Latest / Why You Got Sick: How Emotion Drives Chronic Illness & Healing in Women / #35. Two Hidden Survival Responses Are Driving Your Chronic Illness Flare-Ups — And This Is Why You Can't See Them

Transcript

#35. Two Hidden Survival Responses Are Driving Your Chronic Illness Flare-Ups — And This Is Why You Can't See Them · Why You Got Sick: How Emotion Drives Chronic Illness & Healing in Women

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: fight and flight are not the only state of survival mode.
• 0:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And by now you know that being stuck in survival mode has a huge impact on your chronic symptoms and your flare-ups.
• 0:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: But there are two more states and because they're so much quieter than fight or flight, almost no one recognizes them for what they are, which is exactly what makes them so damaging.
• 0:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is why you got sick.
• 0:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Teclody Francesco, certified mind-body practitioner, and certified holistic life coach.
• 0:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: This podcast is for women living with chronic illness, autoimmune disease, IBS, chronic fatigue, PCOS, andometriosis, migraines, fibromyalgia, or persistent symptoms that no one can fully explain.
• 0:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Twice a week we look at how emotion drives chronic illness in women.
• 0:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: One episode goes deeper into the pattern beneath the symptoms.
• 0:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: The other gives you a quick way to interrupt the cycle.
• 0:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you're done organizing your life around symptoms and flare-ups, this is where that changes.
• 1:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: This podcast shows mind-body education.
• 1:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is not medical advice and is designed to compliment not replace your medical care.
• 1:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's begin.
• 1:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: In this episode, you'll discover the two hidden ways your body fights to survive that no one ever taught you to spot.
• 1:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: You'll learn why the comest woman in the room can be the one whose body is struggling the most.
• 1:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you'll discover the one shift that tells your body the threat is over so it can finally start deep healing.
• 1:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's talk about these two other survival states, and we're going to start by naming them.
• 1:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Those states are freeze and fawn.
• 1:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Freeze is what the body does when it has decided it cannot win by fighting and it cannot get away by running.
• 1:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it goes the other direction entirely.
• 1:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: It shuts down.
• 1:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: where fight and flight flood you with energy frees pulls it out of you.
• 1:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The system drops into a kind of conservation mode and is heavy and slowed and shut down waiting for the threat to pass.
• 2:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the body, this shift is not subtle.
• 2:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Your energy drops out from under you.
• 2:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're thinking goes foggy and far away.
• 2:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: You feel heavy, slow, like you're moving through water.
• 2:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes you go numb, like you're watching your own life from behind glass.
• 2:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is a state women with chronic illness live in far more than any one recognizes, and it gets mistaken for laziness or brain fog, or for the illness itself.
• 2:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is not.
• 2:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is a nervous system that has dropped into shutdown and stayed there.
• 2:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fawn is the opposite motion, where freeze shuts you down, fawn pushes you into engagement.
• 2:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's the state where your body decides the safest way through a threat is to manage the person in front of you.
• 2:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know that feeling, even if you've never had a name for it.
• 2:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The conversation starts to get tense and you fill your self-start adjusting, softening your voice, reading their face for the next shift, reaching for the thing or the response that will smooth it all over, settle them down and get the temperature in the room back to safe.
• 3:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Saying the yes that makes a discomfort go away before you've even checked in whether you mean it.
• 3:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: From the outside, it looks like understanding and maybe even emotional maturity and diffusing.
• 3:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like you're being easy and accommodating.
• 3:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Inside, it's a body on high alert, scanning another person for danger and moving fast to keep that danger from escalating.
• 3:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: The fight is gone, and the flight is gone, and what is left is you working over time to keep someone else okay so that you can be.
• 3:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: In both of these states, the threat response is still fully switched on.
• 3:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is the thing to understand.
• 3:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Freeze looks like nothing is happening, and fawn looks like everything is fine, but underneath both, the body is in exactly the same emergency, it would be in if it were running or fighting.
• 4:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: That activation has not gone anywhere.
• 4:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's just stopped being visible, which makes this so dangerous.
• 4:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is what makes this so costly for a body with chronic illness.
• 4:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: fight and flight at least move toward completion.
• 4:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: They'll burn through and eventually they will end.
• 4:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Freeze and fawn do not end.
• 4:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're holding states.
• 4:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: The body stays in the emergency, sometimes four years and it never gets the signal that it's over and it's safe to begin repairing.
• 4:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is the pattern.
• 4:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let me show you what both of these have looked like in my own life because I have lived each of them.
• 4:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Freeze still takes me out sometimes even now.
• 4:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: It sneaks up on me.
• 4:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: I get overstimulated.
• 4:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: My system winds higher and higher and then it just crashes.
• 4:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: 24 hours sometimes where I cannot do anything.
• 4:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: I feel heavy, overloaded.
• 5:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like the volume on everything has been turned up too high and my body has pulled the plug in response.
• 5:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And here's the part I want you to hear because it is so easily mistaken for something else.
• 5:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is not a low mood problem.
• 5:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: I am not sad.
• 5:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: I genuinely cannot think and I cannot do.
• 5:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is a full body shut down and it arrives because I've been running so activated and so heightened for so long that the system can't hold it anymore and it just drops hard.
• 5:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: When I'm in that state, if someone asked me to do even one thing, even something so small,
• 5:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: I get so snappy, because I have nothing left to give.
• 5:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: And what is wild is that I don't even see it happening while it's happening.
• 5:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: I only catch it on the way out.
• 5:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: When I surfaced and think, oh God, that was a shutdown, that was my body in freeze.
• 5:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is what makes the state so hard to spot in yourself.
• 5:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't announce itself the same way these big other responses do.
• 6:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: It just quietly takes the day.
• 6:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fawn was a different survival skill that I learned very young.
• 6:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was a family member with a very explosive temper.
• 6:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when someone erupts like that, loud and overwhelming and verbal, a child works out very fast that there's no reasoning with it in the moment.
• 6:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is no conversation or counter argument that fixes it.
• 6:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: The only way through is to appease, agree, sue, shrink, say whatever, ends it and get yourself out.
• 6:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that is what I learned to do, and it did not stay in childhood for me.
• 6:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: It followed me into my closest relationships.
• 6:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: This reflex to manage the other person and to keep the peace at a cost of myself, to make the discomfort stopped by giving them whatever the moment required.
• 6:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the one I have had to actively rebuild.
• 6:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now when someone gets heated, I have to work so hard to stay calm, but I do not abandon myself to do it.
• 7:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't escalate, but I also don't fold.
• 7:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: I stay in the room.
• 7:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Really steady without rushing to agree just to make it end.
• 7:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I'll be honest with you.
• 7:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: It takes everything in me some days to hold that moment, because the old wiring is still there.
• 7:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Telling me the fastest way to be safe is to just give in.
• 7:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is fawn.
• 7:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not a weakness, just a response the body learned a long time ago that told it keeping the piece was how to survive.
• 7:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: So here's what is actually happening in the body and why these two states are so much more damaging than they look on the outside.
• 7:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Think of your nervous system as having an accelerator and a brake.
• 7:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fight and flight are pure accelerator.
• 7:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Energy floods in.
• 7:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Your body moves and you can see it working.
• 7:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is doing the obvious thing, pushing the danger away or getting you out of it.
• 7:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Freeze is different, and this is the part almost nobody fully understands.
• 8:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: In a freeze state, your body slams the brake on, while the accelerator is still flat to the floor.
• 8:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: The shutdown you feel, the heaviness, the foggy,
• 8:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: But underneath, it is the engine still screaming and firing on all cylinders.
• 8:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: full activation and full shutdown firing at the same time, fighting against each other inside the body.
• 8:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's why a free state can wipe you out for a full day.
• 8:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not that nothing is happening.
• 8:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's that everything is happening at once and it is tearing into directions and there's no movement to release any of it.
• 8:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now let's talk about fond because it has its own
• 8:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fight pushes the threat away.
• 8:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Flight removes you from it.
• 8:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Freeze, hides from it.
• 8:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fawn is the only one of the four that keeps you connected to the danger.
• 9:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: To manage someone, you have to stay close to them, keep watching them, keep reading them.
• 9:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: So your body never gets to break the contact with the thing it's afraid of.
• 9:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: It stays in the room with it on duty, sometimes for years.
• 9:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the why this is why we care about this, because both of these states ask your body to spend an enormous amount of energy while looking from the outside like calm or fatigue.
• 9:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And for a woman already running low from chronic illness, that hidden spend is energy her body did not have to give.
• 9:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: She's not resting in the freeze, and she is not fine in the fawn state.
• 9:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: She is burning through the exact reserves her body needed for repair, on an emergency that no one, including her, can see.
• 9:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: These two states need opposite things from you, so here is a small little lever that you can pull for each of them.
• 10:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: When you're in a free state, your body has disconnected from the environment you're actually in.
• 10:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you need to bring it back online, and you can bring it back through a five senses exercise.
• 10:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: This requires you to just run through your senses, and name five things you can see, four things you can hear.
• 10:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Three things you can feel against your skin, two you can smell, and one you can taste.
• 10:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: It sounds too simple, but there is a real reason it works.
• 10:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Freeze happens because your body has lost track of where it is, and is treating this moment as a threat.
• 10:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Naming what is around you one sense at a time is how you show it where you actually are, and that the room is safe.
• 10:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: That right now, in this moment, nothing is coming for you.
• 10:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fawn is the yes that leaves your mouth before you've even checked in with yourself.
• 10:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so the lever there is to just buy yourself a breath.
• 10:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Someone pushes the old reflex surges up to smooth it over, and instead of answering straight away, you just say, let me think about that, or can I get back to you?
• 11:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're not holding your ground or saying something that's hard to communicate.
• 11:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're just giving yourself one beat before you hand over the automatic yes.
• 11:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in that beat, your body learns it can stay in the discomfort and hold a boundary and be completely fine.
• 11:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's recap what we talked about today.
• 11:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are four ways your body tries to keep you safe, not too.
• 11:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Everyone knows fight and flight.
• 11:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Almost no one knows the other too, and they are the easiest ones to miss in yourself.
• 11:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Freeze is the shutdown.
• 11:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: The heavy foggy cannot move throughout the day feeling that gets written off as laziness or fatigue when it is actually your body stopped with the engine still running underneath.
• 11:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fawn is the appeasing, the yes before you've checked it.
• 11:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The rush to keep everyone else okay at the cost of yourself.
• 11:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The wiring that learned managing other people was how you stayed safe.
• 12:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: It looks like being accommodating, but it's your nervous system on duty all the time.
• 12:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you want to know which one of these patterns your body runs automatically, I've made something for you.
• 12:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a free prompt that you drop into chatGPD and it will walk you through finding your own freeze and fawn patterns, where they came from and the physical symptoms they are connected to.
• 12:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: The way we did today, but personal to you.
• 12:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's completely free right now, but that will not always be the case, so go and use it while you can.
• 12:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: The link is in the show notes.
• 12:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'll see you in the next episode.
• 12:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Bye for now.