Episode 125- Weight and Trauma feat. Corinne Crabtree

What is the relationship between weight and trauma? In this episode, Denita speaks with Corinne Crabtree. Corinne is a weight loss expert and a highly successful coach. Corinne shares several practical tools on where to start to create a positive relationship with your body and with food. If you struggle with body image or weight, this is an episode not to miss.

I have an amazing treat for you today. I have Corinne Crabtree on the podcast to talk about weight and trauma. So I’m going to start with her info and then we’re gonna get into the interview.

Corinne Crabtree

Corinne Crabtree is a master certified weight and life coach with a mission to help every woman break generational curses in order to improve their personal health and wealth. Corinne lost 100 pounds 15 years ago and ever since she has dedicated her life to teaching women how to do the same.

Corinne Crabtree is one of the leading voices in the weight loss and business industry. She is the host of the wildly successful podcast “Losing 100 pounds with Corinne”, which has been downloaded over 50 million times in 160 countries. Over 1 million women have taken her free weight loss course and Corinne now serves over 14,000 paid members in the no BS weight loss program.

No BS weight loss program

After being a featured expert at The Life Coach School, Corrine founded the no BS women’s membership. The program provides online entrepreneurs with simple frameworks, tools and focus they need to take action and build the business of their dreams. In addition, current offers advanced weight loss life coach training for life coaches, dietitians, and medical professionals who want to improve their clients weight loss outcomes. You can catch Corinne on Facebook and Instagram talking about the diet and online marketing industry.

Her greatest passion is helping women get rid of their old thoughts by using self love to never quit on themselves again. Without further ado, here is Corinne.

An interview with Corinne Crabtree!

Denita: Hi, Corinne, thanks for coming to the podcast.

Corinne: Thank you for having me. And I’m excited to be here.

Denita: All right, so we’re going to talk today about trauma. Nice light topic. I just know that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, we don’t have a lot of vices. We don’t drink, we don’t smoke. We have a health code that gives us some very defined boundaries. So for many members, it becomes food and eating and sugar. And I will say, weight has never been my problem. I’m 120 pounds. And if anything, being underweight has been my problem. So this isn’t a topic that I naturally thought of, but I do think it will benefit a lot of people. And you can have so much experience in this realm of weight and body and all of that.

Trauma and Weight study

So I want to hear your thoughts. But before that, I just wanted to bring up the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. It started with an obesity study. In 1985, Dr. Vincent Felitti, Chief of Kaiser Permanente, noticed that every year more than half of the people in his obesity clinic were dropping out as the Department of Preventive Medicine was doing an obesity study. And it was puzzling him. And so he went to figure out why are these people who are losing weight? Why are they dropping out of the study? And basically, he found out that so many of them, I don’t remember the exact statistic, I think it was like half, had experienced childhood sexual abuse or some kind of adverse experience.

So if anyone is out there listening and struggling with body image or weight issues, here on my podcast, you know that I talked about trauma and I wanted to have Corinne on to just get her thoughts about the relationship between trauma and weight, and all of that. So I’m just gonna start Corinne with a very general question. What do you think about that relationship between weight and trauma?

Corinne: I think it’s, well, I just think it’s for real. So I’ve coached thousands of women at this point. And very often what I noticed, especially in a lot of my clients who have, like over 100 pounds to lose, they, at some point did experience some type of trauma as a child. And at the time, the only way to cope was to eat.

I mean, if you think about, especially when you’re a child, whether, you know you’re real little three or four years old, or you’re in your teens, so much of the brain’s ability to be able to make sense of things and truly reason and see things long term and stuff, or even be able to distinguish this is not a me problem. This is like an outside of me thing that’s happening. Like there’s nothing wrong with me, doesn’t even come on mind until like our 20s.

And most people don’t even teach us that stuff. So most of us are just walking around thinking, whatever coping mechanism we dealt with, we figured out as a child, now, as an adult, we use it as a weapon of mass destruction against us. I was coaching someone the other day, she had sexual trauma at 13. And one of her biggest fears was, if she loses weight, more people will pay attention to her. And so like when we went back and looked at it, she noticed that Oh, like, my parents didn’t think it was a big deal. They told me that I should dress different, that they were probably well intended. They probably were not trying to traumatize her. They were just trying to figure out like, how do I keep her safe?

So often, some of the mental side of things starts from a well intended parent, at some point, trying to figure out in their panic mode, how do I make sense of all of it, so she’ll eat? And she noticed that the bigger she got, the less people paid attention to her, especially men. And her reason was that was a really good way to stay safe. Well, now she’s like in her 50s. And having a hard time losing weight, she’s like, every time I lose weight, there’s a certain point when people start noticing, I just start panicking. I just started thinking like, oh, just wish they wouldn’t talk to me, I just wish we wouldn’t do all this.

So we kind of pieced it all together. And then when we did, it made a lot of sense for her that what she needed now, she could continue trying to lose weight. But what she really needed was to create safety in her body around attention, she really needed to do some inner child work, she needed to do a lot of stuff like that, so that losing weight was not a dangerous event. Because that’s the way her brain treated it. So it’s just very common.

Denita: I will say, with all of my experience, I tell my clients this also, there’s like the two traumas, the big T’s, which is like what my client experience. And then there’s series and series and series of little T traumas that can happen over lifetime. That especially when you’re young, they add up and they just feel like a big T at some point.

Corinne: And that’s kind of more what happened to me. I never had big T trauma. But I definitely had lots of like small traumas. I was very bullied in school. Like my body was highlighted by every man in my life when I was young, except for my grandfather. Like, I got the message, something like my body was wrong. I was too big. I remember, my parents were divorced. I rarely saw my father. And when we did like, once a year, we would see him, he would sing the hefty bag, trash commercial to me, because I was overweight. And you know, I internalized all of that amongst other things. And so by the time that I was in my 20s and early 30s, there was just a lot of like, food insecurity issues.

For me, I was very poor growing up, I had a lot of like, fear that for me, when I would date someone that I’d lose them. And like even when I got married to my husband, I spent a lot of our relationship testing his love. I was like, how far can I push him? It’s almost like I needed to know I could make him really angry. I could do all this he won’t leave me because so many people have left me in my life. So I think they go hand in hand. I don’t doubt it one bit. And I think there’s more walking wounded out
out there than we know.

Denita: Oh, I love that term walking wounded. I went to your website. And I was reading your about page, and that 13 year old. That picture of Corinne at 13. I’m just like, I just love her.

Corinne: Oh, yeah, I keep a picture of her on my little wall over here. And my friend Rachel Hart, she had given us a talk one time and I got to be there where she was talking about one of the things that she had worked through in therapy. She had done a lot of talking to Little Rachel, and how helpful it was. And so I had reached out to her after talking. I told her that just really resonated with me so often. I feel like, I want to just take little Corinne and hug her and say, I fixed everything. Like we did it! Like at the time when Rachel was talking, I was not doing inner child work. But it really resonated with me. And in my own coaching now, I do a lot at going back, sitting with Corinne. Talking to her. Sometimes she has wisdom for me. In present day, like very often she’ll tell me, I just want you to be more grateful for what you have. Like I had dreamed of this.

And then sometimes I like comfort her to say like, it’s all okay. You know, you don’t have to ask for this anymore. You can rest now. And so anyway, Rachel sent me a silver frame that says Little Corinne at the top. And at the bottom, it says, “Would you say that to her?”

So on my tough days, I always look at that I look at her little face. I’m like, No, I would never say this to her ever.

Denita: So that’s what you’re talking about when you’re referring to inner child work is sort of imagining a younger version of you. And having a relationship with her, speaking to her, listening to her?

Corinne: Yeah, a lot of times I will do it with my coach. Sometimes I just write about something that’s going on. And I’ll ask myself, like, you know, where did this start? Or like, Why do I think that it’s so scary for me now. And very often, like an old childhood memory will come up for me. And I have remembered so many things that I had forgotten, you know, just for years of doing that. And it would make sense. And so then I’ll write to that version of me. And ask her, what do you most need me doing now? What is it that you’re afraid of? What would you like me to know, what’s going on for you. And then sometimes I’m like, we don’t have to worry about that anymore. That’s just an old fear. Like, we have already solved all of that.

Or sometimes it’ll be something newer, that I’ve not been thinking about. And I’m like, okay, this is stuff that I can like work on in my present day life. So I do it with a combo of talk or with some journaling sometimes, yeah, I think that my audience will really resonate with this idea that you never had kind of that big T trauma, like sexual abuse, or, you know, in a way you lost a parent through divorce. But we often think of like, you know, well, my parents didn’t die or whatever we we justify a lot.

Denita: But one of my questions, if you’re willing to share, is why we see a lot about the before and afters the Corinne who was in her 30s, who was 100 pounds overweight, and how you lost that weight. And you did it by loving yourself and never giving up and, you know, no BS that that the way you talk to yourself all of that. I’m curious about, like you said, how did we get here in the first place? What were some of those things, like why was food the thing or maybe some of those underlying feelings?

Corinne: Well, I know that the food is one that, naturally because I’ve worked on it,
I definitely know kind of what was going on there for me. When I was growing up, we were so poor, like my mom, she was 17 when she had me my parents got married. Then we had she had my brother at 19. And then my parents were divorced by the time she was 21. And it was just the three of us and she had a very low education. So she worked all the time and only made minimum wage so she needed two minimum wage jobs to not even get a decent salary, just to be able to make sure that we ate on a semi regular basis.

And so growing up for me, like, one of the things that was hard for me when I was losing weight was not overeating at night. Very often for me, the only meals we got like in the summers and stuff was dinner, we didn’t have breakfast, and we didn’t have lunch, we had some days, we didn’t get to eat at all, we just ran out of food. And we’d have to wait for a paycheck, or we’d have to wait until, you know, she could figure out if one of her like sometimes she would work at hotels and stuff, if they would let her use her employee meal for one adult meal to just feed me and my brother.

And so for me growing up, like when you got food, you needed to overeat. And you needed to overeat in order to feel safe, because you didn’t know when it was coming again. When I was in my 20s and 30s when I had plenty of food. If I wanted to eat I could. I got to where it was really hard for me to stop at enough. I was always over eating as if you shouldn’t waste any food, you don’t know when we’re like, like I traded legit not knowing when the next meal was at the age of 13 to not knowing if I was going like being worried about this meal, because I didn’t know where I’d go out to eat that night. So I would eat up at this one as if you know, like there was some kind of impending danger. The danger was well, I don’t know if I’ll get what I liked. You know, but my brain like from the trauma couldn’t distinguish the two. Yeah, it was just fear around waiting for food period. And it treated food insecurity. It treated it just as importantly as like, you know, I don’t know if I get to pick the restaurant tonight.

Denita: And I just made a connection in my mind between too little for too long, which is one version of trauma, right? It could be maybe you didn’t have enough attention or affection from a parent, but in your case, it was literally too little food. With this scarcity mentality, the the mindset that we get stuck in of like, there might not be enough, there might not be enough, there might not be enough.

And I had never really made that connection before. Like from a survival point of view, which is trauma has a lot to do with survival. Yes, that sometimes scarcity is real. And then sometimes it moves into that emotional zone, the perception of not enoughness which is what we do when we’re looking at mindsets, like is it true that there’s not enough, but you’re just telling the story of it literally was not enough right?

So for anyone listening, I just want to point out if you feel like you’re stuck in a not enoughness cycle, it might have started with a legitimate not enough, and for a lot of people with weight loss.

Corinne: I know you’re a trauma coach I teach a lot of diet trauma and one of the other things that came up for me that I teach heavily inside my program is that most women that need to lose weight have probably had inflicted on them some types of diet trauma. So for example, the body does not like being starved. It just doesn’t like it. Its whole job is to try to get you to eat, you know it thinks it’s very easy for the body to primitively think of famines come in whether one’s in or not.

Denita: For a lot of us who didn’t grow up broke like Corinne and stuff, but we did jerky diets, that you know, like I remember doing diets I did this one called the military diet was horrible, like you ate like, two hotdogs without buns for breakfast. And then you got like a grapefruit like it was the weirdest and there was a scoop of aspirin thrown in the middle. I mean, it was just the weirdest combination of foods. And then you did that for three days and there wasn’t much food involved. And then for four days, you could eat all you want to.

Talk about creating a traumatic experience for your brain like, you know, eat all you want as if there’s no boundaries, so override everything your body says about what it needs. Then on these other three days, don’t eat hardly anything and don’t eat anything you lie just to only eat these things. As if you need to be punished, and then your body gets tripped wired into not getting enough calories. When the body has done enough diets where there has been restriction, severe restriction like 1200-100 calorie diet, cutting out all of your carbs, you know those kinds of things. When your body has done that enough, what happens is is every future diet that you do, it freaks out as if it’s going to have to go through the misery of the last time.

Corinne: I will tell people all the time. If you want to do keto and stuff like that, that’s fine. I just want you to always recognize that whatever you pick to do, you need to be able to do it for the rest of your life. This, like losing weight cannot be a quick fix. Losing weight has to be a lifestyle you adopt. And there’s a lots of different ways to do it.

The 4 basic rules

A lot of times what happens with my clients is they come in, and I teach them just four basic rules, water, and sleep is two of them. Like, I mean, I think every human can agree we’re supposed to get some sleep, and we’re supposed to drink water. Those are two basic human needs that so many of us try to override that our body cannot survive without. Then you’re just going to like I haven’t planned their food for each day, just to get them into the habit of choosing what they want to eat, versus feeling that they always have to follow something external. And I have them do that. So they can repair the relationship with all types of foods. Because a lot of it’s been traumatized from past diets villainizing food, putting morality on food.

So you’re talking about planning, and there’s no restrictions, you can eat whatever you want, you just have to plan it ahead of time have to plan what you’re going to eat ahead of time just in one day. So you’re just going to wake up in the morning. And you’re just going to plan what you’re going to eat for the day. Knowing your emotional needs, your physical needs, your time constraints, like all the things, your entertainment needs, whatever they are, because I don’t believe that food is just fuel. I think that that is a terrible definition that the diet industry has tried to put on food.

Denita: Well, that’s probably what the military would say, right? That military diet, right? It’s like Food is fuel. And it’s like, in many religions. There’s a lot of cultural meaning behind food. If we start saying like, Oh, I got a lot of clients who are Jewish, and they always tell me like during Hanukkah, they eat like basically, this bread dripping in grease. But it’s delicious. You know, and they ended, but it’s got so much cultural representation for them. Well, if somebody says, like, the Keto bread is evil. Well, you also just said that whatever I do for my religion is evil, too. You know, so we wrap morality have on food too much. And I don’t know what you believe, but I don’t think you’re gonna go to heaven. And God’s gonna be like, Oh, my God, you had Twinkies on Thursday, April 26.

Corinne: I don’t think it’s checking your food logs, you know. So it’s important for us to realize that food has so many different roles that it plays in our life. So we want to plan for all the roles, but we just want to be intentional about it. The problem with most of us is that what we’re doing is we’re not being intentional. Like we’re eating emotionally. And we’re not doing it intentionally. It’s like, if I go on vacation, I may want to have nachos at my favorite restaurant. And I’m doing it for pure entertainment.

I want to honor that version of me. But what I don’t want to do is have nachos tonight, because I had six hours of podcasts to do. So pulling that all together. Yeah, this applies to pretty much any area of our life, right? Not just food. It’s it’s like, why are we doing what we’re doing? I’m working a lot on my sleep right now on on an evening bedtime routine on a morning routine. And I had I have to spend a lot of time thinking about, Okay, I’m intentionally doing this. I’m planning for this. Why am I doing that?

Am I trying to beat myself up in some way? Is it like the world’s saying I should, right? I think food is just the easiest thing because we all have to eat food. Right? My grandfather was an alcoholic. And I remember him telling me that he had he had quit drinking. He also was a slight smoker. He quit smoking. And after he quit drinking and smoking, he gained like 20 pounds. And he was determined to get back to his marine military weight. And then he was in his 60s and he was like, I’m gonna lose some weight like just just felt like confident because he had quit drinking and quit smoking that this was going to be so easy. Like, a weekend. He comes up to me and he’s like, if I ever say anything about losing weight being easy, you feel free to slap me.

He was like I’ve given up drinking, and I’ve given up smoke and he was like, but you can’t just give up food, like it’s just there always to eat. So food is like the great equalizer, we have to build a room. Like if we want to really lose weight, we can’t just take foods away, we have to build a relationship with food, we have to build a relationship with ourselves. And in order to build a relationship, you got to understand what the relationship is, you got to look for that past diet trauma.

The fourth basic need is we only eat when we’re hungry, legit, hungry, not starving. But like I’m starting to get hungry. This is when my body needs food. I have had enough, my body doesn’t need more, I may want more. I may think I deserve more. I may not want to waste my money. There’s lots of emotional reasons why I might want to keep going. But at the end of the day, you think intentionally. You only eat it intentionally. You only eat when you’re hungry, you stop it enough, you drink your water, get your sleep. I swear anyone can lose weight. But we have to get all of the other stuff cleaned up. Because, like for my women, when they have to stop it enough, it activates fear of getting hungry later.

Denita: Yeah, it activates, like missing out.

Corinne: So we that’s why we have to do all this mental work around all of it.

Denita: Yeah, I was actually just thinking today about a very, very simplified idea of the work we do as coaches is where you have disconnected from yourself, because you don’t want to feel. And also where are you feeling too much, right? And in my mind, I was like, Oh, we’re so focused as humans on, I want to feel better. I want to feel better, I want to feel better. But we’re not really focused on the magnitude of the feeling whether it’s positive or negative. So we are feeling too much. And it feels overwhelming. And where have we disconnected and we’re not feeling enough.

Part of the work I do with trauma is learning your body, the sensations in your body, do I feel activated? My clients call it anxiety. And then that word is all loaded. So they’re like, oh, I shouldn’t feel anxious. And I say, Okay, what if we just say, Oh, I’m activated? Look at the energy here. Well, immediately, they’re just like, oh, yeah, that’s okay. That’s okay to have energy in my body. So there’s that element too of just, am I connecting and disconnecting? What am I feeling? How much am I feeling? Because some of us, I dare say, those of us who really are on a mission to feel better, “feel better”, and many of us are very sensitive. So it’s not that we’re feeling wrong. It’s that we’re feeling too much. Yes. Like it’s overwhelming, these emotions. And that’s when we go to food. Or in my case, that’s when I go to sugar.

Because I’m like, do I have the activation? I don’t know why I find myself standing at the pantry. And then I’ve learned that I’ve started a habit of, asking “Am I hungry? Oh, actually, I’m not hungry.” And that’s part of learning yourself and your relationship with yourself and your relationship with food or whatever other thing you go to, right?

Corinne: One of the things I have my clients do, like, especially when they think they’re hungry, because hunger is like one of those things we can convince ourselves we’re hungry, because we just want to do something with that energy. And food is an easy thing to do. You know, and it’s so easy to talk yourself into hunger. I mean, it’s amazing how easy it is to talk yourself into, like, oh, I should eat, I deserve it. I don’t know when I’ll eat this again, or whatever it may be. I just always tell them in that moment, before you decide to eat, just ask yourself, if I wasn’t going to eat, what is it that I truly need in this moment? Because very often, if you notice, like I’m not actually hungry, I’m just kind of talking myself into being hungry.

I have a client who one time said this, I was interviewing her. She was a success story. She had lost like 50 pounds. And she said, there was just one day when it all started clicking. After everything you said, I opened the refrigerator and I was just looking for something to eat. And she said what she had learned is that her pattern was when she was seeking something to eat was just yes, no, yes. Oh, that looks okay. Then she knew she wasn’t hungry. She had watched herself eat so many times doing that, that she realized that she was usually stressed. Feeling guilty about something. And she said, “I closed the fridge and just said, Tanya, the answer is not in there. The answer is inside you.” And she said, from that moment on, she just started really trying to figure out, like, if I’m not going to eat over this, what do I need right now? What can I give myself right now? Like, what’s going on for me? And it was so helpful for her.

Denita: I’ve really learned, this is something I learned through my trauma certification, oftentimes we say like, oh, I feel like I need to do something, and our brain says, oh, that means I need to work, right? Like sit at the computer and work. But what our bodies usually mean when it’s like, oh, and I feel like I need to do something.

That sort of stress or active energy, our bodies are saying, I want to move. So you think about 100, 200 years ago, I need to do something. It’s like I need to go plow the field, right? I need to go milk the cows and bring these like heavy buckets of milk in, right?

We’re activating our bodies. So something I’m really playing with a lot with my clients when they are talking about anxiety or some kind of active energy is, we shake our hands, we rub ’em together, we stand up, we pace, we push against a wall, like we do something to activate the body because that active energy is metabolized by movement.

Corinne: Yes. Right. So that’s like so good to know. Some people might be going to the fridge or the pantry when really their bodies are like, I wanna move, we’ve got energy here. Brenda Burchard teaches something. If you look it up on the internet, there are these activation exercises for like when you’re just trying to even get ready for a call or whatever.

But it also can be a stress reliever. And you basically pound with your fists on your lower back. Like, there’s several things that you do. There’s like this, like series of breathing and stuff, and it just, it kind of like, it dissipates that energy. So if you have nervous energy, it will help you get the nervous energy outta your system.

You can also use it to get yourself ready to do something. So like if you’re dreading something or you feel like you need to do something that, where you’re gonna be focused or on, you can do those exercises also to kind of get your like adrenaline up just a little bit. Because a lot of times when we’re dreading doing something, we don’t have enough of the stress, cortisol to get us going, or the stress hormones to get us going.

Like, you know, a lot of times when you talk about adrenaline and cortisol, people are just like, Ugh, like, you know, like, like they don’t want cortisol. I’m like, no, you actually do. We don’t want an overuse of it, and we don’t want it coursing through our veins because we’re thinking like a poop head all day long.

What we really want is cortisol in a useful manner. And so like, just even for, you know, for a lot of people learning, some of these little hacks are very helpful. Like a lot of times, like between podcasts, I just walk a couple laps in my house to kind of like breathe different air than my office. Just to change gears, we’re getting ready for the next one.

Just to kind of clean out some stuff. It is very helpful. Yeah. Our bodies are not meant to be sedentary, and we are so sedentary in our culture.

Denita: I just thought of something hands on. Instead of going to the pantry or the fridge, Maybe I just need to do five squats, right? Maybe I need to like do some jumping jacks. It’s just part of learning your body, right? So we’re kind of bringing this idea of weight loss and um, food and all of that, all those triggers alongside. Trauma and emotion work. And they’re so closely related.

Corinne: And I think the important thing for, especially in the weight loss side of things for everyone is like when it comes to urges, and that’s what we’re really talking about here, this urge to eat when I have no good reason other than like something going on in my head. Like my body is not telling me that I actually need some food. So now I’m eating for other reason. You have got to be willing to try things. Every single one of us is an individual and we’re all very different. You know, some of my clients, some meditation, some of that stuff works. Some of my clients doing some activation work like this works.

Some of my clients have to think through it, some of them just have to physically remove themselves and just be like, I need a change of like arena. Like if I, if I stay close to my pantry, I’m more likely to go in, it’s like a magnet. So I tell them like, all right, if you know that during a certain time of day or a certain emotion or whatever is put physical space between the two of you so that you have time to lower the trauma response, or you have time to lower the urge, we wanna let some of that feeling process.

So that the logical brain can come back online, cuz that’s another big key component. I think that where trauma and weight loss really intersect is the moment you start going into either big or little T type trauma responses where your body’s scared or anxious or whatever that logical brain says, oh, it’s not safe for logic to be here right now.

We need automatic responses. That’s what we need. So giving yourself physical space or some type of a process that’s quick, efficient, and easy that you can go through to allow some of that emotion, to clear out the chemicals that are pulsing through your blood to clear out, let it clear out a little bit.

Then your logical brain can come back online. I just watched so many of my clients beat themselves up because it. I know I shouldn’t eat, and every day I say I’m gonna do better, but by the evening I’m so stressed, I’m so overwhelmed and I’m so tired. I just find myself eating. And it’s like, well, it makes sense.

But now what we need to do is we gotta figure out one, how do we like address what’s really going on? But until we can unwind all of it, we need a process for you, for you to like calm your nervous system. Put some space between you. Like your fruit snacks right?

So one hack that I give my weight loss clients all the time is, because we just don’t wanna be eating them because we have nothing else to do, or because we’re tired or we’re overwhelmed or stressed, put ’em in a container. That’s very different than what you have now. That has an incredibly hard cap to get off and put them in that cabinet above your refrigerator that no one uses because you can’t reach it, right? That’s the new home. So if I want it, I’ve gotta crawl on the counter. I’ve got to get a ladder.

I’ve gotta do these things because when I’m doing all of that activity and I’m doing all of it, my reasoning brain has more and more time to come online. Versus it just is on the convenient counter. Sitting there, staring at me at the moment, my brain gets hijacked.

Denita: Well, this has been so amazing. So many useful tips, all of it I think will be so useful for everyone listening. Thank you for coming on. Any last words of wisdom?

Corinne: The only other thing I would say, something that’s been helpful for me in terms of trauma is at the end of the day, if I can’t do anything else, I like to put my hand over my heart because I always feel like it beat, it gives like a protective cage over it because a lot of times for me, like I’m always worried about at the end of the day, being left behind or you know, my heart getting hurt in some way. I just protect it and I take a few deep breaths and I just tell myself I am safe right now. Like I do that over and over again until I realize I got a lot of thinking going on. I got a lot going on in my head, but there’s actually nothing happening to me in this.

And that right there has always been enough for me to just be like able to take a breath. Whether I do anything else, I’d rather do that than just go eat. And that’s been very calming for me. So it’s something I started doing a couple years ago and it’s just been a game changer. So I thought I would share it with your audience when it comes to just some of the general worries and stuff.

Denita: Yeah, I love that. I love hand over heart. Awesome. Well thank you so much. I’ll include links to all of your stuff down below!