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Have you observed negative patterns in your behavior for reasons you can’t seem to pinpoint? Often, these stem from childhood trauma we think we have already buried or forgotten. That’s why sometimes, we can’t explain why we respond and behave to circumstances the way we do. Living our purpose as our authentic self requires healing from childhood trauma we don’t talk about. And more than anything, it starts with self-knowledge.

In the first episode of Returning Home, Elise talks about how she became a therapist. She shares her own experiences of childhood trauma and how it has helped establish her vision as a therapist. Elise delves into Dr. Bruce Perry’s Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics and the functions of the nervous system. Remember: childhood trauma healing is much more beyond the mindset. It requires work both in our body and our subconscious mind.

If you want to be one step closer to healing from childhood trauma, then this episode is for you.

returning home after childhood trauma
Here are three reasons why you should listen to this episode

  1. Learn the meaning behind the name “Returning Home” and how you can benefit from it.
  2. Discover the importance of learning about the nervous system’s different functions in understanding childhood trauma healing.
  3. Find out how mindfulness practice can help in healing from childhood trauma.

Resources

Episode Highlights

[01:08] Returning Home: The Podcast

  • The rationale behind the podcast is to serve clients and people in the community around therapy.

[01:34] Becoming a Therapist

  • Elise wants to be part of creating a world where people want to have self-knowledge.
  • Deep self-knowledge leads to love and acceptance of ourselves. It allows us to expand fully in our most authentic expression.
  • Elise became a therapist to get to know herself better and heal from things she’s experienced.
  • Becoming a therapist helped her step more fully into her life purpose.

Elise: “Everybody deserves to be able to feel the freedom in life to express themselves and to pursue the knowledge of themselves and have access to resources to live as their most genuine, authentic self—doing things that align with their values and being able to live as their full, true identity.”

[03:25] On Pain

  • Elise arrived at her vision of the world she wants to live in through pain.
  • Going through challenges and difficulties is part of the human condition.
  • Elise grew up afraid of the world, feeling like a misfit and a black sheep. 
  • There was a lack of connection and warmth in her family. Her anxious attachment style made it hard to connect with other people.
  • She came from a family of immigrants. One of her siblings committed suicide.

Elise: “Hurt people hurt people, right? That people who are suffering tend to be the people that are inflicting suffering on other people.”

[05:18] Alleviating Suffering through Therapy

  • Elise wanted to be somebody who could provide intervention and alleviate suffering through connection.
  • Her sister committing suicide put some things in perspective for her.
  • She wanted to be her true, authentic self. That Elise is someone she didn’t feel she had the permission or the example of how to connect with it.
  • Elise decided to go to graduate school and become a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW).
  • She majored in Women and Gender Studies. It fed her love of learning and challenging the situations she gets immersed into.

[07:00] Becoming A Licensed Clinical Social Worker

  • Elise opened her eyes to potential career paths and did information interviews.
  • She realized that the people who were doing the things she wanted to do were LCSW and therapists.

[07:23] Discovering Trauma and Creating Her Own Life Path

Going to graduate school made Elise discover the childhood trauma in her life. Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) is a 10-question questionnaire around childhood trauma.

  • Elise scored 4 or 5 in ACEs. The highest score is a 10.
  • She wanted to be an example of what’s possible when you decide to take your life into your own hands.
  • Becoming a therapist was the way she could create her own path as well as her clients’.

[09:14] Her Vision of Being a Therapist

  • Elise’s initial vision of therapy was a romanticized, cozy therapy office.
  • Her training included work with children in many experiential modalities.
  • The type of work Elise likes to do is creating warmth and safety in therapy for clients.
  • Her vision evolved and changed throughout the years.

[11:37] Dr. Bruce Perry and the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics

  • Dr. Bruce Perry developed the theory called the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics.

As a child psychologist, he is an expert in child development and the effects of childhood trauma on children’s brain development. Learning about the effects of trauma on children’s development changed Elise’s life.

  • The model focuses on the developing nervous system of fetuses, infants, and kids.

[13:30] The Brain and Its Functions

  • The brain stem develops from the bottom up. It starts developing 16 days after conception.
  • It controls the heart rate, breathing, body temperature, and blood pressure.
  • The diencephalon cerebellum or the midbrain controls coordination, movement, balance, sleep, and appetite.
  • The limbic system controls the social and emotional skills of children between ages 3 to 12. It develops into adulthood.
  • Neocortex controls concrete thought, abstract thought, advanced thinking, and problem-solving. It doesn’t fully develop until the mid-20s.

[16:31] Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics Approach

Trauma-informed training and education around what goes on in the brain of developing kids are critical. The theory shows that children who have experienced childhood trauma have “pins” in the parts of their nervous system. It affects how the rest of the system develops.

  • The nervous system changes the way it develops on a chemical-biological level.

[17:57] Childhood Trauma Healing Goes Beyond Mindset

Trauma intervention and healing are so much more beyond mindset. Trauma has physical ramifications on the body and the subconscious mind. The top 5% of the mind is the conscious mind, while the bottom 95% is the unconscious mind. All childhood trauma is in the bottom 95%.

  • Our formative experiences impact how we see life. 

We need to bring the body into work to heal from childhood trauma.

Elise: “We need to bring a level of gentleness and a level of understanding and a level of compassion to our work. Because the choices that we make are more often than not very much caused by this unconscious process that’s happening that is beyond our ability to just think through it. We have to really work with the body.”

[19:32] The Importance of Co-Regulation

  • Elise worked in a school and did intensive in-home counseling for at-risk youth. She used the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics approach in her work.
  • Infants need co-regulation when something triggers them. Time, intention, and education can help rewrite how the nervous system interacts.
  • Our brains can change, learn, and grow because of neuroplasticity. 

Neuroplasticity allows us to become who we’re meant to be rather than a reflection of our childhood trauma.

[22:20] Mindfulness Practice and Mental Health

  • Mindfulness practice and training helped Elise turn theory into practical, real healing.
  • She started practicing mindfulness seriously in 2016 through Mindful Schools.
  • Mindfulness helped her slow down and be in her body and experiences. It helped her face herself in an authentic, honest way.

She stopped drinking in January 2020. A lot of her conditioning, traumas, and patterns have come to light in terms of healing from this experience.

[24:35] Accountability and Ending Generational Trauma

Generational trauma is real.

  • While accountability is critical, people do better when they know better. This knowledge should be on a learned level, not just on an intellectual level.
  • Decide to be the one who chooses not to perpetuate harmful patterns on future generations.
  • Forgiving people without letting them in your life is an acceptable approach to healing.
  • Inflicting harm to other people often roots from the subconscious and unconscious patterns people aren’t willing to see.

[26:51] The Therapy Space

  • Elise’s vision as a therapist sometimes puts her at odds with therapy.
  • Therapy isn’t only about results. It’s more of a safe space to process and talk through life experiences while feeling seen, heard, and validated.
  • In Elise’s work, therapy also involves challenging clients to expand, learn, grow, and try things differently.
  • She ties together clients’ present circumstances and past experiences that have shaped them. Then, she helps them embody who they truly want to be.

Enjoyed this Episode on Childhood Trauma?

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Leave an episode review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in to this episode, don’t forget to leave us a review. You can also share what you’ve learned today with your friends to help them embody their true, authentic selves. Anything is possible when you return home to yourself. 

Have any questions or lightbulb moments? I’d love to hear from you! Feel free to hit me up on Instagram or send an email at elise@elisekindya.com. 

Thank you so much for listening! For more episode updates, visit my website

Podcast Transcript on Childhood Trauma

Elise Kindya: Welcome to Returning Home, the Podcast. My name is Elise Kindya, and I am a trauma-informed and intuitive therapist. This podcast is a space that I have created for you to discover a deeper understanding and love for yourself, which leads to expanding what you think is possible in your own life. My goal is for you to feel excited to live your life as your full, authentic self. 

By listening to these episodes, you will learn things like how your brain works, my favorite resources for healing, stories from my own life, practices that you can press play on to add to your healing toolkit, and so much more. I invite you to return home to yourself in big and small ways to live the life you desire on your terms. You can live connected, empowered, and aligned. When you return home to yourself anything is possible. I can’t wait to share all of my insights with you. Now let’s begin.

Welcome to episode one of Returning Home, the podcast. I’m so excited that you’re here and that this is getting done. Making a podcast is something that’s been on my mind for a while. When I think about why I want to make a podcast, it’s really to serve my clients and other people in my community around what are we doing. The place that I really want to start is my story as to why I became a therapist. 

There’s a specific psychological theory, a model of working with people that when I learned about it in grad school, my mind was just blown. I really want to talk about that in a little bit more depth here. I’m gonna let you in on some things, kind of pull back the curtain a little bit. 

When I think about what kind of world I want to be part of creating, it really speaks to my desire to become a therapist, and why I’m here. So the type of world that I want to be part of creating is where people want to have self-knowledge. I believe that knowledge is power. I believe that when we know better, we do better. I think that when we have this deep self-knowledge, then that can lead to love and acceptance of ourselves in order to expand fully into our most authentic expression. 

So why I became a therapist was I wanted to get to know myself better. I wanted to heal from some of the things that I’ve been through. In learning these things and working with other people, it’s really helped me to step so much more fully into my life purpose. I believe that everybody deserves to be able to feel the freedom in life to express themselves, and to pursue the knowledge of themselves, and have access to resources to live as their most genuine, authentic self, doing things that align with their values and being able to live as their full true identity. 

Like I mentioned, how I arrived at this vision for the kind of world I want to live in is through pain. Of course, I think we all go through challenges. This is part of the human condition. This is part of being a human being is like we have to go through things that are difficult. I grew up really afraid. I grew up afraid of one of my parents, and afraid of the world, and never feeling like I fit in that well. I always felt like I was the black sheep like everything I did was wrong. It was under a microscope, and everybody was going to be able to see everything I was doing wrong. 

I grew up with not a lot of connection or warmth in my family. I had a really hard time connecting with other people. I felt like when I got really close to people, I would do things that would sabotage the relationship. In attachment language, I have anxious attachment. So that was always a struggle for me—feeling like I could just never be seen for who I truly was and that it wasn’t good enough. 

In addition, one of my siblings committed suicide. My family is immigrants. On my dad’s side, my grandmother was an immigrant. On my mom’s side, her grandparents were immigrants. There’s just this level of like we fit in, but we don’t. We belong, but then there are these different things about us. It just feels like I didn’t fit in. 

I learned that hurt people hurt people, right? That people who are suffering tend to be the people that are inflicting suffering on other people. I wanted to be somebody that I could provide an intervention that could alleviate suffering, that could help people change through connection because I was so disconnected. That brought me on this journey. Especially once my sister committed suicide, I think that really put some things in perspective for me. 

I changed some things about how I was relating to people in my life. I had different standards for what I would, for lack of a better word, put up with. Things were different. I wanted to be my true authentic self, like the name of this podcast, right? Returning home. I wanted to really get in touch with the Elise that is deep within me, that I didn’t feel I had the permission or the example for how to connect with myself. 

That’s when I decided to go to graduate school to become a licensed clinical social worker. After I graduated from college, I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do. I majored in women and gender studies. I just really love learning. So that was something that definitely fed that need that I had to always be reading and learning and challenging the situations I was immersed in. Living in a very patriarchal society, I always wanted to challenge things. I definitely found the opportunity to do that through my studies but wasn’t sure what to do as a career. 

So I was working on a nonprofit. Then, I started opening my eyes a little bit more to what other people were doing that I thought, “Oh, I want to do that.” Then, I started doing informational interviews and realized that a lot of the people that were doing things I wanted to be doing were licensed clinical social workers, and they were therapists. 

I didn’t necessarily know it at the time, but I had been through a lot of trauma in my life. I don’t know that in undergraduate school in college, I didn’t think about it like that. But once I got into graduate school, and I started learning a lot more, that word “trauma” was coming up a lot. I was realizing, “Oh, I’ve been through some traumatic experiences.” 

There’s a study called the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, and there is a 10-question questionnaire that you can look it up online. But once I took that, my ACES score is like a 4 or a 5, and the highest you can have is a 10. That helped me realize, “Oh, okay, so what I’ve what I’ve been through isn’t necessarily normal, or isn’t how it’s ‘supposed to be’.” So, being in grad school, I realized, “Oh, I’m in the right place.” By being a therapist, I originally was working with children. I just really wanted to be an example of what’s possible when you decide to take your life into your own hands. 

When you decide to take responsibility for your life, when you know that there’s something better out there for you, when you have faith that who you are on the inside is good enough and is capable, and you can make your life what you want it to be. It doesn’t just have to be what someone else tells you it should be or as my mom likes to put it, not letting somebody put a script in your hands and tell you, “This is your role. This is what you have to do.” So I felt like becoming a therapist was the way that I could do that for me, and I could also do that for my clients. 

Originally, when I was in grad school, I had this vision of being a therapist. If you’ve ever been in therapy and before the pandemic years and years ago, having that kind of vibe of there’s the waiting room, and it’s cozy, and there’s magazines, and maybe there’s a candle, or there’s an essential oil diffuser, there’s tissues, there’s comfortable chairs and pillows, and you have this really cozy atmosphere of the waiting room, and the therapy office, and all the plants, and all these things, right? 

That was very romanticized in my mind of like, “Oh, I really want to have an office. I want it to be this really cozy space where I get to hold space for people.” I really love creating spaces for people. Part of my work and my training included work with children, and I got training in sand tray therapy, play therapy, and these other experiential modalities. That was something that really fed my soul because I loved watching the kids make their own safe spaces in the sand as part of this therapy. Maybe I’ll go into that in another episode, I’m not going to go so far into that today. 

But it’s just like the type of work I like to do with people is creating that warmth, and that safety, and that container of therapy, right? Of course, now we’re in 2021, my vision is a little bit different, but that’s what it was back in 2010, 11, 12. But as you know, things tend to work out differently than we expect, and oftentimes, better than we can even imagine. That has been a really interesting experience, a really fun experience over the last couple of years, is watching my vision kind of evolve and change and watching how I work with people change and grow. 

Of course, there’s even more still coming. I have dreams that are in the works currently. I’ll definitely be expanding on that more as we go. But that was where I started my dreams of all of this. I remember sitting in a classroom and learning about this man named Dr. Bruce Perry and his work in psychology with children. So he is very famous. You might have seen him. He’s been on Oprah. He’s written many books. He’s also in the true-crime world, not by his own choice. He was married to somebody who was a victim of a pretty famous crime. That’s for also another podcast. 

I learned about this theory that he helped to develop, which is called the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics™. Dr. Bruce Perry is a child psychologist. He’s an expert in child development, the effects of trauma on brain development in children, neuroscience. This is a field that is, even since I learned about this originally, 10, 11 years ago, it’s exploded, right? But when I learned about this, everything started clicking into place. Even on my resume, you know at the top of your resume, where it’s “professional mission.” 

Mine was really being passionate about understanding the effects of trauma on children’s developing brains and bodies. I’m going to go into that a little bit here because I just think it’s so important. It’s so valuable. It’s something that changed my life when I heard about it. When I share this with my clients, I see light bulbs going off and they’re like, “Oh, okay, so this significant event happened at this age; this explains a lot.” So I just want to unpack this a little bit with you right now. 

The Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics™ very much focuses on the developing nervous system of fetuses, and infants, and children. If you can imagine the brain and the brain stem, it actually develops from the bottom up. So the brain stem and even below that is the spine and the spinal cord, that part of the nervous system starts developing 16 days after conception. This part of your nervous system, your brain stem, it controls your heart rate, your breathing, your body temperature, your blood pressure. So very fundamental, important, completely out of our conscious awareness, we don’t think to control this part of ourselves. This just automatically happens. 

Moving up to the next part of the brain. Going from the bottom up, if you picture the part of the brain that is connected to the spine. This is called the diencephalon cerebellum. Or another way to put it is the midbrain. This controls coordination and movement. So picturing a baby learning to grasp, roll over, crawl, and even standing up, taking steps. So you could also picture a toddler running and playing. This part of the brain really controls balance. It also controls sleep, our ability to fall asleep, stay asleep. It controls the appetite and the ability to recognize whether you’re full or you’re satisfied. It also controls, like I said, motor regulation. So balance. 

Moving up to the next part of the brain is the limbic system. This is young children between the ages of 3 and even up to 12. This is our social and emotional skills. This is around emotional reactivity, even our attachment to people, that concept of closeness, the ability to read people’s facial expressions, as well as sexual behavior and urges and things like that. The limbic system is still even developing up into adulthood, our mirror neurons, our ability to pick up social cues and learn things. But they really start coming online in school-aged children. 

Then, going up to the top. The last part of brain development, this is the neocortex, which controls concrete thought, abstract thought, advanced thinking, problem-solving. This part of the brain is not fully developed until our mid-20s. Another exciting thing about that is neuroplasticity. Our brain can always change. This theory, this approach to therapy, especially with children, is what’s so vital to me in working with people that have experienced trauma. 

I think that trauma-informed training and real understanding and education around what is going on in the body and in the brain of developing children and how that has effects on people as they grow older because this is really biological, right? This is where “The Body Keeps the Score” comes from, where that saying comes from. I know everybody’s read that book and is really passionate about that. But this is what it means. 

From this theory and the work that Bruce Perry has done, is you see, with children that have experienced trauma along these different parts of brain development, there are literal pins in those parts of the nervous system. If you experience trauma in utero or as an infant, that affects how the rest of the system from there on develops. So that’s where the body is keeping the score. Your nervous system is literally changing the way that it is developing on a chemical biological level. 

While yes, we can heal from our trauma, and that’s really the work that Dr. Bruce Perry has put in place, there are interventions you can do to help heal. But that’s why this is so much more beyond mindset. There’s actually physical ramifications on the physical body, as well as in the subconscious mind. 

When we picture the mind as an iceberg, that top 5% is our conscious mind. Then, the bottom 95% is our unconscious mind. All the trauma that happened as a child, and especially as an infant, and as a very young child is all in that 95%. It really helps write the program that we’re seeing in our life. Like it’s the type of world we expect to see, is largely decided by those really formative experiences.

This isn’t just about deciding to change. This isn’t about thinking, “Oh, I have this problem and I’m just going to think my way through it.” We need to bring the body into work, right? We need to bring a level of gentleness, and a level of understanding, and a level of compassion to our work. Because the choices that we make are more often than not very much caused by this unconscious process that’s happening that is beyond our ability to just think through it. We have to really work with the body. 

As an example, I worked in a school for a few years. I also worked doing intensive in-home counseling for at-risk youth and was certainly using this approach in my work in those locations. If you think back to what you needed as an infant, what infants need, what one-year-olds, two-year-olds need, they need to be regulated. We need co-regulation, right? Like, rocking them, breathing with them. This was something that was applied to children 6, 7, 8, 9, right? Because they are brought all the way back to when they’re triggered. 

When something has happened, they’re brought all the way back to that where that pin is in their nervous system, and they can’t regulate themselves. They need help regulating. So rocking them, or passing a ball back and forth, maybe dancing, maybe deep breathing, mindfulness and things like that, that’s going to help with time, and with intention, and with teaching them that this is going to help heal what’s going on underneath the surface. 

That stuck energy can move, and you can, eventually, rewrite how your nervous system interacts. But it needs to come with the knowledge and the training and knowing how to do that, right? This is what’s really exciting about the brain is neuroplasticity. We can change. We can learn. We can grow. We can become more of who we’re meant to be and not a reflection of the trauma that we’ve experienced, right? 

This brought so much, so much light to me at age 24. Like I’m sitting in the classroom, and for so long, I’ve always wondered, “Why am I the way that I am? Why do I do this? Why do I act like this?” Like I was explaining earlier in the episode, pushing people away? “Why is it so hard for me to have these close relationships?” This was all clicking and making sense. Because when you think about when significant traumas happen, there was a pin stuck there. 

So it’s just been really helpful, I think, for me, in my own personal life, to unlearn this way of being and to understand that I can be more of myself when I acknowledge the trauma that I’ve experienced, when I give myself permission to take up that space and to see, “Okay, this is why I am like this and this is what happened,” I can be really honest with myself about what happened and I can now choose to move forward and to be my true authentic self through that. 

One really important thing that helped me to bring this out of theory and out of intellectual understanding and into actual healing has been a mindfulness practice. In 2016 is when I really started practicing mindfulness in a more serious way. I was learning through an organization called Mindful Schools. I was being trained through that because I wanted to bring it into the school I was working in. A big part of the first module of their training is, if you want to teach mindfulness to kids, you have to embody mindfulness. 

You have to be mindful and practice mindfulness. That was something huge in my life that helped me to really slow down, and be in my body, and be in my experiences, and acknowledge, “Who am I? How did I get here?  Who do I want to be going forward?” and being able to face myself and saying, “I actually really want to be myself.” For so long, it’s been all these layers of conditioning on me that made me feel unworthy to be who I truly am. So mindfulness helped me face myself in a really authentic, honest way. 

Even up to today, so it’s 2021. In January of 2020, I stopped drinking, and so much more has come to light from that experience and so much more of my conditioning has flooded to the surface. I’m able to unpack my trauma. I’m able to look at my patterns. I’ve been able to really heal a lot of what I had been putting on top of myself for all those years in response to my trauma. 

As we get deeper into all of this healing, talking about what can be done to really be your true, authentic self—I’m definitely going to put out an episode on being sober because that has been something, for me at least, that has been probably the most significant thing that I could do for myself on that journey. Just wanting to acknowledge that accountability for harm is so needed, and generational trauma is really real. 

We can’t point to one specific person and say everything is this person’s fault. Yes, there needs to be accountability for when someone inflicts harm, but like I said at the beginning of this episode, I believe that when people know better, they do better. Knowing isn’t just on an intellectual level. It’s on a learned level. It’s on the level of “I feel this in my body. I am embodying the version of me that knows better and is doing better.” Right? So it’s about deciding to be the one who chooses not to perpetuate these patterns on future generations. 

Teaching people who are waking up, how to take ownership of these patterns and putting an end to it is my life’s work. I love working with people that are awake, and they’re looking at their stuff, and they’re looking at their own patterns and their own behaviors and saying, “I’m done. I’m not doing this anymore.” That is something I’m so passionate about. I think it’s really important to… Yeah, we don’t let people that have hurt us have access to us. But we also don’t need to hold on to the anger around that forever. 

Forgiveness has been huge medicine for me. You can forgive people and still not let them in your life. I think that is a completely acceptable way to approach the healing process. There’s this level of, yes, people need accountability for what they’ve done. But I don’t think people wake up in the morning and choose, “I’m going to be a terrible parent. I’m going to be a terrible sibling. I’m going to be a terrible coworker. I’m going to be a terrible president,” whatever it is. 

These are all such subconscious and unconscious patterns that people aren’t willing to look at yet. I want to live in a world where we hold out hope that people want to have self-knowledge and they want to take ownership of their patterns. Those are the kinds of people that I love working with. Sometimes, this desire in me and this vision I have of the world that I want to live in, it sometimes puts me at odds with therapy. 

Therapy isn’t so much about results, necessarily. There’s not pressure to have any kind of results to be this new embodied version of yourself that’s actually your authentic self that you’re returning home to, right? But therapy, it’s a place to process what has happened that you’ve never been able to tell anybody before. It’s a safe space to talk through your life experiences and to be seen, heard, and validated. But in the work that I do, sometimes, it’s also about challenging my clients to expand, to learn, to grow, to try things differently, to do something new. 

That sometimes puts me at odds with my mission as a therapist, right? But the way that I bring that together is that I really use our time, as a therapist, to work through what’s currently happening in your life but also seeing how your past experiences may have shaped the circumstances or may have shaped your behavior that then led to the life that you’re living now. So then, how can you embody who you truly want to be now so that the future is more of your conscious choice? That’s been really exciting. 

That is what I’ve got today for my first episode. I’m really excited to share this with you. I hope that you learned something. I would definitely love to hear from you. If you did learn something from this episode, if this sparked any kind of questions, or aha moments, or lightbulb moments, I would just love to hear that. Feel free to reach out to me. My Instagram should be linked in the show notes. That’s really where I like to hang out. 

Thank you so much for listening today, listening to my story, how I came to become a therapist, and now, working with people on these kinds of past traumas and how that is shaping who they are today, and this model, the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics™, by Dr. Bruce Perry that really changed my life and validated so much of what I’ve been through, and I hope that it helped you as well. I will look forward to seeing you in the next episode, and I will talk to you soon.