Self Abandonment of Complex Post Traumatic Stress

Have you ever gone against your instincts, not trusted yourself, engaged in people pleasing, hid parts of yourself, found yourself in perfectionism? Or not expressing your feelings overall, not acting in alignment with your values, downplaying your needs? These are all ways that we can self abandon. We're going to dive into all of this, as we tackle the final distinguishing characteristics of, of CPTS. Self abandonment -this is going to be a big one. Welcome tom Trauma Rewired.

I'm your co host, Jennifer Wallace, a Neurosomatic Psychedelic Preparation and Integration guide and also on the, NSI Education team. I'm Elizabeth Christoph, your co host and founder of Brainbased.com, an online membership where we use applied neurology, somatic practices and neurosomatic meditations to re pattern trauma - to change behavior, to improve capacity and resilience. I'm also the founder of the, Neurosomatic Intelligence Coaching Certification. So, self abandonment, here we go!

For me, self abandonment is the mother wound of these five distinguishing characteristics. I mean, they're all so important and have such a big impact on our health. I think that that disconnect from ourselves, that fragmentation is just a huge part of everything that drives a lot of the other outputs that we experience with cpts. And like all the other chronic outputs of cpts

that we have discussed, this really comes on a spectrum. It could look like putting other people's needs or opinions before your own, ignoring your own inner thoughts, your feelings about something, ignoring your instincts, downplaying your emotional experience. So, it can be these little ways that we abandon ourselves in everyday life. It can be more severe, too. We can find our places in deep self abuse with that inner critic

where we lose self compassion. It could lead to shame spirals that are immobilizing and leading you to not tend to your own needs at all, your basic needs, maybe even like showering, eating and feeding yourself, cleaning in general. It can also be because of high levels of dissociation and the fragmented self. Yeah, many times we can abandon parts of ourselves that need love, that need security, really need it from a long time ago. They need to be seen

because we think those parts are too much. Or, maybe it really is a lot to reconnect to those parts. The feelings that will be experienced in the body are so big and so overwhelming, we don't want to feel that, we don't want to express it. A lot of times that, separation, the fragmentation, comes at an unconscious level. That repression, the disconnect from that part of ourselves is not even within our conscious awareness.

We're just moving into the behaviors and the self regulation practices that keep that part at bay. Yes, they can be abandoned in small moments of conscious choicea and be deeply repressed. Gabor Mate says, that every human being has a true and a genuine, authentic self. Trauma is the disconnect from that self, and healing is the reconnection with it. Why do we get disconnected? It's too painful to be with ourselves. We don't have that capacity. Dissociation is inherently a fragmentation.

This fragmentation limits the ability for us to lay down memory and have a continuum of consciousness. The understanding and the overall feeling, you've just been through a full experience. It's that lapse in time that could go on for short periods of time or could be really severe and lead to chronic dissociation, where you may have lost literal years, maybe decades of your life. Those repressed parts that can lead to fragmentation, self fragmentation, also lead to

self alienation. Where you could feel disconnected from your own identity. It can also really lead us to not know who we are, just like the,Gabor Mate quote, to not even understand what is our unique expression and the authenticity that I bring into this life experience with myself. When your sense of self becomes fragmented, it can lead to an interplay, a complex interplay of emotions, of perceptions and experiences.

We will talk about all of this a little bit more deeply in the dissociation conversation that we're going to have, because this really wreaks havoc on the sense of the internal self. If you can't rely on your own experiences and as you come into your body, your very presence in your nervous system will be the threat. I'm really excited for our next conversation on dissociation - to take that at a very deep neural level, because it is such

a big part of complex trauma. But, fawn response also is a huge underlying factor of why self abandonment would occur. When you're abandoning yourself, a part of that is when you're putting yourself as the second priority and that has real consequences to our health, both physically and mentally. As we abandon ourself, we're hiding our genuine emotions from others to please them. That happens all of the time with fawn response, because we're so afraid of losing that connection, that attachment

bond with the expression of our emotions. We've defined previously, the fawn response as a behavioral adaptation. It's a reflexive protective trauma response, where we actually move toward the threat a little bit, toward appeasing the threat and engaging to stay safe at a social level, to keep an attachment need met or to really placate a predator so that we don't get hurt, hurt with some kind of retaliation.

As you were saying about fawn - it develops when we don't get attachment needs met in development - we need that for survival. So, securing attachment becomes the priority over our own authenticity and self expression. We reactively say, yes, violate our own boundaries and people please to stay socially safe, because the conflict or severing of the attachment, the discomfort of allowing someone to have their own emotional experience, is so intense and dysregulating that this

pattern continues in adulthood. It's so funny, I just found myself fawning and self abandoning in a really minor way the other day. But, you know, this is so different from the way I used to experience it. This might seem kind of like a small example, but I thinkit's how I experience self abandonment now. It's in the smaller, or maybe lighter, lower end of the spectrum, the less severe, because I have this daily

practice. I have more capacity in my nervous system to even to witness myself, which is what I did the other day. This is something I have to watch out for. This is coming from my journal. " I was at my friend's house recently. She was so excited about her dinner and I had already eaten for the day. I finished eating early, but I found myself wrapped up in her excitement, wanting that excitement for myself and not wanting to tell her no, in

her own excitement. I felt like I would be shutting her down in some way by not accepting the food and the beverage she offered me. So I did it. I found myself eating Tomka, which I love, but just had no room for." I mean, my stomach was full. I had eaten. I found myself in the, Tomca and found myself - this is good. You know what? It wasn't good. It wasn't good. I did not like the drink, and

I did not want the Tomca, but there I was. I think what I have to look out for is that experience of, like, the other person's experience, excitement and wanting to be part of that excitement. Not wanting to tell her no, because that's severing the attachment. To find some yourself in this big place of joy. Then to be," No, I don't want that". It felt too overwhelming for me in the

moment. Not only am I breaking my own boundary in that moment, but I am creating a false narrative with, in this relationship, this friendship, and then I am patterning a social moment with her. Do you see that loop? There's not only a dishonesty with myself, but there's the one that I'm creating in the relationship in the present moment. It's hijacking in a way, this, this kind of, it was

a conscious engagement almost, in a way, too. It's like I went into it knowing, like, I'm not hungry and nor am I interested in this probiotic beverage. Totally. I actually, as you were saying, that I have an example of a place where I did not self abandon, which is a really new behavior for me. And I think these are really good examples because they're small. They're like these little moments, but when we are aware of them and we re pattern, that's how those

shifts start to occur. My partner got a new car - a jeep, and he loves it. He's very, very proud of it. He's very protective of it. He likes to keep it very clean and just perfect, you know? He was super, super excited about it, like your friend, and wanted me to drive it. I didn't want to drive it because, one, driving is really stressful for me. Two, it's something that he put so much of himself into - if I dinged it or if something happened, that would be really, really stressful for me.

I'd had a very long day. It was more than I had capacity for. To drive around in traffic and to have the stress of, what if I mess up his brand new, beautiful vehicle that he loves? So in that moment, he was super excited about it. I paused for a minute and I said I really don't want too right now. I could tell he was a little bit disappointed and we kind of talked it through, but I didn't add that big stress load to myself.

I had a moment where I honored what my capacity was and I said something that I knew might disappoint someone else. It seems really small, but it's one good rep of choosing to honor my capacity and what my nervous system is really okay with and re establishing that relational safety around, not reflexively self abandoning. It was interesting to be witnessing myself in that moment. I didn't finish the whole bowl of soup.

I just had a sip, but I still found myself just engaged in this way - that was, "I just don't even know if I can help myself right now because I think I'm so used to saying no to people so much". I do tend to have a - I'm very... It's so funny to say this, because I'm so used to not self abandoning and choosing myself. I say no a lot to engagement and to food and drink things. I think in that way. You are really good about it. I just felt like she was so excited. Bu,t

it's also awesome. Sometimes. Sure. But it's this idea of we can have awareness and we can see and what does it represent for myself when I'm doing that, even if it's this really small thing. Also, how huge it is, to come to this place where these are the little moments where we self abandon instead of putting myself in really dangerous situations or being completely checked out of my body or not able to hear my intuition at

all. That's a win. It's a really big move away from some of these very harmful patterns, and there's so much awareness there in what you experience. Really true. Really true. Thank you. As someone who knows you in the real world, you're very good most of the time about honoring your boundaries and your capacity. So, what's happening inside of us with this fond response when we

reflexively move into that behavior? Is that a part of us, our sympathetic nervous system mobilizing us and another part of us, our parasympathetic nervous system, our calm and respond is at the same time, putting the brakes on. There's a part of us that wants to say no, wants to run away, wants to use our voice. That part is immobilized by our parasympathetic nervous system. There's also a part of us, though, that is being activated to engage with the other person. Yes, I'll do that.

Let me help you to say whatever it is they want to hear. We've this true freeze response happening in a freeze response. Both things are happening. We're getting a heightened sympathetic activation and a heightened parasympathetic activation. And so you have parts of you that are bracing, shutting down, and other parts that are moving into a reflexive behavioral response. And again, this is occurring because that discomfort is so

big, the dysregulation. When we talk about discomfort, it's the internal felt sense of dysregulation is so big that if you had maybe an emotionally unstable environment growing up or you experienced emotional neglect, it really feels life threatening not to take on the responsibility for other people's emotions. We talked about this in the social anxiety episode, as well. But, if they're angry or hurt or disappointed, there might be strong

repercussions for you. Not only might you lose the attachment bond, but, like, you might get hurt, you might get punished. It's hard, because it feels so dangerous inside to not placate that person or please them at the expense of yourself. Yes, emotional neglect and self abandonment are closely intertwined with each other because, childhood emotional neglect occurs when parents fail to adequately respond to a child's emotional needs. It's basically what we don't get from

our childhood. But childhood emotional neglect is mostly invisible. The child could appear to have a comfortable life externally and still be experiencing emotional neglect. Emotions are as vital as physical needs, like food and shelter. Emotional connection is a fundamental human requirement for thriving. When a child experiences childhood emotional neglect, they are kept in the dark about their rich emotional world. That is not an

experience that they get to have in their bodies. They learn that their feelings are not important and often begin to hide their emotions, shut the emotions down and prioritize, really, the safety of the attachment over the emotional needs of the felt experience.

Absolutely. I mean, we might learn that our emotional needs are not important and we're also not learning the skills from our primaries modeling to us how to express emotions, how to regulate after emotional expression and how to let that whole natural stress cycle complete. We don't have that skill. So that can make us afraid of our own emotions because they're so overwhelming to the system, because we never developed the skills to

process them. O,r we learned, because we never developed the skills to process them, or we learned it wasn't okay to express them. We move into this automatic repression or maybe conscious suppression of our emotions, right? We start to feel that emotional sensation rising up and many, many times below the level of our consciousness. Our nervous system goes into shutting down that emotion, numbing it out with some kind of avoidance behavior. Or we might consciously decide,

this is too much. I don't want to express - my emotions are too big. I don't want to be so needy. We downplay our own emotional experience and emotional neglect leads to big feelings of aloneness and isolation because we're carrying all of that by ourselves. We desperately need that social connection. We really want that, as a young being trying to learn how to navigate the world and our own emotional landscape. And then we start to really prioritize again that that attachment

bond to others. So, we are much more prone to put the needs of others over ourself so that we don't lose the attachment, then we can get those emotional needs met. Again, this is on a spectrum. For some people, it's really debilitating co-dependency, but it can also just lead to problems setting boundaries, discomfort, and being alone.

And it leads to a lot of behaviors like overdoing and distracting ourselves with overtraining, just constantly filling our life with busyness, or it could even look like really abusive relationships and self harm. There's a big spectrum that this can occur on. Also, the experience of parentification

in early development. We've talked about parentification on here before, but this is when the roles of the caregiver and the child are reversed and the child begins to take on the roles, the emotional, physical or logistical care for the primary caregiver. Instead of the child receiving care, the child ends up giving more than they receive and more than what they have the capacity

for. Once again, the lack of understanding of, since this is survival, it is sort of an automatic propelling into this type of behavior, like parentification. Or maybe, it's pretty clear what's going on - emotional immaturity or overwhelming responsibilities faced by parents, a weak support system that leads them to need the child for this level of processing. Health conditions in parents, child abuse, or situations like divorce, financial hardship, immigration, can all lead to

parentification. I'm not placing blame, but these are the real life circumstances that can lead to this type of experience of parentification. In the examples I see a lot in my clients, it comes in more of the emotional capacity, where the primary, just even as they age, still never have the capacity for the emotional

experience. When you're in recognition of parentification being an aspect of your life, it can be really hard when you are now in front of your caregiver and you're identifying the parentification that is taking place. Again, why these tools are so helpful and important to support you in real time. Then, after an experience, really to prepare yourself to see and spend time with your caregiver. I think it is really important to have the tools because there can be so

much guilt. If you are a kid who had that responsibility. As you said, a lot of times it is the emotional responsibility. It's that our parents don't have the skills or the bandwidth, the capacity in their nervous system to process emotions. So, that falls on us, as children. As we recognize and see that pattern, start to try to move out of it, a lot of guilt and shame, can come up. Those roles are so deeply established with our parents.

There's such a huge component of, structural trauma that you touched on, which is important to highlight, too. If a parent doesn't have resources, job opportunities, community support, that responsibility is going to have to go somewhere because they can't manage it

alone. When we're talking about parentification, it's important to look at, like, what are the components of our society that are setting people up in this way, that that is an inevitable outcome of somebody who doesn't have the resources that they need for a number of reasons. And so, and again, the consequences are still the same, like not placing blame on anyone, but the, the same developmental

issues occur with anyone who experiences this. When you have all of this responsibility, whether it's emotional or logistical, you are always learning that you have to put your own needs to the side, especially your emotional needs, really for survival. Like, who has time to process emotions or to feel anything when you're also responsible for all of this other stuff to ensure not only your safety, but, like, your family's safety, and to make sure that your

primaries and your family unit are okay. Then this becomes a pattern, all of this into adulthood and replays in future relationships. Even when someone else may not be in the same situation, they might not need you to do all of that for them, but that pattern is already woven into to your nervous system. It can also lead in some cases, to reverse abandonment anxiety, where a child fears abandoning the parent rather than being abandoned. I really resonate with that.

I feel so guilty and so intense about establishing boundaries with my mom or not showing up for her in the way that I feel like I should as she ages. And that if she has to spend time alone, it often pushes me to exceed my own capacity because I feel so. I do. I have that reverse abandonment anxiety. In all these situations, the well worn path is to self abandon rather than to express our own needs. Over time, this

chronic abandonment impacts our identity. Like you were talking about, we don't know who we are, what are our desires, what are our boundaries, what's healthy for us? The more we disconnect from, from our own internal sensations, the more that has an impact on our nervous system function, our interoceptive system, our brain function, and the ability to create that sense of safety inside of ourselves. The this level of self abandonment, you never learn. I think this came up in our social anxiety

conversation. Who you are, you don't know who you are in development because you've been patterned in a way that is external. You know, like hiding, shutting down. This is who I need to be. Show up over here like this, do this for my parents. This is all so self abandoning because we don't know who we are. It can come from structural trauma reasons just as well as like, as just as Elisabeth highlighted. But what we're really talking about here in this level is, how do I identify? There's masking

involved. As we have been studying neurodivergence for next season, this is something that really hit me pretty hard. Now, let's define masking. Masking refers to when an individual hides or suppresses their mental health symptoms, behaviors, or difficulties in an effort to blend in with others. That is self abandonment. It can occur both

intentionally and unconsciously over time. While often associated with neurodivergent individuals such as people with autism or ADHD, people with various mental health diagnoses think of what falls under the lens of complex trauma. You struggle with these things, but are afraid to express them. Self abandoning your own needs to appear normal because you are afraid of social rejection. People who mask may copy others demeanor, suppress their true feelings, or may engage in compensatory behaviors.

It's interesting, too, as we've been reading about neurodivergence and looking at the health of women in particularly, and masking, and so much of self abandonment and masking come together because we learn as women to imitate other women. We learn the social cues from watching other women, seeing how other women are doing things and moving through the world. Although that's educating us, it's also teaching us, once again to hide and to mask.

That perpetuates the self abandonment, because there's so many societal rules and expectations for women to meet every day. If you're a coach, therapist, practitioner, healer looking to bring nervous system health and training and resilience into all of the good work that you're doing, this conversation is, maybe, resonating

with you. You know, there's a deeper place you want to take your work with your clients, also to help your own nervous system to prevent burnout and to create greater capacity to do all of the good work that you're doing. We are enrolling now in the next cohort of neurosomatic intelligence, and we would love to book a discovery call with you. You can do that at, neurosomaticintelligence.com.

There's so much of, the narrative of being broken that comes with Complex Trauma, that you're running around all of the time trying to make sure that things look okay on the outside or that you're acting, quote unquote, normal in social situations, that people don't see the internal chaos going on. That does require a lot of self abandonment, because it feels like you wouldn't definitely be rejected if people saw what was really going

on inside. I think masking, usually used in the context of neurodivergence, is found typically these days. But, it can apply so much in the realm of CPTS. Masking can come in a lot of different forms. You can have social masking where you're trying to behave in ways that don't come naturally to you. Something as small as making eye contact. But, that causes discomfort in. In your nervous system, in your body, where you're mirroring body language to try to fit

in. For me, when I'm in a shame response, it's really difficult to make eye contact. I try to force myself to do it so that I'm not disconnecting from other people. Then that sometimes creates more shame and more dysregulation. Then there's behavioral masking, like concealing. We talked about this withm Lindsay on

our neurodivergence and chronic pain episode. When you conceal the behaviors that you use for self regulation - maybe you're someone who, like, rocks around a lot or you fidget in order to self regulate, but you feel like that makes you appear strange. It doesn't fit in the social context. You try to hide those behaviors that you've naturally learned that your nervous system is asking for, for self regulation, and it can come from compensation, like

overcompensating. By spending more energy to hide your struggles, like, the things that are really difficult for you, you push yourself to adapt to these systems, especially the educational system really comes to mind, where you're trying to appear as if things aren't as difficult for you as they are, so that you can fit in and live up to some kind of certain standard, maybe even writing with your non dominant hand.

I had a friend that was left handed and really self conscious about it and forced themselves to write with their right hand because it didn't seem socially acceptable. There's all these little ways that we can mask the truth of who we are to try to fit in at a big structural level. It's such an interesting example. So you may be asking yourself, like, why? Why do we mask? Why would one do that? It really comes down to fear. Fears of stigmas, ableism and

discrimination. They all drive masking behaviors because people want to protect themselves from negative reactions. We have, as humans, a real desire for acceptance. Some mask to fit in, to be accepted or to avoid standing out. This could be a learned behavior. Masking can be a learned behavior, because from our childhood experiences, especially in unpredictable or abusive environments, this all leads to self abandonment. So, children adapt

by hiding their true selves, much like masking. You can really see the interplay of all of the components of Complex Trauma when you think about masking. For example, right now, I'm thinking of, social anxiety. I'm thinking of the inner critic intertwined. All of this comes into play. We just talked about social anxiety and this desire for acceptance here, for masking. Masking to fit in, to be accepted. We all

have this desire to be accepted. When it comes to those learned behaviors, just like I was talking about as women, how we learn how to be in society and in relationship, that's very learned because we're watching the existing examples and maybe we're watching our own mom's self abandon and we are learning from her. Absolutely. Absolutely! I mean, masking leads to self abandonment because ultimately we're prioritizing fitting in. Again, we're talking about fitting in as a deep social need, as it.

It really feels life threatening to be rejected from the herd, to be rejected from our community or caregivers. We learn to prioritize that fitting in over honoring our own true feelings and needs and it has an impact on our nervous system. If we're constantly hiding or not doing the things that we need for our unique nervous system to regulate and create safety or maybe forcing ourselves to take in too much stimulus because we are sensitive and we want to still engage with the world. The

world is overstimulating for our unique nervous system. This leads to chronic dysregulation, chronic stress, and or maybe the lack of stimulus that your unique brain needs. So either way, we all have a unique nervous system. It has different needs. And when we suppress those needs and try to fit in, there's long term consequences on the health of our nervous system, on

our brain function, and on our physical health. You know, as someone who obviously identifies as having, Complex Post Traumatic Stress and someone who identifies as having ADHD, there's so many overlaps. Neurodivergence is something we're going to be exploring next season in Season Four.

Let's just talk about some of these little overlaps of self abandonment and ADHD, because there is that level of, you know, and when we talk about fear, there is a sensitivity to having criticism and being judged. There's also a sensitivity that we can find ourselves in when we have ADHD, to understanding that we have

ADHD. Then, this inner critic starts to come into play, and we can really find ourselves in the level of energy that it requires to pretend to, like, pass in a social environment, it just becomes so much the masking and the constant need to. To just skate through. To get that pass. It can lead to depression, anxiety, fatigue, and burnout, because the more energy it requires to pass, the harder that level that

is to maintain. One of the experiences for someone with ADHD is that there is this sense of accumulated trauma that happens over repeated attempts to do something the right way and not being able to. Finally, it just starts to boil over. I think that overlaps with self abandonment because of how much we are masking and mimicking and trying in the exterior to feel validated, to feel worthy, to feel seen and heard.

What ends up happening is something that we talk on here a lot is there's this undercurrent of shame that happens because we cannot keep up with all of it. As the mask comes off, our well being improves,. As we embrace our authenticity, as we come into the body for a full body experience. Then, we begin to embrace who we are, setting boundaries, learning our nervous system. The mask comes off and our well being improves because overall, the stress level is so much lower. Right. That's

what we're doing. We are lowering the stress -it relates to sensory processing disorders. We're going to dive into that a lot deeper in Season Four. I'm really excited about, Season Four and diving into all of this. What we're talking about here is big structural ways in which society impacts our nervous syste -, especially if we have a nervous system that's maybe a little bit different from the nervous systems and the brains that're celebrated and

supported in this structure. We're going to be looking at, Structural Trauma a lot in Season Four and how it adds chronic stress to the nervous system for all different types of people. Because these structures of oppression, the patriarchy, the dominant culture, they impact us all in different ways.

Everybody's nervous system is unique. As we're looking at self abandonment, you can also see ways in which different structural institutions would bake that self abandonment in at a deep level for different populations and communities. That pattern again! It's very deeply ingrained into our neural architecture. Self abandonment and ignoring our instincts then becomes pervasive. That can happen with emotional

repression, right? As a. As all of us, but especially as I'm thinking about, like, some men that I work with, it's really not ever encouraged or taught to express grief at all. Again, there becomes this deep layer of structural trauma that leads to that emotional repression and self abandonment. As you said, there are structural components of emotional repression. I mean, we live in a society that actively teaches us not to

express our emotions. We. A lot of people identify with being part of the hustle culture, that hustle and grind, wake up and grind every day. O,r that we have to be strong all the time, keeping it together. The narrative of, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and don't listen to your body. Continue to push through. That's a deep system of oppression. It's a system of oppression intentionally designed to keep you from your authenticity

as your gift. We're just sort of taught at this structural, systemic level that we push through and don't listen to your body. Again, there's this huge spectrum. It's these things that are seemingly makeup or identifying yourself somewhere. But there is this. There's this continuous disconnect from social safety, from feeling safe in the world, in the body that you're in. I mean, diet culture also, as we;ve

talked about previously, disconnects us from our own internal sensations. It ells us when to eat and what to eat and cuts us off from our interoceptive signals leading to a relationship of being really disconnected from the body. I mean, there's many, many facets of the dominant culture paradigm of the patriarchy that gets woven into our own nervous system and create these reactionary responses and further, all of these different complex trauma distinguishing characteristics.

Some of that Complex Trauma happens from development, but some of it may happen from societal trauma, from systemic trauma. And we also talked with Victor about how, you know, systems of oppression, it benefits them to keep people in emotional repression, because the people who are doing the oppressing don't have to feel the pain and the grief and the sacred rage of the people that they're oppressing. It becomes part of the dominant culture to repress emotions that then gets

baked into all of us. All of us get disconnected from our emotional experience because it serves people in a certain way. It serves the disconnection that they want us to have to each other. Which leads us to dissociation and self abandonment. Yes. Which obviously, dissociation is a huge, very physiological, very brain function part of self abandonment. Your consciousness is quite literally abandoning you and your body sensations, when we

have dissociation. We're going to talk a lot about this in the following episode, but part of our brain is deciding all of this information, this sensory experience is too much. Block those sensory signals from making it to conscious awareness. You disconnect from the sensations coming in from your body and from information coming in about the world around you. You can lose memory.

It's, it's ultimately, it's a disconnect from presence and integration of a sensory experience and very much a disconnect from yourself. We are diving into dissociation next week. When we dissociate, we can't be embodied or feel our instincts and our intuition. We can't be embodied without interoceptive signals making it up to the cerebral cortex. Gabor Mate talks about the spectrum of needs between attachment and authenticity and how they're both survival needs,

because instinct is a part of authenticity. If you think about an animal out in the wilderness, they don't just need the attachment to their caregivers, but they also need to be able to hear their own instincts to survive if there's a predator nearby, if the situation is dangerous, so they can mobilize and have appropriate action. In that way, authenticity also is a survival need. Attachment is a survival need. Authenticity is a survival need. There's this kind of relationship between the two.

With dissociation, you have disconnect from instinct, so you're naturally losing that balance between authenticity and attachment. It's out of whack because you don't have those instinct signals. There's too much importance put on maintaining the attachment, often because of those developmental experiences. There's so much underneath self abandonment. It can lead us into so many different harmful behaviors and relational patterns that disconnect us from that instinct. Let's

talk about what do we do about this? What do we do to heal our self abandonment? The first step is really cultivating awareness. Just like in the two examples in the stories that we shared earlier. We want the awareness that we self abandon when we are self abandoning. What does that look like for us? Can I start to notice my own needs and sensations when we feel triggered by not being seen or feeling heard? Where are we not hearing ourselves? Where in our bodies? Where in our experience?

What part of the abandonment is self abandonment? Is that why the trigger is so big, because we are abandoning ourselves? Yeah, that was a huge thing for me, just making that connection now I'm an adult, I'm a fully capable adult. I'm not really being abandoned because I'm not a child that is reliant on somebody else for my survival. I'm likely abandoning myself and replaying that pattern and creating that response inside of my body. It's a real different level

of awareness. It gives me some agency to start to re -pattern that. Also, we've started developing the skill of emotional processing, feeling and expressing the emotions and knowing that that's going to be messy, and that there's just no way to move out of the behaviors without being able to experience and process the emotion. It's very different to understand intellectually. I have some grief, I have some shame, or I have some anger underneath

there. Maybe you listen to the podcast and you think it all makes sense and it resonates. But, understanding it's really not the same as experiencing it and processing it. It has to be re-educated to our body, if we want to stop self abandoning and repressing and suppressing our emotions, we have to develop the capacity and the skill to actually be with those emotions and process them. There's just no way to move out of the behavior otherwise. Emotional processing is key

to keeping your nervous system regulated. Also, if you're not engaging in emotional practices, you're likely, if you're not processing your anger, your fear, your grief, you're not understanding your joy back to your authenticity. This starts to tie into boundaries. Boundaries are kind of the next level of this, because when you start breaking your own boundaries and self

abandon, there's going to be an emotional component to that. It's normal to feel anger or rage or resentment when someone is breaking a boundary that you don't even know that you have in place. That's the really interesting thing. So, starting to set boundaries, and we do that with our neurotools for regulating and processing the stress of setting those boundaries, of receiving those boundaries, receiving boundaries from someone else. We have SO many neurosomatic classes on site for the ways to

work with the nervous system to make boundaries safe. So joining us at, rewiretrial.com - you'll find that in the on demand library. Self compassion! Starting to develop the skills to have compassion for ourselves so that we don't move into those narratives of I'm too much. I can't express this. I

have to put other people's needs ahead of my own. We had that conversation with, Amanda Smith about the neuro of self compassion and how it is really critical for regulating our interoceptive system and restoring brain function, getting fuel and activation to our insular cortex. There's all kinds of practices that you can do, starting with just this awareness, this conversation, to

develop more self compassion. Then, you can actually work with the nervous system and the body to start to, at a neurological level, create more capacity inside of yourself for self compassion. And again, that is something that we do practically and actionably on the site. We'are doing a whole series right now on working with the distinguishing characteristics of CPTS. You can join us to put these practices in place in a way that is really applicable to

the things that we're talking about here. You can do it for a free two weeks at, rewiretrial.com. AJust see how we use the tools to really make an impact in these specific ways. Then, it's going to be really important that you start spending some time with yourself to discover who you are and what you like. I've said this before and say it many times with clients like, I think with CPTS, what happens is the light of who we are, the true essence and being

of us that makes us unique. It gets buried under all this CPTS components, all this crap, all this, quote, "Trauma", all these narratives, all these patterns. What we do when we start intentionally on this path with the nervous system and subconscious work is that we start unloading all of these things. It's about doing less, almost, and getting the things off that don't serve you anymore so that you can come through

as your authentic self. A lot of times that can be really scary because it's like having a blank canvas and you think, "What do I like to do? How do I like to be in this world as as myself?" Then, back to the tools. This is why. Back to the tools for the experience of, like, that kind of fear that can come into play when we want to play and have fun and have new experiences and new explorations of what we actually really like. The opposite of self abandonment is, self care.

Making the time to really care for ourself and for us, that means at a very deep level, at the level of our nervous system. Learning about my nervous system, learning how I respond and then taking the time, making the moments in my day to really have that daily intentional nervous system hygiene practice where I'm helping my system rehabilitate and create safety. This is how I come back to myself, that deep level of

knowing. This is my operating system. This is how it works. This is how I can give my body and my nervous system the stimulus that it needs to get the fuel and activation that it needs, the regulation, the safety. And then I'm really not abandoning. I'm really caring for myself. It makes such a huge difference in your life. It just makes such a huge difference in your life. Experience. Experience. It creates a much richer

experience. And so join us at, rewiretrial.com to check out our CPTS series on the site,, these are classes for working with all of these distinguishing characteristics and we really look forward to seeing you there working with you. Awesome. That's the end of our CPTS series. So thank you all once again for joining us, and we will see you next week fo,r Dissociation. Yes, looking forward to it. Thank you all for joining us.

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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.