The Science of Feeling Safe In Your Body

You know, when you said fake it 'til you make it. -That hit me too. -It really hit me. Especially in your example earlier, when you were talking about no matter how bad you wanted to show up, you always felt yourself pulling away. I faked it until I could make it to survive in this scenario, and now I need to eat. Yeah. 100% relatable. And there's a physiological connection to that because if the prefrontal cortex is trying to be all of these other brain areas, it's gonna burn through so much fuel to do that. It is gonna be exhausted, and we're gonna be running on fumes. So, yeah, after you fake it 'til you make it and overuse that frontal lobe, we're gonna be physiologically hungry, as well as looking for a coping mechanism or a release valve for whatever was under the surface. Yeah. There's a cost. There's a huge cost. Have you ever had a moment where your logical brain knew you were safe but your body still spiraled into panic or watched a client who's done years of therapy shut down the moment that stress hits? This isn't a flaw in personality, it's a breakdown in integration. When different brain systems can't communicate fluidly, emotional regulation falters, signals get stuck in survival loops, and that can leave people reactive instead of resilient in those moments. And when we confuse our emotions with who we are, believing that feeling of fear, anger, or shame means that something is wrong with us or that this is a fundamental part of who I am, we can get trapped in those states instead of being able to move through them. And true post-traumatic growth requires more than mindset shifts. It's about repairing the pathways of integration so that the brain can process signals accurately, regulate emotions effectively, and really free us to respond with greater flexibility and capacity in those moments. In this episode, we explore what emotional regulation really is, how impaired integration disrupts it, what causes those breakdowns, and why that matters for healing, and most importantly, what we can do to restore balance and support growth. So many people come in thinking emotional regulation means not expressing, not crying at work or always staying calm, but real regulation is about full-spectrum access to emotion without being hijacked by it. It's not about not having big emotions or feeling deeply, but about having the capacity to feel them fully and to move through them. In this episode, you'll discover how emotional regulation is not just a mental skill, but a full-body, brain-wide process that can be trained and transformed. Together with NSI educator Matt Bush, we'll unpack what true regulation looks like, why integration across the brain and body is essential, what disrupts this connection, and how do we rebuild it. You'll walk away with a new understanding of why emotions are physiological, not just psychological. What's really happening when you feel dysregulated? How trauma fragments integration and blocks emotional access. Simple science-backed practices that reconnect you to your system. The truth that regulation is possible for you no matter where your starting point is. 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 Neurosomatic Psychedelic Preparation and Integration Guide, and I bring your nervous system into your peak somatic experiences. I'm also one of the educators at the Neurosomatic Intelligence Coaching Certification. And I'm your co-host Elizabeth Kristoff, founder of BrainBase.com, an online community where we use applied neurology and somatics for resilience, personal growth, and behavior change. And I'm also the founder of the Neurosomatic Intelligence Coaching Certification, an ICF accredited course for therapists, practitioners, and healers to bring the nervous system into all of the good work that you're doing. And we are so excited to be joined again today with founder of Next Level Neuro and one of our co-lead educators at NSI, Matt Bush. - Thank you for having me back. I'm really excited about this particular conversation. I'm gonna jump right in, 'cause for me, emotional regulation is the foundation for learning, movement, safety, agency in our lives. And without integration, the system stays very fragmented and reactive. What that means, one of the possibilities at least, is that without emotional regulation, we keep hitting the same road bumps again and again, looping or getting set back by our emotional reactivity rather than creating the traction and the growth that we're striving for. - Yeah, this is such an important episode. I think let's start by defining what we mean by emotional regulation. So for me, emotional regulation is the brain's ability to sense, understand, and respond to emotions in a way that is flexible and context-appropriate, right? It's not about suppressing, definitely not about repressing. It's about that modulation and being able to complete the cycles of emotional experience, mobilizing those emotions through the body and regulate through that experience. And regulation doesn't mean being numb or calm all the time. It really means having a choice. It means being able to move from one emotional state to the other without getting stuck there. - Yeah, similar to Elizabeth, my working definition is the ability to feel, understand, and articulate our emotions and to move through them or to allow them to move through us sometimes. So we can complete that emotional cycle and then return back to baseline. So when we learn good emotional regulation, we don't get stuck in the reactive responses that any particular emotion could provoke, but we continue just to move forward in life. I agree with what both of you said, and I really wanna underline what Elizabeth said around context, because regulation is my capacity to sense accurately, place it in a context, and then choose a response that fits the moment. And I think that's meaningful to relationships because without that, my lens can get really narrowed by dysregulation. I could misread cues or project. I might miss you or you might miss me. And that in relationships, it could look like talking past each other, triggering each other, miscommunications, in really various ways. It's the opposite of co-regulation. When I'm integrated, emotions don't become my identity. They're information. I can feel anger and still set a clean boundary. I can feel fear and still stay in my dialoguing. And that's why I say emotional states, processing, integration, and regulation are an expansive portal to presence and connection. Not something to suppress, but something to be in and move with as in alongside of, right? The goal is super simple. Not to get stuck, don't get hijacked, and let the feeling inform me without distorting my view of you or of a situation. - Yeah, that really made me think, Jen, when you were talking of attunement, self-attunement and attunement to others as a key part of emotional regulation. So let's dive a little bit deeper into what exactly is integration and why this is important. Integration is the process that allows the brain and the body to work together as a coordinated system. At its core, integration means that different regions of the brain, the body's sensory networks as well, are in ongoing communication, balancing and regulating each other in real time. On the body side, we receive consistent signals through our interoception, which we have talked a lot about on here as the awareness of what's happening in our body, our heart rate, our breath, our digestion, our sensations from inside of our body, and our proprioception, the sense of where we are in space and how we're moving, all of our different sensory input systems. The brain interprets these signals, assigns meaning and organizes a response. And when that loop is intact, we can notice what we feel, we can understand it with clarity and accuracy, and we can respond in a way that matches the present situation. But when that loop is disrupted through maybe trauma or chronic stress or survival adaptations, we start to lose access to that regulation. For example, if someone is dissociating or going numb, their body's cues don't reach their conscious awareness, the brain can't coordinate a healthy response to that situation that is appropriate for that moment. And when these systems aren't connected, our emotions can also run really high, and we can lean into that reactivity, right? We can have a response that's disproportionate and out of context, like Jen was talking about. And then when we can also dissociate, we can get stuck in analysis of the situation rather than actually feeling it. Integration is ultimately about this healthy balance and appropriate activation and inhibition, this relationship between parts of our brain, parts of our nervous system being activated and others being inhibited, and that being right-sized for that moment. And then to begin to be able to shift flexibly between those states rather than being stuck in either over-activation or in a shutdown state. So let's unpack a couple of the brain areas that are responsible for that. And we'll keep this kind of general level. We're not gonna go too deep yet. But the first one, there's four of these that I wanna mention just really quick. The insular cortex is number one, and it's responsible for receiving and interpreting that introsceptive set of information. Like what am I feeling inside my body? It's also responsible for perceiving through our vision and our hearing the cues and body language and tone of voice like the emotional content that other people are sending our way. So in this emotional regulation conversation, there's how do I perceive and regulate my own emotions to create an appropriate response? But there's also a little subtext of how do I interpret the emotional cues, the nonverbals that I'm getting from other people? And that comes from that insular cortex, okay? The second one is called the anterior cingulate cortex. It's responsible for perceiving when there is a conflict or a discrepancy between what I expected to happen on an emotional level versus what actually happened, right? Like I might ask a question to someone if they happen to perceive that I'm kind of attacking them or judging them and they respond very defensively. My anterior cingulate cortex should pick that up and go, uh-oh, I was asking out of curiosity. I got back defensiveness. We have a conflict there or a discrepancy. So I need to understand that and then respond appropriately to course correct where this conversation is going, right? Number three, the cerebellum is in the back part of the brain at the back bottom. And it's responsible for inhibiting unwanted responses. So it doesn't work all by itself, but it's given like a blueprint or a plan of how I intend to act and respond on an emotional level, how I want to take things from my prefrontal cortex. And then it's responsible for eliminating anything that is not actually part of that plan. So kind of keeping me in check. It's one of the brain areas that does a major amount of our inhibition of other brain networks and systems that might start to run out of control. And then the fourth one is the prefrontal cortex, right? This is our cognitive thinking brain. It's where we decipher meaning like understanding what does that mean? What should I learn from that occurrence or that situation? And so it's kind of regulating all these other areas, telling them the overall direction that we want to be going and how we want to frame and understand what happens during our life, okay? So emotional integration is a synchronization across these brain regions where they're all working together as a connected network so that emotional signals are felt like within the insular cortex. They're understood like interpreted both in the insular and the prefrontal cortex. And then they're acted on based on the direction that our brain has set with these other systems like making sure that it's happening accurately and correctly and appropriately so that we can right size and fit the context of whatever is actually happening. - Yeah. The science is really interesting and now I'm gonna share some examples with you where you might be finding this in your real life. So think about and maybe in a relationship that you're in and it feels like your partner's tone spikes and it triggers your shame. And before you know it, you snapped back and defense turns into attack. Underneath your body is experiencing a chronic hyperarousal, racing heart, tight chest and shallow breath, right? It's narrowing your lens until you emotionally flood. And old stories color the present moment and your system prioritizes protection over connection. Maybe you even shut down and go numb mid conversation but the body still has those same internal activations. Maybe at work, like Matt was even saying a minute ago a small piece of feedback lands like a verdict and you either freeze or you overwork. Your body surges into over activation, that tight chest, shallow breath, once again maybe even a clenching jaw or maybe you even crash right after that. Those pendulum swings between activation and collapse, right? Behaviorally it's showing up as avoidance or maybe even compulsive tinkering masquerading as perfectionism. As a parent, the room gets loud. Your kid is buzzing and your volume jumps before you even register it, you snap. Your system flips between hyperarousal, racing heart, breath up in your chest and in between shut down, right? Words disappear, you fall flat. That rapid pendulum that leaves everyone confused. It looks like emotional flooding from the outside but inside your body is trying so hard not to be overwhelmed. And I think this is one that a lot of people are gonna relate to in the era of social media because in behavioral loops, think about that time that you just go on your phone to check one thing. And then you come up 40 minutes later fatigued and maybe even more anxious, right? That shut down dissociation is dressed up as a break followed by the compulsive urge to keep scrolling. It's classic self-sabotage that deepens the stuckness that you feel. Your body is toggling between low grade over activation and collapse and underneath all of these scenarios, shame kicks in and you could be saying something to yourself like, I know better, why can't I control this? Why can't I change this? - Yeah, I think there's a couple of things that both of you talked about that I just wanna touch on. And I think Matt, as I was listening to you talk about these different regions and their interaction with one another, it just seems really important to remember how much of this is a brain-wide process. And I think sometimes we hear so much about frontal lobe and the frontal lobe inhibiting the limbic system, but it's more complex than that. And that also means there's so many different ways to go about it. Like I feel some of the most particularly potent work for me in terms of emotional regulation has been proprioceptive complex non-linear movements that are really driving fuel and activation to my cerebellum, helping with that accuracy, prediction and correction. And so like there's different ways to go about working to enhance these skills or the health of our emotional regulation because there's so many different areas of the brain that are coordinating in. And then it is just so relatable, those moments that you talked about, Jen. And I remember in past life, other version of Elizabeth, I would always describe myself as a ruiner. Like in my mind, that was the thing that I said to myself because I would have these expectations, really wanting connection. I would see the event and then I would just show up and I couldn't control my desire to pull back and to be maybe aggressive or angry underneath and that that was like vibing off of other people. That was creating a vibe for other people and every situation where I really had these high hopes for deep personal connection and an exciting experience, it would end up totally in disarray because there was so much emotional dysregulation just going on all of the time. - That's super relatable actually, yeah. - Yeah, so talking about the brain networks and the brain areas, one really big idea since you started to bring this up is that our brain is not actually divided into separate areas or stages. Like all of the brain is active all the time. It's just a matter of which parts of it are a little more focused on or which ones are kind of maybe running the show a little bit more and have more influence over the outputs that are created. And so you're right, like basic proprioceptive work, like mobility drills and gentle movement practices can create such a difference in that cerebellum activation, the prefrontal cortex, and then that turns into emotional regulation, right? We used to have people coming to class when we were teaching and they would show up and very dysregulated maybe because of group setting, maybe because of something going on in their life, you never really know. And they would kind of learn the basic drills that we were teaching, they would leave and maybe six months later return for another course. But when they come back, if they've been practicing those basic movement drills, they were a totally different person, like different personality, different emotional regulation, much more open most of the time and engaged. And you kind of do a double take, you're like, who are you and what happened to that other version of you? They're like, I don't know, I've just been doing these basic proprioceptive drills and it creates such a huge difference. - It's remarkable, yeah. - So when we're talking about integration, the integration of these networks is really the brain's ability to synchronize three major networks. And this is not three separate brain areas, but just three kind of interconnected spaces. So the first one is the bottom-up inputs, like what's coming into the brain from the interoceptive and proprioceptive systems. Meaning, can I feel what's going on inside my body and can I feel where I am in space, okay? Then there's the salience network and the default mode networks. We've talked about these before on the podcast. And so these are our ability to be aware of ourself and our inner feelings, to detect threats, to hold context of what we've done in the past and how it's turned out. And so those set the tone for what our brain is gonna be paying attention to and focusing on in any given situation. And then there's the top-down control, which is that prefrontal cortex that we focus on and people talk about all the time, like inhibiting and regulating everything else. But that prefrontal cortex of top-down control, it can't work by itself. It has to be integrated through all three levels, all three networks, okay? So what's important to note is that when these networks are not working together and they're not synchronized, what we're seeing in the research is it's not just that those areas may be underactive, but they're actually under connected to one another. So signals aren't being sent appropriately between the different networks and from one area to the next. So if someone struggles to even recognize their emotions, let alone regulate them using these higher order networks, the brain would have a really difficult time distinguishing between real danger versus false alarms. So the body tends to kind of stay in a survival loop, not ever being able to gain traction and then move forward from there. - You know, I associate, when I think about like past versions of me, I really associate to that like prefrontal cortex not being as stimulated, or it maybe is in a more suppressed state than other brain areas. And so for me with my tools, what's really helped me with my emotional regulation is adding a prefrontal load and then also like a non-negotiable for me is cerebellar training. I really need that because if I am not in my own regulation and doing my tools, I can make things up in my head. And I need those other brain areas lit up to be like, stop, stop that. Like stop that. Like this is, no, stop that, get regulated and move on because I could get caught in these- - In the stories. - And make believe stories. I mean, it's totally making things up. And so it's just really important that we understand this about ourselves. And like with NSI, when we train people through the certification and NSI plus, that we really do understand these brain regions and how to get in there and figure out like, what are you experiencing? Because the tools really do land in real time. And you know, sometimes you even got to, depending on where I'm at in my life, I'm like, I need to pin that and circle back when I get home because like I said, I mean, it will just get wild inside my head. And I don't want to dissociate, right? I don't think any of us want to be dissociating and whoever's listening and you like resonating with this, like dissociation is not ideal. We want to be in our bodies and it just causes so much more stress when we are repressing and suppressing and not showing up authentically. - And then when we're dissociating, we're also not getting that connection that we're probably really wanting. And that those regions that you talked about and having the tools to resource them, train them for better fuel, better activity, it is really important for the error correction and for the interpretation of these other emotional signals coming from other people. And then to reign that in because when the emotional response feels in the body so different or mismatched, we will create the stories around that. And so being able to have checks and balances with that is important. - Check some balances is great. - One quick note, this may be a little bit of an oversimplification but one of the ways you can know or notice I should say that the cerebellum isn't fully online is that all of your emotional responses feel 100% justified. If your emotions feel right and you are perfectly justified and feeling exactly what you should be feeling without question, you can be pretty sure the cerebellum might not be helping you to regulate and eliminate the unwanted emotions. - Totally, because there's always more nuance and complexity than this one way. Yeah. - Not anymore, the past version of me, like all the little parts of me are just like, yeah. Okay, so now that we have an understanding of what integration is, why it's so important, we wanna look a little bit at what impairs integration, right? And so we're really thinking about this impaired integration as a neuroplastic adaptation to threat. The brain is designed to adapt for survival. And if we're living in chronic stress or traumatic developmental environments, neuroplasticity begins to wire our system to prioritize protection over integration. Instead of building flexible connections between regions, the brain becomes highly efficient at defense. Patterns like hypervigilance, avoidance, shutdown, become the default strategy. They're also less energy costly because they have been reinforced over time. And these are the strategies that kept us alive in the short term, but over time, they limit our access to regulation and to growth. And then also we have unprocessed emotions here. Unprocessed emotions add another layer of fragmentation. When our emotions aren't expressed or metabolized, they aren't available as information for action and they continue to remain repressed as we have those patterns in our behavior. And that creates blind spots in our awareness. It keeps parts of the body brain system offline out of communication with one another. And so in this state, we don't lose the emotions themselves necessarily, especially if we are moving into repression, but we lose that access, that functional access to those emotions in a way that supports healthy processing and the integration of that emotional experience. - Trauma and chronic stress create fragmentation. This we know, that disconnection between the body and brain, between feeling and thinking. Early life experiences are A-scores. Our chronic stress environments, it also creates inconsistent attachment or trauma can wire the brain for hypervigilance, making integration harder later. Unresolved trauma and ongoing threat are repeated activation of survival circuits. The amygdala, the periacuductal gray, builds a default pattern of fragmented processing. - What most healing and personal development programs don't tell you is that your patterns, your behaviors, your emotional responses are outputs of your nervous system trying to keep you safe. And changing your thoughts won't change those deep-rooted patterns, you have to go deeper. Inside RewireTrial.com, you'll learn how to train your nervous system for greater capacity so that you can navigate life with more ease, more presence, more connection. We have five live classes a week with expert instructors. We have an on-demand library with thousands of recorded neurosomatic training sessions, and we have an incredible, supportive, inclusive community of people just like you. Doing this deep work together. You don't have to keep fighting against your own nervous system, you can repattern it. Start your two free week trial now at RewireTrial.com. - I really wanted to take a moment to in this conversation to talk about peak somatic experiences like psilocybin or somatic breath work because they're actually measured, emotional breakthroughs are measured in these experiences. And just a reminder that that's why these practices are risky because without proper preparation, if there is fragmentation, dissociation, low interoceptive skill and weak network integration, dropping into a huge state change can overwhelm the system's predictive model. In the moment, it can feel hard to feel these sensations accurately too much or strangely numb and afterward the brain may misencode the experience, bypassing the parts that needed processing or reinforcing helplessness. Big emotion without integration often becomes a story without change. Prediction errors don't reconsolidate into safety and choice. They can reconsolidate into more avoidance, more dissociation and a narrower window for future processing. Intensity does not equal integration. And without proper preparation and real time interoceptive capacity, peak experiences can outpace the system and get filed as threat. And bypass entirely. Integration is what needs, what lets insight land as behavior and behavior change, right? Signal quality and context are the answer, not more intensity. - That's very true. - So what would it look like if someone went through a peak somatic experience or a plant medicine experience like you just talked about and they weren't able to integrate? - Well, I can tell you what one of the biggest issues is, number one, they might not be feeling like anything happened, right? They don't feel the medicine, especially like a lot of journeyers and psilocybin experiences are somatic journeyers. They actually don't have any visuals. And so in the case of like, I didn't feel anything, we're back to languaging that looks like, it doesn't work for me. I can't heal, healing doesn't work for me. And when you've added a serotonergic medicine that has this big boost of neuroplasticity to it, right? What we do, we get better at. Now we've added a boost of that into the space where someone doesn't believe that they're healable, right? So it just kind of makes a well-worn path that you're trying to get into a new path of even more myelinated. - Makes it even stronger. - And that's really dangerous because a lot of people who don't have support and don't prepare for peak experiences have a lot of suicidal ideation afterwards. And then we're actually moving into a worse state of being than what we came in here to start with the first time. - I think what you touched on about the somatic experience only, and we've talked about this before in here, but it can be so confusing for people who aren't used to feeling, interpreting, understanding the signals from inside of their body. They don't have any visuals. It's fully just a knowing of felt sense from the body. The message that's trying to come through. And if you have no experience dropping into your body, feeling that it's very overwhelming. - Very overwhelming. - And very confusing. And you feel a little bit lost, I think, a lot of times on the back end of that. - Yeah, on the back end, having known people who've gone through that, it's described sometimes as like, I lost my footing. I'm lost in my life. I don't have an anchor point. I don't know where or what brown it feels like. I don't know what reality feels like. It can be really dangerous. - It's really distorting. - Yeah. - Yeah. - And you can get those big experiences if we don't have regulation and ability to fluidly move between these states. I think you can also come out in a very deep, big emotional place that you can't find your way out of. Like the suicidal ideation, the depression that sometimes follows. And there's no support. A lot of times people go to these centers and they have no support. People don't actually understand what integration is. And like we've said it so many times on here, we're talking about integration. We're like in the brain integration and that leads to a better integration already because the system is already kind of firing and wiring more completely, might be the word. And when people don't have a visual, that throws them off really because that's the expectation. When you don't have the visual and you don't trust your body, how can you trust your experience? How can you trust what the body is actually saying to you? - Yeah. So there's two more things I wanna add here. You two have mentioned trauma, conditional threat interpretation, chronic stress, these peak somatic experiences. But there's two more things at least that can really contribute to poor emotional regulation and integration. One is sensory mismatch and then one is our modern lifestyle. So sensory mismatch and the under activation of some of those pathways is sensory mismatches is a disconnect in the incoming sensory signals. And we've talked about this before a lot. - Five minutes ago. - Right. - You can't try this again. - Even in this episode. But in that moment or in those situations of sensory mismatch, the brain has to use an immense amount of energy just to figure out where am I, what's going on around me and am I safe? And so when those pathways are more active to try to figure out those questions, it leaves far less time, energy and resources for the frontal and emotional areas of the brain to stay integrated and regulated. So they're more likely to disconnect or we dissociate or we shut down some of the prefrontal cortex and cerebellum regulation because we're just trying to figure out what the heck is going on, right? So under activation of those can lead to really poor regulation. And in long-term trauma responses or chronic stress situations, our brain is gonna lean into survival strategies rather than really good regulation. The brain's going, I don't need to be happy, I need to be alive. And that can lead to long-term changes in our neuroplasticity and our adaptation, like Elizabeth, you were mentioning. On the modern lifestyle side of things, like our screens, so much disembodiment, such a fast pace, it really overloads the brain and can reduce coherence. This especially happens when the salience network or the default mode network are hijacked by our devices, like social media, email, YouTube, our dopamine networks desensitize to normal daily sensation. And then those practices really influence and keep us distracted and dissociated from ourselves and others in favor of a digitally connected world, right? End quotes. So that's not the only problem by any means, but it's a contributor, especially when we're trying to reconnect and really feel our body, be aware of our emotions, express them appropriately. Getting stuck in these digital loops and fast lifestyle and having sensory mismatch just compounds all of the challenges that we face. - I think that's important. I think it is important to bring up sensory mismatch again on here because when we talk about that chronic stress that can keep us from having integration, it's not just the stress you know about. It's not just the things that happened in the past or the stories that you can name, but it's also the unseen stressors of these deficits in your input systems that are driving up that stress all of the time that can lead to this as much as the things we might be able to know and name. - I honestly have never met a client who doesn't have sensory mismatch. - Of some form. - Yeah, honestly. - And maybe because of modern lifestyle too, that that's really-- - Yeah, certainly a contributor. - There was another layer that I kind of wanted to add into this because recently you sent me something that I thought was really interesting. There was a therapist and coach, Raquel Hopkins, and she was speaking and she said, "You're not carrying big feelings, "you're carrying big interpretations of normal emotions." And that line kind of stopped me because she was talking about the human experience of we all experience emotions. That's part of what it means to be human, but there's an interpretation of what am I making this mean that I'm having an emotional experience. And I think that's such a perfect reflection of how dysregulation and poor integration can disrupt our emotional experience. And she's really pointing to the difference between emotional depth and emotional distortion. And in an SI, that's often about brain integration and interceptive skill or our ability to sense and make meaning and move through an emotion without being consumed by it. And that also, I think, really ties into the theory of constructed emotions, which we've talked about quite a bit on here in the past episodes. This idea that an emotion isn't just something we feel, it's something that our brain creates and constructs based on our past experience, our body signals, and our predictions. And so all of this is kind of going into what meaning am I making of having emotions when having emotions is part of being a human being? - Yeah, yeah, I really love discovering her. And embodied perspective and distortion versus capacity, this is a really big theme of her work and why I've really loved discovering her because I love how Raquel names that holding big emotions without drowning is actually a sign of capacity. And that's what we're building here, not fewer emotions, but more ability to stay regulated as we feel them. When we lack introsceptible awareness, when we're disconnected from the nuanced signals of the body, emotions are nuances. They are layered and all that is happening all at once. It becomes easier to interpret very uncomfortable sensations as danger. So something like sadness or fear gets labeled as overwhelming or too much. And when we start building stories around it, then we're negating our capacity. And that's how identity gets entangled with emotional states. I feel sad becomes I am broken. And we turn a passing state into a personal truth. And that's when emotional distortion takes root. I also heard her say something and I thought this was really important to say as we talk about relationships and emotions like, how something you say is landing through my emotional state is not receiving what someone is actually saying. And that's really dangerous in connection and in presence and back to the attunement that we opened with in the conversation. - Yeah, it's really tough to listen through a dysfunctional lens, if I can say it that way. 'Cause everything you say to me, I interpret as more severe or more pointed maybe than it is or more dangerous than what you intend. And that could be positive or negative. If everything gets skewed and seen through that lens, makes a relationship really difficult. - Yeah, yeah, it does. - From a neuroscience standpoint, what Raquel is describing in that quote is a breakdown of like predictive coding and emotional modeling. And those terms may sound kind of scientific, but what that means is the brain interprets body signals, especially interoceptive ones, based on past patterns, past experiences and context. And the better integrated the system is that we've been talking about, the more accurate those interpretations will be. When interoception is impaired, or when brain regions like the insular cortex or the anterior cingulate cortex aren't communicating well with the prefrontal cortex, the brain doesn't have good data to build its predictions on. So it makes emotional interpretations that are louder, less accurate, possibly more overwhelming and like perceived as more dangerous. So in NSI, we talk about building regulation. We talk about building regulation, not by shutting down emotions, but improving the quality of our interpretation, the quality of the data that the brain receives. So better interoception leads to better integration. And that's how we can shift from that emotional distortion to having better capacity like Raquel was talking about. - Yeah. And I think as we have talked about on here many times, but it is important to keep coming back to this idea that emotions aren't just feelings they're brain-predicted body states, right? They're interseptive changes, they're motor patterns, they're autonomic shifts. There is a whole physiological experience of an emotion. And for the brain to be able to move through that emotional state or the brain and the body to be able to move through that emotional state to resolve and have that fluidity and metabolize our emotions, the states have to be perceived accurately like you were just talking about Matt having the clear sensory data coming in to build those predictions off of. They have to be linked to context and meaning through some of the networks that we've been talking about, the default mode network, executive networks working together. And then they have to be modulated and moved through the body with movement, sound, vocalization, the same way that we have to move our body. And I don't mean big movements, we don't have to go run. It can be gentle movements, it can be movement of our vocal cords, but there is a movement component to processing stress and to processing emotions as well. And when integration is impaired, emotions either become held as somatic tension and process states or spill over into that, overwhelm the emotional reactivity and then maybe shut us down completely. - Yeah. - I think it's important to remember that from a brain perspective, there's a reason that emotions exist. And we say sometimes we lose track of that 'cause it's kind of a weird meta thought about how emotions work. But emotions are there for a reason, they're motivating, right? Emotions are motivation toward something, to engage or disengage, to open or close, to move or to remain still. And it's not always as simple as those, we can't always boil it down to really easy connections, but our brain is trying to accomplish something by creating that particular emotion in that situation. And that's all based off of the prediction, right? So where most approaches start from a top down perspective like mindset, cognitive retraining, talk therapy, maybe willpower, to grind our way through it, those systems are largely offline during survival activation. When we do perceive danger or threat, all of those systems virtually disappear. And so what happens is then, if we don't have good regulation, but we're trying to use those systems, like the cognitive systems and mindset, it can lead to over intellectualizing of emotions. That's what I'm trying to say. So either trying to make ourselves feel what we should be feeling, like I don't feel anything, but what I should feel in this situation is X, Y, Z. So I'm gonna try to emulate that and kind of fake it till you make it. Or with an over interpretation and anxiety about what my emotional feelings mean, what to do about them. And we start to kind of loop into our own stories of interpretation and go deeper down that rabbit hole. So in both of those or the variations of them, the prefrontal cortex is trying to do the work for all of the parts of the system. It's trying to be the insular cortex. It's trying to be the anterior cingulate. It's trying to be the cerebellum, but it just can't do it all in a way that's accurate and appropriate. We need our interoceptive systems functioning well and getting appropriate input from the body and layering that with our prefrontal cortex in order to have good emotional regulation. And then additionally, it's possible that even some somatic methods can fail if sensory mismatch is keeping the threat level high. So someone is or would be perceiving their interoception and their sensory data, but it's distorted or unclear. So the brain can't link to it and make context with previous experiences. It's really gonna struggle to make any meaning out of that. - You know, when you said fake it till you make it. - That hit me too. - It really hit me, especially in your example earlier when you were talking about, no matter how bad you wanted to show up, you always felt yourself pulling away. And then, you know, I'm also thinking about, will the fight responses release this week? So like that's still so fresh in my mind and like thinking about my own prefrontal cortex and what came to my mind immediately was seeing myself in a binge, right? Because I couldn't regulate enough. I didn't have the tools and food was so supportive. I mean, it really was to be like, now I've left this situation. I've faked it until I could make it to survive in this scenario and now I need to eat. - Yeah, 100% relatable. After social situations, that was always when I would go home and binge. - And there's a physiological connection to that because if the prefrontal cortex is trying to be all of these other brain areas, it's gonna burn through so much fuel to do that. It is gonna be exhausted. And we're gonna be running on fumes. So yeah, after you fake it till you make it and overuse that frontal lobe, we're gonna be physiologically hungry as well as looking for a coping mechanism or a release valve for whatever was under the surface. - Yeah, there was, yes, definitely. And there was something too about the fake it till you make it. I was thinking of like the lack of like nuance or granularity in my emotional experience too. Like I really had such a limited somatic emotional vocabulary. It was like I either felt numb all of the time or like rage or overwhelming despair. And if I didn't feel one of those, I didn't feel anything. And so like I should be feeling connection. I should be like laughing and having fun and feeling joy. I should feel scared or excited or just none of these things were there unless I tipped all the way into like these two emotions that I had. And so I think we lose a lot of the spectrum of emotions sometimes too when we have emotional dysregulation. - And this is why masking is so prevalent, right? Because we mask the joy, we mask the connection and we mask through that cognitive lens of framework like, oh, this is what this looks like. So I can just act my way into and through all of this. And it's like, you really can't. - There's a cost. - There's a huge cost. - Yeah, that reminds me of our conversations about neurodiversity, right? And how we've kind of coined the term neuroabundance that in those cases, it's not necessarily sensory mismatch, although in some it's prevalent. It's not that there's inaccurate information or poor information, but the flip side of that, there's too much information coming in. And so it's really hard to interpret what is real, what is significant and meaningful within that informational flood. How do I pay attention to the piece that should be driving the emotion? And masking comes into play there too. Like, there's so much going on. I don't know where I'm supposed to land, but this is how everyone else is acting. So let me put my mask on and play the part. And that can be exhausting. - Completely. - It's very resource costly. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think what we're really highlighting in these examples of our real lived experience is like trauma splits us from our head to our body, logic from feeling, past from present. And emotional processing depends on restoring that wholeness so we can feel with support, not overwhelm. When we reconnect sensory inputs like breath, proprioception and vagus nerve tone, the brain perceives safety and only then can it allow stored emotions to surface for regulation and repatterning. - When you were mentioning that, that fragmentation, I just thought like it's interesting because we're talking about brain integration, but there's so many types of integration that we're talking about happening here, the integration of the work, the integration of the sensations and the like integration of parts of ourselves that fragmentation creates as we start to bring this back, working our brain, working as a cohesive unit, there is like a, it is the opposite of that fragmentation that creates that disconnect. And so I think that is a really powerful reason to dive into this work, to restore that sense of wholeness. And some of the ways that we began are really simply the tools that we talk about on here so often, beginning with simple intraceptive tools and then practices of regulating around that, giving yourself minimum effective dose of feeling a sensation and moving it, expressing it, it doesn't have to be this big catharsis, it doesn't have to be a huge event, but just these little moments of self-attunement and expression couched in other tools and sensory stimulus or maybe just other things that resource your nervous system, taking a walk, putting your feet in the earth, like surrounding those moments of feeling and expressing with things that are gonna support your nervous system's capacity to regulate through that experience. And then really thinking about being intentional with the pacing and dosage of that so that you're not exceeding your capacity to positively adapt to those experiences. - Yeah, and when I start working with clients, and even when I started working with myself as my first client, you know, I didn't just dive into emotions right away. You know, it was really about creating an overall safety so that I could excavate a little bit more, so that I could titrate into emotional processing. And I think it's really important for the person listening to understand that we're all starting at different places and this doesn't have to look any particular way, but you do have to start with a foundational daily nervous system hygiene practice. That's where we all begin. And that's sort of like the foundational place. And then from there, our practices grow because when I can create that safety, that allows me to get on top of things. That allows me to catch the, uh-oh, you're running stories. Like you've gone a little wild over here or like the idea too, that like I can feel the activations in my body and I can accurately describe them to myself like, oh, this is, this trigger is bringing this up. I can move with a lens of curiosity. And that just makes everything a little bit easier. But when you're in activated states, curiosity just feels like so unattainable, right? - So all of those are really excellent beginning tools to start to access body feeling and interoception, proprioception, training that cerebellum. And Jen, I love what you said about finding that ability to kind of excavate a little bit and be curious about emotions. So for those who may be a little bit more advanced on the journey, you've already had some experience using the tools and creating the daily practice. I often take people into then going in to do what I call an emotional retrospect or an emotional review. And I want to talk about this briefly, but I want to preface first to say, absolutely use your high payoff tools and minimal effective dose with this because it can be somewhat challenging to dig into our own emotions. And certainly only do this at a time when you have a cool head, like when you're emotionally dysregulated or wound up is not the time to try to do this. Put a pin in it, as you said, come back to it later. But the way this works is to pick a point in the recent past, maybe yesterday or the day before, that you want to spend some time exploring and excavating. I love that term by the way. So you may start off by doing some high payoff tools, regulate your nervous system, but then kind of dive into this with a journal and go, what was I feeling in my body physically, interoceptively? Does that remind me from anything in my past? What was the context in the previous experiences? Did I learn that type of reaction and feeling from someone else in my life? Or did I learn it as a rebellion against someone in my life? What did I think those feelings meant at the time, like the other day when that happened? How did I interpret them? What else could they have meant if it wasn't that, right? What was the benefit of that emotional interpretation? What was the cost? And then eventually you kind of end with, do I want to hold on to my original interpretation or do I want to reframe it and learn how to see it differently? And regulate throughout, right? Any one of those questions could be triggering. And so that's why I say do it when you have a cool head because you want to be able to be aware of do I need to pause and regulate again. But when you can slowly start to kind of excavate and learn about your own emotional responses and plant the seed in your prefrontal cortex, it says, you know, next time, I think I want to try it differently. I want to offer a different option, offer a new choice. There's a really interesting thing about the brain that it's so strongly craves novelty that even if you've been through similar experiences a thousand times and you have this well-worn pathway of behavior and emotional response, if you've gone through a practice like this and you've planted a seed that said, maybe next time I'll do it differently, then in the future, when you get into a similar situation and your brain is at that moment of making a decision of how am I going to react to this? Am I going to follow the old pattern that I've been through a thousand times? Or am I going to take the new pathway that I've never done before, but it's just an idea. It will often choose the new pathway just because it's novel and it kind of wants to see what's going to happen. So if you planted the seed of a possible positive response rather than your old style of reaction, there's a pretty good chance the brain goes, yeah, let's try that out. I want to see how this is going to go. And that's how you start creating a new neural pathway, like building a new option for your emotional journey. - Yeah, I love that. - It's so neat. - Having the reflection and I think it is really important to have these times where we're separate from the moment and we don't want a different state, but we do make the intentional time to go back and reflect and notice what were the more subtle cues that were happening in my body? When did that start? And when we're in that space, we have room for curiosity to start to think about that. And when I feel these again, what other path could I take instead of just letting the sensations push us into the thing, we're starting to recognize them sooner. Of course, doing tools and regulation throughout that so that we keep the state shift. And I think it's really powerful. Yeah, agreed, agreed. And let's talk about and close this out as like, why do we care about all of this, right? And for me, I said this earlier, but like our capacity to feel is our capacity to live. And when we can't process our emotions, we lose access to presence, to pleasure and to connection. And integration brings us back online so we can move through life with more freedom, choice and embodiment. Yeah, for me, it's because there's tools that actually work. You're not stuck. Neuroscience is the science of hope. A term that my wife coined a long time ago. You don't have to white knuckle your way through your triggers and emotional floods and just get washed over by emotional reactions that feel out of your control. This episode really offers a new path that's based in neuroscience and a little compassion and some tangible practices that reconnect your brain and body. This integration we've been talking about is really the foundation of healing. It's the way that our brain connects back to the body and talk therapy, mindset work, self-awareness, those are helpful certainly, but without the brain body integration, they don't land, they don't stick. So when the nervous system is fragmented, it's hard to find any amount of insight that creates change. This is really showing you how to bridge that gap and bring your brain and body back together so that emotional regulation is possible. I think for me, there's some individual reasons for this, emotional regulation shapes everything, our relationships, our ability to focus, our capacity for rest and joy and all these things that we want, our other healing modalities, how effective that is, affects our business and our leadership, but I also have been reflecting on the conversation we had with Prentice and Bill and how they talked about collectively, there is a lack of emotional regulation and capacity to process these big emotions that are so prevalent in this time with everything that is happening in the world, the grief and the fear that is real and the anger and all of the things, right? And that that emotional immaturity at a collective level or emotional underdevelopment, maybe, at a collective level keeps us stuck in these patterns of conflict and divide and large-scale dysregulation at a societal level. And so I do also think that there is something important for our growth as a society, as a community into making the time to understand this about ourselves and to begin these practices and for collective change as well as for individual growth. Well, I think if I deny my own grief, my own rage, I'm denying that of someone else's experience and then that's gonna lack empathy and connection right there because I'm denying your experience. And I think it's, whether we agree or not on whatever is happening, we should agree on the emotional experience of somebody else. And recently going through a time of loss, it's like grief was my portal through that, right? Because I want to feel the grief. So it's not like just sinking me and tanking me, right? It's so heavy. Some of these emotions have more like states of being attached to them, right? And so it's like emotions are portals and we want to get to the joy, not just wearing our mask. Right? So I find emotions are portals and they're really connective feelings. Threads. Threads. Yeah, yeah. If this conversation helped you see emotional regulation in a new light, please take a moment to subscribe to our audio channels and you can watch us now on YouTube. Subscribe to Trauma Rewired and share this episode with someone who's ready to reconnect with themselves. When you share, rate and review this podcast, you help us bring these powerful body-based tools to more people who need them and we're really so grateful to be on this journey with you. If you've ever felt like healing modalities just aren't working for you, like you're stuck in the same cycles, no matter how much mindset work you do, you are not broken. It's not about your willpower, it's about your nervous system. 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