Welcome to Breakdown to Breakthrough,
The podcast that empowers you to transform your life by awakening to your true authentic self.
I'm Lisa A.
Romano,
Your host.
As an award-winning author and certified life coach,
I've dedicated my life to helping others understand the incredible power of an organized mind.
I believe that true empowerment begins with awakening to our false self.
My mission is to support you on your journey toward mental and emotional regeneration through conscious and deliberate awakening.
In this podcast,
I'll share insights,
Tools,
And transformative stories that illuminate the path to healing and self-discovery.
So today we're going to be talking about the high-functioning woman who is secretly and quietly exhausted.
This woman looks calm.
She's accomplished.
She's the one everyone in her family and her circle of friends and even at work knows they can depend on.
But at 2.
17am,
Her jaw is tight,
Her stomach is in knots,
And sometimes she wakes up in a cold sweat.
Her mind is running simulations about conversations that haven't even happened yet.
She ruminates,
She worries,
And she obsesses.
And if this is you,
This isn't a time management problem.
It isn't a motivation issue.
And it's not that you care too much.
It's nervous system conditioning.
High-functioning women who look powerful on the outside,
But internally live in a state of chronic stress.
And if you're anything like me,
This resonates.
It lands.
And more importantly,
What has to collapse for you to finally feel emotionally free?
To put the rumination to end?
To stop carrying the weight of everyone around you?
So let's talk about the polished exterior and the wired interior.
High-functioning women are often praised.
Society loves us.
Our families adore us.
We're productive,
Emotionally intelligent,
We're reliable.
We're the one who holds everything together.
We are the go-to person.
But oftentimes,
And almost always,
What no one sees is this.
You don't know how to relax without guilt.
You feel responsible for other people's moods.
When things are calm for too long,
Your body feels uneasy.
You might anticipate problems before they even happen.
You just don't do a lot.
You scan.
You manage.
You anticipate.
You absorb.
You adjust.
You edit yourself.
And here's what I want you to understand at a deep level.
You're not strong because you were calm under pressure.
You were calm under pressure because your nervous system was trained in pressure to adjust to pressure,
To adjust to chaos.
So let's talk about the neuroscience of the fixer and the caretaker,
Which so often accompanies this idea of being codependent.
Let's move into the brain.
When you grow up in an unpredictable,
Emotionally immature,
Neglectful,
Addicted,
Narcissistic,
Or chaotic home,
Your brain had to adapt.
Now the child's brain is not philosophical.
It is biological.
And up until the age of seven,
It is in a brainwave state called the theta hypnotic brainwave state.
So you're being brainwashed in this state.
It asks one question.
How do I stay safe here?
If safety depended on being helpful,
Anticipating the needs of others,
Not upsetting anyone,
Not rocking the boat,
Soothing a parent's emotional point of wherever they were at that point at that time and space,
Wherever they were,
Overachieving.
If you were taught that not needing anything kept the system safe,
Then your nervous system encoded all of these as a survival adaptation.
Now,
What happens neurologically?
Number one,
Amygdala sensitization.
Your threat detection system becomes highly tuned,
And that's not your fault.
So by default,
You notice micro shifts in tone,
In facial expression,
In body movements,
And in energy.
The prefrontal cortex overdevelopment in control pathways.
Now you become more strategic.
You become more analytical.
You become hyper aware,
And planning reduces anxiety.
And again,
This is all happening at a subconscious level.
Number three,
There's a dopamine reinforcement loop.
When you fix something,
When you soothe someone,
When you abandon yourself,
When you avoid conflict or prevent chaos,
Your brain releases dopamine.
So relief equals reward.
Your brain learns,
If I manage everything,
If I carry everything,
If I anticipate everything,
Then I am safe.
The belief doesn't stay cognitive.
It becomes physiological.
You can know that you're doing something that is self-sabotaging and still do it.
This is why.
And as an adult,
You're not choosing to overfunction.
Your nervous system is running an old safety algorithm.
It's doing what it thinks it needs to do to keep you safe.
Now let's talk about why calm feels unsafe.
Now remember,
You're not conscious of this.
You're running a program.
Here's something most high-functioning women never realize.
Well,
Until they have a breakthrough,
Which often comes at the expense of a breakdown.
Your body may equate peace with danger,
Dear one.
If you grew up in a household where calm moments were followed by explosions,
If good days were unpredictable,
If love felt conditional,
You learned that you had to behave a certain way in order to have love not withdrawn from you,
Then your nervous system paired calm equals something bad is about to happen.
So what do you do now?
You create motion.
You stay busy.
You fix.
You organize.
You take responsibility.
You manage other people's responsibilities,
Which actually makes them more irresponsible because action to you regulates anxiety.
Stillness,
However,
Exposes it.
You're aware of this tension in your body when you're still.
So now let's talk about the identity you built to survive.
Let's go deeper.
Now remember,
This is all subconscious.
The fixer,
The caretaker,
The strong one,
The one that has no needs.
These are not personality traits,
Dear one.
So let's get that straight.
These aren't personality traits and they're not flaws.
They are survival identities.
There's a difference.
And here's the uncomfortable truth.
You're not exhausted because you're doing too much.
You're exhausted because you believe who you are depends on doing too much.
There's a difference.
High functioning women often fuse identity with usefulness.
The more useful I am,
The more worthy I am,
The more people will need me and possibly never leave me.
If I'm not needed,
Who am I?
That question creates panic because our identity is being outsourced to how well we please others.
So it's not internal.
It's not authentic.
Because if your worth was calibrated in childhood through performance,
Emotional labor,
Or achievement,
Then rest feels like ego death.
And ego always needs a problem to solve.
It always needs something to complain about.
It always needs something to do.
So let's talk about nervous system calibration.
Children don't just form these subconscious invisible beliefs.
They calibrate their physiology according to those beliefs.
If love was inconsistent,
Your attachment system learned vigilance.
You scan.
If chaos was normal,
Your baseline stress hormone adjusted upward.
It's your baseline.
There has to be chaos in order for you to feel stable.
Chronic cortisol exposure in childhood can wire the body towards hyperarousal.
So hyperarousal feels normal,
Calm,
Feels unfamiliar,
And stressful.
It could actually signal danger.
So you become high capacity,
High output,
Hyperresponsible,
And hyperaware because you've adjusted to your childhood experiences and deeply,
Deeply tired.
But here is the distinction that you must understand.
High functioning is not the same as regulated.
High functioning is often rooted in inauthenticity,
But we don't know it.
You can be competent and dysregulated at the same time.
You can be admired and anxious at the same time.
You can be successful and terrified of slowing down at the same time.
It's like burning the candle at both ends.
So now we're going to move into the part most people avoid.
If you want real freedom,
Not surface level coping,
You must prepare for identity collapse.
This is where the old you is confronted by the awareness of the patterns and programs that are running you.
Because the woman who survives by fixing cannot become the woman who rests without the fixer dissolving.
And your brain,
Dear one,
Will resist that.
Your nervous system will scream.
Why?
Because from a neurological standpoint,
Something you're not even consciously aware of,
Identity equals safety.
The default mode network in the brain maintains your narrative self.
It reinforces,
This is who I am.
I fix.
I caretake.
I'm competent.
I can handle anything.
This is how I survive.
This is what people expect of me.
Who else is going to take care of them if I don't?
When you begin to set boundaries,
You stop rescuing.
When you allow others to feel their own discomfort.
When you stop taking on too much at work and you start leaving the office at a decent time,
Your nervous system interprets that as a risk.
Your body is going to feel the sensations of anxiety spikes.
You're going to feel guilt.
The fear of rejection might pop up.
A strange emptiness might surface.
And this is not a failure.
That is withdrawal from a survival identity,
From the high functioning fixer caretaker codependent identity.
I want to teach you to help your mind prepare for this collapse because this is critical.
You cannot accidentally drift into your true self.
You must intentionally prepare for the destabilization phase.
I wish I knew that's what I was going through when I was going through it.
But now looking back,
I understand that's what I was going through when I was having these mini breakdowns.
So here's what that looks like neurologically and psychologically.
So you don't freak out as you ascend out of these unhealthy patterns.
Number one,
Cognitive rehearsal.
Before you change any behavior in your life,
Before you set boundaries,
Immensely rehearse the discomfort.
Tell yourself,
When I stop fixing,
My body will panic.
That panic is old wiring,
Not present actual real danger.
Name the response,
Label it,
Call it out before it happens.
Prediction reduces amygdala activation.
Number two,
Somatic recalibration.
When you sense the urge to fix or over function or overdo,
Simply pause,
Observe.
Notice the tight chest,
Forward leaning posture,
Notice the shallow breath.
This is activation.
Instead of acting,
Breathe slowly and lengthen your exhale.
This truly is you interrupting old patterns and teaching your nervous system to relax.
You're actually teaching your vagus system that stillness is survivable.
Imagine that.
Number three,
Tolerating other people's discomfort.
When you change,
People are going to be uncomfortable.
You're recalibrating the scales and some people don't like that.
This is the hardest part.
When someone is upset and you don't intervene,
Your nervous system may react as if abandonment is imminent.
You must consciously,
This is why I'm always talking about elevating your consciousness,
The conscious way.
You must consciously say,
Their discomfort is not an actual threat to my survival.
You are decoupling responsibility from safety and this is huge.
This is a metacognitive path.
Let's talk about the emptiness phase.
When the fixer identity begins to loosen,
Many women report feeling a sense of loss and emptiness.
Who am I if I'm not the strong one,
The responsible one,
The problem solver?
The fixer,
The one people come to with all their problems.
Who am I if I'm not the emotional manager of my family?
There may be a quiet grief,
There may be a sense of powerlessness because that identity kept you alive.
It actually made you feel in control,
Even though in truth it was making you more out of control.
That part of you deserves compassion and understanding,
Not shame,
Because it is not your true self.
It is a brilliant survival adaptation.
The true self is not dramatic.
She doesn't overfunction.
She's not a performance artist.
It's not performative.
It does not need to prove anything.
The true self is regulated.
It's balanced.
It can rest without guilt.
It can love without rescuing.
It can enforce a boundary without guilt.
It can help without overfunctioning,
And it can succeed without self-abandonment.
It can even fail at something without judging the self.
The nervous system of the true self is flexible.
It's like the wind or water.
It moves between activation and rest fluidly.
It does not live in a constant scanning state.
It does not equate usefulness and other perceived value of you with self-worth.
Your self-worth just is.
The final pattern interrupt.
Dear one,
Maybe you grew up hearing that you were too much and you were too needy,
But you're not too much,
And you're not overly sensitive,
And you're certainly not broken.
You just calibrated,
And calibration can change.
You're just unconscious,
And we can shift your unconscious to a more conscious state.
You're just working from subconscious patterns,
And we can teach you to be more metacognitive.
But just remember,
Change requires something most high-functioning women fear more than failure.
They fear letting go of that identity that earned them love and power,
Respect,
And control.
Your breakthrough will not feel empowering at first.
In fact,
It will rock your world.
It will feel destabilizing.
It will feel like you are becoming less.
It will make you feel empty and lost.
In reality,
You're becoming less defended,
Less hypervigilant,
Less fused with performance,
Less driven by childhood survival codes.
But it won't feel good at first,
And that's something you must prepare for.
And it's something that I wish I knew more about when I was going through it,
And that's why I share these sessions with people like you.
So if you see yourself in this,
Understand your stress is not weakness.
It is stored vigilance.
Your over-functioning is not your personality.
It's not just the way that you are.
It is rooted in needing protection or feeling protected.
It's a survival-based strategy.
And your exhaustion,
It's real.
It's not laziness.
It is the cost of carrying roles that were never meant to define you into adulthood.
Maybe they helped you survive childhood,
But they're only holding you back in adulthood.
The way back is not about doing more or becoming stronger or taking more on or just sucking it up,
Buttercup.
It's about allowing the survival identity to soften and preparing your mind intentionally for the collapse that makes room for your true self to emerge.
So someone else might call this self-improvement.
I call it nervous system liberation because codependency is a straitjacket.
We're operating from codependent beliefs or codependent survival adaptations below the veil of consciousness,
Over-functioning in relationships,
Which causes our partners and family and friends and even coworkers to under-function.
And we can't keep up that pace.
And eventually the dynamics that we've been living out cause us to experience tremendous,
Tremendous breakdowns in our own life,
Mentally,
Emotionally,
Physically,
Psychologically,
Relationally.
We just start to break down under the pressure.
But when we become highly conscious of the patterns that we're engaging in,
Dear one,
That's the breakthrough.
First step,
Awareness.
I so hope that if you're a high-functioning woman who is quietly exhausted,
This information has landed for you.
You now understand your pattern and you have a clearer path forward as to what direction you should move to.
