Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Ready to lose 40 plus pounds without giving up happy hours, weekend brunches, or date nights. Then it's time to uncover the hidden link between binge eating and toxic relationships. And finally break free from both. Welcome to the Hungry for Love podcast with Jillian Scott. Y' all ready? Let's go.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Hey. Hey. Welcome back. All right, we are gonna try for like the fifth time to record this podcast. And by we, I mean me and the dogs.
Anyways, we are gonna dive into more topics around trauma, ptsd, complex ptsd, complex trauma, what all of this means for us in real life. And so I have a special guest coming on at the end of the week, Anne Marie. I'll be releasing the episode that we recorded last week and we had such an amazing conversation. You are not gonna wanna miss out. But leading up to that, I wanted to set the stage and kind of start this conversation around.
This is so much of the work that I do with people is really helping them to better understand and heal from relationship trauma as well as diet trauma. And often these two are overlapping and they are intertwined. And so today's topic and the context, I guess, in which I am really coming at it from this lens is more on the life relationship side of things.
And this is why it can be hard to create the bandwidth and the capacity to then focus on other goals like life losing weight or ending emotional eating or getting a new job or starting a business. It's because we feel like we are stuck in this survival mode. It can keep us and prevent us from being able to achieve our health and weight goals. But there's also a survival mode of weight loss, which is a concept I developed to help us better understand the fight flight, freeze appease mode and how it relates specifically to the weight loss process and where we can get stuck in this quote, kind of survival mode when on a weight loss journey. Today though, let's set the stage of complex trauma, complex ptsd, which is slightly different than what we might think of trauma or ptsd. Often those are one off events, they are one off occurrences or. And so complex trauma is prolonged exposure to multiple severe and often interrelated traumatic events. So typically this happens when there is abuse, when neglect or violence. Often it happens as a child, it can happen in a long term relationship, in a marriage. But sometimes we still are in survival mode post divorce. And this is the lens that I want to look at this from, is seeing how we can have this complex trauma which then leads to complex ptsd, a prolonged state of heightened stress and alertness caused by Repeated trauma where the nervous system gets stuck and fight, flight or freeze responses.
It's not just a one and done. It is long term repetitive abuse. It looks like growing up with an emotionally or verbally abusive parent, it could be a physically or sexually abusive parent. So something where there is constant repetitive exposure to the trauma and then the PTSD is now we get stuck in this. Because of the repetitive nature, we are now stuck in a fight, flight, freeze response.
We learned as a kid survival mechanisms and coping mechanisms. We learned how to survive, but then we got into often long term relationships, marriages sometimes where we now are continuing to employ those same survival mechanisms and then we get out of those. Now you are maybe post divorce, but still operating from this survival mode, from this survival mechanism, because divorce alone does not change that.
Divorce alone and divorcing a person, the legal aspect of ending a marriage does not change your dysfunctional patterns, your habits, the way that your body has learned to survive, it's learned to cope, it's learned to just get by.
And this is what I see is so many women that I work with and that I talk to, they are stuck in this survival mode of just getting by.
And so it's like we're operating down on this lower frequency.
We don't have even the capacity sometimes to have the vision for what's possible and for the future and to then be able to take the action towards it because we are stuck in this low survival level. And the way that we think about trauma, I think plays a factor and plays a role. So when we have this view of trauma as something that happens to us, this terrible, horrible, negative thing, when it's now also these terrible things that happen to us or these bad things that happen, and it's what we make it mean. It's laced with so much negativity. One of the things that Annemarie and I talked about on the podcast, which we'll all share later in the week, is this idea around there being a gift and a message in the trauma.
There's a message there that we have to decode. Just like we have to decode our emotional eating or binge eating patterns. We have to decode our trauma and really understand what is the message, what is the lesson, what was that here to teach you?
Because there are sacred lessons that we have to learn within the trauma that we experienced. There is meaning, there is value. And your job now is to pull and extract out that value.
But only you can do it. This is something that is unique to you. Your journey, your lessons, they are going to be unique to you and what you have gone through. When we get so laced with trauma, being this terrible, horrible, negative thing that happened to you and you're a victim and woe is you and this other person and this shouldn't have happened and it was really supposed to look like that over there. When we get caught up in these stories around the negativity of trauma and what we've experienced, that's what holds us and keeps us in that survival mode. And when we can shift into really seeing the value and seeing the message and learning and identifying what that looks like for us, that's what helps to shift us out.
It's all of the negativity that keeps us stuck in those same patterns.
A fight, flight, freeze and appease. Your brain is just trying to cope. That's all it's doing. That's what this is all about. Survival mode, complex ptsd. It is your brain's attempt to cope with an environment that doesn't feel safe.
It's exactly what I've been saying here with our habit brain. It is designed to keep you safe and alive at all costs. It wants to avoid pain and seek pleasure via the path of least resistance.
Often it's so easy for it to be food or alcohol or a dating app or sex or social media and doom scrolling.
Not that any of those things are necessarily bad in and of themselves. We always want to understand the intention.
Why am I reaching for it?
Why am I opening this app? Why am I turning to this food?
So let's look at some symptoms because I think this is important. Number one, we want to understand where we're at so we can meet ourselves right where we're at.
This is one of my core philosophies around weight loss is you don't start a program where it's like you could be doing it a year from now or eight months from now. It's like you've got to meet yourself where you're at today and get 1% better. Too many diets are way too restrictive and they start you off at where they think you should be, six or 12 months down the road. And it doesn't work because it's not a long term lifestyle. It's not something you can do. You have to cut out and restrict and avoid not just food, but often events, parties, people.
That's part of what creates the diet trauma. We need to understand where we're at in terms of healing from the relationship trauma that we've been through because this will open up and create the Capacity now to be able to address these other aspects.
Otherwise the problem that we run into is weight loss or even ending emotional eating is like taking away our only coping mechanism, right? It's like, you know how to feel better by turning to food. You know how to feel better by turning to wine. So now if I take it away from you, now what?
Now we have such a hard time wanting to, quote, give it up because that's the only way our brain knows how to feel better in the moment.
Even if logically, in normal daytime hours, we know we can feel better in other ways in the moment. It's like we don't want to give that up.
It feels like a withdrawal, it feels like a restriction, some symptoms so that we can better understand, meet ourselves where we're at right now and identify what the next step looks like and how to start changing the story. So symptoms, okay. Excess worry or constant fear of worst case scenarios.
Definitely a sign of complex ptsd, a sign of survival mode, constant exhaustion or fatigue, constant stress and or overwhelm.
If you feel like there's always too much to do, not enough time, this sense of urgency as well, but just feeling really overwhelmed, feeling like your cup is really full. If you are quick to be agitated, irritated, quick to lash out, or to feel like you lose your patience, that's a sign.
If you struggle to remember things, especially short term, struggling to make decisions, you might have difficulty planning or delegating, especially when it's one month out or longer.
So I see this as you might be able to plan or be prepared for a couple days at a time, maybe one week at a time, but you can't look beyond that. That looks like too much. You just can't take on anymore. Your brain can't take on anymore. And it makes sense because delegating or planning, thinking ahead to the future, it's also asking you to make decisions. If you're having a hard time and struggling to make decisions day to day, it's now going to make those longer term decisions feel even more burdensome.
And I know I felt this just shortly after my divorce. Almost exactly two years ago, October of 2023, I went through a four to six week period where I felt like I was just surviving, just getting by and all I could do was look at that current week and anything that was the following week. I told myself I would get to the following Monday. I just didn't have the capacity, I didn't have the bandwidth. I couldn't look at it, I couldn't address it, I couldn't get ahead.
It really was just me trying to survive week by week.
And I could tell, I knew it was like, just get by, just make it here. And I could bring it down and I could focus on just one week at a time and I made it through. But that was definitely a heavier period of survival.
Feeling numb or wanting to numb out is another sign. Trouble sleeping, especially staying asleep.
Racing or repetitive thoughts, overeating, over drinking, basically any form of overdoing it. We could put overworking here too. Like any form of overdoing.
Feeling unmotivated, feeling on edge, difficulty, truly relaxing. Even when you do take a break, it has you feeling more stressed or more anxious, more pressure to get things done.
It's almost like you kick yourself. You're like, dang it, now I just lost an hour getting a massage and trying to relax and trying to feel better. And I now I just feel even more stressed, even more pressure.
So even if you do take a break, it's like you can't really fully enjoy it.
You might have mood swings or feel like you're moody, and you also likely feel detached, as if nothing really matters. Hopeless, helpless, feeling stuck, feeling like no matter what you try or what you do, it's not going to work. It's like this negative cloud.
And some of these kind of overlap with other things. They might overlap with anxiety or depression.
But this is how I look at and how I would start to better understand where we are in terms of survival. If we are still stuck in this survival mode of heightened state of fight, flight, freeze, we are going to be experiencing a lot of these symptoms.
The key and the way to move through it. There's a couple different pieces. Number one, we want to radically accept where we're at and recognize that this is okay. To not be frustrated, to not feel like we should be further along, to not be kicking ourselves. This is where I'm at, and I might even hate it. And that's okay. This will not hurt me. And this is helpful because it means that we're not in a hurry to have to fix it or get out of it immediately when we can make peace and have this sense of acceptance. I don't love this. I hate how this feels. But this is where I'm at and I'm learning to accept it. I'm learning to find my comfort zone in the uncomfortable.
Whatever it is. Like we just start talking to ourselves a little bit differently.
And this was one of the thoughts that really got me through my divorce, was this feels terrible.
And that's Okay, I can do hard things.
Or another one was, this feels terrible, but this is what it looks like to get everything that I want.
Because I didn't want divorce necessarily. Divorce was what needed to happen though, in order for my now ex and I to both find the true happiness that we were both looking for because I knew we weren't going to have it together.
Is about who you are becoming. The point of this, it's not just to lose the weight, it's not just to get divorced. This is about who you are becoming and can you show up more as that person because that's how your results last, that's how they stick. If we look at something like weight loss, it's not just about being able to lose weight once. Anybody can do that. So many of you have done that and that's been. The problem is you can lose the weight, but it always finds you again, you always regain it.
Instead of becoming the person who now has the habits long term and the mindset that can keep the weight off forever.
To radically transform your relationship with food and body and exercise and your self talk, that is something that no other diet is out there teaching you. And that is why it is such a core foundational piece. That is the central piece. You've got to change your self concept, change your relationship with you.
And it's how we do life. It's changing how we show up in the world.
This is what it means to make habits stick. It's so much deeper than just do something for 60 days in a row.
You can do something 60 days in a row and it still falls off your radar because it does not change who you are and how you see yourself.
We don't want to use the past against us. This is not here to kick you. Right? I am not trying to throw sand in your face. This is about understanding where we've gotten it wrong in the past so that we can get it right moving forward.
Not right in terms of like, we never make a mistake or we never experience failure or disappointment or frustration. We are still going to have human emotions and human experiences. But there's a difference between the clean pain of life and the dirty pain of suffering.
Just because we experience pain doesn't mean we have to suffer. Just because parts of life and parts of our journey are going to be hard doesn't mean we have to suffer through it. So if you think about parenting, I've been almost five year old now, and there are some days, there are some weeks that are hard.
But even when they are emotionally Hard when they are emotionally draining.
It doesn't mean that I have to suffer through that. I can just recognize this is part of the 50, 50, 50% of the time things are gonna feel amazing. 50% of the time they're gonna feel pretty hard.
Sometimes they're gonna be so lit up and so mind blowing awesome and sometimes they are just gonna feel so terrible.
But we can do hard things.
We can do this too. We have overcome so much.
When we can recognize now and start to see how trauma is now, this new lens in which we can see, see ourselves, see the world, we can learn new things, we can become a different person because of our trauma, because it makes us better, not in spite of it. And this is important, is that we don't just fall into this victim mode of these negative things happened and now I'm stuck and woe is me. There's a time when we need to acknowledge and accept the hard of where we're at. This is not about trying to gaslight yourself. This is also though about recognizing and always taking yourself back to There is a lesson, there is a message. It is my job to decode it. It's my job to understand it. It's my job to learn from it.
It's mine. These survival patterns, these coping mechanisms, these dysfunctional habits, they are mine. They are within me. It is no longer just about your ex or your parent or your former boss or anybody else.
It's about you. And it's about how you are operating. It's about how you are showing up. It's about how you not just got into it, but stayed for so long.
And when you work on you, you now change the story. You get to rewrite the story moving forward.
And one of the key things that I do with clients is also we want to rewrite the stories from the past as well. Because that's part of the experience of healing, is to find new and healthier ways to process those past experiences. It's intentionally creating new stories for old circumstances.
It's something I do every week with clients. We look at what is the old story, what's the old pattern, the old circumstance. And now we are going to tell a new story. We are going to find something that is more true, more empowering and more in alignment with who they are and what they want.
And this is how we get to do trauma as a whole.
We get to see it now as what if it was a gift?
And most of us would not see it that way. It sounds so counterintuitive, so backwards, but what if your trauma was a gift? Gift?
What if it made you stronger? What if it made you better?
But we have to be willing to look at it that way when we do, when we can start to pull out the lessons and the learnings, when we can find the core wounds and where we were really hurt as a kid, in relationships and dynamics with friends, with careers or career paths, maybe some that didn't work out, some that did, when we can really pull out the wounds, we can then start to identify what is the healing here that's necessary.
So growing up with an emotionally dysregulated and I would say, emotionally abusive stepdad and without my biological dad and a mom who was very much a pleaser and appeaser, I learned how to please and appease as well. I learned how to walk on eggshells. I learned how to try to be perfect, how to say the right thing, how to not wake the bear. I learned a lot of dysfunctional patterns.
And because of these different situations and circumstances in my life, there were some core abandonment wounds because I felt abandoned by other people.
I was physically abandoned in certain situations because I was given the silent treatment. My stepdad would ignore me, not talk to me, pretend like I didn't exist, things like that.
I was abandoned at various times as a kid, in addition to the abandonment that I felt of not having my biological dad. And it was the story of he must not want anything to do with me. I must be a burden. I must be too much and yet simultaneously not enough.
It was partly these stories that created such a deep wound.
And those wounds often led to me abandoning myself.
I learned how to say yes when I wanted to say no. I learned how to give in. I learned how to make other people happy around me, often at my own expense.
I learned how to abandon myself to try to keep others happy, to try to keep them from abandoning me.
And the antidote to that for me has been to recognize and see when and where and why I have abandoned myself.
And now to bring in self love and self compassion, to learn what it looks like to have my own back, to learn how to be disappointed, how to fail, how to make some big mistakes and yet not throw myself under the bus, not think negatively of myself, not beat myself up internally, going back to the podcast from last week, learning how to think better about myself, even in the mistakes, even in the failure. And thinking just as positively of myself when I'm failing as when I'm succeeding.
That's what the antidote looks like to me.
But everybody's solution is gonna look a little different.
Everyone's journey is gonna be a little different.
And there are some similar flavors, there's some similar aspects, similar dynamics, but everyone is going to get their own truth. You have your own antidote. It's within yourself. And this is one of the things that I help to draw out. I help to pull out and help you to see what those wounds are and what the antidote is so that you can give it to yourself. And when you bring this in and you start to give yourself the antidote, you have the antivenom. When you bring that in and you give it to yourself, what you've truly been craving and desiring all along, this is what we're hungry for. We are hungry for love. Not just from other people, but from ourselves.
And when we can learn how to love ourselves bigger and deeper than anybody else, when we stop needing the love of someone else to make us whole, make us complete, make us enough, that's when we can thrive.
That's when we find our stride. We have the momentum.
But this is a journey, and this is yours to uncover. And there are not five simple steps to healing your trauma. And there are a lot of articles out there like three steps, eight steps, Heal from complex ptsd.
It's not quite that simple.
I've actually looked at many of those articles just out of curiosity, and so many of them are so eye rolling, boring. Like, you've got to be f cking kidding me.
You've got to be kidding me. Like self care. Duh. Of course.
Tell me something I don't know. But self care is different than just mani pedis. Part of this is the rewriting of the story. It's telling yourself a new story. And it's learning also how to prioritize your physical, mental, emotional, well being over certain goals. So there are sometimes clients who come to me where they are more in survival mode. And instead of focusing on weight loss, we have to focus on getting out of survival, in decoding and understanding what has them there, what has them feeling so trapped and so stuck, so overwhelmed. And sometimes it feels like leaping over the Grand Canyon. Getting to this thought or this idea of this is for me, this can make me better. This could be a gift because it just feels so heavy. And so we take it one step at a time and we start to play with and recognize, like where our nervous system has us right now and how we start to get 1% better, 1% better, day by day, validating your experience and where you're at. And also Deciding that there's going to come a day when you're going to decide, I'm done.
I'm no longer going to sit in shame and regret. I'm no longer going to keep beating myself up for these mistakes.
I'm tired of continuing to overeat or binge eat or emotionally eat or fall into these same patterns, these same habits day after day. I'm going to figure out a new way. I'm going to start doing something different.
That's when everything can change. Give yourself time to allow and experience your emotions as well as the physical sensations you experience in your body.
Both of them are important.
We have thoughts and stories that drive emotions like shame or guilt or regret. But then there's how we experience it. And it's those physical sensations, like a heart racing, your chest tightening, your stomach churning. Those are what we are often most wanting and trying to avoid.
That's what we are so often trying to escape, in addition to survival mode as a whole, and feeling so overwhelmed and stressed and just burnt out.
Of course we want to escape with food. Of course we want to escape with alcohol. And the goal now is not just to address the food or the alcohol or to just take it away. It's to create a life you don't need an escape from. Which means we have to address this underlying piece right here before we really dive into the emotional eating or weight loss side of things. Because you have to have the bandwidth and the capacity there. We have to be out of that bandwidth, baseline survival. I'm just trying to make it and keep my head above water. We've got to break out of that.
And there is so much healing that comes when you do this work, when you decide, intentionally and on purpose, that this is for you, that this is making you better, this is making you stronger. And this could be done no other way. There's no other way that this could have happened. It needed to happen this way. And I think about it with my ex and my divorce as well. Even if I didn't marry him, I would have married somebody just like him because those were my patterns, those were my habits. Any healthy relationship I would have sabotaged because I pushed one away right before I met my ex, pushed that guy away. And had I stayed with him, had I chosen him, I guarantee I would have sabotaged it in some way. I would have. That's just where I was at. I didn't know any better.
And now I do. And now I can make better choices. And that has come from a lot of learning, a Lot of growing, a lot of pain and definitely some hard rock bottom moments.
But there is peace and healing and freedom on the other end.
And so if you are in survival mode, you are in the messy middle. And right now it might feel like the current is raging and you are in the middle of the river and it looks like the banks are so far off and they're a lot closer than you realize. But this is where we want to learn how to get into the current and use it for us. Rather than constantly trying to swim upstream, trying to fight and resist and keep stuffing things down, keep trying to solve for the wrong things, the wrong problems, and actually bring it back to this baseline foundation.
And so often what we need to do is create the emotional safety for ourselves as well as the physical safety. There's physical safety in our bodies with our nervous system, safety to lose weight, safety to let go of emotional eating or emotional drinking habits, just like safety to fail. Because I'm no longer going to talk about myself. All of this is part of the process.
This is how we heal, this is how we get better. And if you want some help, I would love to chat. I have two spots open right now for one on one private coaching. And I also have body you crave Accelerator, which is a small group coaching program that is also launching at the beginning of November. And there are a couple spots still available for that. So if you'd like to learn more about what it would look like to work together to see what it would entail if we are the right fit. If you have any questions, your next best step is to schedule a free consultation.
And on the call we'll talk more about where you are now, where you want to be in a year and what's really getting in the way.
And oftentimes we get so hung up and I think so urgent and frantic to create results now, immediately. And yet when we start to look out, six months, 12 months, two years down the road, when we can stay focused on that future vision, I promise you, create it faster.
I have done this, my clients have done this. We create a one year future vision and then so often we go on to create it in six months or less.
It's mind blowing and you can do this too. But sometimes it is that willingness to slow down that actually speeds you up.
This is what it's all about, is really understanding what is getting in the way and where things like self sabotage are coming up as a way for your brain and your body to try to protect you.
It's self protection at its finest.
And that's all your brain ever wants to do, is to keep you safe so that it can keep you alive. Because it sees any type of pain or threat of pain, physical, mental or emotional, as being a threat to your very survival.
And this is what we have to rewire. Because in the past it was in the past you were shamed, in the past you were guilted. In the past you were belittled and demeaned. And there were snarky comments. Even as a kid you dealt with this. But there is healing and it starts with you.
That's the beautiful part. You don't have to make or wait for anyone else or anything else to change. You get to be the catalyst. And if you would like some help on this journey, I would love to chat more.
All right, the next episode is going to be the survival mode of weight loss and how I see how these different dysfunctional patterns play out, but how our nervous system often mirrors the same same struggles and the same challenges we have with weight loss.
So that'll be the next one and then our bonus episode around trauma and healing with the amazing Annemarie. I hope you all have a fabulous week. Here's to creating the life and body you crave.
[00:29:21] Speaker A: If this episode resonated with you, it's time to break free from destructive cycles around food, alcohol and toxic relationships. Your next step Book your free Break the Cycle call where you'll finally see why your binge eating and relationship patterns are so deeply connected and how to break free from both for good.
You'll walk away with fierce clarity and a game plan to step into a life full of fun, adventure and self love. Grab your spot now at www.bodyyoucrave.com forward/btc.
It's time to break the cycle.
[00:29:57] Speaker B: I'll show you how.
