7 Habits for Healing the Traumatized Inner Child: REFRAME the Present

Hey there everybody, and welcome to this brief presentation on 7 Daily Habits to heal the inner child. The mnemonic for this is Reframe. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. Now, before we get started, if you would take a moment to click like and subscribe. That way you can be notified when you whenever we put out new videos. So reframe. What we're really talking about is helping you reframe your perception from one of being a victim, from one of being wounded, to one of being a survivor and being empowered and being safe and strong. So the first thing in Reframe is rest. This is important because we found that people who don't get adequate quality quality sleep, don't get adequate quality rest actually have an increased rate of intrusive thoughts and more difficulty silencing those intrusive thoughts. Therefore, if you want to feel safe within your own head, sleep is actually a helpful strategy. The second thing is expectations. Start your day out with good expectations. Envision going through your day successfully, safely empowered. Now, everything is not going to go well all the time. We know this. But if you have expectations that things are going to go well and when things do go wrong, that you have the ability to handle it, you will feel more empowered, less anxious. That will help keep your HPA axis from getting over activated. F stands for focus on progress. We say repeatedly in recovery progress, not perfection. If you have grown up in a traumatic environment, or even if you have just been living in a traumatic environment for a period of time, changing the way you think, the way you react, the way you feel is not going to happen overnight. So focus on progress. Were you able to reduce the frequency of your panic attacks, for example, or the intensity of your anxiety response? Or the duration of your ruminations? How long you were stuck in that thought loop? It's important to recognize small steps. Yes, they may not be gone completely. Everything may not be perfect, but are you moving toward that goal? R stands for reality. Check the facts. Too often when we are in fight or flight mode, when that HPA axis is activated, when we don't feel safe, we act and react. From a emotion based standpoint, we listen to that amygdala that says, ooh, I feel anxious. Therefore there must be a threat. That's based on feelings, not facts. So check the facts. In situations, whenever you start feeling anxious, examine whether you're using all or nothing words. If I don't do this, then it is the end of the world. Or every time I try to talk to this person, they end up Dismissing me all or nothing, thinking of things as every time, always, never. Is that accurate or are there exceptions? Jumping to conclusions is another problem that a lot of us face. If we have grown up or lived through traumatic experiences, our schema that were formed during those experiences are designed to help us predict the future and stay safe in future similar experiences. However, they're not always accurate. What one bad actor, what one bad person did in the past doesn't mean that in similar situations in the future, another person is going to necessarily do that same thing. So we want to check the facts in this context at this time with this person, am I safe? Am I empowered? And magnification or catastrophizing because of the traumatic experience, because of the changes to our stress response system or our HPA axis, a lot of times people who've experienced trauma dysregulate. So they go from being flat or being fine, if you will, to feeling completely out of control, to catastrophizing, to feeling like the world is ending, the sky is falling. It's important to check the facts in this situation at this time. What is the actual impact of whatever's happening? If your boss calls you into his office, you can catastrophize and think, oh my gosh, he's calling me into his office. I must have done something wrong. I'm going to get fired, and then I'm never going to get another job and just spiral from there. So it's important to again, check the facts and examine in this context, what is the meaning of this event. A stands for acceptance. Acceptance of the moment as it is. It is what it is. You can't change something that just happened because it happened already, it's actually in the past. But also acceptance of your feelings, recognizing that sometimes you're going to feel anxious, sometimes you're going to feel depressed or angry or happy, or sometimes you're just going to feel ick. You can't really put a label on it. You're having difficulty, but you know you feel ick. Okay, Accepting that in the moment, instead of being hard on yourself, instead of beating yourself up for having distressful emotions, recognizing this is how I feel in the moment. Now, what can I do to address it? If I'm feeling anxious, if I'm feeling angry, that's a potential threat response. Is there a threat? If there is, how can I handle it? If there's not actually a threat, what can I do to improve the next moment? M stands for mindfulness. And it's really important to practice mindfulness. Multiple times a day. When you get up in the morning, being mindful of how you feel, your thoughts, wants and needs, including your vulnerabilities. If you didn't sleep well, if you're in pain, if you got a kink in your neck, if you're dreading something you got to do that day, okay, you're mindfully aware of your status at that point in time, you can protect yourself. You can buffer against those vulnerabilities. If you know you didn't sleep well, okay, what do you need to do to protect yourself from extreme distress or from responding overly strongly to situations because you're tired? What do you need to do in order to feel safe and empowered? Mindfulness is also important to do throughout the day, though it's not enough to just start in the morning and go, okay, these are my vulnerabilities. What let me have good expectations for the day and then move on. That is not going to be helpful. It's important that you check in with yourself periodically, at least before each meal. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and ideally before you go to bed, to identify how you're feeling physically, emotionally, what your thoughts are, what your wants and needs are in order to start becoming more attuned to yourself. You cannot feel safe and empowered unless you know what your needs are. You can't meet your needs for safety and empowerment unless you know what they are. So mindfulness is essentially essential to this process. And finally, E stands for endurance. If you've gone through trauma in your life, or even if you haven't and you're going through trauma right now, regardless of when that trauma happened, it is unpleasant. If you've gone through trauma in the past and it's being triggered in the present moment, enduring that situation, recognizing that those emotions are not going to swallow you up, recognizing that you are safe and empowered in the present moment, and you can tolerate the distress. You can endure the distress. Sometimes there's nothing you can do to change the current situation. It is just. It feels uncomfortable. It may feel like you're out of control and you can endure it. There are likely strategies that you can use to help you endure distress, like reaching out to support or journaling. But endurance is important because as you endure trials, as you endure challenges in your present life, you start to recognize how strong you are and how much you've grown and how far you've come from where you started.