Brain-Body Resilience
A podcast dedicated to stressing less and living more. Equal parts personal development and story telling and a bit of brain science to back it up. New episodes drop every Monday! We're all busy so I keep it breif, just a little nugget to take into your day.
Brain-Body Resilience
BBR #192: Unpacking Life with Emotional Scars
In this episode I explore how our families shape us, contributing to both our traumas and our sense of self. We talk about the hidden scars of childhood neglect and the ways they shape our adult lives.
Sharing my journey from feeling disconnected and alone to understanding and healing from abandonment trauma, I discuss the impact of growing up in a family where emotions were unacknowledged and dismissed.
Understand how hyper-independence acts as a shield, a trauma response, and how breaking down these walls can lead to genuine healing and self-acceptance.
Through years of self-work, therapy, and learning to regulate my emotions, I've begun to rewrite my relationship with myself and the world around me. Join me as I delve into the importance of emotional awareness, the challenges of hyper-independence, and the power of our brain's ability to change and heal.
By the end of this episode, you'll have valuable insights into how the brain works, giving you the power to make more informed decisions for your mental health.
Whether you've experienced similar struggles or are just curious about the ways family dynamics affect us, this episode offers insights, hope, and a reminder that you are not alone.
Get in there and give it a listen for more!
Resources:
Manage Your Stress Mentorship
Discovery call
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What is up? Hello there, my name is Jessica Patchingbunch, you can call me JPB, and this is Brain Body Resilience. This is a podcast dedicated to growth, human development and stressing a little bit less so you can go ahead and live a little bit more. Hello, my friends, and welcome back to another episode of the Brain Body Resilience Podcast. I'm your host, jpb, and this is episode number 192.
Speaker 1:I actually started writing this a few weeks ago, when I spent some time with family, which, like most of us us, can be a complex area with lots of layers and lots of emotions all existing at the same time, because the people we grow up around shape us, even, you know, as hard as we try not to let that happen or deny that it has, even if that is chosen family or biological family, adoptive family or anything else. The people we are around shape us. Our families shape us. They contribute to our traumas, our sense of self, our understanding of the world around us and our role in it. And the feeling of family as it relates to my biological family is relatively new for me, feeling like I have family, feeling like I want to spend any time with them. There was a long period of my life that I felt like I didn't have any family, that I was completely alone. I felt like my family didn't understand me, didn't approve of me or my decisions in life, the way I live my life, or generally just kind of look down on me. And there's so many other stories involved in why those things are that way and that all might be true. Some of it I know is true and that all might be true. Some of it I know is true and that has not changed. What has changed is not the interactions that I have for the most part, but the way that I choose to show up in those.
Speaker 1:In those times, those interactions for myself, I used to leave family visits hysterical family visits hysterical in tears, incredibly activated and anxious. I mean, I was hysterical, I was completely dysregulated. I wanted to have something that didn't exist. I wanted my family to be close and loving and supportive and I wanted us to get together and laugh and share joy. But those are all things that lived in my made up world of things I wanted and they didn't actually exist. And so when those expectations were not met, when I was upset at how something was and refused to accept what it was and wanted it to be something different. It created a lot of pain and that lot of a lot of pain, um, and that stemmed from a lot of other pain, because I wasn't able to accept that it wasn't real. It was only after years of my own work with my relationship to my life and to myself that things changed.
Speaker 1:Uh, what changed was my ability to regulate my emotions, to self soothe and create space and capacity to hold the hard feelings, the disappointment, the anger, the hurt, to hold space for them but not carry them, to process them. And what I didn't understand for a long time was that hyper independence the kind of I can do everything on my own, take care of myself and can't count on others attitude that so many of us hold. And even I will speak for myself, and I know I'm not alone here. There was a long period of my life where I was proud of that. I was very proud that I didn't need anyone Because I don't know what. At this point I'm like, I don't know why, what that meant, because I have such a deep understanding now that community is an integral part of our overall health and well being, mental health being at the top of those benefits. So anyways, um, you know, some of us like to pride ourselves on how we don't need any help with anything. We do everything by ourselves, and that is a trauma response. Feeling unwanted, insecure, alone and misunderstood is a trauma response. These coping skills that I had learned didn't just happen with family, the hyper independence it wasn't just with my family. We don't get to turn these learned survival skills off and on, especially when we don't even know they exist. I was so insecure in my relationships I constantly wondered if my friends really liked me, if they really cared if, you know, I was actually just bothering them or if they I don't know like if they just felt bad for me but didn't really want me there.
Speaker 1:There is a specific memory from grade school, I think, like fifth grade or so. I was invited to walk to school with some other girls that lived close, and the days before and up until that morning, I remember, when we were actually going to meet up, I had thought about not going in order to save myself from the inevitable terrible experience of them not really wanting to hang out with me, but invited me over just to make fun of me or to ditch me or be cruel in some other way, and this was the fear I carried further into my life that I wasn't actually worth knowing, that I wasn't good enough, cool enough, smart enough, interesting enough, and this is a large part of why I drank and smoked so heavily for most of my young adult life. It was how I coped with the anxiety of not being wanted and not having a sense of belonging. I never trusted. I never trusted others to show up. I never trusted myself to handle the outcome of whatever was happening, even though I had a life full of proof that I was able to handle everything up until that point Maybe not in a well-adjusted way, which I was completely unaware of, but I had survived everything up until that point, and there was plenty of evidence that I faced challenges and did not actually die. I was still here.
Speaker 1:When we grow up with parents or caregivers who don't acknowledge our feelings and emotions, the lack of response feels like abandonment, and this can lead to all of these other pieces of feeling like we're alone and confused about the experiences we're having. We learn that our feelings aren't okay, so we ignore them instead of learning to create healthy relationships to our feelings, and because a lot of us grew up with this lack of acknowledgement because our parents didn't know, how Many of them still don't know how they were never taught those skills of emotional awareness or recognition to build the skills in that area in order to teach. And because of this, a lot of us have the feeling that we are alone, that we're unwanted, that these feelings that make these interactions with our families so complex and sometimes really hurtful and leave us hysterical in tears, completely dysregulated. And so I want to talk a little bit about why, what that comes from, um, how we end up being hyper independent and not feeling like we can trust anyone except for ourselves, why we are doubting ourselves so much, why we are so insecure. And when we did grow up with parents who didn't acknowledge our feelings and emotions, again that lack of response feels like abandonment, and a lot of us grew up with this lack of acknowledgement because our parents didn't know how.
Speaker 1:I imagine many of us grew up hearing some of the same things Stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about. Unless you're dead or dying, I don't want to hear about it. Stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about. Unless you're dead or dying, I don't want to hear about it Stop your blubbering, don't be a crybaby, don't be so emotional, or anything else that gave us the understanding that how we felt didn't matter, it wasn't okay, and we definitely didn't learn what to do with it.
Speaker 1:What we did learn is that no one cared about our emotional needs, and so learning at a young age, in prime developmental years, where we are constructing our foundations for sense of safety and our role in the world, that our emotions are not valid, they're not allowed and they're not important. This leads to all kinds of things later on, like what we were just talking about insecurity, anxiety around uh, specifically around social relationships, intrusive or obsessive thoughts about being abandoned, um, or discarded, or I mean um. I mean, yeah, discarded, but also a disregard for, for yourself, um, self-abandonment. And we deal with these things by shutting out connection, by not trusting anyone but ourselves, by being hyper-independent and then being proud of it and that part might not actually even be true by self-abandoning, by being hypercritical of others, usually as an outward projection of our own inner criticism of ourselves, or by pushing others away so that we don't open up to the possibility of getting hurt and being abandoned again. Shame, depression, anxiety, perfectionism, low self-esteem, feeling inadequate and unworthy and difficulty trusting. These are all symptoms of abandonment trauma, which is a type of emotional distress that can result from feeling neglected or rejected by someone important in your life, especially in early developmental years. Emotional abandonment is a subjective emotional state in which people feel undesired, left behind, insecure or discarded, and it's common for children with emotionally unavailable or immature parents to experience this.
Speaker 1:My story, a little piece of it. My mom was a long haul truck driver and a single parent. For the first seven years of my life she was gone on the road, sometimes for months at a time, without coming home. Because that was the case, we had a live-in nanny. It was her and her son living with us. They had a place to stay and my mom had 24-hour child care. So, because she was gone, my mom would write notes every day on a calendar for my brother and I, a note about how she loved and missed us. I am assuming I guess I never knew because I couldn't read, because I was too young to read and the nanny's son would read them for us and tell us. They said things like I hate you and I wish you were never born, or I'm happy that I don't have to be around you. I wish I never had kids and things like that. And I knew it wasn't true, but I couldn't read what it actually said, so that's all I had to go on. He was also sexually abusing us for the first uh, for the whole time that they lived there. So my mom was physically not there, emotionally unavailable, and the adolescent boy abusing me told me that if I said no or if I tried to tell anyone, I would be in trouble and everyone would hate me.
Speaker 1:This led to a lot of problems saying no to all kinds of things later on in my life, and so I learned that I needed to keep my feelings to myself the hurt, the anger, the shame, the fear, anything else I haven't learned to identify yet. At around age seven to eight, somewhere in there, I inherited a violently abusive stepfather who was terrifying, and so any consideration of my feelings took a sideline to actual physical safety a lot of that time. So I just kept on shoving my feelings down and I kept this practice of intentional dismissal and refusal to acknowledge my feelings into adulthood. I would tell myself explicitly that if I can't feel anything, I can't hurt, but the hurt I don't know why I was trying to trick myself. There was hurt. It was deep, like one of those scary wells that goes forever. You can see down, but only until the part where it gets dark and scary. When I was a teenager, I would cut myself on a regular basis just to feel, just to feel physical pain that I could actually acknowledge, because the depth of the emotional pain was too much and I had no skills to. I didn't know what to do with it, I just knew that it wasn't acceptable and so I just kept shoving it deeper.
Speaker 1:Abandonment, trauma can affect memory, focus and ability to plan. Um, not learning to process emotions, the chronic stress associated with this, along with the lack of emotional regulation skills, or even developing a sense of what is going on inside of us, what we are feeling, even the actual sensations in our body these are all things that feeling dismissed and then self-dismissing can lead to. And this means we probably weren't learning interoceptive cues either, because disassociation is a common coping strategy that helps us feel disconnected from our bodies and or emotions when we don't feel safe there, when we don't know what to do with it. There's research out there that shows that a lack of introceptive sense leads to inability to regulate emotions, because we can't regulate and process something we're not aware of or refuse to acknowledge.
Speaker 1:Each individual's experience shapes our neural circuitry input. Jules' experience shapes our neural circuitry input, so experience guides brain development, and our social interactions play a major role in that. Many of us did not grow up with a strong foundation of secure social support, as we're discussing, which is a huge contributor to the fact that chronic stress, anxiety and poor emotional regulation, leading to the overall compromised mental well-being, are so common. There is good news here, though I am getting to, that your brain is plastic, meaning that it is always changing again with experience. So new experiences create new connections between brain cells and regions, and we can begin to integrate brain regions that weren't previously integrated, and we can reshape our associations to stimuli, whether that be people, places, things.
Speaker 1:We can learn the skills of emotional regulation. We can learn to grow our interceptive skills, which allows us to pay attention to our internal environment. How are we feeling? What needs to be addressed? Where do we need attention? Like, what are our needs? We can choose to pivot anytime we want.
Speaker 1:Is it easy to learn these skills? Absolutely not in my experience. Is it quick and painless process? Again, absolutely not in my experience, but I will tell you that my life is something unimaginable to any previous version of myself. It has taken years of uncovering, unlearning, relearning, discovering, allowing lots of therapy, lots of crying, lots of patience and forgiveness from my loved ones along the way.
Speaker 1:And I am still here, unfolding, and it makes me sad. It is incredibly unfortunate that I did not know that I could change these things. I didn't know that there was another option. I didn't know that I had agency um, that I could learn to feel my feelings and learn what to do with them, and learn how to process all of the depths of anger and shame and start to address the insecurities I had around attachment and just relationships in general to myself and to the world around me, to others. I didn't learn how to do those things. I didn't start learning how to do those things until I lost my brother to suicide, and it's unfortunate that so many of us have to have something tragic, something that just kind of destroys our existing understanding of the world, before we take these steps to care for ourselves, to give ourselves the attention to address our needs and give ourselves the love that we have always been wanting so badly, and sometimes we just can't see any of that until our world is shattered. But it doesn't have to be like that. If you are aware of those things and you're like maybe I should address these things or find some help, give that another thought, maybe do that.
Speaker 1:I wanted to share this episode in hopes that anyone else who has experienced any of these things I talked about, anyone who has a complex relationship to family, feeling alone, unwanted or insecure in that way, which is a significant amount of us I want you to know that you're not alone. I want you to know that it's not you, there's nothing wrong with you and hopefully, knowing a bit about what's going on in your brain and your body because of these experiences and what your brain and body can do to help you move forward. I want you to know that you have agency, that you can change the experience you have now. You can reshape how you experience yourself in the world. Your brain is always changing and rewriting your story according to new information, but new information doesn't integrate well when we are stuck in old traumas, old patterns, old ruminative ruminations of bad things, stressors, experiences that we keep replaying.
Speaker 1:So go see a trauma therapist if you need to Lean on your loved ones and trusted community if you have that around you. And, most importantly, choose you. Choose to keep going. Choose to give yourself the attention you need and still you needed and still do need. Choose to show up for yourself. Choose to dedicate the time and effort that it takes to create a life that feels good, that you don't want to escape from, that doesn't just drive you fucking mad every day.
Speaker 1:All right, that's all I got today. I am so happy that you're here. I'm so grateful that you choose to spend your time listening to me. It's always interesting because I love hearing from y'all, because I am just talking to a microphone in my room here where I do my podcasting, and so I am always so grateful to hear from y'all here about what lands, or your thoughts, questions, comments, concerns, about any of the episodes that you listen to, and so I want to say thank you to everyone who does reach out and just who gives me the opportunity to connect and make this a little bit less just me talking at a microphone, which I like to do. I'm a talker. So, in any case, thanks for being here, thanks for your time, for your attention, thanks for reaching out, thanks for connecting.
Speaker 1:If you enjoyed this, please share it with a friend. I think this is something that a lot of us please share it with a friend. I think this is something that a lot of us need to hear, need to read here, read here need to know that we're not alone on and understanding a little bit about how our brain and body work is always useful in understanding that we have the ability to navigate a little bit differently if we so choose. So if you liked it, share it. In any case, we'll be doing this again next week. I am wishing you a beautiful time until then, peace.