Hello beautiful souls! I’m welcoming Jen Soriano (healing advocate and author of Nervous) as she helps us explore the profound impact of ancestral and generational trauma on our well-being. Jen begins their story by recalling their journey from sickly child to discovering the intricate connection between their own healing and their family’s history. Jen shares insights on navigating the complexities of inherited pain and offers tools to aid in healing. Tune in and learn how to embrace your past while forging a brighter future.

To learn more about Jen Soriano and their work:
JenSoriano.net
Jensorianowrites [Instagram]
Jen’s book Nervous is available from bookshop.org

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Chapters:

(00:46) Welcome to the Angels and Awakening podcast featuring Jen Soriano

(02:40) For more than 40 years I’ve been on this journey with chronic pain

(11:23) Long memory science shows our body stores memories from previous generations

(16:29) You can take a behavior that a person has and pinpoint it to historical trauma

(20:05) Our healing is absolutely interdependent on other people, so environmental change is necessary

(30:20) Being able to metabolize generational trauma is key to healing after trauma

(33:25) Jen Soriano writes about connecting with ancestral guides through her book

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TRANSCRIPT

Julie Jancius (01:51): Welcome back to the Angels and Awakening podcast. I’m your host and author, Julie Jancius and friends, if you have questions about ancestral trauma, generational trauma, we are here with the expert today. Her name is Jen Soriano and she’s the author of the new book called Nervous. If you have seen the cover page or the cover of her new book, it’s just a gorgeous book that really takes you very deep, energetically, and it also brings you essays on heritage and healing. Yes, thank you for sharing that beautiful image. Jen, welcome to the show and thank you for being here.

Jen Soriano: Thank you so much Julie. I am really excited to be here. I love your podcast and I’m just thrilled that you invited me.

Julie Jancius (02:42): Course, of course. So I thought that we could start more with your background because you have not just an expertise from what do you call educational or book smarts. You’ve lived this and you felt this and you’ve experienced this. So maybe bring people into the mindset of who you are and your background and your story.

Jen Soriano (03:03): I am by now a youngish, I would say middle aged person. Uh, which means that for more than 40 years I’ve been on this journey with chronic pain. I started to feel odd things I would say in my body when I was a teenager. Although I was always a sickly kid. I was a really sickly kid. And I grew up in the Chicago area, which we were just talking about before we started recording. And so for a long time I thought that I was sickly just because it was so cold for most of the year. And so I would just get bugs, viruses and flus, bronchitis anytime those bugs came around. 

(03:44) Then when I was a teenager, other things started to happen. I had to quit sports and I was very much into sports and I had to quit all my sports because my ankles would just give out on me and I would have these strange neck pains. My neck would get stuck, turned in a certain direction and so while I was playing tennis I couldn’t turn the other direction to hit the ball back. So all these odd things started happening and eventually by the time I was in my early twenties I think it’s sort of exacerbated by stress in college. At some points I completely lost the use of my arms and couldn’t dial numbers on the telephone, for example. I started to embark on this journey, first of all of trying to stay functional. I was working in journalism so I needed to be able to type on a keyboard, much less type numbers on a phone, but then also to figure out what was going on with me. Because at that point all the doctors I went to see pretty much dismissed what was happening to me and said it was mostly in my head or I just needed to take a Tylenol or I just needed more sleep. And the first essay in my book is a history of that type of treatment of chronic pain, that kind of dismissal and misdiagnosis. 

(05:02) So yeah, I’m a person that’s had a long relationship with chronic pain and my journey into looking at the source of this chronic pain has taken me pretty far into not just different theories of chronic illness, but also into my own ancestry and history and also concepts of historical and ancestral trauma.

Julie Jancius (05:23) : Clarify for me what is the difference between ancestral and generational? I know that sometimes we use these terms interchangeably, but as I really dove into the work there’s a lot of differences.

Jen Soriano: So there’s no one definitive answer to that question. It’s a great question, but you’re going to get a different answer from different people under the different definitions. (05:49) The way that I think about it is that generational trauma can include anything that you might learn through behavior. For example, it could be physically abusive behavior that gets then learned by future generations and that can be an example of generational trauma that gets passed on. Ancestral trauma I personally think of as something that is spiritual as well as behavioral and intimately linked with historical and collective trauma. Historical trauma is by nature a collective form of trauma and it is basically a way to talk about trauma that’s experienced by entire populations because of mass historical events like slavery, war, a major natural disaster, colonization, which is what I focus on, the form of historical trauma that I focus on in my book. There’s one other distinction in terminology that I would share also, which is around the, uh, difference between intergenerational and transgenerational trauma. So at least according to the scientific world, the difference is that intergenerational is between two generations, usually what we think of as parents and kids, and then transgenerational is across more than two generations.

Julie Jancius (07:02): Okay, perfect. That’s interesting. So take us on this journey with you. You grow up having these different ailments that are just starting to come up for you as a kid, and they continue, and you go to the doctor, and it’s not getting worked out there. How did you end up making the link between the generational trauma and what you were experiencing? How did that come about for you?

Jen Soriano (07:27): It was a slow process of accumulating different information and making different connections over time. I wish that I could say that there was like an AHA moment or a moment where the light bulb just switched on, but there wasn’t. There was really a lot of important information and experiences that came together towards an understanding of oh, so trauma might be at the root of my pain. I remember suspecting that trauma might have something to do with it. This was in my twenties, and I hadn’t started professional psychotherapy, and I didn’t even really know exactly what trauma was. But as listeners will probably understand because people have spiritual practice and experience, there was still something inside me that knew even though in my head I hadn’t learned about trauma, there was still something inside me that kind of suspected. There was something deeper at the root that had to do with very deep emotional experience, which is essentially what psychological trauma is. And so I kind of suspected that. But I never wanted to say the word trauma. I thought it was maybe a bad word. 

(08:40) Then I started psychotherapy, and it was actually a somatic and bodily form of psychotherapy that helped me tune into different parts of my body that kind of opened up the affirmation that there was at least one type of trauma that was contributing to my pain. And it was specifically with that therapist that I learned about and explored the early childhood trauma that I had directly experienced, and that was specifically emotional neglect. 

(09:07) But then I was also at the same time, part of a community of Filipino Americans in the California Bay area that was really active in political work and education, work and cultural work. And I began to learn a lot about my history, the history of the Philippines, cultural history of the Philippines, political history of the Philippines, and history of American colonization in the Philippines. Eventually, I put together all of those learnings with this amazing body of work by indigenous scholars, specifically Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart and Karina Walters, who– Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart was the one who coined the term historical trauma. And Karina Walters has a whole body of work that’s about how we carry history in our bodies and the embodiment of historical trauma and experiences from our ancestors’ past. Then, uh, I started to realize, oh, I don’t think it’s actually just my own lived experience. And that really connected with another way of knowing I had in my gut that I was like, I don’t think all of this is mine. It’s not just mine. It felt older. It felt heavier than anything I had lived in my own life. And it really made sense once I started to put that all together.

Julie Jancius (10:20): Once you really start to kind of go within and unpack this, there are so many different thoughts, feelings, emotions, behaviors that we all have that we didn’t just start doing that really came from what we saw. And I think it’s such a different experience to be a parent and look at your child growing up and my husband and I kind of I don’t know if you call that tongue in cheek joke, uh, about it. We’re screwing her up in some way. There’s got to be something that we’re doing where she’s going to be in therapy one day saying, mom and dad did this. My sweet daughter already on, uh, TikTok. She’ll make fun of my reels because she’s like, hello, beautiful souls. We’re definitely screwing her up in some way, shape or form, even though we are trying our hardest not to.

Julie Jancius (11:23): But when it comes to these thoughts, feelings, behaviors as you have studied this work and I’ve really been looking at Dopamine this year and how much is our brains? How much of it is the chemicals within us? How much of it I guess if you had to put a percentage on it is learned generational trauma, historical trauma within us?

Jen Soriano (11:50): OOH, that’s a good question. I don’t know that I can put a percentage on it, but I will say so I’m going to bypass that. By saying that I think the key point is that we are always learning and we have a long memory. So it’s both of those things. So the long memory– science is showing more and more even if we forget what we had for breakfast. Right. Because that’s happening to me more and more now. Right? Like older age. I’m like, what happened this morning? I don’t remember. 

(12:23) But my body remembers experiences from when I was a childhood. It’s why smells can trigger, automatically trigger memories from when you were like, four. Music can automatically trigger things that you had thought you had forgotten from decades ago. Right. So we have these memories and then the body actually then stores memories from previous generations. And there is more and more scientific evidence to the actual biological mechanisms for how that happens. And they’re primarily, uh, around at least what science has studied so far around response to threat memories of, uh, environments and things that made our ancestors feel really scared and made our ancestors learn or decide that that particular thing is not good for us. And so we need to avoid that. And so we have memories in our bodies that actually are not just about horrible, terrible things, but actually are lessons of wisdom and survival. 

(13:25) Now, in our current day situations, if we’re lucky enough to not be in a war zone where our grandfathers and grandmothers were, we may still have some learned memory that interprets the sound of a car door slamming as a gunshot or that interprets the sound of the Blue Angels flying above us as the sound of bomber planes coming to bomb our city. Those kinds of memories are inherited probably because they help us survive, but in a different environment of peace. It means our stress response is activated constantly. And these memories of fear and threat don’t necessarily serve us in the current day. And so that’s where the continuous learning comes in, right, is that even though we have learned through these ancestral memories of fear and threat to interpret sounds a certain way, reflexively, it doesn’t mean that we can’t learn something new. As in, oh, that’s just the car door, or oh, the Blue Angels are just out here doing loop de loops and I don’t have to be scared of them. And I think that’s the amazing thing about our bodies and sort of the gift that this new science is showing about the mechanisms that, frankly, I think our communities have known in some way for a long time, right? Is that, yes, we can inherit all kinds of behaviors and memories and knowledge and traditions and practices. Some of them good, maybe some of them not so useful anymore. And then we can choose and change the ones that aren’t as useful to us anymore because our nervous systems are designed to be plastic and fluid and they are designed to adapt to changing environments.

Julie Jancius (16:29): So I’m interested in the behavior piece to this and I’m wondering if you’ve seen this within yourself or if you’ve seen this within others, where you can take a behavior that a person has, pinpoint it to this historical trauma within them and then actually change the behavior through that neuroplasticity. Or I don’t even know the mechanics of how the behavior actually changes. But what is that process? How does that look like? And maybe can you give us some examples?

Jen Soriano (16:58): Great question. Well, I’ll start with saying that it looks like anything else that people choose to do on a regular basis. It takes practice. And, um, practice by definition means doing something over and over and over again, right? Practice in a spiritual or a ritual sense means doing something over and over again with an intention, with kind of a deeper intention.
Neural retraining and neural rewiring is a practice of experientially doing something over and over again. 

(17:32) So I’ll give you an example from my own life. I think that one of the I don’t know if it’s intergenerational or transgenerational behaviors that I learned and inherited and perhaps partly remember through biology, but also learn through modeling on the part of my parents is social avoidance. I learned pretty much through actual– my parents sayings in so many words, but also doing so in their behavior to not trust anybody that, uh, people in general were untrustworthy. They’re out to rob you or do worse. So the best thing to do is to not engage with people. Definitely don’t form any deep relationships with people. But honestly, in the day to day, you just don’t even have to engage either. Right? So I learned a pretty extreme form of social avoidance and isolation which I believe came from my parents growing up in wartime and having the experience of their homes– so not just the country, but in my mother’s case, her literal home, her house being invaded and occupied by Japanese soldiers. From her and her body language and also her verbal language, I learned the lesson that if you keep people at a distance, then they won’t invade you, essentially.

Julie Jancius: Right.

Jen Soriano (18:52): It was really hard for me to form any kind of social relationship that was based on any real intimacy. And, um, the only way that I was able to overcome that was first of all through understanding what was happening, which professional therapy helped me understand. But then beyond that, even if I understood that in my head, I needed to practice. If I didn’t actually practice interacting with people, then the behavior wouldn’t change. It was painful, to be honest. I had legit social anxiety, diagnosable social anxiety, but I don’t anymore at all. And it turns out I’m a really social person. And that was just through practice. It was through showing up and interacting with people and feeling the pain of what Tara Brock calls those porcupine pricks kind of get real close to each other, then ultimately feeling the dopamine rush and reward of being in relationship with other people.

Julie Jancius: Because I want to go deeper into this and I just want to simplify it for people so that it’s really easy to digest and that they can take it and apply it to their lives. Sometimes I feel like when we’re doing this work, it’s very easy to fall back into the old patterns. Right.

Julie Jancius (20:05): What were some ways that you were able to stay present with the work? And when you were putting yourself out there into social situations, did you have to be really present? What you’re feeling, what your body is experiencing at that moment and kind of how did you stay present to keep with it?

Jen Soriano (20:25) : Great question. I think it’s a balance actually, between presence and allowing yourself to have breaks and um, check out. It’s like a titration process almost.

Julie Jancius: What does titration mean?

Jen Soriano (20:38): So titration means in this context, I can describe it as doing a little bit at a time as opposed to just going all in. And that’s really important when you’re working with yourself or anybody else that’s infected by trauma. Because one of the physiological impacts of trauma is and what causes traumatic response is a feeling of system overwhelm where you’re just overwhelmed. You’re overwhelmed by a sense of threat and you feel like you can’t do anything about it. So in order to not be retriggered and be overwhelmed, it’s really a good idea to be able to take things a little bit at a time. I wouldn’t necessarily choose to go camping with people for two weeks when I didn’t have any out. I’d show up events and then be able to retreat back into my little own little cave. And I think it applies to any situation around any kinds of behaviors that people are trying to overcome. If someone has anger issues, which I have definitely had in the past right. It’s that titration of like, okay, I’m going to give myself a break that this time yelled at my kid and um, probably he’s going to be talking about that in therapy ten years from now. I’m going to give myself a break and just step back, step back from it and then I’m going to try again. I’ll try again tomorrow. 

(21:55) So I think that titration and stepping in and out of practice is really important. Another thing that’s really important is that there’s a balance between what we can do as individuals and taking responsibility for our own behaviors and then also recognizing that the biggest type of change happens when our environments really support us to change. Right. So if I was trying to overcome social anxiety in an environment where everybody was like, bullying me really hard and probably not healthy, actually, I was in an environment prior to starting to heal where I felt very alienated and isolated and made me retreat even, um, more. It was my college environment. The fact of being able to then move to California and find this community in which I felt more accepted and where I could belong more, that environmental change was necessary for me then to be able to have the conditions to be able to practice what I needed to practice towards healing. So sometimes environmental change is necessary too.

Julie Jancius (22:53): You do you find that a lot within just spiritual awakening, spiritual healing? Sometimes we have attracted the environmental, maybe support system that suited us at the time, but that as you heal, you do need different people surrounding you or different environments. And that’s a really hard part of healing work because it’s this– I don’t know if the right word is juxtaposition or just this duality of you can be so proud of yourself and just so contented and fulfilled with the work that you’ve been doing on yourself. But at the same time, there can be grief and losses of losing that surrounding.

Jen Soriano (23:40): Absolutely. To be in a place where you can do individual work and then have deeper emotions like grief and loss be recognized. I think with spiritual work and spiritual community, being able to be around people who share, if not the same spiritual practice, at least values around spirituality. All of that is necessary because one of the main themes that I explore in the book and it’s a lesson of how the nervous system works, is that our healing is absolutely interdependent on other people. And now there’s a neuroscientist named Lisa Elman Barrett who says that the best thing for another person’s nervous for your nervous system is another person’s nervous system. But the worst thing for your nervous system can also be another person’s nervous system.

Julie Jancius: Oh, go into that and explain that because that’s deep.

Jen Soriano (24:33): So there’s another somatic therapist who is also an author, whose name is Rezma Mennecom, who wrote a book called My Grandmother’s Hands that was a big influence on me and this book Nervous. And he talks a lot about how our nervous systems entrain to each other, which means that basically our nervous systems, they will adjust to the states of the nervous systems of the people around us. It’s why if somebody comes into a room feeling kind of agitated and nervous, even if they don’t speak to you, you might start feeling a little agitated and nervous too. But then there’s people who are know, these very evolved bodhisattvas who come into a room and all of a sudden you just feel like you’ve meditated for a whole hour, right? It’s a way of sensing other people’s nervous system states. Rasma Mennikum talks about how the more that each of us works on regulating our own nervous systems, the more we become catalysts for helping others to regulate their nervous systems as well, and the more potential there is for us to harmonize together at an autonomic nervous system level which sets the conditions for positive behavior.

Julie Jancius (25:43): When you talk about kind of regulating that nervous system, I’ve been getting together with, uh, some of just like the most amazing spiritual minds, and I believe this too– It’s the very first part of the first book that I wrote. It all comes down to your own vibration. And if you can set your own vibration, then you can feel alignment. You can hear your intuition more clearly. When you talk about regulating the nervous system. And spiritual folks talk about really tuning in and holding the vibration. Are we talking about the same thing?

Jen Soriano: I absolutely think so.

Julie Jancius: Amazing.

Jen Soriano (26:20): Yeah, I think our nervous system regulation is absolutely tied to our energy and vibration and vice versa.

Julie Jancius (26:28): So when it comes to nervous system regulation, what have you seen work the best, like tools or practices?

Jen Soriano (26:35): I’ll start by saying I think that there’s a myriad of tools out there. I think there’s increasingly a whole spectrum and a huge kind of playbox for people to work with these days. But then I’ll also say that there have been these practices that have been around forever. They just haven’t necessarily been described as neural regulation practices like chanting, singing, dancing, and especially in collective and communal environments. And so in the book, I focus on one of those ancient neural rewiring techniques that was very important for me and that was playing live music with a band. Even though, I mean, you wouldn’t necessarily think that it was calming to my nervous system because we started out as a rap metal band and we are very loud and screaming and banging on cowbells. But it was really the process of being able to collaborate with other people and train our nervous systems and then create together. That was an incredibly healing neural regulation exercise for me. 

(27:40) But there are lots of other things that work for folks if they do it regularly. Again, it’s the practice piece, right? So yoga, meditation. Absolutely. And then there’s more and more professionally designed courses for neural retraining. And actually, Jennifer London is an author who wrote a book called American Breakdown in which she talks about her chronic fatigue syndrome. This is a spoiler, but in the end, after trying all of these different remedies, one of the things that worked the best for her was a neural retraining program, a specific one that she talks about in the book. So I never went through anything very formal like that. But there are formal programs like that exist, other folks who don’t necessarily need the formal program. One of the main messages in my book is that with the right intention, a lot of communal and relational practices can be used and leveraged as neural retraining exercises. And so music, like I had said, for me, activism also was another form of neural regulation. There’s also cultural and spiritual practices that I highlight as well.

Julie Jancius (28:47): I wonder if there’s a part or, uh, like a page within the book that you want to read that just kind of brings people in.

Jen Soriano (28:56): Wonderful. Okay. Yes. As we slowly make our way home, i, uh, once again think of our car as an electrical impulse on another nerve in the city’s body. We will get there. We will reach our destination. It requires having patience with our ghost haunted bodies, enough to board the slow boat that hums through troubled rivers. This boat navigates by the North Star of our longings toward a delta where sweet and salt waters mix to create imperfect but rapturously interdependent bodies of hell.

Julie Jancius (29:26): Spirit, thank you for that. There’s a point at which you get to and I think that this happens for people maybe continuously. Like, we get to this point over and over again, but that point is surrender. And with that surrender comes a, uh, peace where you’re no longer wanting, striving needing to make something happen, needing to reach a destination. You just relax into… I’m on this journey, I’m with myself, I love myself. I am going to figure this out. But it doesn’t have to be on my timeline anymore. It can just happen in divine time. And Spirit said that you’re really good at that and just finding that peace, peace feel like to you.

Julie Jancius (30:21): And how is it a different experience of life to walk with that surrender, acceptance and peace instead of the pushing and the wanting to reach a destination?

Jen Soriano (30:32): Beautiful question. It feels like a homecoming. I spent a lot of my life trying to be comfortable in my body. I think a lot of people can relate to that kind of journey. It was the process of neural co regulation and processing and metabolizing generational trauma that allowed me to feel that I didn’t have to treat everything as so urgent and that I could look at the world not as a series of problems that had to be solved right away and that I could look at myself not as a problem that had to be solved, but that I could see myself integrated into the larger worlds in both a physical and a spiritual way that allows for the sense of peace. But trauma, by definition, divides us internally and also from each other. And so facing trauma and being able to metabolize and process and heal from it and retrain our nervous systems is a prerequisite, I think, for many of us, to being able to feel that greater connection to Spirit and the rest of the world. And in my case, I feel an even stronger connection to my ancestors and my ancestral guides and that sense of interconnectedness and interdependence and bigness like this sort of universal kind of bigness of love, I think, really it’s not the ultimate destination, right? Because we’re talking about how we’re just trying to accept, but it is a wonderful place to be. I’m happy to– yeah. I feel grateful. To have had the resources and the opportunities to be able to heal in that way.

Julie Jancius (32:22): It’s such a powerful thing to connect on your spirit team to all of the ancestors who came before you. And I find a lot of times that when I’m in sessions with folks, they’re like, Julie, well, I didn’t know this person, or somebody will come in from generations past. They’re like, I have no idea, I never knew that person. But that doesn’t mean that they’re not with you. That doesn’t mean that they’re not guiding you. What’s really fascinating, too, is how much Spirit has been bringing in that because there is truly no time within all that is it’s not really happening linearly. A lot of our future ancestors, the people who will come after us also are our biggest cheerleaders in this lifetime. They’re on our spirit team because our success leads to their further growth and their further purpose that they’re able to accomplish here.

Julie Jancius (33:25): I just wonder what that felt like too, and what your experience was in connecting with those ancestral guides and ancestors maybe how you feel more close to them now than at the beginning.

Jen Soriano (33:42): I used to really doubt any of the messages and connections that I felt with my ancestors. For example, when I was little, I always had this picture of my grandfather that just stayed with me. I never met my grandfather. I also had never seen a picture of him when I was a child. But in my mind, I had a very strong picture of him. It was of him holding me as a baby. I started to really doubt that type of visitation or vision because it actually didn’t match up with facts. My grandfather was no longer alive when I was a baby. Pretty much chalked it up to, well, that’s wishful thinking. But then as I got older, I started to have just more and more visions that I now look at as visitations from my grandfather. In the book, I talk about a specific instance where may have actually had like an embodied flashback of one of my grandmother’s memories. My grandmother was really devastated when my grandfather never returned from World War II. He was a prisoner of war, and he was tortured, and his body was never found at the end of the war. And that affected my grandmother for the rest of her life. 

(34:58) Not too long ago, just a couple of years ago, I had this embodied experience of sudden needing to just fall to the floor. And I was just overwhelmed with grief. And I kept on saying, I couldn’t save him, I couldn’t save him. And for hours after, I felt in my body that I had lost somebody that I loved, and I had no control over it. I’ve had now multiple experiences like that as well as been able to talk to my grandfather and grandmother through ancestral transmission sessions. There was one moment where my friend Angela was channeling my grandfather, and he was talking about how he had experienced many lifetimes and many wars on repeat. And then he started to talk about my son in the way that you’re talking about it as, uh, a future ancestor. One of my favorite things about that conversation was in the end, because I was asking him for advice about how to better raise my son. How do we end these wars on repeat? And he just went straight to, your son is a comedian. Your son is hilarious. And the thing is, he’s right. It was spot on. It is the truest thing about my son. And he’s like and so you just have to cultivate that. So now I have this connection with my ancestors that’s not just based on pain and loss, but that is also about remembering all the joy that they must have experienced as well, and all the laughter. For my grandfather’s spirit to be able to identify my son as a comedian, it means that he probably liked to laugh a lot, too. I think that that’s been, um, a major gift and change that’s come in part through writing this book, is being able to tap into ancestral guides around all the emotions, including joy and celebration.

Julie Jancius (36:40): Amazing. Jen Soriano, you are amazing. Thank you so much for sharing this. Feel your heart just like, pouring through this conversation, huh? Thank you for writing the book Nervous. We’re going to put all the information in the show notes. It’s just a gorgeous book. Tell everybody where they can find you, where they can find the book, and we’ll put all of those links in the show notes, too.

Jen Soriano: I am mostly on Instagram @JenSorianoWrites, so I would love to connect with you all on Instagram. If you’re on IG as well. I show up on Twitter once in a while. So if you’re on, um, Twitter, you can find me as LionsWrite so that’s lions like the animals and write like write a book. And, um, you can also go to my website, jensoriano.net.

Julie Jancius: Love it. Love it. Friends. While you’re there on TikTok and Instagram, follow me over there @AngelPodcast. I only need, I think, a hundred more followers on TikTok that I can go live and I’d love to bring through angel messages live there like I do over on Instagram. Jen, thank you again for being here and your work in the world.

Jen Soriano: Thank you so much, Julie. I enjoyed this conversation so much.