Complex Trauma and the Inner Critic: Why You're So Hard on Yourself

[MUSIC] Most of us have a voice in our head that critiques or questions or second guesses, but if you've experienced complex trauma, that voice can become amplified, more constant, more convincing, and at times really debilitating and deeply dysregulating, leading to a state of chronic stress. One of the distinguishing characteristics of complex PTSD is the intensity and persistence of the internal voice, the inner critic. Many people with complex trauma grew up in environments where criticism, unpredictability, or emotional threat were constant in the nervous system learned to internalize those signals as a way to anticipate danger and maintain connection. Over time, that external pressure becomes internalized as a running commentary in the mind, and experiencing physical changes that come with that, like the stress state that it creates. Today, we're exploring the neurosamatics of the inner critic as part of our complex PTSD series, why it develops how it relates to complex trauma and what begins to shift when nervous systems no longer need that constant internal surveillance. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss any episodes in the series. Welcome to Trauma Rewired, the podcast that teaches you about your nervous system, how trauma lives in the body and what you can do to heal. I'm your co-host Jennifer Wallace, I'm a neurosamatics psychedelic preparation and integration guide, and I work with women to embody psychedelic medicines, and I'm also the creator of Sacred Synapse. And I'm your co-hosts with Christoph, founder of neurosamaticsintelligence and brainbase.com, and I've worked with hundreds of individuals and practitioners to bring the nervous system into personal development, behavior change, and growth. Let's define the inner critic and reframe it. So it's actually interesting. My inner critic voice has dramatic, like the volume dial on it has drastically decreased over time. But as I'm creating sacred synapse and launching something new, putting a new voice out there in a world that in the psychedelic renaissance and this freight train that's running that I feel like is very important, but I can also hear how fear is connected to my inner critic. So I get these sort of like not so much, my thoughts will loop a little bit, they're not terrible, but what I experience is freeze. And freeze, fear, and my inner critic are, and it's not a loud voice, but it's just sort of back there. It's just sort of whispering to me like, should you do this? Yeah, you see it so much in that rumination that comes like, I think for so many people it's perfectionism. And it comes in many different flavors of like social perfectionism, work perfectionism, but that feeling of like sometimes we can push through, but then it's the rumination afterwards in the physical response that's happening in the body. When we have that rumination and I see it in so many different patterns in people, you know, the do a podcast and then ruminate after that or do a social post and ruminate after that or do a presentation at work or all of these things and there's just it's the big load of internal pressure. And I do witness it in the social connection aspect as well that we talk about a lot here because even when I'm working with clients one-on-one live and it doesn't go a particular way or they have something expectations in their mind and then it's like this real reach in this grasp that happens for connection and I think it is really highly linked to the inner critic voice about the way that they show up. And the freeze that you mentioned is so important too because I think for so many of us that carry this big stress load of knowing that we're going to have to be navigating the inner critic as we do these things that stress load at a subconscious level can lead us into avoidance or freeze or shutdowns so that we're not moving into these things that we know are going to be followed by the inner critic because it's so much to carry. So then it's like we just shut down. Yes. And as entrepreneurs as creatives and putting our voices out into the world it can feel a little bit scary. So there are still times even though it's dialed down that it does it it lives lives in me. I think it's important that we talk about these distinguishing characteristics because it is a way for people to understand that they have maybe complex trauma. We don't always think of ourselves as having complex trauma but then when we hear the distinguishing characteristics of it it's like wait a minute that's not normal. Like I just thought everybody had this much internal pressure. I just thought everybody had that really loud voice that is critiquing their behavior or their appearance or all of these things and when we start to look at these that can be a way to understand oh there are developmental experiences shaping this and maybe this is a this is not what everyone is experiencing all of the time especially people who came from a more safe, secure developmental environment. Like we said in the beginning everybody has that voice but the difference is the volume and the physiological reaction inside because there is a different response of stress activation and moving into F responses if you have developmental trauma in your background with these distinguishing characteristics. When my voice was used to be much louder I mean it would be about everything I felt like I had this constant narrator telling me exactly sort of narrating what I was doing and how I was moving and how I looked so much about it was about my body and of course with it being linked to toxic shame that lens would shift and it was like the inner critic was screaming at me because shame was so pervasive. Everything I did was bad or wrong. And then you just think like well that's the way it is that's what it is. Everybody is doing that. And it's not to like over identify with our trauma but to have some understanding that these are outputs of our development of the way our nervous system was shaped and that there is a like neurobiological reason for some of this. This was an intelligent adaptation but it's maybe not serving us now so that we can start to work with it and so that we can understand that this isn't just the way it has to be. Well because it's a mean voice. Yeah. I experience mine as a very mean harsh critical voice. Yeah. I think just really understanding that not everyone experiences the same levels of hypervigilance around things and the same internal stress load. It does create a lot of hypervigilance because you're just waiting for it to drop. And I think we can also really reframe and understand that this is a protective adaptation right. It's no longer serving me but it came for a reason and that means that I can work with this pattern to get some freedom so I can honor it. I can honor how it's been protecting me but I can also expand beyond it. The inner critic is a protective neural pattern rooted in threat detection and self-referential processing networks of the brain. In the context of trauma especially complex or relational trauma it becomes amplified as the nervous system learns that visibility, emotion or needs may lead to punishment or disconnection. The critic attempts to reduce risk by preemptively attacking the self. Don't say that. Don't be too much. You should do better or you have to do better in order to avoid external attack or abandonment. And it's a predictive safety mechanism to preempt rejection, prevent humiliation, maintain attachment, suppress behaviors that previously led to punishment or a way to control unpredictability. This developed to protect us but often it increases stress all of the time. When we're talking about complex trauma, we're looking at that chronic relational threat that starts to wire in this hyper monitoring of not just our environment or our physical appearance but other people's reaction to us the way that we're being perceived and our nervous system is beginning to predict a lot of danger in authenticity because we have learned expressing ourselves being open about our needs, emotional expression. These weren't always met with safe environment, safe people and so we learned to hold that back to to get our needs met and to protect ourselves. And self-attack starts to become safer than the external attack. And neurobiologically that is leading to heightened medial prefrontal cortex self evaluation. Our amygdala is tagging stronger signals of social risk. There's often conditioned somatic coupling between expressing our internal sensations and danger that can come from that. And so this can lead to this really high stress load that then we start to crash after taking risks, after performing, after public speaking, after doing these that we want to do maybe social engagement, right? Going to a party or putting yourself out there in the world going out on a date, but then afterwards there's this big crash because of the high stress load. And we want to remember as we're looking at this that the critic is not our core self, right? It is a learned adaptation, a modulation strategy to protect us from some of this threat. The perception is really interesting because if I think this way about myself, everyone else must see what I see. And it's like you said about the self-attack, if I can control it within me, if I can be the mean one, maybe I won't be attacked by the other person because I'll notice it first. And I'll reign it in and perform all the things so that no one can-- Or maybe over-apologize for myself or talk about, oh my gosh, it looks so terrible today. Or like, oh, I'm sorry, I don't look like this particular way. Or, you know, and then it's really a downspiral. Yeah. Let's break this down a little bit more because a key concept to look at is that CPTS amplifies self-referential processing and rumination. And self-referential thinking in the brain is the ability to interpret experiences in relation to the self. Who am I in this? What does this mean about me? How do I fit in here? This capacity is essential for identity formation prediction and social navigation. In complex trauma, however, this system becomes organized around threat detection and attachment preservation rather than flexible identity development. Sefer-affirential thinking is not pathological. It is necessary for identity, empathy, and development. In relational trauma, this system narrows. The brain organizes around preserving attachment and preventing rejection. The question, what does this mean about me? Becomes a survival question instead of flexible self-reflection. The system engages in hyper-vigilant self-monitoring. Shame-based identity consolidation, rumination as predictive safety strategy. And so let's look at this in our personal lives and expand on this a little bit. I think it's this difference of, you know, if I'm moving through the world and I've had my social safety needs met, you know, I grew up in an environment where I could explore and I could express, it's a different experience than an environment where I'm always having to hold everything in and edit myself to maintain that again, social safety is mostly what we're talking about, looking at complex trauma as an attachment wound. And so then as I go into new experiences in the world, now as an adult, and I'm reflecting, the reflection becomes much less about, you know, what is this experience teaching me? What can I learn from it? What are the good from this? But more really hyper-focused on the self and self-criticism of all the ways that it didn't go right and that is because of me. Yeah, yeah, it brings back so much memory of times where I would just like, maybe leave something social and get in the car, even work. I had worked in restaurants and bars for so long to being in service where it would be like, I would criticize my performance all the time. And I'd just be in loops of thinking about how was I, or if I was sitting down like, you know, now it's funny, sitting here now, I don't think about it. But before I would be sitting in a really particular way, because I'd be so worried about how my body was presenting to the video that we're taking. Oh, yeah. And so it's like, it's really relieving actually to revisit this series again, because it's like, it's not that I don't edit myself, because of course I want to show up a particular way. Sure. You know, I like taking pride in the way that I look and the way that I dress and all of that, but like to sit here and know that like, I'm breathing. And I'm not thinking about my body so much as staying engaged and present with you in this conversation. Whereas before it was just like, I was a failure at whatever I was doing. I can show up so much in our thoughts about our body, which is this undercurrent all of the time, right? Like, hold it in, sit a certain way, appear this way, and those running loops of body criticism. And it is interesting to think about the growth and the difference, because that narrative does not run through my mind hardly at all anymore. And that is coming in a really long way. And as I'm continuing to grow visibility in the world, you know, I'm really trying to lean into this belief of messy, authentic expression, fosters deeper connection. Right. And that is still something I have to work on in these podcasts, or when I'm doing a lecture to still, like, there's always layers of working through something. And it's like an audience gets bigger. I'm doing like a professional presentation. It's much better than it used to be, but I can still find myself in rumination afterwards. Like I should have said it this way, or what if somebody takes offense to, I said it this way, or I'm going to be misunderstood. Yeah. And maybe something I said is going to harm someone. And we're having some big, complex conversations this season. And there is social threat with that. Yeah, I hate when I leave here. And I think, oh, I should have, oh, I had this as an example. And it's like, well, tap on it, do some processing, and let it go. Oh, and that'll come up in another conversation. It will. And I think that's the difference. Everybody has times where they reflect back and think, like, oh, I wish I could have this in that. And that when we're still really held in the throws of complex trauma, we can't get out of that. You know, it's like the loop just keeps going. And all of it is happening in our body. The stress response, the bracing, the maybe emotional flashback that comes through it. Whereas now it's like, I can have those moments. I can find myself in rumination, but I can move through it. And I can let it go and move on. If you're a coach, therapist, or practitioner, who's been resonating with what we talk about here on Traumari Wired, and you're ready to start learning how to apply this work with your clients, check out our NSI Foundation Spundle. This is a self-paced program that gives you the science and the tools behind everything we teach inside, the full NSI certification. How the brain and body wire patterns of protection, how to safely work with the nervous system, and how to start creating real embodied change. You'll get three on-demand workshops, some of our most popular introductory workshops that show you how to integrate, apply neurology and somatics into your sessions, to support client regulation, and expand your own capacity as a practitioner. This is a perfect first step into this work, whether you're deepening an existing practice, or just starting to bring neuroscience into your approach. You can get lifetime access for only $37 at neuro-somaticintelligence.com/foundations. That's neuro-somaticintelligence.com/foundations. I also want to go back to a little bit of the brain science that you were talking about, and explain one piece that really helps make sense of the inner critic and complex trauma, because we've talked about the default mode network a bit this season. So just a reminder, that's the network that is active when you're not focused on a task. Like when your mind is wondering or reflecting or remembering, and you're thinking about yourself. That helps you build your identity. It's where you ask questions like, "Who am I? How do I fit in here?" And two important parts of that network are the medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior singeal cortex. The medial prefrontal cortex sits right behind your forehead, and it helps you evaluate yourself in social situations. It's involved in self-reflection, social judgment, meaning making and under-safe conditions, it helps you learn and adapt. And then there's the posterior singeal cortex, which helps connect memory to your sense of identity. And it plays a big role in autobiographical memory, the stories that you tell yourself about who you are. And when someone grows up in chronic relational stress, where attachment feels unpredictable or unsafe, the default mode network can become organized around threat. So instead of flexible reflection, it becomes hypervigilant. Instead of asking what happened, the brain asks, "What does this say about me?" And the medial prefrontal cortex becomes more self-critical. And the posterior singeal can loop painful identity memories, and that leads to this increase in rumination, replaying conversations, over-analysing mistakes, predicting rejection. And this is one of the neural roots of the inner critic. It's not randomly negative. It is a survival adaptation. The brain is trying to prevent future harm by scanning the self for errors. Developmental neuroscience shows that young children cannot interpret their environment in a non-personal way. Because the brain systems that are responsible for perspective taking and contextual reasoning are still developing. So children tend to assume that if their needs are not being met emotionally or relationally, then it has to be because of something about them. So they begin trying to change themselves to secure that connection. But that doesn't usually work because the situations don't change as the child edits themself. So then the inner critic gets louder and louder. And remember everything we do is a skill, right? What we do we get better at. So if we're constantly developing in this way, we're getting really good at self-protection through attempting perfection and guarding ourselves with our inner critic. And then many of us carry this into adulthood. And that is really what we're working with this season. When we talk about post-traumatic growth is how to shift from that protection-driven self-reference into more expanded, flexible, embodied identity. I talk about the DMN a lot on sacred synapse because it comes in a lot in psychedelic experiences that rigidity can get loosened. And you can have that little bit of flexibility where you do get to experience the dissolution almost of this network in some way on the spectrum. Yeah. - That's part of the reason why it's so powerful. - Yeah, yeah. But you have to have the practices in place in your nervous system for that flexibility to remain, to stay in a place where it's like more of a curiosity versus a statement. - Yes, and that curiosity is so important. Bringing that in. And then you have this one experience and can we bring it forward? - Yes, exactly. - And then continue to bring it forward. We get the big embodied experience and new perspective and then holding onto that. - Because like we're talking about with this developmental trauma, you know, thinking that everything is your fault from for decades, you know, it gets patterned in and then you have a moment where it's like, maybe it wasn't me. - Yeah. - Now what do we do with that information, right? And that's why NSI is so important. So the question is, how do we work with this to reduce this rumination, this part of the brain? One thing to remember is the DM and quiets when task positive networks engage, external orientation, right? Naming the things that make you feel safe, something that you can see or feel or hear. They're sensory stimulus, right? Feet pressure, temperature contrast, textured objects on the skin, coordinated movements, cross-crawls, crawling patterns, rhythmic walking. When the loop is going, I sometimes pause. I engage with my tools. I provide my system with some sensory stimulus or focus on a different movement and I try to interrupt the loop. And I think that's one thing that's really important is like we just have to interrupt the loop. - Yes. - It really doesn't matter what we do. - It doesn't and it's a much easier pathway to interrupt the loop, not by thinking, but by doing a movement or sensory stimulus or using a neurotool or something that you know works well for your nervous system, feet on the ground, whatever it is, dance around, make a strange sound, interrupt the loop with something that's not trying to think your way out of it. - And this is how NSI really builds because it takes time for you to just automatically go to a drill. So the more you practice it and the more you engage with your nervous system, the more altitude you can even get to know like, oh, I'm in it. I'm in it right now. Let me do a tool and then literally do anything else. Yep, I'll often remove myself out of the room and really try to do something else for a few minutes. - Yeah, it's really important because you know, thoughts and emotions and physical states are all connected, so we can work with our state to shift our thoughts. It's not just the thoughts that are creating our state. It's also the internal state that's happening inside of us that then is starting to drive the thoughts. So as we start to practice utilizing our tools, shifting our state with those or practicing some self-attunement, tracking the sensations, feeling them beginning to express them, that is a way to interrupt the thoughts because it's not, they're not so separate, right? Like thoughts, emotions, they're all connected and so we can find these inroads to that repatting. We develop the skill of that self-attunement and tracking sensations and minimum effect of dose emotional processing. And then we can begin also to gently cognitively reframe after we do some regulation or some processing not before, right? But then after we've utilized something to resource our nervous system and to help create that state shift, we can remind ourselves that this is a part of me that is trying to protect me from an exaggerated social threat, right? The threat is not real, most of the time. For most of us in that moment, the threat is not real. And you can see it with new altitude from this different state and you can thank it for protecting you and also, no thank you, I'm okay now, right? And we can have the space to remember, this is a part of me, but it's not all of me. And we can start to separate our inner critic from our core self, from our essence and really have that moment where we can pull back and be like, wait a minute, if I'm observing the inner critic, then I must not be the inner critic. That's not the essence of who I am. Yeah, I'm the observer. And then there's also working with shame, right? Because that comes with this. So having practices to work with our shame response. And we're gonna talk a lot about shame in the next part of this series when we talk about toxic shame. So if we think about the rumination is what's going on inside of our mind and also maybe driving some of those physical states, there's behaviors that come with this too, right? So perfectionism is often the outward behavior that comes from the inner critic. And here we're talking about perfectionism being perfectionism and how we're perceived by others and how we need to change ourselves to be accepted, right? Perfectionism around our body, like we talked about in our appearance, perfectionism around our environment, perfectionism about our work. And that's why we talk about perfectionism as a trauma response, as a regulation strategy that is shaped by chronic stress and threat detection. And in relational environments where connection felt conditional or unpredictable, the nervous system learns that safety comes from monitoring and correcting yourself. And that can show up as this relational perfectionism, editing what you say, suppressing your emotions, bonning, trying to be the right version of yourself in order to maintain that connection. Yeah. And for others, it shows up as environmental perfectionism, controlling surroundings through cleanliness, appearance, or organization to create a sense of predictability and safety, both keep us stuck and high stress states in multiple ways. One, there is a stress of trying to be perfect. And then there is a stress of the aftermath when we can't be perfect. The dysregulation and reactions that occur when we make mistakes say the wrong thing and can't perform to our unrealistic expectations, or maybe we're worried that we are disappointing someone. Yeah, I mean, when my inner critic is loud, I couldn't do anything right. I mean, my house was never gonna be good enough. I couldn't do, and I couldn't show up here good enough. I couldn't be on the podcast good enough. I couldn't be in a clean enough house. And it's like, when I learned to relax, you know, it's so different now. Now I know like, hey, I'm a one man band. And I actually do a lot. So who cares? No one's here to tell me to do the laundry. It literally doesn't matter, you know? And I can relax because rest is so important. And if I can learn, like as I've learned to lean into more rest, things aren't perfect. And guess what, there never gonna be. That's just so. Because the perfectionism, it's like, if you're, as a perfectionist, the mark keeps moving, right? And so you can never reach where you're going because it's never gonna be perfect and it's never gonna be perfect. It's a trick race. To race with no yet. And we're all losing in that race. Yeah, and it is such a loop. Like you were talking about like, first there's all the pressure of being perfect. And then because we will never meet those expectations of whatever we think perfect is because our inner critic is like trained to be hyper vigilant for looking at all the mistakes, then there's the fallout and the shame and everything that comes from that. And so then we try harder to be perfect. And then there's the fallout and it's just. And like the cortisol, the high stress state, the bracing of just trying to hold everything in all the time. Yeah, it's so costly. That's what connects the dots between these distinguishing characteristics and the health outcomes that we see with ACE scores and with developmental trauma because it is leading to a chronic state of stress all the time. And that has an impact on our body and our health. And so there are ways to work with the inner critic. To loosen the grip of it. The nervous system has to relearn that expression and vulnerability are not threats, but experiences that can actually lead to safety, connection and reward. I think when we're talking about this, one of the ways of repaturning is thinking about the reward system. So I'm going to break it down just a little bit. The ventral striatum is a key part of our brain's reward and motivation system. It's deep in the brain within the basal ganglia. And it includes structures like the nucleus accumbens, which plays a central role in how the brain processes reward, motivation, reinforcement. The ventral striatal reward signaling system refers to the neural activity in the region that occurs when our brain detects something is rewarding, that we want to move toward it, that we want to keep re-engaging with it. Or it can predict a positive outcome from the experience. And then when this system activates, it increases the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which helps the brain to learn. So if this behavior, whatever it is, led to something good, it's teaching you do it again. And so then our brain is constantly updating our behavior based on that reward signaling. And when action is followed by a rewarding experience, like connection or relief or praise or safety, then the ventral striatum strengthens the neural pathways associated with that action. And that process is called reinforcement learning. And so then if that behavior repeatedly leads to reward signaling, then our brain becomes more likely to repeat it again in the future. So part of changing the behavior is intentionally reinforcing nuance. of imperfect expression of rest and relaxation, because sometimes we have to plan to do that because it won't be our default. And so let's explore this a little bit deeper because I think it's this is why it's really important to celebrate the small things, the small steps we take each day, the two minutes, several times a day of maybe visual reset, right? And just like think about emptying out that boat that's overflowing of the rest capacity and to celebrate our wins to literally move around and just be like, there are so many times and I mean I still do it today where I'm like, good job. Hey, you're doing good today. You did good. Okay, wasn't perfect. We're not going for perfect and I really make sure to like touch myself, hold myself and really tell myself like you're doing good and I love to use my animals for this. I will look at them and be like, aren't I doing a great job? Hey, look at me. Look what I did. Barrow their joy. Yeah. Yeah. So excited. You know, and that doesn't come very inherently for many of us to do that. And so it really does have to be intentional. Like I have to think about I'm going to do something and then I'm going to play a song, you know, I'm going to have time where I'm going to play a song that feels good and I'm going to dance around or I'm going to go for a walk and or just like you said, like just taking a second to put your hands on your body and like, thank you. You did a good job and making that more habitual. It takes time and practice, but it is really important because it's then reinforcing the behaviors instead of driving us away from it. And you know, I think not everybody out there has people that they feel safe with, which is also why I think it's important to hire people that you might feel safe with. Because if you don't have someone to practice around, it's important to have that person. Yes, like a practitioner. Yeah. When we practice that embodied celebration, then our reward system associates expression or safety or connection with that positive reinforcement rather than with threat. Do it a little bit at a time. Yeah. And it really, it compounds. It stacks up. And I think it's important to look at sometimes why we don't go against the inner critic voice. Because I think many of us want to, right? We understand that we don't want to talk to ourselves that way or we want to take big risks. But the internal stress load that we've been talking about can feel so big to go up against it that it's like, I'm just going to stay in this being really harsh on myself because it's too scary to start to let it go. It feels too activating inside or too shut down inside. And so that's why these having these little moments of practicing moving in a new direction is so important because remember, this is a protective adaptation that has been there for a long time. And to some extent, it worked. It kept you safe in some way, but now it's also causing harm. And so being able to chip away at it little by little rather than just thinking like, okay, I know this isn't how I want to think about myself. So I'm just going to stop. Yeah. And now years into this work, I literally will sometimes be like, that's not even true. I'm like, hey, that's not true. And I'm wait, that's old. That is so old. And that is not true. Yeah. And I'm going to do my tools. I'm going to move around. And I'm going to switch this up right now because that is not true. Yeah. It can just be, it can feel very stressful to our body to allow imperfection or relational rupture. And we can't move through the experience. So we develop practices of helping our nervous system to modulate. And this is really important because modulation is a skill. And it has to be redeveloped sometimes, you know, when we don't have that experience growing up. So we do that repeatedly. And we're teaching ourselves in our nervous system that I can move something. Right. I can, I can move through it. I can feel stress and I can discharge it. And we use our tools for that. We use stress processing. We use movement impact to the bones, helping the system to yeah, just begin to relearn that skill of modulation. So then I know I can move into something, a new behavior, a new way of being, I can risk imperfection or authentic expression. And I start to trust that I have the ability to not get stuck in the state of too much activation or too much shut down because my nervous system is more fluid and flexible. Yeah. And this is why we talk about emotional processing so much on here too, because toxic shame, which we're going to, you know, you're going to listen to next. I mean, it comes on so fast. And so we often see these, all of these components of complex trauma paired up together, but inner critic and toxic shame are other sides of the coin. Another way the nervous system begins to soften hypervigilance in the inner critic is through oxytocin mediated safety. When the nervous system experiences consistent cues of safety with other people, oxytocin signaling increases. And this shifts the body out of chronic threat monitoring and into a state that supports connection, openness and emotional regulation. We've talked about oxytocin quite a bit this season, but just to remind folks, it's a neuropeptide that's produced in the hypothalamus and it releases both into the bloodstream and directly within the brain. And it plays a very central role in social bonding and trust and stress regulation. So the research shows us the oxytocin can dampen threat responses in brain regions like the amygdala, which then helps reduce the physiological fear and the internal state that is driving the vigilance around safe social interactions. And there are several ways to do this. Safe co-regulation with people, pets, nature gives the system reps of safety. There's physical touch if that is safe for you. Eye contact in regulated states. And any, you know, we had a conversation recently with Dr. Levy on the sister wound. And it's so important once again that we have people that we can be with and connect with people who understand us and people that we can express safely with, that we know, even if it feels threatening, that we can re-regulate with and know that we're not going to get punished and punished. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that, you know, it sometimes does have to start small for people. Yes. Like you were talking about with your pet or with a practitioner or finding a community and dipping a toe into find maybe one person that you can connect with. And I also think a good way, sometimes if we're feeling a lot of lack in something, is to give it. Yeah. You know. Yeah. And so if I'm feeling that I have, I don't have any social connection, I don't feel safe ever. Could I flip that and kind of get out of that self-referential thinking for a moment and be like, is there someone else that I can offer social safety to that I could, whether it's just visualizing, giving that to someone else, someone else experiencing that or showing up in a space and, you know, this is something I used to do a lot when I first stopped drinking at a lot of social anxiety. And so I would go into places and instead of focusing on my anxiety, I would think, is there someone else in this room that looks like they're also struggling and could I reach out to them to help them feel more connected. And that is a way for me to get that connection. And also when we're talking about these oxytocin practices, you know, self-touch or maybe experiencing a little bit of minimum effective dose pleasure, we could do like oxytocin bathing where we're just feeling nice sensations, we're recentializing the nervous system. All of this is stuff that we probably again have to be intentional about, right, because it's not always comfortable at first to explore like for many of us pleasure has a loaded somatic memory, somatic coupling. And so finding these little ways to recentialize our nervous system not in a sexual way, but in a just I am a sensory being way. Can I feel the sun? Is there a texture that I like? Something soft and knowing that these practices are actually helping us to produce more oxytocin, which is going to reduce social breath. Yeah, when I'm introducing pleasure to my clients in a non-sexual way, it's like, what materials do you love? Yeah. What blankets do you really like the feel of? What smells? do you like our foods or colors? How can we bring more of this into your environment so that it cues safety just through a sensory experience? Yep, pleasure and smells and taste. And that is also a really important way to resource the nervous system, especially the female nervous system as the more oxytocin driven nervous system. And so, you know, as we do these practices, we're helping our nervous system, our brain begin to calm some of that social threat. And we're also creating more capacity to again, have that altitude to engage in new behavior to start to take new actions, because we just have more capacity in our system, because we're spending some time resource in ourselves. An interesting thing when we're talking about the inner critic is to look at the flip side of the coin too. And Pete Walker talks about this in complex PTSD, surviving to thriving, but that there's, you know, there's the inner critic. And then the flip side of the coin is the external critic. And both of them are protective. It's both based on this idea that I'm going to get hurt that I'm going to be let down that I'm not socially safe, but instead of that criticism going inward, it's constantly being projected outward. And micro-managing, controlling other people, showing up into situations very braced and guarded, because we have this constant feeling that our needs are not going to get met and that we might be hurt. Yeah, being highly critical of others. You know, the idea that everyone sucks, our people can never do anything right or road rage comes to mind even in this. Like, when you're constantly critiquing, and when I witness it in other people, my first thought is, wow, they have a really loud inner critic. Yeah. And I feel automatically some compassion for this person because the threat is really high, because this voice is loud and now your voice is loud to other people. Yeah, there's no loud external critic without there also being allowed internal critic, you know, and those same demands that we make other people were also making on ourselves. And then some people, it's kind of the difference between I think being a little bit more oriented to go into fight. Yeah. And a little more oriented to go into fawn or freeze or shut down. Yeah, absolutely. It's just a rigidity, both with other people and ourselves, and then always protecting against the let down the hurt. And then that leads to it reinforces itself, right? Because if I'm moving through the world constantly, braced and thinking that everyone is not going to do a good job or let me down, then I create relationships where that often ends up to be true. It's a self fulfilling prophecy. If you believe it, you are going to experience it because your brain's also looking for it, right? When everything is under threat, you will find the threat. Your brain's going to find it, you're going to have those experiences. And it can be pretty hurtful and damaging to a life that you really want to create, but can't seem to move into because of all the things that we've talked about. I think one of the important things with this is just again, starting to have some awareness of it, you know, so you can start to recognize when you're doing that, when that voice is loud inside, or maybe when it's being projected out and again, become more of the observer of it. If I'm the observer of it, I'm not it. And can I reconnect more back to the essence and recognize that that other person also has an essence and like take some of the ego out of it. Yes. And just be to people, but it takes capacity in the nervous system. It takes being able to modulate through experiences. And it also, and then there's some space for some mindset shifts of this is not, this is a pattern. This is not really the truth of the situation. And so let's talk about me because this is a season of post-traumatic growth and emotional expression and post-traumatic growth is not forcing positivity. It's not overriding shame or eliminating the inner critic. It is expanding capacity, increasing modulation, repatterning predictive coding around expression, relinking identity to flexibility versus threat. I think all of those things that you just mentioned are really important. And then it just keeps what keeps coming back for me is this separation of separating myself, capital S self from the inner critic voice. And that begins just with the awareness of this is a pattern. My nervous system, my brain, my body are running this pattern. And I can just see it as the pattern. And then like we talked about once I start to see it, then I have the capacity to interrupt the loop. And do that not just at a cognitive level, but at a sensory level, create a different state in the body that allows for different filters to be there for different networks to be engaged and have a new experience. But it is the combination of those two, but even in the beginning, just the awareness can really open up some doors, I think. Because there is a cognitive part of it. And we want to be able to recognize it. And that's what starts those moments of like, oh shoot, I'm in it. I'm in it right now. It's I'm looping. It really has to be combined. We have to be able to one work with our nervous system to have to be resource enough and have capacity in our bucket to be able to see with altitude and to be able to move into some new behaviors. And then we have to have the awareness and the understanding and then tools to again, because state is so much of the time driving the story, internal state is driving that story. So we have to be able to work with the internal state and let the story change there, but also start to shift the story cognitively. Please join us in exploring the other distinguishing characteristics of complex trauma. We still have social anxiety, toxic shame and emotional flashbacks to explore. And if this episode resonated with you or you know someone that I would help, please share the episode we would love for you to subscribe and share.