Our topic today is somatic expressive therapy. Our guest is Victoria Ellington-Deitz.
Victoria is a licensed professional counselor and a registered somatic movement therapist. She works with teens and adults. She helps clients experiencing anxiety, stress, trauma, depression, anger, self-harming behaviors, and problems regulating behavior and emotion. She also works at Insight Counseling and Wellness. I’m lucky enough to call her my colleague.
Welcome, Victoria. I’m excited to learn more about somatic expressive therapy.
Let’s start by explaining the model and the intention of somatic expressive therapy.
Somatic expressive therapy is a body centered therapy created by Dan Levin, who trains out of Life Movement in Massachusetts. It focuses on the felt sense; the feelings and sensations we have in our body. The expressive part is using art, movement, writing, journaling, any kind of expression to help understand and deepen our connection with the body centered part of our knowing.
Our thoughts have all kinds of opinions. They want to lead us to interpret what we’re experiencing. Yet so much of what we’re experiencing is unconscious or implicit. This is a way of allowing our thoughts to take the back seat and developing a deeper listening for what is really going on. That helps us get to our deeper beliefs, deeper emotions, and understand patterns that we get stuck in but are not sure what has happened.
What does it look like the process?
Depending on the person, there are many different ways to use somatic expressive therapy.
First, we sit down together and it’s always an invitation, wherever the person is comfortable. It might start with talking. Is there a situation that the person struggling with? If so, we can check in and see how’s your body reacts. Do you notice any sensation?
We could also start with a body scan. A body scan is noticing your body and then turning inward and scanning for any sensations or emotions. We have a body scan meditation on the podcast website so you can practice a body scan after this if you’d like.
We’re gleaning information. We’ll find a sensation in the body. Often what comes up is tension in the shoulders. We’ll go to the shoulders and ask what it’s connected to. Is it connected to the situation? We can then go to drawing or to the art piece. Maybe there is a movement to accentuate the feeling in the shoulders. The intention is to glean more information. Our thoughts want to interpret for us but here we’re trying to work directly with the sensation.
Let’s say we’re using art and you tell me you have no art skills. That was already a slight judgement. Like how would I even create or draw attention in my shoulders zone? I love stick figures and coloring and blobs.
It’s a way of helping us, especially if we’re going towards something that has overwhelmed our nervous system, to look at it objectively. It gives us one degree of separation from what’s going on internally, which our biology often causes us to move away from.
We are using somatic expressive therapy, using attention, to move towards attending to what is going on with us. We can attend to patterns, emotional feelings, or overwhelm that seems scary to us, or we don’t want to move towards. It’s a survival strategy to avoid, shut down or disengage.
It sounds like this process you’re describing first honors the emotions in our body and what’s happening and then uses our body’s wisdom to get more information.
The art helps engage your prefrontal cortex which allows us, in a way, to step into that one degree of separation where it’s safer to explore. It’s not so alive in the system, it’s on the page.
Can you share with me an example of what that looks like, so that we can imagine it and understand it more?
Often, we carry tension in our shoulders. If we turn towards our body, we automatically feel this tension. To identify that, we would move our attention towards the body, have a short body scan, just noticing. Then we can go to drawing. Can you draw a simple picture or a symbol of what that feels like, what that tension is? Some are very simple; some people get elaborate and that’s fine too.
Then we use the picture as an external way of looking at the tension in our shoulders. We talk directly to the sensation. We’re dipping into the slower part of our processing; some people call it wisdom brain. It’s just the slower thinking. We have quick thinking that we need every day. It keeps us safe in day-to-day interactions. Then we have slower thinking, broader thinking, more perspective, bringing in different factors to fully explore the situation.
We asked the picture to explain any concepts of the world. It sounds like a belief. How does that resonate with you? So, checking in with the body, checking in with that sensation, does that resonate, there could be a belief in there that you are responsible.
Then we move towards emotions. The intention is to notice, to attend to, but also find out what that area needs. What did your shoulders need? Can we add an image? Is there a visualization there? Is that belief really working for us? As we explore, we’re continually checking in with the person, first somatically and then using the art to express that tension.
Suddenly a drawing about shoulder tension or a symbol drawing, can lead us to a place of, wow, I feel like I’m really expected to carry the outcome of not only myself, but everyone around me, to make sure everyone’s okay, to make sure everyone’s emotions are okay, to make sure good things happen.
It takes that slower knowing, that slower processing system, to find that wisdom. We don’t do that often. We are just trying to get through that day and resolve what happens next.
Often, when I lead meditations, people say, I didn’t even notice my jaw had tension until slowing down and going inward. I didn’t notice my shoulders. One of them was curling up and in because of tension and stress until I slowed down and explored that. Then, what beliefs are being held in my body?
We are not taught to slow down and to navigate our body sensations. It’s not taught in our culture. To sit back and listen to that slower wisdom or listen to our body, through our bodies or any way that we can sit quietly.
Once the information about what’s happening is discovered or some deeper beliefs uncovered, what happens next in the process?
Then, we become curious about it and how to help. A lot of times the need for safety comes up. Our body holds a lot of experiences where we felt unsafe, unsupported, or that our system was overwhelmed.
Biologically it’s unconscious. We automatically close up and organize ourselves away from it. So, when we turn towards it, fear can arise because we get the signal from our alarm system that we shouldn’t go there. There’s danger. But it’s a biological misunderstanding. Dan Levin describes it as swimming upstream. We have to swim against our natural instincts to become curious about this pattern.
When safety comes up, we get to talk about. We get to figure out how we can create a sense of safety and move forward from there. Everything comes back to creating this safe container for the exploration to happen.
I can imagine that part of the work of somatic expressive therapy would also involve helping settle the nervous system and helping the whole brain and body feel safe. How does that show up in this work?
Often when we are dysregulated or we feel overwhelmed or, however, it comes up for us when we feel scared, our thoughts are going to explain it. Often, we can’t rely on our thoughts because they are really quick and based on past information. We work with the immediacy of our body and that taps into connection with our nervous system.
Moving towards the body, there’s an unconscious message that it’s scary. When we can feel our body, even if we’re not in our body, we can feel where we are in relation to our body. That is a step toward soothing our nervous system. There’s more of a connection. Asking what it needs is regulating and helps us feel more ground.
A lot of times our thoughts create a groundlessness. We have a sense of spinning. A sense of confusion.
Art can really help educate our nervous system. That, yes, we’re going to heal here. We are here to reverse a lot of patterns that have not served us or are not serving us now.
We are really big fans of the nervous system and helping the nervous system regulate and shift from activation and survival responses into what’s called ventral vagal, which is a sense of safety and connection and feeling calm and grounded.
What are some strategies that somatic expressive therapy brings to helping the nervous system regulate?
Often, we can’t shift directly to ventral vagal, but we can move towards equilibrium from any part of our nervous system. The goal is always to get to ventral vagal, but you can tap into the positive qualities of sympathetic arousal, like play. It’s personal and we get to experiment. Having ways of being that activate or open up different parts of our brain can lead us there.
Also, in general, curiosity. I use the word curiosity a lot. It helps open up different parts of the brain instead of the parts that want to close us in and keep us safe.
Another concept we use a lot is gratitude. The intention of gratitude is to help activate a different part of our brain that helps us shift away from the narrow perspective of our fear response.
If I wake up full of fear and anxiety. I’ll notice that and, if I can, call it out. There’s the fight or flight response. There’s my fire alarm. Then start wherever you can. I’m going to start by thinking, I’m grateful.
Another concept or way of being is learning to savor. Savoring is a way to help our senses open up and shift away from our alarm response. It is just noticing and really taking things in. Seeing the blue of the sky, really seeing it. Feeling the coolness of the air or a breeze. Feeling a soft blanket, really on purpose, noticing that. I like to savor the last bite of a really good meal.
This morning I was sitting on the couch having my morning coffee time and my cat was purring and she was all snugly under a blanket. I just savored it for two or three minutes, slowed myself down to feel the purse sensation, to hear it, to just be with the taste of the coffee, to feel relaxed on the couch and snugly. Those moments help ground you and get you through all the difficulties.
The next is self-appreciation. I like to open it up to just appreciation. Sometimes negative self-talk can really take over because it is connected to our fight or flight response, it’s connected to survival. Some of us have really good self-monitoring systems. If that self-monitoring system is keeping the self-appreciation system out of reach, then we can go to appreciation. It’s not to negate the things that are difficult, it’s to help open different parts of our brain, to create a network in which we can receive. It is important to activate other areas of our brain that then fire together and wire together. It’s activating and creating other neural networks so that it becomes easier and easier to offer gratitude, to savor, to maybe then offer self-appreciation. What we’ve known through experience is being proven. The mindful self-compassion website has all of the studies. This stuff is so cool.
I wanted to bring up something that’s not often discussed when we think about therapy but is understandable and almost expected to be a part of the therapy process. When we offer ourselves compassion, or we savor, or we practice gratitude, sometimes it can ‘poke the beehive’. Can you explain that a little bit more?
When we move towards compassion, in a supported way, and attend to places that didn’t have support, often what comes up is fear and negative self-talk. That’s because compassion is foreign, not necessarily to us, but to our biological system.
Our body holds on to all the situations that we’ve felt overwhelmed in and when we move towards experiencing them as a sensation, they don’t have the network to receive, so what can come up are really difficult emotions. Shame and fear are the two that I see most often.
If someone is doing really good, gentle, kind, productive work, the result or immediate response isn’t what they expect. If they feel shame instead of relief, that can be confusing. Why am I doing this then? I didn’t expect to feel worse. Compassion or support come in and there are no receptors, so it bounces back. Then we automatically think, what’s wrong with me?
What do you recommend then in those moments?
I think education about biology is so important. It’s not the person’s fault, it’s just how their nervous system and their brain are organized. We then get to work to create those networks. We get to reframe that reaction toward understanding that this is your system saying, I don’t know how to take that in, and becoming curious and how to do that. Doing this with a guide can help validate that this is common, this happens to all of us and how we can be curious and take care of ourselves so that we can continue forward instead of protecting ourselves and turning away.
The therapy process isn’t perfectly linear. There are experiences that sometimes feel a little harder before they feels better, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.
I think that often we aren’t given the room to be in the moment with ourselves and show up and welcome what comes up. Having that space and time, it takes practice.
‘Looking at the stuff isn’t bad, it’s just hard, but we can do hard things and when we do hard things, we transform.’
Thank you so much, Victoria. Thank you for joining us.
Welcome to Insight Mind Body Talk, a body-based mental health podcast.
Today we’re going to talk about self-compassion.
Self-compassion comes up a lot as therapists and in our personal lives. It is one of the things I personally practice most often. It is something that we all need and all struggle with. It’s so essential.
What does that even mean? Let’s start with the topic of compassion. Compassion comes from Latin, meaning to suffer with. It’s suffering with people. When have compassion for others, we’re able to be with them and understand their suffering.
Compassion is different from empathy. Empathy is commonly discussed as putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes. It’s feeling what the other person is feeling. While that’s necessary for us to gain insight into the other’s experience, I suggest pursuing the path of compassion, because empathy can, at times, trigger our own pain and suffering. It removes us from being present with the other person.
Often when people have empathy for someone it’s because they care about that person and want to be of support and assistance. Compassion allows us to do that because it is concern and care for that other person. It’s separate from our own internal state.
When we talk about self-compassion, we take that care and concern and shine the light on ourselves. It’s extending kindness to ourselves that we’re so often ready to extend to others, especially for caregivers cultural conditioning. They often shine their light on others around them. What self-compassion asks us to do is to utilize that skill, that strength, towards our suffering and towards our experiences and be there for ourselves just as much as others.
Often people think self-compassion, that’s selfish. In the last few years, studies show that self-compassion is really beneficial for our mental, physical, and emotional health. It’s not a selfish thing. It doesn’t mean that we’re narcissists. It means that we’re able to hold ourselves in loving awareness.
I’ve studied a lot of Kristin Neff’s work. I did the core skills training with her and Chris Germer in 2008 in Madison. She has focused her career on researching self-compassion and there’s real science behind its benefits. It’s a good thing for us. Some of the research talks about how self-compassion is linked to a reduction in negative mind states like anxiety and depression. It’s also linked to an increase in positive mind states like happiness, connectedness and optimism. It helps us to be more effective at coping with adversity, more resilient, protects us against post-traumatic stress disorder and chronic health conditions. It helps us to be more self-motivated and get more done since we don’t beat ourselves up.
I love that research exists because it really helps debunk this myth that self-compassion isn’t useful. We are in a culture where criticism runs the show. We’re hard on ourselves, we judge ourselves, we judge others. We’ve learned through time that that doesn’t work nearly as well as using befriending, care and compassion towards yourself.
Compassion even helps us speed up recovery from disease. Research shows that it can lengthen our lifespan. When we pick our mate the trait that’s most highly valued in our potential romantic partner, studies suggest is kindness. It helps our internal relationship as well as our external, mental and physical. It’s everywhere.
Yesterday, I was having a conversation with some colleagues and we were talking about Cobra, Kai, Johnny and Daniel. It’s one of our favorite topics here. The consensus was we liked Johnny. We liked the bad boy. But who do we choose in our lives? We choose somebody who is kind.
It also got me thinking about Dylan and Brandon and 90210. Didn’t everybody want Dylan. The bad boy, right? My colleague pointed out to me; you married Brandon. It’s true. I married the nicest man in the world. Stay tuned for an episode on 90210.
Let’s talk about how compassion impacts our mental health.
When I talk about self-compassion, I begin by describing the second arrow. The Buddha discusses the second arrow and that as humans we experience pain, experience suffering. That is the first arrow. The second arrow is when we don’t offer ourselves compassion. When we’re critical or judgmental. The second arrow is one that we bring upon ourselves. It goes straight into the first one and it hits that same wound again. Often, we experience something that is traumatic or hard for us and then our thoughts, behaviors, and beliefs keep that wound alive. Self-compassion can stop that, or at least slow it down. When we turn towards ourselves with love and forgiveness, we eliminate the second arrow.
That fits perfectly with the tenants of mindful self-compassion, which is the program that Kristin Neff and Chris Germer have created based on Eastern contemplative practices, mindfulness versus identifying with ourselves. Essentially, one of the core tenants has to do with being aware that we continue to twist that second arrow. As humans, we do that. Another one of the tenants is common humanity versus isolation. This is something that we all experience. All humans suffer. Suffering is inevitable.
Another one of Buddha’s gems, the first noble truth is one of the ways I practice self-compassion. Trusting that I’m human and I’m going to make mistakes. That I’ve had experiences that have shaped how I react and the choices I make. And, along the way, I’ve hurt people as much as I’ve been hurt. Choosing to honor that I’m imperfect. Honoring that I’m human and allowing myself space and forgiveness. I can’t control if other people forgive me, but I can control if I forgive myself. That’s the third tenant of mindful self-compassion, self-kindness versus self-judgment.
We’re all ready to judge ourselves, but if we can offer self-kindness and understanding when we’re suffering, we’re able to change our relationship with suffering.
That’s what this is really all about. It’s not about erasing the pain. It’s about changing our relationship to the pain so that we can be in the same room with it, be able to tolerate it, allow it, maybe eventually befriend it.
There’s a saying “feel it in order to heal it”. Absolutely. Yeah, let’s talk about neurology.
We need some empathy because there is suffering in the world, and we need to honor that other people are suffering in order to serve and help. Often though, I meet people who feel burnt out because they care so much. We want to transition them to compassion because when we experience empathy, research shows that it lights up pain sensors because we truly are feeling what that other person is feeling. When we have compassion, we have mindful separation. Our internal state can remain regulated, and we can offer care and concern for someone else. That lights up pleasure centers in our brain. It’s almost as a misnomer to talk about compassion fatigue, because those of us in the helping professions, we’re really experiencing empathy fatigue. If we feel for someone so deeply, it can freeze us. It can shut us down.
I heard Mare Chapman once give a story like this, which was really helpful for me in thinking about empathy versus compassion.
If you’re on a hike with your BFF and they trip and fall and they break their leg and you’re like two miles from your car, the empathetic response would be, “I should feel what you’re feeling. I will break my leg too.” If you have compassion, you can see their suffering and ask, “What can I do to help?” I can carry you or make some sort of stick cast. I can’t do any of that if I’m literally in pain. If I break my own leg, how helpful am I right to that person?
Compassion allows us to stay grounded in ourselves yet take action to support that person. We don’t get lost in the pain.
We can see how that’s analogous with self-compassion. We have to be really kind to ourselves when we’re suffering. It’s the human condition to really identify with that pain and attach to it, but if we can show ourselves kindness when we’re in pain, we will move through it or change our relationship to it.
We will also have a lot more awareness of what’s happening. That’s where mindful self-compassion is really powerful. It gives us tools to work with really difficult emotions. What mindful self-compassion would tell us to do is to identify and label those emotions. We do that through being aware of our own experience. The key is to become aware of them in the body. Identify where we find these emotions in the body because only then can we start to soften in our physiology, sooth ourselves, and then just allow that pain to dissipate.
There’s been research on where emotions are felt in our bodies. When you feel a swell of love for someone, where do you feel that? Where do you feel shame? Whenever I feel shame or embarrassment, my face flushes right away. The research is showing that that is common. It was a 2014 study. We can put a link in the show notes.
They did heat maps of their body to see where emotions were felt. As you can expect anger is a hot red head, throat, chest. With love, we can really see a warmth across the heart region. Then, shame just like you described is bright red cheeks.
It’s so fascinating. If it’s in the body, we can work on healing. We can have an awareness of what’s happening in our bodies and then start to offer compassion, soothing and openness. When it’s in the body, we can work with that. It isn’t just something that we can talk our way out of.
I go back to another research study, where they looked at a compassionate lifestyle. Someone who chooses to offer compassion towards themselves and others, has a lens of forgiveness and understanding. It proves to be a really wonderful buffer for stress. Using compassion predicts a longer life, and when we die, there’s less disease, less inflammation, less suffering than those who don’t live a compassionate lifestyle. Research shows that when people live a compassionate lifestyle and treat themselves kindly, rather than critically, they are more likely to believe that they can improve, that they can correct mistakes so that they can re-engage with their goals. It really helps us fight against self-judgment, the procrastination that follows, stress, rumination, all the things that stop us in our tracks and stop us from growing.
We tend to think that we need to motivate ourselves with punishment. If being hard on ourselves was going to work, it would have by now. Most of us have a few decades of that experience under our belts. So why don’t we try something different? Why don’t we try being kind to ourselves? It doesn’t mean that we’re going to just let everything go. In fact, research shows that it actually motivates us more.
I talk a lot with clients who are trying to make lifestyle changes or movement changes, or who have a defined goal they’ve tried to reach multiple different times in their life. With that follows perhaps shame or self-judgment or criticism. I acknowledge that we live in a culture that thinks criticism is how we achieve a goal.
If we think about it, you’re going back to the neurological response to criticism. It’s a threat, right? When we experience a threat, we go into a threat response. We freeze or we flee, or we shut down. Compassion is the antidote to those responses. When we’re compassionate towards each other, we can bring ourselves into that ventral vagal place of safety, regulation, feeling calm, feeling kind. That does create more space that helps the growth mindset.
Our ancestors had a really highly developed stress response system. That’s why we’re here today, because they understood fear, ran away from threats and lived to tell the tale.
We’re still in that cycle of stress response. That sets off this cascade of negative things in our bodies where we’re flooded with stress hormones which lead to disease and it’s because we’ve got that critical, fearful voice.
What’s the harm of starting to rewire it, even just with a little kindness toward ourselves? There’s a lot of good that can come from that. Our nature is to experience suffering. Yet, we can honor that and then be gentle with it.
We’re built to do this. It’s a survival response because not only does it help our physical and mental health, but it also helps everybody. Compassion is contagious. When you see those people who pay for the coffee for the car behind them and it lasts an hour and a half.
We need to practice random acts of kindness for ourselves too. This is not a selfish thing. It doesn’t mean that we treat ourselves to something that might be detrimental. It means that we greet ourselves as we would a friend. Maybe that’s a 10-minute meditation break, getting on the yoga mat, having a dance party in the kitchen.
Compassion is about meeting ourselves where we’re at. Allowing ourselves to set down, as Brene Brown talks about, that shield of perfectionism. I’ll just put my hand on my heart or on my arm, soothing rubbing my arm. Compassionate touch. After hearing Mary Chapman explain this, I’ve started practicing saying out loud to myself, I’m sorry this is so hard for you. Just my ears hearing I’m sorry releases oxytocin and dopamine. Not excusing, not trying to make sense of it, just honoring.
One that I often do with my clients is an affectionate breathing meditation. Allowing our breath to rock us, to soothe us, can be very powerful.
I also really enjoy tapping. We haven’t talked too much about tapping, the emotional freedom technique. Stay tuned for more on that.
When I was working with Annie Forest who was on our podcast a few weeks ago, she created for me a parasympathetic workout to calm my system and be present for myself.
Things like red light therapy, that warmth and feeling the slowing down of my nervous system.
I was also doing coat sleeves. Imagine you’re a kindergartner and you took your arms inside your winter coat. And then you flap your sleeves back into the coat. While you’re waiting in line, that can be really regulating. That creates space for being present with those emotions and offering compassion.
I like to pair that to that body work with mindfulness work. That’s the key. We have a group here at Insight on self-compassion using yoga and mindfulness tools. It’s so powerful.
These tools are so accessible to anyone. They can be practiced on the floor, in bed, anywhere really. They can help us shift our physiology and our nervous system toward more kindness toward ourselves.
We all have that inner critic, that self-judgment, that voice that we get to really identify. And we have the ability then to flip the script to really change that to a more compassionate voice, a compassionate witness to our experience. That’s what we’re looking for. We can do that ourselves. It’s so empowering. When we can hold ourselves in kindness, we can really start to see shifts.
I read a quote from Tara Brock, the meditation teacher and psychologist. She described that palliative care givers often say that the greatest regret expressed by the dying is that they didn’t live true to themselves. She believes to live true we need to awaken this self-compassion and love ourselves into healing.
We have more resources on our website if listeners are interested in cultivating self-compassion and exploring what that means for them. Go to www.insightmadison.com/podcast.
I’m feeling lots of kindness for all beings, including myself.
Welcome to Insight Mind Body Talk, a body-based mental health podcast.
Today, we’re excited to talk with you about the Polyvagal Theory. It’s probably our favorite thing. It has really changed my perception of other people’s behavior as well as my own.
It’s the foundation of the trauma work that I do. Bringing awareness, not just emotionally or from our thoughts, but from the nervous system, the body and the brain. Noticing when our system’s dysregulated versus what happens when we’re feeling safe and calm.
This is a very special episode. We are framing it through the lens of the Karate Kid and Cobra Kai.
We’re going to give you a brief explanation of Polyvagal Theory. Then, we’re going to fan girl all over Cobra Kai, and explore these relationships and the perspectives and wisdom that this show can offer.
We’ll probably touch on a bit of childhood trauma as well, because there’s really no way to look at the Karate Kid and Cobra Kai without considering intergenerational trauma and adverse childhood experiences.
All right, let’s go.
How would you explain the theory of the Vagus Nerve?
I usually start with the concept of survival. We are wired for survival and are a complex network of systems. Those systems need to be in balance, homeostasis. The sense of safety is very crucial to that balance.
We used to just think about the balance between our parasympathetic nervous system and our sympathetic nervous system. If we’re looking at the big umbrella, we’re looking at our brainstem and spinal cord, central nervous system, autonomic nervous system as a part of that. It’s the automatic part of us that keeps us alive, that keeps, that helps us survive. Where we’re going out to get food, running and fighting and all that stuff that, but also needing to chill out, to rest, to be immobile, to sleep, to procreate, to digest her food. Those two systems can click on and off with some fluidity and then we find homeostasis.
Once in a while we get out of balance, but then we can come back into balance.
That’s our traditional view of our nervous system, but there’s more. In the eighties and nineties, Stephen Porges, discovered a different framework to look at all of this that has to do with our Vagus Nerve.
The Vagus Nerve is the 10th cranial nerve. The cranium, the base of the skull, is a big nerve. More than just a nerve, it’s nerve bundles. It’s the network. It’s the highway from the brain to the body.
These different pathways go to all the different organs in our bodies. They communicate to our muscles to move, to mobilize blood flow, our breath, our heart rate, our digestive system. All of these things that keep us going are connected to this autonomic nervous system.
There’s one pathway that moves down from the brain to the body. There are four from the body communicating up to the brain.
That means, listening to the wisdom of the body and bringing the body into our health and healing, allows us to get to our root causes a lot more quickly than if we are just using the brain to solve problems.
The Vagus Nerve goes all the way down through our torso. The oldest of its pathways is below the diaphragm. The diaphragm is our biggest muscle of breath, where our lungs end, and our stomach begins. The diaphragm is the bridge between those areas. This is where our immobilization response lives. Our freeze response. Below and above the diaphragm we have all these sympathetic fibers. Those parts of the Vagus Nerve innervate our limbs and mobilize us for action.
There’s even a newer Vagus Nerve pathway, more than fight or flight and rest and digest, that’s actually myelinated. This is where Stephen Porges blew the lid off this whole balance theory. The nerve that is associated with this, he calls the ventral vagal.
It’s the response of connection. A more sophisticated nerve that enervates and connects our face or throat and our heart. A kind of tend and befriend response. We have shutdown, immobilization, mobilization or the sympathetic fight or flight, and now we’re looking at connection.
Essentially, we go through these responses every day. What you’re talking about is the autonomic hierarchy. When someone feels safe and connected, they feel like they can move through things with ease.
If you have a threat that feels dangerous, you mobilize. The first thing a mammal will do is flee. Then it will try to fight. Somewhere in there, it could try to fawn or have an attachment cry response. These are all strategies of mobilization. If those strategies don’t work, which is decided in milliseconds, we travel even further down to the most ancient response, freeze and shut down.
We move up and down this autonomic hierarchy depending on the threat. The way that our nervous system decides what to do is a concept called neuroception.
Neuroception is our nervous system and brain continually gathering information from our internal experience (heart rate, breath, digestion, muscle tension) then from external sources, (our environment, things happening around us) and lastly from other nervous systems around us. So, if you walk up to someone and they’re feeling panicky, you may start to feel that panic as well, or if they’re feeling shut down you may notice your body starts to feel shut down as well. We’re constantly reading each other through neuroception.
The last concept, co-regulation. Co-regulation is when we move into that ventral vagal nerve, that social engagement system, that sense of safety, through each other and through connection. If we’re feeling overwhelmed, we can find someone who is regulated and naturally our nervous system begins to feel safe. Co-regulation starts when we’re in our mother’s wombs, reading their nervous system.
Your clients are co-regulating in therapy. This is some really dense stuff we’re covering. A lot of scientific neurobiology. The bottom line is that if you are a loving, safe presence for people, you’re creating a healing space. If somebody comes to you and you meet them, in their anxiety or in their sense of shutdown, you’re not going to be able to go anywhere. You have to be completely grounded. That means being able to regulate yourself and conveying to them with really subtle signals that you are a safe person to attach to.
When I frame polyvagal theory with clients, I often frame it as it’s not that we’re supposed to avoid feeling that sympathetic energy. That’s not the point. It really is to spend more time in ventral vagal.
Also, this idea of practicing the skill of autonomic resiliency so when we do feel a threat, we’re more easily able to get ourselves back to ventral vagal. It takes awareness. We don’t always know how the system retunes itself. Sometimes it happens over time and with care and attention. There’s no magic prescription for this either.
That takes us into Cobra Kai.
The Karate Kid, starring Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita, hit theaters in June of 1984. I was four years old. This is the one movie I remember seeing in a theater where I couldn’t sit with my family because it was so crowded. It was one of the most immersive experiences.
It was very much good versus evil in a really simplistic way. This person’s good. This person’s evil. That’s what really stuck with me until recently.
Daniel LaRusso and his mom moved to a new town across the country. He’s from Jersey. He moves to California and he’s having trouble fitting into the culture at his new school. He’s picked on, he’s bullied, basically for just being new and different.
Mr. Miyagi is the apartment maintenance manager of Daniel’s apartment building.
Unbeknownst to Daniel, he flirts with Johnny Lawrence’s ex-girlfriend, Ali. Johnny’s the leader of this unforgiving brutal Cobra Kai karate dojo led by John Kreese.
Daniel gets into some fights and doesn’t do very well. At one point, Mr. Miyagi shows up on the scene and he steps in and basically whoops everybody’s butt to protect Daniel.
Daniel becomes super interested in Mr. Miyagi. They bond and become very close. There’s lots of montages of them training. They get pressured to join the All-Valley tournament and Daniel gets to show off his new skills.
It’s very intense. Daniel wins.
Then, in subsequent movies around the same plot line, there’s lots of Mr. Miyagi wisdom, lots of martial arts.
Moving forward, Cobra Kai.
It’s been 34 years since the All-Valley tournament. Daniel beat Johnny in the final and it was humiliating. Mr. Miyagi’s mindful self-defense overcame Sensei Kreese’s strike first, strike hard, no mercy philosophy.
Mr. Miyagi and Daniel defeated this force of evil, these irredeemable characters of Johnny and Sensei Kreese. Johnny actually comes up to Daniel afterwards and tells them you’re all right, LaRusso. Something changes where he gets it. He has a sense of connection with Daniel. He feels safe enough to congratulate him. Then he goes outside and Kreese yells at him and I’m sure that sense of safety completely dissipates and shifts and back into a protection mode of fight.
34 years later, Cobra Kai picks up the story from Johnny’s perspective.
Now we fast forward and Johnny is fired from his job, estranged from his son and crushing Coors banquets constantly. Dude has some wicked addiction issues happening.
Juxtapose that with Daniel LaRusso. He is a successful car salesman, owns a bunch of car dealerships. He’s married with kids. Financially well off. He’s got billboards around town that say, kick the competition.
It tells the story of what that feels like for Johnny. He’s very angry. He’s very much stuck in that fight response and some immobilization mobilization. He has a lot of pain that he’s turning away from him. He’s turning towards alcohol. He’s turning away from connection.
Through three seasons, we see where that pain comes from for Johnny. We see his childhood where as much as he wanted and tried by making bids for love and connection to a stepfather, he was repeatedly turned away, mocked, made fun of. His only source of regulation and safety is his mom and his mother passes away right before his son is born.
Johnny’s uses the coping strategies that he knows, which are addiction and withdrawal protection. His son is being born and he can’t even get himself to go across the street and see his son because he’s in such a place of shutdown due to his mother’s death. From that moment, his story of shame around not being there for his son, influences the whole trajectory with Robby and how he relates to Robby and how Robby feels. That intergenerational pattern.
Robby’s story of protection, from not feeling safe to feeling safe and regulated with Daniel and then again, later in the series, Robby, again, feels that he cannot connect, he’s not safe, he doesn’t belong, and he goes back to protecting himself.
This is a story of constantly shifting allegiances. Everybody changes teams constantly. When you think about it that makes a lot of sense. I go where I find safety. It might not be a good connection, but when we have childhood trauma, any attachment feels safe, even if it’s not a healthy attachment.
Let’s think about Johnny’s childhood. He had an overbearing stepdad. It looked like he was the privileged one because he lived in the Hills. He was abused. He wasn’t seen. He found connection with other kids who also had the same experience. Then they find an attachment figure, Sensei Kreese, who was ruthless. He was just normal.
I think a great way to summarize him is he really believed protection and anger meant strength. These kids are already wired for this because of the adversity, because of the trauma. On the other hand, Daniel and Mr. Miyagi, are more about connecting, being aware of their own experience and then responding rather than reacting.
As we were talking about before, with neuroception, our nervous system and sense of safety can be shifted by our senses.
Here’s an exercise. Take a moment to create a blank slate, maybe close your eyes, or soften your gaze and check in with how your system feels right now.
I’m going to play a clip as to what it feels like to train with Johnny. Pay close attention to how your nervous system feels, how your muscles respond, how your breath and heart rate respond. Imagine yourself a part of the Cobra Kai dojo.
Here we go.
What’s your response to that?
I jumped and felt full body alert. I’m mobilized. It didn’t feel very safe.
Total fear response. Even when he does it during the show, I freeze and feel muscle tension. My heart feels like it jumps. I stop breathing and move into freeze mode. I was ready to defend.
We’re not thinking, it happens automatically. You mobilize. I freeze.
His brain is not developed yet, so he’s all respond, all reaction.
Then, let’s get a little bit of what it’s like to train with Daniel.
What’s your response to that?
I’m so soothed. He’s using the prosody of voice that really appeals to our Ventral Vagus. He is connecting. He’s creating a sense of safety. I don’t feel like fighting. I’m more connected to my body. I’m more aware of my thoughts. I’m able to hear what he’s saying and integrate it.
Those are two very different styles and two very different responses.
Remember, this is a show about attempting to train teenagers in self-defense, which is a wonderful thing. Martial arts is a discipline. It is very much about tolerating distress. It’s about mobilizing when necessary and being able to discern right from wrong, good from evil.
When we look at all of the nervous systems that are going into this, that’s what makes it such a great show. It is nostalgic, but what does that mean? That nostalgia that means with pain, right?
We’re almost painfully reliving those experiences because I think we can all relate. We can all relate to being an impressionable teen. Who are those influences for us? Was it more of a Sensei Kreese or was it a Mr. Miyagi?
Cobra Kai frequently echoes the words of Mr. Miyagi.
The key thing. Whole life has balance. Everything will be better.
Daniel translates that to be the bonsai tree. You are the tree Robby. You’ve got strong roots. You know who you are, so now all you have to do is visualize what you want your future to look like and make that happen.
The idea of balance and homeostasis is a key theme throughout this show. How we find that through connection or when we don’t often because the characters are protecting themselves because of what they’ve been through.
When we see Sensei Kreese’s backstory, it all starts to make sense. We look at the generations that came before and what injuries were inflicted to create the people that we see today. Yet when we experience Kreese we wonder, how can this person be so cruel? How can there be such little empathy? Through flashbacks, you see how kind and caring he was when he was younger. We see how the loss he experienced and trauma from war shaped his nervous system and created a sense of fight, a sense of attack. That’s the way that he figures out how to navigate the world so that he can stay safe, so he can survive. He learned to strike first, to strike hard, and to show no mercy. It was all about survival.
Cobra Kai shows us there really is no good or bad. We’re all human.
It highlights some of Daniel’s survival strategies. Growing up without a father figure, without financial resources, we see in Cobra Kai how he figures out how to be in the world without one of his attachment figures. Daniel’s responses, as an adult, are in a mobilization state. A lot of the time he is trying to provide. He’s very focused on results. He easily shifts to fight. Mr. Miyagi said just breathe, yet Daniel is not breathing. He’s jumping to conclusions very quickly. Name-calling or shaming Johnny. He’s so focused on his work that he doesn’t really have the relationships he assumes he has with his children. There is a form of disconnection there. I see him strategizing to make sure he is safe.
The transformation we watch is him return to karate. Return to the martial arts, return to his breath and to his body. He finds his own form of ventral vagal that he was not in before. He needs Johnny for that. That’s a hard thing for him to come to grips with, but he wouldn’t have grown so much if it weren’t for the influence of Johnny Lawrence who he thinks is just a thorn in his side. They help each other grow. It is almost post-traumatic growth. Very restorative to their systems.
In their kiddos, right? Robby has his own story protection, connection protection, shifting up and down that autonomic hierarchy from safety to flight to fight, to shut down, to fight again. Daniel’s daughter, Sam, even the altercation she has with the other dojo creates some post-traumatic stress responses and she is in a freeze state often. I think they did a great job showing what can happen in real time for someone, especially when their brain is not fully formed. It’s very honest in a lot of ways that she didn’t even know how to articulate it or share it with people because you really don’t sometimes when your system is offline.
Miguel, one of the leads of the show, is in some ways in ventral vagal. When we meet him, he’s in a place where he feels connected to his mom. He is suffering, he’s getting beat up, he’s getting bullied, but he has a friend group. He has a safe home with his mom and grandma. Then he initiated the relationship with Johnny, and they co-regulate together. Through that journey with Johnny, they heal.
Miguel has a transformation but the neuroception goes the other way for him. He shifts from ventral vagal to a place of fight because Johnny is so important to him. Sometimes we find that sense of safety in a place that isn’t the best for us. It’s an attachment and Miguel doesn’t have a father figure in his life, so he looks to Johnny for it. Johnny is inconsistent. I think that Miguel sought out Johnny because he needed connection. He needed somebody who could teach him about how to keep himself safe because he was getting beat up. It’s a weird place for Johnny because he has low self-esteem and doesn’t want to deal with this kid because he can’t even parent his own son.
It is a wonderful relationship to watch develop. They have a bond that transcends a lot of Johnny’s trauma. It really helps him heal as well.
We see a lot of bully victim dynamics that are also fascinating. From a neurophysiological lens, these kids who’ve been marginalized now find a voice. They don’t always act on it in a way that is restorative, but they’re kids. They find co-regulation through belonging. Belonging is survival. We are wired to be part of a group. If our ancestors were shunned from the group, it was certain death and we still have nervous systems that want us to be a part of a group.
Lots of good conversations that can happen through plot lines. They did a great job. It’s almost a guilty pleasure. When I watch it, I’m thinking about polyvagal theory and trauma and childhood experiences and how we’re shaped and attachment theory.
If I had all the time in the world, I would create a Genogram. It’s a marriage and family therapy technique where we chart intergenerational patterns through families. Cobra Kai really needs a Genogram because you can chart family systems, connection, protection, fight responses, trauma responses, intergenerational patterns.
Art imitates life. We need artists. This also underscores the importance of really deep thinkers. People who can convey these really complicated messages in an entertaining way. What a gift. Thank you to the writers of Cobra Kai. And these are classic archetypes, right? We’re just using this one show as an example.
This has so much to do with the work that we do as mental health professionals. It helps us to really look at somebody’s story, what influences they’ve experienced, and how their nervous system is tuned. What kind of connections have they had? Do they have any awareness of what’s happening in their body? It’s a nice lens to help explain some of these bigger concepts of polyvagal theory and body-centered psychotherapy.
All right. Polyvagal theory through the lens of Cobra Kai. We did it. My favorite episode yet.
Thank you everyone for listening. If you have any questions about polyvagal theory and Cobra Kai, shoot us an email, or if we missed anything we’d love to hear from you. Otherwise, we’ll see you next week.
In today’s episode, my guest Annie Forest and I talk movement. Annie is the owner of Forrest coaching and studios. She is a 200-hour registered yoga teacher, a Strong First level two kettle bell instructor, and a certified TRX instructor.
Movement isn’t just about fitness, it’s a full brain, body, mind experience that opens us up to deep connection, healing and growth.
We’ll dive into the ideas of mind, brain, and fitness, how increasing your understanding of your body is empowering and how to show up for your whole self in and outside of the gym.
Annie. Welcome. Thanks for having me.
Let’s talk about the new type of fitness experience, being a person instead of just a body.
The fitness industry developed as an anatomical experience. Over the past 40-50 years it has shifted into a subset of the healthcare industry. In the last two years, we’ve developed an awareness that exercise will change brain chemistry. We are starting to look at people as people. If we’re really going to help, we have to acknowledge people have a heart, a life outside of the gym, hopes and dreams, and all of the other things tied up in and creating barriers to, and creating pathways for, your fitness or exercise experience. It’s important that, as professionals, we recognize that and honor it.
For quite a while, I had an injury which caused a lot of psychological distress, pain, and limited my mobility and movement. I had been trying to navigate that path by myself and kept hitting walls. Then, when our friend and colleague, Kristen Radtke referred you to me, I knew it was the right fit. You considered that I wanted to be able to squat again, but also what my nervous system is feeling all day long. What is my brain doing? Am I feeling safe? Who am I as a person? How can I adapt and change my world in a way that supports my body?
Let’s talk about how neurology and fitness go together.
It’s twofold. Movement professionals know a lot about bodies. Most of us are highly trained in anatomy and physiology and movement and function and how the human body works. Somewhere along the line, we forgot that there’s a brain that controls, what I call, the ‘meat puppet’.
You’re always practicing neurology; you just don’t always know it. When you’re doing a squat, you’re not just strengthening your glutes, you’re also triggering reflexes in your eyes and your inner ear and your tendons and ligaments. You’re changing your gut function. Even if you don’t know anything about neurology, you’re practicing it all the time in the gym.
What does it look like when you’re not going in the right direction?
Frequently it will look like one of three things.
It will create frustration. You won’t see results. People will come in and they’ll try to get stronger, or they’ll try to get leaner, or they’ll try to get out of pain, and just plateau. I remember a moment training with you and you asked, how are you feeling? And I was like, angry getting really, I get angry sometimes when I’m lifting. And you said, let’s not do that. The fight response is not where you want to be when we’re moving our body.
We’ll see emotional responses. Your brain is wired for survival by prediction. It wants to know what’s going to happen so it can keep you safe. If you’re doing something that it can’t predict or thinks isn’t safe, based on the previous experience, it’ll kick you out and we see emotions. We see people cry for quote, unquote, no reason. We’ll see people get really angry. We’ll see people laugh inappropriately, for no apparent reason, hysterical or maniacal sounding laughing. That’s a really clear indication to us that their brain is not okay with what you’re doing,
We see pain responses kick in. Back pain, knee pain, etc. Pain is a request for change. It’s an indication from your brain that something could potentially go wrong or that something is about to go wrong. There is something going on that your brain considers threatening.
Can you describe the concept of the threat bucket?
You’ve got a bucket. At the base level, this bucket always has some water (threats) in it. We were mammals living on a planet that at one point was full of tigers and famine and lack of water, etc. Over the course of our lives, more threats go into the bucket. You fall off your bike when you’re a kid and you hit your head. Over time, they accumulate. Especially when there’s childhood trauma or acute trauma of any kind. Trauma events put a lot of water into the bucket. Now, your brain believes the world is not a safe place and operates on that understanding. The level of water keeps rising closer and closer to the top of this bucket. When the last thing goes in the bucket, you’ll get overflow. That overflow is a pain output that varies from person to person. The pain output could be mood disruption, metabolic disruption, or actual physical pain. It is your brain alerting you to too much threat.
What can we do? If I introduce a midday snack, that decreases the water level in my bucket. If I meditate for five minutes in my car before going into the house, that might decrease the water level in my threat bucket. When we have pain from a squat, most of us think, I hurt something. What if you just don’t have enough fuel or you’re dehydrated or need to sleep more. I love the idea of considering all the different influences of your pain output and exploring if it’s pain or our body is telling us it needs something. All of a sudden, your exercise and movement practice becomes, how can I better inform my nervous system about the world around me?
An article I found about the parasympathetic nervous system and recovery talks about people who are more likely to experience challenges with recovery due to their nervous system state.
In polyvagal theory, we have this ventral vagal state where we feel calm, safe, grounded. Then there’s a danger in our state shifts in this sympathetic. Then, if the danger becomes life threatening, we either freeze or shut down.
This article talks about sympathetic dominance and how chronic, physical and mental stress can overtax the body and its ability to adapt and maintain homeostasis and feel safe. For example, athlete’s training for an event and performing multiple training sessions a day, or clients with a more stressful home or work life or who have chronic psychological or emotional stress. What are your thoughts?
The terms we often use are adaptive or maladaptive stressors.
Adaptive stressors are where we push the physiological systems enough to force a change. That’s the whole idea of fitness. You want to stress the system enough that it adapts and steps up.
Maladaptive stress is when you’re pushing the system so hard that it cannot keep up with the demands that you’re putting on it.
Today there is a lot of focus on how hard you’re able to work to achieve change. What happens, though, is you end up in a maladaptive stress response where your nervous system literally doesn’t have enough resources to get through the day so it leans on adrenaline. It’s not even a cognitive process, your system just starts this adrenaline cortisol cycle to meet the needs or the demands that you are putting on your system.
We start thinking, can we get you to a parasympathetic state by the end of your workout? Can we keep your system in a place where it feels safe enough to complete the rest and digest and rebuild processes? When you’re in adrenaline and cortisol cycles, all you’re doing is surviving. Your resources are going towards survival instead of towards recovery and healing.
The goal would be to set up a workout that is hard enough to create a bit of stress so your system adapts but not so hard that your brain kicks into too much adrenaline.
A workout to help your system feel safe enough to sleep well and allocate resources to recovery and metabolic resets. We want to create an environment in which you can actually rewire the neurological structures to put more muscle there or create strength here.
If lifting a barbell, kettlebells, going for a run is your jam and it’s done mindfully, it is practicing for life. I can meet resistance and I can do hard things and come back down and feel peaceful and joyful and engaged and ready for the next thing.
Let’s talk a little bit about behavioral neurology, something my clients want to know a lot more about.
This really goes back to the threat bucket. It’s this idea that change is really expensive. Making a change in your life, stepping out of your habitual way of being requires resources. It requires prefrontal cortex activation, the part of your brain that gets fuel lasts and uses the most of it.
We hear people say I really want to do this thing, but I just can’t seem to get myself to do it. I’ve tried so many diets, so many exercise things and I just don’t have enough discipline.
Willpower is often the language that we’ll hear. And when it comes down to it, you’re making the decision to expend resources on discomfort instead of reserving resources. Recognizing that gives so much grace and eliminates a lot of shame.
If it’s going to be one of those expensive days, instead of making it a big thing, make it smaller. Make it the smallest, most non-threatening change possible. Can you change into fitness clothes when you get home for a week? Don’t even work out, just change your clothes. Proving to yourself that you can do something out of your normal routine can actually push your brain into a space where it is safe to take care of myself in new and exciting ways.
Often the advice is to workout three to five days a week for six weeks, and then talk about it. That’s a lot, especially if you’re going to go to a gym where there’s bright lights and loud sounds and smells and weird equipment and people staring at you. It can feel like a life threat to walk into a place that you don’t know. Our nervous system is continually scanning, trying to decide if you’re safe. 60% of people never go back into a gym after they purchase a gym membership. Start with non-scary, non-hard changes and build a little bit at a time.
Patterns are a big part of how the brain makes that decision.
The Forest Method helps teach freeing up the body to move and freeing the brain to allow the body to heal well.
Three skills:
Sensory before movement.
This is the idea that freeing up your brain to allow your body to move. If you’re going to move something, especially if it has had a previous injury, touch it first. Maybe use your fingernails, a paint brush, washcloth, to brush your whole body before you start a workout. It gets blood flowing to the part of your brain that preempts your movement patterns. If you’re struggling with movement, add some sensory to it and see what happens. If touch doesn’t feel good or is overwhelming, breathing is also a nice sensory experience.
Visual resets with movement.
Vision influences our brain and safety. Our eyes are flooded with unnecessary information, especially today. If you’re moving and notice something’s starting to ache, it can be useful to stop, get to a safe place and close or cover your eyes. This allows that bandwidth requirement to drop for a little bit. If closing your eyes doesn’t feel good, putting on dark sunglasses so you can still see your environment.
20-20
Every 20 minutes, look 20 feet away for 20 seconds. You have two sets of muscles in your eyes. The oculomotor muscles move your eyeballs around in your head. The ciliary muscles that control the shape of the lens, getting clearer or less clear based on distance. By changing your eye position, you give new and novel stimulus to the ocular motor muscles which allows the ciliary muscles to relax a little bit.
You have an X-axis and a Y-axis that your brain constantly calibrates from. The horizon line and then a vertical line of gravity that’s in your inner ear.
If I’m walking forward outside, I see things coming toward me and then they go past the sides of my eyes into my peripheral vision. On a treadmill, things move up and down, but they don’t come towards you and go past you. There’s nothing moving past your horizon line. That triggers a sensory mismatch. For some people, it’s not a big deal. Other people don’t want to use the machine ever again.
It really is individual to each person’s neurology. It’s important to pay attention and create awareness around what’s happening and what information you’re getting from your body.
Chunking. Chunking goes back to behavioral neurology. It’s the process of taking something really big, not understood, or not safe and making it small enough that you can do pieces of it.
A kettlebell swing is one of my favorite examples. We break it all the way down into its smallest components. Start with a hip hinge. When that movement pattern has been established and they can do it without thinking, there’s no threat, there’s no pain. Then, let’s give you a little bit of weight and see what happens. We stay with that chunk until such a time that the brain is doing it with safety. Here’s the next chunk.
The hardest part about chunking is that we don’t do it as adults. We don’t ask a kid to write their name. We teach them how to write the first letter of their name and then the second letter. As adults, we somehow expect ourselves to just understand this massively complex movement pattern or complex behavioral pattern. Give yourself permission to take the smallest piece and spend some time with it and then plug it back into the larger puzzle.
Annie, you coach and teach from a place of radical acceptance, and grace. Focusing on how vulnerability, consistent skill development, and a focus on the whole self leads to places of deep healing and strength. You founded Forest Coaching on these practices and your mission is to teach your staff and your clients the importance of the whole self. When people are feeling better and living from their whole self, they go out into the world and do what they’re meant to do.
What does that actually look like?
It looks like accepting and embracing every single human as separate and beautifully different from every other person.
It’s also recognizing that we are working with bodies and primarily people who want to move it or change it.
We are neurologically informed, recognizing that there is a central processing unit controlling the thing that they are asking us to change. We step back and look for areas that may not be safe, may not move well, may be hitting the brakes or in bucket overflow response.
We look at movement patterns in anatomy, at neurology, and why it may or may not be allowing the anatomy to shift.
It’s our job to teach you that you have the capacity to hold space for yourself so that you can do it forever in every area of your life. It’s our job to be emotionally and trauma informed as professionals. Reminding a client, you’ve got some big freaking stressors at home, please give yourself the grace to miss a workout.
Will you speak briefly on feeling your heart as much as feeling your body?
You have optimal foods that, for your particular physiology, feel best and you’re able to metabolize and integrate them. Everyone is different. There’s no one way to do it.
Then, you have your easy go-to foods. This is quick and is low stress. You get calories in and you keep moving throughout your day.
Then, you have your joyful foods. These are foods that your body can relax. For example, I sat in my car before this and I ate an apple cinnamon muffin and I drank a decaf latte with whole milk with the windows open. Muffins are not an optimum food for me, but they’re fricking delicious.
If you are eating an optimal diet all the time and never nourishing your nervous system, you might get optimum performance but be unhappy.
For all our listeners out there, what can we take from today? Please consider your brain and your nervous system. Practice those drills. If they help you feel safe, integrate them. If not, it’s okay to set them down and honor your emotional experience.
Annie, I don’t want to let you go, but I’m thankful you were here. Thank you. Yeah, you as well.
Welcome back. Thank you for joining us in part two of bringing the body into therapy. Last week, Kate and I talked a lot about trauma; emotional processing, cognitive processing, sensorimotor processing, and how trauma influences not only our thoughts and feelings, but our body and our present moment experience.
Today we’re going to finish the conversation by looking at what’s called the window of tolerance. The five core organizers of experience; our feelings and our thoughts, our five senses, and our internal sensations help bring meaning to what we’re experiencing.
If you’re interested in pursuing sensorimotor psychotherapy, we want to share an insider view so that you know what to expect when you start to work with your body in a therapy session.
Let’s start by talking about the window of tolerance.
I would explain the window of tolerance by drawing a window with my fingers. Imagine a window. In an individual, there’s a range of activation or arousal, that’s comfortable. It’s where normal information processing happens. We’re able to listen and respond and make mindful choices, but we’re not overwhelmed. That’s when we are in our window of tolerance.
If there’s a threat and our system is activated into response, there’s too much arousal to integrate information.
We can move above or below the window of tolerance.
If there’s too much arousal, the prefrontal cortex is offline. We are in limbic, sympathetic response, hyper vigilance above a point of being able to respond and integrate information.
On the other hand, if our arousal is too low, a person goes into hypo arousal, below their window of tolerance. Here a person might be numb or depressed, or just really shut down? There’s not enough activation. There’s not enough arousal present to be integrating.
Trauma comes into the body on the same pathway almost every time. If you watch the trauma response, almost everyone, first gets hyper aroused. Then, if hyper arousal does not help bring them into their window and regulate, we drop down and then we go low.
Everyone’s window of tolerance is shaped through past experiences, through childhood, through past traumatic events, etc. Someone might have a very narrow window of tolerance, meaning it doesn’t take much of a trigger to send them out of their window.
The window of tolerance is also not fixed. It’s something that can grow and change working with the edges of activation, through bringing mindfulness to the moments where we come to the edge of the window of tolerance. That edge is where a lot of sensorimotor work happens.
Sometimes in session, it’s about finding resources to practice getting back into the window. Sometimes we work on making the window bigger so that the events that triggered hyper or hypo arousal a year ago don’t today. A lot of self-care is working on expanding that window of tolerance. If we feel resourced in our life, like we’re eating well, we’re getting enough sleep, we’re active, we’re doing things to manage our stress, we’re going to feel like that window is bigger. We will have more capacity to respond to triggers or to stressors without getting overwhelmed.
What factors can shift us in and out of our window?
Every moment of our lives is organized in our body by our brain or nervous system. We gather information through the five core organizers of experience: thoughts, feelings, our five senses, movement, and inner physical sensations.
We have information coming in at all times and we don’t just organize and make meaning of it through our thoughts and feelings. The body makes sense of what’s happening as well. Things like movement ranging from small to large, our posture, facial expressions, other gestures, give us information.
We also want to think about our perception of our five senses. Our perception of smell, taste, touch, sight, hearing, gives us information about the outer world too.
Then, internally generated tastes and images. You were feeling the color blue earlier and that influences where we’re at in our window of tolerance.
Lastly, the inner body sensation. A flutter in my stomach can pop me out of my window faster than I can think. And all it is a flutter. These internal sensations like our heart rate, our breathing, temperature, anything internal are another way our brain, nervous system and body decide where we’re at in our window.
We have cognition which refers to our mind. It includes our thoughts, the meaning we make of things, the way we interpret things, our beliefs about ourselves, our beliefs about the world. Small thoughts to deep beliefs influence the overall quality of our lives and where we are in our window of tolerance.
Then there’s emotion. Feelings of being overwhelmed, joyful, sad, feelings of mistrust, or of confusion. Those also shift our experience in the window of tolerance.
These five elements; thoughts, feelings, our five senses, movement, and inner physical sensations are swirling together at all times. If any of them reads a threat, we could pop out of our window. So then imagine if two, three or four read threat or danger.
It’s so important to observe what’s happening within our window of tolerance and with these five core organizers so that we can change things.
Understanding of how we’re organizing can lead us to explore movement and posture. Maybe changing your posture changes your organization of experience. Maybe sitting up brings you back into your window because you feel confident and safe or, for some, sitting up is too vulnerable and it pops them out of their window.
Learning how your body is organizing experiences allows you to increase your window of tolerance, which leads to change.
Stitching all of these core organizers together and seeing how they work together to make up the whole experience. Noticing how they’re interrelated and how one leads to another is essential, to bringing the body into the therapy room. There’s lots to be discovered when we do that.
There’s always an opportunity to notice what’s happening in the body and how to bring in a resource to find a groundedness in the body through mindfulness. Mindfulness is a key component in working with the body.
What might you expect if you wanted to work with a sensorimotor psychotherapist?
It’s important to note that everyone is different. Every therapist is different.
Step one is that we create a safe container. A container is a felt sense of safety that we know that the client feels okay being in their body with working with their body. To create a strong container, we usually check in and assess. We provide a lot of education so that nobody is surprised, nobody feels out of the loop. We explain how the brain works and how the body works, so that we can begin to start observing.
In sensorimotor psychotherapy, observing how a person is organizing their experience in the present moment, especially in the body, is called tracking.
It’s our job to start tracking what’s happening in the moment. Noticing any small changes like someone’s eyes dilating or squinting. Maybe their cheeks are getting flushed or they’re getting fidgety. Maybe a postural change, their shoulders round forward, or they slump in their seat Even hand gestures, turning away, or wanting to leave the room.
If a situation, at one point, was perceived as threatening to our safety and survival, those defense survival responses get triggered and the inability to complete these survival responses can cause them to get trapped in the body. That’s what we’re looking for. Are there any survival responses that are still showing up right now.
Then, we help build a movement vocabulary with the client. It’s called contacting, when you begin to name what you’re tracking in the body. For example, when you talk about your son, your shoulders rise, or when we focus on this positive from memory seems like your breath slows and deepens. This helps anyone begin to notice how their body is involved.
We aren’t necessarily aware that we crack our knuckles when we talk about a specific person or that when I ask what it would feel like to tell that person your thoughts, you lean away, and your eyes get really big. Seeing that response really helps someone begin to observe rather than just interpret their present moment experience.
More often than not, I get an interpretation, not an observation. It must mean something. This is what it means. Now I’ve attached a narrative of shame to it, or self-judgment. I’m so out of shape. We’ve totally skipped observing. We work to observe our experience instead and build a movement vocabulary.
Sometimes a therapist will ask mindfulness questions, I’ll give mindfulness directives too.
I’ll pick one core organizer to focus on to allow the body and the mind and the whole self-regulate and come back into the window where they’re mindful and safe. Something like, point at every red thing in the room.
Then, maybe, we start to hypothesize about why it’s happening. Setting aside the narrative and observing. Allowing for exploration.
It’s also so important for safety and the whole process to collaborate and decide together what we want to work on and getting permission. At the end of the day, it’s not the therapist’s agenda, so we always check in. Is this where we should be going? How is this feeling? I may interpret they want to talk about that, but maybe it doesn’t feel safe yet to talk about that body gesture. If they say no, that’s important too. No is such a resource. I love when people tell me no. How is your body telling you that’s a no?
In the therapy room, we allow that response to be followed through with, and that’s called an act of triumph. When we have an act of triumph, that means a survival response is allowed to run its course. Pat Ogden frames it as the possible future becomes explicit, conscious, and with choice.
In trauma-informed personal training, there are so many moments for active triumph. For example: Are you ready to return to movement again? Maybe someone says, I am but I can see their hesitancy. I may say, would you like more time? Would it feel good to walk and get some more water? What does your body want to do right now? More often than not, they’re being polite and caring towards me and feel as though they should get going.
In those moments, we allow micro active triumphs like slowing down and saying no, I want more time. That’s such a success. Being conscious and acting with choice is so healing. It creates a sense of empowerment for a person to feel like they can notice their needs, listen to them and act on them. They can take care of themselves right now.
What’s your experience of how clients feel after an experience like that? I hear the word relief a lot and usually the client can feel, with practice, the shift.
Everyone describes it differently. Sometimes there is grief that comes with realizing how that had been impacting them in ways that they didn’t realize until they felt relief.
There’s also the possibility that they shift into another survival response, almost like they’re stacked. That’s a common reaction that when one survival response is allowed to move through, they’ll shift into another one.
There’s no perfect path. Our job is to be present and create safety. To be a compassionate witness, be mindful with the client. To help if they need to shift and work on something differently. We ask questions about the present moment and bring mindful awareness to their internal organization. We find opportunity for shifts in the body, helping complete actions and create shifts in the system.
What is the point of all of this?
The reason we do the hard work of observing, noticing, processing, and being mindful, is to find places of transformation.
When we find those acts of triumph or feel something shifting in the system, we can return to the window of tolerance. We want to help integrate this new resource connect to all of the five core organizers, building that movement vocabulary. How can we bring those tools for accessing resources and feeling grounded and empowered and self-compassion into our lives?
That’s the goal is to help the body, heart, soul figure out a new way of being.
Thank you, Kate, for your wisdom and your time; for sharing with us how sensorimotor has not only impacted you as a professional, but as a person. I’m really grateful for having you with us in these two episodes.
