Episode 19 | How to stop ruminating thoughts with somatics

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Hello and welcome to today's episode of the Trauma Educator podcast. Today we are going to talk about body memory, triggers, and ruminating thoughts. And I want to start by stating this. Ruminating about what could go wrong is not a prediction. It's a memory of what has already happened. Why did I want to talk about ruminating thoughts and triggers? Because with complex trauma is something very common that we experience in our daily lives. Something happens, we get triggered, and a spiral of ruminating, intrusive thoughts gets started and we can't stop it. And the thing is, the more we try to stop it, the more persistent it becomes. And before I go on to explain the neuroscience behind ruminating thoughts, I want to share an example from my own life that happened a few years ago. A few years ago, I was in a chat group, probably it was WhatsApp or maybe Facebook, I don't remember, with two other friends of mine. We are talking, and one of our friends says, How about we go for a coffee? My other friend responds and says, Yes, we can do that. And I don't respond. And before I had the chance to respond, because I was busy, they had already arranged to go somewhere. Now at the time, one of my friends who accepted the invite of the other friend knew that I wasn't going to be in London, in the city, at the time that the other friend suggested that we meet up. But I believed that the other friend thought that I would be around. And I started thinking, so why didn't she wait for me to say if I'm available? And she just went ahead to schedule to arrange this meetup without me saying whether I can do it or not. The other friend knew about this, but she didn't know. So why didn't she say something? And I got so triggered that for maybe an hour or a couple of hours, I couldn't stop thinking about it. And I felt a deep sense of shame. And my perception was that I got rejected, that I'm not good enough, that there's something wrong with me. And my friend so obviously doesn't want to meet up with me. And also, she does this in front of me. And I kept thinking and thinking about it, and thinking about it, and thinking about it, and trying to make sense of it. Now, of course, there were maybe about hundred other scenarios that I could think about why she didn't wait for me to confirm, all of which could be completely benign and innocent. But my mind was obsessed with the idea that I was rejected and she didn't want to go out with me, to have coffee with me, which now thinking about it is insane from the lens of my prefrontal cortex, but my amygdala back there was on fire. I think I even remember crying at some point about it and crying like a little child. And by the way, it's not an exaggeration, it was a younger part of me who felt rejected and was showing up. Now, a couple of weeks later, we see each other at another friend's house that we were invited over for Sunday brunch. And that friend who initiated the coffee meetup, when I went in to that house, looked at me, and she was surprised to see me there. Her eyes were wide open, and she said, What are you doing here? And I said, What do you mean, what am I doing here? She said, I thought you were in Athens. And I said, No, I'm not in Athens, I'm here. I thought you were going to spend the whole of December, including Christmas, in Athens, and that you would go there very early, way before the Christmas holiday started. And I thought, no, why did you believe that? Now the thing is, I was going to go to Athens, but I wouldn't go for such a long time as she believed that I would. But at that moment, to me, it became so clear that that's the exact reason why she didn't wait for me to confirm whether I was going to join them for coffee because she believed that I was already in Athens. And by the way, the funny thing is that this coffee meetup with my other friend never even took place. It never happened. They were not able, for whatever reason, to arrange it at the time. Now, this story, in hindsight, seems very lighthearted and uh even funny, but at the time it wasn't funny at all. It was very distressing for me and for my nervous system. I felt very overwhelmed. And here, what goes really well is Dan Siegel's quote, who is a very well-known clinical professor of psychiatry, who said that implicit memory doesn't carry the internal sensation that something is being recalled. I'm going to repeat it because it's so important and I want you guys to remember this. Implicit memory doesn't carry the internal sensation that something is being recalled. What happened at that moment within my nervous system as I was reading the exchange between my one friend and the other friend trying to arrange that coffee meeting and saying, Yes, let's do that, I really want to see you, and sharing excitement between them and me not being included triggered my implicit memory of the past that includes sensations, emotions, core beliefs about myself, but not the understanding and conscious awareness that something is actually being recalled from the past. And that's what makes trauma triggers so confusing. Because they can feel so real. Something so small can happen and can feel flooding. And suddenly we might find ourselves raging or crying or feeling shut down and or frozen, not being able to make a simple choice or decision about something and thinking, what's wrong with me for reacting this way? There's nothing wrong with you for reacting this way. It's your nervous system remembering something in the present moment and your mind believing that this is about the present moment only. When we get triggered, if only our explicit memory would be evoked. Explicit memory is the memory that shows up when we're able to recall specific things. And I say, for example, oh, this thing happened and then this thing happened, and after that thing happened, that's what happened. And I have images of the past on my mind, and I'm able to explain and describe to you what happened. I can narrate a story about it. So every time a trigger would happen, explicit memory, then I would have the recollection of what has happened, and as a result, I would be able to tell the difference between okay, so what I'm feeling right now, 80% is because of the past, and 20% has to do with the present, or 100% is about the past and 0% about the present or whatever. But this is not what's happening, it's our implicit memory mainly being triggered. Sometimes we might get glimpses of the past, very few, some images, maybe a voice, maybe the face of our father or our mother, but even those things are below our conscious awareness, and we're not really paying attention to them, and we're hyper-focusing on what's happening in the present moment. What I'm actually saying is that those images are clues from the past, telling us maybe where to look at, but they're below our conscious awareness. Our brain doesn't really pay attention to them as much, that it pays attention to what has triggered us right now because it tries to prevent any similar harm from happening in the present moment that we experience in the past. That's why our brain is so attached to what is happening right here, right now, and we might be hyper-vigilant, trying to find different pieces of evidence pointing to a possible threat. Now, implicit memory is a very useful type of memory because it allows us to learn things automatically and habitually. Thanks to implicit memory, we can develop habits and learn new skills, maybe a new language very quickly, and learn to ride a bike without thinking about it every time. So it's anything that relates to automatic activities and skills and processes that do not require very conscious processing in the here and now. It just happens. So when you learn to drive a car, in the beginning it feels very difficult because the skill of driving the car is not part of the implicit memory, but the more you do it, the more it becomes implicit memory, and it gets way easier to drive a car. And when you get in the car, you don't think about every move you're gonna make because otherwise it would be extremely difficult to drive a car. Without deliberately thinking about something, you're able to execute it, which is fantastic. When it comes to trauma, though, it becomes challenging because this implicit memory can trip us up in the ways I described already. Judith Herrman was the one who noticed and talked about it that talking about the past and traumatic experiences that we live through doesn't resolve them. And why is that? Because when we talk about the past, we don't use implicit memory. We use our explicit memory when we're able to recall what happened and tell the story. However, trauma is not only part of explicit memory, it's also part of our implicit memory. And our implicit memory involves body sensations, impulses, emotions, nervous system states, images and voices, and other aspects of experience that create this automatic and habitual response to everyday life. And this implicit memory is so powerful, which is why when you learn to ride a bike, you never forget it, even if you don't ride a bike for a year or five years. The same applies to driving a car. If you've driven a car for quite some time, you don't really forget how to drive a car unless there's an actual reason that doesn't allow you to remember it. Now think about complex trauma. We are raised in an atmosphere of overwhelm, disconnection, sometimes abuse, chaos, confusion. And those experiences become part of our implicit memory. This means also that not everything that happened and has impacted our nervous system, we will be able to recall. However, all those things are stored in our implicit memory. And when something happens and triggers us in the present moment, our implicit memory will become activated, and as a result, there will be a spiral of a chain reaction that might include behaviors and thoughts and emotions and uh core beliefs and impulses that will show up together as a packaged experience and manifestation and expression that will be so automatic that we won't be able to stop it. That's the reason very often when we get triggered by something and as a result there's a coping mechanism that follows to be able in some way to navigate the trigger, what's happening, but we know that this coping mechanism is not very helpful anymore, even though, of course, it helped us survive for quite some time, but now it might be causing a little bit of trouble. We are not able to stop it. Because that coping mechanism is part of that in place in memory that is habitual, that's automatic, and becomes overpowering. The nervous system always uses past hurt to anticipate and predict future danger. That's how we are set up neurobiologically. But for this to happen, for the nervous system to be able to use what happened in the past as a way of predicting the future and trying to protect us from similar traumatic, overwhelming experiences, those past experiences should have been encoded through heightened emotions. This means that the more painful something is and the more overwhelming the emotions attached to that experience, the more a nervous system will go to that past hurt to update its predictions about the future. If something is not as emotionally intense, the nervous system will not be bothered by it so much to use it as a map to try to understand what might happen in the future. And when it comes to trauma, you can imagine why traumatic experiences become the roadmap through which the nervous system is trying to predict what's going to happen in the future. For example, to many people who experience abandonment in their childhood by their caregivers, when they go into a relationship that they truly care about, their fear of abandonment gets triggered. Why is that? There might be no indication that the person who is with them right now is gonna leave them at some point. I mean, they might because that's what people do sometimes, but right now, in the present moment, there might not be any evidence pointing to that. However, the nervous system doesn't care as much about what is happening now, but it cares more about how the present moment might be even in the slightest ways similar to what we experienced in the past. So if the way we experience connection in the past with our caregivers led eventually to abandonment, so the nervous system will say, when I experienced connection in the past, it led to something very painful because I was abandoned. Now, the pain and the intensity of the emotions is what allows the nervous system to encode that experience as important. If there was no heightened emotion, if it wasn't painful, then the nervous system wouldn't need to remember it. And it wouldn't be using it, as I said before, as a clue, as evidence that you see, that's what happens when we experience X, Y, Z. So now the nervous system takes the experience of that connection and tries to apply it to what is happening now. So as I'm experiencing this beautiful relationship that feels good and I care about that person, well, I know what's gonna happen because it has already happened in the past. That person, one way or another, at some point is gonna leave me. What often happens as a result, we start ruminating and we start thinking about the same thing in different scenarios over and over again, and we're not able to stay present and enjoy life now as it is. When this happens, it's a sign that our body has moved into a state of hyper-arousal, constantly scanning for danger, trying to predict the future, not being able to be present, and constantly preparing ourselves for something that our mind believes is gonna happen no matter what. We might be able to have flexibility. Usually, we're able to have flexibility when we hear similar stories from other people, and we wouldn't approach them with the same black and white thinking. However, in our case, we believe that this is the only likely outcome, which is also called negative exceptionalism. This means that to any other people, this is not necessarily the only available outcome. But for me, that's the only thing I can have access to. Through the lens of complex romance somatics, rumination is a sign of frozen terror in the body. That's why when we ruminate and we have these intrusive thoughts, we are not able usually to do anything. We're stuck there. Maybe we're scrolling on our phone and keep thinking about things, or once we finish the task, then we start thinking about the same thing again and we're not able to forget about it. We're washing the dises and we're thinking about the same thing. Or we go out with our friends, maybe we're able to forget about it for an hour or so, and then once we are alone again, we keep thinking about the same thing. Our brain is attracted to these catastrophic scenarios about the future like a magnet. The types of stories that we're ruminating over gives us clues about the past, not direct clues, but definitely some clues that can help us understand what kind of terror this is about. Because the body is frightened and is unable to complete what it needed to complete back then and it needed to process back then, and now it's stuck in this loop. And instead of the body experiencing this internal movement as a result of emotional processing, the mind is moving constantly, but the body is stuck in freeze. That's why I love the saying that says, what we are afraid of has already happened. For example, when we're afraid of being abandoned and this becomes an obsessive thought, then this is a memory. Especially when we don't have any evidence that this is going to happen. The ruminating thought that I'll be betrayed might be the body remembering the betrayal we experienced at some point in the past. Or the thought I'll be humiliated might be the body remembering that at some point we experienced a lot of shame and we didn't have anyone around us to help us process it. So once we get triggered by something, it doesn't mean that the nervous system is witnessing the exact same thing we experienced in the past, but there might be a subtle cue of something that feels familiar. There might be a similar type of connection or pattern or voice or tone, a specific cue that might be very small, but it can open Pandora's box and a whole emotional activating experience shows up that's also very somatic. When the nervous system interprets the present moment based on past hurt, it's like saying, Well, I know exactly where this is going. I know exactly how this is gonna end, I know exactly what's going to happen. And when there's so much certainty over the outcome, usually it's a memory of what has already happened. Because the truth is. The future is so nuanced, there are so many possibilities that can come true. It's not black and white, and in reality, no one is out there like a superior power that wants the worst for us. It's that our body is remembering something really painful that happened and is trying to protect us. When explaining this to my clients or my students, often they are saying to me, okay, but how do I know that this thought is about the past and it's not intuition about the future that I need to pay attention to? Well, I'm going to share with you three ways to be able to tell the difference. First, the thought is persistent. It keeps returning again and again, but without any new evidence supporting it. If you keep having the same thoughts over and over again, without any facts, any real life evidence supporting, then most likely the rumination you're experiencing is about the past and not so much about the present moment. This doesn't mean that there's nothing in the present moment that you don't need to pay attention to. Please, by all means, be curious about what in the present moment might be triggering this reaction from you. But here we're talking about proportionality. So be curious about what is happening in the present moment. Be open to understand yourself more in relation to that thing, but at the same time, also pay attention to the persistence and to the absence or the presence of evidence supporting that persistence. The second clue that your ruminating thoughts are more connected to the past and the present is that they lack nuance. They come with this black and white thinking, as I've already mentioned to you. There's no flexibility in what could be possible. There's no diversity of thought. There's this certainty that this is gonna happen and there's no other way. But at the same time, if you test the exact same scenario for any other person, you will not believe the same thing. So that's something for you to pay attention to because right now those thoughts might be reflecting the past. And third, the catastrophe we're predicting is disproportionate to what is happening in the present moment. For example, we might be in a loving relationship and suddenly our partner doesn't reply to us for a couple of hours. They might be in a conference for work and we start having these ruminating thoughts that they're gonna leave us, they're gonna meet someone new there, they will not come back home, something bad has happened to them. You see the disproportionality there, and or we go to work and a colleague looks at us in a bit of a strange way, and we interpret it as, oh my god, they are thinking something really bad about me right now, which might not be completely untrue. They might be thinking about their family, something bad might have happened, they might be divorcing or anything else that might be completely unrelated to us, but we interpret it as this is about us. So, how do we work with ruminating thoughts through the lens of the nervous system? So the first thing that we want to do is to learn to disidentify with those thoughts and to see them as one aspect of our inner experience. We tend to see thoughts as the main thing of our experience because that's what we've been taught to do. Just try to solve problems through thinking. But when it comes to reminiscing, this is not gonna work because thoughts are trying to solve the past, not the present moment. And the past is gonna be resolved by feeling it and processing it through the body, not just by thinking about it, and especially by thinking in very repetitive ways. One way to disidentify from those thoughts is instead of saying I'm afraid they will leave me, we can start saying a part of me that lives in my body is afraid that will leave me. So we recognize that there's a part of us that believes that, but at the same time, we'll recognize that this is not who we are in our wholeness. There's a bigger part of ourselves, a bigger self that includes that part as well, but it's not only that part. This allows us to create some distance between us and those thoughts, and uh allows us to not blend with those thoughts and especially our identity to keep blending with those thoughts. And the second thing that's very crucial is to start developing self-attunment. Self-attunement means being able to connect with our inner experience, not just with our thoughts, as I said, but to include other aspects of our experiences as well, including sensations, including an impulses, including what is happening in the present moment when I think about that specific thought. How does my body feel? How does the energy in my body feel? What is happening in my heart rate or my breathing? What word or sound wants to come through my voice? Because self-attunment allows us to anchor ourselves to the present moment. And we don't have to do this in an intense way and start doing this all day, every day, because that's not sustainable, especially for a traumatized nervous system. But we want to start practicing it little by little. And the more we practice self-achunement, the more we're able to tell the difference between what happened in the past, what is really happening in the present moment, and what might happen in the future. If you wish to develop the skill of self-achunement and understand how you can make this happen, but also learn more about the neuroscience of somatic memory, triggers, and how we are able to work somatically with triggers in our daily lives to support ourselves so that when we get triggered, we don't go from one to ten straight away or we don't fall always into a very deep black hole, but we're able to catch ourselves earlier because the point is not to stop feeling triggered, the goal is to reduce the intense spikes of this activation as a result of those triggers so that they don't happen as much, they happen less frequently, but also we're able to bounce back quicker so that our nervous system is not getting out the window of tolerance too much, too fast, too soon, too frequently. If you wish to join us, I would love to have you. You can find the registration link in the show notes. And I wish you all the best, take care, until I see you for the next episode. Goodbye, guys.