Comedy Centered

Hello. Hi everyone. Hello, Cadre. What is going on? It is Sunday. It is 6pm and this is comedy Centered. Hope you had or are having a great weekend. I did my. Did a lot of nothing, which was kind of what the doctor ordered. I've been definitely doing a little bit too much thinking. I've been in a thinking space, which is good in preparation for comedy centered, of course. But yeah, it's funny how just sitting around thinking can make you exhausted. But that's kind of where I've been at lately. Hey, Ms.

Jules, welcome on in. Hope you're having a great Sunday. Hope you had a great weekend. Normally I try to post in advance of what the topic's gonna be. I wasn't exactly sure before I started. Hey, good evening. Oh, good. And the comments are working too, because for a while there people were making comments and I wasn't seeing them. So I wasn't trying to be rude and not respond to people's comments. I just, there was just a glitch and they've got it fixed now on the app. But so I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to talk about tonight.

One of the things that's been kind of on my mind quite a bit is, and I've spoken about it before, is my own personal cp, CPTSD diagnosis, which is complex post traumatic stress disorder. And you know, I know we've talked about it, I'm sure people are familiar to a certain extent with PTSD and cptsd and there's great information, great research and stuff like that. Don't just take my word for it, but I was trying to kind of, I was going back through some notes, I was trying to think about what I want to talk about.

And I came across a, in my ratings, a term I hadn't heard before and it's called enmeshment trauma. Now enmeshment trauma is a specific kind of a dysfunctional relationship. And like I said, this came up in my research under complex post traumatic stress. Often in complex post traumatic stress, post traumatic stress, there's the regular kind. Well, regular kind that sounds, that sounds arbitrary, but there is the standard type we think of. You're exposed to a horrifying event, right? Like there's a tornado, a freak accident, you know, your, you know, a military situation, something like that, right, where this horrible thing happened.

Complex PTSD generally is repeated over time. Generally it happens in childhood. It's not a one off type of situation. It is a repetition of situations or exposures that are unhealthy for the kid, right? So. And adults. So. But CPTSD generally rears itself in childhood, or it begins in childhood. And so through that research, I found this term enmeshment trauma. Now, I'd never heard this before, but it rang specifically very true for myself and for my own experiences within my family. Right? So basically, enmeshment trauma, like I said, is a dysfunctional relationship dynamic.

Happens within families. It can happen with other people as well. Okay? But generally families. And this is a dynamic where boundaries are very blurred. It could happen in a cult. There's an example. Boundaries are very blurred, and individual identities aren't necessarily totally developed. Okay. Basically, there is a disregard for individualism and individual individuality within any particular group. Like I said, it could be family structure. It could be something else. Right? Through this, though, there is a loss of autonomy for the individual.

There is generally one person kind of the driving force, usually the adult. If we're talking about a parent child situation, that is basically someone who's overly intimate. Now, this doesn't have to be, you know, romantic or, you know, of a sexual nature. It could be right. But this is when you almost have, like, an emotionally undeveloped parent that is overly relying on the child to meet their emotional needs, to help regulate their own emotional stuff. Because they're not capable of it. Right.

Just because you can become a parent doesn't mean you're actually right, you know, capable of it. You know, like, you might not have all the skills you need anyway. But enmeshment is basically emotional power. It's a way to manipulate. And what this enmeshment does is it creates a narrative where the family itself is more important, the group itself is more important than the individual person, your individual identity. Right? The family is the important thing. And whoever the head of the family is could be a matriarch, could be a patriarch, could be two.

There could be more than one. Right? But the family's always first. And so there's little regard, little encouragement for people to express any kind of emotions or feelings or political beliefs or religious beliefs or educational beliefs. Probably different than the dynamic that has been set forth by that family, by that enmeshment. And if you feel very attached in enmeshment to your family, I mean, obviously we want to be close with our family, but this is something that is an extreme closeness.

There are very low levels of autonomy for the individual members in this group. It's too close. Occult is actually a really good way to kind of think about it, right? There are very high levels in these situations. Of inappropriate intimacy. You can imagine a situation where maybe an adult is over sharing personal problems with their child. You know, a divorced mom who is telling her teenage daughter about her last date or, you know, the men she's seeing or something like that. I mean, that would be, you know, kids don't want to hear that, first of all.

But also that it's a manipulation to use the child in that way so that the child becomes almost like the sounding board for the adult. And then the child, you know, of course, once the love and the praise of the apparent. So they're gonna mirror back and say, oh, yeah, of course. Oh, he's a jerk. Why didn't he call you back? You're the best mom. You're the best girl anybody could ever date. Whatever it is, there's no autonomy. What. What the head of the. What the person who's kind of charging the enmeshment wants.

They convince you that that's what you want too. You want what I want because you are an extension of me. We're together. We're the family. So whatever's good for me is good for the family, and whatever's good for the family is good for you, if that makes sense. So they get. They gave us a little bit of a. Like a list of like, some. Some indicating signs, you know, and again, I hadn't done a ton of research onto this, but I really did kind of like this author's point. So again, I'm just going to rattle off some of the things that they were citing as signs of maybe an enmeshment trauma, because we do talk about a measurement.

I. I mean, I guess I haven't talked about a measurement, but when. As soon as I thought of measurement trauma, I. In my mind, I. It equated being an enabler, like, enabling someone, like, as we use in the context of, like, recovery and al anon and all that kind of stuff. But a measurement trauma is a bit different. Okay, so seven signs that you may be in a situation where maybe you're a little too enmeshed if there is a lack of boundaries. Now, of course, we all say, oh, I've got to get better at setting boundaries, da, da, da.

But I mean, what the author was saying in their examples was a lack of boundaries. For example, you can't ever be in the bathroom by yourself without someone coming knocking on the door. You can't have privacy. You can't, you know, they'll read your diaries. You can't write things down. Maybe the lack of boundaries equates to and this is related, I think this is the third sign but a complete lack of privacy. You know, of course if you've got a child who is a teenager or something like that, of course you're going to want them to share their location with you on your phone.

But this lack of privacy goes farther than that. You don't have alone time in your room. Your room is not your own private place. Anything you have is also there. So they can also go through it. All right? This is that a meshment. Everything is all meshed. Right. Let's see what else on the list. You often are made to or naturally do feel responsible for your parents feelings and their moods. Parents of poor mental health too will often rely on the children to be their self worth in the sense of supporting them and listening to them and consoling them, sure, but also elevating them and holding them up as when you do well as the child, like, ooh, look at this wonderful accomplishment that we got.

We got as the family, the enmeshed family. This is our win, right? Lack of privacy. We talked about that. Avoiding conflict. You may be so afraid of being blamed for something or fear of losing intimacy with that parent that you start learning early on the best way to deal with maybe the mood swings or the anger or the things you don't quite understand is just to avoid conflict. One of the things I've. I've learned about myself is the things that, and I believe it's true of others because I've seen it in other writings in that.

But the, the things that you avoid, you think in the short term, you, your anxiety is lessened by avoiding something unpleasant. Let's say you have a trigger. You had a bad experience at a car wash just to pick something. And ever since that bad experience at a car wash, you don't go to car washes anymore. You don't wash your car at all. Which is fine until your car starts rusting because you didn't get the winter salt off of it and now the car is starting to fall apart. The same can happen by avoiding conflict.

If you're constantly just avoiding the energy and avoiding the conversation and avoiding the conflict, it doesn't resolve itself in you. You don't feel any better about the situation. And more importantly, you've just reinforced your neural pathways to say we can avoid these things, we can avoid stressors, we can avoid triggers completely. And the more you rely on avoidance as a strategy to being healthy and happy, you can kind of see where that, yeah, you can kind of end up chasing your own tail, trying to avoid conflict.

You'll end up going nowhere. You'll end up being agoraphobic. Yeah, there's no conflict, but you're also not living. So let's see. Lack of identity outside of the family. Oftentimes, children of a mesh families, when they go off to college or maybe off to the service, or they. They're going on and about their lives, they don't have the family unit as present on a daily. They struggle with their own lack of identity because the. The. What do I want to say? The worship of the group, the worship of the family, the worship of the unit or whatever, and the prioritization of the community over that individual.

Once the individual is removed from that particular community or situation, they really don't have a clue. And that particular one really, really hit home for me because I remember going to college when I was 18, and a lot of the things that are being described very much happened in my family, both sides of my family. My family's divorced, but there were instances of this enmeshment on both sides. And without getting into too much detail, but I really didn't know who I was outside of being either in one house, the kid who was always in trouble, or in the other house, the kid who was always the good kid.

I was never one. I was never the golden child or the scapegoat. I would flip back and forth depending on what house I was. And so my brother, his roles would flip as well. So I know I struggled with that. Figuring out, who am I without all these other voices. When people stop telling you, when you. When you get criticized and told what to do every moment of the day, it's kind of like being incarcerated for too long, and then you get out without someone bossing you around. You really don't know what to do.

So there's that. Let's see. Complicated interpersonal relationships can be a result of an enmeshment trauma that you have from childhood. Although that makes sense, you're gonna have difficulty trusting people because you kind of couldn't trust the family unit fully. And when you did try to express who you were in your own family unit because of the overriding loyalty to autonomy and to the family, you. Maybe when you express it, you're like, mom, I want to dye my hair a crazy color, or, I don't like country music.

I want to learn how to play music, but I want to learn a violin, or I want to learn something different. These. These are. These things aren't accepted. So you don't trust you, don't. You're not allowed to act out and express how you individually feel about things. So it's pretty easy to see when you're going into adult relationships. It's tough, it's tough to show up as you are. Yeah. And a lot of people actually have a stunted romantic partnership or situation. I guess I'm trying to think of a careful way of saying it without making anybody feel bad, but oftentimes people will just say, forget it and just these, they'll have no relationship, no relationship of a romantic level with a partner.

They will, the enmeshment is so deep, they'll just continue to get all of their emotional needs met through the family and the family members and they're just gonna stay right there. And this can go on and on and on and on. Right. So in these enmeshment situations, particularly in family dynamics and it seems like it falls into four kind of groups. There's about four different kinds of parenting that are pretty prevalent within this enmeshment. Trauma 1 is the romanticized parent. This is a little bit of a triggy triggery subject, so I'm just going to put a caveat in there.

But this would be something that would fall into the range of like an emotional incest. Not necessarily an actual. But the adult is going to the child for emotional intimacy. They treat the child sometimes as a romantic partner or as a best friend. They're basically taking, they, they, they, they're, they're lacking an adult relationship in their own lives and so they're using the child to be a stand in for that other adult. Helicopter parenting. Well, I know we've bantered helicopter parent around a million times in the media.

Excuse me, excuse me. But helicopter parenting and wanting to be safe and watching our children. And we all know too, you know, the first child you watch like a hawk, the second, third, fourth child, maybe not as, maybe not as like hyper vigilant about the security. Right. Being a good parent, being one of your children, safe. Nothing, there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with being an involved parent. I don't want to discourage that. But sometimes this can be, this helicopter parenting style can actually be a ruse.

It can be a manipulation where they're saying, well, I need to look in your phone for security. I need you to not have privacy. You can't keep secrets from me. You have to tell me everything because it's for safety, it's for, it's for your own security. It's for your Own good. Well, in a situation like that, when a child is growing up, it's healthy for them to have certain things that they keep to themselves. That's okay. It's not a negative reflection on you as a parent. Actually, it's a good thing, you know, because that means they're growing up into their own individual person.

But if you're in an enmeshment situation, a helicopter parenting, it might look like these are just amazing parents that are just all over it. Like, they're at every kid's game, they're at every play, they're at everything. But are they there in support of the child, or are they there in control of the child? Are they there because they want to make sure the child isn't saying anything negative about them or negative about the family? You know, when they're out in public, are they there to control the child?

In an enmeshment trauma situation, it seems like that's more of the underlying motivator than actually the safety of the kid. Right, okay. Scapegoating and favoritism. I think we're all familiar with that concept, right? But in an enmeshment type situation, parents don't feel odd. Oh, I get it. Oh, I'm sorry. I can't even. Sometimes I can't even read my own writing, y'all. But scapegoats, scapegoating and favoritism, the reason why they've got that in there, as far as the enmeshment, is that that's.

That's a. And we've also talked about it in family dynamics and group dynamics that. That can shift around. And I even just talked about it a minute ago. In one situation. Let's say you've got siblings. You. You're. You're usually the golden child. You're usually the one in the family that everybody holds up and prays. Right? But then all of a sudden, you're kind of goofy little brother who is generally just kind of a carefree person or whatever, all of a sudden had a brilliant idea, has started their own company, and, oh, my God, they're making a ton of money, and now they're the golden child.

And you're not the golden child anymore. Hmm. So what are you gonna do? Are you gonna take that opportunity to go, oh, well, now I can get out of this enmeshment situation with my family. The spotlight's on them. They'll love that for a while. I'll just back myself out and protect myself and get my. Get my head back on. Right. No, man, you're not letting it go. You're not letting your little brother steal the shine from you. You're now going to get competitive with your little brother. You're going to now be vying from that, you know, for the parents attention.

You're going to want to get back to your original pecking order, the original status. Right. And these things can be, you know, children can obviously be played off of each other, you know, so that there's this constant circus around the measure or the leader, the family of like, who loves me more, who's going to get my favor tonight, who's my best friend. So yeah, and I know we're already going kind of like pretty close to our time, our time. But this enmeshment trauma that, that it feels, I feel like I cracked open a little sliver of something from my own past kind of reading, reading through this.

Oh yeah. And before I wrap up too, there was this. Oh, where is. Oh, there we go. So one of the things when I part of why I was going into the, the original talk. See, this is how it is with the ADHD too. I, I, even though I make the notes, I still, I anyway, but I was reading up about hormone levels and how these affect our different statuses, our different, our homeostasis, how this affects our reactions to things and all that good stuff. And cortisol, if you're not familiar, cortisol is a hormone naturally secreted in our own bodies.

And what it really does is it turns proteins and energy, it regulates our blood sugar, it regulates our blood pressure, but it also regulates our immune system. Okay. Cortisol is key in regulating our immune system. And our immune system is our body's ability to fight off, you know, foreign, foreign, you know, things and diseases and all that good stuff. Right. Well, undiagnosed trauma, untreated trauma, unprocessed trauma, whether it be ptsd, cptsd, any kind of childhood problems. Medical. Like if you were a child that was really sick all the time and you had to have a lot of invasive medical stuff, things like that, your cortisol levels may be ratcheted up higher and stuck at a higher level than they should be naturally.

And instances where that's happening, it can actually hijack your immune system and deplete your body's ability to fight off immune related disorders. And they have shown that, well, PTSD is more common in women than men. It occurs at roughly twice the rate. And when you have complex ptsd and it's gone on for years and years and generally it started in childhood. You will often have abnormally high cortisol rates and levels in your body for a lifetime. So if you do not take the time to unpack some of this stuff and do the work and analyze some of these problems, it leads to a lot of bad stuff, obviously, like alcohol misuse, bad relationships, bad decision making, all that kind of stuff.

But the actual cortisol immune system correlation, that's why they're finding that the more common denominator with people that are suffering from autoimmune disorders, often if you, if the, if the clinician or the doctor is keen enough, if they ask about childhood trauma or past trauma, there's usually a great deal of it and unprocessed as well. That doesn't mean people that have, that get autoimmune disorders had a bad childhood. It doesn't mean that. But there is a correlation between abnormally high cortisol levels, which will happen in situations of prolonged or repeated stressful situations.

Your body's just going to create more of that hormone, that fight or flight hormone because it's constantly trying to assess whether a situation is dangerous, and a lifetime of those higher cortisol levels. What the body has to do to keep those cortisol levels high, it's got to burn more proteins into energy. It's got to, it's got to burn more sugar. It's got to regulate those things. And the functions that drop off is the regulation of your own immune system. So even though it's not necessarily fun to start analyzing a lot of this stuff or looking at our own past, looking at childhood dynamics and trying to figure out where.

Because comedy centered started as, you know, my little accountability measure as I was trying to go alcohol free, going alcohol free. But my alcohol misuse is for sure a coping mechanism. I've used too often, right, to numb out of my own unprocessed crap. And whether you process it or not, it goes on affecting you. There's a, There's a Buddhist phrase that the things that you want to do in life, the things that you want, you have to imagine your mind is almost like a house, and your house has a basement.

And these things you want to do with your life, these things you want to go for, these things you want to try, these adventures you want to have, you keep throwing them in your basement. You keep throwing it in a basement saying, well, not now or maybe someday or I don't know, or I don't trust myself. But even the stuff you throw in your basement, even the stuff in your Real house or in your mental health, even the stuff you throw in the basement, shut the door and don't look at it, still goes on influencing you.

It's still in your house. You still know that. So sometimes it's hard to open up that door to the basement and go look at some of this stuff. But if you really think about the things that you want to do in life and you think about what's limiting you from trying and having faith in yourself, you know, it might be that you need to look back and look a little deeper and honor the little you, the internal version of you, the inner child of you, and try to, I don't know, try to honor them by forgiving them, knowing and forgiving yourself, knowing you did what you had to do to survive what you survived, but also knowing that just avoiding, just evading, tuning out, numbing out, sitting on the Internet, drinking a bottle of booze, all those things, all that avoidance, it catches up.

It's probably increasing your cortisol levels. And as we go through life, the journey of life, the decisions we at critical points become more and more serious. So if you've recently been diagnosed or told that maybe you are at risk for an immune disorder or things of that nature, do some research again. Gabor Mate. Dr. Gabor Mate is someone I've recommended numerous times, but he has some really groundbreaking work on the relationship between trauma and disease. And I encourage you to, you know, take a moment and check out his work.

So that's kind of what I had. Fun, light topic. Nothing like a little enmeshment trauma to keep your Sunday rolling. Right? I hope you guys enjoyed that. I know I was kind of rambling a little bit at the end, but I bring these things up because, A, they interest me, and B, I'm working a lot of this stuff out in front of you guys in real time. So obviously sometimes I'm picking subjects that I can that ring true for me. So if you're watching past episodes, if you've engaged with me online, if there's subjects that you think I should talk about or things that maybe there's a book you've read that you think would be helpful, something that you've gleaned an article that you think I should highlight, send it to me.

I would love to get that information. And always looking to learn and bring new stuff to you guys. Oh, my God. Thank you, Ms. Jules. You have a great week, too. And happy Halloween coming up. So I'll see all you ghosts and goblins after Halloween next week. And we'll be back in a week, next Sunday at 6pM Central, comedy centered. All right. Have a good night, y'all.