^{A's to your Q's}

This work can be best compared to learning a second language, or a musical instrument. 

You have to practice and repeat a LOT at first. You have to develop your vocabulary and learn how words and sentences flow, or practice your 'musical scales' and develop your own flow. 

Ultimately, it is about becoming so versed in the education and practices that you don’t even need to listen to the audio or watch the video – it’s all internalised and there, ready to be used spontaneously as needed. You become fluent in your second language and can write poetry. 

You become skilled enough on your instrument to improvise with a jazz band.

When you find yourself spontaneously and naturally orienting throughout the day, aware of what is happening inside you in response to what’s around you, and be in relationship to how your body wants to express and it’s just part of your way of being as you ebb and flow through life; that is nervous system mastery. 

This can certainly be frustrating! 

It can feel so tempting to try and do ‘big work’, but if we end up overwhelming our system then we have only reinforced the perception that this stuff is dangerous to work with. 

Please know: the 6 week course duration is not designed to be your learning pace, it's just a structured way in which I can dispense this information; it's not meant to be something to measure your pace against by any means. 

The foundation of this work is learning how much of it we can tolerate in any given period so what you're feeling is totally normal and it's good to recognise it.  

In our achievement based culture, even learning to sense and honour our own unique capacity is doing the rewiring work.

The benefits of honouring the needs of your own system cannot be overstated, so have a ‘talk’ with that part of yourself that is frustrated.

 See if you can feel that worry or frustration in your body. If so, consider gently resting a hand there in the spirit of communication. 

If you can’t feel it in your body just let this be an internal dialogue. Express care for that part of yourself, let it know you hear it, and that the desire to ‘keep up’ is just one more thing that you are healing. 

Let yourself know that finding the pace that is right for you, is right! And this is the first, VERY important step in this work. 

Just try your best to keep making peace with just doing those tiny bits, consistently, and with plenty of space after to integrate. So even though it may feel like nothing is happening, if we can keep on doing little bits of this work, a little at a time, and work on integrating the principles into our daily life, especially orienting to safety, those little pieces will add up. 

‘Less is more’ really is true with this work! 

Go at your own pace.

I really cannot stress enough how important this is. Step by step, one bit at a time, slow and steady. 

This is how we build capacity and restore regulation to even the most dysregulated systems.

Finally, understand at the cognitive level that this material isn’t going anywhere. You have it for life, you can be present for every live "round" of Unclench, so you could even do one module per year if that suits - my point being; whatever you need is exactly right! 

Lastly, you can always reach out to Hannah and your peers for personal reassurance in our community group.

If, while doing a practice or watching one of the educational videos, you are feeling exhausted, spacey, can’t concentrate, disconnected, or numb; or, on the flip side – very agitated, angry, tense, or irritable, those are all indications that it could be time to take a break.

It’s okay! It's normal and to be expected to have moments of all of these experiences as we are working with our system, but if these kinds of experiences persist longer than a few minutes, and don’t change no matter how you work with them, then that is generally a sign that we need to take a break from the work and go do something else for a while.

It also could mean your system is asking for more time to integrate whats been learned rather than moving on the next practice or piece of education. 

Also, on a bigger picture scale – if you have symptoms that flare after doing a piece of work that is also normal, but if they don’t subside after about 24 hours, that is often an indication that you have done too much, so that can serve as good information for doing your next piece of work.

SO often with this work, less truly is more, because if we do more than we can integrate that can reinforce impressions in our body and psyche that this material is dangerous to work with - and we don't want that. 

When we are holding unresolved trauma in our system, it is always there. 

Whether we are awake or asleep, that survival energy is running in the background, affecting all levels of the mind, including the unconscious and subconscious landscapes that we often traverse in dreams, and so we often experience impressions of those survival energies through frightening or very strange dreams.

As far as what to do with it, the answer is: do this work. 

We just have to keep going and do this work consistently and make it part of how we live our life.

What is so wonderful to see happen, and I see this over and over again, is that as people start to heal in the waking world, those positive changes also cross over to the dream world, and people start to have changes in familiar, disturbing scenarios – like all of a sudden they are able to say NO, or fight back, or escape.

Also, if we wake up from such a dream, and want to work in the direction of calming, it means soothing the system, so use your auto-regulating practices, whatever they are – tea, hot water, a teddy bear, whatever.

Or, we can work right then and there with the imagery. This means not suppressing or soothing any lingering fear but rather, working with it.

Sit up and put your feet on the floor and let the legs run, let them express that fear you are feeling. See yourself in your mind successfully escaping the dangerous thing from your dream.

Or flip the script into fight – imagine an image of the thing your system is fearing and use the healthy aggression practices in module 4  to mobilise the body into expressing self-protection. 

This approach is more advanced and requires more capacity which is why it's further into the course, but can sometimes lead to a deeper resolution than simply soothing the system.

Your choice!

The purpose of this work is to first educate you on what is happening in your system, so you can understand it and have a more conscious, and less reactive, relationship with your internal experiences. 

And, the work itself is meant to guide you into your system in different ways such that the old, stuck, junk in the system can start moving out, and when that happens, it usually doesn’t feel ‘good’ in the way that we normally define that word!

Granted you are not sleep deprived, if you are feeling tired or even exhausted after watching one of the educational videos or doing a practice, that probably means that your system just did some hard work – which can definitely happen just from taking in the theory. 

If this happens consistently then it probably means that you need to go a bit more slowly, and do less when you watch or engage with the videos/practices. Same thing if you’re feeling activated. 

In either case, if you notice these things happening during the video/practice, then STOP. 

Do something else and come back to the video/practice the next day. 

Big picture answer – keep doing the work. Waking up in a panic is a common expression of a system that is holding a lot of unresolved fight/flight energy, and it is by doing the steady work to clear that out and restore regulation that this will resolve.

Small picture answer – in the moment, there are a couple of things you can do in a broad sense; either work to calm the activation, or go with the activation.

If you are working in the direction of calming, it means soothing the system, so use your auto-regulating practices, whatever they are – tea, hot water, a teddy bear, whatever.

Oftentimes people will just try to go back to sleep, and the system will generally respond better if we actually get up for a bit and attend to it, as inconvenient as that may be.

Or, we can go with the activation. This means allowing that panicked energy and even encouraging it. Sit up and put your feet on the floor and let the legs run, let them express that fear you are feeling. 

Or flip the script into fight – imagine an image of the thing your system is fearing and use your Healthy Aggression tools to mobilise the body into expressing self-protection. 

This approach is more advanced and requires more capacity, but can sometimes lead to a deeper resolution than simply soothing the system. Your choice!

It could just mean you are sleepy! But if you weren’t sleepy before you started, and then all of a sudden you are yawning like crazy, that most likely means that this education or practice is a bit intense for your system in this moment, and so the freeze response is starting to assert itself.

If this is the case, maybe try one practice only for a while or watching a video in tiny bits, instead of trying to make it through the entire recording.

To some degree, yes. As you become more familiar with the practices, you'll come to see  that are a few practices focused specifically on soothing and regulation, like the 'Orienting The Body', 'Finding The Safety' and ‘Feeling The Now’ practices. And there are some Healthy aggression tools in module 4 that are specifically for working with anger and tension.

That being said, it’s highly individual and some people may not respond to these things in the same way as others. Some people may get more uncomfortable and agitated when they tune into their environment. Some people may respond really well to Orienting when they get activated, others may get MORE activated from this and respond better to something like the 'Follow Your Impulse' or the 'Voice, Vagina & "VOO" practice

The practices in this course are about giving you a large and varied pallet of tools to work with creatively. Ultimately, it’s about learning and internalising these interventions and using them, and even combining them, organically and creatively, moment to moment, in whatever way works well for your unique system.

This is indeed a common experience, and the reasons why could be many.

It may have to do with the direction that threat came from, or if the stressor or ‘bad thing’ was associated more with the left or right side of the brain. 

It may also have to do with neuro-muscular patterns i.e. posture, or repetitive motions.

No matter the cause, noticing differences and moving our attention back and forth between those different experiences is a way that we will often work with expressions of held trauma, so oftentimes it can be a gift that one side may feel less clenched than the other, and over time we tend to see the two sides equalise – where the side that was more clenched relaxes, and/or the side where we may have felt very little starts to have new sensations.

Yes, they can recover!

The body is incredibly resilient and repairable, especially so when the nervous system is regulated and we are not continually clenching for no apparent reason i.e. no real time threat.

Absolutely!

Often this pain and tension is our system tensing and bracing, to  self-protect by trying to keep the uncomfortable sensations and emotions of unresolved trauma at bay, but it can also be pain from an injury that was traumatic, and never got the proper care.

The idea is to find an area that is clenching and tense, and then just see if it can naturally unclench and let go. It may be that you are stopping yourself before this natural release happens, or it could be your system simply does not feel safe enough yet to let go of its "armour" in the form of habitual clench and tension.  

Yup! That is not an uncommon experience.

Anxiety is just another word for fear, which is the energy behind the flight side of the Sympathetic survival response.

When working with this energy just staying present and feeling it may be ok if you are able to do that while not fearing the sensations of fear.

This can be difficult to do without shutting down or getting overstimulated though, so being proactive and mobilising the body in some way is usually recommended.

How would fear move? 

This is often the most effective at actually transforming the energy and renegotiating the trauma.

Even if you are tired and its the middle of the night, which is often when fear and panic surface for many, this can still be a good practice sometimes, if you’re not sleeping anyway.

You could try just sitting up and expressing a bit, or you could get up and fully mobilise. 

When the freeze response has become an embedded part of how we deal with stress, meaning it’s constantly on to some degree, it can have many manifestations in our physiology, mind, and how we engage with the world.

Low blood pressure, constipation, poor circulation (leading to cold extremities), chronic fatigue and lethargy, and poor cognitive, digestive, reproductive, immune function are all pretty common physiological experiences when we are living with an unresolved freeze response.

Depression, lack of motivation or purpose, and a sense of hopelessness are also all common manifestations.

In evolutionary terms, the freeze response comes on in order to protect a mammal who has failed to fight off or flee from a predator by stopping all functions not immediately essential for survival, bringing the blood more into the core or the body, lowering the heart rate, and numbing the system…all to keep the animal from feeling the pain of being eaten.

Basically, if the freeze response comes on it’s because the physiology expects to die — hence the numb, dissociated state.

So, dissociation is a part of the freeze response function; it is not the freeze response itself.

When one starts to come out of freeze what generally happens is they start to feel things, often uncomfortable sensations and emotions associated with the unresolved trauma and activation the freeze was keeping a lid on. This may be accompanied by improvements in energy and biological organ and hormone function, especially if we can allow these uncomfortable experiences, not shut them down out of fear, which takes the right education, support, and tools, which you will get a lot of in this program.

Gently engaging the Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) with mild to moderate movement may help support coming out of dorsal freeze IF, and only if,  the system is ready for it.

Often what needs to happen first though, is for the physiology to feel supported and cared for, to feel safe.

This is why learning to orient, following your impulses finding safety are the first practices in the course, and why I encourage you to return to those basics again and again.

Yes, this is the essence of dysregulation – BOTH the Sympathetic (Fight/Flight) and Parasympathetic (Freeze) survival responses are on in the system at all times.

This leads to complex problems like chronic health syndromes as well as many mental health problems.  This is the gas/brake pedal both being pushed together analogy.

It’s also common when this is the case to flip-flop between being more dominated by one or the other of these survival energies; switching from ON to OFF without much middle ground. Bipolar disorder is an extreme example of such flip-flopping.

Healing trauma and restoring regulation to the nervous system is what restores our ability to have a middle ground, with everything functioning as it is supposed to.

It’s possible, but unfortunately it is much harder, or it may take longer. This is because the foundation of nervous system healing is safety.

Our home needs to be a safe haven where our nervous system can settle. This doesn’t mean there can’t be any stress, but if the environment is one of constant stress, it will be very hard.

One way it can work is if we manage to create a ‘good enough’ environment; a room that is off limits to others, for example, or a period of time in the day that is only for you.

If we can create just a little bit of safety in this way, we can do our work in these containers, and then as we start to heal we can develop better boundaries and greater capacity to deal with stress, which can lead to the overall environment feeling less threatening to our system.

It can be very useful to know the difference!

The destructive and maladaptive responses to survival energy are the ones we are all familiar with as trauma survivors.

On the fight/flight (Sympathetic) side of things, we have chronic tension, irritability, explosive rage, or anxiety. On the freeze (Parasympathetic) side of things this could be depression, hopelessness, dissociation, clumsiness, poor circulation, or chronic fatigue.

And when you have both going at once, that’s when chronic health syndromes start to develop.

A healthy expression of Sympathetic energy would be things like healthy boundaries, expressions of healthy aggression (coming up in module 4), intense exercise, bountiful energy, and a strong drive.

There really is no healthy expression of the freeze response as this extreme end of the Parasympathetic system is a last ditch survival effort, but healthy Parasympathetic function includes things like being able to socially engage with ease, digesting our food well, menstruation and ovulation cycling properly, repairing our cells, and sleeping well.

The human system will often process or relive events in dreams. The mind and nervous system will often not differentiate between events that occur in the waking world vs. events that occur in the dream world, so a threat that is perceived while dreaming can produce a very real physiological response.

Trauma, in addition to being a very personal experience, is also cultural and multi-generational. We inherit our ancestors’ unresolved trauma either whilst in utero or via the learned behaviours that go along with unresolved trauma.

So, trauma has been passed down from parent to child for a very long time now, and it is only recently that we have found effective ways of truly resolving it.

Also, industrialised culture does not well-support the healing of trauma, in fact it actively keeps it going through pollution, stressful schedules, economic disparity, not nearly enough paid leave or maternity/paternity leave, and cultural norms of repression. 

We are just waking up to the reality of what needs to happen to correct this trauma at the individual and collective level, and it will take some time yet for that healing to spread.

Have a look at the letter I drafted precisely for you, for this purpose. You'll find it in the 'Extra Resources' section on the course platform. Feel free to modify or use this. 

The Vagus nerve is very much like visualising a tree with its roots. The tree is the Ventral Vagus and the roots are the Dorsal Vagus. The Ventral Vagus innervates parts of the face and all the organs above the diaphragm, while the Dorsal innervates all the organs below the diaphragm.  

This can be due to a few reasons. Our posture may not support our diaphragm easily dropping down and so the breath is strained and we unconsciously hold it. It can also be part of a survival response — holding the breath to stay quiet and hidden.

This seems like a simple question, but it actually is quite complex, so please bear with me…

It’s not really ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but it can be indicative of two very different experiences.

Yawning shows that the Parasympathetic branch of the nervous system (PNS) is coming online, that is the down-regulating branch that brings us out of Sympathetic activation (fight/flight). 

This would seem on the surface to always be a ‘good’ thing, but it really depends on which branch of the PNS is perking up and producing the yawns – the ventral vagal (safety) and/or low scale dorsal (rest/repair), or the high-scale dorsal (shutdown).

The Ventral Vagus Nerve (VVN) is our safety and connection system and is very healthy for the human being.

The Dorsal Vagus Nerve (DVN) is the part of our PNS that governs rest/digest/repair when there is a low voltage (low-scale) of energy going to that system, and that is also very healthy.

So, if it is these things that are coming online then, that yawn is a sign that you are dropping into greater internal safety and rest, and that is very healthy.

However, the DVN also governs our freeze response – this is what happens when a LOT of energy is going to that system (high-scale). And this can also produce yawns, and going into the freeze response is not healthy for the human system, as it is meant to be a last resort system that only comes on when we are in imminent danger of dying.

However, due to the complexity of the kinds of trauma we now experience, and the function of our neo-cortex (higher rational brain), many human systems have learned to recruit the freeze response as a go-to in times of stress. 

So, if it is the former, healthy kind of PNS activity (VVN, and low scale DVN) then these yawns will tend to be pleasant, and come along with a general feeling of lassitude and well-being. 

If it is the latter (high scale DVN) then these yawns will tend to be uncontrollable, never really able to ‘complete’, and may come along with a feeling of being knocked out, dissociated, spacey, or numb.

Also, one can go into freeze without the uncontrollable yawns, but you can still tell the difference between freeze and relaxation by noticing if elements of freeze are present. 

If you feel spaced out, numb, depressed, lethargic, very heavy, dissociated, brain fog – these are indications that freeze is present. If you simply feel tired, fatigued, but kind of neutral or even pleasant too, that’s an indication that this is more likely to be exhaustion or tiredness.

The answer to both of these questions has to do with our capacity (which simply means our ability to stay present with what is happening), and discovering how much capacity we actually have is often a learning process in and of itself.

Often we may think we have capacity for something when we are actually unconsciously employing some kind of auto-regulating coping mechanism in order to manage the experience.

So that’s the first step — learning to discern what our capacity actually is, and whether we are finding the  safety so we can survive: a process that this program will help you with.

Once we can start to get a feel for our capacity, then we can start to figure out the answers to these questions above. As a general rule of thumb, we want to simply be with whatever experience is happening and learn how to allow it to express through the body up until the point that we start to become overwhelmed — which means we are going past our capacity.

At this point we want to go to our healthy auto-regulators/anchors of safety, or familiar coping mechanisms if we haven’t yet developed those healthy auto-regulators, so that we can come down.

This is a process that takes time to learn and even longer to master. Ideally, we want to gently push ourselves just to the edge of our capacity and then use a healthy internal or external anchor of safety to settle the system.

By doing this, we increase our capacity until eventually we can simply stay present with our activation until it reaches its natural ‘set point’ and then deactivates naturally without us having to do anything at all, like a thermostat that clicks off once the room reaches the right temperature.

Again, this takes time and practice and the right tools – which you will get in this program.

So yes, we can over use our anchors of safety, even healthy ones, if it means we are keeping ourselves from exploring those uncomfortable or unknown edges.

When we do that, when we over-resource, those anchors can turn into coping mechanisms. We also don’t want to push ourselves to the point of overwhelm.

So, learning when to find the safety resource and when not to is a bit of a dance, and a big learning process in and of itself, and takes time to master.

Being triggered means we have had our unresolved trauma activated and we are no longer present with what is actually happening, but rather we are reacting to the past.

This means that our survival energies are “up” (fight/flight and/or freeze) and when we are in survival mode it is much harder to access the part of the brain that remembers our practices (the neocortex) because we are being dominated by our brainstem (survival brain) and limbic centres (emotional brain).

This is why practicing and cultivating our internal and external resources via the practices when we are NOT triggered is absolutely crucial.

It’s the same as a musician rehearsing for a big show — they rehearse until the music is in their muscle memory so that when the stress and bright lights of the big performance arrive they don’t have to think about the music, they can just play.

Orienting is the single most important basic tool in this program, and for good reason.

Being simultaneously aware of both the environment and our internal response is something ALL mammals (except for us) do automatically and all the time except for when they are asleep. It’s an awareness we are supposed to have ticking away whenever we are engaged with the world. It’s a fundamental part of being alive, and yet so few of us know how to do it at all. Also for good reason.

This is because trauma and chronic stress happen in the environment. They happen in relation to people and things in our space. As a result, most of us learn very early on to either not pay attention to the environment because it’s too unsafe (resulting in things like clumsiness, being ‘accident prone’, and having a tendency to dissociate), or we pay attention to the environment in a way that is driven by hypervigilance (resulting in experiences like anxiety and chronic tension).

So can you see why slowing down and attempting to engage in a gentle, natural curiosity could bring up SO much?

Most of us have avoided doing this for our whole life because being relaxed, curious, and aware in our environment was not possible when we were kids, or for some period later in our life. So, engaging with our self and our environment in some way, especially when that support and engagement may not have existed in our early lives or which has been overwhelmed by sustained stress at some point, will invariably bring up the stress and trauma we experienced during those times.

So, we may resist doing it at all or, if we try, we may check out into daydreams or distract ourselves with racing thoughts, get angry, irritated, anxious or feel like we hate this and it’s pointless. We might feel nauseous or feel nothing at all, etc. All these experiences happen because we are stirring up those old stuck body memories and emotions, and our system is trying to protect us from feeling any of that again.

If you hate it, or just don’t see the point, or think it’s stupid (when in reality it is an absolutely crucial part of simply being alive and in connection to the world) it’s probably very important for you to do, but in smaller doses to start. A minute here, 5 minutes there.

Sometimes there may also be very specific traumas that have to do with some sector of our environment, like we don’t want to look to the left because that’s where that bicycle came from that hit us, or I don’t want to look up and to the right because that’s where my father always stood, over my right shoulder, yelling at me while I tried to do my homework. Or, maybe we ALWAYS want to pay extra close attention to those sectors to keep an eye out for bicycles and angry fathers, and we miss the rest of our environment. There can also be physical pain and tension that build up from always avoiding or habitually going towards certain areas in our field of vision.

When we manage to do a bit of orienting to the safety around us, even a little bit is often a huge change for our nervous system, and afterwards we may feel nauseous, have a headache, or feel absolutely exhausted.

ALL OF THE ABOVE IS NORMAL 🙂

The only way out is through. We need to keep doing it in whatever bits we can manage, as often as we can manage it, even if that only means one minute a day to start. Remember, this is an awareness that we are supposed to have online all the time, unless we are asleep. It is a fundamental shift in our entire way of being in the world and in relationship to our environment, and that’s why it can bring up so much.

Orientating could definitely be considered a kind of mindfulness, and there are different kinds of mindfulness practices.

Oftentimes mindfulness simply means paying attention to your internal experience as it is.

This is usually done with the eyes closed, but the problem with that for people who have unresolved trauma is that for them, the internal experience of the body is commonly either scary or numb, which can lead to people feeling overwhelmed, anxious, or dissociated and checked out.

That’s why orienting is about noticing the safety actually present in the environment, which does mean that this practice is best supported by a safe, relatively unstimulating environment at first, and later can be practiced all the time in places that may be more stimulating, like at the grocery store or on a city street.

Simultaneously, orienting is about noticing our internal experience in relationship to that safe external place. This is an opportunity to help introduce parts of the physiology that may be stuck in survival mode from past trauma to the safety actually present in the environment.

So you could say it’s a kind of internal/external mindfulness that is informed by the physiological realities of trauma.

If having the eyes open feels too overwhelming, one can close the eyes and orient to the external/internal with the other senses. We can feel our butt on the seat, our feet on the floor; we can hear the sounds around us and smell the air, and notice our internal experience in relation to those things.

Along with this, we can experiment with having our eyes in a soft gaze with the eyelids very relaxed, but still open a bit. We can also titrate the journey between our eyes closed and having our eyes more open to varying degrees, or just orient to things very close – our clothes, shoes, or the floor.

There are other practices of mindfulness that involve the breath, and generally this means simply noticing what our breath is naturally doing, as it is. Then there are other practices that are all about controlling the breath in different ways. With orientation, we want to lean towards the first one of these options.

We may find though that our breath, as it occurs naturally, in the moment, doesn’t feel ‘natural’. It may feel shallow, constricted, or gasping and deep, or fast, and that can be scary to tune into. Again, granted the environment actually is safe, these breathing experiences are often a sign of the past body memories of trauma arising.

So the idea is, if possible, to just allow the breath to be whatever way it is and notice the safety in the environment in some manner, eyes open or closed, whichever is easier.

Usually, if we can just allow the breath to do what it is doing, and keep tuning into safety in some way, the breath will eventually start to change, so then we notice that change in us, and the safety in the environment again, back and forth, or even simultaneously. If you find yourself feeling like you can’t breathe or are getting overwhelmed, definitely do whatever you need to do to settle. You can manage your breath in a familiar and calming way, or leave the practice and soothe in whatever way is best for you, and then try again when you feel up to it.

it’s important to note that for some, orienting is quite pleasant and relaxing right off the bat. Awareness deepens and so does the sense of internal safety and relaxation. And that is awesome. As we get deeper into other aspects of the work and things start to shift and surface, that could also change and you might experience a layer of activation when orienting, and that’s also awesome. It means those old wounds are rising to the surface to be healed.

If it's one question I'm asked the most is this: How to discharge trauma from my body? 

How to end this? 

And it's a valid question. When we suffer, we want to heal. But here's what I understood from this process of trauma healing. It's not done by "us," and it's not coming out of effort or pushing hard.

I have a question for you. Did you wake up one day and say, "Today I will protect myself through freeze." or "Today I will disconnect."? No, you didn't. So, obviously, there's an intelligence within all of us that knows. It knows how to protect, what survival adaptations to activate, and when or for how long. This is Life's intelligence. If it knows how to protect, why don't we trust that it knows how to heal?

One of the most empowering shifts I could make on my healing journey was realizing I didn't know how to heal.

I didn't know how to discharge trauma from my body, unfreeze my nervous system, or regulate my nervous system. The best I could do is to take a step back and create the conditions for my system to do what knows best.

Under adverse conditions, our system will activate trauma responses, will adapt, and keep the system in survival. Under safer conditions, our system will begin to come out of survival, discharge traumatic stress and initiate the healing process.

What are the conditions that I'm referring to? 

Safety, body-attunement, regulation, connection, and inner space (capacity) are the foundational conditions for our system to discharge traumatic stress.

The trapped life-force energy you're experiencing as "stuck" in your body is the accumulated survival energy that your nervous system didn't have the right support and conditions to discharge.

Your body has a "valid" reason for keeping the life-force energy trapped. The intensity associated with the survival energy exceeds the regulatory capacity of your nervous system. This is an ongoing signal of threat.

Your body wants to discharge. It's in so much pain and fear. But it needs a little bit more support.

How to support? Let your practices and experiences focus more on restoring core conditions than discharging trauma.

What brings you closer to your body and Nature?

What teaches you core skills like observing, witnessing or emotional repair?

What offers you a sense of safety? Even if 0.1%?

When your system feels safe, it will begin the process of trauma discharge. 

And the discharge is not one BIG RELEASE. No, no, no. The discharge is very subtle, almost unnoticeable, although sometimes it can be more noticeable. The discharge happens to the degree that our bodies experience safety and has regulatory capacity.

I find nothing else more powerful to regulate the nervous system than nature. 

Our nervous system is the product of natural evolution. When we return to nature, there's a profound recognition and a sense of coming home and support. We are part of nature and disconnection from nature is traumatic for our nervous system. Like removing a baby from his/her mother.

So, if you don't feel safe relating to your body, turn your attention to nature first. 

Create a relationship with mother nature. She tells a very powerful story; one of constantly moving through seasons, shedding & rebirth; as do we. 

Start simple, and even just for a few moments each day ask yourself:

What does the sun's light/warmth feel like?

What flowers are blooming? What do they smell like? 

What’s it like to feel the shade of trees, and to touch their bark? 

How does the wind feel on your skin? 

What birds are in the area? 

Spend time with your bare feet on the grass or dirt, which facilitates beneficial electron (energy) exchange. These are very positive and predicable co-regulators, and are the kinds of things we evolved perceiving and relating to for hundreds of thousands of years, and so they inherently support well-being, and offer co-regulation on the path to building capacity for internal safety. 

Also, connect to other bodies that feel safe. So any people/animals/natural elements you feel settled with and soothed by. Avoid as much as possible any and all people who are predictably co-dysreguating, especially if they are family members who have a powerful energetic and biological influence.

Finally, continue to do the inner work that you are learning about in this curriculum so that you can increase your capacity and resiliency in the face of feeling higher states of stress/fear. 

This will support you to gradually pay attention to your internal world, and aid in continuing to refine the practice of internally finding the safety.

Orienting is the single most important basic practice in this course, and for good reason. 

Being simultaneously aware of both the environment and our internal response is something ALL mammals (except for us) do automatically and all the time, except for when they are asleep. It’s an awareness we are supposed to have ticking away whenever we are engaged with the world. It’s a fundamental part of being alive, and yet so few of us know how to do it at all. Also for good reason.

This is because trauma and chronic stress happen in the environment. 

They happen in relation to people and things in our space. As a result, most of us learn very early on to either not pay attention to the environment because it’s too unsafe (resulting in things like clumsiness, being ‘accident prone’, and having a tendency to dissociate), or we pay attention to the environment in a way that is driven by hyper-vigilance (resulting in experiences like anxiety and chronic tension).

So, can you see why slowing down and attempting to engage in a gentle, natural curiosity could bring up SO much? 

Most of us have avoided doing this for our whole life because being relaxed, curious, and aware in our environment was not possible when we were kids and into later life. 

So engaging with our self and our environment in this way, which was often NOT supported when we were young or which was overwhelmed by sustained stress at some point, will invariably bring up the stress and trauma we experienced during those times when we lacked any support. 

So we may resist orienting at all or, if we try, we may check out into daydreams or distract ourselves with racing thoughts, get angry or irritated or anxious, feel nauseous or feel nothing at all, etc.

These experiences happen because we are stirring up those old, stuck body memories and emotions, and our system is trying to protect us from feeling all that again. 

Sometimes there may also be very specific traumas that have to do with some sector of our environment, like we don’t want to look to the left because that’s where that bicycle came from that hit us, or I don’t want to look up and to the right because that’s where my father always stood, over my right shoulder, yelling at me while I tried to do my homework. 

Or, maybe we ALWAYS want to pay extra close attention to those sectors to keep an eye out for bicycles and angry fathers, and we miss the rest of our environment. There can also be physical pain and tension that build up from always avoiding, or habitually going towards, certain areas in our field of vision.

When we manage to do a bit of orienting to the safety around us, even a little bit is often a huge change for our nervous system, and afterwards we may feel nauseous, have a headache, or feel absolutely exhausted.

ALL OF THE ABOVE IS NORMAL 🙂

The only way out is through. 

We need to keep doing it in whatever bits we can manage, as often as we can manage it, even if that only means one minute a day to start. Remember, this is an awareness that we are supposed to have online all the time, unless we are asleep. It is a fundamental shift in our entire way of being in the world and in relationship to our environment, and that’s why it can bring up so much.

Following your impulse simply means allowing your body to do what it authentically wants to do, and that word, authentically, is the really important one when it comes to understanding distinctions.

For example, we have a bodily impulse to drink water, and following that is super important. Or we may have an impulse to eat all the cookies in the cookie jar, and that is probably not something we want to follow, because it is not authentic.

What I mean by this is when we’ve been through trauma we may have many impulses that are driven by unresolved suffering which are NOT what our body actually wants, instead these cravings are something our psyche is using to manage/suppress the bodily sensations/experience.

And that’s okay. You can’t chuck those out the window right away because those are part of how we deal. Those coping mechanisms have helped us to survive. But part of healing and evolving means learning to listen to and follow those authentic bodily impulses that may be suppressed.

Allowing ourselves to cry can definitely be a powerful way to follow our impulse. On the other hand, if we cry all the time as part of a downward spiral of despair that is very familiar, then it’s probably more of a coping mechanism, not a healthy impulse. Likewise, allowing our anger to express in a healthy way when it has historically been suppressed is a great way to follow our impulse, but lashing out in rage at others or at ourselves is more of a response driven by the unresolved trauma.

So when it comes to following our impulses, we need to discern if it’s a familiar way we use to cope with something, or if it’s more of an organic bodily impulse that will be good for us. It may take some practice to notice the difference, but you’ll get there, just keep practicing!

Following our impulses can be as simple as peeing when we need to pee, passing gas when we need to pass gas, and allowing our other biological needs to be honoured. It can be as refined as following your impulses through a department store to the exact shirt you were looking for, or by listening when your body says NOT to go down that particular street.

The body knows a lot.

The fact we live and work around others sometimes may make following our impulses feel problematic. How to authentically express our anger and frustration at a co-worker, when standing up, snarling, and wringing the heck out of your sweater generally isn’t deemed appropriate workplace behaviour. How to allow ourselves to burp or pass the stinkier kind of gas when we are in a crowded place and fear judgment. Again, there is room for discernment here – is anybody really going to be harmed by you passing gas? Probably not. Will you get fired for snarling and growling on the job? Quite possibly.

If we are talking about a basic biological impulse like needing to go to the bathroom, then that is something you want to honour as soon as possible. If you are in the middle of something that makes this impractical or impossible, then simply acknowledge your system (say internally’ “I hear you! we’ll head to bathroom as soon as we can”) and then get to the facilities needed as soon as you reasonably can.

Also, the bathroom is your friend for other reasons. Most public environments have private bathrooms (even in malls there is usually the ‘family’ bathroom which you can slip into), or at least a private stall. So this is one solution. Become aware of what you are experiencing and what it feels like you need to do, then take a little trip to the WC for privacy.

Also, it may be that you can refine your impulse. In the example of anger, maybe you can still allow yourself to speak your truth or establish a boundary, and then do the snarling and growling later. And speaking of later, if there really is no safe place to follow your impulses that are arising, you can ask them to please wait until you get home, and promise your body that you will allow it to do what it needs to do then. Just make sure that you then actually do that!

When it comes to following one’s impulses around sexuality, I would say if you are by yourself, then still practice discernment, to try and discover if this a healthy impulse or a behaviour that is helping you cope with suffering, and allow yourself to explore. If you are talking about sexual impulses that involve another, then taking the time to discern is even more important, and so is communication.

Not being allowed by others, or not allowing ourselves, to follow our impulses can definitely be a major cause of unresolved freeze in the system. And then, not being able to hear or follow our impulses can also be an expression of that same shutdown.

If we are living with a lot of shutdown and our impulse is to sleep all the time and isolate ourselves, then these are most likely not completely authentic impulses, but are instead ways we have found to stay safe and manage our trauma (though this may also be intertwined with one’s authentic nature if they are more introverted). We don’t want to just ignore these by overriding our fear and forcing ourselves to be social or more active, but we DO need to push ourselves out of our comfort zone a bit, and this is well supported by doing good trauma work, both in this program, and also maybe with some one-on-one work. Having a safe, therapeutic alliance can be a good way to start pushing at our edges in a context of safety and attunement.

This may sound over-simplistic, but it’s true that really it just comes with practice. Keep practicing the practices in the course, particularly the Orienting practice, Follow Your Impulse, and being aware of finding the safety.

hen we have lived with unresolved trauma for a long time it takes time, practice, and the right tools to communicate new information to our system.

Yes, it sounds like your legs are holding some sympathetic energy for sure, and that this has been contained by some freeze. It may be useful to try sitting in a chair and letting your legs ‘run’ a bit while sitting before you settle down to watch the videos.

You can do this just by lifting the heels up and down and imagine running, or play with laying on your back and pushing against a wall, and also hugging a pillow whilst watching. Your legs most likely want to run, kick, or push away.

A coping mechanism is typically something we use in order to deal with life. It could be a behaviour, substance we consume, thought pattern, avoidance or distraction when we get stressed, or even a bodily posture we unconsciously adopt.

Coping mechanisms generally aid one in checking out, numbing out, or otherwise avoiding what’s happening and are often detrimental to health. BUT! They are still an important part of us staying sane and feeling safe on the way to developing internal safety, so in that sense they do contribute to the healing process as long as we are learning and working to develop different options, and not only staying fixated on our existing behaviours.

Also, sometimes they can be fairly benign. For example, I always write a lot (and I mean a LOT) of stories as a kid. It was my escape and it helped me survive. There were no adverse effects so it was a pretty healthy auto-regulator.

On the flip side to that, I started smoking at 15 and that turned into an addiction that was an  unhealthy auto-regulator. 

To be clear, an auto-regulator of any kind should never be seen as ‘bad’; they helped us cope, survive and get to this point.

It’s better to have coping mechanisms, and better yet to be aware of what they are, than to not have any or to be unaware of what we are doing to manage our stress. And again, if coping mechanisms are all we have at this point, that is a form of support.

So, an auto-regulator that doesn’t involve coping or management and helps us to be with the stress without suppressing it, and then enables us to come down from that activation in a natural way so we can move forward in our healing is most supportive.

Sometimes though, things that people think are healthy auto-regulators resources are actually coping mechanisms in disguise.

For example, someone could say that their meditation practice, yoga routine, or exercise regimen is a resource, and that may be, if they are not rigidly habitual about the practice, and if they are trauma-informed, tuned in, and know how to work with the material that may get triggered by these activities. But more often than not in our culture, these practices are actually glorified coping mechanisms that simply look nicer than drugs, booze, or compulsive shopping.

A truly healthy auto-regulator is often something that sparks the internal capacity to be with what is; meaning it is supporting some quality or ability we have within ourselves, and for trauma survivors these are generally the things that are lacking and need to be learned the most (which is what this program is all about!).

This can be things like being able to tap into one’s own innate sense of safety or personal power, having the capacity to allow difficult emotions and sensations to move through the body, or having awareness of what fight/flight activation (that sympathetic nervous system) feels like, and how to come down through activating the parasympathetic in different ways.

Healthy auto-regulators can also inspire us to connect with safe people or even pets, or immersing oneself in the natural elements or music, or orienting to the safety in the external environment, are all natural ways to feel into our experience and to bring down activation. These are the kinds of things we generally see as healthy auto-regulators. 

Well, it’s normal for trauma survivors 🙂 Not to make light, but it may be helpful to know it’s often very difficult for trauma survivors to remember their childhood, or if they do, they may generally only remember the bad stuff. That’s because it’s much harder to form memories when we are constantly in survival mode, and because the bad stuff gets marked by the system as much more important to remember than the good stuff.

In such an environment, it’s very hard to develop any healthy resources in the first place; developing coping mechanisms to survive is much more the norm.

Our parents, grandparents, and their parents and grandparents, and so on… all have an influence on our level of trauma. Trauma gets passed down through generations in three primary ways. One — through our time in utero, two — through the formation of the ventral vagal nerve, and three — through modelled and learned behaviour.

If someone doesn’t heal their trauma, tendencies likely will be passed on to their offspring. Also, if our mum never got the proper attunement and care from her mum such that her ventral vagal nerve could form properly, she will almost certainly pass on those limitations to her children, unless she has healed her trauma at the nervous system level.

And the behaviours associated with unresolved trauma — anxiety, depression, explosive rage, emotional numbness, etc. — these will also be passed down and reinforce the behavioural tendencies, and health expression. 

So much can be repaired with the right education, practice, and support, which you are getting in this program.

Parents who have been traumatised can heal, and that will ripple out to their children, even if those children are teenagers or adults.

Maybe grandparents who were abusive to their kids have healed and wised up in their old age and can be a positive influence for their grandkids.

It even happens that kids who grow up traumatised and then do the nervous system healing work can have a positive impact on their parents.

Nervous system healing radiates out in all directions.

If you are a parent and you know you have passed down your trauma to your kids, try not to be discouraged.

At least you know it now and are taking steps to heal, so you are moving the needle forward. 

I suggest riding it out and putting your savings into a therapy fund for them, so it’s there once they are older and open to working on themselves. Just keep doing your work and know that as you get more regulated, it WILL have a positive and dramatic  impact, even if that is not seen until later.

If you at least have access to a safe room that is your own, and have the ability to have boundaries about who enters (a lock is a good idea!) then you can begin the process. 

But, in order to fully heal you WILL need to eventually be in a safe living situation and be able to let go of, or hold very strong boundaries with the predictably co-dysregulating people in your life.

One way we  can start to access more healthy ventral function whilst doing the practices is through things like calming the system with gentle pressure. You can use a weighted blanket or placing a pillow on the abdomen and chest, which usually sends a signal of containment and safety to the organs there, which in turns helps the Vagus. You can also hug the pillow tighter or give it a big squeeze when you feel activated. 

It's okay if now is not the time for you to connect with others. 

If we have been through relational trauma we may have a strong resistance to engaging with people in general, because our system interprets all people as potential threats.

So if we notice an improvement in our ability to interact with others in a calming way, this is a big sign that our Ventral Vagal function is improving, and less energy is going into the survival responses.

It’s never too late to do this!

We may never get to be exactly as we would have been had we not been traumatised in the first place, but ginormous improvements can be made in the functioning of our Vagus Nerve through safe relationships, such as with an attuned therapist, friend, partner, or caregiver. By engaging with safe people, this stimulates the Ventral Vagus.

This depends on each person. When one is living with freeze (the brake), that automatically means there is also a big sympathetic activation in the system (the gas), because remember — the freeze response only comes on after fight/flight has been unsuccessful, so where there is freeze, there is also fire, though one may not feel that.

The most common thing we see when someone has been living with both unresolved freeze and fight/flight in their system for a long time is what we call Syndromes (fibromyalgia, chronic pain, Crohn’s, IBS, PCOS, endometriosis, etc.). This is because the nervous system is so darn exhausted and confused! We have these big survival energies always running in the background, and over time that wreaks havoc with all the functions the autonomic system is supposed to support: immune function, heart rate variability, breath, digestion, reproduction, endocrine hormone production, cell and tissue repair, etc.

The gas on/brake on experience can also show up behaviourally or emotionally; manic depressive episodes and borderline personality disorders, etc. Always being ON or OFF is essentially flip-flopping between the high Sympathetic arousal and the high Parasympathetic arousal. This may also show up more mildly as episodes of both anxiety and depression.

The trembling response you describe is a deactivation of the fight/flight energy, which only occurs once the animal is safe. The impala was still in imminent danger, so it went from freeze right back into fight/flight so it could get outta there! Once it reached safety it would then come down from the fight/flight, which often produces that tremor response.

The freeze response is high activation of the Parasympathetic Nervous System, specifically the Dorsal Vagal branch. This can be confusing, because with the freeze response everything feels numb, like there is very little happening in the system, but in fact, there’s a lot happening. It takes a huge amount of energy to numb the body, draw the blood to the core, slow down the heart rate and breathe (the breath may be so shallow that it feels like it has stopped, and this is also to help the system feel less), and stop all non-essential biological functions. So it really is a state of peak activation.

Along with freeze often comes dissociation, though not always. The dissociation serves as a function to help mammals not feel the pain of being eaten by a predator — that’s how it evolved. As humans, our higher brain enables us to manage these survival energies, often unconsciously, so the freeze response may manifest simply as feeling lethargic, hopeless, or numb in parts of the body, without the dissociation. Or it may be experienced primarily as dissociation: being completely checked out.

When the freeze response has become an embedded, go-to option as a response to stress, people will often end up living in what we call a functional freeze. This means it has become normalised and doesn’t necessarily show up in dramatic ways.

Functional freeze can actually show up as the ability to accomplish TONS of work and achieve a lot, especially in Type A personalities. There are many successful business people and incredible athletes who are living with functional freeze. They are only able to be such high performers by not feeling into their bodies and what is happening inside.

Generally, they don’t know they are doing this, they just know they prefer to always be on the go. Always doing, producing, moving is often the only way they feel anything at all. In first responders, for instance, this is very common. The ‘rush’ of constantly being in a crisis is the only way for them to feel into their bodies.

Functional freeze can also show up as limitations; fear of speaking up, not having boundaries, always giving in to others, lethargy, a feeling of no purpose in life, or no drive to accomplish anything. These are all manifestations of trying to stay as small and quiet as possible. In other words, to remain frozen.

There are often big events that are traumatic, even though they have been normalised and may not seem big by society’s standards. Things like circumcision, early surgeries or severe illness, choking on food – these are all pretty big events to a young system. 

But more often in our society it is the things that don’t seem ‘big’ at all, that have a serious impact on the nervous system – parents who are chronically stressed (that’s just ‘normal’, right?), parents with unresolved trauma, or who don’t like each other, who fight a lot in the presence of their kids, who are addicted to drugs and/or alcohol, or who are separated and uncommunicative – all of these things are quite common and not usually considered traumatic, but they almost always are.

Yes, totally normal and a good thing. It may not feel like a good thing, because of the discomfort, but there is simply no way to heal this stuff if we are numb. As we say – if you can feel it, then you can heal it!

This is also why it is SO important to go slow and really titrate this work. When we do that, our system will generally not offer up more than we have the capacity to deal with. If we’ve been living in freeze, functional or otherwise, as we connect and attune to our system, and the freeze starts to lift, we can have periods of actually feeling MORE stressed than before we started this work, as the underlying Sympathetic energy starts to move. We may feel angry, afraid, and new, uncomfortable sensations.

Being afraid of this is understandable, but there simply is no other way out but through, so we really need to work on accepting this, knowing that it is our life energy returning to us, and that the discomfort wont last forever.

We also may need to work more proactively with engaging the Sympathetic system in healthy ways, like with increased movement, and/or things like the Healthy Aggression work in module 4 such as the 'Be The Animal You "AHH"’ practice. 

Contrarily, we may also need to support our Parasympathetic down-regulation with some of the slower practices (bearing in mind that everyone is unique, and that exercises that are soothing for some people may be stimulating for others). Example 'Finding The Safety' & 'Feeling the Now'

On the bright side, being able to feel more uncomfortable things means we also will get to feel more wonderful things, like joy and pleasure, though that may not be apparent right away.

Parts of the body may be numb and have little sensation, or when someone tunes in to feel what’s happening on the inside, there may just be a sense of void, nothing going on. Or it may show up as poor digestion, a poor reproductive flow/cycle and low immune function, and an inability to get a restful night’s sleep, because when we sleep or are deeply resting we are supposed to be in a more nuanced and healthy zone for the Dorsal Vagal branch — which is the low-scale state. This low-scale Dorsal Vagal state supports digestion, reproduction, barrier-keeping in the guts, cell repair, physical growth, and immune function. So, if we are living with functional freeze, there may be a tendency when we sleep to dip fully into that freeze response such that we don’t have access to a healthier, low-scale state.

There are many ways freeze becomes a normal part of how we react to stress.

Usually it is rooted in early/developmental trauma, where the little one could not fight or flee a hostile, neglectful, chronically stressful, or misattuned environment, and so the system perceived freeze as the only option left, and then eventually just starts to default to freeze when stress enters the picture.

It can also happen because of traumatic births or surgical procedures early on, but it’s not a guarantee; if the caregivers are healthy and attuned then the little one’s system will be able to bounce back from pretty much anything. It can also happen later in life through physical abuse that can’t be escaped or defended against; an older child’s system may still learn to numb out as a way to defend.

There is no one timeline or sequence to coming out of freeze, it will be different for everybody. One thing is the same though, in that it does take time. This isn’t something that happens in a session, or a week, or a month.

Generally we are looking at months or years, with improvements and gradual changes in physiological function that happen slowly. Some may start to notice they simply feel more alive or feel more sensation, or have more energy or better boundaries. They may start to speak up for themselves. Sleep may improve and start to be more restful, or immune problems may start to clear up. Digestion, reproduction may get better. Basically, physiological function will slowly improve over time, and we see this in improvements in the systems that have been compromised, and in the behaviours that have their roots in the unresolved freeze response.

The Vagus nerve plays a huge part in Parasympathetic function, which is to down-regulate the Sympathetic Nervous System. In other words, it helps to calm us down. The Ventral Vagus is the part we really want to do this. It is the part that governs safety and connection, and lets us, by engaging with safe people, or by making sound, or hearing soothing sounds, gently take the foot off of the ‘gas,’ which is the Sympathetic.

The Dorsal Vagus, on the other hand, is more like the emergency brake. When a lot of energy goes into it (we call this High Scale Dorsal), it activates the Freeze, or shutdown response. This will also bring us out of Sympathetic, but it is a survival response and not very good for us when it has become the go-to option.

On the other hand, ‘Low Scale Dorsal,’ when a lesser amount of energy is in this system, is VERY good for us. The Low Scale Dorsal state lets us rest, digest, reproduce and repair our cells. It supports immune function and barrier-keeping in the gut. When we have more access to the Ventral Vagal part of this system, we will also have more access to this healthy ‘Low Scale’ state. This is optimal.

With unresolved trauma in the picture though, it is much more common to flip between high Sympathetic activation (Fight/Flight), and High Scale Dorsal (Freeze). When this is the case our gut is impacted because we don’t have nearly as much access to healthy digestion, healthy reproductive flow/cycles and barrier keeping in the gut.

When I say ‘scale’ we simply mean the amount of energy of the dorsal state in the system. The technical word is 'tone' but I like the word 'scale' as I feel it can be understood better. High scale is a lot of energy, low scale is a little bit of energy.

In the context of the dorsal vagus, this is the difference between getting ready to die, and successfully living!

The high scale dorsal vagal response is the Freeze response, the last ditch effort of the organism to survive, or at least to be more numb to the experience of dying. The low scale dorsal vagal response is what governs digestion, reproduction, immune function, cell repair, barrier-keeping in the gut, proper sleep, and growth. In other words, all the good stuff.

If the vagus nerve never got properly tuned and myelinated, then it will probably never be ‘good as new.’ However, in most cases it can recover and be functional enough to live a healthy life. Once we learn to regulate our nervous system, I would say we are actually LESS prone to dysregulation, because we have already taken that journey; we know what dysregulation looks and feels like, and we know how to return to regulation when we get momentarily activated. In short, we have more tools in our belt than someone who has never had to recover from trauma.

If someone got proper support during their early life, then they will generally be more comfortable with others, and often more comfortable with themselves, for they have learned how to self-regulate.

I don’t think they get some kind of reserve gas tank of ‘safety and connective energy,’ it’s just that they are likely to be much more comfortable both alone and with others.

If someone who is recovering from trauma needs to build that ventral vagal function, but they are alone, there are many ways of doing this.

Singing is great for the ventral vagus, as is listening to soothing music and sounds, or pleasing human voices.

Believe it or not, even watching a good TV program with characters you care about and are emotionally invested in can stimulate the ventral vagal system.

I lived pretty much alone for years, and the tv show ‘Friends’ was my positive social engagement 🙂

It’s not as good as the real thing, unless the real thing terrifies us, in which case it is better than the real thing, at least until we build more capacity, and it’s certainly better than nothing.

Yes, babies are born with both the sympathetic nervous system and the dorsal vagal nerve ready to rock. They have access to fight/flight/freeze, but they do not have access to safety, connection, social engagement and self-soothing, which are governed by the ventral vagus. This must be learned. If a baby is distressed all the time, that is a good sign that their sympathetic nervous system is in overdrive. If they are super calm and pretty unresponsive, this most likely means that their dorsal vagus is on overdrive.

Yes. That’s how we see it. A flip-flop between high sympathetic activation (fight/flight) and high tone dorsal response (freeze).

What we usually mean by chronic stress is a low-level stressor or stressors, that are pervasive and inescapable but not obviously threatening, like a chronically stressed parent or parents when we are young or being in a highly polluted environment. It could also be an extremely demanding workplace, or a partner who is always unwell. A lot of shock traumas in a row could also be perceived that way though, such as being in a war zone, or having a series of accidents, but the effect will probably be slightly different, as chronic stressors usually lead to an embedded freeze response, while a series of shock traumas may not do that.

The path is different for everyone regardless of the state of their nervous system, because our personalities are all unique. That being said, yes, for someone who is stuck in freeze (which always has that fight/flight underneath) the journey will usually be slower and more complex than for someone who has a lot of sympathetic activation without the freeze.

Peter Levine, the founder of Somatic Experiencing, says  when it comes to trauma healing that, “no one can do it for you, and nobody can do it alone.” This is true. We can make a LOT of progress on our own using the education and tools in this program, but relationship is very important, and it has to be the right kind of relationship. For some, the support they get from their friends and family, and even the support available in online groups, or in local in-person support groups, may be enough. But if you find that talking about it never seems to resolve anything, then yes, it is likely that you would benefit from some one-on-one work with a qualified and attuned somatic therapist.

Absolutely. Our body can hold trauma for our entire life. It is the wound that time does not heal.

The first thing to know that these types of specific fears often tend to diminish as we do the overall good somatic trauma work in general.

That being said, there are definitely some ways to work with fear of specific situations, and they revolve around the principle of titration.

The first thing to try is, when you are in a state where you do NOT feel activated at all, and your surroundings are safe, to use your imagination. What happens if you simply imagine the thing you are afraid of? 

Very often this will produce the same kinds of sensations as one might experience when actually in the situation, though sometimes they may be milder, kind of like an echo of the full experience.

So, if that perks things up, then good! 

You can now work with those sensations using all your somatic tools and know how. 

You can pendulate between the imagined scenario and orienting to the actual environment around you, you can find out where the uncomfortable sensation is happening in the body and work with principles like the 'Uncoupling' practice or maybe a healthy aggression practice (module 4) is needed. 

Follow your impulses and work with what arises.

There are often further ways of titrating the experience and applying the same process. 

Say you have fear of driving – ok, then after working solely with the imagination, go and actually get behind the wheel, but don’t start the engine. Just sit there and again imagine driving, but this time work the gas and brake, put your hands on the wheel, etc… – bring in some of the somatic actions associated with driving in the actual environment. 

Next time maybe you start the engine, but don’t go anywhere. then you go for a drive just around the block, pulling over and stopping at any point and working with the experience. This kind of approach can apply to many situations.

Another thing to try is to bring in a safe anchor during these explorations, and then to bring that person with you during the actual experience. 

So perhaps, if you have a fear of being around a lot of people, you ‘practice’ going to the mall in the ways described above, with your anchor present, and you share with them your experience. 

Then you try actually going to the mall with them, knowing you can sit and work somatically, or leave, at any time, with them there to support you.

This type of titrated approach, bridging between the imagination and the real experience with titration and support, can be very effective!

To keep a system in freeze requires a lot of energy. 

If we have, let's say 100 units of energy available, then to keep a system in freeze requires about 95 units. Very little energy is available for LIFE other than survival.

A system in freeze is characterised by an inability to receive and a low regulatory capacity. 

An orgasm is not harmful, but it is energetically draining for the system in freeze. Because the nervous system struggles to receive pleasure, regulating the orgasmic energy becomes draining rather than expansive.

Below I will offer a simple framework to work through this. You don't need to give up sex and especially an orgasm. If your body orgasms is a good sign, actually a very good one :)

1. For the next months, have sex more when you're ovulating. It is between your bleeding cycles. Your hormones are at their peak and there's a bit more energy in your body. Your body will let you know when you're ovulating.

2. Explore with sensuality and pleasure, not only sexual. Sensuality is the art of awakening the senses. Notice which one of the five senses feels more accessible. The sense of sight and touch are very beneficial for regulating freeze. Explore simple life pleasures so your system can open the pleasure channels.

The more your nervous system can regulate the freeze, the more it will unlock life-force energy through the system.

When this is the case we want to be on the side of caution, especially if everything seems fine while watching a video or practicing, but then we have a big blow up or crash later on. If this happens then revisit the video/practice and only do a bit of it, like 5 minutes. Then see what happens later. You can also try just listening to a practice without participating with it, and see if there is the same kind of after effect. Once you internalise the principles of a practice, you can also do a bit of that practice without the audio – just a few minutes – and see what happens.

Sometimes there are specific traumas that are an obvious cause of phobias and sometimes not. For example, we may have had a close call with drowning in a bathtub as a toddler, and thereafter have a fear of water. Or there may be no obvious cause like this.

Either way, we work with it the same way we work with anything else – somatically! What are the sensations in the body happening when the phobia rears its head? That’s the first thing to find out. 

Then, we work with that experience at the body level in the ways that you are learning.

The first thing to know about this, is that these thoughts and beliefs are just another symptom of the underlying activation and dysregulation. It is the threat response and the imprints from our trauma living in the mind and presenting as negative thoughts and beliefs about ourselves, worry, fixation, looking for threat, etc.

So yes, as we get more and more regulated, these 'overcouplings' become less of a problem.

First, they become less convincing, where we still have the same patterns but they don’t hook us in so much as we learn to direct our attention elsewhere. As we get more and more regulated they will often disappear entirely, though an echo of these patterns CAN persist long after regulation is established and trauma is healed, kind of like a slightly annoying mosquito that’s easy to squash.

The best way we have found to work with these mental experiences is a twofold approach. 

1. Name it for what it is. Consciously say to yourself, ‘I have the thought, or belief, that xyz…’
2. Redirect your attention to the body. What are the sensations and emotions happening in the body while these thoughts are happening? Focus on those and work at that felt-sense level with the somatic tools you are learning. 

This takes a LOT of repetition and practice - use the 'Uncoupling' & ''Activators' practices to support you. 

Those experiences are often VERY well worn grooves, and it takes a lot of repetition to drag our energy out of those tracks.

Anything that is ‘high energy’ can feel like too much to a compromised nervous system, even emotions we perceive as positive. Though it is important to note, there is no such thing as a negative emotion. The Sympathetic Nervous System is ON when it comes to both excitement and threat, and if we have unresolved trauma, particularly early/developmental trauma, it can be very difficult for the system to distinguish between these things — it all just feels like too much.

Try spending more time with the pleasant bits, and know you can dip briefly in and out of the more uncomfortable places, slowly increasing the amount of time you spend there; like start with a second and gradually increase to ten seconds. You can also try picking a spot that is just kinda neutral instead of painful, and use that as an area to alternate with the pleasant.

The pain is real, and it is also changeable! Often, the pain is actually bracing or resistance that is not allowing the emotions and sensations of unresolved trauma to surface. When we spend some time noticing stuff other than the pain, and then go back and forth between these contrasting places, we are getting the energy moving and simultaneously building a resource for our body while not denying the pain, which often allows that bracing and resistance to dissolve.

Yes, this is a pretty common occurrence. The pain can dilute and spread out, and it can move into other areas, and the pleasant areas can also change and move. Both can influence the other. The real goal here is to notice things can change; that our system can let go of stuck places when we are able to let it experience other things than just that painful spot.

The best thing we can do with grief is invite it in and essentially, get out of the way.

Grief is like a wave that moves through the body, and most people have a habit of clenching and creating constricting around it, so they associate grief with tightness in the chest, throat, eyes, forehead, but that tightness is actually the body trying to manage the grief, not the grief itself. 

When the system is open, grief is actually a powerful, expansive experience – it flows through like a wave and out the eyes as tears, so if we are having trouble letting grief move, we often want to focus on softening the throat, mouth, eyes, and forehead – this is what I mean by getting out of the way.

Staying connected to the physicality of grief is very important – the wave moving through the body, the sobs that may want to happen and how the diaphragm is involved with that, the wetness of tears on the face, the sounds that may want to emerge. 

Staying connected to somatic (body-based) experience of grief, and NOT the image or story of what the grief is about, is very important in letting it move through. 

Otherwise we can get caught in a loop where we start to feel sad, and then go into the mind and think about it, and feel more sad, and think about it more, etc… which never lets us get to that primal, powerful expression of grief.

This is such an important part of healing the nervous system and addressing trauma. 

The key to processing internalised toxic shame lies in finding our way towards feeling and expressing disgust. This doesn’t mean that we feel disgusted about ourselves, but that we allow ourselves to feel and express the disgust that our body feels at having to hold such toxic energy.

Other elements may include working with the posture of shame by allowing ourselves to collapse into that shame posture – chest collapsed, shoulders forward, head down, tail between the legs – and then to slowly move into the antipode posture, the ‘Superhero posture’ – standing tall, hands on hips, shoulders back, chest high, chin lifted. 

Moving between these postures mindfully and slowly and really feeling how they feel can also help us, as also may working with the thwarted self-protective impulses, and healthy aggression that would have wanted to arise to protect us from receiving that toxic shame.

These are such valid questions, especially after one has (like so many of you have) tried pretty much everything to heal. The thing is though, what that looks like may be different for each person, but I can give some ideas.

One of the main signs of healing and increased regulation is symptoms that have been around forever softening and fading away – that chronic ache or irregular period is gone, or you find that it’s easier to socially engage. Perhaps the anxiety is much less, or you find that you have lots more energy. 

There’s no way to say for sure what exactly will happen or when, but you can be sure that if you put in the time and effort, your symptoms will start to shift. 

And very often, new sensations and experiences will arise! 

One common experience that is a good, but uncomfortable sign, is that one may feel much better emotionally and mentally – the cycles of depression are gone, and the anxiety has lifted, or the intrusive thoughts are way less, etc. –  but their body may hurt more, or a rash may pop up out of nowhere. 

When this kind of thing happens, it is a definite sign that the system is releasing old trauma and regulation is returning. Same thing if the body starts to feel much better, but one finds themselves angry and irritable for no reason at all, or one starts to feel WAY more in general, whereas before they were numb and didn’t feel much at all.

What we are looking for is CHANGE, even if it’s a temporarily uncomfortable change, that shows that the patterns of dysfunction that the system has been locked into are shifting, making way for greater energy and health.

As for how long? 

Sorry, it is impossible to say, as this is completely dependent on what one has been through, what kind of experiences and other treatments they’ve explored, their personality, their living and work situation, their relationships, and just the unique nature of their being. 

A person may have had a bad car crash but had solid attachment and a healthy family system growing up, and they can get totally better in a couple months. Or a person may have had really bad early/developmental trauma, and even though there is nothing readily available in their history that identifies as ‘a big trauma’, it can take years of practicing the work to get back to regulation. 

It is SO personal that I can’t say for sure how long.

One thing I can say for sure though, is that this work is not about ‘fixing a problem’ in the traditional mechanical way that we tend to see this in the west. It is about fundamentally changing the way we live and relate to the world and ourselves, and our body. It is a total lifestyle shift that lasts a lifetime.

Also, I don’t think there IS actually any end to healing. 

I mean, one can get back to regulation, and have full functionality and live a life full of health, vitality and purpose, and STILL have old layers arise from time to time. Or they may then move into processing more intergenerational trauma at a cultural level. 

As we get better and better, and have more and more capacity, we simply have room (less 'pebbles' in our 'jar’) to experience more in general, including deeper processes of healing.

Above all, work on yourself. 

This is the most effective thing we can do. As we get more regulated and resolve our trauma, the benefit of that will automatically ripple out to them. This is the MOST important thing.

Below are a few practices that help with discerning and refining your perception.

1. Be ok with not knowing at the moment what is what. The "need" to know may come from a part of you that feels threatened by not knowing. Uncertainty is scary while certainty brings safety. If you don't know that's ok. Move in the direction of what feels right or true for you or what "breaks" old patterns or how you're used to operate or show up. Explore, be curious, open and create space for the discomfort that comes from now knowing.

2. Engage your body relationally. To "hear" the body, we need a bit of space to listen sense or feel what is being transmitted. Experience yourself in relationship to your body. Observe it.

3. Ask questions to your heart, your body or core self. For example, ask: What do you need? And don't wait for an answer right away or for the answer to come from thoughts as though someone could tell you: "You need to spend more time in nature" or "You need to pause more often."

Expecting immediate and clear answers is part of our survival protection. It's not like this, or at least not at the beginning when there's a lot of survival activation and enmeshment with our trauma responses.

If you ask a question and live through this question for one week, paying attention and being open to guidance, you'll see that an answer will come to you, even if 1%. Something will open up. But it's important to stay open and not project and answer. Make space for the unknown.

2. Connecting with animals and the natural elements. Animals are instinctual beings that can remind us of our instinctual capacity. The part of our brain that is in charge of survival responses and instinct is our brainstem. Animals live a lot through their survival instinctual brains. Observe animals, notice what animals resonate with you and play or be that animal in your body. Be that animal and notice how life is through their lens. This sounds "off" for the intellectual mind but quite empowering and liberating for our survival brain.

3. Spontaneous, unstructured, free movement. Allowing our body to move in the way that the body ant to move is a portal towards body empowerment. This practice is very simple. You can do it without music or with music. You can stand and tell your body: How do you want to move? And the waiting for the body to initiate a movement. Much like what the 'Moving What You're Feeling' practice suggests. 

4. Befriend your nervous system and how it protects. Unresolved trauma and survival responses distort our capacity to discriminate between danger and safety. Our body may perceive danger where there's safety and safety where there's danger.

5. Nurture your sense. Notice simple life experiences where you can explore more with your intuition and impulse rather than intellect. For example, choose four spices or four different flavours, and begin to smell or taste them and notice which one calls you or resonates with you. Do this for one month, not every day but perhaps during weekends. Look at four colours and notice which one resonates with you. Look at various pictures of yourself as a child and notice how your body responds.

For now, Take ONE thing that resonates from this and put it into practice.

Yes, this is not unusual. If we complete a procedural memory which has been wanting us to do something to protect ourselves, this can help the muscles and fascia come out of bracing, which is like a kind of sustained preparation to act. Also, it may be helpful to revisit this action in a slower, gentler way — going through the same kinds of motions and images/emotions, but with more awareness and less force.

In the video of the polar bear, the shaking and trembling starts as he is beginning to emerge from the anesthesia. He is not fully conscious, but is emerging from unconsciousness. This is a perfect example of how the old stuck sympathetic response wants to emerge, as the layers of freeze (in this case it’s a chemically induced freeze via tranquilizer) that are often on top of it, start to lift. In this case you can literally see the bear’s legs “running,” completing the procedural instruction to flee that got shut off when it got hit by the tranquilizer. Then, after that energy discharged, those big spontaneous deep breaths came in, signalling that his system was returning to baseline.

What’s important to remember is that this is a very straightforward example, for the purpose of illustrating the process of deactivation. That bear is a wild animal that has no social conditioning. The trauma was very straightforward and easy to complete. Human trauma, and our process of coming out of freeze and into deactivation, will almost always be much longer and more complex than this!

For most of us, there have been many overwhelming events that caused our survival responses to rear up and remain incomplete, and these events may be decades old, not minutes old. The threats were often much more chronic, or subtle, and tied in with issues of attachment and authenticity. We may have learned to default to freeze in times of stress very early on, such that the freeze response became a deeply embedded part of how we go through the world. We have societal conditioning on top of that, which tells us not to ‘be impolite,’ or ‘act out.’ All of this makes for a longer and more complex process.

So, for us the first thing is establishing safety. That is key. Without a safe environment, where we feel free to start exploring these old survival energies and how they may want to express, we cannot progress. If your work environment isn’t a safe place to do this, well, that’s pretty normal in this day and age and not a huge deal, the trauma work can wait ‘til you get home. If your home environment is not safe though, that is a huge deal. I wish there was a better answer but there just isn’t — without a safe home environment a person cannot heal from trauma. At the very least there needs to be room that is yours, which no one is allowed into, while you are doing this work, but it will still be difficult if those who are living with you aren’t able to support your expression, or at least leave you alone to process. So, if this is the case, the first step is getting out of that home environment and making a new home for yourself that is safe.

Once we have safety, then there are all sorts of ways in which our system may want to start expressing these incomplete responses. It could start with words — speaking truths that never got to be spoken. It could start simply with doing enough orientation that it really LANDS in your system that the environment you are in (where you are doing this work) is now safe. It could start with pressing, or pushing, or squeezing something, or making funny faces. We can never know exactly what each person’s system will need, and that’s why learning to follow your impulse is SO important in this work. Your body knows what it needs, you just need to have a safe environment in which to listen, and then trust your impulses enough to act on them. It also may be very important for some to support this individual work by working one-on-one with a good Somatic Experiencing Practitioner.

It is pretty much universal that at some point there will be some trembling, shaking, or internal vibration of deactivation, but it shouldn’t be forced, and we can’t know when this will happen organically, but we can be sure that at some point it will, though it may be subtler than one may expect. This is why this video with the bear is so important — so we can see that this is a natural process, and when it happens for us, is something to be welcomed and celebrated instead of feared.

If there is a specific incident, like a car accident, that you know left you traumatized, you can try working with this, using memory. Start with before the accident when everything was fine, and also remember after the accident when you knew everything was safe. Then, see if you can slowly progress to the moment of impact in your memory, noticing the whole time what is happening in your body, and pausing to allow any kind of impulse or emotion to be expressed. Remember to go slow! Do this in small bits and pieces, so it may take several tries to get to the actual event.

Again, this kind of work can be well-supported by a qualified Somatic Experiencing Practitioner.

Around the age of 3.

Absolutely. Feeling accepted, understood, and supported is so important, as is being able to express our experiences with this process. All of this sparks up that good ventral vagal social engagement system, which is the antipode to survival energy.

There are many kinds of memory! It is not necessary to have declarative memory (mental images and words) of traumatic events in order to heal them. In fact, that’s the entire beauty of this work! The body remembers, and it’s much more effective to work directly with implicit memory (body memory) than it is to work with declarative memory. That being said, as our implicit memories start to surface, the declarative memories may also spontaneously arise, but they don’t have to in order to heal.

Absolutely. Think about the strain and effort that would have to go into suppressing years of growls that want to come out! Allowing that expression to emerge will usually provide relief from tensions that have built up to keep those energies contained.

Yes. Focus more on the physical exertion of the towel wringing, and how you can allow the face to snarl and bare your fangs. You don’t have to make any sound to do that. And you may also be able to let some soft growls emerge without being heard. A little rumble in the throat doesn’t have to be loud. Also, the car is a great place to do this work, or in the shower.

The Healthy Aggression exercises, like twisting the towel, serve a couple of purposes.

One is to allow us to find a way to let sympathetic (fight/flight) activation move through us in a healthy way. It engages the muscles of self-protection (the arms and hands), and if we can allow our face to express as well, and maybe let some sound emerge, it can engage the affect, or emotions, associated with self protection. So this can be a way to address activation in the short term, while building our comfort with this kind of work.

Two, through that practice we open the door to allowing old, thwarted, self-protective responses to complete. By becoming familiar and comfortable with letting the energy out in this way, we can organically start to move into completing these old responses when they arise, which will often happen from a present-moment trigger. Usually, these old responses will have something specific they want to DO, and that may be wringing someone’s neck, so the towel thing will work well, or it may mean pushing away, or hitting, kicking, biting, or all of the above.

If you are just going through the motions with these but don’t actually feel anything happening, then this means your system is probably not feeling safe enough yet to let that energy out. You can keep practicing and slow it down, and hold the intention of really inviting that energy into the world, or it may be that you would benefit from the added safety and containment of exploring this work with a good Somatic Experiencing practitioner.

We can’t know ahead of time exactly how it will look, but by practicing the principles and above all staying connected to the energy, and how it wants to move through the system, we can discover what our body wants to do.

Whatever that looks like, the key is to stay connected to our body and the energy and to not be explosive in our actions, but rather to slow them down, and really feel the effort involved.

For example, if the urge that organically arises is to punch someone, to take that motion and reaaaalllly slow it down, like a punch in slow motion, to feel your effort and energy, and to allow yourself to see, in your imagination, the completion of that (the impact on the person’s face, their response, how you feel being victorious, etc.) is the goal here.

The anger energy IS the energy that is wanting your face to snarl, and to beat the shit out of someone and shout. The fear and sadness are most likely part of the internal mechanisms that have helped keep this anger energy at bay. The idea is to try and stay connected to the more aggressive feelings and how they may want to play out, remembering to keep your motions slow, and to stay connected to your body. You can acknowledge the fear and sadness as real, but understand that they are part of what has kept this anger suppressed, and aren’t that useful for this particular work, though of course it’s a good idea to make space for them afterwards, should they still be around. Often times rage will alternate with grief like layers of onion.

Yes, indeed! It sounds like your system has been controlling pent up aggression for a long time, so it is probably quite good at that, and we are actually wanting to start letting go of that control, and allow that energy to flow into another kind of action that is still contained and safe, but not controlled in the same kind of way. It is controlling and suppressing this aggression that makes us sick in the first place, so this is about finding a way to start letting it out!

There is no need to jump into the annihilation work, just start with the pure, somatic approaches suggested in the article — wringing the towel, allowing the face to mobilize its aggressive affect, allowing sound to emerge, while staying connected to your body.

It’s fine to do this bit by bit, but we DO want to start building that bridge towards allowing the thwarted self-protected responses (which is what pent-up aggression IS) to move and be expressed.

It may be that you would benefit from the added safety and containment of exploring this work with a good Somatic Experiencing practitioner.

Absolutely. Think about the strain and effort that would have to go into suppressing years of growls that want to come out! Allowing that expression to emerge will usually provide relief from tensions that have built up to keep those energies contained.

Yes. Focus more on the physical exertion of the towel wringing, and how you can allow the face to snarl and bare your fangs. You don’t have to make any sound to do that. And you may also be able to let some soft growls emerge without being heard. A little rumble in the throat doesn’t have to be loud. Also, the car is a great place to do this work, or in the shower.

The VUUU sound is a powerful way to start to feel our insides more, and to stimulate both the ventral and dorsal branches of the Vagus nerve. Since that Vagus is connected to every organ, as well as muscles of expression in our face, the range of sensations one can experience during and afterwards is vast.

If you feel vibrating, heat in a specific location, an increased sense of overall warmth, or greater life energy, that’s great. It simply means your system is coming more alive. If you feel more pain or tightness afterwards, this also likely means your system is coming more alive, and you are simply feeling more of what was already there. If this is the case, see what it’s like to play with imagining the vibration of the sound gently moving through those areas of tension.

If you notice that you immediately get tired and start yawning, this could mean a couple things. It could mean you are activating the low-tone dorsal rest/digest/repair state and your system is relaxing nicely, in which case you should feel kinda mellow and a sense of well-being. OR, it could mean that this is quite stimulating for your system, and/or your system has a strong tendency to go towards the freeze response, in which case you would probably feel more like you are about to pass out, feel spacey and checked out, and/or kind of ill-at-ease or immobilized.

If you are experiencing something like the former, then great! No need to do anything different. If you are experiencing something more like the latter, then it will be important to play with doing a little less and titrating your experience. Make the volume softer, and/or only make the sound for a little while, and don’t use all your breath, see if you can just do a little bit that doesn’t bring on the big yawn, and then slowly play with increasing.

If this is hard on your throat and it irritates it, or you feel like it’s itching or tickly on the vocal cords, then I suggest trying it softer, and shorter as well.

There is a need for a very important distinction here. It is actually not normal for the abdominal muscles to contract while exhaling! It IS normal for the diaphragm to raise back up towards the lungs, thus making more room for the organs in the abdomen, which results in a gentle deflating of the area, but this is very different from the abdominal muscles contracting.

Ideally the belly can stay soft and have a sense of just hanging there without moving at all, except for the slight inflation/deflation that results from the movement of the diaphragm, but this is often not the case with unresolved trauma in the system, because the breath is tied in with those stuck survival responses, which may indeed be telling our abdominal muscles to clench, so we can stay protected.

If you notice you have a sense of pushing to force the last of the air out, try simply stopping the sound a bit sooner, and just let the last of the air flow out without sound. We don’t want too much effort when we do this, as it will be counterproductive to gently stimulating the parasympathetic system.

If you can’t sense any vibration, try putting your hand on your belly or womb and tuning in that way. With this practice we actually want you to only start with the ‘V’ and then continue the rest of the way with the open ‘OOOO’ sound — as it is that low, open tone that allows the vibration to be felt all the way down into the vagina.

No. Just make the lowest pitch that is comfortable for you.

You can feel free to do these as often as you like!

The "V" gives us a clear starting point that is more pointed than the open sound ‘OOOOO.’ You can definitely play with both, and notice how each is different for you!

This stimulates both the ventral and dorsal branches of the vagal nerve. If we have been more shut down, this can indeed release that emergency brake of the strong dorsal response (freeze), by stimulating the healthy low-tone dorsal, or social engagement systems of the ventral, both of which help to down-regulate the sympathetic in a gentle way. If that emergency brake has been on, then this tapping into a more gentle dorsal response could actually elevate the heart rate.

Another explanation could be that this sound actually tapped into your sympathetic nervous system, but given the relatively small increase, and that at 80 bpm you’re still in the normal range of healthy heart rate while at rest, I’m going to guess it was likely the first explanation.

Most of us who have survived trauma will have a lot of resistance or difficulty when it comes to expressing anger and aggression. This is normal! We usually only saw one of two models (or both!) when it comes to this: repression and depression, or explosive rage and violence, neither of which are healthy. But it’s very common to go towards the repression/depression route, because it feels safer. If you have a lot of resistance to doing this, or if you feel exhausted just at the thought of it, please know that this is why. If you have complex trauma and autoimmune issues in the picture, it may also be that your system literally doesn’t have the energy to start moving anger yet, even in a healthy way.

In either case, you can start by just playing with the sounds and movement, without thinking about anger or who you’re angry at, etc. Just make it about the sound and movement, and that’s all. Try doing a little bit by starting softly, or by not using up all the breath with the sound.

When we do manage to do this, and actually get some anger moving in a healthy way, often for the first time ever, it is very normal for grief to surface on the heels of this, or even in the middle of the exercise. If this happens in the middle of your exploration, then try your best to lean towards staying connected to the anger and aggression, and then allow yourself to feel and express the grief and sadness afterwards, if it’s still there. It’s normal for anger and grief to be layered like an onion, and that’s okay, it’s just that in the middle of the exploration, we want to reinforce our ability to stay connected to the anger, as grief, sadness and freeze are usually what have been keeping that anger suppressed.

It is actually not a good idea to start this exercise at all if you are already feeling overwhelmed with grief and sadness, because even though those emotions are part of what is suppressing the anger, we don’t want to override them and totally fake it. There needs to be at least a spark of some aggression, or at least an absence of overwhelming sadness there to get things going.

One more really important point. Most of us have WAY more anger inside of us than we may realize. Doing this once, or even ten times in a go, is not going to get it ALL out. It takes time and practice, and the other Healthy Aggression tools as well. We need to slowly build our capacity to move the energy of aggression and anger out, usually over a time span of months or years.

We want to start with the VOOOOO, and then slowly move into the AHHHH.

Some people may be able to move straight to the Ahhhh without problem, and if that is the case, then go ahead and focus on sustaining that, and exploring how you can let the lips snarl and eyes narrow as part of the expression. 

Many people have a lot of tightness in their jaw, and if this is the case then we want to titrate the opening, so we open our jaw only to the place where we feel resistance, and then we back off. Then back again to the point of resistance, and back off. Again. Like that. When we do this we may notice that we can open our mouth a little bit more each time without strain. The resulting sound will be like, “wwwaaaaaawwwww-wwwwaaaaaaawwwww-wwwwaaaaaaawwww.”

Many people have a lot of tightness in their jaw, and if this is the case then we want to titrate the opening, so we open our jaw only to the place where we feel resistance, and then we back off. Then back again to the point of resistance, and back off. Again. Like that. When we do this we may notice that we can open our mouth a little bit more each time without strain. The resulting sound will be like, “wwwaaaaaawwwww-wwwwaaaaaaawwwww-wwwwaaaaaaawwww.”

Nope. You can feel free to do it as much as feels good to you. Just be sure to keep an eye out for other emotions that may arise, and make room for them too.