E 260: Navigating the Path from Awareness to Regulation: A Guide for the Adult Child of Dysfunction

Well, hello everybody, and welcome back to another episode of Adult Child of Dysfunction.

Today you have just me again.

And I'm coming back to kind of discuss the episode that we had last with Kimberly Conte.

Was that an honest conversation?

And I know so much of what she said.

You heard yourselves in her story.

The people pleasing, the bullying, the feeling of, I'll be whoever you need me to be so I don't rock any boats.

And that moment she described of realizing she had to rewire her entire brain.

Today I want to kind of follow up with something I see constantly in my work.

Why awareness alone is not enough.

It's just not enough.

It's the first step.

But why?

Exactly why?

When you know exactly why you feel the way you do, do you still feel stuck?

And the answer is that you're not broken.

It's just that your nervous system is doing its job.

It's protecting you.

When people grow up in the kind of dysfunction that many of us does, your body learns safety through strategy.

Some people learn to get loud, some people learn to disappear.

And a lot of us learn the fawn response, which is that people pleasing, we come, agreeable, highly helpful, willing to do anything.

Like I said, just so you don't rock the boat.

We also become hyper aware of everyone else's feelings.

And this isn't who you are.

It's not who you are, it's just what kept you safe.

This is where it gets super frustrating, because you'll read the books, you go to therapy, you do all the journaling.

You go, you do all the things, and you'll be able to explain your patterns perfectly.

But then you're in a real moment where the rubber hits the road.

You've probably heard me say that before.

And all of a sudden, here you are having to make that decision, having to stand up for yourself, having to be your authentic self and get what you want and ask what for you, what you want without stress, without anxiety, without guilt, and without shame.

So what happens?

Your heart races, your throat tightens up, your brain goes completely blank, and you say yes when you wanted to say no.

Here's the simplest way, and I want to explain this in the simplest way that I can explain how healing happens.

It happens in three layers.

One is awareness.

You see the pattern.

You know you've been to therapy, they've told you why you act the way you do and what to do about it.

Number two, regulation.

That is where your body learns safety.

And that is the most important part.

Until your body truly feels safe, it doesn't matter how aware you are, you're not going to be able to stand up for yourself or say what you want because your brain perceives that confrontation as dangerous.

And then step three, after you've learned the safety part of it is the repatterning, your subconscious learns a whole new default.

And all of a sudden, what was at the subconscious level as fear and anxiety and stress is now just a normal part of life and something you can deal with every single day.

Kimberly and I talked about so many great things.

Please, I encourage you to go back and listen to the last episode because we were all over the place.

We talked about everything.

But she talked about going back and talking back to that inner critic.

And I love that this is part of repatterning.

But if the system is dysregulated, even the best affirmations can feel fake because your nervous system hears, I am safe.

But how does it respond?

How does your body respond?

It says, no, we're not.

Look at the history.

Things always go wrong.

Things are always bad.

If I say yes, if I confront, it's going to be bad.

So we start by creating first enough safety in the body to let the mind work.

So let's do something right now.

It's kind of like I call a 90 second reset.

I want you to look around your space, look around the room.

Let your eyes land on five neutral objects.

I don't care what it is.

A picture on the wall, a microphone, a glass, an essential oil, whatever is sitting in your room, a chair, a wall, a plant.

Doesn't even matter what it is.

Just look at anything.

What this tells the brain is we're here and we're not back there.

We're not back where these bad things are happening.

Second, take three long inhales, three in, three out.

And I want the exhales to be longer than the inhales.

That is very important.

I like to do add something to that.

When I breathe in, I like to say I'm breathing in safety and a sense of calm.

And I'm breathing out anything that does not serve me at this moment.

Third, I want you to repeat, name it.

In this moment, I am safe enough.

And then I want you to ask yourself, what's one true thing I can say without having to over explain.

What's one thing I can say?

Anything.

Just make a sentence.

Today is a good day.

I'm feeling safe today.

I'm feeling grand today.

Today's a beautiful day.

Just one true sentence about your here and now, right now as you sit.

So just a Little exercise.

And sometimes it really does calm you down.

Like I said, the naming the five things or the focusing on five things on the room, it brings you back to the present.

And so many of much of the anxiety and the stress that we feel is because we're ruminating, we're thinking about what's going to happen in the future because of things that happen in the past when we're really not focusing on the present at all.

And usually the present moment is not that scary if we really sit down and think about it.

So again, five neutral objects.

Deep in, breath in, deep breath out.

And then tell yourself you're safe.

So another thing we wanted to talk about, so that's that I just kind of, like I said, I'm just kind of going back over the episode.

I like to point out some pointers and kind of wrap all these episodes up together so you can kind of make sense of it.

The next one is boundaries.

And I know that scares you.

We talked a lot about boundaries.

Sometimes that sentence that you just made up for yourself is the boundary and it is a non negotiable boundaries.

I want to say this very clearly.

Boundaries aren't just communication.

Boundaries are a nervous system skill.

Because the body has to believe it can survive.

Has to believe it can survive honesty.

Like I said, when you were little, what happened?

You would say something and you would get shot down for it.

Or sometimes you get reprimanded, or sometimes you get scolded.

But a lot of times the outcome just wasn't what you were looking at.

So when you have to set boundaries and you don't quite know how to do it and you can't quite find the words, I want you to practice some of these sayings.

Here's some of the scripts you can use and you can borrow them from me or you can come up with your own.

If someone wants you to do something that you don't want to do, you can say, let me get back to you.

You can say, that just doesn't work for me right now.

You can say, I'm not available for that.

You can say, I'm not discussing this today.

Or you can say, I hear you and my answer is still no.

And all of those you can say safely.

So if any of those, or even the thought of saying some of those makes your chest tighten, it's not failure, it's information.

It's telling you that your body is still saying this is new does not feel safe.

And new doesn't mean wrong.

It just means your system needs a Little more support.

So practice this again.

You might have to practice it when you're not with the people that you're going to be setting the boundaries with because then it will become kind of like muscle memory.

And pick one.

You don't have to do all of them.

I dislike the one that says, this doesn't work for me.

Not happening, not today.

Or I hear you and my answer is still no.

Those are simple things and you're asserting yourself, but you're also, as soon as you say it, you're going to, hopefully, God willing, you're going to get an experience back that makes you feel a little safer.

Because usually when you set a boundary, it's.

Unless it's something severe, it is usually met with compassion.

If you have friends and you're so used to going out for what they want to eat and all of a sudden they say, let's go get Chinese.

And you say, well, that doesn't work for me, let's go get subscribers.

There's a good chance they're going to say, okay, let's do it.

And you've just set a boundary.

You've told them what you wanted, you expressed your feelings without any safety concerns.

Now if they say no, what's the worst thing that happens?

You end up getting Chinese food.

It's not the end of the world.

So if any of this makes sense, if it's hitting home, if you're someone who's done the awareness work and you know that you're aware and you know you're still having these patterns because your body is still living in survival, that's exactly where I support people.

I use a very trauma informed approach that blends nervous system tools, NLP and body mind, spirit alignment so that you can move from coping to truly living.

If you want to start gently, I also offer a very fun tool.

It's a complimentary biofrequency voice scan.

And what that does is it reflects stress patterns and energetic loads.

And from there we can build simple, realistic plans to help your system feel safer.

Because at the end of the day, you need to be safe.

You need to feel safe in your own mind.

And sometimes those mantras, those affirmations, those just telling yourself you're safe isn't enough.

So let's work together to see if we can really make our bodies feel safe.

You don't have to become a new person.

You need to come back to who you were before you learned you had to earn love, earn belonging and earn safety.

These are things that should have been given to you, but they weren't.

So you spent your whole life thinking you had to perform or outperform or be perfect or be quiet or be what everybody else wanted you to be so that you were safe.

That's not the case.

So what I'm here to do is walk with you and help you realize that that is just not the case.

You are so much more than you've been led to believe.

You have no idea.

You have absolutely no idea.

So reach out, please.

I encourage you.

Drop, go in the show notes, get the free biofrequency scan.

It's super fun to do.

We'll have a lot of fun.

It'll just show you some patterns, some energetic patterns, and you can explore yourself.

It also sends back balancing harmonics, and sometimes that music in itself is enough to put you in a safe space.

So, again, I just wanted to follow up with the interview from Kimberly.

I just wanted to kind of, you know, give a couple extra little tips and tricks here, because we're all in this together.

We're all in this trying to feel better after a lifetime of chaos.

And the more tips, tricks, and tangible strategies we can get, the better.

So thanks a lot, and I hope to see you all soon.

Have a good day.