Family Disappeared

Shadow Work & Inner Child Co-Regulation w/ Dr. Nima Rahmany Part 2 - Episode 120

• Lawrence Joss

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In this highly anticipated Part 2, Lawrence Joss and Dr. Nima Rahmany explore the unconscious dynamics that make relationships feel like a painful dance, especially in the context of family conflict and parental alienation. Dr. Rahmany breaks down the tension between the two core relational fears, abandonment and engulfment, that create the exhausting push-pull pattern in partnerships, and with your children.

Key Takeaways

  • Many of us were born into cultures and societies where we had to choose attachment over our authentic truth.
  • We are conditioned to fawn for safety.
  • Fawning is a performative self abandonment that we do to feel safe.
  • The codependent is the one that fawns, abandoning themselves for attachment.
  • Deep down, every time you fawn, there's a little resentment towards the person you're fawning.
  • People pleasing is a response that can lead to losing one's identity.
  • Clients often express that they don't even know who they are anymore due to people pleasing.
  • Cultural conditioning plays a significant role in shaping our behaviors.
  • Self-abandonment can lead to unhealthy relationship dynamics.
  • Understanding these patterns is crucial for personal growth.

Chapters
0:00 - Abandonment Meets Engulfment: The Cycle
0:25 - Mission, Community, and Parental Alienation Support
3:20 - Living the Pain and Grief of Alienation
5:10 - Defining The Push-Pull Pattern
8:15 - Becoming Trigger-Proof And Repair
10:25 - Enmeshment And Boundary Walls
12:07 - Alienation As A Repeating Pattern
18:05 - Shadow Work and Owning the Parts We Hide
23:35 - Authenticity And Secure Bonds
27:08 - Fawn Response Explained
32:00 - Health Costs Of People-Pleasing
35:02 - Boundaries And Nervous System Safety
38:24 - Breaking Cycles Through Parent Healing
41:28 - The Trigger-Proof Experience Overview

If you wish to connect with Lawrence Joss or any of the PA-A community members who have appeared as guests on the podcast:

Email - familydisappeared@gmail.com
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/lawrencejoss
(All links mentioned in the podcast are available in Linktree)

Connect with Dr. Nima: https://drnima.com/

Please donate to support PAA programs:
https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=SDLTX8TBSZNXSsa bottom part

This podcast is made possible by the Family Disappeared Team:
Anna Johnson- Editor/Contributor/Activist/Co-host
Glaze Gonzales- Podcast Manager

Connect with Lawrence Joss:
Website: https://parentalalienationanonymous.com/
Email- familydisappeared@gmail.com

SPEAKER_01:

So the more you come at me with your fear of abandonment, the more that my fear of engulfment gets activated, and I want space, which then causes your fear of abandonment to get activated even more, which then causes you to push more, which causes me to pull and run away.

SPEAKER_00:

There was a time in my life when I was overwhelmed and underwater. Those days are the inspiration for this podcast. This is by far the ultimate healing journey for all of us. Healing ourselves emotionally, spiritually, and physically is paramount to this journey. From this place of grounding, we can all go out into the world and change all our interactions and relationships. We can engage people from an integrated and resourced place. This is a journey of coming home to ourselves. In today's episode, we'll start to explore some of these issues. Let's begin the healing journey today. Welcome to the Family Disappeared Podcast. Hi, my name is Lauren Strauss, and welcome to the Family Disappeared Podcast. And today we have the second part of the podcast with Dr. Nima. If you did not listen to the first part, stop. Go back to the last show and listen to the first part of Dr. Nima's podcast. And that's probably one of my favorite podcasts that I've done. He has so much wonderful information about trauma, about trauma bonding, about boundaries, about shadow work, which kind of starts it as we start to look at these different things in our life that triggers him. And what a beautiful storyteller. It's just super, super informative, engaging, delivered in a digestible way. And I highly recommending listening to it over and over and over again, like I'm gonna need to do because I forget part of what happened already. So if you're new to the community, welcome. We have a bunch of great podcasts in the can around anything that you would like to learn about parental alienation, estrangement, erasure. And if we are missing stuff and we are missing nuances, which certain people have told me we are in different comments, please let us know. Email me at familydisapeared at gmail.com. We'd love to include those populations that we're missing, or even those nuances related to more like children or young adults experiences and even what estrangement and alienation or whatever word looks like to those folks. And if you are part of that community and you are doing your work and you want to come on the show and represent some of that stuff that I'm not doing a great job of sharing or talking about, reach out, email me, family disappeared at gmail.com. I'll get back to you. And if it feels appropriate for both of us to have a conversation on a podcast or a community of folks, 100% I'm in. And great stuff in the show notes, or Dr. Nima's contact information is in the show notes. We have a free 12-step program, Parental Alienation Anonymous, which I always talk about. There's a link there. Community has saved my life. And the neat thing about this community is we don't have to explain what we're going through. Everyone understands. And it's a recovery-based community. It's about doing our shadow work, but it's through the 12-steps that can go along with any of this other stuff going out there. So love to see you. Like, share, let people know what we're doing. Donate if you can. We want to bring more resources. We want to engage with some of these professionals in a more complete way. Where we can host different events and trainings at a really affordable rate, but we need other folks to help out to make that possible. And let's get into the second part with Dr. Nima. Put on your seatbelt. Let's go. It's so hard going through parental alienation, estrangement, erasure, whatever you call it, and just getting stuck in these different places where like I just want my kids to love me. And there's this thing going on with my kids, and they're rejecting me and they hate me, but they're so close to their mother, and I don't know what's going on, and I just hate it. And it brings up all this abandonment and fear, and I'm a bad parent. And that cycle happened for me for so long. And it also turned into like these ruminating thoughts, and I couldn't work, I couldn't function in the world for a while, and I didn't know what to do. And the stuff that Dr. Neem is talking about, this thing about starting to look at all these triggers and all these things that are going on in our life that look like the worst possible thing, and starting to heal around them. Right? Not just push outwardly or use a substance or a person or an activity to get rid of that feeling of discomfort, but actually going into the discomfort and healing that part of ourselves so we're able to integrate more into our lives. It's probably the best gift I've ever given myself. And I still get triggered and I still have stuff come up, and sometimes I still act like a knucklehead, but it happens less often. And when it does happen, I'm able to actually identify it and clean it up first with myself and my inner ecosystem, and then maybe with an external person or institution that I need to make an amends to. And that's my long-winded way of saying, like, I'm so grateful for this work, in ways grateful for the pain because it's helping me transition through some of the stuff that I have to look at in order to survive. And I think if you're like me and you're in this place where you just want your family back, you might have to do this work too. And with that wonderful warm yay, maybe a little depressing something. Let's see what Dr. Neima has to say. In part of this conversation we had, you mentioned the idea of the push-pull patterns in relationships and with our kids and with our family members. Can you tell us what the push-pull is and talk a little bit more about it?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So there's an in a push-pull of a relational dynamic, because as a child, there's a part of us that craves connection with our parent, right? And it's driven by the fear of abandonment. So I'm going to use this shoulder. The fear of abandonment, it drives this need for connection. Come close to me. I need you. I'm afraid of being alone. So that's called the fear of abandonment. We have another part of us has a fear. So there's two anxieties that we got to deal with. This part of me that felt like love was obligation. Does that make sense? Like love meant obligation, love meant duty. Love meant being consumed and losing my freedom. So there's this other part of us that wants freedom. Okay. And space, which is driven by right here, the fear of what's called engulfment. So we have one part of us that wants connection that's driven by the fear of abandonment. The other part of us that's driven by the fear of engulfment that wants space and freedom. So naturally, can you see the problem here? Within all of us, we have these two parts of us, right? That are constantly at war, depending on what's being triggered. Now, if I'm in a relationship with you and you are driven by your fear of abandonment and you are heavily wanting more connection with me, wanting texting, wanting to talk. Can we talk this through? I need your attention. All of a sudden, what part of me is going to get triggered, Lawrence?

SPEAKER_00:

The engulfment part of you, right?

SPEAKER_01:

The part of me that is like wants freedom and space and is overwhelmed and feels duty and obligation. So that part of me goes, oh my God, get me the hell away from this dude. Okay. And this can happen with friendships, this can happen with romantic partnerships, it can happen with clients. It's just, it's there. So the more you come at me with your fear of abandonment, the more that my fear of engulfment gets activated and I want space, which then causes your fear of abandonment to get activated even more, which then causes you to push more, which causes me to pull and run away. So the more you pursue, the more I want to distance myself. And finally, if you start to figure it out and you go, Oh, God, I'm done. It just isn't working for me. And then you start pulling away. What does that activate within me? My fear of abandonment. The one that wants connection. So I'm like, oh my God, oh my God, come back, come back to me. Right. And then you're like, no, you're not giving me attention. Come back, please, please. I'll do it right this time. I hate being alone, whatever the story is. And then now we have the honeymoon phase and everything's great until the neediness gets triggered. And then now I want space. And then we go through that push-pull dance. So the push-pull dance is the interplay between the fear of abandonment and the fear of engulfment that happens within both people as a normal experience of tension of being in a relationship of people who don't understand how to work with those shadows that get activated. But once you learn to become trigger-proof, you can integrate those parts of you instead of needing the other person to quell that anxiety, you become the one to quell that anxiety, the fears. And then you bring your adult self online. And when you communicate, you're like, hey, take the space all you want. I'll see you when you're ready. And that creates that overwhelming duty, calms down within you, and it causes you to approximate. So it's by taking full responsibility for the shadows that get activated, integrating it, bringing your adult self online so you can have a conversation because ruptures will happen, but then you can repair much quicker instead of just going through this exhaustive dance, which destroys your health completely, like bankrupts you. This is why divorce attorneys are rich because of this push-pull dynamic. So I'm really keen on teaching people how to become trigger-proof to that.

SPEAKER_00:

I love the explanation of the push-pull. And again, so many people in our community that are struggling just to have a relationship or have access with their kids or their grandkids, or people struggling to have access with their parents. You know what I mean? Totally. Like I can't do this until I take care of myself. And if I take care of myself, then I can start to heal this and possibly change the dynamic.

SPEAKER_01:

One of the things that you might notice in your community, the people who are dealing with that, is that if I run away from you, if I say to you, all right, we're done, we're not speaking. I help people kind of heal that. And a lot of times it's like, oh, my kids don't want to talk to me. And so what I tell them is that there's a thing called enmeshment. And the reason for that is a really sneaky system called enmeshment, which is a lack of a boundary of my inner world with yours. Enmeshment means there is no shape around me that your emotions become mine. And it means I can't be in a room with you where I don't internalize whatever you're feeling. I can't be with you and still have me because I can't separate your pain from my pain. Because I don't know how to do boundaries. So the only way that I can do it is by creating a wall. So my boundary becomes the wall. I don't want to even see you. And so this was my case in my parents. I just couldn't speak to them because their judgments, their feelings, their anxiety, I didn't know how to have a boundary around it. Their anxiety would become mine because they didn't know how to regulate themselves and they would freak out and they would download their fears onto me and make me responsible for quelling their anxiety. And I didn't want that responsibility. So the only way that I knew how at the time was to say, I can't speak to you. Until I did the work of becoming trigger-proof. Now, when I'm seeing them, whatever emotions or judgments they're having about me and what I want to do or not, I'm able to create a boundary and separate my pain from theirs. And I don't allow their pain to be mine. And when they tell me what to do or give me their opinion, I'm able to lovingly, elegantly say, thank you. You know, I'm not going to accept that. This is what I'm available for, this is what I'm not. And so the reason why breakdowns happen, you have experiences where family members are not speaking. What they're actually saying is, I don't know how to be in a relationship with you and not lose myself.

SPEAKER_00:

So if we take that and just kind of delve a little bit deeper, like in the community, a lot of people use the word parental alienation, estrangement, some form of that. And when parental alienation is in play, there's another parent that the child is usually more enmeshed with, or there's something trauma bond or something going on. And then me as the other parent that's feeling emotional or wanting to connect with my kid, even if I'm doing work, my kid still can't handle anything that's coming from me, and they're picking the enmeshed place where there is no boundary, and having a boundary with me, like it's so confusing. Like, how do you explain that to a parent going through parental alienation?

SPEAKER_01:

So you're talking about, okay, so I'm the dad and I have a kid, and the kid and the mom are kind of like in cahoots, and I'm on the outside.

SPEAKER_00:

Basically, basically, yes.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay. That's hard. First and foremost, huge compassion to anybody who's experiencing that. So, what I would do in that situation is I would allow myself to feel like the victim, first and foremost. I would feel all the feels. And so, what my work is about is about seeing how this experience of being on the outside, being the outside looking in in this relationship dynamic with my kids, if you look carefully, guaranteed in people in this situation, this experience is not new. They've experienced that in childhood where they were the one on the outside looking in. And what this is now, because if you don't have control, like I don't have control over whatever's happening out there, I can't plead, I can't beg. All I'm here to do is to sit with my feelings of rejection and ask, how old is this part of me that feels like the outside looking in? And what I would do in that time is I would use that time to integrate with the younger child within me that always felt like he was the outsider, that he was not loved, that he was not seen, that his voice wasn't heard. And kind of like getting to a spiritual path of seeing that why I unconsciously co-created this dynamic, and I'm not victim blaming here, is I created this pattern, co-created this pattern because it was familiar. In other words, there is an unconscious part of me, younger part of me that wanted to be included by me. And I know this sounds crazy, but if you talk to anybody who's going through that right now, and I were to sit them down and I were to regress them, you will see that this is a repeat of a familiar pattern for them. This is a repeat of a younger part of them that's calling on them to re-engage and heal and to make amends and reconcile with a younger part of them that they have excluded. And once you do that, you start to see this as there's a meaningful reason behind it. So the only way that I can get through something so difficult, by the way, me trying to get out of my trauma bond, I'm still five years in my relationship. My ex that I'm speaking of is still in the process of litigation, just won't let go. And in the suffering that I'm experiencing, my work is to assign something meaningful to the challenge that I'm currently going. And something meaningful is it's giving me an opportunity to really bring a voice to what most people aren't wanting to talk about, which is violence, abuse, trauma bonds, codependency from an insider's perspective. And I want to talk about it externally. And now that I've assigned a meaning, the challenge that I'm currently going through, if I can assign a meaning to it, I can integrate, I can be healthier. So the to the parent that's alienated right now, my invitation for you is to see that there is a spiritual calling that you've unconsciously chosen so that you can get out of your victim story around it. Like let's honor the fact that you feel victimized by the alienation. And let's kind of take it to a higher frequency to help you see that there's a part of you that's been calling this as a way of reconciling with those parts of you that you abandoned and alienated from a long time ago. In other words, the question I would want to ask myself is this is the shadow work, is what part of me have I been alienating that my wife is alienating me from? What part of me is she holding a mirror up to that I've been alienating? This is where shadow work becomes very effective. And so once that becomes apparent, now I know what my inner work is because I can't control what she does. So my work is to then integrate with the parts that I've been alienating. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, everything you're saying makes a lot of sense and actually finding the spiritual path and the meaning, you know, for growth, for generational trauma, healing, all that stuff sounds great. And the follow-up question would be is like, I see my shadow work, I'm working with healing myself, and my kids still don't talk to me. So I'm healing myself, I'm having great relationships, and then there's this distorted relationship over here. And what do you say to a parent in that part? What's that next stage? Or is that just like I'm okay?

SPEAKER_01:

You create the possibility that one day that child will become an adult, and that as they go through their process of healing, because that's going to be traumatic to be alienated from your father or whoever, it's going to be traumatic for them. They're going to have to deal with it. And on their healing journey, because they probably now to help make sense of their reality, they probably have to see you as the bad guy. Right? You've been placed as the villain in someone's story, or your father was a terrible person and he was a bad guy. And so my work, because I've been placed as the villain as well in someone's story. And so my work has been to surrender to allowing myself to be the bad guy, to love those parts of me, and to create a possibility of reconciliation one day, because that child is going to be an adult one day and they will figure it out. I mean, the truth does come out at some point. Because I mean, we're living in an uncertainty. And so what I would do is I would pray that I get the opportunity to reconcile, and that will be a beautiful experience as they go through their healing journey and that I'm here whenever they're ready.

SPEAKER_00:

That's wonderful. And must probably happen a good amount of times, but there's also this thing where that's never going to happen. In the shadow work, where's the shadow work and going, oh, this is never going to change? This is actually what's going to happen. Is there a release? Is there some kind of reconciliation with, oh yeah, I don't have any control in life. It's just going to be this way.

SPEAKER_01:

So this is going to be quite triggering and confronting, but uh to answer your question, but hey, that's just what I'm here to trigger and confront that. The shadow work component, one of the key components of shadow work is that to empower yourself and that that you're a consistent of many parts. And what that means is having is equivalent to wanting. So, in other words, there's a part of me, not all of me, that wants the freedom of not having the responsibility of being in the family. And to give that part of me that doesn't want to be a father and wants the freedom, not having the responsibility to allow that part of me a voice as well, to not gaslight that part of me as well. So the shadow, how we integrate that is to say that, okay, here's what I've been using specific example of this. In my situation, my ex has a love addiction codependency. And the way that she is keeping me in her life is by consistently antagonizing me in the court systems. And so as I'm sitting there going, wow, it's almost been 10 years and she's still at it. My integration part was to sit down and say, All right, so what part of me loves this? What part of me, part of me, not all of me, because you know, a big part of me is like, can we just move on? I have a family and I'd love to move on. But to get out of my victim story, to empower myself, I'll integrate with the shadow part of me that says, you know what? There's a little kinky part of me that enjoys the fact that she's just can't get over me and she's trying to keep me in her life, and that there's a part of me that maybe wants, and I don't really want to acknowledge that. It really feels like a kick in the pants. I feel kind of gross and I'm really judging that part, but my work is to kind of surrender that even if, like, what if she never lets go? To turn the what if to an even if. The what if, what if she never lets go and wants to constantly is obsessed over what I'm doing, following my work and you know, all this stuff, one court thing after another, because this is my third court proceeding. What if she never lets go? Turns to even if she never lets go. I fully embrace the parts of me that want to stay connected to that. And this goes from victim to empowerment. And remember, this is not to say that I want this. This is not about victim blaming. This is about saying that Nima is not one person. He is a multiplicity of parts. We all have multiplicity. There's a part of me that wants this, a part of me that wants that. And so using these triggers to kind of examine, get curious with these parts of me and take ownership that that's what exists. It's gonna take courage, it's gonna take vulnerability, it's gonna take a willingness to feel the guilt and the shame and the ickiness of that. But this is where it is is that I don't need to get rid of any part of me or any part of my life to fully embrace all of me. And that's where my power is. That's why shadow work has saved my life.

SPEAKER_00:

I love that. And also talking about like a little bit, there's a part of me that doesn't want to be a father. There's a part of me that's relieved that I don't have to deal with all the crap that's going on. I feel that all the time.

SPEAKER_01:

And I love my kids and I want them in my life, and I want yeah, but you know what's funny is how many moms that I work with and they're just struggling. And the amount of relief they feel when I'm sitting on a call and I'm like, tell me about the parts of you that just want to fucking just quit, quit being a mom. They're like, oh my God, I feel so guilty that I feel that way. And I'm like, not here. I totally get it. Those parts of you are allowed to roam freely. We all have a part of us that wants to end our suffering and end our lives. We have a part of us that has joy and loves life, right? And so a part of me that wants out, you know, there's a joke that I have in my marriage. The joke that I have in my community, we talk about it. To create secure relationships is to understand that there's a part of you that just wants to break up with your partner or wants your partner to die so that you could be liberated. I go, how many of you want that? They put their hands up. I'm like, we all feel that way, except my wife, of course. You know, the only one in the world that doesn't feel that way is my wife. And so we joke about it and you're laughing, but what you're exposing is that how shadow work is a discharge of the energy by acknowledging the truth of parts of yourself. Your favorite comedians are all shadow work practitioners, right? It's just making the unconscious darkness conscious, right? And so, how does this work with grief? You know, oh my God, I've been grieving for years. I haven't been able to get out of bed. And then I sit with them, I'm like, what part of you is glad that they're gone? And they're like, they're kind of like looking at me like, am I allowed to? Yeah, all parts of you are welcome. I'm fucking glad that they're gone. I don't have to wipe their ass anymore. And I'm like, yeah, here's what I want you to do. I want you to throw your hands in the air that you're so grateful that they finally died. And they do that, and it's like literally four years of grief dispelled in minutes because they allowed that part of them that felt relief, a voice and to breathe. And so that's shadow integration, right? So whether it's parental alienation, whether it's being taken through court by somebody who crazy psycho ex that won't let go, two choices. You either play the victim to it forever and feel powerless, or you tell the truth of the parts of you and you reclaim that power back. And I choose the latter. And I love teaching people how to make that kind of like a part of their life.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I love how you bring the humanity and the humor into it because everything you're saying is what I think and I have conversations about, and it's true, and it's freeing to be true. You don't want to admit it in public, but this is the truth. This is the truth, and it's counterintuitive, but it's super freeing.

SPEAKER_01:

I love our cycle breakers community because imagine a room of people on Zoom where we all give the space to bring the truth of those parts of ourselves. And so it's not about getting rid of them, it's about seeing them and understanding them. Like a child, the child, when they're crying, when they want attention, they just want attention. You don't have to do anything about them. Sometimes just looking at those parts and acknowledging them is all you need, right? Doesn't mean you have to act on them. Just means, oh, I have this part of me that gets curious about, even though I'm happily married, gets curious about having sex with other women. I mean, just because I'm married doesn't mean I have to get rid of that part of me. But I see that part of me, but I don't have to act on that part of me, right? But by suppressing it, it becomes stronger and then consumes me, right? And then those are where the affairs come up, right? So shadow work saved my life and the methodology, the trigger-proof methodology that I love, kind of like skills that people can get. You can implement it as a parent to become a more authentic, safe, regulated person as a parent, as a partner going through a divorce, as a person trying to get back in the game. Essentially, it makes you more authentic. You take the mask off. It's like, hey, I once I've integrated with all these parts that I'm ashamed of, I can take off the mask and say, hey, look, I was abusive in my last relationship. I sometimes, even though I'm happily married, I get curious about having sex with other women. I have done this or done that, and I'm working on integrating those parts. I'm looking at just becoming a more truthful, authentic human being. I'm working at loving all parts of me because they all serve.

SPEAKER_00:

Love it. I got a couple of other questions here as we're getting on the downside of the podcast. We don't talk about fawning a lot as a trauma response. Like, how does that play into that? And what does fawning actually mean?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, everybody talks about fight and flight. You know what that is? It's like if you had an older brother, like one of my clients, he has an older brother, three years older than him. Parents were out, you know, working on the business, and the older brother would just kick the crap out of him. So he now developed a fight response in order to survive childhood. So now in his marriage, he's having a tough time because anytime she expresses any emotion, he goes into fight. And so they're at the rock bottom, you know, they're ready to divorce. And so he's now going, Oh crap, I gotta work on that fight response because it's impacting my marriage. The flight response is when the perceived predator was too big and you couldn't fight back, so you ran. So that's the running. Then we have the freeze response when running was dangerous. Let somebody holds you gunpoint, fighting them back, you'll get killed. Running away, you'll get killed. So, what do you do? Your system protects you with freeze. So the freeze response is the deer and headlights, you know. And so we see this when with sexual abuse and running away wasn't safe. And so just by freezing, you protect yourself because biologically it's like the gazelle that's being chased by a tiger gets eaten, and then you know, it's going to be pretty painful to get eaten alive, so their nervous system goes into shutdown, so they can't feel anything. It's kind of like your soul leaving your body. And the majority of people are actually the collective, especially after COVID, are in this freeze response where you just can't feel anything, you're avoiding your emotions, you feel numb. So that's called the freeze, dorsal vagal shutdown. But a very little-known trauma response, it's called the fawn response. And the best way that I can describe it is when my wife is out because a girl's night with her girlfriends, and my son and I are playing at home. We'll play all these, you know, games, and then I'll chase him around the house and I'll be the monster, right? And he's like, chase after you. So I'm like, I'm coming after him. And he's like laughing. And then I notice in his nervous system there's this threshold point where he kind of goes into freakout mode. He kind of gets scared because I'm like, I make this really scary face. And then he's like laughing, and then all of a sudden he realizes, oh shit, I'm in this house alone and mom's not here to protect me. And I could see his nervous system freaking out. And then what does he do in that moment? He stops, turns towards me. He's like, I love you, I love you, I love you. And then he comes after me towards me when he's being chased. And I'm like, I make that face. He's running around the kitchen, and then all of a sudden he stops and then goes, I could see his face. And then he runs towards me. I love you, I love you. And I'm like, oh my God, he's fawning. Fawning, if you look at it from a biological perspective, it's a signal of love, of connection, of consent when my body says no as a means of protecting myself, because if I sweet talk or soften towards my predator, my predator's nervous system will calm down and then make me safe. So the fawn response is a performative niceness, is a performative signal of consent when your body is in threat. So the body is in a freeze, but you are performing a niceness, right? You're performing agreement, right? You're performing connection. And women who say yes to sex with a man when her body says no, just so that she can be loved or just so that she can get a job. This is called sexual fawning, right? And by the way, this is not about blaming victims. This is about understanding trauma responses. Date rape and all this stuff that happens is because people don't understand the fawn response. The fawn response is a nice guy syndrome where you're upset, you're not happy with things, but you smile. Imagine a performative smile when your body is constricting. Pretty much everyone in the hospitality industry is fawning, right? When you've gone to a restaurant when they're waiting, oh, hello, how's it going? Sure, yes, sir. And then they're being chewed out by their boss or a customer, and they're like, sir, yes, sir, absolutely. That's fawning. It's a signal of agreement when the animal body is in disagreement or in a threat. And so it's a reflexive niceness of self-abandonment, is that in order for me to be safe, I need to abandon myself. So if you think about it, many of us were born into cultures and societies where we had to choose attachment over our authentic truth. So we are so conditioned to fawn, it's the people-pleasing response that after doing it for years, I see clients that say, I've been people-pleasing all my life to the point that I don't even know who I am. So fawning is a performative self-abandonment that we do so that we can have agreement and feel safe. And what happens is, especially in codependent relationships, the codependent is the one that fawns, that abandons themselves for the sake of attachment. And deep down, every time you do that, there's a little resentment that happens towards the person you're fawning, because deep down we all want to be loved for who we are. So if I'm fawning in a relationship with you over five years, and deep down, I've been thinking that if I don't fawn, if I don't abandon myself and be agreeable to you, then we can't have an attachment. Deep down, I'm gonna resent you, number one, and then I'm gonna resent myself. So one of the hallmarks of codependency is the fawn response. And one of the hallmarks of the fawn response is resentment. And over time, that resentment towards myself for abandoning myself. I can't abandon myself without resentment. And that resentment deep down is anger towards myself. So over time, you will see people developing health problems. So think of autoimmune. What's autoimmune? It's self-attack, right? So think of anybody you know with an autoimmune issue. They're fauners and their bodies are attacking themselves as a means to deal with the resentment. It's like I'm resenting me for abandoning me. So then the body then shuts down so that I can say, Oh, sorry, I can't help you move. My back is out because I have now a health condition. So because I don't want to say no to you, because I don't want to be seen as the bad guy and I fawn to you, my body then wears out. I become exhausted, chronic pain, digestive issues, hormonal issues, thyroid issues. I don't speak my voice, so it's the thyroid issues. I don't obey my gut feeling, so I get gut issues, right? So all of these energy centers of the body house certain organs. So those organs start to break down, and now I can blame the organs. I can't, I got the digestive thing. I can't come to dinner. I can't host Christmas because of my digestion. Now my body becomes the boundary that I'm not able to give by saying no. I just don't have the capacity to host Christmas dinner. And because of that lack of capacity to say no, I host Christmas dinner and then I get ill. And the body becomes the boundary when I'm not able to do it myself because I'm a fauner. And so the answer when you become trigger-proof, you learn how to become elegantly boundaried. Sorry, I'm not available for that. Normally I hate to say no because I feel a lot of guilt inside, but I'm practicing just honoring my needs, and I'm gonna have to decline your offer. I'm gonna have to decline your invitation. So practicing interrupting that condition pattern and then speaking your truth. So to break that fawn response, we have to develop a very intimate relationship with the younger parts of ourselves in the shadow that felt like they had to abandon themselves for love. Then we have to start advocating for those using our animal body.

SPEAKER_00:

What an incredible explanation. And I totally see the fawn response in myself and the people pleasing and my body shutting down out of chronic pain for a lot of years and not being able to set the boundaries. And super great, easy to understand in the context that you put it in there, and then kind of like stepping back a little bit in my relationship with my ex-wife, and she's really enmeshed with my kids, and my kids don't talk to me at all, but they are scared of losing her love, so they fawn all the time and they're super immeshed. And at a period of time, you're saying they're gonna start to resent themselves, must probably have some kind of physical stuff come up and have to do this work, or be super stuck in that cycle of just people pleasing, fawning, and that's what their life might look like.

SPEAKER_01:

They won't notice it until they start relationships and they're going to act out the incompletes with the enmeshed relationship with a kind of like a narcissistic mother and a father that they deemed was absent, right? And so they get to act that out in their dynamics, and as they heal, a part of the journey that I take people through is healing with their mom and dad. Because let me give you an example. You're in this case, right? If you look back on your family system, Lawrence, if you look back on how you grew up, can you see similar type of chaos in your family system growing up? Because I don't know your history, but can you see that similar type of chaos with the push-pull dynamics with your parents and the codependency that you kind of repeated in your family system?

SPEAKER_00:

100%. The meshment was there, you know, me fawning over my mother to take care of her nervous system and tending to her and abandoning myself from in vitro. So 100%, I see the pattern.

SPEAKER_01:

So your work then, if I was working with you, I would guide you into healing with your mom and dad. Are they still alive?

SPEAKER_00:

Just my mom.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay. Do you have a relationship with her? Yes. Okay. So healing with that will help break that cycle because by healing with the younger part of you that became enmeshed with mom and had that dynamic, you will have loving awareness and understanding of what your kids are going through and compassion. And there's a little blind spot in there that I probably could pull out is to be able to see yourself in your wife, to be able to see that she's mirroring aspects of yourself that you haven't noticed or wanted to look at, but there's an opportunity there. And once you do that energetically, the dynamic starts to shift. And then I don't know, it's just the energy, the space between you, because you've worked on your history, the space between you now starts to resolve. And so ideally, as your kids grow up and then get into relationships and then start to notice similar chaos going on. And if they have a really great guide, they will point them to, hey, what did you grow up with? And go, wow, I didn't have a relationship with my father. And their work will be to try to go back and repair and then see about all this time that was missing and then repair that with you. So again, your job is to start with you. It starts with you.

SPEAKER_00:

Totally. Always starts with us, do the work, shadow work, healing, and then we start to move through these different layers.

SPEAKER_01:

Huge compassion towards you though, Lawrence, because wow, what you've been carrying and what you're about and the story and the podcast and the message that you have, and what a huge opportunity for you to have, you know, portion of the population seen and heard. And my invitation for you is to just keep going deeper with it, and your message starts to evolve as it has for me and just keep going.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, I would say a lot of what you're talking about, like my relationship with my mom is great and it's not personal anymore. And it feels super healed, and I'm able to track those things. And some of the nuances you brought up in the conversation today have been phenomenal. And as we're wrapping up here, I'd like to hear a little bit more about your cycle breakers. Like, what does that look like? What does the program look like? Is it on demand? Is it in person? Like, what is that?

SPEAKER_01:

Because it's the trauma world, it's not like open to the public. But what I do have is the best way to learn how to become trigger-proof is to attend my trigger-proof experience. It's a six-hour Zoom event that used to be a three-day live event that I was doing all over the world. Then COVID hit, and I was like, what do we do now? I had to cancel all these events. And so I said, could I take that three-day event that was like two grand and put it online for under 500 bucks, like 400 bucks, put it on Zoom and do it in six hours and have the same magical experience? And it turns out we can. So it's a once-a-month, usually on a Saturday, six-hour event, Saturday afternoon, evening in Eastern time, where I teach you how to take the conflict. It would be great to have you attend one time because this method is really magical, where you can have 20 years of resentment that you've been carrying energetically in your body. And I take you through a shadow work journey where you take the trigger and we stretch it out over six hours, and you see the origin of where it actually comes from and what to do the moment you get activated and the pathway to go through so that you're no longer externally controlled by other people. We go through a nervous system breakdown of how to move through one aspect, which is the freeze response, up to sympathetic, which is fight or flight, up to ventral, which is safety, and understanding the neuroscience of safety and how to access that safety from within so that then we can create safety on the outside world. And at that point, we can't control other people, but we could be a space for magnetism. Then we go into this really sadistic little exercise I like to do at the end, who has a really great uh cliffhanger where the reflection is shown, where the mirror is held up and everybody just kind of has this cathartic, like holy crap, like revelation that I don't want to give away. And it literally shifts the context of your story so that you're no longer feeling like victimized by it. You feel very empowered. And then now you have a skill to use moving forward where you develop self-trust, you develop a sense of nervous system kind of safety from within, breaking free from that codependency, not caring so much about what other people think, having an ability to integrate the fact that some people see me as the bad guy, and I'm not gonna use that to abandon myself. I love myself, you know, all parts of me. The part that I used to be ashamed of, I now have compassion and understanding towards myself. And then the other person that hurt me, I'm not feeling so personalized by it. And so it's a very liberating tool that is my gift to the world that saved my life. And so it allowed me to go from insecure, toxic, push-pull dynamics that was codependent in my last relationship to a totally secure, team, committed, really powerful, safe and secure relationship that I was never able to have until my mid-40s. So my mess is my message, and I take people through the exact journey that I needed to go through. I teach what I most needed to learn. So that's called the overview experience. And that would be probably the best place to begin.

SPEAKER_00:

That sounds incredible. And we're gonna have all this stuff in the show notes and all your links so people can get hold of you. They can jump into this program if it calls to them. And I also think in the beginning of the podcast, you also said that you had a book. Am I saying that correctly?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it's coming out next year.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, super excited.

SPEAKER_01:

Just taking a look, my lawyer's kind of reading through it and he's seeing, okay, what parts can we put out there? And it's all been written. It's just about being published. So it's really about kind of like an interwoven of my story and what I did and what I had to do to kind of heal. It's a guidepost, it's a guideline for breaking free from trauma bonds, healing, codependency, and creating secure love. And it's literally the path I went through, and my story is woven and it's full of exercises and it's just everything that I learned. One of the things I wanted to offer as well is that where I began was understanding my attachment style. So if you wanted to understand, like, am I the anxious, which is the one who's the pursuer, or am I predominantly the avoidant, which is the kind of the distancer in that push-pull dynamic, or disorganized, which is like back and forth, a little bit of both, which is really challenging. So the place to begin is like a seven-minute quiz that helps you identify what your attachment style is, and then gives you the results and then takes you kind of on a path of how to heal it. So I'm gonna provide that. It's called the attachment style quiz. So it's right there. That's the best place to begin.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, that's incredible. And thank you so much for your time, your generosity of information and your ability to storytell as you're communicating what you're super passionate about in your journey. It makes it so digestible and wonderful to listen to.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you for seeing that. I appreciate it. I mean, this is my purpose. I love helping people that really want to take ownership because most of us we go into the victim story, and you know, there are great therapists to help you feel validated in that. And I believe that that's a great place to start. But who I really want to talk to are the ones that have done all of that, and they're still feeling the heaviness and the weight of feeling victimized, and they no longer want to live like the world owes them something, and they are ready to live with their power, like owning their power and not being so impacted by the outside world to be able to get to a place where they feel like they're the creator of their lives rather than kind of like uh being dragged through because of the woundings from their relational dynamics, which have very little to do with what's happening with your partner and everything to do with the unhealed wounds of the younger parts of you. So I again teach what I most need to learn, and I love seeing people who are getting it, who want the training rather than just to repeat their story.

SPEAKER_00:

That is so beautiful. And again, thank you so much for taking the time to come out and chat and play a little bit and share your experience. It's been a wonderful conversation. I had a blast. Okay. Again, home run. Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. Just yell at a wow for yourself out there, too. What a great interview! So much information, so much humanity. Like there was something super just human in the experience and naming some of these behaviors about us and things we don't want to say out loud, but they're really human and they're part of us too. And can we acknowledge at this part of me that sometimes is relieved that I don't have to deal with the dynamics of my family? And I love my kids and I want them in my life, but sometimes, geez, this might be easier this way. I feel some emotion in my eyes saying that, and also feel a little shame saying that, and at the same time, it's a reality. Sometimes this is super hard, and I just want something different. And with that wonderful news, thank you for coming out. Please like, share, email us at family disappeared at gmail.com, comments, suggestions. And we want to represent all different populations, and we don't do a fantastic job of that all the time. And we need your help. We need your help in recommending different people to interview. If you happen to be doing recovery work and you feel like your story is really relevant and represents a part of the population that needs to have a voice, love to hear about it. Even if it's in contradiction to some of the stuff we talk about. So thank you for coming out and playing today. Like, share, donate if you can, come to a meeting if you want. If you don't, find community, find a place where you feel safe and heard and you can do some of the ceiling work. And if no one's told you yet today, I love you. I appreciate you playing in the sandbox with me today. I feel super connected to myself in this moment through the interview, and therefore feel super connected to you. So have a beautiful day and we'll see you around the neighborhood. Thanks for taking the time to join me on this episode of Family Disappeared Podcast. Do you know someone who can benefit from what we are discussing on today's episode? If so, please share this podcast with them and anyone else in your community that might be interested in changing their lives. Together we'll continue the exploring, growing, and healing journey. I will see you on our next episode. Until then, happy days to all.