Dr. Russ: Hello! Welcome to the Anxiety Podcast. I am your host, Doctor Russell Kennedy, and I'm doing this on my own today. I've had a few people suggest that they would like to just hear me talk for whatever reason, and today I thought that I would talk about safety. It's the first week in January right now, and I, I know a lot of people felt unsafe over the holidays because I can speak for myself in that. So the holidays were always a time that my father, who had schizophrenia and bipolar illness, would always go off the rails. He would always kind of go off the rails. And I was kind of at his mercy, you know, there wasn't there wasn't really a whole lot I could do. And I felt helpless and powerless. And I think that really affects our safety, especially as children. You know, we need to know that our parents are going to be there for us. And if our parents are actually the source of the pain, that's kind of a double whammy that no child should have to endure for sure.
Dr. Russ: Now, my dad was never abusive or violent, so it wasn't anything that was. The house would blow up or anything like that, but often he was gone because he would. He would get so sick around the holiday season because it's such an energetically active time of year. That's where a lot of alcohol abuse. Schizophrenia, bipolar, anybody who has mental dysregulation. The holiday seems to be a crucible for that. That just lights people up. And every year, that's basically what would happen in our family. We didn't really have a lot of extended family. There was my brother Scott, myself, my mother and my dad, and often my dad would be in the hospital for those, you know, 2 or 3 weeks over the course of the Christmas holidays. And, and it would just be the three of us looking around at each other like, okay, how's this supposed to go? And all of us are kind of like, even to this day, we're like, we're really glad when the holiday season is over and now the holiday season is over.
Dr. Russ: It's early in January. January the 4th. Today is my recording day here, and and I just wanted to talk a little bit about safety, because I think that that is the grounding part of how we heal is we feel we need to feel safe to be able to heal. We can do all the mental gymnastics or understanding why. I can understand why my dad went crazy on the holidays. I understand that I know it, I expect it, but it doesn't really help me heal in that way is because I didn't get a chance of feeling safe. There was always this waiting for the other shoe to drop, and a lot of my anxiety. People tell me that around Christmas, there was always this expectation that mom was going to get drunk or dad was going to get violent. And it's a very difficult time, and it's supposed to be a time of peace and calm and quiet and connection. And for me, it certainly wasn't that we didn't get a lot of connection. We were the only the four of us were kind of isolated.
Dr. Russ: We didn't have extended family, so we didn't have this feeling of safety. And I think it's so important for us as human beings to feel safe. And I think in our healing we need that feeling of safety. And so rarely is it actually offered to us. I mean, we get therapists that are kind and considerate and empathic and that kind of thing too. But we're often talking about heated issues. We're often talking about things that weren't safe abuse, abandonment, loss, neglect, bullying, maturing too early, whatever it was. And I think to change our nervous system from one of survival to one of growth, we need to feel safe. And in my opinion, current therapy goes at the problem and it doesn't really establish a grounded place of safety first, which is why I like somatic therapies, is they they focus on how can you feel safe in your body first. And when you feel safe in your body, then you can venture out into dipping your toe into the trauma. And it takes a while.
Dr. Russ: It takes a while to feel safe in your body. If for ten, 20, 30, 40, 50 years, you haven't. So I've been working a lot on myself in the last year is how do I make myself feel safe? I'm working on this hypno-meditation that I'm making right now for my MBRX people, and it's designed to help people find a place of safety, even if it's just in the moment. Because that's all we can really do is, is make yourself feel safe in the moment. And then when we do that on a regular basis, the moments start to congeal in to longer moments. And when we feel safe in those short periods of time, we can start to extrapolate that we can feel safe in longer periods of time. Because one of the things that I know about anxious people is that we are hyper vigilant, and that hyper-vigilance is what keeps us out of safety. If you're always waiting for the other shoe to drop, if you're always being hyper vigilant, if your nervous system is always waiting for some negative thing to happen, you never rest.
Dr. Russ: There's no safety in that. And I think as children, what we do is we create this hyper vigilant environment because we perceive that we need to be on guard all the time in case something goes wrong. Because so often in our childhood, something did go wrong, and we were essentially powerless as children because it was usually the adults or something beyond our control that went out of control. And we are there as kids and we're like, we have no agency in this. We have no way of alleviating this. And if your parents weren't good at repair, which so many parents weren't, Then the kids left in the suspended state of unsafely. And then we developed this sense of hyper-vigilance where we're always on guard and there is no safety in that. And in fact, when you're always on guard, when you're always vigilant, you convince yourself unwittingly, unconsciously that you're not safe. Because if you're always vigilant about what could happen next, what's going to happen, what's going to happen, what's going to happen? There's no safety in that.
Dr. Russ: There's no grounding, there's no peace in that. And I think it gives us this false sense of security that we're always ready for the next trauma. Because so often as children, there was the next trauma. The next trauma did come up. So it's learning how to create safety now. And it's not, I don't think, created through our minds. I don't think telling yourself I am safe, I am safe, I am safe, really has any long lasting applications. I think that we need to feel safe in our body, and that's why I'm creating this meditation to help you feel safe in your body, because our default setting is vigilance. And so by definition, our default setting is telling ourselves we're not safe. So the more we stay in hyper-vigilance, the more we overthink. The more we worry, the more we try and keep our ourselves prepared for any possible negativity. The more we leave safety and the more we leave safety, the more we tend to slide into hyper-vigilance. Because as a child, that was our only coping strategy was to become vigilant.
Dr. Russ: So what we do is when we're always vigilant, we are training ourselves through operant conditioning that we aren't safe. We are proving to ourself safe. We are proving to ourselves, through our own hyper-vigilance that we were not safe because if we were safe, we wouldn't need to be vigilant. As a result, we are always waiting for the next negative, the next approach on our safety. The next assault on us. We're always waiting for that. Maybe not consciously, but unconsciously and unconsciously is what rules our lives. So if we have this unconscious program running that we need to be vigilant. We're also running a program that says we are we are not safe. And as safety is so critical in being able to heal, creating a false sense of safety in your body allows you the platform and the grounding that you can create a new perspective in your nervous system where you are actually safe, even if it's just for a few seconds to start. But so often we don't even see that we can create safety. The hyper-vigilance has taken us over to the point where we don't even see it.
Dr. Russ: It's like a fish doesn't see water and we may have periods of calm or quiescence. We may have periods of calm where we feel okay, but that hair trigger is always there. It's all it's always waiting to come up. And it doesn't take a lot to fire things up again. And that was the case for me with my father is every Christmas there was going to be some kind of price to pay. There was going to be he was either going to go to a hospital or, he would become so depressed that he wouldn't leave his room. And if you've ever had a depressed parent, you know what I mean about how helpless that feels. So you develop this vigilance, you've this self-protection all the time. And by definition, like I keep saying here, is when you're hyper-vigilant by definition you're not safe. And the more hyper-vigilant you are, the more you teach yourself, consciously and unconsciously, that you're not safe. And we need safety to be able to feel calm, feel peaceful, allow that nervous system, that fight or flight nervous system to come down to rest.
Dr. Russ: Because the autonomic nervous system, like a teeter totter, you know, there's the parasympathetic which is the rest and digest wing. And then there's the sympathetic. So ideally like a teeter totter or seesaw or whatever you want to call it, when one is up, the other should be down. And when the sympathetic is up, the parasympathetic, the relaxation is down. When the relaxation is up, the sympathetic is supposed to go down. But with us, because we're always hyper-vigilant, that sympathetic never actually reaches the ground. We get this what's called Co activation, where we activate the parasympathetic and the sympathetic. At the same time, it's this state of vigilance. And it's so common for us and it's so regular that we don't see it as abnormal, but we certainly feel it that way. We certainly feel that we're on edge. We certainly feel that we don't have a lot of resilience, that we don't have a lot of back backing. When things start to go wrong, it automatically fires us into this vigilance and it's a horrible way to live.
Dr. Russ: It's a very difficult way to live. We can do it. A lot of people with anxiety live their whole lives like that, and they are able to adapt and cope to it, but it's not a very peaceful or productive or creative life or connected life, because you're almost always in some sort of survival mode, even if you don't really realize it. And when you're in survival mode, you shut off the social engagement system, social engagement system, the system that allows you to have eye contact, tone of voice, positive voice, body language, facial expressions, these things that allow us to connect to each other. And if we're not able to connect with each other. We can't also have safety because our safety comes in our connection with other people. The one of the worst things about anxiety is that it shuts off that ability to connect. And I'm sure if you have anxiety, you know how hard it is to connect to your partner or your kids or your parents when you're in alarm, because the survival physiology in your body has shut off the social engagement system of your mind that allows you to connect so many people, so many of my clients, patients, whatever you want to call them, say, you know what, I'm anxious, I, I withdraw, I can't connect.
Dr. Russ: Yeah, because you don't have the software enabled to be able you don't have that social engagement software engaged to be able to be warm and friendly and connected, because the survival software that's running under everything else is shutting off your ability to connect. And it's no wonder people have social anxiety disorder. Because if your body is alarmed, you're not going to have the luxury of your social engagement system working and flowing well. And I think we've all had that situation where we feel comfortable in the environment that we're in. We're maybe cracking jokes, we're happy, we're connected to the people that we're with. But if we don't have that connection, we get more hyper-vigilant, we feel less safe, and we double down on the fact that we're not safe. So what do we do? Well, we develop a sense of safety through our body. You can't really develop a sense of safety through your mind. And I found that out the hard way. I think you can have positive thoughts. I think that that does help to a certain extent, but it's really about breathing into your body.
Dr. Russ: It's really about creating a sense of touch, something that brings you in a sensation because sensation brings you into the present moment anxieties about the future. It's always about the future. Alarm background. Alarm trauma is always about your past. So in the present moment is the only place you actually can create that safety. Because the ego itself, what they call the ego, what I call the ego dragon in my book, is this omnipotent figure that says, you're not safe. I'm going to make sure that anything that's ever hurt you is never going to hurt you again, because you're never, ever going to do those things again. And unfortunately, because we need to do those things to grow. The ego dragon keeps us protected, but it doesn't allow us to grow. It doesn't allow us to heal. So it's really about, how can I breathe better? How can I stay in touch with my body? Things like tapping, you know, tapping works. Tapping is helpful because it brings you into the sensation of the present moment.
Dr. Russ: And if you can find your alarm, like I say in about all my books and programs, if you find the alarm in your body and you put your hand over it, and you connect with the alarm in your body and you breathe into it. And like I said, I'm making a meditation for this specifically, kind of to go along with the yoga nidra and the Ember program to be able to feel safe just even if it's for short periods of time, because we never feel safe. There's a part of us that just doesn't allow us to feel safe. Because as a child, that wasn't safe. When you felt safe as a child, you were vulnerable. And a lot of times what will happen is a child will feel safe and then the whole thing explodes again. Like this happens with a lot of alcoholic families. Alcohol has a binge. There's this huge I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Loving, loving, loving. Whatever. And then everything's calm for a while, and then the whole thing blows up again.
Dr. Russ: So the child realizes, hey, I shouldn't let down my guard and feel safe here because it's just going to explode again, which is one of the worst things about growing up in an addictive alcoholic environment, is that you can't trust safety because it's always shattered with with the next binge. And to some extent, that happened with me too, less frequently because my father would go crazy. You know, sometimes he'd be six, 12, 18 months between really crazy periods. But again, usually around Christmas it would sort of light up again. So my whole focus on this, (and maybe a bit rambly!), is to just explain how much we need safety. We need a sense of calm and peace in our body before our minds will even accept it. And we also have to use our minds if we have to use our minds in a way of setting up that safety and way of acknowledging that safety. Because as soon as we acknowledge the safety, we can make more of that. But if we just blindly go through our lives unaware that we're so vigilant all the time.
Dr. Russ: There's no safety there. There's no healing there. There's no place. There's no platform that we can use to ground ourselves to heal from that. We can use thoughts to help us and thoughts will help us. But it's our body that creates the unconscious blueprint of our lives. And if we can make that body feel safe, we can start getting closer to the authentic version of ourselves. Because if we're fearful all the time, you're not really seeing the real you. You're seeing the scared you. You might see the real you every once in a while. But in general, when we adopt this hyper-vigilance, which most people with anxiety do, we become different people. We get separated from ourselves and we get separated from the people that we love because we don't have the software engaged to be able to connect with them. Because the hyper-vigilance has activated our physiology so much that our psychology becomes so blunted and so unable to connect that we perpetuate the anxiety. Because to heal the anxiety, we need connection with other people.
Dr. Russ: But if the hyper-vigilance blocks that safety, blocks that connection, we don't have access to healing. And this is why I think we get into addictions. We get into zombies. Scrolling Instagram. I'm guilty of this as a distraction because we distract, because we're trying to find the only safety that we've had. And I put safety in quotation marks there because it's really not safe, but it distracts us from the pain of alarm in our body when we're distracted on Instagram or distracted by social media or any sort of addiction that we have. It takes us away from that feeling of being unsafe. But the vigilant, the vigilance is always there. So how can we create more safety in our lives? Well, learn how to breathe better, learn how to be in sensation. More like you learn how to use that. That mantra that I have sensation without explanation. Learn how to use that so that when you get into these alarmed, anxious periods, you can say sensation without explanation and stay in that sensation and learn that, yes, I don't like this feeling, but I can create a sense of safety despite this feeling.
Dr. Russ: If I practice this, if I stay with this sense of alarm and breathe into it and stay present with it, because I do believe it is a version of your younger self asking for your attention. When you give that younger self that attention, they can start to rest. Because this feeling of non safety started when you were a child, and we have to go back to that child and show that child that they are indeed safe. Adult you is going to take care of child you. Adult Russ is going to take care of Rusty. And when the child knows this, it is curious. When the child knows that you are actually trying to create safety for them, they will open up to it. It may not happen right away, but when you start creating a sense of safety because you probably never created it before, because you never knew you had to. When you start creating that sense of safety, you start pushing the hyper-vigilance away. So initially, the hyper-vigilance pushed out the safety. And now creating the sense of safety in your body in the moment starts pushing out the hyper-vigilance, and then you start correcting the original flaw in your programming, which was I'm not safe.
Dr. Russ: I have to protect myself at all times. When you start seeing I am safe, even if it's just for the next five seconds, that starts to you. Give it a chance to build. Once you start seeing safety, you get a chance to build it. But if you've never felt it, and if you've never allowed yourself to feel it, and if you've never created it in your body, it's unlikely that it's just going to spontaneously appear. So we have to create this sense of safety. So breath touch, taking some time just to be present with the discomfort and seeing that even though it's even though it's uncomfortable, I am safe. I am safe in this moment, despite the fact that my body feels scared, my body feels activated. I can take some breaths. I can put my hand on my chest. I can realize that in this moment I am actually safe. And then we just expand that. And like I said, I'm creating a hypno-meditation for this too. So you're not on your own with this.
Dr. Russ: And it's really important, I think, that we listen to something like this every day to start opening up the opportunity of creating safety when we've never really believed in it before, because we've never really seen it. We've lived in this hyper-vigilant state, even though we have periods where we feel okay. That hyper-vigilant state is always there. It's always hair trigger ready to start. So the more safety we can create, the more we start pushing out that hyper-vigilance. And like I said initially, the more hyper-vigilance you created as a child, the less safety you felt, and that became a coping strategy. Now we have to try and reverse that coping strategy because you're not a child anymore. You actually have the agency to be able to create safety where perhaps you've never had it before. And again, you don't have to create 24 hours of safety a day. You need to start slowly by creating little bits of safety. And those little bits of safety congeal over the course of time, where you start feeling more and more safe, and then that automatically releases this hyper-vigilance, this need to worry, this need to ruminate because you can go into your body, find this place of safety and stay there.
Dr. Russ: So that's it for this week. Join me next week. And, thanks for hanging in there with my rambling. I think the meaning hopefully will shine through and we'll see you again soon.
