257. Unlocking Your True Potential: Overcoming Trauma and Anxiety with Theresa Lear Levine

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This is happiness solved with America's happiness. Coach Sandee Sgarlata.

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's show. This is your host, Sandee Sgarlata, and I am so happy you're here. First of all, I want to thank each and every one of my listeners for all the five star reviews. And I'm so proud to announce that. Because of you, happiness Solve podcast is.

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Enjoy the show.

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Teresa, so excited to have you here today. Just, I've been waiting for this interview for so long and you've been so flexible with scheduling and all of this stuff. How are you doing today? I'm doing fabulous today and I'm so excited to be here talking to you. Like, I was just saying, I actually get kind of more excited when there's that extra time for anticipation.

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It's almost like when you plan a vacation and you have a few months to look forward to it. We plan, we replan. I've been anticipating it's here. We're doing it. Oh, my goodness.

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And talk about short term memory. You had just told me exactly how to say your last name, and by the time I hit record, I forgot. So can you just say your full name? Theresa Lear Levin. Levine.

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Because I was stuck in my head levine. And I'm like, I'm going to mess this up, so I'm just not going to say it. So. Theresa Lear Levin. I want to make sure that the audience knows that so that they know who we're talking to and just a little bit about Teresa for the audience.

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And I'm looking at Teresa's bio right now. So your battles with past traumas, high functioning anxiety and ADHD trapped you in a recurring Groundhog Day of disease, distraction and dissatisfaction. I love that because I think that so many of us today are probably a high functioning, anxiety ridden ADHD. I know myself is included in that. I go through it.

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I just happen to have the tools in my back pocket, so I know how to deal with it when it pops up, but it doesn't mean that. It doesn't pop up. It's going to pop up. And my son, who's now 23, was diagnosed with severe generalized anxiety disorder when he was 1516 years old. And so that's a whole nother topic of discussion on how to raise a child that's having that, because there are certain things.

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And to this day, all I have to do is just say, breathe, and he starts breathing, and he's like and you see his face relax, and it's just like all right. So without further ado, I want to hear your story of how you got to this point, and then we're going to talk about your book launch and all sorts of other things. Oh, wow. So from where I am today, doing what I do, a lot of that came from a pivot that I made about seven years ago. I mean, I've been working on myself.

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I'm a personal development junkie, Sandy. Like, I have loved so many junkies in the house. Two junkies in the house. That's right. Absolutely.

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But here is the thing. I would learn all of these things, understand all of these things logically and rationally, and yet I still felt like I was stuck, and I was not able to take the aligned action with the things that my brain understood, and. I didn't understand that my brain was just trying to keep me safe. And that all of these things that I so desperately wanted and was remaining. Separate from either because I wasn't aligned with the vibration of them or because I didn't know how to make them familiar and safe.

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My brain was just doing its job. But it was around seven years ago. I'm a mom of four. I have four boys. Oh, my gosh.

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That right there puts you at a whole nother level of sainthood. I don't know about that, but, I mean, my children are constantly giving me. Opportunities to grow every single day. Since I was pregnant with the first one, there's been just endless opportunities to grow. And about seven years ago was when my fourth was coming into the world, and I was already just kind of losing it.

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Honestly, I'm just going to be frank about it. Trying to run businesses from home, trying to raise these kids, wanting to check all the things off the to do list every day, that type A high functioning anxiety. And from the outside, everything looked great, and my businesses were doing okay. My kids were doing okay. I was doing okay, marriage doing okay.

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But nothing really was feeling fulfilling and great to me. I was feeling the chaos, cortisol spikes. And confusion when what I really wanted. Was the calm, clarity, and confidence to be able to kind of move through my day with the ease and the joy and the happiness that I felt like I should feel. But that wasn't really hitting with me.

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Because you were shouldn't all over yourself, weren't you? You got it. Exactly. I like to call it sometimes headbutting. Like I would get these great ideas.

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Or I'd start kind of going with the flow or with what felt like my highest excitement, which is always the right way to go, right. And then all of a sudden it would be like, oh, but what about the kids? But what about this? But what about your marriage? But what about how are you going to find time?

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But what about that last thing that you tried that didn't work out? But just kind of in my head. All these butts were coming up, I would find myself kind of reverting to the lack mindset instead of the endless possibilities and abundance that were available for me. So that was when I really started getting into even more personal growth and development and understanding things like nervous system regulation, which for me, and I feel like it's such a buzzword these days. I don't know if it's because I.

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Work in nervous system regulation that I hear more about it these days or kind of like you look for the red car and then you see the. Red car everywhere kind of thing. Or of course, people are just getting in tune with it. But I didn't understand how regulating my nervous system would help everything else come together too. And once I did, all that stuff that felt inactionable or too difficult, too hard, impossible, even beforehand became doable.

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And from there I started unraveling a lot more of the subconscious mind and going deeper in with things like hypnotherapy and emotional freedom techniques. And those became the things that really pulled me out of my funk. Whether that meant that I was able to make greater advances in my business and breakthroughs with my money mindset or whether that meant I was able to show up as a totally different kind of mom or a better wife, a better friend, all those different things. I just started showing up in my own life in this whole new way. You just unpacked so many things and I'm trying to figure out which direction I want to go in because there were so many golden nuggets in there.

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So let's talk first about nervous system regulation. Now, just to put your minded knees, I haven't heard that that often. So it probably is that you're living in that space. It's my red car. It's your red car, exactly.

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But I have heard people touch on it, talk a little bit more about that. I have an idea of what you're talking about, but I'm not going to put my own misconceptions of it because I'm not really sure exactly what you're talking about. So can you talk the audience through what nervous regulation is and maybe a couple of ways in order to accomplish it? Yeah. So I mean, for me, I found that I got the greatest nervous system regulation and relief through emotional freedom techniques.

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And if I can explain kind of that in relation to this, I think it's going to make it make a lot more sense. Okay.

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When you're feeling that high functioning anxiety, or you're feeling anxiety in general, you're usually in a state of Dysregulation. And that's like learning to understand when you're feeling Dysregulated versus when you feel regulated really helps you to understand the transitions that you make in the nervous system and the resiliency that comes when you learn to create that regulation, which is what you want to be able to do to move kind of flexibly between those states. We're always going to have things in our life that cause us to become Dysregulated, and we always have the opportunity to return to a regulated state where we feel safe and secure to go about our business. And when I started doing emotional freedom techniques, it was like I finally understood when I was feeling one way versus another, instead of kind of living in that kind of frenetic, chaotic kind of feeling inside of my body, which just had become a normal state for me. But the problem is, and that's the whole fight, flight, freeze, flea, fawn, all.

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Those things that happen in our amygdala. And that little almond shaped, walnut shaped, whatever nut it is part of our brain that gets triggered when something makes us feel unsafe. And back in our cave woman days or whatever, if we were being chased by a saber toothed tiger or something, great, that made total sense. And it allowed us to shut down all of those things that weren't vital to our survival at that time and simply focus on survival. The problem is that these days, the little things that make us anxious I'm getting ready to launch a new book.

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And I find myself feeling anxiety when I wake up a little too early going, how is this going to go? And it's the same reaction that my body has from that anxiety over something that's totally not threatening. There's nothing threatening about this, more exciting than anything else, but I know that my cortisol is going up at those times. My stress levels are going up, and different systems in my body are functioning less than they normally would or should if I were not in that state. So we have all of these little triggers, these actually nonthreatening things that are raising our stress hormones.

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When our stress hormones are up, all those feel good things like oxytocin and stuff can be only down. It's like a seesaw. If one ends up, the other ends down, and vice versa. So anything that we can do to lower those stress hormones allows us to have the possibility at least to elevate the good feelings. So with emotional freedom techniques, which people may have heard of as tapping, have you heard of it before?

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Yeah, I have. Heard of tapping. Okay, so we get to actually tap on these meridian endpoints. We use ancient Chinese wisdom and the same kind of endpoints that you would use if you went to see an acupuncturist or went for a nice deep tissue massage or something like that. We're using those points and we're talking about whatever the challenges that we're dealing with and we're sending and doing that a signal directly to our amygdala bypassing like the frontal lobes and the things that are normally accessed through basic talk therapy and things like that, and getting the additional relief of that fight or flight instinct being calmed.

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And through that, in the course of sometimes just like 5 minutes, you can reduce your stress hormones by up to 43%. Wow, that's significant. And from that place I always say to me, it feels like if I was like at a concert and I was in the front row and I. Might love being in the front row. And it's great to be at the concert, but it feels a little unsafe.

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There's people there, maybe somebody's crowd surfing above your head. Like, who knows? And then once I do a round. Of EFT tapping, it's almost like I got raised up into the presidential suite and all of a sudden it's like I have perspective over everything. I have this whole new vantage point and everything just feels kind of like logical, rational and peaceful.

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Regulated. I love it. It's regulated. I love that. Wow.

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And you talked a little bit in the beginning about this and then you mentioned it here just a few minutes ago as well, where so often that ego mind or whatever kind of gets in your way. How does that regulation really? And you may have answered it and I just didn't hear it in a way. So just repeat yourself if needed. How does that play into that regulation when that ego is trying to take over and tell you what you're doing or what you're not doing and things like that?

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Yeah, well, if you were doing tapping, the whole heart of the process is about love, acceptance and forgiveness. Okay, all of that is going to calm down a lot of that ego right away and really bring you into elevated consciousness and awareness about whatever it is that you're working on. So when we do a round of tapping, we focus on one thing. And what I love about it is that we get to focus on negative things and we live in this world where everybody just wants us to feel better sometimes. There's almost this toxic positivity about how.

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We just need to convert whatever crappy. Thing we're dealing with into something like bright and shiny and it doesn't feel good. We're resistant to that because we actually need those emotions are here to lead us somewhere. Tell us something, give us something. So when we actually get to acknowledge those emotions and create genuine love, acceptance, and forgiveness around them, then guess what?

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We actually feel better genuinely and authentically. And that's why tapping and also Hypnotherapy are effective on anything that you can feel, whether it's physical or emotional, whether it's something that happened a really long time ago. I work on a lot of past trauma with people or something that you're future pacing about. That would be the anxiety. But in either instance you're allowing the power from the present moment, the only place that we actually have any power anyway and can do anything with those things to leak back to the past or to leak forward to the future.

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So techniques like this allow us to pull that power back into the present moment where we can use it and really amplify our authentic self. I love it because that's really anxiety. And I'm going to say this and this isn't to minimize anyone's anxiety because it feels very real in the moment. And as I mentioned, my son has severe generalized anxiety disorder. However, when you break that down, at its core, anxiety is really just an illusion.

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Yeah, nothing, right? It's stress and it's an illusion. So this is a good opportunity to move right into your book. I love the title becoming more me. Tapping into success.

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I love that. Tapping into success subconscious secrets of an ADHD entrepreneurial mom like whoa. Is that catchy or what? I hope so. It's me.

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I couldn't be more authentically myself with any other title, I don't think. Right. So tell me about the book and what will people get out of it that can help them navigate through all of this? Absolutely. So this book is a culmination of my own stories.

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Lots of different vulnerable sharings from my own life as well as other anecdotes. But it's not my story per se. It is kind of applied to these different things that help us to transform in our life. So there's a lot of actionable things in this book. There's EFT tapping rounds that are done on subjects that I think all of us have difficulty with, like getting grounded and slowing down, like procrastination, things like.

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That, that I think I don't know. Anybody that's a stranger to these things. And there's also whole bonus website connected to the book. So there's like hypnotherapy audios and videos and other things. So there's a lot of things that people who want to actually get their hands on and try these things will be able to.

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And then I really do trust and believe that the people that are reading this book are going to be able to really connect the dots between the stories that I'm telling and their own lives and understand how these things really translate into their own life, even if they're not in the same kind of position or whatever that I am. You don't have to be somebody who's. Writing a book or coaching other people or whatever to be dealing with a lot of these things. And you don't have to have ADHD either because in this day and age, we're all distracted. So I think a lot of the things I discuss about the distraction and.

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The focus issues are pretty universal also. So I'm just really hoping to connect with those people who share those things and help to give them support and a little bit of light in their corner, to shine in there and also to help them to shine. The light in the dark corners of their life and really be able to transform those shadows and benefit from the darker side of things, too. I love it because there's so many people and I love how you brought that up, that even if you're not launching a book and coaching clients, it doesn't matter. It's just fill in the blank.

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We all have these struggles on a daily basis. So the last thing I want to talk about, because we've talked about the anxiety, let's talk a little bit about ADHD. Sure. What are some tools that you have used in your own life to help you stay on track? I know it's been a journey for me.

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I've never been actually diagnosed with it, but I know myself and I know I'm like squirrel all over the place and I've learned to manage that. And so I have my own thing that works for me. But can you offer some suggestions of what people can do when they find themselves in that squirrely, not being able to complete a project, finish what you start kind of thing? Yeah, and I offer a lot about this in the book, too, because for me, learning how to time manage from the perspective of what works for my own brain was super important because here's the thing. So many of the different planners and systems and apps and things that are out there have been designed with a male's 24 hours cycle in mind as a male perspective.

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Even the things, unfortunately, that have been designed by women like myself a decade ago, who only learned the things that were taught from the male perspective and they're not helpful. We have all of these different cycles in our lives, as women especially, and those cycles need to be honored. So for me, learning to cycles of the season, my own menstrual cycle, the moon cycles, there's all these different cycles that overlap and all of those things influence and affect my productivity and my focus in addition to my own brain. So taking into consideration cycles, taking into consideration my own time management and planning resources of which I also share in the book how I plan my week from my ADHD brain and lay things out, because for me, it's so important to actually write. We have a digital world pretty much right now, and digital calendars, but I also use like I have my remarkable pad right here and I like that I get to use a pen and actually write on it.

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And that's what helps me get the concept of time because ADHD can be really weird as far as our concept of time and time management and losing time. So when actually look at a day and I understand that I have an appointment at a certain time, okay, it's going to take me a half an hour to drive there, it's going to take me a half an hour to drive back. I actually look at it and it processes and it makes sense, versus if I just look at my calendar digitally, none of that actually computes for me. And that might be different for other people, but for me that's been really helpful to actually look at my day and spend time writing down what's going on and also setting intentions for the day and realizing that the to do list is not something I ever want to be a captive to anymore. But it is really helpful to do a good brain dump, get the important things out of our head and then know that they're safely stored somewhere and be able to pull out the things that are most important on any given day and put my focus there.

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Any one of us, we only have so much bandwidth on any given day to get to things and we don't want to spend our whole life trying to finish a to do list. We want to be enjoying things and so getting intentional. And I use EFT also. I have some great rounds in the book on getting over that procrastination. We have resistance to doing the things.

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That we need to do on a daily basis and when we can locate. What that's all about, where that comes from, and release it and also just accept that that's part of who we are, we're able to move forward so much easier. I love it, love it, love it. And yeah, when you're writing things down, it uses more of your senses and you remember things more, which is why it's kind of a shame that now students are using tablets and computers more than handwriting. Because if you're taking a course and you're a class and you're writing things down, you're going to retain that information so much better than if you're typing.

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Absolutely. I also love recording things on audio. If I'm taking a class or something so that I can listen back to them, that helps. And I knew I was writing my. Book for the right audience when immediately after I kind of announced that I was writing it, people started asking me, is there going to be an audible version?

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I was like, no way would there not be an audible version? And so many people were like, because. I love to read and listen at the same time and get that greater retention from doing that. And I was like, oh my, yeah. I mean, I any book that I really love, I will have it.

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I forget the name of it, so I apologize to everyone. Oh, it's blinkist. So I have Blinkist because then I can get almost, like, the Cliff Notes of the book, and if I really like it there, then I'll buy the book, and then I may get the audio version too, because for me, the way I learn, I learn in multiple different ways. And so it's really just about figuring out how you learn and how you retain information, because everybody's a little different. I love that.

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Yeah. All right, so where can people find your book when this is going to be released? I think your book will be launched the following day, is that correct? Yes, it's going to be launched on. 1111, November 11, which anybody who knows.

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Me, I'm a huge repeating numbers fan. So when we figured out that was going to be the launch date, I. Was like, perfectly aligned and right on time. There you go. My book, much like our interview, got delayed several months many different times.

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So when it finally landed on that day, I was like, yes, it's meant to be. It'll be on Amazon. I'll make sure you have the link for it. And of course, people can also find me or any of that information right on my website, which is simply my name. Teresalevine.com perfect.

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And we'll have all of that in the show notes as well. Teresa, this has been such an amazing conversation. Thank you so much again for your flexibility and I just wish you huge success. And at some point we'll have to get together since we're practically neighbors. Absolutely.

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Sandy and I wish you the same. Thank you so much for having me. And sharing me with your audience. Oh, thank you. And thank you, everyone, for listening today.

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I certainly hope that you enjoyed today's interview. Thank you so much for joining me. And as always, I hope that you. And your family are healthy and safe and that your lives are filled with peace, joy, and happiness. Take care.