Emotional Neglect

So I'm really excited to dive into this topic of emotional neglect, how it impacts our nervous system and what we can do to start healing the patterns caused by emotional neglect in our nervous system. Welcome to Trauma Rewired. I'm Elizabeth Christof, founder of Brainbased.com comma, a website that teaches you how to create resilience and re pattern your nervous system

for new outcomes and new experiences. And I'm Jennifer Wallace, a neurosomatic psychedelic integration and preparation guide bridging the two incredible modalities of nervous system health and sacred plant medicine experiences. Have you poured your energy into meditation, mindfulness, and mindset practices trying to find relief from anxiety? But despite your efforts, you still experience

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From noon to 03:00 p.m. central time. There's a workshop replay available and also a live Q and A with Matt. It's interesting to hear you say that this is the more overlooked AcE score, because I felt that within myself, honestly, like, I had, it was really hard for me to come to terms that this was one of my Ace scores. Like, I did not want to feel this in my body, and I did not want to know this in my cognitive mind. And it was really hard for me to accept that it was. I can know how

much my mom and dad love me. Like, I know that. And I have the recent experience of, my parents are selling our family home. So I've just gone home to go through all my childhood life. And it was really. It was really jarring to see an experience that they were creating for me and that I was having a totally different experience. And part of the gap is the emotional neglect. Yeah, I think emotional

neglect, it really is. It's like the overlooked a score, because one acknowledging it, I feel like there's a lot of guilt and like you were talking about, like, you don't want to acknowledge it, you don't want to put more on your parents. And then also, too, it's so much more subtle, right. Than physical or sexual abuse. And so a lot of times people can think, like, I had a really good childhood. All of my needs were met. Nothing like what would classically be described as, like, big t trauma

happened to me. Why are all these things showing up? And there isn't a component of emotional neglect and it is, in fact, an ace score. Yeah, no, I'm really excited too. Like, and I really feel like if there is a big t trauma, like sexual trauma outside of the home or even in the familiar home, when there is attunement between the primary caregiver and the person experiencing that, the young one developing, that you could

probably survive it, for sure. We can table that. I think we need to circle back and dive deep into that because it's a really important component. This conversation is so big today that I'm actually wearing an ab belt so that I can process this in real time. You know, back to what we were saying in the introduction about the guilt. Because, like I said, understanding the dichotomy of where I came from and then also the understanding of, like, if no one's taught something, how can they

teach it? How can they be it? This is not only a big conversation today, but it's one of the harder ones. And I mean that in the sense of the experience and talking about it comes with a lot of emotion. And it's really being on the other side and being in healthy relationship that allows for me to be in this conversation and hold all of the truths in my nervous system. Because the truth is I also feel like the need to defend the love that I also share with my

primaries with my parents. Yeah, yeah. It's a lot to think about. So just backing up, if someone's listening to this, you may not even understand, like, what do we mean when we're talking about emotional neglect? And it's really defined as a relationship pattern where an individual's needs are consistently disregarded, disregarded, ignored, invalidated or unappreciated by a significant other. And

in terms of in our childhood is being an ACE score. It is one of the criteria for having an adverse childhood experience that then later has impacts on your health. And in the ACE study, they define emotional neglect as often having a feeling that no one in your family loves you or thinks you're important or special that your family is not looking out for each other. There's no feeling of closeness, or you don't feel supported by your family. It hits home so hard. That is exactly how I felt my

whole life. I mean, really struggled to fit in. And a lot of times I would always say to myself, like, they don't understand me, they don't know who I am. And we've talked so many times before on here about the endless channels of communication between a mother and a child or the primary caregiver, and that how much. This also includes emotional states that are being communicated through the nervous system. Open lines of communication allow for us to feel

each other from the inside out. So in that feeling, you know, when your primary caregiver's nervous system, your parents nervous systems, are disconnected from yours, we feel that. And us feeling that disconnect leads to really high stress states in the body. The emotional state transfers happen so very quickly and particularly in our early development. We feel their stress, we feel their joy, we feel

everything that is happening. And when we're such little bodies, particularly those 1st 18 months, we don't have another way to emotionally regulate. And so from my own experience, I was self taught, as I'm sure my mom was self taught. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing, right? We've had a bunch of episodes that relate to this. So we talked about attunement and the importance of a caregiver to be able to attune to

their child. And then we also just had the recent episode with Doctor Perry Nicholson talking about the importance of being able to process and regulate emotions to maintain an optimal, healthy state of our nervous system. But our society still really doesn't encourage emotional expression. And so a lot of times, our caregivers don't have those skills themselves. They have a lot of repressed emotions. They have never had the experience of healthy grieving or

healthy expression of rage. And so we're modeling ourselves directly from somebody who also doesn't have that skill set. And little developing nervous systems are, as we've talked about many times on here, completely reliant upon their primary caregivers. To be able to process emotions and to regulate the skills for self regulation aren't there. And, you know, for me, it was a lot of emotional numbness. Like not even understanding how do I feel?

How do I process this? And that numbness led to massive states of shutdown. Like, when I think of myself in this emotional state, I see myself with, like if I was a wind up, just slowly, slowly slowly turning down and slowing slowing down. It's something that I'm still dealing with in my forties is that high parasympathetic shutdown as well as high cortisol and high stress states in the body at the same time. These are two very. Well, we know repressed

emotions are so dangerous in the body. This is what the Ace score, cumulatively, of course, adds up all of the stress. And into the higher your score goes, the more likely you are to go into chronic illness. But I think I got a little. Ahead of myself there. But what I wanted to say really, about that shutdown was that I always thought that it was me, it was my fault when things went the wrong way or when things got awry in the family dynamic and

something happened. I always thought it was my fault and it was sort of put on me that way. So it fueled shame, it fueled the inner critic so hard because it was always me. I am so bad. I am causing this and at the same time, not understanding. Like, no one taught me this and I did not understand that till a few years ago. Yeah, not only do we not see it from our primaries, but we don't see it in society, period. Right. For the most part.

And really, childhood emotional neglect can cause us in adulthood to avoid emotions altogether because we haven't developed the skills. And those emotions become really scary. And so we move very quickly into repressive outputs, right? So we'll experience anger and sometimes not even be aware that we have that anger going on in our body. We just go right into whatever repressive mechanism our brain and our nervous system are using to keep that emotion stuff down.

So it might be a maladaptive behavior using substance, binge eating. It might be a physical output like pain. We might start to feel a lot of pain that our brain and our body are generating as a distractive mechanism to keep us from experiencing, experiencing and being with the emotion. It could be a migraine. And so, yeah, for me too. Still, a lot of times I will have to experience an output first and then be like, oh, shoot, I'm experiencing this thing. What's going on? There must

be an emotion underneath. And then take the time to use my neuro tools and do my somatic practices to let that emotion come up because it's so deeply wired to just go right into the behavior or experience the protective output rather than. Than feeling safe with the emotion. Well, when you're not primed for connection and every time you are told or, you know, not not told verbally, but every time that you, it is put on you to be your regulator, to be your emotional

processor. You're just winging it. You have no template. And then when things don't go right, you know, that's an issue. But like those chronic states, they become well worn paths as to how we live our lives. And then we show up later on in relationships, and it's like, well, of course my attachment would be so disorganized and choosing partners who are emotionally unavailable, because that's what I know how to navigate. Yep, totally. I can't even navigate my own emotional

experience. And then it leads to these really big imbalances in, like we talked about in the episode about the empath and the narcissist, when we don't have those emotional regulation skills, we're maybe relying on other people, people's emotions, to feel and experience emotions or to emotionally regulate, or we

disconnect from them entirely. And so with emotional neglect, we can really end up, like, living our life with this big block between ourselves and our emotions, and we just don't feel like we're able to access our emotional world. And that's a bigger deal than I think sometimes people think it is, because so much of our health and our nervous system regulation depends on also being able to process and regulate around emotions. And you've really missed out on learning on how to identify

emotions. Name them, manage them, express them. Right. Like, when you start to work with people and they're like, I don't know what I'm feeling. I don't know how I feel about this. Describe the sensation. I don't know. It's like there's a wall there that they can't bust through. And then, as an adult, that also leads us to feeling disconnected from others, feeling really overwhelmed and confused when emotions are present, and not being able to really identify the sensations within ourselves.

These emotions are basic survival human needs. We need them. They impact our immune function, and they impact our brain development. So when you're talking about this wall, the wall stands in an emotional, say, the wallet has an emotional foundation to it. But then behind that, and in the concrete of that foundation, there's so much other interwoven experiences, and it gets

really hard. Like you said, finding myself in the behaviors, that's often when we're working with clients, like, we have to help them find themselves in their behaviors. So then you can kind of track it back a little bit. Definitely. Yeah, definitely. I mean, the best way to start to understand when there's an emotion behind something is to follow the dysregulation, follow the protective output, follow the behavior, and start to gradually begin to process what might be

going on underneath there. I think still, for a lot of people, it's hard to identify even that they might have had emotional neglect in their childhood because it's such a. It's so much more abstract than the other types of abuse that someone could experience. So I just want to go over a couple signs of emotional neglect from parents that maybe people could identify with so it could show up as indifference to a child, viewing or labeling the child as a burden, ignoring the child's

needs. If your parent has substance abuse, there's gonna be definitely an element of emotional neglect there because they are intoxicated or absent in that way. Apathy toward a child, blaming a child for their behavior, like putting a child's own behavior back on them, pretending the child doesn't exist. Parents that ice out the child or won't speak to them for times, and then also just if the parent isn't

around. Right? Like, if someone is not there, even if they don't mean to, we are going to be emotionally neglected because there's a physical absence of someone there to help us process and regulate emotions. Absolutely. I think the silent treatment and icing someone out is one of the most abusive forms of emotional neglect. To just pretend that the person doesn't even exist, it's to deny your existence. And it's so cruel. And I hear this one a lot

frequently with my clients. This is probably the one that I hear the most. And even in my own self, like, in when I can reflect on how I've lived and how I didn't understand how to process emotions, I can see how I've done that. Just in the total avoidance of not understanding how to set a boundary, how to have a hard conversation, or how to be vulnerable with someone and trust that person with my needs and my emotions. Like, I didn't really

grow up like that. And so to then find myself, like, in relationship, it's very scary to do that. And it's only been very, very recent to be able to have those hard conversations. Yeah, yeah, same as you. Like, I see this one a lot, and I've honestly been quite shocked because this is not one of my childhood experiences. My mom, I'm lucky, was really great at, like, communicating through conflict and always ensuring that, like, there was just never a time where she didn't speak to

me. But I've been really surprised as I've been working with people. This comes up a lot. Like, how many people's parents would go through days or even hours, but also sometimes days or like, weeks of not speaking to them, of literally shutting them out of their life, especially as a child. And that is really impactful. It will trigger an emotional flashback as an adult. If this is happening in your life now, as an adult, it will 100% trigger an

emotional flashback. And I think this kind of emotional neglect, it also drives hyper independence, particularly, I think, in a single child home. Oh, definitely. Because there is no one else. Definitely. I think so much of this can trigger that hyper independence. And the more isolation that we have developing, the more we learn that we have to rely on ourselves. And so if the parent is icing out or also just, like I said, not there, and you spend a lot of time alone, you learn that you have to

rely on yourself to be able to figure these things out. And most of the time, the strategies that we figure out as little kids to process and deal with this aren't always the healthiest. Right. It might look like self harm, binge eating, substance use, complete dissociation, deep repression of emotions, because we couldn't handle it all on our own. Well, the substance abuse could be even a trigger later from the binging of food. You know, I wasn't into drugs until I was,

well, 14, but at that point, I'm not a child. But not in early development. Not that it didn't stunt any of my brain development, because that's another real impact here, is that emotional neglect has consequences to your brain development. Yeah. So this isn't just getting shut out and having the silent treatment as a little person. It's no big deal. We're talking about your immune function and your brain development.

Yeah. Your hippocampal development, the way that you process and encode memories, the way that you can learn. And like I said, we have no template. We're just winging it. Winging it from a survival state. Yes.

Think about that. I think you brought up something a little bit ago that is so important, I think, to talk about as well, and that's that there is also a huge, like, compounding factor of when we have traditional big t trauma, something like sexual abuse or physical abuse or something that people would maybe more traditionally identify as a trauma. But we're in a home where we have caregivers that are attuned and available and can help us process our emotions and will stand up and protect

us, us as a child. And so we feel that sense of, like, I can take this problem to my caregiver and they will handle it for me. They will protect me, and all will be restored. That's very different in terms of the lasting impact of that trauma on a child's nervous system versus if you are, you experience that trauma and you also are living in an environment where you don't have a primary or an adult figure that's there to help protect you and also help you regulate and make sense of those

emotions. That patterning ends up being very different and really amplifies the dysregulation that occurs in the nervous system because of maybe the single event. I've seen it in a client or two. I've only seen it a couple of times where a client did know from an early age that there was early childhood sexual trauma. The parents knew, and she ends up. They end up to be pretty adjusted in

a different way. There's a different level of adjustment and growth that happens for someone who is seen and heard during that time of life, of that super high chronic stress versus a little one who's, like you said, went unattuned. It gets compounding. That's what I was the word I was looking for when I was thinking of that wall that you were talking

about. Like the emotional neglect. If that's at the foundation, the wall starts to build with these other ace scores around it, because it's very unlikely that emotional neglect would be your only one score. Yep. And then you have these big emotions from whatever the other trauma is. Right. And you don't have an environment that fosters the safe expression of those emotions. So they get repressed and continue to cause that deep dysregulation held in the body and then continue

to be retriggered very easily. And you also are more prone to develop a real hyper vigilance and self reliance, like you were talking about, of protecting yourself through looking for ways that you might be hurt in relationship. Lots of distrust, lots of just hyper vigilance around protecting yourself because there wasn't anyone else

there doing that. It's really interesting when I think about it with attachment in that style, too, and thinking about really so much comes to mind, in my mind is swirling cancer and gut dysfunction. And then I'm, like, seeing these faces of these men that I dated that were so unavailable to me. And we've said several times about this health outcome and emotional repression and ace scores both have

dangerous health outcomes attached to them. I'm going to pop a link in the show notes so that people can listen to our conversation on adverse childhood experiences, because we did record a conversation that's much more in depth about the study that Vincent Filetti did that we are not going to get into super deep today, but emotional neglect is one out of ten points that a person can score. One in every six people have a score of four.

That's my score. I'm a score of four. And what we know back to the poor health outcomes, every time your score goes up, you get a little bit higher, bigger percentages. Five out of ten of these ace scores are linked to the top ten causes of death in the US. We're talking heart stuff, talking lung stuff, we're talking cancers, combinations of all these things. Autoimmune. That's your experience from your a score. So

this is. It puts you at risk? Yeah. I think it's always worth reconnecting the dots between our emotional experience and our physical health outcomes, because there really isn't a way to separate that. And this is part of the foundational reason why Ace scores lead to substance abuse, truncated lifespan and disease states is because in addition to the general states of dysregulation, sometimes it's difficult to know if we have experienced emotional neglect. But you can,

again, like we were talking about, you can see it in your behaviors. And so if you're somebody who gets triggered by certain things really easily, like you experience a big reaction in your body to some of these things, you find yourself in a high stress state. You may have a background of emotional neglect. So if you find that you're often dysregulated or pushed into emotional flashback whenever you're around your parents, that's a pretty good sign. And it can be difficult to reengage in

family time. When you get really activated. If you feel ignored or like maybe even a little something, like someone's not paying attention to you and they're looking at their phone while you're talking, that could be a definite trigger. Left over from emotional neglect

in childhood. If you have a very difficult time experiencing conflict and are really adverse to moving into conversations where there's conflict, if you have a really difficult time needing help and asking for help and trusting others to support you, and if it's really difficult for you to be around someone else with strong emotions, if that makes you really uncomfortable, it feels really dysregulating to watch somebody else who can experience emotions, then those are all signs that

some of your patterning comes from that emotional neglect. What about, like, what would healthy emotional modeling look like so people could maybe distinguish the difference there? I've never experienced that. I mean, I've never experienced. I don't have a clue. Everything that I would be saying right now would just be reading out of textbook. I do not know what that would look like, but I know that,

that what we're talking about is secure attachment. Yeah. With healthy emotionally modeling, definitely it leads to secure attachment. I have a friend. It's not actually something. It's very rare to find people that can healthy, emotionally expressed. But I have a friend who has two young children, and her family was pretty stable, as far as I know from the outside. And I'll tell you, I used to be really uncomfortable around her for a lot of my life because

she is very emotional. Like, she'll talk to you and she'll just let herself cry. If something moves her to cry while she's talking to you in the same breath, she'll laugh, you know? And when she's angry, she'll emote in a way that is pretty exceptional. And it used to, honestly, it used to really bother me. Like, I couldn't handle being around her. And it was kind of like, why are you so emotional? Get it together. But now, now I know

more. And as I'm more comfortable with my emotions, I'm more comfortable being around her. And I watch her with her kids. And one, if they're upset, it doesn't bother her. Like, she doesn't get dysregulated by their being upset. She stays very calm and grounded, and she just allows them to have their emotional experience. And she's there to hug them or hold them if they want. But she also lets them do whatever they want to do to express and doesn't seem to be bothered by it.

And then she'll also allow herself to emote in front of them. You know, if she is feeling something and cries, there's no apologies for the tears. There's no, like, this is weird. It's just like, it's just part of being human. And I feel like those kids are having a very different experience of the emotional spectrum. And if something happens to them, a big t trauma, there's open lines of communication where those kids are going to go to her and her partner, if she has one, and they're going

to feel really comfortable saying, hey, something happened to me. Someone talked to me like this, or I feel this way in my body, and then the proper next things are going to happen. You know, I even thinking of, like, some of my friends that I, that do have kids and I look at the tired state that they're in also, and the extreme fatigue that mothers are under and particularly if they're single mothers. We both grew up with single mothers. That is a high stress state.

It really is. I was saying in the beginning, like, how can someone do better if they don't know? They can't teach you. And I'm not saying that maybe there are some people out there. You know, what we talk about here is on a spectrum. And so maybe there are people out there that have experienced extreme emotional neglect that was intentional.

Maybe we experienced it and it wasn't intentional. So. Right. We're looking at this on a spectrum, and we understand, under the lens of CPTSD that we're all having very different experiences as to how it was in our homes when we grew up, how it was in our caregiving situations, and that our experiences might be very different from yours. And so when we are talking about this, like, from where I stand now, I can say that

about, how can you do better if you don't know to do that? Because my experience was on the lighter end of the spectrum. I feel like even though it. It is one of my ace scores, and I can see as a reflection now that my mother did not have the tools, and she was under a lot of stress as a single mom. So I also just want there to be some grace out there. 100% with this ace score. Yeah, 100%. It's a tough one. Also raised by single mom who did an amazing

job and had to be gone a lot. And so, really, it was just emotional neglect and the lack of presence, rather than, like, her doing anything to intentionally neglect me. And, you know, we had a mother bring up a really great question in one of our neurosematic intelligence coaching classes the other day. And, you know, she was like, for those of us who are trying to heal generational trauma, it's really hard because sometimes I react.

Right. Being a single mom is really stressful, and I'm really trying to undo these patterns for my children. And sometimes I go into the old patterns. I go back to what I was taught. I have a survival response, and am I doing more harm to my children than good by being inconsistent like that? And I really think it's so important that we continue to have grace, especially, like, you know, we're not parents, so I don't ever want to try to

tell somebody how to do something that I have no experience with. But I do know that shame and inner critic is never helpful in terms of. Of growth and regulation. And so it's so important to have some grace. And I think that there's always great benefit to then just having a conversation with your kid, depending on what age they're at, but finding some way to kind of communicate with them. Yes, I was really stressed. I'm doing the best I can. This is a hard day for me.

I didn't mean to take this out on you. It's not personal. These things just happen sometimes in explaining to the child what's going on so that there is that open communication and they learn, like, it's also okay to be human and sometimes have a reaction. Yeah. And it's hard to understand that sometimes, even with something as low key abusive as, say, silent treatment. Right.

Someone knows when they are giving the silent treatment, you know, when you are doing that to someone and that energy makes it so hard to accept that it might not be your fault, that it might not be your fault. And it's really hard, too, when you are healing generational lines like this, you end up taking radical responsibility, knowing that they may, your primary may never understand the work that we are doing, the work that you are being called to, listening to this podcast and giving them

maybe that grace that we talked about a few minutes ago. It's important, I think also, too, in that vein, like, one of the consequences of experiencing emotional neglect can also be ending up being really hard on yourself. And so continuing to be really hard on yourself and on others is counterproductive to our own healing, because when our emotional needs aren't met, they're neglected. We miss out on that felt sense of being held,

not only physically, but emotionally. And like at the level of our nervous system and our emotional expression. Then we miss out also, too, on learning a lot of the nuances of emotions and the duality of emotions. Like, I can be afraid and also be excited. I can feel grief and also see the possibility for hope and change and newness. Everything becomes really black and white because those subtleties of emotional experience just

aren't taught. And then that leads in turn to, I think, the way that we think about ourselves and our behavior as also being really black and white, thinking and setting these really unrealistic standards for ourselves. And so we can end up having a very harsh inner critic and being very, very hard on ourselves. Well, I think that emotional numbness is just a lot of muddiness. It's a muddy, because you don't know, like, it was so hard for me to even

understand. What is joy? What do I like about pleasure? What does connection mean for me? What is the difference between anger and rage? What is shame? What is grief? What is sadness? Like what are in the spectrum of human emotions? It was black and white because there wasn't a lot to go on. It was happy or sad. It was like, I'm showing up or I'm shut down. There wasn't a lot to go on, and it wasn't

modeled. And then, because of the emotional distance and neglect, it was not being caught that I was shutting down further and further and further and further because the distance in the nervous system was already created so I could go further, deeper into my own nervous system, shutting down further and further. But at some point, the gap of my shutdown gets missed because it's just another apple dropping,

basically. Do you know? Does that make sense? Yes. Yeah. I think that that muddiness that you were talking about, I mean, gosh, it took me years to be able to feel anything. It was either like I was totally numb or I had a giant outburst. You know, like, sometimes it would come bubbling over in this big emotional outburst in a way that. But probably I didn't want it to, or it would just be nothing. And even, like, when I started somatic practices or I was doing

eft, I would hit a wall with it. A lot of times, we would refer to that in eft as a smokescreen, something that, you know, my subconscious doesn't want me to feel or see it. And it would be like, what do I feel? What are the sensations? I'd be trying to say it out loud, and it was just nothing, nothing, nothing. Over and over and over again. And now I can access that stuff pretty well through somatic practices

and eft. But in just, like, regular day to day life, I still have to really make time to pause and sit and breathe and be intentional about feeling that, because it is not, like, second nature for me to feel things. It's much more likely that I'll just go into repressing and distracting, and I still have to really slow down and, like, work a little bit to feel things. I'm still sometimes unclear about what I'm even feeling. Yeah, I really only just started to feel things

clearly. And those repressed emotions, they are protective. They become protective at some point. Like, you repress to survive, but the survival mechanism starts to turn against you. The protection starts to. The words that are coming to mind are, like, it starts to kill you. It starts to come after you in your body, you know, those clogged channels of emotional repression. Like, yes, it's protective, and also it will lead to these

very depleted states. And when we go into one of these f trauma responses, this is another one of these insidious consequences of emotional neglect is because when you're in a trauma response, your body shuts down in other places. So this is why later on in life, we deal with gut function stuff. We deal with a system that's not been turned on back to the massive shutdown states I was talking about earlier. That became a well worn path. High parasympathetic

states, high doses of cortisol, high doses of stress chemicals. And so I don't need my digestive system, there's certain breathing patterns I don't need, like there's so much that your body. So you're, you're harming. The protection becomes. What's the word that I'm looking for? The protection becomes the threat. Yes, that's it exactly. The protection

becomes harmful and threatening. Because it's just like stress suppressing an emotion is the same concept of like we need a little bit of stress to take action to cause adaptation. And we're having that stress response of adrenaline and cortisol and mobilizing energy in order to protect us. But when it gets turned on all of the time and it becomes chronic, then it is

damaging. And it's the same like in that moment of childhood, maybe those emotions were really too big and too dysregulating and we didn't have a safe place to process it. So the repression or the dissociation was the most adaptive thing in that moment to ensure our survival. However, when that becomes the well worn path and we're constantly moving into repression, constantly moving into dissociation, now, that's problematic. It's chronic. It's chronic dissociation, it's

chronic repression. And that's creating consequences for our health that are not good. But again, our survival mind lives in the present moment and it's not thinking about those long term consequences. And that response is patterned to occur frequently and rapidly over and over again, becoming chronic. And then we experience the outcomes that we do not want. And then we get into the patterns more and more. Right? Like your brain will choose a familiar hell over an unfamiliar heaven every. That's

right. And you will find this emotional neglect like I was talking about, emotionally unavailable partners. Like you will find it in your partnerships, in your friendships. You can look everywhere at your attachments and see how am I being fulfilled in my relationships? What's the energy exchange in these relationships? Is there a balance here? What other nervous system I dealing with? And you can just look around at what your experience is like right now and see,

but reflect then on your emotional. What the pattern is. Yeah. What's your pattern in relationship? Well, it's exactly that. It's the devil you know, versus the devil you don't. And remembering that our brains are incredibly predictive and really rely on that prediction for our survival, so sometimes we might cognitively know. I do not want to continue this relationship pattern. I don't want to keep perpetuating this dynamic with other people.

And yet, at the level of our survival mind, a brainstem DeepMind, our brain knows that we have ways to survive that situation. Like, it's like, I know how to handle this. Even if some of those survival mechanisms are kind of maladaptive and harmful to our long term health. It's like, okay, well, I have survived, survived this so far. I know when I'm in something with these dynamics, I can rely on a, b, c, and d to get through this. In the other situation, I don't know. I just don't know

what it's going to be like. I don't have a well worn survival path laid out for that. And so, at the level of our survival mind, it actually is more threatening to go with what's unknown because it doesn't have a predictive plan in place to ensure survival. Something's coming up for me around boundaries and around the absence. Let's talk early development under eight.

If a nervous system, a young, developing nervous system is being developed with a primary who is dissociated and emotionally neglectful, this is what's happening for me. There's like a bound. There's an energetic boundary there of distance, right? There's like, at the same time, there's no boundary at all. And the role of the parent at such a young age is to have no boundary, right? And at the same time, there's this huge boundary wall of, like, you don't feel me, you don't see me.

And then we move into our adult lives, and no boundary. Boundaries are the hardest thing for. I mean, we're going to get into emotional. But boundaries continue to be a conversation on this podcast in our work with clients. The scenario you were describing just then, like, was my childhood. And I have set a boundary with my mother not to listen to this podcast. So I'm gonna go ahead and talk about it for a minute here, because I also caveat. Love the shit out

of my mother and think she did an amazing job. 100. 100. Both of them always want to put that out there. Both of our moms are awesome, but. She was my mom. Dissociation is a well worn path for my mom, who experienced a tremendous amount of stress, especially in my early childhood, in an abusive relationship, you know, had to then raise me as a single mom. And there was just a lot there. And so our boundaries were both very enmeshed. Like, she never had any hard

boundaries with me about, like, anything. Like, I never had a curfew. I never had. It was always like, you know, she would give me whatever money she had, she would. If I woke up at, like, two in the morning at ten years old and wanted to go to IhOP, she's taking me to IhOP. And there was, like, an emotional boundary of her not being able to handle the stress of, like, my tantrums and my big emotions, because when I expressed, she would disconnect, she would dissociate, the stress level

was too high. And it's almost like she was always trying to reconnect us through this, like, constant giving of her whatever she had to give. But she also didn't have the capability to stay present. And that does. It just leads to this really confused understanding of boundaries, because there's no structure and there's also, like, when something is expressed, I lose my connection to someone else when it's beyond, like, whenever those big emotions come up.

Yeah, yeah. Some of what you said really feels so resonant for me, too. And one of the conversations that we're going to have here later on in this season is about parentification and about the emotional processing that a parent will put back onto a child. So we'll

just drop that little nugget there. Now, thinking about parentification and a child then taking on a parent's emotional experience, because that does happen a lot when our parents aren't capable of handling their own emotions and we feel how it dysregulates them or how our emotions dysregulate them, the child ends up taking on a lot of that emotional regulation and emotional experience.

And I want to go back all the way to, like, one of our very first episodes this season when we were talking about disorganized attachment style and how the children with mothers with PTSD, unresolved trauma and grief often took on their mother's emotional experience, and they were playing out the inner world of their parent, even when the parent didn't actually

express that. I mean, when I hear you saying that, my heart feels so heavy, even in the imaginary scenario that I would have had a child, it just really makes my heart feel heavy, though, to hear that, because I think of if I did have a child and what I've been through in my life that would have been unprocessed at their birthing time. I mean, like, I'm ready to have a child now at 46 at a time when I'm healed and can't do that because now

I can handle that experience as an emotion. But like, what you just said, had I had a child, in my most dysregulated times of unprocessed trauma, my heart feels so heavy. For all of the children, for all of us who have experienced the unprocessed trauma of our primaries, it's a lot. And our grandmothers, like, it's our whole, some of us have whole lineages of trauma. Yes. Yeah. I mean, it's a lot. It's a lot.

And the quote that I was thinking of from neurobiology of human relationships is a parent's unconscious becomes the child's first reality. And that idea of, you know, that. Going on, the nervous system is being shaped when you're in the womb, I mean, you're already regulating, co regulating to whoever's carrying you. So what do we do when you're, I mean, like, here we are talking about this big task of healing generational trauma. What are some of the things that we've done to start

to heal this emotional neglect wound? I think the number one thing is that you, for me, I learned what was my nervous system. I started to get real intimate with the way it spoke to me, and I started to get real curious about why? Why? Why am I like this? Why was that conversation hard for me? Why couldn't I share my experience? Why couldn't I be honest? Why didn't I use my voice? Why? Why? And then when I got intimate with my nervous system, and that all came with having

the tools. It starts with the tools, like, start getting regulated. I guess that's the first place to start, right? Get regulated so you can even understand your nervous system. Yep. And then get curious that understanding is so important. Just, just like listening to this and other podcasts and trying to understand what's going on. And then that embodiment piece that you were talking about, like having the

skills, like the types of tools that we teach@rewiredtrial.com. comma, having the skills to actually start to feel into your body and start to feel safe connecting to your body, because part of being able to experience and express emotions is like reteaching yourself how to feel the sensations in your body, how to feel safe in sitting with those sensations so that you don't just dissociate and really working directly with the nervous system and the body to be

able to practice embodiment and presence so that all this other stuff is possible. And you said something earlier about a person missing out on being held and being in a safe container. When you start to learn your nervous system and regulate it, you become that safe container. And then, like, we have talked about with a little bit of altitude today as to how we see our caregivers and, like, not holding that blame, taking radical responsibility, doing the deeper work, knowing

that maybe they're not called to it. Like, that takes regulation. Yeah, it's like, I'm gonna have to become that for myself. Yeah, that's the radical responsibility of, like, I've got to create safety and ability for myself. I've got to reeducate my body and my nervous system how to do this. I have to be the one to teach myself this so that I can move out of this behavior. And the difference is, when you come into rewire trial, you're not winging it anymore. There

is a template. Like, we are laying that down every week. I hope for you guys, like, we have done this, we are doing this. We have healthy relationships with our primaries. And that was not something I could have said ten years ago, definitely. Probably not even five. So it does change. And it's been so helpful for me to understand my emotional body, to understand what are my emotions. What is the difference between anger, rage, and grief? I know that now, and I work with them

independently. I can. Sometimes something will get triggered, right? It just comes out of nowhere, and then it's upon me. I have the tools to work with that, or I can intentionally trigger one of those emotions because I just want to clear it out of my body. There seems to be a never ending well of grief and rage. So I can always sort of tap into that. And it's been. It's been so beneficial. I just wanted about to say, like, I just feel so healthy.

I feel the healthiest in my life. And I don't think that's down to nutrition, only. Like, it's because of my emotional state. It's because of my nervous system. I think I completely agree with that. And I have just this big landscape of emotions that I feel now. I'm able to move through, and it's very different. I also like EFT. Tapping has been really important for me in being able to experience and express emotions. And so working with some really

great EFT teachers, I do think it's a really powerful way to do that. And that's why we also have so many different kinds of EFT taps for all these different emotional experiences on the rewire trial site, because it is a really powerful way for those of us that are very blocked to start to chip away at that wall and work with the body as we're intentionally moving some of that emotional energy through. And we always talk about minimum effective dose.

We are looking at life as minimum effective dose. Like, what's the least I can do to get the maximum benefit? And that really, like, really is super resonant when it comes to emotional work and when you haven't been used to experiencing your emotions safely in your body. And so a minimum effective dose and the tools really make it possible for larger emotional experiences that are safe. It's important always to honor that. Yeah. And then there's certain brain areas that we particularly work

with. Insular cortex. Man, that one comes up just about every episode. I think we talk about the insular cortex and interoception back to my ab belt that I'm wearing today. Like, this is giving me a boost of interoceptive stimulus. It's giving me passive stimulus to sit here and have this harder conversation. And I'm here for it. Yep. Presence vagus nerve health super highways. That's actually sending those signals from inside of your body up to your brains. You can't hear and feel.

It's really hard to have the felt sense when your vagus nerve is compressed or not functioning well. And so again, that's another reason why we have so many different types of vagus nerve classes on the rewiretrial.com site. So that that is a really key system in creating health of that to be able to feel our emotions. Yeah. Thank you all so much for joining us today. We hope that you enjoyed this conversation.

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