From Reaction to Choice: Nervous System Regulation and Limiting Beliefs

Welcome to Brain Health and Healing. I'm Sandra

Lee. This show is for people living with head injuries and

the families and supporters who love them. If you are ready to

reclaim your life, identity, and dreams for the future, you are

in the right place. Today, for better brain briefs, I am

talking about nervous system regulation. So, I am talking

about brain injuries, helping people recover from strokes,

falls, accidents, but also being able to focus and helping people

to have more clear thoughts, memories, the ability to think

clearly, and to maintain the ability to think clearly

throughout all of life. So, when we are talking about stress and

situations where we tend to get all sorts of agitation and

upset, are people going to like me? I don't know what I'm doing.

How can I be heard and seen? All the things that people in

general struggle with in life, these happen for everybody,

whether or not you've had an injury actually to the brain. I

think of them as being thought injuries and belief injuries-the

ways in which I stop myself with just my thoughts, with how I

feel about things, the way I look at myself as being limited

in life. If I say this, this person is going to like me. Do

these people like me at all? I don't know how to be myself out

there in the world with other people. This is something that

people in general struggle with all of the time, and I am

familiar with this myself. So up until last year, like 2025, when

I did the big neuro linguistic programming training that I did,

I was afraid of bothering people so much that I was paralyzed

around making phone calls, and I was so afraid of making mistakes

that it's like keeping me from taking action. These are the

kinds of things that stop everybody, that stop people from

being themselves, being able to start a conversation, being able

to go out in public because I'm afraid that people aren't going

to like me. What are people going to think? All of these

really pretty crazy thoughts that get people stuck. So today

I am talking about nervous system regulation, and how can

I, when I have all of these crazy thoughts going on, how can

I pause, Calm down. Center in being myself, just being myself

in the world, and feeling safe enough to be able to do things

like start a conversation, or go to a networking meeting, or for

younger people, you know, go to school and interact with other

people. I remember when I was in high school, I was like I felt

completely isolated in a school with many hundreds of people. I

remember standing there in what was the playground, you know,

the the place where everybody's around outside, and it's like

feeling like here's me all by myself, and all these people are

wandering around talking to each other and interacting, and me

just be here by myself, afraid to go up and start a

conversation because it's like I wasn't comfortable with myself.

I wasn't comfortable being myself and speaking with other

people, much less starting conversations, and it just felt

weird, you know, going going up to groups of people and just

feeling like everybody else is interacting, and here I am by

myself, not participating, and so there's this stress, this

conversation going on in mind. All the self talk, self talk is

crazy making, and it was all self generated. It wasn't coming

from anybody saying anything mean to me. It was all just me

taking the things from early in my life that led me to believe

that I couldn't be seen and heard. I couldn't be myself. I'm

not safe to, you know. It's like I used to feel like everything I

did was a mistake, and everything I did and said was

wrong. Those are understandable conclusions that many people

make from childhood and interacting with authority

figures like parents, leading to all kinds of beliefs about self

that are limiting, keeping me from being able to be myself in

the world, expressing myself, asking for what I need, saying

how I feel, all these things. You know, used to be that if you

asked me how I felt, I didn't know. Confused, shut down in

response to the question. What do you want? I don't know. Shut

down and withdraw.

So, if you or people in your life, people in your family,

friends of yours, family members have this kind of response where

they don't feel like they can be themselves, once you know I can

help, helping you to integrate the experiences in your mind, so

you have the ability to be in the flow, be yourself, and

express yourself, and then at a deeper level, to go in and work

with the actual beliefs, the things that happened in the past

that led to the formation of those beliefs, and I have to

tell you, the things that happen don't necessarily have to be

really like from the outside world traumatic. Normal events

to a small child can feel extraordinarily significant and

traumatic and meaningful. The things that happened to me when

I was just like really small-they were normal things

that you and I, as adults today, wouldn't see as there's no no

problem with them. They are normal things to occur, normal

events. But to a small child, to a baby, to a toddler, those

things can be massive, leading to the formation of beliefs

about self that are limiting, that can be limiting for the

person all the way through their life into adulthood. I am what,

62 years old, and I did not do the major healing of these

beliefs, the things that happened when I was very young.

I didn't heal these things until last year, 2025, and it has

affected me in my life all the way up until today. Normal

events early in life lead to beliefs and thoughts that are

limiting, and the nervous system gets up when situations come up

that trigger those issues, and all the chaos, all the

craziness, all of the ineffective responses, clamming

up, shutting down, quitting, ineffective responses, not

starting conversations, taking things personally when somebody

says something, ineffective responses. This what happens

when the nervous system gets ah crazy in response to having old

things from the past get triggered by somebody saying

something normal in life today, or a situation of wanting to

start a conversation, and it's like

I don't know how to do that. I used to feel confused, shut

down, quit, run away, give up. Ineffective responses with the

work that I do supporting people in being in flow, not being

stuck in your brain, allowing that to flow, and then.

When, when possible, when necessary, to go back to the

things in the past that created the triggers in the first place,

and again, there doesn't necessarily need to have been

anything that's truly traumatic, because a child interprets

normal events in a totally different way than you and I, as

adults, interpret them, can be life-changing. The decisions

that get made at six months old, something happened that was

normal, but I made decisions that limited me all the way

until 2025. Learning to manage these things and then actually

heal them, make it so they're no longer triggers. I used to be so

afraid of making mistakes that I was paralyzed. I thought that if

I make a mistake, it's going to be the end of not just the

world, not just of me, but of everything-the whole

universe-which is not logical. But from a baby's perspective, a

baby thinks they're the center of everything. So something

happened that led me to feel like led me to believe that if I

made a mistake, it was the end of the universe. Why would I do

anything that risks making a mistake? I wouldn't. So I was

paralyzed, which is crazy. Now I have resolved that. So now I

have a normal level of concern about making mistakes. Normal

level, as opposed to shut down everything and go home because

that's what I used to do. Really, so learning to have your

nervous system be able to, when faced with something, just be

calm, be able to sit back, pause, think. As let's go, this

has come up. What do I want to do? And be able to pause and sit

back and think about it. And I was like, okay, so what do I

want to do? This happened, and it triggered me, and I reacted,

and I feel. But I don't want to be that way now. What do I want

to do? How do I want to be now? And it's a choice. Being able to

calm the nervous system down, tone down the reaction, and sit

back inside myself,

Stay myself, and be able to think about it calmly, and come

to a decision. What do I want to do right now?

And have it be a conscious choice, an intentional choice

about how I choose to be in the moment. Is that something that

would be of use to you? Again, this happens all of the time.

The need for this happens all of the time for people who have had

actual injuries to the brain, fall and concussion. There's

there's parts of the brain that aren't working well anymore, and

so a lot of symptoms and function are affected, leading

to this chaos. And learning to be able to calm that down help

the brain to be able to repair itself and establish connections

and function better, to be able to stay calm in the moment and

choose how to be, and to regain abilities to do things normally.

But even if you don't have an injury to the brain, this

chaotic state can happen frequently. Used to happen to me

every time I tried to do anything relating to business.

Panic, freak out, overwhelmed. Go home. I'm out of here. Not

effective. Learning to resolve those things and to be able to

regulate my nervous system. So when triggered, I was like, I

can pause. I was like, wait a minute, this is going on. I

don't want to do that now. What do I want? If this is something

that you would benefit from, with or without an injury to the

brain, I would love to talk with you. You can schedule a

10-minute share your story call with me, and it's not a sales

call. Just giving you an opportunity to tell me about

these are the things that go on for me, and what I want is

instead there is a link to the share your story call scheduling

down below, and I look forward to talking with you. Like, what

is your experience? And then, if you decide you actually want to

work with me, we can find another time for that. But for

now, just schedule a talk. This is brain health and healing,

receiving versatile gifts. Thank you. I am Sandra Lee.