The Missing Tool for Stress Relief
This article highlights important sections of the interview, listen in if you’d like the full episode.
Today we are talking a lot about trauma and how we store that trauma. And my guest is Marnell Hesterman. We all need to work on our own emotional wellness, and she has done that. She is the owner, founder, CEO of Insight Inspirations. And Marnell refers to herself as an emotional wellness specialist for adult women. She is a certified life coach and tapping practitioner. And she helps women who are struggling with their emotional wellness, stress, overwhelm, burnout, and so much more. And I like her, her intention. She helps women move from what she calls the emotional spin cycle. God knows I've experienced that myself many times. And to return themselves to a space of calm, clarity, and confidence.
I was on my own journey just to give a little background of myself and probably mid-forties, I found myself really struggling. I sought out some self-development stuff and I spent probably five years on that journey. And that's where I took my life coaching certification. And that's where I was exposed to tapping. And it was at the very end probably the end of the five years that I had an experience with tapping. And the person that came in and did it was like, it was like a 15 minute session. And I was so blown away by it that I was like, wow, this is the piece that's been missing.
It's like, we've all had this great awareness of all of these things that we've been struggling with throughout our lives and the imprints that are left on us and... here is a tool that we can use to alleviate that stress, to get rid of those old beliefs, those old hurts, those old, and to create some new pathways in the brain to live a calmer life. I immediately sought out training and added that to my coaching. And here I am 13 plus years later. I found a way to relieve some of the fears about life.
I work mostly with the trauma that's stored in our minds. Trauma is also stored in our bodies and we do have physical responses to trauma, but I work with the trauma that's stored in our subconscious. Our subconscious I like to refer to it as a filing cabinet. And as we go through life, every experience that we have, whether it's good or bad, we store little bits and pieces in that subconscious. And that becomes basically our blueprint that we pull from when we have any situation that's similar to something that we've already experienced, our mind automatically goes to the subconscious and says, how did we react to this before? What did we do previously? And it will react in the same way, or it will react from a belief that we created because of what happened. I like to give an example of if you're learning to drive, you have to really think about it when you're learning that red means stop, green means go. When you're first going through those initial times, you need to stop or you need to go now. But once you've driven for a while, you automatically do it because those things are stored in your subconscious.
I like to relate to if you had problems with a family member, say, and there was a lot of hurt or a lot of different things that have happened over the years, you store all those things in your subconscious. Maybe you've pushed those emotions down. You just tried to ignore it. You say let's make peace for peace sake. Right? And then you're at a family gathering and that family member says some little thing to you, nothing major, but you might explode or you might have a very emotional reaction to that family member because all of those old things are still stuck in your subconscious. and they're coming to the surface because this thing reminded you of what has happened in the past. You think that's kind of scary for someone because at that point they probably don't even realize what's brought forth that reaction?
I can remember times myself, I've had a reaction to something and part of me is thinking, why am I doing that? Well, and it's very unconscious sometimes, right? Our subconscious is 85 % of our brain and 15 % is the logical reasoning part. And when we are triggered by something in the subconscious that has been painful or scary or traumatic in some way, then our logical reasoning part of our brain goes offline. because our amygdala takes over and we go into that fight or flight response.
What I do is I work with people to rewire those neural pathways in the brain through tapping. We're working on the energy meridians of the body and we're talking through whatever has happened. We don't always necessarily have to talk in great detail. It's just to address it specifically for them. It's like this event happened and this was really scary and maybe there were certain smells, maybe there were certain surroundings that affected them, and we can work through it so that they can remember the event or the experience, but they no longer have that physical or emotional response to it. You reach the point where it actually starts to physically and emotionally, mentally work.
I have done a lot of my own work and one of my big ones that I worked on was my fear of flying. And this one still just to this day is just like, I got on a plane for my very first time and I was physically ill. I was so afraid to be on that plane and I was white knuckle gripped on the arm rests and... wanted to get off the plane. We had a layover, and I got off and I did not want to get back on to get to our destination. I was just, I was terrified. Well, it came up later in tapping that my dad had a really good friend that he lost in a plane crash when I was like six years old. So I watched my dad grieve the loss of his friend over that plane crash. And we also went out to visit the crash site. It was very traumatic for my little mind. was like my six year old mind automatically created a belief that if you get on a plane, you're going to die. I worked on that fear and I only worked on it once. And I have no problem flying now. None.
I've worked on so many things in my life with this, like relationships and, I had a really difficult relationship with my mom. And I would spend days crying after every one of her visits, you know, and I got to the point where, you know, through tapping, that I could actually see her with compassion and love and understanding of where she came from. And I could create my own boundaries so that I was no longer affected by what she was dishing out, you know, it was like, I don't need to take that personally. That's got nothing to do with me really.
I offer a 10 minute complimentary telephone conversation. If you want to have a chat with me about whatever is going on with you. And just to see if we'd be a good fit to work together, whether I can help you with whatever's going on in your life.
