My Day with J.T. Foxx: A Journey into Fear and Nurturing

It Was An Interesting Day!

Scrolling through Instagram I saw an advertising with the headline “Female Speakers Wanted.” I have spent the majority of my career in a small office space, sitting face to face with just one other person. My work is not seen by the masses. It is experienced in intimate dyads. I want to venture out into the world and share what I have learned, so I thought lets give this a try.   

I expected it to be a day of another trying to sell me their product, as are most meetings that take place inside a hotel conference space. I really had no idea who JT Foxx was. I was interested in learning about an area that I know little about.

It was an interesting day.

The Surprise: We Had A Lot in Common

The more I listened and held myself as open to hearing the messages, I realized that this multimillionaire and I had a lot more in common that I ever would have expected.

JT Foxx Had a Hard Childhood

For those who don’t know who JT Foxx is, he is a self-made man who is regarded as the best business coach in the world. He does not spend a lot of time talking about how he got to where he got, but there is enough to understand what drives him. I would typically use the word motivate, but what he spoke of was more than motivation. What made him successful in the business world was his concentrated determination.

The words that stuck with me the most was the fuel to his engine. He did not want to be like his parents. He, like most of us, had a hard childhood. It is the powerful avoidance of insecurity that seems to drive him. In his effort to not be insecure, he focused everything he had to learn everything he could about business. At one point in time he had five different business coaches pushing him, testing him, challenging him and helping him do what he needed to do in order to not feel as he did as a child.

This is the part that I can relate to.

A Personal Story: The Birth of "Fred"

When I was three years old my father and sisters and I were watching the movie Jason and the Argonauts (1963). I don’t remember any of the details like the plot, all I remember was the frightening, oddly, stop-motioned moving skeletons. They looked real and not real at the same time. There were hundreds of them, crawling out of temples like rabid ants, with their swords in hand, ready to kill. It scared me something awful. I clearly remember what it felt like. Hot and burning, like some type of acid or electrical fire, raging inside of me. I ran from the living room, up the stairs, yelling in my very little voice, “I’m a’scared, I’m a’scared, I’m a’fred, I’m a’fred”.

My two older sisters, chasing me, yelling back, “ha ha, you’re a FRED, you’re a FRED.” They were laughing at me not being able to speak well, not because I was terrified. After all, I was safe in my house and the weird skeletons were imaginary things on the TV screen, and not able to hurt me. They did not know how scared I was – making it all so much worse. I stopped running up the stairs, and looked down at them, arms on my hips, full of defiance, or indignation, or something much purer and younger than that, “That’s right I am a FRED.”  My fear, which changed to anger, was the creation story of a nickname. From that moment on, I was not known as Christine, but as Fred. I insisted on it. There are those who still, to this day, call me Fred or Freddy and I answer. It’s a name of mine, but it is also so much more than that. Only now, in my experienced and more mature 54-year-old self, can I see that this was a declaration. Perhaps one of the most accurate statements that has encapsulated my life.

I hate being scared.

The Pursuit of Understanding Fear

Where JT Foxx dedicated his life to finding financial security, I dedicated my life to understanding everything I possibly could about human fear. It is all that I have thought about, really, since I was 3. What is it and more importantly, what to do to stop feeling it.

At this point there is not a version of human fear that I have not witnessed or experienced. Reading thousands of peer reviewed articles, hundreds of books, working with thousands of people, participated in thousands of hours of trainings, as well as learning how to understand my own fears, I have learned one important thing. Nurturing is the only real way out.

What Is Nurturing?

What is nurturing? Nurturing is a lot like human nutritional needs. It is a lot of things that meet the energy, mineral and vitamin needs of a human body and brain. But instead of protein, carbohydrates, and fats

Nurturing, fundamentally, is about fulfilling the relational needs of humans. It is akin to lifelong nutrition. Just as food includes various components that satisfy the energy, mineral, and vitamin requirements of our bodies and brains, nurturing provides what we need to feel secure in our bodies and minds.

Nurturing is a forgotten art, language, and concept in a world that fears it, which I refer to as true misogyny. Adequate and complete nurturing, particularly in a world unconsciously dominated by psychopathic tendencies, is often seen as wrong, bad, odd, strange, or weird, rendering it not only invisible but also opposed.

A Call to Action: Break the Cycle

I am here to help people break the cycle of relational deprivation. I am here to assist people in understanding their fears and, more importantly, how to nurture them so that the messages within the fears can relax and ultimately vanish.

Join me in the most revolutionary act possible: learn to nurture yourself and those around you in ways that are congruent with our species. The components for nurturing exist. Allow me to demonstrate the recipes you can follow.

Learning to Add Nurturing to Your Practice

Take a look at my current course offerings on dissociation, mindfulness, and securefulness on the Courses page of my website.

The Profound Impact of Nurturing: Exploring Safety, Attachment, and Mindfulness

Introduction

As a therapist specializing in long-term therapy with people with dissociative identity disorder, I have delved deeply into the complex world of trauma and its profound effects on the body and mind. My work sits firmly on a feminist foundation, and my approach emphasizes the transformative power of mindfulness—essentially the embodiment of safety within our bodies. In this blog, I will explore how early safety and attachment experiences shape our human functioning and adulthood, and the massive nurturing required to repair disrupted attachments.

The Roots of Human Functioning

Early Safety and Attachment

A lot of people associate Buddha with mindfulness. However, when Buddha discovered mindfulness, it was a really misogynistic time in our history. It never would have occurred to him that his experience and discovery had anything to do with anything other than spirituality or enlightenment.

But the surprising thing that we know now is that the brain structures involved in mindfulness are the same in secure attachment primarily in the relationship between the mother and the child and the father, but also with grandparents and other people.

The brain structures that are responsible for mindfulness are intensely massively regulatory. They regulate various bodily systems, from the lymphatic to the respiratory, and are fully developed at birth.

The things that make our bodies function are fully developed at birth, including our sense perceptions.

Evolution and Mindfulness

Evolutionary Insights

My fascination with human evolution extends to understanding how our bodies and mindfulness practices have evolved.

A human is born in a wild state like animals. However, unlike domesticated animals that revert to wild states if left alone, domesticated humans are different. We've evolved to value teamwork and cooperation. We've outgrown the wild state.

The Impact of Evolution on Behaviour

Our particular evolution points to why we can be so cruel to scared, hurt, or wounded people, and why we are also capable of profound tenderness and care.

I believe that misogyny is the bodily instinctual response to pain and suffering that comes from not being nurtured properly as infants and children.

The Infant's Experience

No Way Out of Upset

So, what we feel as adults, we feel as infants. I don't think people fully appreciate that fact and let it sink in. Ours is a patriarchal and misogynistic way of understanding humans.

Infants are born with the same physical traits, feelings, and sense perceptions they will have as adults. This is crucial because infants cannot self-regulate. When an infant is upset, they cannot meet their needs or comprehend their stress. They rely entirely on caregivers to soothe them.

They have no way of meeting their own needs. They have no way of thinking out of the upset, planning out of it, or imagining out of it.

Infants have no way of calming themselves down. They have no way of comprehending it when their entire world is stressful.

The Development of Regulatory Brain Structures

The brain structures that help us calm our system and mindfully meet our own needs, don't start until we're three or four and they don't finish until we're about 25. And that's if we had an ideal developmental environment.

Meeting infant needs is about shushing, assuring, reassuring, rocking, comforting, listening, and paying attention. It's about the caregiver being aware and focused using all the brain structures responsible for mindfulness.

The Evolution of Human Nurturing

The Role of Fire and Security

The more we evolved to be uniquely human, the fewer things we had to protect ourselves. We have no teeth, no claws, thin skin, and we don't move very fast. We have dulled senses compared to the rest of the world's animal species.

How did we end up like this?

There's lots of speculation and evidence that we evolved as the most intelligent species on the earth because we utilized fire. Fire would have given us food security: abundant, calorie-dense food. The evolution of our species suggests that we thrived due to the security provided by fire. This security allowed us to develop more complex brain structures responsible for mindfulness and attachment.

Researchers have discovered a nearly 500,000-year-old wood structure on the banks of a river bordering Zambia and Tanzania with interlocking-stacking logs. Why is this important?

It suggests that we're a species that has had food and housing security for a long time--a lot longer than we previously thought.

So, it would make sense that we didn't need strong teeth and thick skin. We'd need to get along and grow more of the brain structures responsible for mindfulness.

We Are an Alloparenting Species

We are an alloparenting species, meaning that there are supposed to be four to six adults taking care of one infant. We're not supposed to individually have and care for a bunch of kids. A caring group is supposed to give focus and attention to one child.

Thousands of years ago when we were inside the "fire circle" many adults supported the nurturing parents. Some hunted because they were better at that. That was how we functioned. Not everybody was designed to be a parent. Not everybody was designed to hunt.

In alloparenting cultures, mothers never leave their children. So children had an external gestation period of five to seven years. I'm one of those mothers designed to do that. I would have happily spent all my time with my kids for five to seven years.

While I was pregnant and nursing my kids, I was in a very mindful, intuitive state. Not everybody has that ability.

With nurturing parents and a supportive cast of others, a child would grow into an incredibly mindful, thoughtful, connected, aware, and present person with other people.

The Misconception of Emotions

Emotions as Bodily Data

Contrary to the belief that emotions are solely mental, research by Lisa Feldman Barrett reveals a different picture. She shows that emotions are constructed in real-time through the interaction of core systems, which include networks for body regulation, attention, and memory. The brain uses past experiences, cultural knowledge, and contextual information to construct emotions. This means that the same physiological state can result in different emotions depending on the context and interpretation.

This is exciting because it means we have more control over our emotional experience of life than we previously thought.

This Happens When You Think a Lot But Don't Feel a Lot

We are designed to have words, meaning, and context for the data from our bodily systems. Emotions let us know how we feel: hey, I'm cold; hey, I'm sad; hey, I feel a little lonely; hey, I'm a little unsure or hey, I'm scared.

When we think a lot but don't feel a lot, important information is scattered. When it's not put together into a cohesive narrative, as it is supposed to be, we might not make sense of what we're seeing, hearing, and feeling. This is dissociation.

When we dissociate, we can see something and it doesn't fit with anything else. We can hear something and it doesn't fit with anything else. The front of the brain is missing important data.

So, thinking is very different than "regulated thinking". It's like we're staring at a leaf of information on tsunami of scattered data. So, for most people they get scared.

If people in this state pause and bring awareness to their body, they would most likely feel tight chest muscles and a churning stomach.

Nurturing Through the Pain

When we're healing, we start to feel what we feel. We start to experience the pain, the terror, the panic, and the realizations. If you can nurture yourself or someone through that painful spot, they can start feeling the rewards from being nurtured.

We need other people to help us through the pain of being aware of being in pain, and the knowledge that we have that we've been in pain.

We heal by soothing and dancing and holding and rocking and tending to emotional pain so that we're back inside that metaphorical fire circle.

Conclusion

The journey towards emotional regulation and mindfulness begins with nurturing care in infancy.

Our species is relationally starved because the majority of our needs around being accepted, seen, and heard by others are not being met.

By understanding the profound impact of safety, attachment, and mindfulness, we can work towards a more compassionate and nurturing society.

Introducing "Securefulness": A Groundbreaking Term Bridging Trauma, Attachment, and Mindfulness

Though trauma, attachment, and mindfulness are often viewed as distinct, they share significant commonalities worth acknowledging, comprehensively. To date, no single term in the English language accomplishes that. This gap inspired myself — Christine Forner — Lisa Danylchuk, Rochelle Sharpe-Lohrasbe and Marie Damgaard to jointly coin the phrase Securefulness. 

After years of research, study and clinical work, we decided to solidify the connections between the biopsychosocial process of attachment and the impacts of mindfulness (neurological, psychological, and social) into one term.

While many continue to think of trauma, attachment, and mindfulness as separate, there are striking commonalities that feel important to name in a cohesive and comprehensive manner.

 “Securefulness”  likely evolved as a consequence of social evolution. It arose from the neurobiological processes responsible for awareness, self-regulation, and co-regulation. It refers to prolonged states of attuned mindfulness, within attachment relationships. 

When the secure, mindful person taps into “securefulness” they can assist even the most harmed human in growing beyond their trauma. Tapping into securefulness means harnessing the power of co-regulation, empathy, attunement, internal regulation, internal awareness, and non-judgemental presence.

The foundational principles of securefulness address essential needs of human beings. From here we can identify a new understanding of human connection. We have a foundation for profound healing. 

Using mindful brain development for DISSOCIATION

In this blog, I’ll cover the ABCs of dissociation, mindfulness, mindfulness meditation, and meditation at a pretty high-level. I want to give you an appreciation of all the factors surrounding these.

I’ll discuss how mindfulness can be the superhero for those dealing with dissociation, and how clinicians can add mindful brain development into their practice to help with trauma recovery.

Cracking the Code: Demystifying Dissociation and Mindfulness

I often feel like the topic of dissociation is the elephant in the room. 

It's typically met with a bit of hostility, or benign indifference and it’s not taught in mainstream education. The lack of a clear definition and the variety of opinions about dissociation make it a real challenge for treating mental health issues effectively.

It’s crucial to understand what dissociation is and how it shows up in clients. It’s like the secret sauce to overcoming therapeutic hurdles and achieving genuine healing. Personally, I'm convinced that dissociation is the reason people get stuck in therapy without healing.

Dissociation's Definition Challenge

Defining dissociation is challenging. There are more concepts and theories about it than flavours at an ice cream shop, yet there is still no universal definition.

I see dissociation as the life-saving removal of information and awareness in response to emergency – like pulling a hand away from a hot stove. At the same time, there is the distinctly negative side to dissociation. When someone dissociates, critical information for a secure sense of self also disappears.

Pervasive Role in Mental Illness

Dissociation plays a bigger part in mental health issues than we think. Dissociation has been found in all mental illness like depression or anxiety. From where I sit, the trauma world is not seeing dissociation's full role in mental illness. 

Instantaneous Response to Danger

When danger appears, dissociation is actually the superhero that jumps in — instantly. Chemicals and electricity are at play.  When running or fighting isn't an option, we go into freeze mode – that's dissociation.

Biological Dominance

Dissociation, as the MVP of emergency biological systems, can dominate other bodily functions. When you're in an altered state of dissociation, feeling goes out the window, logic takes a vacation, and information can vanish into thin air. No other bodily system can hit pause for a human like dissociation can, except for safety and calm.

Dissociation vs. Mindfulness

Mindfulness a powerful tool of human functioning, doesn’t get along with dissociative bodies and brains. Think of it this way: they're like frenemies – dissociation is terrified of mindfulness because, in states of "unaware survival," awareness is just too much to handle. Its too painful to feel.

And dissociation and mindfulness? They're like rival brain activities. Dissociation is all about survival and disconnection, while mindfulness is promoting thriving, connection, and awareness. It's like they're playing different games.

Mindfulness and Mindfulness Meditation Distinctions

And what about meditation vs mindfulness meditations? They're not the same thing. 

There's a whole variety of meditation practices that induce mindfulness – concentration meditations, mindfulness meditations, and goal-oriented meditations, but mindfulness and the mindful brain is a different thing

The Mindful Brain 

So, let’s zoom out. Mindfulness isn’t just about meditation. It's about paying attention to your internal experiences – thoughts, feelings, sensory perceptions, and movement impulses.  That’s the critical distinction. It's got its roots in sensorimotor, affective (feelings) neurobiology, and human development. It’s actually more about human attachment.

Creating A Better Brain Through Mindfulness

A well-functioning, mindful brain is like reaching the pinnacle of development and building solid relationships. It is like the grand master of self-regulation/self-agency/self-control.

We can create a better brain through mindfulness. Intentional mindful awareness, from a place of curiosity and acceptance, will flex those brain muscles. The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and its related brain structures are systems responsible for body regulation, attuned communication, emotional balancing, and more. These can be thought of as the brain’s and the body’s rockstars.

Helping Dissociative Clients Achieve Mindfulness

So, how do you help dissociative clients get on the mindfulness train? This is possible and difficult because of the dissociative brain’s fear of mindfulness.

There’s two ways of proceeding: start slow enough for the brain to do its thing naturally and begin with small steps for the dissociative brain to handle the awakening.

Connection is Everything That is Uniquely Human

Connection is the heart of all things human. Dissociation isn't just a mind thing; it’s a full-body experience. We're wired to be connected, not just spiritually or philosophically, but biologically and hormonally. When we’re safe, we roll with evolution’s game plan.

Secure Attachment as the Key to Healing

Secure attachment is like the VIP pass to healing. If an individual can achieve secure attachment, the rest of life unfolds more easily. Securefullness, that natural state when needs are met, is the key to trauma healing.