Emotional Regulation: Somatic Tools, Feeling Safe, and Self-Acceptance | Being Well

hey everyone welcome to being well I'm Forest Hansen if you're new to the podcast thanks for joining us today and if you've listened before welcome back one of the most important skills we have to learn in life is the ability to regulate our emotions this means being able to ride the emotional waves that naturally come along in life with some Effectiveness some skillfulness to be able to manage emotions so they don't explode out of us inappropriately while also being able to look inside and feel how we're actually feeling emotional regulation is tough for everyone it's

tough if you're 2 years old it's tough if you're 62 years old but it is really really particularly hard for people who have a history of difficult experiences and I tend to be a pretty top- down person but the truth is that you can't think yourself out of a feeling uh you might be able to paper over it for a while but what we resist tends to persist what we push down tends to just pop back up so a lot of the work here is actually driven by the body it's driven by the relationship that

we have with how things literally semantically feel inside of us and so in order to tackle this topic I was joined today by my wonderful partner Elizabeth Ferrera Elizabeth is an associate therapist practicing in the San Francisco Bay area and she is a somatically informed therapist as well uh her work really focuses on the body I've talked to her a couple of times on the podcast she's as you would imagine one of my absolute favorite people in the world and I just loved talking with her about this topic so I really hope that you enjoy

today's conversation thanks for doing this with me today yeah I'm really glad that we're doing it um I've been looking forward to talking with you about this for a while because so much of your work in my understanding of it and this is probably a good question to start with like orbits the idea of how to effectively regulate yourself yes uh when you're feeling a little high how to turn yourself down when you're feeling a little low how to turn yourself up and just how to like manage all the difficult experiences that people have in

their life because that's really what regulation is MH so how do you think about it like where do you start with people I O good question where do I start yeah like somebody came in and you're noticing that there might be some kind of a regulatory issue going on how do you work your way into that well the very beginning is that I try to be as regulated as I possibly can Within Myself so the more regulated I am the more it invites regulation into the co-created space between me and the other person sure the

other thing is finding safety the key thing is that we have to feel a degree of safety in order to start to become more aware of our sematic experience because if we don't feel safe the body tends to not be a fun place to be could you talk a little bit about how you try to get that into a person that that feeling that they actually are safe wherever they are I think the first thing that I tend to do and right I'm taking the view as a therapist so I'm usually working with a specific

population and I'm also a sematic therapist so I am seeking bottom up processing kind of all the time yeah so it typically begins in the room where I try to relate to the person like what can I start to find resonance in um do we have a similar sense of humor right I'm trying to move us into where we naturally start to begin to connect with each other and and this is kind of the bridge right if I'm really regulated and I'm calm and I feel safe in my body it invites the other person into

that experience of safety because I'm feeling safe MH and there's a lot of kind of practical things we do in the room to establish safety one is we give a lot of empowerment and autonomy um within the space so there's always you can say yes no or maybe I apply this is an exploration and there's no right or wrong way and the key thing is that it's not about you the client trying to make everything I'm giving you work right it's not about that it's about finding what works for you well I love that because

it's the opposite of the experience that people tend to have in their day-to-day life yeah where a lot of people feel like they're put into a very specific box they have to do things one way and they have the repeated experience of basically being like a fish who's told to climb a tree yeah and they're they're just trapped in a setting or around people who sort of force themselves or who force them to relate to these people in a particular kind of way and that's such a foreign model and so we have repeated experiences essentially

a failure MH you know I'm I'm a fish I can't climb a tree I I don't know how to speak that language disempowerment disempowerment yeah so I love that you're starting with like the development of agency and even small ways where you're allowed to say no you're allowed to say I don't know about that one but hey maybe this one over here and you're allowed to say I don't like it I don't know why I like it but I don't like it and then we're like great let's move on let's find something else yeah so

even backing up a little bit from here a lot of the experiences that people have that tend to develop like healthy regulation side of ourselves come in when we're a lot younger through secure attachments of different kinds like predominantly with caregivers but also with other kids uh as I've talked about in the podcast in the past I was pretty securely attached to my parents not so securely attached with other kids at school right a lot of averse experiences and that kind of a setting and so often it's the case with people who have a little

bit more difficulty regulating themselves that they didn't form those secure attachments growing up yeah and so part of what you're giving them is the opportunity to form a kind of secure attachment with you it's you know it's bounded it's specific you're not trying to be their mom but there's an opportunity there for reparative experience exactly I couldn't have said it better than myself maybe I should just like take that clip and put it on my website Elizabeth F giving you the opportunity for reparative experiences not forcing you opportunity yeah yeah totally well um how would

you mind giving an example of what that looks like like I don't want you to pull from an actual example for a whole bunch of different reasons but just like yeah but just like kind of in general what does that tend to look like I kind of think about uh development of a human being as having like different steps right and the image I use a lot is you're building a house right so very early early development is building a solid foundation if there are missing elements to that Foundation like say there wasn't enough concrete

or say there wasn't enough water or say whatever or it was built on Sand you know like it's going to have cascading effects on a person's ability to regulate their nervous system so a part of the way that I work and think about this is finding the missing element not necessarily what happened to you but what didn't happen what didn't have an opportunity to get a sense of empowerment so a part of my work is finding what that is and inviting an opportunity for that experience to happen and so it's really about me as the

therapist being that which is needed um and that's usually through a certain degree of mirroring Attunement reflection and invitation to empowerment this is reminding me a lot of the convers ation that I had with Dr H yeah yeah which you listen to I'm a big fan yeah you do like Dr Hever I you it so hard when you were in there recording I was like it's him it's happening no I love Dr hob he's amazing amazing trauma therapist and one of the things that he talks about in his work is rupture repair yeah it seems

like there is an aspect of his work that is focused on identifying when there is a little rupture between him and the client m you have a little moment something didn't land quite right I I used a word wrong you can tell that just a Vibe has entered the space of there being a disruption of some kind yeah and then he'll really go out of his way to call it out directly yeah he'll say hey I noticed a thing I think I messed this thing up he talks about it really overtly or Stephanie Fu actually

talks about it really overtly in her book what my bones now um where she talks about this kind of therapy that they did where there was really an opportunity for that and part of the point of the therapy was to have those little repairative experiences with your clinician yeah which again if you think about a lot of people's model of like self-regulation or relationship comes from Early Childhood experiences where they had those kinds of moments with caregivers where there was never repair there was just a rupture and you get rupture on rupture on rupture and

so you start to get really really good at like holding on to all of that you know does my parent require me to really downregulate myself and just be like smooth as the other side of the pillow yeah or do my parent require me to be in this really revved up state so that they can soothe me in some kind of a way or because that's just the energy that they demand and now you're creating a new story with your clinician which can be really great this might be a good a good place just to

kind of say that particularly with folks who have experienced trauma or more complex trauma the pathway to learning how to regulate your nervous system can be really Frau M because it's almost like they're all these landmines and moments of you know becoming triggered like a moment of the past is now it here in the present moment and the body remembers right so I just want to like make space that what we're talking about today in particular is kind of for the population who has either like gone through that Journey enough to have some fac already

or a population that identifies as not having experienced more complex or developmental trauma just to kind of put that as my own kind of voice as a trauma therapist that this is not easy stuff yeah and I would really recommend if you start a journey of taking this on as a practice or learning how to regulate to just be really gentle with yourself um because I mean at least Le I'll speak from my own personal experience um I was not fully aware of just how little facility I had at one moment in my life to

be able to regulate my nervous system and when I started to move into this stuff it just kind of Awakened the reality of what had happened to me so yeah I just I just wanted to kind of put that there can I ask you a personal question about that oh of course okay just you know for for the record let's go let's go so what were some of the key skills that you had to learn um in adulthood in order to be able to deal with big emotions more effectively or uh rev yourself up if

you were kind of in more of a I don't know you were having a hard time doing that well speaking just from my experience I survived by dissociating yeah I can't think of the word that would be a little bit more over regul I was I might have been like over regulated and what that means was that I kind of was like generally flat most of the time I never showed anybody my disregulation externally most people would have thought I was totally fine when inside I was not yeah and I have a nervous system and

a body that is more in that structural dissociation window where you describe that means yeah so for me I had a lot of misattunement when I was developing and I identify as a parentified child I had to very quickly learn that I needed to regulate to my parents and also regulate my family system in order to be safe MH so as I was developing right like my little body was creating my Foundation there is the part of me that knows how to get on with daily life which I kind of interpret as being a bit

more left brain it's thinky it's top down I'm not really connected to my body but I can just bite down on the stick so to speak and just get through whatever I need to get through MH and then there are the parts of me that have developed through that dissociated state so when I dissociate there is a part Corel related to that more fight ORF flight part of my nervous system so you could say there's a part of me that knows how to get me through it when I'm in that activation there's also the part

of me that knows how to get me through it when I'm in that freeze that dorsal vagal mode and there's also the part of me that knows how to be when I'm in that kind of more sensitive disregulated attachment place of my nervous system as I started to learn how to regulate it became very disregulated because I wasn't fully integrated I did not have a fully integrated sense of self so I move into a nervous system State and now I kind of feel like a different person in a way like not fully but like I

am in a different part of me that was great context and uh so from that stance as somebody who was maybe a little bit more over regulated more dissociated what skills do you feel like you had to learn to work with that effectively I had to let the parts out and have the either the Tantrum or have their experience yeah cuz my getting on with everyday life part or my more manager parts are very very strong and I learned as a kid not to show those parts so I would just Exile them I would push

them away so I'm not actually being with my nervous system and having a degree of flexibility to move through states of arousal when I felt them I just would dissociate from them so I would lose awareness lose a sense of tracking and eventually later on they would come back and I would be like H that line you didn't have the flexibility to move through states of arousal as a phenomenal line oh thank you yeah could you could you explain kind of like what that looks like in a in a healthy version of it yeah anyone

can go on Google and you just Google poly vagel Theory and there will come up a great image so in a more flexible nervous system it's normal for us throughout the day to move through various states of arousal meaning it's normal to dip into that dorsal vagal freeze State and then you come back up and you're like back in that connected social space you feel pretty good and then you maybe get aroused you know maybe some cut you off you on the freeway you know that rises up but then you can go okay mindfulness and

compassion you know like he's probably having a bad day and then you're able to bring it back down right yeah you have this wave function and you're you're in a fluid relationship with it yes yeah you're not locked into one or the other yes so what I used to do as someone who is more structurally dissociated is that when I felt my nervous system start to go up into say that fight ORF flight response I would get stuck there the part of me that knew how to be in that state kind of would hold me

in that state which looked like if someone cut me off on the freeway I'm spending the rest of the drive being like you know and then when I get to wherever I'm going I'm irritated I'm kind of pissed at everybody you know that doesn't really deserve that I am bitter I'm a and I'm I'm stuck there for a period of time yeah what um what did you do to be different for a lack of better way of putting it like what what was that process like what do you think that process is like for people

and and what what helped you um approach those situations differently I'm more aware of my inter reception I have built the relationship with my internal feeling State and my nervous system to be able to feel that wave as it's happening so I can really feel when I'm in that safe regulated peaceful I'm capable of connecting space of my nervous system and I'm able to feel when we start to move up to the fight ORF flight and I'm able to feel when we start to move into that kind of free state so the first piece for

me was building that inter reception like actually feeling what it's like as my nervous system moves through those States M and in the beginning it was a process of allowing because I tend to dissociate so it's like okay how do I stay with something that my body experiences as unbearable right that I was taught to not do this so now I'm having to ret myself how to stay with something how to stay with this wave as it's happening it's funny that for both sides of the coin more over regulated and more underregulation key skills that

tends to be come up is um some people refer to it as developing distress tolerance that phrase is a little complicated for a lot of different reasons but essentially being able to stay with an experience without becoming overwhelmed by it yes because what a lot of people don't understand is that it's not that people who are overregulation you know we've been together for like seven years at this point and I'm I'm not sure if I've really thought about you in the past as somebody who is over regulated but looking into your your like past history

and why these systems developed the way they they did it makes total sense um I've always kind of thought of myself as the more like repressed over regulated one of the two of us sated you as the more like loose emotionally free one but I do think that like that was a practice yeah it was a practice EX exactly and I think a key thing is that I have a traumatized body so I think like the key difference is that when we started really living together that's when kind of my unraveling started to happen and

it happened because finally there was enough safety for that to happen yeah previous in my life there was no space of safety anywhere for me to allow that flexibility and freedom within my nervous system so by us you know moving in together um my nervous system finally feeling a degree of safety and it took a lot of effort for me to try to stay in that relational part of my nervous system because frankly mine was quite narrow so there was a lot of like at every turn kind of within relating the possibility for me to

become like very very triggered and in the past I would just hide it I would over regulate it um but then with us being in relationship I started to reveal more and that was a part of the practice too leaning on someone else for co-regulation like I am actually not okay yeah and look at it yeah it's it's so interesting what you're saying this uh this aspect of it where when you finally get into that safe environment that's sometimes when things feel like they just all fall apart yeah particularly emotionally uh I'll get emails sometimes

often seemingly from guys who are in relationships saying some version of I'm in a relationship with somebody who has complex PTSD or pmdd or ADHD with rejection sensitivity issues or whatever it is for them um somebody on the more kind of sensitive borderline side of the spectrum and they have a very healthy relationship things have been going well for a long time and it just feels like my partner is more sensitive there's all this emotional stuff coming up I don't really know what to do like am I doing something wrong what's going on here and

when you dig into it a lot of the time it's because like actually things are going really well and actually as a partner you have provided a very safe environment for this person to finally do some of the emotional work that's been kind of left on the back burner for a long time because there just wasn't a conducive space for it to happening also just like there's enormous vulnerability in relationship yes and so if you're somebody where experiences where there was relational vulnerability typically did not end well for you for the first fill-in the blank

years of your life and all of a sudden that starts coming up again as an adult it's natural that you would you'd have some emotional you know emotional disregulation poping and also right calling in that attachment part of our nervous system and if you have some attachment wounds or there's a pattern of maybe um a lot of chaos happening within attachment you can't trust attachments right usually there's a certain degree where a body will allow us to attach and then something shifts where then all of a sudden the attachment is perceived as not safe there's

a lot of uncertainty now starting to happen o did I lean in too much was I too vulnerable did I reach out too much was I too needy right and then it can flip into the shame part of our nervous system so what I would love to do here if you're up for it is I would love to embody two different people okay one person who's a little more and these are kind of like I'm holding real people in my mind one of them's me um so one of whom's a little bit more on the

over regulated side of the spectrum one of whom is on the little bit more uh [Music] underregulation of a different process but as this person's coach friend you know I'm you got 10 minutes with them and you're giving them some advice what would you say to them okay right all right so first person little bit more uh overregulation up they get a lot of feedback from other people that hey man you just need to kind of get in touch with yourself a little bit more they can come off a little logical and Spock like to

other people very focused on the detail of a thing the right way to do something they're emotionally intelligent in a in a theoretical kind of way but they can come across as like a little Bruce or remove to people and what they really want to do is they want to feel like they can tap in their interior and feel those feelings without being overwhelmed by them what kind of advice would you give that person or are there tools that you would give them um Concepts you would want them to look up just anything that kind

of comes to mind for you right now well because I'm a sematic therapist I start with how that makes me feel yeah and the first thing I notice um from my own nervous system is that there's a lot of sensation in my heart center like my chest and there's this sensation of energy moving up and there's now a speed starting to come in which in my body signals the presence of hypervigilance so someone or a part of them maybe unconscious or not is hypervigilant in some way and when I hear hypervigilance within this context I

think of a very very tight like um manager in a person so there's a lot of inter Al rules there's a lot of compartmentalizing there's a lot of structure in the barrier to express out so from a sematic lens there's probably a tightness in the body that I could already see in someone there's probably an unconscious place of tension like the jaw like hooking the jaw back like this a person puts a lot of pressure on the gadal diaphragm in the throat so we hear a lot of this start to happen there's a lot of

like pulling back and you could even get the image or the metaphor of like a horse with the bit in the mouth constantly pulling the rains back so then it's like okay the I'm aware of what's happening I am embodying that I can feel the impact that might have so how do we invite the opposite how do we find the places in the body that are very willing to relax so we don't right to to up here where the most tension might be and for those listening you gestured to your throat and kind of your

chair yes they talk for me so with this structure or when I'm noticing this sematic posture and form um I will usually Begin by let's just start by swaying a little bit and it's not swaying that's supposed to you know be big we're doing it very small the the goal is for this to feel super easy super gentle we honor points of resistance so if you're leaning to the left and you feel the beginning of resistance you go the other way and we just get a little bit of Artic articulation in the spine and as

we slow down right because hypervigilance is a speed by doing this we're slowing things down and usually our managers are very mental so as we slow down we're inviting ourselves to slow down to the pace of the body the body is much slower than the mind so usually by now if we're you know if I'm offering this as a practice or a tool the person will have a natural sigh or a natural breath that might come in or they might notice there's less resistance now they can move a little bit more in a certain direction

than they could be before and then we begin what are you noticing how does this feel is it uncomfortable is it comfortable is this good or bad right do you have a preference Often by this point people are already starting to notice something in the body that they did not notice before that's great for starters awesome stuff and it's reminding me of something that was actually super helpful in my own process and remains very helpful in my own process which is a I use sometimes which is how do I let the Fizz out of the

bottle yeah for a lot of people who for lack of better word are more repressed because that's a lot of what we're talking about with overregulation there's a repression we're pushing energy down for a lot of people who fall into that category there's a feeling that if I pop the lid on this so much is going to come out that I don't want to deal with or that's going to cause consequences for me in my life and because I can't let it out safely I can't let any of it out because you know once you

pop you just can't stop right it just it all comes flowing out so the question then becomes how can you let some of it out without letting all of it out because then by letting a little bit out at a time suddenly you have more access to the central material yeah it becomes safer to go into the body of it cuz you've let little bits out and for me what's been really helpful is actually a lot of sematic practices little things like handshaking mhm like when I got mad about stuff in the past sometimes I

would just like be like no see you late or anger and what's been helpful for me these days is to just like shake my hands when I feel that just like bounce like dispel a little energy so I feel like I can interact with the emotion but with enough of it released where it kind of takes the edge off and I can still approach it the way that I want to approach it does that make sense makes total sense and what you're talking about is titration yes great which again more from this sematic lens usually

within every window of our nervous system we have a certain window of tolerance for that and it's important when we start to lean into okay let's explore you're really tight you're really over regulated how we let some of the Fizz out that it's just enough to kind of have the whisper of the oh God experience we don't even want you get you're having manage what's because now your manager involved and now we're out of the right brain and now I'm just having a conversation with your left brain and that serves nothing right so by slowing

down right and doing a little bit at a time we're expanding a person's window of Tolerance within a given state of activation now the the thing is that it's really common if we notice that we're more in that fight ORF flight part and uh anger right is definitely up in that part of our nervous system that it makes sense to have a movement that matches that energy right because we're talking about something that is inherently physical so it we can't think our way through it we have to find a movement find a physical way to

channel that energy and help us regulate it's almost like we're letting the Fizz out in a safe way okay I let a little bit out I'm I'm good I'm still with it I'm still with my interoception I'm aware and I I can be here I can still be in this you want to talk about shame for a second sure okay because that can be really hard for people yes uh for a lot of different reasons yeah uh one of them is because they feel silly they feel dumb are you telling me I'm in a group

of people with seven people I feel a little safe I feel my emotions getting out of little getting away from me a little bit not out of control but internally just getting away from me a little bit and you're saying I should start like shaking my hands awkwardly in front of people like I'm not going to do that are you crazy yeah yeah so you know that's one way it can come in yeah another way it can come in for people is just like wow I've got to think about this at all uh I I

didn't learn these skills when I was younger my parents didn't attune to me in the ways that helped me learn how to do this m i Peter line line is shame is the thousand pound gorilla in the Consulting room yep it's a great line it comes up constantly and I'm wondering how you either what advice you would give about that to people who are dealing with that kind of stuff or just like how you start to work with that well I would say shame is the Great Barrier so because I'm a therapist often I try

to co-create a space with someone where no matter how weird something may be I am not going to shame you for that now what you're talking about with live fire outside of therapeutic space yeah you know it may not feel safe to engage in something you have found useful that helps you regulate something in a physical way so there are a couple of kind of covert little ways that I've kind of explored it's really easy to kind of be subtle and hide certain movements like putting your hand in a fist mhm right getting a degree

of pressure somewhere you know pushing into your thighs right like feeling Into Your Own Strength you're channeling that anger a little bit maybe in a way like squeezing your thighs right I'm saying if you're in a group of people right um the other thing is using your breath to help you down regulate a little bit so I often invite spend more time on your exhale right because if we're constantly taking in air we're kind of feeding the nervous system to become more hypervigilant to be we're lifting ourselves up and off of our root and our

groundedness so by spending more time on your exhale it's a subtle way to start to downregulate the nervous system the other thing is starting to slow down right so talking a little bit slower giving yourself a pause right and the other thing is that even though right I'm I do say that we can't really think our way through an experience a lot can happen when we internally acknowledge the experience we're having or we're having yeah right so by having that internal Ally built inside of ourself that's like yep you're really angry right now and you

know what it's Justified this is this is an accurate moment to feel anger and it's okay to be angry right now so that's actually a fundament Al practice that's taught in mindfulness based cognitive therapy where you have the ability to look inside of yourself label an experience that you're having an emotional experience in particular saying something overtly to yourself like uh I'm angry I'm in pain um I am experiencing a lot of anxiety right now whatever it is that kind of basic emotional labeling but then kind of taking it a step further and this is

the more mindful aspect is to be able to say to yourself This is how I feel and that's okay to go full acceptance practice with it that's okay that's how I feel that's okay we can deal with it later if it needs to be dealt with but how I feel right now is okay and what they found in the research on it is just that practice alone had an enormous impact in in people's just overall experience of being able to deal with the emotion happiness and well-being broadly they just felt better most of the time

after doing that which is really interesting I've taken it on myself as a practice and I found it incredibly helpful a lot of the time even though it sounds like both tiny and a little a little cornball a little cheesy um but if you actually do it it's like oh yeah then everything lightens up all of a sudden it's pretty cool yeah yeah my kind of way into that with what you're just describing um and this this is my experience is that because I'm more structurally dissociated I've learned to really start to feel when a

part of me starts to become triggered mhm starts to come in and I know that because I can start to feel myself dissociate a little bit and then I'm like let's stay here and then I can become very aware of like a part and I experience Parts as very physical right so when a part kind of you know metaphorically like takes the steering wheel of my body it has a very different feeling than when my adult y self is in charge so a part of acceptance how I inter interpret it is being able to keep

the wise adult part of myself in charge of driving the bus but is still able to be with the part of me that is panicking or the part of me that's in a state of activation and I kind of perceive the parts that have a real connection to my nervous system as being much younger so sometimes I get a lot of flexibility within my nervous system when instead of pushing aart away or being all like get out of here you know like I don't like you right almost reparenting myself allowing that part of me to

come here but allowing the impact of the experience to be held by my more adult self so it's like I am being the adult while bouncing the scared child on my knee at the same time that's a great visual and this might be a bit of an oversimplification I don't know how somebody like you know I talked to Richard Schwarz pretty recently creator of ifs very very cool guy and um but maybe one way to think about overregulation and underregulation is when you're over regulated the the um the vulnerable Parts the child part is you

know in the basement yeah when you're underregulation where that part is writing shotgun but it's not driving the car yeah and so part of the question is like what helps people get there yeah I kind of think about it as you know get their little sticky hands off the driving yeah you know like a little a little four-year-old has no business driving a bus totally totally totally that's not how you uh teach your kid to drive for sure yeah yeah so a part of this and this is also a part of my work is finding

that wise adult self that we all have and giving that part of ourselves a lot of experience of feeling empowered of making that wise adult part of ourselves feel like there's a lot of agency I know what to do I can accurately help these parts I can keep driving the bus and within this process I am able to ride the waves of my nervous system and not be overtaken or overwhelmed by them this is a perfect transition to case study number two okay my more vulnerable under regulated sensitive person so like hold hold the wise

adult in your head or what you were just saying because I think that that actually has a lot of connections here but I wanted to go back to that model so okay so second case this is somebody who is a little bit more sensitive is a little bit more emotional uh tends to either go to a lot of anger and sharpness or a lot of uh sadness tearing emotional overwhelm quite easily and they've just had a really hard time with self soothing and self soothing is like a major challenge that they deal with like you

were talking about when they get revved they stay revved and they often stay revved until somebody else is available to kind of talk them down from the ledge and they come to you and they say I really want to learn how to do this for myself where do you go with that so again because I begin with my own body I'm already starting to feel myself kind of dissociate a little bit and this is a sensitivity that I have with this type of population when I'm around this structure my parts start to get activated because

it can feel quite similar to certain parts of me and also I was in a family system with people who were like this so my body learned to dissociate from certain parts of me and certain parts take over to be with this structure right so just honoring that I can already feel a little bit of dissociation I can feel a lot of chaotic energy in my body again it's still in a lot of my um chest Center but it is not actually as intense as the one we just did that it's fuzzier it's harder to

track I'm like something's happening but there's a lack of containment so that's a good way to describe underregulation in general a lack of containment yeah it's diffuse it's ephemeral it's all over the place I can't find you so with that it's about joining the person in their own chaos it's about meeting them where they are at while still being able to hold on to my ability to regulate and still be here right so it's not that I get totally consumed by the chaos it's that I have learned inside myself how to dance with this chaos

and this is way too much for one person to regulate so that's why we start with joining with so I might try to with this type of structure or person do a lot of mirroring like honoring like wow this is a lot this sounds overwhelming I'm naming what I am seeing as it's happening right we are moving out of this ephemeral disregulated place and I'm like hey I'm with you I see it and I'm and I'm okay you know and that's the key bit is that I remain okay as this is happening and then because

our nervous systems interact with each other usually it starts to invite a little bit of that co-regulation Things become less chaotic and now we start to move into the containment and with someone who is of this structure that you're bringing in there might be a lot of unconscious Parts floating around so then it's we're containing the experience I might kind of grab the reins a couple times I might move us into a practice that regulates the nervous system right away right like let's pause the story let's drop into the body okay that's intense let's totally

shove it and now let's find some safety right with these types of experiences we need to start to get more experience of safety in the body as fast as possible yeah that's really I love that you're highlighting the safety aspect of it because often that kind of explosive emotion comes from a place of just not feeling safe it's Terror yeah yeah and so there's the there's the pulling of emotional resources from other people to confirm to yourself that you are safe and you are going to keep on existing and this is okay are there things

that you do with people or things you teach them how to do for themselves maybe again this is more of like a coaching question than a therapy question um that helped them get more in contact with the wise adult part that you were talking about earlier my immediate answer is through experience we we have to give that part ex the experience that allows it to come forward right so often and just to be clear it's very common for this type of structure to be associated with complex PTSD yeah so often we're also working with trauma

responses which is different than an emotional response because now it's it's like Inception now the stuff from the past is in and now you know the parent who did something is in the room and now like and this is why we need containment because it will just spiral and kind of become more ephemeral and this gets to reenactments reenactments all that so it's about giving the wise adult part of us the experience of being able to regulate and we can only regulate when we are in the present moment M you you can't regulate the past

right and if you're worried about the future you can't regulate the future so often with this it's about bringing them back into the Here and Now right cuz that's where we find the Wise adult self like hey you're here with me and I'm already starting to see this part we have to reflect this part when it shows up like there's a part of you that knows something you know we may not know it yet but you can feel it already because this is the part that brought you here this is the part that can tell

something is wrong this is the part that's like wait I this is not normal and I shouldn't have to be working this hard that's the first beginning pieces of the wise adult there's an empowerment aspect to that yeah where a lot of the time people with that kind of a personality formation like we were talking about at the very beginning they just have not had a lot of agency and empowerment experiences um they've received a lot of negative feedback from other people based on that personality structure that they have they've quite often experienced a good

amount of trauma um these are very very painful experiences that led to a disregulated system that is tough to manage it's tough to manage for them what will sometimes happen for people that as not a clinician I would imagine is just like so cool when people start to get to this point is they'll have enough of that ability to maybe through a mindfulness practice to kind of come into the present moment or maybe they develop the psycho education that lets them kind of reflect on what's going on and there's this moment where they can kind

of go I I see the the wave coming and I see this overwhelming experience building up or maybe I'm reflecting on a time it did in the past and this other sort of part steps forward that is more knowing that does feel more capable and is making kind of a choice about either how I want to be in the future now that I have seen this pattern or in the present is like oh this is happening to me right now and I'm in it but I'm also noticing that I'm in it as I'm in it

does that does that make sense yeah being a therapist getting to witness this with people I I feel inside myself just this like immense amount of like Joy like did it you know like and and I really lean into celebrating those moments you know like we often especially as a trauma therapist we spend a lot of time in the density and the heavy stuff but it's equally as important to spend a lot of time when we've had a win or when we feel more empowered or when we can trust our gut and we can trust

what we're noticing is happening and we're like hey I am actually with it and I'm noticing that my body's responding absolutely appropriately and there's often a moment where things start to or reorganize themselves and often with this structure that you brought in there's a pattern of shaming ourselves for being so disregulated and when we can shift it towards applying wait a minute this is not not my fault this is actually appropriate and applying I don't want to say fault but that's the only word I can really like find at this time you're um you're correctly

attributing where this is coming from yes yeah yeah and and that kind of frees ush right to trust in our own empowering experiences and to start to now outside of the therapeutic space have those experiences that are now filling and supporting and really grounding that wise adult self so as somebody who's been to graduate school has now been working with people for a couple of years in different capacities you have access to a lot of information that a lot of people don't have but in that there are all of these practices and tools and ideas

that could just be like generally useful for people if they're wanting to learn how to regulate themselves a little bit better or frankly are trying to develop a little bit more like compassion and understanding for people who struggle with these kinds of issues are there a couple particular tactics ideas techniques skills anything that you would want to highlight to people that you think are particularly useful from what you've learned yeah so first is finding a practice it doesn't matter really what it is that puts you in contact with your body so something that takes some

movement requires body awareness to do it so yoga is a great one right even it can be more like authentic movement just kind of like dancing in your space um could even be you know doing a a workout class right starting to like get your body feeling something that it typically doesn't right um another thing is uh there's uh tapping practices um some people can find um some guided tapping practices through uh YouTube and that kind of starts to just bring more sensory awareness could you break that down a little bit and kind of describe

it particularly for audio again yeah so so it's a specific type of uh practice and I'm forgetting the exact name of it but basically you tap different parts of your body right so you can tap kind of uh your cheekbones your jaw your chin right and what that does is that it's bringing you into more contact with your physical body it's building sensation awareness it's helping you start to also build some interception and it invites more of that right brain processing um another one is tremoring like when you do certain movements or exercises that create

a tremoring EXP experience in the body which stimulates or sorry simulates kind of that more animal part of our body when you know if an animal in the um like when an animal is being hunted and gets away from the prey right usually there's like a shaking experience after so we're bringing that in so those are kind of ways of building more physical experience with your body right building more somatic experience the other thing is becoming more self-aware so this is mindfulness practices things that either start to help build you towards more being able to

track your inner states so this could be starting with some Journal prompts every morning how do I feel when I wake up how do I feel at this time how do I feel at that time right um and kind of even starting to map where do you spend most of your time throughout the day are you have a really stressful job and you're noticing you're kind of hypervigilant most of the time or do you feel your body responds to stress by kind of freezing out and you feel super fatigued most of the time right just

getting a sense of where you at already right and once you know that then you can start to find practice as it either help upregulate your nervous system if you tend to go to freeze or if you tend to be more fight ORF flight what helps you down regulate and there are a lot of different practices that can be helpful you can find them on YouTube um you can find a bunch of guided stuff on I'm sure different podcasts and things like that but the thing that I would advocate for is that it's not just

about you listening to it and kind of yada yada Ying through it it's about getting as much of yourself in it as it's happening so for example really being aware of the room that you're in orienting and grounding listening to whatever is being prompted right fully going in into the thing and staying with yourself as it's happening like and again the work isn't about making things work for you it's about finding what works for you yeah so if a practice doesn't land move on find something else the other thing that really I feel helps with

this is having a community a community of safe people that you can trust to mirror and reflect in a tune to you that way they might notice things that you don't notice and being able to get that Reflection from people you trust and feel safe with so not people that are going to shame you or guilt you for this but just to go wow I'm really noticing you're going through a hard time huh right so being in a sense of community can be really valuable too that was a great list of things that people can

do very very practical and at the end with the more relational aspect of this it's imperfect because it's very very difficult to duplicate the safe container of therapy totally out in the world yeah it's just it's really hard that's frankly that's part of what you're paying for as somebody who's going to therapy is the complete safety and total focus on your needs and if you feel like you are working with a clinician where you don't feel completely safe and you feel like they are not focused on your needs it's a bit of a red flag

but we can get some of that out in the world sometimes with the right groups of other people supportive social environments uh even frankly like this sort of a weird example but just like going to a spin class sometimes or something like that if if you're in an area where that's a thing there can be a sense of shared community of of shared Pursuit people going after a similar thing that can start to give you some of those reparative experiences that we were talking about at the beginning where you feel like you're writing a new

and different story it had maybe the same beginning but now it has a different ending and the changing of the ending is such a power ful part of the whole process yeah I think that's kind of the the secret sauce in a way it's like giving yourself opportunities to experiment to practice being flexible but maintaining an allegiance with yourself so WR that empowering piece what actually makes you feel more empowered right empowered to express yourself empowered to move through your nervous system empowered to regulate your nervous system right maybe for someone who say is just

kind of interested in having um a deeper relationship with themselves who you know kind of connects with I'm having a pretty great life I had a good enough childhood you know I'm doing pretty great right but if there is this curiosity right to lean a little bit more maybe into this regulation space a key part of it that I think is really helpful is daring to try things that might be perceived as edgy that you might have a response of ooh I don't know right but pushing yourself to try it anyway right because it's through

those experiences that build our resiliency that give us more capacity in our nervous system that give us more window of presence and tolerance in each state which will have a positive impact on how people experience you well is there anything that we haven't talked about today that you think would be helpful for us to to talk about here at the end at the end of the day our nervous system all the things that we've been through live in our muscles in our fascia like as a trauma therapist trauma is in the body right so a

part of Regulation is about being with the body and moving the body so however you want to move your body do it and move your body in the ways it normally doesn't you know like if you tend to be like really fluid and flowy what happens when you try to invite a little more staccato movement or sharper movement does that create a response right and so much about regulation and working with the nervous system is again about that exploration so where's your curiosity what's starting to be like ooh this this is interesting I might I

might feel a certain way about it but there's a curiosity there and so following your curiosity because curiosity will guide you towards what you find enjoyable and the joy leads to more regulation I think that's a great note to end our little recording here on thanks so much for doing this eleth I I always appreciate it so much you're such a pro I'm so blessed that you're my part and yeah just like thank you for talking about this with us well thanks for having me I really appreciate your time I really enjoyed this conversation with

Elizabeth she's one of my favorite people to talk to about you know just about anything and it's always great when we can find an opportunity to have her on the podcast and I was particularly interested in talking with her about regulation because that is such a huge part of the work that she does with people as a somatically informed trauma therapist and I thought it was really interesting that we started the conversation with safety how safety is the natural precursor to the ability to regulate oursel the safer we feel the more possible regulation becomes but

the problem is that a lot of the time when we need regulation skills the most are also when we feel the least safe this means that the ability to find a sense of safety in ourselves even when circumstances are are not the way that we would want them to be is an absolutely key skill and it's also where she starts with her clients with the people that she works with uh if you're in a situation with a therapist and you don't feel totally comfortable with them if you don't feel safe in that environment it's going

to be really hard to get productive work done and this took us to a conversation about agency experiences and particularly how many people who struggle with regulation did not have a lot of agency experiences growing up they learned that they couldn't influence their environments or that their emotions didn't really matter and this creates a situation in adulthood where part of the process is going back in and figuring out what the key experiences are that you didn't get back then what emotional experiences if we got them would be incredibly valuable for us these days and this

creates a kind of emotional relearning process which is part of what happens in therapy it's part of the value with it is that you now get to have interactions with your therapists that go differently from the ones that you used to have with other salian people in your life we then started to use Elizabeth as an example of somebody who had to learn healthy emotional regulation skills in adulthood and she described having a pattern that included dissociation really jamming down her emotions and then eventually exploding when she couldn't repress them any longer and she described

the typical process here as a multi-stage process a healthy nervous system can move through different states of arousal in a fluid way without becoming trapped in any one of of them so in order to not get trapped in that over-regulated state she was in which then became a bit [Music] underregulation being able to look inside her body and get a real feeling for how she was actually feeling she she also talked a bit about being able to see experiences of overwhelm coming before they' hit her so she could be more at choice about what you

wanted to do about them we then went through two case studies a more over-regulated person and a more underregulation person and I really used myself as an example here and Elizabeth went through a pretty detailed process of talking about how she would first start working with that person and some of the things that might be really supportive for them and in both cases and this makes sense because she's a sematic therapist Elizabeth really emphasized the relationship that people have with their bodies she focused on the feelings and emotions that we build up in and around

our bodies and how we can titrate ourselves into those emotions so we can feel them without becoming overwhelmed by them and she closed the conversation with some very practical suggestions for people she mentioned finding a practice of some kind that puts you more in touch with your body and becoming more mindful throughout our normal lives which helps with self-awareness and then as you start becoming more aware of what tends to rev you up or freeze you out it becomes a lot easier to apply various kinds of tools I want to close with something that Elizabeth

said pretty early on this work is not about making things work for you it's about finding what works for you people often have the experience in life where they're given all of these tools that feel like they are for gazel when they are a fish so the real value here for most people is in getting the support that they need to figure out what actually works for them and part of this process frankly is being able to say no to things that don't work for them so if there was anything this episode where when we

were talking about it you were like you know what that's just not for me great that is a fantastic part of this process I hope you enjoyed the conversation I always love talking with Elizabeth of course uh if you're interested in learning more about her you can find her website I've included a link to that in the description of today's episode if you'd like to support the podcast you can subscribe to it wherever you're listening to it now on and you can also find us on patreon it's patreon.com SL beingwell podcast and if you'd like

to check out more of my work you can find me on substack until next time thanks for listening and we'll talk to you [Music] soon sh