Codependency & Resetting The Vagus Nerve

The vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve in the body and wanders throughout most of your organs. The vagus nerve not only receives sensory information from outside of you, but it also sends information about what you are feeling back to the brain. What you think, and what you think you feel, is why so many get STUCK in toxic relationship cycles. Narcissistic relationships will keep you stuck in anxiety. You can use knowledge about the vagus nerve to help you break out of the survival cycle.

Transcript

Welcome to the Breakdown to Breakthrough podcast.

My name is Lisa A.

Romano.

I am a life coach,

Bestselling author,

YouTube vlogger,

Meditation teacher,

And expert in the field of codependency and narcissistic abuse.

I am a believer in the power of an organized mind.

My aim is to help people learn what it means to live above the veil of consciousness rather than living a reactive life.

May your heart feel blessed,

Your mind feel expanded,

And your spirit find hope as you spend time with me here at the Breakdown to Breakthrough podcast.

So today we're going to be talking about the narcissist in your life and your nervous system.

If you are not new to learning about childhood trauma and emotional trauma,

Then chances are you've heard about the vagus nerve.

The vagus nerve is super important to at least begin understanding,

And I highly recommend learning everything you can about the vagus nerve because it will help you find some direction when it comes to healing your body,

Healing your mind,

And getting your life back on track.

The vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve in the body.

It actually stems from the brain deep into the colon.

And really interesting,

This vagus nerve not only receives information from the exterior world,

But it receives sensory information from the internal world.

So there's this mind-body connection.

Understanding the vagus nerve in my life really helped me,

Like I said earlier,

Get direction in the area of calming down my nervous system.

When you are dealing with someone who is highly narcissistic,

Someone who is gaslighting you,

Someone who you feel like you have a trauma bond with,

Then obviously your nervous system is jacked.

Your nervous system is out of whack.

How do you know your nervous system is out of whack?

Well,

How many times have you said to someone or have you heard yourself say,

I feel nervous,

I feel anxious?

There's a lot of electricity going on versus I feel calm,

I feel content,

I feel serene.

When you are living inside a toxic marriage,

A toxic relationship,

Or you have come from a toxic childhood home,

Then your nervous system has received information from the exterior world that has been downloaded and is now part of your interior world,

Which is also sending information back to your brain.

So think of it as this loop system.

When you are in a dysfunctional childhood home,

You are captive.

You cannot fight,

You cannot flee,

And eventually you learn to freeze.

So think of that as this over-stimulation response when it comes to the vagus nerve,

And now you can't react at all.

Have you ever felt have you ever had anyone say to you,

I'm surprised that you didn't react to that?

Or are you someone who seems to be very calm when there is a traumatic experience happening in an event where you seem to be very,

Very stable and you can triage a situation very calmly,

And people speak to you like,

How come you're so calm under pressure?

It could be because you are so accustomed to trauma that your body isn't even registering what's happening to you as a traumatic event anymore,

Which is really sad because it means that you have pretty much put yourself,

Or due to the circumstances,

You might be in this freeze response and can be almost robotic through a situation that happens immediately right before you.

Now there are people who are really good under pressure,

And it's I'm of the belief that those of us who have experienced a lot of trauma,

We're sort of used to it,

And so we're the ones that we will rush to the burning car and be calm and pull someone out,

Where someone who is not used to that type of trauma might freak out and might start running in the opposite direction.

When they're training Navy SEALs,

They actually train Navy SEALs to override the limbic brain so that they no longer are reactive to this frightening stimuli.

So Navy SEALs are actually trained to override this impulse,

This fight or flight impulse,

And those of us who come from very traumatic backgrounds,

We're sort of used to it,

And so we can respond under pressure.

Really,

Really interesting.

When you're dealing with someone who is highly narcissistic,

If your parents were highly narcissistic,

Then your nervous system is hyper activated.

You can get stuck in these emotional responses.

Trauma gets stuck in the body.

Now your brain isn't doing anything wrong when it remembers as painful event,

When it recalls the scent of the perfume or the cologne of someone who hurt you when you were three or four or five or six or seven,

Whatever.

Your brain is designed to remember all of this sensory information from the outside.

This sensory information gets stored inside the brain and inside the body.

It keeps a record of the past,

As we like to say,

And when we are triggered by an external experience,

Then an internal alarm gets set off and those signals get sent to the brain,

And we can get stuck in that space and have this emotional flashback and have a somatic memory come up and actually feel as if we're three,

Four,

Five,

Six,

Or seven years old again.

This is a very normal response.

The problem is you don't want to get stuck in that response,

So I have some things that I want to share about the vagus nerve.

Now the reason you want to investigate this is because it's something practical that you can work with.

When I realized that A,

I came from a dysfunctional home,

B,

I had been programmed to live in fear,

There were certain faces that my mother would make,

Certain phrases my father would say,

Certain body movements my mother would have,

And they were stored in my body.

And when I got married when I was very young and experienced similar phrases and felt similarly and saw similar expressions or heard similar things,

I was triggered.

Felt very powerless,

I felt very stuck,

And I think that's why as a woman,

Married woman with three children,

I had my own business at the time,

I felt stuck,

I felt frozen because I didn't realize that I was stuck in a trauma response.

My feet were not stable to the floor.

I could have started a divorce proceeding at any time,

But looking back I wonder,

Because as a child it was fight,

Flight,

Or freeze,

Or fawn at that time,

There was no escaping my childhood home,

I needed my mother and father,

I was powerless,

The people that were supposed to protect me I was actually afraid of.

And here my adult relationship with my ex-husband was a mirror to that experience,

I felt stuck,

I felt like the person who should protect me was wounding me,

And here were all these mirrors presenting themselves to me.

And is that why it took me so long to figure out there was another option,

I could actually leave this marriage?

Did I still,

Or was I still reacting the way I did when I was a child in one of those fight,

Flight,

Freeze,

Or fawn responses to stress?

It took tremendous pain and the love of my children and realizing that I had done to my children what was done to me,

Modeled codependency,

Modeled stuckness,

Modeled emotional dysregulation,

And I was not modeling emotional intelligence at the time,

And when that level of reality struck me I could not escape my reality anymore,

I knew I had to do something.

It was through all of that awareness,

And that's why I always say like the spiritual journey begins with emotional awareness,

A self-awareness process where now I see the truth and the truth is really difficult to process,

But I can't unsee it anymore.

I know that I'm a part of this dynamic.

Looking back even further as you gain awareness and you keep looking back into your childhood,

You keep looking back into your past,

You begin to connect the dots.

I was stuck.

So even though I was a grown-up woman with three children,

I felt like I couldn't leave.

I felt powerless,

And it wasn't until I experienced tremendous pain that I realized,

Uh-oh,

I have a right to go and my feelings matter,

And certainly learning about codependency,

Learning about being the unrecovered adult child of two unrecovered adult children of alcoholics,

Learning about the fawning response,

Learning about enabling,

Learning about feeling invisible,

Feeling unseen,

And feeling stuck in those dynamics inside my so-called adult relationship allowed me to pull the pieces of the puzzle together to a point where I was able to see my part in it,

Which helped me move the needle forward.

I knew that I could get out if I followed these laws that I was learning,

And certainly spiritual practices came in,

But they weren't until much later on on my journey.

Learning to get my nervous system back into balance was amazing,

And it was something that I could actually do on my own.

At the time,

I didn't realize that I was rebooting my vagus nerve.

At the time,

I had no idea that deep breathing,

That meditation,

That journaling,

Exercising,

And yoga were actually ways that I was resetting the vagus nerve.

I had no clue.

At the time,

I wasn't even aware that my nervous system was out of whack,

Even though I had suffered from migraine headaches,

I had asthma,

I had gut issues.

I had all the symptoms.

My thyroid was blown out.

I had all the symptoms of having an impaired vagus nerve,

But no one ever pointed me in that direction.

And that is the value of digging in deep when you are someone who has come out of a narcissistic relationship,

Someone who has recognized themselves as codependent,

Someone who is serious about healing,

And maybe even considers them a truth seeker,

A guide,

Or a wounded healer even.

The benefit of staying on this path is that you learn all of these different tidbits of information that all dovetail very nicely into your reality,

Which help you make sense of where you've been and where you're going and how you got where you are.

It'll also help you build a bridge to your future reality,

Which is a beautiful thing.

If you are emotionally dysregulated,

If you are highly emotionally reactive,

If you are someone who is still trying to prove the narcissist wrong,

If you are easily triggered,

If you are still experiencing gaslighting,

If you are walking around on eggshells,

Chances are your nervous system is out of whack and it's highly activated.

And what we want to do is find ways to calm it down.

So here are some of the things that I want you to remember when it comes to the vagus nerve.

When our life has presented us with tremendous stress and specifically trauma of some kind,

And that could be gaslighting is trauma,

Abandonment trauma is trauma,

Insecure attachment is trauma.

When we as children are unable to feel safe and feel like life is predictable,

We develop insecure attachments.

And one of those ways that that manifests,

Although it manifests in many,

Many ways,

A nice umbrella is codependency.

You are someone who doesn't feel like you have a sense of self,

You are behaving in a way that behaviors are changed because now you're toning yourself down,

You're acquiescing,

You become a servant to the people that you love,

Even the people that you work with.

Your life is about servitude.

You don't even know when you're being taken advantage of by a narcissist,

You just follow the breadcrumbs and if they get angry,

You tone yourself down or if they have a need,

You figure out a way to fulfill that need.

If they accuse you of something,

You spend your life trying to convince them that that's not true.

You end up feeling like you're walking around on eggshells and you don't even realize it,

You just stay on that path.

Yet you can't sleep,

You can't eat,

You actually have symptoms of impaired vagus nerve functioning and you don't even realize it.

Impaired vagus nerve function can be impacted by childhood trauma,

Narcissistic relationships,

Stress,

Emotional trauma,

Smoking,

A lack of exercise,

Excessive drinking,

A lack of nutrition,

A good nutrition,

And a lack of sleep.

Now when you think about being in a toxic relationship and if you've been in a toxic relationship,

You probably have lost sleep,

You're probably not taking care of yourself nutritionally,

You're probably under tremendous stress,

You probably stopped going to yoga,

You probably stopped exercising as much as you should,

You may even be drinking more or smoking more than you normally would because of the narcissistic relationship.

So you could even,

Let's say for argument's sake,

Be somewhat of a pretty confident person,

Just you have a lot of empathy and you get reeled in by a narcissist who's charismatic,

Seems to care about you in the beginning and over time they start to belittle you,

They start to isolate you,

They like your friends in the beginning of the relationship but then they slowly start picking and pecking at your relationships with these other people,

They start questioning your loyalty,

Things start missing in your home but they tell you that it was never there,

Why would you think that you had this thing that you didn't have,

Gas lighting,

And you're not realizing it because this person that you met you believe is who they say they were early on,

You're not someone who is asking yourself is this true or not,

You're just believing this person and if they're really really clever they're able to make you feel guilty for even questioning them,

So little by little your faith in yourself is being deteriorated,

Little by little you find that you're a little bit more anxious,

You're a little bit more uptight,

You're a little bit more defensive,

You're a little bit more self-doubting,

You're a little bit more afraid of saying the wrong thing,

It happens a little bit over time.

I like to use the analogy of the frog,

If you put a frog in a pot of boiling water it'll jump out to save its life,

If you put the same frog in a pot of lukewarm water and you turn up the flame slowly that frog will acclimate to that heat and will actually boil to death,

It will actually die and that's what happens to many people inside a toxic relationship,

It's not like someone who has high narcissistic traits reveals themselves to you,

This happens over time.

So when you think about being in a narcissistic relationship we don't even realize that we could in time experience vagus nerve impairment just as a natural consequence of being in such a stressful relationship.

So now here we are and it's important to remember that the vagus nerve is receiving sensory information from your own body,

So when you're smiling your vagus nerve is receiving information and relaying it to the brain saying oh everything's cool,

When you are frowning or when your eyebrows turn down,

When your back hunches over all of these body movements or facial expressions are sending sensory information to the vagus nerve and the vagus nerve is sending this information to the brain and the brain says stress stress stress something is wrong.

If you've ever lived with someone who is toxic,

Who is angry,

Who's narcissistic,

Someone who has a really difficult time with rage,

Someone who blames you for everything,

Someone who has an addiction,

You may not realize that it's not just what's happening outside of you that you need to be aware of,

It's what's happening inside of you and it's also how you're perceiving the experience by way of your facial expressions,

By your own body movements.

So the vagus nerve is receiving sensory information from the outside temperature,

Touch,

Hearing,

As well as receiving information from your own body and sending that back to the brain.

So how does this help you?

Well this helps you because if you know that when you are standing in front of someone who is toxic,

What you have control over is how you react to this person.

It is so important that we learn to control our reaction to what's happening outside of us which is super super difficult to do but it's essential.

For those of us who are interested in the ego death and how we can transcend the shadows in our own shadows,

It all parlay as well because learning to control how I react to what's happening outside of me is the path to spiritual enlightenment because it's my ego which is dense,

Which is dank,

Which is 3D,

That wants to respond favorably or not so favorably to what's happening outside of me.

So if I am completely in ego,

I can be afraid of someone,

Terrified of someone,

Yelling at me,

Being angry at me,

Co-dependence,

I have a really difficult time with people being upset with them,

It goes back to trauma,

It goes back to survival,

It goes back to abandonment.

One of the telltale signs of a co-dependent is when they say don't be mad or please don't be mad at me,

They start conversations off with I hope you're not mad or please don't be mad at me.

There's a real fear there and it's primal and it goes back to the fear of abandonment from childhood in my humble opinion.

And so when we are dealing with a person,

Dealing with someone who tends to trigger us emotionally and triggers our nervous system,

It might be helpful if you realize the power that you have in your own body,

The power to control how your body responds to what's happening outside of you.

It's helpful to remember that you and this person are not one.

It's helpful for you to remember that in this experience if someone is angry or someone is irrational,

Your goal is to not react to this person's reactivity.

Super difficult,

But it can be done.

How this can help you is by or at least learning about the vagus nerve.

It just makes sense.

If you know that the vagus nerve is very much paying attention to or tied to sensory information from the face,

Your facial expressions are sending information to your brain via the vagus nerve.

If you know that the vagus nerve runs right through the solar plexus down into your gut,

Then you know that when your heart space changes,

When your heart feels constricted,

Or when your heart is breaking,

Right?

We say,

Oh my heart is broken.

Be careful of the words that you use because when your solar plexus contracts,

It's sending information via the vagus nerve to the brain.

Danger,

Danger,

Danger.

And this affects your nervous system.

It's a feedback loop.

So something's happening that's negative outside of me.

I am responding to it internally.

I have facial expressions and my brain is receiving information now from my internal system through sensory pathways all throughout the vagus nerve.

And by the way,

Vagus in Latin means to wander.

The vagus nerve wanders all throughout the body.

When my throat chakra is locked,

When I feel like I can't speak my truth,

The vagus nerve runs through the larynx,

The soft palate of the mouth.

The way that we speak,

What we say,

The tone,

The vibration of the words,

The intention of our words,

Right,

Is going to be picked up by the vagus nerve.

The vagus nerve is going to send this information back to the brain.

If I am yelling,

If I am screaming,

If I am reacting,

My vagus nerve is sending all of this sensory information back to my brain.

Essentially,

We stay locked inside 3D,

I call them the 3D ectoplasm experience where if I have,

And I try to teach my kids this all the time,

I have a 33 year old,

A 30 year old,

And a 24 year old,

And Anthony has a 37 year old,

35 year old,

And also a child that's turning 30.

And we try to have conversations around not reacting to what's happening outside of you.

That's where your power lies.

So learning about the vagus nerve is,

I think,

Super powerful,

Super helpful because when I am experiencing something that I don't want to experience but I am experiencing it,

I have to surrender to it because it's happening.

It's already manifesting.

You know,

The work of Eckhart Tolle tells us that it's happening.

We have to surrender to it.

All power is in the now.

And if I want to shift a future experience,

Then I have to be very careful about how I'm experiencing the current experience because how I experience the current experience is sending information back to my brain,

Which is the command center,

And sending information throughout my body while it's also receiving information throughout my body.

So now that I knew,

Now that I know,

And I learned this the hard way and I learned it the long way,

Dealing with negative people,

It's my job now to hold on to my energy.

It's my job not to frown,

Not to bury my head.

It's my job to stand up straight,

Keep my chin up,

And if I can,

Not to be a smart aleck or anything,

But just to like a little bit of a smile with my lips turned up,

Very calm and very serene.

I don't want to be affected or infected by this person outside of me,

But I will be and I will absorb this person's energy and my body will feel it by way of me hunching my shoulders,

Getting really small,

Protecting myself,

Frowning,

Crying,

Saying things that represent fear.

All of these things that my body is doing is sending information to my brain that triggers a response and so it is helpful for me in very climactic situations,

If you will,

Or very triggering situations.

It's helpful for me to remember to stand up straight.

That'll help my vagus nerve completely feel relaxed,

Make sure my head is on top of my shoulders and I'm not hunching forward.

It's helpful for me to remain calm,

Just tell myself everything's okay,

Everything's okay,

This too shall pass.

Chanting and mantras,

Prayer,

Very helpful when it comes to resetting the vagus nerve.

You're trying to remember to not allow what's happening outside of you to make you feel upset on the inside because your body is going to receive that information and it's going to make you feel more stressed,

Which is what a narcissist wants.

A narcissist must elicit a response from you.

A narcissist may want to elicit guilt from you,

So they'll manipulate you,

So they're pulling on your heartstrings,

Right?

Again,

Talk about the heart and the vagus nerve.

A narcissist will break your heart by gaslighting you,

By making you feel responsible for what you're not guilty of.

A narcissist will suggest that you're the reason they went out and got drunk and wrapped the car around a pole,

It's all your fault.

Or the narcissist will say,

Well,

This bad thing was happening in my life and that's because I did that.

Again,

Pulling on the heartstrings of other people,

Which is really manipulation,

Emotional manipulation.

And now even though this narcissist is outside of you,

The words that they're using have gotten inside of you,

It's caused an emotional reaction,

And the vagus nerve is picking up all of this sensory information from your gut,

From your heart space,

From the words that you're speaking and from your facial expressions,

And even from what you're hearing and seeing.

And so that's why it's so important to see other people as completely separate from you.

This is you developing,

As I call it,

The psychological condom.

Like I have to know that everybody is separate from me,

And just because someone is experiencing this terrible thing,

I don't have to feel responsible for it.

Even with empathy,

You want to make sure that your empathy doesn't go so far that you lose yourself in this experience,

That you become one with this experience and you can't tell where you and this other people end or begin anymore.

Really,

Really important.

You can take on the feelings of someone else.

And again,

Your vagus nerve is what's taking all of this sensory information,

Relaying it back to the brain,

And your brain believes everything that it's experiencing.

It's not going to argue with you.

The subconscious mind just accepts data.

So even though your world could be full of 99.

9% of the things that are happening are happening pretty automatically,

Pretty systematically,

And pretty well,

You will focus on the one or two things of the 0.

1% or so,

0.

05% of the thing that is happening in your life that you magnify through focus.

And by magnifying through focus on this one thing or this one experience or this one conversation,

By magnifying it,

Your vagus nerve sends all of this information back to the brain and your physiology responds in tandem.

Understanding the vagus nerve gives you an opportunity to pay attention to the way that you feel,

Pay attention to your facial expressions.

So some of the things that I've researched that I've learned to do along the way is I tap behind my ear,

Right?

I tap behind my ear when I'm nice and calm to help me reset the vagal nerve.

Another thing that I do is I interlock my hands,

I put them behind my head,

I lay down on the floor,

I take a deep breath and I move my eyes to the left,

I hold them for 30 seconds,

I keep my nose straight and then I move my eyes to the right and I hold them for 30 seconds and back to center.

Some of the things that happen to me is that I notice that I yawn or I notice that I just feel a letdown response.

I feel like,

Okay,

Things are really okay.

You're really trying to tell your body that things are okay.

When you're around someone who is a narcissist,

You have a narcissistic mother-in-law,

A narcissistic boss,

Your nerves are on hyperdrive and so you really want to pay attention to what can I do in the meantime to relax my body,

To send my body the feedback information that says,

I got this and I'm okay.

You don't need to react to this.

You don't need to stay in a hyper state or hyper vigilant state.

Dr.

Mandel,

He's a great doctor.

If you don't follow him,

I highly suggest that you do.

He suggests that what you do is you take your thumb and you squeeze the nail bed 20 times in a row and then hold the sides of the nail bed for like 30 seconds.

That will also help regulate your nervous system.

Tapping behind the ear,

Also pulling down on the ear,

Down and out is also very effective.

I do that a lot.

I do that automatically.

I didn't even realize that I was soothing myself in that.

Also taking your four fingertips and right between where your nipple line would be,

You put your four fingers and you press really,

You press,

Not to the point of pain,

But you just press and then see if you notice any let down response,

Any let down reflex response.

I like to tap the outside of my palm also,

Four fingers I like to tap.

And this is just letting my nervous system know like,

We're good.

Everything's okay.

These are things that we can rely on even if we're in a relationship that is toxic.

It's basically teaching you that you have some power over what's happening within your nervous system.

Narcissists want to jack your nervous system.

Why?

Because narcissists can't generate their own energy.

They need to drain the energy of others.

Empaths and codependents for instance and people who are highly functional,

People who don't take their eye off the goal,

Are people who are willing to put energy in a relationship and so that's what a narcissist wants.

So in time however,

You could be the most balanced person and within a year or two be an emotional wreck.

You won't even know what happened.

You could have had a house,

The house is gone.

You could have had a car,

The car is gone.

You could have had a nice home,

The house is a wreck.

You could have had a great job.

You can't even go to work anymore.

Why?

Because your nervous system has been totally obliterated through this narcissistic relationship who has drained you emotionally and psychologically.

When your vagus nerve gets locked and it is impaired,

It's because it is more interested in keeping you in a state of fight or flight which means the executive part of your brain is not able to be accessed.

The good news is you can retrain the vagus nerve.

You can retrain your nervous system and I think these are great tips for anyone who's interested in becoming less anxious around someone who's highly narcissistic.

When I learned shutti shutti and many of you have heard me use this phrase shutti shutti,

That was me resetting my vagus nerve.

I just didn't even know it.

So it was the norm during the separation from my ex to receive 20 to 30 text messages a day and or emails and or phone conversations or voicemails on my home phone.

Back in the day I had a voice answering machine you know in the house.

So it was the norm to receive about 20 or 30 not so happy messages and one day I was at work and I had a flip phone and had it in the locker.

I heard the heard my phone going off with a bunch of texts and my nervous system was totally jacked up at the time.

I was having a lot of uterine problems.

I ended up having a hysterectomy.

The vagus nerve is also if you have an impaired vagus nerve you could have fertility problems.

You can have gynecological problems,

IBS problems.

I am not surprised that I had a bleeding issue and so on and so forth.

I'm not surprised at all but in this moment when I heard the phone going off I decided I looked at the phone and I saw all of these negative text messages and I said not today and I shut the phone and immediately I felt my body relax.

It was like I gave myself permission to not react and not allow what those messages said to go inside of me because remember the vagus nerve is not only responding to what's happening outside of you the vagus nerve is responding to what's happening inside of you.

So it's the mind-body connection nerve and so I couldn't control my ex-husband texting me but I could control the way I responded to him.

So that's where I came up with the term shutty shutty.

No more.

And so I really hope that this information has helped you.

I hope that you have found more encouragement.

I hope that you have found more hope in the idea that you can recover from narcissistic relationships and just toxic relationships in general.

I hope that you feel more empowered and more willing to try these tips and tricks to help you regain emotional control on your healing journey.

Namaste everybody until next time.

Bye for now.

Reviews

Brilliant

So helpful!! Thank you!!

Love this. Thank you so much.

Excellent

I understand the power of the vegus nerve now, and why meditation is so important. Everyone needs this recording. Be well.

One of the best pieces of information on the vagus nerve and how it gets activated and tips to deactivate it. Thank you

Very interesting Lisa, thanks for tips and info on the Vagus nerve

Super interesting! So grateful to have so much information available to me

Thank you 🙏❤️

Another amazing and mind opening talk. I will be listening to this many more times. There was so much good info- thank you 🙏