Hello and welcome back to Line by Line Survivor Notes. This is Jon Murphy, psychiatric nurse practitioner. Welcome back let's jump into it. So I've been talking a little bit so far on this podcast about the therapeutic modality I've created. Survival modes and there's eight of 'em, and it's tied to a screener I developed. It's all based around nervous system responses and clinically it's been a major breakthrough. A lot of really complex patients I can understand and help individually.
It's just been tremendous. I'm looking forward to discussing it more as I collect data and build the screener out in a more sophisticated way to collect data and hopefully screen some of you guys out there and figure out what survival role you're in. But today I wanted to just kind of pull back and maybe get a little bit broader and just talk about emotions. And even though I started psychiatry, psychology, what have you, patient care when I was 23, I'm now 40.
It wasn't until just a few short years ago that I absorbed a new idea and I really started to live by it. And that is all emotions are normal. Yes. You've heard that, right? Lemme say it again. All emotions are normal. In a world where we just had this second movie of this Inside Out franchise, Disney, Pixar, I haven't seen it, but many of my patients tell me I should and I ought to, and I understand the basic concept.
And that being a theme in the mainstream culture, tells us we've come a long way. However, with that being said, I think that it's a lot easier said than done, and many clinicians like I once did, can have confusing beliefs. 'cause where do we learn about our emotions? Well, where do we learn about anything? As we grow and survive? We're around a group of people. Usually that group of people is our community or family, our attachment figures.
Be it mother, father, whomever, the other adults that are around, the other humans that are around. We need to develop bonds in order to survive for our nervous system to calm down and feel safe. We need to observe through our lived experience what we see, what we hear, what we feel and our body interprets it. Through this input, we react and respond accordingly. Either an environment is for the most part, predictable and we find our place in it. Can we be vulnerable?
Is it safe to remain immature? Is it safe to let our guard down? And as we do so, are we learning based on the responsiveness of the people that are taking care of us? Do we have to react naturally due to an environment where emotional safety of children is not prioritized or maybe even physical safety? However, an interesting duality presents itself culturally where many people, myself included for most of my life, would say, oh, I'm not traumatized, or I wasn't abused. I don't have abuse.
And the interesting thing there is we can have societally parents and there can be families that really do on paper look great. Parents that are really trying their best. In their heart of hearts, they really want to succeed. We don't have to be quote unquote, toxic to be affected for us to experience the fallout of an unsafe childhood. When I say unsafe, what do I mean?
Well, it's we, the child, the one that would do best remaining dependent, we cannot do so effectively in accordance with our developmental age. In other words, we're not able to be afforded with the opportunity to embrace immaturity, physical, emotional otherwise, or just basically be kids. So we have to adapt, we have to learn, and we do that. We do that very well. And it's all to remain dependent on other people, and we grow and we become adults.
And then now as an adult, the very confusing change, the very interesting change, the very culturally novel idea that when we're mature, we are aligned and we'll do best by understanding what our emotions tell us. However, that isn't always the case if we're in a childhood. Where emotions are internalized and everything on the external looks perfectly fine. These are some of my most tortured patients.
No physical abuse, no sexual abuse, nothing on the surface, just quietly internalizing because as adults there's a major cognitive dissonance. We've been living life a certain way on autopilot and then suddenly drastically. Something changes. We feel stressed, we feel anxiety. We're overthinking. We feel like we're gonna pop. We gaslight ourselves. We don't understand or distracted, whatever it is the dissonance means what we observe and what we feel are two different things.
So we feel one thing, but we look out in the world and we see other people, environments, social environments, and otherwise. And those environments tell us you're wrong. But what about this feeling? So this incongruence, I would say is relative to the amount of distress a patient has. Some of the most distressed patients I have, you know, they've already figured out their life. They survived. Whatever they've been through, they're kind of chugging along doing their thing.
When all of a sudden, boom, something hits different, oh my gosh, heart starts racing. One patient of mine outta nowhere became extremely jealous and didn't understand where this was coming from. So we don't always need to be aware of these things, but this incongruence, what does our body tell us versus what do we experience? All emotions are normal. Even anger, even disgust, even silliness. Even sadness. All of those emotions are normal.
The limbic system, the activation, the felt emotional experience, it's all normal. Well, what's not normal? Behavior. We can behave in an unsafe way. We can take that input and not know what to do with it. Have an inability to process it, internalize it, whatever we do with that emotional stuff. Usually as a byproduct of what we had to do in the group environment growing up. So there we are.
Regardless of what your parents said or didn't say or what was going on, and doesn't mean anyone is a bad guy. Your parents can still quote unquote, do the best they can. They did the best they could, whatever. It's, we don't need to go there. We don't need to condemn anyone. This doesn't mean anyone is wrong or bad. Push all that immediate stuff outta your head and just understand there's something inside that we're not in control of that.
And the stronger it is, the more associated it is with a previous adaptation, uh, oh, reading my emotions, I'm scared, or I'm overthinking, or whatever it is. The first step is gonna be understanding our physiological responses, fight and flight, increased heart rate, sweating, whatever those signs are. Are we holding tension? If we're stressed, that's a survival response. We release stress as a survival response physiologically to protect ourselves.
We want this cortisol reaction to take place when we're actually fighting a gorilla or whatever it is. Being attacked. It's there for a very good reason, but it's not meant to be activated in the boardroom or hanging out with a partner or just walking down the street. That is the part that we need to understand is not normal. Meaning if it continues, it will have health effects, lifestyle effects. The cortisol physiologically will take a major toll on us.
Well, I think that's a good place to end for today, I just wanted to give a quick overview about emotions that they're normal, what that means as adults. If I'm talking to someone over the age of 21, you're an adult.
If you're not, there's more context to consider, but anyone over the age of 21, we're gonna do the best when we're aligned, where we can take that input our body tells us and integrate it into our reality, and eventually in time become informed by it, to allow us to live in alignment with what we feel and to have what we think, support that. This change that we can make ultimately through lived experience will feel better. We will trust it when we live it, and we will feel better.
And for now, until next time, this is Jon Murphy, nurse practitioner. Check out my podcast, my blog. That's my focus path.com. Until next time, we'll see you later.