Dr. Nicole LePera

And what is happening is we're becoming emotionally flooded because those are the confusing moments, right, where we have all the no and we know that these habits and we don't want to be saying or doing these things or we want to stay connected because this person is important to us.

Yet our body goes into a stress driven autopilot, so to speak.

Where we tune in somewhere down the line, right?

Sometimes hours later, sometimes days later, right?

And it's like, oh, gosh.

And we carry then shame based on the reactions that we've had.

So my hope is always to not only give, right, the why in those moments.

You can't just calm down like maybe a very well-meaning loved one is telling you to do.

Because you are so flooded and brought back in time and your body can't calm down unless you teach your body how to calm down.

So beginning in the body, as I often suggest we do, it feels very much like a stress response, which impacts three major systems that we can give our self-awareness of by focusing our attention on our heart rate, our breathing, and the tension in our muscles.

So for a lot of us, right, a moment of emotional flooding, and again, I'll just briefly talk about, right, the over and under, is when our heart starts racing, our breath quickens, our muscles become tense, we might clench our jaw or even our fist, right?

We're flooded with energy.

I want to also give justice, though, to those of us that kind of shift into a more shut down state, where instead of, right, all of that amplified energy, we might feel numb, feel cold in one second.

Right.

Our heart rate, we can't even feel our heart in our chest and we're holding our breath and our muscles might well as feel like putty.

We want to get up and run, but we don't even feel like we can summon the energy to.

So that's what's happening in our body.

Right.

This immediate we don't have to think about it.

Our body is already shifting into that action or reaction in our mind.