Most people who experience dysregulation and stress think of it as something bad; they are ashamed or want to make it go away. Befriending our sensations seems contra-intuitive.(If you are new to the language of stress responses you might want to start with the polyvagal ladder)
When we reject our stressful experiences we reject our human nature. The body is designed to have these responses. They are meant to be helpful. There is healthy hyperarousal, in moments when we are in danger or need to catch the train. There is healthy hypoarousal when we are in mortal danger or when we experience loss. Our body shifts between states constantly, creating a healthy flow: it self-regulates. These experiences are built into our system. They are natural and normal and we can’t get rid of them because they are part of healthy regulation. No amount of therapy can make all stress responses go away. They will be with us all our life. So we could just as well make peace with them.
The problem with rejecting dysregulation
We only call it dysregulation when the responses don’t match the situation. That is when they cause suffering. It is possible to work on our window of tolerance to reduce dysregulation. But to do that, we need to get familiar with our physiology of stress, stop being afraid of it and eventually befriend it and partner with it. When we experience a stress response and react with anxiety and rejection, that will increase the stress response. Treating dysregulation like an enemy that needs to be fought frantically reinforces our body’s sense that we are in a battle and need the flight/fight energy. Being mortally afraid when slipping into dissociative experiences increases the sense of life-threat that tells the body that dissociation is needed at this point.
(If you are a therapist, you shouldn’t be afraid either. Your client is not dying, they need you to stay calm for co-regulation. Get proper training if you feel helpless. Acting like this is a fight, with yelling and frantic action, is a sign that you are doing it wrong.)
Know thyself
Stress responses are usually not dangerous. They are just this normal, uncomfortable thing the body does. The better we know what it feels like in our body when we get stressed, the better we can recognize what is happening to us. Once we have an explanation, the experience has already lost most of its threat. It’s not the trauma that is happening right now, just a stress response.
It helps to go through our memory of stressful experiences and identify what they felt like.
You could write down all the words that come to your mind when you think of yourself in
- the safe&social response (like: calm, interested, focused, playful, curious, restful, fun, connection)
- flight/fight (like: nervous, hypervigilant, on guard, movement, tapping my feet, sweat, tight jaw, anger, anxious)
- shutdown (like: exhausted, shame, hopeless, sluggish, lack of ideas, staring without seeing)
These are just examples. Your lists should be a lot longer, include body sensations, emotions, behaviors, habits, impulses and everything that describes these states in a way that will help you to recognize them when you experience them.
Once we are in a stressed state, thinking gets more difficult, that is why it is best to reflect on our personal signs of dysregulation beforehand. When we feel them, we can tell ourselves that we know exactly what it is: it is stress. And it is there for a reason.
Another exercise…
uses the letter of your name to describe how you personally feel or behave in certain states.
In my case I would write down T h e r e s a and then brainstorm:
Safe/social: tall, humor, expressive, rest, engaged, safe, attention
Flight/fight: tense, hectic, erratic, reckless, Eff-off!, stressed, anxious
Shutdown: tired, helpless, error, retreat, escape, sedated, abandoned
Once you have a list that describes you in your different states, take a close look at it and notice how this is all you.
You are the one who can be calm and connected. You are also the one who is anxious or impolite and you are also the one who feels ashamed and helpless. It is all you, just different states. You can be like all of this at times and it keeps changing. It all belongs to who you are as a person. You’re not just the friendly side of yourself, there are stressed and withdrawn sides and they are You just like the social side is You. Your name can express all these different things, they are yours.
No state lasts forever, the body will regulate in a different direction if we let it.
Once we become familiar with the fullness of how we can be, we can find more compassion for ourselves when we are in a state that feels uncomfortable. Nothing bad is coming from the outside to hurt us, it is just our body doing this regulation-thing, it will pass. We can be gentle with ourselves while it lasts.
We are not a state, we have them. The things we think in a certain state will pass and in another state we will experience ourselves differently. This is especially important to remember about the chronic shame of a shutdown state. We are only a bit of regulation away from feeling better.
Know your DID system
With DID, we can do the exercise with everyone in the system who wants to participate. You can use names, but you can also just make separate lists to compare, if you feel like the names only get in the way.
Different parts might have different ways to sense stress and respond to it. Some might tend to show a certain response more often than others or might not even know what another state feels like. All that is hugely valuable information that can help us to understand our system: why sometimes a switch is happening for a certain state to be able to be expressed, why some therapy tools (like relaxation) might not work for certain parts etc. The things we can learn about the inner workings of the system can be amazing.
And again, looking at the whole of our responses can show us a glimpse of who we are as a system that belongs together, all sharing experiences of states or being able to express things other parts don’t experience. We complete each other.
Following the Flow
Recognizing stressed states is our first step in befriending our physiology. They aren’t complete strangers anymore. To increase our understanding we need the position of the distant observer.
Imagine you are standing in a stream of water that is your current stress response. This river has a source somewhere. Observing from a distance, you can follow the stream up to its source, the trigger. We are more compassionate and tender with ourselves once we know what caused all these difficult feelings. Of course we are stressed when that trigger was present! A reality check or discrimination excercise might help at this point.
But we can also just wait and let the body do its thing. There is a flow of regulation within the nervous system. It doesn’t stay in a state unless it is fed information that tells it to. When we take turns, looking at a safe environment and then mindfully noticing how our physiology shifts within the flow (pendulation), we will soon notice that we are calming down. The stream doesn’t increase endlessly. It starts to ooze away, seep into the ground.
Regulation happens like waves that we can follow with our awareness. There are highs and lows, it is always changing. It happens in small ways all the time! The big waves are why we go to therapy.
When we learn to follow the flow with our mindful awareness it is easier to get through. But we have to get to know ourselves to stop being afraid of the experience. We can trust our body to regulate and move us out of states that don’t feel good. Our nervous system can be our friend.
More exercises can be found in Deb Dana’s ‘Polyvagal exercises for safety and connection’
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Very helpful–thanks. Good to see you posting again.
The long vacation was good for us. We haven’t had one in 10 years. And the pandemic started getting to us.
We hope to write more useful things soon.