Mindset Work Can’t Change your Survival Physiology

To make shifts in your life, you’re supposed to shift your mindset… right?

Sure. But what if the thing you are trying to shift is something you can’t ‘mindset away’? If the thing you want to shift isn’t influenced by your mind, how can you use your mind to fix it?

Take this as an example: when your thoughts are dominated by your stress physiology, your brain chemistry focuses on survival. You can ‘distract’ your mental preoccupation on ‘survival’ for a short while, but inevitably your neural pathways will go back to negative states like worry and fear.

When the problem is rooted deep within the nervous system, your mind can’t get to it. There is a way to get to it, just not with your mind.

I feel really sad when I hear someone criticising themselves for not being able to maintain positive thoughts, or stay happy, or be grateful. It’s no wonder that mindset gets thrown out the window as intermittently effective at best or completely useless at worst!

There is a place for mindset work. But only after you’ve laid the foundations from the bottom up. And working from the bottom up is achieved by changing the response to stress in the body first.

So, when people tell you that you can create a magical life by only focusing on the magic and then IT DOESN’T WORK, you become convinced that manifestation is a load of crap.

But what if is just that your brain (not your mind) can’t focus on the magic? Mindset and manifestation work for others because they have laid the foundations so that it can work (a bottom-up approach to change). When that foundation isn’t there and you focus on ‘fixing the mind’ through mindset work, you are using a top-down approach that has no legs to stand on.

It is important to think of yourself as a holistic being, with your mind being just one component. If you take care of all of you, then the tools you use have a better chance of working effectively because the groundwork – such as establishing the body as a safe container, identifying resources, and building (or rebuilding) resilience in the nervous system – has been laid. When you train yourself to manage the highs and lows of contraction and expansion in the nervous system with ease and without feeling overwhelmed, you are creating the capacity within yourself to deal with stress more effectively. Having achieved this, you are in a much better place for managing your life using whatever tools resonate with you, or for using somatic trauma therapy to process trauma.

Disconnected and numb…in survival state of freeze

Often, the situations that overcome us are derived from early childhood experiences that we are not always aware of. Our inner critic is so pervasive that we don’t realise we have internalised one of our parents’ voices – telling ourselves the same negative things we have heard them utter to themselves.

It frequently boils down to an intergenerational trauma pattern, where the parent was chronically dysregulated by something in their own childhood. Because those experiences – and missing experiences – are held in their nervous system as encapsulated traumatic memories, over time it becomes almost impossible for that parent to feel hopeful or to expect a positive outcome. They may be intensely negative, highly critical, unable to play or have fun, and like Chicken Little, always expect the sky to fall down. Those neural habits eventually lead to permanent changes in the filter they use to perceive and interpret the world - and the behaviour of humans in the world – a filter which is unconsciously passed along to offspring.

The primary caregiver’s neural circuitry moulds their children’s neural circuitry (and also forms their central and autonomic nervous systems), and this can lead to their offspring spending their adult lives in a low-level depressed state, similarly expecting the worst to happen, unable to visualise, manifest, and actualise the best outcomes for themselves – unless they discover elaborate ways of bypassing what’s happening within.

It isn’t their fault.

It certainly isn’t remedied by thinking happy thoughts.

It IS remedied by switching off the survival physiology – which is the only state they are familiar with because it was inherited from their primary caregiver – and has been switched ‘on’ for a very long time.

It’s not even the parents’ fault, because their natural survival biology didn’t switch off after their own nervous system became chronically dysregulated.

Finding a solution to this often feels like an overwhelming and incomprehensible thing to most people. That’s because the mind doesn’t know how to fix it. But the body does.

Turning off the survival switch isn’t accomplished by the mind.

It is accomplished by the body being supported by another body to co-regulate, a body that has learned to regulate its own nervous system, and can help the traumatised person switch their physiology from dysregulation to regulation.

Read more about the nervous system here.

Support for neuro-sensitive healers

In my trauma-informed group counseling program for healers and neuro-sensitives, I teach methods to eliminate overwhelm and rewire patterns of protection, banish procrastination and self-sabotage and metabolize trauma that's holding back neurodivergent practitioners from thriving. All set within a safe container of shamanic wisdom practices.

Expansion Training for Healers is a 10-week group program for just 12 healers and neuro-sensitives - with plenty of individual support.

Doors are now open for the next round of Expansion Training for Healers, starting Tuesday 9th May, 2023.

If you're curious how healing and expanding your nervous system can help you, book a co-regulation call to explore whether this trauma-informed therapy is for you.