← You Make Sense
You Make Sense
Understanding Why You’re Stuck: Using Polyvagal Theory to Unlock the Life You Desire
01:13:23
In this episode, Sarah takes you through the different states in your Autonomic Nervous System, likening it to a special ops team constantly working to protect you. She explains how, through a process called neuroception, the system is constantly monitoring for internal and external threats. Sarah then delves into the three states of dysregulation—Sympathetic, Dorsal, and Freeze—and how each state has brilliantly adapted to protect you, as well as your primary state of regulation—Ventral—which is where we experience much of the “good” in life.
Loading summary
Transcript5 lines
- [00:00]
Sarah
Hi, I'm Sarah, and welcome to youo Makesense. I'm a somatic experiencing practitioner, an expert on trauma resolution, attachment parts work, and nervous system regulation. This podcast is a manual to understanding your human experience so that you can navigate the world with freedom, ease, empowerment, and create the life that you desire. Remember, you make sense. All parts, always. All right, so in this episode, I'm going to give you a full understanding of your autonomic nervous system. Because remember, we cannot change, change what we don't understand. And then I'm going to equip you with some things that you can begin doing to gain control of this system. As I said in the last episode, I think of our, our, our autonomic nervous system as a Special Ops team. And the reason I call it this is not because of any military affiliation, but because a Special Ops team is the best of the best. There's many members on the team that have different jobs, but they have one primary mission. And your autonomic nervous system is the same way. There are many members of the team, there's actually seven. They all have different jobs, but they have one primary mission which is to keep you safe and alive at all costs. It will literally do everything in its power, including, as I said before, eat your own muscle tissue, even in order to ensure your survival. That's how much it loves you. And so remember, as I said, we can't change what we don't understand. So I wanna begin introducing you to those members of the Special Ops team which you're experiencing all the time. In fact, we are experiencing one of six members of our Special Ops at every moment that we have lived. You are always experiencing, they're called states, but a state in your nervous system. Now, as we previously went over, the first line of defense in your Special Ops team is called neuroception. This is your threat detector. And its whole job is to look outside of you. That's called neuroception. Look outside of you every millisecond of your life to see if you're safe. So it looks to things and categorizes them into three different categories. Is that safe? Is that dangerous? Is that life threatening? It also looks inside of you. That's called interoception, to see if what's happening inside is safe. Is it dangerous or is it life threatening. Now, when it decides if something is safe, dangerous or life threatening, it has different Special Ops team members that it calls in based on what it has decided and what we talked about in the last episode. And if you haven't listened to that, be sure to listen to it because it's really the foundation of everything that we're doing here. Just to really give a quick recap, the way that threat detector decides if you're safe or not is by looking to or research resourcing an internal database you have that lives in your midbrain. And every lived experience you have is in that database. So when it looks out into the world, it resources the database to decide if your present situation is safe or not. Now, remember, it might be thinking that your present situation is safe is unsafe rather, even though it's actually safe. The reason it does this is because we might have a lot of information in the database about how, you know, for example, people weren't safe in the past. So I might be around people in my current life who are really safe, but my nervous system doesn't know they're safe because people weren't safe in the past. And again, in the first episode, we go a lot deeper into how neuroception functions. But it is the one who calls in one of six states or special op team members of your nervous system, and it's always calling in one specific state. So there are three states of regulation, meaning the good experiences that we have. There are three different states of regulation, and there are actually three states of dysregulation. And dysregulation, remember, is active self protection. This is really brilliantly adaptive that we have all these states, because when we're in danger, there's different things that we need to do based on what is being presented to us. Like, sometimes the right move might be to fight back. Sometimes the right move might be to try to disappear and collapse so no one can see us. So there's different things that we're going to want to do based on the environment and based on the situation that is pres. Preventing itself. So it's a really beautiful thing that neuroception has those three to call upon. And as I named, it also has three states of regulation, which is all the good things we're desiring. And the wonderful thing about having three states of regulation is it's what allows us to be present and feel good, but sometimes have a lot of energy in our body and be playful and silly and weird, and sometimes be more quiet and introspective and be meditating and so on and so forth. So it allows for lots of nuance of a regulated state because of those three. So I first want to talk about the three states of dysregulation. And then we're Going to get to the primary state of regulation in your nervous system. Now, if your threat detector decides that you are in danger, but it thinks it can do something about that danger, it calls in something called your sympathetic nervous system. Your sympathetic nervous system is your state of mobilizing. So this is all about the doing when we're here. A lot of people refer to it as fight or flight. But one of my mentors, Deb Dana, says it's not really fight or flight. The predominant function or the main function of it is mobilizing, so doing. And of course, that includes fight or flight, the sympathetic nervous system. Again, this is what we would want to use in resource. If, let's say I'm on a hike somewhere and a grizzly bear is coming towards me. Actually, I don't even know if you're supposed to run from a grizzly bear. You probably aren't supposed to run from a grizzly bear. But let's just say that that was your instinct. It's going to be what allows you to try to get away. And when we are here, all of our resources go to us mobilizing. Every single part of our bodies is online and a part of this process. You don't have to ask it to that. It just does it for you, which I think is so exquisite and amazing that it has that ability to do it. Now, your sympathetic nervous system, the general location in your body is your upper chest and your upper back. Now, the reason why it's located in that area is because that's where your heart is. By the way, when you're in your sympathetic nervous system, you might notice that you have a lot of tension in your shoulders and your back, in your jaw even, and certainly in your chest as well, because that's where the system is located. And remember, it's all about the doing. This system is something called myelinated. And myelination simply means that there's. You think of it like saran wrap, meaning there's a sheathing around nerve endings. So your whole autonomic nervous system is compiled of many, many, many different nerve endings. The sympathetic nervous system has many nerve endings associated with it. And if you're looking at my hands, think of them kind of like fingers or tentacles. Or if you can't see them, just imagine like tentacles. And so those nerve endings is what information travels through. So myelination simply means there's a sheathing or a wrap around the nerve endings. That wrap acts as, like a highway for information to travel faster through the nerve endings, which means that when you're in your sympathetic nervous system, you can come out of it a lot quicker than some of the other states of dysregulation that we're going to talk about in just a few moments. Now, I want to recap this. Something that I named in episode one is that your autonomic nervous system is subcortical, which means it doesn't understand a verbal language. And instead the language of your nervous system is somatics, or the embodied language. So those nerve endings, right, they can't understand a verbal language. And when you're dysregulated, all of the nerve endings constrict. They even constrict around your organ systems because they touch every single organ in your body, actually. So imagine those nerve endings constricting. That communicates to the organs, but also to the rest of your body that there is danger. And when you're in your sympathetic nervous system, it's letting your body and your system know we need as much energy as possible to evade this threat. And so it's absolutely brilliant. What occurs is it restricts around your organs, which communicates to them essentially, hey, we're in a pretty big danger right now, and we need as much energy reserves as you have in order for us to mobilize as fast as possible to get away, to fight as hard as that, as hard as we can. So imagine it constricting around, like your stomach, for example, because digestion takes a lot of energy, so it's letting your stomach know, hey, we don't really care about digesting that sandwich. We need that extra energy to go towards survival. It does it around your liver. We don't need to detoxify to the same degree. Can you give up maybe 50% of your energy? It does it to your immune system. System. We don't really care about getting a cold. Can you give us more of your energy? Your gallbladder, your kidneys, your colon, even your intestines. And of course your prefrontal cortex, your thinking brain, which totally shuts off when we're coming into dysregulation. And certainly a deep dysregulation. So all of these organs. And again, isn't it incredible? I've said this. I don't even know. I should probably figure out how many times, because I'm like thousands of times, maybe 10,000 times, I don't know, a lot of times said this a lot. But it is so exquisite that your system does this without you having to ask it. So it constricts around all the organs and Then all of that extra energy or in blood flow goes towards survival. And what happens is all of that energy goes towards opening up something called your vagal break. So around connected to our heart is something called a vagal break. Think of this like a dam that holds water back. And so when I'm in regulation, I'm in control of the dam, which means I can control how much energy I have in my body. If I need more, because I'm, you know, dancing around, I can open the dam. If I need less, I close the dam. When you're in your sympathetic nervous system, it's as if the dam just opens up and you don't have control over it anymore and water is flowing through, really, that's energy flowing through. And we actually want that because it's what allows us to fight as hard as we can or get away as fast as we can. Now, I want to name when we're in short spurts of our sympathetic nervous system, like I'm running from the grizzly bear, it's not a big deal that my organ systems don't have a lot of their resources that they need because it's short term, right? So my immune system is going to be just fine. My liver is going to be just fine. My stomach and my intestines are going to be just fine if I'm not absorbing the nutrients that I need, et cetera. And then I come into regulation. And what occurs when you come into safety is remember, the threat detector says, the coast is clear, we're safe. We don't need your help any more. Sympathetic nervous system, you can take a break. And they high five each other and they're like, yay, we evaded the threat. We're the most amazing special ops team. They don't really do that. But I also feel I'm a little bit like, I'm a. I should have a. I should have a children's show talking about the nervous system because I feel like I advocate for it in a pretty strange way Anyway, so the nervous system says, hey, sympathetic system, you can take a break. And when it does that, the nerve endings, remember I told you they constrict when you're dysregulated? The nerve endings actually loosen up. The loosening of the nerve endings is what communicates via that myelination. So that sheathing up to your brain. The coast is clear, we're safe. And 80% of information travels from your body to your brain. Only 20% is brain to body, which therein lies the importance of really befriending. This nervous system because so much of your experience and the information traveling through you is occurring there. So you come back into regulation, the nerve endings release, and they say, all right, everybody, you can have your energy back. And your immune system is like, thank you so much for giving me back 30% of my energy. And your liver says, me, too. I'm ready to detoxify. And your colon says, me as well. I'm ready to use the bathroom. And so on and so forth. Everything comes back into homeostasis. Now, if you're in long stays of dysregulation, whether it's your sympathetic nervous system or the other two that I'm about to name in a minute, what occurs is those nerve endings are staying constricted, not for short periods of time, but long periods of time. And the result of that is over the course of months and years and maybe even decades, if you're like me, your immune system, for example, says, hey, I've been trying really hard to function at 50% for quite some time right now. Some time now, I can't do it anymore. And you start to develop autoimmune diseases. Your GI tract and your intestines say, I'm really, really, really trying, but I don't have the energy I need to digest food or to absorb nutrients. And you start to develop ibs, Crohn's disease, colitis, ulcers, and so on and so forth. Now, this isn't happening because you're broke, and it's happening because your system has been holding on and working really hard without the resources that it needs. And there's so much research now on the correlation or connection between dysregulation and trauma and chronic illness. I can say, of course, I'm not, you know, a doctor, medical professional, but I just want to start with that. But I will say there is so much research on what. What I just named. And as personally, I have experienced extraordinary healing in my. As a result of regulating my nervous system. I'm someone that had fibromyalgia colitis, ibs. I was sick about every other week of my life. Just so many health issues that resolved via regulating, which is why I say that regulation is the best medicine for our bodies. We'll talk more about that in a later episode, too. So that's a little bit about your sympathetic nervous system, and I just actually want to try it on for you so I can show you what it's like to be in this state. What you're probably going to say, as I do, this is going to say it now, you're probably going to say, sarah, why are you talking so fast? Sarah, why are you making me feel anxious as you're talking about this? So two reasons. I'm talking fast because I want you to see exactly what it looks like in an embodied experience. And the other thing I just want to name is, as I try on the different states of dysregulation, you might notice that you start to feel that a little bit in your own system. And that's because of something called mirror neurons. So nervous systems read each other, meaning my nervous system is affecting your nervous system right now. And so a regulated nervous system can regulate a nervous system. A dysregulated nervous system can dysregulate a nervous system. You know that because think about one person in your life who has been a pretty constant of somebody who brings you regulation. For me, a couple of those people are. I'm going to name a few. Mr. Rogers, maybe he was that for you. Bob Ross. I know it's random, but I only had PBS as a kid. I was pretty poor. And that was their only channel. My two dogs, Truman and Jerry, my grandmother. So those are. Those are beings who pretty much a hundred percent of the time brought me regulation in my nervous system. Why? The reason was because they were all predominantly regulated in their own nervous system. And this is why. Just think about it for yourself for a minute. Like, is there a person that you like to listen to? Maybe it's a podcast, or maybe it's someone that you know and just being around them, when you're around them or you hear them, you just feel a little better, that is a clue that their nervous system is regulated and it is affecting change in yours. The same goes for if someone is dysregulated. So have you ever been around someone dysregulated? Just kidding. We all have. But think about that. If you've ever been around someone who's like angry or they're anxious, really anxious, or frustrated, you might notice that you start to feel dysregulated, and that's because theirs is affecting yours. This is the concept of mirror neurons. So you might even notice that as I try on the different states, states, it's also, I just want to name this. This is why I also say that nervous system regulation is the best medicine you can give the world because people who are walking around predominantly regulated are like a light in the world. Your system alone is bringing healing just by being you. So it's another, another really wonderful benefit of bringing regulation to our nervous system. All right, so let's try on the sympathetic system so you can see it. You might say, oh my goodness, I know this state. You're going to say that about one of states of dysregulation and it could be your sympathetic. Now this is the first after your neuroceptive response. This is the first state of self protection we go to. And we only go here when something is dangerous. But our system thinks I might be able to do something about it to make the danger go away. The result of it is it's all about the doing. So that vagal break I mentioned opens up, we get a lot of energy in our body. I think of it like the porridge is not too cold, it's not just right, it is too hot. So when we're here, we're gonna notice that there's a lot of heat in our body. We might notice that our heart is racing a lot. There's gonna be tension in our body. The reason there'll be tension is because our system, and you can see me coming into this state, our system is saying I might need to fight it, fight against this thing. I might need to do something about it. So you'll often notice tension in your shoulders, in your back, in your jaw, even in your hips. You'll notice that you have a difficulty digesting food cuz your GI tract shuts down when you're here, you're gonna notice that you're, you have a heightened alertness of all your senses. Why? Because if you're trying to run away from a lion, you really need to be on the. Is there another one coming? Is there a whole pride of lions? How far away are they? So you're going to hear things louder than you normally would. Your vision is actually going to be laser focused or tunneled. And when you're here, you can only really focus on the task at hand or the thing that you think is dangerous. Because your system is saying, oh my gosh, there's danger, danger, danger. And we need to address this specific danger. It wouldn't be very adaptive to be taking in everything around you. Right. Like I'm running from a lion. It wouldn't be adaptive for me to take in the beautiful tree over there and then that like really sweet zebra. I want to be focused on the path ahead of me. Which is why you are going to be laser focused on whatever is going on currently in your sympathetic nervous system. So you're going to have a racing heart, butterflies in your stomach, tension in your body, heat in your Body, you're going to notice experiences like anxiety, worry, frustration, fear, terror, rage, panic. Your thoughts are going to be racing. I have to do something now. If I don't do something now, things aren't going to be okay. You might have thoughts like, you know, is that person mad at me? They haven't texted me back. I think they might be mad at me. Maybe I should send them 10 more emojis. Maybe 10 was too much. Maybe that's why they're mad at me, because I sent them 10 emojis. I shouldn't have said that thing at dinner. I said that thing at dinner and I wish I could take it back. And maybe I should make a joke about the thing I said at dinner because now they're gonna be really upset and they're never gonna wanna be my friend again or they're gonna wanna divorce me. I don't know what to do. Or you notice you're so frustrated, right? You're, like, around your family and you're like, oh, my God, they did that for the ten hundredth time. And you, like, slam down the laundry basket just so they can make sure you make sure they hear you slamming down the laundry basket. And you just find yourself snapping at people or annoyed by things like, why at the airport, somebody is putting water through the, you know, the, whatever you call it, the belt thing. You're just agitated all the time. And all of this, everybody, is your sympathetic nervous system. It's a go, go, go, go, go. I have to, I have to, I have to. The thing about your sympathetic nervous system is it's going to tell you there's not enough time. So there's so much to do. There's not enough time. You can't slow down. Which is why, like, if you have that experience of struggle to slow down, this means you're in your sympathetic system. It might be like, let's say the weekend and you're sitting down to do emails and your partner's like, hey, I thought we were going to go to the beach. Like, I just have to get all this done. And they're like, well, didn't you say that doesn't actually have to be done till Monday? And you're like, no, it has to be done now. Because if it on how everything's gonna fall apart and we're gonna live in a box because we have to do it now. And you incessantly check your finances or you incessantly worry that you're gonna lose your job, all of this is sympathetic. And the story of the Sympathetic is it tells you, when I get this done, I'll be able to relax. But it's a lie. Because no matter how much you do when you're in your sympathetic nervous system, it's going to want to continue to mobilize. We're gonna find that we need to control our external circumstances. And I've spent a lot of time in sympathetic myself, so what that could look like, like maybe in your house, everything has to be exactly right. Like the counters have to be wiped down. Exactly right. You can't actually relax and watch the movie until all the dishes are done, because how could you possibly relax otherwise? Or until your email box is at zero, or you have to double check on everything going on, or you have to micromanage your partner or your kids or like do the karate chop of the pillow, not that I know that, to make sure that everything is really tidy. So it's all about control. It's all about the doing. There's a lot of energy when we are here. And if we have what's called an anxious attachment, which we're going to get to later episodes, you're going to be really used to being in your sympathetic nervous system, because again, it's all about the doing. If I find myself being a workaholic and go, go, go, go, go, go, go. Really good under stress. That's all a clue that I'm experiencing my sympathetic nervous system. And for anyone who's experienced burnout, burnout is simply a long stay in your sympathetic nervous system. That then your system says, I don't think sympathetic is working. And you go into one of your other states of dysregulation that we're going to get into in a, in a moment. Now, now. So let's say you're running from a lion. Let's use that example again. And you're running, you're running, you're running, you're trying to get away, but the lion is getting really close. So what will happen is the threat detector is watching all of this and it will say sympathetic nervous system. You tried really hard. You did a really good job, but I don't think we're going to be able to mobilize out of this danger. And it's almost like a relay race. And it tags in, or can tag in something called your dorsal vagal complex. This is our state of immobilization, or shutdown. It's actually our most extreme form of self protection. The sympathetic system, by the way, is 300 million years old. The dorsal vagal complex is 500 million years old. And so the only reason we go here is because our threat detector has decided, I don't think we can get away from this. And I also don't think I can make this thing stop. But what I can do is I can help you leave your body so you don't have to feel the perpetual pain of what we can't make go away. When I learned this about the dorsal vagal complex, it actually made me cry because I spent so much time in this state myself because I had so many human beings let me down in my life. I was abandoned and a lot of other things that that occurred. But to understand, oh my God. There was a sim, a system inside of me that never let me down, not once. Was just a really beautiful and loving thing to learn. Because there's can be so much shame and we can be so unkind to ourselves about the dysregulation we experience, when in fact, there's nothing to be ashamed of. There's nothing wrong. In fact, everything is totally right when we're experiencing dysregulation. Our system, as we talked about before, just might not know that we're actually safe. That's why it's keeping us dysregulated in our current lives. So let's go to the dorsal vagal complex for a minute. I really want to make sure you understand this statefully. As I said, it's your state of immobilization. So instead of the going, going, going, going, it's about energy conservation. So if the sympathetic system was a cheetah, running the dorsal vagal complex would be like an a bear going into hibernation. So it's. Everything is shutting down when we are here. This system is a part of the parasympathetic nervous system. I just want to explain some of the neuroscience of polyvagal theory, because I know there's people listening that are going to be like, tell me more about the science. Science. Just really quickly here, I just want to explain this. When it comes to your autonomic nervous system, there are two primary branches. We have your sympathetic nervous system, which I just told you about, and then we have something called your parasympathetic nervous system, which is a part of. Or. Or rather the vagus nerve is comprised of vague. The vagus nerve is the largest nerve in the body. Vagus means wanderer. And it actually does wander all the way from our 10th cranial nerve in our head, in our brainstem, up into our head, our face, and our inner eyes. Our eyes all the way down into our gut and our viscera touching every organ system. In the lower part of the vagus nerve, or the parasympathetic nervous system is this dorsal vagal complex. The upper part of it is called our ventral vagal complex, which we're going to get into in a moment. And that's the rest and digest. I get a lot of people asking me all the time, is the parasympathetic nervous system just rest and digest? It's not. It's actually two. Two. There's two different components of the parathyl, the parasympathetic system. So the lower part is this dorsal vagal complex I'm talking about. And unlike your sympathetic nervous system, it's not myelinated, it's unmyelinated. And that means that the nerve endings don't have a sheathing around them. And so the result of that is that information takes longer to travel through these nerve endings up to your brain. What does that mean for you? It means that it takes longer to come out of this dorsal vagal complex into regulation than it takes to come out of your sympathetic nervous system. But think about a barren hibernation, right? It doesn't come out of that hibernation quickly. It's a very slow waking up process, which is what it can be like when we are in our dorsal system. I'm going to try this on for you. And if sympathetic wasn't something that you experienced a lot when I tried it on, you might notice when I try on dorsal, like, oh, that's really familiar to me. So the dorsal vagal complex is all about the shutting down. Essentially what it's doing again is our system saying, I cannot make what is happening stop, but I can help you to leave your body so you don't have to feel the perpetual pain of it. So beautiful. So if you were in a school system where you were bullied, a home where your needs weren't met or you weren't safe, your nervous system likely said, well, I can't get away from this or make it stop, but we can leave your body so you don't have to feel the perpetual pain of it. The result of leaving our body means when we're in dorsal, we're going to feel really disconnected from our truth, disconnected from our feelings. Like we might not know how we feel at all. You might be able to talk about difficult things like that have happened to you, but you don't feel any affect. This was me for a really long time. I remember I would tell people, people Would ask me about my history and I would tell them about it. And there was a lot of sexual abuse and neglect and pretty intense things. Not pretty, very intense things things. And I felt nothing. And then I would look at the person in front of me and they'd be crying. And I didn't really understand why, because I couldn't feel anything about it. And that's because I was so disconnected. So if you find yourself disconnected or a lot of people that use humor and like will make a joke about something like, yeah, my parent, you know, they cheated on my parent and whatever, and they like blah blah, blah, and they make a joke that's a sign of being disconnected from the affect. And that happens in our dorsal vagal complex. So again, this is all about shutting down. So when we're here, the porridge is not too hot, it's not just right, it's too cold. So it begins with experiences like we feel apathetic, we feel disconnected. We'll notice that we have some brain fog. Difficulty to think. You'll notice me trying it on right now, even if I've slept, I feel exhausted, Just feel sort of out of it. We have a mutedness of all of our senses. So the sound's kind of muted. Colors don't. Don't seem as vibrant as they usually do. And your vision might even seem a little fuzzy. You might notice that you feel numb or like you're floating outside of your body. Other times you might feel really heavy. This is where malaise lives. A hopelessness. We'll find that we're removing ourselves from connection when we're here. So we might feel deeply lonely, but it feels impossible to reach out. Like I just can't text someone back or make plans with a friend. Or even when, when you're in the world, it might be difficult to make eye contact. Contact with people like you just don't want to be seen. You want to curl under the covers and disappear. All the thoughts when you're here are going to be about how you can't. I'm not capable, I'm not able. It's not possible for me. If you're watching this on video, my body posture actually changes. So when you're here, instead of being tense, like sympathetic, there's a slackness to your body. There'll be. Your posture will be one of self protection. So you might notice it's almost like you're turtling over into collapse. Again, difficulty to make eye contact when you're in a deep dorsal state. It's even difficult to talk like I can't even get the words out or even think about what I want to say. All the thoughts are going to be about lacking agency. So I can't again, I'm not able. Something's wrong with me. It's too late for me. It's not possible for me. I'm different. It's never going to work out. And so on and so forth. This is where depression lives, of course too. And that the deepest levels dissociation. So I'm not in my. There's. There's a wide range of dissociation from as small as. By the way, we all dissociate. Like you're driving home to your house and you don't remember how. You went through four stop signs. And you're like, how did I get to my house? That's a mild dissociation. Deeper dissociations are. I don't remember what happened today or for a decade. I look in the mirror and I don't know who I am or I don't know if the world is real. Those are depersonalization and derealization. So those are deep, deep levels of dorsal. Simple tasks will feel impossible. Like, I just can't. It's that bare and hibernation. Now here's me back in ventral. You can even tell in my voice it's different, right? And if you feel like from going into dorsal, because remember mirror neurons, you're like, I think I need to take a nap. That's because your system was following me into that state. I could feel my system pulling me into that state the more I allowed it. The same with when I was in sympathetic. I could feel it pulling me towards that mobilization. So I just want to name if you notice that happening. That makes a lot of sense. Now, the last state of dysregulation that I want to introduce you to is called freeze. And freeze is something called a blended state. So freeze is a combination of your. We've got your sympathetic nervous system and we've got your dorsal vagal complex that come together, rendering you stuck. The reason they render you stuck is because these are two, as I named, equal and opposite forces. So we have all this mobilizing, mobilizing energy met with immobilization. So think of this like deer in headlights. You have all of this energy inside, but you're trapped, unable to do anything about it. A simple thing. Unless you're driving a car or flying a plane or holding a baby or something like that. Don't do what I'm about to ask you to do. Unless you can stop doing those things or when you stop doing them, do this exercise. And I really want you to follow through with what I'm about to say so that you can feel what freeze is like in your body. If you're watching me on video, you're seeing me doing it. So what I want you to do is imagine in one hand is your sympathetic system with all that energy. In the other hand is your dorsal vagal complex with that shutdown energy. So they're two opposite forces. And what I want you to do, and I'm going to do this with you, try to do it with this microphone, is put your hands in front of your chest and your palms flat against each other, pushing against each other. And as hard as you can, I want you to push equally on both sides, sides. So pushing your hands together. And I really want you to push as hard as you can. And if you're still not doing it and you're saying, why do I have to do it? I want you to see if you can join me because I want you to feel how hard this is. Keep pushing. What you're going to notice is your heart rate is probably going to increase. You're going to notice tension in your back. You're going to notice that it is very challenging to focus on anything else. And this takes a lot of energy. And you can rest, you can rest because I don't want to be out of breath as I continue to do this episode with you. It takes a lot of energy to be in freeze everybody. A lot of energy. And so the reason I'm sharing that is because when we're in this state of, it's really the state of stuckness. It can feel like we're doing nothing. But so much is happening when we're here. So much. So again, think about it. Like I've got sympathetic inside of me, but I'm cloaked in this dorsal shutdown. So it's like there's a steel wall around me. So the overall experience is I have to, but I can't. I have to, but I can't. Can't. A low level experience of this is like you get a text from somebody, a family member that you're, you know, have some things, little issues with and you're like, ah, I gotta text them back, I'll do it later. You have this like urgency, I need to do that little anxiety, I'll do it later. And you think about it all day, but you don't do it. And maybe you think about it for a week and you still don't do it. That is freeze. Or a higher level of freeze is like maybe you want to step towards your purpose and you think to yourself, oh my gosh, I'm so behind in life. I really need to do this thing. Someone's going to take my idea. And you sit down at your computer on a Monday morning and you're like, here, I'm going to do this thing. And then you're feel overwhelmed and blank because you have 75 tabs open on your computer and you just can't seem to step towards the thing. And now you need to take a nap. But no, you have to do it. But I can't do it, but I have to do it. And I sit there and I don't even know where to start. Do you start with hiring somebody or do you start with building a website? Or you start with this thing and do I need a manufacturer? Ah, what do I do? And then you get overwhelmed again, you need to take a nap. But no, you have to do the thing. And you can spend hours and hours and hours in that state of freeze. And then what we often do is because it's. We're so stuck in it, then I tell myself, okay, I think I'll just go reorganize the juncture for the 20th time today, because at least I can mobilize and sympathetic around it. And so this is why if you're in freeze, it's really common that you're like, you know, I'll go run that errand instead of actually doing the thing I'm frozen around, or I'll clean the bathroom for the 12th time because I can do that versus this thing I'm frozen around. And we can spend so long in freeze. I spent like probably at least a decade in freeze and certainly around my purpose. I was in freeze for a very, very long time. And so this is the, the experience of two equal and opposite forces. So we have all that energy of sympathetic, but I'm trapped in it. The highest level of freeze would be like the tonic immobility or deer in headlights. I saw this happen not too long ago. I was walking one of my dogs and someone was walking their dog. And the dog got off leash and ran into the road. And the owner of that dog went into a 10 freeze. The highest level of freeze. And then they couldn't even move. So I was watching this person totally frozen, unable to mobilize because their system was seeing this as such incredible danger for them. And I went to my Sympathetic nervous system, and grabbed my dog, who can't really walk that well, and ran into the road to try to get the other dog. I was in sympathetic, they were in freeze. And that person had a lot of shame after, like, oh my God, why didn't I do something? And so the reason I'm talking about freeze in such depth and wanting you to try the state on is because so many of us have a lot of shame about it. Why didn't I fight back? Why didn't I say something? Why didn't I do something? And I just want you to know that your system was, it was choosing the right response. Now, the last thing I want to say about it is why do we choose this response right? It, it might seem like a strange one to choose. Well, to use an example from nature, if you think about a, a gazelle, for example, they're a prey animal. Gazelles are not attacking their herbivores. They're not attacking other animals. The thing that a gazelle has is its camouflage in order to keep it safe. Safe. Now, gazelles use, and lots of other prey animals use freeze a lot as a resource to protect them. Because imagine they're grazing and they hear a sound that they think is a lion, but they're not sure if it's a lion. They, they don't know if they've actually seen the lion yet. They will likely go into freeze. The reason being is because freeze allows them to either mobilize into sympathetic if they need to, or immobilize into dorsal if they need to. It wouldn't be very smart to just go into sympathetic and run off. If I don't even know if the lion, lion saw me, because now the lion saw me. My chances of living are much less. If I just went into dorsal. That wouldn't be a good idea because remember, dorsal is unmyelinated, which means it takes a long time to come out of dorsal. So imagine the lion did end up seeing me, but I've gone into dorsal. It's going to take me 15 to 20 minutes to get out of dorsal and I will not be able to get away from the lion. So being in freeze, having both of those states present allows me to respond to the stimuli, respond to what's happening, and I could easily drop the dorsal if I need to and run away. Or I could easily drop the sympathetic and go into dorsal if I need. So it's a very, very adaptive thing. And again, we go into this all the time. You might be at a dinner party and you're Wanting to say something and you think about saying it and you're like, really should want to say this thing and participate in the conversation. But then you're like, ah, maybe that's stupid, I shouldn't say it. And I really want to say it, but maybe I shouldn't say it. And then someone looks at you and they're like, are you okay? And you're like, yes, I'm fine. But you're actually in freeze. So freeze is those equal and opposite, opposite parts. Now those are our three states of dysregulation, everybody. And probably when you're listening, when you listen to me, there's going to be one that you experience more than the others. Most of us have a predominant state which we're going to talk about why in a moment you might also say, you know what? In my relationships I'm in sympathetic in my purpose, I'm in freeze. And with my finances, I'm in dorsal. Dorsal is about avoidance, right? So if you're like, I don't even look at my finances, I have no idea. La la, la la. That's very dorsal dominant. Now the last state I want to talk about in this episode is your primary state of regulation. So we've got the three states of dysregulation that give us optionality in terms of how we're self protected. We have one predominant state of regulation. We're going to get to the other two in another episode. Your ventral vagal complex is a part of the parasympathetic nervous system, as I named it, is the upper part of the vagus nerve. So that begins in the brainstem and goes up into your head, face and inner ear and all around your eyes and faces. I named. This is the thing that everybody in the world wants and they don't know it. Your ventral vagal complex. If you're predominantly anchored in regulation, you will have a fulfilling, happy life. It's what allows us to navigate the world with ease. It's allow us. It's what allows us to feel connected to ourselves, others in the world around us. So we only go here when the threat detector decides we are safe. Safe. The ventral vagal complex is the youngest part of our nervous system. It's 200 million years old. And I want to just like take a moment to guide you through the process of it, even of what it's like to be here, even if you don't spend a lot of time in regulation. We have all been here. So what I want you to do is I want you to think of for a moment, the most wonderful experience you've ever had. It could have been something that was 2 seconds long or 5 seconds long, or it could have lasted days, days like the birth of your child or children. It could have been a spiritual moment, a moment in nature when you were in awe. A moment where you were being playful or laughing or silly with loved ones. Any moment at all. And what I want you to do for a moment is I want you to bring that to life. A fully embodied experience has sensations, feelings, thoughts, behaviors. And we also see images. That's what makes something fully marinated. So I want you to think of the sensations that were involved. It's probably things like feeling expanded, warm, open, at ease, grounded, steady, firm, flowing. All of the yummy, yummy sensations we want to experience, rested, alive. What feelings arose when you were here? It might be things like feeling, awe, contentment, love, curiosity, playfulness, openness, and so on and so forth. And then I want you to think about what images you see. When you're in ventral everybody, you are anchored in this moment. You are not in any other moment. You're not in the past, you're not in the future. You are here. And when we are here, we're going to notice that we're taking in the surroundings around us. We see everything that's in our surroundings. Uh, there's vibrancy to the things that we are seeing and we are hearing. And we're going to notice that when our, when we're hearing here, there actually won't be a lot of thoughts because we are so present. If we are having thoughts, they're going to be around how we are capable and able. Things are going to be okay. It's all going to work out. We are curious. So we are not self protected. Meaning if someone's, you know, behaving in a way that maybe we might not behave, we'll just be curious about it and we'd want to explore it and talk to them about it. We're interested in other people. We're wanting to step towards the things that we desire. Not only wanting, but can. And we're flowing down the river of life with ease. So when we're in regulation, the porridge isn't too hot, it's not too cold, it's just right. This is a just right experience when we're here. If we want to experience health in our bodies, we need to predominantly be in regulation. It is literally the best medicine for our bodies and our health. This is what allows us to step into our calling to have relationships that we desire to feel good in an ordinary moment. It is literally the answer to not only getting unstuck, but living the life you are here to live and healing the past in the process. Process. When we're regulated, it's as if our nervous system. I've said this before, but it's as if our nervous system is standing at our side. And so just think of that visual. If it's at our side, it's doing that because it thinks we're safe. And that means that you can go towards the things you want. And the things you want can also come towards you if you're dysregulated. It's like your nervous system is standing in front of you. So regulation is what we are looking for. Now, every single one of us has something called a vagal tone. And essentially your vagal tone means the current shape of your nervous system. System. Now I want you to think about as I went through those four predominant states. Which one is most familiar to you? Is it sympathetic? All that energy? Go, go, go, go, go. Is it dorsal shut down? Not enough energy? Disconnection? Is it freeze? So much energy, but I can't do anything about it. So I have to. I can't, I have to, I can't, I have to, I can't. Which one is or. Or rather ventral. And that's. That's the thing we're all looking for. If you're saying ventral is not my most familiar, that's okay. That's the goal that we're going to get to. So I want you to ask yourself which one is most familiar? And not only do we have a state that's most familiar, our vagal tone, we also have an intensity of that state. So I think of this like a 1 is least intense, 10 is most intense. So if you're saying, yeah, I think I hang out around like a 4 in intensity sympathetic, where I just kind of always am on the go. I can't really relax. That means that's the curve current shaping of your nervous system. I want you to think of it like, like a muscle system, really. The beautiful thing is that neuroscience shows us that we can actually reshape our nervous systems. Reshaping your nervous systems means you can go from living a life in dorsal or freeze or sympathetic to literally living life in regulation. I can tell you, as a human being who spent all of my life in either dorsal freeze or sympathetic until I did this work, that the, the work of regulating my nervous system is the only reason that I'm Predominantly anchored in ventral now. And I've walked thousands of people through this work too. So a simple thing that I want to give you, just that you can practice, is what we need to start doing to reshape our nervous system is we need to do something called consistent neural exercises. Think of a neural exercise like a rep at the gym. So if I was to lift weights, like I'm to do curls, that would be like a neural exercise. If I consistently did curls or push ups, my arms would get stronger, right? You that there would be no doubt about it. That's what would occur. When it comes to your nervous system. Consistently doing neural exercises is what reshapes it. And I just like to share this because healing can feel so elusive a lot of the time. Like, how do I even do it? And it's out of my grasp and I don't understand it. But I want you to know there's actually a practical process in and how we do this, which is through these consistent neural exercises. So a simple thing that I invite you to do is create a list of. I call this your regulation toolbox. Just a list of things that support you to feel better here and good. So they don't numb you. Like maybe scrolling Instagram, you could do that for three hours. And you're like, what happened to time that's numbing you? Instead, I want you to think of things that support you to feel really here, really present in your life and in your body. So anything that you classify as good is a regulating tool. I also have therapeutic regulating tools that all of my programs are filled with. If you're interested in that, you can look into the work that I do and all the programs that I do that will help facilitate that for you. But you already have things in your own life. So put together a list. It could be things like meditating, going for runs or walks, being with my pets, dancing, shaking, jumping on a trampoline, breath work, tapping, yoga, nidra, qigong, cooking, pottery, like literally anything that supports you to feel good. And what I want you to do is decide on a number of times a day that you're gonna do a neural exercise. All that means is set some alarms in your phone. It could be 5, 10, 2. And when an alarm goes off, I just want you to ask yourself, am I regulated or not? For extra credit, you could ask yourself, what state am I in? Sympathetic, dorsal, freeze, or ventral. And then I want you to engage in one regulating tool. Literally one thing that supports you to feel more present in here. And after you engage in That I want you to ask yourself, is anything different at all? Not looking for huge, gigantic shifts. We're looking for subtle change. It's the subtle changes that add up to a life lived in regulation. That is how you do it. That's the consistent neural exercises. So if you notice in sympathetic after you regulate, you just feel a little more calm. That's a clue you're regulated. If you're in dorsal and you notice I have a little more energy, that's a clue you regulated. If you're in freeze and you notice I'm not such I'm not so stuck. That's a clue you regulated and you feel an overall experience of being more present in here. And if you do that enough, your nervous system will reshape one tolerable step at a time, enjoying what you've heard so far and want to go deeper into somatic healing. I have a free workbook called how to Gain Control over how youw Feel. And it will help you to get in the driver's seat of your experience and step towards your desires with more ease. Check the show notes below for a link to download. So something that you're going to experience in most episodes that you're listening to is a Q and A component. And the reason why I decided to do this is because it's so important to really understand the practical lived experience of this work. So my hope is as you hear other people's questions, you're going to find that they resonate for you. Because for myself, in working with thousands and thousands of people at this point, what I found is that the human experience is so much more similar than it is today, different. So whether you've submitted me a question or not, I think you're going to find that these resonate for you. I can tell you personally that basically every question we get is something that at some point in my life I have, I've experienced myself. I also want to name if you're thinking, well, I want to submit a question, how do I do that? You can email mediarabincoaching.com and we will get that question from you. You can do a. A written one, a video one, an audio one. So there's lots of options. You can send me a DM on Instagram or you can look out for some posts on Instagram that will directly to a link in order to do that. So we are going to listen to our first audio question today that relates to this episode.
- [46:43]
Listener 1
Hi Sarah, first of all, thank you for all you do. Very helpful teachings. I Think it would be amazing if you could do a podcast episode about sleep issues or insomnia that comes from trauma. So I have ptsd, complex ptsd. And I've struggled with insomnia for, I mean, most of my life, but especially the past decade, and been on and off of sleeping pills. And when I don't take sleeping pills, I can usually sleep, but I never really feel rested and I feel like my brain is on fire the next day. Especially when I was in a long term relationship and I slept next to my partner at the time, I would wake up just fried, so exhausted, as if I had been running all night. And I understand I must be like in a sympathetic place when I'm sleeping, but how do I heal that? Just to hear you speak about sleep in general would be amazing. Thank you.
- [47:37]
Sarah
So sleep is something that so many of us struggle with. Whether you have a complex trauma history or not, it is something that so many people all around the world are experiencing on a consistent basis. And so I just want to explain the reason why. And like all things you're going to listen to on this podcast, it's usually going to come back to what's happening in our nervous system, because that's really the foundation of everything, everything. So if you're struggling with your sleep, whether you struggle to fall asleep or you struggle to get deep sleep or stay asleep, that's simply a clue that you're experiencing either your sympathetic nervous system or your state of freeze. Those are two states that you're likely going to be in if you're not able to sleep. Now, the reason being is this is, it's actually quite simple. If you are running from a lion, right? Which is what's happening when you're in your sympathetic nervous system. At least that's what your nervous system thinks is occurring. That mobilization, the necessity for mobilization, your nervous system would never allow you to lay down and get deep rest, right? Wouldn't that be very maladaptive if I'm running from a lion to say, okay, now I'm gonna lay down and get REM sleep instead? Your system, if you needed to rest, would be on the lookout. It wouldn't let you go into a deep sleep because it's looking out for how there, there might be a sound and there might be something that you need to evade. And so it never lets you get into that deep, restful state. Place the same with your, if you're in freeze, right? Because freeze, remember, is equal parts your sympathetic nervous system and your dorsal vagal complex that come together so there's that sympathetic activation there. And the sympathetic activation is what's going to cause this inability to sleep. Now, there's a lot of reasons why we are experiencing this. For some of us, if you, perhaps for this listener, if you had traumas that occurred at night, your threat detector, remember, because it likes it, looks for flavorings of similarities, might say nighttime's not safe or not being on guard isn't safe. So because of that, going into a deep, restful place won't be something right now that your nervous system is okay with. For others of us, you know, we live in a world that is not conducive to nervous system regulation. There's obviously lots of benefits to capitalism, but there are other things about it that have really, really been detrimental to our species. We should not be working and looking at a computer screen for 10 hours a day. Right. It's a lot. And I can tell you I am somebody who does look at a computer screen for a lot of hours a day, but it's not conducive to regulation of our nervous system. So if you have 50 things at all times or 100 things on your to do list, your nervous system is going to start the day in a place of mobilizing. Go, go, go, go, go. I have to. I have. Do I have, have to? Not only that, but the way that culture is set up right now, I don't have it on, thank goodness. I don't have it on me. It used to be next to me, but my creative director took it away a moment ago, thankfully. So you don't see it. My telephone was sitting right here next to me. We were just on a break, and I was looking at my phone, and I will tell you, I went to go look at my assistant bringing Truman, my dog, to the vet. And what happened, though, was I didn't just look at that. I saw my email. I saw how many unopened emails there were, and I opened it up. Should I have probably done that right now? No. But I did. And then I looked at another app that was showing me some news going on in the world, all in the matter of, like, three minutes. My nervous system. No one's nervous system can take in that much information at once. So I'm sharing that because just to normalize this a little bit, what do most people do when they wake up first thing in the morning? They look at their phone, right? The first thing you do is you pick it up and you look at it and you are inundated with everything happening in the Entire world evolution happens very, very slow. So what I mean by that is this, when back to hunting and gathering, when you were living in a village, you knew what was happening in your village. You're like, oh, yeah, so and so broke their arm last week. What a bummer. The person, the village next to us is going through a drought. Oh, my gosh, are they going to be okay? I didn't know anything happening far in the distance, right? Only in my direct vicinity. That is what our nervous systems have the capacity for. Also, we weren't moving fast in our lives. We were walking slowly, hunting and gather few hours of the day, and then commuting the rest of the time. So our whole world is set up not to be conducive of regulation. So if you are looking at your phone a lot, if you don't have a morning practice, and we just jump to doing things all day long, if you're looking at screens like a computer not moving your body, all of those things create dysregulation and often create a lot of sympathetic activity. So what happens is, throughout the day, you might start where you're at A, between a 1 to a 10 and sympathetic. Maybe you start at like a 2. But throughout the day you're like, I gotta do. I gotta do more. I gotta do more. Because remember, your. Your state creates your story, your thoughts, and I'm behind and I gotta do more. Throughout the day, you're increasing that sympathetic activation. And then for a lot of us at night, maybe you're looking at your computer or maybe I know I'm talking to one of you. You're watching, you know, like crime documentaries on serial killers right before bed. What is that going to do? Your nervous system is going to say, oh, my gosh, that's not safe. Maybe a serial killer is going to come into my house. And I know that might sound silly, but it's not. That's actually what your nervous system is going to be doing or responding or watching like some horror film on a cult that's going to accost you in the middle of the night. So my point is, so many of us are doing things that exacerbate the problem of not sleeping well. So a couple of things that we need to do here to change, change this. Number one, regulating throughout the day is imperative. You know, in this episode, I talked about neural exercises, the reps at the gym. You must begin. So it's not just the sleep. A lot of people think like, we'll think, okay, so what do I do in the moment? I'll talk about that in a second. But it's not just that, it's what am I doing in the lead up. So throughout the day, regulating your nervous system, doing things that support you to feel more present here and good lessens the sympathetic tone or activation in your body. Another couple of practical things very important to get morning sunlight and end of day sunlight. What that does is it helps the proper release of cortisol in our bodies from the morning until the night. So looking at the, at the sky early in the morning when you first wake up, and then trying to get access to light. So going outside when the sun is setting, remember, we have not evolved very much. So if I'm in a village somewhere with no light, all we have is fire. And I see the orange of the sky coming. My circadian rhythm, see, says it's time to begin unwinding and going to sleep. So that can be hugely beneficial. Moving your body is very important throughout the day. We are meant to be moving and bilateral stimulation, walking. So bilateral movement is a powerful way to discharge energy in our bodies, to move energy out and also help us come into that place of deep rest. Something that we're going to talk about in a later episode is your autonomic state of stillness. We haven't talked about that yet. It's a state of regulation where we come into a real slowing. So what I want you to do is a couple hours before bed, I want you to think about what activities evoke stillness for me or slowing for me. Something I do a lot in my house is I'll play either sound bath music. So the vibration of a sound bath is really supportive for deep regulation. I'll listen to nature sounds. I live in the middle of Los Angeles where there's not a lot of nature sounds. So I'll play the sound of like wind in a forest or rain or a river. And that makes my nervous system come into this deeper, relaxed state. Just a couple other practical things. Not eating at least a couple hours before bed. If you eat before bed, your digestive tract turns on and you can't come into this state of stillness. Also not looking at screens or blue light a couple hours before. This is ridiculous. But anybody that knows me and loves me sees me wearing blue blocker glasses at night. But not the regular blue blockers. You might think I wear bright orange ones. Like they look like I'm chopping, chopping wood. And the reason I do that is because that actually shows my system. Oh, it's time for bed. Everything's orange like when we were living by candlelight. I also turn off lights and light candles at night. You don't have to be as hardcore as me, but doing some of those things are going to bring you into a deeper place of regulation. Lastly, when you get into bed, if you notice that you wake up in the middle of the night and you can't sleep, it's very important to get out of of bed because you're in your sympathetic nervous system. And when you're in your sympathetic system, you have to mobilize and move. So it might be getting out of bed and shaking your body or dancing really quickly, not looking at your phone, it might be reading or even walking around the house. All of that can help support you to then be able to go back into sleep. When we can't sleep, we actually also want to get out of our bed because we don't want our neuroceptive response to associate your bed with a place you don't sleep. The more that we do this, the better our sleep gets and the more overall that you regulate your nervous system and create internal safety. That's what we're really looking for. Then your system no longer thinks you're perpetually unsafe. The result is that your sleep gets a whole heck of a lot better.
- [56:37]
Listener 2
Hi Sarah. It's so nice to talk to you, to have the opportunity. My question refers to feeling what is right to do and feeling into my potential. And then when I look around where I am at in life and look like my, my action steps don't match what is, what is right to do or what's the right thing to do, I notice doing it in very little ways. Like when I ask myself what's the right thing to do right now? It's just like you would say, orienting a little bit. But I just wanted to ask you if you have anything more to say to that state of being or maybe even how I can, or I can more specifically move towards making my action steps match where I want to go. Thank you.
- [57:42]
Sarah
Every single one of us on the entire planet, everybody, including everyone that you love, Michelle Obama, every person is living the life that their nervous system has the capacity for. All of us. Me too. And what I mean by that is this. So the good things that we desire in our lives have energy to them. There's a energetic charge around. And remember, our nervous systems like what they know they do not like the unknown. So if my nervous system is not used to being seen and being exposed and being vulnerable and, and being in front of thousands of people Whatever it is, then my nervous system is going to say, I don't know if that's safe. It's really overwhelming because there's so much energy involved with that. And I also haven't experienced it before. And that can be really confusing, right, Because. Because I really want this thing. So why is it so challenging for me to have it? And so what I. I want to say a couple other things, but the first thing really that I want you to hear here is that your pace is exactly right. I don't have the capacity to hold the life that I will have a year from now or two years from now or three years from now. If I got all of those things, like around my purpose, let's say the things, the goals that I have in this work, if I, I. And when I say goals, really what I mean is the amount of people that I want to help serve. If I got all that today, if that happened today, it would overwhelm my nervous system. It was too much. And so what I would probably do is sabotage that in some way or push it away. The same goes for me. Four years ago, if you told me, my company, we were gonna have a really incredible, expansive team of people and all the stuff going on and a podcast like this, it would have been too much for my nervous system, and I would have found a way to push it away or sabotage it. So every single person is right on pace, right on track. What we want to do is consistently build our capacity to step into the things that we're desiring. And I'm going to, in a moment, just give you a simple way to start doing that. Now. The other reason why you might find yourself having an experience like this wonderful, beautiful woman experience, explain of why can't I just step towards the things I really want, even though I want them so much, is because of this. Again, I have a. I have such a luxury that I get to work with so many thousands of people because I get to hear how normal all of this is. So normal. And I hear it every day, all day long. You know, for most of us, maybe you listening, you don't get to hear it every day because nobody talks about this stuff. And when we're in the world, we're all good at masking and smiling and pretending we're okay when we're not really okay. And the result of that is it leaves us feeling like we're the only one. But what I can say is, in working with so many people, I have never found this not to be true. That wherein Lies our greatest calling and purpose or purposes. Lies our greatest healing. Never found that not to be true. I think to me it's the way the universe, God, whatever you call this great mystery thing we're doing, has a way of trying to help us to become fully self actualized. It's like a dangle's a carrot for us. Which by the way is really annoying. As someone, somebody who's experienced this with the universe, I can say, like, it also bugs me and also is very kind that it does this. And, and what I mean by that is this. Remember how the threat detector works? It looks for flavorings or similarities. So more often than not, the things you want the most have flavorings of things that were unavailable or dangerous in the past. For example, let's say you want to start a business and that's going to require you to use your voice, take up space, ask for help, make mistakes. It will require you being vulnerable. It will require you exposing yourself to desiring something. And you don't know if it's going to be successful or what's going to happen on the other side. It requires you to let go and so many other things. Now if in the past it wasn't safe to use your voice to make mistakes, to take up space, to ask for help, to be vulnerable and for that to be received and so on and so forth. Every time that, that you step towards the thing that you're desiring, you try to step towards it. Your nervous system will stop you in the form of dysregulation because it's saying, the threat detector is saying, why are you doing that? That wasn't safe in the past. You must be confused. You're welcome. I will stop you so that you don't have to feel the pain of what you felt in the past. Because remember, if your nervous system has to choose between your greatest calling and desires or your safety, it will, hands down, 100% of the time, choose your safety. So I say this a lot. You know, if you're finding yourself really stuck around stepping towards the things you want, the relationship you want, family, maybe your purpose, and you find yourself really stuck, that's a clue. You're probably on the right track. When we're in something that doesn't matter very much to us, it's probably not our calling. It's way easier to do. Have you found that? I sure have found that in my life. Like it's so much easier to mobilize towards that thing. So, so what we can't do and I can Tell you as someone who tried it is battle against your nervous system. If you try to do that, it will win 10 out of 10 a hundred percent of the time because it's stronger than our strongest will that we have. What we can do is begin showing not telling our nervous system that the thing we're desiring is safe. Simple way to do that is through something I call tolerable steps. And that simply means it's engaging in some something that doesn't feel good because your nervous system is saying I don't know about that, I don't know about that based on the past. So it's not going to feel good. But you can complete the step, meaning I'm actually able to mobilize through it. When you break the step down small enough, it doesn't overwhelm your nervous system and your nervous system is receptive to allowing you to mobilize through. So you know the step's not tolerable if you can't complete it. So really thinking, how can I break down the step within the step that's going to support you to mobilize? The other thing I just want to say is co regulation. So co regulation is connecting to another person's nervous system. There's two ways we regulate self regulation, co regulation and when we connect to another living being's nervous system, it's like a boost to support us to be able to do or mobilize. So before you're going to take a challenging step, doing something like that's highly regulating, could be self regulating or being with a loved one, going working in a coffee shop around other people. People will support you to be able to do this. The more you gather data points or disconfirming experiences that we've previously talked about, the more your nervous system is going to let you step into the life that you are here to live. And your healing is the way to it. Hi Sarah, Please explain more about shutdown states and specifically about shame, chronic shame or maybe different types of shame that trauma can make and how we can heal that shame. Thank you. So shame is the internalization of what happened to us, the internalization of trauma really. And it is experienced as this man beautifully and eloquently explained in our state of shutdown or dorsal. So for many of us we had experiences in our lives, whether that was in our childhood or later in our lives where when we were in danger the it wouldn't have been safe for us to mobilize and do. Meaning it wouldn't be safe to say you can't speak to me that way. No, it wouldn't be safe to leave the house and say, I'm not, I'm not putting up with this anymore. When you're 10 years old, it wouldn't be safe to fight back. And, and there would have perhaps been a worse consequence. And I don't mean, you know, this doesn't have to be terrible abuse happening to you. It may be that you had a parent who would get frustrated a lot and they would say to you something like, oh, why did you. Sorry if that sounded so loud in your airpod when I just did that. If they yelled at you and said like, why are you doing that thing again? Oh my gosh, you left your crap around the house. Oh, right. They say that to you. And you knew if you said, hey, can you not talk to me that way? It's not okay that your caregiver didn't have enough emotional regulation in their nervous system to handle that and they would have gotten more frustrated with you. So what you learned to do was be quiet and take it. Does that make sense? I said, oh my goodness, isn't that funny? As you're listening, I said that, does that make sense? I never told you why I titled this podcast. Does do you make sense? Because I have always said for years and years and years, you make sense. Everything about you makes sense. So sometimes I'll say, does that make sense? Anyway, that's just a side note. That's not really necessary right now, but we're going to keep that in there just so you can see that this is just recorded and we don't over edit it. So anyway, this doesn't have to be just for somebody who has a big trauma history like mine or maybe the person who sent that recording in. This is something that so many of us have experienced. Another example is in school, right? You had a teacher who bullied you a bit or was tough on you. It wouldn't have been okay to say, listen, you can't do that. I don't know, you must be very unhappy at home, but you can't take that out on me. Whatever wouldn't have been safe. So we internalize and the internalization of our trauma or our experiences creates shame. So no longer is that act or that behavior bad. I'm bad now. Reason why children internalize shame is because children are actually egocentric. They're self focused and, and this is actually quite good and part of the developmental process. And then we learn empathy and so on and so forth, but self focused. Now if a Child was in a home where their caregivers couldn't meet their needs. Maybe they were loving, but they were, you know, an alcoholic or they were emotionally immature, Whatever. That is not a safe environment for the kid. But so if a kid was to actually name, wow, I'm more, you know, at 10 years old, I'm more emotionally mature than my caregiver. That wouldn't make the child feel very, very safe. So instead, a child has to say, no, my parent is really good. I must be bad. My parent is good and I'm bad. That's very adaptive that we do that. All kids will do that. And then I internalize the experience, and that creates shame. Another way that I think about this is like. Like a dirty sweater. Once a therapist gave me this way of thinking about it. I think it's really beautiful that when we internalize something that happens to us, it's like we get this tattered sweater that was kind of thrown up onto us by the person whom we were interacting with. And we wear that sweater, and we think this old tattered sweater is our skin. We think it's us, but it's not our skin. It's a sweater. Now, the thing is, there is no amount of talking yourself out of shame that is going to work. I can tell you I tried that for a full decade. I was abused most of my childhood, and there was no amount of people saying to me, it wasn't your fault, Sarah. You didn't do anything wrong to deserve this. That actually made me feel like that was true. I cognitively understood it. They would say, sarah, would you think any other child was disgusting? And I would say, no, of course not. But I don't feel it myself. And that's because shame lives in your nervous system. It does not live up in your thinking brain. Now, something we haven't talked about yet is that there's actually a hierarchy or order that you come into your nervous system and go out of it. So if you're in dorsal, in order to get to regulation, you have to go through your sympathetic nervous system to get to ventral. And when you're in dorsal, what's actually occurring is. And if you're not watching this on video, I'm just going to show you to tell you what I'm doing. Imagine I made a fist, okay? That fist is all the sympathetic activation I was experiencing. That overwhelm. Endorsal helps to cover up the overwhelm of activation. So what I'm doing with my other hand is I'm putting it over that fist Think of it like it's a blanket covering up the fist of activation. That's what dorsal, dorsal is, okay? So in order to come out of shame, where that is all experience, that internalization, we have to lift the cloak of dorsal and come into something that Peter Levine calls healthy aggression, which is in the sympathetic nervous system. You're addressing that fist, all that activation. Healthy aggression is your life force energy and it's your ability to self protect. It always matches the circumstance at hand. So healthy aggression is something as simple as you go to a restaurant, they give you the wrong food and you say, oh hey, actually I, I didn't order the steak, I ordered tacos. And they say, oh, I'm so sorry, let me get that for you. So I'm speaking up for myself. That's healthy aggression. Now a higher level of healthy aggression. If someone is, you know, yelling at me, I might say to them, you can't speak to me that way. And if you continue speaking to me that way, I'm going to leave. That's appropriate to the experience. Can you see how there's a different level of energy in my body when I did that? I'm not like I was with the waiter because it is requiring higher levels of self protection. So a part of coming out of shame is dealing with or being with the appropriate response to whatever happened to us. For me, I can tell you that that was quite intense healthy aggression to come into that helped to remediate my shame because I, because I had quite severe abuse in my, in my childhood. So because of that I had to really lean into and build capacity in my nervous system to be with the approach appropriate response, which is quite a high fight response. And of course this doesn't mean that I'm going to go harm someone. It's that my r physiology is waiting to complete the incomplete experience. That's what trauma is about. So complete the incomplete experience means do what I wasn't able to do. For me that meant like I need to stop you. Which you know, would have, would have been quite aggressive. And my body needed to be able to, to feel that, process it through in a somatic container and release it. And we, and this is a beautiful thing. This is not unkind. This is a safe thing. This is how that shame that's been internalized becomes, becomes externalized. Something as simple as this to begin building our capacity to be with healthy aggression is when I'm noticing I'm frustrated if I have like some, let me think it could be something like literally like, like a stick that you hold the stick and you take all of that activation, that sympathetic activation, and you channel it into your hands. So really feeling the intensity of that, however big it is, you might notice that it becomes more heat in your body, there's more tension and then allowing that energy to break the stick. So, see, there's nothing cognitive about that. It's all embodied. I am showing my system it is safe to be in this life force energy. It is safe to defend my myself. And the last thing I want to say about this is, and this is normal and loving. If you have anybody have cats got somebody have cats. Somebody that is wonderfully producing this podcast for me has two cats in the other room. Cats. When you have cats together or any animals, they might get in a tiff, right? One cat has a toy and the other one's saying, hey, that's my toy. Because they pulled it away from them and they might do something like hiss. What are they doing? They're showing healthy aggression. They're saying, hey, buzz off. That's mine. And I'm not okay with you taking taking it. And that doesn't mean they're unkind. That doesn't mean they're bad. It's actually really beautiful, healthy life force energy. And so to remediate shame, we have to come back into this. And this is also the way that we heal chronic illness in our bodies in a way that we really have access to our creativity and our energy of creation. It's all our life force energy.