The Inner Critic of Complex Post Traumatic Stress

Do you have a really mean person living in your head, criticizing you, putting you down, saying the cruelest things on a daily basis? A voice that you can't seem to shut down no matter what you do? It's just always there. Today, we're going to spend time understanding that voice, the reflexive, protective voice of the inner critic. Welcome. I'm your co host, Jennifer Wallace and this is 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 a, Neurosomatic Intelligence Educator and a Practitioner that bridges the intelligence of your nervous system and your sacred spaces. And I'm Elizabeth Christoph. I'm the founder of Brainbase.com, an online community where we train the nervous system for resilience, trauma resolution and behavior change. I'm also the founder of Neurosomatic IntelligenceCcoaching Certification.

So, we are diving into the distinguishing characteristics of CPTS - today we're exploring the inner critic. When we talk about the inner critic, we're really just talking about the voice inside of our head that judges, criticizes us, and demeans us. It doesn't matter if that criticism is objectively justified or just out of the blue. It's about everything that we do about our body, about the way we talk, about all of the ways

we interact in the world. Having a highly active inner critic voice can really take a toll on our emotional well being and our self esteem over time. But, what I really want to explore today is looking at this as not really the deep beliefs we have about ourself, but re-framing it to understand that this is part of a trauma response. It's a reflexive response when we're triggered that serves a protective purpose - that's what makes it part of, Complex Trauma.

It's really harsh. I mean, we're not talking about a slap on the wrist you may give yourself or that we're given by society. We all have an inner critic - that is normal, that is tribal. It's rooted in community. Think of when a child gets a timeout. That's to ensure this child learns a lesson. Like, if I do this, I could get left from my herd. I could get kicked out of the tribe. But with the inner critic, the voice gets so loud and so big, it says things like," You're

ugly. You're stupid You're fat. There's something wrong with you," and it's on repeat. You're different from other people. "You're bad. You're weak, You're needy. You're too much. You're too sensitive. You'll never be loved." So, for someone who's experiencing CPTS, this voice is so critical and so mean. It goes far beyond just a slap on the wrist that I'm talking about or that you might receive from society.

It's, "Oh! I shouldn't do that again" and it spirals into something so much more severe. Yes, there's definitely a difference between normal self criticism, which we all have a little bit of, and the experience of having Complex Developmental Trauma. The biggest differentiator is the impact of that on the nervous system. There's an extreme dysregulation that comes for someone with

CPTS. When you have a very loud, pretty abusive voice inside of your head your body responds to it and there's a reaction inside the nervous system. Our nervous system starts to move into one of our five responses - into a reflexive protective response. That dysregulation can re-occur. So, then we're getting driven into these chronic cycles of dysregulation. With CPTS, it can then trigger into the other components of CPTS that we've discussed:, emotional flashbacks, the ones

we'll talk about later, and toxic shame. So it's a cascade effect, ongoing and there're real impacts on the health of your nervous system, on how your nervous system is perceiving the world because you're in that high threat state, what's happening in your body and your health outcomes. It's like you were saying - having inner self criticism is part of being human. But, with Complex Trauma, this is not self

evaluation. This is a reflexive trauma response linking to an attachment wound from neglect or abuse from our past. It's very disproportionate to the present day situation. In fact, this is one of the ways I find awareness in my inner critic and in some of the other CPTS distinguishers that we're going to get into later. I start to notice that my reaction to myself is too disproportionate to what's

actually happening. It's like the feelings in an emotional flashback- they're huge and feeloverwhelming, and don't correspond to what's actually happening. At the level of the self abuse and the internal criticism, it doesn't match

the reality of the situation. It's for far more severe and cognitively, we can understand this isn't true and we know that we are not fatally flawed, but in the moment of a trauma reaction, that knowing it's not available to us and the only thing that we know is that we are experiencing this in our bodies. I want to break down a little bit of the neuro here because I think this helps people to understand that this truly is a Reflexive Trauma Response, not necessarily part of

your higher order thinking systems. It's not really a deep core belief about who, who you think you are. This voice doesn't live in those areas of the brain. Right. We have parts of our cerebral cortex, our prefrontal cortex, where our ideas and beliefs about who we are and about the world live at a cognitive level. This reaction is not part of that. Right. When sensory information comes in to the system, there's kind of, very broadly speaking,

two different routes that it can take. The sensory information comes in through the peripheral nervous system and makes it up to the brain, into the limbic system, where your amygdala, your thalamus, your hippocampus plays a role in that, in deciding the threat level of this stimulus coming in, whether that's social stimulus or physical stimulus. Information about the environment around you, signals from inside of

your body. All of it goes up through that route. Then, if at that point, the amygdala especially decides this is unsafe, this warrants a threat response, then that information, those sensory signals, are just routed right back into your survival mind, into your brainstem, and a reflexive trauma response begins. If it's safe, that information can make it up to your frontal lobe and be processed cognitively before returning to the amygdala and

then having the reaction occur in the body. When we're talking about the inner critic voice, this is initiated when we get triggered into a trauma response. So, it's not part of the reaction that involves the frontal lobe, it's part of the reaction that is a reflexive trauma response. It's part of that low road response, the fear circuitry, that

doesn't involve our higher order thinking systems. Just for a minute, I want people to think about that, because when we hear that voice, it's not really coming from our cognitive, logical, rational mind. We don't really believe that about ourselves. It is instinctive, reflexive. It's just a loop that's playing to try to protect us when we get thrust into that trauma response.

It's really hard to not believe that voice, when that's your chronic living situation, when that's how you're experiencing the world. But, as Elizabeth's talking about higher order systems of thinking, for that to be turned on for you to be activated and living from that place, you can't be in survival mode. You can't have the harsh inner critic and be performing with your executive functioning at a high level because you can't jump

and stand still at the same time. When you're in a reflexive trauma response, you're gone into survival patterns. If you're being thrust into the throes of the inner critic and say, toxic shame, you've been hijacked by those nervous system survival patterns. You've been. You have no clue. Sometimes, your body is responding to a threat without your consent. That's the

reflexive nature of it. In regard to those Reflexive 5 Responses, let's explore the fawn trauma response for a moment or its relationship here to the inner critic. To understand Fawn is to understand that fawn propels us to engage socially with the threat and it can often be misinterpreted as a personality trait. From an NSI perspective, Fawn is a behavioral adaptation. It's a response based on the attachment need for survival. The trigger is often rooted in connection or is

relationally based. It elicits a heightened sympathetic activation in the nervous system. That racing heart tension in the body, bracing in the muscles. You could also experiencing shifts in your breathing, because our need to secure connection and without the awareness of our fallen behaviors, they can easily lead into dishonesty, manipulation, self harm. This deep unconscious resentment of not being able to uphold our own boundaries. Enter the inner critic.

It's these loops that are sometimes unconsciously and wildly dangerous that we have on repeat. Every time we fawn, we break our own boundaries and the person we're fawning at, breaks our boundaries as well. So a normal response that might come could be rage or anger, and it really could lead to illness in the body, because as fawning becomes a lifestyle, that boundary is being all the time broken. It's being suppressed, that natural anger and rage. Inflammation is going to happen in the body.

Adrenaline. Over time, diseases like autoimmune thyroid. There's like physical deteriorations of the thyroid because of the constriction, it wears down over time. And it has a lot to do with repressing the truth. With NSI and working through the nervous system, we are uncoupling that expression of truth to the threat, to the social threat. I think Fawn is a beautiful example there, because it is like, it's a behavior we're moving into a behavior we're moving toward the threat, but it's still a

reflexive response. It's still not coming from, like, a cognitive decision. I want to break my boundary. I want to engage with this person and experience all of this. Like, no, it's happening at that survival level. It's kind of like when you examine the neurology of other reflexes. You can think of it like when you get a sensory signal to like you, you have an itch, and then you don't have to cognitively think about making your body move and doing

the things to scratch and alleviate it. As soon as you experience that sensory information, parts of your motor cortex get activated, parts of the brain that plan movement. So you experience the itch, and then your nervous system begins to engage in the planning of the behavior that'll alleviate the itch - those are really hardwired. They're linked together, and self criticism can be really similar. When you experience the social threat,

that inner critic loop just gets activated. The brain automatically creates the behavior you need, which is the self criticism, to alleviate the itch. This is really true for my own experience. It can sound really conceptual, but to give a real life example, something might happen that will trigger me. Reflexively, I experience the outputs in my body. Maybe the inflammation or the racing heart or my throat closes up, but at the same time. This might have nothing to do with the

trigger that I experienced. Maybe the trigger was just a sound or somebody's facial expression or something very small. In my environment, the thought loops will begin about my body, about my work, about the way that I'm showing up in the world. They're the same old loops that played from way back when, but they just get activated with that trauma response, even though it might not seem

to have anything to do with the trigger. I can know, oh, I'm pushed into a trauma response because these old tapes are playing. I think it's like this with so many of the components of complex trauma and shame, we're going to get into next in the next conversation. But it's the same kind of lens, the same filter gets, gets turned on, because it's not just like, oh, it's the inner critic say around this podcast. If something comes up, then it's like my house, the laundry, the car, every. I'm not

good at anything anymore. So, and that's another way that I can tell that things have gotten disproportionate, because I'm not just checking myself on something that I maybe, like, drop the ball or there was a mistake happen in relation to, say, this podcast. It then goes on to everything else in my life. I suck and I'm terrible at it -it's years of my life,

decades. I spent time in the inner critic really believing that that's who I was, that I was this unloving, unworthy, terrible bad person that didn't deserve any. Anything, literally nothing. I learnt, through regulating my nervous system, as Elizabeth was saying, that's not true. Those are not my core beliefs. You know, that is now through a lens shift that my brain is experiencing. I'm not in my higher order systems of thinking. I'm not able to jump when I'm being like, it's not even standing

still. It's like in the fetal position on the ground. No jumping and fetal positioning at the same time. These come from most of the time patterns that are developed during development. So whose voice even is that? Where do these thoughts even come from? We want to remember, with all reflexive trauma responses, they're protective. At the root of this is an attachment wound. It's our fear of

social loss. We have spent a lot of time exploring how much social connection is necessary for our survival, especially as infants, as young children. Children. We need our primary caregivers, we need our herd. Many children adapt to an environment where they're not getting those needs met by developing this really strong self criticism. They live in this high stress environment. Maybe there's abandonment, maybe there's actual abuse and they adapt to it with

perfectionism. This can come from passive abandonment of neglect or active abandonment of abuse. In that climate, the developmental water they're swimming in, forces their identity to develop in a way, really forces their, their nervous system, their unique neuromatrix, to cultivate these dynamics of perfectionism and threat. So you become really hyper vigilant about making yourself perfect in all these different ways to keep your social connections met

and to try to get the care that you need. Then you're doing that so that your parents, your primary caregivers will be safe, will be loving. But that doesn't happen because usually when we change ourselves, it doesn't change the other person, it doesn't actually change the environment. We just don't recognize that as kids. So we keep trying, and we keep failing at it. The voice becomes more hyper vigilant about that perfectionism. It becomes stronger, it becomes louder.

Pete Walker compares this to soldiers that are in combat for a long time. It's the same thing with a little kid. They get locked into this hyper vigilance and this sympathetic nervous system arousal, trying to relieve the abandonment, trying to get the care that they need. It keeps compounding on itself because you keep trying harder and it keeps not happening. Then you try harder and it keeps not happening. The voice gets louder and becomes a more well worn path

for children. They internalize everything. Their brains aren't capable of having the altitude that we often have as adults when we're going back into our childhood experiences, back and through our developmental trauma and starting to heal things and getting this other level of understanding about the way things were when we grew up and maybe even why our parents are the way that they are and having a little bit more. Grace is something that's going to come up here later on this

podcast. But the brain and the nervous system is going to respond to threat and perceived threat the exact same way. If a young, developing brain is perceiving threat, perceived neglect or abandonment, like Elizabeth was talking about, the priority is still attachment. Not only attachment, but attachment means literal survival. How is a tiny baby going to feed, shelter and clothe themselves, without an adult? Well, they

can't. We're going to prioritize survival, and the lack of brain development will only lead into the feeding of, like, this is all my fault. Children cannot self regulate until between the age of three and a half to four years old, which happens to also coincide with the long term memory being able to be laid down in the brain as well. All of those little years, these perceived knowings, they get stored in our bodies and those reflexive responses of trying to change

really begin with the thought loops of there's something wrong with me. Then we start performing in all sorts of different ways to try and secure that connection. And then we figure out, okay, like Elizabeth said, maybe I'm going to go into perfectionism, maybe I'm going to. The question sort of becomes more of like, how do I need to change myself to stay safely, to stay safe physically, socially and emotionally? If you grew up. We've already talked about fawn. So perhaps you grew up with a

fawn response getting deeply well wired. Maybe your parents, your primary caregivers, are fawners. You might start to learn to quantify love based on politeness, then you value politeness over your truth. Maybe you learn that you get rewarded when you control your body versus experiencing the truth of your body. Whereas, like, manners are saying," I see you,

I respect you, and thank you, I honor you." Those are manners versus, "I have to do something with my body that I don't want to do" - a forced hug, forced smiles, forced hellos. With children, we need to let them learn how to negotiate their boundaries for their own felt sense of internal safety. The truth of our bodies, it sometimes makes people uncomfortable.

That's what a lot of people, you're going to hear later on in Season Four when it comes to this, it could be lifestyle, it could be social systems. That could be racism. People who experience racism in their bodies and are in a different skin color than the dominant culture, they could experience fawn on different levels just because of the truth of the body being the experience of making

somebody uncomfortable. With your primary caregivers, if your emotions are too big, if you sense that your emotions get your parents overwhelmed, then you might say to yourself, like, they can't handle me when I'm like this. So I'm gonna shut this down. I'm going to play small. I'm going to hide myself. As, Gabor Mate says, "When secure attachment is threatened, we choose security over authenticity". Think about that when the child has to develop in that way, they don't understand how to

express themselves in a true way. You can see how shame starts to come into this and get really exaggerated and hypervigilant. It can start to play itself out in future relationships when we're adults. That emotion can get triggered so easily when we feel like our connection with another person is in danger. That inner criticism can show up so much. It really hit me what you were saying about, the somatic experience in the body. That memory of

the feeling is not safe in my body. Then, having to move into that inner criticism to try to change even how your body is expressing emotions, experiencing the world, it's very layered, and it creates a real loop. It's an effect on the body that keeps

us in a trauma response. That's kind of the thing about these five distinguishing characteristics, is that we do need to find a way to break these loops because they are outputs of the nervous system, because of the dysregulation, but they're also inputs in a way, and then they create more

dysregulation. When I have this inner critic voice get triggered and activated, it's not only a response of the dysregulation of the trigger, but now it's creating more dysregulation in my body by having that harmful inner dialogue. That is going to lead to the activation of my shame response at a really physiological level. We'll talk about toxic shame in a minute or on the next episode. But

it's going to create that response. It's going to create bracing and muscle tension and racing heart or maybe freeze and shut down. So it just keeps perpetuating itself. Then as you get triggered, then the inner critic voice gets louder, then it creates more dysregulation, then the inner critic voice gets louder. There's got to be a way to interrupt that cycle.

Freeze is so interesting too, because a lot of people associate with freeze as their most common trauma response or the most deeply worn path of their Reflexive Five's. It's so misunderstood in a way, because freeze is intended to be an acute trauma response. It's supposed to be short in duration. It's, when that pause moment, think of the animal body. The animal, the, the little possum is out there doing its thing, and then here comes a cat and it's just like,

boom, it freezes. It doesn't want to be seen. And that's what's happening for us. And it's this moment to make a decision, am I going to fight or am I going to run away? But what happens is, like in a chronic situation with freeze, when freeze might look like anxiety, depression, fatigue, shutdown, overwhelm, migraines, neuroticism. Dissociation is often attached to

freeze. You often get freeze, shame and dissociation kind of all lumped in together, just sort of running their cycles interwovenly. This is found at this level of overwhelm and shutdown. It's a protective output of a nervous system under chronic stress or too much stimulus. The bucket is overflowing and it could really lead into further immobility, into flop situation. Into a collapse immobility when escape is not possible. Then you might experience fainting, fatigues, blackouts, dissociation

once again. " Am I good in there" Trying to think of where I'm at in my body. That's just it. It's just it compounds. All of these characteristics, they create more trauma responses. Those trauma responses compound to bring more of the distinguishing characteristics about. One of the things I think is really important to think about is self compassion would be the opposite of the inner critic. The inner critic is really

hard on us. Self compassion is looking at ourselves with curiosity and understanding for why things might be difficult for what's going on for ourselves and just having compassion for the experience that we're having. We did an episode not too long ago with, Amanda Smith where we talked about

the neurology of self compassion. It's very interesting because self compassionate self talk actually activates parts of our brain, the anterior insula, that help our our brain feel the signals coming from inside of our body more clearly and with more accuracy. We can actually use self compassion to create less threat, better perception of the feelings that we're feeling inside of our own body. Then the

opposite is kind of true with the inner critic. The more we have that inner critic voice that is pushing us into dissociation, like you talked about, that big triad of shame, dissociation and freeze, then we are no longer able to hear or we're really misinterpreting the signals coming from inside of our own body. So the way we actually feel our body changes when that inner critic voice

is going. You might be able to really resonate with that, like, when the inner critic is going again, even if it's about, like, your job or this podcast or your money. Maybe you feel great. Gross. In your body. You feel uncomfortable. You feel like you want to hurt yourself. That's when this inner critic voice is really loud. I often see people wanting to self harm, wanting to abuse the

body. There's this real effect on the interoceptive system and the ability to hear what's going on inside of our body and to know where our body is in space and be connected to our body when that inner critic voice is so loud. You know, when I think of boundaries, too, the interoceptive system plays such a big role. Your interoception and your exteroception, they are literally your physical, living boundaries of your nervous system before you go into the outside

world. We've talked about on this podcast so much, I think it was season three and season two. We talk about the insular cortex because those that's one of the key players into your interoceptive system, training your vagus nerve and training your insular cortex because that insular cortex is responsible for turning emotions into motivation and action. So you can see, if you have a harsh inner critic, how the motivation and act action would be turned down, right. You don't have a lot

of motivation. You can't take a lot of action when you're frozen and shut down and dissociated. So by working with certain areas of the brain, we can start to implement new action. When we start turning the survival brain down and going into the higher order systems of thinking into the prefrontal cortex, working on executive functioning, you're going to see a huge shift in the way that you are showing up in your brain to yourself. And

that's where we want to be right with it. This is back to the daily nervous system training practice that we talk about every single, every single moment we get on here, right. Offering you the free two weeks at rewiredrial.com. You can come see, and experience these tools. Come see if you've a deficit in your nervous system. Learn more because you are going to want to know the accuracy of the signals that come from the internal sensations of your body.

Definitely intraoceptive training, frontal lobe training has been so huge for me in moving out of this inner critic loop cycle. I want to talk a little bit, too about perfectionism and this inner critic because we have the episode on perfectionism. If you're resonating with the inner critic, definitely go back and listen to that because real talk, perfectionism is

a trauma response. It's this hyper vigilant way of trying to control ourselves and control our environment to make sure that we stay safe socially, physically, emotionally. It's often, rewarded by our society as being a high performer, people will give you a lot of praise for

pushing through your pain and doing so much. You might get rewarded financially, but there are real costs to what that stress level is doing to your body, to keeping you stuck in this trauma response and to stay living in that experience of being in constant dialogue with the inner critic that's really driving all of that behavior. It's not from our own sense of desire and purpose, but it's just to escape this. That'ss tough. That is a really tough way to live.

Perfectionism is a constant state of high stress. It's a constant self abandonment from your truth and expression, because what is perfect? What are we going for here? Have you ever arrived there? Is there no end in sight? You're just going to keep pushing and driving until you don't ever reach something and think about what that causes for you every day, whether that's like, showing up as

what I think about more is like, is hiding. What I see a lot of coming through with our clients is that they want higher levels of visibility. They want to use their voices more, but, like, they just can't. Not until my. Not until my body looks like this. Not until I get this, not until I get here.

Then when I get here, I can do this and it's like, but you're never going to get there to the first stop anyway because of this driving perfectionism and learning to let life be messy is really scary in the beginning. It is scary af to all of a sudden, let God, the Universe, whatever your words are, to have a little bit more play in your life, to slow down, to rest. These are other components of the opposite of perfectionism. And those are all

really scary narratives to push against. When you have developed in a way as a little person, that says, well, I have to be perfect so that I can maintain attachment and life of what we know from season three is all about connection and attachment. Oh, it's such a good example of people being really shut down to take any action because of that perfectionism loop. It can drive us in so many ways where we. We can't actually take any forward momentum in our life because we have to be so

perfect before we get there. Or it can keep us constantly overdoing, over training, overworking, and just these doing. Doing loops that are. They're going to lead to the outputs of exhaustion. The stress bucket is going to overflow. It's going to lead to maladaptive behaviors because at some point the nervous system is going to need to come down

from that state. So you might find yourself binge eating and, like, you just can't get out of that cycle of overworking, overdoing, and then you have a binge or you drink some alcohol or you use some cannabis or whatever it is that you're using to make it safe to come out of that state. It can feel really, really scary to allow yourself to come out of that cycle of whatever behavior it is that you're doing. Because the inner critic voice is so loud and so

harsh. You know that if you don't do the thing, you're going to have to face that inner critic voice that's saying, like, you should have done the thing. You're not good enough. I remember working with a client that had a really difficult time eating food because of the really loud inner critic voice. Even though we looked at all the ways that the disordered eating was keeping life really small and shutting things down and the cost to her body and the

cost to her social connections, and, like, cognitively, I got it. I understand. I don't want that. But then knowing if I take the action to move out of this disordered behavior, I'm going to have to face that inner critic. It's going to feel so uncomfortable in my body, in my head that in that moment, because, again, survival brain lives in the

moment. The stress of the dysregulation and the shame that would come from taking the new action was so big and overwhelming, we just couldn't push past that to take the new action. I think it's a really important point on perfectionism - someone with perfectionism could have a driving, overdoing response and a total shutdown response at the same time from the same

response. All of this, what we're talking about, can also lead to some really compulsive behaviors where we plan on recording a conversation on OCD in season four. Disordered eating. We'll explore more in season four as well. But that is definitely one of the compulsive behaviors that I found myself in as I was driving against some of these reflexive responses while it was food, alcohol, and cannabis at one time, some of them at multiple times altogether, and one at a time. You know, it's

not. True. Not really the way to live in a high stress response. And then just using something to shut you down also. This is what the tools do. They start to regulate us to be able to come out of these high stress states every day in a moment by moment basis and situational experiences on a situational basis. And, you know, these compulsions, they're sort of this way to try and control the body, control the environment to feel safe. But that never ending need that gets met

because the safety never comes. As we're asking, " Are you a high driving perfectionist? Are you shutting down perfectionists"? The inner critic is going to drive us in so many different directions, but without something that really makes us feel safe, we're never going to feel the safety. That's the beauty of working with your nervous system. That's right. It's just like that little kid developing in that high stress environment, trying to change themselves through the inner

criticism to get their needs met. If that safety is coming externally, even now in adulthood, we're just chasing it, and we're never creating the internal environment of safety that allows us to have that moment of realization. The self criticism, perfectionism and those driving behaviors just go on and on and on. Until we have the tools and the ways to create that safety internally, we can't stop. There's another huge component of this. Kind of the sibling of the internal critic. The

external critic. Another component of the same thing. It's the flip side of the coin, but it's another protective response. One is pushing inward to stay safe and try to create change there, and the other is pushing outward. But they're both reflexive mechanisms that change the way our brain is taking in information, filtering information about the world around us, about our relationships, about other people, about ourselves. It comes from a need to secure safety,

always physical, emotional, or social safety. We can have a very loud external critic, too, that is putting that same lens of not enough and distrust onto other people around us all of the time, because we don't feel safe with those social connections. It's interesting, you know, as a content creator, as someone on social media, back to, you know, people not wanting to be seen on social media for fear of, how people will respond to you. What we see a lot is the

external critic online. You can look on there at any time and just go through a post and listen to another person, shame degrade in some way online, telling somebody that they're wrong,

they're dumb, you're stupid, you're fat, you're ugly. I mean, it's happened to me before - you're experiencing the inner critic of someone else as your inner critic is also like, you're shutting your inner critic down so that you can show up, you can be visible, be authentic, and then at the same time, we are being exposed to someone else's inner critic that's gone wild into

their external critic. The inner critic, that voice in our head, is often times showing us what we could be most afraid of, right. Back to visibility, to love, to worthiness. The things that we want the most. Often that inner critic is in there telling us, like, no, you don't deserve this. You are not good enough for this. Then here comes the external critic of somebody else actually coming at us and saying those things.

It's another really beautiful thing about learning about our nervous system - you begin to learn other people's nervous system. Totally. I want to circle back to the social media thing in a second, but about our reflexive response..... It's like when we're so afraid of intimacy, connection or really allowing ourselves to be vulnerable and possibly hurt socially, when. When a relationship expands into more depths, we might find that external critic kick on as well. Right. There's part of us

inside that's saying, I don't deserve this. But then there's another part that's hyper vigilant about all the ways we're going to get hurt or this person's going to let us down or disappoint us, and we start to pick that apart. I've found it when I'm working, even with other

professionals, when I'm vulnerable,. With a neurocoach or with a somatic therapist or something, when the container gets too deep, I will go into pulling back myself and I'll also start pushing out with external criticism about why it's not right for me and all these things. When you were talking about social media, I couldn't help but think about your grief. Real. That went viral and quick. It was a very vulnerable post and it showed a lot of emotional expression. That's scary for

people.People are scared of expressing emotions, watching somebody else express it -the calling it has, to them themselves to express it, the emotion that it might bring up in them to see someone grieving. If that emotion of grief is scary, there's a big response there. There was a lot of external criticism response. The external critic absolutely can be protecting us from deeper emotions like

shame or grief. We get hyper critical of others to protect ourselves from experiencing those emotions, from abandonment or from even, like, when a relationship is pulling up those emotions in us, when a connection with someone else is pulling up those emotions in us and we don't want to feel our own shame, anger, grief, whatever it is that external critic will come out to protect us. Look at gossip... Look at gossip. That's external critic engaging in social connection. That's it. That's not

great. Everybody. Like, that is not - that's not nice. Back to, what I think of when I think of the external critic, too, and, like, it's this. You know, when people talk about other people's weight and then they put it as like, oh, I'm just concerned for you, or I'm scared of what could happen to you, like, through your body weight. And, like, that's how I think about it, you know? And it's like, no, you have fears around yourself. You

have an inner critic around your body. How you feel about such and such as body is a reflection of how you're feeling about the body. But just think of any time you're engaged in gossip. What's going on there? That is your external critic alive and out there? Totally! It's really fascinating to explore. When mine does come out, I have a much louder inner critic than external critic because I'm so conflict averse. Bu,t sometimes it does come out in

my thoughts. Not out loud though. I'm never very vocal about it, but in my thoughts, it will protect me in relationship. It's really interesting to have this awareness because I can know when those things start to come up. Oh, this might not be an accurate reflection of how I really feel about this person, this relationship, this container. It is likely that I'm feeling threatened by something that's happening here, and it's

pushed me into this reflexive response. That kind of brings us to what can we do about all of this now that we are seeing it? What do we do when we know that we have this reflexive protective trauma response? The first step always is the awareness, just that understanding of knowing that when the loops start to play, it's just a loop. It's just a well worn protective path that has been activated by a trigger. It's not real. It's

not my actual beliefs about myself. It's probably not my actual beliefs about the other person and it's definitely not objectively true. It's just the filtering system that my brain has. It only feels true in that moment because it's how I feel inside. It's not real. It's important to start cultivating some self compassion. That's when you can catch the awareness and start to have some self

compassion. You can regulate your nervous system, use some of your high reward payoff tools and start developing a relationship with yourself. Right. Relationship through. I did have a strong external critic, particularly when I was growing up and in my teenage years. In a my twenties too, when I was drinking a lot. Everyone else was wrong, but never me. Everyone else was wrong. I did not understand how to take any responsibility for my nervous system.

I I sought so much external validation at the same time in so many ways from people and didn't understand how to trust myself. Part of understanding how to trust myself was understanding the thoughts coming through my mind. Is this real? As we were talking about it earlier. How wild is this thread going in my head? This is getting really disproportionate. I can catch myself. I can catch that and be okay. I can have a cognitive conversation with myself. I can stomp

around. I can move my body, have some somatic expression, do some intentional training in my higher order systems of thinking in my prefrontal cortex. That's really important for people to understand. You can. If you get hijacked, you can get control right back over that of your brain. Using those practical, actionable tools is a really

big deal. Then just to taking the reframe a little bit deeper, even, is that I think sometimes we might even be willing to say, like, okay, this is just a reflective, reflexive, protective trauma response of a well worn loop. But there's some truth to this loop - there's something about it that's true about me, because I've heard it so many times that it actually has kind of become baked into my beliefs about myself.

Taking a moment to understand, that this is a loop and it's just a reflection of your fears, of your social connections being severed. It is nothing that has anything to do with how you actually are. It's only what you're afraid of. The things you think would separate you from other people, cause you to be abandoned or rejected. It's those fears given a voice, and so it's just a reflection of your fears and nothing about your actual behavior or way of being in the world.

Yeah, that's so empowering. I don't know if I'm missing anything. I think we're just going to touch on the drills one more time. Okay. We talked earlier about the interoceptive system and working with the insular cortex and the vagus nerve. Learning. Learning what your nervous system needs, what it wants and how to communicate with it. The language of the nervous system is through sensory input. It's not a cognitive conversation. That's why we train our sensory systems intentionally

each day. One of the drills I feel like I talked about a lot throughout Season Two, was sensory stimulus and understanding, where my body is, what it is, where are the boundaries, and starting to love on the parts that I was so critical about before. Again, just having a practice of those practical tools that speak the language of the nervous system. So it definitely really does help to join us on, rewiretrial.com and start getting those tools. The

emotional processing practices too! Remember, if these are protective and they're protecting us from big emotions that we don't know how to move through the body that we've repressed, got, or suppressed for so long, we have to also start developing the skills to process those emotions and emotionally regulate so that we don't go into these reflexive responses every time we experience the emotion.

We do a lot of emotional processing on the site, shame processing, fear processing, being able to process joy, all of these things, and really making some time to re educate your nervous system and do it with us in community or find some way to do it so that you don't have to go back into these responses. Yes! There's another way to be. You don't have to experience the world the way you may be experiencing it today - as you're taking in this podcast and this information.

There's a whole other way out there. I'm sure that you dream of it, you have dreamt of it, and it's all possible through your nervous system. So, please join us at, rewiretrial.com and we'll see you next week when we explore Soxic shame.