Welcome to the universe is your therapist. We are your hosts, Dr. Amy Hoyt and Lena Hoyt. We are sisters. Take a seat and let's dive into this week's episode. 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 help lab, you can access it from anywhere, anytime, even on an app. And the best part is in honor of May being mental health awareness month, our listeners can get access to the full program for only $97 a month. So for less than a fancy cup of coffee a day. You can get the tools you need to recover from trauma and create a better future for yourself. Visit mending trauma.com backslash whole health lab and learn more. Get your questions answered. We've got a 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 there. Welcome back to the university's your therapist. I'm Lena white. And I will be talking to you today about the part two of our trauma bonds. We did part one last week. And before we get started, I do want to note that this is not a podcast about how to escape a violent environment when your life is being threatened. This is a podcast about small consistent action steps that you can take to help you break a relational trauma bond. Please call the National Institute for domestic violence at 800-799-7233. If you are in a dangerous situation that you can't escape. All right, as we talked about last week, trauma bonds can happen in relationships. It can be friendships or romantic relationships. And at the end of our last podcast, I told you we would talk a little bit more today about what to do about a trauma bond. And what are some concrete action steps that you can take that are well recommended what to do about a trauma bond. So the first thing is awareness. And when we are engaged in a relationship in which there's a trauma bond, I know this is gonna sound funny that oftentimes we are the last to know about it. So a lot of people around us, our friends, our family, sometimes co workers, other people might be aware of it long before we are finding a way to increase your awareness is really essential. And one thing that can help the brain not be quite as resistant to your awareness is to use the key word sometimes. So sometimes I see this our relationships sometimes I see that in my relationship. That way of looking at things helps reduce the brain's resistance. So instead of thinking and all or nothing or black and white terms, we pave the way to our awareness by noticing sometimes things happen, sometimes they don't happen. First step is awareness. The second step is notice all the dynamics. When you are noticing the dynamics, what you're noticing is not only the things that you find positive in the relationship, the intense love bombing the making up afterwards, but you're noticing all the different parts of your relationship. And when you're able to do that, sometimes it can even help to write it down. What do I find positive about my relationship? What do I find problematic about my relationship that can enhance your awareness and it keeps us from being totally one sided in our awareness. Another step, step three is to understand that something in your earlier life drove you to find this dynamic, exciting, or reassuring, or familiar or soothing. So something that happened in a primary relationship in your childhood, that made this dynamic seem very comfortable and natural. Number four is if your situation is so violent, that you find your life has been threatened, develop a plan of action right away to save your life. Develop a plan for where you can go, who you can go to, and if possible, set aside some funds. Number five, find ways to calm your nervous system so that you have quieted the amygdala, which is where the fight or flight response comes from. And you've increased your blood flow to the prefrontal cortex, this part of our brain so that we can use our prefrontal cortex and executive functioning which occurs in the prefrontal cortex to be come more calm and more regulated, and it helps us to notice things and can provide us valuable information. When we are constantly in fight or flight, we have reduced blood flow to the prefrontal cortex, and it makes making decisions difficult, it makes accurate perception very difficult, it can be challenging to be reasonable or realistic or accurate when we're in that part of our brain and that part of the brain is in charge. So do anything you can to calm down the amygdala. One way is to do some grounding techniques, you can notice five things in the room that are certain color, you can notice three things that you can feel. So if you're sitting or laying down, where is your body hitting the seat or the mattress, you can also engage in doing some breath work. So box breathing is for and for hold for out for hold on that can help, you can just take several deep breaths, and make sure that you're exhaling fully on the exhale. So we don't run the risk of hyperventilation. You can also notice without judgment, what's going on and what your thoughts and feelings are. And sometimes it can help to try to connect with our younger self, because it's our younger self that is really predominant in a trauma bond relationship. Another technique that I recommend is bilateral tapping. And that's tapping that you've seen me do in other episodes where you cross your arms, and you tap on alternate sides of your body. Just doing that alone, while you breathe deeply, will help your body come back into physical regulation and help your emotions come back into regulation. We also recommend movement, yoga can be outstanding for calming down the amygdala connecting ourselves back with our body and allowing blood flow to increase to our prefrontal cortex. Number six, notice what you typically do to find soothing, is there substance abuse or extreme behavior happening? If there is it's okay, we're just trying to notice this kind of thing. Without being critical or judgmental about ourselves. You can explain to yourself that we are always driven towards soothing after a difficult abusive or traumatic event. It makes sense. And right now, you're just noticing that how you can typically Sue that's all you're doing in this part of the exercise. Number seven, know that you don't have to take action right away. And that many steps will lower the brain's resistance to big changes, allowing you not to feel as overwhelmed. A lot of times when we realize something that there's a part of our brain that is extremely urgent about trying to read Solve it or solve it. And that can put us back into fight or flight mode. So we want to just pay attention to what we're noticing, and know unless your life has been threatened. Know that you can take some time to start paying attention. Get yourself into a better physiological and emotional regulation. And when you feel less overwhelmed, you will be better able to observe and make small changes and make healthier decisions. Number eight, develop connections outside of the abusive relationship. This can be challenging because a lot of times in relationships that include psychological emotional mental manipulation or abuse, we become isolated. One of the reasons why I become isolated is because the people who are around us and who love us are so distressed by what they see happening, that they become over involved, or they become intrusive, or they become insistent. And believe it or not, the brain does not like it when someone else insists that we do something. If you can just realize that the people who are noticing these things and encouraging you to do something different, are doing this because they are afraid for you. And they can see your struggle and your distress sometimes even before you can.
Nine, take a few minutes and write down the things in your past that helped to see yourself as competence, connected, or purposeful. This can be anything, it can be little league, when you're eight, it can be soccer when you are four, it can be a school play when you're 12, or 14. And you were just trying to make a short list of things that we've accomplished or done in the past to help us gain a perspective about our life overall, instead of just this period of our life. One other thing that can be very helpful is to attend a group for battering. And I want to point out this really important concept that Batterien is not necessarily physical. In fact, some of the women I've worked with over the years, have said to me that they wish that their perpetrator the abuser had hit them twice as often, but kept their mouth shut. Because the verbal battery and the psychological battering the mental battering just stays in our minds. And it creates a faulty belief about ourselves, and oftentimes a faulty belief about the world. So those are some recommendations for some actions or interventions that you can use if you find yourself in a trauma bond in a friendship or a romantic relationship. And then the second thing is to find a way to develop a stronger sense of self. It's okay to be in a place of observation. One thing that tends to overwhelm us, as I mentioned before, is this internal voice that tells us, I have to do something, right this second, know that your brain also will vacillate between the left side and the right side. And the left side of the brain is where your functioning is going to come from, and how you maintain everyday life, even in a living situation, or a relationship dynamic, that's really overwhelming. And the right brain is the emotional brain. So it's not unusual at all, to be in this place of vacillation, where you can have an accomplishment at work or in a volunteer position or in friendship and think, oh my gosh, I'm doing okay at this. And then something can happen to trigger your reminders of the things that you've heard from the person that you're in a trauma bond relationship with. And you can go into that emotional side of your brain and feel really overwhelmed and have a sense of incompetence and a sense of ineffectiveness in your own life. Number three, when this happens, notice without judgment, use benevolent curiosity to lovingly take a look at this. And when I say benevolent curiosity, I am talking about loving curiosity, curiosity that has the best intention gins and is not looking at things to judge. But to notice, number four is notice when you tend to under react. And when you tend to overreact in the context of your relationship. These two extremes are very, very common under reaction is designed to be protective, because it is a way to avoid conflict or to get out of a conflict. And overreaction is the opposite end of that spectrum where we're so overwhelmed that we can't manage our reaction very well. And so we're overreacting. Both of these things are normal. And it's really important that you realize that. One other idea number five, is to write down in what way the intensity of the relationship creates a sense of emotional intimacy in your brain. When we're in a trauma bond, there's an intensity and there is a misconception or a inaccurate belief that the intensity means that we're very, very emotionally close to somebody. And in actual fact, in order to be very close to somebody, you have to be in your prefrontal cortex more often than your fight or flight. And there has to be in the relationship or reciprocity of both people and their emotions and their thoughts being acknowledged and important, instead of one person who constantly is bringing attention to their thoughts and emotions and blaming you for how they feel. Number seven, notice emotions and body sensations as information. Just notice it as information. There are no good or bad or positive or negative emotions, emotions are energy. And when you are able to notice what's happening in your body, and what your emotions are doing, if you can just observe and be in your observers mind, you have a chance to gather information. Number eight, practice widening your window of tolerance by noticing when you are flooded with emotions. And then use a coping tool when your prefrontal cortex comes back online. One thing that I see a lot in my coaching and therapy practices is that people in the moment of great overwhelm, actually cannot remember the tool that they've decided that they're going to use. This is normal, it's typical, it's actually a biological way that the body prepares to flee or to fight. And so I encourage people, once you're back into a little bit more calm state, and you can think to yourself, Oh, I forgot to use that tool, use the tool, right, then don't beat yourself up that you couldn't access it in the moment, when the blood flow is reduced to your prefrontal cortex, you're, you don't have the same kind of access to that part of the brain that holds our wisdom, our reason, our logic, and that kind of thing. The ninth idea in finding a way to develop a stronger sense of self is to find and notice and acknowledge any wins, gains, forward movement, et cetera, the brain is 40 times more likely to notice what we perceive as negative than it is to notice neutral or positive. Because the brain is so terrible at this, I have a little formula that I explained to my clients that can be helpful. The first thing I say is identify the behavior that you want to increase or decrease. So let's say I want to decrease eating ice cream. You're gonna hear a lot about me and ice cream in this podcast. So I want to decrease my consumption of ice cream. And that's number one. Number two, I'm going to pay attention to the frequency that I consume ice cream has it reduced even by one day, or even by one spoonful. And I know this sounds ridiculous because it seems so minut and tiny. But it really can be helpful. So first, I want to decrease my ice cream meeting second I'm going to notice if there's any reduction in frequency, almost always there is when we pay attention to something that we want to change, but our brain doesn't consciously notice it. So being able to use the prefrontal cortex and our accurate perception, and our logic and reason can give us an opportunity to notice that the frequency is reducing. The third step is to notice if the intensity is less if the intensity is lower. So if I tend to eat ice cream frantically, I know this is silly, but work with me here. If I tend to eat ice cream frantically, am I now approaching it from a more calm and rational mind set? Often what this looks like for me is I think I shouldn't eat ice cream because I have high cholesterol. And then I have this other part of me that's like, I will eat ice cream, because you cannot boss me around. And this is very common as well, when we have these seemingly opposite parts of ourself, argue with each other. So is there a reduction in intensity. And the fourth thing you're looking at is, is there a faster recovery?
When I eat ice cream, and then I feel sick or bloated or really critical of myself, am I able to come out of the mental distress a little bit sooner than I have before. And those are some steps that we can take that can help us to notice the forward movement that we're taking, even if it is very small, it is still movement. And it's important to acknowledge, I hope that you've enjoyed this podcast on trauma bonds. Part two, I wish you luck. I know that being involved in a relationship like this is really difficult. And sometimes we can even have a sense that we're going to be deeply ashamed if we admit what other people have seen. That also is really typical and normal. And it's okay for you to say. I think part of my challenge in eliminating this relationship is that I'm going to be really shamed when people who love me say I told you so. Trauma bonds are really difficult to escape. So give yourself some grace in terms of the work you're doing to get out of that dynamic. And remember to pay attention to the things that you're accomplishing, even if they're very small. Thank you for joining me, and I look forward to seeing you next time. Take care.
If you enjoyed this episode and you enjoy learning more about how trauma and toxic stress affects your life. You will absolutely love the whole health club. This is our signature program that helps you recover from trauma. And this month, the month of May in honor of mental health awareness month. We have priced the program at $97 a month, Blaine and I would be honored to guide you through your trauma recovery and we hope to see you inside the hole health lab go to mending trauma.com backslash hole health lab. Thank you for listening to the universe's your therapist this week. If you have any questions or looking for more information, you can find us at mending trauma on Instagram, as well as mending trauma.com Our website and if you're enjoying our content, we'd love it if you could rate review and subscribe to the show. We'll see you all next week.
