Nervous System Care is Self Care

In the work that I do, the nervous system is a main player. I tell my clients often that I think through the nervous system to make sense of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It is not uncommon for me to ask clients, “What do you think your nervous system is telling you?”

You see, our nervous system holds the blueprint to how we function. It’s been with us every single day of our lives. For all of our experiences, our nervous system has been present-collecting data. Your nervous knows you, like REALLY knows you. It holds memories and experiences that you may not even have conscious memory or verbal ability to articulate. That’s right, our preverbal experiences also live in our nervous system. 

Despite it’s importance, we can forget it’s such a big role in our emotional, cognitive, and behavioral functioning. I strongly encourage my clients to think about what their nervous system is signaling to them during times of excitement, discomfort, avoidance, fear, or worry. This practice also supports building self-acceptance and love towards the self. Taking time to learn your nervous system and what activates it leads to knowing how to respond and regulate it.

Traumatic experiences are overwhelming by definition. They are experiences of such significance and severity, our current operating system is unable to cope with what is occurring. Traumatic experiences can be so excruciating and painful, we will block memories out altogether. The fascinating thing is though, even if we cannot consciously grab hold of a memory, our nervous system often still has reactions that are reflective of our trauma. Isn’t that wild? 

There is so much power in learning what both regulates and dysregulates our nervous system. Often, traumatic experiences can make down-regulating very uncomfortable. We can become accustomed to the level of activity in our nervous system, even if that level of activity is inappropriate. If for example, we were raised in a household with lots of anger, conflict, and loud arguments; in turn, our nervous system can become accustomed to that level of chaos. We can even find ourselves unsettled and out right uncomfortable when we experience regulation because to the nervous system it feels so foreign. Learning what our body needs in the context of stress and dysregulation to settle itself into regulation is called self-soothing. Traumatic experiences, particularly those experienced in childhood are a direct interruption to us learning how to soothe ourselves. Any guesses on what helps us regulating our emotions across our lifespan? That’s correct, our ability to self-soothe.

In a world that is bombarding you with messaging about self-care, I ask you today the following reflective prompts listed below. I invite you to sit with and consider how your daily life routines and activities either support a healthy nervous system OR replicate a pattern of activity that may be familiar to previous trauma experiences. 

What events in life may have impacted your nervous system?

What do you do to tend to your nervous system?

How does a resting state feel for you?

Do you find it difficult to find comfort in stillness?

What things have you learned about what helps you feel settled in your body?

Be mindful, lead with love, and don’t forget to listen.

Dr. C

The Story Behind Our Boundaries

Often, discussing boundaries comes with discomfort. It is not uncommon for worries to accompany setting boundaries, especially if there is a story within us related to boundaries (or lack thereof) in our nervous system. 

What do I mean by this? Attachment behaviors form procedurally (interaction by interaction overtime). Our nervous system collects data from these interactions to make sense of relationships and creates what we refer to as a “working model.” Think of the working model as a script that tells the story of what to expect in a relationship. 

Even though research has found many benefits of boundaries within relationships, setting boundaries for ourselves is a layered experience. In fact, boundaries have been found to be associated with improved communication, decreases in conflict, and increases in self-esteem. Nonetheless, setting boundaries for ourselves often is a reflection of the attachment style we have with ourself. If our relationships in life have lacked boundaries, we can question if we deserve them, if they are rude, fear the other individual’s reaction, or even fear the ending of the relationship altogether! We are certainly a part of that story, but so are the other people we have experienced relationship with. If boundaries were never formed, encouraged, or respected-they can feel threatening, unsafe, and trigger feelings of rejection and/or abandonment. Depending on the attachment styles our nervous system has experienced, the story around boundaries can vary widely. 

This evening, I invite you to reflect on the story your boundaries tell. Not only with others, but within yourself. That’s it. I know I usually provide lots of reflection prompts, but as mentioned, this topic is layered. If it feels safe to do so, peel them back, take a look, and sit with your story. 

Be mindful, lead with love, & don’t forget to listen. 

Dr. C

What is the Story of Your Nervous System?

Working in trauma, grief, and attachment requires a framework of understanding people through the story of their nervous system. You see, it is our nervous system that has been collecting data our whole lives that determines our emotional, behavioral, and cognitive experiences. Our nervous system holds the story of our life experiences-including the good, the bad, and the ugly. 

Have you ever thought about yourself in this way? What is the story of your nervous system? How does your body respond in times of stress, love, excitement, fear, or rejection (to name a few)? How do you respond to being needed by another person? In contrast, how do you respond when someone doesn’t need you? What do you do when someone expresses emotion in front of you? What about when you show emotion in front of others? These are all questions that our nervous system answers.

Learning the story of our nervous system is an overwhelming process. Acknowledging relationships and experiences that were significant in our lives is often heavy and emotionally intense. I find we often want so badly to tell ourselves that things didn’t matter “that much,” or that we’ve “moved on,” or that “it all happened so long ago I was a kid.” We have the same nervous system our whole lives. It’s always taking in data and that data gets encoded into our emotional, behavioral, and cognitive functioning, at any age. As much as I wish this was true, age is not relevant. Even experiences that occur before we can even talk are influential to our nervous system. 

Today I invite you to go through the questions I’ve posed throughout today’s message. Take some time and think about the story of your nervous system. Consider what life events and relationships make up the chapters to the story. And, as an added challenge-I invite you to start perceiving the people in your lives through a similar lens. While you may not know the story of their nervous system and the intimate details involved, it can do a wonder for our relationships if we simply practice being curious, rather than being immediately judgmental. When a person in your life has a reaction that stands out to you, I invited you to remind yourself, they too have a story.

Be mindful, lead with love, and don’t forget to listen. 

Dr. C

Understanding the script

I love attachment for so many reasons. I know I am biased, but it really is a fascinating lens to see the world through. Our attachments with our primary caregivers set the stage for how we navigate our world. A big part of that navigation process is what we do with our emotions. 

How our caregivers responded (or lack thereof) to our emotions is important data for our nervous system. Our nervous system takes in this data one interaction at a time to build a blueprint or script of what happens when emotions are present. Our nervous systems are smart and can build different scripts for different emotions. 

Think for a moment how your caregivers responded to your feelings. Did you receive different responses for different emotions? How did your caregivers respond when you were mad? What about sad? What did it look like when you were excited or curious about something? What did you learn about what happens when each of these emotions are present in your relationship with your caregiver(s)?

Ideally, we receive help to organize our feelings. Receiving help in the midst of our feelings supports us in learning what to do with them. Specifically, it helps us to learn when can I manage this by myself and when do I need support? When the attachment is either too intrusive/co-dependent or too avoidant/absent-this process gets thrown off. In doing so, it becomes confusing to know how/when to self-soothe and when to seek support from others. 

As an adult, how are you at self-soothing and knowing when you need to turn to others for more support? Does turning to others bring up discomfort, embarrassment, or shame? Do you have confidence that even if an emotion is uncomfortable that you can take steps to soothe it? Or are uncomfortable emotions too intense to feel without the presents of someone else? 

These are all questions that can be answered from understanding our attachment systems. Different from therapy modalities that focus on thought patterns or exposure, attachment work aims to understand the script of our nervous system. If we can understand that script, we can start to explore and identify places in the script we’d benefit from editing. We can start to learn in adulthood the things that perhaps were absent from our attachment systems. 

Today I encourage you to explore. To sit with the questions posed and start understanding your own script. 

Be mindful, lead with love, and don’t forget to listen. 

Dr. C

Mother’s Day

Yesterday was Mother’s Day in the United States. And although we can recognize the holiday has origins in commercialism and capitalism, it’s a day that often influences our mental health. It’s a day that can heavily influence our mood, the thoughts we have, and the emotions we feel.

It makes sense, right? Even if you yourself are not a mother, the day can bring about whatever (resolved or not) is included in your relationship with your mother. It’s a day that also has pressure and expectation- because good ole’ social media is alive and well displaying perfect and romanticized content celebrating motherhood. It’s a day that can be filled with love, festivities, and smiles for some; while also a day that can be filled with longingness, anxiety, anger, grief, and immense sadness for others.

As a psychologist that works in trauma, grief, and attachment, I have the privilege of working with all kinds of mother-child relationships. From difficulties with fertility/conception, to bonding with your baby in the NICU, to grieving the loss of your child, to finding your identity as a mother, to working through your childhood trauma with your own mother- I am grateful for the many ways in which I get to work with you mothers. It’s an honor to be invited in to such intimate and important relationships.

One of the many things I take away from this work is that how we are mothered matters. How we were loved, seen, spoken to, disciplined, celebrated, or the lack thereof matters. It influences how we see ourselves, how we process our emotions, and the internal voice we carry with us throughout our lives. Sometimes we benefit from and keep these influences, while at other times we redesign and create new ways of mothering. Whether the way we were mothered was helpful or hurtful; how we were mothered matters. Because it matters, it is worth exploring, acknowledging, and understanding.

So today, if it feels safe to do so- explore the prompts below:

What words describe the relationship I have/had with my mother?

What does motherhood mean to me?

How was I influenced by my mother?

How does the way I was mothered influence how I mother/my relationships?

 Be mindful, lead with love, and don’t forget to listen.

 Dr. Cunningham

Attachment Styles: The Blueprints We’ve Had Since We Were Babies

One of the many reasons I am highly interested in attachment work is the concept that so much happens in our very early years of life. We literally come into this world ready for and dependent on relationships. Take a moment to appreciate the significance of that; during a time of complete vulnerability, our brains are being influenced by our relationships in a way that has lifelong impact for our developmental, physiological, and neurological health. Our society can fall into a terrible coping mechanism making claims that little ones do not remember or understand what is going on around them. That could not be further from the truth. During infancy, we look to our caregivers for signals to make sense of not only ourselves, but the people and the world around us. These signals define what is safe and what is not safe. Interactions with our caregivers build up, one at a time, resulting in a blueprint for our nervous system. Before we are even ready to talk, our brain is collecting data and filing it away.

So, what is this blueprint I’m referring to? Our nervous system collects data procedurally to establish expectations and processes for the world around us. Through the relationships with our caregivers we receive crucial information about the importance of our physical and emotional needs, the availability of the caregiver to get them met, what those needs activate for them, and how well they are able to regulate stress in the process. In turn, this data also informs us on things like our ability to trust others, regulate our own emotions, and even the behaviors we engage in when we are upset. These are all ingredients used in the recipe of our attachment style(s). And although we have the capacity to change our attachment styles, without conscious effort and safe relationships to do that work-we are left navigating the world through the data that we took in from our early years.

Attachment conversations are not easy, and in fact are quite fragile for all parties involved (for this conversation let’s use caregiver vs care-receiver). For the care-receiver it can be quite uncomfortable revisiting moments of unavailability, let down, isolation, fear, shame, anger, or disappointment to name a few. It can be emotionally overwhelming to connect with earlier versions of the self when our needs failed to get met. We can also be bombarded with the desire to protect our caregivers so fiercely that we neglect acknowledging our experiences. For the caregiver, it can be equally (yes equally-not more, not less) emotionally intense to sit with, face, and process the influence one’s own behavior had on another. To revisit those moments in time and what was going on that contributed how the caregiver showed up can include processing trauma and other difficulties with mental health. I cannot stress enough that these conversations are not about blame, they are about learning, understanding, and identifying what ingredients went into each of our individual blueprints. Because remember, that caregiver has a blueprint from their childhood too.

Today is not about how to have those conversations (let’s bookmark it and revisit it in a way that it gets the space it deserves). Today is about understanding the influences to your blueprint. It’s about exploration. I invite you to take sometime getting to know your blueprint. Our attachment styles are processes we’ve had our whole lives, yet we can live life never getting to know them. Despite them being so important for our relationships, mental health, and physical well-being- we can be completely unaware and detached from the data our nervous system continues to use today. So, if it feels safe to do so, I invite you to start exploring.

Who was involved in your caregiving system?

What did your caregiving system relationships teach you about your emotional/physical needs?

What comes to mind when you think about the words you would use to describe how your caregivers responded to your emotions?

Does your blueprint look different with your caregivers vs other relationships in your life? (For example are you more avoidant with your caregiver but more secure with friends or partners?)

Be mindful, lead with love, and don’t forget to listen.

Dr. C