When Depression is in your bed

Signals of Safety: Real Stories of Nervous System Self- and Co-Regulation

• Trish Sanders, LCSW • Episode 43

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The hardest part of a taxing day likely isn’t a thing on the to-do list— our nervous system state that influences how we perceive what needs to be done and if we have on "depression googles," we can expect that even the lightest load may feel like seriously heavy lifting.  When depletion hits and dorsal shutdown pulls you under, forcing productivity can deepen the spiral. I share how I recognized my capacity, swapped a plan that I didn't feel connected to in the moment for one that felt more aligned, and used small, body-first moves to steer back toward safety. From literal sunlight on my skin to honest words with my daughter, each tiny choice was designed to do one thing: not make it worse, so something better could emerge.

We get practical about self-regulation: noticing state before strategy, choosing “comfy cues” that quietly lower threat, and practicing compassionate self-talk that interrupts the urge to self-criticize. I also break down why rehashing conflict can flood your system and how to ask for support in ways that soothe rather than spike. Inner child attunement shows up as a guide, helping meet adult responsibilities and younger needs so decisions can feel holistically beneficial. The throughline is capacity—matching the day’s demands to the body’s actual fuel, not the fantasy of what you “should” be able to do.

The heart of this conversation is a bed-side moment with my 14-year-old. Advice didn’t help; my nervous system did. I shifted from fixing to co-regulation, lay down, and practiced coherent breathing until the room felt safer. No lecture, no push—just presence. That silence sent a signal he could trust and opened the door to one small, self-chosen step up the ladder. If you’ve ever tried to talk someone out of collapse, you’ll hear why safety often travels faster through breath, tone, posture, and proximity than through the smartest words.

If this resonates, subscribe for weekly episodes, share it with someone who needs a gentler path, and leave a review to help others find the show. Your step today can be tiny—one breath, one boundary, one text to a supportive friend. Take it.

If you and your partner are ready to co-create the roadmap to the relationship of your dreams, join us for the next in-person "Getting the Love You Want" Weekend Couples Retreat!

For support in how to have deeper connections and better communication in the relationships that matter most in your life, follow the host, Trish Sanders on Instagram , Bluesky or LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_00:

Hello and welcome to the When Depression is in your bed podcast. Lately, you might be hearing more about self-regulation and co-regulation. But what do they actually look like in real life, in real moments with real people? Today I'll be sharing two personal examples from this past week that brought these concepts to life in a practical, grounded, and conscious way. I'm your host, Trish Sanders, and I am delighted that you are here. Let's get started. I just want to start off by mentioning that this week I did plan on continuing my conversation from last week's episode about ketamine assisted psychotherapy or CAP. I was going to provide some more information and more about the research, but for reasons that I will share more about in just a moment, I decided to shift gears and do an episode about regulation today. I do expect to circle back to CAP and the next episode or two. So stay tuned for that. So I just want to very briefly talk about what regulation means. But part of the reason I chose not to do the CAP episode is because I didn't feel like I had capacity today to do a really information-heavy episode. So I'm not going to dive into this very deeply. You can go into past episodes and check out more. And I certainly will talk more about regulation in the future. It's a really big concept for nervous system wellness and health. But just for today's episode, I just want to say that you may hear the term emotional regulation. And while I think that that is a related concept, when I talk about regulation, self-regulation, co-regulation, what I'm talking about is regulating our nervous system, which means helping our nervous system be able to flexibly move between its states of safety and survival or self-protection and being able to have awareness over that and feel safe enough and grounded so that you can really take care of yourself by being attuned to your nervous system. And when you do these activities and you're doing it by yourself, that's called self-regulation. And when you do it with others in the research, it's mammal nervous system to mammal nervous system, so human to human or human to dog or something like that. So for today's episode, that's all I'm going to say about regulation. But just to know that it really is, in my opinion, probably maybe the deepest form of self-care to really attune to your nervous system state and help you to feel better. But part of my approach and the perspective that I have grown over many years of being a very depressed person myself, I actually focus often on how to not feel worse. And that is often part of my regulation tools, whether that's with myself or working with others. And I'll talk more about that in just a moment. So this past week, I had three distinctly different situations that were completely unrelated that ended up having a collective pull on my resources. I won't go into them in great detail, but just to give you a little bit of an idea of what felt heavy or what used up some of my resources this week. So the first thing was this past week, I had a wonderful play date with my six-year-old daughter and four of her friends. And for some people, this might be something that happens all the time, but for us, it is not. It is a growth edge for me to be having play dates at my house for me and my ADHD brain, organizing and getting everything together and planning and time management and several other factors makes it something that feels a little bit hard to do sometimes, even though having play dates and giving my daughter that joyful connected space is very much in alignment with my values. So it was a pretty big deal, and I was really excited about it, as was my daughter, and it ended up being a fantastic time. And if that alone had happened, I don't think that it would have felt like a drain at all. It felt very nourishing. I was very grateful. It was a really joyful day. But I think that in the timeline of the week, that happened and was immediately followed by two other experiences that pulled on my resources in a different way. So the second situation was something that happened with my teen son. I will talk about that a little bit more towards the end of this episode because it actually involves a beautiful example of co-regulation, which again, I actually felt really grateful for that experience, even though it was heavy and challenging. But right on the tails of that experience, I had a conflict with my husband that I won't talk about in any detail today, as it's still going on and we're still in the process of repair, but I will probably very likely talk about it in the future at some point because I think it's a really good example of relationship rupture and repair. Uh, hopefully it'll be a good example of repair. Uh, I think so. I think we're doing well. We're just not complete in that process. So the combination of all of these things happening in just a three-day span ended up leaving me waking up feeling pretty depleted today. And I was able to check in with myself and realize that I couldn't do what I had planned to do today. And I really noticed that my nervous system was going into a self-protective shutdown kind of place, which is the dorsal state of our nervous system. Again, you can check out past episodes of mine to learn more about nervous system states, but that is the protective state of immobilization and being withdrawn and collapsed, being invisible. So I had a very strong urge to not get out of bed this morning, but I did because my kids had to get to school. And actually going outside was probably the first really positive experience. I mean, I probably did a hundred little tiny things to get out the door this morning. But when I went outside, it was a beautiful fall day, very bright. And as soon as I felt the sun and the brightness outside, that was really regulating for me, which was really helpful and it helped me feel a little more energized. But I think that before that, just really quick and just in thinking about it, helping me get out the door, I was talking to myself very compassionately and I wasn't being too hard on myself. I made a very conscious effort to let my daughter know that I had kind of low capacity and I really wanted to work in really good cooperation with her today to get out the door. And we were a really good team. You know, I didn't put it on her to make me feel better. I just let her know, like, hey, this is what I can bring to the table this morning. If we could work as a team, that would be awesome. And we did. And there were a lot of other probably little things if I thought about it. But anyhow, I realized by the time I came back home after dropping her off that even though I had a little bit more energy, I knew that I needed to consciously choose where I spent my energy today and where I conserved it. And I had planned on recording a podcast episode today, and I really wanted to do that because recording podcasts and staying committed to my weekly release feels important to me. And it's something that really feels nourishing and really feels in alignment with my personal goals and my professional goals. And it feels really good again as an ADHD person. Consistency is something that is often really a challenge for me. And my success of being able to release this is the 43rd episode, the 43rd weekly episode is something that really feels very validating and I feel really proud of, to be quite honest. So it felt important for me to release an episode this week. So I had to record today because I don't have time to record in the next couple of days. And I quickly realized that doing the cap episode, which, like I said before, was very information-based and was about research and was interesting to me, but it wasn't like a lot of my personal experience. It was more information that you could probably mostly Google with some of my spin on it or my interpretation or what it means to me. But it just didn't feel like I had capacity to do that kind of episode. So one of the things that is incredibly self-regulating for me, in addition to talking to myself with compassion, which I already mentioned, but it's so incredibly important because it is so easy to beat yourself up, especially when you go into a dorsal shutdown place. I've talked about depression goggles that can kind of come with being in a dorsal shutdown, and that can come with a lot of self-criticism. And I'm very conscious of that. And so I was like, hey, is this something that it feels like I have capacity to do today? If the answer was like, yeah, I think I can do that, then okay, this is something I'll spend energy on. But if the answer was like, mm, I don't think so, or definitely not, I trusted my system to guide me to what I could do today. And so I was thinking about it in a very gentle way, like, okay, well, what kind of episode feels more accessible for me to record today? And the answer was very easy. I started thinking about a situation that I had with my son this past weekend. That was a really good example of co-regulation. And when I thought about that, which I will share in a few minutes, it was really clear that talking about this self-regulation experience today really paired well with that. And so here we are with today's episode. Some of the other things I did today to help me self-regulate was that I was very clear that today was a comfy clothes, no makeup, no jewelry day. And I don't wear particularly uncomfortable clothes really ever, but I do have, I guess, more comfy clothes, and today was definitely a more comfy clothes kind of day. And something else that I did that was also really self-regulating, which if you don't know about either IFS, which is internal family systems, or inner child work, if you're not familiar with those things, this might not make so much sense to you. Maybe you'll connect with it. I'll see. I'm not going to go into IFS or inner child work in any detail. I'm just going to say that I have been very actively working with my inner child, I call her Little Trish, for several months. And being attuned to my inner child experience and thinking about how my experiences this weekend that I have mentioned earlier were impacting that part of me were really important. And again, I'm not going to talk more about that today, but just to say that being really deeply attuned to not only my adult needs, I would say, but also a deeper, younger part of me. And those needs that were clearly coming up was really helpful in self-regulation because I was able to make choices that were truly aligned with all of my needs. And I was able to really validate all of the different feelings that were coming up in me. So those were all really helpful and allowed me to get here today to record an episode. I will also just mention very briefly a couple of co-regulation techniques that I used, but I'm going to talk a little bit more deeply about co-regulation in just a second when I talk about my son. But I did reach out to my sister and I left her a voice message talking a little bit about the challenges that I had this weekend just to be able to share that experience with somebody else. And I also did talk to one of my very dear friends about it. And I consciously chose to focus on what I was doing to repair the situation and take care of myself as opposed to the details of the conflict, particularly with my husband, because I knew that if I talked about the details of what happened, that would make me feel worse. So again, a lot of the time feeling better is often not necessarily immediately about feeling better. Sometimes it's just not making it worse. And I knew that if I got on the phone with my friend and I was telling her all the details of what happened with my husband, it would work me up. And that's not what I wanted. So I consciously chose what to share and how to share it. I knew that if I wanted to share more details, she was available and she was kind enough to offer that. But I also knew she didn't feel like I was keeping information from her or that I didn't trust her. She understood that it was a conscious choice for me. And she was beautifully supportive and helping me with that and being there to hear what I needed to share that felt helpful to me and again didn't make me feel worse or go into a more self-protective place. In this case, would have been angry place, which would have led to me having probably a much stronger fight response in relation to my husband, which is really the wrong direction in this particular case because getting more angry and more defensive and more on attack mode would not help me make repair with him. So just briefly a couple of co-regulation things I did for myself today as well. So moving on to my son, I just want to say he's 14 and I did ask for his consent before making this episode today. And I told him very clearly that I was not going to share any details of what he was going through, just to say that he was experiencing, I would say, a pretty human experience, also probably a very adolescent experience, a lot of emotions, things that we go through again as human beings, with our self-concept, with relationship challenges, and just what we need to learn along the way. And sometimes things are hard. And he was in a dorsal shutdown place. Again, I'm very familiar with that as someone who has been depressed for so much of my life, and he was definitely struggling in a moment of collapse. And I will also add here, we were actually laying in his bed, or he was laying in his bed, and I was sitting on the edge at first and eventually was laying next to him as part of the co-regulation. But it occurred to me that my podcast title is, and I've talked about this before, is When Depression is in your bed. And that could elicit thoughts of how depression impacts a couple's sexual relationship. Because of course, you think about in bed, what that could mean. And that's definitely a part of it. But also part of the reason I chose that title is because when depression is in your bed, it's a very intimate experience. And the relationship that you have either with yourself in your bed or your partner or your children, it's all very intimate relationships. And it doesn't necessarily have to do anything with the impact of depression on sex or anything like that. When depression is in your bed, it can look a lot of different ways. Again, without going into the specifics of what was happening for him, I noticed in myself, which is very, very typical as a parent and also as a partner, that when you're with another nervous system that is going into dorsal shutdown, going into withdraw, collapse, avoid, there's often a very strong urge, and there was a very strong urge in me to jump into that dorsal hole with him, but pull him out. That's a sympathetic response. That's actually like a fight response, a fix-it response, a help response that is something I've talked about in other episodes and I'm sure we'll talk about in the future. But I noticed in me that I was really trying to help and fix. And I'm a relationship expert, right? So I know a lot about relationships. I know a lot about the dorsal experience. I had a wealth of knowledge that I could share with him. I very quickly saw that my words were landing as cues of danger a lot of the time for him, meaning that they were not being helpful. They were actually making things worse. And really, at best, most of the time, they were landing in sort of a more neutral way where they weren't helping. They didn't seem to be making things worse either, but they definitely weren't moving things in the direction that I wanted. So I took pause and I noticed where my system was and I was like, oh yeah, I'm in sympathetic. Fix it response. This is not helping. Let me take a moment. Ah, I know what I can do. I can work on co-regulation. And co-regulation can really focus on introsception, which is the non-verbal below consciousness communication between nervous systems. So I trusted that I didn't need my words to communicate the message I wanted to communicate to my son. The message that I wanted to communicate to my son was that he was safe. And so the best way to communicate that is for me to make sure that my nervous system felt safe. So I laid on the bed next to him and I told him, I said, I'm not gonna talk. I'm just gonna lay here and do some breath work. I have been doing something called breath body mind breath work. I'm actually gonna be trained on it in the new year. And I have a little 20-minute recording of scales that I breathe along with. And so I just put the scales on and I did 20 minutes of breathing next to him. And then when I was done, I shut it off. And I actually don't remember exactly who said what first, but he very quickly was like, Oh, I think I want to get up and play some video games, which for him is self-regulation. Certainly it could be avoidance, but in this case, it definitely was a movement towards coming up on the nervous system ladder. Again, you can check out previous episodes, but the dorsal experience at the bottom of the ladder, sympathetic is a few rungs up, and then ventral safety, grounded, connecting, openness is at the top. And so him being able to get out of his bed and be able to move to video games and then later other things as well was a really good indicator that he was moving up the ladder. And it didn't happen because I was talking him into moving up the rungs, and it didn't happen because I was pushing or pulling or trying or fixing or actually putting in a whole lot of effort at all into trying to get his system to change. What I focused on was making sure that my system was in a safe and grounded place, which again I did by doing my breath work and by sharing space with him and our nervous systems communicated and co-regulated together to the point where he was able to feel safer. So that's all for today. I am really happy that I chose to do this episode. I hope that you connect with something in it, and I look forward to talking more about self-regulation and co-regulation in future episodes. As our time comes to a close, I ask you to keep listening for just a few more moments. Because I want to thank you for showing up today, and I want to leave you with an invitation as you hit stop and move back out into the world on your own unique wellness journey. In order to move from where you are today to the place where you want to be, the path may seem long or unclear or unknown. And I want you to know that if that seems scary or daunting or downright terrifying or anything else, that is totally okay. Know that you do not have to create the whole way all at once. We don't travel a whole journey in one stride. And that is why my invitation to you today is to take a step, just one. Any type, any size, in any direction. It can be an external step that can be observed or measured, or it could be a step you visualize taking in your mind. It can be a step towards action or towards rest or connection or self-care or whatever step makes sense to you. I invite you to take a step today because getting to a place that feels better, more joyful, more connected than the place where you are today is possible for everyone, including you, and even when depression is in your bed. If today's episode resonated with you, please subscribe so you can be notified when each weekly episode gets released. I encourage you to leave a review and reach out to me on social media at trish.sanders.lcsw. Your feedback will help guide future episodes, and I love hearing from you. Also, please share this podcast with anyone who you think may be interested or who may get something from what I have shared. Until the next time we connect, take care of yourself and take a step.