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Hey guys, I'm Heidi Prib. Welcome back to my channel or welcome if you're new here. This week on this channel, we are doing a minieries on nervous system literacy. So, what that means is becoming aware of all of the small ways
Heidi Priebe explains the 'get healed quick' trap: fantasies of a single change fixing C-PTSD keep us dysregulated, while realistic, authentic healing rewires the nervous system.
Key Takeaways
- Fantasies of instant healing keep the nervous system dysregulated and can cost more than they give.
- Chronic trauma responses are rewired through consistent, realistic practice, not a single dramatic change.
- Authenticity reduces nervous system strain, whereas masking to win approval increases it.
- Realistic planning that honors current capacity is the path out of nervous system debt.
What the video covers
- Part of a nervous system literacy mini-series focused on complex PTSD and chronic nervous system stress.
- Introduces the 'get regulated quick' or 'get healed/normal quick' scheme, inspired by a Taylor Swift lyric about quick-fix love schemes.
- Explains nervous system richness versus poverty, depending on whether positive coping resources were passed down in childhood.
- People with toxic shame often believe their struggles stem from being fundamentally broken rather than from a nervous system deficit.
- Fantasies of a future transformation are adaptive for resilience but inaccurate, because they misattribute internal dysregulation to external conditions.
- No single life change (wealth, marriage, career) will erase chronic trauma responses; the nervous system still needs ongoing work.
- Pursuing goals inauthentically, such as a career or partner chosen for others' approval, creates a constant tax of masking and additional dysregulation.
- Authentic goals tend to energize and sustain people even on hard days, unlike fantasy-driven pursuits.
- The speaker uses a personal example of a debt fantasy and bankruptcy consideration to illustrate realistic versus fantasy-based planning.
- Healing requires realistic, structured, long-term plans, building in rest and slowness, and letting safe others see one's true history and trauma responses.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to Nervous System Literacy
- 01:23The Get-Healed-Quick Fantasy
- 02:49Nervous System Richness vs. Poverty
- 04:35Toxic Shame and the Get-Normal Fantasy
- 06:01The Hidden Cost of Inauthentic Goals
- 08:08Realistic Planning: The Debt Example
- 10:16Being Seen and Long-Term Healing
- 12:28Building Sustainable Nervous System Work
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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our environment is constantly impacting us on a nervous system level, how our bodies and our emotional states are responding to what goes on in our life and then how we can be more intentional about the way that we approach our lives
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in order to make things as easy as possible on our nervous system particularly if we are dealing with something like complex PTSD or chronic nervous system stress.
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And what I want to talk about today is the concept of get regulated quick schemes. So I actually came up with the idea for this video when I was listening to Taylor Swift and her song LOL, which is one of my favorites of hers, has this
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line in it that goes, "The conmen sells a fool a get love quick scheme." And it just got me thinking about all of these areas of our lives where we apply that same idea that there's some way we can
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go from being in severe debt around something to suddenly having absolutely no problems in that area ever again. And I think that for a lot of us who grew up with a lot of wounding, it's really tempting to fall into fantasies about
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all of that wounding suddenly being absent from our lives forever. So this looks like some version of a get healed quick scheme. But that's often not what we think we are fantasizing about when we go into our fantasy worlds in this
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way. What we think we are fantasizing about is just something that we are going to do like get into a certain relationship or get hired to work a certain job that is magically going to repair our self-esteem forever. And the
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reason I want to address this inside of nervous system literacy week is because often these fantasies because they are so far removed from what it actually takes to heal our self-esteem end up disregulating us further without us noticing. So one of the first things I
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want to talk about today is doing away with this get healed quick scheme that many of us often don't realize is a program we are running inside of our minds all of the time. So, in the nervous system debt video that came out
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earlier this week, one of the main things we talked about was tiny deposits and withdrawals that go in and out of our nervous systems over the course of our lives. And if we are nervous system rich, it means generally we were born
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into an environment where a lot of positive coping mechanisms were passed down to us consistently over the course of our lives. And if we were born into nervous system poverty, essentially it means that we were chronically feeling disregulated and functioning at a
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nervous system disadvantage as we grew up. The problem is that not a lot of us are really aware of the difference between these two things. So those who grow up with things like toxic shame or complex PTSD often go on to believe that
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all of the problems they are facing in their lives have nothing to do with which emotional resources were passed down to them and have everything to do with the fact that they are just a bad or worthless human being who for some
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reason cannot figure out their lives the way everybody else can. And this is an incredible burden on the nervous system in and of itself. this toxic shame, this belief that there is just something broken or wrong with us that for
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whatever reason makes us fundamentally different than other people. And the way that a lot of us naturally start coping with that deep sense of toxic shame is by escaping into a fantasy world where we imagine ourselves at some point in
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the future as having made some significant change that means that we are now normal and happy forever. So we would never call this on a conscious level a get regulated quick scheme. What it would feel more like for those who
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are inside of it is a get normal quick scheme. And these fantasies are in a lot of ways very adaptive because they give us the courage and resilience to keep persisting with our lives even in unfavorable conditions. But
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unfortunately they are also incorrect because what we are doing when we have these fantasies is we are making the inaccurate assumption that it's the conditions of our lives that are causing our internal angst and dysregulation as opposed to the fact that we grew up in a
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nervous system poor environment. So we are imagining that some very overt thing could come along and change our lives in a way that would forever rewire what is going on inside of our nervous systems.
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But that's not how nervous systems work. When we have chronic trauma responses going off, even if we were rich and famous, even if we were married to the perfect person, we would still have chronic trauma online. And we would
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still need to find ways to work with that. And so, unfortunately, there is no one major change that any of us could make that would drop us off in a place where it feels consistently and never endingly good to be inside of our
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bodies. if our bodies are chronically disregulated. But that does not mean that there is not hope for learning to rewire our nervous systems and get to a place where we are functioning inside of our window of tolerance more often than
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not, which is what it means to do actual healing work. But before we get into how to do that work, what I want to make clear is that these fantasies might actually be costing us more than we realize. A lot of what self-regulation
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is is essentially managing the relationship between our internal state and reality. And in reality, a lot of these fantasies that we are using to self-regulate around, we might not realize would actually be taxing us quite a bit to pursue. So, for example
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when I was younger, I had these ideas of myself as this high-powered businesswoman when I grew up because I thought that to be a good, respectable person meant to essentially have no feelings and do really good work in the
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world in some field like commerce that was very impersonal in nature. And so as I grew up and I tried to deny who I was in favor of pursuing this fantasy, I did actually start my undergraduate degree in business before eventually
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flipping into psychology. As I went through pursuing this goal that was inauthentic to me because I believed that it would give me redemption, what was happening was that I was creating additional stress on my nervous system as I went towards it by behaving
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inauthentically and shoving down who I actually was and what I actually wanted to do. And so, while I thought that achieving this goal was going to redeem me, what I didn't realize was that getting there was going to cause me more
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and more and more dysregulation on route because I was doing something that was inauthentic. And that masking and that shoving down of who I was was causing me way more dysregulation than I needed to be going through. The same is true if
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let's say we have this idea that we can marry someone or end up in a relationship with someone who our families or whoever it is that we desperately want the approval of would respect. If we are choosing partners
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from that place rather than from a place of who am I and what do I want in my close relationships? What's likely to happen is that we're going to have to be behaving inauthentically in order to get into that type of relationship and to
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sustain it. And so all of a sudden these fantasies we have that we might be self-regulating around are going to be causing us chronic dysregulation as we move towards them because they are requiring us to pay the consistent tax
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of being inauthentic. And this is very different from what it feels like to pursue a goal that we actually feel aligned with. Those type of goals tend to give us energy and tend to help us on the route towards them
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because we feel more and more inspired and lit up as we go towards them even on the hard days. And so very often if we have complex PTSD, these fantasies of how we are going to turn our lives
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around completely, if we can only achieve this one thing are actually the things that keep us stuck in these cycles of disregulation because we are not attuned to the tax that we are putting on our nervous system to move
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towards these things. And we are also having our expectations and reality chronically be mismatched because again no one thing is ever going to be able to save us from the challenges that are built into our nervous systems. Only
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slow, careful, intentional work over a long period of time gets us to that place where we're more comfortable inside of our own bodies and systems.
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But what we're going to talk about now is how to start doing that work. The first thing we need to do is get real with ourselves about what it actually takes to heal. So, there was a point in
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my life where I was in a truly overwhelming amount of financial debt. And for a really long time during that period, I had been dissociating from my financial situation because I was so busy tending to my mental health, which
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was in a very dire state. And once I was starting to get back on my feet, I started actually looking at and getting associated to just how much debt I was in. And I remember having this feeling of being underwater
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and thinking to myself, okay, I have to do one of two things. I have to either find a way to get out of this debt extremely fast or I have to declare bankruptcy. And so I called a financial
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adviser for some legal advice on how to declare bankruptcy in case I wanted to go in that direction. And I realized after hanging up the phone that it's actually not that easy to do that and that there was no thing I was going to
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be able to simply and immediately do to get my head above water. And so I remember going for a really long walk that afternoon and realizing that what I was going to have to do was just find a
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way to breathe underwater for a while because this problem was not going away in the next 6 months. And it probably wasn't going away in the next couple of years either. I was going to have to develop not only a long-term solution to
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this problem, but I was going to have to develop a self-regulation strategy for dealing with the fact that I had a long-term problem. Because prior to that point, for a very long period, I had always been responding to my life in
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like six-month increments. I would look only at what is the most pressing problem right now and how do I solve it right now? Which is often the situation we find ourselves in when we have chronically disregulated nervous systems
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that pattern out in certain ways that give us big structural problems in our life. We have to learn to triage. But finally, I was at a point in my life where I realized I have enough stability to be able to begin tackling things on a
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more structural level. And so now I can start looking at things like what would a long-term financial plan that got me out of debt for good actually look like?
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And this is also what we have to start considering if we want to start getting out of nervous system debt for good. It requires two things. One, a long-term plan for dealing with the dysregulation and the mental health challenges that
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we've been facing for most of our lives. But it also requires that second thing that plan for how we are going to self-regulate around the fact that we have this problem that it's going to take us a long time to heal from. If we
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are not used to dealing with things on a long-term basis, we are actually going to need to develop the skill of staying calm about the fact that we can't fix this in 1 month or 6 months or whatever
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it is, but we can fix it over a long period of time. So, at the time when I was making the decision to handle my debt this way, I kind of thought of it as I am settling in for a really long
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car ride and I need to make sure that I'm comfortable enough inside of the car to be able to actually make the whole journey which means when it came to financial problems, I cannot live on an incredibly strict budget that doesn't
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allow me any breathing room. If I try to do that, it will necessarily backfire at some point and I will go on a spending spree and end up in a worse position than I started in. I have to build out a
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budget thoughtfully. So, I have to be really intentional about making sure that I'm giving myself a little bit more of an allowance than I would if I were trying to kind of grin and bear this problem and solve it in 6 months.
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Because this is going to be a long journey, I have to accept my limitations as well as what I'm going to need in order to stay regulated enough to keep going on the journey. And I'm going to have to build all of that into my plan.
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The same is true when we are making a healing plan for ourselves. So, if I expect, for example, to get into my next romantic relationship and be perfectly healed and never make a mistake, I am just going to be setting myself up for a
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massive failure that then I'm going to feel a ton of shame around. And that shame is going to be a huge tax on my nervous system. So, I have to get real with myself about the fact that I have a
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long-term problem and that as I am working towards getting healthier, I'm going to have to find ways to manage what is still going to come up on route to that. So, I have to be realistic with myself and go, you know what, just like
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I can't live off rice and beans forever I also can't live off just having no social relationships until my trauma is totally resolved. So, I have to look at how do I make this situation realistic for myself? How do I do things like make
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new friends or date or work on my existing relationships with friends or family when I know that I am not fully healed yet? Can I be real with myself about the fact that I am going to flip into a trauma response every now and
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then, if not somewhat frequently inside of my close relationships? Can I decide ahead of time how I'm going to deal with that? Can I learn to communicate to the people around me the fact that I have these trauma responses and that they
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probably are going to come online and that I'm working on them, but they're also just going to be something that we're going to need to learn to work around and to integrate into our relational dynamic in a way that's safe
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for both of us as we go forward. So if you are trying to heal from something like complex PTSD or like having chronic trauma patterning or dysregulation, you are not going to be able to survive on no relationships until you are healed.
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You are probably, unless you're in a very fortunate financial situation. You're not going to be able to survive without having to work between now and the time when you've done a lot of this healing work. You are going to need to
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find ways to figure out where you're at and be realistic about how you are going to manage the different compartments of your life as you are in the healing process. And what this is at the end of the day is about putting down those
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fantasies and replacing them with dignity. So when we are fantasizing about ourselves as perfectly healed and as not having anything in our lives that we need to feel shameful about, what we are doing is telling some part of ourselves
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you are broken and bad as you are. And you do not deserve to have good things in your life like self-esteem or close relationships until you have rid yourself of all of these broken parts.
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And the opposite of this is stepping into dignity. Dignity is the energy that encompasses everything we are struggling with. Our trauma responses, our dysregulation, our shortcomings, and the ways in which we have not learned to develop ourselves into healthy human
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beings because we haven't had the chance to yet. And it is the ability to take all of that in and look at it with compassion. Compassion does not mean that we are giving ourselves free and unbridled license to let our trauma
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responses take over our lives or to lash out indefinitely at other people. It simply means that we are willing to accept that we have the lives we have.
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We have the nervous systems we have and the only way out of the patterning that is causing us pain and dysfunction is to be realistic about it and to incorporate the reality of it into our lives and into our relationships. So dignity does
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not mean that you get rid of your trauma responses overnight but it means that you are not shaming and blaming yourself ruthlessly for every time a trauma pattern crops up. you can expect that they will and you can learn to deal with
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them intentionally and work with the people in your life who those trauma responses affect to make sure that the damage is minimal on both them and on you. So, this is about getting real with yourself and other people and standing
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up for the part of yourself that knows it's in progress and being willing to admit, I'm not going to get everything right, but that also doesn't mean that I am, a, worthless, person., So,, one, of the biggest aha moments that I had in the
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healing process was realizing that while I had spent the majority of my life self-regulating around this fantasy that I was someday going to marry someone who had nothing wrong with them and how that relationship would prove to everyone
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around me that I too was worthy and had nothing wrong with me. In reality, the only way I was ever going to be consistently happy with another person was probably if that person had a pretty good understanding of me. And what that
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meant was that I was going to have to actually let them see me, including all of the trauma responses and all of the history that had led me to the point where I was at. And the kind of person
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who was going to be able to understand me the most deeply was probably going to be a person who had dealt with a lot of that stuff themselves. And so this idea of a shiny perfect relationship with no
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problems was one that I had to grieve and mourn to accept the reality that if I was a complicated person and I wanted to be fully known and seen, I was going to have to welcome another complicated person into my life and we were going to
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have to work together to make sure that each of our trauma responses were not too heavily impeding upon each other's ability to stay feeling safe. And this is not to say that this is how every relationship has to go. But what I want
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to be clear here is that a lot of the time when we are self-regulating with these fantasies about our future selves who have somehow magically become perfect, what we are leaving out of the picture is that in order to stay
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consistently regulated, we generally need to feel like all parts of ourselves are being expressed. And all parts of ourselves include the parts of ourselves that have a trauma history or the parts of ourselves that are still in progress.
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And we are going to need to learn to be comfortable getting seen in those parts in order to work our way out of this chronic dysregulation long term because again the way we work our way out of dysregulation is we find a way for our
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inner and outer worlds to match more. So for us to be doing less resisting, less repressing of ourselves, less masking of our authentic personalities and that is only going to come out of us being more honest with ourselves and
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other people about where we are at which is the opposite of what's going on in our fantasy worlds, where we suddenly don't have our inner world anymore, and so we have been transformed into a different person. The reason that's
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never going to work is because we do not leave the people we are behind when we heal. We take them with us. That is what healing means. We allow the people we have always been and the people we still
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are to be accepted with dignity and then we find better roots forward for that person. So this is healing from the fantasy of self-abandonment and dropping ourselves into the reality of tackling life as we are with the histories we have and the nervous
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systems we have. And this might involve doing a lot of grief work. Maybe there are just a couple of years where we are chronically feeling disillusioned and sad and where we are grieving the fantasies of the lives that we thought
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we could just magically achieve. And maybe those are years where we just need to build more slowness and more rest into our schedules so that we can actually give ourselves the time and space that we need to lay those
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fantasies to rest. And on the other side of that grief work, we're then met with the realistic possibilities that exist for us within the lives that we actually have. And the cool thing is that those possibilities are often way better than
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we could have imagined. I could never have told you 20 years ago that I could have a career where all of the dysfunction that I'd endured in my life and all of the psychological challenges I'd brought myself through and all of
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the clarity that that had eventually brought me to was now actually a giant contribution I could make to the world.
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That would never even have occurred to me before going through the grief work of what I thought my life was going to look like. And this life is one that feels good in my nervous system, not just in my fantasy life. And that's what
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we want to look for here. Lives where our fantasies correspond with something that it would actually feel really good and replenishing and rejuvenating for our nervous systems to experience day in and day out. Because the whole of who we
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are has been brought with us into that relationship or whatever it is that we are dreaming of. This is the long but effective road out of that nervous system debt where we are constantly pushing back against the conditions of
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our lives because they are inauthentic. And we are instead learning to live in alignment with how our energy naturally functions until we get to that place where those two things, the lives that we want to have and the lives that we
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are capable of living actually deeply intersect. All right, that's all I'm going to say for today on this topic. But as always any comments, any questions, anything coming up for you as you go through this video, please leave in the comments
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section below. I love you guys. I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and I will see you back here again really soon.
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Topics:C-PTSDnervous system regulationget healed quick schemetoxic shamenervous system debtwindow of tolerancetrauma healingself-regulationauthenticityHeidi Priebe
