Noticing, Naming, Navigating: Everyday Nervous System Practices

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Transcript

Co-regulation and tracking. Now co-regulation is a key principle of the polyvagal theory. According to Steven Porges, connection through co-regulation is a biological imperative. In fact, it's vital to human survival. It is essentially the reciprocal sending and receiving of signals of safety. It's not merely the absence of danger, but connection between two nervous systems, you and your client each nourishing and regulating the other in the process. It supports safety in connection and creates trusting relationships. In fact, it's through co-regulation that we connect with other people and develop a sense of safety in relationship with others. The more that you can stay centered and grounded in your own experience during your work with clients, the more co-regulation and safety your clients will find in your presence. Polyvagal theory sees co-regulation as an imperative in a person's ability to sustain life through being enabled to move into safe relationships and meaningful connections.

It's critical to recognize what state you moved into so that you can realize you are not your responses. This is my system trying to protect me. You're going to be noticing physical signs, indications, or sensations that signify rising or settling into your nervous system, and you're going to be tracking an internal sense of safety that apply to tools to either up or down regulate. If you're disconnected from this awareness, then these states become your story, and we're asking our clients to be able to choose to respond a new way. When I know where I am on the map, there's a framework to my experiences, right? And I can attend my nervous system and befriend it and potentially choose to interrupt what could be like an automatic response to an old story, and I can build capacity to separate that state that I'm in from my story.

So by tuning into cues and sensations, we can regulate our arousal and stay within our window of tolerance. So one aspect of being a trauma-informed practitioner involves tracking both your own and your client's automatic nervous system. This is called dual awareness and can help with burnout and compassion fatigue. An important aspect of dual awareness is having one eye in and one eye out as you track nervous system states. So one eye in means keeping a portion of attention on yourself by continually checking in with your own somatic experience and asking, where is my nervous system on the map? What am I noticing in my body? Am I within my window of tolerance? Am I starting to feel activated? Am I nearing the threshold? What self-protective responses may be arising in me right now? One eye out means keeping a portion of your attention on your client and kind of tracking their autonomic expressions and asking things like where is their nervous system on the map?

What are they experiencing in their body? Are they within their window of tolerance? Are they starting to feel activated? Are they nearing a threshold? And finally, what self-protective responses may be arising here? So I've just read those questions to you. You've got them on your slides so that you can print this out or find your own authentic version as you are beginning your tracking system over time and with enough practice, where are we on the map will become part of your general orientation when working with clients. Right? The first question when navigating regulation is, where are we on the map right now? Both my client and myself? Are we grounded? Are we centered? Is there activation in one or both of our systems? What tells you this is the case is someone outside of their window of tolerance. That dual awareness technique of one eye in and one eye out really does help you to kind of keep track of what's happening and remember to attend to yourself first so that you are the regulated nervous system and your client can attune to you and co-regulate with you.

So by asking yourself, what do I need to do to become more regulated in this moment are tools that we're going to be exploring throughout this certification so that you can answer that question with greater ease. So this tracking autonomic expressions table is available for you to download. In this lesson, I find that familiarizing myself with the white part, which is the nervous system state and what we can be looking at. So emotional tones, eyes, breath, posture, movements, and then finally, how to support your clients through the states they can go through. So what does regulated look like? Fawning flight, flight and freeze is just such a great way to start to familiarize yourself with what's happening. Remember, sensations are the foundations of emotions. There are three essential stabilization tools for you to use both for yourself as a practitioner and for your client to help navigate dysregulation.

First is grounding. Now, grounding supports the nervous system by helping the body to get its bearings and time and space through connecting to gravity. I invite you to quickly try this with me right now. However you are, wherever you're positioned, notice the points of contact that your body has with the chair or wherever you are. Notice where you sense the most weightedness. Feel your bottom on the seat of the chair. Feel your back. What part of your back is contacting the space behind you? What about your feet? What part of your feet are contacting the floor? This is simple. This is like three steps, right? Your bottom, your back, and your feet. It's a very simple grounding experience. And in your practice library, you're going to find a grounding exercise that's a little bit more in depth that you can try and share with your clients, but that just was to give you a little teaser of it.

Second tool is for navigating activation, and dysregulation is self contact. Now, self contact can offer a sense of containment and boundaries, and this is when we kind of need that quality of feeling met, held and supported. Your clients may actually naturally move into self contact when they cross their legs or their arms when they're feeling uncomfortable, right? It's kind of giving them that sensation so you can invite them to initiate self contact by placing a hand or hands on a part of the body that they think may need a little extra support. This could be the chest or the belly, could be the top of the thighs, the upper arms, the back, the sides of the head, or even the front of the head. I remember when I was in grad school and I was going through some stressful studies. I would often when I was studying, just kind of put my hand against my head on the desk, and that was my own sense of self contact to help myself kind of get through those trials and tribulations.

Now, the third tool is orienting, and this is useful for people who are actively dysregulated and potentially are over the threshold in fight, flight, or freeze. All of these exercises are available in the practice library for you to work through and try and then give as appropriate and share with your clients. When we build nervous system capacity, we can bring on more, right? It frees us up and dislodges sort of that old trauma that may feel stuck in the nervous system. De-stressing daily to me is all about building up capacity. The more capacity we have to be with our internal environment and to feel our sensations and notice our thoughts, dysregulation impacts our digestive system, our immune system, our muscular and cardiovascular systems are reproductive systems and really our ability to have higher brain function. My husband, Doug Vestal is a mathematician, and I remember when he was working on his dissertation to get his PhD, I saw I was spending time with what's called a sign wave and math, and that's what you see here on the right side of our slide.

While I didn't generally understand most of what his research projects were on, I peeked over his shoulder and saw this image, and I thought to myself, that's a good looking nervous system. So a sine wave is basically a line going up and down and oscillates between the two, right up and down and up and down. This is a flow state where when there's a stress, the stress is gone. We come back down. There may be another one, but again, we come back down and when we have this healthy regulated nervous system, we actually want this variability because if we don't, that's when we kind of get stuck in that small window of tolerance. So how do we build regulation and move through trauma? Honestly, it comes back to building capacity. Increasing capacity of our nervous system comes back to self-awareness and interception, learning how to orient, how to build back body awareness.

When we have increases capacity, we've increased the ability to feel, to notice, to see what's going on around us, to pause, to free up a little space in the system. And the more we feel, the more we can be comfortable with being uncomfortable in the world, right? And interestingly enough, when we start to release some of these feelings and these behaviors, we can actually stop and pause, and all of this contributes to growing that capacity so that we have more space to heal. And so we need to continually integrate practices throughout our day and throughout our life. So you may say to yourself, there's a lot on my schedule today. What can I do today? What can I do today that is simple but is actually reminding my body to release a stressor? So regardless of how busy you are, how busy your client is, simply asking that question can be really helpful.

So instead of rushing all day long, I'm going to take a conscientious pause between transitions in my day to day life. De-stressing in real time is a wonderful tool and is paramount for the nervous system. Not waiting till we need to do it, but getting ahead of it. So there are three Rs when we are going to be considering working through a nervous system informed lens. The first is regulation, the ability to move in and out of adaptive states that our body has available to us according to our environment and our circumstance. Second is resilience. The ability to regulate and resource ourselves as we meet challenges that we're adapting to and recovering with the least amount of consequences and resourcefulness. This is our ability to resource ourselves internally with our tools or externally through our social supports or through communication so that we can better regulate our experience. Now, all three of these work together to feel safe in our nervous system and our body, and to actively nourish us throughout our life. Again, our goal is to not always be inside our window or to be in that ventral vagal regulation. Anger is healthy if we need to face an emergency or if we need fight or flight, right? And if we're going through grief, that dorsal state is okay too. But we just want to be able to move in and out of states by building a flexible and adaptable nervous system.