Shownotes
Why do we repeat patterns we know don’t serve us? In this episode of The Soul Mirror, hosted by Shreya, we explore a deeper truth—what if self-sabotage isn’t failure, but protection?
This conversation is for anyone who feels stuck despite doing “everything right.” You’ll learn how your nervous system shapes behavior, why awareness alone isn’t enough, and how small body-based practices can gently shift you from survival mode into self-trust.
About the Guest:
Leslie Draffin is a trauma-informed somatic practitioner and former news anchor who helps women regulate their nervous systems and reconnect with clarity, safety, and self-trust.
Episode Chapters:
00:00 – Why we repeat self-sabotage patterns
04:20 – Self-sabotage as nervous system protection
08:45 – Childhood imprints and survival responses
13:10 – How dysregulation shows up daily
17:30 – Anxiety: sensation before thought
21:50 – The Shift Method explained
26:40 – Healing without shame
Key Takeaways:
- Self-sabotage often comes from learned safety patterns
- Awareness softens shame and builds compassion
- The body reacts before the mind understands
- Small daily practices can regulate the nervous system
- Healing is about safety, not fixing yourself
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Transcripts
00:00:06 Shreya : Sometimes the hardest person to understand is ourselves. Why do we say we want change yet somehow repeat the same patterns? Why do we move towards something beautiful and then quietly sabotage it? Maybe it's not weakness. Maybe it's not lack of discipline. Maybe the body is simply trying to keep us safe. And today we are exploring how self sabotage might actually be a nervous system response, and how learning to regulate the body can gently open the door to real healing.
00:00:37 Shreya : Welcome to the podcast, where we slow down long enough to notice the patterns that shapes our inner lives. I am your host, Shreya, and today we are exploring something many of us experience but rarely understand the quiet cycles of self-sabotage and what our nervous system might be trying to tell us. Joining us today is Leslie Draffin, a trauma informed somatic practitioner and psychedelic microdosing guide who helps successful spiritual women regulate their nervous systems and move out of survival mode and back into clarity and self-trust. Lesley Glenn's somatic signs feminine embodiment and modern ritual to support women who look capable on the outside but feel overwhelmed and disconnected within. Welcome, Lesley. I'm honored to have you on my show.
00:01:30 Leslie Draffin: Well, thank you so much for having me. That was such a great intro.
00:01:34 Shreya : Thank you so much, Lesley. Like when people first start recognizing patterns of self-sabotage in their lives, whether it's in relationship or like work or their own well-being. What do you notice? They are usually misunderstanding about what is actually happening inside them.
00:01:54 Leslie Draffin: Such a good question. I think the first thing that especially highly capable, high functioning women start to think is, oh, well, something's wrong with me. I'm broken. Um, this is an issue with my discipline. I'm lazy. All of these ideas that really are rooted in blame and shame come forward for us because we see ourselves as highly capable. And yet when we start to self-sabotage, when we can't hack it, maybe like we used to, we immediately drop into these ideas of, oh well, I'm broken and something must be deeply wrong with me.
00:02:33 Shreya : Yeah, that's really beautifully said. And something that really stands out in your work is that the idea that self-sabotage is not actually self-hatred, it's protection. Yeah. And I'm really curious, how did you come to understand that what we call self-sabotage is often the nervous system trying to keep us safe rather than trying to harm us.
00:02:57 Leslie Draffin: You know, it came from my deep training in nervous system work, but also in my own lived experience, so I pride myself on being a self-aware, intelligent, highly capable woman. And so much of my late twenties and early thirties were me gathering these tools that I wanted deeply to use. Like logically, I wanted to use these tools to help myself feel better. But yet in moments of overwhelm, and when I was under pressure, those tools just left the building. They were unavailable to me. And so as I really began my own healing journey and then training to do this work as well, what I started to see is that our nervous system wants things to feel familiar because familiar equals, well, if anxiety, if overwhelm, if burnout, if self sabotage is what is familiar to you, because you have had to learn that those are the ways that you are protected, that those are the ways that you stay accepted by those around you, or you stay just under the radar enough so that you're not too visible or too in danger. Your nervous system will revert to those old patterns, regardless of whether or not you logically want to go forth in a more empowered, uh. Uh, yeah, more empowered way, a more positive way. And so when I realized that in myself, the self-sabotage is actually just a pattern my nervous system learned. It made me feel a lot better because if it learned it, it can unlearn it and you can learn a new way. And so that's really the key and core of the work that I do is helping women notice their patterns, see what's underlying the pattern, really getting back to the root and find ways to embody this version of themselves that does soften the nervous system, not constrict it so that it actually lands, so that you can expand your capacity to feel more love, feel more wealth, be more visible, be more empowered.
00:05:05 Shreya : That's really beautiful. I think there is something really compassionate in that perspective. And also when someone begins to see their patterns through that lens, uh, as protection instead of failure, what tends to shift in the way they relate to themselves?
00:05:22 Leslie Draffin: I think there's a softening in a lot of us, especially when it's someone that I'm working with. I think on your own, it might first feel like questioning. It might feel a little confusing, um, to think, wait, well, if nothing's wrong with me and I'm not broken, what is going on? Um, and so in in people who are DIY ING their journey, that might be something that comes up, but I hope even if you aren't working with someone, that the first thing that does happen is exactly what you said. Compassion. I'm someone who spent fifteen years as a news anchor. Curiosity is something I have had since I was a kid, and so compassionate curiosity is really the root of how I have worked on my own healing, and it's the root of what I try to instill in the people that I work with, or the people that listen to me on podcasts like this one. And so compassionate curiosity just asks you to be open to the what if? What if you're not broken? What if everything's going to be okay? And what if you can make just one next tiny, simple step to actually start changing your life? It doesn't need to feel like this long, drawn out process. It can be as simple as just asking yourself, huh, can we get curious about that?
00:06:40 Shreya : Yeah, like instead of fighting ourselves, we begin listening to what our body has been trying to communicate all along. And I think that brings up something deeper. Like many people assume the. These patterns started in adulthood, but often they are routed much earlier. So from your experience working with women, what kinds of life experiences tend to train, uh, the nervous system to stay in survival mode even when the life outwardly looks successful?
00:07:14 Speaker 3: Oh, this is such a good question.
00:07:16 Leslie Draffin: So absolutely. You're right. This is something that is often imprinted on us at an incredibly early age, zero to seven. And at times it can be imprinted into our nervous system before birth. That was certainly part of my story. As somebody who was adopted, my birth mother had a very traumatic pregnancy. Um, and that sort of a conversation for a different podcast, but I was just sharing that because sometimes the pattern imprinted on you is in your subconscious. So you may have no idea why. And so for me, it's actually not that important to know exactly why, but to answer the question, some things that might impact this. Ah. Did your parents get divorced? Were you bullied in school? How were your grades? Were you in extracurriculars? Were you the one who got picked for the team or not? Did you have siblings? Were you the oldest? Were you the youngest? Were you the middle child? Did you see your parents expressing their emotions, or did your mom hide in her room and cry, not letting anybody see her move through Uncomfy feelings? What was your dad like when he was angry? Right. There's so many things about childhood that implants into our nervous systems because all of that. Right? Very. And and I say all those things. Nothing's wrong with any of those things, right? That doesn't mean you had a traumatic childhood, yet all these little cues, your tiny little kid nervous system picks up on lead to ingrained patterns that can become stuck survival modes later in life. So for instance, let's say your parents get divorced. Maybe it's not that chaotic, right? Maybe it's not that bad. And still you have to go from dad's house to mom's house. Maybe they are fighting a little bit. Maybe you feel like you're the in-between. That creates a nervous system response of fawning, people pleasing, caretaking, keeping the peace and see what happens when you're an adult and you have that as your nervous system response. You're the great, dependable one in the workplace. They love relying on you because you never say no. And so that's one example of how something in childhood creates this cue in the nervous system that says, oh, I better respond this way if I want to stay safe. And yet in adulthood, even though you may be out of that situation, your nervous system is still running through the loop of that pattern. And it can happen with anxiety. Maybe you didn't have a very stable home life growing up. Maybe you learned to feel anxious about the future because your parents were. Same thing with grades. Maybe you didn't feel smart enough. And. So now you're over capable, you're over producing, right? Which is another example of being in flight, which is a service, a survival mode as well.
00:10:04 Shreya : I think I've explained this so beautifully. And I think, um, also when someone has spent years, sometimes decades operating in that survival state, how does that show up in their everyday thoughts or behaviors?
00:10:19 Speaker 3: Um.
00:10:21 Leslie Draffin: You know, since there's four different survival states and you can have blended states as well, which is something that's really recently been discussed a lot. Um, I would say some of the main things that I see in people's belief systems or their thoughts or their everyday life are things like, well, if I don't say yes to this project, I'll get fired. If I am not the one who's always happy go lucky, then my partner will leave me if I'm not doing everything I possibly can for my family, then they won't love me anymore. It's this quiet unraveling as well that happens, right? You are going to look so successful on paper. You might have gotten the promotion. You might be making great money. And yet internally, when everything is calm and quiet, there's no more chaos for you to respond to. You start to feel this little gnawing feeling in the inside that says things like, well, you've got everything you wanted, why are you not happy? Or you may also have this idea that you just can't sit still. Maybe that's a personality trait of yours, right? I know lots of people who say, oh, I just always am busy. I'm always moving. And if you can't sit in the quiet with your thoughts and feelings, that's another way that it might show up.
00:11:42 Shreya : Yeah. It's really powerful to recognize that what looks like anxiety or like Overthinking or reactivity might actually be the body remembering something unresolved one hundred percent.
00:11:56 Leslie Draffin: And so for me, what I found really empowering as someone who has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, who was on medicines, who had multiple therapists, for me, what was so interesting and empowering was starting to take the logical mind out of anxiety. I think one thing talk therapy did for me was try to help me rationalize anxiety. Unfortunately, when you're in a panic attack, there's very little you can do to rationalize it. And that's why talking about your issues are not nearly as helpful as learning to meet the sensations in the body first. And so when I started to understand, okay, anxiety is the name of this feeling sensation that I'm sensing in the body. That's what I have given it. But it's made up of a lot of different things for me, right? Racing heart, elevated, breathing, flushing. I get very hot to the touch. Might feel like I'm going to throw up. When I started to do was nourish and meet each of those sensations first instead of thinking, oh, this is anxiety, I look at all the different sensations and what they need. So my anxiety plan became take a cold shower or put my hands in ice water, or start to do some slow, deep breathing laying on the ground with my legs straight up the wall. All of those were meeting the sensation first. And through that process, going from the body up, anxiety for me was something that I was able to overcome and really alleviate. And now if I do have anxiety hit again, or if I start to feel like I'm panicky, I know exactly what to do because I've, I've understood the sensation first, the sensations that you feel are the messengers, right? And unfortunately, the way that we are taught, we let the message be the thing that we're trying to quiet, right? The message is, oh, this is anxiety because my logical brain said it was. And we forget to look in the body for the little tiny messengers that were the first signals of that anxiety. And when you can meet the messengers where they are, it starts to quiet the whole message overall.
00:14:08 Shreya : Yes. And also, like for someone who's listening right now and who might be quietly wondering, is this happening to me? What are some subtle ways nervous system dysregulation shows up in daily life?
00:14:24 Leslie Draffin: Oh, snapping at your kids. Snapping at your partner, waking up at three a m. Can't go back to sleep. Not being able to fall asleep at night. See, uh, scrolling on your phone while you're also watching television. So not being able to focus your mind, right? Um, having to watch the same show over and over because you can't handle the anxiety of watching something new. Um, getting lost in the same page, like you're trying to read your book and you just keep reading the same page over and over again. Um, feeling like you have to numb out in some way. Maybe it's drinking alcohol, maybe it's eating sugar, maybe it's working out in a punishment to your body. All of those are ways that you might be living in a state of fight, flight, freeze or fawn.
00:15:16 Shreya : Thank you for sharing this. I think this is really helpful for many of my listeners. Um, and also you created something called the shift method, uh, nine minute nervous system reset. So why do small body based practices sometimes work more effectively than long intellectual approaches of healing?
00:15:36 Leslie Draffin: Such a good question. So again, this sort of goes back to that idea of meeting the sensations in the body first. So what we need to understand about the nervous system is that it's communicating within nanoseconds between your brain and your body. And so it takes us three to five full seconds to then create a logical thought. And so that's important because your sensations are the first things that fire when something happens, when your brain senses that something isn't quite right. Your body sensations are what come first, then the thought happens later. So long, drawn out intellectual talking style of healing practices are meeting the thought where it's at, right? And, and for a lot of us, that's the second thing that happens. And so that's why no amount of talking about anxiety for me was actually beneficial to quelling it in the body. And so that's the first thing, right? Your sensations always come first. And so a simple nine minute practice like shift Asks you to seek sensations in the body. First things first. And so you could start a shift when you're actually in an anxiety spiral. But what I hope folks do is they use it as a preventative measure to allow you to really get very in tune with any sensation in the body you might be feeling. So if you're listening right now and you just pause, you might notice some sensations in your body right now. Right now, I feel a little bit of fluttering in my chest. And this is a really interesting one. So I feel fluttering in my chest, right? That's a sensation. That could be excitement because I get to talk to you or it could be, am I anxious? So sensations can be very similar and show up in very similar parts of the body, but my brain is what labels it afterwards. Okay, so if I notice the sensation of fluttering in the chest and I take a solid grounding breath, then I'm able to sort of pause and honor what's coming up while I'm talking to Shreya right now. This is exciting because I get to share my story and get to reach all these wonderful people who are listening. Versus if I had the same feeling at three a m, I might feel like, oh, this is anxiety because I'm worried about what's going to happen next week or in the world around me. And so a daily body based practice like shift helps you to start learning the language of your body. And it allows you to practice some of the most grounding things that I have found overall for nervous system stabilization. Breathing, which the practice of shift includes a breath pattern that's inhaling through the nose. Exhaling through the mouth. Only thinking of making your exhale longer than your inhale. And if you want a bonus point, make a sound while you exhale. So maybe it's a sigh or a moan. And then the last part of shift is intuitive somatic movement. And so you can start and you might feel really silly starting. You can just start by swaying side to side or gently tapping your leg right to left over and over. Then you might notice that you want to shake your body out, or you want to dance, or you want to stretch whatever it is. The point of this is to take the mind offline for just a little bit of time, allowing the body to be what is speaking and really becoming fluent in the language of the body, which is not something that we're ever taught as kids.
00:19:10 Shreya : Yes, I think that simplicity is actually sorry, that simplicity is actually very reassuring. Like healing doesn't always have to be dramatic. Sometimes it just, uh, about teaching the body little by little, that is like that the body is safe again. Yeah. And also when someone begins doing this kind of healing work, there are often moments where old patterns suddenly reappear. So how can people approach those moments without falling back into shame or self-criticism?
00:19:46 Leslie Draffin: Ah, that's such a good question. So you're right. When you start to show the body, it is safe. A very strange phenomenon happens where suddenly things might feel worse. And you might think to yourself, oh gosh, this isn't working. I'm falling back into old patterns. But what's actually happening is when your body starts to soften, when your nervous system starts to sense that it is safe to feel all of the decade's worth of things you've tried not to feel can come bubbling up. So this is why I say having guidance is really, really essential when we're walking through the shadows of the subconscious, which come out when we do nervous system work. It can be really helpful to work with a guide myself or someone like me, because oftentimes you're not able to see your own shadow, you're not able to see your own blind spots. But more than that, you can really, especially in the beginning of this work, start to backslide quickly because when resistance comes up, instead of seeing it as the opportunity it is and the positive thing, it actually is, right? It's, it's, it's a part of your body saying, hey, this doesn't feel like we want to go there anymore. Remembering what I said before, this doesn't feel very familiar. When the resistance comes up, you don't see it as an opportunity to keep going. You see it as a signal that you should stop. And so having support can be really helpful. Um, whether it's again, a coach, one on one, a group, I have all of those offers. Um, but I would say that's the first thing that I would recommend when you first start the work.
00:21:20 Shreya : Yeah, I think that perspective feels incredibly grounding. Like healing is, is not about becoming a different person. It's about building a safer relationship with the one we already are. And this is truly, truly a very amazing conversation with you. And if one thing I'm taking from this conversation is that self-sabotage is rarely the enemy, and it's often the nervous system asking to be understood. And this is truly a very amazing conversation, a very, very, very helpful and grounding conversation for my listeners also. And if after this, my listeners want to connect with you and want to know more about your work, then what's the best place to connect with you?
00:22:03 Leslie Draffin: I think you said that so beautifully. So what I would recommend is you download the shift method. It is a free e-book. I can give you guys a link to put in the show notes. It will send you up a beautiful twenty five to twenty six page document that includes playlists. It explains why shift works and really will walk you through it. That also puts you on my email list, where I send out all the details about what I'm working on, my one on one group, my one on one coaching. My group offers. I'm also on social media as well, Instagram and TikTok. But I would say if you're listening to this conversation and, and you're really feeling kind of like what you said, oh, this, this actually seems possible, I might actually be able to, to move forward. If you're feeling a little hopeful, then the shift method is certainly where I would start. And quarterly each year I offer a live shift, a free community shift.
00:22:56 Shreya : Yes. And I will make sure to attach all these details and links below so that the listeners can find them easily and get in touch with you. And for my thank you so much, Leslie, for sharing your insights and the presence with us today. And for my listeners, if something in this conversation reflected a part of your own journey, then take a gentle moment with it. Healing often begins not with fixing ourselves, but with listening more deeply to our bodies that have been holding. This has been the sole mirror podcast. And until next time, stay curious about the patterns within you. Because sometimes the answers we are searching for are already waiting inside. And do not forget to hit the follow button. Subscribe and feel free to share your thoughts because your ears deserve premium content. Thank you.
