Welcome to the narcissistic abuse recovery podcast. I'm Caroline Stawson and I'll be sharing with you

awareness, understanding and education about the devastating effects of narcissistic abuse to help you thrive.

I want you to know that I've been exactly where you are now and I believe you.

And this show is all about taking you from trauma to transformation.

In this episode, I want to talk to you about depression and anxiety whilst in or when you come out of a narcissistic relationship.

You know, depression and anxiety are trauma responses within our body and really are great

descriptors of system states that happen. So I'm going to break this down for you. I want you to

imagine a ladder now.

And at the top of that ladder is when we feel safe and connected. And I'm going to use the

polyvagal theory when I talk about this. And I'm going to use Deb Dana's analogy using the ladder.

So that top of the ladder is when we are feeling the most maybe in control.

It's when we're in our adult self. And it's when we recognize that challenges can happen in our

life, but we are still safe enough to feel like we can deal with them. Now, if something happens in our life that our brain

perceives to be dangerous, we start to move down that ladder. And we move into the middle of the

ladder now, into what we call our sympathetic nervous system. And that is where we will go into fight or flight.

So that moment, our brain perceives threat or danger, our system state becomes in our nervous

system, in our autonomic nervous system, fight or flight. Now, this tends to be when we become more

angry, maybe we might become anxious, and it's when our body

starts to produce more cortisol. So we'll produce adrenaline and then cortisol. Now, of course,

if we were being attacked or something major happening, we need this natural body response to occur.

Because if we needed that extra bit of cortisol or adrenaline to either fight somebody or

something off or to run away, to fight, we're going to need that extra energy.

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