Welcome to the narcissistic abuse recovery Podcast. I’m Caroline Strawson. And I’ll be sharing with you awareness, understanding and education about the devastating effects of narcissistic abuse to help you thrive. I want you to know that I’ve been exactly where you are now. And I believe you. And this show is all about taking you from trauma to transformation. I love talking about this topic, and I could sit and talk about this for hours and hours and hours. And it was actually something I didn’t really understand when I initially started my healing journey, because hey, I was an adult. And I should know what I’m doing. I didn’t realize that actually, what I was feeling was very much deep inner child wounds. And when I work with my clients, there is so much deep in a child healing that will occur. Because it’s not a coincidence that you end up in a relationship with a narcissist, whether that comes from having a parent, that’s a narcissist, because obviously you’re born into that family, and then indeed, attracting friends or being in a relationship with a narcissist. There are always patterns to this type of behavior. So we really have to look at where does it all start? Where does it all come from? You know, how do we heal from narcissistic abuse. And it’s not just a case of thinking about where you are right now. And what you feel right now, we have to go back, we have to go back and look at the series of timeline lines that led you to where you are today. And this will go back to your childhood. Now, our childhood really is the blueprint for how we are going to behave and feel as adults, so many of you listening right now will have an adult body. Absolutely. But when you start to feel these things, when you start to feel any anxiety or, or excessive anger, or hurt or pain, that often comes from an unhealed inner child wound. Now, when we come into this world, we come into this world expecting love to be available to us. And if it isn’t, for whatever reason, and that can come from neglect abuse, it can come from an emotional parents, for whatever reason, this starts to create, and wiring subconscious beliefs that we start to feel about ourselves. So when we come into the world as babies, we have a formed already very strong fight flight and freeze response in our body. So you imagine 20 years ago, it was all really the rage and popular that when you put babies out to go to sleep, you put the baby down, and you let them cry it out and they go off to sleep. We now know from extensive research, that when we did that with a baby, what we were doing was we were teaching that baby even from a very young age that the world is unsafe. So when we understand how our nervous system works. So again, a lot of the work I do is around trauma, what happens in our nervous system in that fight, flight and freeze our autonomic nervous system responses to our perception of danger, when we start to understand that if we put that baby down to sleep, and it starts crying, it’s very much then in its sympathetic nervous system, it’s in that fight and flight trauma response. And it will get louder and louder as it’s trying to get its needs met. Now, if nobody comes to that baby to nurture and cuddle and hold and regulate with that baby co regulate, that baby then thinks no one’s coming, this is dangerous, my needs aren’t being met. And yes, it might go off to sleep at that stage. But it dips further down our regulatory ladder. And it then goes into freeze. So when that baby is then quiet and goes off to sleep, it’s not because the baby’s going, hey, no one’s coming on, mice will go off to sleep. I think this world is a dangerous place, I need to just survive in this moment. And because it’s exhausted, then it will go off to sleep. But what you’re doing at that moment is you are really toning the trauma response system of our body. We’re already priming that baby to think the world is unsafe. You imagine, you know years ago in sort of, say Romanian orphanages, if you went into a Romanian orphanage, it would often be very, very silent. And you think that there were lots of babies in there that they would be crying all of the time. But what happens is they get conditioned to know no point crying because no one’s coming. The world is dangerous. So they’re actually really, really silent, not because of any other reason other than their, you know, freeze trauma response, because they know they’re at the bottom of that regulatory ladder. They’re literally in survival mode. So when we start to understand our system and how our body works, and we call this polyvagal theory, so again, a lot of the work I do is through a polyvagal lens, really understanding our nervous system how reacts with our perception in this world with our environment, you know, we will have neuroception what it feels like in our body, we will add perception to all of that. And that will then mean how we react to certain events in our life. And all of the perception comes from past events. So if we’ve had events, even from birth, where we’ve been left to cry, so don’t get me wrong, there’s some of you might be listening now thinking, oh my god, I did that with my babies, don’t worry, it doesn’t mean it has to be like that forevermore, you can change it. But this is just kind of talking about this from a certain starting point, and just really helping to educate you and understand why our system, why our brain and body reacts the way it does, because it’s all about safety and protection and moving you away from the biggest perceived pain. And the reason why I always put perceived pain in here is because you might be sitting in pain right now, many of you, when you’re healing from narcissistic abuse, it is painful, but your brain thinks it is less painful than something else. And that’s the key. What is this something else? Why is it keeping you stuck? Why does it think how you feel right now is less painful? And this is when we start to get curious about all of this as well. So when we know then that as a child, we come into this world, you know, that top part of our regulatory ladder, which is what we call the ventral vagal. So it’s the front part of our vagus nerve. So we have in our autonomic nervous system, we have two branches, there’s sympathetic, which is our fight or flight, or we have our parasympathetic, which is our freeze response, but it is also our social engagement network. So this parasympathetic nervous system really consists of our vagus nerve, which goes down the back of our neck where our brainstem is, and that splits into two. So we have the ventral vagal, which is our social engagement network, it is our safety, it is our when we’re in flow, when we feel safe in this world, and we can co regulate and self regulate the back part of that nerve is what we call the dorsal vagal. And that is in charge of our freeze response. Now, if we already know when we come into this world, just like wild animals that are sympathetic, and our dorsal vagal, the fight flight and freeze are already toned, just like wild animals, it’s humans, we have this higher brain. And this higher brain then brings about this ventral vagal aspect where we can communicate where we can have this connection with others. Now, if for whatever reason, our parents and caregivers don’t give us in teachers, that top part of our nervous system, that regulatory ladder, if they don’t teach us and tone that for us, then we’re pretty much living a life in our trauma responses, we think people are dangerous, the world is dangerous. So we can look like we’re functioning. But actually, we’re already aware. And this is very, very prevalent in those that have had abuse in their childhood. As adults, they don’t really know what it’s like to feel safe in this world, because no one taught them that it was safe in this world. So because of this higher brain, we start to then make judgments, perceptions, we start to create beliefs around everything about why things happened. And everything feels dangerous. So from this inner child healing perspective, we’ve got to really look at reparent in that inner child and those needs of that inner child that weren’t met for whatever reason, whether it be abuse or neglect, or simply an emotion and capability, we’ve got to go back and fill those gaps because that inner child then who doesn’t feel safe to doesn’t feel worthy or good enough or lovable or significant, those beliefs get wired in really between the ages of two and seven when we’re in a theta brainwave state. So if they’re getting wired in that I’m not worthy, I’m not good enough. Even as we get older, as a teenager or as an adult, we start to think we are good enough, because we already then have those wires in beliefs from that child. It’s like we’ve got the back of our head open. And parents are really, really programming us for who we’re going to become as an adult. That will only change when we change those beliefs at that deep level with that inner child healing. When was the last time you all upgraded your operating system in your phone or laptop or your computer? Now, probably most of you are saying last month, the last six months. When was the last time you upgraded your operating system that you’ve got as a child? Do you want to live your life like your parents? I’m sure many of you now are shouting at me going Oh, hell no. You know, and as much as I love my mom and dad, there’s no way I’d want to live my life like my mom and dad, but they were the ones that programmed them so when we started to really understand that your programming came from you being a child. What we have to look at then is going back and reprogramming rewire. And that needs to be done. We’re using things like I use things like rapid transport National therapies, this is a form of hypnosis, psychotherapy, NLP and CBT. And also using EMDR, and brainspotting. Because we’re really then getting right to the root cause of why you feel the way you do as an adult symptoms such as depression, anxiety, these are symptoms of trauma. And in our society today, you might go to the doctor and don’t get me wrong. I’m a fan of conventional medicine, I have a medical background myself, but so much in society, now we’re just treating the symptoms. My goal is to treat the cause of depression? Why have you got anxiety? Why did you find yourself in a narcissistic relationship, because I don’t want you to find yourself in another one. So really, what we have to look at here is deep inner child healing, you’re in an adult body, but you’ve got a wounded inner child with a belief of not feeling good enough or worthy, you’re lovable. That’s what we need to work on. When we heal and upgrade that inner child into your world today, we get a level of understanding. And when we heal that inner wound, we change everything. But we’ve got to understand that we need to nurture that inner child, we’re not going to keep waiting for somebody else to fix it and do that like we would as a codependent, you need to do that you need to parent that wounded inner child, nurture, care for it reparent that inner child. And when you do that, everything changes everything you need to heal from narcissistic abuse you have within you, we have a tremendous capacity to be able to heal our brain and our body is the most wonderful machine. You just need to know how we need to get to the root causes and not keep working on those symptoms. Because you can heal you can find meaning in this trauma of narcissistic abuse for you to go on and heal. And actually being in a relationship with a narcissist is your opportunity now because they’re shining a great big spotlight on your inner child wounds. So this now gives you the opportunity to really go within and heal those deep wounds. So you can go on and what we call in positive psychology have post traumatic growth growth because of the trauma of your narcissistic abuse. Thank you for listening to the narcissistic abuse recovery podcast. Karen find my warm, welcoming, free and private Facebook group called narcissistic abuse recovery for women only to help you heal the trauma and thrive