GLASSES YOU CANNOT TAKE OFF
What is happening, neurologically, when we get stuck in a state of steam or ice? Usually, there is something that we have experienced (it could be one thing, or many things that have accumulated) that has shifted our Autonomic Nervous System across the threshold from feeling safe to feeling in danger or lifethreat.
Think about your own life for a moment. Let’s say that you are feeling good, and then something stressful happens. Maybe you get hit with an unexpected expense. Or maybe someone in your family gets sick. Perhaps there is social upheaval in your country. Or you get worried about climate change. Imagine that you are liquid water, and that those concerns (stressors) are increasing your temperature.
The body is EXTRAORDINARILY resilient. Yet even so, if we keep adding stressors, there may be a point when, like liquid water boiling, your body just crosses a threshold from feeling safe to feeling in danger. It might happen gradually, or it might happen all at once. When an experience happens gradually we think of this as life stress. When it happens all at once, we think of this as a traumatic experience.
In both cases, something gradual, or something sudden, we can find ourselves deprived of a moment-to-moment felt sense of safety. When this happens, our nervous systems re-tune.
If I am not safe, my body has different priorities. Survival becomes my primary imperative.
Humans have been here on earth for a very long time. Depending on who you ask, our evolutionary history as a species goes back between 8 million and 200,000 years.
For most of our evolutionary history, the threats that we were dealing with occurred rather suddenly, and then resolved. Saber-toothed tigers and earthquakes are both sudden and violent, but they are not chronic and enduring. So our nervous systems evolved to respond to these kind of threats.
Many modern threats, by contrast, are of a different quality. Financial stress, for example, is something our nervous systems are ill-equipped to deal with.
Once our bodies have shifted to steam or ice, we no longer have available to us the capacities and perspective we had when we were the liquid water version of ourselves. This is not our fault: those neurological systems are no longer available.
Autonomic State (experiencing ourselves as liquid water, steam, ice or some combination thereof) is like a pair of glasses that we cannot take off. When we are in a state– we are looking at the world through the lens of that state.
If you put on tinted glasses, the world looks a different color. If you can take those glasses off you realize – wait a minute – it was the color of the glasses that was making things look this way. But if you cannot take the glasses off you don’t know that. Things just look this way.
And this is the power of your Autonomic Nervous System. Our present moment state shapes:
Our visceral experience (how it feels in the body- heartrate, breathing, tension)
Our emotional range
Our thoughts
Our perceptions of what is happening around us
Our behavior
Take a moment to contemplate that list.
So here’s where the rubber meets the road.
We want to do two things.
1) We want to understand – if you are not the liquid water version of yourself– where are you on this map? And how do we get you back to liquid water? (this is healing)
2) We want to build your ability to spend more and more of your time in the liquid water version. (this is growing)