I’ve been contemplating healing from a lifetime of trauma (big and small, discrete incidences and repeated patterns over time.)
Specifically, my own.
I’ve been feeling what I considered a lull in the last couple of months. This was an overall decrease in my physical and mental/emotional symptoms. It was so different from the last year-plus, that I was actually getting that foreboding feeling: when is the next wave of $&!/ was going to hit me.
I asked my practitioners about it. They both asked me versions of “Maybe you’re getting better?”
And I balked.
I have my own trauma triggers, and I won’t get into those. But let’s just say that it took me a good couple of weeks for this possibility to sink in.
I also needed to look at it differently, explicitly using words that don’t trigger unhelpful lines of thought and sensation.
And I realized it’s possible that I could actually be making progress in my own healing. This is inevitable, after almost 2 years of somatic work. But it had been easier for allthereasons for me to not look for change or contemplate what or when or how long healing might look like for me.
But after sitting with the possibility of progress, this is what my science/nature mind has come to understand on a somatic level, instead of just an intellectual one.
When it comes to the nervous system, a regulated state doesn’t mean calm.
We all tend to think that. That regulation or becoming regulated means coming down from activation.
It doesn’t.
Regulation is the natural process of activating and deactivating in a regular-ish pattern.
It’s what we do.
Dry, clinical version: we notice the possibility of a threat, which gets us upandready, then we either realize it’s nothing to worry about, and we relax again and go back to what we were doing; or we handle the threat, then calm down and finally relax, and go back to whatever we were doing.
Or personalized, real-world version: we get anxious about the dinner happening tonight, our heart starts pumping and we feel allthefeels about it. So, we scurry around, cleaning and making sure we’re going to be wearing the right thing, purposely concentrating on what we are doing, not why. Then, we’ve used up the activation/nervous energy, and we start to calm down again. And we can go back to being just fine.
Then something else catches our nervous system’s attention.
It’s a rhythm. Up and down, up and down, up and down.
What’s important about this regulation is that nothing that happens is too much for the current state of our system. This is where the “window of tolerance” or “zone of confidence” comes in. We never get so activated that we pop out the top of our zone, and we never get so quiet/calm/relaxed that we sink below that zone.
So having a regulated nervous system means we mostly stay within the zone of confidence, meaning that our system can confidently handle the stuff we are dealing with.
Everybody’s zone is different.
Some of us have a very narrow zone of confidence. If we get too comfortable, maybe we start getting reactivated, or if we get too activated, maybe we dissociate or freeze.
Some of us are pretty ok, with room to improve.
In practice, increasing the zone of confidence is the same for most people. This is where the muscle building comes in. With the partnership of your practitioner, you basically activate and deactivate within your zone. Sometimes it’s well within the zone, sometimes it’s nudging at the edges a bit.
That’s how physical conditioning works. If you’re training for a marathon (let’s call that life,) you walk or run about as far or fast or long as you can. If you push too hard and tear a muscle, all you get in another injury. And you certainly can’t get up the next day to train some more.
I tell my clients that they can certainly expect to be tired or even a little emotional the afternoon or evening after a session. But they shouldn’t feel bad the next day. If they do, then we need to go slower, more titrated.
And this is important. It’s at least as much my fault if a client who has been working with me and trusts me ends up ouchy.
We are taught to go all in, to rush and push through to get to the results. And if we’re working through some rough stuff in a session, we also have a desire to tell the whole story.
But that can end up doing more harm than good, depending on our individual zone of confidence. Remember that tearing that muscle for the sake of doing another full mile will only set you back.
Therefore, my part is to watch and get the feel of what you can handle and keep you just within that capacity. Also to make sure that I don’t leave you hanging, unable to complete a full activation/deactivation before the end of a session. That’s why I leave buffer time.
Over time, just like with slowly conditioning for that marathon, we will expand our zone of confidence. This means that we will literally be able to handle more than we used to be able to.
When I realize that I’m making progress toward my own healing, this is what I’ve been doing. My zone of confidence is bigger than it was two years ago, one year ago, six months ago. I can handle more.
And I’m able to be more regulated.
As in, I get activated and I can handle being that activated, then I deactivate and I’m able to handle being calm and comfortable.
Do things still throw me out of my zone?
Oh, heck yes! And I expect more stuff will come up and need work.
Not as often, though.
My expanded zone will mean that, in future, it might not take as long, or be as anguishing, to handle that stuff.
And I know that I’m still gaining nervous system condition and strengthening those muscles. So I’ll be able handle more and more.
And that feels. SO. GOOD.
Check out “Work With Me” for more information about me and my work, including how to set up that introductory appointment to see if we can work well together.
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