Changing the Meaning Part 2: The Laws Behind the Associations We Carry

Resources Mentioned

• Revelation LIVE
• Un-M-Othered: A Revolution in Adoptee Healing Retreat
• Schedule a call with Julie

Summary

A few weeks ago, Julie Brumley released an episode about changing the meaning we attach to experiences and how those meanings shape the stories, emotions, and patterns we repeat.

But in this episode, she goes deeper.

Because meanings don’t just shape thoughts.
They shape the emotional and nervous system baseline we live from.

Through an adoptee lens, Julie explores three concepts she first learned from mentor Kelly Brock:

• The Law of Vibration
• The Law of Attraction
• The Law of Assumption

Not from a “just think positive” perspective… and not from a place of blame.

This conversation is about understanding how the body learns associations long before we have words, and how those practiced associations quietly shape what feels safe, familiar, expected, and possible.

Julie explains why adoptees often struggle with:

• hypervigilance
• fear of rejection
• emotional guarding
• hyper-independence
• difficulty receiving love or rest

…even when they consciously desire connection, peace, and belonging.

She also shares a gentle somatic exercise to help listeners begin loosening old meanings and creating space for new experiences in the nervous system.

Because healing isn’t just cognitive.

It’s nervous system work.

And changing the meaning changes the signal your body is broadcasting.

Keywords

adoption, adoptee healing, nervous system, trauma, somatic healing, hypervigilance, attachment, identity, emotional patterns, belonging, trauma responses, embodiment

Key Topics

• Why meanings shape nervous system patterns
• The Law of Vibration through an adoptee lens
• Practiced emotional states vs. conscious desires
• Why adoptees often anticipate abandonment or rejection
• Familiar pain vs. unfamiliar safety
• The Law of Attraction as emotional familiarity
• How assumptions become identity over time
• Hypervigilance, over-functioning, and emotional guarding
• Releasing old meanings gently through somatic awareness
• Building new nervous system experiences through safety and openness

Key Takeaways

• Your nervous system learned these meanings for a reason
• Familiar does not always mean healthy
• The body often broadcasts practiced associations, not conscious desires
• Healing is not just insight - it’s repeated safe experiences
• Survival meanings are not always ultimate truth
• Awareness allows you to interrupt old cycles
• “That makes sense” is often more healing than “How do I fix this?”
• Changing the meaning changes what becomes possible

Chapters

00:00 – Why meanings matter so much
02:21 – The Law of Vibration and nervous system signals
06:53 – Why adoptees struggle with stillness, visibility, and safety
09:20 – The Law of Attraction and emotional familiarity
11:44 – The Law of Assumption and identity formation
14:05 – Guided somatic integration practice
15:34 – Julie’s personal example around money and safety
18:29 – Why awareness changes the nervous system
20:36 – Revelation LIVE, retreat updates, and closing reflections

Closing Reflection

Your body adapted around what it experienced.

Not because something is wrong with you…
but because your nervous system learned what it believed it had to do to survive.

And maybe healing begins the moment you stop asking:

“What’s wrong with me?”

…and start asking:

“What meaning has my body been carrying?”

Website

Instagram: @juliebrumley_

Facebook: julierasbrum

TikTok: @juliebrumley_

Click to Join My Free Adoptee Facebook Group

You Tube: @julie_brumley

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hi y'all, I'm Julie. I'm a trauma-informed adoptee coach and somatic healing guide. After overcoming deep abandonment wounds, I now help adult adoptees move from feeling lost and disconnected to experiencing profound self-belonging. I know what it is like to carry the weight of abandonment, to feel stuck in patterns of longing, adapting, and searching for belonging. To have tried every healing modality available and come up empty. My own healing has taught me this. The answers aren't out there. They're buried within me. And I'm here to guide you home to yourself. The Resilience Project Podcast brings voice, visibility, and validation to the parts of adoption society rarely names, but all of us feel. Through an trauma-informed somatic lens, I explore the lived experiences of the entire adoption constellation with a tender emphasis on the adopte experience. This podcast goes beyond storytelling into soul telling. It offers embodied insight, compassionate education, and a path towards awareness, hope, and strength. Each episode invites listeners to understand adoption more deeply, not just with the mind, but with the nervous system, and to reconnect with the truth, identity, and belonging that were always yours to come home to. Welcome. Welcome back, everybody, to the podcast. A few weeks ago, I released an episode called How to Change the Meaning You Attach to Things and Break Old Patterns. And in that episode, we talked about something really important. That so often we think we are reacting to what's happening right now when in reality we are reacting to what we think is going to happen based upon what's already happened before. We talked about how old meanings create old stories, which create old emotions, and then that creates repeated experiences. And after releasing that episode, I realized something. I don't think I fully explained why those meanings matter so much. Because meanings don't just shape thoughts, they shape the emotional and nervous system baseline we live from, especially for us adopted people, because many of our meanings were formed before we even had words, before language, before logic, before conscious memory. I know I say that a lot, and I will not stop saying it. I think it's very important for us to understand. So today I want to go deeper into the nervous system side of this. And I want to talk about three laws that are universal that I first heard from my mentor, Kelly Brock, who was on the podcast last week. And she helped me understand these in a completely different way. I want to bring them to you from an adopt-D lens, the law of vibration, the law of attraction, the law of assumption, but not just from a let's think positive perspective, and definitely not from a place of blame. You will see what I mean. This is not you created your own trauma. This is about understanding how the body learns associations and how those associations quietly shape what feels familiar, expected, safe, and possible. Because healing isn't just cognitive. It's not all about insight, it's not all about knowledge. And changing the meaning isn't just mental either. It's nervous system work. So let's get into it. Law number one is the law of vibration. So your nervous system is always broadcasting a signal. The law of vibration says everything carries a frequency, including your body, your emotions, your expectations, your nervous system. And what's important to understand is your frequency is not just what you consciously want, it's what your body has practiced. And when we talk about vibration, it's important to know that everything is made up of what is called quanta, tiny energetic particles constantly moving and vibrating. When we talk about this, it means even though we experience ourselves as solid, fixed people moving through a solid world, underneath it all, our bodies are actually living energetic systems constantly responding to and interacting with our environment. So for us adopted people, this matters because our nervous system learned very early how to interpret safety, connection, separation, belonging, and threat. So when we talk about frequency or vibration, we're not talking about pretending to be positive all the time, like I said in the intro. We're talking about the emotional and nervous system state your body has practiced living in. For example, if an adoptee's body learned early that connection could disappear, which most of us did, our systems may unconsciously live in hypervigilance, anticipation, hyper-awareness, or self-protection, all of those trauma states. Not because they consciously choose it. We didn't consciously choose this, but because our bodies adapted around what it experienced. So even when life looks calm externally, the body may still be vibrating with fear of loss, fear of rejection, urgency, hyperindependence, hypervigilance, like I said before, emotional guarding, afraid to share our emotions because of how they will be received, overfunctioning. This is definitely what I experienced. And over time, those emotional states became familiar internal frequencies. Not your identity, not your fault, just practiced nervous system patterns. That's why what I said before and have said many times really truly matters here. That's why healing is not only cognitive for us. Because you can intellectually understand I am loved, you can intellectually understand I belong or I am safe now, intellectually. But if the body has not yet experienced those things consistently enough to believe them, the nervous system may still be broadcasting that signal of protection instead of openness. And this is where changing the meaning becomes powerful. Because when the body begins attaching new meanings to experiences, when conflict no longer automatically means abandonment, when stillness no longer means danger or that it's unsafe. I mean, that was so much the message that my body had. I could not be still. This is why we can deeply want closeness while simultaneously being terrified of it, or crave peace while feeling unsafe when slowing down. But the nervous system is not broadcasting your wishes, it's often broadcasting your practiced associations that I talked about a few weeks ago. And practice associations become emotional frequencies that signal your broadcasting. The examples are people leave. I'm too much. Conflict means disconnection, or if I need too much, I'll lose them, or being myself isn't safe, or I'm defective, or I shouldn't exist. All those meanings create emotional states like hypervigilance, hyperindependence, anxiety, shutdown, overfunctioning. Not because something is wrong with you, but because the body learned to survive that way. Law number two, the law of attraction. We often recreate what feels familiar. I have said it so many times. I said it last week with Kelly, that our nervous system is way more comfortable with a familiar hell than it is with an unfamiliar heaven. So this is where we can misunderstand these laws and accidentally begin to shame ourselves again. The law of attraction can be simplified to you attract what you think. However, that is incomplete. More accurately, we tend to recreate what feels emotionally familiar. And familiar, like I just described, doesn't always mean healthy. For example, if your nervous system associates love with inconsistency, consistent love may actually feel uncomfortable at first. If your body associates connection with eventual disappointment, you may unconsciously anticipate loss even inside safe relationships. If your body associates being authentically you with judgment, being seen may activate fear even when people are loving. So the nervous system starts reacting to anticipated pain before pain even happens. That anticipation becomes the emotional baseline, not because we manifested badly. And over time, people can unintentionally recreate those familiar emotional realities because the body keeps scanning for evidence of the old meaning. But because the nervous system is trying to predict and prepare, this is why awareness matters so much. Because once you notice the association, you can begin interrupting the cycle. Hey, if you're listening to this podcast episode and finding yourself thinking, wow, this explains so much, I want to personally invite you into my next Revelation Live experience starting Monday, May 25th. This is a gentle adoptee-centered seven-day experience where we begin exploring the patterns, beliefs, and survival responses many of us have carried for years through the lens of self-awareness, somatic reflections, and belonging. You'll receive daily teachings, guided reflections, and access to our private community so you don't have to do this work alone. Because healing doesn't begin by fixing yourself, it begins by finally understanding yourself. You can find the link to join in the show notes. Law number three is the law of assumption. Meanings practiced long enough become identity. So this law of assumption says what we repeatedly assume to be true shapes the way we experience reality. But assumptions usually begin as meanings, and meanings repeated over time start feeling like facts. Examples are I always get left. I've mentioned these before. I'm going to repeat them again. I have to do everything alone. People eventually will pull away. Stillness or rest feels unsafe. I'm hard to love, or I'm a burden. At some point, these stop feeling like thoughts and start feeling like identity. And this is where our healing becomes so sacred, y'all, because many of us have spent years living inside assumptions our nervous system created in order to survive the early rupture and severance that we experienced. But survival meanings are not always ultimate truth. And changing the meaning is not pretending painful things didn't happen. It's allowing the body to experience another reality may also be possible. So maybe it shifts to something like conflict doesn't always equal abandonment. Or needing people doesn't make you weak. Or maybe it's something like rest or stillness doesn't mean I'm failing or not being productive enough. Maybe it's authenticity doesn't always lead to rejection. Or love can stay, or connection can be repaired. That's how assumptions slowly begin changing, not through force, through repeated, safe experiences. So let's try to embody this, y'all. I'd like to invite you to place a hand over your heart. And if you're watching on YouTube, you'll notice that I'm doing the same thing with you. And I'd like for you to close your eyes if that feels comfortable for you.

SPEAKER_00 16:39

And take a deep breath in through your nose. Inside out.

SPEAKER_01 16:49

Try to go longer than the inhale. What you're doing when you do that is actually triggering the parasympathetic nervous system into rest, into digest, into regulation. Let's do a couple more of those. Deep breath in through your nose.

SPEAKER_00 17:10

Inside out. And one more deep breath in through your nose. Inside out.

SPEAKER_01 17:31

And I'd like you to notice, if possible, what meaning has your body been carrying that no longer feels supportive to who you are becoming? As you're sitting here present with your body, just notice what surfaces without judgment. Just be curious. What meaning has your body been carrying that no longer feels supportive to who you are becoming? I'm going to share mine. Currently, I am planning for a retreat. And I am holding the funds of those who have registered. And when I first saw those funds come into my account, immediately my body started responding, becoming anxious. And I believed that the phrase that kept going through my head was, I'm bad with money, I won't be able to manage this. Those things started happening. And I remember thinking to myself, where is this coming from? It was me beginning to notice that association. My body has been carrying this, and this is no longer supportive for whom I'm becoming. This isn't my truth. So noticing how that registered in my body, like I described, my heart started beating faster. I felt a lot of anxiety. What would it feel like? Like to invite you to close your eyes for a moment and follow me along with this. What would it feel like to loosen your grip on that meaning, even slightly? What if I were able to say to myself, I am learning that I am not bad with money? That I can actually hold funds and see them as an addition to my life rather than something that feels unsafe. What does my body do then? I can notice a settling in my shoulders, my heart slows a little bit. And sometimes our bodies will call BS on those things. And that's when you change the wording. But the reminder is we're not forcing this, we're not trying to be perfect, we're just trying to be open to a new meaning and teach our nervous system a new way to hold this meeting gently. We are teaching it new meanings for a reason. We're letting it know that it's allowed to experience something new, even if it's only 1% less reactive. As you begin to do that, your body begins to realize it doesn't need to crave that familiar hell anymore. That it can really crave the unfamiliar heaven that it so desperately desires, but has been protecting you from for so many years. Let's take a deep breath in together.

SPEAKER_00 20:30

Inside out.

SPEAKER_01 20:37

Remembering that when we do this practice, we are allowed to experience something new because changing the meaning changes that signal that we are broadcasting. And changing that signal changes what becomes possible. As you sit with this episode and what we've discussed, I really want you to remember something. Your nervous system learned these meanings for a reason. The hypervigilance, the overfunctioning, the fear of rejection, that anticipation of pain, the emotional guarding. None of that developed randomly. Your body adapted around what it experienced. And for us adopted people, especially, so many of those adaptations formed before we had words to explain any of it. So if something came up while listening today, I don't want your first response to be, how do I fix this? I want it to be that makes sense. Show yourself kindness because that awareness changes things. And when we begin attaching new meanings to experiences, when conflict no longer automatically means abandonment or stillness no longer automatically means lack of safety or That you won't be productive, or when being authentic with you no longer automatically means rejection. The nervous system slowly starts learning something new is possible. Again, not through force, not through perfection, but through repeated, safe experiences as you build your capacity through openness, through relationship with yourself and with others. That's what really this work is about. Changing the meaning changes the signal, and changing the signal changes what becomes possible, like I said before. I'm so glad you've been with me today. And if you'd like to explore this more or ask some questions, please feel free to DM me or even feel free to schedule a call to connect with me. I have included the link in the show notes. I have space available for calls if you want to learn more. And don't forget about Revelation Live. I know there was an ad in the middle, but don't forget about that. It's coming up in a few days on Monday, May 25th. And the retreat that is happening literally in a day, it's starting on Saturday. I'm really excited about that. Look forward to telling you more about that after it happens. But if you still want to come, please feel free to let us know. And I'll also include the link in the show notes as well. But as always, I'm available to chat about any of the things that resonated with you today. If you feel so led to review, give me a five-star review. I would love that. Or even just comment on how the podcast has helped you. Please do that so more can see it and it can be listened to in more countries. The last time I looked, we were over 40 countries, and so that's so exciting. And I want to reach as many people as possible. So thank you so very much, and I'll see y'all next week. Happy Thursday. Peace.