Regulate & Rewire: An Anxiety & Depression Podcast

“I’m Too Much” & Other Beliefs I’m Unpacking in Therapy Right Now

• Amanda Armstrong • Season 1 • Episode 69

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Episode 69

One of my deepest beliefs is that “I’m too much” – I’m too loud, I’m too energetic, I ask too much, need too much, my idea’s or dreams or plans are all too much, my pace is too much, etc… It’s a wound that gets triggered a lot in my friendships, entrepreneurship, and especially in my marriage. It's also a belief that holds me back from fully showing up in a lot of areas of my life.

Join me for a conversation about how all our beliefs, while well-meaning and self-protective at one point, may no longer serving us anymore and when left unchecked they'll hold you back in your healing journey and keep you stuck in patterns you don't want anymore.

Here's the 3 takeaways:

  1. If you’re feeling stuck in your healing, it might be happening out of order. Reflect on my  pyramid of healing (pg 85 in my book Healing Through the Vagus Nerve) and ask yourself if you maybe skipped a step? Often times before we can do the deeper healing and rewiring work, we need to first stabilize and regulate our nervous system.
  2. As long as I believe it to be true, that I’m too much and people prefer a muted version of me, I’ll filter everything through that. What belief do you currently have as a filter that are no longer serving where you'd like to go?
  3. If you can identify a belief, spend some time with these final two questions: “What do I risk if I stop doing or believing X?” and “What do I gain if I stop doing or believing X?”

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Email: amanda@riseaswe.com

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Welcome to regulate, and rewire and anxiety and depression podcast where we discuss the things I wish someone would have taught me earlier in my healing journey. I'm your host, Amanda Armstrong. And I'll be sharing my steps, my missteps, client experiences and tangible research based tools to help you regulate your nervous system, rewire your mind and reclaim your life. Thanks for being here. Now let's dive in. 

Hey, friends, welcome back after many, many weeks of what I feel like are more structured conversations, they had particular topics, I shared some research, I want to take a week and just chat. And in today's conversation, I want to share and process and unpack some things with all of you that actually have come up for me recently in therapy. 

And I shared I don't know, maybe six or so weeks ago on my Instagram that I was back in therapy. And there were some people who were shocked, it still amazes me how often people take things like when I say talk therapy isn't always the best fit for people or it's not the right time for it may be in your healing journey, as me being not team therapy. And instead, I am practicing what I preach. And that is that there are different modalities, there are different seasons for different approaches to healing. And right now I am in a season where my nervous system is pretty regulated, I have a lot of tools, I have more capacity. And I have noticed some pesky patterns, specifically beliefs that are showing up in a lot of areas in my life in the way that I show up as a wife, as a mom, as a business owner. And I was talking to a good friend of mine who's also in the mental health space. And I was like, I think it might be time for me to go back to therapy to proactively do some of this work. To look at these patterns, I feel like I have the capacity to do that deeper healing work. And really just following my own trauma informed pyramid of healing that guides our practice and the work that we do at Rise As We. 

So for those of you who are unfamiliar with my pyramid of healing, this is a way that we lay out the layers and the phases of healing through a nervous system and trauma informed lens. So if you are somebody who has bought my book healing through the vagus nerve, you'll see this pyramid laid out on page 84, and 85. And for those of you who don't have my book, I want you to take a minute right now and imagine a pyramid with four layers. The foundation step one, the bottom of that pyramid is labeled education and awareness, you have to understand how your mind body system works before you can work with it towards healing, you have to understand that 80% of this Mind Body conversation originates in the body originates with the nervous system. And then the awareness part of that is not only learning about the nervous system, but exploring your nervous system, what we often refer to as mapping your nervous system. And then once you have some foundational awareness there, the next section of this pyramid is regulation. Far too often we jump to that third layer, which is rewiring. This is oftentimes what happens in traditional talk therapy you're a few sessions in this was my experience. Many, many years ago, when I was first trying to heal from anxiety and depression. I was at my worst my system was so dysregulated my capacity was zero. And here I was being asked to retell and relive the hardest experiences of my life over and over and over again. And while it was helpful to have that time set aside to talk or to vent or to process, no part of my life outside of those sessions changed, I was still having just as many panic attacks, my anxiety was just as bad. And it's because I skipped these first two phases of that education, awareness and regulation. We have to learn how to regulate our nervous system. We have to learn how to recognize when we are dysregulated. And what we can do to bring ourselves back inside a range that's manageable for us. And when you do this, you create some capacity in your system. And with that capacity, you can move on to that phase three, which is the rewiring. It is that deeper healing work, the trauma work. 

If you're familiar with my stress bucket exercise. Imagine your bucket is full. Doing the deeper work it takes to remove some of that water from your bucket, you have to put in a ladle, you've got to put in a big spoon. If your stress bucket is already full, and you put a spoon in, it displaces water, your bucket overflows, you become even more symptomatic. And so what we have to do is we have to get that water line down, create capacity, so that when we put that ladle in, to scoop out some of the water for good, because we can rewire our beliefs, we can rewire the way that our brain works, neuroplasticity is real and it's rad. We have to have some capacity. And then that fourth phase is once you've done some of that rewiring, and you have a new baseline either belief system perspective of the world, whatever it is, you get to spend some time resourcing just keep on keeping on you know, the habits, you know, the people, you know, the places that help you to be regulated, and inevitably, a new pattern is going to show up a new trigger is going to appear, life is just going to hand you a hard situation. And we move through this pyramid in different ways over and over and over again. 

And so this is just me sharing that I got to a place where I have the capacity, I had the awareness of some of these sticky patterns, these sticky beliefs. And I wanted to step into a season of rewiring. And so this is where talk therapy is playing a role in my healing journey right now. And it's been incredibly beneficial. And I'm there specifically right now to get to the root and hopefully rewire some of these patterns. And one of my deepest beliefs that has become really clear is this belief that I'm too much. I'm too loud, I'm too energetic. I asked for too much. I need too much my ideas, my dreams, my plans are too much my pace is too much. And this is a wound that are a belief that gets triggered a lot in friendships in entrepreneurship, and especially in my marriage. And it is a belief that holds me back from fully showing up in a lot of areas of my life. 

And to to illustrate one of the memories that comes up the most clearly for me around this is I'm in fifth grade, maybe it's fourth, but I'm almost certain it's fifth grade, I can see exactly where on the asphalt, it's like the corner of where we would do recess. And then where we would eat at the tables, I can see exactly where I am in this moment. And I am talking to another girl in my class. And she says something like you're just too hyper or too loud all the time. And I can still feel in my body. That shrinking of a Oh, I must be I'm too much. And people don't like don't like me when I'm this much. I'm going to get smaller. 

And what I see is year after year after year, examples of where I stayed smaller, or I got even smaller in some way for acceptance. And a clear pattern for me showed up again in high school where I often felt like I didn't fit in anywhere in particular. I was in some honors classes, but not as many honors classes as my really smart friends. I was an athlete, but I also was in a commercial Recording Arts program I sang and so I oftentimes didn't feel as sporty as my, my sport friends because I was also a singer. And when I was with my kind of like the theater singing group, I was definitely not as artsy in Indy as them. And I often felt myself being kind of this chameleon, where I would be I would play up my smarts when I was with my honors friends, I would play up my my jockness, my sports when I was there, I would play up my artisticness when I was here, and that can all be fine and normal and natural. But for me, it always had this undertone of imposter syndrome. I was like man, if my really smart friends know that I'm actually a pretty good athlete like they might not take me as seriously here. Or if I think you get the point. 

And before I share what I'm about to share about what came up in a really raw way recently for me in therapy. I just want you to know that I am inviting you into some vulnerable process The thing that I'm doing in real time now, and I am likely going to share it imperfectly, it may come across, a little bit fragmented. So forgive me for that. And I do want to preface this with that things are actually really good in my life right now. I think there's this misconception that things need to be bad or hard or whatever for you to go to therapy. And I've chosen instead to take a season of good to take a season where I have extra capacity, extra support, and a lot of areas of my life to do some of this deeper, proactive healing work. And that deeper healing work is kind of messy. So in sharing this mess, I just want to reassure you, I'm good, a family is good. And here we go. 

So something I said in therapy last week was this quote, sometimes I think my husband would prefer me to be a less intense or more muted version of myself, rather than the big feeling big question asking nuanced and shifting human that I am. And here's the thing. So end quote. I could have replaced the word husband with just about anything or anyone. And it would feel true for me at my core with this belief that I'm too much. It could have said, I think that my Instagram followers prefer a more muted version of me, I think that my friends prefer a more muted version of me. And the real gut punch came a little bit later in the session, when I got really quiet, and said, I don't even know if I know who all of me is. Because I started muting. So long ago, I started shrinking. So long ago, I started getting smaller, and quieter. I was that chameleon, who was more sporty with their sports friends artsy with their art friends churchy with her church friends, hustling with her entrepreneur, friends, and really believed that, if they knew the other parts of me existed, that I wouldn't be taken as seriously in one area or another, that I wouldn't be as liked in one area or another. And at some point, in the midst of this conversation, my therapist said something like, quote, as long as you believe this to be true, you will filter everything through it. As long as you believe that your husband wants a less nuanced, more muted version of you, you are going to filter to find evidence of that. And so that's one thing I want to offer you right now is that as long as you believe something to be true, this is how our brains work. It's this confirmation bias, our brain wants evidence of what it already believes. Because that's really effective. It's really efficient, that belief has served you at some point in the past, it kept you safe. If we keep believing that thing, our brain just assumes it's going to continue to serve us. And so just reflecting on some beliefs that you might hold, maybe true, maybe not. But if you believe them to be true, you are going to filter everything through it, you are going to find more evidence that that belief is true. 

And then my therapist offered me that she said, What if you just sat down and asked him, What have you just point blank asked him if that's true. And then she said, You need to test the accuracy of this perception. And so number one, we need to reflect on what our beliefs are about ourselves, the world, our relationships, we have to build some awareness around that. Before we have even a shot at rewiring it, we have to understand that as long as you believe it to be true, you are going to filter everything through it. And part of the work is what does it look like for you to test the accuracy of this perception? And I'll talk more about that in a minute these questions that she asked around risk, and game. And so this same thing applies to your beliefs around healing. If you believe that you just came this way, that this just is the way that you are that you came anxious that you came depressed, that there's nothing you can do that there's a permanence to the things that you're struggling with. You will filter everything through that belief. You will find consistent evidence that that is in fact true. Whether it is objectively true or not, and one of my greatest hopes, with the conversations here on this podcast is that they hold space for you to challenge that, to help you see that your brain and your nervous system are always reorganizing that they have this natural inclination towards healing when the conditions are set up for that. What you've heard me say over and over and over again, is that all of you, all of your symptoms make sense. Through this nervous system lens. All of your symptoms make sense based on your past lived experiences and your current life circumstances. And if you believe that to be true, okay, then there isn't anything wrong or broken about me, if I make sense, based on those things. What can I do to shift those things? What can I do to change my current life circumstances? What can I do to repattern and rewire my past lived experiences, I can't change my past lived experiences, but I can absolutely change the way that I relate to them. 

And I have had the beautiful opportunity to have heard from literally hundreds of you, who have told me that this podcast does give you hope, and a message I received just earlier this month read: "Your podcast gives me hope. It gives me tools I use every single day. No one had ever told me about my nervous system. In the years I've been struggling with anxiety and depression. But because of what I've heard from you, it all makes so much sense. Now, I share your podcast with everyone." And this message is not unique. And yet it is so so so special to me that anything that I share here helps you make sense of your struggle helps you feel seen in your humaneness and in your struggle. 

And so when it comes to that last part of what she said, which is you need to test the accuracy of this perception. She said to ask myself, What do I risk if I stop muting myself? And so in the example I shared with you, what do I risk if I stop muting myself in my marriage with my husband? Right? Maybe I risk my marriage? What if I stopped muting myself with my friends? Or on this podcast? Or, you know, social media? Maybe I risk losing friends, maybe I'm canceled? Maybe I say something that goes too far and people are like, Absolutely not. And so recognizing that there is some validity to the belief that you have builds compassion around it, that this belief or this practice, or this way of being it did serve you in some way. But the follow up question to this is what do I gain? What do I gain if I stopped muting myself? Because maybe my marriage actually gets better. Maybe my friendships get deeper. Maybe the value I offer increases tenfold on this podcast on social media and all of the other places. 

And here's where nervous system regulation comes in. nervous system regulation isn't about never feeling scared or worried or anxious or uneasy. It's about knowing that you can handle those things and still be okay. It's not about never thinking, what if, what if? What if it's about having the assurance that even if you'll be okay, because I have to have some level of capacity and agency to even entertain the maybe, maybe my marriage gets better? Maybe my friendships get deeper. And not because almost immediately there's there's the voice of like, but what if it doesn't, and to be able to meet that voice with even if it doesn't, you don't want to keep living as a more muted version of yourself. And while I can see that this served me in fifth grade, to find more acceptance among my peers. It is not the most helpful belief. Now in my life, it does not support what I want for the next 50 years of my life. 

and when our underlying beliefs go unchecked, they do they keep running the show year after year, decade after decade. And know that unpacking these beliefs getting to the root of the trauma or the experiences that wrote this narrative into your psyche. It's tough work. Sometimes it gets worse before it gets better, feels worse before it starts to feel better. And why I brought up this pyramid is because this is not the work that I would have benefited from when I was struggling the most. This is not the work that I would benefit from if you My current life was handing me a ton of unpredictable stressors that kept me stuck in survival mode. This is work that I need to have capacity for, I need to have space for, I need to know what the tools are to help me regulate my nervous system when these big emotions get turned up as these younger versions of me share their painful stories. 

And so maybe for you again, this belief is that I'll always be like this, I'll always struggle with anxiety. And what I want to invite you to ask is, you know, what do you risk if you stop believing this? What do you risk if you actually believe you can heal? Maybe some disappointment? Probably a lot of that. But also, what do you gain? What do you gain and instead believing that healing is possible that life can get good again? And how does life look, if you allow this to be the belief that filters your experiences instead. 

I hope that there was something in this conversation that one of you on the other end of this needed, I would love to hear from you. I don't know what else I have to offer you with today's conversation other than just this sneak peek into my world and my healing work to remind you that I am alongside you in this being human is pesky, and it's hard. healing from trauma happens in layers over years and years. And this unlearning is tough and beautiful and worth it. Because we only get one go at this 100 years, my friend and we get 100 years of we're really, really, really, really lucky. And so I am actively trying to heal and unburden the parts of me who feel like I'm too much too loud to what he has to everything. And in that, I want to invite you into this work to into risking the belief that you can in fact heal, that you're not too much that imperfection is safe, that play and rest aren't earned, that you're not a burden. 

And as always, if you are looking for a new way of doing this work, this is what we do. Our practice combines nervous system regulation with a deeper look at the beliefs under the surface running the show. All of the coaches in my practice, make sure that you work through this pyramid. Through that education and awareness phase, learning how to work with your system, gaining awareness of your nervous system, your needs are different states, learning how to be in conversation with your body enough to regulate learning those tangible research supported nervous system regulation tools that give your system the capacity to then step into that deeper rewiring work. In our programs you are supported and learning the tangible regulation tools you need for today, as well as that deeper work to heal and unburden the parts of you that are carrying around these beliefs that are holding you back from the healing or the life that you want. So that's what I have for you, my friends. And as always, the links to our program are in the show notes. I'm always just a DM or an email away if you have any questions. 

So today's three takeaways are number one, if you're feeling stuck in your healing, it might be happening out of order. So this is an invitation to reflect on that pyramid and ask yourself if maybe you've skipped a step, you skipped a phase. Oftentimes, before we can do that deeper healing, that rewiring work, we need to first stabilize and regulate our nervous system. 

Number two is as long as I or you believe it to be true, that you're too much that people prefer a muted version of you, or that this just is how you are and healing might not be within reach. You will filter everything through that. So reflecting on what beliefs do you currently have as a filter that are no longer serving you? 

And number three, if you can identify a belief, maybe spend some time with those final two questions. What do I risk if I stop doing or believing? Insert your belief and what do I gain if I stopped doing or believing and see what comes up? 

All right, friends. That's it. Thanks for being here. And I'll see you next week. 

Thanks for listening to another episode of The regulate and rewire podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and leave a five star review to help us get these powerful tools out to even more More people who need them. And if you yourself are looking for more personalized support and applying what you've learned today, consider joining me inside Rhys, my monthly mental health membership and nervous system healing space or apply for our one on one anxiety and depression coaching program restore. I've shared a link for more information to both in the show notes. Again, thanks so much for being here, and I'll see you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai