Wellspring Wednesday|Week 21: Unnecessary

Author Note: If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
 Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

I speak a lot about coping skills on these episodes. It’s really important to acknowledge and honor your coping skills. Whatever regulation methods your body has been using, mechanisms of safety and comfort, and everything that brought you even a bit of peace while you endured what you endured — those are coping skills. The cool thing about the brain is that when something works, it can stop looking for ways to accomplish the end result. For instance, it wouldn’t need to spend energy keeping you calm in stressful situations if it found that food or medication temporarily did that for you throughout your teen years enduring an abusive foster home.

The saying that “neurons that fire together, wire together” is true. Now when the brain picks up the cue of overwhelm like it did during your teenage span, it can just temporarily pacify your nervous system with binge eating because that was working then. The brain thinks “problem solved” and can file that tool in the “use again next time that ‘overwhelm’ starts to spike”. This doesn’t matter to the brain if the overwhelm came from a perceived fear, stress of prepping for a college exam, a sighting of a look-alike to your abuser at the grocery store, or your boss asking you to work overtime. The feeling is the same, so the firing sets off to go wire that emotion to binge eating to dull the sense of the overwhelm. This is true for every coping skill. It started out as a high-functioning, adaptive mechanism for your traumatic situation. It was helpful, useable, and had a well-intended purpose.

Now, you are in the place in your healing where you are recognizing not only the aftereffects of the original trauma(s) but also the aftereffects of the coping skills. This is where the journey gets a little intense, and I’m speaking from experience. Taking a further step back looking at your trauma, you can now recognize that the coping skills you’ve adapted are no longer helpful. In fact, they have become unnecessary in reality, even if your brain still stamps them as “works just fine”. Some of these coping tools, you’ll begin to see, have become unhealthy along with being unnecessary. This is where you start examining the aftereffects of the coping tools themselves. Binge eating may have started to cause GI or other biological issues. A substance misuse tool to numb might have now led to dangerous drugs with dangerous consequences. Self-harm may have kept you grounded during your trauma, but now may just be an obsession anytime you feel triggered that is causing scarring or infection. Overworking kept you away from the house from your narcissistic spouse, but now is keeping you from finding a new relationship or enjoying time that you have with your children. Keeping you away from potential abuse using strong trust issues may now cause social isolation problems and lack of healthy intimacy. On and on and on the list can go.

See, your brain wasn’t caring about future effects of your coping skills back when it was just trying to keep you alive. Its concern wasn’t specific to the quality of your life, just making sure you could survive beyond the trauma. That was the goal then. Now, outside of the trauma, these are exactly the types of discoveries that are available for you to work on and through. Sussing out unnecessary coping skills, the mechanisms of survival that no longer serve you, is a great way to explore where they stem from, the origin of the tool, and why your brain still feels it needs to use this under duress.

It’s imperative that we don’t confuse the brain by using the word “unnecessary” in a hurtful way, though. I find it very important to the intrapersonal bridge and your self-trust building for your brain to know that you aren’t saying the skill itself was always unnecessary. Part of the internal healing is to find gratitude for your adaptive coping during the trauma and to really be thankful that you had that comfort, safety, protector, or numbing tool available. If you spend some time really thanking that once-useful tool and your brain for creating it, you will find that this part of you can relax when it’s time to tell it that you no longer need it. This is where you want to gently find ways of exploring the now-unnecessary mechanisms — really rooting around to let it help you with your deep healing, asking it what it wants you to know and why it’s there, and making peace with its once-important job in your life. From there, it’s much easier to call it unnecessary and to de-throne its role in your life now. Once you’ve built a relationship with this coping skill (“Protector” — if you are following IFS language), you can now let it know some of the consequences it is creating in your life, some of the negative after effects, and how and why it is no longer serving you — why it’s no longer needed.

Sometimes this looks like it truly not being needed because the part of you that it was trying to protect you from (severe pain, suffering, potential harm, shame, fear, being hurt by family, etc) is no longer a threat. Yet sometimes it means that that threat is still sometimes there but that you’d rather not use this particular tool anymore because it’s unhealthy to your overall wellbeing. This is where we supplant maladaptive tools for new, healthy ones — like exercise, emotional release, a coaching relationship, singing, breathwork, travel, boundaries, work/life balance, writing, etc.

Each person will be different as to how to handle these old coping skills. Many clients need to continue using their coping mechanisms during the first part of coaching while they are unpacking all the bitter turmoil of the past. If you still need it, then listen to your body and use it if you feel you must. However, there will come a time in your journey where it will be time to put down a burdening pack of stuff and leave it on the trail as you march forward. That’s where support from a coach or a therapist is really helpful — to know when, know how, and to follow through.

If you have questions about this episode, any of the IFS language used here, or want to learn more about unburdening and deep inner healing — feel free to reach out with a message. I’ll resource you and help advocate for you as you find your footing on the trauma recovery road.

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 6: Four Fs

*Author Note* If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

The title is a trick subject because as you’ll see there are more than four Fs when it comes to trauma and the nervous system.  It is still called “the four Fs” in psychology though, and I bet you’ll know at least two of them.  The 4Fs are the main stress response types of mammals.  I think it’s important to understand each of them and to be able to recognize which ones you generally have used in traumatic situations and use currently during a trauma trigger reaction.  With this knowledge, you can begin to realize when you are going into a “4F response” and learn how to calm yourself during the event, as well as perhaps start to pinpoint what prompted it.  This is great inner wisdom to know about yourself, I find. 

In basic terms - inside your brain, you have an amygdala whose job it is to watch out for danger.  When a danger is perceived (whether real or not), the amygdala sends a message to the brain’s hypothalamus to start turning on the engine for the autonomic nervous system (the ANS).  The ANS then kicks your heart rate up, speeds up your breathing to get more oxygen to your muscles (or holds your breath in certain responses), dilates your pupils to let in light to see better, makes your blood thicker to help with clotting in case of injury, causes sweating due to the increased heart rate to try to cool the inflamed system, and a few more things. 

All this happens to save your life.  Full stop.  Your brain is trying to save you from what it thinks is danger.  Even if you recognize there isn’t danger, your logical mind will begin to slow the system once you tell it it’s safe, but you probably notice that you are still activated in your body.  It takes a bit to calm down all the areas that heightened in preparation for the danger.  If there is a real threat to your life, this ANS activation is what gets you to react quickly to jump back on the sidewalk if a car is coming at you, to slam on your brakes to avoid an accident, or to run away from a dog attacking you.

The main four Fs are called: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn.  The fight or flight response is as old as human existence is.  Run away or duke it out is what our ancestors did forever.  In humans now, these responses have sometimes become normal ways of life in everyday circumstances to anything that may seem hard at all – not just fear of a true danger.  For trauma survivors, your brain has suffered enough pain and anguish that it tends to imagine that anything COULD be bad, dangerous, fearful, strange, unfamiliar, unsafe, or uncomfortable.  Your brain has adapted to learn to respond to things in these ways on a regular basis, sometimes no matter the reason.  Like we learned in Monday’s mindfulness practice – a trauma survivor may have something as small as a familiar dangerous smell (like the cologne of an abuser) that sets them into a 4F trigger response, and they can’t even comprehend why. 

For some examples, the fight response now could be asserting power over someone else or fighting inwardly with yourself rather than just wrestling a lion like our ancestors.  The flight response could be any type of escape used to avoid conflict or potential danger, not just to run away when you are in it.  This even translates to escaping into your own world of thoughts, or workaholic syndrome.  Freeze is a big one because, in the mammal world, this shutdown response - based on the circumstance - is to either try to trick the opponent into thinking you are dead or to literally start shutting down your body in preparation for death.  The freeze response may be dissociating regularly throughout the day or avoiding human contact altogether because you believe humans are innately dangerous to you.  In trauma, the freeze response looks like the body shutting down for death – the heart rate slows and breathing slows because it is bracing to die.  The fawn response is said to be the people pleasing response.  In a traumatic event, this is the child who is trying to calm the people around them as to avoid the danger that they sense is imminent.  In regular post traumatic events, this becomes a people pleasing perfection – which is a developed coping skill to try to keep everyone else happy, so they don’t become a safety risk.  It’s born out of fear. 

If you are a trauma survivor, you may have a hybrid of some of these tendencies.  You may try to placate an aggressive situation that reminds you of an abusive father that you used to be able to calm with fawning, but you may completely run away from the first signs of deep connection with a friend because your brain remembers the way your siblings would use your vulnerabilities to manipulate and psychologically abuse you. 

There is so much to say on this topic really. I tend to find anything related to human personality and characteristics fascinating.  If you are interested to know your 4F type but are struggling with the self-introspection to do so, I’d love to help you support you in learning more about these and getting to know your responses and reasons behind them. 

I also like to add more Fs to this conversation because I believe there are also stress responses like: Fix (akin to doing and helping), Function (just keeping on going in the system of your inner world), Feel (stopping and feeling the stress and healing it), Flow (finding rhythm in your chaos and moving through it), Follow (looking to authority for cues of how to respond), Flop (related to flight escape, turning inward to laziness and couch potato lifestyle to avoid life), Forget (repressed memories can lead to inability to even recall daily stressors), Force (just pushing on pretending that you aren’t stressed), Fun (seeking adventurous ways to release your activation), and Forgive (using the triggered moments to recognize where the activation came from to forgive your trauma for causing it). 

There is a lot to explore here and even more to discover about your inner world.  If you need help navigating that, shoot me a message on the “Connect” tab of my website, or check out the “Work with Me” tab to see if coaching is right for you.  Knowing your body and brain’s response choices is helpful in figuring out where your trauma response came from, unlocking ways to calm your activation, and finding some freedom from these triggers.