Hello, my name is Jon Murphy. I'm a psychiatric nurse practitioner, and this is Survivor Notes brought to you by Focus Path www.focuspath.com. Well, it's nice to talk to y'all and introduce myself and introduce this podcast, which is an opportunity for me to freeform and in this creative stream of consciousness that I find very beneficial. There's so much to talk about, so I gotta make it a little bit clear so I don't go off on this huge tangent.
I think survival is probably the best frame of reference. 'cause that's what we do. We survive. If you're listening to me, you have survived. Congratulations So. We know humans. It's a story of survival. Cue the music. So we're surviving, but are we thriving? What do you think? Well, what's the difference? Maybe we just start there. What's the difference between surviving and thriving? Surviving means reacting. It means we can't be at rest. It means we need to preserve ourselves.
We need to act impulsively, automatically. It's a stress response. Underlying fear, there's a threat. What is the nature of the threat? So we have to think about this. We have to establish our safety mentally, physically, spiritually. Where are we? And most importantly. And I think this is the point that is most often left out why I feel it is so necessary for me to share my perspective. Group psychology. We are creatures that are social.
We rely on each other to determine our safety and as we are developing, whether it's infancy. Childhood or adolescence. We look to our family, our attachment figures, the group context we have to mold into the group and groups behave differently. Whenever there's more than two people, we got ourselves a group and a group behaves differently. There's things that are true about groups. Number one, groups are always dumber than the individual groups behave differently.
We understand our role within the group. Our role within the group will help us understand. The reactions and responses as we navigate the group, if we seek to understand our place within the group, but we don't get to choose the group in which we're born into, and nevertheless, what we do as humans, we adapt. So that's a good starting point. How do we adapt? And why do we adapt?
Well, we can adapt in many ways, and I think the differences in adaptation can tell me a lot about what is going to be the threat for each individual person that I see that I engage in medication management or psychotherapy. So we think about this and we're born into an environment we're reflexive, we don't even know we're here. And yet we're doing things to preserve our safety, to maintain the bond. We experience life and we need information. The information is, can I let my guard down?
Can I rest? What things that are unfolding are they unfolding in a predictable manner? Predictable, or be reinforced by similar experiences as we engage our behavior as we naturally play out our abilities. We practice and rehearse our abilities, and we need the group and our attachment figures to help us along the way. It doesn't always work out so perfectly. So what do we do? Well, we're gonna adapt. We're gonna find a way.
We're gonna do what we need to do to preserve the bond if we're gonna not pay attention to what's going on around us so much, or. Get in our head and overthink and come to some conclusion that makes us feel good at the time. Or maybe we internalize our emotions, shut them down, go to another place we, you know, find enjoyment and worthiness in other areas. That's all good and fine, and that's great to do.
It's great that we did it whatever we did because we did it and it's over, and now we're here and what have we been through? So the things that we did then is good. Because we had to get through. We had to grow. We had to remain dependent. Preserving these bonds, they're outside of us. Interpersonal group dynamics are more important than individual. There's a difference between adults and children. When we look at adults, an adult doesn't require biologically the same needs.
What does an adult need now? We're 21 years old. What have you? We require alignment. We need to feel, we need to understand what we're going through. We need to use this information, the sensory input. What are we comfortable with? What does our nervous system tell us automatically? If as children we're not given the understanding of what these emotions are, maybe we shut them off. There's gonna be a little bit of a system update.
We need to update the software and that can be tricky for many, but ultimately we do all these things to get to the point we're an adult, so we have to remember what we've been through to understand what we're going through and develop a new way of doing things. Not because the old way is wrong or bad, but because there's a different way now, a better way now. So look inside, stabilize, tolerate, normalize. Internalize. We wanna look inward, not in our mind. We wanna look to our body.
What do we feel? What do we remember, what do we know, align, and then use that information to navigate the environment. We have to navigate the environment relative to what our body tells us. If we're stressed out and anxious. Usually there's a boundary issue because group dynamics, they're so important to survival, and our nervous system really understands. We don't want to be threatened again. So if we're told in groups to just be quiet or be the scapegoat, that's what we'll do.
So even as we're drawing awareness, we just have to remember. Everything it used to be, it's not anymore. The old way is do it now and do it quickly. We feel stressed and we have to think about it, and we think about it and we feel better. We solve the problem, we just move on. We don't think about it so much and we do it really quickly and it works really well. And now as adults, it just doesn't hit the same.
We get a sense that like it used to work, maybe we don't have the same energy, it's because we don't have the same needs. So it's understanding. That what we're going through now is different than what we went through then. We have to understand that we don't need to do anything. What we need to do has already been done. We grew, we survived. We remained dependent. We had to remain in a situation that was not optimal, but we do this to survive and we did it well.
So now understanding if we feel like we need. Unless there's a bear attacking us or something actually violent, we don't. When we know what to do with the adult part of our brain, it will be "aha". We won't have to reach for it. We won't have to overthink for it. We won't have to fight for it. So it's letting go of the need to know, letting go of the need to do and act, and instead becoming comfortable with being alone. Or doing something different.
Now, this is a little bit of a variation person to person. In fact, I think there's about eight rough categories that I can look at. It's gonna tell us a bit about how people, what's their path to healing as an adult, and I'll get into that in the future. I'll get into the survivor roles and the survivor types. But for now, I think that's a good introduction to Survivor Notes line by line. Once again, this is Jon Murphy, psychiatric nurse practitioner. We'll see you next time.