9 Steps To Heal Your INNER CHILD. Part 2

The neuroscience and physiology of inner child wounding, and how to heal.

In this podcast

• The neuroscience and physiology of triggering - Fight, Flight, Freeze & Fawn
• The Top 10 emotional triggers to addiction, & other types of triggers
• How to recognise being triggered
• 9 Steps to start healing your inner child, nervous system triggering, & comfort eating or addiction. 

In two weeks, I'll talk about how you can be compassionate towards yourself.

Another podcast for you: Heal Self-Worth Through Embodiment & Somatic Psychotherapy

Citations
Zora Neale Hurston quoted in Nicabm training below
Some ideas here were inspired by a Nicabm training on working with self-worth. You can buy your full training programme here.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

I'm gonna show you what's happening in your nervous system when you're triggered into comfort eating. I'm gonna show you how this relates to your inner child, and I'm gonna show you how to start healing from this. Hi, I'm Shelley Treacher from Underground Confidence. I'm a body-centred psychotherapist. I help people to build up their self-esteem, their confidence, and to heal from relational trauma. Some of the people I work with are comfort eaters or binge eaters who feel very frustrated for not being able to stop eating. This podcast pairs with the last podcast about your inner child. Since life began, all creatures have had a physiological response to threat. Generally, it's accepted that we have four responses wired in when we perceive a potential threat. Fight, fright, freeze, or fawn. I will be talking a lot more about this in many of my podcasts, and I have done already. So if this is something you want to know more about, please check out the history in the backlog. But for our purposes of understanding the inner child and comfort eating, this is what's happening when you get triggered. Your body perceives a threat, so it gets ready to defend itself. Physiologically and unconsciously, your nervous system decides to choose the option that it feels will protect it the most from fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Your body goes into this automatically and unconsciously and cannot be stopped. Because you are often triggered when your inner reactionary child chooses to comfort eat, this is also often the state you're in when you binge or comfort eat. If I say that more simply, sometimes your inner child is upset or scared or angry, and that's what makes you eat. So in both of those states, your physiological system has perceived a threat and is responding accordingly. In most cases with comfort eating, it's freeze or flight. But sometimes it's angry eating, and sometimes it's trying to please people, which will then cause you to eat. Next time you're feeling criticized or uncomfortable or you have a binge or comfort eating urge, see if you notice any of these in your body. 1. Is your heart beating faster? 2. Are you breathing shallowly up in your chest? 3. Have you gone numb, paralyzed, or cold? 4. Are you making yourself bigger or raising your voice? 5. Do you want to walk away? Or do you walk away? 6. Do you dissociate, daydream, or lack concentration? 7. Do you start apologizing profusely? Or eight, do you try to fix or please someone? These are all signs that your nervous system is triggered into trying to protect itself from a sense of threat or danger. In the next part, I'm going to show you the top ten emotional triggers that comfort eaters experience. I've talked this week and last week of being triggered, meaning having a reactionary response that may come from having hit a raw nerve that relates to something you experienced in the past, usually a core wounding. So it follows that these experiences in the present could come from the past. Here are the ten internal experiences that I see the most that trigger people into eating or feeling the need to defend themselves. One worry or anxiety. Two rejection three conflict four criticism. Anytime you feel one of these you may be reliving a moment from your past. So it's worth taking a moment to pause and reflect on what is actually bothering you. It's worth mentioning here that a trigger can also be something physical or in the environment. It can be a lot of different things actually. It could be a smell, a sound, a taste, it could be an object, a place, anniversaries, dates, times, it could be movies, it could be endings, that's a really big trigger for a lot of people. It could be other people, it could even be muscle tension or posture. These can all be triggers to the traumatic, formative experiences of the past. The memory. Recovery is all about acknowledging this trigger when it happens and recognising that it might belong to an older time. Then being kind to that part of you to reassure you that you are safe now. This leads to being interested in and taking responsibility for what you do and what you go through, such as being anxious, angry or defensive. Rather than feeling at the mercy of these reactions and underlying fears. But in the next part, I'll start to tell you what you need to do to start recovering from this. Here I'm going to show you what you need to do to start healing and recovering your inner child, your nervous system triggering, and your comfort eating. Zora Neil Hurston said, Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place. Basically, you need to start having loving conversations with your inner child. Here are nine ways that you can do that. 1. Note down the thoughts associated with not being good enough, like I'm useless. 2. Go back to the first stage that you remember feeling like this. 3. Remember details of yourself, where you are, and what it feels like in the past and in the present. Number four, say or write down all the words that come with not being good enough. Number five, allow yourself to feel it. This pulls out the sadness of the human condition, which is just normal. Number six, ask what your inner child needs from you. Number seven, you can practice tucking the child or the teenager in your heart. Number eight, pause at the place where it all began, the story of hurt. Take in that this is where you got this critic from and the emotional response to it. And finally, number nine, whenever you notice this critic, soften your body and breathe. Why don't we just do that last one right now? Take a gentle breath and soften your body. When I ask clients about this, the child often wants just to sit with you, to have a hug or for someone to stand up for them. Sometimes they are wary and stand back, so it can take time to get communication going. But keep offering this gentle kindness and acceptance just as you would any child in distress. This is healing on a heart level in your unconscious. It's attention for the lonely part of you that may have always been there. Then, in the same way, remember first feeling wanted, loved, or special. Allow yourself to feel and re-experience every detail of that as well. There's a connection that you need to learn to make inside for yourself. No one can do this for you. You need to be able to recognize when your self-esteem collapses and to have compassion for yourself at that moment. You need to explore what it's like for you to be held, heard, loved, accepted in non-judgment. You might be experiencing that right now. What's it like to take this in? With healing your inner child, you can only take tiny steps forward, one by one. Healing early difficulties or how we developed how we feel about ourselves and whether we deserve to be loved or can expect love is not an easy quick fix process. But it is a case of combining love for your wounded parts with corrective experiences. Compassion is something we need to learn and to practice. Thankfully, we can. Progressing a tiny step towards feeling worthy counts enormously. So what's your tiniest first step? What step could you take towards being more compassionate towards yourself? In the final part here, I'll give you a summary of everything I've talked about this week but also last week, so you can see how it all hangs together. Firstly, last week I introduced you to the part that reacts to your inner critic, your inner child. I asked you to notice your inner child and what reactions you're having. Secondly, I talked about feelings being suppressed by comfort eaters, so I encouraged you to start noticing and naming your feelings. Then, thirdly and finally, in last week's podcast, I explained how your inner critic might echo your past. I explained that being triggered might lead to any addiction or comfort eating and may also relate to your past wounding. I explained that parts of our brains can't tell the difference between the past and the present. Then this week I started by showing you that the physiological threat response cycle is how our nervous system responds to those triggers that make us feel we have to protect ourselves. I then listed the kinds of triggers that you might have. And finally, I started to show you how to heal and how to be compassionate to yourself. As I said last week, we often look outside of ourselves to something external that will make us feel better. My commenters on social media, as I'm learning in the last four weeks with this great big social media campaign I'm doing, can be a really good example of this. Most people I am so thankful for because they're very grateful and they keep their comments positive and helpful to others. This is great. It's just like I can't imagine that it could go any better. This is amazing. But occasionally I get an angry comment or two from people who haven't been helped quickly enough. I understand this frustration, and it's actually endemic in the problem that we're dealing with here, because ultimately this is triggering. This impatience is needing something to take the pain away and being frustrated with me, with the world, with yourself, for this not happening quickly enough. But even if I do offer you a quick fix, the pain is still gonna be there and it needs compassion, which is what I will start talking about next time. But for now, I'm gonna take a little tiny social media break just for a week because it's my birthday, and just as I'm trying to teach you, I will be being compassionate to myself and celebrating my life with the people I love. Birthdays can bring out childish desires and triggering too. There can be a lot of pressure to make it a really good day or to feel good and loved. I once had a birthday when I was planning a moving in party, but I was getting really anxious about it, so I asked for some help. My mentor reminded me to surrender, to not push for a certain outcome. And you know what? This was one of the most fun weekends of my life. I'm not really expecting that this year, but I will be taking a break to address my own needs and to see what my inner child is feeling as I turn 53. I'm imagining there might be some feelings there. I would love to encourage you to do the same and then to tell us about it. If you're on any media channel where you can leave a comment or if you want to send me an email, I would love to hear about how you're looking after yourself, how your inner child is triggered, and what you criticise yourself with. If you want to go further, if you want help healing from this triggering from your inner critic, from your inner child, learning to be kind to yourself and from comfort eating, please look up my group that's coming out soon and my free blog at undergroundconfidence.com. This is Shelley Treacher from Underground Confidence. I will see you again in the last week of February. Thank you so much for listening. Have a great couple of weeks!