Balance & Beyond Podcast

Ever wondered why that headache appears right when you finally sit down after a hectic day? Or why your back pain intensifies during stressful periods despite no physical injury?

The answer lies in the profound mind-body connection that many of us have lost touch with. Dr. Evette Rose joins us from Bali to unravel this mysterious relationship between our emotions and physical wellbeing. She explains how many women become "numb from the neck down," disconnected from bodily sensations until pain or illness forces awareness. This dissociation isn't random—it's often a coping mechanism developed early in life that creates the illusion we can handle more stress than we actually can.

The conversation takes a fascinating turn when exploring how midlife transitions amplify this dynamic. As hormones shift in our forties, emotions we've successfully suppressed for decades—particularly anger—suddenly demand attention. Rather than fearing this anger, Dr. Rose offers practical strategies for channeling it constructively through physical movement, transforming what might be viewed as a crisis into an opportunity for profound reawakening.

Perhaps most revealing is Dr. Rose's insight into why so many women take excessive responsibility for others' emotions and wellbeing. This pattern, often rooted in childhood experiences, creates a perfect storm when combined with bodily disconnection, leading to burnout and psychosomatic illness. The path forward? Self-compassion—approaching ourselves with the same kindness we've readily offered others.

Whether you're navigating midlife changes, experiencing unexplained physical symptoms, or simply feeling overwhelmed by responsibility, this conversation offers both validation and practical wisdom. Your body isn't betraying you—it's communicating. Maybe it's time we started listening.

Ready to transform your relationship with your body and emotions? Subscribe now and share this episode with someone who needs to hear they're not alone in their experience.

Want to dive deeper into Dr. Evette Rose's world? You can find her books right here: https://metaphysicalanatomy.com/books-by-evette-rose 

Episode Transcript

INTRO: Welcome to Balance and Beyond, the podcast for ambitious women who refuse to accept burnout as the price of success. Here, we’re committed to empowering you with the tools and strategies you need to achieve true balance, where your career, relationships and health all thrive, and where you have the power to define success on your own terms. I honor the space you’ve created for yourself today, so take a breath, and let's dive right in…

Jo (Host)

Welcome to Balance & Beyond and you're in for a treat this episode coming all the way from Bali. have Dr. Evette Rose. Evette, welcome to Balance and Beyond.

Evette Rose (Guest)

Hi Jo, I am thrilled to be here with you today. Thank you so much for having me on your show.

Jo (Host)

You're welcome. We're going to dive straight in. You have written a bunch of books, but they are all on this theme of the mind-body connection. I have to ask, what does that even mean?

Evette Rose (Guest)

Yes, that is such a great question. So Jo, let's start with a very relatable example. I'm sure that maybe you've had days where you had a lot going on and maybe you were not necessarily aware of how you stressed you were because you know how we go into these autopilot moments. We just go, go, go. We do, do, do. And we kind of think we're okay, but we feel the stress a little bit. And then suddenly that headache comes, that neck pain comes.

And there's no real reason why we should have a headache. mean, you don't necessarily have an underlying medical cause. Not every headache is a cause of that. And maybe you have back pain, but you didn't bend or do anything specifically that would validate, know, you're not having a back pain, but it still comes forward. This is an excellent example of what I would call psychosomatic stress.

This is a very beautiful and frustrating process to really understand between the mind and the body. And this is when the body is saying, you have been doing way too much, you're too stressed, I'm feeling the stress. We're not dealing with the stress in a constructive way and it's hurting me and now I'm stressed.

And so what the body does is it would trigger often pain as a result of this built up emotional stress, which is a result of muscle tension, hormonal responses, our fight and flight responses that sometimes also gets activated during the day, right? So there's so much that's happening in the body, but the mind is not taking note of that. And that's normally because of our insular, the insular part of the brain, which helps us to interpret sensations, emotions, heartbeat.

So sometimes that goes a little bit offline when we are so stressed because the brain is prioritizing whatever stress you're dealing with in the moment. It's not prioritizing signals that's coming through from the body. And this is a very beautiful example of the mind-body connection.

So when we do sometimes sit still or we have that quiet moment or we get home from a busy day and you sit in front of the tally you just want to relax a little bit and then suddenly there it is the headache the back pain wow now that foot pain that I had awareness of during the day but didn't bother me but now suddenly it's like you know seven out of ten strong that's because all these other threats all these other distractions that the brain is now not prioritizing anymore.

Now it has the ability to prioritize what was underlying and for that now to come forward. So you see this process of the brain constantly talking to the body through its own beautiful little internal system. But it's a matter of when the brain prioritizes what is going on in the body and when we feel a lot of emotional stress and how that is affecting the internal side of the body as well.

As an example, so when you look at someone who has had, a headache, medical underlying cause, normally what that person has been doing that day, if we look at the psychosomatic language and the relationship between the mind and the body, is that they felt deeply frustrated. There's an underlying tone of anger that they're holding back, that they are suppressing, because they're trying to be the peacekeeper and they're trying to do too much.

They're overstepping their own boundaries. And now they start to feel this internal conflict between, don't want to do this, but I feel like I have to. I don't want to, but I feel like I'm committed. Right? So now these people will start to have headaches because they take their commitments very seriously, like overly responsible. And then we have the headache.

So it just shows you that internal conflict that we feel and the communication between the mind and the body. But sometimes it comes forward stronger when we're quiet because the brain is like the threat's over. there's another problem. Okay, let's go see what's going on there. And then boom, the signals comes up and then we feel that headache. So this is an excellent example of that really great question that you asked.

Jo (Host)

Hahaha. So it's funny you say that our body is actually feeling things all day long. So many women in particular are in this life. You mentioned we're stuck in our heads thinking all the time, never been able to switch off. What do you see as some of the symptoms or causes of us being so stuck in our heads? You know, we're trying to get the kids to school. We're trying to get ready for this meeting.

Evette Rose (Guest)

Yes.

Jo (Host)

And we've almost been programmed to be numb from the neck down and forget that we have a body until it smacks us in the face.

Evette Rose (Guest)

Right. Right. Right. So first of all, the biggest challenge that I see with all the clients and students that I've worked with every single time, you know, safety. When we hear the word safety, we immediately think of, not something nice and warm, protective, nurturing where I can be me, where I can just feel free, where I am protected from harm.

Right. That's normally the cognitive at least perception and interpretation that we would have of safety, right? But the nervous system doesn't relate. It doesn't relate to that. Feeling safe often actually feels unsafe to the nervous system. Because our nervous system becomes deeply, deeply programmed from the moment we are born until the age of three.

And what that means is we very much in the right brain, very just stalled, you know, voice, tonal experiences, eye contact, touch. It's a very visceral physical experience that the body now relies on to learn. And that means we're leaning on the nervous system. We're leaning on our survival responses. And this part of the body is hyper-supercharged and it's taking in everything.

All these somatic responses that we're having, my body wants to...feels like all these aches and pains, all these different things. Yes, that's coming from a very early time in your life. And the rest of your life, as you mature, it just continued to build on top of that and add to that and add to that. And as everything in life, we have a threshold. And when that threshold collapses, that's when we have psychosomatic ailments, pain, discomfort, mental health problems, depression, anxiety. I mean, the list can go on.

But to answer your question, the reason why I mentioned that, a lot of us, when we are in that age, when maybe there were stressful circumstances, maybe the root cause can be endless, right? But predominantly what we see is a fight response that couldn't be acted out on, met by the freeze collapse. Which means it can often become that a person's default response to stress is to dissociate.

And when we dissociate, that is when all these endorphins are being released because that's what the body does to keep you safe and to at least make you feel comfortable in the state that you're in. But the ramifications of that is brain fog, exhaustion, tiredness, feeling like you want to withdraw, the lights and sounds, everything feels louder and brighter. We withdraw, we don't want to connect to people. And so now we start to withdraw from all the very things that we actually need to co-regulate, to just, to feel, to continue our lives in a really beautiful, happy way.

Isolation becomes our new boundary. And so with these patterns, we actually start to pull back from vital behavioral patterns that we actually need to connect to in order to feel less fearful, right? Because this is the pattern that we get stuck in.

So what happens is when we are in this dissociative state, we think we can do more than what we actually can because we don't feel the real true impact of the stress. And that is why people have panic attacks. That is why people have breakdowns. And I mean real breakdowns because we can only stay in that dissociative state for such for a certain amount of time. Like I said earlier, everything in life Joe has a threshold and that dissociative state is going to take its toll at some point. And when we come out of that dissociative state, we feel everything. And when we do.

That is when we collapse. That is when we collapse. That is when spilled coffee feels like the end of the world, right? That's a clear sign. Yeah, right? You know exactly what I'm talking about. That's a perfect example of just your body's just saying, I've had enough of suppressing what I'm feeling. I need you to listen because everything that you're feeling is now coming up that we were not listening to. And it's not that we consciously decide to ignore it. We don't do that. Of course.

Jo (Host)

Mm, I hear this all the time.

Evette Rose (Guest)

We don't wake up every day thinking how much can we suppress our body? We don't consciously at least do that. But coping mechanisms that we become attached to is what also reinforces the dissociative state, the numbness, the freeze, not feeling. And this makes us feel and think that our tolerance level for stress is high when it's actually not.

Have you ever looked at someone and then you sit and you think, my God, that person, you know, they're so strong. think, wow, they've accomplished so much in their life and you know, they've been through so much and look how they go, go, go. And then I sometimes sit there and I'm wondering, have you ever asked a question how much that person might have mastered dissociation and they just learned how to work with it, right? So every person, yes.

Jo (Host)

Well, that's a very, very common thing we see, whether that's disassociation in terms of the people pleasing, the perfectionism. When you say we have a tolerance, do you find, have you seen any patterns in the people you've worked with that women early to mid forties, it's like, is that a very common point when the line gets drawn, whether it's a, we just don't give as much of a shit anymore. Like we've put some of that stuff down.

 

A continual thread and I'm seeing it amplified, particularly in last couple of years where women are getting into their early and mid 40s and going, is this it? Like, surely there's got to be more than this. Is that a breaking point?

 

Evette Rose (Host)

I fully appreciate that question because, being in my 40s as well and what I'm seeing with clients also that I'm helping, suddenly you just wake up and you're like, God, I didn't realize how annoying that friend is anymore. I don't want to deal with that anymore. I don't even know if I like my husband. I want to divorce my husband. I don't like my kids anymore. Maybe you should just get out of my life.

Our tolerance for stress and things that we used to be able to manage with and tackle with actually decreases and that normally is because of a hormonal shift. However, now here's what's important. What I did notice is that women who go through this shift, it impacts them harder. The more they went through their past, suppressing how they really feel.

When I look at the other women who have, for example, done maybe regular yoga, regular meditation, they have a tool that they've been going to over the years to help regulate themselves. This transition is less impactful to them. Now this I noticed from the thousands of people that I work with.

And to me, that makes perfect sense because that, that, that when your hormones drop and when you start to feel, well, I don't know if I like my life anymore. Right?

Jo (Host)

And they blame it on perimenopause. They go, it's perimenopause. Now that's my excuse. I'm like, no, it's not the excuse.

Evette Rose (Guest)

 

Let's just be honest here. Okay. I'm speaking just honestly, because that that's really what it is. It doesn't matter how much life work you've done. No one is above this transition. Absolutely no one. And we need to embrace that because the more we resist that, the more painful it's going to be. Right. It's like when you're in a river and you resist the stream and you just like push, know, I want to go against the stream. It's exhausting and it's tiring, but no way.

Let's just go with the stream analogy. There's a rock. Okay, I see it coming. So let me just maneuver gently ever so slightly around that. This is exactly what we now could also do going through this hormonal shift, going through this change. If person development work is new for you, start meditating, start meeting your emotions one by one, just as they are and love them for being there because they are echoes of tough experiences that you've been through. When we go through this hormonal shift, this midlife change and transition.

It's calling for more self-compassion. All that self-compassion that you gave to other people, it's now time for that to come back to you. So this is all about rebuilding our relationship with ourselves in a loving way, not in a critical way. Your body's not failing you. It's not doing anything wrong. It's just going through a natural cycle.

So the more we can just normalize this cycle, the more we can just love and gently, gracefully support ourselves through this beautiful transition. So this is my interpretation of that. But what I see to just add an extra point to the question that you asked that I think a lot of women will relate to thyroid problems. Suddenly thyroid problems skyrocket, ovary problems, uterus problems, bowel problems, stomach problems, and bloated-ness skyrockets, headaches skyrocket.

This is all emotional stress that I have seen that can turn into cysts, that can turn into sometimes benign tumors. It can turn into imbalances. A lot of these conditions, in my event's opinion, what I've seen can be psychosomatic with the doctors that I've worked with, with their patients.

Addressing stress, seeing things shifting and changing, thinking, wow, isn't that incredible? All these years of stress combined with this hormonal shift creating such a powerful impact on the body. Wow. So it is vital.

Jo (Host)

So saying this midlife is like rocket fuel for anything that you've had in the past. Now you've just added some gasoline to that fire. So if you haven't dealt with it before, steroids, it's going to whack you.

Evette Rose (Guest)

yeah, mean, yeah. Some steroids, right? And it's strong and especially anger. Anger is the new wave. That is the new wave, right? Everything takes the backseat. And the challenge is what we need to be mindful of when we go through this transition is not to start to subconsciously associate anger with our new boundary.

Because that anger is hurting you, it's hurting your autoimmune system, it's hurting your gut, it's hurting your cardiovascular system, and it's hurting your mind. And it actually exacerbates hot flushes. If you struggle with hot flushes like severe, work on suppressed anger. Work on suppressed anger.

I can't say this enough and eat food that's cooling, right? Like earth food, very, very powerful, very helpful, right there off the bat. Just two simple things that can be applied to just help support these flare-ups because these flare-ups are gonna come. They're gonna come and let's love them and let's embrace them.

Jo (Host)

You say to women who are, I know, what do you say to women who have, you know, go into their doctor and their doctor's not talking about emotional work, but they're, quietly seething or they're carrying, let's just go back to anger for a second. I've seen a lot of women holding a lot of anger, but they won't call it that because they're not allowed to feel anger, but they can feel a bit pissed off. They can feel resentment. They can be frustrated. They can be irritable. They can be grumpy. So low level anger is okay, but full on rage.

That's not acceptable. What are you seeing in your work is, I guess, allowing, giving women permission to step into these other areas of work like processing the anger that their doctor who they've gone to about their hormones is not saying, by the way, you might have some suppressed anger.

Evette Rose (Guest)

Well, I totally get that. So this is a really good point. And I'm going to speak for myself and what other women that I've worked with also do to support themselves. So believe it or not, I love Muay Thai. I have gloves on, I have a trainer and I kick the life out of this man and I punch and everything that I possibly can. He's like, no, but you know, Muay Thai, should do it like this, like this.

I'm like, "I don't care about learning Muay Thai. I need to punch someone now." I'm like, "I'm paying you to punch you." So just stand there and hold the gloves. Let me punch you. And so now he's learned to not try to actually teach me how to do all of this. He realized, and he's a young, you know, Indonesian trainer and he's, he just, you can see he understood what I needed. And so, and this is my way of getting that out of my system.

If I can't go training, I go walk, and I actually have extra weights in my hand, like little sandbags, and I walk vigorously and I swing it so that I can get, you so you can get like your arms and your legs moving because anger is the fight response, know, instinctive responses. So when we feel angry, adrenaline cortisol is released and also there's a lot of stress being held in our arms and our legs. So these two are the best areas of your body that you can move.

Go for a swim and vigorously swim if you can. Do the frog paddle, but really put emphasis on getting that anger, that frustration out in your arms and in your legs. It is the most cathartic thing that you will be able to do. Yoga is great, but you need something that can give you resistance, something that you can push back and really get that frustration out. That's really important.

And I see all these ways as beautiful, graceful ways, but it really helps you to get that out of your system. mean, there's tons of other ways of doing it, but this is an example. Sometimes when I feel really angry, I would just put a pillow under my knees and I will just do one or two pushups on the floor. Just very gentle. And just that, that resistance of just pushing that out. Wow.

That's incredible because the anger comes and it's a tear, right? In the chest, the back, stomach, and often maybe in our head is a headache. So this is a really powerful way also of getting that to shift. Yeah.

Jo (Host)

Mm-hmm. love it. like anger is the new black.

Evette Rose Guest)

Totally embrace it! It's just, it's part of, it's just part of the process. Your body is telling you whatever you feeling that hits you the hardest. That is what we've been suppressing the most. So instead of feeling that your body is doing something wrong or that you are unstable or you are unwell, you're not, you're going through a perfectly normal phase. Let's normalize this, normalize it.

And we need to normalize powerful ways of also working with it. It's not trying to resolve it or trying to fight it. Let's work with it. You notice that river? We're not going upstream. Let's work with it. We flow with the river, use the power of that current in a constructive way. Okay, great. Well, I can just lie back and flow now and I just need to watch for the rocks and just make sure that I gently glide around that. So that anger can be used to channel into a new project.

 

Maybe you want to do a new creative project that you didn't feel you had the energy for. Well, let's go. Now we have it. Let's channel that. Use through meditation how we can start to use this as maybe a new gasoline. There's so much that we can do by just utilizing the power also of our mindset to redirect that whatever it is that's coming up. And, but here's the key Jo.

It's still about coming back to us, coming back to the body, loving the body, loving everything that it's been through because of your body's feeling it. That's just an end result of what you've been through. So let's give ourselves a pat on the back. And instead of saying, my God, what are you doing wrong? Just well done. Let's work with what you are doing right. Which is a lot because Joe, know that you know, and everyone else listening, when we're angry, when we're stuck in a place of pain, that is all that we see.

We forget about the fact that we have a roof over our head. We forget about the fact that we have food in the fridge. We forget that we have friends. We forget all these other great things because it's this tunnel vision, right? And this is what we need to start to break that habit out of by focusing on what am I doing right? What am I life is going right?

Jo (Host)

 

So I bet a big trend we see amongst women in our community who listen to this podcast is that they're gradually discovering how much responsibility they take for everyone else in their lives. What are your thoughts on what might be any psychosomatic reasons for that pattern? Because it's so prevalent across cultures, across ages, it's everywhere.

Evette Rose (Guest)

Right, this is a really great question. And this is again, stemming from actually our childhood. And that is when we start to feel responsible for a parent's happiness. And what happens is, or a caregiver, and what happens is we do something wrong and we see a shift in their behavior. And then we realize, now I'm responsible for that upsetting behavior, which is now hurting me as well. So how do I correct that?

Right, so not only do we take on feeling responsible for how they're reacting to us, but we now take on the burden also of needing to behave out of character in order to regain that connection because that's what the nervous system wants. wants to connect again. And this often, deep down from what I see from my experience, very closely ties in with the survival response. Rejection often translates through the body as, my God, I'm gonna die.

And it really triggers the fear of dying response. And here is why, when you look at our ancestors and you look how they grew up, all in communities, all inclusive, know, there's always someone, there was always food, was always protection, there was always shelter, everything was provided, but it also required you to be part of the community, right? There was not a lot of, I would necessarily say individualism, so there was always adapting and those who would go against or whatever conflict there is, they would get thrown out.

And now your chances of survival have decreased drastically, drastically. And you don't have that regulation connection, nothing anymore. So there's a complete disconnect. And that has registered very deeply in the survival responses as well. And I'm seeing people feeling the aftermath of that even to this day. That is also often what I see sometimes why a lot of women can become stuck in quite unhealthy, volatile relationships.

I mean, there's many other reasons, but this is one of them. So this over responsibility is that inner child that's still working to co-regulate a parent by trying to regulate our environment, trying to regulate other people, because that's where we start to feel also a connection to our worth, because your self-worth is an echo of how you were treated in the past. And when we are raised by people who are extremely traumatized in their relationship, in their language for love, our self-esteem is deeply affected as a result as well. And this leaves a very big door open now for how do we try to reestablish that self-esteem? And so self-esteem challenges combined with feeling responsible for a parent's behavior, this is not a good combination. It's not a good combination. And this often is one of the reasons that can lead to people just taking on so much responsibility.

I'm not allowed to be happy. I'm not allowed to have what I want and need because someone else's emotions were always prioritized during your childhood. And that pattern has now just taken on different relationships and different forms.

Jo (Host)

And that becomes people taking too much responsibility for their kids, for their kids' friends, for their community, for their partners, for their teams. They just heap it on until eventually, interesting these kind of patterns all overlay, then they ignore their body. And then they wonder why they wake up with an autoimmune disease or eager, exhausted.

Evette Rose (Guest)

Chronic fatigue, pain, pain, discomfort, cramps, spasms, headaches, all of this. And you see also women who take on way too much responsibility. see cysts, breast cysts and cysts in their ovaries because what happens is when you do so much, you're too much in the masculinity. You're too much in the masculine, meaning that fight response, but it's a graceful fight response. It's not necessarily aggressive.

But sometimes it comes out as irritation, frustration, being snappy, being very short in communication. And this behavior, this being leaning too much in the masculine, this is what I have seen creates that constant stress response in a woman's body. And this is where psychosomatic ailments can start to break, where it can start to come up. Yeah.

Jo (Host)

And so what would your parting words be for someone who's heard themselves in this, whether it's the fatigue, whether it's the, my gosh, that was my childhood. I take too much responsibility. I'm numb from the neck down. What's one, either piece of advice or something that you wish they knew?

Evette Rose (Guest)

And something I also wish that I knew was self-compassion. Jo, the power of self-compassion, this is what really turned things around for me. It really turned things around for me. I'm trying so hard. Yes, but Yvette, you're doing great. Well done. Just having compassion for yourself, having compassion for perceived failures, having compassion for these days where you wake up and you say, I'm so exhausted. Have compassion for that.

Have compassion for maybe any outbursts that you have as well because we don't wake up thinking, how much can I yell and shout at people? We don't do that. These are all expressions of limitations. Listen to these limitations. It's not there to ruin your life. It's just there to guide you and is there to show you where you need to maybe have more discipline with yourself, but with self-compassion.

And when I say self-discipline, I mean, start pulling back a little bit more and be disciplined in that. Reserve your energy a little bit more, be disciplined in that. As disciplined as you are for others, your body now needs you more than ever because it's a tough transition to go through that hormonal change. It's not for the faint hearted. And that's probably why men don't go through it because when we can handle it, we can take that punch.

Jo (Host)

I was going to say, we've done everything else. We've given birth. We've done all of these things. We've been mothers. It's like, have one more. But maybe often I've heard this, as said, midlife really be a reawakening as opposed to a midlife crisis. It's a reawakening. It's a coming back to self of compassion of who actually are my friends, who does light me up, who does make me feel good instead of, I guess I often see this as a beautiful opportunity to break all those patterns that have held us hostage for so many years.

But we have to do it quickly and we often need help because if we would have been able to break these patterns ourselves, we already would have.

Evette Rose (Guest)

I fully agree because that personally has been my experience and I'm seeing, wow, life looks different. And I love that. I love the fact that now I can see now that it's, you know, I'm starting to, with that awareness, it makes it more graceful, right? To feel that life is working with you. It's not working against you. And with that information, with that understanding, to appreciate what has left, to appreciate what has become too much.

And it doesn't mean go divorce your husband or cut people out, but maybe it just means more refined boundaries are now needed that we haven't been able to express in the past. So your body is just giving you a new way of life.

Jo (Host)

A new beginning, right? And a new phase and one that we get to step into with curiosity and compassion. I love that. So Yvette, if people want to learn more about psychosomatic and you've got some amazing books that talk about the history of trauma and commonalities amongst cultures, where can they do that?

Evette Rose (Guest)

So at evettebooks.com, all my books are there. So you can go and see which one maybe you feel drawn to. And you can find me also at metaphysicalanatomy.com

Jo (Host)

Well, Dr. Evette, thank you so much for your time today. It's been a pleasure to have you and I hope everyone is walking away with something tangible, whether you're going to go and scream, you're gonna embrace your anger, find your compassion or even just a little more understanding of what's below your neck.

Evette Rose (Guest)

All right, thank you!