May 20, 2024 • 55 mins
“You can’t be present and dissociated at the same time.”
These wise words from co-host Jennifer Wallace encompasses why this topic is so important to explore. Presence is the truth of our emotions and our reality, because we cannot heal what we do not feel. Being present with our emotions, and feeling them in our body, allows us to truly understand and heal our nervous system in ways that dissociating from the body cannot.
This is a powerful conversation highlighting what goes on in the brain and nervous system when we dissociate, and how this protective mechanism can become maladaptive when its original function no longer serves us. There is a way to overcome dissociation and authentically feel emotions in the body to truly heal.
In this episode, Elisabeth Kristoff and Jennifer Wallace deep dive into dissociation and its characteristics. The discussion begins with defining what dissociation is and how it is learned at an early age as a protective mechanism, followed by unraveling how dissociation shows up in the brain, specifically which brain structures are involved in disassociation, as well as the connection between the vagus nerve and the interoceptive system as it pertains to dissociation.
It’s not enough to just understand these concepts intellectually, the real healing happens when we can experience them, which means feeling them in our bodies. That’s where Neurosomatic Intelligence Coaching comes in, where we teach you the tools you need to heal the whole self, and move out of dissociation and into the body in a safe way.
Tune in for this and more!
Topics discussed in this episode:
-
Definition of dissociation
-
How dissociation is on a spectrum
-
The protective aspects of dissociation
-
How dissociation gets wired in the brain from an early age
-
The function of the thalamus and how it’s related to dissociation
-
The deep connection between the vagus nerve and the interoceptive system
-
How the brain makes predictions based on our past experiences
-
The possibility to train in new protective skills that are not maladaptive
-
Knowing about the nervous system is not the same as experiencing it
-
Spiritual bypassing and dissociation
-
The importance of presence in understanding the truth of emotions
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Trauma Rewired podcast is intended to educate and inform but does not constitute medical, psychological or other professional advice or services. Always consult a qualified medical professional about your specific circumstances before making any decisions based on what you hear.
We share our experiences, explore trauma, physical reactions, mental health and disease.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:05):
Today, we are diving into a big topic,
dissociation, which is not actually one of the five
distinguishing characteristics of CPTS, originally
defined by, Pete Walker. But, I really feel like it should be
because so many people with complex trauma have
the experience of dissociating in big ways and
(00:26):
small ways. It's one of
everybody's favorite topics to discuss on here. So! I'm
really excited because today we're going to take a deep dive into understanding what's
going on in the brain and the nervous system so that people have a
better awareness of what's happening inside
of themselves. It's always fun to dive deep into this
(00:48):
topic. Welcome to, Trauma Rewired, the podcast
that teaches you about your nervous system, how trauma lives in the body, and what
you can do to heal. I'm your co host, Elizabeth Christof, and I'm the founder
of Brainbase.com, an online membership where we train the
nervous system for resilience, behavior change and trauma re-patterning.
I'm also the founder of the, Neurosomatic Intelligence Coaching
(01:11):
Certification. And, I'm your co host, Jennifer
Wallace. I'm a neurosematic psychedelic preparation and integration
guide, bridging the powerful modalities of your
unique nervous system and the sacred spaces
of peak somatic experiences. I'm also an educator for
the Neurosomatic Intelligence Coaching Certification and we really hope you
(01:33):
enjoy this re-exploration o,f dissociation.
Elizabeth mentioned, we often hear from you about
how much you like to talk and hear about more about dissociation.
We thought it was really important to come back on a year or
so later to like we did with the CPTS series,
(01:54):
like just getting a little bit more altitude on it and having our own experiences
and working with clients for just that more time.
So, let's start with defining, dissociation.
Dissociation, it's a phenomenon where a person experiences
a disconnection between different aspects of their
consciousness, identity, memory and perception.
(02:15):
It's a protective response that is learned when it's
too much to stay in our bodies. It's a response that
often gets patterned in development and it continues to affect people
as the triggers get repeated, activating a neurotag, which
we're going to get into a little bit later. It's really important to understand
where and what's happening during
(02:37):
dissociation, why it's happening, and how we can start to heal
it. You can't be present and be dissociated at the
same time. We can't be embodied and you can't learn and grow
to. Into a life that you really desire and into
a way that you desire of being. If you experience
chronic dissociation.
(02:59):
There are a lot of different areas of our
brain function and our nervous system that are affected by dissociation. So
it really, first and foremost, it affects our consciousness. It's this
feeling of being detached from reality, as if
daydreaming or being really intensely focused. It might even be as
small as, like I drove somewhere, and I don't even remember
(03:21):
driving there, how I got there, or having a conversation with someone.
Maybe, it's a little bit
activating.You may feel even
almost a little bit out of body and you can't articulate your thoughts.
Late,r that memory is really fuzzy. It also
impacts our identity. Losing a connection to our
(03:41):
sense of self. That can be our internal body sensations,
our body mapping, and our proprioceptive awareness.
The parts of our brain that
carry our identity can get fragmented and
disconnected. It affects our memory. We could experience
gaps in our memory or forgetting certain periods of
(04:03):
time. We talk a lot on here about large chunks
childhood that you just don't remember. You only remember
because people tell you stories and you look
at pictures. But the actual
memory of the experience is just not
there. Then, it affects our self awareness
(04:25):
and our awareness of our surroundings. It can even be like
feeling like the world is unreal and not able to
orient to our environment because we're not able to take in
all of that sensory stimulus.
I think you just highlighted some of the various ways that this does live on
(04:45):
a
spectrum.Daydreaming.
..Daydreaming isn't always a bad thing. Daydreaming can be a really positive experience
in dissociation. One time, I had a client who
would find herself actively participating in
daydreaming as a form of dissociation, as she
was healing her dissociation, because it was a way for her to recognize
(05:08):
cognitively, that she was dissociating.
That led her into deeper exploration of more
of the emotional context or maybe some of the relational conversations,
how she would start to check out. So that was like a kind
of familiar pathway. We do talk about the spectrum and dissociation
now could be just moments of time, hours,
(05:30):
as I've gotten so far ahead of it, where in my past with
complex trauma. It's wiriring - it was
months, it was days, it was years. It was literally, decades
of my life that I could not remember. Particularly, I've
used the example in here of my childhood bedroom.
I was there. That still, only comes back in pieces to me,
(05:52):
which I think really speaks to the daily
nervous system training practice, the deeper exploration
of the emotional, the regular. The emotional regulation
of my body. Then I start to get more of these memories back and being
like, oh, yeah, I had this poster or I
had this little album or this cassette tape.
(06:13):
I remember dancing in here and all my walls were pink
at one time. It's really fascinating to heal
through dissociation because you will get chunks
of memory back - or moments
of memories. One other thing that
you mentioned, is that idea of not being able
(06:36):
to ground into the way that you feel inside your body.
Usually, well, often we really
do see this a lot because of our clientele. We don't ask
people, "How do you feel?", because that's
really threatening. It's a really threatening
question because oftentime,s people can describe their thoughts.
(06:57):
You can describe intellectual ideas and maybe
even think in metaphors, but not
in physical sensations. hen you lack the awareness
of how to identify your physical sensations, that's dissociation. Absolutely. That
spectrum is
so real. I think so many people
(07:19):
think of it and they hear the word, dissociation and it's, Dissociative Identity Disorder. Or
really splitting off and fragmenting. Bu,t we all
do it to some extent. It's exactly the
reason why when we're starting to work with someone, it can be almost impossible
for them to feel their internal sensations because they have
that well worn path of dissociation. I disconnect from
(07:42):
my body a lot. My body map when I'm
dissociating. I'll notice myself starting to do a lot of body checking, like
touching my body and trying to, at a subconscious level, start to
map out, like, where am I? What do
I feel like? I'll touch my hips and my stomach. This reflexive,
subconscious thing that I have developed that lets me
(08:04):
know, okay, I'm moving a little bit into dissociation now. You
also mentioned that it's protective
and that is really important to look
at. It's a reflexive, protective response
that happens in our nervous system when we're overwhelmed
by stimulus. There's a lot of
(08:25):
reasons why, especially in childhood during development, the stimulus
of an extreme situation or just the
chronic stress of, you know, a bunch
of, "little t" traumas. An environment that's not meeting your needs would lead your system
to have to check out, because the capacity is really
limited. When that happens in development, it can
(08:48):
become a well worn path, a protective response that our
brain and our nervous system go to when we're experiencing stress
or threat. That could be social stress or emotional
stress. Emotions comes up and we start
to dissociate physical stress.
What will happen, the more we go down that path,
(09:09):
the faster and easier we go down that path,
because what we do, we get better at. So we, we can find that
over time, we need less and less stimulus from our
environment, from social situations for that reaction
to occur. Also, as
we've moved into that path more frequently, there's a lot of areas of our brain
(09:31):
and our nervous system that start to under function
or become hypersensitive. That will
lead our system to be shaped in a way where
dissociation becomes a more frequently
occurring output.
It really is such a
(09:54):
fascinating protective response to
explore because it can become chronic.
The thing, too, is that you could
have been rewarded by your level of dissociation, by this
way that you've learned how to protect and to survive as you move
through your life. Later on in life, you have. What it
(10:15):
does, is it allows you to push through. It allows you to
push past your physical needs for rest, for
nourishment, for play. It gives you this
ability to perform at really high levels
under stress. But, if it gets unaddressed, then it
will lead to more protective outputs that are going to come
(10:38):
through the threat bucket, and it will perpetuate the
self abandonment that we just spoke about last week and
many other aspects of complex trauma and its
distinguishing components. It's going to lead to
harmful
states in the
(10:58):
body - disease states, which we're going to get into later. But, you
know, with CPTS, if dissociation becomes chronic- and
it's okay to dissociate, sometimes it is going to happen,
particularly if this is your well worn response. But chronic dissociation
and disconnection from the body, it leads to health implications
and mental health issues, emotional
(11:20):
repression and memory issues, just like Elizabeth was just speaking
about. So, we're really going to get into now how
this protective response gets wired into the brain from an
early age, and that it is a skill that we learn
that is adaptive and protective.
(11:40):
I just want to touch really quickly on a really
important point you made there, that it can
sometimes be something that we start to think of as one
of our assets. I can handle a lot of stress. I can handle
a lot of pressure, because we don't actually
feel what's going on inside of our body. We're disconnected from
(12:03):
that, and that can definitely be rewarded. But, it can also lead
us to stay in environments and relationships
that are really dangerous to us long term,
because we're not getting that information from our body. We're not aware
of everything that's going on. So I might stay in a toxic
or abusive relationship at work, or
(12:25):
in an intimate relationship, or even friendships that are really
doing damage to me, to my insides, because
I'm not aware of that. Let's
dive a little bit into the neuro and what's going on in the brain. I
think one of the most important areas of the brain to
talk about is our thalamus. Our thalamus is this
(12:47):
complex little structure nestled in the
middle of your brain. It's kind of egg shaped, and it's a mass of
gray matter. It's really like your information relay
station. Almost all of our sensory input, except for smell.
Everything that's coming in from your body has to
pass through the thalamus. It takes in all of this information and
(13:09):
the thalamus directs it out to other areas of the brain.
The thalamus decides what makes it up to our higher order
thinking systems, our cerebral cortex, for processing
and interpretation
every sensory bit of information. And there's so
much sensory stimulus coming in all of the time.
(13:31):
Senses like taste or touch or
hearing or sight, all of this information comes in,
and then it goes to your thalamus. And there are specific
nucleus in your thalamus that are responsible for processing that
information and then transmitting it to the relevant areas of
your cerebral cortex, where you can then take that information
(13:53):
in, make sense of it. It also works with our motor
pathways, and it gives us information about our
movement, and it really helps us
to prioritize. We have all of this information
coming in. If we were aware of that cognitively, it
would completely overwhelm us. The thalamus
(14:15):
decides what deserves our attention, what gets to make it up
to our consciousness. The stuff that it's going to
prioritize is what it thinks is most important for our
survival, then that
shapes our experience of the world, our
conscious experience, because that information
(14:37):
is the information allowed to pass through. The
thalamus becomes our reality of our conscious
experience. Then, that affects our memory,
because it's also connected to structures in our limbic system that
regulate our emotional experience, the formation of our memories in
the hippocampus, and even, like pleasurable
(14:58):
sensations, sexual arousal, our ability to learn.
All of this is first processed through the thalamus.
The thalamus, as we like to say in NSI, it's the
gatekeeper, it's the bouncer of your brain. It
decides what comes in and where it goes.
It's the director. It's this
(15:22):
gatekeeper of sensory information. Sensory impulses
travel through nerve fibers from your body to the
thalamus, and then these specialized areas within the
thalamus, called nuclei, they process different sensory or
motor impulses. These nuclei then send the selected information
to the corresponding area of your cerebral cortex for
(15:43):
interpretation. That's just a little summary there
of your thalamus and how it's related to dissociation
is while the precise mechanisms remain
elusive, neuroimaging studies and disorders characterized by
high dissociation, such as depersonalization or
derealization disorder, dissociative identity
(16:05):
disorder, and the dissociative subtype of
PTSD, they have provided
valuable insights into brain alterations, possibly underlying
dissociation. There was
a research paper that came out in 1995 from, Crystal
and Colleagues, that proposed that the thalamus plays a crucial
(16:26):
role in dissociative states of altered consciousness.
Based on earlier research in post traumatic stress disorder.
I think as people have continued to do FMRIS,
it's just really clear that our
thalamus is
(16:49):
absolutely one of the critical components of
the brain to look at when we're thinking about dissociation.
That doesn't just have to do with our
senses of, my touch orsme ll, but
also my emotional reactions to that and the
other emotional signals that are happening inside of my
(17:12):
body, my interoceptive signals that are coming, that
felt sense of the world. Those signals also are coming up
and being processed through the thalamus before making it to
our conscious awareness. There again, there's that
interplay between the thalamus and our limbic system.
And that's then what creates the emotional
(17:33):
experience inside the body, those
physiological reactions of grief, of anger,
of shame and it's
determining a lot of how this different
stimulus creates emotions
inside of me. Remember here, we're always talking about that
(17:55):
the emotions are not just our affect, like, not just our feelings,
but the whole physiological response that happens in the
body. It's a
very important structure in understanding what's driving
dissociation. To hear you talk about its
connection to the limbic system, you can really see how based on the
(18:18):
information that comes through, you could get that dial turning
up or that dial turning way down into like
heavy hyper vigilance, maybe. Or like you said, some of
the, either the high hyper vigilance, it could also
totally shut you down into freeze and flop situations.
You know, when we're talking about the neuro of dissociation and how we
(18:40):
heal through the sensory inputs, we have to talk
about the vagus nerve and interoception. Vagus and
interoception are key aspects of the nervous system. In
the feeling and the knowing of what
is going in, going on in our bodies, those are the
two systems we're going to look at the most. So let's look at
(19:01):
interoception and depersonalization. First of all,
interoception is the brain's ability to accurately
interpret the signals coming from inside of the body, right? We
know the vagus nerve is that cranial nerve that leaves the
brain and touches all the organs. It touches all parts of our
bodies. 80% of the information gets
(19:24):
traveled up to the brain. Only
20% iscoming down from the brain. 80% of your vagus
nerve's job is to relay information back in.
That's interoception, and that's how these two
come together to work together. The vagus nerve and
the interoceptive system are deeply
(19:48):
connected. So, poor interoceptive
awareness can lead to a sense of depersonalization and
dissociation. Depersonalization involves feelings
that are detached from oneself, as if observing
yourself from the outside of your body. It can create
a sense of unreality and disconnection.
(20:09):
The vagus
nerve, which plays a critical role in interoception,
it contributes to these feelings by influencing our
bodily sensations and emotional states. The Vagus nerve
plays a major role also in your autonomic
nervous system. It has two main branches, the ventral
(20:30):
vagal, associated with safety and social
engagement, and then the dorsal vagal, associated with shutdown
and immobilization. When faced
with an overwhelming threat or trauma,
the dorsal vagal branch leads to total, complete shutdown.
This state of dissociation includes
(20:52):
feeling of numbness, overwhelm, and being disconnected
from the world. In extreme cases, the vagus
nerve can induce a feigned death response, whereas the
body appears lifeless and dissociated, potentially
as a survival mechanism. You
know, being dissociated is also going to contribute to
(21:14):
deficits in our interoceptive system. It's going to
get harder to hear those signals from the body and not only
hear them, but interpret them accurately.
That could come, like we're saying,
with an experience of an emotion or having our intuition
disrupted. Yeah,
(21:35):
definitely. The vagus nerve is so crucial
in relaying this information.
We say her,
a lot, if you don't use it, we lose it.
If we're constantly dissociating from the
signals inside of our body, that whole mechanism starts
(21:57):
to deteriorate and we have deficits
in that interceptive system. We're not getting clear,
accurate information from our body to our brain
about what's going on inside. Then, as
you were just saying, too, not only can we, can it become
really hard to feel those sensations. So, like, when you're talking to
(22:19):
a client and you say, like, how does that feel in your body? Or what
do you feel inside? Like you were just speaking about... It's nothing. I don't know.
They get totally overwhelmed because that connection's not there.
Also, when a system
doesn't have enough stimulus, in this case, because
of chronic dissociation, it can also become hypersensitive. Right?
(22:41):
Because it's every nerve wants stimulation.
It needs activation to stay healthy and
alive. When it's operating in this deficit
of interceptive stimuli, the nerves can actually become
very hypersensitive to try to pick up more information.
Stay healthy, stay active, stay alive. We become very
(23:03):
hypersensitive to those signals. Not everybody with
intraceptive issues feels numb or disconnected. You can
also feel too much into the
sensations and you can also have a very high level of
threat associated with those sensations.
For some people, when they feel what's going on inside of their body,
(23:24):
it's very activating. It moves them into a big sympathetic
response or maybe shuts them down. But there's a
big stress response that comes from feeling those signals
inside. We feel them a little bit too intensely and we become hyper
vigilant around them. That's why sometimes for
people, as they're trying to practice mindfulness or
(23:47):
develop a relationship with their body and start to have somatic practices, it's
too much initially to drop into
the body ask, "Do you feel your heartbeat? Do you feel your breath?" That's
going to be really stressful for them. They might want to externally orient,
you know, can you feel yourself being supported by the chair? Can you feel the
air around you? Can you even just look around the room and take in some
(24:09):
information from your eyes and use different types of sensory
input that aren't so stressful for someone
who's been in dissociation for so long? There's
also a huge component of the vagus nerve that helps
create our sense of safety. This idea of neuroception,
which is just our nervous system's automatic scanning
(24:31):
of the environment all the time, looking for
danger cues below the level of our conscious awareness. Again, it doesn't
have to be physical danger cues. It could be somebody's facial expression,
their vocal tone, all these different
things that we're reading all of the time. Our interceptive
system plays a really big role in
(24:54):
our neuroception, determining whether or not we're safe,
if we're in that more ventral vagal state of safety, or whether
we should move into one of our f responses, fight or flight, or whether
we should shut down completely or dissociate. And all
of that is how our brain interprets sensory
information. The dissociation
(25:15):
is the output of that interpretation
of
threat. That's really what it is,
coming from inside of the body.
Another component of, the neuro
of dissociation is the insular cortex.
(25:35):
The insular cortex is one of our
shining stars of, Trauma Rewired. The insular cortex is
a deep fold within our brain that plays
a crucial role in interoception - interoceptive processing.
The insular cortex is the
primary processing center for internal body feelings. It
(25:57):
receives signals related to our internal states, such
as hunger or thirst or pain. And then these signals
come from various resources from our body. The insular
cortex. It has functional connections with other
areas of the brain, including parts of the thalamus, relaying sensory information
(26:18):
throughout the brain. It's associated also to
the limbic system, associated with emotions and memories. Also,
it's connected to the amygdala, right? That part of our brain historically
known for its role in perceiving anger or
fear or threat in any way
(26:39):
and our introceptive system. We're
talking now about our vagus nerve, but also the insular cortex
and the parts of our brain that interpret that information coming
in. This is a predictive system, so it's
not responding actually in real time
to what's going on. It's predicting
(27:01):
ahead what your response is going to need to be based on the
information coming in. It's operating a little bit ahead of the present
moment. and our internal
sensations that we feel are coming from
those predictions within our interoceptive system.
Our brain makes predictions based
(27:23):
on our past experiences - our brain is
making these predictions all of the time about what the sensory
information means and then generating an output
ahead of what's really going on. If we
have a lot of experience with threat
and stress in social situations, in different
(27:45):
environments, then that's how our brain is going to interpret those
sensory signals and it's going to create those responses
inside of our body. These predictions may or may not be
accurate, but they're what drive our mood, our
feeling, the way we are inside and our insular
cortex really contributes to our
(28:07):
self awareness of these internal body states
and what that felt sense experience is.
Then, it takes those signals,
integrates them, relays them to other areas of
the brain and produces our emotions, our emotional
experience. It impacts our cognition, our
(28:28):
ability to stay in our higher order thinking systems or not,
and our identity, and sense of
self.
You may be getting into this podcast now,
thinking, what is the point of all of this? Why does
it even help for you to know all of this information?
(28:51):
You hear us say a lot on times," Where do we start?" It does start
with being able to take in information and start to maybe
think a little bit more broadly about
the way that life looks for all of us.
We talk about
every episode, conversation, we really
(29:13):
stress intentional stimulus training.
When we understand how our
body and brain work to take in and interpret
information. We know we dissociate because
the nervous system is interpreting too much threat and producing
the output of dissociation to keep from the system from
(29:34):
being overwhelmed, we can gradually train
these areas to feel safe with the stimulus that's
coming in. Over time, we won't dissociate as
frequently or maybe as severely.
Initially, we train the brain and nervous system with stimulus and regulation
as the right dose. I want to say something for
(29:55):
a moment after I say severely. As I said in
the very beginning, when we talk about the spectrum of dissociation, it's
no longer means losing time in months and days, in
years and in decades. That looks now more like hours of
time. The severity has decreased
with time, because of the time I
(30:18):
put into my daily intentional training. My sensory
input systems getting that accurate amount of information from the
vagus nerve and from the interoceptive system, you know, particularly.
We intentionally train the brain and nervous system
with stimulus and regulation at the right dose so that
it adapts to it safely - adapts to the stimulation
(30:39):
safely.
The next cohort of, Neurosomatic Intelligence is
enrolling now. If you're a coach, therapist, or
healer and you want to bring these tools and this framework into the good
work that you're doing to create bigger, deeper, more lasting
change for your clients and to help your own nervous system
(31:02):
prevent burnout, have greater capacity, and be able to
expand your life in many different directions, then I would love
to talk with you about the program. We are taking discovery calls now.
You can book that at, neurosomaticintelligence.com.
I
think we are diving a little bit deeper. It's a high level
(31:25):
overview of what's going on in your brain. Again, everybody's very
unique and different, but we are diving
a little bit more into the neuro. It's kind of like
a, "Why?" But, I think it helps to connect the
dots a little bit that our experiences
shape these areas of the brain, these
(31:47):
nerves, because, again, we are neuroplastic
beings and our nervous system is like constantly, constantly,
constantly adapting to the environment,
to the situations that we're into, the social experiences that we have.
All these experiences that we've had over our life,
they change how our thalamus interprets information. They
(32:09):
change how our vagus nerve functions, how it relays information to
the brain, and then how our brain interprets that information.
That's real. That
experience of, I'm moving into dissociation all the time. There's
a reason for that, because your system is adaptive,
and that was the adaptation that helped you
(32:31):
survive and not become overwhelmed. It's
also changed how you are now and patterned you in this certain
way, so one of the
really important takeaways from this is that we're neuroplastic and changing
all of the time. When we understand that, we can
start to intentionally train our system, whether that's,
(32:53):
in social situations and social stimulus that's coming in,
environmental, the internal sensations, we can help
our brain by communicating with the nervous system in the
language that it understands, which is sensory inputs, to start to
create more safety with this stimulus coming in.
The brain can start to get that information in and
(33:15):
have an experience of feeling
safe with that information and not
going into dissociation not going down that well worn path
because the same threat load isn't there. When
we do that over and over and over again by using our
tools, we're carving out new pathways,
(33:37):
we're reshaping the nervous system in this new way. In that
way, it's really like we're training ourselves to be present because you
mentioned it's a skill - we've talked on here, especially in our
episodes with Matt, about everything is really a skill, whether you're
intentionally training it as a skill or not. Your immune
response, your social response, your emotional repression,
(33:59):
that's a skill that you've trained yourself over time.
If everything is a skill and every skill is
trainable, when we know how our nervous system
works and we know how to dose the interventions appropriately and we can
do that consistently, then we can start to train at new
skills that are still protecting us, but
(34:20):
differently with different outputs. That's right, because if
dissociation is this overwhelm of sensory stimulus coming
in and that being threatening, so it's easier to check out of the body.
Now, we're intentionally training the sensory inputs
to make that more safe.
You could do this with
mindfulness, but only to a particular degree.
(34:43):
That's only going to keep you from in a head up
space and that's not what we're talking about. We're
talking about direct sensory stimulation,
regulating around it and creating a new experience
physiologically. This is what we
do at, rewiretrial.com and why we encourage you to take advantage of
(35:05):
these free two weeks with us on the membership site so
your brain can now
re-organize the information that's coming in
so that it perceives information accurately.
Then, you don't lose that continuity of
time like that continuity of consciousness, that dissociation
(35:25):
really fragments. Yeah.
It's really important when we're talking about,
re-patterning the system to think
too, about, how important it i,s to get to know your own nervous
system and to be able to assess and reassess
what the right amount of stimulus is for you. What the
(35:46):
right amount of change and, and trying to
create a different experience is, because, remember, this is
a protective output and this is a well worn path.
If we overdose ourselves with
any kind of intervention, that could be like a somatic practice. It could be
a cognitive therapy session. It could be just trying
(36:08):
to cognitively push through and create behavior change, set
a boundary, whatever. If we're going at that
too much, too fast, just
not at the right speed for our nervous system.
We don't know how to assess and reassess how our nervous system
is responding. We're just going to keep pushing ourselves down that same
(36:30):
well worn pathway. It's happening subconsciously.
I'm going to be finding myself
in these states of dissociation and overwhelm
or a, " f - response." I can't
change that without also working with
the nervous system and without knowing what is the speed,
(36:51):
what's the dose, what's the amount that works for me to start to create
positive adaptation, a new experience.
When we're talking about healing, something like dissociation and most
aspects of complex trauma often come with slowing down a
little bit. That can be really scary. To come
into the body is going to require an aspect of
(37:12):
slowing down and we want to
be able to rely on the
information that's coming in from the body, from the vagus nerve, from the
anteroceptive system, and really being able to
cultivate that presence that makes life so
(37:33):
enjoyable. But also, too, we want to be working on,
like, the brain area processing, right? That's processing all of
this information. You know, it's
one of the things that we see a lot in dissociation.
One of the aspects of dissociation is an intellectual dissociation away from
the body - it's this concept and idea.
(37:56):
It's a way of living for people where you can stay in your
mind and avoid the body. It's like you can
intellectualize, you can know something, you can understand
intellectually the way the nervous system works for, say, or
like knowing that something. But knowing something isn't the
same thing as experiencing it somatically.
(38:17):
This happens a lot in
our realm, especially when we start working with one on one clients who are high
drivers, high performing women, very successful, and they've
learned, like we've talked about before, to just push through, override the
signals of the body, over train, overwork,
over perform. Those are levels of dissociation that
(38:39):
are usually rewarded in some way, even
by ourselves. We go to the gym, we overtrain, we overdo it, and then we
look at ourselves and we see, oh, this actually might be
what I want to look at or look like. I'm totally disconnected
from my body's signals, telling me that I'm in
pain, I'm tired, I can't hear myself. But
(39:01):
then cognitively, you just keep knowing that what you're doing is actually
working, working for your aesthetic
or maybe that overdrive at work is working for your
paycheck. Maybe that overdrive of dissociation in your
relationship is just keeping you safe in some way because you're too
scared to leave or you're too scared to share your voice
(39:23):
and your experience as to how this relationship is actually
keeping you hiding and in other protective mechanisms
apart from dissociation.
I think it's so important to stress,
that knowing how the nervous system works is
not the same thing as working with the nervous system. We're
(39:46):
giving you all of this information and it's important to start to connect the dots,
to start to understand how this happens, to know more about yourself, to see
your behavior differently with altitude, have more self
compassion. But in order to really make changes
in your emotional processing, in
cultivating that sense of safety inside, you actually have
(40:08):
to work with the nervous system.
You can't just understand that you
need to process your emotions. There's an
experience of that that has to happen.
Many people, get stuck in that first part of, like, let
me read all the books about somatics, let me
(40:30):
do this research, listen to this podcast. I
really want to encourage people to
work with a
somatic practitioner or work with us on, rewiretrial.com
or do something where you're actually getting the work.
I lived a lot of my life
(40:52):
up in my head understanding all of this. I relied on my intellect. I thought
if I could just figure it out, I could push through it, and there were
real health consequences to that. My behavior wasn't
actually changing. You know, I couldn't stop binge eating. I couldn't
stop getting into the harmful relationship patterns. I couldn't stop,
you know, panicking and not being able to rest until I
(41:15):
actually started working with the nervous system. What that looks like for
me now is as if something might happen. I
still get triggered. Just the other day, I was watching a
movie, and there was a scene that was really
reflective of my, one of my personal trauma
experiences.
Cognitively, I felt
(41:38):
fine. I was safe. I was in my house. Bu,t I started
to experience a little bit of pain between my shoulder blades. Then, that pain
started radiating down my arm and I got a little numbness.
And because I know what I know, I was like, okay,
this is a protective output of my nervous system. But, if I had just
stopped there with that awareness, I still might have gotten
(41:59):
pushed into the emotional flashback. Looking at, you know, my
partner through a lens of distrust, being really
shut down, experiencing brain fog. It would have just continued
to build. But instead, because I have the tools,
I got out m,y z vibe and I started doing some
regulation tools. I had to play around for a minute, maybe I started with
(42:21):
some camshafts, moving my body a little bit. Then, I tried some breathing but, that
wasn't working. Okay. I went to my vagus nerve. I did that.
All of a sudden the pain started to go away. I was like, this is
the stimulus my body needs. I know how to work with my nervous system. I
know how to recreate safety. And I actually have to stop in real
time, in real life and, and make
(42:43):
the space to do that work so that I don't go down the well
worn path and really create that change. Really beautiful example
of why you wouldn't want to intellectually
bypass this experience in your body. We're
also going to talk about spiritual bypassing and dissociation as a means of
dissociation. This is going to hit
(43:06):
our spiritual community a little bit differently here now. I
am one of you. I work in psychedelic spaces. One of the reasons
I strongly suggest preparation
of the nervous system before going into these peak somatic experiences
is because of, dissociation. When you are working in
modalities that are incredibly
(43:27):
embodying medicines - plants that are very embodying, and
you have someone who's chronically dissociated, this experience
of a medicine ceremony could be really frightening.
On the back end and very challenging from a nervous system that is
not ready for an experience, like a medicine.
I really think about the most, when I
(43:50):
think of spiritual bypassing and dissociation, is meditation and astrology horoscopes.
So, we've heard this before with people who are really
great meditators. They can just leave their bodies and experience
a deeper consciousness, maybe
in that meditative state, yet still not understand
and be able to feel
(44:12):
the experience of their bodies. It's just easier
to check out. It is easier to go into an
altered state of consciousness. With something like astrology horoscopes,
it's seeking this external cognitive
framework of understanding
who you are based on the stars. It's like,
(44:34):
oh, I'm a Gemini, so I act like this, or, oh, that's my Capricorn moon
and I do this because of this. It's like your
nervous system has been recording every
experience that has ever happened to you and then patterned
the way that you are right here, right now.
What my two personalities were - actually four
(44:55):
personalities. Of my four, "f trauma" responses,
it
was more socially acceptable
to feel my fight and my freeze response from my community
and my friends because I was a Gemini.
That's
an unfair way
of you to live for yourself. I guess,
(45:18):
that's just the way I think about it. I think
there's great things about
achieving those higher levels of consciousness. Meditation is
great, and looking at different energy systems
can be really great
and a very interesting experience. But, it's important
(45:41):
not to use it to avoid also having
a connection with your body and understanding your reactions from
that level of the nervous system. I remember, like, not that
long ago, I was doing a teaching for another
membership to work with some of their coaches. I was teaching some
NSI tools, and we just dropped into the body for
(46:05):
a few moments to try to feel some internal sensations to
get an idea of, a somatic yes or no, in business. The response
from a lot of the people in there - it was a very spiritually
based, meditative program that was that they were really challenged.
I realized very quickly, "Oh, man!" Just
that 30 seconds exceeded minimum effective dose for these
(46:28):
people. One of the participants straight up said to me, I
love to meditate because I can leave my body, but as soon
as I start to feel the sensations inside, I want to run out
of the room. I get
that. I understand why it's threatening.
There's a real reason we
(46:50):
need to start making those sensations safe, so
we can have a different relationship with our body and
not always have to leave it to feel comfortable.
I think
too, when we're talking about emotional expression. We
cannot express and process our emotions if
(47:10):
we are disconnected from our bodily sensations, because they
are very physiological events. I'm going
to be in a high level of emotional repression or suppression
if I'm not connecting to my body. I have clients that
have behaviors they want to move out of-
maybe, obsessive compulsive behaviors or
(47:33):
pain, physical pain, binge
eating, all of
these things, that these behaviors are more repressive tools
to keep us from feeling the emotions. Until
we actually start to process those emotions and have the
experience in our body of being
(47:54):
with that grief, moving, that pain, those
behaviors aren't going to stop. As
much as we might cognitively know, I don't want
to do this behavior or maybe even I cognitively know I need to process my
emotions, but I don't actually get in there and do it. Then, we
aren't able to move out of that patterned repressive
(48:15):
behavior.
Then, the
opposite of dissociation is presence. If
dissociation is the easy, well worn pathway, then what we're really
trying to do is train for presence.
I was saying before, about relying on your own
(48:36):
experiences, when you start to come into your
body, you'll start questioning yourself, questioning those
realities that you're feeling and that you're sensing. And so
presence becomes kind of the threat
into the body. So back to that intentional nervous system training
practice that you want to cultivate each day is because
(49:00):
when you're present in your body, you will be experiencing
your world very, very differently and relationships will be experienced very differently.
We talk on here back to that daily nervous system
practices. What we're looking for is measurable experiences.
Experiences where you could walk away from and say, like,
I was here for all of that. I stayed in my body
(49:22):
for that conversation, or as I received that information from somebody
or from the world. That information is the sensory stimulus coming
in. The presence
now is going to
feel, I'm going to use that word, feel because you're
going to start experiencing sensations
(49:46):
in the body. Experiencing the world very differently.
Presence is so important for emotional expression
and being able to understand the truth of how you're
feeling emotionally, so that you might notice some
dissociative aspects and the disproportionate reactions that you're
having to something. I think, too,
(50:09):
in the emotional component of things is like understanding how
we are feeling inside, being able to discharge that emotion from
the body, because emotional dysregulation will dysregulate the full nervous
system, which is not new information for those of y'all
listening to this podcast.
I think presence is so
(50:31):
powerful because it allows us to feel
how powerful we really are. That can be very
scary for someone who's been used to hiding for so long.
Yeah, absolutely. There are so many reasons
to start to try to create presence
in your life. Another really important reason is,
(50:54):
as we're engaging in all of these different healing
activities, trying to create changes
in our physical health outputs and
outcomes, it's very
important that we're actually present for those
activities. We talked about this in the presence episode. We go
(51:15):
deeper into this, but there are studies that look at
what happens when we're doing different healing practices and the
impact that that has on our telomeres. Our telomeres, if you recall,
are little compound structures at the end of our chromosomes,
and they're what are often used as markers
of biological age, biological
(51:37):
health. Not my chronological age. People can
look at your telomeres to know your physical biological
age inside of your body and with different practices, like sauna
or meditation, that helps us have healthier
telomeres and reduces stress. But
there were also studies that found that
(51:59):
you don't experience the same effects if you're not actually
present in that activity. I think we talked about - let's say
you're sitting in the sauna, you're still stuck in this fight and
flight state, or you're still totally dissociated from your body or
whatever it is that's going on. That stress is
still there. I'm sitting in a sauna, but I'm having
(52:21):
the racing thoughts about everything. My heart rate is still going, the
stress chemicals are still going. So, as we engage in
all of these different activities for our health, if we're not present
for that, we're not getting the same benefits as if
we can actually be there embodied. We can't
be in two places at once. We can't reap the benefits of something
(52:44):
that we're doing, if we're not in the body. So presence, being
present is really important to creating the
change and for laying down these new pathways that
we're really talking about here.
That dissociation really wreaks havoc on
the internal sense of self. Absolutely.
(53:07):
When we're usiing our neurotools, you don't
get the same re patterning if you're not present with the
sensory stimulus, if you're not actually engaged in the activity in
a way that is going to help your nervous system lay those new pathways
down, myelinate the nerves, then you're just kind of
going through the motions and that the brain, the
(53:29):
nervous system, is not paying attention to
that in the same way that's going to really create the changes that
you're looking for. Of course, it's the same with
our relationships, too. We want to
be present in relationship as we're trying to re pattern our relational
responses and show up differently in
(53:51):
the world and have a different sense of safety in relationship with
other people. We can't
do that if we're also checked out of our body. Remember, our
nervous systems are always communicating with one another across
the social synapse at that subconscious level. So,
as I'm here talking to you, your nervous system is reading
(54:13):
mine. Even the listeners are reading my vocal tone, and
there's communication going on all the time.
That other nervous system can read
when we are dissociated, when we're not present and when we're
not checked out. Same with a little kid's nervous system.
If the parent is not actually present,
(54:35):
that has the same effects as
neglect, as abandonment, because the way that our nervous
systems interact, and so, you know,
how we, our ability to be attuned
and really show up for other people requires
a level of presence.
(55:00):
We talk about this lack of presence through our attachment
and so many of the conversations that we had through Season 3 - how this
level of dissociation in our primary caregiver creates an
insecure attachment for the child,
experiencing that lack of connection and that lack of
attunement in our own nervous systems without us having back to
(55:21):
cognitive ability in them in the mind. We don't have a
cognitive way to reframe it or to think about it. All of
that is being experienced in our bodies through the social
synapse. If dissociation is a skill
that we learn for adaptation, so is presence, and we can learn
that skill, too, and that's what we do@rewiretrial.com and we're there
(55:43):
five times a week. We've got classes from ten minutes to 45 minutes.
Emotional processing, neuro for all of the
sensory inputs, but particularly on here today, we've talked about
interoceptive system and the vagus nerve.
We really can't
encourage you enough to join us on site
(56:05):
and start changing and re-patterning the way you
are literally, wired. Change that predictive
thought. If the prediction is threat, let's start rewiring that
so that you're primed for connection, so you're primed for
thriving and not just surviving and getting through in the
world.
(56:27):
Right now, we're doing a whole series of classes
specifically related to the
outputs of CPTS, including
dissociation. You can pop on and
join us in these practices. These are the real things that we do
that our clients do to start to create change.
(56:48):
It's very easy to find them. We're on their live, and then there's a
whole huge on demand library where they're categorized under the CPTS
series. So, yes, please come join us after
this. We're going to be playing, we're going to re release some episodes from
Season 3 that are more foundational
information that you'll want to take in. Before we go into Season 4, we'll do
(57:11):
stress response and relationship and a lot of the ones that show
what's happening internally in our world with
connection to other people that are a little bit more on the neuroscience side.
So that as we move into Season 4 and we're really looking
at specific outputs of the nervous system that
people might experience in chronic health outcomes and chronic mental
(57:34):
health outcomes, there's a you have a good understanding
of what's going on inside. Thank you guys so much
for revisiting this whole CPTS series with us
and stay in touch while we're taking this little
break to dive into some of the research and get ready for season four. You
can find us on the socials. We love to hear from you
(57:55):
and we're really excited about Season 4, so stay
tuned. Thank you all so much.
This podcast is for informational and educational purposes
only and should not be considered medical or psychological advice.
We often discuss lived experiences through traumatic events
(58:19):
and sensitive topics that deal with complex developmental and
systemic trauma that may be unsettling for some listeners.
This podcast is not intended to replace professional medical
advice. If you are in the United States and you or someone you know
is struggling with their mental health and is in immediate danger, please call
911. For specific services relating to mental health,
(58:40):
please see the full disclaimer in the show notes.
Today, we are diving into a big topic,
dissociation, which is not actually one of the five
distinguishing characteristics of CPTS, originally
defined by, Pete Walker. But, I really feel like it should be
because so many people with complex trauma have
the experience of dissociating in big ways and
(00:26):
small ways. It's one of
everybody's favorite topics to discuss on here. So! I'm
really excited because today we're going to take a deep dive into understanding what's
going on in the brain and the nervous system so that people have a
better awareness of what's happening inside
of themselves. It's always fun to dive deep into this
(00:48):
topic. Welcome to, Trauma Rewired, the podcast
that teaches you about your nervous system, how trauma lives in the body, and what
you can do to heal. I'm your co host, Elizabeth Christof, and I'm the founder
of Brainbase.com, an online membership where we train the
nervous system for resilience, behavior change and trauma re-patterning.
I'm also the founder of the, Neurosomatic Intelligence Coaching
(01:11):
Certification. And, I'm your co host, Jennifer
Wallace. I'm a neurosematic psychedelic preparation and integration
guide, bridging the powerful modalities of your
unique nervous system and the sacred spaces
of peak somatic experiences. I'm also an educator for
the Neurosomatic Intelligence Coaching Certification and we really hope you
(01:33):
enjoy this re-exploration o,f dissociation.
Elizabeth mentioned, we often hear from you about
how much you like to talk and hear about more about dissociation.
We thought it was really important to come back on a year or
so later to like we did with the CPTS series,
(01:54):
like just getting a little bit more altitude on it and having our own experiences
and working with clients for just that more time.
So, let's start with defining, dissociation.
Dissociation, it's a phenomenon where a person experiences
a disconnection between different aspects of their
consciousness, identity, memory and perception.
(02:15):
It's a protective response that is learned when it's
too much to stay in our bodies. It's a response that
often gets patterned in development and it continues to affect people
as the triggers get repeated, activating a neurotag, which
we're going to get into a little bit later. It's really important to understand
where and what's happening during
(02:37):
dissociation, why it's happening, and how we can start to heal
it. You can't be present and be dissociated at the
same time. We can't be embodied and you can't learn and grow
to. Into a life that you really desire and into
a way that you desire of being. If you experience
chronic dissociation.
(02:59):
There are a lot of different areas of our
brain function and our nervous system that are affected by dissociation. So
it really, first and foremost, it affects our consciousness. It's this
feeling of being detached from reality, as if
daydreaming or being really intensely focused. It might even be as
small as, like I drove somewhere, and I don't even remember
(03:21):
driving there, how I got there, or having a conversation with someone.
Maybe, it's a little bit
activating.You may feel even
almost a little bit out of body and you can't articulate your thoughts.
Late,r that memory is really fuzzy. It also
impacts our identity. Losing a connection to our
(03:41):
sense of self. That can be our internal body sensations,
our body mapping, and our proprioceptive awareness.
The parts of our brain that
carry our identity can get fragmented and
disconnected. It affects our memory. We could experience
gaps in our memory or forgetting certain periods of
(04:03):
time. We talk a lot on here about large chunks
childhood that you just don't remember. You only remember
because people tell you stories and you look
at pictures. But the actual
memory of the experience is just not
there. Then, it affects our self awareness
(04:25):
and our awareness of our surroundings. It can even be like
feeling like the world is unreal and not able to
orient to our environment because we're not able to take in
all of that sensory stimulus.
I think you just highlighted some of the various ways that this does live on
(04:45):
a
spectrum.Daydreaming.
..Daydreaming isn't always a bad thing. Daydreaming can be a really positive experience
in dissociation. One time, I had a client who
would find herself actively participating in
daydreaming as a form of dissociation, as she
was healing her dissociation, because it was a way for her to recognize
(05:08):
cognitively, that she was dissociating.
That led her into deeper exploration of more
of the emotional context or maybe some of the relational conversations,
how she would start to check out. So that was like a kind
of familiar pathway. We do talk about the spectrum and dissociation
now could be just moments of time, hours,
(05:30):
as I've gotten so far ahead of it, where in my past with
complex trauma. It's wiriring - it was
months, it was days, it was years. It was literally, decades
of my life that I could not remember. Particularly, I've
used the example in here of my childhood bedroom.
I was there. That still, only comes back in pieces to me,
(05:52):
which I think really speaks to the daily
nervous system training practice, the deeper exploration
of the emotional, the regular. The emotional regulation
of my body. Then I start to get more of these memories back and being
like, oh, yeah, I had this poster or I
had this little album or this cassette tape.
(06:13):
I remember dancing in here and all my walls were pink
at one time. It's really fascinating to heal
through dissociation because you will get chunks
of memory back - or moments
of memories. One other thing that
you mentioned, is that idea of not being able
(06:36):
to ground into the way that you feel inside your body.
Usually, well, often we really
do see this a lot because of our clientele. We don't ask
people, "How do you feel?", because that's
really threatening. It's a really threatening
question because oftentime,s people can describe their thoughts.
(06:57):
You can describe intellectual ideas and maybe
even think in metaphors, but not
in physical sensations. hen you lack the awareness
of how to identify your physical sensations, that's dissociation. Absolutely. That
spectrum is
so real. I think so many people
(07:19):
think of it and they hear the word, dissociation and it's, Dissociative Identity Disorder. Or
really splitting off and fragmenting. Bu,t we all
do it to some extent. It's exactly the
reason why when we're starting to work with someone, it can be almost impossible
for them to feel their internal sensations because they have
that well worn path of dissociation. I disconnect from
(07:42):
my body a lot. My body map when I'm
dissociating. I'll notice myself starting to do a lot of body checking, like
touching my body and trying to, at a subconscious level, start to
map out, like, where am I? What do
I feel like? I'll touch my hips and my stomach. This reflexive,
subconscious thing that I have developed that lets me
(08:04):
know, okay, I'm moving a little bit into dissociation now. You
also mentioned that it's protective
and that is really important to look
at. It's a reflexive, protective response
that happens in our nervous system when we're overwhelmed
by stimulus. There's a lot of
(08:25):
reasons why, especially in childhood during development, the stimulus
of an extreme situation or just the
chronic stress of, you know, a bunch
of, "little t" traumas. An environment that's not meeting your needs would lead your system
to have to check out, because the capacity is really
limited. When that happens in development, it can
(08:48):
become a well worn path, a protective response that our
brain and our nervous system go to when we're experiencing stress
or threat. That could be social stress or emotional
stress. Emotions comes up and we start
to dissociate physical stress.
What will happen, the more we go down that path,
(09:09):
the faster and easier we go down that path,
because what we do, we get better at. So we, we can find that
over time, we need less and less stimulus from our
environment, from social situations for that reaction
to occur. Also, as
we've moved into that path more frequently, there's a lot of areas of our brain
(09:31):
and our nervous system that start to under function
or become hypersensitive. That will
lead our system to be shaped in a way where
dissociation becomes a more frequently
occurring output.
It really is such a
(09:54):
fascinating protective response to
explore because it can become chronic.
The thing, too, is that you could
have been rewarded by your level of dissociation, by this
way that you've learned how to protect and to survive as you move
through your life. Later on in life, you have. What it
(10:15):
does, is it allows you to push through. It allows you to
push past your physical needs for rest, for
nourishment, for play. It gives you this
ability to perform at really high levels
under stress. But, if it gets unaddressed, then it
will lead to more protective outputs that are going to come
(10:38):
through the threat bucket, and it will perpetuate the
self abandonment that we just spoke about last week and
many other aspects of complex trauma and its
distinguishing components. It's going to lead to
harmful
states in the
(10:58):
body - disease states, which we're going to get into later. But, you
know, with CPTS, if dissociation becomes chronic- and
it's okay to dissociate, sometimes it is going to happen,
particularly if this is your well worn response. But chronic dissociation
and disconnection from the body, it leads to health implications
and mental health issues, emotional
(11:20):
repression and memory issues, just like Elizabeth was just speaking
about. So, we're really going to get into now how
this protective response gets wired into the brain from an
early age, and that it is a skill that we learn
that is adaptive and protective.
(11:40):
I just want to touch really quickly on a really
important point you made there, that it can
sometimes be something that we start to think of as one
of our assets. I can handle a lot of stress. I can handle
a lot of pressure, because we don't actually
feel what's going on inside of our body. We're disconnected from
(12:03):
that, and that can definitely be rewarded. But, it can also lead
us to stay in environments and relationships
that are really dangerous to us long term,
because we're not getting that information from our body. We're not aware
of everything that's going on. So I might stay in a toxic
or abusive relationship at work, or
(12:25):
in an intimate relationship, or even friendships that are really
doing damage to me, to my insides, because
I'm not aware of that. Let's
dive a little bit into the neuro and what's going on in the brain. I
think one of the most important areas of the brain to
talk about is our thalamus. Our thalamus is this
(12:47):
complex little structure nestled in the
middle of your brain. It's kind of egg shaped, and it's a mass of
gray matter. It's really like your information relay
station. Almost all of our sensory input, except for smell.
Everything that's coming in from your body has to
pass through the thalamus. It takes in all of this information and
(13:09):
the thalamus directs it out to other areas of the brain.
The thalamus decides what makes it up to our higher order
thinking systems, our cerebral cortex, for processing
and interpretation
every sensory bit of information. And there's so
much sensory stimulus coming in all of the time.
(13:31):
Senses like taste or touch or
hearing or sight, all of this information comes in,
and then it goes to your thalamus. And there are specific
nucleus in your thalamus that are responsible for processing that
information and then transmitting it to the relevant areas of
your cerebral cortex, where you can then take that information
(13:53):
in, make sense of it. It also works with our motor
pathways, and it gives us information about our
movement, and it really helps us
to prioritize. We have all of this information
coming in. If we were aware of that cognitively, it
would completely overwhelm us. The thalamus
(14:15):
decides what deserves our attention, what gets to make it up
to our consciousness. The stuff that it's going to
prioritize is what it thinks is most important for our
survival, then that
shapes our experience of the world, our
conscious experience, because that information
(14:37):
is the information allowed to pass through. The
thalamus becomes our reality of our conscious
experience. Then, that affects our memory,
because it's also connected to structures in our limbic system that
regulate our emotional experience, the formation of our memories in
the hippocampus, and even, like pleasurable
(14:58):
sensations, sexual arousal, our ability to learn.
All of this is first processed through the thalamus.
The thalamus, as we like to say in NSI, it's the
gatekeeper, it's the bouncer of your brain. It
decides what comes in and where it goes.
It's the director. It's this
(15:22):
gatekeeper of sensory information. Sensory impulses
travel through nerve fibers from your body to the
thalamus, and then these specialized areas within the
thalamus, called nuclei, they process different sensory or
motor impulses. These nuclei then send the selected information
to the corresponding area of your cerebral cortex for
(15:43):
interpretation. That's just a little summary there
of your thalamus and how it's related to dissociation
is while the precise mechanisms remain
elusive, neuroimaging studies and disorders characterized by
high dissociation, such as depersonalization or
derealization disorder, dissociative identity
(16:05):
disorder, and the dissociative subtype of
PTSD, they have provided
valuable insights into brain alterations, possibly underlying
dissociation. There was
a research paper that came out in 1995 from, Crystal
and Colleagues, that proposed that the thalamus plays a crucial
(16:26):
role in dissociative states of altered consciousness.
Based on earlier research in post traumatic stress disorder.
I think as people have continued to do FMRIS,
it's just really clear that our
thalamus is
(16:49):
absolutely one of the critical components of
the brain to look at when we're thinking about dissociation.
That doesn't just have to do with our
senses of, my touch orsme ll, but
also my emotional reactions to that and the
other emotional signals that are happening inside of my
(17:12):
body, my interoceptive signals that are coming, that
felt sense of the world. Those signals also are coming up
and being processed through the thalamus before making it to
our conscious awareness. There again, there's that
interplay between the thalamus and our limbic system.
And that's then what creates the emotional
(17:33):
experience inside the body, those
physiological reactions of grief, of anger,
of shame and it's
determining a lot of how this different
stimulus creates emotions
inside of me. Remember here, we're always talking about that
(17:55):
the emotions are not just our affect, like, not just our feelings,
but the whole physiological response that happens in the
body. It's a
very important structure in understanding what's driving
dissociation. To hear you talk about its
connection to the limbic system, you can really see how based on the
(18:18):
information that comes through, you could get that dial turning
up or that dial turning way down into like
heavy hyper vigilance, maybe. Or like you said, some of
the, either the high hyper vigilance, it could also
totally shut you down into freeze and flop situations.
You know, when we're talking about the neuro of dissociation and how we
(18:40):
heal through the sensory inputs, we have to talk
about the vagus nerve and interoception. Vagus and
interoception are key aspects of the nervous system. In
the feeling and the knowing of what
is going in, going on in our bodies, those are the
two systems we're going to look at the most. So let's look at
(19:01):
interoception and depersonalization. First of all,
interoception is the brain's ability to accurately
interpret the signals coming from inside of the body, right? We
know the vagus nerve is that cranial nerve that leaves the
brain and touches all the organs. It touches all parts of our
bodies. 80% of the information gets
(19:24):
traveled up to the brain. Only
20% iscoming down from the brain. 80% of your vagus
nerve's job is to relay information back in.
That's interoception, and that's how these two
come together to work together. The vagus nerve and
the interoceptive system are deeply
(19:48):
connected. So, poor interoceptive
awareness can lead to a sense of depersonalization and
dissociation. Depersonalization involves feelings
that are detached from oneself, as if observing
yourself from the outside of your body. It can create
a sense of unreality and disconnection.
(20:09):
The vagus
nerve, which plays a critical role in interoception,
it contributes to these feelings by influencing our
bodily sensations and emotional states. The Vagus nerve
plays a major role also in your autonomic
nervous system. It has two main branches, the ventral
(20:30):
vagal, associated with safety and social
engagement, and then the dorsal vagal, associated with shutdown
and immobilization. When faced
with an overwhelming threat or trauma,
the dorsal vagal branch leads to total, complete shutdown.
This state of dissociation includes
(20:52):
feeling of numbness, overwhelm, and being disconnected
from the world. In extreme cases, the vagus
nerve can induce a feigned death response, whereas the
body appears lifeless and dissociated, potentially
as a survival mechanism. You
know, being dissociated is also going to contribute to
(21:14):
deficits in our interoceptive system. It's going to
get harder to hear those signals from the body and not only
hear them, but interpret them accurately.
That could come, like we're saying,
with an experience of an emotion or having our intuition
disrupted. Yeah,
(21:35):
definitely. The vagus nerve is so crucial
in relaying this information.
We say her,
a lot, if you don't use it, we lose it.
If we're constantly dissociating from the
signals inside of our body, that whole mechanism starts
(21:57):
to deteriorate and we have deficits
in that interceptive system. We're not getting clear,
accurate information from our body to our brain
about what's going on inside. Then, as
you were just saying, too, not only can we, can it become
really hard to feel those sensations. So, like, when you're talking to
(22:19):
a client and you say, like, how does that feel in your body? Or what
do you feel inside? Like you were just speaking about... It's nothing. I don't know.
They get totally overwhelmed because that connection's not there.
Also, when a system
doesn't have enough stimulus, in this case, because
of chronic dissociation, it can also become hypersensitive. Right?
(22:41):
Because it's every nerve wants stimulation.
It needs activation to stay healthy and
alive. When it's operating in this deficit
of interceptive stimuli, the nerves can actually become
very hypersensitive to try to pick up more information.
Stay healthy, stay active, stay alive. We become very
(23:03):
hypersensitive to those signals. Not everybody with
intraceptive issues feels numb or disconnected. You can
also feel too much into the
sensations and you can also have a very high level of
threat associated with those sensations.
For some people, when they feel what's going on inside of their body,
(23:24):
it's very activating. It moves them into a big sympathetic
response or maybe shuts them down. But there's a
big stress response that comes from feeling those signals
inside. We feel them a little bit too intensely and we become hyper
vigilant around them. That's why sometimes for
people, as they're trying to practice mindfulness or
(23:47):
develop a relationship with their body and start to have somatic practices, it's
too much initially to drop into
the body ask, "Do you feel your heartbeat? Do you feel your breath?" That's
going to be really stressful for them. They might want to externally orient,
you know, can you feel yourself being supported by the chair? Can you feel the
air around you? Can you even just look around the room and take in some
(24:09):
information from your eyes and use different types of sensory
input that aren't so stressful for someone
who's been in dissociation for so long? There's
also a huge component of the vagus nerve that helps
create our sense of safety. This idea of neuroception,
which is just our nervous system's automatic scanning
(24:31):
of the environment all the time, looking for
danger cues below the level of our conscious awareness. Again, it doesn't
have to be physical danger cues. It could be somebody's facial expression,
their vocal tone, all these different
things that we're reading all of the time. Our interceptive
system plays a really big role in
(24:54):
our neuroception, determining whether or not we're safe,
if we're in that more ventral vagal state of safety, or whether
we should move into one of our f responses, fight or flight, or whether
we should shut down completely or dissociate. And all
of that is how our brain interprets sensory
information. The dissociation
(25:15):
is the output of that interpretation
of
threat. That's really what it is,
coming from inside of the body.
Another component of, the neuro
of dissociation is the insular cortex.
(25:35):
The insular cortex is one of our
shining stars of, Trauma Rewired. The insular cortex is
a deep fold within our brain that plays
a crucial role in interoception - interoceptive processing.
The insular cortex is the
primary processing center for internal body feelings. It
(25:57):
receives signals related to our internal states, such
as hunger or thirst or pain. And then these signals
come from various resources from our body. The insular
cortex. It has functional connections with other
areas of the brain, including parts of the thalamus, relaying sensory information
(26:18):
throughout the brain. It's associated also to
the limbic system, associated with emotions and memories. Also,
it's connected to the amygdala, right? That part of our brain historically
known for its role in perceiving anger or
fear or threat in any way
(26:39):
and our introceptive system. We're
talking now about our vagus nerve, but also the insular cortex
and the parts of our brain that interpret that information coming
in. This is a predictive system, so it's
not responding actually in real time
to what's going on. It's predicting
(27:01):
ahead what your response is going to need to be based on the
information coming in. It's operating a little bit ahead of the present
moment. and our internal
sensations that we feel are coming from
those predictions within our interoceptive system.
Our brain makes predictions based
(27:23):
on our past experiences - our brain is
making these predictions all of the time about what the sensory
information means and then generating an output
ahead of what's really going on. If we
have a lot of experience with threat
and stress in social situations, in different
(27:45):
environments, then that's how our brain is going to interpret those
sensory signals and it's going to create those responses
inside of our body. These predictions may or may not be
accurate, but they're what drive our mood, our
feeling, the way we are inside and our insular
cortex really contributes to our
(28:07):
self awareness of these internal body states
and what that felt sense experience is.
Then, it takes those signals,
integrates them, relays them to other areas of
the brain and produces our emotions, our emotional
experience. It impacts our cognition, our
(28:28):
ability to stay in our higher order thinking systems or not,
and our identity, and sense of
self.
You may be getting into this podcast now,
thinking, what is the point of all of this? Why does
it even help for you to know all of this information?
(28:51):
You hear us say a lot on times," Where do we start?" It does start
with being able to take in information and start to maybe
think a little bit more broadly about
the way that life looks for all of us.
We talk about
every episode, conversation, we really
(29:13):
stress intentional stimulus training.
When we understand how our
body and brain work to take in and interpret
information. We know we dissociate because
the nervous system is interpreting too much threat and producing
the output of dissociation to keep from the system from
(29:34):
being overwhelmed, we can gradually train
these areas to feel safe with the stimulus that's
coming in. Over time, we won't dissociate as
frequently or maybe as severely.
Initially, we train the brain and nervous system with stimulus and regulation
as the right dose. I want to say something for
(29:55):
a moment after I say severely. As I said in
the very beginning, when we talk about the spectrum of dissociation, it's
no longer means losing time in months and days, in
years and in decades. That looks now more like hours of
time. The severity has decreased
with time, because of the time I
(30:18):
put into my daily intentional training. My sensory
input systems getting that accurate amount of information from the
vagus nerve and from the interoceptive system, you know, particularly.
We intentionally train the brain and nervous system
with stimulus and regulation at the right dose so that
it adapts to it safely - adapts to the stimulation
(30:39):
safely.
The next cohort of, Neurosomatic Intelligence is
enrolling now. If you're a coach, therapist, or
healer and you want to bring these tools and this framework into the good
work that you're doing to create bigger, deeper, more lasting
change for your clients and to help your own nervous system
(31:02):
prevent burnout, have greater capacity, and be able to
expand your life in many different directions, then I would love
to talk with you about the program. We are taking discovery calls now.
You can book that at, neurosomaticintelligence.com.
I
think we are diving a little bit deeper. It's a high level
(31:25):
overview of what's going on in your brain. Again, everybody's very
unique and different, but we are diving
a little bit more into the neuro. It's kind of like
a, "Why?" But, I think it helps to connect the
dots a little bit that our experiences
shape these areas of the brain, these
(31:47):
nerves, because, again, we are neuroplastic
beings and our nervous system is like constantly, constantly,
constantly adapting to the environment,
to the situations that we're into, the social experiences that we have.
All these experiences that we've had over our life,
they change how our thalamus interprets information. They
(32:09):
change how our vagus nerve functions, how it relays information to
the brain, and then how our brain interprets that information.
That's real. That
experience of, I'm moving into dissociation all the time. There's
a reason for that, because your system is adaptive,
and that was the adaptation that helped you
(32:31):
survive and not become overwhelmed. It's
also changed how you are now and patterned you in this certain
way, so one of the
really important takeaways from this is that we're neuroplastic and changing
all of the time. When we understand that, we can
start to intentionally train our system, whether that's,
(32:53):
in social situations and social stimulus that's coming in,
environmental, the internal sensations, we can help
our brain by communicating with the nervous system in the
language that it understands, which is sensory inputs, to start to
create more safety with this stimulus coming in.
The brain can start to get that information in and
(33:15):
have an experience of feeling
safe with that information and not
going into dissociation not going down that well worn path
because the same threat load isn't there. When
we do that over and over and over again by using our
tools, we're carving out new pathways,
(33:37):
we're reshaping the nervous system in this new way. In that
way, it's really like we're training ourselves to be present because you
mentioned it's a skill - we've talked on here, especially in our
episodes with Matt, about everything is really a skill, whether you're
intentionally training it as a skill or not. Your immune
response, your social response, your emotional repression,
(33:59):
that's a skill that you've trained yourself over time.
If everything is a skill and every skill is
trainable, when we know how our nervous system
works and we know how to dose the interventions appropriately and we can
do that consistently, then we can start to train at new
skills that are still protecting us, but
(34:20):
differently with different outputs. That's right, because if
dissociation is this overwhelm of sensory stimulus coming
in and that being threatening, so it's easier to check out of the body.
Now, we're intentionally training the sensory inputs
to make that more safe.
You could do this with
mindfulness, but only to a particular degree.
(34:43):
That's only going to keep you from in a head up
space and that's not what we're talking about. We're
talking about direct sensory stimulation,
regulating around it and creating a new experience
physiologically. This is what we
do at, rewiretrial.com and why we encourage you to take advantage of
(35:05):
these free two weeks with us on the membership site so
your brain can now
re-organize the information that's coming in
so that it perceives information accurately.
Then, you don't lose that continuity of
time like that continuity of consciousness, that dissociation
(35:25):
really fragments. Yeah.
It's really important when we're talking about,
re-patterning the system to think
too, about, how important it i,s to get to know your own nervous
system and to be able to assess and reassess
what the right amount of stimulus is for you. What the
(35:46):
right amount of change and, and trying to
create a different experience is, because, remember, this is
a protective output and this is a well worn path.
If we overdose ourselves with
any kind of intervention, that could be like a somatic practice. It could be
a cognitive therapy session. It could be just trying
(36:08):
to cognitively push through and create behavior change, set
a boundary, whatever. If we're going at that
too much, too fast, just
not at the right speed for our nervous system.
We don't know how to assess and reassess how our nervous system
is responding. We're just going to keep pushing ourselves down that same
(36:30):
well worn pathway. It's happening subconsciously.
I'm going to be finding myself
in these states of dissociation and overwhelm
or a, " f - response." I can't
change that without also working with
the nervous system and without knowing what is the speed,
(36:51):
what's the dose, what's the amount that works for me to start to create
positive adaptation, a new experience.
When we're talking about healing, something like dissociation and most
aspects of complex trauma often come with slowing down a
little bit. That can be really scary. To come
into the body is going to require an aspect of
(37:12):
slowing down and we want to
be able to rely on the
information that's coming in from the body, from the vagus nerve, from the
anteroceptive system, and really being able to
cultivate that presence that makes life so
(37:33):
enjoyable. But also, too, we want to be working on,
like, the brain area processing, right? That's processing all of
this information. You know, it's
one of the things that we see a lot in dissociation.
One of the aspects of dissociation is an intellectual dissociation away from
the body - it's this concept and idea.
(37:56):
It's a way of living for people where you can stay in your
mind and avoid the body. It's like you can
intellectualize, you can know something, you can understand
intellectually the way the nervous system works for, say, or
like knowing that something. But knowing something isn't the
same thing as experiencing it somatically.
(38:17):
This happens a lot in
our realm, especially when we start working with one on one clients who are high
drivers, high performing women, very successful, and they've
learned, like we've talked about before, to just push through, override the
signals of the body, over train, overwork,
over perform. Those are levels of dissociation that
(38:39):
are usually rewarded in some way, even
by ourselves. We go to the gym, we overtrain, we overdo it, and then we
look at ourselves and we see, oh, this actually might be
what I want to look at or look like. I'm totally disconnected
from my body's signals, telling me that I'm in
pain, I'm tired, I can't hear myself. But
(39:01):
then cognitively, you just keep knowing that what you're doing is actually
working, working for your aesthetic
or maybe that overdrive at work is working for your
paycheck. Maybe that overdrive of dissociation in your
relationship is just keeping you safe in some way because you're too
scared to leave or you're too scared to share your voice
(39:23):
and your experience as to how this relationship is actually
keeping you hiding and in other protective mechanisms
apart from dissociation.
I think it's so important to stress,
that knowing how the nervous system works is
not the same thing as working with the nervous system. We're
(39:46):
giving you all of this information and it's important to start to connect the dots,
to start to understand how this happens, to know more about yourself, to see
your behavior differently with altitude, have more self
compassion. But in order to really make changes
in your emotional processing, in
cultivating that sense of safety inside, you actually have
(40:08):
to work with the nervous system.
You can't just understand that you
need to process your emotions. There's an
experience of that that has to happen.
Many people, get stuck in that first part of, like, let
me read all the books about somatics, let me
(40:30):
do this research, listen to this podcast. I
really want to encourage people to
work with a
somatic practitioner or work with us on, rewiretrial.com
or do something where you're actually getting the work.
I lived a lot of my life
(40:52):
up in my head understanding all of this. I relied on my intellect. I thought
if I could just figure it out, I could push through it, and there were
real health consequences to that. My behavior wasn't
actually changing. You know, I couldn't stop binge eating. I couldn't
stop getting into the harmful relationship patterns. I couldn't stop,
you know, panicking and not being able to rest until I
(41:15):
actually started working with the nervous system. What that looks like for
me now is as if something might happen. I
still get triggered. Just the other day, I was watching a
movie, and there was a scene that was really
reflective of my, one of my personal trauma
experiences.
Cognitively, I felt
(41:38):
fine. I was safe. I was in my house. Bu,t I started
to experience a little bit of pain between my shoulder blades. Then, that pain
started radiating down my arm and I got a little numbness.
And because I know what I know, I was like, okay,
this is a protective output of my nervous system. But, if I had just
stopped there with that awareness, I still might have gotten
(41:59):
pushed into the emotional flashback. Looking at, you know, my
partner through a lens of distrust, being really
shut down, experiencing brain fog. It would have just continued
to build. But instead, because I have the tools,
I got out m,y z vibe and I started doing some
regulation tools. I had to play around for a minute, maybe I started with
(42:21):
some camshafts, moving my body a little bit. Then, I tried some breathing but, that
wasn't working. Okay. I went to my vagus nerve. I did that.
All of a sudden the pain started to go away. I was like, this is
the stimulus my body needs. I know how to work with my nervous system. I
know how to recreate safety. And I actually have to stop in real
time, in real life and, and make
(42:43):
the space to do that work so that I don't go down the well
worn path and really create that change. Really beautiful example
of why you wouldn't want to intellectually
bypass this experience in your body. We're
also going to talk about spiritual bypassing and dissociation as a means of
dissociation. This is going to hit
(43:06):
our spiritual community a little bit differently here now. I
am one of you. I work in psychedelic spaces. One of the reasons
I strongly suggest preparation
of the nervous system before going into these peak somatic experiences
is because of, dissociation. When you are working in
modalities that are incredibly
(43:27):
embodying medicines - plants that are very embodying, and
you have someone who's chronically dissociated, this experience
of a medicine ceremony could be really frightening.
On the back end and very challenging from a nervous system that is
not ready for an experience, like a medicine.
I really think about the most, when I
(43:50):
think of spiritual bypassing and dissociation, is meditation and astrology horoscopes.
So, we've heard this before with people who are really
great meditators. They can just leave their bodies and experience
a deeper consciousness, maybe
in that meditative state, yet still not understand
and be able to feel
(44:12):
the experience of their bodies. It's just easier
to check out. It is easier to go into an
altered state of consciousness. With something like astrology horoscopes,
it's seeking this external cognitive
framework of understanding
who you are based on the stars. It's like,
(44:34):
oh, I'm a Gemini, so I act like this, or, oh, that's my Capricorn moon
and I do this because of this. It's like your
nervous system has been recording every
experience that has ever happened to you and then patterned
the way that you are right here, right now.
What my two personalities were - actually four
(44:55):
personalities. Of my four, "f trauma" responses,
it
was more socially acceptable
to feel my fight and my freeze response from my community
and my friends because I was a Gemini.
That's
an unfair way
of you to live for yourself. I guess,
(45:18):
that's just the way I think about it. I think
there's great things about
achieving those higher levels of consciousness. Meditation is
great, and looking at different energy systems
can be really great
and a very interesting experience. But, it's important
(45:41):
not to use it to avoid also having
a connection with your body and understanding your reactions from
that level of the nervous system. I remember, like, not that
long ago, I was doing a teaching for another
membership to work with some of their coaches. I was teaching some
NSI tools, and we just dropped into the body for
(46:05):
a few moments to try to feel some internal sensations to
get an idea of, a somatic yes or no, in business. The response
from a lot of the people in there - it was a very spiritually
based, meditative program that was that they were really challenged.
I realized very quickly, "Oh, man!" Just
that 30 seconds exceeded minimum effective dose for these
(46:28):
people. One of the participants straight up said to me, I
love to meditate because I can leave my body, but as soon
as I start to feel the sensations inside, I want to run out
of the room. I get
that. I understand why it's threatening.
There's a real reason we
(46:50):
need to start making those sensations safe, so
we can have a different relationship with our body and
not always have to leave it to feel comfortable.
I think
too, when we're talking about emotional expression. We
cannot express and process our emotions if
(47:10):
we are disconnected from our bodily sensations, because they
are very physiological events. I'm going
to be in a high level of emotional repression or suppression
if I'm not connecting to my body. I have clients that
have behaviors they want to move out of-
maybe, obsessive compulsive behaviors or
(47:33):
pain, physical pain, binge
eating, all of
these things, that these behaviors are more repressive tools
to keep us from feeling the emotions. Until
we actually start to process those emotions and have the
experience in our body of being
(47:54):
with that grief, moving, that pain, those
behaviors aren't going to stop. As
much as we might cognitively know, I don't want
to do this behavior or maybe even I cognitively know I need to process my
emotions, but I don't actually get in there and do it. Then, we
aren't able to move out of that patterned repressive
(48:15):
behavior.
Then, the
opposite of dissociation is presence. If
dissociation is the easy, well worn pathway, then what we're really
trying to do is train for presence.
I was saying before, about relying on your own
(48:36):
experiences, when you start to come into your
body, you'll start questioning yourself, questioning those
realities that you're feeling and that you're sensing. And so
presence becomes kind of the threat
into the body. So back to that intentional nervous system training
practice that you want to cultivate each day is because
(49:00):
when you're present in your body, you will be experiencing
your world very, very differently and relationships will be experienced very differently.
We talk on here back to that daily nervous system
practices. What we're looking for is measurable experiences.
Experiences where you could walk away from and say, like,
I was here for all of that. I stayed in my body
(49:22):
for that conversation, or as I received that information from somebody
or from the world. That information is the sensory stimulus coming
in. The presence
now is going to
feel, I'm going to use that word, feel because you're
going to start experiencing sensations
(49:46):
in the body. Experiencing the world very differently.
Presence is so important for emotional expression
and being able to understand the truth of how you're
feeling emotionally, so that you might notice some
dissociative aspects and the disproportionate reactions that you're
having to something. I think, too,
(50:09):
in the emotional component of things is like understanding how
we are feeling inside, being able to discharge that emotion from
the body, because emotional dysregulation will dysregulate the full nervous
system, which is not new information for those of y'all
listening to this podcast.
I think presence is so
(50:31):
powerful because it allows us to feel
how powerful we really are. That can be very
scary for someone who's been used to hiding for so long.
Yeah, absolutely. There are so many reasons
to start to try to create presence
in your life. Another really important reason is,
(50:54):
as we're engaging in all of these different healing
activities, trying to create changes
in our physical health outputs and
outcomes, it's very
important that we're actually present for those
activities. We talked about this in the presence episode. We go
(51:15):
deeper into this, but there are studies that look at
what happens when we're doing different healing practices and the
impact that that has on our telomeres. Our telomeres, if you recall,
are little compound structures at the end of our chromosomes,
and they're what are often used as markers
of biological age, biological
(51:37):
health. Not my chronological age. People can
look at your telomeres to know your physical biological
age inside of your body and with different practices, like sauna
or meditation, that helps us have healthier
telomeres and reduces stress. But
there were also studies that found that
(51:59):
you don't experience the same effects if you're not actually
present in that activity. I think we talked about - let's say
you're sitting in the sauna, you're still stuck in this fight and
flight state, or you're still totally dissociated from your body or
whatever it is that's going on. That stress is
still there. I'm sitting in a sauna, but I'm having
(52:21):
the racing thoughts about everything. My heart rate is still going, the
stress chemicals are still going. So, as we engage in
all of these different activities for our health, if we're not present
for that, we're not getting the same benefits as if
we can actually be there embodied. We can't
be in two places at once. We can't reap the benefits of something
(52:44):
that we're doing, if we're not in the body. So presence, being
present is really important to creating the
change and for laying down these new pathways that
we're really talking about here.
That dissociation really wreaks havoc on
the internal sense of self. Absolutely.
(53:07):
When we're usiing our neurotools, you don't
get the same re patterning if you're not present with the
sensory stimulus, if you're not actually engaged in the activity in
a way that is going to help your nervous system lay those new pathways
down, myelinate the nerves, then you're just kind of
going through the motions and that the brain, the
(53:29):
nervous system, is not paying attention to
that in the same way that's going to really create the changes that
you're looking for. Of course, it's the same with
our relationships, too. We want to
be present in relationship as we're trying to re pattern our relational
responses and show up differently in
(53:51):
the world and have a different sense of safety in relationship with
other people. We can't
do that if we're also checked out of our body. Remember, our
nervous systems are always communicating with one another across
the social synapse at that subconscious level. So,
as I'm here talking to you, your nervous system is reading
(54:13):
mine. Even the listeners are reading my vocal tone, and
there's communication going on all the time.
That other nervous system can read
when we are dissociated, when we're not present and when we're
not checked out. Same with a little kid's nervous system.
If the parent is not actually present,
(54:35):
that has the same effects as
neglect, as abandonment, because the way that our nervous
systems interact, and so, you know,
how we, our ability to be attuned
and really show up for other people requires
a level of presence.
(55:00):
We talk about this lack of presence through our attachment
and so many of the conversations that we had through Season 3 - how this
level of dissociation in our primary caregiver creates an
insecure attachment for the child,
experiencing that lack of connection and that lack of
attunement in our own nervous systems without us having back to
(55:21):
cognitive ability in them in the mind. We don't have a
cognitive way to reframe it or to think about it. All of
that is being experienced in our bodies through the social
synapse. If dissociation is a skill
that we learn for adaptation, so is presence, and we can learn
that skill, too, and that's what we do@rewiretrial.com and we're there
(55:43):
five times a week. We've got classes from ten minutes to 45 minutes.
Emotional processing, neuro for all of the
sensory inputs, but particularly on here today, we've talked about
interoceptive system and the vagus nerve.
We really can't
encourage you enough to join us on site
(56:05):
and start changing and re-patterning the way you
are literally, wired. Change that predictive
thought. If the prediction is threat, let's start rewiring that
so that you're primed for connection, so you're primed for
thriving and not just surviving and getting through in the
world.
(56:27):
Right now, we're doing a whole series of classes
specifically related to the
outputs of CPTS, including
dissociation. You can pop on and
join us in these practices. These are the real things that we do
that our clients do to start to create change.
(56:48):
It's very easy to find them. We're on their live, and then there's a
whole huge on demand library where they're categorized under the CPTS
series. So, yes, please come join us after
this. We're going to be playing, we're going to re release some episodes from
Season 3 that are more foundational
information that you'll want to take in. Before we go into Season 4, we'll do
(57:11):
stress response and relationship and a lot of the ones that show
what's happening internally in our world with
connection to other people that are a little bit more on the neuroscience side.
So that as we move into Season 4 and we're really looking
at specific outputs of the nervous system that
people might experience in chronic health outcomes and chronic mental
(57:34):
health outcomes, there's a you have a good understanding
of what's going on inside. Thank you guys so much
for revisiting this whole CPTS series with us
and stay in touch while we're taking this little
break to dive into some of the research and get ready for season four. You
can find us on the socials. We love to hear from you
(57:55):
and we're really excited about Season 4, so stay
tuned. Thank you all so much.
This podcast is for informational and educational purposes
only and should not be considered medical or psychological advice.
We often discuss lived experiences through traumatic events
(58:19):
and sensitive topics that deal with complex developmental and
systemic trauma that may be unsettling for some listeners.
This podcast is not intended to replace professional medical
advice. If you are in the United States and you or someone you know
is struggling with their mental health and is in immediate danger, please call
911. For specific services relating to mental health,
(58:40):
please see the full disclaimer in the show notes.
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