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

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