When Your Nervous System Never Feels Safe | Parental Alienation & PTSD

In this conversation, Lawrence Joss and psychologist Faust Ruggiero explore the trauma responses many alienated parents experience while navigating parental alienation, estrangement, and high-conflict family systems. Together, they unpack how chronic stress, fear, hypervigilance, and unresolved grief affect the nervous system—and why many parents begin living in a constant state of emotional and physical survival.

Blending clinical insight with lived experience, the discussion examines PTSD, nervous system dysregulation, emotional overwhelm, and the physical symptoms that often go unnoticed during alienation. Lawrence reflects on his own reconnection journey and the challenge of teaching the body to recognize safety again, even during positive moments. Grounded in recovery, self-awareness, and emotional regulation, this conversation reminds us that healing is not about becoming emotionless—it’s about slowly coming home to yourself. Living fully is not giving up, but an act of love and integrity.

Key Takeaways

• PTSD changes how the body responds
 • Family dysfunction shapes trauma responses
 • Hypervigilance becomes a survival pattern
 • Emotional stress creates physical symptoms
 • Internal self-talk affects nervous system healing
 • Trauma distorts safety and emotional trust
 • Chronic alienation impacts mind and body
 • Healing requires emotional and physical awareness
 • Grounding practices support nervous system recovery
 • Self-regulation helps restore inner stability

Chapters

00:00 - Understanding PTSD Beyond the Mind
 04:53 - How Family Systems Shape Trauma
 10:06 - Why the Body Holds Trauma
 14:55 - Self-Talk and Nervous System Healing
 20:07 - Balancing Emotional Reactions with Reality
 24:53 - The Long-Term Impact of Victimization

Support & Community:

Parental Alienation Anonymous (PAA): Join our free 12-step support group with 16 online meetings weekly for parents, grandparents, family members, and previously alienated individuals seeking healing and recovery.

PA-A.org: Parental Alienation Advocates is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to fostering education, advocacy, and support for individuals grappling with the distressing impact of parental alienation, estrangement, erasure, and family disconnection.

All our services are free and sustained by grants and community donations. Your support helps us continue offering these vital resources.
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Email your questions or insights: familydisappeared@gmail.com
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If you wish to connect with Lawrence Joss or any of the PA-A community members who have appeared as guests on the podcast:
 
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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

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Background

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So today we are so excited to have Faust Rogero. And I could be butchering the name. I try to go over before the introduction. But uh Faust, if you could just uh please go ahead and introduce yourself to the community, let us know a little bit about your body of work. That would be great.

SPEAKER_01 0:16

Absolutely. My name is Faust Ruggero. I'm a psychologist here in the United States. And uh I've been counseling people for 45 years. I've written seven books, uh counseling. I've done everything uh from individual to family to marriage. Uh I've done a lot of work with corporate entities, uh, first responders, veterans, kids. Uh so it's been it's been a long uh a long ride. I've enjoyed all of it. I'm still doing the counseling part-time as I'm doing everything else. So it's been fun.

Trauma Vs PTSD Explained Simply

SPEAKER_00 0:49

Well, thank you for that introduction. And you have such a wonderful body of work that I really want to concentrate on PTSD today. I think it'd be a great conversation for the community. And our community is mostly parents that are struggling with alienation, estrangement, erasure, something to that's a degree, and also kids that are young adults or adults that have been disconnected or alienated from their parents, grandparents, and stuff like that. So I just wanted to throw that out there. And like PTSD, we hear that all the time. Could you give us what your definition of PTSD would be?

SPEAKER_01 1:19

You know, Oz, what when you start talking about PTSD, you first want to talk about trauma. Um, you know, it doesn't just happen, it's in a response to something. So there's some type of a trauma. It could be a single trauma. Uh something happens, you're in an accident, uh, uh you see someone uh uh hurts someone else, you get bullied or beat up, something, anything like that. Single trauma. A complex trauma could be two or three different types of traumatic episodes, or it could be something that spans someone's lifetime, abuse as a child, and then continues on when you're older. For some people, they can let that go. They'll process it and let it go. For many others, there's no reset, so to speak. Uh, the body doesn't reset, the anxiety kicks in, the depression kicks in, mental clarity seems to be gone. Now we're into a stage where people start to relive the episode. Uh, there are flashbacks, there are nightmares, there's avoidance behaviors, there are aggressive behaviors, isolation, whatever the person needs to not re-experience that episode, now we're into PTSD.

SPEAKER_00 2:27

Okay, thank you for that. And if we just take it and kind of like melt it down to like a an easier bite for the community, and we say someone that's going through a high conflict divorce maybe's lost contact or access to their children, you know, which will start off with a single event where all of a sudden the kids are not talking to them or something like that, and then it just keeps escalating into family court systems, attorneys, and this continuous inflow of negative emotional information, I guess. Would that be some sort of complex PTSD or what how would you label that?

SPEAKER_01 3:00

Great question. Uh, because what it leads into is the difference between something that almost explodes and there's the trauma versus something that's far more subtle. When we start to lose uh contact with family members when when there's disruption in the family and we're not communicating and there's alienation, that can be a very traumatic experience, and people may not let go of that. And it can lead into PTSD, it can lead into you know the fear of reliving things, all the avoidance behaviors, the you know, the compromising of the way the family works. Absolutely.

Hyperreactivity Triggers Like Mail And Texts

SPEAKER_00 3:33

As we're starting to talk about this, I'm thinking maybe my definition of PTSD is is a little bit confused because as a parent struggling through through this dynamic of losing access to the children, like my nervous system in the beginning was like super highly dysregulated, and the ruminating thoughts of not being able to go to work and not being able to eat or exercise or kind of like do everything, kind of like feeling like frozen. Is that part of PTSD or is that just the trauma that's happening and it's separate?

SPEAKER_01 4:01

That's part of PTSD. There's a kind of a hyper stage we get into. You know, we I hear people say, you know, a little a noise went and and and they begin to uh react to it. The other part of PTSD, and what what you're saying is it's not only that that happened, now you you begin to fear it. Now you begin to uh you know be apprehensive about what's going to go on. Now you're thinking about that and it dominates your thinking. And we've all been through it. Myself also, you know, we have situations in families where it seems to be gone, we can't connect anymore, and it just overrides all the thinking. Even when we're doing something that we're we're enjoying, either it uh you know it comes in and brings us down or it brings on feelings of guilt or shame or whatever it may be. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 4:46

And a funny thing that we discuss often within our community is the idea of being afraid of the mail. And I don't know if you've like heard this, like you're going through your divorce or whatever the legal proceedings are, and the mail comes and there's a letter or whatever. You don't even know what's in it, and your body's already like, I don't want to go get the mail, I'm scared, I hate this. And I started to get actually scared of getting the mail, and it became something I just didn't do on a daily basis anymore.

SPEAKER_01 5:13

And I hear that a lot. Another one I hear is cell phone, the text button, you know, ding, and they say, Okay, what is it now? Who is it? Is it them? Is it is it something? So we begin to fear all these things. Everything seems to connect to that hyper feeling that we have, and we just confuse everything. But we're react what we're doing is we become reactive. That's what's happened. And the nervous system engages and we fear anything and everything that can be possibly connected to it to that event or that feeling we have.

SPEAKER_00 5:43

And just to understand, kind of like the arc, like there's an initial event that kind of kicks your body into overdrive, and then everything kind of like builds on top of that and keeps weighing it down and pushing it further down into different layers, I guess, of our psyche or something.

SPEAKER_01 5:58

And you said the right word, body, when we talk about PTSD, we talk about anything. What you know, we talk about mental health, we leave the body component out too all too often. If you think about what you're talking about, family dysfunction and all the things that go along with it, there's this physical component where everything tightens up. And that's what you can't seem to turn off. I've had I can't tell you how many times someone has said, if I could just get my body to calm down, I think I could think through things a little easier. I wouldn't be as reactive. So oftentimes I'll tell people, uh, you know, let's look, let's work with your body, let's talk about what you're doing that may accelerate your body uh in and of itself, how much coffee you're drinking and you know, energy drinks and uh all those kinds of things. Keeping your body, self-care is such an important part of working with PTSD in any type of family dysfunction.

Normal Stress Vs PTSD Thinking

SPEAKER_00 6:52

And just to also give people a little bit of an idea, like what's the difference between a normal stress response and a PTSD stress response that doesn't resolve? How do we distinguish between those two?

SPEAKER_01 7:05

The normal stress response, two things I look for. One is that it's gonna be you know not as intense and temporary, but the the real thing I look at, uh Lawrence, is can I reason through it? Can I take a step back, can I you know catch my breath here and say, okay, let me look at the facts here and let me see what I need to be able to do. That's a normal stress response. You're still gonna be stressed when you do that, but in a normal situation, you can think a little bit. You can say facts are so important. Because when what when we get into the PTSD component, when you're reacting to the mail and all those sorts of things, you're really not uh reacting in a way that is efficient, that is normal, if you will. Uh what's happened is we've gone to extremes. You know, it's like the bell rings and the fighter is gonna come out and get us, and that's not gonna happen. Normal stress response, everything accelerates, but we can still think. That's the key.

SPEAKER_00 7:58

Okay, that's super useful. So if we're able to think through it, reason through it, and in that reasoning, it's still gonna stay stressful, but then I guess typically people are able to breathe again, they feel their body relax, they're able to go on with their regular daily chores. I guess that's a really simple baseline.

Internal Language That Calms The System

SPEAKER_01 8:15

It it really is. And if I can offer your community a huge uh piece of advice, we're talking about internal language. I even have a book I wrote on that. It is the way we speak to ourselves. The mail's gonna come. What do you say? Oh my God. What's gonna be in that mail? I know it's gonna be whatever, I'm gonna feel this. We have now talked ourselves into a state that is hyper-reactive, versus the mail's coming. It's probably going to be fine. If there's something in there I have to deal with, I will calmly take it out, look at it, and see what I need to do. That's a whole different internal structure. It's the way we speak to ourselves. When we get into all these situations in our lives, particularly the emotional ones with family, we begin to say things to ourselves that actually sabotage the way we could move forward in a more comfortable and in a more healthy fashion.

SPEAKER_00 9:12

So if I'm going to get the mail and I'm I'm feeling somewhat anxious about it, you're saying like myself talk about, and this is like below I guess the cognitive thought where it's actually happening in my subconscious or in my body, or I'm clasping my hands, starting to sweat, whatever it is. It's not really something that I'm actually telling myself. Sometimes, I guess sometimes it can be super negative and be verbal to ourselves internally too, but most of the times it's these other smaller factors that are starting to tighten up and give us some kind of indication that we're going into the jungle, basically.

SPEAKER_01 9:48

Yeah. And the key, the key is not to try to use positive language only when those types of situations occur. It's really a check. How do I talk to myself normally? You know, and when I say talk to myself, we all use language to think. So that's when I'm when I say talk to yourself. It's not like you're having a conversation with yourself. However, uh, if something comes up, we want to be able to use the language we are typically using. So I tell people, how are you thinking normally? Are you a person that tends to be a little bit negative in your mind? Uh, you know, uh it is Murphy's law of, you know, is that your way of uh of living? It's gonna happen to me probably. I know this is gonna be terrible. Those types of things. If you're doing that all the time, you're going to apply that thought what when you get into uh emotional situations, and particularly family dysfunctions. However, if your thought is, and I'm not talking run through the roses here, just that it's positive and fact-based and gives you a way to think through things, not be victimized by them.

SPEAKER_00 10:56

This is part of our conversation too, is like this this negative thing. Hey, the male's scary, I'm gonna go out there, my body starts to lock up, and then then it turns into I'm a I'm a bad parent, I hate myself, like all these different things. Are these just like escalation of PTSD? Are these something separate and and different from that, and it's more of a mental health thing that doesn't include PTSD?

SPEAKER_01 11:19

Both. It's separate in that you don't have to have PTSD to use negative language. On the other hand, when you're in the throes of PTSD, it's real hard to stay positive. I've seen some of your work, and we I see how much uh you rely on good communication skills, you know, and those don't start by what's how you work with other people, they start about in terms of how you communicate with yourself. All this stuff I'm saying in your head, how you think, is typically how you're going to speak. It's very close. So if you are typically saying, all right, let me be solution-oriented, let me gather the facts, let me not react and respond to this, let me think about how I want to uh approach this, how the other person is communicating, and let me not be reloading and constantly you know firing back at that person. Let me think about what they're saying and and and be able to talk to them. Uh that's all that all starts in our heads. That all starts the way about you know, in terms of the way we ourselves handle our our own internal communication. And we do this all day long. You know, you're thinking all day long. You'd be driving, you know, and you can we know that the next guy's probably gonna pull out in front of me. It's a good possibility. I can really get a negative attitude and get my fist up there. I can say, I know this is gonna happen. I'm gonna deal with it in the best way I can, and constantly put myself in that position. It it sounds like something that, you know, uh, gee, that you know, that that's hard to do. It really isn't, because you don't only wait for the crisis, you do it all the time. Then that's what you're gonna borrow it from, that's what you're gonna rely on when something comes up, like getting that mail and the divorce decree could be in there, or here comes your child support, or whatever it may be. And the other thing is we keep in keep in mind, I say victim, we have the power, we have the ability to overcome all these things. We're taking some of our energy and throwing it into the negative pool. We're making ourselves weaker than we need to be. It's low reaction. Gather the facts, formulate a plan, execute your plan. That's really what this is all about.

When Good News Feels Unsafe

SPEAKER_00 13:29

I love that. I love that we have the power, we are empowered, we have agency, and that it takes practice like anything else, whether it's going to work, going to school, writing a paper. If you don't practice, then you're just gonna keep doing what you're doing. So that's that's incredibly useful to hear. And and I have this question, like in the beginning with with divorce and some of this more acrimonious stuff we go on within family systems, it's really about the negative situation that kicks in this behavior, I'd say, within me. But what I also find happening is when something good happens, it kicks up similar behavior, and sometimes the good is harder to metabolize than the negative, and it takes me into these negative thought patterns because I'm now I'm used to the negative. Don't give me the good, but I want the good. Do you have something to say about that?

SPEAKER_01 14:18

Yeah, very much so. And you're right on the mark. What happens, whether it's acceleration born out of fear or anger, or acceleration from the highs that life provides, it's acceleration. What happens is the body and the emotions go up in either in either one of those. However, if we are geared to fear, then you know something happens and it's negative, we say, there I go again, and I'm in this. But now it's something that happens positive, and we say, This is great, but it's a reminder that I'm probably gonna go back and get that, or the next thing's gonna happen. It's acceleration in either in either direction. Some people love acceleration and they're happy all the time. And then there's the rest of us who say, Oh, yeah, I'm up there again, and I can't, you know, it's like being on a high wire, no matter what, you're looking down and I'm I'm gonna fall.

SPEAKER_00 15:14

I like the word acceleration, and everything just gets impacted by this. And uh, yeah, the body can't necessarily again metabolize all the good stuff too, just like they can metabolize the bad stuff. But it's so funny to get what you want, and then it feels overwhelming to have what you want, and it feels like the complexity of that PTSD or that trauma in the body, just to be able to continuously live life in more of a and even kill and enjoy, enjoy the good stuff. Because so much of that good stuff comes and it's hard to actually enjoy it and stay with it, and it could be a really simple outing with a friend that's not related to the family whatsoever, but that joy seems so much more elusive to me as I've gone through and am still going through some of the stuff.

SPEAKER_01 15:59

There's that old concept uh when when someone dies and uh we thought we could have helped, then we have that survivor's guilt. That applies often when we're having dysfunctional family situations and we're in pain. It's not survivor's guilt, but it's guilt and it's shame, and what could I have done better? And if we're not performing to the level we think we should, we know that. And then, you know, because usually it usually is very rarely that there's only one person doing the damage. You know, we have that relationship and they say something and we say something back, or they do something and we respond, or we initiate, and we didn't realize it. So now we go out and we have fun, and that person's over there, and we're our mind keeps going backward, and we're we're rethinking what I should have done, or what was done to me, and I'm victimized, and I can't get have a good time here because you know, good times aren't for me, and I've been you know beat down so much. So, even in the good times, they remind me of the person I'm not and I want to be.

Building Balance With Body And Mind

SPEAKER_00 17:02

From a healing perspective, as we start to watch the mind go into these negative places and we start to interrupt them and we start to do the practice that you said where we're practicing metabolizing this differently in every conversation, every day, changing our language. Does it become like we go from one side of the bell curve to the other bell curve and all of a sudden, like, hey, well, everything's great? Or is it like we get some of these reactions and the windows open for a shorter period of time? We're in the state for a shorter period of time as we start to heal. Is that how it would traditionally look with dealing with this?

SPEAKER_01 17:37

Yeah, but you know, that's kind of fleeting. What I tell people is if you focus on fixing that one situation and you're not taking care of yourself and you're not thinking about how your body and your mind and your emotions need to work, you may fix that, but you haven't created the balance in your life that you need. Other things will come up. What happy people are definition are the people that work the process of being happy every day. That's what it's really about. Then situations arise and we use all our tools and we calmer about it and our thoughts a little clearer. Those are happy people. So what I tell people is get your body healthy. Start there. Do all the things you have to do to stay healthy. Try to, you know, get yourself healthy enough so you can get off those medications. Exercise, get your diet where it needs to be, sleep the way you should be sleeping. Do all those things when it comes to your mind, be able to work with facts, not jump to conclusions. Emotion, it just leapfrogs all the facts and gets you to a horrible destination on the other side of them. Work with the facts. Give your brain enough time to pull back a little bit, see what's going on, make some decisions. With your emotions, the key, I have the thing I would say is called I over E, intellect over emotion. You're going to emote, we all do, but get the facts and let your brain work first. Then emote on the facts, not your fear of the facts. That's a whole different story. And for some people, those you know, who have a good solid spiritual connection, whether it's your faith, it's God, or what's inside you, whatever, be grounded spiritually if you can. Those four attributes physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual, when you balance those out, all these things about PTSD and all those things about the trials of life, they become minimized because you're strong enough to deal with them.

SPEAKER_00 19:36

I love that recovery, finding yourself. And then from that place of finding yourself, actually going out into the world to interact with people, I think is imperative in in any of this work that we're doing. And I see so many parents or kids or something coming and they just want to solve the problem at the tip of the iceberg and thinking everything's going to be okay. And it's it's just not. So I love that your work is centered in that. And you started saying some stuff earlier on about the body and stuff is happening in the body. What are like some symptoms or impacts on the body or some common things that you see in people so they can track a little bit better that they might be having a PTSD or trauma response, you know, what whatever the situation calls for?

SPEAKER_01 20:18

The first uh one is the hyperreactive part. If you're not able to settle down, that's a concern. You know, you should be able to relax a bit. The body and the mind are connected, Lawrence. I mean, that's the thing we tend to put aside. We think we think the mind is here and the body's over here. It's all one. So when the body gets accelerated, the mind can't think clearly. Look at that. Am I am I able to focus on what I need to focus here? Am I able to get the facts, or am I so worked up that I can't do that? Can I sleep? How am I sleeping? If I'm not, you know, I'm up at night, I'm worried about this, or I'm just so my body's just so accelerated that I can't sleep well. Eating, some people overeat to medicate, some people can't eat when they get when the body accelerates. I look at those. Am I overreacting to things? Someone brings it up, and instead of me just having a calm conversation, I'm already up and ready to go. I look at those kinds of things. Bathroom habits, you know, when we get accelerated and the body's getting really worked up, either we can't or we go too much. Are there changes in those kinds of things? Are you experiencing any physical ailments, aches and pains that typically aren't there? All those things tell you their body, something's going on with your body. And if you can't settle most of those or at least minimize them, they'll continue to exert their influence, and those will affect your emotions and the way you think.

Feeling Unsafe When Nothing Happens

SPEAKER_00 21:45

That's really useful because all those signs from sleep to bathroom to eating to exercise are indicative of the trauma, and so many of us overlook that in the beginning. And I will say that I see this happen quite often is where some of these physical symptoms. Into some major issues and major problems because no one ever talks about that this is something that we need to address, and the cognitive stuff gets in the front, and you're talking to whoever, but we're we're not addressing the body, and that that was my experience. And and was probably one of the hardest things was neglecting the body and then having to get the body back to a place of symbiosis just to get out there on a daily basis. So I I love that you gave all those great examples. Can someone feel like unsafe even when nothing is happening in the moment? And why is that? Like what's happening even though nothing's happening in the moment?

SPEAKER_01 22:36

Let me give you an example. I think it'll make it easy. If you're a child and you're or even if you're a spouse and you're being abused by someone who uh lives with you. Okay, when they're home, you know, they're maybe maybe they're physically abusing or they're they're drunk or they're emotionally at you all the time and you're just having a horrible time. Now they're gone. What happens when they're gone? The apprehension of them coming back is often worse than what happens when they really get there. That's what the mind does. Even when something is not in the picture, we have now been so victimized that it becomes the normal way we think. There's a process in the brain called habit formation. It is the repetition of something happening so it becomes normal. Example, um, if you go into Africa and you go on a safari, why is the lion walking right in front of the jeep and not attacking the people because it's been normalized in his mind that that's not food? We get normalized. Victimization becomes normalized. We now think like a victim, we feel like a victim, we do everything in our life like a victim. And even when the abuser is not there, they're there because they're in our minds. They're part of our nervous system, so to speak, the way that we react, the way we think about everything. So when these things happen, the person doesn't have to be there, the male didn't have to come, it doesn't matter, because now we've normalized the process of internal victimization. And how do you deal with that? Your language is one. Sometimes it's getting help. So someone else is saying, Well, wait, hold on. You just said this. How did you get there? And you get to work through that because what happens is the event occurs, and again, we leapfrog. We're all all the way over here to the emotion where someone says, Wait a minute, let's just examine this process. How did you get there?