Dr. Robyn Koslowitz

Yeah, and I feel like we don't teach kids that enough.

How to, I wouldn't say not take rejection personally because actually you do need the helpful feedback aspects of rejection, but how to look at rejection as only feedback and nothing to do with self-worth and nothing to do with you, even though it does make you feel like you are personally being rejected.

I was bullied as a kid, so it's activated the bullied circuitry in my brain and made me feel like, once again, the cool kids don't like me.

But it had nothing to do with the cool kids not liking me.

And sometimes it did.

Initially, when he asked me that question, and it was really hard for him, he actually started to cry.

I realized in that moment that what I was doing in going away behind my eyes, which is what psychologists call dissociation, it was a trauma response.

It's something that I do whenever I'm very stressed out.

And it happened through my intensely traumatic childhood.

I would disappear into my work.

And I could be chopping vegetables in the kitchen, taking care of my kids, but my brain is coding data right now.

And it really helps because then I'm calm.

I'm like that if I'm like when I was in graduate school, if I was really anxious, I could focus intensely on the patient in front of me, the research I was doing, a book I'm reading, really anything that takes me out of my body.

And then my panic attack goes away.

All of those yucky feelings inside me go away.

But I'm not present.

A piece of me goes away.

Until my son said that to me, I thought that I had my whole PTSD thing handled.

I knew how to breathe through a panic attack.

Like I had figured that part out.