THE ACCRESCENT™ PODCAST EPISODE 258

Lisa Arrigo (00:00.278)
Ha

Leigh Ann Lindsey (00:01.247)
Well, Lisa, welcome to The Accrescent Podcast. I’m so excited to have you.

Lisa Arrigo (00:05.816)
Thank you, Leigh Ann. It’s great to be here today with you.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (00:09.267)
We were already talking that there’s so many places we can go. There’s so many things I’m excited to get your perspective on from your lived experience, but also from your professional clinical experience. But as always, I think rewinding and starting with a little bit of your origin story of how did you get to be here today in front of me talking about what you’re talking about? And I know that’s a really broad question. So feel free to answer it in any way that feels good for you.

Lisa Arrigo (00:22.466)
Mm-hmm.

Lisa Arrigo (00:29.154)
Mm.

Lisa Arrigo (00:39.254)
Wow, that that is a big question. You know, you just never know what the first question is gonna be. so so I’ll try to answer it very briefly. so I am a licensed clinical social worker and I came to this work, gosh, it feels like a hundred years ago. but what brought me to psychology and social work retrospectively was a desire to heal myself.

I had a very complicated, chaotic upbringing. I went away to college, became addicted to cocaine, and that started my journey into addiction and ultimately recovery and healing. So I think I started with, you know, maybe a desire to understand myself better. And it’s been a long, interesting, at times scary and painful journey.

But currently I you know I’m feeling a calling to really teach people you know where the intersections of neurobiology, psychology, healing, understanding you know what is actually happening in our nervous systems and you know how we can educate ourselves and depathologize experiences such as trauma or

Addiction or other maladaptive behaviors that may not serve us. in my experience as a therapist, I find that a lot of people come in feeling broken, feeling like you know, they can’t get unstuck, feeling like they’ve been in therapy forever, they’ve tried various modalities and and treatment you know, efforts and that.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (02:19.155)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (02:25.651)
Yep.

Lisa Arrigo (02:36.352)
For a variety of reasons, they they just can’t get out of their own way. so in my experience working with clients and even in my own healing, it’s become really powerful for me to understand, you know, the neurobiological underpinnings of why we do what we do. And it starts with a need to survive, whatever that comes from, and everybody’s story is different.

And it starts way, way back, even before we’re born. So I find that when people get curious about, gee, why, you know, why why are there generations of patterns that I replay in my current life and why is it so hard to break them?

Leigh Ann Lindsey (03:25.214)
Completely. And I think we’re gonna spend some time on how do we start to shift these patterns that we feel caged by completely. And I love that. With with clients, the essence of it is why why am I stuck in danger signals? Why am I holding on to these things? And the essence is where are those narratives coming from? And I love that you talk about, hey.

Lisa Arrigo (03:26.572)
Mm-hmm.

Lisa Arrigo (03:30.594)
Yeah.

Lisa Arrigo (03:35.106)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (03:52.497)
They don’t just come from your like known lived experience. They can come from in utero experiences. They can come from generational inheritance. They can come from birth trauma. And so we’re being the detectives a little bit to kind of figure out where did these narratives come from?

Lisa Arrigo (04:02.134)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Lisa Arrigo (04:12.435)
Right, right, right. And generational trauma is a big part of this as well. And there’s been a lot of research re s well, I guess over the last ten or fifteen years surrounding epigenetics and you know, the ways genes get turned on and off and passed on to the next generation, again in service to survival. so second, third generation Holocaust family members.

have a higher degree of PTSD, depression, anxiety, because they’re carrying the genetic code from the generations that came before. And when people get curious about that, you know, it’s never the whole story, but you know, it it’s a piece of it’s a piece of the puzzle. Right?

Leigh Ann Lindsey (04:58.002)
Yeah, exactly. We’re not ever trying to be reductive. Everything is so nuanced and multifaceted. I don’t know. I’ve never worked with a client who it was like, aha, here’s the one thing. The one thing that’s causing everything. And if we just solve this, it it tends to often be a perfect storm. And yes, there’s sometimes like the big core core.

Lisa Arrigo (05:02.381)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (05:23.154)
traumas, wounds, narratives, but it ends up being kind of this tangled ball of yarn that lots of other things stem from.

Lisa Arrigo (05:28.705)
Yeah.

Exactly. Exactly. You know, I I start my book in utero. And when I was writing the chapter, you know, I I was thinking, how how am I going to describe my intrauterine experience? Because I guess I was there for it, but I don’t have memory. I don’t obviously didn’t have a brain that could process anything, right? But in thinking about

Leigh Ann Lindsey (05:47.325)
Yeah.

Lisa Arrigo (06:01.666)
The conditions in which I was brought into this world, you know, my mom was very, very stressed. She did not have a lot of support in her life at that time. and whatever she was feeling, I was getting transmitted to me through the placenta. So her stress hormones became my stress hormones, her cortisol levels became mine, right? So her rhythms became my rhythms.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (06:26.588)
Thanks.

Lisa Arrigo (06:31.175)
So when I really thought about her life during that time, it really helped me appreciate the conditions that set the stage for me. I was also born prematurely, so I spent the first six weeks of my life in an incubator in 1966. So in terms of attachment and attachment theory, where the baby comes out and you know, you know, sort of crawls up and starts rooting.

Know I miss that whole experience. does that explain everything about my life? No. but it’s good information because I didn’t come into this world easily, right? and they’ve done actual studies where if you take a woman who’s who carries a baby in a war-torn area and you move her to safety, that baby is still going to be wired for.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (07:28.788)
Wow.

Lisa Arrigo (07:29.057)
Right. Right. So then that child could go on to become like overly sensitive or have a nervous system that’s that’s wired or their amygdala’s firing high because the first six or seven months of the pregnancy, they were getting messages around safety, around patterns of safety and threat.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (07:49.009)
And to that point, when it when we look at this primary about survival, that fetus essentially the the system is trying to go, here’s the world you’re about to come into. So we need to prepare you for it. If it’s a war-torn world, we need your cortisol to be high and your adrenaline to be high so you’re able to respond to the threats that you’re gonna be faced with every day.

Lisa Arrigo (07:58.986)
Exactly.

Lisa Arrigo (08:11.561)
It makes perfect sense. It’s brilliant. Right?

Leigh Ann Lindsey (08:14.054)
Mm-hmm. Except that we live, you know, primally thousands of years ago, the environment our parents were born into was actually very likely to be the environment we were born into. I think in modern times, we live in a world in which things are changing so rapidly in terms of economics and stability, but also the ability to move to a completely different country. So I think what we’re seeing is

Lisa Arrigo (08:27.585)
That’s right.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (08:44.044)
Often we’re born into a world that is not the world our parents lived in, right? Like my grandmother grew up in the depression and she hoarded food, and that wasn’t the world my mother was born into. And so it it gets passed down, this narrative of scarcity, but that actually isn’t what’s true anymore.

Lisa Arrigo (08:58.173)
Right.

Lisa Arrigo (09:07.423)
Right, right. That is such a good point because, you know, those patterns, those tracks are laid down so early in our lives that they’re not even conscious. So you know, we can have ideas, you know, about you know, how we want to live and the abundance that we have and you know, even moving to different countries, but but those patterns are so embedded inside of us that

there is no working knowledge of that. You know, there’s there’s simply the the patterned response of

I don’t know if I have enough, or I don’t know if I feel safe, you know, whether it’s in a relationship or you move to Croatia, but you’re bringing yourself with you. and you may not feel that sense of connection there because your hardware is telling you something different. So we have all this freedom and flexibility today. but what we’re carrying, if we don’t understand it.

can impact our ability to really appreciate the freedom and, you know, some of the abundance that we have that our that our generations that came before did not have. Right. I don’t I don’t know if you can hear that. That’s the firehouse. We’ll edit that out if we need to.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (10:24.06)
Yeah, absolutely.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (10:32.145)
Yes, totally. You’re in New You’re in New York, right?

Lisa Arrigo (10:36.49)
I I am in New York and I live right across from a fire station and it could be quiet all morning and I get on a Zoom call or a podcast and this is what happens.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (10:46.036)
An abundance of noise, yes, it’s okay.

Lisa Arrigo (10:49.452)
Yeah, yeah, but you know, I wanted to say something else about this because I just I I don’t know if you’re I’m gonna ignore it. I just came back from a trip to Italy. I went to the ancestral home of my mom’s family and I really learned a lot about how they suffered and how they survived, right? And how hard it was for them.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (11:06.62)
Wow.

Lisa Arrigo (11:16.972)
And what got passed down to the next generation and the next generation. And it was very emotional for me to be back in this little village, this little medieval village in Abruzzi, Italy, and to really have that felt sense of like almost being home because it’s like the body remembers the DNA, the the cells kind of have that familiar sense of you know, I’ve been here before.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (11:44.499)
Yeah.

Lisa Arrigo (11:46.389)
And I also left with a real feeling of responsibility because sometimes we think of healing as I want to heal myself so that I can heal my relationships so that I don’t mess up my kids and the legacy stops here, right? And we don’t always consider, nor did I until very recently, that, and this may sound a little woo-woo, but that healing can can work.

Both ways. We’re not just healing ourselves and the future generations, but I do believe that there’s healing of the ancestral line because our ancestors didn’t have the luxury of self-reflection.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (12:29.299)
Yeah.

Lisa Arrigo (12:30.56)
They didn’t have the tools, they didn’t have the resources. My grandparents and great-grandparents, they fought all the time. It was chaos, it was drama, because they didn’t know anything about the nervous system or, you know, how to relate to each other around stressful or painful things. Keeping secrets and just moving on to the next thing was just what they needed to do. So

For me personally, I feel a responsibility to honor that it’s their hard work and their survival that allowed me to be in a place today where

I can understand and reflect and focus on how to heal not just myself but to heal.

To pass it on and also to honor, you know, the generations that came before us, because they didn’t have choices, but they did what they could to get us here today. So there is a sense of responsibility that I feel. So that’s just a little sidebar for me.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (13:32.371)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (13:37.341)
Yeah. Well, you know, I think quantum physics has a scientific explanation that supports that thesis that it can go both ways, past and future. And what I think is really profound about that is there’s actually many religious texts and ancient texts that talk about healing forward and backward.

Lisa Arrigo (13:40.522)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Lisa Arrigo (13:48.256)
Yes.

Lisa Arrigo (14:00.235)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (14:00.892)
So there there’s there’s an ancient knowing and an ancient wisdom here as well that I think now we have some science through quantum physics that can actually explain how this might be possible. But it’s like our ancient elders already knew this and knew that it was possible in some way. Yeah. And then it it maybe got lost in in modern times. But yes, it is so powerful. To that end.

Lisa Arrigo (14:17.428)
Isn’t that fascinating?

Lisa Arrigo (14:23.029)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (14:27.872)
the generational and the in utero and the birth traumas, they’re so fascinating to me because yes, yes, we are interested in what is your lived experience, what happened that you’re aware of. Sometimes that can be material that’s easier to work with, but I think a lot of people can almost go like, I don’t understand why I have so much crippling anxiety. My life hasn’t been blank blank blank. And

Lisa Arrigo (14:55.722)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (14:57.716)
I see this happen often when there’s generational trauma. And it’s very interesting. I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but sometimes I I almost call it dormant trauma. Just like we have dormant viruses in the body that like you get really stressed and it activates a dormant virus. Sometimes it’s I don’t see that it’s always showing up, but then sometimes something will happen, and all of a sudden it’s like a dormant trauma gets activated. I’ve seen this even happen when like the the parents

Lisa Arrigo (15:06.699)
Mm.

Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (15:25.818)
Had a traumatic event. Let’s say, like the mother lost her brother when she was 13. When her daughter turns 13, the daughter all of a sudden starts to experience maybe depression or crippling anxiety or something that feels completely inexplicable. So being able to bring in those lenses of the generational, the birth, the in utero, I think helps bring a lot of peace. Cause sometimes those people feel like, what is wrong with me?

Lisa Arrigo (15:32.555)
Mm-hmm.

Lisa Arrigo (15:42.698)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (15:54.767)
I know my life, my current life should not really be creating symptoms like this. And there’s of course so much nuance, but sometimes bringing in those other lenses helps us explain why they might be experiencing this thing that actually doesn’t feel true to their own life because it’s not. It was true to someone else’s life in their lineage.

Lisa Arrigo (16:12.415)
Well absolutely, absolutely. I I didn’t know that the conversation would t take this turn, but yeah, yeah. I mean I think it’s it’s really important and you know, the you know, what’s wrong with me?

Leigh Ann Lindsey (16:18.706)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (16:26.632)
Yeah.

Lisa Arrigo (16:28.405)
You know, what’s wrong with me? I think that the language of what’s wrong with me for many people, especially and and in the situation that you just described, I’m not hearing complex trauma, although a lot of people have trauma histories, not just in utero or generational, but they don’t even really have a full sense of what what is trauma.

Right. So I think that’s the other piece of it. I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding still about what what is trauma. You know right? So trauma is a subjective experience, as we know. It’s not an objective, it’s not what happens to you. It’s how you process or how you understand what happens to you and and whether your nervous system can tolerate

Leigh Ann Lindsey (17:08.412)
Yeah.

Lisa Arrigo (17:28.007)
And process the things that are happening in real time. What might traumatize one person may not hit another person’s trauma wall for a plethora of reasons, right? But I think really understanding that trauma is subjective and hypothetically, if you have generational trauma or you’ve had

Your your mom was super stressed or your dad was super stressed while you were conceived and while you were in utero. you know, that that could be a piece of of you know the story. But then things happen, you know, when you’re growing up, you know, things that may not constitute trauma, big T trauma, sexual abuse or physical abuse. But studies have shown that children who feel neglected.

Or have inconsistent parenting, right? And this taps into the generational piece a little bit, are are just as likely to be dysregulated and to have anxiety, depression, developmental trauma. They’re just as likely as children who are actively being abused to feel the emotional sequelae of trauma.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (18:49.094)
Hm, absolutely. So it kind of leads us down.

Lisa Arrigo (18:52.125)
So I I I think a lot of people don’t understand that. They think you know they they’ll come into my office, some clients will be like, Well, I had a great childhood, you know, I had food on the table, you know, I know my parents love me, they didn’t do everything perfectly, no one does, right? But nothing too bad happened. And once you peel back the layers, you see, you know, the little, you know, things that happened along the way that created shame.

Or created a sense of you know not being good enough or feeling the need to be in control of one’s life because of spoken or unspoken expectations, even with the best intentions. You know, children take a lot in and then they process it through their own lens and then they interpret it and then they try to figure out, hey, you know, how do I need to be?

Leigh Ann Lindsey (19:35.689)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (19:47.892)
Mm-hmm. Exactly. Exactly.

Lisa Arrigo (19:49.565)
Right. Right. And that can create anxiety and that can create depression and that can that can create, you know, the development of a self that’s not completely authentic. Right.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (20:03.612)
It’s so powerful because it it’s about imprints and the unconscious is constantly scanning our environment, what’s happening, what we’re experiencing, what we’re noticing, and making conclusions. So it yes, trauma can create very intense narratives in the unconscious because the psyche’s like, whoa, gotta protect myself from that in the future. But also those daily experiences, those daily dynamics are also.

Lisa Arrigo (20:11.083)
Mm-hmm.

Lisa Arrigo (20:32.33)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (20:32.85)
making imprints that start to then create behaviors, that create patterns that we then find ourselves stuck in.

Lisa Arrigo (20:41.297)
Exactly, exactly. And to take it a step further, and I’m not gonna get all crazy about complex trauma, but it is an area of specialty of mine. that in certain cases when there’s developmental trauma, the attachment trauma, you know, which isn’t, you know, my dad, you know, beat me or my mom was emotionally vicious with me, but things that just misattunements.

Lisa Arrigo (21:15.445)
Places where, you know, parents were not able to really meet their child where they were at, you know, that that over time, you know, the child starts to feel like they need to be a certain way. And sometimes when this goes on and there’s also maybe more violent trauma or trauma that’s a little bit more intensive or just across the board, that the psyche learns how to split.

So there’s a model, and I’m I I don’t think I think I’d be doing a better job of explaining this, but when children don’t feel safe, we might cut that other part out. when they don’t feel safe for whatever reason, the psyche knows how to split. Right? So we have the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere. And this is a really important model, and I find it extraordinarily helpful for many of my clients that have.

More complex trauma where you know things were happening and they learned along the way that they needed to be a certain way in order to get their needs met. So there’s a physiological phenomenon that occurs where the psyche splits into survival parts. So there’s a part of the self that needs to attach, right? So that’s an attach-reach part.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (22:35.272)
Mm-hmm.

Lisa Arrigo (22:43.774)
Right. And then there’s an accommodating, submissive part that can come into play. And that was my story. I mean, I needed to be a good girl, whatever my mom needed. I you know, I was there for her, you know, I became a caretaker at the age of ten. And I learned that I could make myself feel invaluable, you know, by accommodating and overaccommodating.

Right. So at a very early age, I needed to exquisitely attune and to read the room. Who needs me for what? Right. So that that’s a part of the self that can be overly accommodating and compliant. And then there’s another part that can freeze up, you know, and and just disappear. So it’s fight and then the fifth or the the fifth is, you know, fight flight.

So oftentimes when kids reach adolescence and these other strategies start to fail, like accommodation and and I’m attaching, but nobody’s attaching back, that fight or flight will kick in, and that child who is now a teenager will try to get out of dodge or will become very combative with their caregivers, right? so I think the whole model is just so interesting because again, it’s all about survival.

You know, there’s a part that wants to connect, there’s a part that wants to comply, there’s a part that wants to you know, feel a certain sense of self-agency, there’s a part that just wants to check out, right? So understanding that there are parts of the self, right? I could be a little bit nervous right now about the interview, and there might be a part of me that wants to grab some Häagen-Dazs after after this podcast just to soothe.

Myself from whatever I think I might have failed in this conversation. Right. And there may be another part that’s like, you don’t really want that ice cream, but that’s gonna really give you the comfort that you need, you know, post-podcast comfort. So I think for many people, even if you don’t have complex trauma, we all have parts of ourselves that show up in different ways at different times. And understanding that and creating more internal collaboration among those parts.

Lisa Arrigo (25:08.914)
For me and for many of my clients is a pathway to healing.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (25:13.364)
Well, I love that. And this is, I feel a bit of a different perspective than conventional psychology, because you I you know, you see so much rhetoric online about you psychologists or therapists going like, your brain is an asshole, and we just need to remind ourselves of that. Or when those looping thoughts happen, like just tell that blah blah blah to sit the fuck down. Or what you know, it’s these things that I’m like, it’s so dis

Lisa Arrigo (25:18.546)
Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Lisa Arrigo (25:41.574)
It makes me crazy too, Leigh Ann. It makes me crazy too.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (25:43.909)
It’s so dismissive of that part that is like, I’m only here to protect you. But here’s my narrative about what keeps us safe. And it could be what keeps us safe from harmful people. It could be what keeps us safe from uncomfortable feelings after a podcast interview, you know. And so I love this: let’s collaborate, let’s have compassion for these protective parts. The deeper journey is to go.

Lisa Arrigo (26:02.494)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (26:13.85)
Hey Protective Part, where and when did you create this narrative? And what do you need to be able to integrate a new narrative?

Lisa Arrigo (26:18.706)
Right.

Lisa Arrigo (26:24.036)
Right. Right. That is so beautifully stated, and I could not agree with you more. one of my mentors, Janina Fisher, came up with a five-step, you know, plan for unblending. So it’s really about recognizing when a part, you know, is hijacking. It’s like, okay, this is not all of me, it’s a part of me. So let me unblend from that part and let me lean into that part’s concern.

And that could be a very young part who never felt seen or loved or cared for, right? So there are so many ways to, with compassion and care and curiosity, lean in and without judgment, really try to understand, you know, what is actually happening in the nervous system. And when are certain memories

Being triggered that may not even have a narrative attached to them. Right? Because trauma does not know time. Right? So you could be sitting in your office, and a client can say something that reminds you of something really horrible that happened. Right? You’re trying to pay attention to your client, but your body is remembering.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (27:30.718)
Right, right. Yeah.

Lisa Arrigo (27:56.362)
Trauma doesn’t know that it’s 2026, right? And I think this is something really important for people to understand because understanding it really helps humanize it and it makes perfect sense because you’re not doing anything wrong. The body has a memory, and traumatic memories are encoded differently. They’re not encoded.

Through the prefrontal cortex. They are encoded through the hippocampus. So they don’t come out as a narrative, they come out as fragments, sensations, you know, flashbacks, associations that don’t make sense. And a lot of people think they’re just crazy or they ignore it, you know, because they don’t understand that there is no narrative, you know, that that is based in cognition.

But the body is still telling the story. It’s remembering something old. And the more we can get curious about it, you know, the more it starts to make sense. you know, I get that tightness in my chest every time my boss raises his voice at me. And I know he’s not a bad guy, you know. I know, you know, my job is not on the chopping block. But when he uses that tone.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (28:58.056)
Great.

Lisa Arrigo (29:24.851)
Like my whole body stiffens up, right? And it may have nothing to do with the boss. And and if it’s hysterical, it’s historical. So if someone’s having an overblown reaction that doesn’t seem to comport with the the reality of today, you know, that might be an indication that the body’s remembering something old.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (29:47.183)
Mm-hmm. Yes. And it’s this the psyche wants to be heard and understood. And it is, but being able to go, sometimes I call myself a translator. Like I’m not here to heal you. I’m just here to translate what maybe your psyche has been communicating. And sometimes the word the words, right? The communication comes through the body. Sometimes it comes through physical symptoms. Sometimes it

Lisa Arrigo (30:12.615)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (30:13.108)
comes through dreams, sometimes it comes through triggers and patterns. And so the psyche has been communicating with us our whole life. No.

Lisa Arrigo (30:23.977)
Totally and we’ve learned not to listen.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (30:26.854)
Yes. And no one taught us really how to l I mean our parents are supposed to teach us how to listen and most of our parents didn’t. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. There’s so many places I want to go. There’s so many questions I have. I I know. I know it’s like okay, neurobiology and in in utero and I think I want to spend a second on complex trauma.

Lisa Arrigo (30:33.755)
Yeah, but they didn’t know.

Lisa Arrigo (30:40.35)
Right.

Lisa Arrigo (30:46.877)
Where are we going, Leigh Ann?

Leigh Ann Lindsey (30:56.23)
Especially since you’re saying this is a bit of a specialty. And I think it’s a good time to share maybe a little bit of my personal experience because my audience already knows, I’ve I’ve shared it many times. I’m very open with it, that I was chronically sexually abused by my father for many, many years in childhood. And there was a lot of other things happening too. There was food scarcity and then, you know, rage and violence and

Lisa Arrigo (31:15.693)
I’m sorry.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (31:24.964)
neglect. So there were so many layers of what was going on. But it’s very interesting because I’ll often share with my audience in like more personal episodes, you know, here’s where I’m at in my healing journey. Here’s what I’m experiencing. Here’s what’s helping me. And it’s very fascinating because this year specifically a lot of beautiful things have happened in my life, a lot of huge growth moments, milestones. And in some ways my life is better than it’s ever been.

Lisa Arrigo (31:52.947)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (31:53.365)
And I am experiencing more protector parts than I ever have. It’s like my life’s better than it’s ever been and the alarm bells are ringing louder than they’ve ever rung.

Lisa Arrigo (32:03.316)
Yep, yep, yeah. I am so happy you brought that up. Cause I think it’s this is this is so common. You know, Brené Brown, I I’m I might misquote her, but she I heard her say something about joy, that joy is the most difficult human emotion for us to to have. Right.

Joy is the most difficult.

Because it requires that we feel a certain level of vulnerability, a certain level of openness, right? And in your life.

There was no room for that. I mean, you I’m imagining you had to armor up in a particular way to survive the abuse, right? So now that life is good because you’ve done all this work and it’s maybe exceeding your wildest dreams, you have parts that are like, not so fast, sister. Not so fast, right? We don’t do joy.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (33:20.595)
Yeah.

Lisa Arrigo (33:20.679)
Because something’s gonna happen, the next shoe’s gonna drop. And it’s gonna be a long, hard fall. Right? Right. Does that resonate for you?

Leigh Ann Lindsey (33:31.589)
yeah.

absolutely. And so many things. And it’s it’s I it’s I sound silly to say this. It’s fun to share. I’m I’m always in this constant like I’m the person experiencing the thing and then I’m like the practitioner observing myself experiencing the thing and noticing. So so it’s I think it’s powerful to share from a personal experience and also that the audience and even my clients know like

Lisa Arrigo (33:53.705)
Totally.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (34:03.46)
I am not a perfect human. There’s very severe trauma. And if I’m in a place now of a level of success and abundance and joy, it’s because I’ve worked really hard to get here. And new layers always surface. But that this feels like sometimes the essence of complex trauma. I feel like I’ve just been in the throes of it this year, where it’s these things that also might be really hard to communicate to the people around you.

Lisa Arrigo (34:05.575)
Mm-hmm.

Lisa Arrigo (34:27.111)
Yeah.

Lisa Arrigo (34:33.479)
Yes.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (34:33.724)
It’s so much of an internal experience rather than maybe these big glaring external things that I do think anyone looking in on my life from the outside over these last six months would be like, What do you mean? Leigh Ann’s Leigh Ann’s doing great. You know, she’s got a successful business, she’s doing a PhD, she has a podcast, she has an amazing boyfriend, and she just moved into a gorgeous home. Like her life’s perfect. I think

Lisa Arrigo (34:40.763)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (35:00.018)
Correct me if I’m wrong, a lot of complex trauma is very internal. And these internal kind of battles and struggles that people are having, or responses and reactions that maybe we become really good at managing, but are happening kind of chronically in the background.

Lisa Arrigo (35:05.875)
Yeah.

Lisa Arrigo (35:20.177)
Yes, yes, absolutely. And and I just wanna put a little bit of spotlight on the people who are like, Leigh Ann, you’re doing great, you know, and and from a very, you know, well-intentioned place. but it is a little bit of a misattunement, which can also, you know, because you’ve to your point, there’s all this stuff going on inside, right?

And whoever’s talking to you, they’re talking to the professional, beautiful, you know, heart-centered woman. They don’t see that underneath the surface, you know, there’s a real like there’s a fire in the kitchen, like, whoa, you know, what to do with these good feelings. And parts, you know, they have a job to do. So they’re not going away.

You know, th they’re just doing what they know how to do to protect you. They haven’t gotten the update that, you know, we are reorganizing, we’re restructuring this internal corporate structure, you know, where a protector part might be a part that’s like, no, run away from that. They don’t know that this is a different time.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (36:41.768)
Completely.

Lisa Arrigo (36:42.598)
Right. And they don’t know that they’re you wanna have those those parts because you never know when you’re gonna need them, but softening their job description so that it’s more adaptive to kind of where you are in your life, I think that is a place where a lot of clients, you know, do a lot of work once they start having that stability and feeling the fruits of their labor.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (37:09.564)
Yeah, it’s yeah it’s

Lisa Arrigo (37:11.174)
Right. Because it can be really, really scary to an internal system that only knows how to survive. It’s like, what? What is this business of living? We don’t know how to live. We don’t know how to feel joyful and proud. and maybe not for you. I I I’m not assuming to know what’s happening inside, but for some people there’s a lot of shame. It’s like, you know, how can I feel so good when, you know.

my mom is, you know, suffering with cancer or, you know, she’s chronically depressed. How is it it’s not okay for me to feel, you know, joy. It’s selfish. It’s, you know, and it rubs against that accommodating strat strategy that many of us have.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (38:01.478)
Yeah, and I think this is where the complex piece of it comes in, is also when there are these attachment traumas and relational traumas. I think, especially with parents or caretakers, it is so confusing for the child brain, right? I absolutely, as a child being sexually abused by her father, there was still a part of me that wanted attachment with him. And so what I learned is

Lisa Arrigo (38:25.329)
Of course.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (38:28.89)
I can only get attachment if I self abandon. I can only get attachment if I give myself over to you fully, as dark as that sounds. And that did manifest in patterns with men of self abandonment in different ways, not necessarily in that specific way. And so, you know, there’s an element of that, which is like now in my current relationship.

Lisa Arrigo (38:44.71)
Yeah. Yeah.

Lisa Arrigo (38:50.631)
Right.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (38:56.678)
Sometimes that gets flared of like, or I have to, and I’m very hyper-aware of it now, so you gently pull it back. But but also the complexity of, for example, my my father is still alive. I have no relationship with him. He’s homeless and very unwell. And when I found out he became homeless, I stopped showering. I stopped feeding myself well. I

Lisa Arrigo (38:58.728)
Mm-hmm.

Lisa Arrigo (39:15.345)
Yeah.

Lisa Arrigo (39:24.528)
Wow.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (39:25.49)
being well. And about like two weeks into that, I was like, holy shit, I am denying myself all the things he can’t access being homeless.

Lisa Arrigo (39:36.204)
Right. Because you needed to attune yourself in a particular way as a child in order to survive and have an attachment with him that you needed to have despite the abuse.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (39:49.737)
Totally. And it’s the the and those are these weird complex things where you talk to someone and they’re like, How could you, how could you give a shit about your dad? How could you have any empathy? He’s horrible, he’s awful, we want bad things for him. And it’s like, that’s not what complex trauma is. The complex trauma is trying to navigate the I I feel grief, but also rage, but also empathy, but also fear all at the same time. And when like the fear gets activated.

this protective mechanism comes out. When the grief gets activated, I start, you know, for me it’s like I start soothing with food. And when the anxious one gets activated, I isolate myself from everyone around me. So

Lisa Arrigo (40:28.316)
Yeah.

Lisa Arrigo (40:33.232)
Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. So there’s there’s there’s the addictive pull towards food, you know, there’s the primitive withdrawal, you know, all of those things that kept you safe. Right. you’re just reminding me of my relationship with my dad, which was pretty fraught. without going into the details, I’ll just give you a snippet of my young adult life. So

I went to school in San Antonio. I developed a cocaine addiction. I was trying to figure out my sexual identity. I was gay, I came out in college, it didn’t go over very well with my family, and I decided after college to go to San Francisco and find my people. And it’s this was 1988. I was gonna go to graduate school, I go to Berkeley, well.

I took myself with me and I took my cocaine addiction with me. Never stepped foot on a college campus. Now, my cocaine addiction didn’t start as an addiction. You know, none of us use a substance or a drink to think, gee, you know, it’d be nice to be an addict. So originally that drug worked so well for me because it gave me a sense of power, control, you know.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (41:47.411)
Right.

Lisa Arrigo (41:58.778)
I could navigate situations. I was, you know, more sociable. I was more confident. it worked for a while until it stopped working. And then I went to to San Francisco and I spent six or eight months just like totally, you know, destructing. You know, I was powerless over my addiction. Everybody that I met was bad for me. Right. And I came home, I

I I woke up and I probably hadn’t slept the night before, the day before the earthquake in nineteen eighty-nine. And I I had a premonition that if I didn’t leave San Francisco, I was gonna die. and I had been having grand mal seizures. I mean, I was a mess. So I came home and for the first time I sat down with my parents. They had been divorced, but you know, my father wanted me to come home. He knew I was in trouble, right?

So my father, bring her home. So he brought me home and I had an honest conversation with my parents. And my father decided the best way to help me was to supply me with cocaine. And he had he was the biggest drug dealer in Westchester County, New York, where I was living. So I did more cocaine with my father than I had done in San Antonio or San Francisco. And the attachment to him.

was so strange but so powerful and my addiction at that point was so overwhelmingly you know compelling and out of control that I couldn’t say no. And I knew it was I knew that what he was doing was really bad and it was a betrayal of of my honest attempt to get help and

I don’t know why I didn’t die with him, because I did more cocaine with my father than I’d ever done because it was free. But but it also reinforced this very incestuous, it was our secret, you know. And now I was an adult and I was replaying the same secretive, incestuous relationship that I had with my father when I was a kid. And my mother knew nothing, and it was a total reenactment.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (44:24.274)
Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Lisa Arrigo (44:25.263)
Right. A total reenactment. But the attachment was so powerful and my addiction was so powerful that I was I I felt like I I couldn’t break free of that pattern until my father went to jail and I got into therapy.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (44:41.076)
Complete

Leigh Ann Lindsey (44:48.136)
There was like a

Lisa Arrigo (44:48.537)
And that was really the beginning, excuse me, that was the beginning of my healing. Yeah. Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (44:55.422)
Yeah. Are you comfortable sharing a little more of what helped because that’s the beginning to your point. That’s massive. And then the untangling, the tending of all these parts begins. And that is a journey. And if you’re comfortable sharing what some of that look like and

Lisa Arrigo (45:02.513)
Okay.

Lisa Arrigo (45:12.475)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (45:19.824)
what helped and what maybe really didn’t help or w what only took you so far. Cause the point we keep making is it is complex. And I think we said this without saying it directly. It’s not just talk therapy. We need to understand the neurobiology and the attachment and the nervous system.

Lisa Arrigo (45:28.913)
Yes.

Lisa Arrigo (45:40.463)
Yeah, yeah. No, it it it it’s a great question and the answer is not so straightforward. you know, I had more and and again it was a different time. We don’t know what we know today, and I was younger, so I didn’t know. so I went in traditional talk therapy and I you know, and then I continued to have intermittent relapses. So she wanted to send me to twelve step and twelve step

didn’t really work for me at that time. and I think that it didn’t work because the complex trauma doesn’t really respond to the talk therapy in the same ways, but it was beneficial. And twelve step didn’t really work for me because the themes around powerlessness and shame. I didn’t i it it just for for complex trauma, twelve step can be very tricky.

And I think for for people who have complex PTSD, they’re often c people who have trouble with 12-step recovery and eventually find themselves to a different kind of you know, therapeutic experience. Right. And I was in psychoanalysis for 11 years.

My analyst, I had no I didn’t know what I was doing. I was flying by the seat of my pants. I met with an analyst. She’s like, I’d like to see you four times a week. I’m like, Yeah, great. Because I had attachment like wounds. So now somebody wanted to see me four times a week. I was hooked. But it was classical analysis. She was sitting behind me. I couldn’t see her. So for someone who has attachment trauma.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (47:21.363)
Yeah.

Lisa Arrigo (47:30.711)
Not a great setup. And she, you know, I the good student in me wanted to do everything right for her. So it was 11 years of me on a couch, free associating, not telling the whole story about what was going on in my real life, making shit up because you’re lying on a couch, you know, you’re vulnerable, like I was dissociative. I I I didn’t know what the heck was going on, and I couldn’t

discern what was good for me from what wasn’t. So I just the accommodating strategy in me was like, I want to keep this relationship. I need her. I need her. I’m gonna do whatever she, you know, suggests that I do, right? but after eleven years, she retired and I relapsed that night.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (48:02.867)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (48:22.452)
Wow, Lisa.

Lisa Arrigo (48:24.654)
Right. So the end of the session was like great work. The part of me that showed up for the session wanted to please her. Other parts were angry and distraught that she was leaving. So we had this kissy kiss. great work, great work. And then within 24 hours I was in Manhattan copping cocaine. So then I went back into therapy to heal from that. so

Every opportunity that I had to try to heal myself gave me good information about what I needed and what I didn’t need. And it brought me to the next and to the next and to the next. So I finally found after doing an EMDR training program where I couldn’t stop having panic attacks. I’m like, I can’t do EMDR with my clients if I’m like Leigh Ann Lindsey (49:07.644)
Exactly.

Lisa Arrigo (49:23.438)
a mess and I can’t do it for myself. So I found a therapist who worked with sensory motor psychotherapy, EMDR, and you know, trauma-informed treatment. And we never did EMDR. And for the last 13 years I’ve been doing a combination of IFS, trauma-informed treatment, you know, working with the body, and have and parts work.

And you know, that’s kind of brought me to the place that I am today, where I’m still working with my parts and I’m still trying to understand you know how

How my patterns continue to play out, especially when I’m feeling stressed or when I’m feeling too good. So I don’t think the the work, I don’t think the work ever ends. And at some point, hopefully it becomes more curious and interesting than burdensome and, you know, heavy and hard. So you know, that was a very CliffsNotes version of my.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (50:12.392)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (50:17.704)
Right.

Lisa Arrigo (50:34.886)
My process, but I’m still healing. And anyone who says they’re done, I’m like, okay, until something happens, because life is going to happen and it’s going to trigger those old places. You know, the best I can hope for for myself and for my clients is for them to come in and say, you know what, this happened. I visited my parents last week, you know, and I and I got triggered.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (50:35.112)
Yeah.

Yeah. Cool.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (50:42.918)
Yeah.

Lisa Arrigo (51:03.77)
And that’s all that happened. It was just a trigger. You know, I didn’t have to, you know, sink back into that old place, you know, of despair or fear or shame, you know. So I don’t I don’t think we’re ever done, but we always have another opportunity to strengthen those muscles and to work with the parts of the self that that live inside of us forever.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (51:24.744)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (51:30.389)
Completely. And shifting the internal narrative to it’s not I can’t have peace or joy until I’m fully healed. It’s those are already accessible to me. And as we move through some of these layers, it’s just more peace, more joy, more authenticity, more alignment. So changing that so it doesn’t feel so much like I’m I’m broken, I need to heal. It’s you know, for me

Lisa Arrigo (51:50.925)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (52:00.061)
It’s a really exciting thing. It’s like, gosh, okay, I can’t wait to uncover this new layer of myself. And that doesn’t mean it’s always fun. Like, this year has been brutal. This year has been hard. I am like, whoa, I am really in something. Something has gotten activated on a level I have not been activated in a very, very long time. And how exciting! Because that means.

Lisa Arrigo (52:09.851)
Right.

Lisa Arrigo (52:13.178)
Right.

Lisa Arrigo (52:23.302)
Right.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (52:28.486)
This is activated. I now have an awareness of it. Great. I can now repair it, tend it, take it to a place it’s never been.

Lisa Arrigo (52:36.736)
Exactly. You have the resource resources, you have the tools, and you have, you know, a history of doing the work and seeing results. Even if it’s hard and it takes time. You know, if you trace where you were, I’m imagining, two years ago, five years ago, ten years ago, it’s a different story, right? So I think the more you know we learn that our feelings are not our enemies.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (52:57.47)
Hundred percent.

Lisa Arrigo (53:06.638)
Our nervous systems are not, you know, working against us, they’re working for us. And we can work with our nervous systems, right? If we’re in hyperarousal, right, and we’re up here, you know, that lets us know, hey, I’m out of my window of tolerance. So I am in trauma or I am overwhelmed, you know, my my body is is is sensing danger. So

Let me look around, you know. Am I am I feeling danger right now? Am I in danger right now? So, how do I bring my nervous system back? How do I pump the brakes so that I can get back into my window so I can process whatever it is that’s coming up? Right? And once you can use those tools, and and the flip side is the parasympathetic and the brake, right? Which can send some people into collapse.

so so then they can’t function or they can’t understand what’s happening inside. So for me, I like to use the window of tolerance, you know, where you know, we we all want to be somewhere more or less in the window. And that’s where we can process these things that lead to more self-confidence, less shame, more pride, more hope.

And and also the ability and the desire to help other people because we develop more empathy and compassion in those places. So the healing is not just about us, it’s about, hey, you know, how can I take this energy and use it to connect relationally with other people in a way that allows this whole experience of healing to be bigger than me.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (54:56.41)
absolutely. I mean that that peace, that interconnectedness that takes it beyond ourselves is so powerful.

Lisa Arrigo (55:02.211)
Yes. Yes. And we don’t have to be therapists to do that, right?

Leigh Ann Lindsey (55:06.13)
Yeah. Yeah. for me, the through line I feel like I hear in this is trauma healing is nuanced and it’s multifaceted. I think we also live in a world that inherently to sell things makes things very reductive. Like just heal your nervous system. Just do polyvagal theory. Just do IFS. And I g they’re all amazing tools, but what I feel like I’m hearing is it’s we’ve gotta bring in a collection.

It’s not a one-size-fits-all. And that that is a little bit of the onus on the client or the patient or the individual to go, how can I start experimenting with some of these things to see what really resonates with me? But I think for me, there’s a message in there of, hey, if if you’re struggling because you’ve only been using one tool and it was kind of sold to you as like this is the tool that will heal all the trauma. It might not even be that that’s a bad tool. It might just be like,

Hey, there’s a couple tools we might need to bring in.

Lisa Arrigo (56:09.786)
Well, that’s exactly right. And, you know, one size does not fit all, one modality does not fit all. I think there’s so much good stuff out there. but what works for one person doesn’t work for somebody else. You know, so I have people in my life who love IFS. for me, I appreciate it and I draw some some aspects of it.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (56:25.671)
Exactly.

Lisa Arrigo (56:37.209)
theoretically and I bring it into my work if and when I feel it’s appropriate for my clients or for myself. But I I have learned over the years that getting too invested in one particular way of doing things is just, you know, sort of repeating an old habit like this is gonna fix me or this, you know, or if this doesn’t work then, you know, then I’m just a loser or I’m broken or, you know, I I just

Healing is not for me. Right. So I would I I would piggyback with you on that. Like if something’s not working, and this is for your listeners, something’s not working, you know, and it’s not resistance, but it just doesn’t feel in alignment with how, you know, what even the language of it or you know, the way it’s structured, if it doesn’t speak to you, it’s okay.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (57:09.48)
Yeah. Yeah.

Lisa Arrigo (57:37.635)
It’s okay. You don’t have to throw it all out, but it’s not a reflection on your motivation, your commitment, or your capacity to heal.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (57:47.738)
Mm. Absolutely. this was so lovely, Lisa.

Lisa Arrigo (57:53.681)
likewise, Leigh Ann, I you know, I I hope that we got to some of those places that really resonate for some of your listeners. And for me, this has been a very, you know, healing, you know, wonderful conversation. And you know, you you hold a beautiful space. Thank you.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (58:13.652)
Thank you so much. Where can people find you? Where can they learn more? What is the best best place for them?

Lisa Arrigo (58:23.599)
Yeah, you know, just Google me, Lisa Arrigo therapist. You know, I have a very active page on Instagram where I’m starting to promote my book. and my website is also on the Instagram account. But if you just Google me, I’m all over the place. I’m not hard to find.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (58:41.652)
Awesome. Good. Good for you. I love that. Well, thank you so much, Lisa.

Lisa Arrigo (58:49.21)
Yes, and you’ll let me know how I can find you. We’ll we’ll do that.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (58:53.352)
Yes.