SOG EP 1657 BONUS: Brain Experts: "This Causes Trauma Bonding!" Use These Strategies to Heal!

0:00My name is Lewis Howes. Thanks so much for being here. I want to remind you about the Summit of Greatness, our annual conference happening this September in Los Angeles. With David Goggins, Dr. Joe Dispenza, and many more incredible speakers and performers, there will be so many live attendees there that you can meet with, you can network with, and you can help transform your life. I can't wait to see you at the Summit of Greatness here in Los Angeles.

0:28Hi, my name is Lewis Howes, and welcome to The Daily Motivation Show.

0:38When two people have traumatic nervous systems or who haven't healed their heart or their nervous system and they are in a relationship and neither of them know how to regulate their emotions, what tends to happen in that relationship if they don't know how to heal their hearts? We tend to, I think, engage in cycles of endless conflict, of endless disconnection, of endless coping strategies that we've learned. We rely on the things that we do, whether it's using substances or distracting ourself by scrolling endlessly online. We are then the living byproduct. Sometimes it's in these explosive cycles of conflict.

1:18I call this patterning that I think is pretty common in most relationships. I know Lolly and I, when we began our relationship now near a decade ago, we were very much in a dysfunctional patterning of what I call trauma bonding. Really? Absolutely. What is trauma bonding? So trauma bonding, again, I like to provide a more expansive definition than I think some could define it online, but it's all of those dysfunctional habits and patterns that, again, once kept us safe in childhood that we continue to recreate, whether it's these cycles of explosive conflict, maybe that some of us are even defining as love and intensity and passion and all of the chemistry we're looking for in chemistry or the just dysfunctional habits and selves that we're playing where we're just one of the partners is always the caretaker of the other partner who's always in need of the care and right no matter what relationship you're in you see yourself kind of engaging within that same dynamic or for me i'm the most prominent one is cycles of emotional disconnection no matter who i was with and i was always in a relationship i was somewhat of a serial monogamous since I started dating when I was 16 years old.

2:24I was more or less always in a romantic partnership, definitely had friendships and social engagements and things to do. But I was really the living embodiment or the feeling embodiment of alone in a crowded room. And the number one complaint that would usually end to the demise of the relationship because I would be so frustrated or resentful or so passive aggressively acting out that before I knew what the relationship would end was I don't feel emotionally connected. Your partners would say that. I would say that. You would say that. I would complain about not feeling emotionally connected, though I can share a story.

2:56My first boyfriend ever in high school, to this day, it sticks with me, when we broke up, we were nearing graduation. We were going to separate colleges very far away. And so we broke up on logistics of, you know, it's college or whatever. He also lodged a statement, complaint, if you will, and he labeled me as being emotionally unavailable. And I was really struck by that because I was like, me, emotionally unavailable? What do you mean? I feel so loving. I felt in love with him. I was kind of devastated when he broke up with me. So I was like, that's unusual to hear. I think he's obviously wrong.

3:28Flash forward a couple years, I discovered I was attracted to women. So now I was like, oh, well, it's because I'm interested in women that I'm emotionally available. Of course I am. Flash forward even more a couple years. I was in a psychoanalytic training program in Philadelphia right before I was licensed. And one of the aspects of the training was to sit in group therapy. around a room of other analysts where essentially for an hour and a half we just analyzed. We just analyzed each other. We just analyzed each other and our experiences with each other and our perceptions and how we feel interacting.

3:58This was part of your training. This was part of my training to get my license. I selected to go into that style of training because I thought it would be beneficial. And it was, though very difficult. And one of the things that I heard from a colleague there one time in the group, She decides to share her experience of me and describe me as cold and aloof. And I'm like, OK, what? That is so interesting. Like now you're reflecting back, right, this idea of me being distanced. But I didn't have any language to understand. I thought that she was a little bit inaccurate. Right, right. Though now you don't really know me.

4:33Yeah. Looking back, I'm like, oh, this is making complete sense. The reason why I was so emotionally disconnected, that was real for me in my relationships. relationships, it was because I was emotionally disconnected from myself. So I wasn't attuned to how I was thinking or feeling. I wasn't sharing that. So of course I was creating a cycle of disconnection in my relationships. So as much as I wanted to not agree with those two assessments, I mean, a lot of ways they were quite accurate. When did you get to a point where you said, okay, this, even though I don't think I'm emotionally disconnected, the pattern is showing up that I am.

5:09Others are letting me know I'm in breakdown, relationships don't work, you know, whatever disconnection I have from people, the pattern is following me. So, okay, I'm going to take a look at this seriously. What did you do to break that cycle? You know, in your book, How to Be the Love You Seek, we talk about breaking cycles. How did you break that cycle? How did you know you had something to break and that you needed to find solutions or tools to improve that emotional connection as opposed to disconnection. I started to look for myself because yes, other people's feedback can be absolutely helpful but I never would suggest that you just defer to what someone else assesses you to be or says of you.

5:50So I finally started to take it in. I started to say, okay, if I continue to hear this and feel this way from that conscious perspective I will always kind of acknowledge consciousness or learning how to observe our yourself in the context of this conversation within our relationships to be that first point of action. So I started to look. I started to pay attention and to assess really simplistically, Nicole, how connected are you? How present are you in any given moment? And as I began to check in with myself throughout the day, whether or not you want to set an alarm on your phone to do it or put some post-it notes on, you know, wherever you walk by regularly, or maybe even set a designated at time during the day, you know, over morning coffee or when I'm reading the newspaper, this is going to be my moment to check in.

6:35And the more regularly I checked in with where my attention is, the more I noticed that it was a million miles away. I could be in conversation with someone and while like I'm here and I'm being talked at, right, I'm thinking about maybe what I'm going to respond to next or I'm just somewhere else entirely. And the more I checked in and noticed that disconnection, the more than I built on that consciousness step and began to, because there's always two steps to change, me becoming aware that I'm disconnected was only half the journey. Then I had to begin to make that choice to reconnect with myself.

7:09Wow. To shift that focus of attention time and time again from the thoughts that, you know, they were consumed in or even just worrying about someone else. Am I more attuned to the person across from me than to how I feel being across from the person. And the more I kind of flex that muscle, the more than I was able to reconnect with what my body was doing in any given moment. How long do you think it took for you then to practice that? Because it was probably most of your life where you had this type of emotional disconnection, what it sounds like as a safety mechanism to create safety from childhood, whatever may have been that you were being safe from.

7:48So how long did it take for you to feel like, okay, I'm not having to think about this. It's more automatic. I am emotionally connected. Did it take months, years, or is it still something you have to focus on? It's still a daily intention, commitment conversation. What has become automatic is the awareness of the importance of checking in with myself consciously, though there are still moments as my stress level goes up, as I become busy with endless obligations, that overachiever conditioned self in me likes to prioritize all of the things that I have to do to show up in service of someone else.

8:23And that begins first thing in the morning when I know I have emails to answer. I know I have a whole membership that I can tend to. I know I have a book to edit or whatever it is that I'm working on. So it's a daily commitment to instead of prioritizing all of the things we do or all of the things I could do to really create time beginning in the morning to attune to my physical body, to how it feels at any given moment, to giving it what it needs, whether it's movement or stretching or rest or just a conscious moment to be with me. And there are moments when I'm not doing that, when I don't prioritize what I know I consciously am benefited to prioritize, that I do find myself being much more detached, much more dissociated.

9:08It becomes still easy for me to travel down that older pathway.

9:18Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving The Daily Motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

10:08Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.