The Prey of the World: When Awareness Feels Like Betrayal
(Continuation from Part 1: “Scapegoat Fatigue — The Cost of Being the Mirror”)
Hello Data Collectors!
I hope you all have been doing well. As promised, part two.
If you missed part one you can catch up below.
Perspective Shift: Back to Self
Now, per my usual flavor, I have to take the perspective shift back to self. Along this journey, I’m discovering that we have to learn how to articulate all of this in a way that doesn’t compare us to the very person we deem is harming us. That is the lesson and the mission we all must learn; otherwise, we repeat it with everyone we’re with until we finally get it. Due to the level of fed-up-ness many of us experience, we tend to struggle with delivery simply because we’ve been suppressing for years.
Our bodies tremble.
They shake.
Even the thought of having these conversations. Your mind already anticipates what you’re going to get in return. You already know how they’ll react, so your body responds first.
That’s the wheel of reactivity.
“The body keeps the score: it remembers what the mind forgets.” — van der Kolk (2014)
The sensation you feel is your nervous system recalling an old script.
This is what wiring is.
According to Polyvagal Theory (Porges, 2011), the body scans for safety before the brain can reason, meaning your story often begins in your body, not your mind. So when that familiar heat floods your chest or your throat tightens before you even speak, that’s your body whispering:
“Last time you told the truth, it cost you.”
Regulation in the Body
I’ve felt my body respond, get tense, or tighten in sessions and even in my day to day with certain people — especially those with borderline traits, because the anticipation of when they might split is something I grew up in. I have to train my nervous system to remember:
I am at work.
I am with my husband.
I am with my mother-in-law.
Even when those people activate nervous system movement within me, I still have to do the work to remind my nervous system: They are not the cast from my past. Meaning, I have to do the necessary behavioral or cognitive interruption what I call “pause & pivot.” The necessary pause it takes to make sure that I do not allow the amygdala to confuse the people in my present with the activation that comes with what the Amygdala gathers from the hippocampus— the memory center. This information is typically almost always from the past. The Pivot is what I do to move away from the external stimuli that activates nervous system activity or “movement.” Pivoting away from the conversation, pivoting my focus or attention. This allows me to get access to the ability to enter regulation mode or at least try.
Learning how to pause in the midst of a trigger?
That’s hard, mostly because our loved ones will inevitably touch the bruises we’ve worked hardest to heal— or for some of us…. Avoid.
Bowen (1978) called this the practice of differentiation — the ability to stay connected while staying separate.
“Maturity is measured by one’s capacity to maintain self-definition in the face of reactivity.” — Bowen (1978)
Inherited Guilt and the Fawn Reflex
During a recent conversation with my mother-in-law, I felt this reflex awaken. BTW she is Punjabi and I think that is important to note due to cultural dynamics. Two worlds learning how to connect and because of language barriers and generational differences, my amygdala can’t always tell the difference between judgment and translation.
…and if you are familiar with Desi criticism….
When she said something culturally off, my body wanted to flinch into apology, into fixing, into fawning. Or— into sacred rage, beucase this started to feel similar to what I grew up in.
Fawning, as Walker (2013) describes, is the trauma-bonded adaptation to perceived threat through appeasement. It’s how many of us learned to maintain belonging — by pre-emptively softening the edges of other people’s discomfort. Even though I knew she meant no harm, my body still remembered every moment I had to “keep the peace” to stay safe.
That’s what I call ancestral muscle memory.
“Children of unpredictable homes learn to equate vigilance with love.” — Cozolino (2006)
Projection and Family Ecosystems
In that same conversation, she commented, “He used to be cool; now he is hot,” referring to my husband’s temperament. Instantly, my nervous system blamed me. That’s perception bias at work. According to Cognitive Theory (Beck, 1979), humans interpret ambiguous information through schemas — mental templates built from early experience. Which is where my old neurons were firing in that direction in the past. Internalized blame. Mine said: If someone’s upset, it’s probably my fault.
But if I pause and clean the glass, I can see her comment differently.
She perceives “hot” because he’s finally using boundaries — not because I broke him,
That’s Bowen’s family systems in real time: when one person individuates, the system feels threatened and pushes back to restore equilibrium.
“Every family system resists change, even when that change is growth.” — Bowen (1978)
The Prey of the World
Those of us who are the prey of the world — the ones whose empathy became our leash. Our hearts can’t always handle the cognitive dissonance that shows up when we finally stand for ourselves instead of the peace we were trained to keep. We tell ourselves, “I just can’t enforce the boundary. That’s not who I am; I’m caring, compassionate, my heart can’t take it.” But is it that your heart can’t take it or that you don’t want to face the dissonance that comes with finally standing for yourself?
That guilt is a learned reflex, not a moral compass from YOU. Here in El Paso, so many of my clients especially mothers are infested with guilt. This causes them to swing the pendulum and even renenect the very patterns they are trying to break. Often that overcorrection creates a new version of the same problem. Which if you zoom out to look at the macro level. Isn’t this what we are doing over there too?
According to Compassion-Focused Therapy (Gilbert, 2009), chronic guilt often arises from shame conditioning — mistaking compassion for compliance.
“Self-compassion involves courage: the willingness to tolerate distress in the service of growth.” — Neff (2011)
Our nervous systems sell us outdated marketing:
“If you speak up, you’ll lose love.”
But that’s the same defective software running fear loops on an old machine.
Think medical scanner printing cancerous results only to discover the scanner itself was broken. Now here is my cognitive challenge that can also serve as a reframe. we allow these fear loops that guide us right off the cliff into the very fires we were afraid of experiencing again or we though this time would be different. Different how? Because you changed the person? What about you? If we disassociate in guilt that also frees us from having to take steps to get where we want.
Integration
Standing up for yourself doesn’t make you the villain. It means your nervous system is finally learning a new language — one called truth without collapse. We also have to understand this: if we’ve conditioned people to expect a certain version of us, and then one day we flip it, of course the other person is going to feel like the victim of that change. That’s human. That’s predictable. It’s why conversations about these shifts are something emotionally mature people have. Naming how you’ve been showing up, and naming that you’re no longer okay with the dynamic, that is maturity. The good work. To expect it to be easy? Now that’s entitlement.
Getting to the point where you can say this out loud, not through a text — that requires rehearsal. It takes practice to detox from the old way you’ve been rehearsing the “poison contract,” the script that keeps you in distress and keeps your body bracing for impact. So try video journaling. It may take a few rounds as you clear out the toxins of suppression. But imagine practicing a version of the conversation that leaves you empowered — not because you got the response that you wanted, not because they texted back with the right tone, but because you finally showed up for the younger version of you who was trained into silence.
That’s the shift. That’s the win.
Pause before the guilt hits.
Breathe before the apology forms.
And ask: Is this love, or is this habit?
Focus on your behaviors only and be consistent with that focus and integration. Watch what grows because of it.
Hope you all had a lovely Saturday
As always…
Come as you are. Where you are.
—Sav. 🫶🏽
📚 Reference List
Beck, A. T. (1979). Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders. New York: Penguin.
Bowen, M. (1978). Family Therapy in Clinical Practice. New York: Jason Aronson.
Cozolino, L. (2006). The Neuroscience of Human Relationships. New York: Norton.
Gilbert, P. (2009). The Compassionate Mind. London: Constable.
Neff, K. (2011). Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. New York: HarperCollins.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. New York: Norton.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. New York: Viking.
Walker, P. (2013). Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Berkeley: Azure Coyote.