Our very first guest episode, and we could not have hoped for a warmer one. Kim Barthel joins us to explore interoception as the ground floor of neuroception, safety and connection, and why asking a child what they feel in their body is often the wrong place to start. It is a deep, tender conversation about meeting our kids underneath the words.
This one is special for us: our first ever guest episode, with Kim Barthel from Relationship Matters in Canada, an OT and friend whose thinking has shaped how the three of us practise. Kim had been living and breathing a chapter she was writing on childhood trauma and dissociation, and she brings that lens straight into a conversation about interoception, the felt sense of what is happening inside the body.
We work through how interoception feeds neuroception, why safety and love sit underneath awareness rather than on top of it, and what all of this looks like in the room when a three and a half year old in the ball pit suddenly needs his mum. There is a lot of heart here, some genuinely mind-bending neuroscience, and a reminder that so much of our work happens before a single word is spoken.
Lightly edited for readability. Speaker labels and chapter markers match the published episode.
Michelle: Hello everyone, welcome to our podcast. We are so delighted to have a special guest with us today, and that is Kim Barthel, who is from Relationship Matters in Canada. Kim is an esteemed OT and friend of all of us, and we have had the pleasure of having Kim in Australia and in our clinic, and we did some treating alongside each other, which was a real career highlight. So we are very honoured. We also thought she is brave and creative and very progressive, and that she would be the ideal candidate to jump on and have a chat with us as our very first guest. So we are very honoured that you are trusting us today, Kim, as we trial how four talkative and very passionate OTs are going to navigate a podcast. Thanks.
Cory: Just quickly, to you, our beautiful spirited conversations people who join us and listen: you are getting an insight into Michelle and my OT upbringing. The minds that have supported and helped us thrive in the way we think, and the depth we like to go into in these conversations. I am just so delighted that people get to join us in this, because we get it personally in our own lives, and the chance to talk to these wonderful women is a gift. Sorry, I just had to add that in, Michelle.
Kim: Thank you, thank you. Interoceptively, I am jumping out of my skin. I feel all of the excitement in my chest, my energy just went up, I can feel a little bit of the hair on the back of my neck, my stomach is excited, and this feels dreamy, to have the opportunity to be in conversation with these three people that I just adore. So thank you very much for having me. I look forward to what we are going to create together.
Tracy: Absolutely. It is a joy to have you here and such an honour, and I think it is a reflection of the way occupational therapists, especially in paediatrics, support each other and come together to learn in community. Kim, you and I have got to know each other better over the last few years, and you spent some very generous time when you were in Colorado this last year, allowing us to spend time one on one. This year has been an anchor moment for me in a year of a lot of upheaval, and I think the way community and coming together and finding joy in learning sustains us as we grow is such a gift. So we are going to talk about intimate feelings, but also from a therapeutic and neuroscience perspective, and I am eager to jump into that.
Kim: Well, I think gushy is good, because when we think about spirited conversations, one of the things the three of you do is create a safe learning environment. I have been thinking a lot about safety lately, and thinking that safety is not enough, actually, that it is more about the sense of love, the sense of loving what we do, and really stepping into the deep willingness to connect with each other from a place of love. That actually just exponentially expands one’s own capacity to take in new information and evolve as an individual. So I feel grateful for the safety that you create for your community.
Cory: Very cool. I have about a gazillion questions, so I am not sure which one to pick.
Kim: I think you always do, Cory. When we are together I just take a deep breath and think, what is she going to ask next. But let me allow some space for somebody else. Did you have anything specific, Michelle or Tracy?
Michelle: Cory genuinely asked about what books Kim was reading. Is that helpful, Kim?
Kim: Yes. One of the reasons I am deeply connected to this conversation right now is that I have been tasked with writing a chapter for the Childhood Trauma and Dissociation textbook. So I have been eating, sleeping and breathing dissociation. For those who do not use that word in everyday language, my perception of it is a sense of disembodiment and disconnection from oneself, in their consciousness and in their being. To me it is a disruption of interoception, and it can happen for so many different reasons. As I was writing this chapter on trauma, the other half of my brain is thinking about all of the children we support whose brains are wired differently, who live in spaces of disembodiment or fragmented embodiment, and how that impacts their sense of self and their connection to the world and to the people around them.
Kim: What am I reading? A million different articles. I have been reading about the default mode network, works of Ruth Lanius and sensory processing, and I know, Tracy, that article too, from things I have read of yours. The Interoceptive Mind is another deeply informative, thought provoking text. Antonio Damasio and his thoughts on consciousness, and I am also thinking about consciousness, the self and the vestibular system, and all of the emerging work. Jeff Blank comes to mind as an author who is really looking at how impactful and integrative the vestibular system is to the foundation of interoception. So there is a lot going on in my head in this moment, evolving as I read and prepare and think about all the things that relate to this.
Michelle: Was there anything that caught you by surprise, or that felt on the edge of something new?
Kim: One thing I was grateful for, and please do not ask me exactly where I read it, is that I have always felt interoceptive perception did not involve much active thought. In the most recent review of interoception neurobiologically, it seems it incorporates more cognitive awareness than I thought. That both evoked frustration, surprise, appreciation and relief. Those emotions came up because for so long I have felt quite irritated by a focus on trying to teach interoception cognitively as the primary point of entry, when the underbelly of sensation and the flow of sensory information was seemingly not equally emphasised. So as I start to appreciate the breadth of the circuitry as it is being teased out, it really is a circular process, and that made me rethink. I love it when I come up with a hypothesis and then have to go in a different direction. It is very humbling, exciting, and also dysregulating.
Tracy: It is so beautiful to share that, and this may reground us or be an interesting thought for us to wrestle with. As the science unfolds, sometimes new findings pull everyone’s attention, like the shiny object in the room. There is so much focus right now on the anterior parts of the insula and the higher structures that connect interoceptive processing to thought and to mind, and the seeking for what is consciousness and what is mindfulness. That lands us in this beautiful place of understanding that interoception is the mind-body connection in so many ways. And yet that is the shiny object that catches attention. We have to remember that interoception is also pre-perception, and it is the primary fodder of neuroception. So much of what happens in the lower parts of the insula before it becomes conscious is actually where the action happens around safety and love. Our awareness builds on that, but it is always both. It is a both-and, not an either-or.
Kim: When I come back to my thinking around disembodiment and my experiences with children and adults who have experienced so much survival in their lives, asking what do you feel in your body just does not get it. It does not create any sense of safety and awareness. It is so much that pre-conscious perception that allows the person to begin to land in their body from the place of beginning to trust being in my body again. To me this is meeting multiple levels of input, sensation from the body, co-regulation and attunement, which I know we all love, as well as the language and meaning we make. The dialogue we are having around interoception is holistic, which brings us back to the whole brain working as an integrated way of processing, rather than one direction or another.
Cory: Can we clearly distinguish neuroception, or is neuroception a whole bigger process, a brain and body process that involves, as you said, interoception as fodder for neuroception? My head is not fully wrapped around the neurological process that is neuroception. I know it is strongly based in sensation, and that is not just interoception, so maybe we can tease that out.
Kim: I am thinking about words again. It is important that we all might not share words, and part of the intention of your podcast is a shared vocabulary. To me, neuroception is assessing into something that has a perception to it, fed by the sensations of meaning at a very sensory based level, as well as an affective level, that create a raw, rudimentary perception, a neuro-perceptive radar. I always have a picture of a satellite dish on my slide when I am talking about neuroception, because it is like a satellite dish tracking, becoming aware of the sense of what I am experiencing in the context I am in. And I feel Tracy elegantly said there that interoception is part of what feeds that intuition.
Tracy: The idea of neuroception as that satellite dish, I love it. It is this continual surveillance for the purpose of detection, for the purpose of mobilising whatever resources are needed. So it is not a single thing, it is a very complex function. Interestingly, Dr Porges is quite specific in saying over and over that it really is not perception, it is below the level of perception. What is so tricky about sensory integrative processing is that we have processes that become perception just a nanosecond later, so it is really hard to draw the line. In our learning we want things to be identifiable in a clear sequence, but what happens is continual processing. Even if we arbitrarily start somewhere to say there is a sequence, immediately it becomes non-sequential, because the feedback from what just happened shapes what happens next.
Kim: One of the things blowing my mind lately, and Tracy and I talked about this in Colorado, is the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett. I just heard her say that we never live in the present moment, that our brain is always about fifteen milliseconds ahead of the present moment, because we are a predictive brain. The circuitry is putting into awareness a sense of what is happening based on what it thinks is happening. That is a feedforward loop, and that is part of what blows my mind about the concept of sequencing. It is more of a comparator, the brain looking for dissonance or equanimity based on what it knows and what is happening. That is so non-sequential, and it makes it hard to tease out in the way we often think about the brain.
Tracy: Yes, that future oriented processing is one of those things. When we work with kids who come from experiences that disrupt the ability to stay in future orientation, it pulls them into a very sticky place of not being able to catch up. We also see it in kids who have weakness in their modulation or discrimination processes. Where it comes more from a basic disruption in sensory integrative processes, that can also cause this dissonance and an inability for the comparators to make sense of what is happening. Then you get a widening disparity that is hard to reconcile, and kids get confused and lost and cannot make progress. So that description applies to really the whole breadth of the clinical populations we see, and it is what we experience when we attune to the felt experience that there is a mismatch happening.
Michelle: Can I go back to interoception and neuroception for a moment. I have always considered neuroception as external to the world. So can neuroception be internal? My sense of, say, worry about missing out that was internally driven, with my heart rate up, is that neuroception? Does neuroception apply to the internal environment, or is that more clearly interoception, with neuroception being the outside world? Cory and I still want to box all these concepts.
Kim: I love that question. I will give you a go as to how I think about it. I think about input of all kinds. I could be lying in bed at three in the morning and all of my sensory input is perfect from the perception of my body’s comfort, and I can be in an absolute state of chaos from what I am thinking about. I think of these circuits as loops of integrated interaction that can be entered from any point, and each can influence the other aspects of the circuit. Cognition is a really influential neurochemical feed that biases the system and changes the valence of what you are experiencing. What we try to do with mindfulness and self-reflection is take care of that piece of the circuit by managing our mind. In my experience it is the slowest, most difficult path, but it has a tremendous feed into the whole system. My sister has Crohn’s disease, and she would report there is no question that her internal pain is influenced by thought, in both a positive and a negative direction. So I do think there is a circular aspect.
Tracy: Absolutely. Neuroception, as is true with most sensation, is the inside, the outside and the in-between. When we think about the in-between, we often think about that as between me and the environment, or me and the people around me, the beloveds, or the folks I am curious or wary about. That is a landscape. But we have that with our own minds too. If you think about the wariness with which you meet yourself, or the ease with which you meet yourself, it is a state, and neuroception responds to that.
Kim: Well, I think trauma is a great example. If you experience developmental trauma, it implicitly and perhaps explicitly influences how you perceive the world, and can set you up to experience relationships and people and the environment as inherently safe or dangerous. It is like an entering point of being that can shadow aspects of your life. So your history lies in there, in what the neuroception is going to detect.
Cory: I am trying to think about where we apply this holistic approach in the moments with the individuals we are with. What I am hearing is that there is pre-perception, before my thinking mind is even aware something is happening, and then there is the actual event of my brain figuring out what is going on. Then there is the comparator, the brain’s expectation of what will happen versus what actually happens. And if I have disruptions in how I process sensations, my brain might struggle to figure out what happens next, or what happens next might be scary. So I have to keep all of these pieces in mind when I am working with a child. I might need an example to piece it out.
Michelle: I have got one, from a session yesterday, with a gorgeous little neurodiverse kiddo, three and a half years old. He was in the ball pit, we were playing dinosaur games, and he is starting to think about numbers. We were counting the dinosaurs and adding a stroke to the board for each one, they were squishy, and he would throw them in the ball pit. After we counted thirteen dinosaurs we hid them, and he had to dive in and collect them, meeting his somatosensory needs there. He was really into the game, but he kept going back to mum, and he would just kind of grimace. On the third or fourth time he came out with the word tummy, he has probably got fifty words. So he held his tummy, we soothed him, and then he perked up and went to get the dinosaurs again.
Michelle: As he was in there he looked up at me and mum and passed a bowel movement. He had a continence aid on, but he went, oh, oh, poo. So we went back to mum, and I tried to thread the interoceptive loop, because he was feeling a thing that was pulling him out of the activity and out of relationship with me. He went to mum for co-regulation that was more than I could offer, even though he is usually super invested with me. He did not have the words, and mum said later he had never paired that together before. It got messy, she thought it was a bout of diarrhoea, an awful experience for him. But all of this unfolded in one little experience: he became aware interoceptively of something, he sought a co-regulator, he went back to the activity, it kept persisting, and he did not know what was coming up next until the stool was occurring. Then we put it all together. I wonder whether in there is a little bit of this coupling of all the concepts we are talking about, interoception, his neuroception of, whoa, something is not right, regulation and co-regulation, and that forward planning of what is coming up next.
Cory: Great example. I wonder if the somatosensory sensation before the event helped him find the language. But I also wonder, because if the neuroception piece is pre-perception and he had that mobilising, then I am trying to piece apart which bit applies where. He has that internal signal from his gut, and each time he mobilises towards mum. It seems almost like in that space it is not an intentional strategy, it just makes sense. You know how we talk about strategies for regulation. It is like, something is coming up and I do not have a predictive knowing of what it is, so I am just going to mum.
Kim: I want to jump in and say something about attachment, because what you are describing speaks to secure attachment. When there is a perception, a neuroception of danger or discomfort, the approach mobilisation comes only in the conditions of safety, with a co-regulator. If a caregiver or co-regulator is perceived to have more danger than the danger I am feeling, I will not approach, in order to be able to make meaning or have someone hold space for me. What neuroscience is telling us, especially through the right orbitofrontal cortex, is that when I experience pain, danger or lack of safety and I am in the presence of someone who holds space for me, I learn to hold space for myself. Through that tolerance, the interoceptive connection grows, and I develop a greater sense of connection to me, to my own living experience, and how it balances my emotions. Back to the beginning around dissociation, I always talk about a thousand faces of dissociation. If a parent said, oh stop, do not worry about it, just go back to Michelle, with a dismissive intonation, that can be a cue that disconnects interoception. So this attachment rule has a place in either accentuating interoceptive trust or minimising it, depending on how it is received.
Michelle: Just on that, Kim, there was a little bit of that flavour when he first came, because it was less obvious. It was a, what are you doing buddy, where do you want to go, back to play. So not a sharp dismissiveness, but a, I do not understand what you are doing here, soothe, soothe, off you go. But it did change. He was resilient enough to go back two or three times, and we were both like, this is a little unusual. So there was a real softening, oh, this is not just distraction or a bit of dysregulation because Michelle did not find the dinosaur fast enough. We both understood there was a different flavour here, and we both softened in.
Kim: That is the scaffolding, that wonder of repair, by the way.
Tracy: It absolutely is. It is that attuned relationship. The brain and human beings are simultaneously processing multiple goals. We are processing, let me be regulated in my body so I can be safe and explore, and I am interested in numbers, and I am interested in this play with you and these dinosaurs. As observers or participants with children, we tend to assume that the lower levels of regulation are being held when there are higher levels of participation and engagement. So we focus on the game, the higher level play, the high capacity. Then what happens when a child gets a cue from their body that something is changing physiologically or emotionally? It takes them a little time to shift, and it takes us a little time to shift too. That process toggles based on cues, and the stronger the cues, the more likely we are to pick up on them, but it often is not on the first or second trial.
Tracy: We know that experience of, this is what I need but I cannot quite tell you why, is matching where his little brain was getting a cue from downstairs, competing with what was happening upstairs. It was drawing resources away from the play and the ideas and cognition, into, uh-oh, my tummy really hurts, something is happening I am not in volitional control over anymore. All of that competes with what he really wants to be doing. So you get this tension as the brain shifts resources away from the high level brain to the lower signals, and the signals get louder down there. It takes a high degree of flexibility and attunement, which is also what builds capacity, through the little mismatch, the little error and the little repair. It is such a beautiful way the whole system, interoceptively and neuroceptively, pairs to help us find and meet need.
Michelle: You have made me think, Kim, of that feedforward component, because he has just got these emerging interoceptive skills and he is incontinent. He has not paired those sensations in his bowel and bladder with, oh, I know what is coming next. You and I would foresee it, oh, I have to go, session is over. He did not have the predictive element to know, so he danced back to me multiple times. I felt like I was witnessing that pairing of a downstairs body cue with a cognition of, poo, toilet, time to go. We are not always able to experience that in the clinic, particularly for bowels and bladders, in the moment as it is happening.
Cory: It was such a good example. We have talked strongly here about bodily signals in relation to bowel and taking care of basic needs like toileting or thirst. But I am also wondering about the emotional interoceptive labelling and experiencing we often have in our sessions. A simple example a lot of paediatric OTs will come across: you have a child sitting on an exercise ball, you move them in a certain direction, and you see a bit of a startle, the eyes widen, the arms come out. When there is a resilient child, or if it is not too big a mismatch to their capacity, and if you are attuned, you can catch it and say, whoa, I moved you a bit fast, or, oh, that might have been a bit scary. So you connect the cognition to the moment.
Cory: But then there is also, if the mobilisation is bigger, say they are on a swing and for whatever reason the experience felt scary, and they mobilise fully away, so they flee and hide, or maybe they are angry as well. So it is trying to catch where the processing created a bump, noticing that, and then helping them with the feeling it created. Whoa, I am really sorry I went a bit fast, that was scary, no wonder you are a bit mad at me. Is that a good example of linking these pieces of the process together? I am just wondering how we can think about it in lots of different ways in treatment.
Kim: I feel like there is another layer as I listen to you, and it is our non-verbals. In that circuitry the words are late, sometimes in the arrival of the integration of the information, and the non-verbals are processed very early in the layers of the brain. So much of how we feel felt by another is through their non-verbals, through their eyes, their voice, their expressions, their bodies, the tension. We do so much with our hands in our work, and we communicate affect through our own bodies touching their bodies, even sitting next to them. Those pieces of sensory data contribute to the whole of the awareness. And this can be helpful or can make it worse. If a child has an interoceptive experience that feels quite intense, and we join them in that intensity for too long, we can exaggerate their experience, just as dismissing can cut them off from their perception. So co-regulation comes back in here again. Attunement is not just what we say but how we say it, which allows the child’s integration of the experience to have a meaning that expands their resilience, to be comfortably uncomfortable.
Cory: You moved directly into my question. Before this podcast I brain dumped all my stuff, in the hope I would not keep trying to get my word in. One of the questions was, when you do not have the words, and we have children who do not have the words, is interoceptive capacity built through the attunement and matching of the affective state, the mirroring, and then maybe labelling with a yucky, or noticing that it is yucky?
Kim: Well, I think that is how it is for infants. I always think about an infant in their crib, crying, their tummy hurts or they are hungry. Imagine if I stood over the crib and just looked in silence and the baby kept crying, versus if I say, oh, and my face is matching the affect of the child, so that the child’s brain, not just their cognition, their actual brain, the von Economo cells that are part of the mirror neuron system, light up. Okay, you get it, we are in this together. Through that mirroring the baby’s circuitry starts to say, what I am experiencing has meaning to you, so it has meaning to me. And that goes on and on. I am just thinking of my elderly mum who has dementia, and how profound it is even now.
Tracy: It is all of that, and it is also that you are continually inviting a return to safety, in order for the meaning to be able to take shape, the meaning that will stick for future orientation. The thing that is so tricky is the valence that happens, the tipping whenever you move out of comfort into whatever the trigger is. If it is big enough to mobilise the person away from engagement, the meaning that gets laid down on top of a lack of comfort is entirely different to the meaning laid down on a base of comfort. With babies we intuitively know that soothing, the queuing of our face and match, but also the total incubation of comfort, offers the neuroceptive cues of safety: you belong here, I am here for you, things are going to be okay. Then meaning takes shape in a beautiful way. Sometimes with our older kids we forget we have to land it on that foundation. We start to focus too high, labelling and naming and bringing about awareness, without remembering you have to begin at that base.
Cory: I have a burning question about over-attuning, or getting caught up in the emotion as the co-regulation, and being too long in it with a child. I am wondering about our autistic individuals. Sometimes I notice that if I attune, it is almost like the affect or the trigger re-triggers. I am unsure how to let them know I am okay if they have that feeling, and how to help them move forward out of the feeling without dismissing the feeling. Sometimes I am not sure I get that balance right.
Tracy: I really do feel like the A in the SPIRIT model is conceptualised this way: at the foundation you have a very basic neuroceptive valence of safety and comfort. But the top parts of the insula, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and other parts of our executive functioning system, are a motivational biasing system, and it works off the same valence. When you get tipped in a negative direction, away from comfort, the brain starts to rapidly produce a lot of protective, automatic negative thoughts, those ants, and they crawl and get abundant. So you start to see and hear negative affect and negative language, a lot of stickiness around things coded as hard. It is easy for us to get hooked by those automatic negative thoughts too. We sometimes overly empathise with the negative. It is not that you want to dismiss it, but remember that is the colour happening because the valence got tipped. So we return to attunement and safety and kindness and openness and compassion, and what happens is the ants scatter and it allows for the positive. You do not have to soothe every thought, every worry, every memory. You just have to allow the nervous system to remember that the foundation of safety is available.
Kim: I want to come underneath a little and speak to presence. That idea of responding in the best way, the intention to be present, and I use the word intention very intentionally, is all about priming the state of the brain to be ready for something. If I have the intention to be present, that in itself is a feeling that I matter. In a sense it cuts us some slack, as clinicians and parents and grandparents, that we can be not quite perfect in what we say or how we attune, but there is a felt sense of love and connection that supports the whole of what is unfolding.
Kim: I have a really interesting story to share, and maybe you can help me unpack it, because it was quite magical. It happened this week. I was at our Moving to Higher Ground camp, and there was a little guy with the therapist supporting him. He is about five, non-verbal, autism spectrum, with big open eyes, eyebrows glued almost to the top of his forehead, bouncing on his toes, eyes up and out, gazing at a distance, pacing constantly. You can feel him as I describe him. His clinician was absolutely magical in her capacity to gracefully connect, to orient her body and use her voice, all the things we try so hard to do. All of a sudden I thought, he does not know what feelings are hers and what are his. I decided in that moment to support them by introducing the Safe and Sound Protocol music to her. So I put the headphones on her, and he stopped dead in his tracks. His feet came down, he oriented in her direction, he put his hands on her cheeks, and he started to cry. It was like he was looking into her soul, and then she started to cry. Her response to me was, I feel so responsible, because he was feeling my sadness.
Kim: It was a reminder of how permeable some of our kids are in their interoception and disembodiment, that they feel things you and I are even less aware of. He then took her hand and dragged her over to the lycra swing for the first time in his entire life of therapy. It was wild to watch. I share it because I am wondering if you can all reflect on how we play the neuroception landscape and the interoceptive landscape of our kids.
[1:00:28] Playing the landscape, and closing reflections
Cory: That is probably why I was asking the question. I have a child at the moment where little things upset her in a big way, and I want to let her know I can see you are upset, but we will go when you are ready. I am trying to play around with how much I look at her directly in that process, how much I play with my tone of voice, and how much I reduce the language altogether. She is thirteen, pretty non-verbal, and we have a great time, I really enjoy her. Sometimes I feel like I am just exacerbating it, and part of me wonders how much of it is me being uncomfortable with the fact that she is upset. When she is upset she uses all the strategies she has, which include hitting her legs and whacking things nearby, never aggressively, just trying to manage the intensity. So, Tracy, your comment that you do not need to continually attune to the affective experience, but to continually offer the safety anchor as the option, helps me navigate that landscape. And Kim, your story is such a powerful reminder that the only person you can change is yourself, and how the people we are with are susceptible to our stuff.
Michelle: I have a similar experience to that, Kim. I was pretty tired on a particular day last week, and mum asked how I was going. To be honest I was tired, but I had my fine face on and I was ready to play. We have known each other for years, so I said, oh, I am not fine, I am tired, but I turned up. She left the room, and her little cherub saw straight through me. He had not been in the vicinity to hear me say it, but my faking fine, he was all over it. Even though I think it is that really base level of neuroception, safe or not safe, I did not have to be off by much, and he was like, well, the landscape has changed, have you got me today, Michelle? Because it does not feel like you had me last week. And the truth was, I did not.
Michelle: In your example, Kim, in trying so hard to be so fully present, they were having an interaction, even though from the outside he looked like he may not have been attuning to her. In fact, from that felt safety, fundamental level, he was neurocepting, I see you, I feel you, I feel you have me, even though I am looking away. When you popped the headphones on, it feels like he perceived that shift, and what happened to her. Time and again I feel they get that they have understood there is a shift here. I see them shift very subtly, and I know they have perceived my shift subtly as well. It shows it is not always us holding them, they are perceiving and holding us too.
Michelle: I love that. I think that is a great way to end, and I do not want to end this episode, to be honest. I have all these questions about resiliency, and where the interoceptive experience sits when we are a little frustrated but the outcome is what we want, and how we manage that with compliance. I have got ten more episodes worth of questions, but that means you just have to come back, Kim.
Tracy: We can have another conversation. Thank you for the juicy inspiration. I am carrying this with me.
Kim: I am carrying this with me in my heart, and so much gratitude for the three of you. Thank you for having me today.
All: Beautiful, Kim. Thank you. Thank you.
And that’s a wrap on today’s episode of Spirited Conversations. We hope this sparks something for you, whether it’s a new clinical idea, a fresh perspective, or just the reminder that you are definitely not alone in this work. If this conversation resonated, we would love for you to share it with anyone on their own learning journey. You can find information about the podcast on our website, and you can join us in the courses and communities the Developmental FX team have put together at developmentalfx.org. And if you’re enjoying listening, please subscribe or leave a review, it genuinely helps more people find us. Until next time, keep the conversations spirited!