Trauma in the Body, in the Mind, and in Our Lives with Meghann Crane-Russ | Part 2 of 3

As a parent raising a child with special needs, we experience unusual amounts of chronic trauma. Trauma therapist Meghann Crane-Russ, LCSW, PMH-C, is back this week, guiding us through the science and mechanisms behind our primal response to trauma. Strap in as we explore the complex terrain of the human brain, and prepare to gain a deeper understanding of your own responses in the face of fear. 

We will learn the difference between feelings and thoughts and why we explode into fight or flight or withdraw into freeze or collapse. Learning how our 'downstairs' and 'upstairs' brains interact when faced with said trauma will help us to understand ourselves more deeply, while giving us the hope that we can live a more present and connected life. 

This episode is packed full of science, with plenty of everyday examples to us understand. For us visual learners, Meghann has provided resources to use while listening to help pull all of the concepts together. 

>>>Click here to Download the Resources mentioned in the episode!<<<


Connect with our Guest, Meghann Crane-Russ:
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Website: https://www.kararyska.com/

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Transcript

Kara: 1:54

Hi, I'm Kara, life coach, wife and mom to four incredible and unique children. It wasn't all that long ago that my son received a diagnosis that had my world come crashing down. I lacked the ability to see past the circumstances, which felt impossible, and the dreams I once had for my life and family felt destroyed. This forward has many years of surviving and not at all thriving, and you'll see a mom who trusts that she can handle anything that comes her way and has access to the power and confidence that once felt so lacking. I created this special needs mom podcast to create connection and community with moms who find themselves feeling trapped and with no one who really understands. My intention is to spark the flare of possibility in your own life and rekindle your ability to dream. This isn't a podcast about your special needs child. This is a podcast about you. If you are a mom who feels anxious, alone or stuck, then you are in the right place. Welcome, hello and welcome to the special needs mom podcast.

Kara: 3:06

Welcome back to the three part series. This is the second of the series. You might want to go back and listen to the first, but if you like to be a rebel, you do you. We did design them to kind of be a one, two, three series, and so, again, you choose what you want to do, but this episode will stand alone.

Kara: 3:26

The emphasis of this episode is science. I love science and, like I said actually last week as I was wrapping up the episode, many of you have already become scientists, as you have, or maybe research scientists, as you have figured out how to get the resources and to learn about your child's needs and disabilities, and so you're a scientist, you belong here. and some of you might be totally acquainted with the language that we're going to be introducing in this episode. It's pretty technical and don't shy away, so some of you might already know it, some of you might be totally new, but what Meghann does really beautifully is breaks it down better than anyone I've heard. So, no matter where you're starting from, you're going to be in good hands. In this episode, we're again going to look at science. If you ever have found yourself spinning, like in thought, out of control, looping and looping and looping, and feel like you're just can't even stop it, that's what we're going to be addressing in this episode, so stay tuned.

Kara: 4:26

Lastly, before we get into the episode, Meghann has generously provided handouts and resources to accompany these episodes, because there's again a lot of information and, if you like pictures, these are the resources for you. What you need to do to get those resources is go to the show notes of this episode, click on the link and we will email them to you. All right, I think that's everything we needed to cover. Let's get right to it. We have Meghann here, who is an expert in trauma, and so she is going to walk us through the autonomic nervous system, polyvagal theory and all the science. So if you're not a science person, stick with us, because we're going to give real examples to make it real and not just like a cool textbook chapter, even though I think I would still like that chapter. So I'm going to turn it over to Meghann and say what happens to our body in trauma.

Meghann: 5:17

So we're actually going to start in the brain, and the brain systems impacted in trauma are kind of like three global levels. There's what's called the reptilian brain, which is like our most fundamental part of our brain, our brainstem and our hypothalamus, and that is when a baby is born. All of the functions that that baby can do breathe, cry, urinate, digest those are all governed by the brainstem, and so it's called reptilian brain because that is also shared amongst reptiles. That rather those basic fundamentals, kind of like the same part of the brain. The next brain system that is tied to that is called the limbic system, and that is a brain system that is shared amongst mammals. So that's our mammalian brain, and the limbic system is comprised of three main parts of the brain, which is the thalamus, which I kind of call the soup pot for all of the raw sensory data that we get from the world. You know, if you think about how we take in the world, it's through the nerves and our senses, right, our optical nerves, the nerves in our skin, our auditory nerves, all of those are nerves that come up through our body, up through the brainstem, and all that raw sensory data gets dumped in the thalamus, in this soup pot for your brain to make sense of.

Meghann: 6:48

Oh, you know what my voice sounds like, you know who I am. You know you're sitting in your house, like, you know we're recording a podcast, right, making sense of the world around you. and then from there it goes to a part of the brain called the amygdala. We are going to be talking about this guy a lot or gal. You know, however your amygdala identifies. But so the amygdala is the primary center for regulating our emotions. It is responsible for emotional learning and assigns emotional meaning to things. So I'm going to teasingly give you this example Kara, how do you feel about strawberries?

Kara: 7:26

I'm good with them. I really like them. Songs are right. How do you feel about sleep studies? Oh well, let's talk about sleep studies. I hate them.

Meghann: 7:35

Right, stamp right Like how do you feel about that? Right, you're amygdala stamped.

Kara: 7:40

Full disclosure, though I've actually never done one. Actually, I hate them this much that I've never done one. I've always gotten my husband on board, so anyhow.

Meghann: 7:50

His amygdala has stamped sleep studies less strongly than yours.

Kara: 7:57

Or his love and devotion to me is higher there.

Meghann: 8:00

Right, I could go with the one, amygdala stamped a lot of love in his brain. so it also associates emotions to memories.

Meghann: 8:11

So, like if you think back to like you know when you got married or when your kids were born, or you know when we first met, we both had positive feelings for each other. Right, our amygdala was like like it's also helps with reward processing. So that kind of like motivation, the difference between like I want to do this versus I have to do this, that desire. And it's our smoke detector. It's the part of our brain that scans for a threat in our environment and initiates our stress response if a stressor or a threat is identified. So that's the amygdala. The hippocampus is its buddy. I don't know, this is a lot to take in auditorially. So there are going to be some handouts that we're making available to the listeners and you can kind of follow along with the handouts as I'm talking through this if you're listening to the podcast.

Kara: 8:56

I'll just make a quick note to where to find those. So those are going to be in the show notes. There'll be a link saying link to handouts, and then I will ask for your email. So then I can, of course, email them to you. If you're like oh, I got to see these handouts. I want to see what she's talking about visually. I'm a visual learner, so I really appreciate this, go to the show notes, look them. And if you're like, okay, I couldn't find them, really know how to find me on either Facebook or Instagram and I will make sure you get them. Okay, back to the hippocampus.

Meghann: 9:23

Back to the hippocampus, which is kind of the amygdala's little buddy and it is responsible for early memory formation and consolidation. It's kind of the early storage for things on its way to a long-term memory and it also relates new information to past experiences in a very rudimentary black and white. Good, bad, yes, no way, not nuanced, just very like what do we think about this? We didn't really like that before, so we don't really like it now. Right, like, not a nuance, just like yes, no, black, white, very binary. That is the limbic system. So the amygdala, the hippocampus, the thalamus, those are the main parts of it. So in trauma talk, when we refer to our downstairs brain, what we were referring to is our limbic system and that reptilian brain, right? So the mammalian limbic system and the reptilian brain, that's our downstairs brain.

Meghann: 10:26

Our upstairs brain is predominantly our prefrontal cortex, which is that wonderful part of our brain that's in the kind of our front forehead area, and it is actually not fully formed in humans till around age 24, which is not surprising why you can't actually rent a car until you're 25, right, and so that is a part of the brain. That is really all of our evolved brain functions. So, abstract thought, putting thoughts into words, learning, recall, executive functioning right. So being able to plan, organize, working memory, impulse control also exists there. And our sense of time, our understanding of where we are on our timeline and where the information that is coming in relates to our timeline. Remember that part. We'll readdress it.

Meghann: 11:19

So, in trauma talk, our prefrontal cortex is what we call our upstairs brain. What happens in trauma, when you have a trauma brain, is that there becomes an imbalance of power between your downstairs brain and your upstairs brain. In a brain that hasn't been impacted by trauma, the upstairs brain calls the shot 99% of the time. Right, it's in charge. You might have an impulse where you're like I don't wanna do that, and then the part of your brain that says, oh, you have to do that is your upstairs brain. Right, that this is how I feel about something, but what I know is different, right, that feeling part is your downstairs brain, that knowing part is your upstairs brain.

Kara: 12:11

Say that one more times the feeling part is the downstairs brain, okay. And then the knowing, the intellect is the upstairs Correct. Okay, got it.

Meghann: 12:21

Yes, and the upstairs brain holds the power, because if we are driven by our feelings all the time, things can get kind of messy. A little wild over here.

Meghann: 12:37

Yes, right, but what happens in a brain that has experienced trauma is that limbic system gets more powerful, right, the amygdala kind of takes over and the upstairs brain can't shut it down, and so, like, typically, if you think about like a situation where, like maybe you are walking off a street and then, like a bike goes by, you would kind of like jump back right Without thinking right, that's your peripheral senseis, like in your thalamus. I've picked up something in like your peripheral vision that like sent threat, something's coming right, projectile your amygdala went autonomic nervous system, right, you just had this like impulse to move back right and then, before you're even aware of what happened, that autonomic nervous system, that full body response from your brain, going correct, right, it's supposed to work that way to keep you safe, right. Another example I use is, like you know, this is a very primitive system in our brain. It was developed a long time ago to keep us safe.

Meghann: 13:44

If you saw a saber-tooth tiger, you would not like go up to it and say, "hey, mr Saber-tooth tiger, I would really like you to not eat me today. Can we like talk about a compromise, or like we can figure out something else. You would just respond. And so that feeling, emotional response, reaction downstairs brain is designed to keep us safe, so it's important. But when it runs the show, when it suddenly thinks everything is scary, when it's on high alert all of the time it causes us to get so dysregulated. The language called the language of the downstairs brain, meaning like what that brain system predominantly like, understands in the downstairs brain. The language of the downstairs brain is emotions, your five senses, your stress response right, your understanding of safety and your autonomic body functions.

Kara: 14:47

Pause real quick, so back to downstairs. autonomic functions, meaning breathing heart, beating bowel movements, I'm thinking.

Meghann: 14:55

All the things that your body does to keep you alive that you aren't actively thinking about.

Kara: 15:00

Yeah, just wanted to make sure that was clear. So back to then jump back to the upstairs brain.

Meghann: 15:04

Upstairs brain, yes, and then the upstairs brain is in charge of abstract thought, actual language like verbal language, again, executive functioning sense of time. If you think about being with someone who's highly anxious right. Anxiety is a fancy word for fear. Can you tell them to calm down?

Kara: 15:22

No, you cannot.

Meghann: 15:23

Right, are they able to engage with you verbally and understand, like, what you're trying to get them to understand, that you see? No, because what their brain is operating in is their five senses, their emotions, their sense of safety and everything in their body that's telling them to be scared, right, all the physical sensations that is like heightened when we experience fear. So we talked a little bit about how the information flows right, comes in through your senses, goes into the thalamus. Somebody gets this check from the amygdala, like is it threatening or not? And it cross references with the hippocampus right, this new thing coming in, like do we know anything about this? Right. And then the hippocampus will say like yes, it's somewhat like this other bad thing. And then the amygdala goes threat, right. Or maybe like no, we don't really know.

Meghann: 16:15

Yeah, it's fine. Like again, good, bad, not really nuanced here, right. And so if it's not bad, right. If there's not something that we know about it that is threatening or like impairs our safety or anything, again like we don't have a strong emotional reaction to it. then that information like flows freely up to our prefrontal cortex and then we have all those great evolved brain functions that I talked about earlier to be able to process that information If it doesn't get past the gatekeeper of the amygdala and the hippocampus, right. So, like a really simple example I use is like and this is kind of an extreme example, but like, let's say, you had like an apple with a worm in it one time. Someone else is like, oh, do you want an apple? And the amygdala goes apple, the hippocampus goes, " no worm. And then no, thank you, right, even though maybe it was a Granny Smith, and like the apple that you ate with a worm was a pink lady, right?

Meghann: 17:08

And then somebody says do you want apple pie? And you go nope, apples are bad, apple pie is bad. Right. Then all of those additional threats get stored in the hippocampus, right? So then suddenly, not just pink lady apples are bad, but Granny Smith apples are bad, Like red delicious apples are bad, and apple pie is bad, and apple juice is bad, Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh.

Kara: 17:29

Maybe all-round fruit is bad at some point.

Meghann: 17:31

Right, right, right and then oranges become bad, right, yes, and so the hippocampus gets stored of what I call fake news.

Kara: 17:39

It's so good. I've never heard it described that way, but I'm like this is nailing it so good. Uh-huh, keep going, yes.

Meghann: 17:45

Fake news, right, and so the hippocampus and amygdala get in this little dance. I think of them. It's like these two, like tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum, right, Like, oh right,.

Meghann: 17:58

But then what the power that the amygdala has the real power that it has is to set off your autonomic nervous system. And this is where Polyvagal comes in, because what the autonomic nervous system is is your sympathetic nervous system, the activation of your sympathetic nervous system, which is your fight and flight response, or, like your extreme response from your parasympathetic nervous system, which is freeze and collapse. Despite how much insight, insight is abstract thought, despite how much insight that your prefrontal cortex may have in the moment about what's going on, if your amygdala decides this is enough of a threat, it will set off your body to react.

Kara: 18:50

So if it's your intellect or that upstairs brain against the downstairs, the downstairs always supersedes.

Meghann: 18:59

Yes, yes, and it's really easy to ignore your emotions. Mm-hmm yes. we do it all the time. It is much harder to ignore the alarm bells of our body.

Kara: 19:12

Mm-hmm, say more about that.

Meghann: 19:14

You know we can suppress, we can repress, we can dissociate right from our feelings. We can not talk about them, we can ignore them, we can distract ourselves right.

Kara: 19:28

Okay, got it. or other manifestations in your body that are perhaps a manifestation of anxiety. Actually, right now, I have what I think is one of those, and I have had like a tickle in my throat, not tickle, but like just feels like I need to clear my throat all the time, and I was like you know what? This developed right when I was traveling away from my kids. I think this is more than meets the eye, I think this is more than cold and flu season. So, anyhow, we can talk about that offline later, but that's an example, right?

Meghann: 19:59

That's an example and that awareness about what you're feeling physically, how it may be related to an emotional experience, how it may be related to like something that's actually going on in your life. That's what mindfulness is. your ability to hover above your emotions and your body sensations, not gonna caught up in them, but kind of this hovering above of observation, without reacting to them in the moment.

Kara: 20:25

and actually I want to pause here to say this is much of the work of coaching and therapy. But coaching is, or when I work with people as coaching, a lot of it is stepping outside and looking from a little higher elevation to observe, not to judge, to observe. And some of you tell me these things. You're like, oh my gosh, I cannot do that. I have not had that experience. I hear you and I'm like what. Practice? So one of my favorite things I learned in my coach training was the answer to most how questions is practice. So if you're like I haven't been able to do that yet, not a problem, you just haven't practiced yet. And so that's where we're gonna eventually get you here o

Meghann: 21:06

and I will add that what facilitates that mindfulness? Mindfulness exists in your prefrontal cortex, that is the part of your brain, the upstairs brain.

Kara: 21:17

Yes, when you are being controlled by your right, like when you're in downstairs, you won't have access to that. I think great point to bring up. So you can't go judging yourself because you can't, because you literally can't, like that's not an option for you.

Meghann: 21:32

Yeah, so this system, right, Like the amygdala, the hippocampus that sets off your autonomic nervous system. You know that system is supposed to go on threat, right. On saber-tooth tiger. runaway. got to safety, turns off right?

Kara: 21:51

Yeah, I guess good to point out that this actually is happening all the time, every day, right, like we're going in and out and all over the range of the autonomic nervous system and we were designed to. So this is a good thing, we're happy, we have the system I'll let you point out. Like what happens with trauma is. how would you describe that?

Meghann: 22:10

What happens is that system goes, it gets stuck on, and if it turns off, it doesn't maybe turn off all the way, as it would have normally. and so your amygdala is ringing for three alarm fire when you're boiling pasta. And so you're having this huge reaction, the threats in your environment that your brain's interpreting as threat and then sending signals to your body that it's threat, but it's not actually threatened.

Kara: 22:40

I will say, I think these are moments where you can, maybe not in the moment. but you can, after this moment passes, you can observe that, "oh wow, I was boiling pasta and I was feeling like my house was gonna burn down. Those are moments that I think you can bring mindfulness to and, especially with practice, even in the moment. I can't remember. There was something that I was doing the other day where I was having this experience. I was like, oh interesting, because what I'm experiencing now is disproportional, like the experience I'm having right now is disproportional to what actually is happening. But I just think it's important. It gives situations that you're gonna find yourself in and kind of what it really looks like, what your ability is to work with, what's the trauma that's happening or the experience that you're happening,

Meghann: 23:30

and on the flip side of that coin, right, noticing the situations where you actually feel safe and secure. Right, where you are having moments of adaptive change, where you are responding in a way that maybe you didn't before. Right, like everyone knows what a trigger is; something that, like, reminds them of something traumatic, right, or s omething bad that happened. A glimmer is the opposite of a trigger.

Meghann: 23:56

I've never heard this I like this yeah, it's a good word. So a glimmer is like that adaptive response or that moment where you were mindful, that moment that you had where you went. I have noticed that I keep having this tickle in my throat Like what is this really about, right? Instead of like, oh my gosh, I'm gonna get sick and they're all gonna get sick and da, da, da, da, da, da, da, right, and we're gonna have a long weekend in a few weeks and it's gonna be terrible, right, but really also, it's recognizing in the moment when you're being triggered and what you can do about that, but also recognizing the glimmers.

Kara: 24:29

I love that. I think I love that word for this purpose, so that's really, really helpful. There's one piece that I think is just really interesting, and so back to kind of the language of the downstairs brain. It's in emotions. and you kind of talked about this fake news, which I think is such a brilliant way of describing this, and many times, I think a lot of us can look back to a situation where we would describe ourselves spinning, thinking about the same thing over and over again, trying to figure it out, trying to figure out what's gonna happen, and I'm gonna explain why things happen and you can validate or correct, and if there's something that you would change that, this is your brain trying to predict the future.

Kara: 25:06

So emotions are generated by our brain and they're based on past data. Emotions guide us to action, right, so that's why they become very, very important, and so your brain's thinking okay, what emotions should I serve up so that this body does the thing I want it to do, like I eat the apple or don't eat the apple, and when we don't have enough data perhaps we've never seen an apple before our brain's gonna be spinning, trying to answer the question, to get some degree of certainty to be able to feel like yeah, like we're good. And so in situations, usually relational or medical, we don't have a lot of data, or the data we have in the past is quite tragic. And so those are situations where, in my understanding correctly to say like, if we're in that spinning, we would be in the downstairs brain and our brain would be trying to sort out where it should send us.

Meghann: 26:00

Yeah, I often will reflect back someone's ruminating and they're like well, I just feel like, and then I feel like, and then this is gonna happen. I feel like I say, yeah, that's a lot of feelings. That's your downstairs brain talking, right Versus I feel like this, but I know this right. That's the dichotomy between the feeling downstairs brain right and your cognitive upstairs brain. Again, anxiety is a fancy word for fear. This emotion has become so, It just has such a persona in our culture, right. like I have brown hair and I have brown eyes and I'm a social worker and I'm anxious. like it's, like it's a personal quality of mine, right? Actually, no, anxiety is an emotion. Of our basic emotions joy, anger, envy, sadness and fear. Anxiety lives in the house of fear, so, and it's a very motivating emotion because it keeps us safe.

Kara: 26:56

I've heard you explain it. It's a fear specifically even more pointed towards the fear of the future right.

Meghann: 27:02

Yes, because of what has happened in the past. Right, and that's where the hippocampus holds that fake news and that's where the power of these two guys that are. You know, two brain systems that are like in cahoots. With the really positive intention of keeping you safe, right. But the tricky part here is often when we are ruminating and stuck right, Spinning, as you called it. thinking and thinking what, if, what, if, what, if You're so consumed with trying to predict and think your way out of something that may happen, and what I challenge you to do in those moments is what are you feeling? I don't wanna know what you think about what's gonna happen. I wanna know what you're feeling.

Kara: 27:41

Yeah, and so that's a feeling, right. A lot of times, and I'm sure you see this as well if you ask someone what they're feeling, they're gonna say I feel like I'm not gonna be okay, that's a thought, exactly, and that's what I was gonna get to, right. So they say I feel. But it's actually a preface to say what they're thinking, and so it takes a little second of perhaps pausing and actually checking in with your body to see what your body is actually serving up to you.

Kara: 28:08

Like what's happening in your body, you may or may not even have words for it, but caution yourselves, because so many of us have not been, I don't wanna say trained to feel, cause we're feeling, but we're just we're so unlanguaged about the two different things. Again, our culture emphasizes thought production and it does not has not historically, and I think we see it shifting Into really kind of the actual feeling and emotion. So if you're saying I feel and then you're saying any sort of statement or assessment, that's a thought and it's not a feeling. So continue going until you actually get to a feeling.

Meghann: 28:49

Yes, and two things there. Human beings love control. We love to feel like we are in control and we have the illusion sometimes that we are, right. that we know how things are gonna go. And you and I know from working in this community, hearing so many stories and people's life experiences, one day your life can just turn up on its head. and you really have no control over that. So you know, I spoke to this in the last episode, but again, what is the task at hand? The task at hand is not to be able to control what's going on. The task at hand is to be able to cope with the uncertainty of what is going

Meghann: 29:29

on, right. and part of that coping is acknowledging the emotions that the uncertainty is bringing up. I am really scared about what's gonna happen. I'm really worried. So what fear does? So our autonomic nervous system? Right, it's a big word, but I'm gonna split up the first part, which is auto. It just happens. It's not a choice, it's just how your body was designed.

Meghann: 29:56

So your sympathetic nervous system, what happens in your body when you go into fight or flight? And so it's a very activating response. Think about it. Resources within your body are being, like, deployed to the body systems that can help you survive, right? So your pupils dilate, your airways, your lungs dilate, you're taking in more oxygen. Your heart rate increases to get you to move. Your digestion is inhibited. So if you think about times when you're really anxious and someone's like, oh, just eat something, like you have no appetite, your liver releases glucose, sugar, energy. Your adrenal glands release epinephrine and neopinephrine, which are those hormones that kind of like get you going right. Your bladder relaxes. You have decreased blood flow to your reproductive organs, like your go mode. You have a perfect story to illustrate this, right.

Kara: 30:54

Oh, yes, yeah, I told you this earlier. So we were, of course, talking about all these systems and how they work and I was sharing about a moment I distinctly remember and it was, unfortunately, the moment where I was learning that leaf I had a recurrence of his brain tumor. I was sitting upstairs in my room that was happened to also be my office at the time and I opened a MyChart message expecting that I was gonna get the message that I got every year. and it was gonna say very few words and it was gonna tell me that it was a clean scan again. So I opened this MyChart message and I couldn't exactly understand what it said. because it was in radiology language, which is not English. Well, I mean, it's English but it's not interpretable by me and I could discern enough to know that this wasn't okay.

Kara: 31:47

It was really, really scary and in that moment, like my first response, the thing I remember feeling a very strong urge to do was to run into my closet. Because, again, I was in my bedroom, so I was only like a 10 feet away from my closet, and I remember just wanting to run and hide and I didn't, because I obviously didn't need to, like, I mean I could understand enough that, but I remember feeling physically this urge to run because I obviously was having an autonomic response to this very, very threatening and dangerous news. So I think it's such an interesting story to think about. Comical is not the right word because I feel like that makes it so maybe too light, because it was obviously a pretty hard moment, but like if I picture the idea of like wanting to run into my closet when I'm getting an email, I think it's just such a good snapshot to show how strong the urge in our body is when it doesn't always match the actual physical experience that we're having.

Meghann: 32:48

Well, except it did, because there was this huge threat, yes, a threat that you knew, a threat that you know well. Meaning, because it was an email like the email, wasn't gonna come smash me, right. Right, but again kind of like back to that analogy with the apple, right, and then suddenly like all around frui t. Threat. Response. Flight. get me to safety. Yeah.

Meghann: 33:17

So you know only because it's, I think, important to say this connect this back to what we were speaking about at the end of the last episode, with adverse childhood experiences and the chronic illnesses that people that have high ACE scores have. So I'm gonna read down sympathetic nervous system activation again and I'm gonna read out some of those chronic illnesses. So again, airways dilate, heart rate increases, digestion is inhibited, both in the stomach and the intestines. Liver releases glucose, adrenal glands release the hormones that to get you really kind of like in a heightened state: COPD, lung disease, chronic inflammation of your lungs, heart disease, your heart is going on high rate all the time, Type two diabetes, because your blood sugar is chronically high, because your liver is releasing glucose. So this autonomic response IBS, right, and some like-.

Kara: 34:18

I was gonna say, and so many more.

Meghann: 34:19

I don't have to list them all, obviously, but yes, yeah, yeah right, like there is such a connection, like again, I just wanna speak back to like it's not about you. This is how our bodies work. Yeah, this is how our bodies were designed to respond to stress, to threat, when that threat is ever present. When we have that chronic, ongoing stress, when we're existing in the traumatic episode, it's really hard to get that on-off switch off all the way, and so we'll talk more in the next episode about what to do about that getting that on-off switch to work correctly again. But this is what our bodies were designed to do.

Kara: 35:03

I wanna put in here that I think it's changing, because obviously we're talking about it. But what you'll often find if you go to traditional allopathic medicine, you will get the emphasis on the body. Okay, you have IBS, let's just test your bowels and see what's happening. Let's change what you're eating. Not that those are bad things, but I think what this conversation is really talking about is the mind-body-spirit connection. that we can't look at any one of these things as an isolated part of our being. That is altogether. And so, just like we definitely couldn't heal all disease by just working on healing our trauma, we can't necessarily address our whole being if we're just gonna look at one aspect which is our body. Looking at these stages, if you will, of the fight, flight, fawn, freeze and collapse, which are these movements throughout our nervous system. Yeah, maybe stages is a better word, but I'd love to kind of look deeper at those and have you give examples of what they look like out in the wild.

Meghann: 36:11

Yeah, so we started this conversation with the brain right. Now we've dropped down into the body. So your parasympathetic nervous system, there's kind of two parts to it. There's where we want you to be, which is what we call rest and digest, right, so like maybe you're familiar with, like the window of tolerance, or just kind of like you feel good, you feel like you know, or maybe there are stressors that are happening but you feel capable to cope with them, right. But then on the end of that parasympathetic nervous system, when it kind of goes too far, is freeze and collapse. Those body systems that were activated and sympathetic kind of go in the opposite direction, kind of like more decreased functioning, kind of shutting down a little bit more. And again on the spectrum from sympathetic response, fight, fight. Then there's parasympathetic, which is a window of tolerance, or also known as ventral, vagal, if you know polyvagal theory, to parasympathetic, which is freeze and collapse.

Kara: 37:13

And the idea here just to reiterate what we've talked about before is, like the first line of defense like the amoxicillin, if you will, of keeping your body safe is fight or flight. And the fight is that movement towards, like you're going to get bigger, more aggressive, louder maybe, and that flight is okay, that didn't work, they are not running away, so I'm going to run away. And then you're saying, as you progress, like so those didn't work. Your next line of defense is the shutting down. Right, so one would think it would just be to get bigger or to be louder, but it's actually the opposite and where it goes into the freeze and it potentially collapse.

Meghann: 37:52

Yeah. So again, we started with the brain, went to the body and then how we experience those stages emotionally and behaviorally. Right, that's where the shame piece comes in, because why am I feeling this way, why am I acting this way?

Meghann: 38:08

right Like why am I running into my closet when I got an email, right? Well, because that's what your body's trying to make you to do to respond to this threat. So what fight can look like? Is that spinning rumination kind of maybe irritability or attacking? We perceive other people as a threat, right, so you're getting geared up to go and have that conversation with the teacher.

Kara: 38:36

You're like the lawyer making the case in your head, right?

Meghann: 38:39

Yes, yes, it's also maybe like aggressiveness or defensiveness, right? So if somebody asks you a question like no, I'm not fine, why would you even ask me? That Feels like anxiety, feels like fear, can feel like panic, anger or rage. That's hyper. We call that hyper arousal. Again, sympathetic nervous system fight flight. You're in a space of reacting. You know not responding. You're reacting and you're not really in control of yourself.

Kara: 39:11

And just to distinguish reacting is that non-volitional, like that is a, "You do not get to choose this, whereas response is where you have the prefrontal cortex online and you're thinking about what you want to do. There's choice in the matter.

Meghann: 39:27

And in hyper arousal, in sympathetic, there is a fundamental fear of like something's not okay, I'm not okay, I'm not safe, and so right below it is like maybe you're not in full hyper arousal, maybe you're really dysregulated right.

Meghann: 39:41

And so you're feeling maybe not anxious, but you're worried right. Maybe you're not angry but you're irritable, or you're agitated, or you're annoyed, or you're flustered, or I just say like you're prickly, edgy, right, and like you're going to blow at any moment, where maybe the blowing is that fight or flight. I think a lot of people in this community live like right below it. 100%.

Meghann: 40:05

And then one little added thing and boom. So some people are fighters, some people are flighters, some people fight/flight right. However, you learned to cope and this goes back into maybe past trauma, our past experiences. We tend to rely on what we know has worked well before, even if it's maybe not the most adaptive or helpful coping mechanism. And so just recognizing how those patterns came to be, again without the shame, but just like, yeah, like I developed this as a way to get through like a hard situation right, and I know that about myself and I also know that I can do it differently.

Meghann: 40:42

Mm-hmm yeah, so freeze and collapse. So freezes like on that right, Like if we think about like a cat in a mouse, right.

Meghann: 40:53

Like the mouse is maybe going to like oh, they can't fight off that cat, right, so if they can't run away then maybe they'll freeze, play dead, right. Or like a possum, right, Make the cat lose interest, so that freezes that inability to take action. The world is too much right and you just kind of like feel the world spinning around you a little bit. You can't make yourself do anything. Or it's also like stuck in indecision, right. What am I going to do about this?

Kara: 41:21

I was going to say overwhelm's the word coming to mind for this Overwhelm, indecision. Like you are conscious that you have things that you need to do or should do, but you're not doing any of them, which I can just see it. I can picture it now spinning into overwhelm and indecision and to then create more of that.

Meghann: 41:37

Yes, yeah, or just losing track of the world around you, right, just kind of spacing out a little bit yeah, yeah.

Meghann: 41:44

Collapse is at the end of that spectrum and that's where we find coping mechanisms like dissociation, really kind of that depersonalization. It can also look like, you know, freeze collapse can look like numbing In, parasympathetic. Your digestive system is stimulated so that, also, like emotional eating, can kind of let mindless eating right, can kind of live there, or like scrolling right, mindlessly scrolling. That all lives in that parasympathetic response. Instead of react, it's retract, oh mm-hmm. So again there's a fundamental sense of not being safe. People are threatening. We're not attacking them, we are protecting ourselves, right, we're going inward.

Meghann: 42:32

And it can feel like tired lethargy, just like a flat affect, depressed, hopeless. And again, these are the emotional and behavioral manifestations of how your brain and body is responding to stress. Fawn is also a parasympathetic response. That kind of lives in freeze and collapse. And fawn is really around emotional trauma and that's where a lot of people pleasing tendencies can come in or kind of codependent patterns where we try to appease our threat, the person that is threatening to us right, to prevent them from causing us harm. And so fawning is really a lot of self manipulation so that the other person doesn't explode, to keep yourself safe.

Kara: 43:23

You can really see how this one, like the emotional trauma from your childhood, would then play out. Let's say, when you're talking to a doctor and you're trying to people, please, and you're like why can't I stand up for myself, why can't I ask for what I want? Right, so you can see how this plays out and it's all just so fascinating. Okay, so anything else on fun that you were going to add?

Meghann: 43:43

Well, in here you say that I was just also going to speak back our favorite topic, self care. Right Like if we were conditioned to not have needs as a child or have our needs minimized by our caregivers or the people around us, people that we're supposed to help us learn how to prioritize our needs and take care of our needs. It can be very difficult as an adult to think that your needs are valid or worth prioritizing for yourself.

Kara: 44:07

Yes.

Meghann: 44:08

So, in the middle, where we want to be, is this place of you know, inside our window of tolerance, is a grounded sense of security, right, a sense of I am safe in this moment. Maybe back then I wasn't safe, maybe upcoming I'm not safe, but right now, in this moment, I am safe, I am grounded, I am present on my timeline in this moment. This is the place that we co-regulate other people. Right? This is a place where we can use our nervous system to calm our kids' nervous system. If we're in hyperarousal, we can't calm them down, we're right up there with them. We have to soothe ourselves first, and this is where we seek connection with other people. This is where we respond. We have a sense of like I can do this. This is hard and I can do this. It feels like you're a little bit more flexible, you're receptive, you're curious, you're present, you feel more in control of yourself and your reactions. Right, you're going to respond, not react.

Kara: 45:11

Yeah, and I'll describe this experience to my clients, as this is when you have a high degree of sponginess.

Meghann: 45:17

Yes.

Kara: 45:17

Right when you things can kind of soak into you. Your kid does something and rather than react, you know you can respond. You have that sponginess, that give, versus if you're outside of the zone of tolerance, where you're already activated or dysregulated, you're like a glass vase Something hits you and it breaks, yes. So I think if we all think back to times in our life, we can probably come up with a time oh, I was spongy then. Yes, I came home from this retreat, I felt energized and, man, my kids were just magical, like it was. And they were still, you know, doing the same night time shenanigans I always do, but I handled it differently. And then we can, you know, have a whole yeah, exactly, and we have a whole different experience when we're not kind of spongy, or aka our window of tolerance. Yes, I think it's so helpful to hit on. Oh, that's what that is. That's why sometimes I can do this or respond this way, and sometimes I can't.

Meghann: 46:14

Yes, and trauma shrinks that window, mm-hmm, trauma shrinks that window and the first step in working around your trauma is learning what your body needs, what you need to kind of increase that Right or to like regulate yourself into the window. You know, we talked about the window of tolerance and you were kind of like I don't, you know, it's like so linear and like I was reflecting on that. And the analogy that I thought of that I didn't say at the time was what the window of tolerance is is. It's not a ladder, it's not like a one way street, it's more like the Guardians of the Galaxy ride At Disneyland. You go like up and down and up and down and up and down, right.

Kara: 46:56

Uh-huh, oh my gosh, that's so good.

Meghann: 46:59

It's not one directional, like you're not ever like only stuck going in one direction. It's like a ride at the fair or, like you know, the Tower of Terror, where, like you go up and then you come down and maybe you pause in one part for a little bit and then you keep going. The bigger your window is, the more you'll be there. And sometimes you may go up towards the edge of your window or go down towards the edge of your window, but like you'll stay in it more, even though there's added stress.

Kara: 47:24

and then sometimes you pop up into hyperarousal and like you look out and see all of LA and you go, and then you like drop down to the bottom and for anybody that doesn't know this ride, it's like you're strapped into like a platform and you're you know hydraulics Hydraulics, that's the word I'm looking for. The hydraulics make you go up and down. It's really fun. Actually it's one of my favorite rides.

Meghann: 47:43

It's like an out of control elevator, Precisely.

Kara: 47:47

Actually, that's yeah, it's an out of control elevator and the thing that I actually just had been represents to on the window of tolerance in.

Kara: 47:55

I think you said it, but I really want to reemphasize that when we have trauma as part of our experience, we will one become dysregulated more easily and have a harder time getting back regulated. And another way of saying regulated is actually getting back inside the window, the window where our prefrontal cortex is available to us. And that was really helpful to me because I think sometimes it's very easy not sometimes it is very easy to start having these thoughts about like what's wrong with me? Why have I not figured this out by now? And that's the gift of trauma, curse of trauma. Maybe that that's not you, that's the impact of trauma, and so I think just normalizing that, yes, what we're picturing when we're talking about the life that we have as special needs moms is like there's a lot of trauma, so there's a lot of reasons that your body has to live outside of that window and to not go back. So I think it's a helpful picture to understand.

Meghann: 49:00

And I just want to speak in this moment to the distinct difference between freeze and being in our window, because sometimes we can be like I'm calm, I'm just chilling, right, like I just watched six hours of Netflix till two o'clock in the morning, I'm all good, right, it can be deceiving when you're in parasympathetic right, when you're lower, that you are in your window of tolerance, but the fundamental difference is that sense of safety. In freeze collapse, you're escaping and you are trying not to feel whatever is going on. Right, you're trying to get away from the distress that you feel in your body, and the way that you're doing that this time is by numbing out right. That is distinctly different than being in your body, being aware of what your body is feeling like, and that you feel safe and secure, right, and that you are doing things that feel good, not in like a self soothing way, necessarily, but like in a nurturing way. You're nurturing yourself instead of running away.

Kara: 50:16

Uh-huh, yeah, it makes a ton of sense. I think one of the cues that I often look to for myself, sharing more personal experience, is that For me, the feeling of being connected and integrated in my body is where I feel the best. It's my window of tolerance and that's where I am ready to connect and have relationship and do what I love. And when I'm in either freeze or collapse, I feel very disconnected from my own body. I can't access, or it feels like I can't access, what I'm feeling. I almost picture a baby panic response of like oh, it's like the tool that I have to connect with people is unavailable to me. So that's a cue. Okay, I'm not in this window of tolerance that I'd like to be in and therefore understanding the difference, and sometimes, like you said, it's really hard to decipher the difference between the two.

Meghann: 51:16

And I'm going to highlight that relational piece, because when we're inside our window is when we want connection. We seek connection. We feel connected with other people. When we are outside our window, whether in hyper arousal or hypoh, we perceive other people as a threat. And so when you're frozen or you're collapsing and your kid comes to you and says, mom, can I? And you're like, oh my gosh, leave me alone. You're not in your window.

Kara: 51:46

And also I'm thinking about community. We're not going to be seeking out community which we'll talk about in the last episode in its role in healing and treating trauma, but you'll be withdrawing, like in actually preventing that restoration of connection. Yeah, okay. So again, we've dumped a lot of information on y'all. There's handouts that will help you picture this, and maybe this is an episode where you listen to it again, because I've listened to, like you know, like I said, a gazillion episodes of different podcasts and one.

Kara: 52:17

You've done a phenomenal job, I have to say, and I took a ton of notes because I'm still like picturing it all. The way that I learned is kind of continuing to picture and to put it all together. So thank you so much for explaining. As we wrap up this episode, I'm wondering if we can kind of go into like a real scenario that we could watch ourselves kind of move through these stages, and I thought we could use the example of an IEP meeting, all the different stages. So we have the request for when we have the gearing up and I'll turn it over to you to walk us through the stages of not just the IEP meeting but actually that we might be experiencing as part of our nervous system.

Meghann: 52:55

Yes, this is such a perfect example, like you talked earlier about like the lawyer role, and so that's like you're gearing up for the fight. You've done your depositions, you laid out your defense, right. That's like edginess, that like okay, like I'm ready for this, right. And then fight, fight, right, that's sympathetic. And then maybe you're like you know what, I don't even want to do this. Like they don't listen to me anyway. They don't ever like meet me halfway, they don't care about what I need, like what's the point? Do I even have to go? I'm just going to cancel, I'm just going to, we're just going to roll over whatever we had next year. It's not worth it.

Meghann: 53:29

And then you show up to the meeting and like you have, and maybe still in that sympathetic response, like edginess, right, and then you're ready to go. And then maybe things aren't going as you hoped, right. And so maybe one response would be you keep going into hyperarousal and you explode and you get mad and you yell, or maybe you're someone who goes to parasympathetic, and so maybe, instead of getting angry, what you do is you fawn and you make concessions and you agree to things that are not true to what you want or not true to what your child actually needs, but just for the sake of it, to get it over with, you're just going to fawn and people please right, meaning like, yeah, you might want to say something, but you don't want to make anybody else upset, you don't want to cause a stir, You're trying to comply with what other people want is kind of the picture that I have of this.

Meghann: 54:20

Yes, and then maybe they put you on the spot about something and you freeze, right, and you don't even have the words to respond and then it's over. And then all you want to do is just go like hide in your bed under a blanket and scroll on the ground and check out from the world. Or maybe you go and emotionally eat, or back to the Netflix example right, do some other maladaptive coping, or maybe you go rage and then maybe you collapse, which is just not surrender in a good way, but just like I give up.

Kara: 54:51

Yeah, I think if I have learned over the years that my emotional capacity after an IEP meeting is almost non-existent, like I'm that fragile glass. It's like you expend so much emotional energy and so I've learned to kind of create a lot of padding around that so that I can get some of it back by the time I have to parent my children or do anything. So I don't do any professional work on those days anymore because I'm not going to be doing my best work, let's put it that way Just because the nature of these meetings so great example. Great example looking at the IEP meeting and our autonomic nervous system in real life. Well, that is a wrap for our second of this three part series.

Kara: 55:35

I hope you enjoyed the science and this is an episode where you may want to go back and listen to it again, because I know myself, like a lot of the terminology, it's easy to get mixed up and be like wait, what's this and what's that, and so it helps me to kind of picture it and reabsorb it and all of that.

Kara: 55:51

So next week I want you to know what's coming next week, because we don't want to leave you hanging and we're going to dive into resources, we're going to take all that you learned in the last two episodes and guide you to how to use the information for good. And the last thing I want to announce here is that, because Meghann is such a fit for talking about this and really helping create the coping skills that we all need, I'm bringing her inside of the Pathway to Peace program. So if you want to access her, this is your hopeful nudge to say, okay, now you tip the scales. it's a two for one I get coaching and I get Meghann, and now I got to do it. Now there's actually no excuse. So let this be your prompt, your nudge, to explore what it might look like for you to join into the Pathway to Peace community and program. Okay, we'll see you on the next episode.