Toxic Shame Of Complex Post Traumatic Stress

The other day I had a conversation with someone and said something which inadvertently was hurtful to the person. I realized, they came to me and told me about it. Cognitively I understood, it's no big deal. I made a little mistake, repaired the damage and was going to go on about my day. Then after that conversation, I started to notice I felt really heavy. My joints were a little bit swollen, I was having some digestive issues. I felt like my voice was a little bit

tight, a little bit high pitched. My throat was kind of hoarse. I realized, as I was sitting down to try to work on some stuff, I was getting a lot of brain fog. I realized, Oh! I'm in a shame response. That's what it feels like somatically to experience shame in your body, even when you don't know cognitively

you're moving into that shame response. Shame is this really human emotion we all experience, but with complex trauma, it can become toxic, chronically dysregulating, and harmful to our health. 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 Christoph. I'm the founder of, brainbasedwellness.com, an online community where we use neurosomatic tools and emotional processing to create behavior, change trauma resolution, and improve resilience. I'm also the founder of, Neurosomaly Somatic Intelligence Coaching. I'm your co host, Jennifer Wallace. I'm a Neurosomatic Intelligence Practitioner working in peak somatic experiences

bridging this to your nervous system. I'm also an educator for the, Neurosomatic Intelligence Coaching Certification. Toda,y we're exploring toxic shame, one of the elements of classic CPTS. We hope you enjoy this conversation. One of the first important things I think to start to distinguish is just the difference between guilt and shame. Guilt is when I did something bad or I did something wrong, kind of like that conversation I was referencing. It's just a little moment where

you can go back and you can repair. Shame, however, is an I am emotion. Guilt, as I did. Shame, as I am, I am bad, I am the mistake. Shame can last for a few hours or even a few days. As with all emotions, it serves a purpose. It's protective, keeping us connected to the people in our lives, to our herd, to our important relationships. It's really a society driven emotion. But, there's toxic shame that goes much deeper than that. It's really at the core of who

we are. Toxic shame is not just that I was bad, but I am worthless at my core from that constant conditioning of the shame loop. Because it's so deep, it becomes toxic, to our health and to our nervous system health and our behaviors. That's what we are going to really dive into today. How Toxic Shame it disconnects us from ourselves, the physiological implications and the impact on our nervous

system. Shame is such an interesting emotional response from the body- an interesting physiological response in the body. We just talked about the inner critic - I think the inner critic and toxic shame both have another element to them that's just like a regular experience of a critic, of the inner critic voice, or a regular experience of experiencing shame. Yet the complex part of this is, when it does get toxic. As you were saying, like, I am worthless

to my core. Just as we talked about an inner critic, there's a lens that shifts here. It's not just. " Oh, I'm experiencing shame". In this particular instance, it just goes everywhere into our bodies, our homes and just everything that you look at now has a lens of toxic shame. Shame, is a normal emotion, and it's trying to keep attachment safe for social safety. So let's talk about that. Everyone experiences shame because we belong to a herd. We belong

to a collective. That's what we've been talking about all season, in Season Three. It's part of being human is to experience shame and to experience each other's nervous systems, to be part of a collective and part of a tribe, part of our herd. Recently, I experienced someregular shame. It was a really new experience for me. I could feel that I had done something wrong. I did not behave in the right way.

When that became a conversation with the person who I was not really behaving well with, thankfully, that person is regulated and can understand with a higher level of altitude, my nervous system, and what I was experiencing. So, in our conversation, as things started to get worked out, it was like, didn't totally shut me down. I didn't experience freeze dissociation. I did not go into the all of I am

worthless. I was able to just move it through my body and really compliment myself on the back and like, oh, I just experienced regular shame. Ordinary shame is going to arise in response to a specific event or a perceived wrongdoing. Toxic shame, on the other hand, is chronic and deeply ingrained. And it may not always feel continuous, but it can resurface intensely when it does get triggered. And there are a couple

of key differences here. Um, they both could negatively impact the sense of self. When toxic shame erodes self worth over time. S,o it's also somewhat disproportionate. Right. We can see that with the inner critic, there's a disproportionate level of shame to what the experience was. The durations could change, too. As with regular shame, you could get through that maybe even in a couple of hours, maybe just that day, and just this experience time as you're processing. But toxic shame, it's not

like ordinary shame. Toxic shame persists, and it really colors the lens of an individual's overall self perception. That's why it becomes toxic. Really looking what do we mean bythe word, toxic? You hear the word thrown

around quite a bit. Toxic relationships, toxic shame. But, in this context, we're talking about chronically dysregulating in a way that is so overwhelming to our nervous system that we can't adapt and come back to regulation and safety and homeostasis, and that is actually harmful to our health. That's what happens for those of us with, CPTS.

Toxic shame, as you mentioned, has an enduring component - this enduring sense of worthlessness, and a deep, deep belief that we are fundamentally bad or flawed or wrong or crazy, and that really impacts our physiology a lot of the time. We're exploring these chronic health outcomes. Usually developing during our childhood, when we're still shaping our concept of ourself and we're very susceptible to our nervous system adapting to

keep us safe and socially connected. We internalize these critical messages about ourselves, then as we bake those into our own neural architecture, that leads to more threat all of the time, because we have that belief about ourselves that we're protecting against. There's always this constant social threat of being abandoned, of being

rejected, of people really seeing who we are. So our system is really primed in that protective way, and it can drive then a lot of our behavior, this excessive rumination on what other people are thinking about us and overplaying conversations and then getting the activation in the nervous system as you replay that conversation over and over again, the perfectionism that we talked about with the inner critic and the way that that either shuts us down or drives us into

overdoing and over performing so many big fears of how we'll appear looking foolish, that we start to guard ourselves and are very rigid with ourselves and how we show up and the emotions that can be triggered by shame, the anger that can come with it, or the emotions that can be repressed by it. There's a whole emotional component that can happen with shame being toxic in our body as well.

In our intro, you opened up with some of the experiences that you were actually having in your body, I mean, there's a real physiological effect with shame. And firstly, it's immobilizing, right. Shame is immobilizing. It's a heightened parasympathetic state. It's contraction, turning in to the body and shutting down. It's primary feelings are," I need to disappear". Then, dissociation. Feeling small, playing small and hiding in your life, leads to the inability to use voluntary

behaviors. We can't get into those higher order systems of thinking that we talk about shame also, it has a posture to it. The emotions of shame have a direct effect on our posture. We call this, through the lens of NSI a, Collapse Posture. This is eyes down, rounded spine, constricted pupils, head lowered, striated muscles of the face between, like, I'm not going to say that part. When even when we're looking at clients, we could see this internal drawing in, turning

into the body. It's very round. Nina Bolt says, when someone is locked in a posture of an emotion, you cannot change the emotion without changing the posture. I love this because this really is the connection of, like, the nervous system in its, in its fluidity and how our posture is going to change based on the emotions that we're experiencing. You wouldn't be experiencing shame and then leading with your heart, shoulders down and back with your head up. It's all going to be

turned downwards. There could be some felt senses of the body, like rubbery legs. You may feel like faint, lightheaded, and a real inability to move. This could cause nausea, ringing in the ears, a loss of perspective and feeling as if you are like being cut open. It can be painful because it doesn't always live with itself. Yes. The posture is so recognizable and interesting to explore because we know posture comes from our brainstem. These

reflexive trauma responses come from our brainstem. And so our posture is so much a reflection of that response that's happening in our brain and then being embodied through our posture and shame is really linked with freeze primarily because, remember, it's trying to protect us from doing or saying something that might sever our social attachment. So a lot of the time, that immobility that you talked about, it's because it's trying to protect us

from. From taking an action or using our voice that could be dangerous at a social level. And so most of the time, this is linked with that freeze response. The freeze response is so interesting, because there's both an activation and a parasympathetic part of that as well. The parasympathetic system puts the brakes on your ability to mobilize. So, we'll feel in freeze, an activation manifest, like a racing heart rate, sweaty palms or the tension

in our muscles and that collapsed posture. But at the same time, we're also getting a big parasympathetic activation that will take away our vocal abilities, keep us from being able to move, actually, over time, slow our heart rate down. And so you're experiencing both. Right. Freeze is different from fight and flight, where we're mostly going into an activated state. Now, we also have this shutdown part of this reflexive response- this was originally referred to

as, crouching. You can see that in the posture, when you think of that, really curled in posture, but it's the complete absence of movement, except for maybe some breath or a little bit of muscle tension, but it's in a healthy isometric contraction. Freeze is meant to be pretty short lived. Then we'll freeze,and then we'll move into our next reflexive response of running or fighting, but with shame. If it's continuously being activated, we might be re

experiencing that freeze response over and over again. We're getting activated and we're getting shut down at the same time with big sympathetic activation and parasympathetic activation. This is going to have an effect on the body, in the inflammation part of the body. Right. What does that feel like? Well, you've talked about it a little bit today - a heavy sinking feeling. It's the feeling of feeling bloated, but you

have no idea kind of why. And yet you've. We talked about this with, Doctor Perry Nicholson when we explored chronic pain and emotions. We talked about the idea of shame-flammation, that there is research that says there is a higher inflammatory response with shame. And once we realize that, we were like, oh, my God, this is such a big discovery in our lives. This gives language to a felt experience inside the

body that has really not had a lot of. Has not had a real cognitive something for us to hold on to, to understand, because it is a response coming from the body. We talked about the inner critic and development, having attachment that through the lens of complex trauma, shame is exaggerated because we need that connection and it just only furthers as we move into our adult lives. This is

really interesting. There have been studies about self blame - reporting the greatest increase in a shame response, and it shows the greatest elevations in pro-inflammatory cytokine activity, while levels of guilt and general negative emotions were unrelated to cytokine changes. Shame-flammation, it's inflammatory markers increase with the emotional experience of shame. If we are constantly experiencing shame, then there is an ongoing inflammatory response in the

body that can lead to a disease state. We work with our tools every day to help create a new physiological experience in the body. And not only that, but it's back to having the awareness of understanding, oh, this is shameflammation. This is a response that coming from inside of my body. And it's the neuroto's that help help improve the health of our nervous system. Totally. It was such a huge moment for me when we started to find those studies, because we

would talk about, oh, I'm in shame. We felt it. We recognized it somatically. We knew when we were bloated and heavy and puffy that there was shame going on, and then there were these studies being like, yeah, actually there is more inflammation with shame than almost any other emotion. And that was so wild to research and to understand it that way. I want to really kind of lay out for people what's happening here, because

this is the toxic part. This is the part that's creating that toxic environment inside of our body that harms our health. So with all protective trauma responses, with all stress responses, there's inflammation. But again, it's heavier with shame. What happens with inflammation or stress response is that our immune system really goes into. Into hyperdrive. First our HPA Axis will get activated, and then we start producing more

cortisol. And then that cortisol response happens. And then the immune system starts producing inflammatory proteins that circulate through the body and try to find and take out any kind of invaders or pathogens or unhealthy cell growth. Normal levels of inflammation is good. It's healthy - it's the way that our immune system

heals our body. But, when we have chronic inflammation, our immune system is over producing that, over overproducing those inflammatory proteins going too much into the inflammatory response, and those proteins actually start to damage our own body tissue, which is where we get things like autoimmune disease, because our body is sending out these proteins, and they're looking for something to attack, and they don't find

anything. So, it sends them out again. They don't find anything, it sends them out again. Eventually, they're going to start to find something and that can become your own tissue. When the body, the immune system, starts attacking itself, that is autoimmune and a chronic inflammatory response is really at the heart of autoimmune dysfunction. On the flip side of that, what can also happen, IF that doesn't happen? Our immune system gets really exhausted and depleted, because

it's working on overdrive all of the time. Then it starts not being able to do its job as well, it can't fight off pathogens, or fight off cells it doesn't want to be there. Then you're more likely to get sick, have a heavier viral load, or maybe even experience cancer. Like me. We've recorded so many conversations on emotions, particularly throughoutSseason Two, that I can't recommend enough, because Elizabeth is really linking the disease state to repress emotions. Just let that sink in

for a moment. Like she just said, cancer, is an autoimmune response. That's what we had, that's what we experienced. Then I experienced the shame of getting a diagnosis. That brought on shame, because I really felt like I was going to lose my herd, lose my tribe, lose my family and my friends that I really needed the support of at a time when I was in need. A heavy diagnosis. You know, shame is a protective emotion. It's the emotion that comes to the front to intentionally repress

other emotions. So, the question really is, what's underneath of this shame? What's underneath shame, that it doesn't feel safe for me to experience? Maybe, you really feel deep down, you want to cry or express some anger, but you can't. You literally can't get those tears to come up. Then you experience shame. You feel shame because you can't express the emotions that you're holding on to.

Or maybe you do process the emotions, but then after that experience of experiencing your emotions, you feel shame. Emotional processing requires mobility. Just like we said, with shame being a heightened parasympathetic response, you don't have a lot of mobility. When we lock up with freeze and shame, it's hard to process an emotion. We really, we can't do it. I mean, when you think about somatic emotional expression work, that those are motor pathways. Our diaphragm has to be mobilizing for

those breaths and gasps. Our vocals have to be able to express sound. We have to move our body and move that energy through the body. And when we're frozen up, we, we can't, we can't have that emotional expression. That really affects our long term health because when our body is bracing and holding in all of those emotions, we get a lot of muscle tension, we get a lot of changes to our posture, like you were talking about, that can create chronic pain in the

body. It can be very energy costly, a lot of fatigue that comes from that. I think we talked in one of our lives about, emotional expression is just a normal physiological process, just like sneezing. Think about if you needed to sneeze and you were trying not to, how hard you'd have to work, how much tension in your muscles, how much energy that takes to suppress that natural body mechanism.

It's the same with emotional expression. It's a really high energy cost to our body all of the time, then that constant over depletion of our energy to repress or suppress all of that can also lead us into some maladaptive behaviors because we're trying to get regulation in another way, or we're trying to keep that emotion repressed through the behavior. So we might find ourselves binge eating or social media scrolling or numbing out in all kinds of ways that can then be harmful to our health as

well. When we don't get to express the emotion and move it through the body and mobilize that energy, we're not completing our stress response. -crying, stomping, shaking, these are all very natural ways that the body completes that activation of the stress response and lets our nervous system and our body come back into a rest and digest or recover states. That ability

to modulate between those states. When we don't have the tools to cry, to emote, to scream, to move, we never get that completion. This affects our hormone health, because we stay in those heightened levels of stress, chemicals, adrenaline and cortisol going through the body, we start to experience the protective outputs of a threat bucket that's overflowing because we don't get the stress relief. So the stress is just building up, building up,

building up. That could look like migraines, cardiovascular issues, all kinds of outputs, chronic fatigue that are coming from that inability to regulate our stress response. The roots of toxic shame are like everything rooted in our development and often attached to chronic misattunement. Children need attunement, and we're going to talk about what is attunement and why we need it and how this chronic misattunement does lead to shame about ourselves. So, what is attunement?

Attunement is the reactiveness we have to another person. It's the process by which we form relationships. If you've ever seen an orchestra before, they start playing, they start tuning their instruments, they're tuning to one another. They're feeling the other sound, because they are coming together. That's what we're doing in relationship. We are coming

together. When we are developing, if we have parents that are incredibly stressed out, if we're learning that our attachment might get severed for some reason - remember, this is our literal survival! We start changing different things. Dan Siegel says, when we attune with others, we allow our internal state to shift, to come, to resonate with the world, the inner world of another. This resonance is at the heart of the importance of feeling felt that emerges in close relationships. Children

need attunement to feel secure and to develop well. And throughout our lives, we need attunement to feel close and collect connected. So, say a parent is not seeing that a child is upset or crying or feeling stressed and doesn't go to them to nurture them and hold them and let. Let them know, like, hey, I

see you. I feel you. This is where mis-attunement leads to the toxic shame, because, when we don't feel seen, heard, or felt, we are going to start looking at other ways to be outside of ourselves, leading to chronic self abandonment and just trying to get those needs met. And all the while, just those narratives. I am bad. I am fill in the blank. That's what starts happening for little children. In adult relationships, attunement might be an adult who always says

something. Or mi-sattunment might look like something like, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine. Another person can feel the nervous system, but the person who's experiencing it can't talk about it. They can't express their regular feelings. You shut down with just this robot responsive. I'm fine. It's fine. Everything's okay. You know, when I think about that response, I used to say that response a lot. It's fine. I'm fine. I'm okay. I didn't know how to express my emotions. I didn't feel safe.

It felt more safe to push those emotions down and to not understand them. And at the same time, I wasn't able to secure connections that I felt really safe in because I didn't feel safe internally. It becomes kind of bigger than you - it's like what you want the most is connection, but you can't get there. In a way, you become the person that's like you block yourself.

Absolutely. It's really just like we talked about in the inner critic episode, that if we're developing in this environment with caregivers that are chronically misattuned and yet we're seeking that attunement for our emotional expression, our nervous system regulation, we become hyper vigilant about changing ourselves, about that internal critic voice so that we can change

ourselves. There must be something wrong with me because I'm not getting my needs met at a survival level that's very dangerous for my little developing nervous system. I'm going to internalize that it's my fault and that there's something wrong with me. Over time, as we continue to develop in that environment where we don't have anyone attuned to our needs, that just becomes a deeply ingrained, well worn path to go into this.

There's something wrong here that I need to fix about myself because we can't, as children, grasp the fact that it doesn't have to do with us. When we talk about all this, we're not talking about this to put blame on the primary caregivers. There's a lot of structural reasons and systemic reasons, why a caregiver might not have the capacity to attune to

their child. If you're a single working mother, if you're an immigrant, if you're dealing with a bunch of other social stress - there are so many things that would cause a caregiver to not have the social support they need and the financial stability that they need and the time to be regulated, to be attuned. This is still the outcome that the child still doesn't get the attunement that it needs. These reflexive responses and deep wounds of shame get really baked into the nervous system.

I think there's an opportunity here for us to say as well, that emotional neglect is also an ACE Score. If we are not being emotionally attuned to, and that can feel like perceived neglect, maybe it is actual neglect. Either way, the shame response, it's coming. Perceived or real, that shame responses is here with us. And, you know, one of the things that we talk about on here a lot is sexual abuse and the over coupling of shame and

pleasure. You know, a lot of times for a little developing nervous system that is experiencing sexual trauma in the pleasure center, in our genital areas, it's going to get very confusing as we grow up. This shame that I experienced from this early developmental trauma in my pleasure center, can feel shameful as I grow up as a sexual being.

As a sexual human in the world. In the case of sexual trauma and early childhood sexual abuse, I really do think this has another layer attached to it in the realms of shame because of that coupling - overcoupling. How can I experience pleasure and shame at the same time? Then that puts us into really dangerous places as adults, as we are exploring our sexuality. We had a great conversation about fawn and sexual fawn with, Luis

Mojica in Season Three. At the beginning, if you go back and just like we were talking about ACE Scores, if shame is protective, that layer of protective shame is going to come on. When our sexuality, our sexual organs or our sexual experiences, our bodies have been violated. Then the body, as we were just talking about a minute ago, can become over coupled with arousal.

The pleasure gets over-coupled with shame and woven in together so intrinsically that it can be really hard to learn how to live a pleasurable life when you are also experiencing high levels of chronic shame. It goes back to jumping and standing still at the same time. So, how can we live a pleasurable life when we have had experienced this overcoupling with shame and our bodies? Yes, absolutely. No wonder, so many people also are afraid to experience pleasure. That's

a whole practice in and of itself. Also, whenever I'm experiencing pleasure, there's also a shame response occurring in my body and all of the physiological components that come with that, including the inflammation. When we recorded our episode on Shame, I talked about this a little bit then, but as we were looking at these studies linking the increase in the inflammatory cytokines with shame, I just couldn't help but start thinking about sexual abuse and what's happening

there. When we think about the inflammatory response, it's a little bit different than just bracing. It's this deep internal protection of something invading your body - that's how my body defends against that internal injury. Then, it's part of my real threat response. It made me wonder about that overcoupling of a body boundary violation

with the shame response. If that has something to do with the link of why there's so much inflammation with the shame response, that our body boundary violations can lead to that deep internal threat response. We know, too, from a lot of somatic literature, that when we can't set boundaries ourselves, our body will do it for us. And that inflammation is our body protecting us first and foremost. If it goes on for too

long, it creates disease. But, if this happens a lot in development, those same experiences where we experience shame - maybe we were being abused or we were taking on the shame of our abuser, we were having an experience that brings that shame on. We knew that it wasn't socially acceptable. So we have these big shame experiences and at the same time, we're experiencing body boundary violations. That inflammatory threat response, yes, it gets overcoupled

with the pleasure. It also gets over-coupled with body boundary violations and then boundary violations in general. It's our body's way of, as we were little, protecting us from a very deep violation. What we know about body and about body boundary violations is that they live on a spectrum. Someone could look at me cross when I'm out in public just doing my thing, going about my business, and could cross a body boundary violation just in

the way they look at me, right? We all know that sometimes a man will look at us and we're like, oh, he thinks I'm pretty. There's no threat there. Then, you'll feel a totally other nervous system give you the same look, and there is a level of threat there - a body boundary violation. When my body feels that nervous system look at me and then elicit all of that response, all of these responses in my body.

I really think that was just important to stop there for a moment and think about body boundary violations -then, of course, all the rest. On the other end of the spectrum, is the physical action being taken on my body without my body's consent. And so we've said many times today, talking about the posture of shame and that really curling, in effect. That's part of what shame does as a language that says, don't look at me, do not look at me, don't talk to me, don't connect with me.

That's really isolating. I mean, that is a REALLY isolating, dangerous place to be. It furthers the dissociation internally when we cannot connect to ourselves in real time and when we cannot attach to other people. Like, we're saying we need the belonging, we want the belonging. We

really want that. But deep down, even though that is something that we need in our survival, needing that tribe, needing our herd, the isolation is the immobility of the shame is what keeps you being able to move into that and even going into, like, trusting support that you may have. It has negative impacts on health, because we know from season three that relationships and connection are a major driver of not just our mental. Of not just our mental health, but our physical health outcomes.

Yeah, it's so interesting because here we have this response that's trying to keep us connected socially, trying to maintain our attachments, but it's actually disconnecting us with those postures, leading to isolation.

At a really deep nervous system level, it's disconnecting us because we talked a lot in the early part of season three about how our nervous systems communicate across the social synapse in this really unconscious way that we're always reading the signals of other people's nervous systems, their vocal tone, their eye position, their body posture. When I'm in this shame response, my nervous system is sending out a signal of, do not connect with me. Do not get close to me.

I can't make eye contact, I lose my voice, my actual ability to communicate and connect. I'm curled in on myself. I'm braced. I'm protected against you .At this subconscious nervous system level, I'm now projecting a disconnect from another person, even though I'm trying to do this to maintain my connection with others. It can really be quite isolating when we are cycling through that shame response. Other people's nervous systems recognize this,

too -when we are dissociated. They know that we've left the space that the connection has been severed, so that dissociation disconnects us as well. Back to attunement. We know when another nervous system is present with us and when they're not. It's so important that we, as practitioners, therapists, coaches, guides and facilitators, look at your client and know when they are in a shame response. There's another way we want to be with a person who is in

a shame response, correct? It's not about direct eye contact. It's certain ways that we position ourselves and there's certain tools that we're going to want to use with that client to then help them come out of that shame response. That kind of leads us into what do we do when we have this shame response, this toxic shame, or you're feeling that shame-flammation we're describing. Step one of this process, is to recognize the shame response, to understand it in your body. That all starts with a

daily nervous system practice. So you can understand the nuances of your nervous system to gain the awareness. When you were talking, it made me think of a really key point that you brought up. As practitioners being able to recognize the shame response and know how to work with it differently because there's something called the, Backdraft Effect. This is when someone is in shame, if we push into that, we

try to connect to them too much. We try to talk about the shame or really force them into intimate conversation or in looking at it, it can make the shame worse. It's this idea of when you have a fire and you bring air and light in, it actually makes the fire get bigger. That has been shown to be very much the case with clients that are in shame. We need to have other ways of working with somebody.

Not talking directly about the shame, using sensory signals of the nervous system, maybe having them sit so they're not having to make direct eye contact with us, working around at a very subtle nervous system level to move out of the shame rather than just talk. That is really important.

I'm really glad that you brought that up. Also, remembering for all of us, as we're listening to this episode and maybe hearing ourselves in it, resonating with it, that this response is just a reflexive pattern built into the nervous system. We're neuroplastic beings and we can re-pattern this with repetition. We just have to know how to work with the nervous system and we have to have the tools this response is not who you

are. You can start to separate yourself from the response so you have more self compassion and recognize it just as a response so you don't get more shame. Then begin to really learn the ways to work with the nervous system to re pattern that response in real time so that a new reaction becomes. The well worn path and finding really small ways to mobilize. For example, it could look like humming. You could be on a vibration plate, or you could walk. You

could get some sensory stimulus if you're in bed. There are certain tools that we would use. You know, if you get on site with us and join us at, rewiretrial.com. you'll find a ton of neuro tools you can use to get you out of this shame response. It all starts to re-pattern shame in real time. That's what we want to do. We want to interrupt the pattern when we are experiencing it.

Another good thing about being on site and being on community is that it can just be very useful, because sometimes when we're immobilized and shut down, we can't even think about what do we need to do. It's easier to just jump on site, find the shame, find the emotional processing, find that mobilization that we need, and do it together. It can just be so much more overwhelming to have to cognitively think your way out of something and when it comes to the body, once again, we,

the nervous system doesn't speak our english language. It speaks in sensory language. I even do that myself sometimes if I'm starting to dissociate or I'm in a shame response instead of trying to figure it out for myself in the moment, because my higher order, this, my higher order thinking systems are not working great. I'll just actually go on to the, On Demand Library,click the buttons for shame, mobility, freeze respons and just

pull up one of your classes. One of Jennifer Simpson's classes, and do that class soI don't have to try to think my way out of it. It's not going to be great to try to think my way out of it. Another really important thing to start to work with is our InteroceptiveSsystem - the system inside of us that tells our brain what's going on in our body. We want to rehabilitate that system because we want to be able to hear the signals coming from within our body so we know

when we're moving into a shame response. We also want to begin making those signals safe, starting to interpret them with accuracy, so we're not perceiving too much threat from those signals coming inside of our body. That can lead us into these other repressive mechanisms or shame responses. When there's so much threat attributed to those signals, that requires working in a minimum effective

dose. Sometimes, we've got to externally orient at first, because dropping into the body feels too overwhelming and scary. Little by little, coupling feeling those sensations with other neurotools that create safety in our body and help us regulate and stay present, starts to re pattern that experience. So now I'm able to feel those signals and not move into the threat response. It's so vital - so important to be able to understand the signals that are coming in and

from your body. Having these higher level of awarenesses that you might be able to start to connect some dots, comes from lowering the threat on a daily basis and then starting to recognize what brings you pleasure and brings you joy. By allowing yourself to experience that. When we say pleasure, yes, that can include sexual, intimate experiences. But pleasure could also just be like putting your face in the sun, walking in the grass, going swimming, dancing, or hearing your

favorite song. What do you enjoy? Then, how can you intentionally engage in those things? Allow your nervous system to feel the joy, to be present with the pleasure in your body that is going to maybe, maybe for some people listening to us, that feels so far away and that's okay. We do workshops around pleasure and experiencing pleasure on your nervous system, where once again, we start in a really minimum effective dose way. What clothes do I like to feel on my skin?

What do I like to feel the sensations of? We start to build on that until we can really touch our bodies and get into more intimate experiences with, say, sexual and intimate pleasure. It's so key starting with those other ways of experiencing pleasure. because if we try right away to dive into sexual intimacy and undoing that overcoupling there, that can be really setting us up for a

not great experience. Just starting with that minimum effective dose and making, creating that safety around experiencing pleasure in the body just for little bits of time is so powerful, it's so impactful and leads to a life where you can have pleasure. It's really worth it. It's really worth it. Finally, some of the practices that have helped me the most coming out of and moving this shame response through my body is vocal practices, vocal toning, and working with my

vocal cords. We do a lot of those classes on the site where we're just at a really nervous system somatic level, working with the body to restore mobility, to get activation and relaxation to the vocal cords so that it helps your body from a bottom up approach to come out of that freeze, out of that immobility, from out of that shame response. Then, the thoughts and the emotional experience will start to shift just by

changing what's happening in the body with your neurotools. It's really incredible. You can interrupt shame in real time, you can re pattern your life, reconnecting to your body and learn what those voluntary mobility drills are. You could even look at your posture sometimes to be like, oh, gosh, I'm I'm in a rounded state. What am I, what am I doing here?

There's so many different ways that this can come into your awareness once you get into the work, once you get on the site with us and learn how to activate your nervous system and the sympathetic response, it's very powerful, y'all. So, I do hope you'll join us at, rewiretrial.com. Next week, we'll be moving right along in our series. So, tune in next week, and we'll keep going through these characteristics. See y'all next week. Thank you. Bye.