Welcome, everyone. My name is Kristen Snowden. I'm a licensed therapist in the state of California, and I try to post monthly or every other month free webinars related to all things related to relationship crisis, how to move through relationship crisis, develop a better language for understanding what's going on in the crisis, evidence-based tools to get through it to the other side, supportive guidance-based environment where you can kind of not feel alone and move through this. But today we're going to be discussing one of the most powerful tools that I know of to use to heal after betrayal trauma. It's called the Polyvagal Theory and it really provides a helpful model to understand what's going on inside your body, how trauma really wires or kind of wreaks havoc on your nervous system.
And the polyvagal theory can really break down a very complex system into a simple way to help you reincorporate tools, everyday practices that can help you feel like you are regaining control and agency in your life, in your body, in your mind, in your emotions again, because any of you, pretty much most of you are here because you've been through some kind of relationship crisis trauma. And I think you can all understand this feeling that your body's just taken over, that you just don't feel like you have control of your thoughts and your emotions and everything. And you really grieve the loss of that.
So this polyvagal theory can help you a lot with that particular problem. So being betrayed by a trusted loved one can be one of the most traumatizing experiences. we experience in life. These betrayals can occur through infidelity, addiction, pornography, financial lies, or any other form of high levels of gaslighting, manipulation, emotional abuse, et cetera, constant invalidation, constant emotional neglect, et cetera. So these can be devastating traumas that record.
in your mind and body. Being betrayed by the one you've trusted most causes your brain to essentially have to split into two, split into this impossible idea that the person that you have loved and trusted the most and made yourself most vulnerable to is now the person that has harmed you the most, is the person that is least trustworthy. And you're not really sure if you're ever going to feel safe or be able to trust anyone, not just this person, but anyone ever again.
And even if the trauma of discovering this particular betrayal, this addiction or infidelity or uncovering some kind of big unknown thing, even if that incident has passed, it has come and gone, and maybe you're in a repair state, the trauma, the betrayal can become imprinted into your body and it can wreak havoc. on everything about your lifestyle, everything about how you show up and operate physically, emotionally. It can show up as unwelcome flashbacks, bursts of anger or sadness that just kind of feel like out of nowhere, constant hypervigilance, just this fear and anxiety, perseverating around your partner, the betrayal, and much, much more feelings of hopelessness.
It can feel like an emotional and physical roller coaster that causes actual physical harm to your body. And most importantly, it makes you feel powerless or out of control. Like you have no agency. You've been thrown on this roller coaster and you don't get to decide when you get off. And it is really important for trauma or betrayal trauma therapists to help you unwire that or change that framework in your body, the mentality that I don't get choice here.
Trauma recovery is all about returning choice back to you. So that's what one of these, that's what polyvagal can help you with. So the cause of these post-trauma symptoms come from our brain's learning and survival system.
When something really scary, unpredictable, powerless happens in our life, our brain locks it deep. into our nervous system, like kind of into every fiber of our life, our muscles, our bodies, everything, where they can resurface at any given moment due to even just the tiniest of triggers. It impacts not only how I'll show up just in my relationship with the betrayer, the person who's harmed me, but it leaks into every other facet of my life. So Dr. Stephen Porges is the one who created this framework, the polyvagal theory, and he provides a framework for understanding how our autonomic nervous system regulates our responses to stress and trauma.
It's important to know that while our brain in a state of trauma really deeply wires and records, this is like, this person is scary. Don't trust anyone. This world is chaotic. Don't ever make yourself vulnerable again.
oh, you're pathetic or, you know, incapable of keeping yourself safe. All these stories that get deeply recorded in you, it is neuroplastic. So meaning it is changeable. These things are not permanent.
They feel permanent. They feel like you're never going to return to normalcy ever again. But through a lot of work, rewiring, practice, training, you know, breathing, it It can slowly but surely be rewired.
So I want to bring hope to those who are feeling like life has been pretty hopeless lately. The format of this lecture is going to be, I'm first going to briefly discuss all how the brain and body and nervous system get disrupted due to the betrayal trauma. Then I'm going to explain Dr. Stephen Porges'polyvagal theory. And then how you can apply the model to your everyday healing practices to either down regulate if you're very hypervigilant, anxious, stressed, or upregulated if you tend to be someone who's more like shut down, dissociated, can't get out of bed, can't, you know, get one thought out straight, et cetera. And most importantly, return some agency, choice, control back to your life again.
When we all know. that that's what trauma does. It just robs you, kidnaps you of stability, normalcy, and feeling like you have control of your life again.
So I'm going to list a few things that are consequences, physiological and social consequences, environmental consequences to betrayal trauma, just so you can kind of understand or name what might be going on in your life because of these traumas that have occurred. And understand that, like I said, even if the threat or the uncovering of this information has already passed, right? So theoretically, let's say you're still repairing the relationship.
The person is remorseful. You're trying to get through to the other side. These symptoms will still occur because your body will still feel safe.
But tack on the fact that if none of that has happened, your betrayed partner is still acting out. You're still getting trickle disclosures. Maybe you are getting met with someone who is invalidating or not remorseful for what he or she has done.
These symptoms will just be increased on many, many different levels. So here are a few things that happen after you have uncovered betrayal. And again, this is due to maybe infidelity.
sexual acting out, pornography use, even uncovering substance abuse, addictions that you weren't aware of, spending large amounts of money, your partner not helping you feel safe, being invalidated, feeling abandoned emotionally, et cetera. These are all types of betrayals that we're talking about here. First and foremost, it increases your stress hormones.
When your body gets a sign that there's a threat. It'll increase the cortisol and stress to try to keep you safe. You know, does anything and everything.
And a threat doesn't need to be a gun to your head. A threat can be your person, your primary relationship, and the money and the life and the family you have all intertwined with this person is now being threatened. And that is as good as someone threatening your life. So you'll have increased stress hormones all the time often. then therefore there'll often be an increased fight or flight response.
So again, a heightened arousal, heightened anxiety, heightened literally wanting to fight, argue, scream, or run away, shut down, et cetera. Speaking of that, there'll be an increased time where when your nervous system gets overwhelmed from the hyper arousal, from constantly... you know, feeling unsafe, feeling hurt, feeling angry, all these things, the fight or flight responses cause you to do, it'll move into a shutdown or numbness state. You'll want to sleep more.
Your brain won't work anymore. You won't be able to put together thoughts. You'll find yourself dissociated.
There's this concept called depersonalization where you just kind of feel like you're removed from your body and you feel like you're watching what's happening from an outside window looking in like, is this my life? I can't believe this is my life. This is just a terrible show I'm watching on TV. Another symptom is depression and hopelessness. Increased hypervigilance.
Many of you betrayed partners have gotten PhDs in detective work, searching computers, searching phones. You could join the CIA or FBI after all of this because you become so masterful at managing your hypervigilance, trying to find out if your partner has been lying to you or acting out still. Disrupted social engagement. this is huge.
But like I said, when you have found that your primary partner is not trustworthy, your brain is not, cannot be that specific. It can't just be like, oh, only this person's untrustworthy. So I'm only going to struggle with trusting this one person. Your brain is highly generalized because right.
It just wants to blanket say, okay, all of this is unsafe because it's just, it's. its first directive is to keep you safe. And so if I just tell you everything is dangerous, then maybe I'll keep you safer, right? Your survival system is highly efficient and extremely generalized, but not always accurate.
So your social engagement, your desire or ability to engage socially spans to your entire environment. Betrayed partners, I always say it's really important. important for you to join a betrayed partners group like the ones that I have or that sex and relationship healing.com has, or several other experts in this field have, because we know it's such an isolating experience. When the person's hurt you the most, that you love the most and made yourself most vulnerable to the last thing on earth you want to do is to share your story is to open yourself up to other people, to judgment. And of course, there's always these stories too, that it's like, what if I share what my partner did to me?
And then we stay together, then everyone's going to judge me and everything. So we have all these multitude of reasons why you pull away socially, but that is definitely a negative and does not help with the healing process because our body and our mind and our heart and souls crave to be seen and heard. We crave socialization.
We crave... someone validating us and listening to our story. And that all gets disrupted when we've been betrayed. Another sign and symptom is what I'd already talked about difficulty trusting, not just your partner, not just other people, but yourself.
Hey, I married this person. So clearly I can't tell when someone is lying or hot. It's this very scary idea that I don't have the basic skills to keep myself alive and safe.
and it turns you upside down. So there's difficulty even just trusting yourself. Problems with intimacy. This can happen in multiple ways. Intimacy happens not just physically through sex and hugs and kisses, but it can happen emotionally.
It can happen spiritually, intellectually. You will struggle with wanting to share intimacy with everybody on all fronts, spiritually. intellectually don't want to share your opinions because you don't trust your opinions, emotions.
Sometimes after all this gaslighting and manipulation, you have these shame stories going on that you want too much. You ask for too much. This whole package is just too much.
So you're constantly questioning what is too needy? What do I need to ask for? So you really, really hold back. on intimacy, on showing yourself to other people, on being authentic and connected with people, which again is very opposite of what you need to heal. But in addition to the symptoms I just said, there's also somatic symptoms.
So meaning physiological symptoms, chronic stress and trauma can lead to physical symptoms like headaches, gastrointestinal issues, fatigue, getting disoriented. brain fog, chronic pain, et cetera. There's also emotional distress. So persistent and sometimes surprise symptoms of feeling angry, sadness, confusion.
Um, then there's also the intrusive memories, a song can trigger intrusive memories, a flashback, your partner may be actually on the mend and repairing. And then all of a sudden you're just like, get away. You monster. Don't touch me.
You're, you know, a horrible person. And then a thing that we're going to talk about mainly here right now is the, this difficulty with emotional regulation. You can feel.
almost like a teenager again, or a toddler again, where they just kind of throw themselves on the ground. And they're having a tired, overwhelmed tantrum, because they just don't know how to come up with their feelings to speak it to share it. And sometimes betrayed partners feel like that they're just feel out of control, and their inability to kind of reel it in and help themselves feel safe and soothed again.
Okay, so Here's the Bolle-Wagel theory in a nutshell. What I really like about it is, again, we think the autonomic nervous system, we all have it. You don't want to wipe it away. I know when we're in crisis and it feels like it is driving this crazy train and we can't get off and it's so scary and we want to crawl out of our skin.
We feel so stressed and overwhelmed all the time. We wish that we didn't have this survival system, but we still want the survival system to help us jump out of the way of a car that's moving too fast, that has a reflex that pushes down on the opposite leg when we step on something sharp with one leg. We want these reflexes and responses, but we also want to constantly keep in mind that we have this thing called the prefrontal cortex. It is the higher functioning version of us, of this, and thank God for it, because it can always override a trauma system.
And I want you to realize that. So Stephen Porges, let me just tell you a couple important things. The autonomic nervous system is an automatic involuntary system in our life. It is running on the backdrop all the time. So every time you enter a room, every time you open your eyes or hear anything, it is all about listening.
First and foremost, noting threats. who's moving in a funny way, tones of voice, nonverbal cues, looking around in our environment, hearing things. These are all things that are constantly running around in the background, trying to say, okay, is there a threat?
How do I keep myself safe? So he says there's essentially three phases to the nervous system, I guess, hierarchy. He says, first, there's the ventral vagal state.
So ventral vagal is... we're social, we're engaged. So let's say we're talking to a good friend or we're in a meeting and engaged in the meeting, or we're having a good time and doing something fun with some family. This is the safe, social, connected, engaged phase. This is when we're able to be present, when my prefrontal cortex is able to be Kristen, when I can think about consequences, when I can think about who am I and how do I want to show up, you know, doing actually real intimacy, like I said.
physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual connection. However, when our body feels any kind of level of threat, and remember it's overgeneralized and it's very highly overreactive, it'll slip into one or two other phases, which is the sympathetic phase. By the way, don't confuse that with the word sympathy.
It has nothing to do with that. Sympathetic actually means heightened. So mobilized. fight or flight responses that kind of rush us with cortisol, rush us with stress hormones, saying, what do I need? Do I need to fight this out?
Do we need to run away from this? How do I get out of this stage or this level of threat? What do I need to do?
Do I need to scream? Do I need to fight back? Do I need to become a highly trained detective to constantly search my partner's phone and...
websites. This is all sympathetic. It's kind of creating this list of things that you need to do. It's the action part of the nervous system.
Move into action, mobilized. Then when your nervous system gets entirely overwhelmed, it gets flooded because it's exhausted. It'll move into dorsal vagal.
The best way I know to describe it is Stephen Porges mentions that regarding our nervous system, we're phenomenologically related to the turtle. And what happens anytime a turtle feels threatened? It does not run away because it's not an option.
It can't really fight. It's not capable of that. So it will always move into its shell. And that's the best way to remember the state we get into when we're in dorsal fagal.
We are not social and connected. We are not mobilized. We are not acting.
We are immobilized with fear in a shutdown mode. Stephen Porges calls it freeze or collapse. So, you know, I just call it, do not path go, do not collect $200. I am in an overwhelmed state. That's when people will just fall asleep.
Sometimes it'll cause they'll like throw up, they'll have a migraine. These are all signs that your nervous system is completely overwhelmed and just needs to stop. And it's just important to listen to that part of your body that's telling you to stop.
So these are all really great questions to ask. ask the first step in learning how to regulate your dysregulated nervous system is to really start getting to know the nervous system. So this is, I believe this is on my website, but you're welcome to write me and ask at Kristen Snowden, MFT at gmail.com.
If you don't, if this isn't on my website, Kristen Snowden.com, but this is like a get to know your phases. What does it look like? When you are in ventral vagal, when you're social, connected, engaged, what does it feel like in your body?
What does it feel like when you're in the sympathetic, mobilized, kind of going and going stage? And then conversely, dorsal vagal when you're shut down. I write this all down.
What I would encourage you all to do is to print this out and write your own version of what these answers are to all these questions. You know, think of an event. where you were in one of these states?
What does it look like? Right. Cause it really personalizes it for you.
How does your body feel in this particular state? Um, what would you call this state? What are your own words for it?
Right. So for me, I put congruent and aware, um, for sympathetic, I call it over-function, over-functioning, um, annoyed, flustered, um, action, you know, doing the things, making the list. pushing myself through the discomfort. And then what kind of coping skills do you use? I do a lot of running.
I do the list making. I do the yelling. I do the try to be breathing during that time, but it's hard. I do a lot of victimizing like, oh, poor me and my giant list of things that I have to do that, that righteous indignation that I'm, I'm completely overwhelmed and it's everybody's fault. that's a calm version of the sympathetic state.
And then what's the story you tell yourself, right? Right here is answer the following for each state. The world is blank. I am blank.
So it's, my words are I'm failing. So I need to over-function in order to get back to not failing dorsal vagal. You know, for me, it's, I can't process.
I can't think rationally. I feel lost. The story I tell myself is not, not only have I'm, am I not functioning anymore.
I'm under functioning and I'm now a failure. Like I've, I've crossed into failure zone. So it's every nervous system is different. So it's really important that you take the time and it might be surprising to you to find out the stories you tell yourself in these nervous system states, because again, understanding what the physical state feels like. the stories you're telling yourself, the behaviors, right?
The coping skills, the things you're doing in that state, these will all be indications of like, oh, I'm in sympathetic. You know, something happened. Stop, look, and listen. What was the threat that caused me to get here? And then you can start moving from there.
So again, it's re-inviting agency to your life, re-inviting choice and control. to your life. Because remember, you don't have control of the environment, but you have control of yourself and what you want to do in these moments of crisis. So first, get to know your nervous system.
The second is start identifying skills for up and down regulation. So a thing that I definitely have on my website is it's called like a self-care menu. It's on kristinsnowden.com.
And these are just a list of potential up and down regulation, right? So if I'm in dorsal vagal and I'm in shutdown mode and I'm sleeping and I'm not moving, these are lists of some of these things that I need to do to re-engage the world to upregulate myself. Conversely, if I am hypervigilant, running around, feeling I'm running around like a chicken with my head cut off, feeling overwhelmed, feeling victimized, feeling like I can never just get through this, you can start using some of these tactics to downregulate, what we call engage the parasympathetic state.
Sympathetic's up, parasympathetic down. A little note, by the way, the most accessible intervention is always breathing. Little fact, when you breathe in, you upregulate your sympathetic system.
When you exhale, you downregulate. Upregulate, downregulate. So stopping and reminding yourself that your breath in and of itself can up and downregulate is fantastic. And then there's also these grounding techniques.
If you've seen my webinars before, I like to trick my brain into getting into higher functioning thought. If you stay curious, ask questions, and then go through some complex concepts, it throws your brain into higher functioning systems so that it can't be in that fight flight free state. So my clients always laugh, but I say, start counting backwards from 100 by seven. Like, just try it. No one can just like run through it quickly.
but you have to think about that or, you know, start naming the things that you see in the room, feel your butt in the seat, do that deep breathing. Say, you know, four names of boys that start with an H, you know, three girls names that start with a W. These are all really quick, accessible things that you can do that pull your body out of that fight, flight, freeze, you know, sympathetic or dorsal stage and get your juices flowing. and return agency to your body again. Okay.
So here's a couple other things that once you learn your nervous system, start testing out that menu of items that I sent you. Because again, your nervous system is like a fingerprint. It's totally different and unique to you based on your own traumas, all the information and learning that your brain's been doing over the past years of your existence.
So things that up and down regulate me. are going to be different than things that up and down regulate another person. So I can't sit here and be like, do these five things. This is going to get you back to stability.
No, because hugging a dog and loving on them might be great and wonderful and healing for one person. And then someone who's been attacked by dogs, having them in a presence in their presence will only upregulate them and re-trigger trauma. Hugging someone can be healing and wonderful.
Sometimes it's more dysregulating. So you need to learn, especially by the way, we go to a lot of this to our phone when we are in a numbing or an overwhelmed state, really pay attention to does zooming through or scrolling through an Instagram or social media or watching videos, is that a healing thing? Does it calm you and recenter you?
Or do you find it to be? dysregulating. And pay attention how when you do join groups, how is the group helping you feel that way?
Okay. So those are all things that you have to kind of do your own work and your own trial and error. And sometimes it might be helpful to create a journal of like, I took a walk in nature that definitely down-regulated me.
I called my friend Susie and she only up-regulated me. But then when I called my friend Joni, that helped. So Joni's more helpful. Susie's not so much helpful.
Things like that. Talking to a therapist helped. Joining a group helped, etc.
Okay, so let's go over some other things that you can do. Promote a safe and calm environment. Create your own safe environment because God knows you don't have control of your partner if he or she will ever be in recovery or tell the truth ever again.
You can't control how other people might judge you or the situation. You have to work really hard to try to create your glimmers, your moments of stability of like, I can do this. I can survive.
I can make meaning from this somehow, some way and grow from this somehow, some way. You might need to reduce noise. You might need to set your phone down. You might need to dim the lights, create some comfortable, secure space. Some people need to move out of the rooms or...
out of the homes of the acting out partner because that's just creating a safer space for them go on a trip away from them i don't know you got to think about that um re-engage that ventral vagal stage right that social connected engaged stage that will help when you are looking into the of a safe, down-regulated person. Your, I always joke, we have superpowers, right? I can walk into a room and I can use my hands and gestures and the tone of my voice to up-regulate everybody else.
And sure enough, we're such social creatures that if you watch me and engage me, your stress hormones and your heart rate will suddenly match mine. And conversely, if I can show up in a room and be calmer and use calm eye contact. slow body movements, slow breathing, validating comments, affirming comments, my downregulated nervous system will help your nervous system match. So engage that social ventral vagal system.
You need social connection, safe face-to-face connection. You do, as scary as it is, need intimacy. You need to go to a place and space where you can share your story. Usually has to be with other people who've suffered and struggled in a similar way so they can understand and they can hear it and validate it in a nonjudgmental way.
But you need to share your story. You can't keep it all up here. It's not going to work and it's not going to ever process out.
You need to incorporate using body techniques. So, um, Vander Kool. Professor Vandal Kolk, the body keeps score.
He talks about how much your body locks in trauma and stress and how actually important it is to use the body to release it. And actually, you know, Peter Levine, he, who created somatic experience, that a therapeutic intervention, he watched wildlife for a long time when they've been exposed to threats and harm, and they find they have a very physical way of kind of having like seizures and convulsions and working out the traumatic stress experience and then move back into the herd and carry on in their life. So it is important. It sounds so crazy, especially, you know, I'm a type a control freak that like I do the power yoga, but I would never want to sit for the 10 minutes afterward where they just lay there, just felt like made no sense to me or just doing nothing.
And I don't do nothing. I always produce. Um, that, you know, always sympathetic state.
And it's important to incorporate those things where you're just doing mind body connection. You're just paying attention to how am I feeling? Where am I feeling it?
Um, internal family systems, uh, Dick Schwartz stuff, his parts work. He has a lot of free stuff on the internet. Uh, Frank Anderson's the other guy too. You can search where they just do meditations about, you know, what's. upsetting to you right now?
Let's talk about the anxiety. Does it have a name with stories around the anxiety? How do you feel towards the anxiety? If the anxiety wasn't anxious all the time, what would it be afraid would happen? If it let go of the anxiety, what would it be afraid would happen?
These are all, again, my 20-something-year-old self would be kicking my 44-year-old self butt and be like, that's such hippie crazy stuff. But it's important. There is a mind. body connection that is so important for you, you know, a social connection and a mind body connection that you have to use to move through the trauma.
So mind, body, deep breathing, practice diaphragmic breathing, deeply breathe, deeply belly breathing. Do those physical scans in your body. Do body-based therapist therapy like yoga, Tai Chi.
Dance therapies, you know, sing and dance in the kitchen, gentle movement, big giant fat movement, punch pillows. Like you got to do it. Try it.
You know, working out, things like that, going for walks, progressive muscle relaxation. I talked about this for a second, but practice mindfulness and meditation. Engage in these practices. Connect with the awareness of it. Again, you're trying to move out of that sympathetic.
doer, I'm just doing and I'm over-functioning and that under-functioning where I'm just, I'm shut down and we're trying to move back to being aware and present and congruent of, okay, what were my goals? What am I going for here? Who am I?
What are my boundaries? What are my non-negotiables? How do I want to show up?
That all happens in ventral vagal. So we're trying to bring back the present, the now, not be back. taken back onto that trauma roller coaster where we are going down crazy town.
So next is engage in the soothing activity. So again, that menu of items. Find out what is soothing. Sometimes massage is soothing.
Sometimes it's the worst place in the world to lay there and have someone touch your body. You know, especially the nature of betrayal trauma due to like sex and pornography addiction. But some people that might be great for them.
So you need to figure out what kind of soothing activity works for you. Some kind of hobby, nature exposure, find out what it is. Grounding techniques.
comforting rituals, right? There's some people, the ones I think who kind of make it out, have these rituals where they do their group, they go to their meetings, they do their book studies, they have their coffee or tea in the morning, and they go to their therapist, they go for a walk with their dog, they have the daily check-in with their partner. It is really important to create some kind of structure or ritual.
I always... explain it through the terms of like military drilling, the way the military trains their soldiers or semen or whoever airmen is they go and they train over and over again. This is what you do.
This is how you respond. This is, this is who you listen to. These are the orders you follow because the idea is that when we're in crisis and we're in, you know, a mode where we're afraid for our life, we have to fall back on that training on that muscle memory. Okay.
Just look to my leader. take advice from them. Okay.
Do these four things because I trained on them six times. So you have to incorporate some level of structure and ritual, um, use sensory, uh, and auditory stimuli, visual auditory stimuli, temperature regulation. So warm baths, um, cold packs, someone's talking about how they use sauna and cold plunge, and it works really well for them.
It helps really heal or just restabilize. their nervous system, self-talk, self-soothing, self-touching. I find this to be helpful. Sometimes people just do this. They hold and hug pillows.
Doing the eye stimulation. There's also the bi-tappers. I'm trying to find my bi-tappers, but they buzz in each hand.
Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, or listening, auditory stimulation. Those can all be helpful stimulation. Let's see what else. Therapy.
Obviously, you can go to a well-trained therapist who knows how to use trauma-informed therapy, such as EMDR, eye movement desensitization reprocessing, somatic experiencing, internal family systems, and collaboration and supportive approach. Remember, social engagement with safe, nonjudgmental people is very, very important to the healing process. So try to identify. Don't lock yourself up.
or isolate yourself. Go out to these betrayed partners groups. Maybe the first one doesn't work. Maybe the second one doesn't work, but you have to find a group of people.
I've been really fortunate. All of my groups, I run into phenomenal men and women who show such strength and courage. I admire them all deeply.
And one of my greatest joys is watching them all find each other under such sad, heartbreaking circumstances. But It's incredible to see them support one another, validate each other, and make meaning from this tragedy. And that they've been able to reach out across the country or across the world and share their stories and comfort others who've struggled in a similar way.
That is so healing, in my opinion. And I would really encourage you all to do that. And so just I'm going to remind you, look at that menu of self-care options. I have other videos on Stephen Porges'Autonomic Nervous System Polyvagal Theory. Reach out to me, Kristen Snowden, MFT at Gmail, or I'm on Instagram or subscribe to my YouTube channel.
These are all ways to reach out to me for resources. And that's it. Great stuff. You know, I was, I thought it was interesting when you shared that both in sympathetic and in dorsal failure, like I'm failing, like it was the.
the same word you used as the end result in either of those states. So it wasn't like, well, in this state, I do this. And in this state, I'm that like, it comes down to I'm, I'm not winning at life kind of thing. Yep.
And it's the story you tell yourself. And I always find the story you tell yourself is tied into your shame stories, right? For those of you, you know, I talk about one of the big hits from this betrayal is it really brings your shame up to the surface and you really have to do work around that, but you'll find it's tied in, right?
One of my biggest. Stories is that I am valuable as long as I'm productive, I'm producing, I'm offering something to the world and, you know, I'm doing it in a, you know, effective manner. And when I'm in crisis or when I, my plate's too full, it starts breaking down and it's bringing up those shame voices. Well, who are you then? If you have to like, start saying no to clients.
Who are you then if you can't produce these 25 things today? Like you gross, you're just lazy then. You're failing, you're breaking down.
So you really find out that the nervous system ties into that shame story and they're really intertwined. And that's the importance of needing to do the work to identify the stories you tell yourself in each of these stages. I always tell clients like what happened to you was not your fault, not one thing about it. Your partner had choices and he or she decided to lie and manipulate and keep really important information from you.
None of that is your fault. And I'm sorry you've been traumatized. But now that that has happened, it's now become your responsibility to figure out how to unwire your trauma body and come up with some skills and interventions to re-stabilize after you've been so traumatized.
And again, I'm sorry you didn't ask for any of this, but if there's anything you're responsible for, it's that ladder. piece. Okay.
So the next one, betrayed husband here, sex addiction is not necessarily involved. Do you know of any true group therapy that targets unfaithful women where sex addiction may or may not be involved? Do you know any of any group therapy that allows men for my situation? Yes.
Co-ed or men only? I now have a co-ed betrayed partners group because I, my heart hurt for all the men that would reach out to me. and not have a place in space to talk about this. So I actually do have a, right now I have a trade partners group.
There's 14 of them. I'd say there's five men. The rest are women.
And some are experiencing infidelity or betrayal trauma because of sex addiction, but some, there was maybe a season of betrayal and infidelity, right. Versus like a more consistent long-term pattern of. addictive, compulsive behaviors.
So I've done it twice so far, so far, so good. So yes, check out kristinsnowden.com. And I now have a co-ed group.
We are out of time. Oh, goodness, how that flew by. So thank you, Kristen. Thanks, everyone for showing up today.
Kristen will be back with another great webinar. So thanks, everyone. And this will be posted on our website. Hopefully yet today. Thanks, everybody.
Thank you so much for coming.