Just One Question | Jeffrey Rutstein: Did I Inherit My Nervous System?

Chris: Hello and welcome to Just One Question from Insights at the Edge. I’m Chris Rock.

Mallory: And I’m Mallory Corbin. We’re producers at the Sounds True Podcast Network. We work with Tami on Insights at the Edge to bring you transformational ideas from teachers around the world.

Chris: And every week on this show, we pull out some of the most inspiring, most transformational ideas from those hundreds of conversations, and we bring them to you in the form of one question and one answer.

Mallory: Thus the name, Just One Question.

Chris: We hope you enjoy. So Mallory, what do you have for us this week?

Mallory: I want to share a conversation about something that I think a lot of people struggle with silently — or maybe not so silently. It’s the way we react to things: getting furious over small slights, feeling overwhelmed by minor criticisms, and then really beating ourselves up and thinking something is wrong with us.

Chris: Yeah, what a terrible pattern. You overreact, and then you overreact about overreacting.

Mallory: Yes, exactly. So in this episode, we’ve got Dr. Jeffrey Rutstein from Sounds True’s Healing Trauma Program. He’s talking about the importance of understanding how our nervous system is wired, and how that might not be something we can choose or will our way through — it might actually be something passed down to us, possibly from our parents.

Chris: Yeah, we inherit so many things genetically — and behaviorally.

Mallory: Right. He makes the distinction that you can be born with a nervous system that leans anxious, reactive, or sluggish — that’s temperament, that’s inheritance. It’s not a personal character flaw or a personal failure. Once you understand that, everything shifts in how you process things.

Chris: Totally. It gives you a reason why — those outsized reactions aren’t proof that you’re somehow broken or bad. They’re just how you are.

Mallory: Right. It’s mom and dad’s fault.

Chris: Mom and dad — I get to blame my parents.

Mallory: No, no — what he’s saying is actually really interesting. It’s how reframing alone gives people permission to stop hating themselves and getting frustrated with themselves.

Chris: It’s part of your physiology. Just like having green eyes or brown hair.

Mallory: Right.

Chris: So here are Tami and Jeffrey exploring the question: Did I inherit my nervous system?

Mallory: Stay with us.

Tami Simon: Jeffrey, I want to talk more about how trauma became an area of specialty for you. But before we go there — you answered this question in terms of describing your background, and your very first sentence was really interesting to me. You said, “I was born with a certain type of nervous system,” and I think most of us don’t really think that way. We don’t think about the nervous system we were born with. We might think about certain behaviors we manifested as a young child, but not about the nervous system we’re born with. Tell me how you’ve come to look through that particular lens. Did you inherit the nervous system of your mother? How do you understand this?

Jeffrey Rutstein: Yes, I do believe I inherited primarily the nervous system of my mother. I was born with a nervous system that leaned more into fight or flight — I just had a genetic disposition. I came out of the womb anxious and clingy. I remember some of my parents’ friends thought I was actually attached to my father’s knee — he had an ace bandage around his knee, and I used to stick my hands in there and sort of ride on his foot, hugging his leg.

A little later in childhood, I went through a period of abuse and trauma, and my anxiety got much, much worse. I didn’t connect the two consciously, but for a lot of my life I struggled with a lot of anxiety and a lot of shame — stuff that caused a lot of pain. I started going to psychotherapy because I was fortunate that my parents were aware of it, so I started when I was ten. It was helpful, but it wasn’t really doing much for the level of anxiety and fear I had. At that time there were no medications for children, and there weren’t really any books on relaxation techniques for kids.

So after about a year of therapy — still waking up every day sick to my stomach and nervous about going to school — I found a book in my parents’ library called Yoga for Americans by Indra Devi. In the first chapter, she talks about being the first Caucasian woman to take Sannyasa vows at our yoga ashram.  And in her chapter, the first chapter,  she talks about how there were ants in her house and she had spoken to the ants, and she’d say, “I put these little sugar cubes outside for you if you don’t come in my house, but if you keep coming in my house, I’m gonna have to call the exterminator.”

The next day she put the sugar cubes out, and the ants never came back into her hut again. To my eleven-year-old mind, I thought this woman had the powers of the universe behind her — so whatever she was going to tell me, I was going to believe.

She wrote about how breathing practices like pranayama — deep diaphragmatic breathing — can ease the body and ease the mind and help reduce anxiety. I started practicing pranayama every day, on and off throughout the day, and slowly but surely it helped — not tremendously at first, but it did help. So I went further, both into doing full asanas and yogic meditation. And then I went on to Zen meditation for many years. I became ordained as a Zen monk during my studies — working both toward having a better sense of not falling into my fear trap or shame trap, and toward being more awake, more present.

For many years, by the way, this was kept very separate from my psychotherapy practice. Back in the eighties there was very little integration, if any, of Eastern contemplative techniques or systems with Western psychotherapy — and I was trained as a psychoanalyst.

Getting back to your question: I was interested from a really young age in why I was having so much pain, so much struggle. But I think most of us swim around in this idea that we’re a unitary consciousness and identity — that we’re the same no matter what we’re doing. And as long as we’re in that place — seeing ourselves as responsible for every state we get into — there’s a lot of suffering in that. Because if I was angry, I’d hate that angry self. If I was sad or cranky or difficult, I’d hate that self afterward.

Through my work — both training the mind and working with dissociation — I came to see that a lot of the time we’re operating in these defensive states. We’re born with a tendency toward one state or another. Some of us are blessed with being fairly balanced and settled in the middle, but some of us are born with a more angry or afraid nervous system, a more activated nervous system. Or we might have a nervous system that tends to be sleepy, tired, sluggish, low energy. I don’t think these are destiny.

For years, I thought it was all my fault that I was anxious. I hated myself for that — I didn’t think I was born with a bad nervous system, I just thought I was born a bad human. And that’s where I think a lot of pain occurs for people: when they start hating themselves for having something that’s simply wired in hard for all of us.

Chris: There’s a lot more on trauma and treatment from Tami and Jeffrey Rutstein in this full episode of Insights at the Edge titled “Not Being a Prisoner to Your Nervous System” from 2021. You can find it on soundstrue.com or wherever you listen to podcasts, and we’ll put a link in the show notes. Thanks for listening — we’ll see you next week.

Tami Simon: The Sounds True Podcast Network.