Understanding Social Anxiety as a Symptom of Unmet Needs for Connection

James Mayfield is a Somatic Healing Coach and BreakThrough Facilitator. He is the founder of BreakThroughCircle.com and creator of Somatic BreakThough Facilitation, which is a synthesis of body and feelings-based facilitation along with inner parts work.

In this interview, James shares his life history and personal initiations that have made him ideally suited to support others' emotional healing. He’s personally experienced and healed from a variety of unmet emotional needs and traumatic physical and emotional abuse from early life circumstances that required him to seek out transformation-focused work at a young age. At a time of extreme vulnerability and deep grief, he stumbled into the world of breathwork, somatic healing, inner parts work, and structured psychodynamic processes. 

James has been involved in transformational education and emotional development training for 30 years. He is a master facilitator of inner work, serving thousands of people through 49 transformation-focused retreats, 8 online courses, and thousands of private sessions. His work has helped sensitive and heart-centered artists, healers, change agents, professionals, and entrepreneurs to empower their transformation by using somatic tools and structured processes to nurture breakthroughs in their lives.  James is passionate about his work helping others and his service is that of a "repairman".  He describes how we can all access transformational healing and in this interview, he shares 13 of the many techniques in his toolkit.  

Website:  BreakThrough Circle 

Gifts for Hearts Rise Up Listeners - https://www.breakthroughcircle.com/Hearts-Rise-Up-Podcast-Listeners-Free-Gifts. 

These five fantastic gifts include: 1) BreakThrough Toolkit and Checklist, 2) Sensitive Healers training, 3) Inner work journey, 4) Mini-course for anxiety, overwhelm, fatigue, people-pleasing, and playing small, and a 5) 60-minute conversation with James.

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(Carol Chapman) All right, thank you for tuning your heart's in for another episode of the Hearts Rise up podcast. I'm carol chapman your host along with my co-hosts Ann Serrie and Concetta Antonelli. We share our own personal experiences, tips and strategies along with powerful stories and compelling insights from guest interviews. We're here to inspire and empower your conscious evolution, help you tap into your inner wisdom and rise to your heart centered higher self. Together we can rise to a higher level of consciousness, an elevated state of being and experience more love, joy and freedom. Yeah, hello and welcome back. Thank you for joining us for another episode of the Hearts Rise Up podcast where we share heartfelt wisdom to inspire your conscious evolution.

(Carol Chapman) I have a very special guest with me today. His name is James Mayfield. James is a somatic healing coach and breakthrough facilitator. He is the founder of Breakthrough circle dot com and creator of somatic breakthrough facilitation which is a synthesis of body and feelings based facilitation along with inner parts work, his life history and personal initiations make James ideally suited to support others emotional healing. He has personally experienced and healed from a variety of unmet emotional needs and traumatic physical and emotional abuse. Early life circumstances that required him to seek out transformation focus work at a young age at a time of extreme vulnerability and deep grief. He stumbled into the world of breathwork, somatic healing. Inner parts work and structured psychodynamic processes. James has been involved in transformational education and emotional development training for 30 years. 

(Carol Chapman) He is a master facilitator of inner work Serving thousands of people through 49 transformation focused retreats eight online courses and thousands of private sessions. His work has helped sensitive and heart-centered artists, healers, change agents, professionals and entrepreneurs to empower their own transformation by using somatic tools and structured processes to nurture breakthroughs in their lives. James, welcome to the show.

(James Mayfield) Carol, thank you for that wonderful introduction and I'm really glad to be on here today talking to your listeners and having this conversation with you.

(Carol Chapman) Well I'm very excited and I've personally experienced your work in a session recently and I must say that your tools and processes are very effective. It takes a lot of guts for anyone to commit to healing and working through layers of unhealthy conditioning those types of unconscious patterns and I know that I have had them for years and years but it takes a lot to cut through it and get to some breakthroughs.

(Carol Chapman) I would love for you to share your story, some of the defining moments in your life, some of the issues, what you've learned about yourself, the transformational moments and then look it into some of the nits and grits of the work that you do.

(James Mayfield) Well carol, thank you very much for the opportunity. I would love to just kind of dive in and share a little bit about my background. Good way to start is just I'm 49 years old in the first half of my life I spent up in my head very insecure trying to figure out what I was supposed to be doing and what I was supposed to be thinking and feeling and I was very confused about it. I didn't have a good map for my own emotions and for other people and the way people behave, it wasn't working out for me very well at all. And it came to a head in my early 30s, even though by then I'd already had Like 12 years of deeply transformational work under my belt. I went into education very early, I started out my career as a school teacher At age 17, I got my first girlfriend pregnant and so I was a teen father ended up in a very dysfunctional relationship that I didn't understand what was happening with a lot of abuse and I ended up getting out of it and ended up as a full custody of my son and then put myself through college as a single dad amidst all of that when other people my age were partying and we're learning about themselves and really being in their early twenties, I was studying personal transformation for children.

(James Mayfield) I was working in a preschool, I was raising a child at a very young age and very, very focused on how can I be here in front of this child and have a transformative experience something so that they either see things differently or they hear things differently, They feel things differently, They experience the world in a different way. So, for the last 30 years I've been very, very focused on, on whether we're working with children or now I work primarily with adults. How do I take the 85 minute sessions that I allow with the client and how do I make that absolutely transformational so that something happens that is totally different than before that session and new possibilities are available and that's a very different take Then a lot of coaches when they sit down with their sessions, I am really looking for what can we do to cultivate a breakthrough moment and that's what my tools do is cultivate emotional breakthroughs.

(Carol Chapman) What is in your experience, a breakthrough moment in the work that you do.

(James Mayfield) I would love to love to talk about that. One of my favorite topics, the first thing a breakthrough is, is a significant change. It's a significant difference from going from one state to another state and in breakthrough work, what it often looks like is either a catharsis, it's a release of energy that's been long held in the body. Oftentimes it can also be an aha moment, a way of seeing a dynamic that's been happening in a relationship or in your life in a completely different way. And seeing it in that different way changes the nature of your relationship to it and changes the possibilities for what happened. It is about feeling something, seeing something, experiencing something that creates new possibility great.

(Carol Chapman) That really helps to explain it because it is really kind of just a major shift in how you perceive yourself in in the world. And whatever is going on with you with respect to getting through that breakthrough, if you could just share a little bit about what somatic really means, at least for our listener.

(Carol Chapman) I mean, we all might know what the term is, but what does it really mean in the context of the work that you do and how it helps people heal well.

(James Mayfield) Somatic means body based and it was really the turning point for me in my own personal life and in the work that I do up until I started doing somatic work, which is body centered work. And some somatic work is more overt moving of the body and appropriate reception moving in space and then other somatic work that I do is more intense reception. It's about the sensations I'm having in my body, the tightness in my throat, to the heaviness in my chest or on my shoulders. The anxiety that I feel in my belly or my solar plexus. It's that interior kind of sensation that's happening. And what I learned with somatic work was that before, an emotion before a thought, there's almost always a sensation that happens and most people miss it.

(James Mayfield) They totally miss that there's a sensation of either pulling away or grasping for and the Buddhists and the meditators have been learning about this for a long time that I did a tin dave upashi honest sit and and they focused the first four days just on feeling the air moving in through your nose over your lips and that very specific sensation for four days. We focused on that because what we learned in the VIP arsonists at least was that before any of the mind activity happens, there's almost always a body thing that happens and a pulling away or a grasping. And in my work with people, what I found is that long before we get to saying something or doing something in our relationship or with our boss or in our life, there's already an energy that's inside of us that is directing us unconsciously and there are parts of us that are in touch with these energies and there are parts of us that are not in touch with those energies and that's what I specialize in, is going in and using, I use altered states, usually breath work to help people to get really, really sensitive to what's happening inside and then to feel what's happening inside as they're thinking about their problems in their life.

(James Mayfield) And what everybody finds is that when we think about our problems, when we reminisce about the struggles we're having or any dynamics that were not comfortable with our body is responding in lots of different ways, it lights up like a Christmas tree and once you get that and you start focusing in and paying attention, you find there's a whole lot going on beneath the surface, beneath our conscious awareness. That is not only fascinating if you study the psyche, but also immensely practical. And so where my work, the turn my work is taken with somatic work is I used automatics to help people to find their inner wisdom to basically find clarity about. Yes, that's true for me. I know that's true. That is absolutely true. I know it in my bones and when someone has that kind of experience, that's an aha, that's a breakthrough moment if they haven't had that and they know, okay, this is true for me now, I can turn off all of the other things over there that were before the clarity.

(James Mayfield) I don't have to consider them. I don't have to be overwhelmed by them. I don't have to be confused by them or sucked into doubt about which what to do because I have clarity in my body. A felt sense presents clarity of what's true for me and that's how I use maddox is as deeply intuitive wisdom that I can trust.

(Carol Chapman) That's a great explanation. I think it would be helpful to understand what really causes emotional upset an outbreak. I can think of it like logically, but there's got to be something more deeply rooted there. I mean, it's not just because somebody pissed me off that I might have an outbreak, you know? But what is it that really causes emotional upset and outbreaks? I'd love to talk to you about that and to do that.

(James Mayfield) There's a couple of things I want to introduce. One is I use a chart that's a hierarchy of needs kind of like a Maslow's hierarchy of needs and on that chart we have certain needs that people have. So we have a need for physical self-care.

(James Mayfield) For example, we have a need for safety when we're in groups or in our family or with other people or even just on our own. We have a need for connection to other people. We have a need for it to feel powerful in our life and we have a need to have purpose and identity in the world and when any of those needs don't get met when they go unmet sensations happen in the body are unconscious, lets us know. So for example physical self-care, if I all of a sudden my stomach starts hurting and I'm like I'm not sure what's going on why is my stomach hurting. And so I decide oh maybe I'll take a nap and I take a nap, it's still hurting and then I go for a jog and it's still hurting and then I eat an apple and it goes away like ah it was hunger, that's what it was hunger was. What was causing my stomach to her. Well if I don't move enough I'm sedentary and I don't move then I'll get very a key and I might get uncomfortable in my body and I might then get fatigued and actually not want to move. So all these things that we, all these choices we make in our life and all these experiences we have, they have an effect and oftentimes people ignore.

(James Mayfield) They don't see the correlation that happens in that they don't understand where this trigger is actually coming from. And so if you examine, I'll give you an example of say a sensitive child, sensitive to I was a sensitive child and a sense of child and I was in a family that was in survival mode. They were just trying to pay the bills and get things done and they didn't have anybody watching out for their emotional needs growing up and that wasn't really on their radar either. And I grew up feeling really insecure. I didn't really have good social skills. I didn't know how to connect and I felt very much different than other people and I just wasn't very successful in the social peace. I was very successful at school. Teachers loved me and that that was a really good relationship I had but I didn't, I didn't really know how to relate to peers and so I would be in a peer situation, a social situation and I would overcome was something I didn't know what it was then. Now I know it to be shame. I didn't know it for a long time, but it was shame. It was this icky feeling, I didn't feel confident and I would try to, like crack a joke and they always fell flat because I wasn't in my body, I wasn't in the present moment, I was up in my head trying to figure out how to impress somebody when I was a kid.

(James Mayfield) But as a sensitive growing up, I ended up having unmet needs for connection for connection. I didn't have an adult there to interact with me in the ways that I that I needed and I didn't know how to do that in my life. So it created anxiety, this social anxiety and the social anxiety, we think is the problem. It's actually not the problem. It's a symptom, the social anxiety is a symptom of an unmet need for connection and social anxiety is the warning system, your body tells you, oh, something's wrong here. I'm not attuned to the people around me, I don't feel safe, anxiety is helpful,...