(Disclaimer: Please excuse any errors. This transcript was made using AI technology.)

Adina Silvestri 0:00
Welcome to the Atheists in Recovery Podcast, where we talk about finding hope in recovery. And now your host, Dr. Adina Silvestri,

Hola Atheists in Recovery squad and welcome to Episode 82 of the Atheists in Recovery podcast. And today, I'm excited to have our guest, Elizabeth Stanley on. And this episode is an interesting one. I definitely took copious amounts of notes while she was talking. And a few things that we talked about in this episode are, you know, widening the window widening this window of tolerance, we talked about what happens if you have a narrow window and you're operating inside this narrow window of tolerance. You know, for practical purposes, we've perceived danger more readily. And when our systems are in fight flight or freeze responses, then you're probably not going to know that you are at the time, then we tend to more frequently pick up the bottle or go for the jog, or do whatever we've been conditioned to do, through experience through gene expression through whatever whatever it is. And so, we talked a little about that. And, most importantly, we talked about what you can do right now, to help widen your window. The best way that you can recover is to help your survival brain feel safe when we talk about how to do that intentionally. Both in terms of where we direct our attention and in terms of daily life habits and boy do we talk about habits. Okay, on to my guest, Elizabeth A Stanley. Elizabeth Stanley is a professor of security studies at Georgetown University. She speaks teaches and writes about resilience, political psychology, civil military relations, technology and security, and international security. She's the award winning author of paths to peace, which was published in 2009, and widened the window training your brain and body to thrive during stress and recover from trauma. After her own healing journey from chronic stress and trauma, during which she lost her eyesight temporarily. Liz developed an evidence based approach to resilience called Mindfulness Based mind fitness, training, and fit she collaborated with neuroscientists to test the efficacy among troops preparing for combat deployment, and fit research has been featured on 60 minutes ABC Evening News and PR Time magazine, The Washington Post and many other media outlets. This has taught these tools to 1000s in high stress environments, including corporate leaders, first responders, healthcare workers, diplomats, military service members and members of Congress. She's also partnered with sounds true to create an online version of MMFT course. Earlier in the career in her career, she served as a US Army Intelligence Officer in South Korea, Germany and on to peacekeeping deployments in the Balkans. Her research has been supported by many funders. And Liz herself is a long standing practitioner of mindfulness practices, including months long silence practice in the United States, and Burma. She's also a certified practitioner of Somatic Experiencing body based trauma therapy. She holds degrees from Yale, Harvard and MIT. Okay, guys, onto the show.

Elizabeth Stanley, welcome to the show.

Elizabeth Stanley 3:35
Adina, thank you so much for having me. And please call me Liz.

Adina Silvestri 3:38
Oh,

yeah, yeah, great. I will. So Liz, I want to start by inquiring about your childhood, your your deepest roots from childhood and I and I love to answer ask this question, because it's so fascinating to me how people end up, you know, where they where they are today. And you have a very interesting story, which, which I'm sure we'll get to. So yeah.

Elizabeth Stanley 4:05
Yes. You know, I think we write about what we need to learn for ourselves. And so it's not surprising that I ended up writing a book about stress and trauma. I experienced a lot of stress and trauma in my life and in many ways I'm Exhibit A of what I write about. I come from a long military lineage family. I'm the ninth generation in my family to serve in the US Army, and one of my sisters as well. But one of the kind of things that co arises in families sometimes that have long military histories of denying and disowning their trauma is alcoholism. So I grew up in an alcoholic family and I experienced a lot of childhood adversity both you know, trauma in the home but but trauma outside the home, and sexual trauma in high school before I went to college, and then when I was In the army, I experienced all the stress of military deployments and intense military training. And I was rarely sleeping. So I was adding on chronic sleep deprivation and doesn't bother me, I had a near death experience so that by the time I landed in graduate school in my late 20s, my system was really out of whack. dysregulated. And then I did several years of coping with all of the effects of that all the the burden that my body could born with all of that emotion suppression and compartmentalization and powering through that I've done to get to that point. I was suffering from depression and PTSD and lots of respiratory problems and insomnia. And I also had Lyme disease, but I didn't know it. And eventually, I lost my eyesight from that. And that was kind of a big wake up call, not being able to see is is sort of, it's a big deal. It gets your attention. Yeah, was like this cosmic frying pan upside my head. So it sent me on on a journey of both first healing myself and learning to understand what was going on. And how did this happen? And how could I change it, and then, you know, helping to heal others creating a resilience program, teaching it in military settings as part of some large neuroscience studies teaching it in lots of different high stress settings, over 15 years and, and now sharing the kind of whole some of that whole arc of of my life. It came together in my book, widen the window. Yeah. been an interesting journey.

Adina Silvestri 6:44
It's been an interesting journey. I want to actually read a quote from your website that sort of really brings this this military culture, and trauma sort of, and meditation together, it says, I used to be a firm believer in powering through a US Army veteran with a PTSD diagnosis, he thought it would be cool to pursue two graduate degrees simultaneously, I was a pro at it, or I thought it took losing my eyesight for me to finally understand that there's an easier way. Wow,

Elizabeth Stanley 7:17
there is an easier way. The thing is, most of us in our culture aren't socialized to it, you know, we've been socialized to powering through as being a sign of strength and grit. And, you know, that's how most people in our culture define resilience, killing, not resilient. It's undermining of resilient and because it's undermining resilience in our bodies, and our brains and our hearts know that. But the culture is telling us it's resilient, we kind of double down on it. And instead, everything starts coming out sideways, in in symptoms in our body, and in our coping behaviors, it often then shows up in addictions. And it creates this this big morass of living double lives where we're kind of living one way publicly, and then we're living another way privately. And that feeds shame. It feeds disconnection from ourselves from others, it wrecks our relationships. It's just, it's such a toxic setup, I really wanted to help kind of share what I had learned to take it apart. Because, at least for me, understanding why my mind and body were acting as they did help me take it much less personally because it was neurobiology doing what it does when you put it in particular conditions, right, and, and then knowing that it offered these leverage points for interrupting all of this conditioning and choosing something else. And that was easier, like learning how to choose something else. And then seeing the effects of these other choices. It's very liberating.

Adina Silvestri 9:06
Why do you think that we as a society, choose the easier it seems like it's such a to be busy and to be stressed and to be sleep deprived? Those seem like badges of honor in our society? I

don't know why.

Elizabeth Stanley 9:19
Yeah, they're absolutely romanticized. Like we socialize that being stressed equal, I'm important on special, I must be very powerful to be doing all of these things. That's how we've socialized it. But I have a chapter in my book where I kind of explore this cultural situation. And I think a lot of it has to do with polarity that any feature has a lot of dark and we tend to associate with one end of the spectrum depending on what it is and we tend to disown the opposite end of the spectrum and so this romanticizing of stress, it leads us to Divorce, all of those behaviors that are the result of stress from the consequences they create, we run around being busy, we run around feeling constantly, like we've got to be on the go. We set incentive structures in our schools and our workplaces that really reward that kind of behavior with promotions and getting noticed. And then we add all the technology that kind of feeds this as well. And the big dopamine hits that come, you know, watching all those those likes and the retweets happening and, like, that's how we live. And then when we have these consequences, down the line where our bodies fall apart, our relationships fall apart, we're coping with addictive behaviors or violent behaviors, we've divorced, the connection between those choices and those results. And I think a lot of it comes from, because we really over identify with this theme of being resilient and strong. By nature, it leads us to disown trauma, because trauma is a condition when our survival brain perceives us to be powerless, helpless, and lacking control isn't a conscious decision, the survival brain is what is constantly assessing our environment to decide is this situation safe or dangerous. And this is happening, unconsciously, we're not hearing it in our brain, it's the system that moves very fast. So it can turn stress on to keep us safe. If that system in a situation perceives us as helpless, powerless, and lacking control, it turns on a whole lot of arousal that moves us into the trauma realm, conscious parts of ourselves, our thinking brain and our self identity. We don't want to self identify ourselves as powerless, lacking or, or lacking control or helpless. And so we zone that, and then we disown all the effects that come from that. And I think that kind of helps to feed this, this real disconnect that shows up sometimes weeks later, sometimes months or years later, but because of our robot,

Adina Silvestri 12:19
yeah, yeah. And when it shows up, it shows up with quite force like, like losing your eyesight. I mean, you know, I was talking to somebody the other day about your story, and they said, does this actually happen? Well, clearly, yeah.

Elizabeth Stanley 12:34
Yes.

Adina Silvestri 12:35
Scary.

Elizabeth Stanley 12:36
I think I was sitting on this big round this this big burden of childhood adversity, you know, adverse childhood experiences that I had had chronic deprivation, all kinds of sleep deprivation, all of this chronic inflammation in my body from all those stress hormones that were being discharged. All of that together created these huge imbalances in my body so that when the Lyme, you know, I was bit by the tick and developed the little Bullseye, and then it faded, and the army wrote it off is no big deal. So I wrote it off. It's no big deal. Later, like that had been swimming around in my system. And it went after my optic nerves, right? Yeah. Luckily, we can regenerate though, you know, I see again, but it was it was what it was what I uniquely needed to have it get my attention.

Adina Silvestri 13:29
Yeah. And get your attention it it did. And so this is how I believe this is how you started on your journey with with meditation is am I correct?

Elizabeth Stanley 13:41
Yes. So initially, I'm in graduate school, and these two different programs, I'm sleeping like two hours a night, I'm very, very depressed, and feeling completely isolated. And initially, I tried, talk therapy didn't find a whole lot from it. And then I moved to DC. And someone introduced me to yoga. And from yoga, they introduced me to meditation. And it was initially really hard. And I explained in the book, why it can be so hard for those of us that come from a background of chronic stress and trauma. And I stuck with it and then started having some additional side effects from that. And that sent me to do some body based trauma client work. And eventually I did some certification, clinical certification and somatic experiencing, which is one of those modalities. Unless you kind of need both. You need to be able to stabilize attention and hold that in ways that you can consciously direct your attention to hold a mindful state. But you need to kind of know where to direct it to so that inadvertently you're not flooding yourself, which is what I early years and that's where the body based trauma therapy techniques and working with the autonomic nervous system It's so important. So those two pieces kind of come together in the resilience training that I created, mindfulness based mind fitness training. Very nice. Very nice.

Adina Silvestri 15:09
So as I'm wondering if we can switch gears a little bit and talk about this window of tolerance, and maybe set set the stage for us, you know, why do we need to widen the window? What is the window, all those things?

Why do we care? Yeah,

Elizabeth Stanley 15:28
absolutely. So yes, I think it's important enough that I titled The book. And the window in the title is the window of tolerance, distress arousal, we each have a window, it starts wiring before we're even born during our third trimester in the womb. And it is an the width of the window is the result of both some genetic traits, and then which genetic traits get turned on based on our repeated experiences. But even more than that, there are multiple pathways by which we can narrow our window over our life, and narrow windows or the windows that have challenges with all kinds of symptoms potentially with addictions, with violent behavior with anxiety, depression, health problems, relationship issues. So narrow windows have these global effects in our lives. The good news is, our window doesn't just need to be narrow, we can take conscious steps to widen it. And people with wide windows are much better able to function effectively during stressful experiences, they can keep all of their deliberate decision making online, they can access choice, so they're much less likely to feel helpless and powerless. And lacking control, they're much less likely to end up experiencing trauma during stressful events. And they can stay connected to other people, they're they're able to give and receive social support during stress. They can flow when life sends curveballs, they're experiencing much less arousal on stress and emotions. When plants get interrupted or life happens. And there's a big change they weren't expecting, they can adapt better, they're much more flexible. So when there's a really big deal and helpful, we narrow our window. over our lifetime, there's three ways that can happen. The first pathway to narrowing the window is childhood stress, and childhood adversity and developmental trauma. So this can happen when we have parents who have narrowed windows, if parents have narrowed windows, they by definition cannot wire their child or wide window. So narrowed windows become intergenerational. And some of that is epigenetics in terms of which gene expression got turned on, some of it has to do with attachment styles, your parents with narrowed windows have usually have insecure attachment styles and, and that then affects how they nurture the child. But all of that sort of sets children from childhood stress and adversity on a trajectory towards narrowed windows later in their life, because affects the development of their brain, the development of their nervous system, it affects the development of their dopamine system, which is so important, or if our dopamine system is kind of dysregulated. From childhood adversity, it can make it really likely that that person later on in life has a real problem with procrastination and, and cravings and addiction. And there's three different adaptations that, you know, the empirical research has shown, from childhood adversity to the dopamine system, I'm sure you've talked about this with other guests. But all of it leads towards that person having a mind body system that is much more wired for addictive craving. And that's hard later in life. Because when you add all the cultural stuff we talked about earlier, you know it big, right? challenging for them, then to overcome that addiction, it's much more likely to default to that behavior. And when you talk about the childhood adversity, are you talking about the aces? I'm talking about aces, okay. And I'm also talking about, you know, just this intergenerational aspect of parents with narrowed windows wide windows. And so the the ACE research is the most compelling in terms of the as adaptations towards addiction. But I think often, people who experience a lot of aces also come from addictive families that have that have addiction in them. And that is part of the kind of family system of narrowed windows to

Adina Silvestri 19:44
right, right when you know and I'm sure this happens to some of our listeners or had happened. You know, if if you're in a culture where we're drinking is very normalized, you know, if you were getting beers for your dad or mom or sister or brother, you know, you started it at a pretty young age.

Elizabeth Stanley 20:00
Absolutely, absolutely, we often adopt the coping behaviors that our parents had. That's what we've seen, and that's what we've been socialized to. So that's the first pathway to narrowing the window of childhood adversity, childhood trauma. The second pathway to narrow window is shock trauma events. And this is kind of the way our culture conventionally thinks about trauma. This is things like natural disasters and terrorist attacks, and war, combat rape, big capital T, trauma type things. And these things where we experienced so much arousal that it pushes us outside our window. And then if we don't have full recovery afterwards, it continues to narrow it. But often, what's interesting about shock trauma for me is that it might be something that our thinking brain or culturally, we would say is minor, and you can't see me but I'm making little air quotes around the minor, a fender bender or outpatient surgery. But if our window was already narrowed, when we experienced an event like that, our survival brain is likely to feel helpless and powerless and lacking control. And so we can experience trauma, even during a fender bender. It's one of the reasons why there's so many people with whiplash syndrome. Again, our understanding Collectively, these things is still a little skewed. And then the third pathway is chronic stress, and relational trauma in our everyday life. This can include things like chronic relationship tensions, all that chronic sleep deprivation, emotional labor, having to hire emotions at work, and having to care for a sick relative. All of these things, we tend collectively to write off as no big deal, right? their everyday life. And yet, it's pretty clear from all of the empirical research that people who have experienced just narrowing their window on this pathway. It's the same level of consequences in terms of dysregulation on their minds and bodies, as people who experienced the other pathways. And that was kind of interesting for me to learn. Yeah, even if we just take everything in my life, except for the many, many years I was sleeping like two to four hours a night, like that alone could have caused all my all my issues. And that was very surprising to figure out. So Wow. So there's a lot of ways we can narrow it, the most important thing is that we can widen it. And the most important way to widen our window is to understand that only our survival brain, which is the part of us assessing for threatened danger, only the survival brain can assess our situation is safe, and it has to assess our situation is safe, to turn off the stress arousal to turn off all of those hormone so that we can have full recovery. And, you know, it all comes down to having repeated experiences with that. So we've had many repeated experiences of sleep deprivation, or or many repeated experiences of addictive behavior or shock trauma events, we have to balance that out for our minds and bodies, and give them many repeated experiences with recovery. Everything about our neurobiology is the result of repeated experiences. So

Adina Silvestri 23:17
tell us more.

Elizabeth Stanley 23:19
habits are really critical for that, you know, our habits drive our repeated experiences, because it's something we're doing on a regular basis. And many of our habits aren't conscious to us. And often those are the habits that have real effects, long term, even things like that we again, might collectively read off is no big deal. The habit of worrying has shown huge changes in brain structure and brain function in the empirical research. It has big survival brain costs, when we're worrying when we're sort of thinking what if this, what is that? Oh, I forgot this thing. Oh, what if this thing happens, anytime our mind is doing that, and for many of us that that's kind of a running commentary, our minds are doing all the time, when your mind is doing that, your survival brain is perceiving that mind body moment as threatening, and it's turning stress arousal on and then if we're just letting that play out, over and over, we're turning the stress on and not turning it off. And it has big material costs over the long term. So understanding the importance of habits, you know, this this repeated experience point, and understanding that where we're directing our attention, consciously and unconsciously, like with this worrying example, anywhere, we're directing our attention in a repeated way, it's having this huge ripple effects through our brain, our body, our nervous system. And the reason I created the resilience training program I did was to help you People train their attention because we have a choice about where we direct our attention repeatedly. If it's getting pulled off into worry, we can notice that we can interrupt it, we can choose to direct it somewhere else. And when we do that over and over and over again, I know this doesn't sound sexy, but it

Adina Silvestri 25:20
well, we're all about sounding sexy.

Yeah, I,

so I'm following you, I am. And I'm sort of also in the back of my mind thinking about my clients and the people that I work with. And the thing that's coming up for me in what they would most likely say, to me is okay, Edina, I'm going to try this, I'm going to try this for a couple of weeks. And if it doesn't work, then I'm going back. And consciously, I don't think they're thinking this. But what ends up happening as they try it for maybe a week or two, and then they have a slip. And then there's the shame that comes up. And it's sort of this wet blanket for all the other emotions. And then they say, you know, if I'm not doing this isn't working, right.

How do I get through to that?

Elizabeth Stanley 26:11
Nice, no, it's that you've just described most humans on the planet, and really toxic role of shame in sort of stopping all change, you know, making it work. And I guess my response to that is, we need to understand going in that that is likely what is going to happen that because that too, is part of our prior conditioning, right. And to make habit change stick really requires having accountability and support. And some of that is accountability we can give ourselves, but some of that is having, it's one of the reasons why people have coaches, why people hire, why people have workout buddies, I'm in several different writing groups, I coached some faculty writing groups, because for important habits that are requiring us to stretch and grow. By nature, they're going to create resistance like that's, there's just, it's just we're wired to if we're moving in a positive, evolving growth, full direction, resistance is going to arise, that's a done deal, it's going to happen, and we have to kind of outsmart it, we have to find ways to get around it. And so in my book, I talk about the importance of habits, and also the importance of kind of substituting very gently habits that, you know, we're slightly instead of going from zero to 60. If we look at our habits on a scale from the ones that are most dysregulated, to us, to the ones that are most regulating for us, there's a whole wide range there. And it can be very hard when we're down in the most dysregulated place. And our body wants to reach for alcohol or nicotine or some other substance or to lash out and have a violent temper tantrum around our children or our partner, like when we're down in that space, the thought of Oh, I'm just going to sit down and meditate or Oh, I'm going to go for a run right now. The disconnect between those things is way too big. Our survival brain can't help us get there. And so kind of building for ourselves a ladder to learn. Okay, so maybe what I most want is to have this drink right now, could I substitute that with something that's just slightly better, it might not be meditating, it might be. Instead, I'm going to call a friend for half an hour. And then I want to watch some television like whatever is the next thing that's slightly less dysregulated. It can be helpful, but having support and having accountability, which often happens for us socially with a partner, a workout buddy, a coach can be really, really helpful. And some of the reregulating habits don't necessarily have to involve attention training. I mean, in the book, I lay out a range of different window whitening habits. And in fact, if I was, I will tell your listeners, if you could pick only one thing that you were doing different. It's a thought right now of oh my gosh, I really don't want to sit down and train my attention and notice where my mind is wandering and then not sound like my boat. That's okay. The most important habit for reregulating ourselves is actually getting enough sleep. So I would say if Okay, one thing to do different, get eight hours of sleep and set up your life so that you can get up eight get eight hours of sleep. And that may mean changing your nighttime routine, it may mean that you're going to have to rearrange things to make that work. And with people with young children or people with medical conditions that make it hard to sleep eight hours I get that you add exercise instead or anyway. Yeah, just one way to widen the window and everybody's different. Everybody's going to be drawn to different things. I don't want to say One size fits all. That wouldn't be.

Adina Silvestri 30:03
Yeah. So I like that you give us hope here and that we can widen our window. That's very, that's helpful. For sure. You know, especially if we have to break this toxic legacy of pain that you talked about earlier. And so asleep. So if we do one thing you're saying sleep is probably the best thing for us to do. It's going to take the least amount of effort maybe isn't the right word. But as far as routine, it's better than nothing. And and also, that's going to help us with our decision making.

Elizabeth Stanley 30:40
It absolutely will. Yeah, there are so many studies that show even getting six hours a night for two weeks, which for many people is their regular amount of sleep all the time?

Adina Silvestri 30:53
Oh, yeah,

even even less Liz,

Elizabeth Stanley 30:56
you know, but many people think I'm getting six a night, I'm totally fine. So I want a baseline, because that's very common in our culture. The studies that have shown related to that, that most of these studies define two weeks of six hours a night as chronic sleep deprivation. So everybody who's listening thinking, Oh, I got much less than that, well, then you're way more sleep deprived. But that's what many of these studies uses as a baseline, and the cognitive decrements, the declines in their cognitive functioning, the changes in their excessive startle response, and the movement of the brain towards anxiety and depression, the lack of ability to read positive social emotions and to misinterpret neutral stimuli as threatening and then start overreacting. The hormone changes in terms of they're sort of three hormone changes that happen from this, that really kill the appetite, suppressing hormones and over inflate the appetite, creating hormones, and you're adding more cortisol, because you're chronically stressed in that state anyway, so there's a lot more desire to eat in that place. Like there's so many things been just from this amount of chronic sleep deprivation, it's pretty amazing. That was probably one of my biggest surprises as I was doing. The research was learning about the effects of chronic sleep deprivation. So eight hours a night is what we really do need, it helps our nervous system do a lot of recovery, it helps us do a lot of brain synapse pruning, for those of us who can't who had chronic inflammation and might have a tendency towards chronic inflammation is associated with eventually developing dementia and things it helps to clean the brain plaque helps us to do toxin elimination, it helps us discharge a lot of the stress hormones that we had turned on that day. It's just so important, I would say, picking one pick sleep. But yeah, there are others, you can pair them together, they become virtuous kind of cycles together, we get better sleep, when we've done exercise, for example, we get better sleep, when we are eating better, that we're not drinking and eating sugar and having meals late in the evening like theirs, they all begin to interact in a positive way. And having an attention building training and some reflective exercises to help us really pay attention to what we're doing kind of helps feed that as well. So we can go in a virtuous cycle direction, or a vicious cycle direction. And it's our choice.

Adina Silvestri 33:37
There certainly is it certainly is, is Is there anything else that that we may have missed that

we want to that

you want to share with the audience,

Elizabeth Stanley 33:46
I would say that I've been thinking more about your thought of your clients, and you know, they think for two weeks and then kind of give it up and getting caught by shame. And I would say you know, it's really important to keep in mind that when we have narrowed our window, our thinking brain capacities have been degraded, our thinking brain functions get degraded when our windows narrowed. That includes, you know, conscious decision making, but it also includes willpower. willpower is a thinking brain function. And so for those of us that are coping with cravings, impulses, intense emotions, stress, we have harder time regulating it when our windows narrowed. And we have less willpower to interrupt those cravings when our code and we're much more likely to end up in shame because many of us don't know that. This is just another piece of the neurobiology when our windows narrowed. It's harder to do that. It just is full stop. And I want your listeners to hear that so that if people do try habit change and they do hit a point A couple weeks in, that they can try and cut themselves some slack and recognize, okay, I'm in a stress place. My willpower is degraded right now full stop. This isn't a referendum on me. Yeah, I can start over. I can just tomorrow is a new day. I can try again tomorrow. It's okay. Because we're trying to build up a big bunch of repeated experiences in a positive direction. And we slip once. That's okay. That's why we have habits. That's why we develop practices consciously. Because life intervened sometimes. And as much as possible. If we can just start the next day, we're still accumulating repeated experiences in the beneficial direction. That's what matters the most.

Adina Silvestri 35:48
Yeah, thank you for that.

So, Liz, how

can people can people best find your book? How can people best find you on the social Yeah, give us all the links? Well,

Elizabeth Stanley 36:00
I am not very socially media engaged socially. I made a conscious choice. Many years ago, I wasn't going in that direction. And I have not interrupted that choice. Having watched many of the recent outcomes in our world of social media, I'm not there so good for you. People can come to my website, www.elisabeth-stanley.com. You can join my mailing list and get the first exercise in training your attention. It's on my website is the first exercise in the mind fitness sequence, it's five minutes long audio file. Even doing that five minutes a day would make a difference. If someone did that just added that one thing, you can access all the different ways to buy the book. I also narrated the audiobook, all of that you can get at the website, you can also through my website, get access to the online MMFT course that's the abbreviation for mindfulness baseline fitness training MMFT.

Adina Silvestri 36:59
Okay,

Elizabeth Stanley 36:59
acronym when you work with the military. So you get the MMFT course there. I recently finished it with a wonderful company called sounds true. And it launched last November. It's available on demand. It's the full eight week course that we teach live. It's obviously different to be taught online. And people can access it there. We have a monthly call with that for support and emails each week. But that would be an opportunity to learn more about all of this. It gets covered in the course as well as the book.

Adina Silvestri 37:31
That sounds great. Well, thank you again, Liz, so much for coming on.

Elizabeth Stanley 37:35
Thank you so much for having me, Adina.

Music 37:37
Thank you for listening to the atheist recovery podcast. For more great info and to stay up to date, head over to atheistsinrecovery.com