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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 regulation. And in particular, we're diving deep on what it looks like to
Heidi Priebe explains why complex PTSD feels like chronic emergency, distinguishing complicated from complex systems and how toxic shame and triage shape self-understanding.
Key Takeaways
- Complex PTSD can resemble a constant emergency, and self-blame often compounds the strain on the nervous system.
- Life areas are interconnected in a complex system; changes in one affect others in unpredictable ways.
- Many perceived personal failures are better understood as nervous system triage under limited resources.
- Reducing toxic shame and cultivating self-compassion can meaningfully lighten the nervous system's load.
- Targeting root causes and accepting trade-offs is more effective than trying to fix every area in isolation.
What the video covers
- Introduces a mini-series on nervous system regulation focused on living with chronic dysregulation such as complex PTSD.
- Defines toxic shame as the underlying belief that everything bad happening is a personal failing.
- Explains systems thinking, contrasting complicated systems (like computers, predictable from expertise) with complex systems (interconnected, dynamic, hard to predict).
- Argues that people with complex PTSD mistakenly treat their life areas (mental health, career, relationships, self-esteem) as independent buckets rather than an interconnected complex system.
- Gives a personal example: depression and toxic shame lowered self-esteem, which worsened health, career, finances, and relationships in a cascading loop.
- Reframes apparent failures as triage: the nervous system prioritizes survival threats, so neglected areas reflect resource allocation rather than personal neglect.
- Suggests releasing toxic shame and replacing it with self-compassion as a key step in nervous system relief.
- Discusses making decisions with awareness of consequences and offering preemptive grace for trade-offs, similar to paying costs in finances.
- Recommends targeting root nodes in the system rather than addressing each symptom separately, to avoid spillover effects.
- Advises acknowledging that interventions in one area may affect others, and sometimes pausing one area to stabilize the whole system.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to Chronic Nervous System Dysregulation
- 01:24Defining Toxic Shame
- 02:58Introduction to Systems Thinking
- 04:58Complicated vs. Complex Systems
- 07:34Applying Complex Systems to Complex PTSD
- 09:37Personal Example of Cascading Effects
- 12:09Reframing Failures as Triage
- 16:52Releasing Toxic Shame and Trade-offs
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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live life with a chronically disregulated nervous system. So, not one where we are occasionally getting thrown into trauma patterning, but a life of living with something like complex PTSD where we are very frequently finding ourselves in some type of fight, flight,
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freeze, or fawn response patterning. And what I want to talk about today is something that I've been wanting to make a video about for a really long time.
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So, originally the title for this video that I had in my head was complex PTSD as a neverending lifelong emergency. And the reason I didn't want to go with that was because it felt kind of discouraging as a title. But what I wanted to make
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clear is the fact that that's often what it feels like to live with complex PTSD.
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It often feels like we are just chronically responding to fires that need to get put out. And there is very little space to kind of pause and reflect and make choices that allow us to be in deep integrity.
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But we tend to be blaming ourselves for not being able to simply keep up with the whole complex system of problems that we are tasked with dealing with on a daily basis with a nervous system that is severely underresourced.
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So this underlying belief that everything bad that happens to us in life is some sort of personal failing is what we call toxic shame. And if you've never heard that term before, I do have a couple of videos that go over what
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toxic shame is that it might be helpful for you to check out before returning to this one. So, I've linked those in the description of this video. But for those of you who are already familiar with that term, what we're going to be doing
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today is looking at how we can start the process of removing toxic shame as one of those huge nervous system taxes that we've likely been responding to for the majority of our lives. And we're going to do this in a way that at first is
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going to seem really kind of headheavy, especially for a week that focuses so intensely on getting back in touch with the body. But I think that sometimes with complex PTSD, a problem is that we have so intensely learned to distrust
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the body that we first have to grasp concepts mentally in order to allow our systems to trust them enough to begin relaxing into them.
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And in order to get there, we are going to take a brief intellectual foray into the field of systems analysis. And I'll explain why this is relevant in a few minutes. But basically, there's this whole field of people who study how
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systems work. And by systems, that means anything from living organisms to organizations to ecosystems to systems of government. essentially anything that is made up of a whole bunch of different moving parts that have to cooperate in specific ways with each other in order
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to form something that is greater than the sum of those individual parts. And one of the most useful things that ever came out of the field of systems thinking in my opinion is the distinction between a complicated system
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and a complex one. So this showed up in the work of early systems theorists like Ludwig von Bertalenfrey. I have no idea if I said his name right there who talked about how human beings are complex systems as well as Dave Snowden
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who really honed in on this particular difference that we're going to be talking about. So, a complicated system can be thought of as something like a computer where basically if you just gain enough expertise in the system and
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you just study it enough to understand each of its individual parts, you're going to be able to do a reasonably good job at predicting the outcome of any given input into the system. So with a computer, if you are a computer wiz and
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you really understand how the hardware works, you are going to be able to understand exactly what you can do to a computer or which inputs you can give it and how it will respond. But when we are dealing with a complex system, basically
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what we're looking at usually is a whole bunch of interconnected systems that all influence each other. So the way that the world works is a complex system. We have things like systems of government, economic systems, environmental systems, all of these different systems that all
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impact each other. Who we vote into office has a big impact on what happens with the environment, on what happens with our economic systems, on what happens to the morale of a country, etc., etc. So, there are all of these
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systems that all have their individual functions and their individual parts that make them up, but they also all influence each other. So any change in one system is going to lead to changes in the others in ways that we are not
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going to be able to perfectly predict because the system is simply too dynamic and complex for us to make clear predictions about it. Now a big error that people with complex PTSD make to bring this back to the realm of
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psychology is we think of ourselves as complicated systems when we are in fact complex ones. So, what does that mean and why does it matter? Basically, a really common pattern that I see in people with complex PTSD is looking at
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all of the different systems of their lives as kind of a series of buckets.
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So, things like, okay, yeah, I've got my mental health and then my physical health and then my career and then my close relationships and then my self-esteem and my practical needs and all of these other areas that make up a
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life that are systems in and of themselves. And we usually have some awareness of how each of these individual systems are doing. So we might look at them and go, okay, my mental health, well that's not going so
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well. My physical health also not great. My career, maybe that's going okay. My relationships are kind of hit or miss.
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My practical needs are in constant fluctuation. And then my self-esteem is pretty low. Or whatever it is that's happening in each of those systems. And when we recognize that we're struggling in any of those individual systems, we tend to think, well, I just need to work
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harder at that area of my life. But the error that we're making is not recognizing that what we're dealing with here is not a whole bunch of independent systems that don't influence each other.
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We are dealing with a complex system. So any change that we make in any of these individual categories is going to impact the other ones for better or for worse or in some cases in both directions. And until we start getting really clear on
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this, it's actually really easy for us to continue to chalk up problems that are developing in different buckets or different areas of our lives as us just being neglectful. when in fact sometimes an action we are taking to increase the
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health of one system is having a directly negative impact on another system. But we're not appreciating that the reason why this system is being affected is because we are working so hard and implementing an intervention that is genuinely working over here. But
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also sometimes a problem in one area or one system is bleeding through all of the rest of them without us recognizing that. So, for example, for the majority of my own life, I dealt with intermittent depression as well as toxic
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shame. And that massively impacted my self-esteem. I had a really hard time thinking of myself as a worthwhile person. And because I didn't see myself as a person who was worth taking care of, my health often started to struggle.
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And then having poor health would contribute once again to lowering my self-esteem. And then when I would hit points where my self-esteem was at rock bottom, it would start impacting my ability to do good work and to advance
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in my career. And then if my career started struggling, it was challenging to meet my practical needs. And so sometimes I would find myself making impulsive relationship moves like moving in way too fast with a partner because I
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wasn't able to afford rent on my own. And so now you have this one thing at the core of the system, this depression that's impacting every other system inside of the self. But if I'm not looking at those things as
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interconnected, the only common denominator I'm going to see is that I am the one at the core of all these systems. And so if they're all suffering, it must mean there just happens to be something wrong or broken
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about me. But the more attuned we get to these interconnections between the systems, the more we are a able to see that it is not just our inherent badness that makes us fail at everything. It's the fact that we are dealing with a complex
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system that we have not developed the skills for adequately dealing with that is keeping us stuck. But B, we can get more effective at managing the system.
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So why does this awareness matter and what do we do with it? That's exactly what we're going to get into next. The first thing out of three things that we're going to talk about in this video that this awareness helps us with is it
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can help us recognize that we have not been failing our entire lives on multiple fronts. We have in fact been triaging. So if you go into an emergency room, there are going to be a whole bunch of patients there with a whole
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range of ailments. And all of those ailments are important and need attending to. But the job of the doctors and physicians on staff is to pick the people who are most in need of immediate help and to find a way to meet the needs
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of the people in that room by prioritizing the ones that are in the most trouble. So for example, if you go into an ER and there's a person having a heart attack as well as a person having a nose bleed, you are probably going to
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prioritize caring for the person who has the heart attack. and you're going to let the nose bleed get slightly worse for a while before you can attend to it because your resources were limited and you had to take care of the thing that
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was the most imminent which is the person having the heart attack. But toxic shame is basically like being the doctor who made that call and saved both patients and then only registering that because of you, this person's nose bleed
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got worse. when in reality what you did that day was you used the resources you had to the best of your ability to save two people. This is what living with complex PTSD is like. Every day your nervous system is feeling into the most
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imminent task that needs to be attended to in your life and it is generally trying its hardest to draw your attention towards that. And if you are simply shaming yourself for the things that are getting worse in the meantime,
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while you are attending to the things that that little doctor that lives inside of your nervous system has determined are the most important, you are going to be chronically living with that toxic shame. And so the first step
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out of this is just doing that conscious reframing for yourself and being willing to admit to yourself, I have not just been failing. I have been triaging.
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Sometimes attending to one area of my life very heavily for a while has led to consequences in other areas. But that does not mean that I was negligent intentionally of these other areas. It means that I was making a wise
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adaptation that got me through that period in the first place. So, one of the biggest income bracket changes that I've ever experienced in my life when it comes to nervous system wealth is going from a place of chronic toxic shame to a
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place of self understanding. And I have a video on this that I'll link in the description of this one that goes over the concept of self-neutrality.
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So, how to learn to see everything you're doing as simply an adaptation to your circumstances rather than through the lens of good or bad or failure or success story or whatever other lenses we might be used to looking at ourselves
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through. But essentially, the more understanding we can give to ourselves about why we have ended up in the specific situations we have ended up in in life over and over again, the more we're going to be able to start
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releasing that burden of toxic shame from our nervous system. And that burden getting lifted is already a humongous shift inside of the system, especially when we can learn to start replacing it with self-compassion.
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Self-compassion is a very relaxing experience for the system. It allows us to stay more present with what we're doing, which means that we generally end up working more efficiently, making wiser choices, and being more present with our experiences overall.
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So this is like adding a new recurring deposit into our nervous system that's going to start compounding in a positive direction while taking away that recurring nervous system withdrawal that is toxic shame.
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So, this is a really slow process, but basically starting to think of ourselves as wise nervous system responders inside of a complex system can go a really long way towards easing that toxic shame.
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Now, the second step in this process is making that process of triaging both conscious and intentional for yourself.
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And the reason we do this is because it helps us restore our selfdignity which again is like a constant recurring deposit into our nervous system. So when we are faced with hard choices in life, instead of responding to them as best we
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can, then noticing all of the consequences they've caused in other parts of the system and freaking out later on, we can actually start getting aware of what consequences are likely to be incurred as a result of us choosing a
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certain thing. And then give ourselves preemptive grace for those consequences happening. Or to even just be aware, this is probably going to lead to some consequences. I don't even know what they are right now. So, this is an
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interesting point in the healing process where we start to realize that we're going to have to make major tradeoffs when it comes to how we are prioritizing our lives and our own healing because we are not dealing with optimal conditions,
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right? We are in debt, which means we are going to be paying some interest and we are going to be stuck in some forms of poverty cycles at least during the periods where we are slowly climbing our way out. So, I actually remember getting
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so frustrated at one point in the healing process because I recognized that the conditions of my life, which were absolutely in shambles in a couple of different areas, required me to make a choice in one area that I knew was
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going to get me through a difficult period, but that I also knew was going to have major consequences down the line. And for the first time in my life, I could actually see all of that clearly. And the first thought I had
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was, "Wait a minute. Isn't healing supposed to mean that I don't have to make these hard choices anymore? But my second thought was, or I can make this choice while being aware in the back of my mind that it's going to have impacts.
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And so when those impacts come along instead of shaming myself for encountering them, I can see them as a price that I was willing to pay in order to make the change that I needed to make in the short term to get through the
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rest of that year. So, just like with finances, we do sometimes have to pay the price of something that it kind of hurts us to pay. The same is true when we're looking at our own lives and nervous systems. Sometimes we make a
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choice in one area that we know is going to be stressful for a while in another area as a consequence of that. But if we can appreciate that we are making that choice with our eyes open and with
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intention, it means that we can move through the whole process from decision point to consequences to dealing with the consequences with dignity intact because we know that we are being at choice and intentional about the expenses that we are incurring on our
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own nervous systems at this point in our lives. So, we are being realistic with ourselves about the fact that life requires tradeoffs and that we cannot improve all areas at once. Any change to a complex system is going to affect
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other parts of the system, often in ways that we can't even be fully aware of from the get- go. Which brings us to the last point that I think it's really important to hone in on today, which is
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that when we are dealing with a complex system, we do not try to figure out how to solve everything at once. By nature, it's assumed that we cannot do that with complex systems, we don't have enough awareness of all of the moving parts and
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how they interact each other. So what we look at instead of doing those complete and total overhauls is figuring out which well-placed interventions are going to be likely to raise the overall health of the system in so far as we can
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predict and again we can only ever predict so far. But this is exactly how we need to start looking at the system that is our own lives if we have complex PTSD. Instead of thinking how do I solve
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every area of my life one by one and then make sure that they stay solved forever, we want to start asking ourselves different questions. Questions like can I be aware of which parts of the system are causing too much strain
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on the overall system as well as which interventions can I take that are going to help stabilize the health of the system overall. So an example of that first category, things that are just causing the overall system too much and
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might need to be removed might be things like addictions, not only to substances, but maybe to habits. So things like doom scrolling or getting really stuck on our phone for 8 hours a day. Those things are likely parts of the system that make
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us up because at some point they were solving a problem for us in one of the subsystems.
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So maybe if we couldn't sleep at night and we started having a glass of wine every night to help us sleep, but then that became a steadily worsening habit, what was once functioning reasonably well to help stabilize a system might
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now have grown into a problem that is causing spillover effects to other systems. So, we might need to recognize when it's time to quit drinking the wine and instead try something like relaxation techniques or melatonin or whatever it is that's going to help us
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solve the same problem in a way that does not spill over as heavily into other parts of the system. So, there's an art to noticing which nodes need to be removed while perhaps thanking them for the role that they once played that
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was useful at the time. So again, this is moving away from that selfshaming and instead of going, "Oh my god, how could I have this problem? I'm such an idiot," going, "That problem was once a reasonable solution to a certain
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part of my life." Maybe there was a point where watching reals on your phone for a few minutes a day was genuinely really helpful in your sense of regulation. But if that started becoming hours and hours and hours of spending
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time on your phone when you would rather be doing other things, it might be time to recognize that that thing that once served a particular part of the system well has now started causing problems in the rest of the system. And so a new
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approach to whatever problem that behavior was initially solving needs to be looked at instead. which sort of flows right into the next thing we want to look at which are which small interventions could actually hit a whole bunch of areas at once or have positive
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spillover effects. So an example of this for me is that I find when I pay a lot of attention to my health and when I make sure that I am getting enough sleep, eating healthy foods, and moving my body daily, it tends to have a
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positive impact on almost every single system. So, it improves my self-esteem, it improves my emotional regulation, it improves my relationships, it improves my capacity to stay present and focused at work. All of these different areas end up benefiting from this one
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intervention. So often if I'm in a period where a whole bunch of areas of my life are struggling or suffering at once instead of trying to address them all individually, I will actually for a period of time just stop and work on
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getting my health in check if my health has been struggling because that's something that ends up resourcing me and kind of giving me a booster in every other area when I do get around to tackling those areas directly. So we
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want to look at solutions to our problems that are likely to have the overall most positive effect on the system. So an example of this is that I used to really really struggle with insomnia like very badly. And for a long
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time I would often have a glass of wine before bed because it helped my system to kind of relax. And that was always in the background of my awareness like oh I should find a way to get to sleep
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naturally. And then I noticed one day when I was reading a really interesting novel that for like three nights in a row because I was reading before bed, I just forgot to have my glass of wine before bed. And I realized that actually
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reading kind of serves the same calming function for me as having a glass of wine does. And so now I found a solution to a problem that saves me money because I can go to the library and take out
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books, but I can't go to the library and take out a glass of wine. and it doesn't have any potential negative impacts on my health. So, I found something that functioned in the same way. It served the purpose of helping me wind down at
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night, but without the consequences in other areas of the system. And this is something that we can just start being more conscious of when we're looking for solutions in our lives. Another example of this is that if we feel bored or kind
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of dopamine depleted, our brain might start flooding us with ideas of things like go on a shopping spree or go on vacation or do things that might cost a bunch of time and money. But if we can find a way to kind of gify something
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that is actually positive for us inside of our day-to-day lives. So something like okay I am going to set a new challenge for myself in my work and I'm going to make sure that almost every day there's some challenge that I can meet
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that's going to give me a little hit of dopamine to know that I'm crossing off that check mark. That might help with the boredom and the energy depletion without disrupting other areas of the system if we simply can't afford to go
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on vacation right now. And in fact, it might work on increasing the health of the system in a direction that would allow us to eventually actually go on that vacation because maybe by making a game out of our goals at work, we
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actually get better at our work as a result and end up making more money.
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Another really helpful intervention I found at one point in my life was building a community who are also engaged in the process of healing work and building relational skills. So this thing that I was doing both in my work
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because my work does center around psychology as well as my personal life. I was on this personal quest to build better interpersonal skills was now something that I was kind of passively picking up through my social networks because I was surrounded by so many
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interesting people who in every casual interaction that I was having with them were teaching me something or were giving me an opportunity to practice some skill in a low stakes environment.
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So my time no longer felt like it was getting split between work or personal development and social. Those things were now interacting well with each other. And so all of these are going to have to be of course catered
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specifically to you and your needs. But the way that we get to this place where we're raising the health of the entire system is by becoming more attuned to how all of these areas of our lives are impacting each other and then drawing
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our attention to what the most high leverage interventions we could possibly implement are. This is how the kind of emergency room that lives inside of us as people who have CPTTSD goes from one that is understaffed and overtaxed to
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one where the people inside of the emergency room, so the different parts of ourselves are actually able to help each other. Now, this is not simple, of course, and by virtue of the fact that this is a complex system that we're
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working with our own lives, it's not always going to be possible to perfectly predict what any given intervention is going to do. But the more intention we can bring to how we are triaging our lives, how we are responding to the
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whole system, the more informed decisions we are going to be able to start making, which once again helps us move away from that patterning of things are suffering because I'm a bad person who can't get anything right to I am
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struggling because this is very complex but I am capable of operating within that complexity and very slowly over time. This ends up bolstering the health of the system as a whole. All right, that's all I'm going to say on this
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topic for today, but as always, any thoughts, questions, things coming up for you as you've gone through this video, please leave in the comments section below. I love you guys. I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and your nervous systems, and
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I will see you back here again really soon. [Music] Oh yeah. [Music] Heat.
Topics:complex PTSDnervous system regulationtoxic shamesystems thinkingcomplicated vs complex systemsself-compassiontriagetraumaemotional regulationHeidi Priebe
