Healing Dissociation

Today, we are diving into a big topic, dissociation, which is not actually one of the five distinguishing characteristics of CPTS, originally defined by, Pete Walker. But, I really feel like it should be because so many people with complex trauma have the experience of dissociating in big ways and small ways. It's one of

everybody's favorite topics to discuss on here. So! I'm really excited because today we're going to take a deep dive into understanding what's going on in the brain and the nervous system so that people have a better awareness of what's happening inside of themselves. It's always fun to dive deep into this topic. Welcome to, Trauma Rewired, the podcast that teaches you about your nervous system, how trauma lives in the body, and what

you can do to heal. I'm your co host, Elizabeth Christof, and I'm the founder of Brainbase.com, an online membership where we train the nervous system for resilience, behavior change and trauma re-patterning. I'm also the founder of the, Neurosomatic Intelligence Coaching Certification. And, I'm your co host, Jennifer Wallace. I'm a neurosematic psychedelic preparation and integration guide, bridging the powerful modalities of your unique nervous system and the sacred spaces

of peak somatic experiences. I'm also an educator for the Neurosomatic Intelligence Coaching Certification and we really hope you enjoy this re-exploration o,f dissociation. Elizabeth mentioned, we often hear from you about how much you like to talk and hear about more about dissociation.

We thought it was really important to come back on a year or so later to like we did with the CPTS series, like just getting a little bit more altitude on it and having our own experiences and working with clients for just that more time. So, let's start with defining, dissociation. Dissociation, it's a phenomenon where a person experiences a disconnection between different aspects of their consciousness, identity, memory and perception. It's a protective response that is learned when it's

too much to stay in our bodies. It's a response that often gets patterned in development and it continues to affect people as the triggers get repeated, activating a neurotag, which we're going to get into a little bit later. It's really important to understand where and what's happening during dissociation, why it's happening, and how we can start to heal it. You can't be present and be dissociated at the same time. We can't be embodied and you can't learn and grow

to. Into a life that you really desire and into a way that you desire of being. If you experience chronic dissociation. There are a lot of different areas of our brain function and our nervous system that are affected by dissociation. So it really, first and foremost, it affects our consciousness. It's this feeling of being detached from reality, as if

daydreaming or being really intensely focused. It might even be as small as, like I drove somewhere, and I don't even remember driving there, how I got there, or having a conversation with someone. Maybe, it's a little bit activating.You may feel even almost a little bit out of body and you can't articulate your thoughts. Late,r that memory is really fuzzy. It also impacts our identity. Losing a connection to our

sense of self. That can be our internal body sensations, our body mapping, and our proprioceptive awareness. The parts of our brain that carry our identity can get fragmented and disconnected. It affects our memory. We could experience gaps in our memory or forgetting certain periods of time. We talk a lot on here about large chunks childhood that you just don't remember. You only remember because people tell you stories and you look

at pictures. But the actual memory of the experience is just not there. Then, it affects our self awareness and our awareness of our surroundings. It can even be like feeling like the world is unreal and not able to orient to our environment because we're not able to take in all of that sensory stimulus. I think you just highlighted some of the various ways that this does live on a spectrum.Daydreaming. ..Daydreaming isn't always a bad thing. Daydreaming can be a really positive experience

in dissociation. One time, I had a client who would find herself actively participating in daydreaming as a form of dissociation, as she was healing her dissociation, because it was a way for her to recognize cognitively, that she was dissociating. That led her into deeper exploration of more of the emotional context or maybe some of the relational conversations, how she would start to check out. So that was like a kind

of familiar pathway. We do talk about the spectrum and dissociation now could be just moments of time, hours, as I've gotten so far ahead of it, where in my past with complex trauma. It's wiriring - it was months, it was days, it was years. It was literally, decades of my life that I could not remember. Particularly, I've used the example in here of my childhood bedroom.

I was there. That still, only comes back in pieces to me, which I think really speaks to the daily nervous system training practice, the deeper exploration of the emotional, the regular. The emotional regulation of my body. Then I start to get more of these memories back and being like, oh, yeah, I had this poster or I had this little album or this cassette tape. I remember dancing in here and all my walls were pink

at one time. It's really fascinating to heal through dissociation because you will get chunks of memory back - or moments of memories. One other thing that you mentioned, is that idea of not being able to ground into the way that you feel inside your body. Usually, well, often we really do see this a lot because of our clientele. We don't ask people, "How do you feel?", because that's really threatening. It's a really threatening question because oftentime,s people can describe their thoughts.

You can describe intellectual ideas and maybe even think in metaphors, but not in physical sensations. hen you lack the awareness of how to identify your physical sensations, that's dissociation. Absolutely. That spectrum is so real. I think so many people think of it and they hear the word, dissociation and it's, Dissociative Identity Disorder. Or really splitting off and fragmenting. Bu,t we all

do it to some extent. It's exactly the reason why when we're starting to work with someone, it can be almost impossible for them to feel their internal sensations because they have that well worn path of dissociation. I disconnect from my body a lot. My body map when I'm dissociating. I'll notice myself starting to do a lot of body checking, like touching my body and trying to, at a subconscious level, start to map out, like, where am I? What do

I feel like? I'll touch my hips and my stomach. This reflexive, subconscious thing that I have developed that lets me know, okay, I'm moving a little bit into dissociation now. You also mentioned that it's protective and that is really important to look at. It's a reflexive, protective response that happens in our nervous system when we're overwhelmed

by stimulus. There's a lot of reasons why, especially in childhood during development, the stimulus of an extreme situation or just the chronic stress of, you know, a bunch of, "little t" traumas. An environment that's not meeting your needs would lead your system to have to check out, because the capacity is really limited. When that happens in development, it can become a well worn path, a protective response that our brain and our nervous system go to when we're experiencing stress

or threat. That could be social stress or emotional stress. Emotions comes up and we start to dissociate physical stress. What will happen, the more we go down that path, the faster and easier we go down that path, because what we do, we get better at. So we, we can find that over time, we need less and less stimulus from our environment, from social situations for that reaction

to occur. Also, as we've moved into that path more frequently, there's a lot of areas of our brain and our nervous system that start to under function or become hypersensitive. That will lead our system to be shaped in a way where dissociation becomes a more frequently occurring output. It really is such a fascinating protective response to explore because it can become chronic.

The thing, too, is that you could have been rewarded by your level of dissociation, by this way that you've learned how to protect and to survive as you move through your life. Later on in life, you have. What it does, is it allows you to push through. It allows you to push past your physical needs for rest, for nourishment, for play. It gives you this ability to perform at really high levels

under stress. But, if it gets unaddressed, then it will lead to more protective outputs that are going to come through the threat bucket, and it will perpetuate the self abandonment that we just spoke about last week and many other aspects of complex trauma and its distinguishing components. It's going to lead to harmful states in the

body - disease states, which we're going to get into later. But, you know, with CPTS, if dissociation becomes chronic- and it's okay to dissociate, sometimes it is going to happen, particularly if this is your well worn response. But chronic dissociation and disconnection from the body, it leads to health implications and mental health issues, emotional repression and memory issues, just like Elizabeth was just speaking

about. So, we're really going to get into now how this protective response gets wired into the brain from an early age, and that it is a skill that we learn that is adaptive and protective. I just want to touch really quickly on a really important point you made there, that it can sometimes be something that we start to think of as one of our assets. I can handle a lot of stress. I can handle a lot of pressure, because we don't actually

feel what's going on inside of our body. We're disconnected from that, and that can definitely be rewarded. But, it can also lead us to stay in environments and relationships that are really dangerous to us long term, because we're not getting that information from our body. We're not aware of everything that's going on. So I might stay in a toxic or abusive relationship at work, or in an intimate relationship, or even friendships that are really doing damage to me, to my insides, because

I'm not aware of that. Let's dive a little bit into the neuro and what's going on in the brain. I think one of the most important areas of the brain to talk about is our thalamus. Our thalamus is this complex little structure nestled in the middle of your brain. It's kind of egg shaped, and it's a mass of gray matter. It's really like your information relay station. Almost all of our sensory input, except for smell. Everything that's coming in from your body has to

pass through the thalamus. It takes in all of this information and the thalamus directs it out to other areas of the brain. The thalamus decides what makes it up to our higher order thinking systems, our cerebral cortex, for processing and interpretation every sensory bit of information. And there's so much sensory stimulus coming in all of the time. Senses like taste or touch or hearing or sight, all of this information comes in,

and then it goes to your thalamus. And there are specific nucleus in your thalamus that are responsible for processing that information and then transmitting it to the relevant areas of your cerebral cortex, where you can then take that information in, make sense of it. It also works with our motor pathways, and it gives us information about our movement, and it really helps us to prioritize. We have all of this information coming in. If we were aware of that cognitively, it

would completely overwhelm us. The thalamus decides what deserves our attention, what gets to make it up to our consciousness. The stuff that it's going to prioritize is what it thinks is most important for our survival, then that shapes our experience of the world, our conscious experience, because that information is the information allowed to pass through. The thalamus becomes our reality of our conscious

experience. Then, that affects our memory, because it's also connected to structures in our limbic system that regulate our emotional experience, the formation of our memories in the hippocampus, and even, like pleasurable sensations, sexual arousal, our ability to learn. All of this is first processed through the thalamus. The thalamus, as we like to say in NSI, it's the gatekeeper, it's the bouncer of your brain. It decides what comes in and where it goes. It's the director. It's this

gatekeeper of sensory information. Sensory impulses travel through nerve fibers from your body to the thalamus, and then these specialized areas within the thalamus, called nuclei, they process different sensory or motor impulses. These nuclei then send the selected information to the corresponding area of your cerebral cortex for

interpretation. That's just a little summary there of your thalamus and how it's related to dissociation is while the precise mechanisms remain elusive, neuroimaging studies and disorders characterized by high dissociation, such as depersonalization or derealization disorder, dissociative identity disorder, and the dissociative subtype of PTSD, they have provided valuable insights into brain alterations, possibly underlying

dissociation. There was a research paper that came out in 1995 from, Crystal and Colleagues, that proposed that the thalamus plays a crucial role in dissociative states of altered consciousness. Based on earlier research in post traumatic stress disorder. I think as people have continued to do FMRIS, it's just really clear that our thalamus is absolutely one of the critical components of the brain to look at when we're thinking about dissociation.

That doesn't just have to do with our senses of, my touch orsme ll, but also my emotional reactions to that and the other emotional signals that are happening inside of my body, my interoceptive signals that are coming, that felt sense of the world. Those signals also are coming up and being processed through the thalamus before making it to our conscious awareness. There again, there's that interplay between the thalamus and our limbic system.

And that's then what creates the emotional experience inside the body, those physiological reactions of grief, of anger, of shame and it's determining a lot of how this different stimulus creates emotions inside of me. Remember here, we're always talking about that the emotions are not just our affect, like, not just our feelings, but the whole physiological response that happens in the body. It's a very important structure in understanding what's driving

dissociation. To hear you talk about its connection to the limbic system, you can really see how based on the information that comes through, you could get that dial turning up or that dial turning way down into like heavy hyper vigilance, maybe. Or like you said, some of the, either the high hyper vigilance, it could also totally shut you down into freeze and flop situations. You know, when we're talking about the neuro of dissociation and how we heal through the sensory inputs, we have to talk

about the vagus nerve and interoception. Vagus and interoception are key aspects of the nervous system. In the feeling and the knowing of what is going in, going on in our bodies, those are the two systems we're going to look at the most. So let's look at interoception and depersonalization. First of all, interoception is the brain's ability to accurately interpret the signals coming from inside of the body, right? We know the vagus nerve is that cranial nerve that leaves the

brain and touches all the organs. It touches all parts of our bodies. 80% of the information gets traveled up to the brain. Only 20% iscoming down from the brain. 80% of your vagus nerve's job is to relay information back in. That's interoception, and that's how these two come together to work together. The vagus nerve and the interoceptive system are deeply connected. So, poor interoceptive awareness can lead to a sense of depersonalization and

dissociation. Depersonalization involves feelings that are detached from oneself, as if observing yourself from the outside of your body. It can create a sense of unreality and disconnection. The vagus nerve, which plays a critical role in interoception, it contributes to these feelings by influencing our bodily sensations and emotional states. The Vagus nerve plays a major role also in your autonomic

nervous system. It has two main branches, the ventral vagal, associated with safety and social engagement, and then the dorsal vagal, associated with shutdown and immobilization. When faced with an overwhelming threat or trauma, the dorsal vagal branch leads to total, complete shutdown. This state of dissociation includes feeling of numbness, overwhelm, and being disconnected

from the world. In extreme cases, the vagus nerve can induce a feigned death response, whereas the body appears lifeless and dissociated, potentially as a survival mechanism. You know, being dissociated is also going to contribute to deficits in our interoceptive system. It's going to get harder to hear those signals from the body and not only hear them, but interpret them accurately. That could come, like we're saying, with an experience of an emotion or having our intuition disrupted. Yeah,

definitely. The vagus nerve is so crucial in relaying this information. We say her, a lot, if you don't use it, we lose it. If we're constantly dissociating from the signals inside of our body, that whole mechanism starts to deteriorate and we have deficits in that interceptive system. We're not getting clear, accurate information from our body to our brain about what's going on inside. Then, as you were just saying, too, not only can we, can it become

really hard to feel those sensations. So, like, when you're talking to a client and you say, like, how does that feel in your body? Or what do you feel inside? Like you were just speaking about... It's nothing. I don't know. They get totally overwhelmed because that connection's not there. Also, when a system doesn't have enough stimulus, in this case, because of chronic dissociation, it can also become hypersensitive. Right? Because it's every nerve wants stimulation.

It needs activation to stay healthy and alive. When it's operating in this deficit of interceptive stimuli, the nerves can actually become very hypersensitive to try to pick up more information. Stay healthy, stay active, stay alive. We become very hypersensitive to those signals. Not everybody with intraceptive issues feels numb or disconnected. You can also feel too much into the sensations and you can also have a very high level of threat associated with those sensations.

For some people, when they feel what's going on inside of their body, it's very activating. It moves them into a big sympathetic response or maybe shuts them down. But there's a big stress response that comes from feeling those signals inside. We feel them a little bit too intensely and we become hyper

vigilant around them. That's why sometimes for people, as they're trying to practice mindfulness or develop a relationship with their body and start to have somatic practices, it's too much initially to drop into the body ask, "Do you feel your heartbeat? Do you feel your breath?" That's going to be really stressful for them. They might want to externally orient, you know, can you feel yourself being supported by the chair? Can you feel the

air around you? Can you even just look around the room and take in some information from your eyes and use different types of sensory input that aren't so stressful for someone who's been in dissociation for so long? There's also a huge component of the vagus nerve that helps create our sense of safety. This idea of neuroception, which is just our nervous system's automatic scanning of the environment all the time, looking for

danger cues below the level of our conscious awareness. Again, it doesn't have to be physical danger cues. It could be somebody's facial expression, their vocal tone, all these different things that we're reading all of the time. Our interceptive system plays a really big role in our neuroception, determining whether or not we're safe, if we're in that more ventral vagal state of safety, or whether we should move into one of our f responses, fight or flight, or whether

we should shut down completely or dissociate. And all of that is how our brain interprets sensory information. The dissociation is the output of that interpretation of threat. That's really what it is, coming from inside of the body. Another component of, the neuro of dissociation is the insular cortex. The insular cortex is one of our shining stars of, Trauma Rewired. The insular cortex is a deep fold within our brain that plays a crucial role in interoception - interoceptive processing.

The insular cortex is the primary processing center for internal body feelings. It receives signals related to our internal states, such as hunger or thirst or pain. And then these signals come from various resources from our body. The insular cortex. It has functional connections with other areas of the brain, including parts of the thalamus, relaying sensory information throughout the brain. It's associated also to the limbic system, associated with emotions and memories. Also,

it's connected to the amygdala, right? That part of our brain historically known for its role in perceiving anger or fear or threat in any way and our introceptive system. We're talking now about our vagus nerve, but also the insular cortex and the parts of our brain that interpret that information coming in. This is a predictive system, so it's not responding actually in real time to what's going on. It's predicting ahead what your response is going to need to be based on the

information coming in. It's operating a little bit ahead of the present moment. and our internal sensations that we feel are coming from those predictions within our interoceptive system. Our brain makes predictions based on our past experiences - our brain is making these predictions all of the time about what the sensory information means and then generating an output

ahead of what's really going on. If we have a lot of experience with threat and stress in social situations, in different environments, then that's how our brain is going to interpret those sensory signals and it's going to create those responses

inside of our body. These predictions may or may not be accurate, but they're what drive our mood, our feeling, the way we are inside and our insular cortex really contributes to our self awareness of these internal body states and what that felt sense experience is. Then, it takes those signals, integrates them, relays them to other areas of the brain and produces our emotions, our emotional

experience. It impacts our cognition, our ability to stay in our higher order thinking systems or not, and our identity, and sense of self. You may be getting into this podcast now, thinking, what is the point of all of this? Why does it even help for you to know all of this information? You hear us say a lot on times," Where do we start?" It does start with being able to take in information and start to maybe think a little bit more broadly about the way that life looks for all of us.

We talk about every episode, conversation, we really stress intentional stimulus training. When we understand how our body and brain work to take in and interpret information. We know we dissociate because the nervous system is interpreting too much threat and producing the output of dissociation to keep from the system from being overwhelmed, we can gradually train these areas to feel safe with the stimulus that's coming in. Over time, we won't dissociate as frequently or maybe as severely.

Initially, we train the brain and nervous system with stimulus and regulation as the right dose. I want to say something for a moment after I say severely. As I said in the very beginning, when we talk about the spectrum of dissociation, it's no longer means losing time in months and days, in years and in decades. That looks now more like hours of time. The severity has decreased with time, because of the time I

put into my daily intentional training. My sensory input systems getting that accurate amount of information from the vagus nerve and from the interoceptive system, you know, particularly. We intentionally train the brain and nervous system with stimulus and regulation at the right dose so that it adapts to it safely - adapts to the stimulation safely. The next cohort of, Neurosomatic Intelligence is

enrolling now. If you're a coach, therapist, or healer and you want to bring these tools and this framework into the good work that you're doing to create bigger, deeper, more lasting change for your clients and to help your own nervous system prevent burnout, have greater capacity, and be able to expand your life in many different directions, then I would love to talk with you about the program. We are taking discovery calls now. You can book that at, neurosomaticintelligence.com. I

think we are diving a little bit deeper. It's a high level overview of what's going on in your brain. Again, everybody's very unique and different, but we are diving

a little bit more into the neuro. It's kind of like a, "Why?" But, I think it helps to connect the dots a little bit that our experiences shape these areas of the brain, these nerves, because, again, we are neuroplastic beings and our nervous system is like constantly, constantly, constantly adapting to the environment, to the situations that we're into, the social experiences that we have. All these experiences that we've had over our life,

they change how our thalamus interprets information. They change how our vagus nerve functions, how it relays information to the brain, and then how our brain interprets that information. That's real. That experience of, I'm moving into dissociation all the time. There's a reason for that, because your system is adaptive, and that was the adaptation that helped you

survive and not become overwhelmed. It's also changed how you are now and patterned you in this certain way, so one of the really important takeaways from this is that we're neuroplastic and changing

all of the time. When we understand that, we can start to intentionally train our system, whether that's, in social situations and social stimulus that's coming in, environmental, the internal sensations, we can help our brain by communicating with the nervous system in the language that it understands, which is sensory inputs, to start to create more safety with this stimulus coming in.

The brain can start to get that information in and have an experience of feeling safe with that information and not going into dissociation not going down that well worn path because the same threat load isn't there. When we do that over and over and over again by using our tools, we're carving out new pathways,

we're reshaping the nervous system in this new way. In that way, it's really like we're training ourselves to be present because you mentioned it's a skill - we've talked on here, especially in our episodes with Matt, about everything is really a skill, whether you're intentionally training it as a skill or not. Your immune response, your social response, your emotional repression, that's a skill that you've trained yourself over time.

If everything is a skill and every skill is trainable, when we know how our nervous system works and we know how to dose the interventions appropriately and we can do that consistently, then we can start to train at new skills that are still protecting us, but differently with different outputs. That's right, because if dissociation is this overwhelm of sensory stimulus coming in and that being threatening, so it's easier to check out of the body.

Now, we're intentionally training the sensory inputs to make that more safe. You could do this with mindfulness, but only to a particular degree. That's only going to keep you from in a head up space and that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about direct sensory stimulation, regulating around it and creating a new experience

physiologically. This is what we do at, rewiretrial.com and why we encourage you to take advantage of these free two weeks with us on the membership site so your brain can now re-organize the information that's coming in so that it perceives information accurately. Then, you don't lose that continuity of time like that continuity of consciousness, that dissociation

really fragments. Yeah. It's really important when we're talking about, re-patterning the system to think too, about, how important it i,s to get to know your own nervous system and to be able to assess and reassess what the right amount of stimulus is for you. What the right amount of change and, and trying to create a different experience is, because, remember, this is a protective output and this is a well worn path. If we overdose ourselves with

any kind of intervention, that could be like a somatic practice. It could be a cognitive therapy session. It could be just trying to cognitively push through and create behavior change, set a boundary, whatever. If we're going at that too much, too fast, just not at the right speed for our nervous system. We don't know how to assess and reassess how our nervous system is responding. We're just going to keep pushing ourselves down that same well worn pathway. It's happening subconsciously.

I'm going to be finding myself in these states of dissociation and overwhelm or a, " f - response." I can't change that without also working with the nervous system and without knowing what is the speed, what's the dose, what's the amount that works for me to start to create positive adaptation, a new experience. When we're talking about healing, something like dissociation and most aspects of complex trauma often come with slowing down a

little bit. That can be really scary. To come into the body is going to require an aspect of slowing down and we want to be able to rely on the information that's coming in from the body, from the vagus nerve, from the anteroceptive system, and really being able to cultivate that presence that makes life so enjoyable. But also, too, we want to be working on, like, the brain area processing, right? That's processing all of

this information. You know, it's one of the things that we see a lot in dissociation. One of the aspects of dissociation is an intellectual dissociation away from the body - it's this concept and idea. It's a way of living for people where you can stay in your mind and avoid the body. It's like you can intellectualize, you can know something, you can understand intellectually the way the nervous system works for, say, or

like knowing that something. But knowing something isn't the same thing as experiencing it somatically. This happens a lot in our realm, especially when we start working with one on one clients who are high drivers, high performing women, very successful, and they've learned, like we've talked about before, to just push through, override the signals of the body, over train, overwork, over perform. Those are levels of dissociation that are usually rewarded in some way, even

by ourselves. We go to the gym, we overtrain, we overdo it, and then we look at ourselves and we see, oh, this actually might be what I want to look at or look like. I'm totally disconnected from my body's signals, telling me that I'm in pain, I'm tired, I can't hear myself. But then cognitively, you just keep knowing that what you're doing is actually working, working for your aesthetic or maybe that overdrive at work is working for your

paycheck. Maybe that overdrive of dissociation in your relationship is just keeping you safe in some way because you're too scared to leave or you're too scared to share your voice and your experience as to how this relationship is actually keeping you hiding and in other protective mechanisms apart from dissociation. I think it's so important to stress, that knowing how the nervous system works is

not the same thing as working with the nervous system. We're giving you all of this information and it's important to start to connect the dots, to start to understand how this happens, to know more about yourself, to see your behavior differently with altitude, have more self compassion. But in order to really make changes in your emotional processing, in cultivating that sense of safety inside, you actually have to work with the nervous system. You can't just understand that you

need to process your emotions. There's an experience of that that has to happen. Many people, get stuck in that first part of, like, let me read all the books about somatics, let me do this research, listen to this podcast. I really want to encourage people to work with a somatic practitioner or work with us on, rewiretrial.com or do something where you're actually getting the work. I lived a lot of my life

up in my head understanding all of this. I relied on my intellect. I thought if I could just figure it out, I could push through it, and there were real health consequences to that. My behavior wasn't actually changing. You know, I couldn't stop binge eating. I couldn't stop getting into the harmful relationship patterns. I couldn't stop, you know, panicking and not being able to rest until I actually started working with the nervous system. What that looks like for

me now is as if something might happen. I still get triggered. Just the other day, I was watching a movie, and there was a scene that was really reflective of my, one of my personal trauma experiences. Cognitively, I felt fine. I was safe. I was in my house. Bu,t I started to experience a little bit of pain between my shoulder blades. Then, that pain started radiating down my arm and I got a little numbness. And because I know what I know, I was like, okay,

this is a protective output of my nervous system. But, if I had just stopped there with that awareness, I still might have gotten pushed into the emotional flashback. Looking at, you know, my partner through a lens of distrust, being really shut down, experiencing brain fog. It would have just continued to build. But instead, because I have the tools, I got out m,y z vibe and I started doing some regulation tools. I had to play around for a minute, maybe I started with

some camshafts, moving my body a little bit. Then, I tried some breathing but, that wasn't working. Okay. I went to my vagus nerve. I did that. All of a sudden the pain started to go away. I was like, this is the stimulus my body needs. I know how to work with my nervous system. I know how to recreate safety. And I actually have to stop in real time, in real life and, and make the space to do that work so that I don't go down the well

worn path and really create that change. Really beautiful example of why you wouldn't want to intellectually bypass this experience in your body. We're also going to talk about spiritual bypassing and dissociation as a means of dissociation. This is going to hit our spiritual community a little bit differently here now. I am one of you. I work in psychedelic spaces. One of the reasons I strongly suggest preparation of the nervous system before going into these peak somatic experiences

is because of, dissociation. When you are working in modalities that are incredibly embodying medicines - plants that are very embodying, and you have someone who's chronically dissociated, this experience of a medicine ceremony could be really frightening. On the back end and very challenging from a nervous system that is not ready for an experience, like a medicine. I really think about the most, when I think of spiritual bypassing and dissociation, is meditation and astrology horoscopes.

So, we've heard this before with people who are really great meditators. They can just leave their bodies and experience a deeper consciousness, maybe in that meditative state, yet still not understand and be able to feel the experience of their bodies. It's just easier to check out. It is easier to go into an altered state of consciousness. With something like astrology horoscopes, it's seeking this external cognitive framework of understanding

who you are based on the stars. It's like, oh, I'm a Gemini, so I act like this, or, oh, that's my Capricorn moon and I do this because of this. It's like your nervous system has been recording every experience that has ever happened to you and then patterned the way that you are right here, right now. What my two personalities were - actually four

personalities. Of my four, "f trauma" responses, it was more socially acceptable to feel my fight and my freeze response from my community and my friends because I was a Gemini. That's an unfair way of you to live for yourself. I guess, that's just the way I think about it. I think there's great things about achieving those higher levels of consciousness. Meditation is great, and looking at different energy systems can be really great

and a very interesting experience. But, it's important not to use it to avoid also having a connection with your body and understanding your reactions from that level of the nervous system. I remember, like, not that long ago, I was doing a teaching for another membership to work with some of their coaches. I was teaching some NSI tools, and we just dropped into the body for a few moments to try to feel some internal sensations to

get an idea of, a somatic yes or no, in business. The response from a lot of the people in there - it was a very spiritually based, meditative program that was that they were really challenged. I realized very quickly, "Oh, man!" Just that 30 seconds exceeded minimum effective dose for these people. One of the participants straight up said to me, I love to meditate because I can leave my body, but as soon as I start to feel the sensations inside, I want to run out of the room. I get

that. I understand why it's threatening. There's a real reason we need to start making those sensations safe, so we can have a different relationship with our body and not always have to leave it to feel comfortable. I think too, when we're talking about emotional expression. We cannot express and process our emotions if we are disconnected from our bodily sensations, because they are very physiological events. I'm going to be in a high level of emotional repression or suppression

if I'm not connecting to my body. I have clients that have behaviors they want to move out of- maybe, obsessive compulsive behaviors or pain, physical pain, binge eating, all of these things, that these behaviors are more repressive tools to keep us from feeling the emotions. Until we actually start to process those emotions and have the experience in our body of being with that grief, moving, that pain, those

behaviors aren't going to stop. As much as we might cognitively know, I don't want to do this behavior or maybe even I cognitively know I need to process my emotions, but I don't actually get in there and do it. Then, we aren't able to move out of that patterned repressive behavior. Then, the opposite of dissociation is presence. If dissociation is the easy, well worn pathway, then what we're really trying to do is train for presence.

I was saying before, about relying on your own experiences, when you start to come into your body, you'll start questioning yourself, questioning those realities that you're feeling and that you're sensing. And so presence becomes kind of the threat

into the body. So back to that intentional nervous system training practice that you want to cultivate each day is because when you're present in your body, you will be experiencing your world very, very differently and relationships will be experienced very differently. We talk on here back to that daily nervous system practices. What we're looking for is measurable experiences. Experiences where you could walk away from and say, like,

I was here for all of that. I stayed in my body for that conversation, or as I received that information from somebody or from the world. That information is the sensory stimulus coming in. The presence now is going to feel, I'm going to use that word, feel because you're going to start experiencing sensations in the body. Experiencing the world very differently.

Presence is so important for emotional expression and being able to understand the truth of how you're feeling emotionally, so that you might notice some dissociative aspects and the disproportionate reactions that you're

having to something. I think, too, in the emotional component of things is like understanding how we are feeling inside, being able to discharge that emotion from the body, because emotional dysregulation will dysregulate the full nervous system, which is not new information for those of y'all listening to this podcast. I think presence is so powerful because it allows us to feel how powerful we really are. That can be very scary for someone who's been used to hiding for so long.

Yeah, absolutely. There are so many reasons to start to try to create presence in your life. Another really important reason is, as we're engaging in all of these different healing activities, trying to create changes in our physical health outputs and outcomes, it's very important that we're actually present for those

activities. We talked about this in the presence episode. We go deeper into this, but there are studies that look at what happens when we're doing different healing practices and the impact that that has on our telomeres. Our telomeres, if you recall, are little compound structures at the end of our chromosomes, and they're what are often used as markers of biological age, biological

health. Not my chronological age. People can look at your telomeres to know your physical biological age inside of your body and with different practices, like sauna or meditation, that helps us have healthier telomeres and reduces stress. But there were also studies that found that you don't experience the same effects if you're not actually

present in that activity. I think we talked about - let's say you're sitting in the sauna, you're still stuck in this fight and flight state, or you're still totally dissociated from your body or whatever it is that's going on. That stress is still there. I'm sitting in a sauna, but I'm having the racing thoughts about everything. My heart rate is still going, the

stress chemicals are still going. So, as we engage in all of these different activities for our health, if we're not present for that, we're not getting the same benefits as if we can actually be there embodied. We can't be in two places at once. We can't reap the benefits of something that we're doing, if we're not in the body. So presence, being present is really important to creating the change and for laying down these new pathways that we're really talking about here.

That dissociation really wreaks havoc on the internal sense of self. Absolutely.

When we're usiing our neurotools, you don't get the same re patterning if you're not present with the sensory stimulus, if you're not actually engaged in the activity in a way that is going to help your nervous system lay those new pathways down, myelinate the nerves, then you're just kind of going through the motions and that the brain, the nervous system, is not paying attention to that in the same way that's going to really create the changes that

you're looking for. Of course, it's the same with our relationships, too. We want to be present in relationship as we're trying to re pattern our relational responses and show up differently in the world and have a different sense of safety in relationship with other people. We can't do that if we're also checked out of our body. Remember, our nervous systems are always communicating with one another across

the social synapse at that subconscious level. So, as I'm here talking to you, your nervous system is reading mine. Even the listeners are reading my vocal tone, and there's communication going on all the time. That other nervous system can read when we are dissociated, when we're not present and when we're not checked out. Same with a little kid's nervous system.

If the parent is not actually present, that has the same effects as neglect, as abandonment, because the way that our nervous systems interact, and so, you know, how we, our ability to be attuned and really show up for other people requires a level of presence.

We talk about this lack of presence through our attachment and so many of the conversations that we had through Season 3 - how this level of dissociation in our primary caregiver creates an insecure attachment for the child, experiencing that lack of connection and that lack of attunement in our own nervous systems without us having back to cognitive ability in them in the mind. We don't have a

cognitive way to reframe it or to think about it. All of that is being experienced in our bodies through the social synapse. If dissociation is a skill that we learn for adaptation, so is presence, and we can learn that skill, too, and that's what we do@rewiretrial.com and we're there five times a week. We've got classes from ten minutes to 45 minutes.

Emotional processing, neuro for all of the sensory inputs, but particularly on here today, we've talked about interoceptive system and the vagus nerve. We really can't encourage you enough to join us on site and start changing and re-patterning the way you are literally, wired. Change that predictive thought. If the prediction is threat, let's start rewiring that so that you're primed for connection, so you're primed for thriving and not just surviving and getting through in the world.

Right now, we're doing a whole series of classes specifically related to the outputs of CPTS, including dissociation. You can pop on and join us in these practices. These are the real things that we do that our clients do to start to create change. It's very easy to find them. We're on their live, and then there's a whole huge on demand library where they're categorized under the CPTS series. So, yes, please come join us after

this. We're going to be playing, we're going to re release some episodes from Season 3 that are more foundational information that you'll want to take in. Before we go into Season 4, we'll do stress response and relationship and a lot of the ones that show what's happening internally in our world with connection to other people that are a little bit more on the neuroscience side.

So that as we move into Season 4 and we're really looking at specific outputs of the nervous system that people might experience in chronic health outcomes and chronic mental health outcomes, there's a you have a good understanding of what's going on inside. Thank you guys so much for revisiting this whole CPTS series with us and stay in touch while we're taking this little break to dive into some of the research and get ready for season four. You

can find us on the socials. We love to hear from you and we're really excited about Season 4, so stay tuned. Thank you all so much. This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered medical or psychological advice. We often discuss lived experiences through traumatic events and sensitive topics that deal with complex developmental and systemic trauma that may be unsettling for some listeners. This podcast is not intended to replace professional medical

advice. If you are in the United States and you or someone you know is struggling with their mental health and is in immediate danger, please call 911. For specific services relating to mental health, please see the full disclaimer in the show notes.