Healing from trauma, relationship and liberation

If I had a nickel for every time I heard someone shame themselves for having an emotional reaction…I’d have a whole bunch of nickels! “Sorry for being upset,” “When will I stop having these feelings?” and “What’s wrong with me?” don’t just make frequent appearances in my office but can appear nearly anywhere people have emotional reactions.

If I name the ability to self-regulate as one thing trauma limits and recovery restores, some folks might interpret that as the work of learning to calm ourselves down.  That is emphatically not what I’m after. 

A healthy nervous system has the ability to move into and out of stress response depending on the situation.  If you’re reading this, you’ve been through a global pandemic and the rise of fascism in the US.

Under those circumstances, it’s important that we’re able to return to rest and recovery for our resilience and well-being—so it’s true that being able to calm down is useful. However, it is equally important that we’re able to feel our difficult feelings and move into action in response to what’s happening. 

Good, deep healing work connects us to ourselves and our communities.  Good healing work intersects with the struggle for liberation.

So what is self-regulation?

In US dominant culture, we’ve largely been socialized to value our rationality and to identify strongly with thoughts and ideas.

Did you know that the fastest responding parts of our brain are responsible for emotions and motor responses? It’s true. The parts of our brain in charge of cognition, communication, and all those thoughts and ideas operate much slower.  Why?

Survival salience.

Humans are animals, and our nervous systems work that way for our survival.  Our survival responses aren't cognitive--they're in our bodies. When we’re so involved in our thoughts, we can be a lot less clear about how our survival responses actually function. Let’s use some examples to illustrate the concepts of regulation, threat response, and window of tolerance. 

We can observe survival responses more clearly in animals; deer don’t have that cognitive bias.

Window of tolerance

When deer are hanging with other deer eating, they're in their window of tolerance. That doesn't mean that the deer are in some pristine calm state--rather, they're in a state of relaxed readiness. They can communicate, chew and digest their food, notice what's around them and respond as needed.

Threat response

The beginnings of a threat response happen when deer detect sound or movement. The deer will notice, pause what they’re doing, raise their heads and scan their environment.

If they see a car going by on a nearby roadway at a distance, they'll go back to eating. Their heart rates will be elevated, but they'll return to normal and everything will be cool since there’s no threat. The deer’s nervous systems will return to their baseline, well within their window of tolerance.

If they raise their heads and scan their environment and instead see a human walking toward them, they'll probably run away. Their bodies will respond by increasing blood flow to their working muscles, raising their heart rates and initiating the motor response that cause the deer to run. After they detect and escape a threat, their nervous systems will come back into their window of tolerance.

Threat response in healthy environments

When people are in healthy environments, our nervous systems function similarly to the deer in my example. Stressors will show up in our lives, we’ll fail to detect a threat and settle back down. Or threats will show up and our threat response will help us move away from it, fight it, do what we need to do to survive—and we’ll once again feel safe when we are safe.  

The thing is, a lot of us humans don't and haven't really lived in healthy environments. Many of us have faced situations that haven't let our nervous systems return to baseline—rather, in the absence of enough safety cues, we retain the sense of being under threat. 

Sometimes, as with a global pandemic or with growing fascism, that sense is an accurate assessment.

When we don’t have enough access to safety, stressors quickly become overwhelming and our bodies register them as life threat. This inhibits our ability to recover from the stressors and takes a toll on us in a literal physical sense.

Persistent threat

If our example deer are grazing and they’re fenced in and trucks keep pulling up, for example, they might not be able to settle back down—and that’s when their nervous systems will adapt to the situation.  That’s when we’d expect to see behavior that reflects traumatic stress.

Nervous systems, figuratively, sound an alarm first and ask questions later.  Traumatized people adapt brilliantly to survive under stressors.  What we’re less well adapted to do is know when we are safe enough—the very thing that allows us to recover.

What helped us survive difficult circumstances leads to challenges like inability to settle, difficulties sleeping, dissociation, depression, anxiety, relationship challenges and hyper-vigilance.  

When we’re in those states it’s really tough to be present with ourselves, tough to be present with others, and tough to be as skillful as we’d like in our relationships with our loved ones and communities.

Until we can do the work of healing and learn to regulate ourselves, we’ll struggle to take in enough safety and act as if we’re under threat most of the time.

What does our healing make possible?

Being able to regulate our nervous systems lets us see and feel and be with our loved ones rather than being hijacked by feelings, impulses, and threat responses.  Regulation lets us feel the feelings that connect us with the world around us. 

That connection allows us to be present when we are hurt—and to look for a remedy.

It lets us feel our part in the world and our empathy for those around us. When we are connected with ourselves, we are present with our hurt at injustice. That opens up the possibility that we can act to prevent, stop and repair injustice—that which we’ve participated in, and that which we witness around us.

From my perspective as both a traumatized human and a healing professional, the most important gift we can give to ourselves, to those we love and to a world that needs more good citizens is to tend to our own healing alongside our struggle for liberation.