Sleep Now - 4.4 - Waking Up Scared Coaching

You used to wake up in the middle of the night scared, didn't you?

Yeah, I would wake up frozen in terror. The nightmares I had were so vivid and so real, and some of them were based on reality from when I was younger. It was not uncommon for me to lay there for two or three hours, unable to move even to reach over and turn on the light because. Because I was literally frozen in fear. And it was horrible. It took so much out of my life and I'd be exhausted the whole next day or for days even.

And it's the type of thing that a lot of people have a hard time talking about.

Yeah, well, it's like I really do think that there's a certain sense of, well, sleep, baby, sleep. What's the problem? Why can't you sleep? Why can't you handle your emotions? Why can't you do this? It's like someone who hasn't learned how to walk if they're physically. And you know, like, there's no physical limitations there. Like, why aren't you walking? Like, why aren't you sleeping? What's wrong with you? That's at least how I had a shame, a deep shame about it.

And so we did a whole six week program on this reprogram, the primitive brain around the energies of the stuff that comes up in the middle of the night. And sometimes the things that happen to us in the middle of the night. We want to honor the fact that nightmares happen. And sometimes they are nightmares that are tied to things that occurred that day, that week, that lifetime. And the intensity of that is really difficult to, to just kind of snap our fingers and go back to sleep. There can be a resistance to going to drifting off because we may feel like if we start going back to sleep the same, we'll be back in the same muck.

Well, often, like, if I did fall back to sleep, I would be back in the same dream. Even if I'd reset things by getting up and watching tv or I used to watch Overboard, the movie with Goldie Hawn. Like that was my go to. Like it was kind of funny and light and nothing horrible happened. And I would watch that and try to go back to sleep. And sometimes it worked and sometimes I would still get sucked back into the same energy of it.

Go ahead.

One of the things that really helped me as I was in the healing process for this, I used to be so angry at myself for having those dreams. I was so confused and like, why am I torturing myself? Was there some part of me torturing me and as I started healing, I realized my system, my energy, body, mind, whatever, was really trying to find a way to heal it. It was running in the same pattern to say, how do we find our way out of this? And it was not trying to torture me, it wasn't trying to punish me. It was looking to heal. But until I found tapping, that was really my breakthrough, was I didn't know how to help it. It was stuck in the same path with the same patterns. But when I was five and I was being abused, often in the middle of the night, there was no solution. I didn't know how to soothe myself, and no one in my family was in a position to support me around it. So I was trapped. So realize that your system is trying to heal you. It's trying to find a new solution. And by being here and reprogramming the synapses in your brain and showing them that there are solutions, you're giving yourself hope. And you're starting to pattern a program of, oh, I can take a deep breath, I can get in my body, I can gently and slowly, baby step at a time, release these old patterns. And I promise you, it can get better. I haven't had a night terror, which is what they're often called when they're that intense. And I don't know how many years, but I used to wake up two, three times a week, just. And I'd be exhausted for the rest of the week, like, just worn out, because it felt to me, to my body and my brain, that the abuse was happening again. So if you can, if that's the place you're in, be really gentle with yourself. We don't have the depth. We can't go into all of that in this program. It's not what the program is designed around. But we do, like Rick said, have another program, reprogram your primitive brain. We also have Healing Childhood Trauma. Those are programs that, if you want to clear some of this out and look specifically at traumas that happened that were more intense, that's the place to go and clear those out so that you don't have to hold that pattern and that energy as you go forward.

Kathy and I are also available for private sessions. And one of the things that you and I discovered, I was your witness and support for a lot of you are amazing with tapping. And I used to get an image that there's an opportunity, the body's coming up with this energy, that there's an opportunity to take all of the capacity that we collected by surviving that and going on with our life and bring that back in time. And you're the one who encouraged us to do more. What we now call inner tapping, inner child tapping. And that can be the you of when you were 27 too, even if you're 28 now. It's an opportunity. Sometimes it means getting up out of bed and saying, okay, this is what we've got. Just like if you have a child that has a really waking up scared and is not immediately just being soothed by a quick presence and a smile, sometimes it does mean getting up, walking, rocking. You can rock yourself, you can imagine rocking the you. But I've also found for me, doing the work with you put me in touch with moments of time when I was scared. But I wanted to be the big boy. And so in all of my work, it's one of the things that we look at is when you wake up, what's coming to you, who's coming to you, what's the age and. And you don't necessarily always have to get up. You can close your eyes and in inner tapping, when we're doing it in a conscious state, we tap on our physical body as we imagine tapping with the scared version of ourselves. If you're in the middle of the night, I have closed my eyes and just taken myself and imagined in my mind's eye just tapping with little Ricky and being there and going from moment to moment to moment to give comfort and soothing to the part of me that has really woken up very, very scared. Sometimes it feels like all of us, and like you said, sometimes we're just so frozen that it won't be until the next day that you really have the opportunity to go back and tap with the you that woke up in the middle of the night. But you've already gone through some. We've already done a lot of tapping on this. You're already changing the transition patterns of going to sleep. You're already giving yourself permission to rest and renew. You can imagine tapping with and try that, see how it works for you.

Yeah, you have a choice at that point, really, if you wake up and you can base it on, like, what you have the next day and what you have the resources for. The grounding exercises, which were on the first page, are a great way to shift out of that energy and going through, like, go watch a TV show for a little bit, go on the forum or go below and type a comment, share what you're going through so you don't feel so alone. All of those things are things that can really help you move forward with this, right?