16-B. The 6 Steps to Break the Trauma Bond - Normalizing Stress Hormone Levels - Chaos Addiction Mini-Series, 4/4 - Emotional Detachment as a Tactical Advantage for Family Court, Season 2

In this episode we explore how to reduce the levels of the stress hormones in the brain to become free from the trauma bond. Being autistic means you can have very methodical trauma bond recovery strategies. If you're also Catholic, that means you have an array of tools at your disposal to heal the trauma bond. Let's explore 6 different ways you can break the addiction to chaos, break the trauma bond and journey towards Emotional Detachment as a Tactical Advantage for Family Court.

This is the transcript for Episode 16-B.

Welcome back to Light in the Battle. I'm Faustina, a single autistic mom raising an autistic PDA child, healing from narcissistic abuse and winning in court. I'm doing it all without a husband, a safety net, and I am carrying 99% of the parenting load. It's just me, my kid, my dog, and Jesus. Light in the Battle is where we get clearer, calmer, and spiritually and legally harder to mess with.

I want to give you some perspective as to where this episode fits. We're in Season 2, "Emotional Detachment as a Tactical Advantage for Family Court" and more specifically, we're in a four-part miniseries.

• Episode 15A was an example of a situation where I was struck with very sudden, unexpected peace and how that felt (hint hint, it was not good).

• Episode 15B is the steps that I implemented to get used to that peace and to tame it.

• In Episode 16A, we nerded out on the neurochemicals in the brain that are behind that addiction to chaos and that explain the trauma bond.

• And in this episode, 16B, I want to go over a quick reminder of the story, followed by the 6 steps that I took from a faith perspective as well as day-to-day very concrete steps to get the neurochemical levels in my blood back to normal. The goal is to build bridges from, "oh, chaos is familiar, everything else is boring, I don't like this peace, I want to go back to feeling intensity, and I want to create more problems in my life because that's what I'm used to", over to, "oh, okay, this peaceful life that I said that I wanted, I can get used to this."

So here's a personal story that I shared in episode 15A. After the last hearing, the one I won, the one that I believe flipped the entire long-term plan of my co-parents inside out, I should have felt peace, safety, vindication, you know, all those good things. And instead, I feel like my nervous system crapped out. It was like, "error, error, something's wrong, we do not recognize this reality, please return to chaos immediately." It was like a bug in my brain, in my system. I was crying for days, as I've shared, and it wasn't because anything was bad. But they weren't happy tears either.

Because that peace felt like a foreign movie, like a weird situation that was actually very scary and was not compatible with what had been going on in my brain for so many years, I just didn't know who I was - without the financial pressure, the terror, the constant prepping for court, my identity of being a woman fighting for survival. When all of that disappeared, I pretty much crashed into a void. And it helped when I understood that game-changing aspect, the science behind it. Okay, my body's addicted to intensity, not because I want chaos, but because it's all I know.

That gave me a lot more patience for myself through that process, a lot more compassion, and everything shifted.

1. Let's talk about the Catholic interpretation of this

There's a "spiritual withdrawal" phenomenon that is very real. In scripture, Jesus says, "my peace I give you, not as the world gives." Well, God's peace doesn't feel peaceful at first. There's his plan, that's what he wants for us. And then there's what's going on on Earth in a reality that we've gotten ourselves into through our own choices, or through wounds that we may have carried, which may have blurred our judgment. I'm not judging anyone here.

We ended up in that situation, that was never God's plan for us. He has a plan for peace for our lives. And it doesn't feel peaceful when you're addicted to intensity. So he's going to give us that peace, not in the sense of what the world would call peace. It's a much deeper, much more godly peace, the peace that comes from the creator, the plan that he had for you, since you were conceived in the womb. And that's not going to be the peace of the world. It's not going to be the peace that you experience at first. And when you finally escape this spiritual bondage, whether you call it narcissistic abuse or flat out demonic oppression, you go through that backlash.

It's a known phenomenon in deliverance ministries

There's a backlash where your soul is free, but your body and the chemicals and the brain and all that hasn't caught up. And that gap between the two, no pun intended, but it feels like hell. And so this is why, in my case, I relied heavily on

• Rosary repetition,

• receiving the Eucharist,

• having Holy Water in my apartment and on me,

• blessed Miraculous Medals in my apartment,

• confession, because confession is going to close those doors of your soul to any demonic influence that might try to enter into your life.

• And just routine prayer, just staying connected to my maker and trying to better understand his plan for my life and that peace that he wants for me.

That was the absolute overall goal, but that I could only see from a distance at first. All of that helped. None of it is magic. It's godly.

And more importantly for my autistic folks, it's rhythm

So the Rosary itself, there's repetition in it. There's a stability, a predictability in it. Receiving the Eucharist at least once a week, that's a routine that you can set for yourself. Confession, same thing. You can decide, I'm going to go every month, for example.

"You're creating a rhythm

which can very well stabilize

your dysregulated nervous system"

Where the enemy is going to use chaos, God is going to use order. So dive into that. Use the tools. They can very much create order in your life.

Now let's go back into non-spiritual, more just physical conversation

What actually breaks the trauma bond, the addiction to chaos on a physical level? I'm not going to be doing the "breathe into your toes" advice, the grounding tools that I have shared in earlier episodes. I feel like I've maybe equipped you in past episodes on very short, very practical, very quick grounding techniques that you can use. So we can look into bigger picture ideas.

2. The second thing we're going to want to do to break the addiction, the second goal, is to lower the cortisol gradually. So you can't jump from chaos to peace. We've all tried it. None of us have succeeded. If you have, please let me know in the comments, I'd love to know what you did to achieve that. Because the body will rebel when the cortisol levels drop too quickly. We need a bridge state first! And that's where your predictable routines come in. Your sensory repetition, the things I talked about earlier, your patterns, trying to have morning sameness. In my case, it's always the same cup for my morning coffee, I've got the Rosary playing in the background in the morning when I wake up, I've got hair everywhere and I haven't showered yet, but the rosary is playing in the background. That's something that's predictable and it provides repetition. And I do the same thing in the evening as I'm getting ready for bed. The same steps, in the same order, with the Rosary playing in the background. I'm building reliability. I haven't achieved calm necessarily at that point, but I've got reliability. Morning sameness, evening sameness, your repetitions, and the predictable routines, all of that will lower the cortisol gradually because it brings in reliability.

   
   

3. The third goal to break that addiction is to replace intensity with strategy. Do not go for stillness. You're going to fail if you try to "relax". No, your brain actually needs something to do. It's been going high rev for many years. You can't just release it into the open. It needs something to do. Don't ask your brain to relax. Just replace the intensity with strategy. And so you've got your usual, your planning, your lists, your order, decluttering, creating systems, scheduling, organizing, whatever you can do that is very high structure and very low emotional intensity.

"The boring stuff will save you.

That's how you transition out of the dopamine-chasing loop"

4. Your fourth goal or your fourth step in breaking the addiction is to create safe intensity. At this point, your body still needs intensity. Fine. Let's go for intensity that doesn't destroy you. Cold showers, boom. There's intensity. It's very healthy for you. Let's go do it. Exercise, power walks, fast decluttering sprints. Ooh, that's intense. Ooh. Singing at the top of your lungs. Nobody's home, you've got all the windows closed and everything's closed and you just sing extremely loud. It's not going to be pretty, but it's intense and it's a good bridge, again, to still feed the brain that intensity in a safe manner. Punching pillows. I've talked about this a couple of times. That's kind of been my life for a while. Podcasts that energize you. Fight scenes in movies, like, "oh, yeah, he's getting beat up really good.This is fun to watch." You've got that intensity because intensity is not the enemy. It's the uncontrolled, abusive intensity that's the enemy. But while you're on that bridge over from addiction to freedom from chaos, you can still have intensity. You should have intensity. Just make sure it's intensity that doesn't destroy you.

"Intensity is not the enemy.

Go for intensity that doesn't destroy you"

5. The fifth goal, fifth step in breaking the addiction is to rebuild identity. Who am I without the chaos? Otherwise, you're going to fall into a void. "I was a victim of abuse." You see yourself as a "survivor of narcissistic abuse". Maybe even, an autistic survivor of narcissistic abuse. All of these things that are or were true at some point in your life, yes, but at some point, you've got to let that ish go. But so now, who am I? Your brain has to attach to a new identity so you can move forward. And you list it and you repeat it every day:

   
   

   1. I'm a mom.

   2. I'm a protector.

   3. I'm a builder.

   4. I'm a woman of faith.

   5. I'm a strategic thinker.

   6. I do this type of job.

   7. I do this type of workouts.

   8. I live in this place.

   9. This is my family of origin.

   10. I am an expert at this or that - in my case, I became a student of the nervous system, but whatever floats your boat.

Whatever you see yourself as, that is positive and has nothing to do with what you were addicted to once. Because that new identity is gradually going to replace the trauma bond and the addiction and rumination over a person or a situation.

6. And the next and the last tool that we use to break the addiction, we go back to something I've mentioned before, in episode 15, is your dog, your pets in general. Yes. You talk to the dog. You narrate calm and order and boundaries, like in the example I had given in the previous episode. The nervous system is going to learn through repetition. Nobody you know is going to want you to use them as practice for those repetitions. So you talk to the dog. You talk to the dog, "This is what I'm seeing. This is what I'm feeling. This is what's going on. This is who I am, dog. Come here. I'm going to tell you who I am. I'm a mom. I'm a protector. I'm a builder,...." You go through your list. You do your thing. Use the dog. He doesn't care. He's just happy to be there, whatever. It works. It's weird. I don't really care. Use it. It works.

Let's discuss what feeling safe in your own skin actually is

We touched on that in episode 15B, again. Safety is the absence of threat. Safety is not silence, stillness, a spa day, white walls, blocking your abuser on all platforms. No. Safety is the absence of threat. And so it's when you get to a point where you can think, you can say, "I know what's happening next."

You're not going to meditate your way there. You're going to structure your way there. You're not looking for the absence of noise. If you're autistic, solo parenting an autistic child, dealing with narcissistic patterns in your co-parenting, and you've got all the legal nonsense and the financial pressure, yeah, the absence of noise, it's just not going to happen. But that's not where peace is anyway.

Peace is the absence of threat. Once your nervous system has learned that, and you have structured your life towards that peace, and you've used those bridges that we talked about, that peace is going to stop feeling like a void and it's going to start feeling like home.

So this is the moment where I remind you to please take it one day at a time. You make it until this evening and then you do that again tomorrow and the day after. We'll see you next week.