← Trauma Rewired
Trauma Rewired
The Emotional Block That No One Talks About
00:39:34
Have you ever drawn a blank when asked how you're feeling? Or maybe you experience constant inner buzzing, numbness, or anxiety without any words to describe it. You’re not broken—and you’re not alone. In this deeply informative and...
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- [00:00]
Matt Bush
I'm excited about this topic because exploring this through a neurological lens, we can really start to see why some people struggle with their emotions and how it shapes their mental health, their trauma recovery, and even physical conditions like chronic pain. This alexithymia really affects how people connect with themselves and others and it's more common than you might think. Understanding it from this neurological perspective really helps us recognize why traditional talk based strategies sometimes fall flat and why brain based tools and interoceptive training can really make such a big difference.
- [00:32]
Elizabeth Kristof
So let's dive a little bit into what is alexithymia? It's not a diagnosis, but it's a trait or a trait where people struggle to identify, describe and connect to emotions. So it's a subclinical personality trait. This comes with, again, that difficulty in identifying and describing and expressing emotions, but it can also come along with an externally oriented thinking style. Have you ever been asked, what are you feeling? And you just draw a blank? Or maybe you find that you're feeling numb or anxious or disconnected and you can't find words for any of it. If that's you, you're not broken and you're definitely not alone. What you might be experiencing is something called alexithymia, difficulty connecting to and or expressing emotions. And that actually affects up to one in five people and is even more common after trauma.
- [01:29]
Jennifer Wallace
And for so many of us and for our clients, honestly, even at different points in our lives, this can be an invisible wall in healing. Today we're unpacking what alexithymia is, how it ties to trauma in the brain, and most importantly, how can we work with it. This isn't just about emotions, it's about disrupted body brain communication. And when we understand that, we can start to train those systems back online. Welcome to Trauma Rewired, the podcast that teaches you about your nervous system, how trauma lives in the body, and what you do to heal. I'm your co host, Jennifer Wallace. I'm a neurosomatic psychedelic preparation and integration guide and I bring your nervous system into peak somatic experiences for you to embody the wisdom, feel the messages and then move on to create sustainable, lasting behavior change. And I'm also one of the educators at the Neurosomatic intelligence coaching certification.
- [02:22]
Elizabeth Kristof
And I'm your co host, Elizabeth Kristof, founder of Brainbase.com, an online community where we use applied neurology and somatics for resilience, behavior change, personal growth. And I'm also the founder of the Neurosomatic Intelligence Coaching Certification an ICF accredited course for therapists, coaches and practitioners. If you are into this episode, make sure to subscribe so you don't miss a future one. We have so much good stuff coming down the pipeline and I am so excited today to be joined in person by Matt Bush, founder of Next Level Neuro and our co lead educator for nsi. And it is just such fun and what I great opportunity to get together in person.
- [03:00]
Matt Bush
Thank you, thank you. Thanks for having me back. I'm honored to be here. I'm excited about this topic because exploring this through a neurological lens we can really start to see why some people struggle with their emotions and how it shapes their mental health, their trauma recovery and even physical conditions like chronic pain. This alexithymia really affects how people connect with themselves and others and it's more common than you might think. So understanding it from this neurological perspective really helps us recognize why traditional talk based strategies sometimes fall flat and why brain based tools and interoceptive training can really make such a big difference.
- [03:38]
Elizabeth Kristof
So let's dive a little bit into what is alexithymia? It's not a diagnosis, but it's a trait or a trait where people struggle to identify, describe and connect to emotions. So it's a subclinical personality trait. This comes with again that difficulty in identifying and describing and expressing emotions, but it can also come along with an externally oriented thinking style. That definition is grounded in the foundational work of Peter Cefanos, who first introduced the term, and it has since been refined through decades of research, especially using the Toronto Alexithymia Scale. It's called the TAS20, which is kind of the gold standard assessment tool for this. And it looks at three dimensions, difficulty identifying feelings, which is trouble recognizing your emotional states and distinguishing emotions from body sensations or those feelings of arousal. The second part is, is difficulty describing feelings, struggling to put words to your feelings and communicating that with others. And then the third part of this scale is the externally oriented thinking, which is a focus on facts over emotions, a tendency to focus on concrete external events rather than the internal emotional experience. And I definitely have experience with this and it was a wild time to hear about this term. And I remember I was driving in my car listening to an audiobook, doing some research for probably one of our podcast episodes or maybe something for nsi. And the term came up and I'd never heard it before. And so I stopped and did a quick Google search and started going into the research. And as I read those descriptions I was like, oh, that's me, that's me. And then it has come up since in episodes like the one we did with Dr. Megan Ann Neff. And it really has been a long journey, journey of first understanding that about myself and then realizing that this isn't a fixed condition, that it is trainable. And so much of my healing experience, my journey has been through that interoceptive training that has allowed me to have a very different relationship to my emotions. But it has been a process and so interesting to recognize myself in this.
- [05:59]
Jennifer Wallace
I think that's why these conversations are so important is because we can find them in ourselves and like it's a nuance experience but more people are experiencing it than we really know. And it's important that I think we have language around these things and to show the value of NSI because it's a past experience for you. And alexithymia, it's really been studied as a risk factor or co occurring trait in conditions like ptsd, autism spectrum conditions and depression, as well as psychosomatic disorders and chronic pain. And you know, Elizabeth shared that she identified with Alexithymia and I would actually feel that in our dynamic, really big feelings. And I felt like she could meet my story but not always the sensation. And that made co regulation kind of hard for me between us. And then it also brought up my own narratives around like being too much, like my emotions are too much or you know, I feel too much, I'm, I'm too much essentially. And once again this is why we have these conversations because we know that healing is relational and it gives me the opportunity to live through and re pattern my own responses to someone else's nervous system. And NSI is so profound as a healing modality because as we feel these shifts, as I feel the shifts in her nervous system, it creates more safety within me and just a more safe in our relationship. And so understanding this dynamic within her also supported my work with other clients because I do see it in other women that I work with and it's, it's different from an interoceptive deficit which we talk about a lot on trauma rewired, they can co occur but they, I have to listen more intently to the words that my clients are saying. And with alexithymia they don't really have them so there can be a lot of like I don't know or I'm fine, but there's these really buzzing sensations in the body that never really settled down and it can create some confusion on emotional processing because there's so much that's felt, but not so much that's identified. And so these. There are also a lot of like, facts being presented, but fewer feelings and it can register as numbness. And we'll explore these questions a little bit more along the lines of, like, where can you feel this in your body? Can we give it a texture or a temperature, a shape, a sound and more. Identify the qualities of what they're feeling versus looking for the words.
- [08:31]
Matt Bush
What's really interesting to me about this is it's not just psychological. Like it's not only somato psychic interpretation issue, but going back into the research on this, like, there was a study, a meta analysis published in 2013 by Vandervelde & Company, and they showed that changes occur with alexithymia in the insular cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex, the salience network, the amygdala, some of these brain areas, some of those we've talked about before on other episodes when I've joined you guys and you speak about them, but we'll talk about those a little bit more in a few minutes. But these are brain areas that integrate bodily sensations in and with conscious awareness. Right. So bringing them together. So Alexia thymia is not just a numbing issue or like a blunted effect on emotions. It's kind of a breakdown of this neural network. And then Jen, a minute ago you mentioned, like, it's a co factor in PTSD and autism and other things. But there's this really interesting difference. In classical PTSD presentations, there is emotional numbing, but it's not the same as alexithymia. It's a different brain network that they've been able to identify in ptsd, it's more of the salience network, like missing emotional cues, not recognizing that they're important, but the signals are there. In alexithymia, the research is saying the default mode network is just missing the signals in the first place. It's just not picking up signals from interoception or even sometimes from our exteroceptive signals too, like our vision and our hearing. So there's these little subtle differences. And then one other thing that popped up when I was looking into this is with this like weakened insular cortex, weakened anterior cingulate cortex, it's not just an under activation of those brain areas, but an under connected network. Right. Like, same thing as the PTSD research. It means that the signals are not getting through. It's not just they're being misinterpreted or we don't understand what they mean, but the signals aren't making their way to those brain areas in the first place. And that really comes down to interoception. Okay, so it's really like a body and brain mapping issue, not just a disconnect of the emotional vocabulary or awareness.
- [11:04]
Elizabeth Kristof
It's interesting when you say that just before we go on, I do think for myself, I probably fall into the Salience Network spectrum of, like, it actually being more related to PTS and complex ptsd, because I do think, like, when I think back as being a little kid, I had really big emotions and I felt them and had these huge tantrums. But it was kind of dangerous to experience that amount of co regulation. It would lead my caregivers to be really stressed out and disconnect. And I think I adaptively learned repressing, suppressing, disconnecting from these sensations is adaptive for my survival, for my regulation. But I don't think it's that the signals aren't there. It's just the, the importance. The salience over time led to that. And then I will find myself, like, for a long, long time in the healing journey. I could create the stories around the events, I could connect dots, but I just couldn't feel it in my body. So I could intellectualize all of it, all the stuff that we talked about on the podcast, but I couldn't really process it through.
- [12:17]
Jennifer Wallace
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And I think it's important really before we move on too, because we are talking about brain regions that, that we might know of, but people don't necessarily. And so the default mode network is a brain network that helps you sense yourself, reflect, and build a coherent inner story. And so when this network is off, your signals don't kind of stitch up into this idea of, like, this is what I feel. Right. And with alexithymia being linked to the dmn, whereas emotional numbness showing up like y' all are talking about in the Salience Network, this is a system that spots what matters and mobilizes you toward or away from it. And so when there's this regulation, emotional alarm alarms can go off or misfire, and that's where the numbing sensation comes in. And so if you're treating someone for alexithymia, it really. If you're treating numbing for someone who has alexithymia, you're kind of missing the mark because we need to map the inner world and you need different tools for each because these are different brain networks. And another thing that we emphasize a lot on this podcast is that both of all of the research that we read emphasizes that what we always say, accuracy through the sensory input systems.
- [13:25]
Elizabeth Kristof
So, yeah. Any other thoughts on those differences before we go into the.
- [13:32]
Matt Bush
We're going to tease it out a little bit more in a few minutes when we look at another research paper on how the insula and the prefrontal cortex work together on this. So maybe I'll just save those thoughts and we'll tie them in in a minute.
- [13:45]
Jennifer Wallace
Okay, cool.
- [13:46]
Elizabeth Kristof
I think one important thing as we're talking about this, and this podcast is focused on complex trauma and trauma is to understand the connection between these things. So There was a 2025 study in the Journal of Global Health Reports that found longer trauma exposure increased the odds of alexithymia by about 75%. And that is a really big increase. Trauma, especially chronic trauma, down regulates the circuits that we've been talking about that let us feel and name our inner states. And we know from so many of our past conversations the high prevalence of dissociation and interoceptive deficits and the impact that all of this has on how emotions are constructed from our somatic sensations. And if we can't feel those, or they there's interoceptive inaccuracy, or there's not awareness at all, then we can't experience the emotions, we can't mobilize them, we can't process them.
- [14:46]
Jennifer Wallace
And even to take this article just a little bit deeper, in this PTSD outpatient sample, sexual violence was the dominant. Exposure, sexual abuse at 53 and a half percent, and rape, sexual assault at 26.7% were the most frequent trauma types. The paper doesn't separate incest, but we've named before the varying levels within sexual abuse on this podcast. And I think that's really important because so many more people are experiencing this type of trauma. And context really matters when we're talking about alexithymia, because we're talking about a really nuanced survival output. And when the body perceives this ongoing danger, numbing or disconnecting isn't a flaw, it's protective. The nervous system dials down access to sensation, emotional awareness, so you can function. What looks like shutting down is the body creating distance from pain until it's safer to process. Over time, these protective patterns can become the default, making feelings and sensations harder to access, even when the immediate threat is gone.
- [15:48]
Matt Bush
So on a structural level, there's a study published in 2015 by Gerlick and Dobre that shows reduced gray matter in this anterior insula that we mentioned, and the prefrontal cortex, particularly within that, the orbitofrontal cortex, which is tied into our dopamine pathways and our risk versus reward decision making. In people with high levels of alexithymia, those two areas are reduced in size and functionality. And those are really the wiring. Those are the two connected networks that are responsible for sensing and integrating these body cues. So when you look into the paper, it's really interesting and this goes back to some things that you were saying a minute ago that it breaks it down into not one. Alexithymia is not just one thing, but there's these two key dimensions. It says, number one, there's a cognitive difficulty that people with alexithymia have that it's a challenge to identify and analyze and verbalize their feelings. Like, it's difficult to articulate what I'm feeling because there may be a lot of emotion going on in the body, but I can't say what it is. It's like, I don't know. And then the second key dimension is an affective difficulty. This is when there's actually a reduced emotional experience. And they're like, I don't know that I feel anything. And this is the one where we said, like, the signals break down. So in the literature there is this distinction between the loss of signaling versus the loss of understanding. But what's important for us is knowing that we can increase brain mass in these areas. We can increase function in these areas through our daily neuro practice. Like as we practice gentle interoception work, as we do reset drills before and after challenging moments, we actually retrain our brain to work through these areas, which may help to improve our feeling and our cognitive awareness and kind of bring this whole system back online.
- [17:55]
Elizabeth Kristof
Yeah, I've really seen that with clients and experienced it myself. But just that client that the answer is like Jen was talking about too, just, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. And just this complete, almost like a freeze, a shutdown, and just like a repetitive loop of I don't know. And then gradually, with minimum effective dose, over time, they start to find these nuances. And also like you were talking about, sometimes it's color or texture or temperature as these gateways into feeling things. And then they start to have this vocabulary and actually can start to process things really deeply when they have time and space and through the NSI tools to begin to cultivate that skill.
- [18:40]
Matt Bush
Yeah, but one thing that's important, and you both have mentioned this already, that starts with that felt sense of interoception right. It starts with what's happening in the body physically, not what's happening in the body emotionally. And then when we try to just chase like and try harder to willpower our way into feeling emotions or articulating emotions, it can often lead to a spiral of failure and shame because we just fall flat again and again not being able to grasp those sensations that are inside of us. So we want to keep circling it back to interoception.
- [19:18]
Jennifer Wallace
I think that, oh, I think that's really a key point because we know we've witnessed so many people living up in their heads and it can be so challenging to drop into the body. And so it is really minimum effective dose because even just starting to feel those sensations is going to be a really different experience for people. And then to like not have the language, right, we're really just kind of taught this really small spectrum of emotions and there's so much happening in the body and often emotions are overlapping and sensations are overlapping and that alone is just a whole new experience for people.
- [19:54]
Elizabeth Kristof
I think that's why so many people resist somatics or they don't like it or they get bored or frustrated or they're like, I've tried that and it didn't work is because there's this barrier here. And then also two people can really go into the. I have to understand this, I have to figure out the reason why I feel this way. I have to create the story. And so much of processing is, is not like you don't have to understand, you just let it move through and it doesn't have to mean anything particularly. But that's a hard place for people to get to. Starting from this place.
- [20:26]
Jennifer Wallace
Yeah, definitely.
- [20:29]
Elizabeth Kristof
If you've been feeling it, the shift happening in coaching, therapy, leadership, you're right. The next evolution isn't about mindset or surface level strategies. It's about nervous system capacity. It's about working at the root. It's about doing it with real science, real tools and real integrity. The neurosomatic intelligence coaching certification is here to equip you to lead that change with practitioner tested framework that's comprehensive, in depth, actionable and transformative. This isn't another fluffy buzzword, heavy training. This is where depth meets impact. If you're ready to become a practitioner who doesn't just talk about change, but creates it with the nervous system at the the center, this is your moment. Join a community of pioneering coaches, therapists, healthcare providers and leaders who are setting a new standard. Go to neurosomaticintelligence.com and join us in this future for personal transformation. So the prevalence of this in the general population, it's actually estimated that 10 to 20% of people have alexithymic traits. But in the trauma, PTSD, addiction, autism, and depression populations, it's far more common. So this is something we see, as we mentioned earlier, really co curring with a lot of these other outputs.
- [21:47]
Jennifer Wallace
Yeah, yeah. And it's often invisible because people can function outwardly. Right. We all know that. That's been even our own experience. But internally disconnection is what's is what's prevalent. And that can block therapy, progress recovery from addiction, and even intimacy in relationships. So when the inner body signals are fuzzy, the brain can't map what's happening or what's needed. And that unce quietly ramps up anxiety. So the system reaches for protection in the ways of like, distance, dissociation, zoning out, going blank, and even time loss. Or it can look like control, like repressive defenses, pushing down feelings and intellectualizing.
- [22:26]
Matt Bush
So that's one of the reasons why researchers call alexithymia a trans diagnostic factor. It's like an amplifier for anxiety, depression, substance use, other types of addiction, because it just makes the distance or the control, the need for those things much greater. So if we don't address the alexithymia, we just try to work on anxiety, depression, addiction. People can feel stuck no matter how hard they're working on those things, because they don't gain this traction to be able to actually move forward in how they're feeling.
- [23:03]
Elizabeth Kristof
Yeah, when you're talking about that co currents, it really, it connects a lot of dots between numbing behaviors, addictive behaviors that I see in the people that we work with, and also in myself. You know, like I was an alcoholic. I drank alcoholically for a long time. I had issues with food. And so much of this, I think, was tied to the issues that were going on with my ability to feel, connect to, and process emotions. So either using those as repressive techniques or to feel some kind of sensation that you're naturally craving to feel.
- [23:42]
Matt Bush
Yeah, I think using substances like that, regardless of what it is, there's a chemical change that happens in the body. There's an interoceptive change. There's a change to our level of conscious awareness and inhibition. And when you mix all that together, you say, put it in a blender, mix it all up, see what happens. If the combination of substances and behaviors allows more feeling, that might be more comfortable in some cases in the short term. And so it totally makes sense why those things fit together like puzzle pieces and often go together because it changes someone's state, and perhaps that's what allows them to feel less threat.
- [24:29]
Elizabeth Kristof
Yeah. And it's important as we talk about this, to remember, like many of the things that we talk about on here, that this is a spectru. Right. The insula, the anterior cingulate cortex, the amygdala, the somatosensory cortex. These are all areas that are critical for turning our raw body sensations into conscious, nameable feelings. And there's different levels of communication between these areas, different levels of function, different degrees of deficits in our interoception. So all of this is. It's not. Not black and white, like I necessarily have this or I don't. It's a changing output that can be trainable with time, and it is something that can be patterned in from our past experience and then drives our behaviors.
- [25:19]
Matt Bush
I just want to jump in really quick because we talked earlier about how this can sometimes feel similar to a freeze response. And what you just said kind of illuminates that because alexithymia is not a fixed state, it can vary with how much stress or threat we're under. Right. So if everything's a normal day or a normal week and I'm not in a lot of stress, I might be able to feel and perceive emotions. But as the temperature, quote unquote, emotional temperature, kind of ramps up and I get into a stressful situation or greater levels of conflict, I might become more and more emotionally numb. And it can sometimes look like that functional freeze that we talked about on other episodes where I can still. Yeah. Can function externally, but emotionally. Nobody's home, Right?
- [26:07]
Elizabeth Kristof
Yeah. Yeah.
- [26:09]
Jennifer Wallace
And with NSI and through applied neuro, it's so important to work with all of these sensory systems and brain areas because there's truly all always working together. And when you have deficits in any one of them, that can lead to what we call sensory mismatch, which we've talked on this podcast about several times. That sensory mismatch can lead to a lot of stress and not knowing our own needs. That lack of prediction causes a lot of stress and anxiety for the brain, and that is going to be in the threat bucket of our own nervous system. So a protective output like alexithymia and mental health outputs, or dissociation, can come from a stress load carried by. Created by deficits in any of these input systems and in the way they integrate together. So alexithymia can feel like flatness confusion, or anxiety without context, you know, you're activated, but you don't know why or what to do with it. And then. And that just goes right back to, I think, like, with the addiction rates too, because, like, you're saying these people with alexithymia have high use of substance disorders. And we were talking about 45 to 67% compared to 10 or 20% in the general populations. Substances become a really fast way to manage these unnamed states. And I think also a way to just be like, I don't know. So why care?
- [27:31]
Elizabeth Kristof
Yeah. Yeah.
- [27:33]
Matt Bush
So as we start to kind of turn our eye toward, like, can we rehab something like this or can we train it? I think it's important to circle back to this focus on interoception. There was another research study published 2016 by Brewer, Cook and Bird that really reframed alexithymia as a general interoceptive deficit. It not just emotional blindness, just to double down on the language that we're where we're coming from. And so, like, from the perspective that our brain is always trying to predict what's going to happen next so that it can predict safety or the need for protection. If our body signals are not integrated and that interoception can't be felt, our brain can't build an accurate emotional prediction. It doesn't know if it should engage or disengage. It doesn't know if it should let down its walls and be vulnerable or up the shield and be protected. Right. So in that loss of predictability, it either guesses about what to do, in which case we can become emotionally inaccurate for a situation, or it just shuts down. Okay. So interoception becomes that key target for change. And there's the connection between the insular cortex and that prefrontal cortex going all the way back to the beginning of this conversation. If our brain isn't aware of those felt sense signals and physical sensations that start off the interoceptive system, it's going to be really difficult to feel and be aware of emotions. They always go together. Felt sensation, then emotion, then articulation.
- [29:16]
Elizabeth Kristof
Yeah. And like so many things we talk about on here, we're always saying everything is a skill, and every skill is trainable, including that interceptive skill and that. That our developmental experience is our training ground to develop these skills. And so that does shape how our brain and our nervous system function later in life. And it's not fixed. Right. Because we are always adapting to new stimulus, to the ways that we interact with our nervous system. We are neuroplastic. And so this is something that is. I don't know if reversible is the right word, but there you can make progress in shifting out of this. And I have experienced this, we've seen it with our clients. And there was a study in 2008 that looked at this particularly and that PTSD patients, alexithymia scores did drop significantly after effective trauma therapy, suggesting that it is at least partially reversible. And when we can start to use our neuro tools to create regulation and safety around emotional. Emotional processing. Right. To help our nervous system have the capacity and to do that gentle interoceptive training gradually over time to feel those signals, but then also to in those moments of I'm going to try to process the emotion, I'm going to try to connect to my body. Can I equip my system with some positive stimulus that creates that safety and regulation so that my system has more good experiences. And then using my tools on the back end to re, regulate and recreate that safety. And I'm teaching my nervous system it is safe to start to dip my toes into this. I can come back, I can regulate. I have the capacity.
- [31:04]
Jennifer Wallace
I mean, we absolutely know that this can be rewired because of you, your case and proof of this. Right. Like you're right here providing once again, like you're proving once again how effective NSI is. And like we, how much we stress this daily practice, this intentional body mapping, the interoceptive work. Because you know that we don't believe in personality traits. And traditionally alexithymia has been viewed as a fixed personality trait. And studies show how it can fluctuate with stress with trauma recovery and nervous system regulation. So regulation and stress processing absolutely can make a big difference.
- [31:42]
Elizabeth Kristof
There are studies, numerous studies that do look at changes with this output with interoceptive training, which is what we do at through neurosomatic intelligence, is provide this gradual minimum effective dose training for the interoceptive system. And there is research looking at that that makes a tangible difference in this experience. Yeah.
- [32:06]
Matt Bush
So I'm going to give some practical ideas of where you can start with this. But as I do, let me preface and say, remember, always use minimal effective dose, assess and reassess. And while I'm going to mention some really specific tools that may make a practical difference, you need to assess these for yourself. Okay. So don't take this as a blanket recommendation that it would be effective for everyone. Please test, test it and actually find out how your nervous system responds. But here's Where I would start in a general way. Okay. Number one, I would try to work with someone to increase interoception in a very gentle or even passive way throughout the day, like using breathing drills, an ab belt or a scarf around the midsection, or maybe a weighted blanket or a heating pad if those are comfortable. That would be number one. Number two, I would adopt some very gentle movement practices so we get the feeling of that body movement on an internal sense. Okay. Like yin yoga or slow dynamic stretching would be useful there to really learn how to feel the body's interoceptive signals. But remember, go at your own pace and allow yourself permission to stop before it's obvious that you need to. And then the third big one would be working on the vagus nerve. Right. So doing vagus nerve activation through vibration, humming, or tapping techniques that will send more of these gentle, calming signals through the vagus nerves nerve into your insular cortex and then into your prefrontal cortex that we've been talking about. So that's the big three that I would begin with.
- [33:39]
Elizabeth Kristof
Yeah, I think that Jen and I talk about this on here a lot. But even just some really simple things, like starting to become aware of and recognize, like when I had to go to the bathroom, or starting to notice when I'm hungry, or just making these short little moments throughout the day to consciously drop into my body, is there something that I need? And what does that feel like? Split second, like not taking a lot of time and just gradually building on that.
- [34:07]
Matt Bush
That is super important to build the awareness side. Right. So you can kind of blend those two and you can. You can give more signals through the tools. But then growing that awareness and building the skill of that is so important to be able to. To work with and grow this particular ability.
- [34:27]
Jennifer Wallace
And even on top of that, it's like taking action, right? I feel this, I need this, and I will take action to provide that for myself. Whether it's relieving yourself to go to the bathroom or, you know, drinking water, being hungry, or, you know, yeah, any of that.
- [34:43]
Elizabeth Kristof
And I know this can seem, I don't know, like, tedious, like a lot to ask of someone. But there are some real reasons to do this. One, of course, is what we're talking about, about with our healing, but also thinking about the costs on our relational health, like Jen was talking about in the beginning of the episode. And relationships really thrive on clarity, Being able to sense, name, and communicate what we need. But if our nervous system has learned to mute those emotional signals, bodily signals, as a form of survival. It can be so difficult to know what your needs are, much less to share them with someone else if we can't have that communication of our emotional states inside. So without accurate interoception, we're always struggling to translate our sensations into emotions. And instead of being able to say like I feel anxious, I need some reassurance or I feel exhausted because I need to rest, then it can just show up as irritability or withdrawal or physical symptoms or, or pulling back from that connection with another person. And then over time, that disconnect can make our relationships feel confusing or unbalanced because our needs are going unspoken or unrecognized. Our partners, friends, colleagues may mistake that for indifference. And those patterns of disconnect or conflict can start to arise over and over again. And so there is a big impact on being able to feel, experience, express articulate emotions and the health of our relationships and the connection that we really want for healthy co regulation in our lives.
- [36:26]
Jennifer Wallace
Part of feeling all of these feelings is our aliveness, right this connection. And it's also about the relationship to ourselves. And as we've demonstrated today in our own relationship dynamics, this really does matter. People high in alexithymia often make slower progress in talk therapy. There are studies around that because they can't connect words with inner states. So when therapists move into more body based experiential and somatic tools that outcomes improve really dramatically.
- [36:56]
Matt Bush
The one other thing to add here of like why is it important to rehab? Is because there's connections to our physical health with alexithymia. People with alexithymia are more likely to develop chronic pain, irritable bowel syndrome, hypertension, even cardiac issues. And the theory behind that is that when you can't sense and regulate your emotions, your threat increases. So eventually stress hormones, inflammation and autonomic dysregulation, they start to wear down the physical body. In studies, alexithymia even predicts greater inflammatory markers totally independent of depression or other psychological issues. It is, it's activating and causing these survival responses in the immune system in the physical body. So I think it's important to understand alexithymia in all these ways that we've talked about and know that it is possible to train your nervous system to improve its awareness and its interpretation of interoception and emotions. And doing so could lead to better health outcomes in the long term term.
- [38:05]
Elizabeth Kristof
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you guys so much for joining us for this episode. I hope that you got something out of it and some practical tools that you can take away. And if it resonated, share it with someone who might be feeling stuck in their healing. Make sure to subscribe to this episode on our audio platforms or hit the Little Bell on YouTube to subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode because we have lots of exciting conversations coming up. Breaking down the science and the trauma of emotional health and nervous system resilience.
- [38:33]
Jennifer Wallace
Clients, you've built success. You've created impact. But if you're honest, you know there's a deeper level you're meant to reach for your clients, for your business, and for yourself. If you've ever wondered why insight alone isn't enough to create lasting change. If you've ever felt the emotional fatigue of holding space without the tools to truly shift what's underneath, the missing piece isn't more mindset work, it's nervous system work done right. The Neurosomatic Intelligence Coaching certification gives you a science backed, trauma informed, immediately actionable framework to create sustainable root level change to build mastery, resilience and credibility that sets you apart. Don't stay stuck repeating the same patterns with your clients or yourself. The next level is here. Join us@neurosomaticintelligence.com and change the way you lead forever.