This YouTube talk (Dr. Karol Darsa, founder of Reconnect Trauma Treatment Center) teaches practical strategies to interrupt impulsive, emotionally-driven reactions. Core recommendation: create a brief pause (suggested 10–20 seconds, increasing over time) between urge and action, use that time to ask "What do I need?" and check bodily sensations (grounding, feet on the floor). Applied to examples—emotional eating, yelling at children, frantic partner-contact—the pause plus somatic practices (e.g., yoga) and mindful awareness reduce reactivity. Dr. Darsa also links chronic impulsivity to accumulated unprocessed emotions and childhood/trauma roots and recommends body-oriented/somatic therapy and ongoing mindfulness practice.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Dr. Carol Darza, author, psychologist, and founder of Reconnect Trauma Treatment center in Los Angeles. Do you dislike yourself when you find yourself getting off of your diet even though you are not supposed to eat, let's say, chocolate cake? Or you are yelling at your kids even though you promised you would never do that again? Or you find yourself crying because your partner or boyfriend or husband didn't return your phone call on time? How do you deal with these feelings and the impulse of reactivity? So this is what we're going to talk about today. I want to be able to help you to learn how to pause and react differently. Let's go with the first example of you promised you are in diet and you are not going to eat dessert or sugar today. And all of a sudden you're upset at something and you find yourself right in front of the refrigerator, engulfing the whole cake down. So let's talk about how you can actually stop yourself before it gets too late. So you notice the urge first of reaching to the refrigerator. And normally between the urge and the action, there's really literally no time. It's a very instantaneous thing, and that's how. Where the awareness really comes in. And that can help you. So if you can just notice first urge, I want to eat chocolate cake, and then take maybe at least 10 seconds, 20 seconds, and if you can take even longer than that, that'll be great. But. But any time between that thought and the action will actually help you to achieve your goal. So in that time, when you take the 10, 20 seconds, you check in with yourself and go, what's really happening? Am I really interested in the chocolate cake or am I needing something else? So what do I need? Is always a good question, right? Rather than what do I want? So, well, it might be, I need to get out of my anger. I need to feel understood, I need to be loved. And of course, we all know that the chocolate cake is not actually going to give us that love, but it might be the sense of an illusionary satisfaction at that time. So taking that moment of break, even if later on you go, okay, I know what I want, I know what I need, but I'm still really, I. I'm just going to still eat it. That's okay. But this pause will eventually help you to deal with emotions and other things as a. As a form of discipline. Let's think of the other examples where your child is doing something and you find yourself yelling. And if you are like any other people that I know who Grew up with parents who were yelling. You probably promised yourself, I'm never going to be like my parents. And you find yourself not only you are yelling like your parents, but you're maybe even saying, saying the exact same sentence or the words that you used to hear from your parents. So the same technique applies here. You're seeing them behave in a way that it's very upsetting, right? And rather than jumping into yelling or maybe calling them names, just take a moment of just really 10 seconds, again, 20 seconds. And not just a brief, what's happening? Why am I so triggered? The question of why am I so triggered? Actually helps the person become much more aware and then helps to regulate your emotions. So you might actually not be as angry as you think you are at your child. Maybe you are really frustrated at work today. Maybe you had a fight with your boss and you didn't have a moment to express that to anyone. So when your child behaves that way, it comes across as straight to the child, as an, as an anger reaction. And so this will really help you to slow down your behaviors and to create more and more conscious, parenting conscious way of really being around your kids. So asking yourself again, okay, what's happening? And then if you actually can stop the anger, the first 10 seconds, chances are when you are saying something, your tone will be much more controlled, which means your kids actually will listen to you much better too. The other example of you are expecting for a message or a phone call from someone that you love, especially in the romantic partnership, goes the same way. So I have worked with many people who the moment they are not getting a message from their loved ones, are very frantically texting back or calling one call after another. And again, so there's not that, that time break. So taking a moment there, just actually even really feeling your body, right? So the question of what am I needing? Is good. The stopping and asking, what's happening in my body? Like, can I feel my feet on the ground right now? Just again, this is all happening very fast. 10, 20 seconds just to slow it down, to see what's happening inside and then reacting afterwards. If you can make this as a habit. So not just like once in a blue moon, but day to day, having the awareness of really checking in with your emotions before reacting, you'll go a long ways. And for that reason, you can't forget your body. Because our bodies are actually containers of our emotions. So in fact, many people, when they react that, you know, very strongly, sort of unexpectedly, they say, I was out of it. What does I was out of. It means I was really out of my mind, out of my body, out of myself. And that's when you'll find yourself the most sort of dysregulated and reactive. That's the reason why in therapy, especially in the last 10 years, we include the body a lot. Talking about really feeling the feeling in the body, connecting to the feet, finding your roots on the ground, and then acting from that place that is much more containing and calming for you. I'd like to share an example from a client of mine that I worked with a couple of years ago. Her main goal was to be able to really control her eating, her binge eating, her over overeating, which was definitely an emotional eating that she was aware. So she'd often start a healthy diet and then pretty much by Monday or Saturday she'd go off of it. And then she'd had really these self hatred feelings of why can't I control myself? How come I'm not in charge of my feelings and of my body? So we started with our duet that I was explaining to you just a little earlier with just the 10 seconds of a pause in between, right? And then with that we increase the 10 seconds to 20 seconds to a minute to a few minutes. And then in when the pause is happening, it's also important to really give the person or give yourself some other strategies, tools, things to do so you're not just maybe like pausing that way and doing nothing. But how can you distract yourself, pause positively? So for her actually it was a movement. She loved yoga, luckily to our advantage. So the moment she felt the urge that she knew it was sort of this anger maybe or feeling urge to eat, she'd actually move into a yoga posture that she really liked. And that started really calming her nervous system down. As you can see, the first step with her was the awareness when she became aware of the, the pattern between the eating and the emotional and the reactivity. We then did everything, really following that awareness. And of course, if you're finding yourself that throughout the whole day, your day is about reacting, right? So it's not just like once in a blue moon, but in the morning you get up and you react to your kids, then you have a fight with your boss and you are angry when you're driving because there's traffic. So you're just kind of constantly exploding this way, right. What's important in that time is to really go deeper into the reasons of why there's such an emotional overwhelm, which is what it is. It's usually an accumulation of unprocessed feelings, an accumulation of maybe anger or probably unfulfilled needs. When we feel like we are not getting really the nurturance and care that we all deserve, it starts showing up as this impatient, impulsive behaviors. So you could try explore some of it on your own, see if there's connections again from your childhood. Of course as a trauma therapist I'm always connecting our current feelings and behaviors to our childhood and if not, maybe you're upset about other things in life, but it comes out as anger, as impulsivity in somewhere else. So if you are needing professional helps to for someone to help to go deeper into that, then definitely look for a therapist, especially body oriented somatic people like at Reconnect that we have. That will be very helpful for you to explore as an ongoing practice to deal with these emotions. And this will be my last advice for you for this video is to practice mindfulness. Mindfulness and you can find out a lot lot of information about that, is a really great practice of really being in the present moment and in your body and increasing your awareness rather than judging and acting impulsively. Thank you for watching. I always welcome your questions and comments below. And remember, trauma equals disconnect and healing equals reconnect. Stay connected. Sam.
