One of the most important ingredients of our healing and growth process is learning to feel, be present with, and having some distance from the fluctuations of our nervous system and disturbing emotional states. The internal ups and downs of our emotional inner state are responses to triggers from outside and inside of us. When we get triggered, our internal experience changes dramatically and normally we react immediately. It’s in this area of our healing and transformation where developing the quality of inner space and meditation is most important and tested.
Tricia is an attractive, sensitive woman in her early forties. She comes for therapy because she is devastated by a recent breakup of a four-year relationship with her boyfriend who left her abruptly without explanation. She’s heartbroken and all her efforts to contact him are met with silence. In our sessions together it’s clear that this rejection has had a profound impact on her. She is confused, often disoriented, and ruminates about trying to understand how he could leave her the way he did.
Tricia was sexually abused her father from age 10 to 14 and raised by a mother who was highly dysfunctional and often absent. She has never worked on the fallout from these traumas. The result is that her nervous system becomes easily dysregulated, and she hasn’t found a way to calm herself. The work we are doing is to ground her by helping her, first of all, to validate the profound impact of the traumas she received and how it’s affecting her nervous system. She imagines that because they happened so long ago, that they no longer have such an impact on her life.
Secondly, because regulation happens by tuning deeply into body sensations, we are helping her to gently tune into her body and notice how her body is feeling the breakup with her boyfriend. As we will discuss shortly, there is a powerful mind body dynamic that causes deregulation. She notices that when she thinks about him and the thought that he will never come back, immediately she can feel the anxiety and grief that happens in her chest and body in general. She can connect and feel how this affects her inner state, and we gently guide her to learn to regulate this with conscious breathing. She is also becoming aware how easily she gets triggered by other factors in her life and using this approach to calm herself at those times as well.
Tricia illustrates some of the common effects of being traumatized. She gets easily affected by outside disturbing events in her current life, she dissociates easily and is somewhat dissociated most of the time, and she has a high level of baseline anxiety. Other common side effects of early trauma include frequent mood changes such as depression and mania, hypervigilance, and reactivity, feeling easily intruded by disturbing sounds, smells, events, and memories that are echoes of the past, and having strongly imbedded negative mistrustful beliefs about life, ourselves, and others.
It is also quite common that we get angry when we get triggered. It activates our fight response because we experience lack of safety or love. And it can be a devastating feeling. But whether a trigger causes us to feel anxiety or anger, it’s still deeply healing for us to learn to regulate. When we’re reacting out of anger from an unregulated state, it generally escalates the situation and doesn’t bring us dignity or healing. Centered anger is different from reactive anger. When we take time to regulate, there might be an action that we need to take but then it comes from a different space. The same applies when we need to repair conflicts and misunderstandings that can arise when we get triggered. But that too can only come in a constructive way when we have regulated our nervous system.
It’s helpful for learning to self-regulate to become aware of what we call, “our nervous system barometer.” Imagine a half circle made up of three sections. The section on the left is what we call, “the relaxation zone.” Most of us don’t live there but it might feel it after a yoga class, a massage, a relaxing holiday, some time spent in meditation, or less skillfully with alcohol, a drug, or any other anesthetic substance.
The middle zone is what we call, “the tension zone.” This is our baseline level of tension and where most of us live. Of course, it varies from one person to another how high our baseline tension is, but it’s generally much higher that we realize. This is because of the omnipresence of overstimulating and anxiety producing outside factors, the stress that many of us have gotten used to living with, and the pressure and criticism we level on ourselves. Often, we’ve become accustomed to our baseline and don’t even realize how much tension we live with all the time.
The third zone, the one on the right, we call, “the red zone or the overwhelm zone.” This is where we go when we’re triggered, when we have had a stressful day, when we have a conflict with someone, or when we experience any disturbing event. It is also where we can go when we’re having a harsh attack from our inner critic, feel isolated, rejected, criticized, or a failure. When we’re in the red zone, we descend to a lower level of functioning in our brain, feel unloved or unsafe, we become dysregulated, and believe that we need to do something to fix the situation immediately.
It’s challenging to learn how to become a master of regulating our inner state because the pull to flight, fight, please, or dissociate is very strong. They’re our survival instincts at play. We need to be patient and compassionate with ourselves as we learn to pull away from being automatically reactive, attacking, pulling away, cutting off, taking revenge, compromising, blaming, and/or going into resignation. We often justify these behaviors as necessary to protect ourselves, and not to feel disempowered, diminished, or put down, and we may also feel that the other person or situation needs this kind of reaction.
Our reactivity comes from our emotional, survival brain which has a different agenda than our reflective brain. But when we react, it hurts us not to mention the person we have reacted upon, and our higher self knows that it’s unskillful and damages the relationship and our self-esteem. With the intention to re-establish love and connection, ee can learn to become less reactive, take a time out, and come back without blame but it takes time and practice.
If we begin to pay attention to where we are on the nervous system barometer, it becomes easier. As our needle moves further to the right, we become more activated, more disturbed, more convinced we need to act immediately, and less able to think or act clearly. It takes a combination of awareness and discipline to learn to refrain from reacting automatically to disturbing stimuli coming either from outside or inside of ourselves.
There are classically three ways to regulate our inner state. One is a method of self-regulation using the method we will explain shortly. The second is having a deep, reliable, committed, and nourishing connection with a beloved or close friends and family. The third is based on rewarding ourselves. A reward can come in many ways – moving to a reliable addiction or distraction, such as a substance or a behavior such as sex, pornography, shopping, or working, or from the steady acquisition of material things, or from fame, power, or prestige – all to soothe ourselves. Of the three, we find that the first is the most helpful. The second is wonderful but it usually takes some ability to master our own regulation before we can sustain healthy relationships.
The third is not so skillful because if it creates unhealthy dependency and can have serious consequences in our intimacy, our health, our self-esteem, our creativity, and our finances. Let’s face it, most of us are accustomed to look for some kind of reward when we’re disturbed or even when we’re not. We may have familiar reward habits, and some of them can even be healthy, such a nice meal, a good glass of wine, nourishing and connected sex, a sport, or a hobby. They can lower our level of stress, give us gratification, and even give life meaning. And this is especially relevant when our baseline level of activation is high. The problem is not that we have rewards in our life. We all do. The problem is when we become dependent on them and give the power of controlling our state of consciousness over to something outside of ourselves.
For instance, in a recent seminar, a woman shared that after a day at work, she looks forward to a stiff drink or two and does it every day. We said that the behavior itself wasn’t the problem. The problem was that she was dependent on it to soothe herself. With deeper work, she might find it helpful to find a way to regulate without relying on the alcohol.
We will need to be extra compassionate and patient with ourselves as we learn to wean ourselves from our dysfunctional reward behavior and learn to replace it with self-regulation. We may have used these behaviors for a long time to soothe ourselves. And furthermore, self-regulation results are not so immediate or reliable. But in the long run, it is well worth our effort.
All that said, let’s explore the process of self-regulation.
It helps when learning this awareness tool to separate chronic from acute triggers. Chronic triggers are anything that is having an ongoing disturbing effect on our lives. It could be ongoing disconnection from a partner or friend, an issue with our body, financial fear, a work situation that is stressful, a home environment that creates continual disturbance, or something like conflicts in the society we live in or are near to.
Acute triggers can be misunderstandings with a partner or friend, feeling ignored, criticized, jealous, a failure, something that we did that we feel ashamed of, feeling inferior to someone, or unable to do a task. An acute trigger can also be anytime we risk to express ourselves verbally or creatively, stand up for ourselves, do something that is unfamiliar, be in a new environment, go on a trip, or even leave home. Self-regulating from chronic triggers has many similarities from self-regulating from acute ones and often they have in common the understanding that much of the time, we are helpless to change them.
- Framing:
The first step in our learning to self-regulate is developing the clear intention and commitment to embrace the process of learning how to sooth ourselves. This means first and foremost making a conscious choice to learn to refrain from reacting, dissociating, or relying on addictive or distracting behavior. This is what we call “framing.” We become motivated to regulate rather than habitually react when we realize how important it is for our self-esteem, our inner state, and the flow of our relationships.
Let’s start with discussing acute triggers. We can divide the process into four parts. And we can bring awareness of each of the four. First is the trigger. The question is, “What has or is triggering me?” That takes us to the second part, the thoughts and the body sensations and emotions that are powerfully provoked. The question is, “What am I thinking and feeling right now?” Third is the impulse to act because our nervous system wants to take away the disturbing experience as fast as possible. The question is, “What do I want to do right now to feel better and take away what is triggering me?” And finally, there’s our reactive behavior is usually habitual, automatic, and compulsive driven by our nervous system that senses threat and lack of love.
In our unconscious state, we go through all four without any reflection and without any ability to change the onward movement toward reaction. Something radically is altered when we bring awareness and willingness to reflect, feel, and refrain from acting out (as much as possible.) Because the pull toward reaction is so strong, this takes practice, patience, and compassion.
- Coming Back to Ourselves:
Once we have committed to the process, the next step is consciously taking our focus away from what has triggered us, bringing the attention to our body and inner state, and breathing into the disturbance. This takes continual awareness, discipline, and practice. The awareness is realizing that we have been triggered and how it feels. The discipline is consistently taking our focus away from the source of the trigger and bringing our attention back to ourselves. And the practice is that it’s an ongoing process to realize and accept that we will continue to be triggered in our relating and in our life, face our resistance to accepting this fact, and staying with the inner experience over and over again.
- Being Conscious of Our Negative Thoughts:
The next part of the process is becoming conscious of our negative thoughts. In learning to feel and observe our inner state, it’s important to set aside these negative thoughts that sabotage us from undertaking this process. Normally our thoughts mix with the anxiety, anger, or shame that we’re feeling. This makes it difficult to stay with the experience because the thoughts can be powerful and inhibit our ability to stay present with them. The thoughts might be:
- “It’s overwhelming, and I don’t have the space for it.”
- “This will never end.”
- “This shouldn’t be happening.”
- “The other person shouldn’t be doing this, it’s unjust, unfair, and unloving and I need to change him or her.”
- “If I don’t do something, I will become a victim.”
- “I shouldn’t be feeling this after all the work I have done,” and so on.
Silvia has been in several relationships since she came to work with us many years ago. And they have all been characterized by a high degree of drama. She would get triggered and fly into a rage whenever she felt the man wasn’t available. She was also critical of the ways he dressed, made love, not earning enough money, and not taking good care of his body. In the beginning, although she was willing to learn and grow, she told us that she simply didn’t have the space or the confidence that she could contain her anger and fears and that she would never get the love she wanted if she didn’t react.
But with time, her ability to stay with her anxiety and anger, aided by doing several meditation retreats and meditating regularly, has gotten better and better. Now, she’s in a new relationship since a year, and it’s hard for her to believe that she’s much more accepting of how he is and less focused on his changing. When she does get triggered, she’s able to hold the feelings and then share from a space of vulnerability and responsibility. The key for Silvia is that she realized that she needed to make a change, that she was committed and persevered in her growth, and that she trusted us and the process.
- Bring Awareness to Our Reactive Wounded Self and Our Sensitivities:
Next, we can bring awareness to the part of us that is so reactive. When we act impetuously, it comes from our wounded, immature, and reactive self that takes over and believes the thoughts we are telling ourselves. Often, our awareness doesn’t kick in until after we have reacted and observe the consequences. But that’s fine. For instance, because Trivia and Silvia didn’t have a secure and loving environment as children, they have a desperate need to feel loved and safe today. This is what has driven their reactivity, the intense ups and downs of their nervous system, and their impetuous decisions. But most of us even if we had a more secure holding environment as a child, may still find ourselves quite emotional and reactive when we’re triggered.
As we feel and bring awareness to our reactive wounded self, it’s also helpful to become aware of our particular sensitivities that cause us to become reactive when we get triggered. As we become more aware of our sensitivities, we can see more easily in what situations, we are more likely to become reactive. For instance, we may be highly sensitive to being told what to do, how we feel the other person should be, or when we don’t feel understood or listened to. We also start to notice how it feels when we act compulsively from our wounded self.
Living in our reactive self has a definite feeling quality to it. It is ungrounded, uncentered, and motivated by a desperate effort to find a solution to anxiety and shame from the outside, either from a substance, a behavior, or a person. We act incredibly quickly from an instinctual survival-based place seeking desperately for safety and love. It’s transformational when we bring awareness to this part of us and use gentle disciple not to allow it to run our life.
When we get triggered, when we are under attack of our inner critic, or when we’re depending on outside nourishment to quiet our disturbances, shame, pain, or anxiety, our attention is focused outside of ourselves either on a person, on an offensive stimulus, and on the negative voices in our head. We seek quick relief and reward. But we learn to slowly master our ups and downs by bringing the attention, energy, and focus back to ourselves and consciously pulling the energy away from the source of the trigger.
What does that mean? It means, instead of focusing on how we can change or fix what is triggering us, we tell ourselves, “No, I’m not going to do that this time. This time I am going to bring all of my attention back to myself.” This takes constant practice because it’s not what our nervous system wants to do and it’s definitely not what our wounded self wants to do. And bringing the focus back to ourselves sets us up for the next aspect of this process.
- Feeling and Staying with Our Body Sensations and Emotions:
Now, we’re ready to bring acute awareness to our body sensations and emotions. We’re all different. For some of us, we contract in the chest, our breathing, and we feel highly anxious and restless. We may want to run away or do something to lessen the anxiety. Others of us become angry with the strong compulsion to fight, attack, yell, or retaliate. Still others of us dissociate and become numb. Or to please.
And, as we have said, a trigger will provoke our thinking with negative attitudes, beliefs, conclusions, and assumptions and can be very familiar. We have found it helpful to write down the negative thoughts so that we can identify them. Most often, we’re not aware of the thoughts or how they influence our activation and our life in general.
It takes awareness and discipline to pay close attention to both aspects of the trigger effect. This is not something that we would normally do. There is also a feedback loop between how we feel in our body and what we think. They strengthen each other and can take us on a whirlwind tour of anger, mistrust, disturbance, and emotionality.
Once we’re aware of the body experience and the thoughts, we can actively breath into the body experience. We call it breathing into the fire or the buzzing. It works, but it takes time and patience. What we suggest is actively separating the body experience from the fear, pain, and shame driven thinking. The image we provide to help this is to imagine that the negative thoughts are like cobras coming out of a basket as if they are being seduced by the flute of the snake charmer.
Then we can use our consciousness to coax them back into the basket so that we can stay with the body sensations without being distracted by the cobras. The cobras are stubborn little fellows, and they will keep coming up out of the basket because they are attitudes, beliefs, and conclusions based on traumas from our past.
We need to stay vigilant to get them back in. It’s an active healing meditation that takes practice, perseverance, and commitment. The meditation involves containing our compulsion to react and then consciously focusing on the body, putting the thoughts aside, and breathing into the disturbance.
To sum up, learning to regulate our activation and the fluctuation of our inner state involves:
- Committing to the process with time, patience, and understanding.
- Observing the triggers, our sensitivities, and our reactivity.
- Pulling back from the source of the trigger and coming back to our inner experience which includes negative thoughts and body sensation.
- Feeling the body sensations and identifying the negative thoughts and breathing into the experience in the body with gentle awareness and discipline.
In the process of dealing with either acute or chronic triggers, it is also helpful to develop what we could call “soothing or energetic stabilizing routines.” These can include yoga, listening to soothing music, taking a bath, wrapping ourselves in a shawl or blanket, singing, chanting mantras, reaching out to a trusted friend or therapist, meditating, a cup of tea or coffee (within limits), playing an instrument, learning something new. More energetic stabilizing routines could include a sport, working out at a gym, taking a walk or run, practicing a martial art or anything that creates rhythm and grounds us in the body. Or a breathing technique of inhaling, holding, exhaling, and holding to the count of 4, ten times. Also, anything that involves rhythm like dance has been shown to be calming.
The process of learning self-regulating takes time and patience, but it gets easier and more familiar with practice. And since we’ll regularly get triggered in our life, learning some ability to master our emotionality, reactivity, and tendencies to disconnect brings us tremendous self-respect and dignity. It’s as though, we are stepping into life for the first time.
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