Whiplash! When a Meltdown Comes Outta Nowhere {EP 196}

Robyn: So we've been lulled into some sense of normalcy, and then an incident happens, an episode, a meltdown behavior, those big, baffling behaviors, pop right back out again, and you're right back to feeling like everything's awful, or it'll never get better, and you'll you're gonna have to live like this forever, right? And you might even be getting frustrated with yourself that you even let yourself just, quote-unquote, relax. All of these experiences are completely normal for folks who love somebody with a chronic condition that occasionally flares. And the reality is, is that just as I observe the behaviors or as we observe the behaviors of our kids, it actually appears as though our kids have chronic conditions that occasionally flare, but I also actually would not be surprised to learn that many of our kids are experiencing neuroinflammation, and you know, they have an actual inflammation condition that occasionally flares right? This isn't just a behavior or a mental health chronic condition. It couldn't be, you know, but there is, especially with chronic stress conditions, there becomes a physical aspect to it, right, and so that condition flares, and that flare creates just a tsunami of cues of danger, and their stress response system becomes so impaired that, in a way, an Attack Level Watchdog or a Shutdown or Collapse Level Possum moment becomes really inevitable. So that's what we're going to talk about today. That's what I mean by whiplash.    

Robyn: So we're going to go further into what the Whiplash is like, the science behind it, why we feel it, why our kids do seem to all of a sudden go to Attack mode or Shut down or Collapse mode out of nowhere. We're going to talk about why it makes perfect sense. You know, I believe all behavior makes sense, but why it makes perfect sense that these moments feel like everything is as worse as it ever was, as bad as it ever was, but it actually maybe isn't, and for some of you, it might actually be as bad as ever, but for most of the parents that I know and have the privilege of connecting with these moments can feel like things are as bad as ever, but when we pause and kind of examine things with our Owl brains, they actually really aren't. And then we're going to end with why it actually is good to allow your own nervous system to finally rest, even if that does leave you kind of a little bit more wide open, a little more feeling unprotected and a little bit more at risk of that whiplash feeling and sensation.    

Robyn: Now, y'all I thought this was going to be a relatively short and succinct episode, and maybe it will be, but the outline that I wrote is actually really long, so we're going to see what happens. All right, let's start with the whiplash like, what is that whiplash sensation. With the 1000s of parents that I've known and again, had so much privilege to be with in the last two decades, yeah, I'd say that most of them use the word whiplash to describe the feeling that comes when their child has an intense resurgence of an old behavior that they thought hoped they were past, and they feel unprepared and really blindsided by this. And those whiplash sensations happen because your mind has begun anticipating a new future, your mind has started to believe in the possibility that the next moment will be okay, as opposed to when your mind was really stuck in believing that the next moment would be a disaster. Basically, what's happened is that your mind and your nervous system has risked shifting into connection mode. You're taking in more accusative safety, which makes your Owl brain stronger. And the brain is almost exclusively an anticipatory machine. It wants to predict what's about to happen next. It's actually not super great at it, but it is pretty desperate to be good at it. Your brain really wants to predict what's about to happen next. It's one of its top priorities, and it's one of the ways it best keeps us alive. And a brain in chronic protection mode predicts that what's gonna happen next is gonna be bad, but a brain that has shifted back into connection mode, has hoped that the next moment will be okay.    

Robyn: When your nervous system has had a chance to shift back into mostly connection mode. And then there's an episode that happens that feels like old times, or it's a behavior that used to happen a lot with high intensity and high frequency. I mean, not only is your stress response system going to respond to that actual, very real stressor, but also the experience is going to awaken memory networks that hold the previous traumas of the dangerous, out of control, chronically stressful behavior. The whiplash, then, is a combination of two things. I mean, it's actually probably a lot more than these two things, but these are the two things I know about. Your stress response system is still likely somewhat sensitized. But also, stress response systems don't exist in a vacuum. So, yeah, just because it's still somewhat sensitized, it is going to, you know, have a big reaction. It is going to go zero to 60 in response to a stressor happening in the here and now, that in the past used to be, you know, life threatening or super dangerous. Okay, that makes perfect sense. But again, the stress response system doesn't exist in a vacuum. It kind of, quote-unquote, remembers responding to this specific behavior in a very specific way, and it remembers life when those behaviors were at their worst, and then suddenly you are plunged into an unintegrated memory network. So there's this sensitivity of the stress response system, and there's this awakening of an unintegrated memory network that holds the trauma and the terror and the danger from when these behaviors were previously at their worst. Now we've talked a lot on this podcast about memory.    

Robyn: You can go listen to the memory series that I previously did. You can go to my website and go to RobynGobbel.com/videoseries. That's my video series on trauma, memory and behavior. Usually I'm talking about memory through the lens of like our kids, but all of that applies to us. So you can go and listen to a ton of stuff about memory to help understand what I mean when I'm saying unintegrated memory networks.    

Robyn: So those unintegrated memory networks bring the feelings and the thoughts and the sensations that were part of the original experience, into the now. But they also don't have, because they're unintegrated. They don't have a time stamp, a timestamp that says this thing you're remembering happened in the past, and without the time stamp, all those memory networks get awakened in the now, and it just feels like now, the sensations, the thoughts, the feelings, literally feel like they are true and related to what's happening right now. So what that means, practically speaking, is that instead of having a thought that sounds somewhat like, wow, this is terrible and scary, and I hate this, and I wish it never happened again. But I also know that we've been meltdown free for weeks, and this one moment doesn't mean we are back in the worst of it. I know things will get better, all right. So instead of having a thought like that, we have a thought that sounds more like, Oh my gosh. I knew it. I knew it would be this bad again. This is as bad as it gets. Nothing is ever gonna get better, and it never will.   

Robyn: So can we just take a breath here together, have a moment of compassion for ourselves here, our memory networks just hijack us, just like they hijack our kids, and of course, we feel terrible. Okay, so the next thing I want to talk about is, why do our kids do this? Why do our kids just go to Attack Watchdog or Shut Down, Collapse Possum, kind of out of nowhere, when they've been, quote-unquote, seemingly doing well for, I don't know, days, weeks, months, years. There's two reasons I'm going to talk about. There's probably more reasons. These are the two that I think are the most helpful to keep in mind and the things I know the most about.    

Robyn: So number one, it's almost certainly true that your kid's window of tolerance has been slowly shrinking again, right? That their bucket that metaphorically accumulates cues of danger is starting to really fill up, fill up, fill up. It's getting to the brim. There's not enough cues of safety that are kind of like counteracting or or reducing that cue of danger bucket. Obviously, this is all a metaphor, right? But our window of tolerance is shrinking. They're able to tolerate less stress, and then it's there's like a straw that breaks the camel's back, right? Something stressful happens, and it might not even seem like a big stress it might seem like a stressor they've been managing no problem, right? But because their window of tolerance has shrunk up, all of a sudden, this stressor is too much, right? They were at the edge of their window of tolerance. Their stress response system is still sensitized a bit, and so they go from zero to 60 straight to Attack Watchdog or Shut down or Collapse Possum.    

Robyn: And then the second reason that I think is most helpful to keep in mind when we're kind of thinking about why this is happening, is that this experience, this sensitive- the way that their stress response system responded in such a sensitized way, had this full blown Attack Watchdog or Shut Down or Possum moment, that experience activates all of their old memory networks of all of the previous times that this happened, so all of their previous Attack or Shutdown, Collapse Possum moments, those memories come alive. They kind of come online in their brain. They get lit up in their brain, and it gets lived out in the here and now, which you're maybe noticing is essentially the two explanations I gave you for why you're feeling whiplashed. And I don't know maybe that's helpful to consider. Maybe it's not, and that's fine, but maybe it's helpful to consider that your whiplash is actually mirroring the whiplash your kid feels. Because when I know folks who can articulate what their experience is, when they suddenly have, you know, a big Watchdog or a big Possum response and one that hasn't happened in a while, I know that they're essentially articulating the same thing, feeling whiplashed.    

Robyn: So why then, if it's a moment in time and your Owl brain knows like, actually, things have gotten better, this is a moment in time, things will get better again. Why is it super hard to think those things right? Like, why does it feel like everything is as bad as ever, even when it actually probably isn't? And I want to give you the caveat that I know that some of you have crises you know that are really dangerous and do end up looking like needing something like hospitalization, so I'm not minimizing that in the least, but I also know that there are a lot of us, myself included, who has a moment where things are really hard and we just get plunged back into, oh my gosh, this is as bad as ever. It's never going to get better, right? So why is that happening? Right? That that feeling of we're right back where we started. We're as bad as it ever was. Almost certainly isn't true. It feels true, but it probably isn't true. When I teach this concept in real life, I like to draw an image, and it is really hard to explain an image in a podcast, and it is especially hard for me because I am actually exceptionally bad at finding description words to describe an image. So y'all just really bare with me here. If you're listening and you're a Club member, my plan is to go into The Club on the day or two after this episode airs, and I will actually draw it. I'll post an image or or I'll do something. So if you're, yeah, if you're a Club member, and you're like, I have no idea what Robyn is talking about, headed to the forum, and maybe I've posted that already.    

Robyn: So when I teach this concept, I draw a corkscrew-looking image, but it's, I'm gonna say diagonal. Okay, so I start the like corkscrew spiral in like the bottom left corner of the page, and I draw this spirally corkscrew thing to the top right corner of the page, right? So it goes from bottom left to top right. I don't draw it up vertically. I draw it in this diagonal way. So if you can picture that, and you can picture, you know, this spiral that goes up a page, I want you to try to picture like the cusp of the spiral, where it's just from going forward to going backward. And there's a lot of those cusps on this page, right? Like there's, let's just imagine there's 10 times, right, that the spiral goes backwards and then frontwards again and backwards, and then frontwards again, right? Picture the cusp of the spiral where it's just from going forward to going backward. Okay, that's the meltdown. That's the going backwards, right? That's the, you know, reawakening of old stuff, where, instead of we're, instead of kind of continuing on this forward trajectory of of healing and growing the window of stress tolerance and strengthening the stress response system and all that jazz, right? There's this moment of going backwards, okay, that's the meltdown. Then picture the cusp where the spiral shifts from going backwards to going forwards again. That's the truly inevitable recovery. This happens over and over and over again, and I'm imagining that on this piece of paper that I've drawn this backwards forwards, backwards forwards. Experience 10 times. When you're riding that backwards part of the spiral, it feels like you are right back at the very beginning of the spiral, right? You cannot put the experience into time and space. It feels like, instead of a spiral that goes like diagonally from the bottom left to the top right, it just goes from top to bottom. It just feels like, it feels like there's no movement in time and space, right? So that you know, going backwards on the spiral brings you back to the very, very, very beginning. It's a feeling. It's an experience. It's not real, but it is real that it feels that way because of what's happening, you just can't put the experience into time and space. You can't feel that yes, this is a backwards part of the spiral, but this backwards is still way further ahead than the beginning of the spiral was. Every meltdown, every setback, every whatever you want to call it does bring you backwards, but it doesn't bring you all the way back.   

Robyn: You'll start to move in a forward, healing, things are getting better trajectory again, soon. Most likely, again, I'm not attempting to minimize those of you who are dealing with the intensity of a mental health crisis that is leading to hospitalization, psychotic episodes, those kinds of things. So I'm certainly not minimizing that, but most of you listening will start to move forward again, and when you do that, you will still be more advanced, more forward, than you were at the beginning of this journey. And when your own Owl brain comes back, you'll have better access to time and space, and now it will be possible to feel and notice this truth right, that this spiral exists on a diagonal that's moving in a forward direction, right? And not that the spiral is static in time and space. There's forward movement. But yes, yes, yes. At that backward part of the spiral, it will be impossible for you to notice and feel that that's normal. You're just in it, and it feels both like this will always be true, and also that it's never been any better. And fortunately, it's just the nature of the neurobiological process that's happening at this moment.    

Robyn: Now, even if this is true, like even if these moments of kind of backsliding are inevitable, it is actually really good if we can to find rest ourselves, even if It does leave us feeling unprotected and ultimately whiplashed. It is good to relax. It is good to shift out of the hyper vigilance of waiting for the next explosion. It is good for all sorts of reasons, physical health, included, to shift back into connection mode. The brain and body is not really designed to live in chronic protection mode. It is bad for us in basically always. So allowing yourself to shift back into connection mode, even if that puts you at risk for kind of decreasing that hyper vigilance and ultimately feeling Whiplash is good. The reality is too that remaining in the hyper vigilant state doesn't help you prevent the next meltdown. If anything, it makes it harder for you to create the safety that your kids need and to respond then in the safest way.   

Robyn: When I was working, you know, hour after hour, day after day, with kids in the office, I had often helped them see that they thought that having an overactive, hyper vigilant Watchdog brain or a numb, shutdown Possum brain was keeping them safe. It's like their Watchdog and their Possums, their fiercest protector, was always working, and there is this false sense of safety that goes along with that, because actually, the opposite was often happening. Watchdogs and Possums that are always in protection mode get overworked and tired, and just like everyone else who's overworked and tired, overworked Watchdogs and Possums make more mistakes, not less, it actually leads to being less safe, not more. It's good to let the Watchdog and the Possum feel safe and rest. The Watchdog wants to play and the Possum wants to chill out and snuggle. We want our Watchdog and our Possums to feel safe. They do a better job responding to danger if they are rested.    

Robyn: Y'all, I know it feels so so so, so bad, so very bad this whiplash, like you were lulled into this state of safety and it was just a trick, and that whiplash feels terrible, and you want to avoid feeling like that ever again, so you're tempted to overwork your Watchdog and your Possum again. And I get that, and if that is the best way for your Watchdog and Possum to feel safe right now, if your Watchdog and Possum really needs to stay in hypervigilant always on, always in protection mode in order for you to feel safe, I understand. I trust your unique Watchdog and Possum and I trust that they're doing the very best that they can, and that it all makes sense. But if you're Watchdog and Possum ever feel like they might be willing to consider resting again, it's okay to tell them that it's safe to rest, that the resting doesn't make a meltdown more likely to happen. I mean, sure, as your hyper vigilance decreases, you might stop walking on eggshells and and you might stop orchestrating your entire life around preventing a meltdown, and that actually, yeah, it might mean you overlook some of your kids cues of stress and a meltdown, then eventually does happen.    

Robyn: But y'all this is really simply just what it means to be human and try as we might. And I get why we're trying, oh, boy, do I get why we're trying. But, but try as we might, we cannot outsmart our humanity. When a meltdown does eventually happen, you're gonna want to be rested. You're going to want to be clear-headed. You want your Owl to be available to respond, as you know, thoughtfully and as safely as possible. And maybe you will need your Watchdog to respond, but if you do, you want your Watchdog to be rested so that they can be very, very strong when they respond and not tired from being overworked. I know it is so hard, so hard to love and care for someone with a chronic condition and having a vulnerable nervous system is almost certainly a chronic condition that, yes, gets better and even goes into remission, but most likely, it is going to surge again, and that's awful and sad and mad and not fair at all, and raging against that reality doesn't make it any less true. So consider the possibility of allowing your Watchdog and your Possum to rest. Allow yourself, if possible, to ease back into connection mode. Allow yourself to risk the future Whiplash, because resting before then is good for you. Ask yourself, can it be safe to feel safe when you are safe? I don't know where I first heard that question. I think it was during my EMDR studies, a trillion years ago. Can it be safe, to feel safe, when you are safe.   

Robyn: All right, y'all look, it's under the half-hour mark. I did good. I did good. I thought maybe I'd accidentally turned a short, succinct podcast into a four-hour diatribe, which would not be unusual for me, but I did not here we are wrapping up, and it's under the half-hour mark. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. As always, 1 trillion, thank yous for being brave, for showing up, for caring for loving somebody with a vulnerable nervous system, whether that's your child, somebody that you care for professionally, a student in your class or yourself. We are making changes in the world like I'm just I believe this. I have to believe this, that this work that we're doing is collectively offering to folks who aren't privileged enough to do this work. We're offering them our safety, and I just choose to believe that that matters for humanity at its whole.    

Robyn: If you're listening and you're kind of feeling like, okay, great. Now what? What's next? I have so many what's next for you? You can go to RobynGobbel.com/free, resources, and download a lot of different free resources that can help you on this journey, help you implement some of these ideas. Help you care for yourself. Keep listening to the Baffling Behavior Show, if you haven't already, hit subscribe, if you are liking the Baffling Behavior Show, I'd be so grateful if you'd leave a rating or review that helps other people find it, and that's good for us, and that's good for our kids. The more folks who are getting turned on to the science of the nervous system and understanding behaviors in a new way, the better it is for all of us.    

Robyn: I have my book Raising Kids With Big Baffling Behaviors: Brain, Body, Sensory Strategies That Really Work, that just passed its one year birthday and has helped over 30,000 people. I mean, it sold 30,000 copies that doesn't account for all the therapists out there loaning it to their clients, that doesn't account for the libraries, that doesn't account for all the ways people are getting access to Raising Kids With Big Baffling Behaviors without buying it. So you can grab yourself a copy wherever you buy books online, or you can go to RobynGobbel.com/book to find a couple different ways. You can find a way to get it a 20% off discount. You can find a way to get an autographed copy if you want one. And finally, you can consider coming to join us over in the club. The club opens for new members occasionally, so go check out RobynGobbel.com/theclub to see if we are currently open for new members. If you are listening to this episode right when it airs, then we are open for new members, because we're open October 1st through 8th, 2024. But if you're listening at a different time, just go to my website RobynGobbel.com/theclub. We might be open. We might not. If we're not, you can put yourself on the waiting list. So lots and lots and lots of ways that I can continue to support you if you need more support. All right, y'all Thank you. Thank you for joining me today. I will be back with you next week. Bye.