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J-SET. J-SET. D-1, the only J-SET.
Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Lemon, welcome to on-purpose.
So grateful to have you here.
I've looked forward to sitting with you for a long, long time.
And so I really appreciate your space and your energy and for you being here.
And I want to start off by asking you, what childhood memory do you have that you feel is define the person that you are today or most defines the person you are today?
There's a few. There's a traumatic one that I don't like to talk about.
That happened when I was two years old.
That was deeply traumatic.
That certainly shaped a lot of the trauma of my childhood, a lot of the shame-based parts of my childhood.
My first interactions with children, other children when I was in sort of preschool, when I was probably five years old, when I was bullied and called the F word an ecstasy and the kids that I acted like a girl, I often say the irony of my life is when I was a child, the kids called me a girl and as an adult, people called me a man.
That I've transitioned and accepted my womanhood.
That's interesting. It's interesting thinking that other people told me I was a girl before I sort of fully was able to accept or reckon with it and it wasn't a good positive thing because I was assigned male at birth as a trans person.
Being called a girl was sort of a bad thing in the eyes of the other children.
That's an early memory in terms of interacting with other kids and then dancing.
I am doing back in the day.
I don't know if there's still physical education in schools but I'm 51 years old and we have PE, physical education and during free play while the other kids were sort of playing sports, I was off to the side dancing by myself with music in my head and I would sort of have characters that I would kind of portray through movement and I'd be imitating what I saw on television from Salted
Gold for those people who are my age who know Salted Gold which is showing the 80s with the countdown show that counted down the top hits of the week and the hexalical dancers.
And there was this beautiful black woman named Darcell Winn who was the lead thalical dancer and she had long hair sort of down to her knees and she was so sexy and so vivacious and so I was sort of pretending to be Darcell as I danced in PE and free play and then church and speaking in church almost every Sunday.
My mother reminds me that I would summarize the Sunday school lesson every Sunday and children's day was like the fourth Sunday of every month and I was always sort of getting out the making speeches in church and that even though I'm not a religious person now I'm very spiritual.
Church was this performance opportunity.
The religious part of it wasn't affirming, it was very shaming but the performance part of it was very affirming.
I'm told that I was a good speaker and that I was smart with something that dancing and starting to study dance in third grade and doing talent shows and then being considered a smart kid who spoke well became my identity in terms of how I saw myself.
In addition to that identity that was sort of placed on me that was from the other kids and from my teachers the bullied identity, the freak, the sissy, the f-word, the queer, all those identities that were stigmatized were sort of placed on me but I also won talent shows and was a good speaker and there was this one moment in seventh grade.
I know you asked for one child to remember this one.
I love this. This is beautiful by the way.
I'm in sixth grade where I ran for vice president of the student council and I remember sort of doing the campaign and I made little flyers and stuff and like not I was this very by middle school I was dressing myself with things from the South Asian army and it was not quite gender non-conforming yet but it was going more in an androgenous direction and I was kind of just
know it all kid. I was like you know for raising my hand you know to be the first one to answer questions in class is very annoying and I was you know chased down from school every day by kids who wanted to beat me up and call it you know this is the f-word bullied because I was very thin film but when the year that I ran for student council president we all got to make speeches
and right after the speeches the kids voted and I remember the beginning of my speech was quality is my principle and qualified is my attitude I don't know what I said after that and I just remember the kids being like and they voted for me and I became vice president in the student council so this kid that like no one liked who they made fun of there was something about me
speaking in this moment with this confidence and this sense of something I don't know maybe I'll speaking to each every Sunday that they voted for me and that was a really wonderful moment of screw you to the kids it's like they voted for me but like I was also like this kid that everyone made fun of and didn't like so there was you know in looking back and I've talked to
very few people from middle school but like I think even though they all sort of made fun of me there was an acknowledgement that there was talent and there was intelligence there and how wonderful as traumatizing as my childhood was to have create a sense of self you know reading gromp drama of the gifted child I understand that you know in retrospect my identity
became about accomplishment and not who I was authentically but how wonderful to be a kid who valued education because of my mother who was a teacher and had this identity that was attached to accomplishments and intelligence and talent that's a lovely thing particularly as I you know as a woman in the world we're so often now 51 year old woman thinking about aging
and who's an actress in Hollywood and so much of being a woman is about how we look and so much of how I grew up was about my talent and intelligence and not that and that's a beautiful thing that's a really really beautiful thing to have those things be valued and associate it with who you are and so as I you know sort of go into the world and do a lot of different things knowing
that I'm talented knowing that I'm smart and that because of all that training and church and doing public speaking competitions and you know valuing education is still being just a student of so many different things that I can lead with those things and that that those are the reasons why I've you know gotten to where I am I think you know on God's time not my time
I thought it should have happened you know 25 years ago but it didn't happen until I was 40 but it did happen right on time and when there was a sense of purpose attached to it and that there was something to say and so that is my another intention of today is to try to say things in a way that people can hear I've been grappling a lot with how sort of anti intellectual our world
is there's so many divides in this culture right now around you know liberal and conservative and all that stuff but it's really one of the big ones is people who've gone to college and you haven't and how they vote you know I think but most non college as you've get a people vote for the Republican party and then I'm an actress but I talk in a way you know I'm an intersectional
feminist and I you know red bell hooks and I just did a pocket episode dedicated to her and I use phrases like imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy to evoke bell hooks his work so I talk in this way that's like that's not always accessible so I want to meet be able to meet people where they are but I don't want to done myself down either but I'm just aware of the elitism
tied to certain kinds of ways of speaking and certain kinds of education and but I also am aware that language sometimes to be exacting with language we have to use words like patriarchy and white supremacy and and heteronormativity you know to really sort of talk about what's going on or trauma or resilience so sometimes to really be precise with language and exacting
with language you might come across as a little bit elitist and so I've sort of been grappling with that too just as someone now who has been a working class person until I was like in my 40s and then now you know have some class privilege so just grappling with privilege I'm constantly sort of grappling and questioning myself and my positionality and trying to not be
this out of touch of Hollywood actress.
Thank you for connecting the dots for us I could see how the experiences you are having back then you can kind of draw that line and I could see you kind of connecting the dots in your own mind to where you are today and I love that you present your experiences so much more of a paradox and a dichotomy as opposed to clarity because I think that clarity comes from the questioning and the curiosity
that you have about your own experience earlier you used the term you said you're learning to reparent you're in a child and you could hear that in the way you were describing the journey so far what are parts of yourself that you think you've spent the most time reparenting or what does that look like?
So much of it is about how I frame my story I'm a Brunei Brown Stan slash scholar and when we disown our stories we're defined by them and when we own our stories we can write a brave new ending and so much of and actually interestingly enough on the podcast I was just watching one of your earlier podcasts when you had Oprah on talking about what happened to me and so much
of the way I for many years I had been in denial about all my childhood trauma like I wasn't denial about the bullying and the straight up violence I experienced as a child in a non forming child and so I needed to for many years to talk about that I needed to reckon with that and just acknowledge that it happened and feel the pain of that that there was no tools to experience
as a child and then so I sort of went from that you know the what happened to me well actually I went I was in what's wrong with me and then I went to what happened to me and then I now I'm in its base of like was right with me you know and what happened that wasn't just traumatic but was affirming and that were resources and the things that sort of helped me get through I've been
working with an amazing therapist named Jennifer Burden flyer who I interviewed on my podcast twice in the first season and we do somatic work that is based in the community resiliency model from the based on the trauma research institute do you know this word I've heard I'm familiar with it but not well but the trauma research institute came up with this thing called
crim or the community resiliency model that is sort of based in resilience and its somatic works it's all about sensing into your body and there's six tools of that and so we've been I've been working with my therapist on sort of refiring and rewiring to sort of the way Dr.
Joseph spends the talks about it and creating new neurotransmitters in my nervous system and deepening my resilient zone so there were things in my childhood that got me through my childhood the dancing and so with yes to acknowledge that there was abuse and that there was bullying and violence in my childhood but there were also things that got me through my life
art and dancing and reading and performing and those things continue to get me through so it becomes it's a both and one of the tools of crim or the community resiliency model is shift and stay and it's all about sensing into your body and shift and stay is about like I would go into a therapy session with Jennifer and she would say you know how you feeling today and I'm
like oh my little anxious and she'll ask me where do you feel that in your body and often my anxiety sort of happens in my in my stomach I'm feeling a little bit of that now I think just because of being in a podcast and then she a Jennifer will invite me you know is there somewhere in your body where it feels neutral or positive and right now it's my ankle so I'm sure she'll
invite me to breathe into that and focus my attention instead of where it's anxious but to focus my attention on where it's neutral and positive so I'm focusing on my ankle right now and then we just kind of focus the energy there and invariably if I can focus my energy in my body where it's neutral or positive sometimes eventually the anxiety will dissipate maybe
not completely but it'll dissipate a little bit and it's about that's really about living in the both and in our bodies and it's a reminder that we become sort of what we focus on too literally in a somatic way literally in our bodies but I think in a sort of more global sense as well we become the thing that we focus on so in the tricky thing for me is in me my attempts to do
both and I do the and without the bo thing meaning I focus on the resilience I focus on the neutral and the positive and I do I mean a little bit of denial of the of the challenge of the anxiety of the difficult thing that's going on in my body and so I have to be able to acknowledge that part too and and not just be in the resilience because there's a bit of denial there and so and I'm
not in the full truth of what's going on in my body what's going on with me in a moment so being able to like say the anxiety is here maybe it's attached to a story maybe it's not sometimes it's just a feeling sometimes it's not necessarily attached to a story often it is or thought and then go to the end go to that neutral or positive place the resilient place the thing that brings
me joy but making sure that I don't skip the difficulty that might be coming along to then be slipping into denial a little bit and effort to just sort of be positive all the time yeah because that's just not real.
Absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing that tool and technique I'm sure everyone is listening is going to try and practice that in their own way.
What is amazing that's thing I'll say about crime or the community resilience amount it's these there are six tools as an app called iChill which breaks down the six tools and it's and it was devised by the trauma research institute for people who might be you know coming from veterans or police officers people who are coming from very traumatic experiences that you
can take into your community and share tools that are very accessible doing it is not easy but their accessible tool shift in stay is one of them resourcing with another one I mentioned gesturing is another tracking is it's huge you have to track what's going on in your body help now so these are skills that are very accessible and that people can teach to each other
the practice of it slow for me the biggest piece is slowing myself down to actually track what's going on in my body and we all know that book the body keeps the score and so no matter what is going on intellectually and all the work and I've been in therapy for 23 years now that it has to land in the body it has to be work that it has to be somatic it has to be because because our
bodies 80% of our information comes from the body to the head and 20% from the head to the body right and so no matter how intellectual we are no matter how much we want to talk it through and understand it our bodies have to if there's trauma if there's stress our bodies have to know it differently our bodies have to understand what a healthy connection or healthy attachment
is have to know it in my nervous system there's this knowing and then there's like this knowing because of that thing I mean you've talked about on your podcast but so much happens on our lives pre-verbal between the ages of one and three one and five before we even have language so many things will happen to us that we don't have words for that our nervous systems are tracking
in those moments and so the work of reparenting the work of resetting the nervous system of deepening our resilient zone it's about that that somatic that pre-verbal that almost is sort of the pre not even the prefrontal cortex but that limpic brain that that peace that's like that that reprogramming that fight flight are free so that we really deepen our resilient
sound anyway I could talk about this all day no no genuinely it's it's so helpful and so insightful and I and I know our community is going to love this so far but I want to go back to your comment and you mentioned a few times on how we like to deny certain experiences and uncomfortable things and difficult things and I know that for a fact I've done that so much in my life
physically as well it's so easy to deny a physical pain thinking it's nothing and emotional pain sometimes even easier to do it with but why is denial so unhealthy and what parts of yourself do you still find you may deny sometimes denial is unhealthy because we're not living in the truth what for ourselves and there's this line I think from magnolia you think you
may be done with the past but the past isn't done with you like even when I'm in denial there's still the stuff is still operating in my life I'm dating Berkhares has a beautiful TED Talk where she talks about adverse childhood experiences and there's this wonderful research about adversity and childhood and how excess doses of adversity is the way she sort of puts
it in childhood can lead to physical literal like you know sort of asthma diabetes all these health outcomes in children and then later in life so that when we don't deal with it psychologically and emotional things they show up in our bodies in unhealthy ways all these other different things and so when we're in denial about a trauma we've experienced or something
that is difficult for us that is happening in our bodies and if we don't acknowledge it and release it it has to go has to move through an out of the body it can be deadly stress can be deadly and my therapist likes to talk about we talk about trauma resilience but then there's different kinds of trauma and different levels and and distressors right stressors can like
bump us out of there's an idea of the the resilient zone she I'm sort of likes to encourage us to imagine like these two lines and they are resilient zone sort of goes in waves between these two lines and then there's low zone which is like she likes to think this is a house and our resilient zone is the ground floor low zone would be the basement and high zone would be the attic
and high zone is when we're in that fight fight or freezing we're anxious and we're stressed and we're just like and then low zone would be this kind of like depressed I don't want to get out of bed maybe I'm suicidal or I'm just like listless and so we want to have deepening our resilient zone is about being able to go into lows and highs and be in our and heavy motions but not be
bumped into that high space we're bumped into that low zone and so if we are constantly in that high zone and I've been constantly in that fight flight or freeze I learned that really early that I didn't feel safe and not nowhere with safe and so I was constantly releasing adrenaline cortisol that constant release of adrenaline cortisol over 40 years we're not hardwired
for that biologically we're supposed to like you know we see the bear in the woods we release adrenaline cortisol to fight that bear to flee that bear and then we go back to homeing of stasis if we're constantly if we cut what if Nadeem Berkheres is what if the bear comes home every night we're constantly releasing that adrenaline cortisol and then our we're just depleted
after a while and years of this depletion and I and so I've in my 40s I was like why am I so tired why am I so depleted it's just all that constant survival not ever feeling safe and so trying to find so much of like deepening my resilient zone is creating safety and if you are a trauma survivor so much of the for trauma survivors we often take um this is from my therapist we
take an alarm bell and turn it into a dinner bell hmm because things have been wired in such a way in a dysfunctional way that everything becomes an alarm everything and so and so that's so much of our work when we think we think about folks who are I'm triggered by this this is triggering for me and it could very well be but our work individually it's the external thing
can be triggering but my work individually is like is this about what's actually going on or it's about my history when it's hysterical it's historical when it's hysterical it's historical when I remind myself of this when the vernace is there a call it's probably not about what's going on in this moment like I had a moment with my boyfriend a few months ago and we've
been you know we've been dating for like three years and it's been lovely it's been wonderful and I had this moment when I went into this shame spiral doing a conversation we were having just went into this great night it's like because the first time with him I felt so safe with him it's the first time with him and I was like and it just like I was like I felt myself just
going into this crazy and I was talking a lot and I was spiraling and I was just like babe let me I need to go the bathroom and get myself together he was like what's going and I sat there and I was like luckily because I've done my shame work I was like okay you're in a shame spiral you were in a shame spiral and we can add to that when we can name shame I was like this is not about this incredible
man who's so amazing to me this isn't about anything he said this is about my own story that I just spun myself out with so it's historical it's not about this moment so it's about some historical stuff you know so I just had I think it was the bad I'm like 30 minutes maybe 40 minutes just kind of like talking to myself breathing and just being and I really take being and in the moment
this is not a dangerous moment I created something historical something historical came up for me but this is safe and the only way I was able to do that is like I've had like three years of safety with this man so unlike this man is incredible so like you know maybe early on I'd be like this man is not safe and you know when a man doesn't feel safe to me or when people don't
feel safe I'm like I'm out I've learned very very quickly to get out and so I've become very good at like identifying what safe space is I'm like so this is not girl you're just spinning out with some things some historical stuff some childhood stuff some old stuff just came up for you and so when it once I was able to do that and regulate then I was able to go out and say babe
when it's your shame spiral and I bet you it is what it is and he just like held me and and cried and and what's interesting to me what I've learned on I'm intrigued this is an experience that you have intervened so many brilliant people I've had so many brilliant people in my podcast and so I think about that moment through a shame lens right there's a we can talk about a shame
spiral we can talk about it through a trauma resilience piece around regulating my nervous system it's also a ten attachment piece attachment theory piece where there's healthy attachment with him so there's just all these different lenses that I was able to kind of filter that moment through that was that kind of kept that brought me back to the present and brought
me into my resilient space where I wasn't spinning out and it was deep and so like reckoning with the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves it just a thought can spin us out right just a thought can disrupt my nervous system that's not it's a thought I maybe it's a comment I've seen on the internet it's a thought I could have about myself that's like oh your pizza shit
oh your horrible person that could just spin me out and just like becoming aware of those thoughts and then you know it's a thought useful I can let this go this isn't the truth can I reality check this thought or maybe just letting go of all thoughts you know there's so there's um in some of my meditation I do transcend all meditation too sometimes it's about trying
trying imperfectly to let go of all thoughts and just be just be letting go of stories letting go of thoughts and absence of data we create stories as human beings we're hardwired for story but trying to let go of story trying to let go of thoughts and just be it's so hard and but have those moments when it's just like you know and I'm like am I an airhead you know I'm moving
an airhead right now I'm just like letting go of thoughts and just like uh yeah sometimes I think like people yeah I don't want like I don't want to be judgmental but sometimes people who are not like intense thinkers they just kind of like chill sometimes I like envy those people because they're not like thinking about like this is your political implications and then
the sort of therapeutic and somatic implications and then the attachment theory implications and then the intersectional feminists and like there's all this stuff going on all the time and then I'm an artist and then like you know my humanity is an as an artist and like having empathy for the character and analyzing human behavior just just a lot going on in there
and so sometimes
