Episode 151 - Your Body Was Never Meant to Hold This
Over the last few weeks, the constant exposure to human suffering, injustice, and horrifying information has felt like an avalanche. If you’ve been taking this in through social media and the news like I have, you might notice yourself swinging between obsessing and shutting down, or believing that if you look away or take a break, it means you don’t care. In this episode, I share what helped me understand what was actually happening in my nervous system and why feeling overwhelmed doesn’t mean you’re broken. It means your body was never meant to hold all of this. Here’s what I cover:
An Instagram post that helped me understand how the overwhelm we’re living through impacts the body
How flooding ourselves with horrific information without containment destabilizes our nervous systems
Why empathy and good girl conditioning can turn caring into self-sacrifice
Three things to pay attention to so we can stay connected to the truth without losing ourselves
What it looks like to give yourself permission to decide what level of engagement is right for you
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Transcript
00:59
A little bit of a different episode today, because one of the most valuable parts of being in a community, and this podcast listening audience is a community, is being able to learn from and feel supported by and connected to each other's experiences.
01:20
I love it when you DM me and you email me your experiences, your stories. I feel connected to you. I feel like I know you better. And I'm going to share a little bit about my experience over the last couple of weeks, why there almost wasn't a podcast episode today, in the hopes that the conversations that I've been having with my friends and with my clients about these things can offer you some relief as well, because it is, it is a really taxing, chaotic time. It is horrifying from one day to the next, what we learn in the Epstein files. It is horrifying what we learn about human suffering around the globe.
02:16
It's horrifying what we're learning about how people are being treated in our own country. If you were in the US and other countries, some of those same things are happening. It's an avalanche of information.
02:30
And about middle of the week, last week, it felt like I just could not go on. And I don't have that experience very often. I am generally optimistic. I'm happy. I can find the good. I love dancing and singing and being funny and laughing and finding the humor.
02:51
And I just, it felt like I was cement. I couldn't think. I couldn't move. I was angry. I was sad. And by the middle of the week, I just felt like I was almost completely shut down. I got into bed with my husband and I just cried and cried and cried and cried and listed like all of the horrible things that were going on in the world.
03:20
And it felt like I was, I was hopeless and helpless. Couldn't stop it. I couldn't do anything about it. And I have not felt like that broken, that absolutely grief-stricken and powerless in a long time.
03:43
And so I went to sleep, which sometimes that is really just the best thing that I can do, maybe you too. But the next morning, I still didn't feel any kind of like resilient sturdiness. And then I read this Instagram post.
04:03
So I'm just going to read it to you. I think there's about eight slides. This comes from a creator. Her name is the Mama Attorney. I'm going to link to the post in the show notes so that you can go read it because it just, it gave me context.
04:22
And here's what's amazing. I know about the nervous system, right? It's something that I coach on and do, but I didn't see this happening. And so I was so grateful that she wrote this and that it showed up in my algorithm because when we are in moments of extreme stress, we forget what we know, right?
04:44
It's not always front and center. And then you pair that with a lot of other good girl rules that show up for me around being informed and not looking away from human suffering and the rules of being a good person.
05:03
And it was a lot. I forgot completely about the nervous system. And she lays it out so brilliantly. So here we go. Here are the slides. Lawyer here. The method with which the Epstein files are being released is deliberately designed to put you in a psychological trance.
05:27
This is their strategy. And here's how I know this. In trial practice, when there are exhibits involving violence, children, or extreme harm, we do not simply dump information into the room. We go back and forth extensively about how and when something is shown.
05:49
The judge guides the process. Experts contextualize it. It is a container equipped to hold this content. Courts understand that when the brain is flooded with horror, your system gets hijacked by the primal brain.
06:09
You go into hypervigilance, rage, obsession, and collapse. We have a name for this, reptile theory. Reptile theory is a trial strategy built on this premise. If you can bypass the cognitive brain and activate the primitive survival brain, which is the oldest or reptile part of the brain, you can control outcomes without ever persuading on facts or law.
06:43
This strategy is not allowed at trial. This is why trials involving extreme harm rely on structure. The law does not do this to protect perpetrators, but to protect the jury. What is happening now is the opposite.
07:04
There is a massive document drop with no categorization, containment, or guidance. The onus is placed entirely on the reader to make sense of chaos. There are random redactions that force the brain into constant guesswork.
07:23
You have to deduce, infer, fill in the blanks. This keeps the mind spinning, searching, and looping. So, number one, you become consumed. You deep dive. You push to get more information. You stop sleeping.
07:43
It takes over your life. Your focus narrows until there is nothing else. Gradually, they frack all of your life force. They keep you locked in an endless energy loop in their sick mind games. You become one of their victims.
08:02
Or two, you disengage completely. You decide it's too much, too confusing, too overwhelming. You walk away. It implodes from your exhaustion. And either way, they win. Same here. We received events frozen in fragments.
08:26
There is no arc, only horrifying snapshot after horrifying snapshot. A nervous system can hold horror only if it is sequenced, paced, and contextualized. If it's not, it will oscillate, fixate, or shut down.
08:49
What you are being fed is exposure to terror without containment. Make no mistake, this is psychological guerrilla warfare. When the nervous system is overwhelmed, it seeks relief. This looks like outrage, doom scrolling, obsessing, or wanting to throw your phone in the ocean.
09:12
Time starts to collapse. Days blur together. You check your phone compulsively. You think, I just need to understand this piece. But there is no final piece. There's always another fragment, another horror dangling just out of frame.
09:31
And you lose your agency. When the trauma cannot be held by the people who caused it and cannot be processed by systems designed to contain it, it looks for somewhere else to go. It looks for nervous systems capable of carrying the terror.
09:56
Mothers are particularly vulnerable to psychological warfare because of our protective instincts. I would probably just say people in general, but that's just me. I know plenty of men and non-gender binary people who would fit that description.
10:17
Back to the slides. So your body begins to alchemize what the children could not because they were in a shock state. And what these men responsible refused to metabolize. So you feel it. You feel it all.
10:37
You feel it in your jaw, your gut, your chest. You're weary around your kids. You rage at your partner. You cut out relatives. You feel irritable and you have a headache and you can't sleep. You feel crazy.
10:51
This is the trance and it's where they want you. Please know this. Super important. You are not crazy. You are having a normal biological response to abnormal psychological warfare. Oscillating between being completely consumed and enraged and wanting to turn away and burn your phone forever is a healthy response.
11:20
That swing is your nervous system trying to protect itself. The risk is not the oscillation. The risk is not noticing it. Noticing is the rupture to the trance. It's how you peel away. The moment you observe the pattern, instead of being inside it, the spell weakens.
11:44
When you name the wave, you start asking, what is being done to me and why? Noticing restores agency. Agency to engage or disengage, to step back, take breaks, to only review synthesis instead of fragments.
12:02
Agency to refuse to become a landfill for unprocessed violence. You can demand accountability without sacrificing yourself. Justice does not require self-destruction. You are allowed to survive this intact.
12:25
In fact, that is part of the rebellion too. So when I read that, it was like the light went on. And I was like, that's right. Exposure to terror without containment. Yes. And how she names oscillating back and forth between obsession and shutdown.
12:55
Yes. That's what I was experiencing. And a really quick review of some really important things that she says. The nervous system needs containment. Humans can, and we have to be able to process horrific things.
13:17
But we need pacing, structure, and meaning. And flooding without that just destabilizes our nervous systems and thus our bodies. Another thing that she said that I thought was really important to highlight, obsessing and shutting down are not failures.
13:39
I went back and forth between I have to know everything about this particular point to total and complete shutdown. And those are protective responses. Nothing was wrong with me. My system was overwhelmed.
13:54
But when I was in it, and I'm still in it, let's be real here, but I'm not as totally in it. When I was totally in it, I couldn't see it. And I was looking around at other people who seemed to be going about their day normally.
14:09
And I couldn't understand it. I couldn't understand like, how am I supposed to care about what we're eating for dinner when these horrible things are happening? And I just couldn't make sense of feeling obsessed one minute and then totally shut down the next.
14:27
And then the third point that I think she makes that is really important is that the real danger isn't that we care too much. The real danger is that we don't know what's happening to us. It's the loss of agency that we experience in that avalanche because we don't realize that we can choose how and when to engage.
14:53
And choosing is so important. So when I was in that obsessive part, it felt like I could not look away, right? I was reading. I was checking. I was trying to just understand this one other piece. I was looking for somebody else who could give it context, who could put it into some kind of sequence for me.
15:16
But I felt like I was unraveling like my sleep, my patience, my body, it all just felt like complete and total breaking. It was really hard for me to switch back and forth between the mundane and the massive uncertainty because I didn't have any kind of context.
15:41
There was no buffer. There was no time. And so my nervous system was really struggling to know how to hold both of those things. All of these horrific things are happening and what's for dinner. And that's not, that's not failure.
15:58
That's a nervous system that hasn't been given adequate support. So a lot of that is fueled for us by some of these good girl or good person rules. And I named a few of them. Maybe you identify, I have had the thought, like I need to stay informed because that's what good people do.
16:22
If I look away from this, I'm bad or I'm somehow complicit. If I don't participate, then I'm part of the problem. If I take a break from this, it means I don't care. We are wired for empathy. So it makes so much sense when some of those beliefs sneak in and start driving, especially our social media consumption.
16:48
So many of us, me included, were taught that goodness means self-sacrifice in some way. And we know that bearing witness to brutality, to violence, to injustice has mattered historically. That's what's turned it around.
17:08
And so it becomes hard to figure out where do I show up? Where do I witness? How do I witness in a way that actually matters? Because for a lot of us, that just turns into a lot of scrolling on social media, which doesn't actually create an impact in the world, right?
17:29
We've liked a reel or we've shared it, but that hasn't actually done anything for us. And sometimes it doesn't do anything for the communities of people that we want to help by watching reels and being informed about what they're going through.
17:49
But it contributes to the problem because that constant exposure, when you're driven by those beliefs, the constant exposure without any kind of a choice, that is what is overwhelming. Compassion without choice just becomes self-destruction.
18:10
And I didn't see it. And I felt totally destroyed. I didn't understand. And I had to remind myself that absorbing everything had nothing to do with my goodness as a person. Nothing to do with it. That I could and should and needed to find a way to rest from the information so that I could resource, so that I could pull my joy and my pleasure and my community and my reasons for living back online, front and center, because I lost, it's like I lost connection to all of that. It actually brought up one of my experiences in the past in a really interesting kind of parallel way. When I was leaving Mormonism, there were massive amounts of information being shared about historical claims the church had made, claims of truth, claims of where things had come from and what had happened that were not true.
19:27
And so if you can imagine, you know, it was me with, you know, a couple of friends and social media and people who were posting, but no real shared container. There was no like trusted authority anymore.
19:45
It's just like, you know, the wild west of social media with whatever people want to put out there. And it was incredibly destabilizing. There were days when it felt like the ground was moving underneath my feet.
20:02
I couldn't find it like what was solid anymore. What could I believe? Who could I trust? All of these things that had felt so real and so important to me were just like dissolving and dismantling in front of my eyes.
20:17
It was too much, too fast without support. And I noticed that same feeling. It was multiplied this time around, but that same feeling of like obsession and then collapse, deep dive and then complete exhaustion.
20:41
And so seeing that again gave me a chance to take a deep breath and say, okay, all right. I felt this before. And although that information wasn't dumped on me like it is being dumped on us now, that same destabilizing too much too fast without support was very familiar.
21:08
And so noticing that and then reading this Instagram post helped me to close the loop. And here's what I mean when I say that. Traumatic experiences create these open loops in our body that want to be completed.
21:28
But we look for completion a couple really important ways. Number one, to have it explained to us. It's the context. It's exactly what she was talking about. To have someone help us to process it, to know the purpose of something, to be able to see it in a broader picture where we know that it's going to be okay.
21:51
And so recognizing that feeling in my body that was very familiar after leaving Mormonism, and then the context of this Instagram post really helped me to give myself the loop closure of the permission to step away.
22:12
And that's what I want to end with here. If you're feeling completely overwhelmed and spun out and angry and rage ball one minute and then collapsing in tears the next, they're not broken. That is exactly what a healthy nervous system does when it is trying to take in too much too fast.
22:40
And if you need to look away, that does not mean you don't care. It means your nervous system needs a break. We have to learn how to stay connected to the truth without completely losing ourselves. And so as you kind of decide what cadence is right for you, I want you to pay attention to a couple of things.
23:08
Number one, pay attention to your body. Your body will tell you when it is too much. And you can give yourself permission to take a break. Maybe you tell yourself, taking a break is how I prepare myself so that I can stay engaged the way I want to.
23:31
Everyone needs breaks. No one is meant to exist in this avalanche. And no one can exist in this avalanche without context, without help, and without soft places to land. So you have permission. I needed permission.
23:55
I'm passing it on to you. The way that we remain human throughout this is by recognizing where our agency is, recognizing when we get caught up again in that either obsession or collapse pattern where our nervous system is trying to make sense, taking a step out of that into resting, into doing something else.
24:22
Guys, I went to a local craft store and I bought stuff to start cross stitching again. I never in a million years thought I would do it. I was like, I need something that is fun. I didn't used to think it was fun.
24:40
That's so interesting. But I totally found a pattern that I think is adorable doing something like that. I have a friend who's crocheting, right? Lots and lots of crocheting. I'm reading some books that are Theo of Golden.
24:52
That's what I want to recommend to you. Theo, Theo of Golden, reading some books, right? That take us out of some of these spins that we get in. It's essential that you do that because if we're going to be here for the long haul demanding accountability and showing up in any way that we can, in any way that we deem useful and right for us, to help the people around us and to help ourselves, to help our families, to help our clients, to help the people we work with and for, whoever it is, you have to take care of yourself. You have to be able to use your agency to decide when you engage and how. I wish there were another way, but there isn't right now.
25:49
And so what we can do is take care of each other, share how we're feeling. If anything from this episode has resonated for you, I would love to hear about that. I would love to hear about what's hard, what's working, what's not working for you, because together is how we get through this.
26:05
I really, really believe that that is true. And we will. I'll see you next week.
