May 6, 2024 • 41 mins
The term social anxiety gets tossed around a lot these days, however individuals with CPTS who experience social anxiety feel its effects on a visceral level. It can be highly debilitating and can affect the way we relate and connect to others, when the need for connection is at the very core of what makes us human.
Knowing if you actually have social anxiety can be tricky, especially if there are socially acceptable coping mechanisms like overconsumption of substances involved. The proof is in the nervous system outputs, such as migraines, pain, exhaustion, or binge eating, after every social event. As well as, if these outputs cause you to refrain from being in social settings all together. At these times, it's important to reflect on whether you're genuinely comfortable in social situations or if social anxiety may be at play.
In today’s episode, Elisabeth and Jennifer explore the world of social anxiety, specifically what signs in your nervous system to look out for if you suspect you have social anxiety, the difference between social anxiety and being socially awkward, the role substance use plays, how your attachment style can indicate your level of social anxiety, and how to repattern the nervous system using NSI tools to overcome social anxiety, and much more.
As humans, we need to connect to others, and we need relationships to thrive. Social anxiety can impede these very human needs, however there is a way around it. It is possible to change how your nervous system takes in information, and change the way it reacts to that information, using simple tools to rewire and regulate.
Tune in to hear how and more!
Topics discussed in this episode:
-
What is social anxiety?
-
The nervous system outputs associated with social anxiety
-
Substance use and social anxiety
-
How the inner critic and toxic shame shows up in social anxiety
-
What is hypervigilance?
-
Physiological reasons why stress in social situations can cause protective outputs
-
How ADHD and social anxiety overlap
-
How attachment styles are related to social anxiety
-
Repatterning the nervous system to experience new outputs using NSI
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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(00:03):
I remember when I first stopped drinking alcohol, I would go out
to these social gatherings and
it was intense in the moment. I was really
aware of everything that was going
on - I would hear everybody's conversation all at once. I
couldn't block out multiple conversations and it
(00:25):
wa a lot of stimulus. I
didn't recognize it as overwhelming at the time.
But, what would happen is, I would come home and I would bend
and then I would crash. I started to notice this pattern
of every time I try to go out and socially connect,
followed by an episode of binge eating, a
(00:46):
migraine, or some pretty intense shutdown.
That's when I really started
to understand - I have social anxiety.
That's what we're going to take a deep dive into
today. Welcome to, Trauma Rewired, the podcast that
teaches you about your nervous system, how trauma lives in the body, and
(01:07):
what you can do to heal. I'm your co host, Elizabeth Christoph. I'm the
founder of Brainbase.com, an online community where we actually
do all the practical tools that we talk about on this
podcast to rehabilitate the nervous system and create capacity.
I'm also the founder of the, Neuroseomatic Intelligence
CoachingCcertification. I'm a
(01:29):
Neurosematic Psychedelic Preparation and Integration guide.
I bridge the worlds between neurosomatic intelligence
and plant healing spaces.
I'm so looking forward to
exploring social anxiety today because it's just so
relatable. I think we should begin with
(01:50):
the question, "What is social anxiety"? Big picture, what
it is and how do we identify with it.
I think a lot of people relate to
this because we hear it all the time. It's the most easily identifiable
for people because they say it,
they claim it. I
(02:10):
have social anxiety for sure, and all
around, a little socially awkward.
I'm excited to even explore what that spectrum looks
like today and dive into this and so, big picture
it's a fear and discomfort in
social situations. People with social anxiety
(02:33):
experience excessive worry about being
potentially embarrassed, humiliated or negatively evaluated by
others. That is one that
really speaks to me personally in
my experience with social anxiety. It can be identified
by the physical experience of a racing heart, sweating palms,
(02:56):
bracing muscles, and overall
tension through the body. It can also drive dissociation
and overwhelm in social situations.
Like all of the CPTs components,
they live on a spectrum. It can be a
really intense fear that leads to big isolation
(03:18):
on the back end, it could be a fear of public speaking,
and overall could lead to avoiding
social gatherings, avoiding your family, maybe even
in that context. It
could also be the feelings of self consciousness
and everyday interactions that overwhelm,
(03:39):
that comes from simple or
broader social interactions. As
Elizabeth was saying, it could come with afterwards a
crash, a migraine, pain, or a
protective output, because really, it is so taxing and
so stressful. Yeah,
(04:01):
and it's a little tricky. As I was talking about
a moment ago, sometimes we don't really know that we have
social anxiety, but we can figure that out by looking at the
output after we're in social situations. I might not
feel in the moment like I'm not
aware of the signals my body is sending me; the racing heart, the
(04:23):
sweaty palms, the muscle tension.
But afterwards, I experienced these
maladaptive coping behaviors that I used to
reregulate because it was such an intense amount of
stress when I was in this social situation. That can look
like a lot of different things for people. But it might be that you do
(04:45):
these social engagements and you push past your capacity because you're
not really aware of the stress. Then you come home and find yourself
social media scrolling, numbing out, needing to have,
long periods of time where you feel pretty shut down,
disconnected from your body. You might experience those physical
outputs like you were talking about; the migraine, pain,
(05:08):
substance use, all of these things are
the outputs of our nervous system trying to protect us
because we've incurred that big social stress.
I think substance used in social situation, like you
said, this is it. This is where people can find themselves and where I
find myself and can still on that spectrum.
(05:31):
I really relate to the fear and the judgment,
the potential criticism, because my inner critic was
doing that, my inner critic was so harsh. As
I was saying to myself, I was
worried that this is the really the way that I was being
perceived and that would really spin me out - that
(05:53):
very loud and abusive inner critic woven into
debilitating emotional flashbacks and dissociation.
So social environments became really
threatening, potentially, because I was in
these cycles of CPTS, and I would regulate myself
by really abusing myself through substance use, whether that
(06:15):
was food, alcohol, or cannabis.
You might
identify with using substances to deal with anxiety in a social
situation like alcohol or cannabis, because the social threat
is so stressful and dysregulating. Maybe you're not someone
who identifies with being on the spectrum of panicking
(06:35):
in social situations. I also really relate to that too,
and just having full on meltdowns. But you'll find
yourself in those patterns of over drinking, over
consuming, food, alcohol, cannabis
- if you are like me, how I was, I
would regulate with one of these substances. To have the courage to leave
(06:57):
my home, my bedroom, my house, my closet, even
getting dressed was a full on, overwhelming response
for me - I was regulating on the front end, regulating
throughout the experience and then I was regulating on the back end,
just as, Elizabeth highlighted. That's really when
food bingeing kicked in. It gets really
(07:20):
painful because I remember
when I did stop drinking and I didn't have that numbing
to go through the experience, but I still really wanted
social connection. I'd lost a lot of my social connections that I
had when I was drinking and it
was painful. I started to understand that I can't do these social things
(07:41):
without coming home, having a migraine having a food binge and being
shut down. So I started to really limit my social interaction because
I didn't want to face the consequences on the back end, but
that also sucked because I wanted the social connection.
It's just a
difficult thing to navigate. It falls
(08:03):
so much on a spectrum and that's when
we're talking about, Complex Post Traumatic
Stress. There are several reasons why
this is a distinguishing characteristic of CPTS, and
that that spectrum is a little bit more intense when
we have this developmental trauma, because one
(08:24):
of the things is, it's linked
to the inner critic and toxic shame -those
feed into the social anxiety.
It's linked to the other distinguishing characteristics of CPTS. If
you have these other two components, it makes social
interaction difficult because you're in this state of hyper vigilance,
(08:46):
performance and perfectionism as you're in these social
environments to secure attachment or cover up the deep
rooted shame beliefs of," I'm not worthy" or "I'm bad".
Carrying all that
gets really pulled up to the surface when you're in
those social situations as it's a heavy stress load.
(09:08):
It is. When you take away a big numbing out, a big
regulator like alcohol
- I can witness myself in those places now and
like I said, sometimes I can just be straight up. So, socially awkward, especially if
I'm on the phone or I feel like there's an ending time of something and
it's not like a comfortable silence. I'm just like,
(09:29):
okay, bye. It's so
weird sometimes and it just kind of comes from nowhere,
but because I've
lightened up so much on those maladaptive
coping behaviors
I find myself
so weird sometimes. Totally.
(09:50):
With CPTS, not only is there
social awkwardness, because everybody probably is socially awkward-
but sometimes. But when you have CPTS,
there's all this rumination about that and what happened to
the attachment bond and what does that mean about me. There's a whole
somatic response happening in your body and it just makes
(10:12):
those little moments, those little awkward moments without having the
tools to navigate that, the awareness, altitude
and all that good stuff that comes with understanding your, CPTS
more. It can make those little awkward exchanges
really impactful. Yes, it's
really interesting. Just the cascade and the interwovenness of
(10:34):
everything that we're going to talk about today as we've been through this CPTS
series. It's really important to talk
about hyper vigilance -it's
a way people could recognize themselves, but maybe they are. Not really.
It's not in their awareness quite yet, but hyper vigilance
is a heightened state of awareness where an individual
(10:56):
is constantly assessing the potential
threat in the surroundings. It's
having an internal alarm system that is keeping
you on high alert even when there's no
potential or immediate danger. It's the scanning
of the room, it's watching all the elements, not
(11:18):
being able to have your back to the crowd or to a door. It's
looking at your escape routes, whether that's emotional
or physical. Reading people's faces, trying
to be one step ahead of the people that you're around,
just by reading their nervous systems and reading the room and
the perceived threat that's going on. One thing
(11:40):
to remember, is that trauma changes our brain as the
amygdala is shaped differently and that it could get
larger and more sensitive to threat.
Stressors have a compounding effect that gives you
less capacity to take in all of the stimulus and it
makes you less resilient to the
(12:01):
stress. With
trauma, an inherent feeling of
not being safe, especially around a bunch of
other people. If you are in a state of hyper vigilance, there is
a lot of stimulus to take in during social
events, people, noises, the new
(12:22):
environment itself is already a stressor. If your
system is perceiving a lot of threat with stimulus, it's
going to get pushed into a trauma response.
Every situation when you have CPTS is a big stress
load and you might not have great tools for
processing that stress.
(12:44):
I noticed it myself in the auditory
stimulus. I can't stop myself from listening
to every single conversation that's going on around me.
That's a lot of information to take in, try to make
sense of and to process in my mind. In addition to
the social threats you were talking about, the trying to read everybody's
(13:06):
facial expressions, make sure everybody else is okay. Man, it's
a lot of sensory coming in to the system
and there can be a lot of physiological
reasons why that much stimulus coming
into our nervous system is threatening. We've talked on here a lot about
the, the stress bucket and how all of our sensory
(13:27):
information is going into that stress bucket all the time.
So when I'm hypersensitive to bringing in
a bunch of stimulus - maybe I have some
deficits in my input systems that are
compounding that stress. Maybe I have some sensory
mis-match - my eyes and another sensory system like
(13:49):
the balance system in my inner ear, they aren't synced up. That's
really energy costly to my nervous system at a very
physiological level because my brain is always having to decide
which one of these is right and needs that information,
to be able to generate predictions, producing an output and
keep me alive. I'm going into these social situations
(14:12):
with a highly sensitive nervous system, I'm hypervigilant and taking
in all this information. I have these deficits that are
compounding the stress all of the time. Then, the water level in that
bucket is just escalating very, very quickly in a
big social situation with all of that input. So, I'm
going to naturally get pushed into protective outputs,
(14:34):
the outputs that my brain produces to try to keep me
safe in that moment, to get me to reduce the
amount of stimulus coming in, like pain, like
a migraine. Now, I'm going to go back and I'm going to lay down
and I'm going to shut out all that social stimulus. It's going to be a
dark, quiet room and my survival
(14:55):
mind is like, okay, we're
safe - that was too much.
There's these deep
physiological reasons why a lot of stress in a
social situation could push us into protective outputs.
There's another component, which is in
(15:18):
the unique development of people's brains that
some people are experiencing, uncovering and knowing now
that you have a neurodivergence of some kind.
I'm coming into the knowledge and understanding that
I have ADHD - this speaks to the threat
bucket. Before, I always questioned it, as I just
(15:41):
didn't have the room in my bucket to
accept and think about that level of sensory
processing, because, like, we're talking about so much of social
engagement, it is a sensory experience.
I'm so
happy about my neuro work and my threat bucket overall baseline
(16:03):
level lowering, so I can embody
this new understanding of having ADHD
and tackle it from the perspective of neurosematic
intelligence. This is from, Genera Nuremberg's
book, Divergent Mind., "ADHD
is not a deficit in attention, but
(16:24):
rather a challenge of regulating it, at will or on
demand". Often, we have too much attention,
just not at the socially accepted times
and situations. So, whoot! That
validation I've experienced in that book
is comparative to reading, Pete Walke, and we
(16:46):
all know that was big. Let me share with you some of the overlapping
components of ADHD and Social Anxiety.
You could find, high
stimulation is both exciting and confusing, which
leads to feelings of overwhelm, being overstimulated
without realizing that and the not
(17:07):
understanding of where those boundaries are
in your nervous system with the level of stimulus
that's coming through. People with ADHD find emotional
regulation is difficult and that adds to sensory overwhelm.
It could lead to those meltdowns that we talked about earlier, earlier sudden
bouts of anger or frustration. And so, you know, with me,
(17:30):
I already have a heightened fight response because of the CPTS
I've experienced. One of the things that we've touched
on today is that high sensitivity to criticism and judgment,
which is also an experience for people with ADHD.
Then we have that masking that dysregulation
through engaging in harmful behaviors.
(17:51):
It's a sensory
overload that's too much when a person is trying to
hold together multiple threads of information under the expectation
of this neurotypical context. And
there's so many aspects to ADHD that I want to
honor that we're not going to talk about right now because we will be
(18:13):
bringing this into season four, because I'm someone who also
relates to having a sensory processing disorder. That's
why this neural work and this daily practice is so powerful.
Yeah, I'm so excited we're really taking a
deep dive into all of this in Season Four, because there
(18:34):
are so many overlaps and intersections between Complex
Trauma and different types of
neurodivergence. Just by starting to look at
if my brain developed differently because of my Tomplex
trauma, or was I just born that way? If I was
just born that way, there's a whole other layer of trauma in a
(18:56):
real physiological sense, because the world
is overwhelming my nervous system beyond
my capacity to cope. That's really what the definition of trauma is.
When we have an experience that overwhelms our
nervous system beyond our ability to cope and positively adapt
to that stress. If I'm trying to move through the world
(19:18):
with a neurodivergent brain and nervous system,
that is another type of trauma, then it gets
woven in to the Complex Trauma. There's
so much going on there that we're going to really dive into.
But, in this specific example, with social anxiety,
like you were talking about with ADHD or with somebody who just
(19:41):
identifies as a highly sensitive person, there's that same
level of sensory overload that happens in
a social situation. Our nervous
system may not have the skills or the
capacity to regulate that stress and it might not feel safe
to do so. We don't have the emotional processing skills or in the
(20:03):
moment. We don't feel like we can do the things that we need
to stay regulated and safe in that moment. And so
we end up in the maladaptive behaviors or the physical
outputs that come when our system is trying to protect us from that
overwhelm. Right now, on site, on the, Brain Based Wellness
Membership site, we're exploring relational healing
(20:25):
and have that series. You can go to, rewiretrial.com to
start engaging with that series and then we'll be moving on to what is
CPTS in this series and how, Elizabeth and I have been
resolving this in a journey of applied
neuro emotional processing, expressing and somatic
movement. So join us at, rewiretria.coml to get those two free weeks and.
(20:47):
Explore this work for yourself.
Definitely. So, let's talk about
the, HOW - about how
social anxiety can be an emotional overwhelm.
This is something we talked about on
our empath episode. We've learned to take on so
(21:09):
much of another person's emotional experience, whether
that comes from misattunement in
your primary developmental stages, or if you experienced
emotional neglect, which is an ACE score, which
we've recorded on previously. I think of how
many clients that I've worked with who talk about as a child, they
(21:31):
had to learn to attune to a parent who is dysregulated
or a caregiver who's dysregulated.
Over the years of their adolescence, they
end up being the one who's regulating the rest of the environment
or trying to regulate the rest of the environment.
They learn that if I
act this way, then maybe my Dad will be more calm, or
(21:55):
if I act this way, maybe my mom won't get so
angry. They start to develop certain
behaviors, because you're the ones who
have to regulate everybody else.
For some, especially
as they get older, they may adapt humor as
(22:15):
a way to diffuse a situation or a physical
activity. There could be perfectionism or
fawning. There's all kinds of different options that the nervous
system will reach for. Children need to have an
adult or caregiver to be able to attune with in order to
regulate their nervous systems, particularly up until the ages of
(22:37):
four, when we cannot self regulate. When
that gets inverted, I think that's a big driver of a lot of
these CPTS survival modes, because, remember,
we can redefine our five characteristics as
survival modes. Those are the survival modes we fall
into. A young nervous system doesn't have that
(23:00):
experience. It doesn't have the wisdom or the knowledge
to be able to self regulate itself and so
much less the whole rest of the
room and the world at large. That's a big
ask for a little nervous system. It can
reallycreate a pattern for some very dysregulating behaviors-
(23:21):
to try to have to do that and to step
into that role when that happens in development,
your amygdala, your hippocampus, is in an altered
state of function. Your HPA access is activated
when. When all of that stuff is ramped up,
the lens by which you see the world, it changes.
(23:42):
Your memory encoding changes, and
everything in the brain changes its function.
You go into a totally different mode
in a totally different state of being, being in
an environment like that, or being in a state where you
can't reregulate and there's no one to help you. If the
(24:04):
brain stays in survival mode, it's going to develop in
survival mode. I think it naturally
leads to a lot of these protective behaviors and stress responses.
Yeah, it's huge.
When we're trying to take on the emotional
(24:24):
regulation of everyone around
us in order to stay safe, it really
feels unsafe to let someone else have their own emotional
experience, to be frustrated, to be disappointed. There's someone else in
the space that doesn't feel comfortable.
We really dove into this in the empath episode about
(24:46):
how empathy is
a beautiful human skill. It's also something that needs
to be worked with in order to let it be a real asset
and not something that's chronically dysregulating ourself. If,
through emotional neglect or maybe parentification, we
have deeply learned to take on the responsibility of
(25:08):
other people's emotions again, for survival, for safety. Well, it's
a lot of work! I think about
this client that I've worked with for a long time
and this has gotten much, much better with time. It used to be very
debilitating, to have any kind of social interaction. There
was so much stress about how
(25:29):
everybody else was going to be experiencing
the event, especially if it was like an event in
their home or, you know, they love to have social gatherings, but
it was the pressure that they put on themselves to
make it enjoyable experience for everyone. There were
real big outputs of pain, migraine,
(25:52):
inflammation that would take them
out for weeks at a time afterwards. You
know, we really
have to start to re-pattern at
the level of our nervous system so we can go into these situations,
have boundaries, emotional and
(26:13):
energetic boundaries, to let everybody else have their own experience. This
brings
us to attachment styles. Throughout, Season
Three, we've explored why CPTS is,
at its root, an attachment wound.
(26:34):
If the core wound is about social connection
and our deepest triggers are about
being rejected, abandoned, or experiencing retaliation from
other relationships, when we
express ourselves, then social threat is the biggest, deepest
stress our system faces. Relationships with
(26:55):
caregivers, remember, shape, our individual attachment
schema. And now in our
life, our nervous system responds with reactivity and threat
to social connection. That doesn't just replay in our intimate relationships,
it shows up in all our connections. Our neuromatrix is
shaped by our developmental experiences. Then, as
(27:18):
we interact in this whole web of human connection, we're now
primed for an attachment that is
protective, which perceives a lot of threat. Inside
our body, in our physiology, we're experiencing a lot
of stress. As human beings, we just aren't
isolated. Part of being a human being is being in relationship and
(27:40):
that's the rub with Complex
Trauma - maintaining connection and relationship can be inherently dys-regulating.
With a
heavy increase in chronic stress, you
have a need for social connection and interaction, and those
two forces come up against each other, leading to
(28:00):
a lot of internal chaos, a lot of stress in the
body. That's a really
important part of understanding CPTS.
Attachment schemas- it's really fascinating. Let's explore
anxious attachment for a moment. Let's dive into this. I
(28:22):
know, you know, from our past episodes, we understand our
attachment styles are fluid, that our nervous systems are fluid and
can change, will change situationally,
depending on what our brain thinks is the most adaptive in
this moment, in this experience. If you
learned in early development that your primaries and the people around
(28:44):
you are not safe, that people are unstable and
unpredictable, you're going to be hypersensitive to the way
that other nervous systems affect you. In the case
of anxious attachment, the mom's nervous system is
dys-regulated. She's dissociated, she shuts
down. We're attuning and
(29:05):
feeling that in here, not here, here, not here (points
to various areas of the body). Then, that translates into anxious attachment. So, we're
attached. We're not attached. It's like having a foot
in and out constantly with other nervous systems and in relationship. So
from development, we
become really hypersensitive to other people's nervous systems and
(29:28):
now we're around a bunch of other people in a social situation,
we're going to be hypersensitive to their nervous
systems. That's a lot for our nervous system! Let's
say you lean into anxious attachment and then
you're actually in a social situation. Individuals with
anxious attachment tend to be overly preoccupied with
(29:49):
their relationships because they fear abandonment. They
seek constant reassurance and worry about rejection.
There's a heightened sensitivity. Anxiously attached
individuals are hyper aware of social cues and potential
threats. There's a big fear of rejection and dread
rejection or disapproval, leading to avoidance of social situations
(30:12):
entirely. There's an overall negative self
perception. There's anxious attachment
fosters self doubt and negative self talk,
and it fuels social anxiety, overthinking,
ruminating about interactions, conversations.
There's the anticipation of judgment or
(30:34):
criticism. And then there's the overanalyzing, dissecting
social interactions, magnifying the perceived
mistakes that you have made.All of
this gets internalized. I'm not worthy of this. I am not
good enough. I'm the one from development who learns
that I'm the one who needs to change, not the environment or
(30:56):
the people around me. This may lead to,
into a lot of overdoing, over giving,
and particularly self abandoning.There's so many
things in a social situation that are dys-regulating
and stressful.
So
this isn't something I particularly relate to, but it's something that I've seen
(31:20):
in social situations. When somebody gets aggressive,
maybe because
they're drinking a bunch
of alcohol to regulate their nervous systems.
Back to if people are the threat,
you move into heightened states of activation when you're around
(31:40):
people and regulating through alcohol,
experiencing and trying to numb out that, like, faster
breathing, that rapid heart rate and all of that,
because you're preparing to protect yourself, but you're protecting
yourself from an activated sympathetic state of fight flight.
But in this case, we're examining flight because the alcohol
(32:02):
has had a cascading effect on the body. And if the person's
already in a dissociative state with numbing properties of
alcohol and living with repressed anger and rage,
boom. I mean, you just have a recipe for disaster.
When you put that same scenario
into relationship and attachment, then you
(32:23):
could also be experiencing those well worn pathways of
that person as they are in relationship to you.
I relate to that. I use to have a lot of rage that came out
when I was drinking as it was
so repressed all my life. But, when
(32:47):
I was in social situations or not, maybe just even
by myself and I would drink that would open the door for all of
that repressed rage to come out on myself or on
other people. It was
not a good situation. When
we're talking about attachment styles, we have the flip side of that,
(33:09):
right? Again, attachment styles are fluid and we can have both and we can be
disorganized. But, there's also avoidant attachment style, where
we have a real reluctance to rely on others and a
fear of emotional intimacy and a tendency to suppress emotions.
It's more of a pullback from the
social connection rather than a move toward anxiously to try to secure
(33:31):
the attachment. People with avoidant attachment can
find it really challenging to open up and connect with others. You
had a caregiver where it was not at all safe
to connect with that nervous system, and they
put too much responsibility too much stress, too
much, too much on your little developing nervous system.
(33:54):
At a survival
leve it feelsl unsafe to take on that kind
of connection and intimacy with other
people. So, in
social situations, you're being asked to
connect and engage with people, and it can lead to
(34:16):
a really big flight response in the body of like, I gotta get out of
here, this is too much. It does not feel
safe and, or you might just feel really socially awkward
because you can't connect to people and isolate it. And,
you know, I'm someone with pretty disorganized attachment, so I relate to
anxious and I relate to avoidant. But, you know, when I would do
(34:38):
things in group situations, I really wanted to connect, but
it also felt very unsafe. I also really pulled
back and was very quiet and reserved and removed from the
situation. I often feel like I wanted to get the Hell out
of there as fast as I could. Although at
the same time, I would see all these other people connecting and I would want
(35:01):
that experience. Many times, when I was in that
group situation, I felt really isolated and left out because I
didn't have the capacity to connect.
It's a lot. I mean... it's justa lot. I
think
we're wired intuitively right for the safety of
(35:23):
connection- that's a desire. To want
that and then to know or to not know that
you have a brain that's not wired for,
for safe connection and not understanding
that, that is a really hard place to be in
a nervous system. I mean, it really is. Thankfully,
(35:46):
attachment schema, your attachment, can change.
It does change. It changes in each
relationship you're in. But, even within those nuances of
each relationship, you can blanket change your
attachment and the way that you attach to others.
All of this is made possible with
(36:08):
where you're in full capacity, right? We have to move within
the capacity of our nervous systems for any change that we
want to make, whether that's personal or social.
There's a need to
re-pattern the nervous system response to
social interaction. One of the things I 've learned
(36:29):
to do is dosing my
social engagement, my social interaction. Now,
I know what the boundaries of my own nervous system are. I know where
I'm starting to be overstimulated or overwhelmed by
the environment, by the people, by the sounds, and just by the
whole thing at large- I'll
(36:51):
spend some time in the situation.
Then, I will remove myself. At that time, after I remove
myself, I'll do some drills, I might push the wall, I might do a little
emotional work, really minimum effective dose and
I'll decide, "...am I re-engaging or am I
done? Am I done with this?". I might just go home and
(37:13):
not experience the pushback on the back end of
the food. I don't
want that. I don't want those stress loops in
my body. It always comes down to the dosing and
the regulation.
Yes, really critical in order to re-pattern, to honor our
(37:36):
capacity and work within that minimum effective dose, because
it is possible to change our attachment schema as you
mentioned. We want to remember.
We've talked about that a lot in, Season Three, the
relational healing season. But to remember that our
attachment schema are the lens, they're the
(37:58):
paradigm of how we see the world socially.
It's the glasses that we're looking through. How do I perceive other people's
behavior, their action, their intentions? And that's the interpretation part
of how the nervous system works. Remember, we're always taking in information,
we're interpreting it, and then we're generating an output, and this is the
interpretation part. And then the behavior, the
(38:19):
anxiety, the response, that's the
output. With NSI, the
input is the social stimulus. Then, we have the
interpretation, which is our attachment schema, that decides safe
or unsafe - we generate the output.
How our perception is going to dictate what the response is. Does
(38:40):
my brain decide safe or unsafe? When we have Complex Trauma,
it's this repeated exposure to lack of safety.
We know it's usually ongoing environmental or
social lack of safety. That happens frequently
over and over again, especially during our development. It's not just one big
thing, but it's really a repetitive pattern of unsafe behavior and
(39:04):
unsafe environments. If we grow up in that type
of environment naturally, that's going to
shape the lens of how we view social interactions.
(41:09):
It's going to change our perception, not just of intimate connection or family relationships, but
all relationships will be affected.
The Complex Trauma is what
has formed and informed my attachment schema. It's
what's created my lens. Again, kind of going
back to this idea of redefining CPTS as frequently
occurring outputs. We have
these five outputs, and the, "C" stands
for chronic. It means there are chronically occurring survival mechanisms that
our system has learned to depend on and that
I'm going to use over and over and over again to try to protect myself
socially. So, if I want
to change those outputs, then looking at this
through the lens of NSI, I have to start to
change the inputs, how my system is taking in information
about the world around me and I have to start to change the interpretation. The,n
I can experience the new.
(41:43):
Outputs and the new outputs. Next week you're going to be hearing our new exploration
of what is, self abandonment. That's what all of this is
about - we do this work so that we don't self abandon. We don't only
just have a relationship to the outside world, to
the social environment and relationship, you have a relationship to
yourself first and foremost. Everything,
gets internalized and it
always comes back onto the self. What do we
do about all of this? It's about the daily nervous system practice.
It's about lowering the threat in your overall bucket.
It's about being here and listening. This
is kind of the first part - that perhaps, this is all just coming into
your awareness and then you're going to jump on site with us at, rewiretrial.com.
Check out those two free weeks that we offer.
(42:37):
Currently, we're in the middle of the, Relational Healing Series on the Brain Based Wellness
website. I 've mentioned that before. Then it's the, CPTS Series. If you
are identifying with any or all of these
distinguishing components and you have CPTS, please
join us for
the special series we're doing. We really want
to see you on site. Rewiretrial.com yeah, we really would
love to see you there!
These class series started as a request from a listener who emailed me and was
a member on the site and said, hey, you guys have been talking about relational
health all of, Season Three. Could
you do some classes specifically related to that? I thought
that's a brilliant idea! Let's teach the tools in
practical application to re-pattern all these things that
we're talking about re-patterning. So, we have the whole Relational Healing
Series. It's in the on demand library. You just have to click, "Relational Healing
Relationships" and all the classes are recorded there.
Now, we have a class series on, CPTS showing
you guys the practical tools, the
way we use somatic practices and nervous system tools to re-pattern.
Click on the," On Demand library CPTS
Series" and it's all there for you.
(43:00):
You can explore everything in your two free week trial at, rewiretrial.com This highlights how
much we really love hearing from you. Please keep
reaching out to us. You're such a big part of the co-creation
of Trauma Rewired and what we bring to you on the, Brain Based Wellness site.
Absolutely! Thank you so much.
I remember when I first stopped drinking alcohol, I would go out
to these social gatherings and
it was intense in the moment. I was really
aware of everything that was going
on - I would hear everybody's conversation all at once. I
couldn't block out multiple conversations and it
(00:25):
wa a lot of stimulus. I
didn't recognize it as overwhelming at the time.
But, what would happen is, I would come home and I would bend
and then I would crash. I started to notice this pattern
of every time I try to go out and socially connect,
followed by an episode of binge eating, a
(00:46):
migraine, or some pretty intense shutdown.
That's when I really started
to understand - I have social anxiety.
That's what we're going to take a deep dive into
today. Welcome to, Trauma Rewired, the podcast that
teaches you about your nervous system, how trauma lives in the body, and
(01:07):
what you can do to heal. I'm your co host, Elizabeth Christoph. I'm the
founder of Brainbase.com, an online community where we actually
do all the practical tools that we talk about on this
podcast to rehabilitate the nervous system and create capacity.
I'm also the founder of the, Neuroseomatic Intelligence
CoachingCcertification. I'm a
(01:29):
Neurosematic Psychedelic Preparation and Integration guide.
I bridge the worlds between neurosomatic intelligence
and plant healing spaces.
I'm so looking forward to
exploring social anxiety today because it's just so
relatable. I think we should begin with
(01:50):
the question, "What is social anxiety"? Big picture, what
it is and how do we identify with it.
I think a lot of people relate to
this because we hear it all the time. It's the most easily identifiable
for people because they say it,
they claim it. I
(02:10):
have social anxiety for sure, and all
around, a little socially awkward.
I'm excited to even explore what that spectrum looks
like today and dive into this and so, big picture
it's a fear and discomfort in
social situations. People with social anxiety
(02:33):
experience excessive worry about being
potentially embarrassed, humiliated or negatively evaluated by
others. That is one that
really speaks to me personally in
my experience with social anxiety. It can be identified
by the physical experience of a racing heart, sweating palms,
(02:56):
bracing muscles, and overall
tension through the body. It can also drive dissociation
and overwhelm in social situations.
Like all of the CPTs components,
they live on a spectrum. It can be a
really intense fear that leads to big isolation
(03:18):
on the back end, it could be a fear of public speaking,
and overall could lead to avoiding
social gatherings, avoiding your family, maybe even
in that context. It
could also be the feelings of self consciousness
and everyday interactions that overwhelm,
(03:39):
that comes from simple or
broader social interactions. As
Elizabeth was saying, it could come with afterwards a
crash, a migraine, pain, or a
protective output, because really, it is so taxing and
so stressful. Yeah,
(04:01):
and it's a little tricky. As I was talking about
a moment ago, sometimes we don't really know that we have
social anxiety, but we can figure that out by looking at the
output after we're in social situations. I might not
feel in the moment like I'm not
aware of the signals my body is sending me; the racing heart, the
(04:23):
sweaty palms, the muscle tension.
But afterwards, I experienced these
maladaptive coping behaviors that I used to
reregulate because it was such an intense amount of
stress when I was in this social situation. That can look
like a lot of different things for people. But it might be that you do
(04:45):
these social engagements and you push past your capacity because you're
not really aware of the stress. Then you come home and find yourself
social media scrolling, numbing out, needing to have,
long periods of time where you feel pretty shut down,
disconnected from your body. You might experience those physical
outputs like you were talking about; the migraine, pain,
(05:08):
substance use, all of these things are
the outputs of our nervous system trying to protect us
because we've incurred that big social stress.
I think substance used in social situation, like you
said, this is it. This is where people can find themselves and where I
find myself and can still on that spectrum.
(05:31):
I really relate to the fear and the judgment,
the potential criticism, because my inner critic was
doing that, my inner critic was so harsh. As
I was saying to myself, I was
worried that this is the really the way that I was being
perceived and that would really spin me out - that
(05:53):
very loud and abusive inner critic woven into
debilitating emotional flashbacks and dissociation.
So social environments became really
threatening, potentially, because I was in
these cycles of CPTS, and I would regulate myself
by really abusing myself through substance use, whether that
(06:15):
was food, alcohol, or cannabis.
You might
identify with using substances to deal with anxiety in a social
situation like alcohol or cannabis, because the social threat
is so stressful and dysregulating. Maybe you're not someone
who identifies with being on the spectrum of panicking
(06:35):
in social situations. I also really relate to that too,
and just having full on meltdowns. But you'll find
yourself in those patterns of over drinking, over
consuming, food, alcohol, cannabis
- if you are like me, how I was, I
would regulate with one of these substances. To have the courage to leave
(06:57):
my home, my bedroom, my house, my closet, even
getting dressed was a full on, overwhelming response
for me - I was regulating on the front end, regulating
throughout the experience and then I was regulating on the back end,
just as, Elizabeth highlighted. That's really when
food bingeing kicked in. It gets really
(07:20):
painful because I remember
when I did stop drinking and I didn't have that numbing
to go through the experience, but I still really wanted
social connection. I'd lost a lot of my social connections that I
had when I was drinking and it
was painful. I started to understand that I can't do these social things
(07:41):
without coming home, having a migraine having a food binge and being
shut down. So I started to really limit my social interaction because
I didn't want to face the consequences on the back end, but
that also sucked because I wanted the social connection.
It's just a
difficult thing to navigate. It falls
(08:03):
so much on a spectrum and that's when
we're talking about, Complex Post Traumatic
Stress. There are several reasons why
this is a distinguishing characteristic of CPTS, and
that that spectrum is a little bit more intense when
we have this developmental trauma, because one
(08:24):
of the things is, it's linked
to the inner critic and toxic shame -those
feed into the social anxiety.
It's linked to the other distinguishing characteristics of CPTS. If
you have these other two components, it makes social
interaction difficult because you're in this state of hyper vigilance,
(08:46):
performance and perfectionism as you're in these social
environments to secure attachment or cover up the deep
rooted shame beliefs of," I'm not worthy" or "I'm bad".
Carrying all that
gets really pulled up to the surface when you're in
those social situations as it's a heavy stress load.
(09:08):
It is. When you take away a big numbing out, a big
regulator like alcohol
- I can witness myself in those places now and
like I said, sometimes I can just be straight up. So, socially awkward, especially if
I'm on the phone or I feel like there's an ending time of something and
it's not like a comfortable silence. I'm just like,
(09:29):
okay, bye. It's so
weird sometimes and it just kind of comes from nowhere,
but because I've
lightened up so much on those maladaptive
coping behaviors
I find myself
so weird sometimes. Totally.
(09:50):
With CPTS, not only is there
social awkwardness, because everybody probably is socially awkward-
but sometimes. But when you have CPTS,
there's all this rumination about that and what happened to
the attachment bond and what does that mean about me. There's a whole
somatic response happening in your body and it just makes
(10:12):
those little moments, those little awkward moments without having the
tools to navigate that, the awareness, altitude
and all that good stuff that comes with understanding your, CPTS
more. It can make those little awkward exchanges
really impactful. Yes, it's
really interesting. Just the cascade and the interwovenness of
(10:34):
everything that we're going to talk about today as we've been through this CPTS
series. It's really important to talk
about hyper vigilance -it's
a way people could recognize themselves, but maybe they are. Not really.
It's not in their awareness quite yet, but hyper vigilance
is a heightened state of awareness where an individual
(10:56):
is constantly assessing the potential
threat in the surroundings. It's
having an internal alarm system that is keeping
you on high alert even when there's no
potential or immediate danger. It's the scanning
of the room, it's watching all the elements, not
(11:18):
being able to have your back to the crowd or to a door. It's
looking at your escape routes, whether that's emotional
or physical. Reading people's faces, trying
to be one step ahead of the people that you're around,
just by reading their nervous systems and reading the room and
the perceived threat that's going on. One thing
(11:40):
to remember, is that trauma changes our brain as the
amygdala is shaped differently and that it could get
larger and more sensitive to threat.
Stressors have a compounding effect that gives you
less capacity to take in all of the stimulus and it
makes you less resilient to the
(12:01):
stress. With
trauma, an inherent feeling of
not being safe, especially around a bunch of
other people. If you are in a state of hyper vigilance, there is
a lot of stimulus to take in during social
events, people, noises, the new
(12:22):
environment itself is already a stressor. If your
system is perceiving a lot of threat with stimulus, it's
going to get pushed into a trauma response.
Every situation when you have CPTS is a big stress
load and you might not have great tools for
processing that stress.
(12:44):
I noticed it myself in the auditory
stimulus. I can't stop myself from listening
to every single conversation that's going on around me.
That's a lot of information to take in, try to make
sense of and to process in my mind. In addition to
the social threats you were talking about, the trying to read everybody's
(13:06):
facial expressions, make sure everybody else is okay. Man, it's
a lot of sensory coming in to the system
and there can be a lot of physiological
reasons why that much stimulus coming
into our nervous system is threatening. We've talked on here a lot about
the, the stress bucket and how all of our sensory
(13:27):
information is going into that stress bucket all the time.
So when I'm hypersensitive to bringing in
a bunch of stimulus - maybe I have some
deficits in my input systems that are
compounding that stress. Maybe I have some sensory
mis-match - my eyes and another sensory system like
(13:49):
the balance system in my inner ear, they aren't synced up. That's
really energy costly to my nervous system at a very
physiological level because my brain is always having to decide
which one of these is right and needs that information,
to be able to generate predictions, producing an output and
keep me alive. I'm going into these social situations
(14:12):
with a highly sensitive nervous system, I'm hypervigilant and taking
in all this information. I have these deficits that are
compounding the stress all of the time. Then, the water level in that
bucket is just escalating very, very quickly in a
big social situation with all of that input. So, I'm
going to naturally get pushed into protective outputs,
(14:34):
the outputs that my brain produces to try to keep me
safe in that moment, to get me to reduce the
amount of stimulus coming in, like pain, like
a migraine. Now, I'm going to go back and I'm going to lay down
and I'm going to shut out all that social stimulus. It's going to be a
dark, quiet room and my survival
(14:55):
mind is like, okay, we're
safe - that was too much.
There's these deep
physiological reasons why a lot of stress in a
social situation could push us into protective outputs.
There's another component, which is in
(15:18):
the unique development of people's brains that
some people are experiencing, uncovering and knowing now
that you have a neurodivergence of some kind.
I'm coming into the knowledge and understanding that
I have ADHD - this speaks to the threat
bucket. Before, I always questioned it, as I just
(15:41):
didn't have the room in my bucket to
accept and think about that level of sensory
processing, because, like, we're talking about so much of social
engagement, it is a sensory experience.
I'm so
happy about my neuro work and my threat bucket overall baseline
(16:03):
level lowering, so I can embody
this new understanding of having ADHD
and tackle it from the perspective of neurosematic
intelligence. This is from, Genera Nuremberg's
book, Divergent Mind., "ADHD
is not a deficit in attention, but
(16:24):
rather a challenge of regulating it, at will or on
demand". Often, we have too much attention,
just not at the socially accepted times
and situations. So, whoot! That
validation I've experienced in that book
is comparative to reading, Pete Walke, and we
(16:46):
all know that was big. Let me share with you some of the overlapping
components of ADHD and Social Anxiety.
You could find, high
stimulation is both exciting and confusing, which
leads to feelings of overwhelm, being overstimulated
without realizing that and the not
(17:07):
understanding of where those boundaries are
in your nervous system with the level of stimulus
that's coming through. People with ADHD find emotional
regulation is difficult and that adds to sensory overwhelm.
It could lead to those meltdowns that we talked about earlier, earlier sudden
bouts of anger or frustration. And so, you know, with me,
(17:30):
I already have a heightened fight response because of the CPTS
I've experienced. One of the things that we've touched
on today is that high sensitivity to criticism and judgment,
which is also an experience for people with ADHD.
Then we have that masking that dysregulation
through engaging in harmful behaviors.
(17:51):
It's a sensory
overload that's too much when a person is trying to
hold together multiple threads of information under the expectation
of this neurotypical context. And
there's so many aspects to ADHD that I want to
honor that we're not going to talk about right now because we will be
(18:13):
bringing this into season four, because I'm someone who also
relates to having a sensory processing disorder. That's
why this neural work and this daily practice is so powerful.
Yeah, I'm so excited we're really taking a
deep dive into all of this in Season Four, because there
(18:34):
are so many overlaps and intersections between Complex
Trauma and different types of
neurodivergence. Just by starting to look at
if my brain developed differently because of my Tomplex
trauma, or was I just born that way? If I was
just born that way, there's a whole other layer of trauma in a
(18:56):
real physiological sense, because the world
is overwhelming my nervous system beyond
my capacity to cope. That's really what the definition of trauma is.
When we have an experience that overwhelms our
nervous system beyond our ability to cope and positively adapt
to that stress. If I'm trying to move through the world
(19:18):
with a neurodivergent brain and nervous system,
that is another type of trauma, then it gets
woven in to the Complex Trauma. There's
so much going on there that we're going to really dive into.
But, in this specific example, with social anxiety,
like you were talking about with ADHD or with somebody who just
(19:41):
identifies as a highly sensitive person, there's that same
level of sensory overload that happens in
a social situation. Our nervous
system may not have the skills or the
capacity to regulate that stress and it might not feel safe
to do so. We don't have the emotional processing skills or in the
(20:03):
moment. We don't feel like we can do the things that we need
to stay regulated and safe in that moment. And so
we end up in the maladaptive behaviors or the physical
outputs that come when our system is trying to protect us from that
overwhelm. Right now, on site, on the, Brain Based Wellness
Membership site, we're exploring relational healing
(20:25):
and have that series. You can go to, rewiretrial.com to
start engaging with that series and then we'll be moving on to what is
CPTS in this series and how, Elizabeth and I have been
resolving this in a journey of applied
neuro emotional processing, expressing and somatic
movement. So join us at, rewiretria.coml to get those two free weeks and.
(20:47):
Explore this work for yourself.
Definitely. So, let's talk about
the, HOW - about how
social anxiety can be an emotional overwhelm.
This is something we talked about on
our empath episode. We've learned to take on so
(21:09):
much of another person's emotional experience, whether
that comes from misattunement in
your primary developmental stages, or if you experienced
emotional neglect, which is an ACE score, which
we've recorded on previously. I think of how
many clients that I've worked with who talk about as a child, they
(21:31):
had to learn to attune to a parent who is dysregulated
or a caregiver who's dysregulated.
Over the years of their adolescence, they
end up being the one who's regulating the rest of the environment
or trying to regulate the rest of the environment.
They learn that if I
act this way, then maybe my Dad will be more calm, or
(21:55):
if I act this way, maybe my mom won't get so
angry. They start to develop certain
behaviors, because you're the ones who
have to regulate everybody else.
For some, especially
as they get older, they may adapt humor as
(22:15):
a way to diffuse a situation or a physical
activity. There could be perfectionism or
fawning. There's all kinds of different options that the nervous
system will reach for. Children need to have an
adult or caregiver to be able to attune with in order to
regulate their nervous systems, particularly up until the ages of
(22:37):
four, when we cannot self regulate. When
that gets inverted, I think that's a big driver of a lot of
these CPTS survival modes, because, remember,
we can redefine our five characteristics as
survival modes. Those are the survival modes we fall
into. A young nervous system doesn't have that
(23:00):
experience. It doesn't have the wisdom or the knowledge
to be able to self regulate itself and so
much less the whole rest of the
room and the world at large. That's a big
ask for a little nervous system. It can
reallycreate a pattern for some very dysregulating behaviors-
(23:21):
to try to have to do that and to step
into that role when that happens in development,
your amygdala, your hippocampus, is in an altered
state of function. Your HPA access is activated
when. When all of that stuff is ramped up,
the lens by which you see the world, it changes.
(23:42):
Your memory encoding changes, and
everything in the brain changes its function.
You go into a totally different mode
in a totally different state of being, being in
an environment like that, or being in a state where you
can't reregulate and there's no one to help you. If the
(24:04):
brain stays in survival mode, it's going to develop in
survival mode. I think it naturally
leads to a lot of these protective behaviors and stress responses.
Yeah, it's huge.
When we're trying to take on the emotional
(24:24):
regulation of everyone around
us in order to stay safe, it really
feels unsafe to let someone else have their own emotional
experience, to be frustrated, to be disappointed. There's someone else in
the space that doesn't feel comfortable.
We really dove into this in the empath episode about
(24:46):
how empathy is
a beautiful human skill. It's also something that needs
to be worked with in order to let it be a real asset
and not something that's chronically dysregulating ourself. If,
through emotional neglect or maybe parentification, we
have deeply learned to take on the responsibility of
(25:08):
other people's emotions again, for survival, for safety. Well, it's
a lot of work! I think about
this client that I've worked with for a long time
and this has gotten much, much better with time. It used to be very
debilitating, to have any kind of social interaction. There
was so much stress about how
(25:29):
everybody else was going to be experiencing
the event, especially if it was like an event in
their home or, you know, they love to have social gatherings, but
it was the pressure that they put on themselves to
make it enjoyable experience for everyone. There were
real big outputs of pain, migraine,
(25:52):
inflammation that would take them
out for weeks at a time afterwards. You
know, we really
have to start to re-pattern at
the level of our nervous system so we can go into these situations,
have boundaries, emotional and
(26:13):
energetic boundaries, to let everybody else have their own experience. This
brings
us to attachment styles. Throughout, Season
Three, we've explored why CPTS is,
at its root, an attachment wound.
(26:34):
If the core wound is about social connection
and our deepest triggers are about
being rejected, abandoned, or experiencing retaliation from
other relationships, when we
express ourselves, then social threat is the biggest, deepest
stress our system faces. Relationships with
(26:55):
caregivers, remember, shape, our individual attachment
schema. And now in our
life, our nervous system responds with reactivity and threat
to social connection. That doesn't just replay in our intimate relationships,
it shows up in all our connections. Our neuromatrix is
shaped by our developmental experiences. Then, as
(27:18):
we interact in this whole web of human connection, we're now
primed for an attachment that is
protective, which perceives a lot of threat. Inside
our body, in our physiology, we're experiencing a lot
of stress. As human beings, we just aren't
isolated. Part of being a human being is being in relationship and
(27:40):
that's the rub with Complex
Trauma - maintaining connection and relationship can be inherently dys-regulating.
With a
heavy increase in chronic stress, you
have a need for social connection and interaction, and those
two forces come up against each other, leading to
(28:00):
a lot of internal chaos, a lot of stress in the
body. That's a really
important part of understanding CPTS.
Attachment schemas- it's really fascinating. Let's explore
anxious attachment for a moment. Let's dive into this. I
(28:22):
know, you know, from our past episodes, we understand our
attachment styles are fluid, that our nervous systems are fluid and
can change, will change situationally,
depending on what our brain thinks is the most adaptive in
this moment, in this experience. If you
learned in early development that your primaries and the people around
(28:44):
you are not safe, that people are unstable and
unpredictable, you're going to be hypersensitive to the way
that other nervous systems affect you. In the case
of anxious attachment, the mom's nervous system is
dys-regulated. She's dissociated, she shuts
down. We're attuning and
(29:05):
feeling that in here, not here, here, not here (points
to various areas of the body). Then, that translates into anxious attachment. So, we're
attached. We're not attached. It's like having a foot
in and out constantly with other nervous systems and in relationship. So
from development, we
become really hypersensitive to other people's nervous systems and
(29:28):
now we're around a bunch of other people in a social situation,
we're going to be hypersensitive to their nervous
systems. That's a lot for our nervous system! Let's
say you lean into anxious attachment and then
you're actually in a social situation. Individuals with
anxious attachment tend to be overly preoccupied with
(29:49):
their relationships because they fear abandonment. They
seek constant reassurance and worry about rejection.
There's a heightened sensitivity. Anxiously attached
individuals are hyper aware of social cues and potential
threats. There's a big fear of rejection and dread
rejection or disapproval, leading to avoidance of social situations
(30:12):
entirely. There's an overall negative self
perception. There's anxious attachment
fosters self doubt and negative self talk,
and it fuels social anxiety, overthinking,
ruminating about interactions, conversations.
There's the anticipation of judgment or
(30:34):
criticism. And then there's the overanalyzing, dissecting
social interactions, magnifying the perceived
mistakes that you have made.All of
this gets internalized. I'm not worthy of this. I am not
good enough. I'm the one from development who learns
that I'm the one who needs to change, not the environment or
(30:56):
the people around me. This may lead to,
into a lot of overdoing, over giving,
and particularly self abandoning.There's so many
things in a social situation that are dys-regulating
and stressful.
So
this isn't something I particularly relate to, but it's something that I've seen
(31:20):
in social situations. When somebody gets aggressive,
maybe because
they're drinking a bunch
of alcohol to regulate their nervous systems.
Back to if people are the threat,
you move into heightened states of activation when you're around
(31:40):
people and regulating through alcohol,
experiencing and trying to numb out that, like, faster
breathing, that rapid heart rate and all of that,
because you're preparing to protect yourself, but you're protecting
yourself from an activated sympathetic state of fight flight.
But in this case, we're examining flight because the alcohol
(32:02):
has had a cascading effect on the body. And if the person's
already in a dissociative state with numbing properties of
alcohol and living with repressed anger and rage,
boom. I mean, you just have a recipe for disaster.
When you put that same scenario
into relationship and attachment, then you
(32:23):
could also be experiencing those well worn pathways of
that person as they are in relationship to you.
I relate to that. I use to have a lot of rage that came out
when I was drinking as it was
so repressed all my life. But, when
(32:47):
I was in social situations or not, maybe just even
by myself and I would drink that would open the door for all of
that repressed rage to come out on myself or on
other people. It was
not a good situation. When
we're talking about attachment styles, we have the flip side of that,
(33:09):
right? Again, attachment styles are fluid and we can have both and we can be
disorganized. But, there's also avoidant attachment style, where
we have a real reluctance to rely on others and a
fear of emotional intimacy and a tendency to suppress emotions.
It's more of a pullback from the
social connection rather than a move toward anxiously to try to secure
(33:31):
the attachment. People with avoidant attachment can
find it really challenging to open up and connect with others. You
had a caregiver where it was not at all safe
to connect with that nervous system, and they
put too much responsibility too much stress, too
much, too much on your little developing nervous system.
(33:54):
At a survival
leve it feelsl unsafe to take on that kind
of connection and intimacy with other
people. So, in
social situations, you're being asked to
connect and engage with people, and it can lead to
(34:16):
a really big flight response in the body of like, I gotta get out of
here, this is too much. It does not feel
safe and, or you might just feel really socially awkward
because you can't connect to people and isolate it. And,
you know, I'm someone with pretty disorganized attachment, so I relate to
anxious and I relate to avoidant. But, you know, when I would do
(34:38):
things in group situations, I really wanted to connect, but
it also felt very unsafe. I also really pulled
back and was very quiet and reserved and removed from the
situation. I often feel like I wanted to get the Hell out
of there as fast as I could. Although at
the same time, I would see all these other people connecting and I would want
(35:01):
that experience. Many times, when I was in that
group situation, I felt really isolated and left out because I
didn't have the capacity to connect.
It's a lot. I mean... it's justa lot. I
think
we're wired intuitively right for the safety of
(35:23):
connection- that's a desire. To want
that and then to know or to not know that
you have a brain that's not wired for,
for safe connection and not understanding
that, that is a really hard place to be in
a nervous system. I mean, it really is. Thankfully,
(35:46):
attachment schema, your attachment, can change.
It does change. It changes in each
relationship you're in. But, even within those nuances of
each relationship, you can blanket change your
attachment and the way that you attach to others.
All of this is made possible with
(36:08):
where you're in full capacity, right? We have to move within
the capacity of our nervous systems for any change that we
want to make, whether that's personal or social.
There's a need to
re-pattern the nervous system response to
social interaction. One of the things I 've learned
(36:29):
to do is dosing my
social engagement, my social interaction. Now,
I know what the boundaries of my own nervous system are. I know where
I'm starting to be overstimulated or overwhelmed by
the environment, by the people, by the sounds, and just by the
whole thing at large- I'll
(36:51):
spend some time in the situation.
Then, I will remove myself. At that time, after I remove
myself, I'll do some drills, I might push the wall, I might do a little
emotional work, really minimum effective dose and
I'll decide, "...am I re-engaging or am I
done? Am I done with this?". I might just go home and
(37:13):
not experience the pushback on the back end of
the food. I don't
want that. I don't want those stress loops in
my body. It always comes down to the dosing and
the regulation.
Yes, really critical in order to re-pattern, to honor our
(37:36):
capacity and work within that minimum effective dose, because
it is possible to change our attachment schema as you
mentioned. We want to remember.
We've talked about that a lot in, Season Three, the
relational healing season. But to remember that our
attachment schema are the lens, they're the
(37:58):
paradigm of how we see the world socially.
It's the glasses that we're looking through. How do I perceive other people's
behavior, their action, their intentions? And that's the interpretation part
of how the nervous system works. Remember, we're always taking in information,
we're interpreting it, and then we're generating an output, and this is the
interpretation part. And then the behavior, the
(38:19):
anxiety, the response, that's the
output. With NSI, the
input is the social stimulus. Then, we have the
interpretation, which is our attachment schema, that decides safe
or unsafe - we generate the output.
How our perception is going to dictate what the response is. Does
(38:40):
my brain decide safe or unsafe? When we have Complex Trauma,
it's this repeated exposure to lack of safety.
We know it's usually ongoing environmental or
social lack of safety. That happens frequently
over and over again, especially during our development. It's not just one big
thing, but it's really a repetitive pattern of unsafe behavior and
(39:04):
unsafe environments. If we grow up in that type
of environment naturally, that's going to
shape the lens of how we view social interactions.
(41:09):
It's going to change our perception, not just of intimate connection or family relationships, but
all relationships will be affected.
The Complex Trauma is what
has formed and informed my attachment schema. It's
what's created my lens. Again, kind of going
back to this idea of redefining CPTS as frequently
occurring outputs. We have
these five outputs, and the, "C" stands
for chronic. It means there are chronically occurring survival mechanisms that
our system has learned to depend on and that
I'm going to use over and over and over again to try to protect myself
socially. So, if I want
to change those outputs, then looking at this
through the lens of NSI, I have to start to
change the inputs, how my system is taking in information
about the world around me and I have to start to change the interpretation. The,n
I can experience the new.
(41:43):
Outputs and the new outputs. Next week you're going to be hearing our new exploration
of what is, self abandonment. That's what all of this is
about - we do this work so that we don't self abandon. We don't only
just have a relationship to the outside world, to
the social environment and relationship, you have a relationship to
yourself first and foremost. Everything,
gets internalized and it
always comes back onto the self. What do we
do about all of this? It's about the daily nervous system practice.
It's about lowering the threat in your overall bucket.
It's about being here and listening. This
is kind of the first part - that perhaps, this is all just coming into
your awareness and then you're going to jump on site with us at, rewiretrial.com.
Check out those two free weeks that we offer.
(42:37):
Currently, we're in the middle of the, Relational Healing Series on the Brain Based Wellness
website. I 've mentioned that before. Then it's the, CPTS Series. If you
are identifying with any or all of these
distinguishing components and you have CPTS, please
join us for
the special series we're doing. We really want
to see you on site. Rewiretrial.com yeah, we really would
love to see you there!
These class series started as a request from a listener who emailed me and was
a member on the site and said, hey, you guys have been talking about relational
health all of, Season Three. Could
you do some classes specifically related to that? I thought
that's a brilliant idea! Let's teach the tools in
practical application to re-pattern all these things that
we're talking about re-patterning. So, we have the whole Relational Healing
Series. It's in the on demand library. You just have to click, "Relational Healing
Relationships" and all the classes are recorded there.
Now, we have a class series on, CPTS showing
you guys the practical tools, the
way we use somatic practices and nervous system tools to re-pattern.
Click on the," On Demand library CPTS
Series" and it's all there for you.
(43:00):
You can explore everything in your two free week trial at, rewiretrial.com This highlights how
much we really love hearing from you. Please keep
reaching out to us. You're such a big part of the co-creation
of Trauma Rewired and what we bring to you on the, Brain Based Wellness site.
Absolutely! Thank you so much.
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