Modern Family Matters

How to Utilize Nervous System Literacy to Become the Empowered Mom

May 10, 2022 with Christa Bevan Season 1 Episode 55
Modern Family Matters
How to Utilize Nervous System Literacy to Become the Empowered Mom
Show Notes Transcript

In honor of Mother's Day, join us as we sit down with certified TRE® (tension and trauma releasing exercises) provider and nervous system educator, Christa Bevan, to talk about the important roles that nervous system regulation, as well as breaking cycles of generational trauma, can play in helping mothers to feel more empowered in their journey through motherhood. In this interview, Christa answers the following:

•    What is nervous system literacy, and how does it show up in our daily lives?
 •    What can we do to maintain a healthy, well-regulated nervous system?
 •    What does it mean to be a radical mother dedicated to breaking cycles of trauma?
 •    How can TRE (tension and trauma releasing exercises) help you eliminate panic attacks and get your anxiety under control?
 •    Why is it so important to view your stress responses as super powers instead of stumbling blocks?
 •    Why is it so important to include your body in the conversation when working to heal from trauma?
 •    What is dynamic self-care, and how can we incorporate it into our day-to-day routines? 

If you would like to speak with one of our family law attorneys, please call our office at (503) 227-0200, or visit our website at https://www.landerholmlaw.com.

To learn more about how Christa can help you, or to set up a free phone consult with her, visit her website: https://christabevan.com/

Disclaimer: Nothing in this communication is intended to provide legal advice nor does it constitute a client-attorney relationship, therefore you should not interpret the contents as such.

Intro: 
Welcome to Modern Family Matters, a podcast devoted to exploring family law topics that matter most to you. Covering a wide range of legal, personal, and family law matters, with expert analysis from skilled attorneys and professional guests, we hope that our podcast provides answers, clarity, and guidance towards a better tomorrow for you and your family. Here's your host, Steve Altishin.

Steve Altishin  0:28  
Hi everyone, I'm Steve Altishin, Director of Client Partnerships here at Pacific Cascade Family Law, and today, I'm here with Christa Bevan, to talk about how to utilize your nervous system and gain your nervous system literacy to become an empowered mom. Hey Christa, can tell us a little bit about yourself?

Christa Bevan  0:54  
I like to say I am a nervous system educator for cycle breaker moms. So these are moms who know that they want to parent differently than they were raised, and give their kids a different childhood than the one that they experienced themselves. And I help them do that through nervous system regulation, which I know you and I are gonna get into talking about. But needless to say, I didn't come to this work on accident, right? So I consider myself to be a cycle breaker mother, just alongside the mamas that I help. And I needed this to sort of break the cycles of childhood trauma that I lived with. And I knew I wanted to parent differently and offer my son a different opportunity and experience of life than the one that I was given. And for me, one of the really foundational pieces that helped me to not only sort of recover from a lot of the trauma that I had experienced, but also show up in motherhood the way that I desired, was through nervous system regulation work and really starting to work with my body in some of the healing that I was doing that had been missing from the approaches that I had tried. And so once I started including that and incorporating that into my life, it was all these like light bulb moments of things, shifting and going the way I wanted. And that inspired me to now do this work and share it and spread this with other mamas.

Steve Altishin  2:14  
Well, I'm really happy you're here today. Because this, to me, is just really fascinating stuff. You know, I understand, I think, what constitutes our nervous system, but what do you mean by the term 'nervous system literacy'?

Christa Bevan  2:34  
Yeah, so good question, because I created this term, right? So it's this idea of becoming literate about our nervous system. So starting to understand the way that our innate stress physiology is wired. One of the things that can happen really frequently is that we will respond to a situation in our life from a place of stress, from a place of being activated in our nervous system. And we're not always proud of how we've behaved. And then afterwards, we can feel a lot of shame and a lot of guilt around that behavior. And what I've found is that when we can actually start to learn and understand why we respond, and why we respond to the way that we do in certain situations, we can not only sort of prevent those from happening in the future, but at the very least we can change how we interact with ourselves after the fact. And the biggest way that we can do that is by cultivating more compassion for ourselves, which actually helps to interrupt that shame spiral, helps to dissipate that mom guilt, and helps us get back to being the kind of mom that we want to be for our kids a little bit quicker and a little bit easier.

Steve Altishin  3:48  
That sounds hard, and maybe not so hard. It really, like I said, just fascinates me. So the nervous system, in terms of what you're talking about, regulating it to get empowerment over it. Can you give us kind of a brief rundown first, like, what does the nervous system actually do that you're trying to regulate?

Christa Bevan  4:17  
Yeah, great question. So let's just talk about what the nervous system is, right? So it's our brain and our spinal cord, but it's so much more than that. It's also all of these nerves running through our body. And we tend to think of our brain as being in charge and running the show and sort of being the Director of Operations and giving our body instructions on how to behave. But the truth is that our body actually gives most of the information to our brain and then our brain responds and reacts to that. There's this huge subconscious component of our body really being in charge. And so when we can start to understand that we can start to work with to our body so that we aren't so betrayed by the stress responses. And then what was--I'm sorry, you're gonna have to repeat the second part of the question, because I completely distracted myself on answering the first part.

Steve Altishin  5:11  
No, that was perfect. That was perfect. Okay, that kind of leads into, you know, how does it do this? Why? What is the nervous system trying to protect us from? I mean, why is it responding like that? 

Christa Bevan  5:25  
Yeah, so its main job is to keep us alive and to keep us safe, right? So the number one job of the nervous system is survival. And that sounds kind of obvious when you stop and think about it. But in the moment, the nervous system can actually be really myopic, and it can be responding to threats of danger that it perceives to be dangerous. So let me give you an example. Let me tie this into actual mom life. So if your child is having a tantrum, just like a complete meltdown, in the middle of the aisle of target, and you are completely embarrassed, that can feel like a threat to your nervous system. And it can trigger you into this place of activation, where you feel like you need to act. And you might respond to your child in a way that again, you're maybe not proud of, maybe you yell at them, maybe you say snap out of it, maybe you sort of pick them up and you say cut it out, or you're speaking in a tone of voice that you don't like. And it's because your body is responding to this perceived threat. We know, rationally, that our child having a tantrum in the middle of target isn't actually a threat. But on a subconscious level, it feels threatening, and that's how our body is responding. And so when we start to understand that, we can, again, sort of have more compassion and understanding for why we're responding the way that we do. And also take that moment to just sort of check on ourselves and say, Wait a minute, this feels like a big deal. But maybe it's really not, maybe I can just take a pause, right? It gives us that space between the trigger and our reaction to go, oh, this is what's happening, this feels really scary to my body, and it's actually not. Maybe if I take a deep breath, then I can calm myself and then help calm them, and then we can get out of the store. 

Steve Altishin  7:13  
Yeah, it sounds like there are two parts of the brain almost going on. There's the survival, and then there's sort of the, I think you call it the 'thinking brain'. Which kicks in first?

Christa Bevan  7:24  
The survival brain does. And the survival brain is getting information from our body. So our body is sensing, it's constantly scanning our environment, both externally and internally, which is why our self talk matters, for cues of danger for things that it can perceive. Again, it's all about perception. We're not talking about reality, here, we're talking about perceived danger. And then it's sending information to the survival brain that has to make a split second decision about how to interpret that information. And again, sort of hold this information in the context of your nervous systems number one job is to keep you alive. If it senses wait, that's danger, then it's going to tell your upper level thinking brain, this is a dangerous situation, and I need to respond, right? And the way that we respond, most people have heard of fight or flight, there's also freeze, or sort of a shutdown state. And those things will sometimes happen to us. And then afterwards, we sort of go, Wait a minute, why did I do that? I was in the middle of an argument with my husband, and then I completely froze. I knew what I wanted to say, and I couldn't get the words out of my mouth. And then you feel bad about that, right? And there's a reason that that happened-- it's that you perceived danger, and your body shut you down to keep you safe.

Steve Altishin  8:47  
So your survival brain, you said an interesting thing, that it's not necessarily a real threat. It's just these perceived threats. Is there something going on in your nervous system then that takes it from 'Oh, this isn't a real threat, let's deal with it this way'?

Christa Bevan  9:20  
Yeah, and it takes being in a regulated nervous system state so that you can respond to stressors in life with more accuracy. So if you have a lot of unhealed trauma in your body, because your body is where that stuff gets stored, then you start to see the world from a state of danger, and your perceptions about your world start to skew in that direction. And so if we can bring in some nervous system regulation work to get you into a place where you are not so quick to react, where you have what's called a larger window of tolerance--o it's the capacity that you have to, I like to describe it as bending to stressors in life instead of breaking under their weight, right? If we can start to expand those things and regulate your nervous system, then when those things happen, we're better able to again put that pause in between the triggering event and our reaction, That's not to say that we never react to things off the cuff. But we're able to often slow that process down and let our thinking brain sort of go, Wait a minute, is this actually dangerous, or is this just somebody that cut me off in traffic? Is this just my boss pushing a work deadline and I'm actually okay? Or is it just, you know, the nightly news that I can flip the channel on, right? We can then sort of have a little bit more agency over how we respond to those things.

Steve Altishin  10:53  
Mm. It reminds me so much of something I talk to my kids about sometimes, which is they get into a--I won't call it a texting war-- but someone's texting, and they're hitting things, and I look, and I go, Are you really sure you want to send that? I mean, that's kind of what your thinking brain is. But it doesn't have time to do it, it sounds like, if you don't figure out a way to slow down the process.

Christa Bevan  11:24  
Yeah. Right, exactly. And it can happen, you know, with our kids with, with different relationships that we're in, right? We can just have reactivity, reactivity reactivity. And instead, we want to be able to actually sit back and say, I'm happy to have this conversation, but I need five minutes, I need to gather my thoughts, right? It's about being able to put boundaries in place, it's about being able to advocate for yourself, it's about having the empowerment enough to know, this is how I'm feeling like I need to react, and I know that that's not actually true to the moment, and I don't want to do something I'm ashamed of. And so I'm going to stop myself and advocate for what I need. I can talk about this with you, but I'm not going to do it over email, or I will only have this conversation in person. Or this is the situation in which I feel most comfortable discussing this, or I'm not discussing this, but I'm happy to talk about this piece of the conversation. You know, whatever it is, but it's about being able to sort of have that control and, again, agency over what happens to you and how you respond to the world.

Steve Altishin  12:32  
When it's all working, like you said, they were supposed to be together. You should have the survival brain, you should have the thinking brain, and they've just got to work together. And you had brought up a term that I kind of want to ask about because that brought up a question with me-- you said one of the reactions, it's not just the fight or flight, it can be this thing called freeze. What is freeze? And is that kind of what I'm thinking it is where you shut down and don't do anything? What is that?

Christa Bevan  13:07  
Yeah, so it can literally be that you become sort of frozen in place, right? This is a classic one that a lot of women experience where they sort of, they can't talk, they will literally stop moving, and just sort of like check out, right. But it can also show up in sort of more subtle ways. So it can be freezing in the sense of not being able to advocate for yourself, right? So if you think about fighting or flighting, they're both very physical acts, you're doing something to save yourself, you're either fighting the bear or you're running away from the bear. Freeze is where your body has made the decision that those two things, fighting or flighting, aren't going to work. And so instead, you're going to shut down, you're going to dissociate from your body as a self protection mechanism, so that you don't feel the pain of the impending threat coming at you. And sometimes that looks like hiding from your life, it can be sort of shut down in the sense that you're kind of moving through the motions, but you're not really there, you're not really participating fully. Maybe, you know, you respond to a stressful event in a free state, and it sort of knocks you off your game for a really long time, takes you a long time to sort of come back to bounce back to your full self. Maybe you're sleeping excessively, maybe you're sort of hiding from responsibilities, right? Those can all be in the flavor of the freeze response, so to speak.

Steve Altishin  14:34  
Can you get stuck and I guess what I mean by that is, if you're reacting quickly or freezing, can you kind of get into that mode where it happens and it's hard to get out of it? Because it sounds like the thinking brain is trying to knock on the door and say let me in, but sometimes that doesn't happen

Christa Bevan  15:00  
Yeah, absolutely. And this is what we would call a chronic state of nervous system dysregulation. And it can be existing in either a state of fighting, so this would look like, you know, chronic, again,  yelling at your kids, being sort of aggressive, being difficult for people to deal with, you being overly just, like, aggressive, right? Or flighting, where you're sort of anxious and you have this anxious energy in your body, or you're always trying to control things, or you're overcompensating, right? These can be sort of those hyper-aroused states, where it can be something like a freeze, like a hypo-aroused state. So something like depression is often in this category, or again, that sort of checked out feeling like you're going through the motions, but you're not really there, you're sort of showing up to your life in this very superficial way. And then sometimes what happens to people too, is they bounce back and forth from one extreme to the next. And they kind of, you know, oscillate back and forth. But we can become, like you said, for lack of a better word, sort of stuck in these response patterns, where that's how we see the world and how we interact with the world. So I'll give you an example from my own life. For years and years and years, everyone just told me, I was an angry person. They just said I was angry, they always thought I was angry, they always thought my face looked angry, they thought my tone of voice was angry, that the way I responded was always angry. And so I started thinking, I must be an angry person, they must be right. All these people in my life are telling me this, and then come to find out, I'm actually not an angry person. I can get angry. But I was a severely dysregulated person. And what my nervous system had done was basically assessed the world to be dangerous. And the best way that my body felt that I could cope with that was through anger as a protective mechanism. And so it sort of became this defensive shield that I wore around even when I didn't need it. Because my body didn't know how to set it down. It didn't have other skills to replace the coping skill of anger, and that sort of fight energy that I knew. And so a lot of times we can develop these sort of patterns and kind of become stuck in not knowing what else to do, where nervous system regulation work is going to help us sort of break out of those patterns and out of those habitual ruts.

Steve Altishin  17:28  
That sounds like it's where the literacy comes in. I guess you have to kind of understand it before you can try to fix it, it sounds like.

Christa Bevan  17:38  
Absolutely right. I'm always telling clients that alteration follows awareness. We can't change what we don't know to change. So first, we become aware of these things, we start to recognize these patterns, then we start to understand sort of the root of the pattern. And then we look at what we can do to shift that, what can we do to augment the pattern. And those three steps kind of work together to give people an opportunity to really change the story for themselves.

Steve Altishin  18:07  
Starting with the first one, how do you recognize it, the problem?

Christa Bevan  18:14  
Yeah, so this one, it's a great question, and it doesn't have a great answer. It's one of those things where you have to just start to notice. You have to start hearing enough people say, Why are you always so angry? You have to start feeling like there's something in your life that just isn't quite right. It's sort of an intuitive knowing that something's not the way that it should be, to get you to start asking questions, to go, Is this really the best that life can be? Is this how I'm supposed to be reacting to my children? Is this the kind of mom that I want to be? Is this the kind of, you know, whatever, fill in the blank, and then through that curiosity, we can start asking questions that open up some of these doorways to more exploration.

Steve Altishin  19:01  
I take it this is kind of the stage a lot of people come to you out there that may be starting to recognize. So let's say someone comes to you, how do you start to break that pattern?

Christa Bevan  19:16  
So the first thing we do is we start to look at what the pattern is. We start to say, is there a pattern when you face this certain stressor? I call them stress hotspots in your life, right? Is it every time that you need to go to the grocery store? Does your anxiety kick in? Is that a pattern that we can recognize? Okay, so let's look at that. What can we do? How can we work with that? How can we honor the fact that your body is having this anxious reaction? Is it there for a reason? Can we accept what that reason is and then change that that reason is existing? Or can we change the way that you interact with that stressor? Can we order groceries to be delivered to your house? What can we do to manage that anxiety? We can start to work on tools to work with the body. So I do a lot of embodiment work, and a lot of different brain science based tools to really get people to come into safety in their body. Because again, when we're talking about the nervous system and the survival brain, we're really mostly talking about the body's responses to things. So the best way, I think, and a lot of people agree with me, to approach working with that is to work with the body. So using somatic approaches to start to shift some of these things, and start to move out of those patterns so that you can create that new story for yourself. 

Steve Altishin  20:38  
What kind of work? You're working with the body-- is this like physical stuff, because I know you said earlier that it isn't just the brain. And it's not necessarily being run by the brain, it's your whole nervous system. And that made sense when you talk about someone who just has an angry face, it's just sort of your nervous system doing it. So what sort of physical things do you have people do to kind of break or stop that or slow it down? 

Christa Bevan  21:10  
Yeah, so breathwork is one option. There's intentional movement, there's intentional movement exercises that we can do. I was actually just doing one of them before we hopped on this call, it's just really, I can show it to you. It's this really simple movement to sort of get everything firing in the right way. And you literally just, it's like rocking a baby, you sort of rock the baby down here, and then you move up, and then you move up, right. And so it's things like this, it's these little hacks that work with our body's physiology. So in this case, what we're doing is firing up the trapezius muscles to activate the vagus nerve to tell the vagus nerve that our body is safe. It can sort of act as like a little reset through our day. So we use things like that. It's yoga postures, its breath work. It's also one of the modalities that I teach clients called TRE, which is tapping into the body's innate ability to shake as a stress discharged function. So there's lots of different things that we can do that are sort of working with the body to release the stress hormones that have accumulated in our systems, and allow those to sort of dissipate, which helps us to recognize maybe things aren't quite as unsafe as I'm perceiving them to be right now. Maybe I actually am feeling better, right? So people also do things, like for anyone listening that likes to run, I am not that person. But I hear after you go for a long run that you feel better afterwards, right? You sort of get that runner's high. And you get those natural endorphins and the oxytocin and all of these things that are working with your system and your stress physiology, to produce a state change to help you feel better. So it's knowing those things and then mindfully implementing them in your life.

Steve Altishin  23:00  
Yeah, you're not just running away from the problem. You're running to understand the problem. It seems to me that it makes sense also, because I mean, so many people that I talk to-- I mean, maybe everybody--one of the times that it seems like some of this perceived danger kicks in and anxiety is when you go to bed, and you're lying in bed. And I mean, should I get out of bed and actually do some of these things? Because it seems like there are people  just lying there, and the more your lie there, the more it kind of compounds.

Christa Bevan  23:00  
Mmm yeah, for me, once I hit that, I don't usually want to get up and out and do anything. But this is where an ounce of prevention is really worth a pound of cure. And this is what I teach clients is, what are the things we can do on a regular basis to nourish our nervous system? What are the things? Can we start to recognize the things that trigger us that put us into this activated state? And then can we also create a custom list for ourselves of things that can help us reset and regulate ourselves? Right? So for me, I just said running is a great one, except I hate running. So running is never going to be on my list. But for my sister, running is one of the things that helps her keep her cool. So what are the things that you can do that would work with your body that you can start to incorporate into your life in this mindful way, in order to prevent that point that you get to where you're laying in bed, and then just sort of spiraling into that into that place? 

Steve Altishin  23:50  
So the list isn't something you'd necessarily tell them do A, B, C, D, E and F because this could be different for different people.

Christa Bevan  24:33  
Yeah, it's more like I give them a menu and ask them to order the things that that they like.

Steve Altishin  24:45  
Should I be writing this down? I mean, is that something that-- I always think about that, taking notes. Is this like you go, Oh, this isn't that bad, and I should not do this, and maybe I should-- I mean, if I recognize some things should I write it down, or is it just the process of doing it over and over again, that sort of intuitively brings you to recognizing?

Christa Bevan  25:40  
For a lot of people writing it down can be really helpful. And in fact, I often tell people to write it down and to have a list. So when I work with people, we create our resources for regulation roadmap, right, and I help people create this custom menu for themselves. And then I say, print it out, and put it on your fridge. Print it out and hand it to your partner, and they can remind you. Because the thing is that when we get in this triggered state, when we're feeling anxious, it's really hard to use our thinking brain to remember, Oh, if I just do this, that'll help me feel better. And so when we have this, like physical document, or you know, put it in the notepad on your phone, if we have it sort of external to ourselves, it can be a really great way to look at it as a reference, and then say, oh, yeah, I'm going to try this thing. And if this doesn't work, I'm going to try the next thing. And at a certain point, it will become intuitive to just know what you need to do. Um, but I do find that for people beginning, it can be very helpful to create a list for yourself.

Steve Altishin  26:44  
Yeah, part of it also would seem that if you've got 14 things to do, and you're between nine and 10, and you suddenly start to feel this way, I mean, do I have to get on to number 11, do I have to do that right off the bat?

Christa Bevan  27:02  
I mean, that's our tendency, right? That's the curse that all Americans need to break is this constant productivity drive. And that's what I mean about, you know, working this stuff into your life. It doesn't happen overnight. It takes practice, right? We've all gotten to this place where we value productivity over rest. And we need to all step away from that more than we are, I think, because rest and downtime, if we think about this from sort of an evolutionary standpoint, our nervous systems are not evolved to live in the time that we live in, because they were used to having a threat happen, and then the threat would go away. And instead, what we deal with is constant barrage of unending threats, right? And again, threat in the perception land, not in reality land. And so when we don't build in time to our schedules, and we don't build in permission to ourselves to allow for time for our nervous system to recalibrate to safety, I mean, of course we're all a bunch of anxious messes. So we really need to start to shift the way that we show up in our day, changing how we schedule our lives, changing the way that we interact with events and things like that, so that we can really build in some recovery time. And I think that that's just a practice and that you can get good at it. I have gotten much better at it in my life. And if I can do it, I promise that anyone can.

Steve Altishin  28:35  
I believe it. I mean, you're talking about it and it all just makes sense. Even though I wouldn't think about it, when you talk about it, it makes sense. And just even listening to it kind of brings you back to being intentional, just kind of hearing it. We're getting close to having to go, but I just kind of want to touch on the stress hormone thing you talked about and maybe hitting again on, what do you do with them when they start to flood? And is there a way to know what's coming, I guess is kind of the question. 

Christa Bevan  29:24  
I mean, knowing it's coming, yeah, we can sometimes predict the stress in our life. So this goes back to the stress hotspots that I was mentioning. Like if getting your kids to daycare in the morning, and then getting yourself to work all within the 15-- you know, you might recognize that that's a stress hotspot and you can sort of anticipate that that's going to be a stressful event. And then you can do things to sort of try to lessen those effects. But also stress can hit us out of nowhere, and what it does on a physiological level is it causes a spike, a surge in stress hormones. So things like cortisol and adrenaline running through our body. And those are happening to prepare us to fight or flight and run away from this threat. And if we don't do one of those things, those stress hormones are still in our body. And we know that when our heart is racing, when our hands are sweaty, when we sort of feel jacked up, like we've had too much coffee. And so we can do things to sort of discharge that feeling from our body and use those stress hormones up. That's where physical movement can come in. But it's also things like, co-regulating with a safe person. So it's what I like to call the phone a friend option, right? I think we all know this sort of instinctually, we've had a long, hard day, somebody said something really crappy to us. And what do we do? We call our mom, we call our sister, we call our best friend, and you vent about your day, right? There are ways to work with your stress anatomy to let the stress valve open up a little bit and let some of those things discharge in a healthy way instead of in a way that's yelling at your kids.

Steve Altishin  31:04  
That makes complete sense. Wow, this has been really cool. Somehow we just ripped through 30 minutes. Before we go, is there anything, one last comment or tip or something about not feeling shame, because it's one of the things that it's like, you know, you could do all these things, and these things aren't bad. I mean, these things, these reactions, they're not bad things. You need them, but it's just a matter of getting to turn them off, it seems like, is where the ship goes wrong.

Christa Bevan  31:41  
Well, you know, you asked me this question. And then you say you want it to be a quick tip. So I'll do my best, but you tricked me here. But I think, you know, this is just one thing to know about this. And I don't say this to make you feel bad, but instead to say this to make you understand the possibility of what can happen when you do this work, which is that your self talk matters. And that can be as much danger to your system as any external threat. And so I want everyone listening to this to just to pay attention to how you speak to yourself, after you behave in a way that you're maybe not proud of, or when you're lying in bed at night trying to fall asleep and your replaying your day. Just start to have an awareness of what that language is like, and start to ask yourself the question, would I speak to my child the way that I'm speaking to myself, and see if that gets you to change what some of that inner dialogue is like. And I have a feeling that for a lot of us, it would.

Steve Altishin  32:48  
That makes sense, it makes so much sense. So obviously, folks work with you on this. This isn't you just give them a book and they walk away. So how can people get a hold of you?

Christa Bevan  33:01  
So you can head to my website, which is christabevan.com, and you can find ways to work with me on there. I also host a podcast as well as a free Facebook community for other moms that are doing this work. And both of those have the same name, which is the radical mother village. So if you search for that in your podcast platform or on Facebook, it'll pop up and you can find me in those places as well.

Steve Altishin  33:25  
I love it. We are now out of time. I really appreciate it. I totally now want to do one on the radical mother village.

Christa Bevan  33:34  
Yeah, that's a whole other thing.

Steve Altishin  33:37  
Yeah. That sounds great. But really, what you did here again, is, you know, you somehow took science and behavior and just a lot of concepts and made them understandable. Because I think if people just thought, you know, nervous system literacy, I wouldn't know what the heck you're talking about, but now I kind of do. So thank you so much for being here today.

Christa Bevan  34:01  
You're very welcome. Thank you for having me. 

Steve Altishin  34:04  
Oh, it was wonderful. And everyone else. Thank you for joining us. If anyone has any questions at all on today's topic, post it here and we can get you connected with Christa. And until next time, everyone, stay safe. Stay happy. Be well.

Outro:
This has been Modern Family Matters, a legal podcast focusing on providing real answers and direction for individuals and families. Our podcast is sponsored by Landerholm Family Law and Pacific Cascade Family Law, serving families in Oregon and Washington. If you are in need of legal counsel or have additional questions about a family law matter important to you, please visit our websites at landerholmlaw.com or pacificcascadefamilylaw.com. You can also call our headquarters at (503) 227-0200 to schedule a case evaluation with one of our seasoned attorneys. Modern Family Matters, advocating for your better tomorrow and offering legal solutions important to the modern family.