I’ll get on my soapbox and cut straight to the case today: Before you drag your 🍑 to therapy it is important to understand how much of the therapy you need is just a result of your nervous system being in survival.

What is Your Go-to Nervous System Response? 

Do you Fight, Flee, Freeze, or appease by Fawning?

Simply put, the autonomic nervous system (ANS) has two branches: the motivating sympathetic, “doing” branch that wakes us up in the morning, and the relaxing parasympathetic - rest, digest, “being” branch. 

When under threat the sympathetic branch motivates first into FIGHT(argue, attack), if that doesn’t seem viable, the threat is larger than us or our capacity to handle, the sympathetic branch motivates us to Flee, the FLIGHT response (this can be an actual running away or emotional avoidance, like keeping ourselves busy). When neither fighting nor fleeing is an option, our ANS enters FREEZE mode (procrastinate, resign, general not motivated “I don’t want to/ I just can’t” state).

To complicate this a bit - our individual nervous systems co-regulate with one another - we pick up on each other’s states. This is called the Social Engagement System. If we feel safe - we are driven to connect, engage, and are curious. We feel under threat in a social setting, we either go to our own ANS for fight/flee or we camouflage our actions to fit in with the group. The FAWN response originates in the social NS when we approximate the thread by appeasing, and being nice as a survival response (not to be confused with kindness). 

Here is a handy table to summarize the responses and how they feel in your body either in safety or under threat:

Everything changed for me when I learned and understood that: 

Connected communication and learning can only happen when our ANS is feeling safe from within.

• There is no use in arguing when we and my sparring partner are both triggered. Easier said than done. 😫

Our ANS state is the origin of the story we are playing out in our head. 

The state our nervous system is in dictates our thoughts and beliefs, and it projects motivations unto others according to which state we are in".

Here are some examples:

Some days I feel okay, I can handle the mess of the world but other days I feel despair, anger, and doubt whether anything is worth the effort. What makes the difference? My nervous system. It is either safe or under threat. Both days and feelings are valid, but knowing despair is a survival response lessens its hold on my spirit. It's valid to feel angst and despair; I’d even go as far as to say that anxiety and depression are totally valid ways be reacting to the setup that modern living is. However, I don't want to be disconnected forever. There are ways to uplevel our nervous system baseline, to feel safe when life happens. The nervous system baseline is our (bodies) ability to feel safe when life is happening - to have the CAPACITY TO DEAL. 

🕳️ Here is a link to Luis Mojica very elegantly and succinctly explaining CAPACITY. Timestamps: Explanation 2m50 to 12m50. The exercise starts at 12m50. 

The bottom-up approach to healing

Most psychology, CBT, affirmations, replacing negative thoughts with positive ones, mindset stuff, and even meditation to disconnect from the discomfort of our thoughts or bodies, are top-down approaches to healing. This is the top-down approach to healing and dealing: using the mind to affect the body and bring on healing. 

But doesn’t that work Vanda? 

Sure, it can but if you have been at it for a while and chasing negative thoughts is starting to feel like a game of never-ending whack-a-mole, it is time to look elsewhere. 

Nervous system work is a bottom-up approach. Using the body (soma means body), the somatic approach lies in learning the language in which our body communicates: sensations and feelings. It took me some time to divorce the two. Sensations are what my body feels: constriction/expansion, heat/cold, numb/ tingly etc. It is the felt sense.What I thought feelings were for a long time were actually my mental commentary about them. Feelings are the raw sensations of the body. The inward experience of them. The mind’s commentary about feelings is not feelings - that is just the outward-facing, often blame-y stuff: “you made me ______” or “he/she/it doesn’t ______ me”. 

What is a healthy nervous system?

To be a chill person all all costs, all love & light is NOT a sign of a healthy nervous system. I gotta call myself out, operating in the yoga world for the better part of the past two decades, I can only confirm that the spiritual yogi folk like to see anger as being very unspiritual. Myself included, I used to have this identity of “I’m just not an angry person” too.

Our nervous system’s role is to go into the fight, flight, freeze, fawn states in response to life and come back. A healthy nervous system gets triggered - that is its role, one will never “heal” being triggered, it’s part of life and our biological imperative. So a healthy nervous system gets triggered and then it completes a full cycle of activation (symp) to deactivation (para) and back to connection - homeostasis or baseline. We we first start observing this, the activation to de-activation may take some time, hours, days sometimes weeks. But the more we practice, the less time it will take from trigger to activation - to baseline. Like a kata in martial arts, the skill in developed by repetition and dedication to mastering the moves.

The way we can start to help our ANS out is to develop an awareness of what each state feels like (FELT SENSE of the state not STORY of the mind about what happened and why) in our body, and acknowledge it. “ooh, my body is having a flee response to it” instead of letting the “woosh” of the emotion sweep us into believing the stories that ANS states come with. 

It helps our ANS out when we don’t believe the story in our heads but instead observe it. And here is where the somatic meditation approach is solid gold: meditating on the felt sense, and sift through what is our internal voice & what is being blown arounds by the winds externally. 

This awareness of our momentary NS state is one of the key factors that will prevent us from being stuck in that NS state. More on how to get unstuck next time. 

There is a sequence to “healing”

Doing inner child work, activating breathwork sessions, embarking on psychedelic exploration or even cold plunging without first awareness of our NS states and awareness of CAPACITY can backfire. 

Resources

🐰 Shall we, Alice? 🕳️

🕳️ link to Luis succinctly explaining CAPACITY 2m50 to 12m50. Exercise starts at 12m50. 

🕳️ Dan Siegal’s S.I.F.T. - A Four Step Strategy for Training Your Brain to Better Understand Your Emotions

🕳️ Irene Lyon on 3 Nervous System Practices That You Might Already Be Doing

🕳️ if you happen to be a NOT ANGRY person: Kimberly Ann Johnson on Healthy Agression

🕳️ for your listening pleasure audiobook Call Of The Wild (How We Heal Trauma, Awaken Our Own Power, and Use It For Good) by Kimberly Ann Johnson - on Spotify or Audible

Next in the series I’ll Cover:

• ways to nourish our nervous system in general

• ways to get unstuck - things that can help specifically move us out of Fight, Flight Freeze fawn. 

Know someone who would love to read this?