When the Nervous System Folds: Trauma, Fawning, and Finding Your Voice

Speaker Identification

Speaker 1 – Opening Vocal / Intro Voice: Identified from the short opening lines before the host introduction. The transcript does not clearly confirm whether this is the host, a sung/produced intro, or a prerecorded voice.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: Identified because the speaker introduces herself by name as Jennifer Elizabeth Masters and continues as the main host throughout the episode.

Speaker 1 – Opening Vocal / Intro Voice: Coming home. Coming home. I remember who I am. I don't have to hide. Welcome to SOS for the Soul: Coming Home. I'm Jennifer Elizabeth Masters, transformational teacher, narcissistic trauma recovery guide, and author of Unbecoming. This is where emotional healing meets embodied awakening, where you can be happy just being you. Each week we explore what it takes to dissolve narcissistic trauma, reclaim your inner authority, and remember who you are beneath survival patterns so that you can live with clarity, confidence, and deep self-trust. If you're ready for real transformation, you're in the right place, and I'm so glad to have you here.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: Today we are talking about folding, and I'm not talking about when we're playing cards. I am talking about when we're in the middle of a situation with someone, and we don't have the capacity to say what we're thinking. Have you ever walked away from a conversation and thought, why didn't I say what I was thinking? Well, why did I just fold here? How come I kept myself silent? What was I afraid of? You may replay the conversation all afternoon. Know exactly what you should have said, the perfect words, the truth you wanted to speak. Maybe you even knew in advance what you wanted to say, but in the moment you folded.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: So I'd like to begin today with something that happened recently. It's small on the surface, but the moment I witnessed it, I knew I had to talk about it here because it is so similar to something I've experienced as well. So I was visiting someone recently, someone I care deeply about, and that is a wonderful, hardworking person, very kind, telling me about a situation in their business. Someone being difficult, someone demanding something that wasn't fair, but rather than pushing back and saying, that's ridiculous, or whatever the person wanted to say, they said nothing, more like I hear you.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: And as they were telling me the story, I watched something happen that I recognized immediately. They began explaining, minimizing, justifying, making themselves smaller. And not in the situation itself, but in the telling of it. Maybe they're right. Maybe I need to think differently about the situation, shrinking the injustice down to something manageable. Have you ever done this? By making themselves wrong. Yeah. It was the way you recognize yourself in an old photograph. That's kind of how I felt with that. I didn't say anything in the moment. I just sat with it. And I recognize it because I too have done it, you know, probably a thousand times over the course of my lifetime. I still do it sometimes. You know, when you're in the presence of somebody who may be aggressive, strong, bullying, perhaps, you know, that folding, shrinking, that quiet, desperate internal negotiation.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: If I push back, they won't like me. If I hold my ground, I'll lose something. Or maybe if I push back, the people that care about this person will be upset with me. If I say what is actually true, something bad will happen. So this person was not in danger. The situation wasn't a real threat. But just somebody being very unreasonable, maybe even taking advantage. And that, my friends, is what we're talking about today. And this is not a character flaw. This is not weakness. This is what happens when a nervous system has been trained. You know, by hard experiences, difficult relationships, growing up in environments where keeping the peace was a matter of survival, you know, emotional survival. And responding to discomfort as if we're in danger.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: So this is the trauma brain. And it lives in so many of us. The trauma brain is a real thing. We're going to be talking about the science of it. This isn't something I just made up, brought up out of thin air. Now this is a real scientific fact. Trauma changes the brain chemistry. So I'm going to walk you through exactly what trauma does to the brain, what it does to your body, and why it makes us fold, appease, maybe people please, overgive and shrink, maybe over function. Even when we know better, even when we see clearly what's happening, even when, like me, you've been doing healing work for nearly four decades. And then I want to give you some tools, not theory, things that you can use this week in your real life. So get your journal out, get your pen out. You may have some things you'd like to write down. And, you know, in your real life in conversations that make you want to disappear.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: That's what we're talking about. So this episode is for the woman who has ever left a conversation wondering why she didn't say what she actually felt. And for the man who knows he's being treated unfairly but can't find the words to say so. It's for anyone who has over-apologized for something that wasn't even their fault, just to make the discomfort stop. You're not broken, but you may be running on a very old programming pattern. And today we're going to start to change that.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: We are going to talk about the science behind the trauma brain. So let me start with something I really need you to hear and really let this land. So take a nice deep breath.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: Trauma is not in your head. It's in your brain. And those are two very different things. When people say it's all in your head, what they mean is, oh, you're making it up. It's imaginary, psychosomatic, you know. Something you could simply decide to stop if you tried hard enough or more positively if you thought harder and tried harder, you could just move on already. But the science, and there are now decades of extraordinary science on this, telling us something completely different. Trauma, literally, physically changes the structure and function of the brain. It changes the neural plasticity of the brain. It changes your nervous system. And it also changes the way your body responds to the world. It's not a metaphor. This is biology. And one of the most important things that happened for me in my healing journey was the day I truly understood this because it meant I could stop blaming myself.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: And you can too. So let me walk you through it. I'm going to keep this simple for me and for you because the science doesn't need to be complicated to be life-changing.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: Here we're going to talk about the amygdala. And what is the amygdala? Let's think about the amygdala as your inner smoke detector. Deep inside the brain sits a small, almond-shaped structure called the amygdala. And like I said, think of it as your smoke detector. Its entire job from the moment you were born, and I love this one, has been to scan your environment and ask one question. Am I safe? Am I safe now? That is all it does: ask, Am I safe?

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: So in a nervous system that has not been shaped by trauma, the amygdala does its job beautifully. Real danger arises, it fires an alarm. The danger passes, and it settles back down. It's proportionate, functional. It does a good job.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: However, conversely, in a traumatized brain, a traumatized nervous system, that smoke detector gets stuck. It doesn't just go off on real fires anymore, it goes off for smoke. It goes off for the smell of smoke, for anything that remotely reminds it of fire. Lighting a candlestick, for example. Lighting incense. Even if the fire was 20, 30 or 40 years ago.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: All right, so what does this look like in real life, you might ask? Well, it looks like your heart rate spiking when somebody raises their voice, even slightly. Even if they're not angry at you. Now I'll talk about my dad. My dad used to raise his voice when he was impassioned about a subject and he would get really loud. And he was scary loud. So you got to know the difference between somebody being excited and when somebody's really angry and are you in danger? But the body doesn't know the difference. It just heard a loud voice and your amygdala says danger, danger, danger.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: It could look like or feel like your stomach dropping when you sense that someone is displeased with you. Even before a word is spoken. You read the energy in the room and your whole system goes on high alert. It could be sitting in a meeting and having someone challenge your idea. And instead of responding thoughtfully or pushing back and saying, well, I can understand how you think that, but. And you just go completely blank or you start talking too fast over explaining, over apologizing, or maybe going completely silent. Not because you don't have anything to say, but because your nervous system just pulled the emergency brake. It looks like my son David telling me about a client and even in the safety of a conversation with his mother, his nervous system was replaying the threat. Still trying to manage it. Still trying to find a way to make it okay.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: It's not weakness. It is trained reaction. Your amygdala learned that certain signals, a raised voices, disapproval, conflict, or someone being unhappy with you, mean danger. And it learned this because at some point in your life, those signals did mean danger. It was keeping you safe the only way. It never got the update, the email that said, danger is over. We're safe now.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: Well, the second layer here is the hippocampus. We have two of those actually a hippocampi on either side of your head, one on each side. And this is your brain's memory processing center. Its job is to take your experiences, make sense of them, file them away as memories with a timestamp. That happened then in that place with those people. It's over. It's in the past.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: And here's what trauma does to the hippocampus. It causes it to shrink actual measurable shrinkage visible on an MRI. And when the hippocampus is compromised, it cannot do its filing job properly. So traumatic memories don't get filed away as past events. They stay raw and present tense, which is why trauma survivors don't just remember what happened to them. They relive it again and again and again.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: It could be a smell. It could be a tone of voice. If you listen to my previous shows for me, it was my mother. it was my mother's, 'You're late,' that tone of voice, the look. And suddenly you're not in your present life. You're back there in the kitchen, in a relationship in that moment, maybe as a teenager or younger. And that is what a flashback is. It's not a trick of the mind. It is a hippocampus failing to mark the experience as finished, complete, past tense. The wound is still open. The nervous system is still responding as if it's happening right now. PTSD, CPTSD, chronic PTSD: that is where this comes from. And this is why healing cannot be rushed. This is why you simply can't decide, which is what my mother said to me. Oh, Jennifer, get over it. Has anybody ever said that to you? Just get over it. The work of healing in part is literally helping the hippocampus do what it couldn't do before.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: Process those experiences, put them in context, and file them away as the past that they actually are.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: Now, there's another part of the brain we're going to talk about: the prefrontal cortex. And yes, it is in the front of the brain. And the wise adult goes offline. That's what happens. And now the most important piece for the conversation today is the prefrontal cortex in the front part of your brain, the part that makes you distinctly human. This is where rational, for most people, rational thinking lives. Your decision making, your ability to assess a situation clearly. I have the right to hold my ground here. Let me think about how I want to respond. This is the wise adult part of you. The part that knows things. The part that can see patterns. The part that frankly has worked very hard in therapy and healing work. And reading and growing to understand what healthy looks like.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: The devastating truth about trauma when the amygdala fires when the smoke detector goes off, the prefrontal cortex goes offline. The alarm is so loud, the wise adult cannot get a word in. Researchers call this the amygdala hijack. I call it meeting someone that is my kryptonite. It is the same thing for me because that is exactly what it is. The survival brain takes the wheel, shoves the wise adult out of the driver's seat, and makes decisions based entirely on one question. How do we make this stop? How do we make this threat go away?

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: And so, in the very moment that you need your wisdom in the middle of conflict, in the face of a bully, in the conversation where everything in you needs to hold firm, the adult part of the brain, the rational part of the brain is not there. You are running on instinct, old programming, patterns that were laid down long ago before you had any choice in the matter. Often, you know, at two, three years of age. And this is why you leave conversations, replaying them for hours and sometimes even days afterward. I call it stewing and brewing. Suddenly, knowing exactly what you should have said, your prefrontal cortex came back online in the car on the way home, lying in bed at two in the morning. Oh, why didn't I say that? Now it has words. Now I can see things clearly and you go, why? Why didn't I say that? But in the moment, gone. Well, I want to say this very directly because I think it matters enormously.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: This is not a failure of intelligence. It's not a failure of character. This is neurobiology. And understanding it, truly understanding it can be the beginning of enormous compassion for yourself. You're not stupid for not speaking up. You're not weak for folding. You are a human being whose brain was shaped by real experiences responding in the only way it knows how.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: All right, so let's talk about what this response actually looks like. Most of us grew up learning about two survival responses. Fight or flight, right? You either face a threat or you run from it. A tiger shows up. What do you do? You either run, or you face it and possibly die. You either face the threat or you run from it. Fight or flight. So later we learned about a third freeze. The deer in the headlights moment. The paralysis that happens when fight and flight feel impossible. We freeze.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: And there is a fourth response. And I believe it is one of the responses that most deeply marks the lives of trauma survivors. Not crazy about the word because it brings to light an uncomfortable feeling. And maybe it will for you. I'm interested to see how you feel about it. So those who have experienced childhood trauma, especially sexual molestation, or people who have been in relationships with narcissists or emotionally immature people. This is called the fawn response. And it was first named and described by a therapist, Pete Walker, who is himself a survivor of complex childhood trauma.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: Fawning is what happens when your nervous system looks at a threat and says, I can't fight this. I can't run from this. I can't hide. I can't afford to freeze. So I will become whatever this person needs me to be in order for myself to feel safe and the danger to stop.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: Now I had someone in my family tell me that whenever she felt a threat, she would laugh. And she couldn't understand why. It could be in the intense moment, maybe a breakup or a very difficult conversation where she would laugh. And she would, the person she's talking to got very upset. Like, why are you laughing? Why are you laughing right now? But this is a fawn experience. It's where you're so uncomfortable. You're doing whatever you can possibly do to make this threat go away. It is, it could be a lot of different things like laughing like it is a joke when something's not funny. It could be nodding when you completely disagree with what the other person is saying, making your needs smaller until you barely realize or remember what they were.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: It could look like over-apologizing, constantly falling over yourself apologizing, reflexively almost involuntarily for things that are not your fault at all. I wonder if any of this feels familiar. So it looks like you are unable to ask for what you need because asking feels presumptuous, like being unable to express disappointment because that might upset someone. Or being unable to say, 'That hurt me,' or that scared me because then you'd have to deal with their reaction to the pain on top of the pain itself. Does that feel familiar? Take a breath. I'm taking a breath.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: So here's where the pattern comes from. At some point, usually in childhood or in a relationship where emotional or physical safety depended on managing the other person's mental and emotional state, fawning worked. It kept you safe. It reduced the threat. When you made yourself small, the yelling stopped. When you agreed, the coldness thawed. When you took the blame, the tension broke and you felt safe again. Your nervous system, which is extraordinarily intelligent, drew a very logical conclusion. If I appease, I survive. And it filed that conclusion away as gospel, as the strategy, as the thing that works. This keeps me safe. And so you continue to do it automatically.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: And the tragedy is that the nervous system doesn't automatically revise its conclusions. When your circumstances change, you leave the house or the relationship or that environment, and you carry this strategy with you into your adult relationships, into your workplace, into friendships, into the conversation with the difficult client. You are no longer in danger, but your nervous system hasn't gotten the memo. And so you fold, even when you can see clearly that you shouldn't, even when the wise adult part of you is saying, this isn't right. You don't have to accept this. This fawn response moves faster than the voice. It's already in motion before the thought is finished.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: So I'm going to share something really personal here, because I think it matters that you hear. this is not just information, but has lived experience. So recently, when I thought I was completely overreacting to somebody that was a bully, last August, I was in a restaurant dining with two older women that I care very much about, one seventy-nine, the other almost eighty-five, who had dementia. So the older lady was named Helen, and she passed away in February of this year, and I still carry her with me. So this woman that claimed to be a friend of theirs began screaming at them in the restaurant. She did something very embarrassing to my friend Lynn, and then yelled about it in the restaurant. I sat there wondering what was going on. She was criticizing these people that she claimed to love, loudly criticizing them, putting them down, and then she started on me.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: Anything I said was a stupid idea. What did I know? And of course, Helen with dementia wasn't able to defend herself, and I'll tell you what happened with me. I started to stand up for them because I felt like they were at a disadvantage. They were obviously afraid. What happened in my body at the moment, this is real, and I think you deserve the real version.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: She stood up and she started screaming at me, yelling at me, spitting in my face. She was yelling so loudly. I couldn't make eye contact. I was looking at, I guess, my hands and my lap. My hands were shaking. My hands were sweaty. I could not look this woman in the eyes and face. Every alarm in my nervous system was going off. My legs started to shake. PTSD came right back up. Yelling is one of my deepest triggers. It takes me back instantly to moments in my childhood. and in my relationships where yelling preceded something bad. My amygdala did not know I was a grown woman in a restaurant in Ojai, California. It thought I was back in my childhood in one of those places. My fawn response was activated. That pull, that almost gravitational pull towards disappearing, towards shrinking, towards finding a way to make it stop without making it worse.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: Your mouth gets dry. You can't speak. And when you do, your voice may shake.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: Something that I believe only comes from years of doing this work, not courage in the Hollywood sense, but not calm and composed and fearless. Just a very quiet, very unsteady decision. I found my voice, couldn't look her in the eye, but I found my voice and I asked her quietly. Please lower your voice. You're making a scene. Please stop yelling at me. You're spitting in my face. She didn't stop and she did the same thing again in another restaurant some time later. And then there was another scene closer to home. And eventually, not in the moment, but afterward when my prefrontal cortex came back online and I had time and space to think clearly. I got a restraining order. It went into effect October 20, 2025. Sometimes we need to do that. We need to get a legal protection around us. I'm glad I did. I have no regrets about that at all. So now people hear that story and some of you are saying, well, you're so brave and I appreciate that, but I want to tell you, the truth felt like I was anything but.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: And I think the truth is more useful to you than a cleaned-up version. Because in those moments, I did not feel brave. I felt like a scared little child. I felt small and scared like the floor dropped out from underneath me. I couldn't make eye contact. My voice was shaking. My nervous system was completely activated. And still I spoke.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: So that's what healing looks like in practice. Not fearless, not composed, not the version where you say the perfect thing with your chin lifted and voice steady like a movie star. The real version is the one where you're scared and triggered and your eyes are down and your hands might be shaking and you breathe and you speak anyway, maybe softly, maybe one sentence as quiet as it needs to be. And then later when you have your bearings back, you take the next step. The gap between being triggered in the moment and the action is where 37 years of healing lives, not in never being triggered. It still happens from time to time in knowing that the triggered state is temporary. And trusting your wise self will come back online and taking the next right action when it does.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: And this is what I want for you.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: So we're going to go deeper into the subject because that particular person is a specific type of bully narcissistic bully actually likely psychopathic or yes, we'll just leave it there.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: So I'd like to spend a little time here on the particular type of person who activates the fawn response with extraordinary reliability in trauma survivors, and that is the narcissistic bully. And that's what I encountered. And not every narcissist is a bully in the overt sense, but a certain type is. And they are experts often completely unconsciously at finding the exact lever that makes you fold. In my case, it was a raised voice, a woman yelling at me. My mother used to do that all the time. She controlled with her anger.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: So here's what they do. They reframe reality. They constantly and consistently position themselves as the wronged party, the reasonable one, the person who is simply responding to your provocations or failures. They are the master of making you and me, the problem, even when you are the one that's being harmed. With their initial provocation when it doesn't produce the result and response they're looking for when you hold your ground or call out their behavior. Ooh, woe unto you. If you do that, they don't like that at all. Or you simply fail to collapse in the way they expected. They increase the pressure. They get louder or colder or more cutting.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: And so for a trauma survivor, someone whose nervous system already reads conflict as danger, whose amygdala is already primed to respond to disapproval as a threat. A narcissistic bully is not just unpleasant. They're not just difficult. They feel at a cellular level, existentially threatening. Your amygdala fires, your prefrontal cortex goes offline and in that moment, you are not a healed adult with decades of growth and wisdom behind you. You are the child who learned that when someone is this upset, you need to make it stop by any means necessary. Including making yourself wrong, even when you're not.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: They make you doubt your own perceptions. They make you replay conversations wondering if you misunderstood. They make you second guess your clarity, your memory, your judgment. And for those of us who grew up in environments where perceptions were regularly dismissed or denied. This hits a very old, very deep wound. I don't know if you remember what I said last week when I told my mother I'd been depressed for decades. What did she say? Oh nonsense. They dismiss you. They dismiss your feelings.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: So I wanted to say something clearly here that seeing the pattern doesn't make you immune to it. You can see the pattern, but still be affected by it. I know what narcissistic behavior looks like. I studied it, lived it, written about it, taught about it for years. I saw the pattern clearly. I recognized it immediately. I took legal action. And I still felt myself want to fold. Still felt that doubt creep in and still felt the nervous system asking, maybe it's my fault. What did I do? Maybe if I'd done something differently. That is not a failure of my healing. That is trauma doing what trauma does. The difference is that I no longer get lost in the doubt. I feel it. I acknowledge it. Oh yes. It's that old familiar feeling. And then I let it move through me. I breathe through it rather than letting it make decisions. This is the goal. That's the goal.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: Not to never feel it. To no longer be ruled by it.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: I want to touch on something that's going to sound a little out of alignment with this discussion, but it's really part of it. One of the things that I've come to recognize is clutter, hoarding, and letting go are the same wound. Different room. Clutter, hoarding, letting go. Same wound. Maybe a different room.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: So this connection might surprise you. And it did me too when I really understood it. Clutter. Yeah, I know. We just went down into the trauma brain, narcissistic bullies, the fawn response. And now I'm going to talk about the pile of things on your kitchen counter. But stay with me because I promise you, it's the same conversation.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: I've seen this again and again in my own life and the lives of people I work with. Trauma survivors very often struggle with clutter, with accumulating things and not being able to release them, especially papers. Of course, it could be different for everyone. And sometimes it reaches the level of hoarding. Sometimes it's simply a home that always feels a little overwhelming, a little out of control, no matter how many times you try to address it. And for some, that may be the biggest issue is addressing it. You know, you come home from a trip and your suitcase lays on the floor for weeks on end. You step over it trying to get to the closet. Well, I just got home yesterday and I am happy to say my suitcase has been unpacked. Everything's been put away.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: So when relationships have been painful and love's been conditional, withdrawn, weaponized, or just not enough. Things start to feel safer than people. Objects don't leave, they don't reject you. They don't change the rules without telling you. Things don't hurt you the way people can.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: And now another form of clutter is hoarding animals, too many dogs, too many cats. It is a form of hoarding. Don't beat yourself up. It's okay. You will work your way through it. It's what we're doing here.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: And so consciously or unconsciously, mostly unconsciously, we accumulate, we surround ourselves. And then when it comes time to let something go, even something small, it could be an envelope. Oh, I might need it. I might be able to write a note on this. It could feel at a nervous system level like another loss, another thing leaving. Another thing we can't hold on to. So for those of us who've experienced significant relational loss, letting go of physical objects can trigger. Oh, boy, I'm feeling that genuine grief. It sounds disproportionate from the outside, but inside the nervous system, loss is loss. The body doesn't always distinguish between letting go of a box of old magazines, records, CDs. VCR tapes. Both activate the old wound that says, I've already lost so much, I can't let this go, too.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: There's another layer for many trauma survivors, especially those with the history of the fawn response. Clutter. Breathe. Everybody breathe is also the accumulation of saying, yes, when we mean no. We take things people give us, right, that we don't want because refusing felt impossible. How often has somebody dropped off a bag of clothes or toys on your doorstep here? 'They're just for the kids,'. We don't want them, but we take them anyway. Because discarding, saying no feels like rejection, ingratitude, like conflict. So our homes fill up with other people's things with things that we never really chose, maybe even other people's pets. With the physical evidence of how many times we said, yes, when we meant hell no.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: I'm going to do a full dedicated episode on this on clutter because it deserves a complete conversation. But I wanted to mention it here because it belongs in this conversation. Clutter, people pleasing, folding, conflict, overgiving, over functioning, the inability to say no. They're all branches of the same tree. The root is a nervous system that learned long ago that holding on is safer than letting go, that saying yes is safer than saying no, that shrinking is safer than taking up space. And the healing, the clutter, the people pleasing, for all of it begins in the same place in understanding what the nervous system actually learned. And gently, compassionately, teaching it something new.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: So I'm going to give you a path forward. And this is where I'm going to share some hopeful, practical, grounded, experienced tools for you to use, real tools. So here's where you can take out your pen and paper.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: So I've walked you through some very difficult terrain and I don't want to leave you there. So understanding why we fold is essential. But at some point, and the point is now, we begin to learn how to stay standing, head upright, able to speak, able to breathe, able to look somebody in the eye. I want to give you tools that are real, not things that sound good in theory, but fall apart in the moment that things get difficult, things that work in the body because this is where the work actually happens. Embodied transformations, what we talk about.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: So the first one, and I like this one, I call it name that tomb. And I talk about this a lot, naming what you feel. It's one of the first things, the first step in awareness that I teach people. What do you feel?

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: A lot of people feel nothing. They feel numb, completely numb. Why? We've talked about this in previous episodes. I think it was like two episodes before. We have suppressed emotions so much. The shadow, the anger, the grief, the sadness. Underneath that anger is sadness. We've stuffed it, and that can cause us to have a heart wall, which is like a shutting down of our emotional state so that we feel nothing. When we have stuffed so much, that's what the results can be. Depression is one of them from stuffing anger, but we can also feel completely numb.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: So whether it's that familiar tightening, the urge to apologize for existing, the pull to agree with something you don't agree with, just to make the discomfort stop. The very first thing I want you to do is name it. What are you feeling? What is the feeling that you're holding? And here's another one. Where do you feel it? And maybe you don't know what the feeling is, but maybe if you close your eyes and you scan your eyes, and you scan your body, you may feel a heaviness, a darkness, a shadow. Just breathe into that area. Just give it some energy. Just don't move from that place until you feel a lightness growing in that area. Maybe it's in your chest, maybe it's in your gut. So you can put your hand there and just focus your breath. As you breathe into that area, you're going to notice that it dissipates. The feeling, the intensity will dissipate.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: So naming it, naming it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: Name it to tame it. That's what researchers call it. So what's happening is you are engaging the prefrontal cortex, and that is the wise part of the adult brain that went offline. You are bringing it back by narrating, putting language into the experience.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: Name it to tame it. So when you identify the emotional state with words, the intensity of it will decrease measurably. You are literally shifting your reactive brain to the reflective brain in real time. What did I say?

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: Name it to tame it. If that's the only thing you get out of this show, that's huge. Name what you feel to tame it.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: And you can practice this after the fact, after the conversation, where you fawned, where you folded, where you said, yes, instead of no. Sit with it. Say to yourself, the fawn response was activated. My nervous system perceived danger. There was no danger. I responded in a way. I was trained to respond. It was a pattern. Now I'm learning a different way. This is not self-criticism. It's self-understanding, self-nurturing. And they feel very different in the body. So that's tool number one.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: Name it to tame it.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: Tool number two is, learn your body's early warning system or symptom. So your nervous system sends signals before the conscious mind is caught up. Learn what yours are. For me, tightness in the chest. A kind of bracing. My face freezes. Do you know what I mean? Your face feels like it's frozen. Maybe you talk too fast. You start explaining too much. Words come out in a rush. You're over-justifying, over-apologizing. Trying to prove how good you are. You're reasonable before anyone has even questioned you. When I catch up with that happening, I know my trauma brain has taken the wheel.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: And your signals might be different. Maybe it's a sinking feeling in your stomach. Maybe your mouth goes dry. That's what happened with me. Maybe your voice gets very quiet, almost inaudible. You shrink. Your voice shrinks. Maybe you feel a sudden inexplicable urge to apologize. Maybe your mind goes completely blank. The white out feeling where you can't access a single thought. You can't think at all.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: Whatever yours is, these are not problems. They are early warning signs, information. They are your nervous system raising its hand and saying, recognize these signals, the more choice you have about what you can do next. Start noticing, just observe without judgment. What happens in the body when you feel that fold beginning? Excuse me. You don't have to fix it. Not yet. Just notice it.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: So the third tool that I'm going to give you is the sacred pause. Love that. Sacred pause. Sit back. Take a breath. Step back. In the moment of confrontation, especially with someone who tends to be a bully or focused on aggression, your single most powerful tool is: 'I need a moment.'.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: My daughter-in-law does this all the time with her kids. Do you need a moment? She does it with her husband. I need a moment. It works well. I need a moment. Then take a moment. Breathe. Feel your feet on the floor. Give that prefrontal cortex time to come back online. Don't rush to respond. Take three breaths. Take another deep breath.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: These slow, deliberate breaths activate the parasympathetic nervous system. They bring you into the present moment as well. The parasympathetic nervous system is the part responsible, the part of your nervous system responsible for calm, rest, for coming down from high alert. Three breaths can be all the difference between reacting from your amygdala and responding from your adult wisdom, the grown-up you.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: I know that for some of us, especially those who grew up around people who demanded immediate answers, I need to know this right now. Who punished hesitation, who interpreted a pause as defiance, or as evidence of wrongdoing taking a pause, an intense moment can feel absolutely terrifying. Like you're doing something wrong. Like the pause itself will cause the very thing you're afraid of. You're not doing anything wrong. You are doing something brave. Very brave. You're interrupting a pattern that has run your life. Three breaths, that's all. I need a moment. All right.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: The fourth tool: your voice is allowed to shake. It's okay. You don't have to be composed. You don't have to find the perfect words. You're allowed to say the true thing with a shaking voice. You're allowed to hold your ground. With your eyes down, your hands trembling. You're allowed to say no, or I disagree, or this isn't okay with me. Even when it comes out quietly, even with imperfection, even when your heart is pounding the whole time. The shaking doesn't mean you're wrong. It means you're doing something. Your nervous system has been trained to avoid. It means this matters to you when you're doing it anyway.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: I think about my son, David, and I want to say to him, and to every person listening, the client who becomes hostile when you hold your position is showing you something important about themselves, not about you. A person who respects you will not punish you for no. A person who escalates when you're holding a boundary is telling you exactly who they are. Your approval does not have to come from that person. It can come from you.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: The fifth and final tool, I think it's the final tool, is regulate your nervous system before you walk in. Get yourself calm before you walk in. Do some deep breathing, three deep breaths. This is when I wish somebody handed me 20 years ago. You know, when you're walking into a difficult situation, something you know is going to be challenging. Where someone tends to be a bully, a meeting, a phone call, where you've been dreading it, your nervous system needs to be prepared before you walk in, not during, not after, before.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: And this is what it looks like practically. Slowing your breathing down. Breathe in for four, hold for four, breathe out through your mouth for six. Breathe in for four, hold for four, breathe out through your mouth for six. Breathe in for four, hold for four, breathe out through your mouth for six. Do this for three minutes. This is not a trick. It is directly activating your vagus nerve, which is the superhighway between your brain and your body that responds to regulates your stress response.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: So you put your feet flat on the floor, you feel the ground beneath your feet. You could walk barefoot if you could. That would be great. This is called grounding and it does exactly what it sounds like. It connects you to the present moment to your body, to the actual reality of where you are right now, not in the past, which is not the danger, which is now. You're safe now. Put one hand on your heart. Take a breath into your hand. Feel your own heartbeat if you can. This activates the body's soothing response. It sounds small, but it's not small.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: And then before you walk through that door or pick up the phone or open that email or text a response, remind yourself of something true. I am an adult. I have survived harder things than this. I have tools. I have wisdom. I have 37 years of healing behind me or whatever your version of that is, whatever is true for you. You were not going into the conversation as a child who had no choice. You were going in as someone who has done the work. Walk in as him or her. So I do have one more piece. Hold healing with both hands.. And I want to close this section with something I believe with my whole heart, something that I've had to learn over the last four decades of doing this work.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: Healing isn't linear and it's not finished. I've healed things that I was told couldn't be healed. I found peace in places I didn't believe peace was possible, including eventually with my own mother, which is another story. I live a life I love truly, deeply love. I'm not performing okay-ness. I arrived at a real grounded joy and you can too.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: I can still get triggered. I can still feel the pull towards something PTSD, which is activated on occasion. I can't meet someone's eyes and my voice goes quiet and everything in me seems to disappear, but the difference is now is not that the feelings don't come. It is that I know what they are. I know they're temporary. I know my nervous system is doing its own thing and I know it will settle. I know my wise self will come back. Even if that step is quiet, even if it shakes, even if it comes two days later when I'm calm enough to think that is what healing looks like in the real world, not arrival at a peace and a place beyond wounding but a gradual, hard-won, deeply beautiful expansion of who you are and what you're able to choose. You're not behind. You're exactly where you need to be. And each time you notice the fold beginning, each time you name it, you breathe, take a pause or say the true thing even quietly.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: You are building new neural pathways. You are literally rewiring your brain and that is real. That is science and it happens one small moment at a time.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: So let me leave you with this today. If you fold when you should stand, you're not weak. If you overgive and under-receive, you're not too much. If you people please, until you've lost track of what you actually want, you're not a pushover. If conflicts still feel like danger, your body is still learning, you're not broken. You are someone whose nervous system was shaped by real experiences, experiences that required you to be a certain way in order to be okay. And that nervous system did its job. It kept you here. You survived and now gently at your own pace with as much compassion for yourself as you would offer to someone you love. You get to teach it something new. You're safe now. You're allowed to take up space. Your no is as worthy as your yes. Your truth is allowed to be spoken even quietly, even imperfectly when your voice shakes.

Speaker 2 – Jennifer Elizabeth Masters: That's the work that is coming home. I'll see you in two weeks. I love you. Good night.