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

How Are You at Listening?

Listening is a fascinating concept. So much so, if you search Google Scholar for studies on listening, millions of results are produced. While it is such a widely studied skill, it is something we take for granted every single day. As important as it is, we often fail at it. Not only that, we often don’t even have insight into how poorly we do it. The truth is, listening takes intentional and conscious effort. Listening is a skill, and like any other skill; listening requires practice and prioritization.

When it comes to listening, I can only speak from my cultural lens as someone raised in the United States. In the US, we are not (or very rarely) praised or encouraged for our listening abilities. Rather, we are socialized to focus on OURSELVES. What WE think, what WE want, what WE believe. There is an imbalance in fostering a love for curiosity, learning, and understanding of OTHERS. This is one of the many reasons I am a proponent of citizens of the United States engaging in talk therapy as a way of life-simply because we have very few spaces dedicated to and prioritizing listening. Going back to listening being a skill, how can we perfect a skill we are never exposed to?

You know me, I love a reflective exercise. I’d like for you to take a moment and think about the loved ones in your life. Think about the meaningful relationships in your village. How would you say you do when it comes to truly listening to each of them? Better yet, how would each of them assess you on your ability to listen? 

Now, certainly there are very real life stressors and neurological conditions that can influence our ability to listen. ADHD, concussions, and exhaustion are just a few examples. And while we can acknowledge the things that can make listening harder, do we also hold ourselves accountable for things we implement to make listening a conscious priority that we practice? Do we also identify things that make listening easier for us?

Listening is a regulator in our relationships. It serves as a critical factor in feeling understood, acknowledged, and respected by others. In a society that overly pushes hyperindependence and the stroking of the individual ego, we NEED to WORK to counteract those messages. And, it’s not just good for the other person-LISTENING IS GOOD FOR THE LISTENER. It improves empathy, provides clarity, and can increase productivity to name just a few positive outcomes. 

Below you will find an exercise I do with my clients, I refer to it as a listening assessment. Take a look and see how you are doing. I encourage you to acknowledge if this is an area that doesn’t come naturally, that is OK! I encourage you to again think about your relationships and how your friends and family would answer the questions on your behalf. Most importantly, I hope that you are encouraged to do the work to place listening as a priority in your meaningful relationships. 

What does listening look like? How do I know if I am effectively listening?

Would I consider myself a good listener?

What does it feel like when I am being listened to?

What does it feel like when I am not being listened to?

What helps me focus and be an effective listener?

What gets in the way of me listening?

Do I often interrupt others?

How much of my conversations with friends and family are focused solely on me?

How often do I take control of the conversations I am in?

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

Dr. C

Is Mental Health in Your Vocabulary?

Think for a moment of the meaningful relationships in your life. Think about each individual person, what they mean to you, how much you cherish the relationship you have with them, and the purpose they serve in your life. Think about who they are and what you know about them.

How often do you ask them about their mental health?

Time and time again, clients, friends, and family members tell me how infrequent conversations about mental health are in their lives. I could retire if I had a dollar for each time I was told, “Dr. C, you are the only person in my life that asks about these things.” Ok, I couldn’t actually retire but you get my drift here. 

Now, of course I understand that not everyone is a therapist, that people aren’t always sure what to say, and that socialized constructs add to the stigma around mental health. In understanding all of those influential factors, I’m left with curiosity as to what to do about it. How do we begin to change this? As with any growth point in life, developing this skill requires us to be willing to be uncomfortable, not have all the exact answers, and open to learning.

That being willing to be uncomfortable part seems to really get in our way, doesn’t it? So much so, we will come up with lots of self-protecting excuses. Yes, they are excuses. Some of them may sound familiar: “I wasn’t raised like that.”, “I don’t want to be nosey.”, or how about this one, “Oh me and so & so don’t talk like that”. Those are all examples of stories we tell ourselves to avoid being uncomfortable. 

It’s ironic right? That we can logically and emotionally truly care for someone, yet never ask certain questions or talk about certain topics-simply because they are uncomfortable. Today I urge you to consider the enormous value on the other side of that discomfort. On the other side of that discomfort is the smashing of social and societal stigmas. On the other side of that discomfort is a new level of knowing your loved ones. On the other side of that discomfort are relationships that involve real life shit. On the other side of that discomfort is the difference between someone suffering in silence and someone having a safe place to say the inside stuff out loud. 

Our mental health is who we are. How can we claim to have meaningful and loving relationships if mental health isn’t even in our vocabulary?

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

Dr. C

Notice I didn’t say was: A love letter to a grieving soul

Dear grieving soul,

Grief comes with so many realizations, it transforms us both inwardly and outwardly. As you are reading this, you may not even feel like you know who you are. While that in and of itself can be unnerving, it’s a signal of how significant the one you are grieving is to your sense of self. Notice I didn’t say was.

I bet you never realized just how uncomfortable the rest of the world around you is with intense emotions until now. Have you found yourself completely annoyed and dreading encounters with others? Have you found the space to laugh at the ridiculous things people say? Perhaps you are desperately waiting for a single other human to just fucking get it. Grief brings a magnifying glass to how unequipped most are at holding space for things that are intense, uncomfortable, and that don’t have a clear “fix.” The fact that there isn’t an easy fix or words that bring much comfort is that same signal. The signal of how significant the one your are grieving is to your sense of self. Notice I didn’t say was.

Our brains work so hard to make sense of our lives and experiences, especially the ones that accompany intense emotions. One of the ways our brains try to help us when things are overwhelming is to organize and create a story line. Our brains work to think of and discover the hows and whys in effort to navigate what is going on around us. It’s typically a good strategy, until it comes against grief. Often, there aren’t answers to our questions in our loss. We are left here living with sometimes no answers or if we do get them, they fall short in comparison to the pain. The answers we do have so often are insufficient and leave us angry and well-aware that answers be damned, it isn’t fair. Having to live life with loss isn’t fair and the fact the brain’s typical strategy falls short is yet another signal of how significant the one you are grieving is to your sense of self. Notice I didn’t say was.

Grief is a complicated ride to say the least. It can influence how we think, what we want to do, create fears, boil up anger, change our priorities, and introduce guilt and doubt-just to name a few. Because of this, it is only human that we desire for it all to go away and meet these differing emotions with resistance. It’s in this resistance that we are the most desperate for control. The thing about grief though, is it isn’t something to be controlled. It is something that lives with us throughout our lifespan after loss. Grief is organic, subject to change, surprising, sometimes silly, sometimes painful, and sometimes down right exhausting. While on this ride, grieving soul, remind yourself that each twist and turn is a signal of how significant the one your are grieving is to your sense of self. Notice I didn’t say was.

Grieving soul, as you put one foot in front of the next, I hope this letter will serve as a reminder to engage with your grief. It is present and will continue to be. The intensity may change, but the loss of someone significant to your sense of self is a loss we feel infinitely. Your grief will likely morph and feel differently at different timepoints in your life, but it will likely always bring certain emotions back to the forefront. Grief does not go away because we don’t have all the answers, because it isn’t fair, because people don’t know what to say, or because we desire to resist. As you take each step in living life with loss, remember the relationship with the one you’ve lost continues too.

Grief is. Not was.

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

Dr. C

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