S3 Episode 21: Why Healing Is Never Just About The Child - Understanding The Family Nervous System in an Overwhelmed World with BG Mancini

The goal is actually not to remove all stress as much as we would love that from life.

It ain't going to happen.

Stress, challenge and adaptation are really a part of being human in this modern world.

So the question is, does the nervous system have the resilience, flexibility and physiological safety required to process, recover from and integrate those experiences? Or does the body begin storing stress and threat within its systems over time? Because the way our bodies respond to the world, as we're always saying at the Brain Health Movement, the way our bodies respond to the world around us ultimately shapes our health, our behavior, our emotions, our resilience, our relationships, and even the way we experience safety itself.

BG Mancini has spent almost 30 years, I don't know how she looks like she does, but has spent almost 30 years working at the intersection of neurodevelopment, functional medicine, movement integration, retained reflexes, developmental vision, polyvagal theory, and the brain-gut axis.

Sounds complicated, but as we talk through, all of this will start to make sense.

And her work uniquely bridges so many of the disciplines we educate parents about here at the Brain Health Movement, helping families understand how physiology, nervous system regulation, environment, sensory processing, emotional well-being and connection are all profoundly intertwined.

And perhaps most importantly, she reminds me and all of us that healing is never just about the child.

It is about the entire family nervous system.

BG, a warmest welcome back to my mighty Quinn.

Thank you.

It's so good to see you and be here again.

So, BG, we're going to start directly into why this conversation matters so much now.

When we first spoke, I say years ago, like I've been doing this for a decade, I haven't.

We're kind of approaching the end of our year two.

But, you know, when we first spoke years that time ago about the family nervous system, these ideas still felt a little bit... new, I guess, to a lot of parents and practitioners.

Why do you think this conversation suddenly feels so much more relevant and urgent right now?

So I think, you know, when I started working with kids 18 years ago, you know, I was working with adults for 10, 12 years before that.

But the feeling, the image that I had was that the train had hit the wall and kids were flying through the air.

And I think that now, because of the overwhelm of living in a world that really is quite unbalanced for where our systems are able to process things, I think parents are experiencing it more, this overwhelmed sense.

this need for more adaptations in order to feel comfortable in their own brain and bodies.

And then that's getting translated for children.

You know, it's here's what it looks like in adults.

Here's what it looks like in kids.

And this is the language that helps to depathologize many of the diagnosis that kids are getting.

The goal is actually not to remove all stress as much as we would love that from life.

It ain't going to happen.

Stress, challenge and adaptation are really a part of being human in this modern world.

So the question is, does the nervous system have the resilience, flexibility and physiological safety required to process, recover from and integrate those experiences? Or does the body begin storing stress and threat within its systems over time? Because the way our bodies respond to the world, as we're always saying at the Brain Health Movement, the way our bodies respond to the world around us ultimately shapes our health, our behavior, our emotions, our resilience, our relationships, and even the way we experience safety itself.

BG Mancini has spent almost 30 years, I don't know how she looks like she does, but has spent almost 30 years working at the intersection of neurodevelopment, functional medicine, movement integration, retained reflexes, developmental vision, polyvagal theory, and the brain-gut axis.

Sounds complicated, but as we talk through, all of this will start to make sense.

And her work uniquely bridges so many of the disciplines we educate parents about here at the Brain Health Movement, helping families understand how physiology, nervous system regulation, environment, sensory processing, emotional well-being and connection are all profoundly intertwined.

And perhaps most importantly, she reminds me and all of us that healing is never just about the child.

It is about the entire family nervous system.

BG, a warmest welcome back to my mighty Quinn.

Thank you.

It's so good to see you and be here again.

So, BG, we're going to start directly into why this conversation matters so much now.

When we first spoke, I say years ago, like I've been doing this for a decade, I haven't.

We're kind of approaching the end of our year two.

But, you know, when we first spoke years that time ago about the family nervous system, these ideas still felt a little bit... new, I guess, to a lot of parents and practitioners.

Why do you think this conversation suddenly feels so much more relevant and urgent right now?

So I think, you know, when I started working with kids 18 years ago, you know, I was working with adults for 10, 12 years before that.

But the feeling, the image that I had was that the train had hit the wall and kids were flying through the air.

And I think that now, because of the overwhelm of living in a world that really is quite unbalanced for where our systems are able to process things, I think parents are experiencing it more, this overwhelmed sense.

this need for more adaptations in order to feel comfortable in their own brain and bodies.

And then that's getting translated for children.

You know, it's here's what it looks like in adults.

Here's what it looks like in kids.

And this is the language that helps to depathologize many of the diagnosis that kids are getting.