Do You Know How To Self-Sooth?

It is important to know how and when to self sooth when you are uncomfortable.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

It's time again for Doc Jock, your addiction lifeguard podcast. I am Dr. Jock DeBerker, a psychologist, licensed professional counselor, and addiction specialist. If you are suffering from addiction, misery, trauma, whatever it is, I'm here to help. If you're in search of help to try to get your life back together, join me here at Doc Jock, your addiction lifeguard, the addiction recovery podcast. I wanted to be real clear about what this podcast is intended for. It is intended for entertainment and informational purposes but not considered help. If you actually need real help and you're in need of help, Please seek that out. If you're in dire need of help, you can go to your nearest emergency room or you can check into a rehab center or call a counselor like me and talk about your problems and work through them. But don't rely on a podcast to be that form of help. It's not. It's just a podcast. It's for entertainment and information only. So let's keep it in that light. All right. Have a good time. Learn something and then get the real help that you need from a professional. As addicts, people usually use, because they feel uncomfortable, That's generally what I keep saying to everybody in these podcasts. The reason that we use is because we're uncomfortable. Uncomfortable can come in many forms. It could come in the form of sadness or anger or anxiety, depression, mania, you know, something that just makes you feel anxious. It's discomfort, right? And when we feel uncomfortable, we want to get rid of that feeling. Addicts have a horrible situation where they can't get rid of that feeling because They either don't have an outlet for it or they've learned not to say anything or do anything about it. But sometimes it's because they have a background of trauma and it's difficult in the early stages anyway. It's difficult, early stages of addiction. It's difficult for people to deal with their feelings. They can't manage them. They can't regulate them. They become dysregulated because they feel the experience stronger than someone who has not suffered trauma. In my practice, 100% of the people that come into my office, if they have addiction, they have trauma, and it's usually in childhood. Sometimes, occasionally, but not often, it's in adulthood. Something else has happened where somebody was killed or a really, really contentious divorce at the hands of a narcissist or something. But it's trauma, and they don't recognize it as trauma. And that's because they experienced it as their life. And so they didn't really understand it. It was just kind of how things were. So anyway, the reaction that they have is because they're having a reaction not only to the current situation, but also to the past situation. And what do you do when that is happening, when you become dysregulated? Well, you use because you're uncomfortable. So then you start using and that becomes uncomfortable. And it becomes this spiraling situation. uh, effect. You know, when you're, when you are in that state of dysregulation, trying to figure out how to, how to regulate, how to re-regulate your body and your mind, it's both. And the research shows that the mind, um, getting amped up makes your body react, right? It's a fight or flight or fawn, fight, flight, freeze, or fawn situation. And so you either want to run away, you fight it, or you just surrender. Um, And it's difficult because that's the body's reaction. So you have all this stuff and we could talk about it, but it's not the point of this podcast of the somatic responses to stress and feeling uncomfortable. But the body and the mind work together and the regulation and or the dysregulation becomes combined. So what do you do when you're feeling that level of dysregulation when you're not sure what it is or how that works? So when I'm working with clients who are trying to work on recovery, not necessarily the ones that are in the middle of usage, you've got to get them to abstain long enough to be able to be reachable. But the person who's working on recovery, and let's say that you're, I don't know, a month, a month and a half into abstaining and working on recovery. And you get to the point where you're running into situations. Maybe you're out of rehab. You're living in a sober living house. Or maybe you've gone through some extensive counseling and you've been working on recovery. And you're at the point where you're starting to live your life, a normal life. You're trying to function normally in some ways. Maybe you're going to school. Maybe you're working part-time at a sober job. Maybe you're just trying to reintegrate into society. And you don't have any major mental health diagnosis. So in the clinical terms, we would call that a dual diagnosis where somebody has addiction and schizophrenia or addiction and delusional thinking or their schizoaffective disorder or extreme psychopathy or something. You don't have one of those, but you just have... kind of your average, like I've got major depressive disorder, mild or moderate, or I have anxiety or both, something like that. And you become dysregulated because you're anxious or upset about something that happens at work or with a friend or where you're living. It is easy to to kind of tip that scale into excessive reaction to behaviors because you don't know how to self-regulate. Perhaps you didn't learn that as a child. Your parents were alcoholics or drug addicts or they were abusive and there was no nurturing or comforting going on. So you don't know how to self-regulate. You weren't taught that. So now you're having to learn it as an adult who's working on recovery. So the early stages of recovery are about learning how to self-regulate and to, in some instances, You have to reparent or self-parent because you didn't have good parenting. But it's the ability to self-regulate through self-soothing. And that's the missing piece is the self-soothing piece. for this happening. They get a colonoscopy. They get an endoscopy. They can't find anything. They don't have anything. There's nothing really there. Headaches, maybe they do a CT scan or something, an MRI. They're complaining about severe migraines. There's no real thing going on there. It's just the body is reacting somatically, that's the term that we use, somatic response, a body response, to the feelings of dysregulation and discomfort. And they are legitimate. The pain is real, right? It's just that the cause is not physically there. It's emotional. It's a mental thing. Irritable bowel syndrome is a good example of that. Research is showing that most irritable bowel syndrome patients conditions can be treated by treating mental health issues. So you put the person on antidepressants or antipsychotic medications to try to help regulate their mood because that is the issue. Kelsey Grammer, the actor, his wife had IBC really bad. and irritable bowel or IBS, sorry, real bad. And he was, he, I remember listening to an interview and he was talking about how his wife had finally been able to receive treatment that was working. And it was based on the psychoactive drugs, psychotropic drugs that were treating her for depression. And it manifested in that way. And that, you know, the, the vagus nerve and the issues of the neurons in the intestinal tract. There's actual neurons, brain cells, in the intestinal tract. We've been able to identify that. So you can have somatic responses to a level of emotional upset. And I've always found it fascinating that people who are addicts really can't focus on connection of that somatic response to the experience that they're having that is upsetting them. They will feel powerless. They will feel like there's nothing they can do about a situation, and yet they have extreme issues with bowel movements, vomiting, ulcers. IBS creeps in, migraine headaches, things like that. They never make that connection. They never make the connection that feeling uncomfortable, emotionally uncomfortable is the driver for a thing that comes up in the body. And so teaching somebody how to self soothe. is a challenge and it's even more of a challenge if you happen to be involved with somebody as a significant other who is also dysregulated or has a personality disorder. They're narcissistic. They're histrionic. They're paranoid. Their narcissism, it becomes grandiose or it's covert or something where there's a lot of gaslighting, a lot of things going on there in the relationship. And so they have these somatic responses to this stressor that they have. And to me, as a clinician, I'm trying to help them bridge that idea to get to the idea that, you know, your situation is that you're feeling uncomfortable. And so being uncomfortable, we can treat that. You've been self-treating it with chemicals. That's not working. So we are going to work on learning different skills. And so the idea of I'm uncomfortable, what do I do? And so the analogy that I use is kind of like a a pressure cooker. And if you've ever seen, like my mom used to use a pressure cooker. It's a pot that has a lid that clamps down really tight. You fill it with food and water and you put heat on it. And then there's this weight that sits on top of this little valve on the top that steam is escaping from. But you want a certain amount of steam to be in that pot to be able to force the cooking. And the whole point of a pressure cooker is that you put the food under pressure. In other words, The water comes to a boil inside the pot. It increases the atmospheric pressure in there. And the heat becomes very concentrated with the steam. And it cooks the food much faster. And so there's shorter cooking times. It's like the old school version of a microwave, basically. Or they have these new hot stoves. I forget what they call them, the new type of cooking devices that you put. It's not necessarily the same as a pressure cooker, but similar. Anyway, the idea is that, you know, when life is what you're living, and so you put your food and your water in that pressure cooker and you put the top on it. If you put the weight on the top, a little bit of the steam escapes. And after 15 minutes or 20 minutes, your food is magically cooked to perfection. if you leave that little weight on there. If you take the weight off, all of the steam escapes almost immediately and then you're left with nothing in there to do the cooking. And so your food just burns up and that's a waste. If you plug up that hole and you don't let any of the steam escape, then the pressure builds up and it explodes. So what you wanna do in that analogy is be like the pressure cooker with a weight on top. You want a little bit of the steam to come out, but not all of it, but you also want some of that steam to stay in there because it's helpful and it does the cooking. So to me, It seems like the analogy, every time I say that, it's funny, the people that are listening to it, they just don't get it at first. And I say, you know what? You know what that weight is that's helping with the steam escaping a little bit? That's your connection to other people. That's going to meetings. That's getting in the recovery community. That is your chance to let a little bit of the steam out. So it's important to have those numbers of your sponsor or other people in recovery. Because they get it. So they're like the weight on top of that little nipple that's sticking up where all the steam is coming out. You get a chance to say something, right? That is what when you're raising children the right way, you give them a voice to express. their feelings about what's upsetting them but you don't just take away all the responsibility for everything that they are responsible for that's lifting the weight off because then all the steam escapes and now you've burned up your food you do that with a child like you just you just overly indulge that that feeling and you focus too much on it it becomes useless it's now you're just you're creating a huge mess if you don't let that child speak you don't let that child express their feelings or tell you like what what's wrong tell me what's wrong and let them do it you're plugging them up. You shut them down, you're plugging up that hole. And you're eventually going to get a kid who starts acting out. They start exploding. They will hit people. They will scream. They'll bite. They'll kick. If they're two or three years old. If they get a little bit older, they become very, very challenging and difficult. They become very angry and they start lashing out physically. And a 15-year-old hitting another kid is different than a 3-year-old hitting. Trust me. And they become very explosive and difficult to deal with. So we want to find that happy medium. Well, that's what they didn't get. Many of my clients who come in who have addiction issues, they do not know how to express things. They either bottle them up and never let them out, or they just let all of it out and they don't even listen or look for that connection anymore. Because they're driving everybody away. Because they're just spewing all this stuff out constantly. Now, if they have some kind of a personality issue, what we used to call the Cluster B personality disorders, the histrionic and the narcissistic and the paranoid, that's a different issue. Because they're probably going to have that as one of their issues is controlling people around them and controlling the narrative. I'm not going to talk about those issues today. In the context of this conversation, what I am going to say is that if you do encounter somebody like that, it can make you feel dysregulated. So if your significant other is a narcissist, all the gaslighting, all the manipulation, all the controlling, all the nonsense that goes on will be very detrimental. But you as the addict, if you do not have the skill set to be able to kind of offload, if you will, the things that you're feeling. you're going to be uncomfortable and it's intolerable because there's no escape for it. There's no way to deal with it because you learn as a kid that nurturing is not possible. So you don't know how to self-soothe. You don't know how to self-regulate because you were not taught how to do it by your parent who was distracted, abusive, addicted, or whatever. It's not your fault. It's not your fault that you're like that. But You have to relearn those skills. So it feels uncomfortable to talk about things. It feels uncomfortable to share things. The experience of going into an AA or an NA or any other type of meeting where you have to stand or sometimes they sit, but sometimes they stand and speak what you're feeling is extremely uncomfortable, but it's all so very necessary. So being able to speak those words, I am angry because my wife did such and such, or I'm upset because my dad or my mom used to treat me this way as a kid, and somebody is now treating me that way, and it really is upsetting me. It's so uncomfortable to do that, but it's so necessary. Because when you speak the words of things that bother you, those words become less powerful. In your head, they're very loud and they're very powerful. And that's where resentment and contempt are built. That's really the platform for them. I remember there was a time when I had a client that came in who had been married to somebody for, I don't know, probably 18, 19, 20 years, something like that. And they were never able to be heard. Like the spouse would not hear them. And it was because there was this constant bullying kind of behavior that would happen. And so the bullying got to the point where my client just shut down and felt powerless. And they had been treated that way as a child as well. And so they were just kind of falling in line with what they knew a relationship was. look like because that's what they were raised with. So I worked with this client for about three or four months to identify that and then spent more time trying to figure out how they could become more self-empowered and to put some boundaries around that behavior. They were successful with it, but it took a long time. It took probably about, I don't know, I think it was close to a year for them to be able to feel like they could say something and understand that that was their way to self-soothe, to stand up for themselves. As adults, we perhaps sometimes just take it for granted that, hey, I'm an adult. I can stand up for myself. But in reality, you may have learned that that's not okay, so you don't. And so your version of standing up for yourself might look very different if you come from that background than somebody who was taught how to self-soothe and how to be able to accept right and wrong from another person and say, hey, look, I don't like that behavior. Please don't speak to me that way. I don't like it when you do that. And to be heard. It might just be like, if you come from a background of extreme abuse like that, it might look more like you walked away while they were berating you or trying to bully you. That's your version of standing up for yourself. And to a person who knows how to do that and understands about self-soothing, walking away might seem like defeat. And so it can look different for different people. But whatever it is, The importance of self-soothing and being empowered to speak up for yourself and speak your feelings. That's why it's so important to go to meetings. I just can't emphasize that enough. Going into the rooms and being able to stand and say with no crosstalk, no response from anybody in a room of people who have probably suffered the same things that you're suffering from. I am so upset about this. And you're saying it out loud. You're saying it and other people are bearing witness to these problems. I'm standing here in front of the microphone. I'm waving my hands right now. So I'm trying to emphasize this. I am upset because this happened and it made me feel like this and like this and like this. And it really made me want to drink because I was so uncomfortable with this and I didn't know what else to do. And then there's silence. And you're looking around the room and you realize you just said this to a group of people. And it's almost like there's an echo in the room where you can hear your own words kind of echoing around. And it's in your head that it's echoing, but you're like, wow. And then you sat down. The secret power of being in the about something you normally would be very quiet about how that helps you soothe and feel less uncomfortable and so in recovery it's important to be able to put a voice to the things that you feel And be able to do it in that experience where you're getting validation and confirmation about how powerful that feeling is and the negativity. It's so weird how it makes it not as powerful to you. And that is the secret of recovery is in a group. We do not get into recovery in isolation. We do it in a group. So the action of learning how to self-soothe, and that's just one example of how to do it, but how to self-soothe. Boundaries, verbalizing things, getting it out, not letting it fester and live in there and rot inside of you or cause you to be angry or whatever, and then have to use a chemical in the false and misguided belief that that is a good coping mechanism because that's a faulty coping mechanism. It's a trip to the morgue. It's not a coping mechanism. That is the magic of the process of recovery that will get you there. So learning how to self-soothe, you know, I don't like this and so I'm going to stop this conversation or I'm sorry, but I don't really believe that this is helping me right now. So I think I'm going to end this call right now. And it doesn't matter if you're doing that with a relative or a friend or whatever. It's not worth trying to just preserve the relationship, even though that person is causing an immense amount of resentment in you. It's better to put a boundary up. And there is no rule anywhere that says you have to have a relationship with anybody if they are being controlling, abusive, or otherwise destructive in your life. You do not have to be in a relationship with that person. You can stop it. You can put a boundary around it. You can regain control of that dysfunctional, dysregulated relationship. It's perfectly fine. And it will actually probably serve you better because you're going to live longer and a healthier life because now you're not using a faulty coping mechanism to deal with the crazy in the relationship. So please research and read about find... ways to learn about self-soothing because self-soothing is the thing that we didn't learn as addicts. We learned how to self-ridicule and self-flagulate and self-revulsion. You know, just everything is self, pointed towards self. I'm bad. I hate this. I don't like, you know, people don't like me. I'm angry. I'm resentful. And then you just kind of meet those expectations by acting that way. And that's not a good way to act.

UNKNOWN: 24:57

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00: 25:00

another episode of Doc Jacques your addiction lifeguard in the tank really appreciate you listening if you do like these podcasts please comment give me a like give me a subscription you can reach out to me too through my website wellspringmindbody.com and reach out to Doc Jacques the addiction lifeguard and ask questions but you know first and foremost hey man start working on recovery if you're listening to this you probably have some problems and you need to deal with them so seek out professional help. Go to rehab. Get a counselor. Do something. Go to the rooms. Walk into AA or NA. Be greeted by people just like us. But in the meantime, this is Doc Jacques saying I really appreciate you listening and I'll catch you on the next episode. See ya.