The Need For Women-Centric Medicine and Connection For Better Health

Welcome to the Satiated Podcast, where we explore physical and emotional hunger, satiation and healing your relationship with your food and body. I'm your host, Stephanie Mara Fox, your Somatic Nutritional Counselor.

At the beginning of my private practice, I'll own that I was often exploring what someone could do to self regulate. This might have looked like finding ways to express themselves, going on solo walks, journaling, and so forth. Now, none of these things are wrong. When you're feeling like you can navigate what's showing up on your own, it can be great to know what your resources can be that don't include other people. What I've found over the years though is that often coregulation needs to come first before self regulation. When you're constantly dysregulated, it can be fairly difficult to self soothe because you don't have enough safety occurring within yourself to send the feedback to your body that everything is going to be alright. Sometimes we need another body or being to relay to your body that you are safe. Your parasympathetic nervous system is known as your rest and digest and safety and connection state. Sometimes, food is coming in as a way to reconnect, to send different input to your nervous system that you are safe, and to connect with something outside of yourself to feel a little less alone. It can be scary to go out and start connecting with others again when your past wounds potentially occurred with other people. I chat about this and more today with Kymber Maulden.

Kymber is a women's nutrition consultant and neurosomatic trauma coach who works with women struggling with C-PTSD and chronic illness to recover, repattern, and improve their overall quality of life. Her work is geared towards helping women eat, function, and live in ways that resolve their symptoms and cater to greater self-understanding, regulation, and sanity. Through her years of nutrition science education, coach training, somatics, and real-world experience, she has found that food and lifestyle choices offer the greatest levers to the sanity we’re all seeking. We chat about the exclusion of women-centered research on health, the role of safety and connection in food and trauma recovery, the impact of loneliness on health, rebuilding connections after experiencing trauma, setting boundaries, and growing in personal agency.

While you wait for the next Somatic Eating® Program to begin, did you know that I have two self paced courses you can take? The Somatic Eating® Intensive even comes with a week worth of 1:1 support from me. You can go to stephaniemara.com/learn to learn more and sign up. Now, welcome Kymber!

I am so glad that you're here and really excited to have you on the podcast right now, and I'm really looking forward to getting to know you and your history and how you got into the work that you do and all the things that we're going to talk about today. So let's just first dive in with a little bit around you and how you created the work that you're doing and where you're at now with your work and your history and getting here.

Kymber Maulden 03:44

Thank you, Stephanie. I'm also really happy to be here. And so where to begin? So I like to introduce myself going back a little bit and explain that my career and education background before I started working in health was in early child development and birth work, and did that all throughout my 20s, and actually did that while I was going through school thinking I was going to become a dietitian. And once I got my science degree and kind of did some research into dietetics programs, I realized, and this at this point, I had done enough like self healing and exploration of holistic health to realize that I didn't fully align with the dietetics programs, and so I took my degree, went to a private nutrition school, got a nutrition certification, got a health coaching certification, kind of just continued to educate myself because I wasn't really sure what to do with it. I didn't have a business degree. Didn't really know how to start a business. So it was a slow process, and my business didn't really get off the ground until shortly before the pandemic. The first year I ran my business, I again, was still kind of figuring out what I'm doing, and was working with everyone, anyone that kind of came to me I would work with, and it wasn't until I decided to work exclusively with women, that my business really took off and I started to develop it, I would say, more of a focus in my work. And that was around like, yeah, like, around 2020, I wrote a full length eBook about the importance of eating animals for women's health, after having, like, long history of veganism and just all kinds of different diets and eating disorder and stuff. And so wanted to take a look at that through the lens of women's health, since women are much more prone to those things, to be vulnerable to those things. And then I built a women's health course, which involved quite a bit of research as well. Ran that for a few years, actually, just closed that out recently, at the end of 2022 having worked pretty intensely full time with women at that point, and have seen a lot of patterns in women that somewhat reflected my own patterns as well. So a lot of like, you know, dieting in their history, eating disorders, body dysmorphia, under eating and then seeing a lot of the nervous system components to it as well, like especially running an htma, which is one of the main tasks that I work with, that stands for hair tissue mineral analysis. And in those tests, we can look at like how a woman's nervous system is impacting her metabolism based on her mineral levels. So I was seeing these patterns over and over again, and I realized, like, there's some deeper patterns that are being ran that are affecting their ability to be well. And that's when I started studying trauma. And so 2022, 2023 was, like, pretty intense study for me, like I slowed my business down tremendously, redirected my focus towards focusing on complex PTSD, so complex trauma and attachment and nervous system functions and somatics, and then began building my business back up. I would say, I never, you know, closed it down entirely, but started refocusing and rebranded myself as well at the beginning to mid 2024 and now here I am. I work exclusively with women's health, but more taking a lens of trauma and nervous system function. I still work with nutrition, I still work with the metabolism, but I work with it more through the lens of what's disrupting it at the deeper level. Here I am today.

Stephanie Mara 07:19

Yeah, I hear it's been quite a journey. I also hear just your passion for supporting women, and I find that, as I agree with you, that the cultures that we live in give such mixed messages. And even you know, as I've been doing research for my PhD a lot of the time, that most of the research that's being done is being done on men or a woman who's specifically in her follicular phase, which is when where our bodies are most like a man's body. And so we have such a lack of focus on, you know, even in our research on what women's bodies need and what they need throughout their cycle, and what they need through every transition in their life. And so I'm really excited with the focus that has drawn you toward, like, yeah, how do we really support specifically women's bodies and thriving.

Kymber Maulden 08:11

Yeah. And it's that particular topic of like, needing more women centric medicine or women centric research, is definitely like a soapbox that I tend to climb on. And even just yesterday, you know, I often have women in my community, like on Instagram, will send me things like reels that remind me of them, of things that I say. And I had a woman in my community, an ex client, send me a reel that was about the first female test dummy for cars was recently released, and this, just like, took me down a little bit of a tangent of, like, researching car design and statistics around that, and the fact that, like, we've had cars for, you know, 100 plus years or whatever, and that entire time, despite all of the technological innovations, medical innovations, we've still been driving in cars that were designed for men's bodies. And as a result of that, women are I think it was, I don't have the statistics like exactly in my head, but it was like 46 or 47% more likely to get seriously injured from a crash because we're driving, quote, unquote incorrectly in cars, because the cars are not designed for us, and that was just like one area where, where this is happening, right? Like it was just most people would never even think about that, right? We're driving our cars, we wear our seat belts. We're doing everything right. But we don't realize how much of our society is designed around research that's conducted on men's bodies. And there are consequences to that. And this is just like, one, you know, area that a lot of us don't think about, consider that falls into that and most of us drive so.

Stephanie Mara 09:49

Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. I mean, what you're pointing out also is, like, how much, just, you know, we talk a lot here around, like, bio individuality, of like, how much each person's body needs something different. But how much women's bodies don't kind of come to the forefront of like, hey, how do we create systems and structures and things in place that specifically support women's bodies in thriving? I'm curious what else maybe you have found that is kind of lacking in attention that maybe sometimes like, we're focusing too much on the food, because like that feels like, yeah, we were talking about before we even started recording like sometimes focusing on the food can feel like, oh, well, at least I can control what, when, how much I eat, but there's all these other things that maybe aren't getting enough attention that actually contribute even more to our vibrancy and us thriving beyond food.

Kymber Maulden 10:47

Yeah, and I did a post recently on Instagram. It was actually something that I threw up pretty quickly, and I was kind of surprised that it got more attention, more shares, more likes, more people like reaching out to me privately than any post I've done in quite some time. Basically, it was like one slide that said, here is what we often get taught to think is important for regulation. So nervous system regulation, which is, you know, kind of intrinsically linked to overall health and wellness. And I listed things that we all kind of hear meditation, hydration, yoga, a diet supplement, maybe a sauna or a cold plunge or something. And then the next page, it was like, what I believe, what I've come to believe, is actually essential and potentially more important for regulation. And I listed things like financial security, relationships, a sense of safety in our bodies, healthy environment, relationship to God or spirituality, you know, whatever you want to call it, something deeper, I would say the sacred, family. There was things that I think have just grown to over the years, recognized as potentially, like, more deeply linked to our sense of safety. Our sense of safety is, is, I think, is, like a driving factor in how we feel and how we experience the world and how we experience our bodies. And so that's kind of where I that's a metric that I use a lot. Is like something increasing our sense of safety, our sense of agency, or is it making it moving us farther away from it, right, or lowering it? And for a lot of women, I think, again, like the food is the easiest thing that they can manage in their lives, because it involves, like, their direct control. They can change something they're eating. They can take a supplement. Oftentimes, those, like, bigger life things can be harder to look at or assess. You know, it's hard to look at something if you're like in it, and it's also can be, you know, there's when it comes to, like, stress and trauma. There can bring up a lot of lot of grief or a lot of helplessness to look at things that you don't have full control over, such as your financial situation, or, like, a deep sense of loneliness. I got a lot of responses from that post, and I got a lot of like, previous clients that I had worked with around the relationship piece itself, reach out to me privately, and, you know, share like, hey, thank you for this. This reminded me of our work together, because the loneliness piece is so real for people in this current digital age, I guess you could call it, and it's getting progressively worse because of things like political division and social media, as much as it can also connect us. And I think that there's not, like, a clear path for a lot of people out of that. And so that's, yeah, so that's something that I've been focusing on more in my work, simply because it is important to help people know what to eat, and to help them eat and to help them improve their digestion and all that. And there's no shortage of that online.

Stephanie Mara 13:37

Yeah, I am completely on the same page with you. One just thank you so much for bringing in that it's so much more than what we're currently being taught with how popular nervous system regulation and somatic work has become. I had a similar experience where I actually commented on someone else's post recently, of like they were also kind of sharing another reminder of what actually regulates our nervous system, which is, like, connection, community, you know, relationships. And that, I think my comment of like, yes, like we are actually bypassing with all of these somatic practices, I just need to push against a wall and shake my body, and it's like, and I don't want to poo poo that, like those things can support a lot of individuals, and can be really helpful sometimes, but it bypasses like a key thing of that we are human beings that thrive in connection with one another, and that I got probably the most likes on that comments on someone else's post. And so I think it's really important that we continue to share this reminder that it is actually the coregulation that we need more than anything, and that I've seen a lot recently, of people trying to share more about ways to eat to regulate the nervous system. And again, this is great information. It can be really, really helpful, but when you are feeling so disconnected, so isolated and so alone in your life, it's really hard to make these nutritional changes. When you're not even feeling like a sense of belonging or purpose or connection with the outside world, and it can feel really lonely. And so if food is the only thing there for you to feel that loneliness, you're not going to feel the natural impulse to want to make the nutritional changes. And so I'm kind of on the same page with you, that we have to first explore actually, like, what is actually the basics of being and living in a human body that this human body needs. And, you know, I reference this a lot of like, I think also the research that's been put out there is that eating disorders, like, tripled at the beginning of the pandemic, and a lot of that was due to social distancing and isolation. I'm just totally on the same page with you.

Kymber Maulden 16:02

Yeah, since working with CPTSD, which is different than PTSD, and that's something that I'm more than happy to talk about if you're interested in talking about that, but a big component of complex trauma is there is a sense of loneliness that people often live with, and potentially for their whole lives. They may live with this sense of loneliness from those early developmental disruptions, and so if you already have that, it makes it much harder even to potentially develop healthy attachments, to develop safe friendships. Self isolation is just more naturally pattern that you can lean into if you're stressed. I do find often that my clients don't always know how they don't always feel this, that they have the tools or the skills to build relationships. I find myself being very cautious with how I talk about this because of the work I do in the understanding of the helplessness that people can go into when they see social media posts. It's really easy to go online and see posts, you know, whether it's a practitioner's post that's saying what you should be focusing on, and then immediately making that mean something about yourself in your own life, or seeing someone else's life presented in a certain way, and then thinking, I wish I had that. And so there's a lot of unconscious programming that we can get from social media. So I try to be mindful of how I talk about it, because loneliness is something that involves a lot of grief and a lot of helplessness for a lot of people. You know, I work with my one on one clients around ways to relate to their parts, to grieve the fact that you don't have the relationships and the intimacy you want in the moment. And I think that's actually a first step. That's a really important first step is just to get people to admit how much this is a factor in their lives, because it's really easy in this day and age to just fill your time with Netflix and social media scrolling and, you know, distractions, basically. And then you wonder, like, why am I so dysregulated? Like, why am I feeling stressed all the time? Why is my cortisol so high? And a lot of it's just because you're not actually like I think you mentioned before we got started recording like your oxytocin and your dopamine levels that you would normally have regulated by that human to human connection every day is not there, and so you're reaching for a screen or maybe a substance or a food to try to get those same chemicals. And it doesn't really provide the same obviously, it's not the same experience. And so helping people just admit to themselves and to maybe to me or to others, that this is a need that they don't have, and allowing themselves to feel some of the grief that comes when we actually sit with that like, I can even like, feel that right now.

Stephanie Mara 18:38

Yeah, I can feel it too.

Kymber Maulden 18:42

Yeah. And I have personally felt this as well, like, you know, someone that is very, you know, independent and naturally will, like, self isolate if I'm stressed or if I'm busy, feel very grateful to have some deep, close friends that I can turn to in any times for anything and and surpasses, like, tribalism and political parties and all that. There's, like, people that I have in my life that I can lean on no matter what, but that's not something that everyone has, and it's not something that everyone knows how to create. So yeah, so this is something that I'm still like developing, like tools around how to help my clients with this, because it's not something that I think most of us are equipped it's a very new thing for our species.

Stephanie Mara 19:23

Yeah, absolutely, I think, through the pandemic and then, as you kind of were talking about, in this maybe digital age that we're in, where we are more disconnected and more connected more than ever, which can kind of feel so confusing that it's like, oh, I can connect with people all over the world. I mean, we found each other on social media, which is, like, amazing that I could connect with these people all over the place, but even more disconnected because we're not in the same room together, you can meet and feel like you are creating friendships on social media because you're commenting on people's posts every day, but getting into that like intimate relationship where you can feel raw and vulnerable and feel held and seen and understood, those friendships like you're talking about that you have in your life are so important to actually feel that sense of regulation and safety and I belong here and receive that oxytocin that sometimes food can come in as a substitute for is crucially important for just feeling like you want to be alive here on this earth. And so I agree with you that I feel like a lot of the times I'm also in conversations around like, how do we do that? I was actually joking with a friend the other day, actually a couple of friends recently about how hard it is to make new friendships as an adult, so difficult, you know, like, when you're growing up, it's just all the people you go to school with, or if you were in some kind of youth group or something like, your friends were just kind of like, there, and the people you were around. And then, you know, if you get into some kind of, like, nine to five job where you are around people all the time, so it's just kind of like, maybe become your friends. But, you know, I work from home every single day, and I know for a lot of people, that's their lives too. And so it's, it's like, how do we put ourselves out there to, like, meet new people and put ourselves in new environments, while also sometimes navigating the overwhelm or the lack of safety or the fear around what if they don't like me, or what's going to happen, or am I going to fit in? And sometimes I find that with those that I'm working with, sometimes we have to be with that fear first of like, yeah, you may meet people you don't click with, and it may actually take some time for you to meet some new people that you do just even sitting with that fear first that it can be really scary to put yourself out there.

Kymber Maulden 21:48

Totally and also like one thing that I've come to realize is that there is an element of self confidence that's involved in developing friendships. You know you have to feel like you're someone worth knowing. You're someone worth investing in, and the barriers to that can start to come up when you're first getting to know people. And I, you know, just to share, like a quick personal example, I am in California along the coast right now. I live in Oakland, but I am moving back to the Central Coast, like Central I don't know if you're familiar with that area, San Luis Obispo County. It's like in between LA and San Francisco along the coast. So I grew up there. It's really beautiful. Spent most of my 20s in the Bay Area, and then moved back to the Central Coast, and just as an adult, developed a strong community there, got into a relationship with someone in the Bay Area, and so decided to move back to the Bay Area. Never would have moved back to the Bay Area, because I'm just not really a city girl, but I moved back there with rose tinted glasses for this person, did not work out at all, and ended up back in this area where I knew a lot of people from my 20s, but I wasn't close with anyone, and I, you know, not really big on political tribalism, not really big on like, level of partisanship, and just kind of the, I don't know, like, people kind of bond around specific things and then other each other. I find that a lot, it's very big here in this area, regardless of what your politics are. I have a hard time with that. Like, that's not where my nervous system feels safe. I like to have just like, kind of an open where we can talk about anything, and, like, lots of different viewpoints and and so I found myself pulling away more and more from people. So for me, it wasn't that I didn't have access to community. There was a lot of people that I knew that would invite me to things. I just found that I had deep bonds, like soul bonds, with people along the central coast, four hours away. It took a few years, but I realized, like, this is absolutely essential for my wellbeing. And so there's like, another factor that kind of comes in when you're older, which is, not only can it be harder to build friendships as an adult, but it can also be harder to build friendships once you've established a little bit more of who you are. Because I think when we're younger, part of what makes building friendships easier is that our identity and our values and our priorities in life are still a little bit more flexible in being developed. So as we get older, people become maybe more established in their values, or they have their family that they've built, or they have, like, their career that they kind of base their time around. So it can be harder to bond with people if they don't actually like fit into your I don't know your value system or your niche, or whatever it is. I did develop quite a bit of relationships, but they all felt a little bit surface level. And what I've gotten from working with CPTSD, both my own and my clients, and then also just from like, engaging with women in my audience, is that I think a lot of people want deeper relationships, and if you have CPTSD, you actually are a little bit like the canary in the coal mine of superficial relationships, because you need that safety in order to be in relationship at all. So this is something that I've also become more passionate about, just talking about and engaging with women about around is developing that sense of who you are, starting to get to know who you are. Here, using parts work, if you're familiar with, like, the IFS model, and then from there, building your relationships from there, right? Instead of just going out and being like, I just need to find people to spend time with, actually getting clear on because that's something that I feel really grateful I've been able to do is like, you know, there's certain things that I value that are really deeply important to me and like, intrinsically linked to my sense of safety, my sense of expansion, and I've been able to build relationships from there, and that actually enables them to, like, transcend time and space, even to where I can, you know, show up and see someone that I haven't seen in a year. And it's like, immediate safety and love. I want that for people, I guess, because that's especially if you are highly sensitive, or you have, you know, health issues, or you have trauma like I do think that safety piece is really important. It's hard to prioritize that if you're not confident in your own value.

Stephanie Mara 25:53

Yeah, I love that distinction. Thank you so much for sharing that of yes, we can be so supportive, to put ourselves out there, to create new connections and friendships and relationships, and if it's coming from a place of like you're pointing to not knowing ourselves, not knowing our values, I find that value work is actually really an important maybe not as much as, like a somatic practice, but, but you know, very much an important part of getting to know oneself is like, what are your morals? What are your top values of your life? There can be a lot of different exercises. One can even Google search of, how do I discover what my top values are? I even think there's, you know, a motivational interviewing exercise that, I think, to discover your top values, that you know, just even kind of knowing those things, so that when you are around people that you're kind of like, okay, you know, I'm in an environment where I feel safe. I'm meeting new people like you're also get to tune into yourself of how do I feel around these people. Do these people support me in feeling like I can relax into my body that I'm not always thinking about what's next? Am I saying the right thing? Am I showing up the right way? Because the people that you actually really deeply connect with you won't necessarily be having those thoughts. And I know for a lot of people that feel like maybe need to like, you know, navigating neurodivergent brains, feel like they need to mask that. When you around people who you they're like, yeah, bring all of you. I like love it. I want more of it. Like, you're great. We get to drop those masks of like, oh, wait a second, I can be held here. But that starts with, yeah, like, if I need to work first on any sense of shame that I've been taught around who I am and because of my past experiences or what people taught me to think about myself like, I know I get into a lot of conversations around that about being highly sensitive, which I certainly am. And so, you know, how many times did I hear growing up, of like, Stephanie stop being so sensitive, which created, initially, shame for me around my sensitivity that I had to heal and reclaim for myself of, like, no, my sensitivity is kind of a gift. And people love that about me, that like, really get me. And so I love that you're bringing in this layer of like first getting to know yourself. I am curious about because you've pointed to how much we talk a lot about trauma here, but how our past trauma, especially childhood traumas, affect our experience with creating attachments and feeling secure that we can put ourselves out there. I'm curious if you can say more about the connections there, and like how that affects our ability to kind of put ourselves out there and create relationships as adults.

Kymber Maulden 28:50

Yeah, for sure. So PTSD is, I think most people are pretty familiar with that post traumatic stress disorder, so that's a shock trauma. That's when something happens to you that threatens your immediate survival. And so it's usually a trauma that lives in the body and that's related to a sense of safety as related to survival itself. CPTSD complex trauma is kind of an umbrella term for developmental trauma, attachment trauma, and this is at least what I focus on, is it's related to ACE's, so adverse childhood experiences during developmental years, when we're still developing our sense of self and when we're developing, I would say, nervous system patterns. So because of this, it's often integrated into things like our personality, our self perception, our communication style, like, there's a lot of different aspects, and I really love looking at all of these things from the perspective of patterns, right, instead of looking at it as pathologizing. But also, like, I am this way, I have this personality. Like, I think, actually, realistically, we are a series of patterns, and I find it to be more empowering. Having to look at it that way, because then you can re-pattern. It's also more neutral. You can kind of take some of the shame out of it. CPTSD, because it's related, again, to our developing self, it's shame based. So where PTSD is survival based, CPTSD tends to be shame based. So for that reason, a lot of people who have CPTSD, and that, I believe, is more common than PTSD, because it's happens so early in life, and so many of us were born into less than ideal circumstances. So it's very complex and nuanced, and so it can look very different. Some of us have much higher ACE scores than others, but it's often integrated into a sense of shame about who we are. And as a result of that, that can show up in our self confidence. It can show up in how we engage in relationship. It can show up in, you know, avoidance patterns, or more anxious attachment. So more insecure, anxious attachment. And as a result of that, I think a lot of people struggle with relationship, right? If they have CPTSD and they can isolate themselves, they can just have no relationships, because that feels safer than getting into a relationship and then struggling with the same patterns. So one of the things that I do with my clients is I help them recognize these patterns and separate themselves from them. Because a lot of us don't even know that these are running, these patterns are running, and we identify so heavily with them that we don't know what's our self, what's our true self, and what's our patterns. And so from the IFS, from the parts work model, I take that perspective that we have a true self, that we're born into this world with, you know, in essence, a spirit, someone that is is our actual age, and someone that is capable of leading our lives, and then we have all of these other parts, which are often the trauma patterns themselves. And so I help my clients recognize these patterns and these parts. And one of the approaches that I take is called NARM, and that stands for Neuro Affective Relational Model. It's a therapy approach that looks specifically at ACE based CPTSD, and one of the core perspectives within that model is looking at our core needs that we had during developmental years, and the survival adaptations that we develop when we don't have those needs met. The first need is connection we come out of the womb. It's like the first thing that we need to experience is a feeling of connection to our environment and our care providers. We need to know that we belong here and that we're wanted. The second is attunement, which is different than connection, like connection is, again, just like that sense that I am, you know, part of this world and that I'm seen and but attunement is like my needs matter. So when I cry, someone responds to me and responds to the reason I'm crying. And I would say it even goes farther into self attunement, so I can actually assess what I need and can, like, you know, act accordingly. I have agency to get my own needs met. The third is trust, so I can trust my environment. I can trust my care providers. The fourth is autonomy, and this is like, I have the safety. And this is kind of like that attachment paradox, where when you're safe enough, you actually end up exploring the world more because you have that safe base to your primary care providers, your primary attachment figures. And then the last one, and this is one I've been focusing on a lot more lately, is the love and sexuality. This happens throughout puberty and development, like in adolescence, and this is the need to remain safe and open hearted when we develop ourselves sexually. And this one can obviously get disrupted with abuse. But something I've been focusing on more in my work is the ways that our culture can kind of encourage love sex splits, and can, I think, lead more people to having a little bit of a severing of that, like open heartness and the sexuality, just because of, like, you know, hyper sexuality in the culture and stuff anyway. So if we have these, obviously, this is these are not, like straight shots. We either have them or we don't. A lot of them had them inconsistently. We had them, you know, maybe more or less, depending on our stories. But the whole point is, if we don't have them consistently, then what happens is, in order to survive, we develop an identity that's based around not needing them, so we more or less sever ourselves from the needs themselves, and this in the moment during the developmental phase. This is adaptive. It helps us survive, but unfortunately, this becomes maladaptive as we get older, because then we just don't know how to connect, we don't know how to attune, we don't know how to trust ourselves or others and so on. Part of my work is helping my clients recognize these patterns. Like, you know, I have an attunement, survival, adaptation, and I can see that in the ways I'm unable to attune to other people, or I'm unable to attune to my own needs. And that shows up a lot, like in just basic self care, you know, like I am not able to put myself to bed at the right time, I'm not able to feed myself, like not reading my own body signals. So that kind of thing can show up a lot, but all of that stuff really ties in with relationships, because this is relational trauma. So a lot of people don't even know they have it until they get into relationship. And so again, tied back to the like the isolation thing, there is a really common pattern of people to isolate themselves, who have these patterns, because it's just easier than having to actually navigate them. And it's like there's so much internal disorganization around what you're experiencing, and you know what to do about it, that it's just easier to be alone or to keep people at a distance. And I think our current cultural climate is making all that worse.

Stephanie Mara 35:30

Yeah, I was just thinking that as well, that, you know, just the intensity of the political climate also is making it of who can I trust and, you know, who can I share myself with? And I feel like I've had a lot of conversations with people of just, like wanting to, like, write off people and just be like, I'm good on my own. But that is furthering as you're pointing to the isolation and the connection that we need. And also, I love that you're pointing out that this is why I've always kind of challenged the quote of, like, you need to love yourself first before you love anyone else. Like, I really don't like that quote, and it's been around for like so long, and that actually sometimes, based off of your history and your trauma, healing actually has to happen in relationship. And like, yes, you can do the work to appreciate yourself, like we're talking about getting to know yourself, getting to know your values and who you are and who you want to be in the world. And that sometimes the deeper work that we need to do to kind of rewire the nervous system is actually in relationship and intimacy, so that kind of the discomfort gets a little poked. You know, I had one of my PhD teachers say this last semester that there's a fine line that we want to build safety, but not too much safety, because we're always riding that fine line of that we actually have to guide ourselves towards a tolerable amount of discomfort, so that we can grow, so that we can show our body that we can navigate more things in life, and that nothing bad is going to happen. And so yeah, sometimes that is getting a little bit more into relationship to kind of like, poke the bear a little bit and say, like, okay, this is going to be activating to me and triggering for me, based on my history, and what is the safest way for me to maybe poke at this a little bit so that I can start to shift things in my body, that it's safe to be In relationship again.

Kymber Maulden 37:41

Yeah, for sure. And that, like, brings me back to, like, one of the core principles in working with CPTSD, which is, like, reconnecting to our agency and agency building and like, building capacity. And I think that there is within the, like, trauma informed world, and I think within therapy, and there's a lot of emphasis on, I think, safety, which is really important, and I can also see ways that it kind of can be hijacked to where we want everyone to agree with us, or we want everyone to have the same viewpoints as us, or otherwise they're not safe, and we do write them off. You know, this is a topic that has been coming up in my community a lot. I did like, a poll a while back, or, like, a few weeks ago, about how loneliness and, like, how isolated are people in my community, and I got a lot of women responding and basically said, like, I feel like I self censor all the time. I feel like I've lost friends. I feel like I don't have anyone that I can talk openly about my views on things. And I think there's something much deeper going on there, because we should be able to disagree on stuff the whole like, let's agree to disagree and still love each other. I think that that's kind of been getting lost, and I think part of it is because people feel triggered, and then they say, I'm not safe. And so I think that's actually creating more isolation and more divide. So I think you have a great point of like we do want to be, you know, we want to have boundaries. We want to have values that we want to uphold. Ways we want to be talked to, that kind of thing. And we also do want to reconnect to our own personal agency, instead of like expecting others to create that for us, that perfect environment. So we feel like we have agency. And ideally, we do want to expand our capacity. We don't want to have a window of tolerance that's so small that we're living in a bubble.

Stephanie Mara 39:28

Yeah, I agree with that. And you know, look, the groundwork of even the work that I do with Somatic Eating® is all about building safety. But I also hear of just what we're kind of talking about and pointing to, is we have to create that this is a spectrum of safe experiences and like, what actually is safety in the body? Like, even what you were just pointing out, what I was kind of thinking as you were describing, like, a situation of, okay, can we agree to disagree? Is, is it actually that I feel unsafe, or do I feel disrespected, or do I feel like out of alignment, or do like we have to maybe sometimes get into the nuance of okay, I'm feeling uncomfortable, but does that really mean that I feel unsafe, or am I just in a heated conversation with someone who has a very different viewpoint than maybe I have. But are they disrespecting me? Are they respecting me? Like, kind of really checking it out of, again, you know, I know that a lot of people in like, the trauma recovery world are, like, starting to need to point out of like, okay, also, not everything's trauma. Of like, yes, just because we're all talking about trauma and where there's more awareness to it, like not everything is trauma, same thing. It's like not everything may be leaving you feeling unsafe, but you are having a reaction, maybe for a reason that sometimes needs to be checked out, that could be, you know, I've talked about before here, about how trauma kind of is the past is coloring the present. And so it may be that you're actually feeling unsafe because there's a past moment from, as you're talking about, from a misattunement, from, you know, not feeling like the connection, the all the things that you needed as a child, that now you're starting to remember what that was like, but in the present moment, you are absolutely safe as you're pointing to. You have agency. You can speak up for yourself. You can say, hey, I really don't agree with that, but you know that's great that you have that perspective, and being able to, like, you know, stand firmly in what you do believe. And I that takes practice. I know, just from my own history, being able to feel like boundaries were safe to set was such a process, and I know when I first started to practice asserting my boundaries and speaking up for them, they came across like a little bit more forceful than they probably needed to, because I so already expected them to be broken, to them to be walked all over, to be bypassed, to not be respected. And so it did take some time to, like, speak up for my boundaries and my needs, and then notice, oh, wait, that person listened to that and they responded to it and they respected it. And like, slowly that got to be rewired, where now it's just, like, that's just a no, like, I'm allowed to set boundaries, and there's not that same reaction in my own body, but it took, as we're talking about, getting into relationship, to practice it and experience it, to be able to update that body story.

Kymber Maulden 42:29

Yeah, and I think Stephanie like I think the internet really does change the landscape of all this. I think everything you're saying is so true, and it's also very hard for people to go through that whole process when all of their conversations are playing out online, and this is something that I've experienced where I will try to have a conversation, potentially even about something that's controversial or heated online and will immediately get attacked, and then I'll have this, like, now I've done enough work with myself where I'm like, oh, that was painful and jarring and didn't actually accomplish anything, and I'm going to leave that conversation I'm going to leave that now, because that didn't feel good. But I think people that would never do that in real life to revert to that when they feel triggered because of the screens, right? It's just so inhuman of a way of interacting. And I don't really know what the answer to that is, other than making it a priority to spend time with people in real life.

Stephanie Mara 43:19

Yeah, I know that I've been having a lot of conversations here about how important, especially in this time in the world, community is, and that we need to be building in person community like online is wonderful and great and like, I know I'm going to continue to show up there and try to build community there, because any community is better than no community, but also, yeah, like getting out in person, there is something really, really different about body to body connection, and I don't mean that in like having to give anybody hugs or physical contact, but just even being in a room with other bodies and seeing like other people in real life is such a huge difference in how our body processes that in the coregulation that can happen in that experience, rather than all of our conversations being virtual, which is hilarious, because our conversation right now is virtual.

Kymber Maulden 44:17

So my business is actually completely online. I only see clients virtually, which is wild. I love it because, like, I can see people anywhere, which has been wonderful, and it's also it means I spend more time online, and so I value my time offline even more as a result of that. So there's a term that a woman that I worked with, I did trauma work with her, that inspired me to move into some of the trauma work I'm doing now. Her name is Syanna Wand, and I listened to a podcast interview with her a while back, like two years ago, she had this she said that a lot of us are trauma bonded to the internet. And that really stuck with me, because that experience of trauma bond, which I've had, that's part of my story of being trauma bonded to someone that would show up digitally a lot and hijack my system. And a lot of us have that of that experience of like, we have a traumatic reaction to some interaction that's digital. We get very dysregulated from it, and then we react, and then we, you know, further instill some identity that we have around our reaction and the other person. And then that kind of, like, continues and facilitate. I mean, you just go on X, Twitter, X, you can see a lot of that, like, people that are otherwise probably, like, you know, intelligent, regulated people I see, you know, people whose books I read. I'll see them on there and they're snappy. And I feel like that platform really, like, brings out the most certain kind of characteristics in us all.

Stephanie Mara 45:40

Yeah, yeah, that is so fascinating. And that comes back to, I think, what we were talking about earlier, of like, coming back to your body when you are in interactions online or around other people, and being able to learn like, who feels stabilizing to me, you know, especially that might be curating your social media feed, you know, really being conscientious about who you do also surround yourself with, like when I talked about even like poking the bear that's not intentionally, like putting yourself around people that feel like highly dysregulating to be around like you get to choose people that feel regulating and like they see you and you feel like you can relax around them, and that just even being in a relationship sometimes that really deeply sees you can be activating, because maybe that's not what you experienced in the past. And that's also just to bring this back to food, because so many people listening to this are here just in their navigation of food. Sometimes that's why food continues to come in, because that's sometimes the only safe relationship that has been built of like, well, this food will never judge me, and it's always there for me, and I can interact my interactions with it, even if those interactions aren't always the like, stabilizing interaction you want to have with food. It is what is known like, even if you have a binge eating experience and it's not a comfortable interaction, you know how to navigate that kind of discomfort where being in relationship just as a discomfort you may not know how to navigate yet.

Kymber Maulden 47:10

Yeah, that makes complete sense to me. You know, I had an eating disorder for the better part of 10 years. Looking back, it was, for sure. It was a way of regulating, you know, I was, I would throw up, I would binge. I would not all the time, but I would basically, like, kind of white knuckle it through life, not understanding what was happening in my nervous system and my metabolism. And then I would get to a place where I just couldn't manage my anxiety anymore. And that was the way that I regulated. And there was, you know, that was that's a long period of time to struggle with that, some years more than others, but it was definitely something that I used to manage a lot of, like early life trauma, that was relational in nature. And during that time, I did, to some extent, keep people at a distance. And you know, it was just easier. I had definitely had friendships, I had some boyfriends, but looking back, there was a huge intimacy barrier there, and I wasn't getting that sense of safety from the connections in my life. And that's part of what tied in with the like, white knuckling, you know, that sense of like, constant up regulation.

Stephanie Mara 48:09

Yeah, I find that is also sometimes what perpetuates behaviors, is the isolation that happens because all your body really needs is actually more coregulation and to be around more people, and the food behaviors continue to maybe produce shame, which maybe perpetuates the CPTSD of, oh, I now have a reason to feel this shame. And like, further down the rabbit hole, it kind of goes where your body needs more and more of what it's not getting and needing. And so, yeah, this can all be really, really hard. And I just want to, like, name that in our conversation today of like, I know we were feeling it earlier, but I feel like it keeps coming back around of like, how much we need connection, and how scary and dysregulating and even terrifying connection can be.

Kymber Maulden 48:56

Yeah, and also just like, how to find it. I think there's even just the logistics of that, you know, that I have to work with clients around, like, going to Meetup Groups, joining, like Bumble BFF. There's, like, all of these little things that they'll have them, you know, will support them in doing, and coming back to me and telling me how it went, and just try to, like, get your toe, you know, get your foot in the water, and get yourself out there a little bit. Because sometimes it's just the practical, like logistical aspects of it that can actually be the biggest barrier to entry.

Stephanie Mara 49:24

Yeah, I completely agree with that. Sometimes it's just the actual practical logistics. And I'm curious, as we wrap up here, I always like to kind of end with a baby step, and you kind of just offered a few things around, like meetup and apps. You know, is there anything that someone's like, oh, I'm listening to this and I'm realizing like, yeah, I really gotta get back out there. I probably need to be putting myself around more people. Is there any baby step that you would offer someone today in how to maybe start this journey?

Kymber Maulden 49:52

I guess the first thing we already touched on would be some level of clarity around what it is that you value and you want for yourself. So that's one thing, is I having that so that you're not just kind of throwing yourself out there around people, because there's plenty of people that are very, very social who are also very lonely because they do that. So that's one thing. And then once you have that, it might be a little bit easier to decide what path to take, right? So I really love because I'm very, like, mission driven, and I love, like, conferences. I love getting together, and, like, intellectually, you know, kind of like debating or talking about things. And also, I am an agnostic, but I've started to dabble in going to church. And so I would even say, if you are agnostic, if you're, you know, you're not really interested in necessarily, like, religious ideology. There might be some kind of church out there that might meet some need for you, because it's something that humans have used for a really long time to connect to the sacred together. And so that's a big need that we have is the sacred, right? I believe relationships are sacred. That's part of what's allowed me to go so deep in my relationships and dedicate so much to them. And so I think if you view it that way, then you can take it a little more seriously, and that might actually like take you to, you know, church or a meetup or a hiking group versus the club or something. But yeah, so I think it's again, starts with you kind of getting clear on what you value and what you want out of relationship, and then finding some places that you can start to dabble in that, like meditation groups, or, you know, yoga classes. And then the last thing I want to say, I know this is, like, added, you know, not just one baby thing, but from working with children for so long, I've witnessed so much, like purity and agency within socializing that I actually think I've adopted with myself to some extent, like, you know, you take a child a four year old to the playground, and they just will go and find someone, do you want to be my friend? And then they start holding hands. And then they're, like, playing together. And I think as adults like we are so afraid of each other. And I like to think of myself as, like, you know, if my little girl inside wanted to be friends with that little girl over there, what would she do? Like, right? And so thinking of yourself in those terms, and allowing yourself that level of love and like can actually kind of break some barriers, because I think a lot of people are also just as afraid as you are, and a lot of people are more open than we realize to connecting.

Stephanie Mara 52:14

I adore that suggestion. I'm so glad you brought that in because, yeah, it's like, okay, if I tapped into my inner child, that would, yeah, maybe go up to someone or, if you're more introverted, like, maybe pull someone aside and be like, hey, I'd like to draw with you. Would that be okay? Like, how would you do it? What would feel safe to you? And like, could you practice that? Could you be inspired by your own inner child and how they might approach someone to become their friends. So I love that. I'm curious how everyone can keep in touch with you and the work you're doing in the world.

Kymber Maulden 52:47

Yeah. So as far as social media goes, I'm only on Instagram right now, so a little bit of a luddite with an online business, I have my own podcast. So nourishing our sanity is a podcast. You're welcome to check that out. I explore a lot of these topics more in depth, and I'm also starting a substack soon. So if you follow me on social media, I'll, you know, I'll eventually announce that that was partially inspired by the fact that I just struggle with social media, and really do love long form communication. And then I also have had a lot of women, again, talk about this loneliness factor, wanting to like engage and talk more about things that they self censor around. And so my substack will probably be a lot more like community oriented and engaging, versus just reading someone's writing from distance or whatever. So that's definitely something that if any of your audience is interested in, they can check out. It'll be live soon.

Stephanie Mara 53:37

Awesome. Well, I will put all those links in the show notes so people can keep in touch with you. And just thank you so much again for being here. I loved this conversation, and, you know, really excited to, you know, hear how people start to incorporate maybe some of the things that we talked about today. So just thank you for sharing all of your wisdom.

Kymber Maulden 53:55

Yeah, thank you so much. This was great.

Stephanie Mara 53:57

Wonderful. Well, to everyone listening as always, keep me updated on how this landed for you, support@stephaniemara.com, reach out anytime, and I hope you all have a safety producing and satiating rest of your day. Bye!

Keep in touch with Kymber:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kymbermaulden/
Website: www.kymbermaulden.com
Podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2418898