot of the prescription medications were always saying, oh, this is a lifetime disease. That you're always going to have. And I just, I couldn't really sit with this as a lifetime thing. And so I started doing a lot of emotional work around it.

And in the process, I realized what it was actually connected to, not only was it connected to what was happening in my outer environment and the stress I was processing through my body, but it was actually connected to something much deeper, which was an unresolved aspect of myself, of feeling like I needed to process someone emotion through my body or other people's emotions. And that took me into some inner child healing where I got to really heal some of my patterns with my father. And uh the tendency I had as a child to process his emotions through my body. When I was able to do all of my inner child healing work around that I was able to get into a place of deeper strength and heal.

And also let go a lot of a lot of my sponge way of healing and actually create boundaries for myself, energetic boundaries. And when you really create a healthy, energetic boundary, because I think sometimes when people have boundaries, it can be a little defensive, which is kind of the swinging pendulum, right? So it's like, oh I'm like taking it all in. Therefore, I'm gonna defend myself now. But when you actually do something like tapping, you come into the deep wisdom and I was able to heal my inner child to get to a level of like, no, I'm holding a field around my body where I don't need to absorb other people's energies.

I don't have to take on other people's stress and I can create my own harmony inside my body. And as that happened, the collider started to heal and I combined tapping with a very clean, simple diet and over the pa place of about two months, the bleeding completely

Inner Child Healing and Boundaries 9:05

stopped and my body started to heal and that was all done naturally. I decided to put the medication to the side. I just really do this as an experiment. And now I, my body is great. I don't have any prescription medications. I was able to really use eft tapping to support myself to heal my own body and heal my own energy, Jen. This is amazing. You are amazing. And I hate the experiment. Right? And this is part of the process. I mean, this has certainly been my journey as well that we self experiment.

And when we're given a lifelong diagnosis, like I was as well and we're like, no, I'm not, I'm not going to align with that. I'm not going to take that on as this is me now. And this is something lifelong. What can I do? And we start self experimenting and it's fascinating but not surprising that it has led us both down a very similar path. Right? Oh, actually, there are emotions and unprocessed emotions and trauma at driving this not to say that it's only that, but that is a factor that needs to be brought into the equation.

And it's fascinating that even just this morning, I was telling you that I was teaching a class just before uh meeting with you here and it was on the one of the six different types of attachment pain. And that one understand me was the one that we cover today. And it is the one that is associated with colitis. And it's those who are more sensitive and are impasse as Children. And so I know. All right. So it's, it's fascinating that again, like we're, we're coming at it from different angles, never having talked to each other about this before. But yet we're arriving at the same conclusion that there's inner child work that needs to be done.

Yes, absolutely. And so much of the time when there is a trauma that happens when we're Children and we don't get the love and the support that we needed in that moment of impact, we'll just store it in the background of our subconscious and it creates patterns and fear based systems and ways of dealing with reality, limiting habits and things like that. And then later on in life, we seem to attract similar kinds of situations to bring it to the surface again. So it can finally be healed. So the body and the brain is very intelligent in that way that it will store it in the system as a way to try to protect you often. It's like I'm gonna store it just in case I need to be aware of it in the future. But what's actually happening is you're storing it, you'll attract something similar again and you'll have that next opportunity to parent yourself to heal yourself in the ways that you didn't get parented or healed when you were a child. And it's fascinating to see how so many people are not, don't have this conscious awareness of these internal messages, even these belief systems that this inner child pain, that their body is even protecting them from that. Yeah.

And it's like, no, no, no, I've, I've got this, I'm gonna, I'm gonna keep it kind of walled off down here. I'm gonna create my disease process so that we have this almost as a stored memory in case we need to use it again in the future. And then that way that is supposed to allow us to just focus on getting through life and functioning. But it, it starts to create a, a disconnect. And then when we start to have more and more symptoms that we can't ignore. This literally is sometimes the only way in which our body has to communicate with us now.

Yes, absolutely. And I think sometimes as Children, we also uh numb out the memories as well. Um because it's so painful when it happens, the only way that we know how to deal with it is to numb the memories. And so a lot of the time people that have trauma have also numbed trauma as well, they can't fully remember what happened. They know something happened or they're aware of it, but they're not in touch with it. And so when I teach tapping, it allows us to go into those memories and to locate those memories and to create safety because when the trauma happened, it didn't feel safe.

And so the first step is creating safety to even access what's buried under there. And then when we can create that safety and access it, then we can finally bring it the love that it needs. And let's go there because you are so right on when it comes to, we have to actually create the safety first to even be able to access these memories. So how does tapping? How do you create that safety with tapping as a first step? Mhm Well, tapping is really powerful because the script that you deliver someone. So no one has experienced tapping before you're blending modern psychology in Chinese medicine and the modern psychology aspect of it.

You're having the client or you're having yourself say out loud, what your feelings, what your emotions are, what your beliefs are, and then you speak about your memories. And so if someone is numb to what they're feeling, what their memories are there are certain scripts that you can use that create safe could just be tapping on your chest and saying out loud,

How Tapping Creates Safety 14:22

I'm in a safe place right here right now to look at this, it is safe to be here and just affirming the safety as you start a session to create that container that yeah, I'm here in my room. I'm in a safe place. This is a time I've dedicated to look at this. It is safe to look at this and creating that field at the start. So that then what reveals itself, you know that you're held in the process. Hm I feel like that is such an important piece and imagery for people to have is that as things surface, like you really are creating the container to hold it so that it's not just coming up and overwhelming us, but no, like I've created the safety so that whatever does come up, it's, it's held.

Yes, exactly. And then oftentimes when you do have the safety, the individual will feel safe to really go into it and then a lot of stuff can come out. And so then when a lot of stuff is coming out, then you create safety in that process right there. So slow, deep breaths through the process as the emotion comes out or even reaffirming, even though this is really overwhelming right now, I'm in a safe place and continuing to bring that safety even as all that emotion comes out in a process as well.

So, I'm curious, do you see other, um, people who use tapping? Are they, are they using it in a way that you see is, ah, it's not the best, it's not the best uh way to provide that support and safety to the body. Are there common or maybe uncommon tapping practices that are actually not promoting that safety for memories to surface? I think as a tapping coach, there's always deeper levels that you can go into to hold spaces of safety. And I actually think it's the most important part in a tapping session.

Um some schools, you know, are short schools so they may not give all of the depth of what it takes to work with someone going through a massive trauma. And so that's why I really love to offer long extended programs to really support individuals in knowing how to hold space for some of the most difficult things, everything from sexual abuse to suicidal tendencies and things like that. This is the time when you really need to be able to show up and hold a container of safety. And then there's always a mirror I feel with a practitioner between someone who's also done a lot of safety work within themselves as well. And therefore they know how important it is to really be present versus rushing along. And I think one of the perhaps pitfalls that people fall into when doing a tapping session is they just move very fast.

Um But really, if we can slow the process down to be with each individual and emotion, then every emotion gets to be met by that love and gets to be held in that love. So really slowing down the process, looking at every frame of the memory piece by piece holding love there going to the next one. And so really doing a slow process really helps clear it all out as well as create that deeper level of safety. And you really do go slow and create that experience for every emotion to be met with love because I've heard it with someone who's had a session with you and she said, I had no idea that we could go for that long.

I have so much work to do and it, and it feels and it feels safe. Yes. Well, the thing is with tapping out there in the world. If you're just getting into tapping, you might find a 15 minute or even a one minute tap online and they're often great for lifting your energy, giving you motivation, making you feel really good in the moment. But if you really want to get into the root and really find where all of this is coming from and heal it from the root, so it doesn't repeat in your life, then doing a longer session is really essential so that you can take your time.

And so normally a session like that could be anywhere between one hour to 90 minutes. And that's when you're really doing the deep inner healing work around your inner child around memories. And it's not as surface level as what you might find online where it's a one minute or a 15 minute tap. And so as you were working with your own colitis, what were some of the specific things

Neurobiology of Tapping and Nervous System Regulation 18:48

that you encountered along that path that you felt were, were really significant for helping the colitis resolve? Mhm So the system was in overload. There was so much fear inside of my system. And oftentimes when people are using tapping, they're using it for fight flight or freeze response. And this is uh when you're in that mode, the Amygdala in your brain is going on hyper overdrive. And so that's sending cortisol into your body that's sending a lot of those hormones that are creating panic and fear as well as hurting your physical body as well.

So all of that was happening for me, I was going through a, a panic response inside my body. And so when I started tapping on it, I was able to find peace. And when I'm finding peace, all of those fear based systems and all of the fear based hormones that are pumping into the body cease because your state of consciousness, your emotional system is shifting. And when that's shifting, you start pumping good hormones into your body. And your body starts to find new levels of peace. Your nervous system starts to relax and everything can come back into alignment.

So that's what I found was happening for me. And whenever I tap, that's really what's taking place. And how is it that tapping is actually helping to change the autonomic nervous system? We, we see it happening. So we know that it's happening. Do we, do we really understand the, the mechanism and the neurobiology of all that shifting? Yeah. So there's been lots of different kinds of studies. So uh neurolinguistics, what's happening inside your brain when something outside of you happens that triggers you that creates that response of fight or flight. And then all of the system gets intense emotions and fears coming up. What happens is when you start bringing love, empathy and acceptance to those fear based systems inside the brain that are shooting back, belief systems, emotional patterns, habits. When those start to get met by love and empathy, what they've seen inside the brain is like you've got these two synapses say in your brain that are shooting back and forth, it's a trigger response and it's shooting another response to another part of your brain.

What they've seen is when you start bringing love and empathy to those triggers, all of the protein bonds that are gluing that synapsis in place that's firing out that system start to melt away. And then the synapsis inside the brain opens up and then you can rewire the brain. So you start to rewire different ways of seeing and believing. And because you're soaking all of that fear and love, you start to wire a system of seeing through love. And so that's changing inside your brain chemistry as well, that then informs your whole body on how to respond to.

So that's what's happening inside the brain. And then you combine that with the somatic work that you're doing. So you're basically stimulating different points on your body. And these points are actually, they've shown where the acupuncture points are, which is where we're percussive tapping. So if you've ever had acupuncture before we're tapping on those points, so what they've shown is actually in science where those acupuncture points are, there's nerve bundles. And so you're actually sending signals not only into the meridian system. And the meridian system are the, have these energy lines that bring in oxygen and prana and life force.

And so if there's a trauma, those en energy lines get blocked and then it starts to create disease, which is why in tapping or in acupuncture, you place the needle on those points, you tap on those points and it clears out that charge. So you're also doing that and then you're sending signals into the nervous system as well that it can relax. But those nerve nerve bundles can also relax as well. So the whole nervous system starts to relax the energetic body relaxes as well. And then you're taking these long deep breaths and the method that I teach, I really encourage deep breathing as well.

Some methods don't do that so much. But when you are able to bring oxygen into the system, after clearing out a block, that energy runs through the energy body and your whole body starts to restore itself. So you're working on the physical body, you're working on the emotional body, you're working on the brain and then you bring in the spiritual component, which is all about love, compassion and empathy. And that's where I feel we're all headed, right? When we're going out of fight or flight or freeze, we're coming back to a state of love. And so you're bringing compassion, forgiveness, love into the system and everything starts to heal itself.

And just as I think of the, the biology of love and the frequencies and the vibrations and on down to a cellular level that really is what will be helpful for kind of all physical conditions and symptoms, right? Is being able to just shift the whole nervous system out of the that fear based process to, to love and the cellular processes that happen when we're in that place. What are some of the other physical illnesses, symptoms, conditions that you've seen benefit from those you've worked with, with tapping? Mhm Well, it can really help with so many different kinds of things. Um any type of illness that you're working through will always have an emotional component to it.

So you can apply it to many different types of illnesses as well. Um My sister, uh who had cancer was going through uh a lot of emotion surrounding her diagnosis and um that diagnosis that they had given her and sometimes they had told her that she was actually going to die. Um And those kinds of beliefs put in the system really created a lot of distrust in her body. And so when she started working with tapping, and I, I taught her some tapping, she was able to clear out some of that out of stimuli that was telling her that her body wasn't gonna live, that she had so many, so much time, all of that and she was able to take her power back.

And so she's, she's doing amazing now. She doesn't have cancer anymore.

Tapping for Illness, Purpose, and Healing 24:58

And um she really worked with tapping in the later stages of her healing to um take her power back from thinking that she needed to do something because the doctors then kept telling her that they needed to take different organs out of her body. And every time she would, that would go in, uh you would take your breast out now and take some. She had so many different types of organs taken out. And after discovering she was like, no, my body is well, my body knows how to heal itself. And she stepped into a new level of power and I think it has a lot to do with our inner belief. And so any area that you're working on, whether it's a headache or whether you're um you've had an accident, all of it's related to emotions. So I also had a friend uh that had an accident and then she did some tapping on the accident and what was happening inside her before the accident took place. And usually when an accident takes place, you're not con you're not present, you're caught up in your mind, you're away from the present moment. And so tapping on what was happening just before the accident took place. Oh, there was something emotional distracting me from being fully present and fully aware. And so it's amazing how you can connect accidents, you can connect, connect diseases, you can connect all sorts of illnesses even when COVID happened. And lots of people were having COVID.

I feel like it was a huge awakening for the planet. And I tapped with a lot of people that were going through COVID as well. And there were always things that were happening, needed to shift in their life and the body was screaming out for their attention. And so I feel like those that went through COVID had an opportunity to really look at their life if they did the inner work for why they were feeling sick. I feel like there was a paradigm shift happening collectively across the planet that was inviting everyone to look at their life and what really mattered, what they really valued, what they really wanted to stand for in their life and create those energetic shifts and then heal their body as a result of it.

And we can really see any and all illnesses having that opportunity. Uh Every, every condition is an opportunity to eval evaluate your life. Like is, is your life the way that you want it to be. Exactly. Yeah. And I think if we're not living the life that we want to have, then things start to shut down. You know, it's less inspiring. We don't feel as good about ourselves and when we're, and then we're pumping all of those toxic hormones into our system. You know, if you're dealing with depression and things like that, the body is getting overloaded because you're not feeling inspired by your life.

And if you can get into a place of inspiration for your life, the whole system shifts as well, you start to, you feel better, you pump really good hormones into your system, you feel energized because you're inspired. So I think tapping for me is all about clearing out what's not inspiring you about your life and what's not feeling good so that you can come into a place of feeling good and actually live the life that you are actually designed to live, that your soul wants to live so that you can create the things that you wanna create, do the things you wanna do have the kinds of relationships that you wanna have and feel powered.

And so what I hear you saying, which I absolutely love and this is why I love you is that tapping is not just to relax the system, happiness. Also to step into your power is to be able to clear out those things that don't belong in your life that aren't inspiring in your life and to be able to move into, into action and movement. It's not just for relaxing totally. I think if we think about like our life on planet earth and we're here in these human bodies, we should have a really good time. We should be enjoying ourselves.

We have these things that we love to do these missions that we like to create and there's so much that can come through us and be animated through our life. And if that's not happening, then things will start to shut down. And so tapping is an amazing tool. Yes, to relax, but to also invite our highest potential in so that we can have an amazing human experience. So let's take a a professional. So there are many in the audience who are taking my professional training program and becoming a biology of trauma professional.

And what would you say for them that they need to know about tapping as they are learning additional tools to become truly like the best trauma informed professional. Mhm Beautiful. Well, I'm not sure what you include in your, in your training, but really bringing in different modalities to support. So even in my trainings and things like that, like offering meditation or offering visualization, like we can pull from so many different things. And I think tapping is an amazing thing because uh you're not only working with an understanding of the science and how it's working with your biology, but you're working with the energetic system, you're working with a 5000 year old system that comes from Chinese medicine and understanding how the energetic body works and how we can also work with the energetic body and how that actually communicates and works with your biology and works with your brain as well. And I think we're in a really exciting time right now on the planet where both of those worlds are meeting.

So medical professionals are connecting to some of these alternative methods and these alternative methods are now being backed by science and it's not just this woo woo thing, but there is a beautiful synergy between them and to have these understandings and to have a knowledge of how the energetic body works and how that affects our brain is a really beautiful way to bring in that connection between anyone that's a doctor or that's a a therapist or a psychologist or people that are working in more of the mainstream to bring in this aspect as well.

And you're right, we have these other modalities and it's when we bring them in and they can synergistically help each other. And that's when I say that, you know what, what has been the the natural or the expected healing journey can now be accelerated when we just bring in pull from these different elements that are all helping the body move towards a place of healing. And I think of you with the colitis and it was the tapping and the simple clean diet,

Advice for Trauma-Informed Professionals and Closing 31:28

right? And that, that combination of the biology piece and this energetic and emotional piece. And then that's when for you, the the magic happened. Yes. And then the western medicine which helped me diagnose it as well. You know, getting, getting my body studied and finding out what's going in there and getting all of the tests done was really powerful for me to actually understand what's going on inside my body as well. So I'm really grateful for that and I was able to bring in those different pieces and then choose which ones feel best aligned for me. And I think for everyone out there, you know, there's a different path for everyone but being able to look at all the paths and then make a choice on what, what will work best for you.

Yeah. So for those in the audience who have had a diagnosis from uh the medical side of things and not sure where they are with that diagnosis, but they've received some kind of diagnosis and it's a chronic illness of some sort, usually inflammation based, right? Is, is usually the ones related to emotions and trauma. What would be your words of encouragement and hope for them for their path forward. First of all, to trust the process and to start to listen to yourself and listen to your emotions. Don't try to avoid them, be with your emotions, bring them love, bring them compassion. Hold yourself as if you're holding a, an innocent child that's going through a process and get the support, hold yourself in safety and find modalities that really support you to not only heal the physical component but to heal the emotional component that's coming up for you as well.

And to do a life review, give yourself the time the space to really reflect on your life and what you really want to shift and what's being called for in this moment in your life to change. Because I think oftentimes when I was going through colitis, I later saw it as an awakening. I an awakening into uh my next step in evolution. And I gave myself eight months of really relaxing and going inward and doing my inner process. And out of that, I got lots of visions for my life and I would say before colitis and after colitis, my whole life changed and actually my business grew and, and my vision for my business. So even though I might have felt like I was like overwhelmed with work, at one point, I was doing way too much and it allowed me to simplify and even ask myself, what do I really want to do?

What do I really want to create? And then after healing, everything shifted, things became si simpler but yet more powerful as well. And so giving yourself space to really reflect and give yourself as much as you can. Because it's a powerful time for your awakening. I love that it's a powerful time for your awakening and your life before and after colitis looks very different. Thankfully, right? Like thankfully, this, this was the gift in it for you. It sounds like absolutely. And I think we can do that with anything.

You know, if we really look for the gift, we find the wisdom in it. And that wisdom helps us create a different perspective on how we want to move forward in life. I love the hope, I love the hope, the solutions, the tools and I hope that you are walking away also with solutions and hope from this interview and that we can, we're not stuck, we're not stuck with our diagnoses, but there's always more that we can do. And so much of this for a lot of us has been through self experimenting. And what can you do to start self experimenting?

I invite you to take my 21 day journey as a way to experiment and become the expert in your own nervous system. So you can understand your body, understand its reactions, understand its triggers, understand when it has gone into that trauma place. That is all what we do in the 21 day journey where I teach you 21 different exercises, somatic exercises for connecting and shifting your emotional states in your autonomic nervous system. And of course, just like in this interview, we start with safety, that felt sense of safety. So if that sounds like something you would want inner safety, that felt sense of peace and safety, then come join me because that's where we start. And then we also move into a felt sense of support and then safe, expansion and joy.

And with that, thank you for joining me for this interview. Please do remember that you can purchase all of the recordings so that you can have these and watch them as many times as you want after the summit. And you don't need to stress about watching all of them during this summit because you'll have all of them at your own fingertips. And thank you for joining me for this interview. I'm your host for this summit, Dr. Aimie. And this is the Biology of Trauma Summit where we are exploring the Trauma disease I will see you on the next interview.