CEO of self - Perfect Trauma Metaphor

We map the mind and body onto a clear corporate metaphor that helps us see why stress, perfectionism, ADHD traits, and chronic illness persist. We show how to reassign roles, quiet alarm systems, and rebuild trust so the whole “company of you” can heal and perform.

• CEO as conscious awareness and will
• CFO as risk and boundary assessor
• COO as habits and automation
• Sales and Marketing as dopamine and motivation
• HR as attachment, nurture, and connection
• Security as fight-flight-freeze response
• Facilities as parasympathetic repair and immune function
• Legal as inner critic and perfectionism
• How boundary violations skew risk and shut down connection
• Overfunctioning patterns in BPD, OCD, ADHD
• Practical ways to reopen HR and calm Security
• Coaching as organizational consulting for the self

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Transcript

Welcome And Audiobook Update

SPEAKER_00 0:35

Hey everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Speak Plainly Podcast, where we speak plainly about things that motherfucking matter. I am your host, Owl Medicine, and I'm a best-selling author, best-selling Amazon author, even, and I've got two books out. My audiobook is now available on uh on Audible. It's Rethinking Broken, Childhood Trauma Didn't Break You, It Trained You. Most of you here already know this shit. So I'm going to jump straight into a new metaphor that I'm working on to help my coaching people figure out, and my accu people figure out where their blind spots are. Because man, there's a lot of blind spots. So this is the metaphor I've been coming up with lately. And it's something along the lines of like the corporate headquarters of the self or the CEO of the self, right? So basically, we identify with our thoughts and mostly. If you get into meditation, you realize that we do identify as our thoughts, and there's a word for that. It's not some some sahara or some sunkkata. There's words for all those things. I don't know, I'm not a yogi, but we identify with our mind quite often. And we miss the mark by that, because we if we do that, then we're identifying with like 1% of what we actually do in the world and what's going on in our in our world. We're really, really missing the whole thing. Because essentially, if you're doing that, like you have to recognize that your conscious awareness, which is the part of us that we identify most with, is like the CEO. And that's why we're breaking this into corporate lingo, okay? The CEO is the conscious awareness or the will. That's you. That's the part that you identify with. The one reading this, the one or the one listening to this, the one who sets the vision and makes the final calls. Ideally, the CEO is calm, visionary, and trusts their departments. Because the CEO doesn't make day-to-day decisions, right? They make big decisions. And then there is the CFO, the chief financial officer. This guy, the financial officer, he's looking at bottom lines, which means he is looking at risk and he is the boundary assessor. This is the amygdala and hippocampus. This is constantly running a cost-benefit analysis for every single thing that we engage in in the world, including like decision making. I've done an episode about how decision making is not when we when our brain shuts down, that is not a conscious decision. That is our um amygdala and hippocampus and the HPA access just shutting down because the cost-benefit analysis running says nope, not worth it, and our brains just shut down. That's why I did a podcast on uh the neurobiology of fuck it. Like what happens when we just say fuck it and throw the towel in. That's the CFO, not a choice. You don't choose to just quit and shut down. I know it feels like a choice, but that is the brain creating a sense of autonomy in a situation where you don't have any. The next one is the COO. This is the habit that's the operations officer. This is the habit and facilitator, the basal ganglia and cerebellum. This department runs the standard operating procedures: driving a car, brushing your teeth, the automatic, how are you? Fine, how are you? Social kind of crap, right? It's efficiency. And the operations officer frees the CEO up from having to micromanage operating routines. This is the, oh, why did I say that? You said you said hi, I said hi, you said goodbye, and I said hello. Oh, why did I do that? It's your COO. He's just that's just stuff running in the in the background, trying to make it easier for your brain to make important brain decisions, the CEO, right? Here's this. It gets more interesting as we get further down. There's other departments, right? There's the head of sales and marketing. This is dopamine. This is the seeking drive system. It's the dopamine and ventral striatum. This department generates excitement, motivation, and the drive toward goals, rewards and connections, it's the part that says, ooh, that's interesting. Let's go for it. Whee! It's the engine that engages with life. Then there is the head of HR and internal communications. This is attachment styles and your nurturing systems. This is opioids, oxytocin, the vagus nerve. So if you have ever had an opioid like um addiction, this part of you is screwed up. If you have uh any kind of attachment problems, this part of you is screwed up. If you have ADHD, the head of sales and marketing, that part is screwed up. This is what I'm trying to get at. I'm gonna be tying these into different parts of us because what I want you to realize is that you are an entire massive corporation and you are the CEO, and you it like when there are dysfunctions in your mind or in your body, it is 100% of like chance, unless there's like a motor vehicle accident, something like that, there is one hundred percent chance that the things that are messing you up are because some of these key departments are not working appropriately. So that's that was he that was HR. Now we have the head of security. This is your fight flight freeze. This is the sympathetic nervous system. This is the rapid response team. When the CFO flags a major threat, security kicks into gear, right? The chief financial officer, that amygdala, its job is to like be looking at this cost-benefit analysis and check for threats. And if it finds one, it says, hey, head of security, the fight-flight-freeze sympathetic nervous system. Hey, you better do something. That that kicks into gear, and then we're we release all the heavily armored and trained for one thing that neutralize the threat now parts of us. And they are not subtle. Our sympathetic response is not subtle. It's meant to be not subtle because it's meant to be life or death. Stress and these kind of threats and our biological past, meaning uh through evolution, you are either eaten and dead and don't care, or you survived and found safety. That's the way stress has worked. Chronic stress is really not good for us. That's why our stress responses are not subtle, because they're not meant to get us away from subtle stresses. Subtle stresses don't matter if they're because lions can chase you. It's the whole thing about like we still have like Neanderthal and hunter-gatherer biology in a very modern world, and that creates its own set of problems. But then, after security, there is the head of facilities and maintenance, and this is the parasympathetic nervous system. This is the part that other eight that ADHDers also have a problem with. We have parts that overfunction and parts that underfunction. And for those of us who are chronic stress adapted, which is what my whole book is about, ADHD is a form of chronic stress adaptation, bipolar um bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder. These all have a dose-dependent relationship with adverse childhood experiences, aka traumas. So the head of facilities and maintenance is the rest and digest stuff. And if you have a hard time chilling and feeling at peace when you're chilling, this is the department that you that you might want to look toward. This handles repair, growth, digestion, immune function. If you have autoimmune disorders, you need to look at your chronic stress and chronic stress and your development and how you have had to handle it and look to see what different departments might be not working so well for you. If you have autoimmune, this is a really great place to look. They only work when the security bells aren't blaring. Which means if you're in chronic stress and the security bells are always going, or if your CFO is a high strung asshole, like it is in all of us chronic stress adapted people. Remember, the CFO is the hippocampus and amygdala, the fear and memory center those together, creating a circuit. We have to pay attention to that. The after the head of facilities and management, the rest and digest, which actually repairs us and restores us, there is also the legal department, which is the inner critic and the perfectionist and the person who's doing all of the editing. We have some people have an overdeveloped like prefrontal cortex and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex that is like telling us what is context-appropriate decision makings. And this department is risk management and rule enforcement. In a healthy company, they ensure compliance and prevent lawsuits, but in a traumatized company, they've gone rogue. They've taken over the CEO's chair and they issue memos constantly. You mess this up, you mess the punctuation in this email. There's a this is a lawsuit waiting to happen. You ate that donut, you did this, you did that, that's a violation of health code, you felt angry, you did this, you said that. You file a formal grievance against yourself constantly. This is usually the dysfunction that I find in rich kids. This is the problem that I see in in uh diseases of affluence. This is the affluent problem. This is always the legal idea this this legal um department is always the part that's screwed up in those kinds of families, the ones who have lots of resources, because once you have lots of resources, risk management isn't nearly as important because you already have what you need, so you don't need to take risks. So risks become more irrelevant, and what becomes more relevant is keeping what you already have, which means the legal department, especially when you reach a certain level of income and socioeconomic class, you only really interact with people of your own level of socioeconomic class. And at that level, you are by default a vulture at a certain level of income. You are making money and profit, and that profit is because other people are not making it. Just pointing that out. These people, their kids, are deeply fucked up in this realm. So when there is trauma, departments get shut down. They start functioning either not at all, which doesn't last that long, because we all have to get through life, for a while they'll shut down entirely, and then they'll start functioning, but they don't function very well. Things get backed up. So when a person's boundary is crossed in a deeply intimate way, what happens in the C-suite, which is just what they call like the corporate headquarters thing? What happens in the C-suite? The CFO, which is that risk boundary assessor, is traumatized. This is the amygdala and hippocampus, the amygdala um assessing it and hippocampus remembering it. Its spreadsheets are now corrupted. It starts seeing all intimacy as a catastrophic financial risk. Any romantic interest from another person, CFO flags that and says, hostile takeover bid, fuck that. The head of security goes into permanent orange alert. A rapid response team is now activated 24-7. Immune system gets gets ramped up, all these things. This is where autoimmune comes in. Anyone who gets close, anyone who reminds them of the violator, even someone kind, security might sound that alarm and hypervigilance sets in. Then the head of HR and the internal communications, attachment and nurturing, shut down it shuts down entirely. The department that handles bonding and trust has been breached. The doors are locked, nobody's getting in. The person might feel numb, disconnected, or unable to feel love, trust, or even like safe with people. The machinery for connection is just broken when somebody crosses the boundary. And then the legal part department, the inner critic, goes into hella hella overdrive. And now the memos change to it was your fault, you stupid piece of shit, you should have seen this coming. Your judgment is garbage. You're garbage. Now I have to work twice as hard to make sure that your stupid ass doesn't wind up in the same fucking decision. So that's where the legal department kicks in. Now let's look at the overfunctioning. With HR shutdown, the person might over-rely on sales and marketing. This is the dopamine attachment thing, or this is the dopamine-seeking thing. This is they throw themselves into work, achievement, and pursuing new partners. This is borderline personality disorder. Do you hear me yet? Do you hear it yet? This is borderline personality disorder. HR shuts down. The person has to over-rely on their marketing and they're they're they're seeking to connect with people. So they throw themselves into work. They identify completely with work. And this is what it means to be a borderline personality disorder is I've said it for ages. You have an unstable or negative view of self. You identify completely with the jobs that you do, which is why I was so fucking good in the honor guard. It's why I was so fucking good as an EMT because I was those things. It wasn't a part of me. I was those things because I was borderline. I was those things. This is where the these disorders start popping in. People start being too kind, overly like overly positive feedback, they're fawning, they're doing all that stuff, and it gets kind of gross, and they can't access genuine connection anymore. They're always, always putting out to everybody, and then they feel like they're not getting back anything from anyone because they're not actually connecting deeply. Because, as Brene Brown says, the opposite of belonging is fitting in. And when the with the HR shut down, sales and marketing, it's sales and marketing doesn't belong. That's what gets people to fit in. It's fitting in by definition. That's why they don't feel genuine connection. And with security on alert, the facilities and maintenance can't work. So sleep suffers, digestion suffers, and the immune system drops, and people get physically ill. This is autoimmune disorders. You keep that, you keep that shit down long enough, and your body's attacking itself. That's what's happening. Your body's attacking itself, and then your body starts attacking the parts of your body that are attacking itself. Because you we stay in this state of chronic stress so long that our facilities and maintenance can't do the work. Our rest and digest parasympathetic parasympathetic nervous system doesn't get a chance to do what it's supposed to be able to do and what it was designed to do. So our maintenance falls apart. With the COO, the habits guy, might develop new, very, very rigid procedures to create a false sense of control. And this is where you get obsessive, like OCD stuff. This is where you get checking locks, rigid routines, compulsive behaviors. All of these things have trauma components. They have boundary-crossed components. Do you see how like this? I'm really trying to build out this analogy, metaphor, or whatever the hell it is. Because I feel like it does a really good job of breaking down the parts of us. This is why I love internal family systems type therapy, is because in internal family systems they talk a lot about the different parts of us. And I'm working with some very high-powered people who work in very high-powered companies. And I was like, I think, I think this will work because I realized the whole like we're identifying with just the conscious part. That's the CEO, but we're missing all the rest of this. So that was like, so when the boundaries are crossed, those things shut down. The the CFO, the head of security starts ramping things up, the internal communications, the legal defense team, and when the HR is shut down, then the sales and marketing team has to go on like the overfunctioning route. Um, digestion doesn't get to do anything. And now we have to develop we have to develop some sense of control to make sure that our boundaries aren't crossed again. And so we develop very rigid, we can develop very rigid procedures around the way that we're supposed to behave and blah blah blah. And that again is that that rich kid thing, where the prefrontal cortex is just constantly like beating them over the head and like doesn't allow them to have any kind of like authentic self-expression. So the let's look at this scenario, lost in perfectionism. This is a classic case of the legal department staging a coup. What caused the shutdown? Often early childhood experiences where love was conditional, like you are good if you get an A, you're lovable if you behave. This child learns that the path to safety is perfect performance. Hi, that's me. I'm the best goddamn performer on the peninsula. You better fucking believe it. As far as the music goes, I'm the best goddamn performer there is on the peninsula. I am not the best musician, not even close. I'm a damn good singer too, and I'm not the best singer, but I am the best performer. Don't get it twisted. This is why. It's it's this is why I've been performing to get approval since I was a baby. I have no and I'm working on becoming a better musician. One day I'll be uh like one of the best musicians and the best performer, but for right now I'll just stick with being the best performer, and that's what I have the most history with. So that all makes sense. Um with this, we go, well, now we're just we have to fake it. We're we're we're fake it. We're lovable if we behave, and so we're just gonna have to perform. So the CEO, the CEO, the will and awareness, is deposed. We go, the legal team says, You clearly uh cannot make the right decisions. So the CEO is overthrown. You're no longer allowed to make decisions for yourself because you can't trust yourself. Does that sound familiar? God, I just had three people run through my head so hard. The HR department, the nurturing part, underfunded. Unconditional self-acceptance, nah. The department's budget was cut a very, very long time ago. There is no internal message of you're okay just as you are. That is very foreign and completely dangerous, and this is I wrote about in Rethinking Broken and how I tried to do the mantra thing, and it was bullshit because I tried the whole like everyone is fine just as they are, because I believe that about everybody else. I just couldn't find a way to believe it about me because it was too conditioned into me to believe the opposite. So then the CFO, the risk guy, is now working for legal. The risk guy is no longer working for the CEO and going, hey, here's the direction that we're gonna go in life. Here's the direction that I think this company should go. And the CFO goes, okay, here's how we can get there with minimizing risk. Nope, CFO no longer works for you. Trauma stole your autonomy. Your CFO no longer works for you. Your risk guy no longer no longer gives a shit about what you want. Your risk guy now gives a shit about keeping you safe. Risk isn't just about physical safety anymore either. It's about the risk of being imperfect. It's equated with being unlovable, which then puts the brain into the threat state. Where now we have to now we have to survive because being less than optimum is not lovable. And that means that we don't belong, and that is a threat to our survival. And with the marketing and sales team working on overtime, not for joy, but for literal survival, the person is driven, but there is no satisfaction. And achievement doesn't feel good because it was faked. Because you weren't you weren't reaching out for genuine connection. You were reaching out for a life raft. You were reaching out for a float to keep you from drowning. And you wondered why you weren't handed a glass of wine. For me, in this model, I'm not a I'm not a therapist. I'm a coach. Which I love. I'd rather be a coach than a therapist any day, because a therapist can't tell you you're being a weak ass pussy little bitch right now. And I can. And sometimes that's exactly what the fuck we need to hear. And the people who don't need to hear that don't come to me for coaching. But my job is to help people diagnose their organizational dysfunction. Through this Metaphor. We can look at all the different departments. What are the bottlenecks? We can look at what that dysfunction was. What was the what was the boundary crossing that happened for you? And we can look at the details of that and then see how you responded. Did your legal team go into overdrive? Did you wind up being like limiting yourself so much that you can't trust yourself? And the only thing that your your mind is actually doing is constantly trying to keep you safe? Or maybe you're more of a BPD person instead of an OCD person. OCD tries to find safety through a sense of control. BPD tries to find safety through a sense of connection. But again, the opposite of belonging is fitting in, and BPD is fitting in. That's when the marketing and sales team is in overdrive. So if you're interested in coaching and you don't know how chronic illness or d like these major dysfunctions in life show up, you can't see it. You can't see it because you're the CEO and you don't see all the operations. But I am the d best consultant you could ever fucking have. Because I live, eat, and breathe this shit. It is the single most interesting thing in the goddamn world to me. And it all just makes so much fucking sense. It makes so much sense. So I'm really happy that I came up with this little metaphor. I'm really glad that I fleshed it out because this is what I will be using with all of my new clients this year. I've got some clients with high-powered contracts and some really interesting stuff happening, and I needed a good way to describe it, and this was so perfect I had to share it. So if you're interested in coaching um by me or anybody else, this is a little bit, hopefully, if you have a good coach, they're helping you do something like this. They're helping you understand that there are parts of you, and the metaphors can all be different and blah, blah, blah. But find one that vibes with you. If you aren't a if you're if you're not a kind of an intense person who's ready to do the work and like is ready to like cringe a little bit, but will keep doing it, then don't hire me. Um I'm expensive because I'm worth it. But find someone who you vibe with because working with a coach is just like working with a therapist. It doesn't matter how good the therapist is. What matters is do you like each other? Do you get along? That actually they've done they've done studies on this actually to see who got benefit within a 12 to uh 12 to 18 month window of therapy and what was the primary determining factor. And it turns out, do you like your therapist? It was it. That was that was the thing. So think about this analogy. If you're struggling with with behavioral problems about protection, or um you find yourself highly suspicious, then let's look at how you're identifying as the CEO, and the CEO might need to go down to the departments and actually walk around the department floor and see what the hell's going on. And maybe a coach can help you do that. All right. My name is Al Medicine. You already know that. If you made it this far in the podcast, thank you, and congratulations. If you like this podcast, consider buying me a coffee. Go to Audible and buy the Rethinking Broken Audiobook and leave a review if you would. That would be really lovely. There are no reviews on it yet. I thank you for your time. Thank you for spending it with me. And I hope this was helpful and insightful. And if you do want to get coaching from me, you can book through owlchrysalismedicine.com. You can um there is a coaching thing there, you can fill out the a Calendly thing, and it'll book a free 15-minute interview with me. And in that interview, we will talk about you, your goals, me, my my pricing, and the things that we do, and how we might be able to work together. So, thank you for joining me. And remember, stay curious and stay uncomfortable.