The Awakened Heart: A Podcast for Healing Women
The Awakened Heart: A Podcast for Healing Women is a safe space for trauma survivors and neurodivergent women ready to claim their voice, soften into their truth and feel at home with themselves.
I’m Autumn Moran, a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC), certified Life Coach, and 500-hour trained yoga instructor who understands this journey intimately as a neurodivergent woman, trauma survivor and as a therapist and life coach.
Each week, I offer soulful episodes where I intertwine my lived experiences with insights from my therapy practice all with the goal to help women unmask and find peace in their lives by healing trauma and learning how to accommodate their neurodivergence.
Through real talk, mindfulness practices, and gentle healing approaches rooted in trauma-informed wisdom and nervous system care, you’ll find practical tools to help you feel safe in your body, seen in your story and supported in your journey.
This is your sanctuary to soften, heal, and remember that you were and are never too much.
Work with me: Click the link to schedule a free 15 minute consultation.
The Awakened Heart: A Podcast for Healing Women
BONUS EPI: Executive Dysfunction, Part Two: The Emotional Overload Edition
This Epi explores emotional overload as a protective response that shuts down executive function and offers practical tools to restore safety and momentum. We map the flood cycle, name four overload types, and practice resets, scripts, and a three-layer plan to begin gently.
• Definition of emotional overload and why executive function collapses
• Emotional flood cycle from trigger to shame to regroup
• Four types of overload: sensory, social, internal, repressed
• Safety-based tools: Name and Narrow, two-minute exhale, Safe Start scripts
About Me:
I’m Autumn Moran, a Licensed Professional Counselor in Texas specializing in trauma-informed care for neurodivergent women and trauma survivors.
Therapy (Texas residents only):
I provide individual therapy in my private practice for women working through trauma, late diagnosis processing, relationship challenges, and healing from narcissistic abuse or toxic family systems. My approach is neurodivergent-affirming and focuses on helping you understand your patterns while building practical tools for nervous system regulation and authentic living.
Life Coaching (available anywhere):
For women outside Texas or those wanting support alongside therapy, I offer:
•Somatic Healing Coaching: Bridges the gap between cognitive understanding and embodied healing through nervous system work, movement practices, and practical integration tools. Perfect as a complement to talk therapy or for those ready to work directly with their body’s wisdom.
•Unmasking Journey Coaching: Specialized support for late-diagnosed neurodivergent women learning to reconnect with their authentic selves after decades of masking. We work on identifying your real needs, rebuilding your sense of self, and creating a life that fits who you actually are.
Whether you’re healing trauma, discovering yourself after late diagnosis, or both, my goal is to help you not just understand your story, but feel genuinely safe and at home in your own body.
Subscribe & Share:
New episodes drop every Wednesday and Friday. If today’s episode resonated, please share it with someone who needs to hear it or leave a comment—it helps other women find this space and know they’re not alone. Check me out on Apple Podcasts and many other platforms.
Work With Me:
Ready to start your healing journey?
Book a free 15-minute consultation: (http://linktr.ee/EmpoweringWellnessHub)
Listen to my DIVINE WOMAN Playlist (Apple & Spotify): Empowering songs for women healing through softness and strength - links are on the linktree link!
Welcome to the Awaken Heart, a podcast for healing women, a space where your voice matters, your body is sacred, and your journey home to yourself is always honored, no matter how winding the road. I'm Audemaran, licensed professional counselor, life coach, yoga instructor. But ultimately, I'm here today to be your companion on this divine path of healing. If you want to dive deeper into your healing, I offer virtual sessions. You can click on the link tree in the show notes to schedule a free 15-minute consultation. Today's episode is a part two of executive dysfunction. This is the emotional overload edition. When your emotions run the show, when you lose yourself in your emotions. This is for anyone who cries while trying to clean the kitchen, or who gets stuck in bed after one text message. Or maybe you can't start a task because the emotional static inside turns everything into noise. Or you may feel flooded, frozen, frustrated, or deeply misunderstood. If you've ever wondered why can't I function when my emotions spike, this is the episode I want to answer that question with. So let's begin. And before we begin, wherever you're at, I invite you to relax your shoulders. Make sure your teeth aren't clenched together, loosen your jaws. Take a nice deep inhale, let that belly rise high. And out of the mouth, exhale out all the hot, heavy air. All right, what is emotional overload? Emotional overload is what happens when your inner world becomes louder than your outer world. Your feelings crowd the hallway. Your thoughts run in circles. It's a flood, not a flaw. For many, overwhelm isn't created by task, it's created by the internal weather. A heavy emotion, an old emotion, an unprocessed emotion, an unexpected emotion. Oh, other people's emotions are the giant throbbing pressure to handle life perfectly. When your emotional world swells too fast or too high, your executive functioning goes offline. The brain cannot plan, initiate, or organize while it's trying to keep you emotionally afloat. And if you grew up in emotional survival mode, your nervous system already learned to treat feelings like storms that need to be contained, quieted, or avoided. You don't just feel emotions, you brace against them. And bracing shuts the system down. This is a learned survival strategy. That needs gentler tools. You have the executive brain, which handles planning, sequencing, motivating, and task, task initiation. When emotions rise quickly, or when emotions feel unsafe, the emotional brain pulls rank and it takes over. Not because you're weak, but because your body thinks it's protecting you. It's saying, forget the laundry, forget the taxes, forget the groceries. We're dealing with a threat here. We're under attack. And what are those threats? A threat may be someone's tone in text or in person. It could be a memory that's fluttered through, an annoyance that has tipped you too far, an unmet need you're tired of holding, feelings of being judged, feeling exhausted, having decision fatigue, having someone else around you that's angry or sad, a sensory overwhelm, are simply one too many things moving, talking, speaking, going at once. And your brain shuts down the task function so it can work on the emotional containment. And then the shame hits and the shutdown deepens, and you're not, and you're not malfunctioning. You are poor, your body is prioritizing emotional safety, even if the threat is invisible. So there's a cycle, an emotional flood cycle that is typical. So what happens is the trigger, the things that we just talked about, triggers a thought, feeling, or situation that cranks the emotional volume right up. And then you have the surge. Maybe your chest tightens, your jaws clench, your thoughts start to spin, your nervous system goes into incoming storm mode. Shit's headed our way. And then you have the freeze. Your executive functioning collapses, your mind goes blank, your body goes heavy. Everything feels like too freaking much. And then what happens? We avoid, we pivot away from the task, you scroll, you lie down, you shut the door, you disappear into distraction, busying yourself with something else so as not to deal. And then shame rolls in. Why can't I get it together? The shame accelerates the emotional flooding. And then you collapse. You go numb, you detach, you get tired, you cry, your body gives out before your willpower does. And then eventually the emotional waters recede. It's a quiet regroup, but the tasks still remain untouched and looming. This isn't like a personal failure. This is just a system melting down. And you can learn how to interrupt it. If you grew up in emotional chaos, criticism, silence, unpredictability, or repr or you were parentified, where you had to take care of your parents' emotional well-beings, then you didn't just learn to suppress emotions. You learn that emotions equal danger. So adult emotions, even mild ones, feel like alarms. And the alarms override everything. And I think this is one of the misunderstood, like a misunderstood effect of trauma. Your capacity for emotional tolerance gets narrower. Not because you're fragile, but because your system, your system has adapted. Don't feel too deeply. Don't rock the boat. And now as an adult, your body treats big emotions like trespassers. Emotional overload becomes the default because your nervous system still believes it's responsible for holding the whole wide world together. You're carrying emotional weather patterns that don't belong to you. And guess what? It is time to release those emotional patterns. So it might be assumed an emotional overload is just crying or melting down, but it has many forms. Here are the four most common sensory emotional overload, too much sound, texture, movement, brightness, or physical clutter. Your emotions spike because your senses can't breathe. Mute it if you can't turn it off so that we can discuss. Turn it way down on the volume. Like I competing noises send me overloaded. Like overload me to the point where I have to stop and say, this is about to get bad. Let me turn this down. I don't care if you think I'm rude. I don't care what you think. I'm having a conversation. Stop trying to pay attention to the TV. Vice versa. And then there's social, emotional overload, conversations that pull energy, use too many spoons, someone else's distress or problems, people pleasing, hyper-vigilance around people's tones and expressions. This emotional bandwidth drains you without you even noticing. Think masking. The third type is internal emotional overload, racing thoughts, memory echoes, decision fatigue, perfectionism. And your internal world becomes a crowded room of all this expectation, emotions, energy. And then we have repressed emotional overload. Feelings you avoided or pushed through start leaking sideways. Tears that don't make sense, irritation, irritability for no reason, numbness, a heaviness you can't shake. Because you told yourself to push through as if that makes it all better and go away. All it does is say, I'm not important. I've got to keep performing. Fuck me, fuck my needs, and I'll just collapse here eventually, and that's okay. Seriously. Don't push through. Don't avoid. What you avoid controls you. Eat the big frog. Eat the frog. The big test first. Right? Whatever you gotta tell yourself, whatever you gotta do to communicate your needs, to set up your house, set up your career, set up your life for you. Don't repress this. Take up space. All right. So what are some tools? These aren't. And these aren't productivity hacks. They're emotional safety supports, and they work with ADHD brains, inner child wounds, and trauma physiology. Tool number one: the name and narrow method. Before trying to do anything, identify what type of overload you're in. You can say things like, I'm not stuck, I'm overwhelmed. I'm emotionally fool, not failing. My nervous system is overloaded, not disobedient. Naming the situation for what it is brings the emotional brain back into regulation. Tool number two, two-minute emotional exhale. Set a timer for two minutes and let your body drop the armor. Shake your hands, roll your shoulders, sigh. Sigh heavily. Cry if the tears are there. Place your feet on the floor, release your jaws, relax your shoulders. Just spend two minutes of releasing, and this can reset your emotional capacity. Tool number three, safe start script. Speak directly to your nervous system like you're soothing a toddler. You're soothing your younger self. You can tell your things like, we're not gonna do the whole thing. I'm just gonna begin gently. You can tell your inner child, you don't have to handle the emotions all alone. I'm here for you. And you can parent yourself and love yourself. I'll take care of us. You're allowed to feel, and I'm allowed to lead, you can tell your younger self. This can help with task initiation. One of the tips I used last episode about executive dysfunctioning is to let her sit beside you. Let your younger version, who is scared, who is overwhelmed, who doesn't feel supported, feel all those things. Feel not scared, feel supported and understood, and not alone. You're doing it together. Tool number four, I say this often, but body double and body double for emotions, not task. This is where someone can sit with you before you start to get overwhelmed while you process the emotional intensity. It could be a friend on the phone, it could be a co-working video, someone texting you. I'm here, take your time. You don't need help doing the task. You need help calming the emotional tide, the emotional wave. Tool five, take a walk. A five-minute walk to release the pressure valve. No goals, no steps, just movement that tells your body that you're not trapped. And then tool number six. Two more tools. I know I'm going a little longer than I normally do with the with recommendations, but here we go. Switch to a task with emotional safety. When overwhelmed, do something that doesn't trigger fear, perfectionism, or stress. Wipe a counter, make a bed, organize something small, feed the pets, change the trash, light a candle. And tool number seven, the three-layer plan. Break task into three into three layers. Layer one, emotionally stabilizing. Layer two, activation start. Layer three, action. What happens is we try to jump straight into layer three and just go for the action. And that's when our system crashes. No wonder. We're not accommodating ourselves. We're not checking in with ourselves. So layer one, emotional stabilizing. That is checking in with yourself. That is checking in with your body, your heart, your mind, your feelings. What's going on? What are you expecting? What are you feeling? Halt. H-A-L-T is very important here. Are you hungry, angry, lonely, tired? Are other things going on that are leading to the overwhelm? Take care of yourself. Emotionally stabilize. And then layer two, activation start is small steps. Give yourself two to five minutes. One step of the whole project. Just a little bit. And then that's when action comes in. You start to get to rolling. All right. How about trying to reset the emotional body together? If you can, I invite you to get comfortable. Place one hand on your belly and one on your collarbone. Inhale through your nose slow and steady. I want you to exhale through your mouth as if you're releasing trap steam. As you breathe in and out, I want you to say to yourself, I don't need to be perfect. Let out any negativity. As you inhale, tell yourself, I'm allowed to slow down. Let any negativity out. I don't. Sorry, my emotions are not emergencies. I have a dog distracting me. I'm sorry. I'm in the moment trying to help you recalibrate, and he is just when we talk about emotional overwhelm. I'm back. I'm losing my shit for a second. I need a pause. I'm emotionally regulating. I'm getting back into the moment. The noise has stopped. Tell yourself as you inhale, soften here. Begin gently. And as you exhale, let that breath settle you. Emotional overload doesn't make you weak. It makes you a human. And if you weren't raised to silence, no, I'm sorry, if you were raised to silence your feelings, manage everyone else's emotions, or perform emotional calm at all costs to yourself, then of course your body gets overwhelmed now. Executive function collapses when you're carrying too much emotional weight alone. And I'm here to tell you you are not alone. Use your supports, ask for help with safe people. And then if you don't have safe people, create new healthy supports. If you need anyone to talk to at any time and shit is heavy as hell, the text line 741-741 is a text crisis line. They will talk to you, they will help you get coping skills. Talk to doctors, talk to support groups, get a massage. Get people in your corner that are there for your well-being if you don't have it in familiar or friendly relationships. Seek out community supports. And if you don't feel like anyone in your corner is safe, we got to talk. We got to talk about boundaries. We got to talk about respect. We got to talk about you settling and not letting people treat you like you deserve and just letting them get away with bullshit. There are plenty of episodes for that. Boundaries, dating rules, taking up space, all of that. I'm here to help you. Listen to some episodes, reach out to me. I want to help you. Because you, yes, you deserve to be treated like an amazing, beautiful woman that you are. Supported, encouraged, validated, loved. Someone that they people give you patience and understanding. People that listen to you and hear you and not discard you. All right, I'm wrapping it up. I don't have any swoop, swoop, swoop to tie it in. If this resonated with you, please listen to some other episodes I've done on executive dysfunctioning. This week's Wednesday episode is about it. I have one about executive dysfunctioning and trauma two weeks ago. So give them a peruse. We can dive deeper if you want to meet one-on-one. I'd love to hear from you. Message me, comment, or follow. Share. If you haven't heard at the beginning, I'll offer virtual sessions, whether you're healing trauma, navigating a big life shift, or wanting to learn more about how to accommodate yourself rather than push through. I hold space for women just like you every week. If that's something you're curious about, you can fill out a consultation request form via my Linkedry with along with some other goodies. There is a playlist that's at Spotify right now. I'm gonna work on the Apple playlist. I'm working on it. It's just sorry, it's not a high priority, but I'm trying to accommodate. But whatever songs you see on the Spotify, you can find on Apple. You might have to do a little legwork. But good songs, motivating songs, empowering songs, songs you need to hear, not the random bullshit that's on the radio. If you're gonna listen to something, listen to something that's gonna build you up, that's gonna calm you down, that's gonna sh make you feel loved and strong. All right, my dears. You are never too much, you are never too late, and you don't have to figure it out all alone. Until next time, may you be happy and free. May mine and your healing ripple out toward outward to the world to bless outward to the world with happiness and freedom. You know, can I try that again? May mine and your healing ripple outward to bless the world with happiness and freedom. Take care of you, and I'll see you soon.
