Heal with Grace

50. When Awareness Isn’t Enough: The Next Steps to Heal Your Nervous System

• Grace Secker • Episode 50

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In this episode of the Heal with Grace podcast, Grace addresses a common question about overcoming the feeling of being stuck in one's healing journey. She discusses the importance of moving from awareness to action, exploring deeper emotional work, and reconnecting with authenticity. Grace emphasises the value of personal support, self-compassion, and specific practices like journal speak to facilitate true healing. The episode also covers practical examples and steps to help listeners navigate their emotional patterns and live more authentically. Grace invites listeners to submit their questions for future Q&A episodes.

Podcast Mentioned:
Why Journaling is Important and How to Use it

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Hey, Hey, welcome back to the Heal with Grace podcast. Today we're diving into a question that I know many of you will resonate with because it's something I hear all the time in my work and something I've really worked through myself. One of my clients recently asked. When working with the nervous system, a lot of the early work comes from just becoming aware and observing a lot.

I feel that I've been able to start understanding my dysregulation and why things are the way they are. But do you have any tips for getting past this point? I almost feel stuck. Maybe tips for taking your healing to the next step. Okay. I love this question because it's so common to feel like we are becoming so aware and you're reading books or listening to podcasts and understanding some skills, learning some tips on social media.

, but there does come a point where there's this, like you understand the information, right? You get it. You're like, all right, I understand in my body, my mind and body are connected and my symptoms are probably really coming from this dysregulation My brain's response to all of the experiences that have built up over time, but like, what do I do with that?

How do I actually make change? And so that is what we're going to go into today. First, I want to say you're not alone. If you're feeling this way, awareness is a huge and vital step in healing, but it's true that awareness alone can sometimes feel like looking at a problem through a window. You see it, but you're not quite sure how to reach in and shift it.

And this is the kind of work that Myself and Liana, the other therapists in my practice love doing, we love helping people at this stuck point because once we can get here, once we get to the awareness and we actually start to make some change, that's where such true, lovely healing comes from. When we're able to be with and really shift our emotions, our behaviors, our symptoms from awareness to actually change.

And that's our whole focus when we work with clients individually or in our group programs. And so I want to just offer this, that if you feel like you've been doing a lot of things on your own, which is fantastic, right? There's a lot of DIY, if you will, like nervous system, regulation practices. And honestly, that's why I have this podcast because I just really wanted this work to be accessible.

And so I try to give you all the tips possible and really help you understand how to help yourself. And at the same time, I cannot put an emphasis enough on how much value I have had in my own healing journey. And I know I see it in my clients when they are able to get that individual attention because look, we, we can't see our blind spots.

I know this work backwards and forwards, and I always have personal support always because I can't see everything about me. I can't see all the things that need to be. shifted or they just need to be supported. And furthermore, a lot of what I work through is attachment and relational trauma, and really having that safe space to be with someone else and learn how to be with someone else in a safe place.

I know I said, kind of said that twice, but essentially. So much of our trauma is from disconnection and hurt from others. And so when we could have a healing space with someone else, that's safe to heal some of those wounds, it's, it's just, it's huge. I think that it's invaluable and, very much so needed.

So that's my soapbox on needing help and support. And, I hope that if, you know, if you've been thinking about it or you feel like you're kind of gotten to a plateau and you're healing and you want a little bit more support. We would love to help you and support you. So find a link below to apply to work with myself or Liana in one to one individual therapy or coaching.

And we would really love to support you. We are opening up our books for the rest of 2024 and, just excited to dive into it with you. 

All right, so let's go ahead and dive into this episode.

So what we're going to explore is what it means to move from awareness into action, into the deeper work of healing. We'll talk about being with discomfort, exploring what's underneath your patterns, reconnecting with authenticity and specific practices like journal speak and self compassion. So go ahead.

Settle in, get cozy and let's go deep together. Okay. So if you're listening to this and really interested to learn more, you've probably done a lot of work in observing your nervous system patterns. Maybe you've noticed how your body reacts to triggers or stress or even quiet moments when your mind feels loud and you understand a little bit more about what happens in your fight or flight.

What are your mechanisms? Which is. Huge progress, right? Maybe you understand, oh, yeah, these things started happening, these symptoms started happening when I had X, Y, and Z stress in my life, right? Or like, this difficult place in my relationship was going on while my body Sent me all kind of symptoms of pain or fatigue or any kind of some kind of illness, right?

Or maybe you recognize that you have some trauma in your past and you may not know exactly why or how it's impacted you, but you recognize there's trauma, right? And we know that trauma lives in the body. So just, I want to pause there. And tell you that's incredible progress. It, it really is. There's so many people that do not understand that, or maybe they hear about it and they completely dismiss it because it's a little too scary to really feel and understand.

And, ooh. Yeah, that's, there is a lot more going on underneath the surface and I can't just take a pill to make it go away or to manage the symptoms. It's, there's more to it and I want to learn more. You want to learn more. You want to help yourself. Seriously. I want you to congratulate yourself for that.

Have some gratitude. That's, this is hard work and you're giving yourself the gift of being able to help yourself. I just, I want to drive that home because if it's not talked about enough, we often push past the strength that we have and the vulnerability, which is a huge strength, putting that out there.

Give yourself a little love and acknowledgement for how far you've come so far.

Now, why you're here is to understand this next step in learning how to be with what's underneath these patterns. To understand, okay, So how do I actually start to unravel these and what we call regulate our nervous system? So first of all, nervous system dysregulation stems from something your body or mind learned a long time ago to keep you safe.

It could be unresolved emotions, unprocessed experiences, or even a lack of permission to feel fully authentic in your life. Here's the hard truth. The nervous system will often push down discomfort to protect you, but to move forward, we have to gently allow the discomfort to come up, not to fix it, but to simply let it be there.

And we're going to dive deep into this because you may recognize what those words mean, not to fix, but to simply let it be. But to truly embody that is like a whole other level. So the question to ask yourself is what's underneath this pattern? What's underneath this reaction? What emotion or memory have I been avoiding?

It's uncomfortable work and there might be times where you're like, I don't know. I don't know what the emotion is. I don't know what's underneath the surface. Usually that's just because we dismiss and we don't validate actually what we've experienced. So I like to think of it as you're sitting beside a child who's having a tantrum.

Sometimes that tantrum might be very loud and reactive and all over the place. And sometimes that tantrum is very quiet and underneath the surface because that child has been told, has been shamed for feeling or expressing or being loud. And what we do with a child who's having a tantrum is that we don't rush to quiet them down.

We don't tell them to be quiet. It's okay. Stop feeling now. That's maybe what you've been told. But we don't want to tell yourself that anymore. What we tell that child is you let them express knowing that you're there to support them, not silence them. You give them that safe, open, expanded space, comfortable, safe space for them to feel.

And in order to do that, you have to be okay with whatever those feelings are. It may look a little ugly, or it may look, loud or messy. But in order to allow for the experiences that we've been shamed to come up, we have to allow them. So I want you to think about when we're talking about sitting with and being with what's underneath the surface or the experiences of life, truly see if you can see your inner parts, your experiences, your emotions as a child that is outside of you.

As a child that you might walk past on the street getting upset or falling down and hurting themselves. We do not want to shame them. We do not want to tell them not to feel or not to cry, but you say, Oh, I bet that hurt. Yeah, that, that looks like it hurt. That looks like that was a hard fall and that's it.

And then just breathe, soothe, let it be. That's what I want you to do for yourself.

Maybe what comes up is frustration that you're not feeling right. Maybe you're stuck and you're annoyed and you feel like a failure because you can't express. Be with that. Be with that sense of failure. Be with that frustration, get angry, get angry that you don't know how to express because you were never taught to, or maybe you were shamed for it, or maybe you never had the space to because you had to take care of everyone else around you and their emotions.

Be with that. Do you get where I'm going with this? There's no wrong way to be with. You be with whatever is present and whatever is arising. This could look like being in meditation. This could be like journaling. This could be like moving your body. but whatever it is, whatever's present. That's what you're going to be with and accept and allow it to be there.

No matter how uncomfortable it is, you are allowing that emotion and that experience to be in your body and flow through. Yeah. Okay. The next part of this, of moving through and past awareness and into action is really exploring your inauthenticity. So a big part. Of all of this is how much we've been dismissing ourselves.

How much have you been dismissing living your true authentic self? This isn't about blaming yourself. It's about getting curious. So many of your nervous system patterns are linked to ways that you've learned to hide or adapt yourself to fit into certain environments. So where are you saying yes, when you really want to say no, or Where are you putting on a mask to make others more comfortable, even if it's at your own expense?

So here's a couple examples of saying yes when you mean no. You might find yourself constantly agreeing to do things that you don't want to do, whether it's volunteering for yet another project at work, attending a social event when you're drained, or even saying yes to a friend's favor when you're overwhelmed.

Each time that you override your true feelings to keep the peace or avoid disappointing someone, you're signaling to your nervous system that your needs don't matter. This can lead to feelings of resentment, burnout, or even physical symptoms like tension or fatigue. So instead, try practicing saying, let me check and get back to you.

This creates space to honor how you really feel before committing. And I'll go even further to and say that, have you ever received a text from someone and you don't know how to respond? So you just don't, or you respond appeasing, right? Saying yes, when maybe you need to say no. So what I suggest that you do as you reply back and say something like, you know, thanks for the offer or whatever, something pleasant in a way.

let me sit with us and I'll get back to you. Or let me take some, I need to take a little bit of time to figure out my schedule or, you know, something along those lines that you can say, great, let me get back to you. This does two things. One, it tells the other person kind of where you are, right?

You're giving them, you're setting a boundary in a way you're giving them, an answer, but not a full answer. And then two, it gives you the space without feeling like, oh, I'm not responding. I need to respond. feeling guilty for not responding or not knowing what to do. So it gives you both space to feel okay.

And taking that space. Another example of not being authentic is maybe putting on a mask in relationships. So imagine you're in a conversation and someone says something that upsets you instead of expressing your true thoughts. You laugh it off or you change the subject to keep things light. Maybe you avoid sharing parts of your personality, like your hobbies or dreams, because you're afraid of judgment or rejection.

Now, I will say this, that you don't need to go and share everything about you all the time. Right? That's not always safe. But when you're suppressing your true self more often than not, your nervous system stays in a low level state of stress. It's like it's bracing against the potential for conflict or rejection.

So being authentic might mean practicing saying things like, I feel differently about that, or here's something that really excites me. Here's the thing, when you might agree with someone's opinion, but deep down you actually disagree, but you just try to avoid an argument or you just.

appease by going along with it. it might even just look like nodding along when a family member criticizes you or going along with a partner's plans, like where they want to eat, even though that doesn't actually align with what you want. Over time, these small acts of inauthenticity can snowball, leaving you feeling disconnected.

And instead I'm encouraging you to start small by expressing a gentle disagreement, like Actually, I see that differently, or you know what, I'm really craving Thai food tonight. Can we get that instead, or can we work, talk about what works for both of us? And usually the resistance from that that comes up for you is that one, you have never learned how to actually be okay with some conflict because all conflict equals bad.

And You're afraid of getting rejected, right? Or you're afraid of hurting someone's feelings. And what I really want to say about that is that when you're afraid of hurting someone's feelings, you're taking on the responsibility of their emotions. That's not your responsibility. Now you can be a nice person and empathetic and verbalize in a healthy way your differing opinion, but if they take that on to mean you're rejecting them, that's their work.

That's their insecurities. That's their patterning that they need to look at.

Now, you might be thinking, okay, how is this actually like regulating my nervous system? But I want to remind you every time we're holding things in, or we are doing things that are not actually aligned with our true selves and what lights us up or what is authentic to us. We're holding like literally our body, our nervous systems are holding, and it's in a state of stress when we're holding all of that.

So we want to be able to express yourself in a healthy way and not take on so much of other people's energy. And this takes practice, honestly, I think it's a lifelong practice, but you definitely get better at it. I know I have. So something that actually came up for me recently in life is, my activity level, which if you deal with chronic pain, and if you've always been an active person, whether sports or working out, or, you know, you've worked on your relationship with exercise, you might understand where I'm coming from.

so I've always. Well, not always, but I usually have been an active person other than a few years of my life, like end of high school and college, where I actually had panic attacks around exercising, and I didn't understand it all the time. So I just stopped exercising. But I moved past that and I've really worked on my relationship with movement and I enjoy it.

And especially when I had was in the depths of chronic pain and I couldn't do the activities I loved. I'm really grateful and excited to be able to move and. be active. Now, what I have learned in this past year is that I still like the creeping up of what I should be doing, how I should be active still comes into play.

So if you've been listening or following me, you know that I have moved in the past year to Colorado and Absolutely love it. It is truly my authentic place to be. at the same time, I have noticed that I've got myself a little bit caught up in the culture here. And there is totally a culture of, high activity level.

There's a lot of active people out here, like outdoorsy, running, cycling, lots of cardio, lots of just, lots of people that love to take care and move their bodies, you know? And also it can lean in the direction of intensity, right, really intense, focus on how much you're doing and how fast you're going and how long you're hiking or running or biking.

And I kind of got caught up in it all. On one hand, it was excitement. I was like, Ooh, let's experience all of these things, right? And then as I look back, I started to get a little more rigid with it. And then I started to feel like I had to keep up. And if I wasn't doing like, you know, two workouts day, then I wasn't living the Colorado lifestyle, which.

yeah, I laugh at myself because that's so not me, but I got caught up in it and my body started to take it on. Literally, I had some pain, pain in my body that came back and I was like, what is going on? And it like, it stopped me from my exercise. And so I had to really, really take a good hard look at my relationship with it.

And realize I wasn't being authentic. I don't like doing all those things all the time. I'm not a fast paced person. I'm actually a very slow living paced, intentional movement type of person. Now, sure. I enjoy the occasional cardio practice, but that's not ever been like what fuels me, but it felt like I had to take it on to be this, like good enough person and the active lifestyle.

It was part of my identity that I started to take on again. And so I hope this gives you a good example of maybe where there are things that you feel like you want to be you, but maybe aren't. Right? Like, I mean, sure, there are some times I wish I was that person so I could be a part of the group or, you know, I could get a pat on the back for doing for running a marathon.

But. Yo, that is so not me. Like, I don't know, maybe one day if it's truly, truly authentic to myself, but that's not happening right now. And I was trying to force it. it's not a bad thing, right? It didn't really come from this disordered place of like, I don't know, trying to change my body or weight. It was just, Yeah, part of the culture I got caught up, caught up in.

So that's a, that's an example I hope that you can see maybe where some of these things creep in, where you think you should be doing something or your identity is wrapped up in something else. Maybe that's a job or a relationship or a friendship or a hobby, right? Where are you wrapped up in something that actually isn't you?

That's what looking at. Yeah. Being authentic or inauthentic means that's where exploring your authenticity comes from. And when you unravel that and you actually lean into the places that feel really good to yourself, your nervous system settles. But when you're trying to take on All the different personas or things that you think you should be doing.

Your nervous system gets over overwhelmed. You get into the stress response very easily.

Basically, authenticity is deeply healing because it allows your nervous system to saddle into a place of truth. When you begin to live in alignment with who you are, your body starts to feel safer because it's no longer has to work over time to keep up this persona of someone that you're not.

Okay. So one of the next steps that I want you to look at and to take when you're trying to get out of the place of awareness and into the place of change and is to pay attention to your emotions. Now I talked about this a little bit in the beginning, but I want to go a little bit deeper and share a practice, which I have talked about on a recent episode. So I'll link that below. And the reason that I'm bringing this up is because This is especially for those people who think like, I don't know how to express.

I don't know what's underneath the surface. Like I'm fine. I don't have hard emotions. Yes, you do. You do. We all do because we're human. And this practice is learning how to pay attention to your emotions. If you can't tell already, your emotions are a huge part of this process. I mean, there's literally a, theory, a psychological theory called emotional expression and awareness therapy.

That is shown to help people release emotions so that their symptoms don't have a place anymore. So, if you keep hearing me talk about emotions, it's because it's just so, so, so, so important.because so much of our society teaches us not to feel or that there are good and bad emotions. There are good and bad ways to be, right?

And what I want you to know is that there's not There are not good and bad ways. There is just your way, which is the perfect way for you.your desires, your dislikes, your opinions, your emotions, they all matter because they make you, you, every person's different and it's beautiful to be different. You have a place here.

Everyone has a place here and I want you to own that. And part of owning it is recognizing. What are the things that we've repressed and stuff down? And so one practice I absolutely love for this work is called journal speak. And you've probably heard of it if you've been listening, but if you've never heard of it, journal speak is a way of letting your emotions flow without filters.

It's raw, messy, and deeply healing if you allow it to be. So again, I will link the, my full episode below on this practice on journaling. It's a journal practice. But basically I'll give you the highlights of how it works. What you want to do is you set aside 10 to 15 minutes and write down everything you're feeling, no matter how irrational, angry, or petty it might sound.

This is your safe place. This is the unconscious. It doesn't make sense. Usually, these feelings are not logical. There's no judgment allowed here, and I want you to name the feelings that you normally push down, like resentment, sadness, or fear. Afterward, you destroyed the paper or delete the document if you want.

We don't need to go back to it. It's truly the act of bringing the unconscious to the conscious and releasing it. Now, when I tell you that I want you to name the illogical emotions, for example, when I started this, I was in a difficult place with my relationship and my career at the time. Actually, I, I mean, if you know anything about my story, you know how much I love being a therapist.

And I mean, I've wanted to do this since I was like 15 years old. And so I've been in this work for a while and, it's, it's truly my calling, my purpose. Thanks. At the same time, not everything is perfect, right? And I was struggling with my business. I was frustrated. I didn't understand why I couldn't, like, bring in enough clients to make it work.

And I love what I do, but why isn't it working? And, I didn't really allow myself to feel those things. So when I really did, what came out was, I effing hate being a therapist and this is horrible. The system is so effed up. Like, why can't therapists actually get paid well for what they do? Because we do such hard work and we're treated like shit and I'm so over this and I hate it and I don't want to do it anymore.

Like, that raw, childlike, anger. Now that's how I felt, right? That was what was coming up. Is that my truth? My full on truth? No. I mean, I'm still here today. I do still love being a therapist, but there are certain times where we have to feel those things. And that's, I think, what can help you get through this practice or at least get started is tune into what's going on now.

And then also it'll teach you to look back at maybe times in your life where you didn't process You didn't feel the emotions and so that's where I'll remind you to go back and to bring those up and start writing about them and I go into all of this in detail and my. podcast episode about how to journal.

So listen to that after this, if you feel like this resonates and you're kind of like, yeah, you know, you have some kind of pain that like, I probably do need to express more. I will tell you this anytime that I have clients that are really stuck, like maybe their body's really sending them some difficult pain signals.

They're having a lot of pain in their body. Maybe they hit a crash and they have high fatigue or their symptoms are and it doesn't make sense because they've been doing all this work. This is the practice I send them to. Emotional practice. I cannot, like, express time and time again how important it is.

I actually just talked to a client yesterday, and she's going through a really hard crash, super intense fatigue crash. And she was like, I don't understand. I mean, what's going on here. But as we started to dig in, she did notice over the past few days, once was when she was watching a movie once when she was having a hard conversation with her dad.

And then while we were in therapy, all of these times, she had emotion come to the surface. She started crying and it wasn't intentional. It wasn't like we're trying to dig deep to understand the emotion. It's just that what we talked about was hard and sad and, you know, she felt while we were talking and she felt while she watched that movie, she felt sad when she was talking to her dad because he didn't see her understand what was going on.

And as she felt, as she started to cry, she all of a sudden noticed she was like, Oh, I, my body feels lighter. I'm not as fatigued. And literally as we were in session, I saw it, I saw it on her face. So when she first came on the screen, I mean, There was absolutely no expression. She was laying down in bed.

I, I kind of thought like, this will probably be a short session because she really has no energy. I mean, her voice was really weak and she couldn't talk very well, couldn't form a lot of sentences once we started to talk a little bit more and. She started to express some emotion and started to cry.

It was within a minute where all of a sudden I felt, I could see light come back into her, into her face. And she started to have facial expressions and she started to sit up in bed and she started to talk a little bit more and even noticed, well, I asked, I. Cause I assumed I could see it. And I was like, how, what's going on right now?

What are you experiencing in your body? And she was like, I have energy. I'm, I could, I can get out of bed right now. I could probably walk around. I thinking a little more clearly and to see that was so powerful. It just really speaks to all of this, especially when it comes to emotion. And I've experienced that with myself as well.

Some of the hardest times, especially with like brain fog and pain and fatigue. Once I go in and I release and I feel there's a shift that happens. So really, what's going on is that journal speak expressing emotions helps your nervous system offload that weight, that emotional weight that it's been carrying.

And the key here is that it's not about solving, it's not about fixing the emotion or understanding why or trying to figure it out. It's about creating space for those emotions to exist and move through you.

Now the next and last most important part of all of this is self compassion and I cannot talk about it enough because healing is messy and there will be moments when you catch yourself reacting to your symptoms with frustration or judgment and that's normal, but part of taking your healing to the next level.

Is learning to respond with compassion instead of criticism. So I was just talking with, a good friend and colleague, Vanessa Blackstone, who's coming on here again, in a few episodes. And she was talking about how for the first time in years, she had a bit of a, she calls it an extinction burst.

where she had a migraine, a pretty intense one. Come on. She hadn't had one for years. And the best thing that she did for yourself was to not figure it out. She responded with compassion and grace and flexibility and gave herself space and time to just be and let it move through instead of, Oh, what's going on?

Why is this happening? I should know better, right? I know all this work. I shouldn't be having these things like X, Y, Z, right? And that's the biggest part of this work when you can respond to your symptoms and your experiences with flexibility and compassion and love and space. Sometimes it's the hardest work for us because we're pretty critical of ourselves.

And this is the biggest shift that you can make is how you respond to yourself. So the next time you notice yourself saying something harsh, pause and ask yourself, would I say this to a close friend who's struggling? You probably wouldn't. So instead, try asking, or try saying, I see you. This is hard. This feels icky.

This feels, insert your word, And I know you're doing the best you can, put a hand over your heart and say, it's okay to feel this way. Self compassion creates safety in your nervous system. When you're kind to yourself, your body starts to trust that it doesn't have to brace for an attack from within.

Another example is when symptoms arise, practice observing it without judgment. Say to yourself, ah, there it is. My heart's racing, my neck hurts, my chest feels tight, whatever it is. My brain fog's coming on. That's okay. My body is just trying to protect me. The simple act of acknowledgement without resistance is powerful.

It helps you step out of the cycle of fighting your own experience and into a place of curiosity and acceptance.

So what I really want you to remember here is that Healing is not a straight path. It's a winding, spiraling journey that often requires patience, curiosity, and a whole lot of self love. So if you're feeling stuck, please know this, that you're not broken. Your body and your nervous system are simply doing the best to protect you.

And so by leaning into these practices, being with discomfort, journaling, embracing authenticity, and practicing compassion, you're already taking the next step forward.

I hope that this episode was helpful. I am going to start answering more of your questions. So if it feels like you have a burning question and you want me to answer, go ahead and find the link below to submit a question on my website. And I'm going to start having Q& A episodes where I answer all of your questions, because I think that, oh, this is exactly what we need, right?

I can talk at you all day long, but what do you need to know? What's going to help you the most? So go ahead, submit your question and make sure that you are subscribed so that you don't miss the Q and a episode. And reminder that if you're ready for deeper support, check out the show notes for ways to work together one to one until next time I'm grace and I'm so honored to walk this path with you until next time.

Heal with grace.