Is Your Biotemperament Contributing to Your Pain? (Danielle Szasz, LMFT)

When you say yes to everything or chronically people, please, most people aren't going to shut that down. And so people end up doing it more. And it starts to tip over into maladaptive. And so that's what we want to look at is not how do we get rid of all of these qualities because they can really be helpful a lot of the time. You want to think of it as like a knife where it can cut you or it can serve you. And we want to figure out how to make this work for us. And then how do we address where it's hurting us? Welcome back to another episode of like mind, like body where we explore healing from chronic pain, symptoms and conditions using a mind body approach. I'm Chris C. Weepy, psychotherapist and founder of the better mind center where our team treats chronic symptoms one on one. Many people who struggle with chronic pain and symptoms eventually hear about the so-called mind body personality traits like perfectionism, conscientiousness, people pleasing and holding themselves to incredibly high standards. But what if these traits aren't simply personality characteristics? What if they reflect something deeper about how a person's nervous system is wired? In today's episode, we're exploring the concept of bio temperament and a particular temperament known as over control. We'll talk about why people with chronic symptoms are so often responsible, driven and self-disciplined, how those strengths can sometimes become vulnerabilities and why healing often involves learning how to create genuine feelings of safety and connection rather than simply thinking our way out of fear. Before I introduce our guest, a reminder that this podcast is brought to you by Curable, the number one app for chronic pain and symptoms. Curable is an online program built with leading pain experts and backed by the latest pain science designed to help you better understand why pain persists and guide you toward lasting relief. If you're dealing with pain or symptoms that won't go away, join more than a million people who have found relief with the help of Curable and get started with a two week free trial today. Our guest today is Danielle Saus, LMFT Founder of the Wise Mind Group. Danielle specializes in helping people recover from chronic pain, anxiety, burnout and other nervous system based conditions. Her work integrates pain reprocessing therapy, attachment-based approaches and radically open DBT, a treatment model developed specifically for people with over-controlled temperaments. Danielle, I am so glad you're here. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much. It's so good to see you. It's so good to be here. So many people in the mind body world are familiar with descriptions like perfectionist, people pleaser, type A, high achiever, but you have a way of exploring the mechanisms underneath these labels that can be tremendously helpful to patients. So I'd love to hear. What do you think we're actually seeing when we talk about the mind body personality? Yes, that's that is such a great question. So having done this work for many years now, I guess about 14 years, I think we we're all sort of familiar with this neuroplastic pain personality type, right? Okay, what are what do people with neuroplastic pain tend to be like? We're often people pleasers. We often are very conscientious. They're really often very good parts of being in somebody who was wired like this, but I became more and more curious over time of is there something deeper happening that is kind of at the root of this present presentation? And I came across something, what they call over controlled bio temperament. And this is based on the work of somebody named Dr. Thomas Lynch. And it's also based on the work of Steven Porge, if you're familiar with that of poly bagel theory. And it is this idea that we have five nervous system states. And so those states are the first one is social safety. And so when you're in social safety, that's when you are feeling safe and calm in your body, you know, your vision literally widens when you're feeling safe. Actually, even the muscles in your ears shift so that you're able to hear better, particularly conversation. So social safety, then there is what's called novelty. And that's when, okay, there's something new in the environment. I don't know yet if it's good or bad, but I'm just noticing, huh, there's, there's something happening here and I'm paying attention to it. And I should say one thing that's interesting to know about these states is that it's a bit like a radio dial where they're not being activated all at once ever. One's activated and the others are turned off. Okay, and it's, this is super helpful to understand this framework in terms of neuroplastic pain because with neuroplastic pain, we're often chronically in what's called threat state. So with threat, that's when our breathing is more shallow. Our bodies are tensor, our vision tends to actually literally narrow. And for those of us who have this predisposition to develop neuroplastic symptoms, this tends to be our kind of default state. We have what's called a higher threat sensitivity. So there, there are those ones, there's reward, which is, okay, there's something I really want. I'm moving towards it. What's interesting about people with neuroplastic pain or symptoms, our reward system is weaker. So it takes more of a good thing to make us feel good. And you're not in that side. It's not relatable. I feel like when I just, when I learned about this framework, it was so validating because I think it's so easy to think, is there something wrong with me? Like, why am I so, why is my startle response like this? Or why, why am I, why do I tend to be fearful of new or kind of suspicious of maybe new things and to kind of have more understanding of, okay, there's actually a bio temperament piece here that's in play. And then the last one is overwhelmed. And that's when we've been in that kind of threat state for so long that our body just sort of, and our nervous system kind of pulls the plug. And that's when you're like, I can get out of bed. And this is just all too much. Okay. So that's kind of the five states. And thinking about neuroplastic symptoms, like I said, those of us who have a predisposition to developing those part of what I think is in play is, oh, we have a higher threat sensitivity. Okay. Danielle, I'm so excited. You're here. I literally just dove right in with you because I'm so excited to get as much as I can out of this conversation. And for listeners to know, Danielle and I go way back. We were colleagues together at the Pain Psychology Center years ago. We've both gone on to open our own practices and do our own things and have remained in touch both as friends and as colleagues. So I'm living for my opportunity to dive in with you, quote, unquote, just as a clinician because I love the way that you think about things. And I already have a hundred follow-up questions I want you to set so far. Great. You can tell I'm like, so jazz. I love talking about this and learning out about it. First, can you just name those five states again in order? Yeah. So now that I've kind of given you the deeper dive of them. So then the five states would be social safety, reward, novelty, threat, and overwhelm. Okay. And we're bringing up this biotemporment piece to help understand why or how many people with chronic, chronic pain seem to share a certain type of personality. This is a way for you to say there has to be something about how we're wired that leaves us predisposed to putting a lot of pressure on ourselves and being perfectionistic and conscientious. And this is something that helps you understand the why the why underneath that. Am I getting that right? That's exactly right where I think, like you said, you and I both have been doing this for such a long time that it can be, well, I would say like that most of the people we see there tend to be very curious people and want to understand themselves and want to understand why am I how I am. And I think how we have tended to speak about it is usually there's something that happened in your early life that probably shaped this. And I think that that's often true. And what I would say is you and I are both parents. I think when you become a parent, you start to see, oh, it's so fascinating that our children also kind of come into the world wired in a certain way. And then our home environment can reinforce some of those tendencies, right? - Makes so much sense to me. And I have shared this with you before. I distinctly remember this. Somewhere in my own recovery journey when I was learning about pain reprocessing therapy and understanding that my symptoms were brain generated, I literally went to my parents and I sat them down. And I said, I need to have a serious conversation with you. I'm like recognizing that all of the symptoms I've been telling you about for a decade are actually caused by my brain and nervousness and dysregulation. And there's something you're hiding from me. I said this to them. And I really believed it. I was like, I'm ready to hear it. Just tell me what happened. What happened? They were like, what are we doing here? We're not keeping anything from you. But I really resonate with that idea of feeling like it has to be something I went through and this shift understanding, there's a big piece of this that is our wiring. And even the word biotemporment, Danielle, is new for me. I'm in love with that word. - Me too. I mean, I feel like learning about this, it felt like one of those kind of things where you learn it and you feel like almost like a weight lifting off of your shoulders where you're like, oh, this actually feels kind of like a relief because I have certainly had so many clients where they get stuck in a similar loop, like what you're describing of, okay, I need to figure out what is the thing that happened that made me this way. And somehow I can't get better if I don't understand like, what is the thing? And making a sort of like a thing on the wall of like, okay, this happened, let me try to draw this connection. And I think just having this recognition of, oh, there is this biotempormental piece where there, and every, you think about human history, every tribe needed people like this, who were really good at scanning for threat and thinking through all the different worst case scenarios of what might happen. And planning for those things, delaying gratification. Those types of things, people with this biotemporment tend to have that in space. And it can be, and often it's what makes us super successful at the things that we want to do. - Yes, it's so validating to even hear you say, every tribe needed someone like this. And I will name like myself, I'm gonna throw myself in that group, not surprisingly, as a chronic TMSer. I will sit, I'm the worst backseat driver in the entire world. (laughing) I will see a car merging like a football field away. I'm telling my husband like, hey, just so you know, just so you're aware. - Car coming, the exit's coming up. You're gonna have to get over in this lane, so start now. - Yes, but what you're saying is, we actually can't help that. - Like our, we are perceiving things at a higher level of threat sensitivity than the, than people with different biotemporment. - Then somebody that's more, and you can even think of it like a bell curve, right? And let me give you an example. Many people are familiar with that marshmallow experiments. Are you, do you know of it? You know, this famous experiment where they tell kids, little kids in a room, and said, okay, you're gonna sit here at this table, and here's one big marshmallow, but if you can wait for 15 minutes, you're gonna get two marshmallows. People wired like this are really good at waiting, and pushing, delaying the gratification. And when they did that research, it was longitudinal where they looked at these people's success later in life, and outwardly, people like this do tend to be successful because they're good at planning. They're good at assessing risk. They're good at being conscientious. They almost are never gonna say no to their boss. All these things, and you think, okay, that maybe there's sort of like just this, never ending upward trajectory of those things helping you. But actually, it's a bit more like a bell curve. And on the left end of the bell curve, there are people where you never have to guess how that person is feeling. Maybe you run into them in the grocery store and something difficult happening. They are crying. They are social signaling for help, right? And those people often end up getting help because it's very clear that they need it. On the right side of the bell curve, are people that are wired more like this, where they're actually become so good at regulating their emotions that sometimes people don't even know that they're having a hard time. Often people don't even know that they're having a hard time. And so the way that you wanna think about it is many of these qualities of having this type of bio-temperman, they're actually, they've helped you become successful in life. But it is not the case that they come without cost. It can become maladaptive over time because, and it really is actually because so many of these things become, they are socially reinforced. You know, when you say yes to everything or chronically people please, most people aren't gonna shut that down. And so people end up doing it more and it starts to tip over into maladaptive. And so that's what we wanna look at is, not how do we get rid of all of these qualities because they can really be helpful a lot of the time. You wanna think of it as like a knife where it can cut you or it can serve you. And we wanna figure out how to make this work for us, and then how do we address where it's hurting us? And what's so amazing about paying is that it often can help us see where it's hurting us so that we can take action and start to address it. And without paying most people don't, right? Like, why do you ever fix something unless you're in pain? - Right, right. - It's the tell that something is, something about the way that you've been operating is starting to cause harm to your system. But to your point, there are so many strengths of having this type of mirroring. And just to try to pull, 'cause a lot of this is new language for me, I'm imagining it might be new language for some of the listeners. If I'm pulling it together to check my understanding, people with our type of bio-temperman, someone who's predisposition to experience chronic pain, chronic anxiety, chronic symptoms, are existing in a state of threat, an actual state of threat. Their brain is operating from that mode more frequently or enters it at a lower threshold. - That's correct. - And there are tremendous benefits to that in terms of our ability to perceive risk, plan, achieve, it's also social benefits in terms of our ability to people please and read the room, we're great employees, we're great friends, and it comes at a cost to have your brain be operating from that state of threat in an accumulated way for days, weeks, months, or your lifetime. - Yes, that it's like so beneficial in many ways, but then over time, living in that chronic threat state can start to have some high costs. - Okay, can I ask you something? Maybe this, you can help course correct me if it doesn't belong in this conversation, but there's something about this that feels similar to HSP highly sensitive people, which is something I think our listeners have heard more frequently that language feels like it's transferred to the general population. I hear that a lot, like I'm HSP, I have a highly sensitive personality. Is there any difference between this and a highly sensitive personality other than the language set, I have to say the language set in of itself is feels very important. The bio-temperman piece I take to much more readily than I take to the idea of a highly sensitive person. So I'm wondering if there's any other difference or if the language is what's different about it. - I think that it's mostly the language and that it's more like this explains why some people are highly sensitive, right? because it. I think my question has always been sort of like, why do I seem to perceive things differently or experience certain sounds and sensation, physical things in a different way than other people? And so this framework provides kind of a deeper explanation, oh, across the spectrum of human diversity, some of us have this higher threat sensitivity, and that changes how our experience of what it's like to be human. That makes sense. And it's a language change, but you're naming something important as well, it's mapping a clear why. Right. Okay. So I'd love to hear more about where you were going a moment ago, you were saying there are lots of benefits of this, there's a, these are adaptive strategies, we learned them for a reason, we use them for a reason, they can be helpful for lots of reasons, and at a certain point they can flip and be maladaptive. Can you tell me more about what that looks like or how you see this show up with your clients and the overlap between this accumulation of threat and a chronic symptom presentation? Yeah. I mean, you can even think about it of, okay, somebody that has a higher threat sensitivity, their brains are definitely going to be more likely to interpret sensation as pain, right? Because they are just fundamentally more sensitive to threat, and if we think about pain or symptoms as our brain and nervous system's best attempt to try to protect us against threat by turning up the volume on a sensation, it makes so much sense that, okay, when we have this, we are just, we are going to, our brains are going to be more likely to make a mistake in this respect, and you can think of it also like, okay, 10,000 years ago somebody is sitting on the savannah, and they hear rustling in the bushes, and you can make one of two mistakes there, right? One would be, it's probably nothing, but it's a tiger, and one would be, it's probably a tiger, but it's nothing. One of those ancestors, our genes, passed on, right? The one that's more likely to make the mistake of, oh my god, there's danger everywhere, and we have to be on alert all the time because anything bad could happen. Yeah. And there's something about what you're saying now that's reminding me of earlier in the conversation where you mentioned, we come into the world with a certain biotemporament, we can see this in our kids, and often it's reinforced by events that we go through. I could imagine if someone is wired this way, and is more likely to say it's a tiger when it's nothing, when they go through something that's actually really fear inducing a traumatic event, a loss, something out of their control, I would imagine there's tremendous reinforcement of their wiring. Yes, that you could imagine different scenarios that might really enforce that, and one would be living in an environment where there is actually consistent threat, right? Where you're like, oh, it's very adaptive actually in a situation like that where, oh, you don't know what's going to set your parent off, or even just one shock trauma, but I think for many people it's kind of that chronic developmental stuff that can be very reinforcing. So if there's a lot of unpredictability or volatility, that can really reinforce it. If the home environment, there's a lot of emphasis, say, on perfection, of basically trying to stay safe through not ever making mistakes, that definitely can reinforce it. It's pretty fascinating that you're like, okay, actually a lot of different ways this could be reinforced, and another one would just be culturally where it's like if somebody grows up in a situation where maybe it's not even necessarily their home environment, but you even think about how much if they go to a really high pressure school, or maybe grow up in a religious community where it's actually a lot of emphasis might be dangerous to not be perfect, something really bad could happen. Those things could all reinforce, like, wow, it's actually very important that you be very hyper-vigilant to be looking for risk all the time or potential danger. Yeah, I'm curious how you talk to clients about this, as it comes up a lot for me with people I'm working with who are highly successful, really ambitious, or proud of their jobs or their accomplishments, and feel really not only tied to their doing, tied to their productivity, but tied to the mechanisms that got them there, they feel a sense of credit is owed to their hyper-vigilance for their success. How do you work with that? How do you talk to clients about parsing out the good from the bad? How do you help them feel motivated to change something that has been arguably legitimately beneficial for them? I actually, that's what I love about this framework because it's so validating where I'm really recognizing, hey, there are aspects of this that have served us so well because I think when we kind of go to battle with our own nervous system or kind of get in this narrative that there's something somehow wrong or bad about me, it's so hard to change, but the more that we can actually take in the full picture of, hey, this has actually served me so well in a lot of ways, and both things can be true that it's coming at a cost. And I think helping people recognize us looking at the root cause of this and kind of working on getting our nervous systems out of that threat mode. It does not have to mean that our success is that it's going to totally cost our success, right? But actually, this way of being, while aspects of us have served as well, it's not very sustainable. And that's what the pink can help show us, right, of, like, okay, it's gotten me this far, but it's not been without cost, and sometimes people who don't develop symptoms, it makes it so hard for them to assess the cost. And I think when you have symptoms, it really helps kind of point you back to, hmm, yes, this way of motivating myself or of coping with life, it's been super helpful in certain ways, but it's also coming with a lot of cost. >> Can I ask you another question about the reinforcement piece? >> Yeah. >> As you had mentioned, this can be reinforced through a very scary traumatic, difficult event. Someone's gone through its culturally reinforced, it can be reinforced by family society. There was a piece you mentioned earlier about emotional regulation, our emotions being on a bell curve between people who let them freely out, in the grocery store versus someone who is hyper-controlled with their emotions, and at the time you had said people get too good at regulating their emotions to the point where others cannot recognize that they're happening, I heard in that that that can become more of emotional repression than anything else if we're at the far end of the bell curve. I'd like to hear more about that, and I'm curious if the reinforce, there's also reinforcement there. If our society reinforces people who can tighten the purse string, so to speak, on their feelings. >> Absolutely. Yeah. You think, okay, somebody who's able to really be extremely disciplined and sometimes even be able to fully disconnect from their emotional experience because they have to work in a really demanding profession, or different things like that, of course that gets reinforced, and actually it's the case that often people wired like this end up drawn to work that tends to reinforce those qualities exactly. What's interesting about it is that, and I noticed this myself, you know that I used to be a big firm litigator, and there's, it's really helpful if you're a big firm litigator to be able to disconnect from your emotional experience because sometimes you're doing things that don't get tough, you have to be tough, okay? And it absolutely gets reinforced, oh this is actually a really valuable thing to disconnect from your emotional experience and be able to really tamp it down, and it starts to take on kind of a life of its own, where it's so common, I'm sure I would imagine it is for you as well. Clients get so good at it that it's completely happening outside of their conscious awareness and it's difficult to even access it and it's a whole process of being able to reconnect with ourselves, help our nervous systems feel safe enough that we can reconnect with our emotional experience. Absolutely, and it's so frustrating for clients. I hear so frequently people get so down on themselves. I know feeling my feelings would help me in my recovery and I just, I don't get it. I can't. It's happening so under their level of conscious awareness, it's so ingrained. It's so ingrained and people wired like this tend to engage in what's called approach coping, where this is reinforced as well, where we tend to be really good at thinking through and solving problems, right? And we then tend to try to take that approach into healing from neuroplastic symptoms. And that same intensity that's made us successful in other arenas, of course we end up translating that into how we're approaching symptoms. And I think probably if anyone listening has experience with neuroplastic symptoms, you probably know how well that goes. I'm just going to keep doing the thing that got the A pluses with my pain. And then really end up hitting a wall because the brain that got us into this, we're not going to be able to think our way out or approach it in the same way. We're not going to be able to use that same intensity that's made us successful in other ways to be able to get out of pain. And obviously it's actually quite the opposite, right? That's why I love your way of explaining this. Why mapping the why underneath all of these common ways of being this so important, because it takes so much blame out of it. I've asked myself this so many times. Why am I so jumpy? Why am I so anxious? Why am I so worried when no one else is? Why am I so intense? You want to develop an awareness of that way of relating and recognize this isn't helping my recovery, then you can weaponize that. Well, now I know I'm intense. I can't stop being intense. What's wrong? What's wrong with me? And you're mapping the why. It has served us for so, first of all, it's how we came into the world. It's our bio temperament. And it's been reinforced in a million ways, totally, totally. And that my whole interest in having this framework, it is exactly what you said of it helps us have more compassion for ourselves to just see, oh, this isn't a fault thing. I couldn't actually be different than how I am right now. So knowing that I'm wired in this way, how can I meet my nervous system where it is understanding that it is going to be predisposed to this threat sensitivity? And what are the things that I can do not to think my way into safety? Because I think that's what can often be hard about what we do. You know, there's sort of this message of like, okay, so the pain is coming from you, your brain misperceiving threats. So you just need to tell yourself you're safe. And I think for a lot of people, that becomes super frustrating. And I think that's because we're trying to use our prefrontal cortex to tell our amygdala something. But those things are not directly connected. And it's really tough. And so a lot of this is around how do we do a bottom-up approach where we are actually showing our nervous system that we're safe through different somatic techniques versus trying to think our way into it. And it's that repeated experience of showing our nervous system that it's safe, that helps it move more easily out of threat versus, okay, let me just remind myself, look, there's not a tiger here, you're safe, you're safe, you're safe. And it's not that I don't think that dialogue, that inner dialogue can be helpful. But I think it, for most people, they've probably had that experience of recognizing, well, I'm telling myself this, but I don't feel it in my body. Oh yeah, here are the front clients all the time. I did this the other day. Did I tell you the story? I went to Legoland with my kids. Okay, I am not a first one. I didn't know there were rides at Legoland. I thought it was Legos, so you're like, wait a second, can I get my money back? I can't break my understand. I am not, for obvious reasons, I am not a ride's person, my nervous system. Right. And not handle that. I went on a roller coaster. I've tried them. The last time I was probably 15 years ago and I'm not kidding. I could not walk for two days after because I tensed my body so tight that I wasn't so much, but I was sore. So anyway, I am not a rides person. And my kids are young. They're three and six. So I realized they're rides. I promise I will get back to what you were saying. And. No, this is I want to hear and I'm invested. We were waiting in line for what I thought was a virtual reality experience. For some reason, that was my understanding. In retrospect, this was obviously my fault, but I thought we were waiting for a virtual reality experience. So you wait in line for a long time, and then you get to this room where you get to make a spaceship. They give you a little tablet and you design the spaceship, which is encouraging this idea that we're about to go on a virtual reality ride. They're saying you're on a mission. You need to build your spaceship. Then you're going to get on the spaceship. So we got on the spaceship. It's moving very slowly. We're watching on the screen in front of us a reflection of ourselves in the spaceship. Okay. So everything up into this point is reinforcing. This is a virtual reality ride. We made our spaceship. We got in the spaceship. We are seeing a reflection of ourselves in the spaceship we made. Then you round a corner on the ride and you drop into a pitch black roller coaster. It just completely changed. We were moving at the speed of a sloth, having fun, making our spaceship, you round the corner and a door opened and you fall into a full blown roller coaster in the pitch black. This is not right. I immediately, so instinctively, first of all, the first thing I do is scream my head off. I have my three-year-old on one side, my six-year-old on the other and I'm just screaming my head off. But interspersed between my screaming, I'm grabbing both of them physically. As if they don't have, I literally am so scared that I forget they have harnesses on and I believe it's my responsibility to hold them. So I'm holding them in, thinking that I am the person holding them in. The only thing standing in between them and in their heart is me, so I'm holding them in and screaming. You're safe, you're safe, you're safe, you're safe, you're safe, and then screaming, holding them and then trying to tell them you're safe. And afterwards, when we got off the ride and we survived, we were cracking up. I was like, that's where my clients get stuck, is they, they're asking themselves, I'm telling, technically, I'm telling myself I'm safe the whole day. Right, why isn't it doing anything totally? But I'm doing it from a place of threat. Why am I so activator? Why isn't it working? You're safe. I know, I actually had a client last week where we were on a virtual session and her dog started, by the way, I love when clients have pets in session, I'll just say, and I can probably speak for most therapists, like bring your animal into the session. But this dog started, could hear something out in the hall. Right, it's the mailman, but the dog is like, oh, there's, there's a threat out there. And it was so interesting because this client has struggled with the same thing. How do I make myself feel safe? But I wash her intuitively with this dog. And she didn't try to forcefully tell, hey, you're safe. Come on, you're safe. She didn't do that. She didn't try to logic with it, like, hey, that's actually just the postman, right? Because that's not going to work with the dog. It doesn't know. She was petting the dog, making soothing, reassuring sounds, regulating her own experience, and that communicated safety to the dog. And I am like, you already know how to do this. You actually know how to do this. But it's so easy when you're wired this way to think, I'll be able to think my way into it or talk my way into it versus, no, it's actually like feeling our way into it. Yeah, oh, I love that story. So I want to hear more. So how do you translate this other than a really helpful dog on call to help demonstrate exactly what you're talking about? talking about, when you're with a client, how do you help them develop safety in their body that's not exclusively language-based, cognitive-based? - That's cognitive. So, this is the cool thing about it. There are so many different ways. And I think those of us wired this way. It's just so beneficial to know about some of these ways so that we can practice them throughout the day, where it's like we can notice, we can bring awareness. Oh, okay, I can tell that I'm in the threat state. I, what can I do right now that will help communicate, safety, help move out of threat, state, into social safety. And so, one of my favorite ones, and people who are listening, you're obviously not gonna be able to see, but I'll describe it for you. It's called the Big Three Plus One, which is the most ridiculous name. And I love doing it with clients because I love saying the name. And it's so silly, but it's so effective. And so, I'll explain what it is, and I'll explain a little bit about why it works. So, the Big Three Plus One, the Plus One is being able to kind of lean back, sit down and lean back. Because when we're in threat, we are gonna have a tendency to constricts, right? Like that it's just biological, that we will hunch our shoulders, we will, our chest will get tighter. And so, one way to communicate safety and the absence of threat, is we kind of lean back in our chair, like we're just like relaxing. And so, even if you don't feel relaxed, that's okay, because we're using our body to communicate safety to our nervous system. And we can actually just utilize that versus, again, that cognitive piece. So, we're sitting down and leaning back if we can. And then, yeah, we can both, for anyone watching, we'll do it. But we're leaning back. And then the Big Three R, the first one is we're gonna do an eyebrow wag. So, for older people, we're like magnum PI, but like, we're just like doing a quick, like, raising lower eyebrows. That's it. So, it's okay, that I can do. Okay. And we're gonna take a deep breath together. And then we're gonna do what's called a wide mouth cooperative grin. I'm sorry, what? I know. It's a mouthful. And every time I do it with a client, by the end, we're just like laughing like this, because you feel so silly. But actually, laughing is a really powerful way to engage our social safety system, right? Because that's a way of communicating, okay, there's not a predator here. We're here and we're laughing, we're safe. So, the wide mouth cooperative grin, it's just, it's kind of what it sounds where it's like, we're grinning together, close mouth though. And that's it. It's just those things, the wide mouth cooperative grin, the eyebrow wag, and the deep breath. Even if you, 'cause why they say the plus one, sometimes you'll be places where you can't easily sit down and just sort of throw your shoulders back, but we kind of always have the ability to take a deep breath with a long, slow exhale to do a little eyebrow wag and to just do the grin. And it's so interesting, it's part of why it works, is that these muscles around our eyes and our mouths, they are communicating with our vagus nerve. And that vagus nerve, when that engages, that's that rest and digest mode. That is that communication to our nervous system. Okay, we're safe here. And when people are chronically in threat, are the ability of our vagus nerve to engage, becomes impaired. And so, any little thing like that, where we are helping it get better at engaging, it's just so beneficial. I love that. Anyone on an airplane is gonna be watching me do the big three plus one. - I think you're just gonna be like rep after rep after rep. So many cooperative grins coming, the flight attendants, why? - Oh, many cooperative grins. They're like, why is that lady raising and lowering her eyebrows? (laughs) - Watch that. - And it's simple, it's accessible to repeatable. I also like that it, unlike meditation or somatic tracking, which I also love for different reasons. It's eyes open, it's not adding the intensity of being, it's using your body without being in your body in a focused way. And I think people need to add those, we need to talk about those more in our rotation 'cause it's, there's a lot of emphasis in our field on using the body by using the sensations in your body, the sensation of your breath, the sensation of your anxiety, the sensation of your pain or your dizziness. And I do think there's a place for that that can be really effective, but it can add a lot of intensity. And what you just shared is so simple, it's impossible to be intense when you're eyebrow wagging. - You just like, I feel ridiculous, but that you're so right that it's, especially when people have a fraught relationship with their bodies because they've had a lot of symptoms, even though I love somatic tracking and then I think it's so helpful. It can be real, it can be intense. It's a lot when you've had that relationship with your body. And actually even doing some of these things before you do somatic tracking, so that you're already coming more into that social safety system versus being in threat, it can really help when you're doing somatic tracking. - That's a great tip, I love that. Another thing I wanted to make sure to ask you about in along the lines of developing self-compassion and using your body to downregulate is something that you call your loving kindness practice? - Oh yes, yes. So this is what's so interesting that they've found about people who are biotempormatically wired this way, over controlled kind of coping style, is well, there's not gonna be surprising to probably anyone listening. We tend to be really hard on ourselves. And that's for so many reasons. I mean, it truly is, it's an adaptation. But that's one where it's really hard to address neuroplastic pain when we're chronically hard on ourselves. Because our nervous system cannot tell if the call's coming from inside the building, right? It's like, if you had somebody of really mean boss walking around being like, nothing you ever do is good enough, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Of course, you would feel in a chronic threat state. And it's not different when it's happening internally. And so, and this for me has been, you know this, but it's been such a huge part of my personal journey of healing, of trying to figure out, okay, I know that I need to change my relationship to myself. To be more kind, but that's another one that's so similar to like what you were describing on the ride, where it's so easy to get looped into like, why am I so hard on myself? I'm such a jerk, like I should know better than this. And now I'm being hard on myself, on and on and on, right? And that wiring is so strong to really to ourselves in that way. And so what they've found, there's just such a substantial body of research now that people who are wired this way, benefit tremendously from loving kindness practice with such an important caveat of how you're going about it. Because I think a lot of times what people will hear is, okay, you can do this loving kindness practice and they'll work on imagining themselves or a younger version of themselves. And what they say with over control is, no, this is not the way that we're going to do it, because oftentimes that makes people feel worse. And what you want to choose is somebody, and this could be a human, it could be a pet, it could be somebody living, somebody dead, but it needs to be somebody different than you that you're practicing with. Somebody for whom it's just easy to feel those feelings, and you never have to, it actually doesn't matter whether you eventually kind of turn it back inward in terms of how you're practicing. It's enough to just do it for somebody for whom it's easy to really build up those neural pathways. - So what would that look like, practically speaking? - Practically speaking, so for me, when I started doing this, I had, I wasn't a mom yet, but I had an 18 month old niece. And it was just so easy to feel love and affection towards her. You know, I think that's all right. Like sometimes with a baby or a toddler, when people get older, obviously relationships get more complicated, but never with a baby or you thinking, "What have you done for me?" I mean, hopefully. You're just like this, this little being is just so delightful. Like I just love them as they are. There's nothing about anything that they've accomplished or done for me. It's just effortless and she was like that for me. Where I could just think of her and it would make me feel so warm and loving. It was just very accessible. So I would spend, and I did use my over-control to help me with this. I committed that I was going to do this for a year. Nobody has to start there, but I could tell that this was at the root of so much for me that I needed to really address this if I was going to get feeling better. And so I would spend five minutes every day imagining my niece, Nora, and imagining sending her things that I knew I myself probably needed to hear, but I didn't worry about imagining myself. So I would say in my mind, when I would think of her, may you love and accept yourself as you are. I would say this is one of my favorite loving-kindness phrases, but I would say may you know that you have the inner resources to meet this moment as it unfolds. And that was because I was so used to living kind of in that planning, hyper-vigilant mode of, okay, if I don't get everything figured out, the wheels are going to come off. And I need to always be thinking into the future and anticipating and embracing and just being able to send that wish to her of something that I would say is more akin to resilience of this reminder of you already have everything that you need inside of you. You can meet life as it unfolds. You don't need to plan everything. But it could be just the traditional phrases too, which are may you be happy, may you be at ease, may you be safe. It's not even particularly important what the phrases are, but it is just spending maybe even just those five minutes practicing with that feeling of that kind of love that's not based on performance. It's a sweetest idea, and can you share a little bit about what is actually happening in the brain, the nervous system, or the body, when someone is sending that loving-kindness to their niece, to their dog, to their loved one, what's happening? You are using what we know about neuroplasticity to rewire your brain, because our poor brains, they require so much energy to run, and they are so evolved for just pure, base survival. What I say to clients all the time is other nature is indifferent to your happiness. Unless it's going to help you spread your DNA, the happiness piece is just not that important. If it's hard for you to access, that is not your fault. That's a feature of our evolutionary wiring. It's not a bug. It's not a just you issue. To access some of these other ways of being, it actually just requires practice. It's not because of something that's wrong with you. What it does, that practice over time, is strengthen those neural pathways, so that when we are having our time, it becomes more accessible to turn it inward. When people are under stress, you and I both know this. It's not like when you work on laying down the new neural pathways, it is going to be the case that when we're under stress, our brain is going to try to just default to the most well-worn ones. It's not like those just get erased or anything, but the more that we can strengthen the beneficial ones, over time, that becomes more and more accessible even when we're under stress. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's a helpful reminder of how much practice it really takes. It is nearly identical to learning a new language for anyone who has learned a second language as an adult or later in childhood. It takes so much practice, like you are breaking it down, sentence by sentence, verb conjugation by verb conjugation until it becomes a little bit more natural, a little bit more normal until it rolls off your tongue, you start dreaming in that language and under stress, you're always going to want to default to your home language. Totally. Yes. Yes, that it's like we never want to be hard on ourselves for that. It's more about getting better and better at recognizing, "Oh, my brain's gone down." That most well-worn, neural pathway, that's okay. I don't need a waste any time beating myself up about that, but can we bring it back to something that's more helpful and adaptive? I love this so much. I always think of you as the queen of self-compassion. I have taken so many things that you've said over the years and pocketed them and truly never forgotten them. I could listen to you talk about the theory all day, but I know that you have such a special way of translating the theory into a meaningful practice in your client's lives. This is not something that you preach is theoretically important. I know you'd actually do these things in your everyday life. I know they were so profoundly transformational for you and you can just feel that coming off of you. It's a release. I know that this is in your core now. I was not like this. This was something that changed for me, and I would say you probably heard me say it, but I feel like self-compassion, practice, loving kindness, meditation. It saved my life. It so profoundly changed my life, and I, 100% believe that this and developing a tolerance for uncertainty, because one thing about being over-controlled is that we tend to interpret or our nervous system's interpret uncertainty as threat. We don't like it, no, really no. Growing our ability to be compassionate with ourselves and to be able to tolerate and be with uncertainty, to me, those are the two biggest gifts that we can give ourselves. I love it so much. Thank you so much for being willing to come on today, and is there any last wondering tip, piece of hope that you would share with someone who's listening for whom this information is new, who's resonating for the first time with this idea of, "Oh, I am biotemporamentally wired this way, who might be experiencing a mix of things, some validation, some nervousness, I'm wondering if I can change this, if it's just how I am, is there any last message that you'd want to share with someone who's sorting through that?" I would say if you're listening and you tend to notice any kind of like threat response to what I'm saying of, "Oh, does this mean this is my destiny?" Absolutely not, because once we have awareness of, "Huh, this is why I'm like this." Then we can stop fighting so much against it and sort of have the frame shift to, "How do I best support my nervous system?" And really knowing this doesn't have to be like, "Oh my goodness, what else can you add into your day?" Can you be more productive about this and what are you doing to try to shift your nervous system out of threat? But more like knowing, "Okay, so I'm wired this way, and so I'm going to have to do things, it's going to be helpful to me to practice every day, just little things to communicate to my nervous system, "Hey, we're safe." And truly, those things can be so simple, even going to a mirror and making silly faces, like stretching your face, I know. It sounds so ridiculous, but it's again, those muscles around our eyes and mouth, when we're doing that, it's just such a simple and accessible way to communicate, "Oh, we're not going to be doing those things if we're getting chased by a tiger." Oh, I'm making silly faces. No. So it's just a bottom-up approach to let our nervous system know, "Okay, you're actually safe right now." And just kind of thinking, "Okay, this is a gift I can give to myself, right, of finding these little ways in the day to let my nervous system know, "Hey, let me give you a nudge. Just a reminder, I'm going to just do this thing to let you know we're safe." It's such a helpful way to kind of have it shift more and more over time, communicating that message we're safe. In a different way that I think is much more readable to our nervous system. system than language. Yes. It feels amazing to hear you say that. It really is so hopeful this messaging. Yes. Totally. That you're like, oh my god, please hear this as something very hopeful because this is something that we can just really, in an accessible way, be working on. Yes. Yeah. Well, I so, so, so appreciate that you came on today. I learned so much. I would keep you here for another three hours if I could. And anyone who knows you knows you are truly just love to in every cell of your body, anyone who knows Danielle, she just believes in the goodness of all people. She, it's in her pores, it's in her DNA at this point, pores out of her. And I'm so happy that listeners got a little taste of that today. That is so sweet. I mean, you know, I feel the same way about you. That was so fun. Thank you so much Danielle. Thank you so much for having me on to talk about it. I love to share about this. Thanks for listening to like minds like body. If what Danielle shared today resonated with you, particularly the connection between personality, nervous system patterns and chronic pain, the wise mind group has put together a free assessment that might help you understand your own coping style more clearly. It takes about eight minutes and at the end, you get a personalized reflection based on how your nervous system actually operates. You can find it at the wisemindgroup.com. Completion of the quiz will also get you on their updates email for an upcoming workshop specifically for people with chronic pain that combines RODBT skills with pain reprocessing therapy to approaches that work particularly well together for the over controlled nervous system. Here's one last reminder to check out all that curable has to offer over at curable.com. Curables recovery program takes many of the concepts we talked about today and breaks them down into actionable steps that help you move the needle toward positive change. In the app, you'll also find Q&As with mind body experts, recovery stories, meditation and breathwork sessions, somatic tracking tutorials, and much more. Thank you as always to the team at Curable for their help with this and every episode of the show. With special thanks to the awesome editing team led by Ryan Howie. That's it for today. If you're interested in working with me or any of our team members for one on one symptom recovery support, head on over to bettermindcenter.com. Until next time, keep at it.