Getting Triggered In Your Relationship? Watch this...

In romantic partnership, that is where our youngest wounds show up the most. Which is why a lot of people say, like, in my work, I feel like, yeah, I got this, and I feel clear with my friends. And then you get into a relationship and you're like, oh, my gosh, what's happening? What's all this?

It's totally different.

Whoa, what's all this stuff? Because that's the beautiful sacred container where these things need to be resolved. They can only be resolved in a romance. Some of them can only be resolved in a romantic relationship because nothing replicates our childhood as much or is enough of a. A match. And so this is where our young parts show up, which is why I then don't see my loving partner who would never do anything unkind to me. And this isn't an example from my own life, but it could be. I have my own examples. But what I then see is this really dangerous adult. And I don't feel like an adult. I feel like a little girl who has no power, no agency. And then what those little parts do is they, either one, they take on the role they had to as a child. So that might be placating. So I become small, and I get quiet. I feel really scared of you. I just acquiesce, I fawn, I become whatever you want me to be. And I say things that I don't really mean. Even our literally, our language will change, so it won't be as eloquent. It'll sound like a mate. Or sometimes what happens is, if I wasn't safe in my childhood to actually say, hey, this isn't okay. I may notice that I have misplaced anger come out from me, and I have a hypersensitivity to their frustration, where I'm not seeing them as being frustrated, I'm seeing them as being rageful. And I'll say things like, you can't speak to me that way, or, that's not acceptable, or whatever, because I'm not here. I'm in 1985 or 1975 or 2005, or maybe I'm not in my childhood. I'm in that relationship where that person cheated on me. And so my partner coming home late from work because they had a meeting that ran long, my threat detector says, that means you must be cheating on me with a coworker. And I'm responding as if I'm in that experience from five years ago, not in the one from today. And this is happening to humans all day long, and we just don't realize it. I live In Los Angeles, a city that has crazy amounts of traffic and the amounts of times I'm driving down the street and people are getting, you know, what people call road rage. I'm looking at somebody who's 65 years old and I can see a rageful 13 year old that's probably angry at their parent that never considered them or saw them. And how's that coming out? Because the person in front of them didn't use their blinker, and that's reminding their nervous system of being unconsidered. And so now the anger that they weren't able to express towards their parent is coming out by flicking off the person in front of them and screaming.

Oh, Sarah, I have to pause you. Wow, there's so much there. And I can feel the energy behind your work. I know we all can feel it. I want to go back to something you said, because I have been there in traffic and I have actually said to my now fiance, I'm like, that person's just really unhappy with their life. This has nothing to do with them cutting me off or a red light. So I feel you 100%. I want to make a personal corollary because when I asked you about time traveling, I have had moments and I wonder if you could unpack this both personally and also neurologically. Where the body keeps the score. We've talked about this book so much. We know Peter Levine's work. We understand the neural tree and how it impacts us, how Arrested Development actually can stick us and hold us hostage unless we are here to exhale and do the somatic work. So my question for you is this. If we go back, if we ride a roller coaster back in our timeline, in that moment where we're essentially unconscious, right. And the nervous system is driving itself, there's no adult at the wheel. How do we personally. Maybe a personal experience that you've had or with so many clients you've worked with, now take the wheel again, because some of the concepts you're portraying are so vast and they're podcasts of their own. How do we just simply put our hand up and say, the adult is here. I'm going to grab the wheel? And we're not in that time anymore. We're actually here in this present moment. I think this is really powerful for all of us.

Yeah, you know, the thing about my field is it's. It's very bizarre that we've had, you know, decades of research, and yet it's left people with this mystical experience of healing. Like, it. It feels very Intangible, what the heck is it? How do you do it? Nobody tells you the order for how you have to do it. And there's just a lot of books written that's cognitive, that's not going to really shift things. Whereas if you look at like physical therapy, for example, and I'm just naming this because I want to bring the corollary to mental health, If I break my knee, everybody knows there's an order to that healing process. That's public knowledge. They might not know the exact order, but you know, you're not going to start with doing jump squats, you know, or deadlifts. You start with slowly and then you build your capacity. The same goes for all of this work. The first and most important thing is we must build regulation within our autonomic nervous system. And become what? What I really see it as is we are becoming our adult self is becoming the warrior for the younger parts. That is first and foremost, if you try to skip to doing ifs. So internal family systems, inner child work. If you try to do that without being the warrior, who the heck is trying to rescue that 8 year old? Probably a protective part who's like 13. A 13 year old cannot rescue the 8 year old. Only our adult selves can. So the first and most important step is we have to bring regulation to our nervous system. This is like going to the gym. So we're doing consistent neural exercises. These are moments that support me to come closer into what we're calling our, what's called our ventral vagal complex. You can literally think it like, think of it like a rep at the gym. So if I do some box breathing, bilateral stimulation, controlled eye movement, tapping, feeling your feet on the earth, putting music on and dancing, shaking, jumping on, a rebounder, going for a walk, which is bilateral stimulation, Safe self touch, safe self, safe, safe touch with others. These are just some, some ways to bring regulation. The more that you do that, the more that you build your capacity to hold activation. And something I say all the time is when we're becoming the warrior, it essentially means you're becoming a parent to those younger parts. And one of the important qualities of a parent is to not be scared of your child. Scared. I know that is not correct English. It's on purpose. What I mean by that is if a kid says there's a monster in the closet, and I say, oh my gosh, you're right, there's a monster in the closet, they will not feel better. Now if I say, if a kid says there's a Monster in the closet. And I feel afraid. But I say, you're fine, everything's fine. They know that you do not feel fine because they can read your nervous system. And the same goes if you're trying to comfort a younger part, like I'm trying to calm that part down and say, they're not cheating on you, you can trust, but adult you doesn't actually feel that you're wasting your time. It will not work. And I say that because so many people think, oh, this work's not going to work. It doesn't work for me. I've tried doing ifs, I tried doing parts work. It doesn't work. That's an indicator to me that you haven't yet become fully the warrior your young parts need. The warrior is completely unafraid of what terrifies the young part. And you do that through regulating your nervous system. So once I have built that capacity, I can hold activation. Then I have to know the difference between. This is very important. This is called the differentiation processor, I call it that. And that means that I have to know in my body, what does it feel like to be in my adult self, my truest self, my soul self. I use those interchangeably. And then what does it feel like to be in each of my parts? Because they feel very different in our bodies. They speak different, they feel different. The postural stance of your body will literally be different. You'll hold your face. People's faces actually morph. You look at people when they're in parts. When I'm in a part, I do not look like my adult self. I look very different. The way I hold my eyes, the way I hold my jaw. Everything changes. So I have to, as Sarah, know the difference between who's in my body. Because we have this thing called self like parts, or these things that are really good at mimicking being an adult. And a lot of times we think it's adult us when it may not be. So something I invite people to do is think of just one moment in time where you have felt either in flow, you. It's a. It could have been a spiritual moment, a moment in nature where you have felt grounded, at peace, where you've felt connected to all things, where you have this deep sense of knowing that no matter what, I am okay and I am safe to be here. And we have to really clock what are the sensations I notice, what are the feelings I notice, and so on and so forth. Then we need to get to know who those other parts are. And they're locked in Time, they're all locked in those experiences. So what we do in this work is we have to go back to the state dependent memory in order to resolve it. That means we have to time travel. So cool. So we become the warrior. My job is to help people become that warrior. Then we have to fall in love with these parts of ourselves. And the only way to fall in love with them is to stop identifying with them. They're not you. They're a version of you, but they're not you. So the more that I can tease apart who they are and who I am, and I can see this six year old as good and lovable and Precious, or this 17 year old as good and lovable and precious, I start to fall in love with them. Then what we must do is we must go into the state dependent memory. So we go back to the experience that once overwhelmed them. It's literally I am traveling time back to the experience. And what's so fascinating about this is we have their vagal tone present. So their panic, their feelings of being worthless, their, their terror, whatever it might be, that's there, we can feel that. But I can also feel adult me here. And when I'm working with, and I've done this work myself, I, I, I, I, for 15 years, it's the most spiritual thing I've ever done. It's really shamanic in nature and it's totally scientific and there are no words to describe the power of it. I've done this with over 10, 000 people I've worked with and something as simple as if I ask someone if I have both parts present, tell me which hand is your younger self, they'll immediately know on my right hand. And then I'll ask them, take the hand of that part. And what they might say is like, whoa, the part's squeezing so tightly, like they don't want me to let go. And I'll introduce people to their parts in the the state dependent memory. And then what constitutes being a good parent to our parts is two things. It's being ferociously protective and soft and attuned. If you look at a lioness, for example, with her cubs, she is both of those things. If you get near her cubs, she will maul you to death. She is ferociously protective. The cubs know that. And because of that, even though they are living in a very unsafe environment, they are free to play and be silly and do all kinds of stuff because they know my mom's going to kill you if you do anything to me. And that Frees them up to be a child, which a lot of us, by the way, we didn't get. We might not have had a caregiver did. They said, oh, they're bullying you because they love you, or they. They have a crush on you, and. And you know they don't mean it. So that's not being ferociously protective. So we have to be that for our. Our parts. And then we have to be soft and attuned. Soft and attuned means feeling on an autonomic level what that part is feeling. A lot of people think attunement is what you say. Attunement has very little to do with what you say. Because we know that. Because, you know, when you've had experiences where people say the right words, but it just feels like they're missing you sure. Like, you don't get me.

Yeah.

Attunement is I'm meeting you where you are in your nervous system. And your experience of fear, of panic, of not belonging, of being all alone, it doesn't engulf me. So me as the parent, the warrior, it's like I have a rope to regulation. And my job is to come find you, to protect you, to hear you, and to rescue you from this experience. And when we do that, we actually. It's called completing the incomplete experience. It gets marked in our psyche as over. And to our bodies and to our psyche, that experience is now different. And the past actually becomes the past instead of a perpetual present. I had for myself. I was sexually abused my most of my childhood and by multiple people. But this happened over years inside of my home. And what usually occurs for children is it comes internalized. So instead of that, you're bad, it's I'm bad. And there's no amount of talking out of that that works. What's necessary is our adult selves accessing the appropriate. What's called healthy aggression, meaning the appropriate response. So healthy aggression is the appropriate response to whatever occurred. So the healthy aggression to a waiter bringing me the wrong food is not to maul them, Right. It's to say, hey, excuse me, sorry, I ordered the steak, I didn't order the broccoli. Whatever. Appropriate healthy aggression to something like what I experienced would be to be in my animal self and stop that. And what happens when we're in our animal body? Of course, just to name we aren't doing this in real time. This is done therapeutically in our mammalian system. For me, that was, whoa, my hands are wanting to strangle this person or to shred them into pieces to make it stop. Now, when that was completed, it was marked as complete in my psyche. And it was the what remediated the shame. No longer. What was it internalized. I was able to externalize it. And from that moment on, after doing that work, the shame was dissipating until it was totally gone. Whoa.

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