Why Your Nervous System Won’t Let You Rest

[Dana] (00:01)
Welcome, friends. Whether you’re out on a walk, running errands, or relaxing at home, it’s wonderful to connect with you. Joining us today is Dr. Charleanea Arellano. Dr. Arellano is a licensed psychologist, founder of the Embodied Narrative Framework, and a powerful voice in the conversation about what it actually costs high-achieving women to keep performing at the expense of themselves. Dr. Arellano, welcome to Phoenix and Flame.

[Dr. Arellano] (00:47)
Thank you. I’m excited to be here, and I’m excited about the conversation.

[Dana] (00:52)
Now, listeners and viewers, you also need to know — would you prefer that I call you Charleanea or Dr. Arellano?

[Dr. Arellano] (00:59)
You can call me Charleanea.

[Dana] (01:21)
Charleanea and I know each other from Mic Drop Academy. We’re speaker sisters and have shared a lot — we were actually both in Indianapolis recently at the Mic Drop Live convention. That was so much fun, such a wonderful thing to get to see each other and hug one another after seeing each other on Zoom calls for so long. It was fantastic. So this is going to be exciting, because we know each other on multiple levels — we’re going to be able to fold in all kinds of juicy stuff into this conversation.

Charleanea, I want to point out that you have over 30 years of clinical and leadership experience. And this next part I find intensely interesting: your work helps women leaders understand how nervous system patterns, trauma-adapted achievement, and the specific stress of leading while managing how their race, sexuality, or gender is being perceived in the room shapes the way they decide, lead, and relate to success. There’s so much packed in there.

[Dr. Arellano] (02:22)
Is it? Yes.

[Dana] (02:24)
But it’s all good stuff — I mean, it’s not one of those paragraphs where I’m like, “this is boring, delete it.” I go right for the good stuff. So — how is it that you got so interested, first of all, in getting your doctorate in clinical psychology? Were you interested in these areas before, and that’s why you pursued your doctorate? Or did you pursue your doctorate and then, along the way, develop an interest in these areas? Share with us a little about your journey, how it unfolded.

[Dr. Arellano] (03:07)
Absolutely. I didn’t start where I am today — I’ll answer that quickly. I think it’s funny, Dana — I don’t know if you have this experience, but sometimes you just go down a path, and you know the next thing. That’s what happened for me. What’s interesting is people often say, if you know a little about my background — did you get into psychology because of where you came from? Because I came from a very adverse background: lots of abuse, neglect, and poverty. And I say, no, they weren’t connected at all. I had always been very curious about human behavior — what made people tick, what motivated them, what made them think and feel the things they thought and felt. As young as four, I remember watching people very intently. That’s what got me into psychology, though I didn’t even know what psychology was yet.

Then, like any young girl or preteen, I thought, “I want to be a doctor” — because that’s what you want to be, right, a doctor, a police officer, a firefighter. I thought I was going to be a pediatrician. Then, I think it was my junior year of high school, I took a psychology class, and it was like — this is it. I knew immediately: I want to do this for a living, how do I do it? So I made the decision right then. I went straight through undergrad to graduate school, got my PhD by the time I was 29. I did very traditional things — worked with families and children, in very high-intensity situations, because I’m a very high-intensity person, and I loved it. I did it for a while and got really burnt out, and I stopped.

And so things evolved. This is going to be perfect for this podcast, Dana, because I’ll make the connection: we are often a version of our perfect client — or a previous version of who we are — and that’s who we serve, because we know it intimately. So when I talk about being a high-achieving woman in these settings, having to manage perceptions, I lived that. And the whole nervous system perspective actually came from my own healing journey.

You have to turn the clock back over 30 years. I was in rooms where I was the only person of color. I was in the closet for a very long time — you’re going to laugh at this — I didn’t come out of the closet until 2024. Being in a room where my last name and the color of my skin would change the dynamic — I could walk in and feel the tension, and you question your reality, you question, “do I not belong here, do I not deserve a seat at the table?” You become very vigilant about those things, noticing whether they’re microaggressions or outright overt aggressions. I’ll stop there.

[Dana] (07:00)
I’ve already got questions — I’m thinking of the listeners and viewers, especially those who haven’t experienced what it feels like to be in the minority in a room. You talk about walking in and feeling the tension. If there’s someone listening who wants to be more empathetic, more understanding, but hasn’t experienced that — what can you share with them? Hypothetically, if they were in a room and weren’t part of a minority group — what are some behaviors, words, or phrases that might come to mind, things that might make a listener think, “oh my gosh, am I doing that, am I saying that, do I even know I have that look on my face?” I want to bring some illumination to that.

[Dr. Arellano] (08:11)
Absolutely. And I want to share this too — something for listeners to consider is that I’m like any other human, I’ve grown and evolved, and I didn’t always understand what was happening in the moment; I understood it after, looking back. I’ll give you examples — some subtle, some not so subtle. Part of it is also intergenerational — it’s not just me, but also hearing about my father’s experiences, my grandmother’s experiences, and the era. The era was: you fit in, you don’t stand out. There was almost this flavor of “you don’t belong here, you’re not supposed to be here” — like you had to ask permission, which creates a very subtle dynamic.

Something subtle: I’d walk into a room — say, in graduate school or postgraduate school, as a PhD, a doctor — and the moment I walked in, the room would stop. Literally stop. The activity would stop, conversations would stop, and everyone’s gaze would go to me. Silence for about 30, 45 seconds, which was weird — that’s a long time. Or, there’d be conversation flowing around the table, and the moment I’d add something — if it had been a white counterpart, there’d be back-and-forth, this flow — but when I added something, there’d be silence. It just wasn’t received.

Here’s a less subtle example: things like, “wow, you’re really smart” — and you feel like there’s supposed to be something after that they don’t say, like “for a Latina.” They wouldn’t say it, but you knew it was coming. Or, “wow, you’re really articulate” — meaning, articulate for someone whose second language is English. I’d correct them: I’m not fluent in Spanish, English is my first language, not my second. Or they’d ask, “so where are you from?” “I came from here.” “No, but really, where did you come from?” “I was born here, Denver, Colorado.” “Well, how about your parents?” “My dad was born in New Mexico.” “What about before him?” “My family’s been here about 300 years — how about yours?” You’d get the sense, whether overt or covert, that you weren’t quite welcomed or embraced.

That became part of my nervous system. Eventually I got tired — I’ll be frank — I was tired of being the token brown person, the token queer person. I decided to stop participating, and I actually got out of the professional world around 2003, when I was just under 40. I’d had enough of navigating whether I belonged, whether I had credibility.

[Dana] (12:38)
Those are fantastic examples. I’m thinking about the nervous system involvement you mentioned, because I imagine we have listeners and viewers experiencing now what you described going through years ago. They might hear us talk about “nervous system involvement” and not really know what that means. Could you take a few moments — for people who might be facing some of what you described right now — how would they know if their nervous system is involved? What does it feel like? Describe it, because they might be feeling it without knowing that’s what it is.

[Dr. Arellano] (13:24)
Exactly. I want to preface this — you started our conversation asking whether I was always interested in this or happened to get here, and I talk about getting here through my own trajectory, my own healing. Because of my background and my own healing journey, I was living the experience of trauma — the hypervigilance, the chronic bracing and activation. My own healing required me to understand what was happening in my body. We’re both therapists — and I do believe therapy is helpful, but I also believe it’s limited. It’s limited because there’s a lot of talking, a lot of verbal and cognitive processing, but it doesn’t reach the nervous system level — it doesn’t go into those deeper layers.

I became very interested in this after I noticed things happening in my body that I wasn’t consciously aware of until I stopped and paid attention. As early as about five years ago, I was doing something mundane — putting my laundry away in my bedroom — and it was such a profound experience I can tell you exactly what was happening. I stopped and thought, “my goodness, I’m bracing, I’m ready for impact — but there’s nothing happening.” I’m 55 years old. I’ve spent more of my life in safety than not in safety. Yet my nervous system was still stuck in “I’m waiting for something bad,” whether that was physical abuse or being in places I shouldn’t have been.

Here I am, 55, totally safe, nothing going on, and my body is tight — I could feel the tension, and there was no reason to be bracing. That was the window opening to this idea of the nervous system, because I’d done decades of therapy — tons of therapy — and it hadn’t touched this. It was a different reality, a different language.

So, how can you tell? There are lots of ways to recognize when you’re activated. It can be bracing, like I described — your body’s tight, ready for impact. Another example: people often say “this is just anxiety.” But anxiety is an emotional label — what’s underneath it is something happening in the body that our mind immediately labels. We as Americans go into thought very quickly, into stories and labels, and bounce out of the body fast. Anxiety is really an activated nervous system: racing heart, shallow breath, sometimes tunnel vision, sometimes ringing in the ears. That’s a nervous system response to threat — an activated nervous system ready to fight or run. We get tunnel vision because we only need to see what’s in front of us; our heart races because we need more blood; we get shallow breath because we don’t have the luxury of a deep breath if we’re about to take off.

In day-to-day work or living, you’ll notice you’re chronically moving at a fast pace, your mind racing, heart racing, maybe sweaty or shallow-breathed. That’s the “go” mechanism, activated and ready. Some people have the opposite — the collapse: “I can’t do this, I don’t want to move, I don’t want to get out of bed, I’m resigned, nothing’s going to help anyway.” There’s literally a biological, neurological undercurrent to that. I didn’t believe this until maybe 10 years ago — I always thought everything started with thought. It doesn’t. It starts with the nervous system. The nervous system is online before we have any conscious thought about it. It’s running the show.

[Dana] (19:30)
It absolutely is — it’s fascinating when you look at the research. That emotional, animal part of our brain is so much faster and stronger than the neocortex, which has the logic and reasoning. Let me ask you this, because I’m thinking about people who’ve been lodged in this for so long and haven’t realized what it is, haven’t gotten help, and it’s become chronic. One symptom I’m thinking of is TMJ — how many clients come in and say, “I grind and clench my teeth”? From your experience, what kind of symptoms do people have when they’ve dealt with this for so long, without knowing what it is, and it’s become chronic in their body?

[Dr. Arellano] (20:35)
Great question. Typically, with the chronicity of this, you’ll see things like TMJ, chronic headaches, chronic fatigue, sleep problems, often chronic pain, and digestive issues. Digestive issues are really common, because part of the biological process involved in being activated is adrenaline being dumped into our system, which has to be processed through our GI system. So people get chronic upset stomach or lower GI issues, and they think something’s medically wrong when there isn’t — although I don’t want to disregard that something could genuinely be medically wrong. A lot of what we call chronic stress is basically an activated nervous system that never turns off, which we’re not designed for. Our bodies are designed for spikes — threat, take care of it, return to baseline. In our culture, especially with the driven, high-achieving women I work with, they’re chronically “on.” They don’t shut it off, and you can see it.

[Dana] (22:26)
So if there are women listening thinking, “my gosh, that’s me” — and we know there are genuine medical issues people have, but if I’m not mistaken, the research also indicates that chronic stress and an activated nervous system exacerbate just about everything, whether it’s GERD, IBS, ulcerative colitis — people can have those physical diagnoses, but chronic activation makes it all worse. Am I recalling the research correctly?

[Dr. Arellano] (23:22)
Well, the question is, is there a chicken-and-egg situation here — is the chronic stress causing these ailments? I don’t know that we’ll ever fully know, but there are definitely processes that would point to that. Take GI issues — none of us really have to think hard about this; anyone who’s been really stressed gets an upset stomach. There’s a reason for that; it’s not just psychosomatic, there are biological things happening to protect you that cause stomach upset. What happens over time, if this is chronically going on? What happens in the GI system, or in the jaw, if you’re bracing all the time and waiting for impact — the headaches and so on. So, is it exacerbation or causal? It could be both.

[Dana] (24:30)
Could be both. So you talk about high-achieving women — which, I must say, we both fit into that category. I’ve interviewed men too, and they’d agree they face different things, but women face different issues, often dealing with so many spinning plates — professional plates, plus partners, families, cultural expectations. And when you’re a high-achieving woman, that pushes you to the forefront, so people around you rely on you and expect you to show up and perform. For the women listening right now who are thinking, “they’re describing me” — what would you say are three things they could do to begin the process of pulling out of that?

[Dr. Arellano] (25:57)
That’s a really good question. There are different layers to it. When you look at the gender differences between men and women — women seem to have bigger challenges with this, and I think it’s because we’ve been socialized very differently. If we look at this from an evolutionary perspective, from cavemen to now, our roles have been pretty defined by gender: men were responsible for two things, getting food and protecting — one track. Women, from the beginning of humankind, have been socialized to manage lots of things at once, to be outwardly focused on the needs of many people simultaneously.

I do a lot of couples work, and I often joke that men and women have different brains, partly because of evolution — men need to be on tracks: “I need to go get food, go to work,” it’s just a track. Women are more likely to think in webs — everything is connected and attached. In terms of stress, men are really good at compartmentalizing: “I get on my train, the train leaves the station, nothing else exists but this track to the destination.” Women are very aware of everything happening around them — again, a lot to do with socialization.

So, what do we do with this? We often have this superficial idea of “just take care of yourself, go get your nails done, get a massage, take some ‘me time.'” But high-achieving women probably aren’t going to do that, because their instinct is “go, go, go.” What’s more within reach — and this is going to sound weird — is something none of us have really been taught to do, something our culture doesn’t model: nervous system resets, several times a day. It takes five minutes or less — sometimes just seconds. Before you go into something, or leave something, or in a transition, or when you notice you’re a little activated — you stop and just notice what’s happening in your body. Say, “I can feel this swirling feeling in my chest — I’m just going to sit with it. I don’t have to fix it, understand it, or make it go away, just be with it.” As you focus on it, the energy changes. You stay with it, anywhere from 45 seconds to a few minutes, and you’ll feel a reset — almost a peaceful, neutral feeling. We never do that. We’re always accumulating — never starting at zero, always starting at 50 or 75 — and because of that, we’re always just this close to going over an edge. Everybody knows that feeling: “oh my God, I’m going to go off the edge, lose my mind.” We know what that feels like, and it’s because we never reset.

[Dana] (30:10)
I love this so much — and I know we’re getting close to time, but I wanted to mention I’ve started using the Pomodoro method, because of the way I work. Here’s how I drive on the freeway: I get in the left lane and go 85, and I don’t want anyone in my way — if you’re going to drive the speed limit, that’s the right lane, that’s for you. That’s how I work — I really enjoy what I’m doing, but I’ll push, push, push, push. If I don’t set a timer on my phone to do exactly what you’re describing — five or ten minutes to reset — by one, two, three o’clock, I’m ready to climb the walls, because my whole system is just revved up. It reminds me of RPMs — like sitting in a car in park, but you press the accelerator and the RPMs just stay up. That’s what my whole body feels like if I don’t stop. But when I do stop — when I hear my alarm, get up, walk up and down the hall, take some deep breaths, let myself move away from it and let my body calm down, exactly what you’re describing — it makes a huge difference.

[Dr. Arellano] (31:56)
It does. It does, and it requires so little time. The thing I often hear from the women I work with is, “I don’t have time, I don’t have time.” I say, first, you can do this in 30 seconds. Second, it’s worth it — because do you want to lose it by the end of the day and regret it? Because typically what happens is it comes out — we hurt somebody, with our words, our energy, our tone — and now we’re dealing with regret and guilt, which are not good feelings. I often tell my clients, this is like brushing your teeth — if you don’t, you’ll lose your teeth to cavities and decay. This is hygiene. This is another form of hygiene — nervous system hygiene, that you do throughout the day. You can do it for 30 seconds, between meetings — shut the door for a second, take a minute, reset, then go to the next one.

[Dana] (33:02)
I love this so much, because it’s practical, it’s doable, and it works. It absolutely does — it makes a huge difference. Now, before we go, I wanted to bring up your second book, The Last Dance, and your forthcoming book — I love this title — Terrible Gifts: Finding the Light in the Darkest of Places. Do you want to tell listeners and viewers about your books before we tell them where they can go to get more of you?

[Dr. Arellano] (33:36)
Yes, absolutely. Terrible Gifts is currently in the publication process — we’re literally editing it; after this call, I’m meeting with my editor. As I mentioned, usually the thing we bring into the world is the result of our own life experience, and I’m no different. Terrible Gifts is my memoir, based on my life story, my childhood. Part of the reason I’m so drawn to nervous system and embodied narrative work is that I’ve lived this — the impact of trauma on your nervous system, on who you believe you are, what you believe the world is about, what you think you deserve. I take the reader through my rise from the ashes — I’ve had a few of those — but the biggest one was at age 34, when I didn’t know if I was going to get through it, and recognized I needed to go back and heal, process the trauma.

The reason I came up with the title Terrible Gifts is that for a long time, I ran from my past — I didn’t want anyone to know about it, there was a lot of shame. I believed I was who I am despite this. What I realized is I am who I am because of this. Think about a diamond — it’s created through massive compression and pressure. We’re the same: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but I also believe the hard things we go through cultivate who we become and what we share with the world. That’s Terrible Gifts.

The Last Dance is about intergenerational trauma, through the lens of my relationship with my father. My father was the perpetrator — very physically abusive, a violent man. He passed in 2012, and it’s interesting — I tell people I have a better relationship with him now that he’s dead than I did when he was alive. I gained perspective; I recognized my father had a lot of trauma, was reacting from trauma, and his father had trauma too. The reason it’s called The Last Dance is that I stopped the cycle — his dance with me was the last one. I’ve changed that trajectory for my family; my son hasn’t experienced any of what I experienced with intergenerational trauma. That’s the second book.

[Dana] (37:01)
That sounds fantastic. I wanted to float this out there, since I know we talk about boundaries — the Queen of Boundaries here — for listeners in a current relationship with someone, let’s say a parent, since that’s what you brought up with your dad. I also had a very dysfunctional relationship with my mother, who has also passed. When they’re deceased, you no longer have to deal with the dysfunction directly, but if someone is still living, you can understand they were traumatized, feel for them, and still need some kind of boundary — like you said, “the last dance, it stops with me.” I understand what caused it, but that cause wasn’t me, and I’m not going to allow that ongoing abuse or dysfunction to continue. That’s where boundaries come in for me, and for other people I’ve talked to, before their parent passed away — you can’t allow it to continue, even though you understand why.

[Dr. Arellano] (38:21)
Right, exactly, exactly. I’ve thought about this in terms of my own journey, because at this point in my life — and it wasn’t always like this — I’m mostly estranged from my family. The couple of people I have any contact with, I won’t even call it a relationship, because relationship implies reciprocity — it’s very, very distant. It wasn’t always that way; I spent much of my life, and I often talk about this with clients, balancing your desire for connection against your need for protection. It’s a dance. There were times connection was higher and protection was lower, and it went back and forth, because at the end of the day, we’re tribal — we’re pack animals, we need families, and families can be chosen, they don’t have to be blood-related. Yet we have that need for tribe in our DNA. I’m very respectful, with my clients and in my own process, of the need to connect and have tribe, and also of deciding what level of protection is needed — sometimes both are possible, sometimes not. With my mother, for example — she passed this past February — I was estranged from her; I checked in about once every six months to make sure she was okay, and that was it. That level of protection was necessary.

[Dana] (40:06)
Totally get that, and I know there are listeners and viewers who understand that too. So, for people who want to know more about you, engage with you more, and find out what else you have to offer — I have your website here, and I’ll spell your name out loud, though you’ll see it in the show notes: C-H-A-R-L-E-A-N-E-A. It’s a very unique spelling. But that’s where you want them to go?

[Dr. Arellano] (40:45)
Yes, that would be the best place, because then they can find everything else on my website.

[Dana] (40:50)
Awesome. Charleanea, this has been — I knew it would be a blast, I knew we’d have so much to talk about. We get along so well, and we’ve had our time together at the academy. I really appreciate you spending your precious time to come on Phoenix and Flame, share your experience, be transparent about your past, and share your wisdom with the listeners and viewers.

[Dr. Arellano] (41:21)
Thank you, Dana. It’s been fun, and I’d love to come back if you want to talk about other things — I’d love to talk about more trauma. I love trauma, trauma and pain.

[Dana] (41:27)
We could talk about that stuff, oh my gosh. Viewers, listeners, I know you’ve heard multiple things today that made you think, “I know a friend, a relative, a coworker who needs to hear exactly what Dr. Charleanea has to say.” Take this podcast episode, copy and paste the link, send it in a text, send it in an email, post it on your favorite social media sites, so we can grow our Phoenix and Flame community and let people know: you are not alone. I hope your day has been great. I hope the rest of it is fantastic. I’m Dana, on Phoenix and Flame.