Sarah (00:40)
I remember a handful of years ago sitting across from someone that I really loved and I was trying to explain something that felt really important to me at the time. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I could feel them just kind of like not getting it. It was the posture, it was their eye contact or looking away. They weren't being unkind, they weren't dismissing me or anything like that. It's just like what I was sharing wasn't landing.

with them and their responses weren't landing with me the way that in that moment I really needed them to land. And in that moment, or I guess in those moments, in that situation, something inside of me just kind of like shut down.

I could feel it kind of happening.

And by the end of the conversation, I was just like completely gone. I was flooded. My chest was tight. My throat was kind of closing. There was that flavor of shame that like washes all the way down.

And underneath of all of that.

What I've come to realize was there was this internal conviction that I was fundamentally impossible to know. That this is what closeness, this is what intimacy, this is what that actually felt like for me. Alone on the inside, even when someone was right there with me.

And here's the funny thing, I knew at the moment, even as it was happening, that the reaction was too big for what was actually in front of me. But actually knowing that, it didn't touch the response because I couldn't really reach myself.

That gap between what I knew and what my body was doing is actually what I wanna talk about today.

Because what was happening in that moment wasn't just that I was being super sensitive or that I was overthinking or any of the other things that people with complex trauma get told about themselves. I was actually in the throes of something that we know to be called An emotional flashback.

and once you understand what that actually is and what's happening in your nervous system when that occurs, a lot of things that have probably felt confusing about yourself for a long time, they can start to make a different kind of sense.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Complex Trauma Podcast.

Today we're diving into emotional flashbacks, what they actually are, what's happening in your brain and your body when they show up, and why understanding them isn't really the same as healing them and what healing might actually require. There's a lot of nuance here, but I also think that emotional flashbacks happen a lot more frequently than complex trauma survivors and even therapists understand.

Which is why I feel like it's so important to give like real life examples and to try to dive into this in a way that's really understandable and digestible

For folks that are and aren't in the therapy field.

One of the most disorienting parts of living with complex trauma is the actual size of the reactions. Not even just that they happen, but the actual size of them. Your partner's tone shifts slightly and it's like your whole system floods. You get a piece of critical feedback from your boss and spend the rest of the day convinced that you're about to lose everything. or someone you love goes quiet and your body is bracing

Before a single conscious thought has actually formed.

Part of you knows the reaction doesn't fit what's actually in front of you, but that awareness, it doesn't make those reactions feel any smaller. It just adds another layer to them, usually shame, like we talk about here in the podcast, on top of that original overwhelm. And then you're left managing two things at once without really having a lot of words for what's actually happening.

for a long time, we understood the brain as primarily reactive. So when something happens, the brain registers it and the brain responds. But what neuroscience has shown us over the last few decades is that the brain is actually primarily predictive. It doesn't wait for things to unfold and then decide how to feel.

It's constantly generating forward models of what is about to happen based on everything that it's ever learned. And it uses those models to construct your experience of the present moment before your conscious mind has had the chance to weigh in.

So your brain has been building a model of your world your entire life, a model that's based on what relationships felt like, what happened when you needed something, what it meant when someone went quiet or started to pull away, what safety felt like and what danger felt like. Every new moment gets run through that model first, actually.

For people with complex trauma, especially relational trauma and childhood emotional neglect, those models were built in environments where danger was often unpredictable, where love felt conditional, Where having needs put you at risk for rejection or shame. where conflict could shift the emotional climate of an entire household without any warning.

So the nervous system, it got very good at pattern matching. And now as an adult, when something in the present even slightly resembles that original wound, the system doesn't just wait for information. It fires old predictions. It responds not just to what's in front of you, but what it's already certain is coming next based on what it's learned before.

This is actually brilliant, right? This is your nervous system that's well trained, doing exactly what it was built to do, to protect you and to keep you safe.

The problem is just that it's running this old programming in the here and now and things might be very different.

So let's talk about what an emotional flashback actually is. When most people hear the word flashback, they picture something really visual, like a memory replaying, images, a scene,

That kind of flashback has a reference point, right? You know what it's connected to. Emotional flashbacks, they're different.

And that's a really significant part of why they're so hard to catch. Pete Walker, who wrote the book.

complex PTSD from surviving to thriving. I've talked about this book on the podcast before. He really was the first one to describe emotional flashbacks. And he described them as sudden regressions into overwhelming emotional states of childhood. So no visual memory, no narrative, just feelings.

Rushing forward with a kind of authority that really makes them feel like present truth. So things like intense shame, intense fear, intense loneliness, intense helplessness.

And most of the time, for most people, no actual conscious awareness of where any of it came from. And to understand why, it really does help to know something about how traumatic memory is actually stored. There are two broad categories of memory. Explicit memory is what most of us think of when we think about remembering something. It's narrative, it's declarative, and it's time-stamped.

You know the memory belongs in the past. You can locate it there.

Implicit memory works different. It's the memory of the body. The memory of sensation, of learned responses, of emotional meaning. It doesn't have a timestamp. It doesn't necessarily come with a sense of this happened then. It just is. And when it gets activated, it doesn't feel like remembering. It feels like now.

Emotional flashbacks, they live in implicit memory, which is why they kind of arrive in your body without an actual story attached. The body knows something the thinking mind can't quite locate.

If you listen to my episode with Doctor Janina Fisher.

It's an episode all about parts. You'll remember that she describes the nervous system as organizing itself into parts in response to chronic early trauma.

She talks about the apparently normal self, the left-brained, daily functioning part of self that goes to work and manages life and often has no idea what other parts of self are holding. And then there are the emotional parts, the survival parts. Each one is still anticipating danger that shaped it.

What matters here is that the emotional parts that hold the original wounding, they don't necessarily know that time has passed. Not because there's some like irrationality behind it, but because it formed at a time when the nervous system was overwhelmed

Beyond its capacity to process what was happening. It's still operating from the worldview that existed in the moment of when the wounding was happening, with the emotional reality and the body sensations and the beliefs about self and other than

beliefs about self and other people that were formed right then, all of it intact.

And when that part gets activated in the present moment, it doesn't access the memory, right? This is the emotional flashback that we're talking about. It relives the original experience, the feelings, the physical sensations, the conclusions about what this means all come back online as if it's happening right now.

So when this park is activated, our emotional flashbacks get activated.

Your body isn't just saying, this reminds me of that time that I felt abandoned. It's saying, I am abandoned. it's not the recollection. It's the full re-experiencing of an emotional reality that your nervous system has been holding for a really long time, collapsed into the present moment with the full weight of the original still intact.

This is why so many people with complex trauma struggle to recognize when they're in an emotional flashback, especially in relational moments.

It comes with this somatic certainty, this body level certainty. your chest might get tight, it might close, your stomach might drop, your throat might tighten, and the mind immediately starts building an explanation for what the body is already convinced is true.

Two things are happening and probably a lot more, but for now, two things are happening At the very same time. There is a reaction to the present moment, and there is a traumatic memory being re-experienced as though it's current. They occupy the same space and from the inside

They feel completely indistinguishable from each other. So that is just like a ton to be navigating. And so many people with complex trauma are navigating it, are experiencing this on the day-to-day, and they wonder why they feel so overwhelmed all the time.

So let's add, let's add a little bit of nuance to this. And I hope that this really makes sense. Not every emotional flashback feels the same. Which cognitively, I know, of course that makes sense. If you're experiencing washes of shame at some points and washes of helplessness or loneliness, of course they feel different.

In Janina Fisher's framework, the emotional parts that I just talked about, they're each kind of organized around specific survival responses.

And if you've listened to the episode on fawning, you'll recognize some of this because I talked a lot about fight, flight, freeze, and fawn in that episode.

And those four F's they really map onto what Janina Fisher describes as the distinct emotional part that carries those survival responses.

So which part of us gets activated in emotional flashback? It shapes everything about how it feels in your body and what story it tells you about yourself. So I'm gonna go through them, the four Fs. The fight part.

Activates when the nervous system reads the present moment as a threat that needs to be defended against.

Janina describes this part as carrying hypervigilance and what she calls post-traumatic paranoia, that waiting for the other shoe to drop, the suspicion that betrayal is coming, even when nothing has happened yet. In the body, the somatic sense, the fight part often arrives as heat, right? A tightening through the jaw, something electric through the shoulders and the arms that wants to move but has really nowhere to go. Breath that gets shortened fast. In a relational moment,

This part might show up as sudden anger that surprises you, a spike in defensiveness, a pull towards argument or distance as protection. The inner critic that kind of travels alongside this part tends to sound a lot like you're out of control, you're too much, you're gonna destroy this.

Next the flight part.

Like the part that runs. In adults.

This might not look like physically leaving. it can look like workaholism, compulsive busyness, substance use, scrolling, any way the nervous system has found to get away from what it actually can't tolerate staying with. In the body, flight can kind of feel like restlessness, an urge to move, to change the subject, to get busy with something. Internally, there's often a bracing through the midsection.

The body trying to make itself fast and small all at the same time. And the inner critic that comes along with the flight response often says, You can't handle this. Just go.

You always run from everything.

Next, the freeze part is one that gets really unrecognized. And I think partly because it can look like a sense of calmness from the outside. What's actually happening is like a kind of blankness, sudden difficulty finding words, like a fogginess, the body going very still, your breath barely moving, kind of like you're almost holding it. Some people describe a sense of watching themselves from a slight distance.

Which is the dissociative quality that can kind of travel alongside Freeze. This is the part that learned that stillness was the safest response when neither fighting or fleeing was an option. The inner critic in Freeze is often a really quiet kind of critical voice, less than maybe a voice even, and more like a certainty.

Nothing that I do matters anyway.

the fawn response, or what Janina Fisher sometimes calls the submit part, learned that making other people comfortable, making yourself agreeable, anticipating needs before anyone could be disappointed was how you stayed safe. If you listen to the fawning episode from I think a couple of months ago, you know this one pretty well by now. In a relational moment, someone in a fawn or submit flashback.

Might find themselves suddenly overapologizing, overaccommodating, managing the other person's emotional state while their own is completely flooded. It can look like kindness or flexibility from the outside, but from the inside, it often feels just like disappearing. The body tends to collapse slightly, your shoulders kind of rounding, your chest maybe dropping. The physical signature of making yourself smaller and less threatening.

The inner critic here says, keep them happy, don't be a problem. If you're too much, they're going to leave.

There are a couple of other parts that I want to talk about just for a second. These are the parts that are still organized around early attachment, that are still reaching for what wasn't consistently there. These parts that are acutely sensitive to any signal of withdrawal or disconnection because they learned early that if someone loves you, you're protected. And if they don't, you're actually in danger. When these parts activate, oftentimes Janina Fisher describes these as.

The attached part or the cry for help part.

There's often an ache in the chest or a hollow or like reaching quality, sometimes a tightening in the throat that feels like something is trying to come out but just can't.

This is what I've come to recognize as the part activated in the story that I started this episode with. Sitting across from someone I loved, feeling them not quite reach me and something inside of me already certain that this meant something much larger and much older than that moment.

Okay, so we've gone through the four Fs, right? And how the four F's, how those survival responses might show up in the form of emotional flashbacks, how those parts of self, those self-states can show up in emotional flashbacks. And I think that it feels important to talk about how these parts, they don't always activate in isolation.

In trauma literature there's

recognition that there's kind of sometimes predictable cycle that can happen amongst parts. For example, the attached part in the fight part. Something small hurts the attached part, like that tone of voice, a moment of distraction, a perceived withdrawal, and the attached part floods forward with distress. And then the fight part comes forward to protect it, maybe as like irritability or defensiveness.

The anger then frightens or pushes away the very person the attached part was reaching for. The attached part then panics and reaches even harder. And the fight part escalates to protect it. And then often another part, a submit part kind of collapses under the shame of having reacted that way at all.

That whole cycle can happen inside a single conversation.

And I wanted to share that because this can get so nuanced. And I think what it does is it explains the intensity and the inner play of what's happening in the body when someone's struggling with an emotional flashback, which like I said earlier and like we know, complex trauma survivors are kind of like churning through Really, really frequently.

And when we understand that an emotional flashback isn't just like a generic flood of overwhelm,

But the activation of a specific survival pattern or a specific survival part, one that has its own emotional reality, its own history, its own very particular way of showing up in the body, everything gets a little bit more understandable. The body really it stops being a mystery and can kind of start to be like a map because each part, each response does have a somatic signature.

The fight part doesn't feel like the submit part. The attach part doesn't feel like the freeze part. And when you can start to recognize which part or which survival response is activated.

From the felt sense of it, rather than thinking your way to an answer, you're no longer just overwhelmed. You're in contact with something really, really specific, something that has a name, a history, and a reason for actually being there. And that can make the difference between being swept away by an emotional flashback and being able to stay present enough to actually meet what's coming up.

So if you're anything like the complex trauma survivors that I know, mean, you're here, you're listening to a podcast about complex trauma. So whether you're in therapy or not, you know, you do the work, right? You're probably reading books. Maybe you've been in therapy or you really want to be in therapy, but you don't have the resources for it.

Maybe on some level you understand your attachment wounds and you can name different parts of yourself and you can trace that thread from childhood to the way you respond in the here and now to people you care about and even strangers on the street.

A lot of people, a lot of people like you, a lot of people like me, a lot of the people that I work with, you can identify patterns that are happening while you're inside of it. And then something small happens and you're like right back in the flood.

And the understanding, the cognitive part, it does help connect the dots, it helps give yourself a little bit more grace, maybe even compassion, but the insight isn't where traumatic memory lives.

I wanna give you some context real quick.

Research estimates that somewhere around one in five people experience childhood emotional neglect. I think that's a really conservative number because emotional neglect by nature, like we've talked about, is the absence of something. It doesn't leave a visible mark. It often doesn't get named until someone is like sitting in therapy decades later trying to understand why their life feels the way that it does.

That is a lot of nervous systems that learned very early that certain things about connection and safety weren't reliable. And a lot of adults then walking around with those predictions still running.

So a lot of those people, a lot of those adults walking around, they they start to understand this, but why doesn't understand change predictions that the brain is making? And part of that goes back to implicit memory. Explicit memory, that narrative kind of time-stamped verbal memory, is accessible to insight. You can think about it, you can talk about it, you can understand it differently.

But the emotional flashback, it's not living there. It's living in implicit memory, in the body, in those survival parts we just talked about. And those parts don't update through the thinking mind. They update through experience.

And you know, there's also something really important to mention about why memory doesn't process normally in the first place. When a little kid is repeatedly overwhelmed in a relational environment without those co-regulating adults to help contain and integrate what's happening, the experience it exceeds what the nervous system can process at the time. It goes beyond that window of tolerance with no one there to help bring them back into their window.

And what can't be processed in the moment doesn't get filed away as like an integrated, completed experience. It stays alive, unresolved,

as implicit as when it was happening.

That's really what overwhelm without co-regulation does to memory.

In a recent episode about emotionally corrective experiences, I talked about Bruce Ecker's research on memory reconsolidation. It's a good episode. It's pretty dense, but it's a good one. So if you haven't listened, be sure to tune in. Bruce Ecker's framework, it describes three things that have to happen in sequence for a traumatic prediction to actually update. First,

The emotional memory has to be reactivated, not just thought about, actually brought back online, felt in the body. Second, a truly contradictory experience has to be introduced while that memory is live. Something that doesn't fit what the memory predicts.

And third, and this piece I think we kind of like hammered in in that episode that I did about the emotionally corrective experiences, is that that mismatch, it has to be felt, not just understood, but really, really felt in the body at the level where that original learning actually lives. Without that third piece, you have insight, which again is super, super valuable, but the prediction doesn't update.

So like we talk about here on the podcast, all of this is really it's body based, right? It's somatic.

As a somatic experiencing practitioner, I trained in Peter Levine's work

And his framework is that trauma gets like lodged in the body as incomplete survival responses. When we face threat, the body mobilizes, fight, flight, freeze, fawn, right? Like we just talked about. And when that response can't complete, when a child can't fight back or run or be protected, that mobilized energy, it doesn't discharge. It stays locked in the system. It shows up later as these patterns of chronic bracing.

The held breath, the shoulders that never drop, the tightness through the chest that never really quite releases. Healing in this framework is about creating enough safety for the body to finally complete what it couldn't complete then. Not through reliving, through titrated

teeny tiny supported contacts with those incomplete responses so the system can actually discharge what it's been holding. So why did I just ramble about that a little bit? And it's because both frameworks, Bruce Ecker's framework, Peter Levine's framework,

Janina Fisher's framework, they all point towards the same basic truth. The body is where the wound lives. Interventions that stay in the thinking mind are working upstream where healing actually needs to happen.

I think in therapy we can sometimes get caught in these patterns of

following impulses to regulate, to ground yourself, to breathe, to come back to the present. And those are actually very important skills. They have a lot of value. But just holding space for a little bit of nuance is that eventually

We don't want to just manage the signal of the body without hearing what it's saying, right? Because if we only ever regulate the pain down without first acknowledging what the pain is connected to, we're not actually doing healing work.

So emotional flashbacks, the suffering in emotional flashbacks, we really can see them as younger parts of you carrying real pain from a time when you had no resources to meet it, like still waiting to be seen.

If we only ever silence that signal, that original pain stays unwitnessed. And it will really keep finding ways to be present because the present is the only place that it can really be felt.

I mentioned this earlier, but I want to come back to it just for a second. When you're in an emotional flashback, you're experiencing two things at once. there's present moment distress, that flooding, the shame, the certainty that there's something terribly wrong right now. And underneath it, there's the original suffering, the younger experience being relived.

Both experiences are really real. The present and the past. Both matter, and they actually might need different things. The present moment distress often needs some sort of orientation, a return to the here and now,

The felt sense of being in an adult body in the present moment with resources that weren't available way back when. That original suffering, it needs something else entirely, I'd say. It needs to be acknowledged, witnessed, brought into contact with the part of you that is here and now And can hold it differently than it was ever held before.

What makes emotional flashbacks so intolerable is partly that the part being activated didn't have adult resources when the original wound happened.

So like we've talked about on this episode, the flooding can feel the way that it felt then, really completely. But when you can access your grounded adult self, when you can stay present enough to recognize what's happening, you bring something different to the moment. You're not inside the wound in the same way, you can be alongside of it.

And that's where a window for learning something new can begin to open.

Oftentimes in this work we start to be really curious about the emotional learnings, like what we learned.

in these moments of overwhelm, of pain.

So when an emotional flashback happens or an intense emotional reaction shows up that feels disproportionate to what's actually in front of you, that disproportionality is information. it almost always means an emotional memory is being re-experienced in the present moment. And rather than immediately trying to regulate the intensity down, there's something that we can do with it first. And this takes capacity, right? This is why

Working in therapy to expand your ability to tolerate distress in your body can be really important.

So when this certain type of overwhelm happens, you can get curious about it, really somatically curious. where does this live in your body right now? What does it actually feel like? The texture of it, the quality, the weight, where does it sit?

And if you can stay with it just for a moment without trying to fix it, how old does it feel? these questions, they sound kind of simple, but it's not really always easy to stay with, right? What often happens when people sit with it is that the feeling starts to feel familiar in a different way. Less like present day crisis and more like something very old that they've experienced a lot of times before.

From there, parts awareness can become really useful. What part of you feels most activated right now? Is there like a reaching quality, an ache, a longing? That's likely the attached part. Is there a heat, a charge, something that wants to push back or protect? That's likely a fight part. Is there a heaviness, a collapse, a sense of wanting to disappear or keep everyone around you okay? That might be that submit or fond part.

Is there an urge to move, escape, get busy, make yourself scarce, numb? That could be flight.

Recognizing which part has come forward starts to give recognizing which part or parts have come forward starts to give the experience some shape. And from there, what does this part know? What did this feeling in this body learn about what this moment means?

Underneath almost every emotional flashback, when you get here, there is some sort of learning, a conclusion that the nervous system drew from the original experience and has been operating from ever since. Kind of like if I need something, people leave. Criticism means I'm completely alone in the world. Making a mistake means I'm unlovable. If I disappear, I'm safer. If I keep everyone happy, nothing bad will happen. These aren't just thoughts.

Like we've talked about, there are these conclusions that much younger versions of yourself drew in order to make sense of what was happening with the cognitive and emotional resources of a child doing their best to survive something they couldn't control. And because they formed early, often before language, even before the capacity to question them, they get stored as truth, as prediction, as the way things simply are. I'm hoping that this helps bring things kind of full circle.

Part of the work in therapy is to find that learning, to bring it into conscious awareness, not to debate it or to try to replace it with something new, but to see it for what it actually is, a conclusion formed under specific circumstances by a very, very young person that made complete sense at one point.

Once this learning becomes visible, you can start to hold two things at once. This is what I feel right now and I know something about where this feeling comes from. Not in a way of dismissing the feeling as a way of being with it with a little bit more ground under you.

In a therapy session, this sometimes sounds something like a client saying, When you give me feedback,

Something in me hears it the way I heard criticism as a child. I know that's not exactly what's happening right now, and I'm still feeling it. Both of those things are true at the same time. That right there is integration and it really is a different thing from just insight.

So let's talk about what these younger parts of you need.

So let's talk really quickly what these younger parts of you might actually need. In trauma therapy, a powerful thing that we work towards is sometimes called ideal caregiver work. And the question at the center of ideal caregiver work is: what should have happened? Not what did happen. What should have happened?

What would a safe, present, emotionally attuned caregiver have offered in that original moment? What would your nervous system have needed to experience in order to draw a different conclusion about what you're worth and what you can expect from the people around you? Maybe it was you're not alone in this. Maybe you made a mistake and you're still completely loved. Maybe I see that you're hurting and I'm not going anywhere. And maybe just I'm here.

And then the work is to let those things actually land, not just to think it, to feel it in the body. Because this is exactly where Bruce Ecker's three-step process really matters. The emotional memory has to be alive. A truly contradictory experience has to be introduced while it's alive. and the mismatch has to be felt somatically, not just registered cognitively.

That's what makes this therapeutic Rather than just something imagined. That's what gives something it can actually update from.

I'll give you some examples. for the attached part, that landing might feel like the ache in the chest softening, a slight release in your throat,

A sense of something that was reaching is actually being met.

For the submit or fawn part, it might look like the collapsed chest beginning to lift a little bit, a small return of breath, the weight beginning to have slightly less grip. For the fight part, the heat kind of beginning to move, the charge in the shoulders releasing, the jaw unclenching, the body starting to recognize that protection isn't needed in this very moment. Again, the body has to experience the contradiction, not just hear it.

this is why the therapeutic relationship matters really so much in healing from complex trauma. The nervous system learned that certain things were true about connection and safety inside of a relationship. That old learning gets updated most powerfully inside of a relationship, too. Co-regulation isn't a workaround. For many people, it's how the nervous system actually begins to learn that safe connection is real and possible.

So it can be helpful to start to imagine what would a safe present emotionally attuned caregiver have offered in this original moment? What would your nervous system have needed to experience in order to draw a different conclusion about what you're worth and what you can expect from the people around you?

And when you feel something get lit up in your body and you can slow down, you can get curious about it, you can start to offer yourself some of these things.

So I also want to offer something pretty concrete for listeners who aren't in therapy. I know there are a lot of you who are listening that aren't in therapy. Or maybe you're really early in this work and you're starting to, you know, try a couple of different things to be with yourself differently.

I know that I'm biased because I'm a therapist when I say that the deeper healing really does benefit from a therapeutic container. But there are things that you can begin practicing that start to create just a little bit more space in the moment. And that space, like I always say, little bits of space, they add up and they really do matter.

So when you notice a wave of feeling that seems bigger than what's in front of you, See if you can pause before you go to explain it or fix it or push through it. Try placing your hand on your chest. This isn't some sort of crazy technique, but just as an act of acknowledgement. And then say something to yourself like,

This moment is touching something much older. I know this feeling. And I'm here now.

Then if you can get a little curious. What does this feel like? Even like the edges of it, what does this feel like in my body right now? Which part of me feels most activated? Is there an ache, a charge, a collapse, an urge to manage everyone around me? Just naming it even loosely Starts to bring your grounded adult self into contact with what's happening.

It doesn't necessarily resolve the underlying memory and it's not meant to. What it does is interrupt the move toward shame and self judgment long enough to create a little bit of room. Enough to stay present with the younger part rather than being swept away with it. Enough to remind your nervous system that there's an adult here now.

with more resources than existed then, who's actually not going anywhere?

And over time, with enough of these moments, with enough real corrective experience and safe relationships, and even if eventually you do some therapeutic work, those predictions they can start to shift. The nervous system starts building a new model to operate from, one where criticism doesn't always mean abandonment, where conflict doesn't always mean the end, where you having needs doesn't always make you a burden.

And that's because you've experienced something different enough times and enough moments of actual safety that the old learning finally has somewhere new to land.

So this was a pretty dense episode.

but if there's something that I want you to take from it, maybe I hope that it's this. The intensity of your emotional reactions is not evidence that there's something wrong with you. It's evidence that your nervous system learned something under circumstances that made that learning completely necessary. And it's been doing its job ever since.

The parts of you that activate in these moments, the ones that reach and ache, and the ones that heat up and protect, and the one that goes still and waits, and the one that collapses under shame, the one that makes itself so useful that no one will ever leave, They all learned what they learned for a reason. And they're still trying to take care of you with the information that they have.

Healing is what happens when those parts finally get to experience something different. When the attached part gets to feel what it's like to reach and be met, when the fight part gets to feel what it's like to lower its guard and find that safety is still there. When the submit part gets to feel what it's like to take up space and not be punished for it, when the fond part starts to feel what it's like to stop managing everyone else and still be loved. Not because someone told them that it's safe.

But because they actually felt it.

As always, this is slow work. It is absolutely not linear. It's so nuanced, so individual. And I really do think that it's some of the most important work that a human being can do.

In my planning for this episode, I didn't really intend for it to be this dense, but here we are. So I'm happy to answer anything that you have.

I'd also love to hear what was most helpful, what was least helpful. Send it all over. I'm here for it.

And of course I will be back next week for another episode. And until then

Keep taking care of yourself.

I'll see you next week.