Welcome to the mending trauma podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Amy Hoyt. And along with my sister Lena Hoyt, a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, we want to help you recover from trauma. Whether it's childhood trauma, complex trauma, PTSD, or any other traumas sustained from abuse or narcissistic relationships. We want to help you develop skills and ways that can help you to recover from the symptoms and the effects of trauma. We are so glad you're here. Let's dive in. Hi, Amy here, are you feeling stuck or overwhelmed by things that pop up in your daily life. And perhaps these are because of past traumas or toxic stress? Have you tried traditional therapy and found that it wasn't enough? I know that was the case for me. That's why we developed the whole health lab, mending trauma has put together a program that combines the latest research with proven methods to help you recover from trauma and move forward from these daily stressors and triggers. We use somatic therapy EMDR, cognitive behavioral therapy and internal family systems therapy. We use nervous system regulation, and many other tools so that we can combine the best methods that are identified in the research to help you recover without being completely overwhelmed. So you can work on trauma on your own pace, your own time. And still with the mentorship and support of a highly trained certified staff. That's us no more waiting for appointments or sitting in traffic driving to see a therapist with our online program, the whole health lab, you can access it from anywhere, anytime, even on an app, visit mending trauma.com backslash home health lab and learn more, get your questions answered. We've got our Frequently Asked Questions section and sign up so that you can have this life changing program in your world today. Don't let your past hold you back any longer. Take control of your future, and we can't wait to see you in the whole health lab. Hi, welcome back to another episode. Today. We're excited to continue the conversation we had last week about trauma dumping. And this week, we're going to focus on what to do if you are being trauma dumped on as a recipient. So Lena, can you recap for us what trauma dumping is and is not?
Sure. Trauma dumping is about often sharing strong intense emotions or difficult experiences. And usually this is at a phase in the relationship that doesn't support this very well. Or we're sharing details at a time in the relationship without enough foundation to handle that type of information, or to handle the intensity or the timing of the disclosure. And it can include expressing overwhelming emotions or facts or sharing details at inappropriate times or in a relationship that's not prepared for it. And what trauma dumping is not is it is not sharing with somebody a challenge or difficulty in your friendship or relationship that has a good balance of give and take a reciprocity. So trauma dumping is not sharing with somebody that you have a friendship or relationship with about a past experience that you've had as long as you're sharing it at an appropriate time or setting.
So being dumped on is also about emotional boundaries and boundaries to remind everyone are these guidelines that we set so that we can stay in our window of tolerance. And it's not boundaries aren't about controlling other people. It's about what we are willing to accept so that we can have a stronger internal locus of control. Remember, we can only control ourselves, not other people. And so when we set a boundary, it's about strengthening our own internal locus of control. And boundaries can either be really high and rigid or very low and permeable. And the goal with boundaries is to find somewhere in between where you can set these guidelines for yourself. So that can be difficult because we often have to modulate depending on the experience we're having, you might have a little bit higher, rigid boundary about one thing, right? For instance, if someone was going to touch me, inappropriately, I would have a very high and rigid boundary about that. However, if it's about you know, having phones at the dinner table, it depends. I have to really modulate that depending on the reason are we reading scriptures together as a family, okay? Our scriptures are on our phones or or is someone watching YouTube while we're having a family conversation, then I'm going to have a little bit more strong boundary about that. So what we want to do is really think of boundaries as somewhat flexible, but also about our what we're willing to tolerate. Do you have anything to add on boundaries? Lina?
Well, I love how you put that, that that we can't control other people and boundaries are about having a set of. It's almost like having these sets of lines that we're not willing to have people cross, but it's for our emotional regulation, our window of tolerance. And it is a very internal locus of control approach to managing your emotional life. And I love how you explain that.
Thank you. So one of the things we talked about is how boundaries get set up in our family of origin typically. So do you want to talk a little bit about that?
Sure. A lot of times, what I've seen, especially with my teenage clients and teenagers are in a prime phase of life to be experimenting with boundaries, and figuring boundaries out is that the parents have watched my client have a friend maybe for several years, and the dynamic of the relationship has changed, and that friend has become more problematic, or starts treating my client in a way that is problematic, hurtful, that sort of thing. And so my client would then start to pull away from this relationship. And the parent will often say, Well, you don't want to hurt Susie Q's feelings, you have to stay friends with her. And the parent is well intentioned. They want us to be kind and considerate of others. But I think sometimes what it is, is that because teenagers are often very reticent to speak about their internal or emotional life, the parent is working with very limited information. And so when we grow up in a family where we're not allowed to have healthy boundaries with each other, or when we're not allowed to share our own experience, because it will hurt somebody's feelings, then we don't have a real template for how to have healthy emotional boundaries as we age. And this can lead to a lot of distress. And one of the things we talked about as we were getting ready for the podcast was this concept of neuroception. And emotional boundaries are really helpful to establish with the concept of neuroception. If we don't have this concept of neuroception, we're missing a key component.
Absolutely. And just to remind our listeners, neuroception, we've talked about it before. But again, we learn through repetition, and neuroception is this internal communication mechanism that is constantly taking in information from our environment, in order to inform our nervous system. So one great example is someone's tone of voice before we can even register, that the tone might be a problem. Our body, our nervous system has already registered cues of safety or threat and has already started to mount either a fight flight freeze, or a safety connection response. And so what happens with neuroception is we're gathering information so rapidly, and it is subconscious, that we are not even consciously aware until a few seconds later. And this can be sights, sounds, smells, and of course, communication between us and another person and not just verbal communication. But it's actually the communication between their nervous system and our nervous system. And in a culture that tends to again, divorce, you know, the mind from the body. So much of western culture is pretty cut off from the body and our body sensations. What what this means is we might have this felt sense a sensation in our body that we can't explain. And this can happen when we're being trauma dumped on. In the moment, it's super hard to consciously be aware of why we have this. Maybe this pit in our stomach or this physical reaction, and often reflecting on the experience later can provide really helpful clues and information. And this has happened to me hundreds of times throughout my life before I learned about neuroception and then Nervous System, I would get these really sick feelings when someone was oversharing. And I wasn't sure why or how to stop it. And so that's why boundaries and neuroception are so tied together. Because if we can learn emotional boundaries, and awareness, then this this subconscious process of communication that's happening with our nervous system, we'll be able to not, we're never going to catch it before our nervous system does, because that's the mechanism that's going to keep us alive. But we're going to be able to get better and better and better at it tuning into our body sensations and being able to make the changes, we need to have those emotional boundaries.
I love that explanation, I think. And we were talking about how sometimes people think that if we have healthy emotional boundaries, we're not going to have friends anymore. And that's something that we need to dispel. Right now as that boundaries are designed to enhance the relationship. And and that when both people enter a relationship with healthy boundaries, there is a there is this somatic or felt sense of nervous system safety. Because both people are in a place where they're listening, they're hearing, they're understanding, they're creating space for the other person to have the the reactions or the thoughts or feelings that they have. And so instead of thinking about having new boundaries, as like, you're not going to have friends anymore, because no one's going to tolerate it, we want to have this idea that these new boundaries are going to enhance our relationships and give us a chance to have more meaningful and more connecting relationship salutely.
And, you know, if some relationships become more distant, after you enact boundaries, that's also really valuable information for you. Because again, boundaries are something you're setting up for yourself. And so if the other person is not able or willing to also respect those boundaries, they will distance themselves. And what that does is that gives it that opens up opportunities for us to cultivate different relationships that are built on emotional boundaries being respected. Great point,
yeah. And this can be a very difficult time of transition. And sometimes your fight or flight flight brain might get involved in think, oh, my gosh, I'm never going to have friends again, or Oh, my gosh, I only going to have two friends the rest of my life. And all of that is coming out of that reactive survival brain, and is not accurate. But we might have those thoughts. And then we hesitate to practice good, healthy emotional boundaries. So it's a process. It's something that, you know, I've learned over many years.
All right. So we know we need emotional boundaries. And we know that we need to also kind of start paying attention to those felt senses. What are some other action steps? or more, I guess more to the point? How do we set up those emotional boundaries around trauma dumping?
Oh, this, this can be a little tricky, and it's going to be a slow start. And I think everybody needs to know that so they can have patience with themselves. And the first thing is awareness, as always, and awareness is enhanced when we can notice without judgment, and when we can use benevolent, loving curiosity, stay out of that critical mind towards ourselves, as we increase our awareness and notice without judgment, one interesting step we can take at this point is that we can spend a few minutes thinking or writing about our experiences, when you have found yourself the recipient of an overshare or trauma DOM. And then just think about, like, what goes through your mind? What happens in your body? Do you feel panicked? Is your is your body sending you signals that this is very uncomfortable? Is there a sense that you don't know what to do? Just pay attention to all of that. Look for times when you have felt really overwhelmed with either the needs of the other person, the intensity of the share, or the details or emotional flooding? And as we do that, we can start practicing what we are comfortable with in terms of how people share information with us. As we become more familiar with paying attention to that, and we learn how to focus on our body sensations or our felt experience, what we're doing is we're gathering a bunch of information at this point so that we can take action, when we are ready to take action.
What about memorizing some phrases, and giving people some phrases to use to establish boundaries around trauma dumping what would be a helpful set of phrases
that I think you can come up with quite a few and some are gonna work in some situations, and some are gonna work in other somewhat work at all, because the person that you're interacting with doesn't have the capacity to understand or respect boundaries. But one thing that I think we can do is we can find ways to share with the person talking to us that what they're telling us is overwhelming, but we do it in a manner that's productive or helpful to the relationship. So maybe we say something like, wow, you have been through so much. It sounds like this is really still such a, such a present issue for you. And I'm so sorry to hear about this. I'm wondering if we can talk about this another time. Or I'm wondering if we can find a time when we're both in a good emotional space, and we can provide support to each other. And we both have an opportunity to talk about things. So that's one possibility. Another possibility is finding a way to gracefully extract yourself from the conversation. And that might look a few different ways. But one way to do it is to say, Wow, I can tell what you have to say is so important to you. And I just don't know if hear it Panera Bread while we're eating lunch is a place that I can be able to be a good listener to you. So those are a couple of ideas. And they're very soft approaches. And then outside of the actual experience, depending on your relationship with this person, we want to pick a neutral time, when we can say to them something like, I've noticed that you have really trusted me. And sometimes you share information with me that I'm not sure what to do with. And I'm wondering if if you could be more mindful of what you're sharing and when, so that we have this chance to develop our relationship or our friendship in a way that feels more balanced.
I think those are all great suggestions. And, you know, I just wanted to add a kind of a footnote to this whole conversation. And that is, often when a friend comes to us for the first time with something big. To me that doesn't, you know, each of us are individually equipped for this. But to me, that doesn't feel like trauma dumping, what actually starts to feel like trauma dumping for me is when it's repeated a lot and there's no reciprocity in the friendship. And so there's no space for the other person to also talk about their life or hardships. And so each of us have to kind of determine if we, if it is a pattern of trauma dumping, or if it's a one time event, because we have a friend who you know, lost a spouse, and they are calling us to talk about it. That is different than you know, many months down the line when there's no reciprocity in the relationship. And that can be really, really difficult because we want to be supportive. But I just wanted to kind of call out that if someone you know, a friend calls you who has an event happened to them, and they're trying to talk through it. That doesn't necessarily mean it's trauma dumping, it can be depending on your emotional capacity. And that's why we have to go back to what your emotional boundaries are. And everyone has a different capacity for this. So I just wanted to wrap up by letting you know that there is no formula. If someone confides in you on time. That doesn't mean you're being dumped on him unless you have, you know, a felt sensation or reaction to that and you realize, oh my goodness, I need I need to shore up my emotional boundaries.
Yeah, thanks for pointing that out. Amy. I think that's an important distinction. And I liked how you talked about it can be repaired additive, like over and over and over again and over a period of months or years. And there's not a lot of reciprocity. So thanks for pointing that out. I think that's very helpful.
Well, thank you all for joining us this week, and we look forward to being here next week. Thanks so much.
Take care.
Thanks for listening to this week's episode of The mending trauma podcast. Elaine and I are really grateful that you spend time with us each week we know you have a choice and that time is currency. We would love if you would share this episode on social media and tag us so we can reshare if you feel so inclined, go and give us a five star review wherever you listen to pod so that we can get the word out and help more people. We know that we are all working hard on our mental health and we wish you great success this week and implementing these new skills we'll check in next week.
