The Past Lives in the Body as a Felt Sense, Not a Story

In this tender, wise, and delightfully expansive conversation, Janina Fisher reunites with longtime colleague, author, hypnotherapist, and teacher Nancy J. Napier—whose book Getting Through the Day shaped a generation of trauma clinicians and clients.

Together, they explore the evolution of their work across four decades: implicit states, parts, SE, hypnosis, spirituality, multidimensionality, and the deep privilege of accompanying clients back into their wholeness. Nancy shares the origins of her “future self” and “alternate self” work, her grandmother’s teaching of the rain cloud of knowable things, and how ideas emerge collectively across time. Janina reflects on why naming, noticing, and staying with implicit states is at the heart of healing.

Whether you’re a therapist, a client, or someone who loves Nancy’s or Janina’s work, this episode is a warm, soulful exploration of healing, wholeness, and what it really means to grow over a lifetime.

• Implicit states are young body–mind states Nancy and Janina describe implicit states as pre-verbal, deeply embodied experiences carried by young parts of self. The clinical task is to help the adult nervous system stay present with those states, not become them.
  

• Naming and noticing implicit states is itself an intervention The “noticing brain,” a term Nancy adopted from Janina, helps clients observe rather than drown in their experience. Noticing activates regulation, calms the amygdala, and brings more presence online.
  

• Spirituality belongs in the therapy room Nancy shares how many clients historically had no safe place to speak about their spiritual lives without being pathologized. Both she and Janina affirm that spirituality and trauma work naturally intersect.
  

• Future selves and alternate selves offer new templates for living Nancy’s “future self” and “alternate self” processes emerged from teaching, intuition, and synchronicity—what her grandmother called a “rain cloud of knowable things.” These practices help clients embody new possibilities, not just think about them.
  

• Love and gratitude as healing frequencies Nancy frames love as a universal healing frequency and encourages daily gratitude toward the body and its “community of non-human entities,” as well as toward protective parts. Janina echoes the importance of thanking parts that helped clients survive.
  

• Implicit healing changes how we grieve later in life Nancy shares how metabolizing an early implicit state of “I’m shattered” transformed her later grief over losing her cats—shifting from overwhelming, childlike collapse to grounded adult mourning.
  

• Trauma therapy requires active guidance and co-regulation Both clinicians push back against overly neutral, hands-off models. They emphasize that trauma clients are “lost in the trauma world” and need the therapist’s nervous system, structure, and guidance to find their way out.
  

Nancy J. Napier, LMFT, is a psychotherapist and hypnotherapist in private practice in New York City, specializing in trauma resolution. She is author of Recreating Your Self: Increasing Self-Esteem Through Imaging and Self-Hypnosis; Getting Through the Day: Strategies for Adults Hurt as Children; Sacred Practices for Conscious Living, and co-author of Meditations & Rituals for Conscious Living.

She also has recordings of guided meditations on subjects including accessing your optimal future self, mindfulness, healing wounded child parts, and healing shame, to mention a few that may be downloaded from iTunes and CDBaby. She also has training videos for professionals on Vimeo.com Videos on Demand. In addition, she posts a monthly audio guided meditation on her website, www.nancynapier.com, as well as on her YouTube channel, along with “Videos on Multidimensional Living”, as well as videos from talks given on issues related to spirituality.