Hey everyone, welcome to Being Well. I'm Forrest Hansen. If you're new to the podcast, thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. One of the most important skills we have to learn in life is the ability to regulate our emotions. This means being able to ride the emotional waves that naturally come along in life.
with some effectiveness, some skillfulness, to be able to manage emotions so they don't explode out of us inappropriately, while also being able to look inside and feel how we're actually feeling. Emotional regulation is tough for everyone. It's tough if you're two years old. It's tough if you're 62 years old. But it is really, really particularly hard for people who have a history of difficult experiences.
And I tend to be a pretty top-down person, but the truth is that you can't think yourself out of a feeling. You might be able to paper over it for a while, but what we resist tends to persist what we push down. tends to just pop back up. So a lot of the work here is actually driven by the body. It's driven by the relationship that we have with how things literally somatically feel inside of us. And so in order to tackle this topic, I was joined today by my wonderful partner, Elizabeth Ferreira.
Elizabeth is an associate therapist practicing in the San Francisco Bay Area, and she is a somatically informed therapist as well. Her work really focuses on the body. I've talked to her a couple of times on the podcast. as you would imagine, one of my absolute favorite people in the world. And I just loved talking with her about this topic. So I really hope that you enjoy today's conversation.
Thanks for doing this with me today. I'm really glad that we're doing it. I've been looking forward to talking with you about this for a while because... So much of your work, in my understanding of it, and this is probably a good question to start with, like orbits the idea of how to effectively regulate yourself. Yes. When you're feeling a little high, how to turn yourself down when you're feeling a little...
low low, how to turn yourself up, and just how to manage all the difficult experiences that people have in their life, because that's really what regulation is. So how do you think about it? Where do you start with people? Ooh, good question. Where do I start? Yeah, like somebody came in and you're noticing that there might be some kind of a regulatory issue going on. How do you work your way into that? Well, the very beginning is that I...
try to be as regulated as I possibly can within myself. So the more regulated I am, the more it invites regulation into the co-created space between me and the other person. Sure. The other thing is finding safety. Key thing is that we have to feel a degree of safety in order to start to become more aware of our somatic experience. Because if we don't feel safe, the body tends to not be a fun place to be.
Talk a little bit about how you try to get that into a person, that feeling that they actually are safe wherever they are. I think the... First thing that I tend to do, and right, I'm taking the view as a therapist. So I'm usually working with a specific population, and I'm also a somatic therapist. So I am seeking bottom-up. processing kind of all the time. So it typically begins in the room where I try to relate to the person. Like what can I start to find resonance in?
do we have a similar sense of humor, right? I'm trying to move us into where we naturally start to begin to connect with each other. And this is kind of the bridge, right? If I'm really regulated and I'm calm and I feel safe in my body, it invites the other person into that experience of safety because I'm feeling safe.
There's a lot of kind of practical things we do in the room to establish safety. One is we give a lot of empowerment and autonomy within the space. So there's always, you can say yes, no, or maybe I apply. This is an explanation. acceleration and there's no right or wrong way. And the key thing is that it's not about you, the client, trying to make everything I'm giving you work, right? It's not about that. It's about finding what...
works for you. Well, I love that because it's the opposite of the experience that people tend to have in their day-to-day life. Yeah. Where a lot of people feel like they're put into a very specific box. They have to do things one way. And they have the repeated experience of basically being like a fish who stole the climate tree. Yeah. And they're just trapped in...
a setting around people who sort of force themselves or who force them to relate to these people in a particular kind of way. And that's such a foreign model. And so we have repeated experiences essentially of failure.
You know, I'm a fish. I can't climb a tree. I don't know how to speak that language. Disempowerment. Disempowerment, yeah. So I love that you're starting with the development of agency in even small ways where you're allowed to say no. You're allowed to say, I don't know about that one, but...
hey, maybe this one over here. And you're allowed to say, I don't like it. I don't know why I like it, but I don't like it. And then we're like, great, let's move on. Let's find something else. Yeah. So even backing up a little bit from here. A lot of the experiences that people have that tend to develop healthy regulation inside of ourselves come in when we're a lot younger through secure attachments of different kinds.
predominantly with caregivers, but also with other kids. As I've talked about in the podcast in the past, I was pretty securely attached to my parents, not so securely attached with other kids at school, right? A lot of adverse experiences in that kind of a setting. And so often it's the case with people who have a little bit more difficulty regulating themselves that they didn't form those secure attachments growing up. Yeah.
And so part of what you're giving them is the opportunity to form a kind of secure attachment with you. It's, you know, it's bounded. It's specific. You're not trying to be their mom. Yeah. But there's an opportunity there for reparative experience. Exactly. I couldn't have said it better than myself. Maybe I should just like. Take that clip and put it on my website. Elizabeth Ferreira, giving you the opportunity for reparative experiences. Yeah, not forcing. Opportunity. Yeah, totally.
Would you mind giving an example of what that looks like? Like, I don't want you to pull from an actual client example for a whole bunch of different reasons, but just like, yeah, but just like kind of in general, what does that tend to look like? I kind of think about. development of a human being. as having different steps, right? And the image I use a lot is you're building a house, right? So very early, early development is building a solid foundation.
There are missing elements to that foundation. Like say there wasn't enough concrete or say there wasn't enough water or say whatever, or it was built on sand. Oh, you know, like. it's going to have cascading effects on a person's ability to regulate their nervous system. So a part of the way that I work and think about this... is finding the missing element. Not necessarily what happened to you, but what didn't happen. What didn't have an opportunity to get a sense of empowerment?
So a part of my work is finding what that is and inviting an opportunity for that experience to happen. And so it's really about me as the therapist. being that which is needed. And that's usually through a certain degree of mirroring, attunement, reflection, and invitation to empowerment. This is reminding me a lot of the conversation that I had with Dr. Hom. Yeah. Yeah, which you listened to. I'm a big fan. It was so hard when you were in there recording. I was like...
It's him. It's happening. No, I love Dr. Hobb. He's amazing. Amazing trauma therapist. And one of the things that he talks about in his work is rupture repair. Yeah. It seems like there is an aspect of his work. that is focused on identifying when there is a little rupture between him and the client. You have a little moment, something didn't land quite right, I used a word wrong, you can tell that just a vibe has entered the space of there being a disruption of some kind.
And then he'll really go out of his way to call it out directly. He'll say, hey. I noticed a thing. I think I messed this thing up. He talks about it really overtly. Stephanie Fu actually talks about it really overtly in her book, What My Bones Now, where she talks about this kind of therapy that they did.
where there was really an opportunity for that. And part of the point of the therapy was to have those little reparative experiences with your clinician. Which again, if you think about a lot of people's model of self-regulation or relationship, comes from early childhood experiences.
where they had those kinds of moments with caregivers where there was never repair. There was just a rupture. And you get rupture on rupture on rupture. And so you start to get really, really good at holding on to all of that. Does my parent require me? to really downregulate myself and just be like smooth as the other side of the pillow.
Or does my parent require me to be in this really revved up state so that they can soothe me in some kind of way? Or because that's just the energy that they demand. And now you're creating a new story with your clinician, which can be really great.
This might be a good place just to kind of say that particularly with folks who have experienced trauma or more complex trauma, The pathway to learning how to regulate your nervous system can be really fraught because it's almost like there are all these landmines and moments of...
becoming triggered. A moment of the past is now here in the present moment, and the body remembers. So I just want to make space that what we're talking about... today in particular is kind of for the population who has either like gone through that journey enough to have some facility already or a population that identifies as not having experienced more complex or developmental trauma. Just to kind of put that as my own kind of voice as a trauma therapist, that this is not easy stuff.
I would really recommend if you start a journey of taking this on as a practice or learning how to regulate, to just be really general with yourself. Because, I mean, at least I'll speak from my own personal experience. I was not fully aware of just how little facility I had at one moment in my life to be able to regulate my nervous system. When I started to move into this stuff, it just kind of awakened the reality.
of what had happened to me. So, yeah, I just wanted to kind of put that there. Can I ask you a personal question about that? Oh, of course. Okay. Just, you know, for the record. Let's go, let's go. What were some of the key skills that you had to learn in adulthood in order to be able to deal with big emotions more effectively or rev yourself up? if you were having a hard time doing that. Well, speaking just from my experience, I survived by dissociating. Yeah.
I can't think of the word. That would be a little bit more over-regulated. Yeah, I might have been like over-regulated. And what that means was that I kind of was like generally flat most of the time. I never showed anybody my dysregulation. Externally, most people would have thought I was totally fine when inside I was not. And I have a nervous system and a body that is more in that structural dissociation window. Can you describe what that means? Yeah. So for me...
I had a lot of misattunement when I was developing, and I identify as a parentified child. I had to very quickly learn that I needed to regulate. to my parents and also regulate my family system in order to be safe. So as I was developing, right, like my little body was creating my foundation. There is the part of me that knows how to get on with daily life.
which I kind of interpret as being a bit more left brain. It's thinky, it's top down. I'm not really connected to my body, but I can just bite down on the stick, so to speak, and just get through whatever I need to get through. And then there are the parts of me that have developed through that dissociated state. So when I dissociate, there is a part correlated to that more fight or flight part of my nervous system. So you could say there's a part of me that knows how to get me through it.
when I'm in that activation. There's also the part of me that knows how to get me through it when I'm in that freeze, that dorsal vagal mode. And there's also the part of me that knows how to be when I'm in that kind of... more sensitive, dysregulated attachment place of my nervous system. As I started to learn how to regulate, it became very dysregulating because I wasn't fully integrated.
I did not have a fully integrated sense of self. So I move into a nervous system state and now I kind of feel like a different person in a way. Like not fully, but like I am in a different part of me. That was great context. And so from that stance, as somebody who was maybe a little bit more over-regulated, more dissociated... What skills do you feel like you had to learn to work with that effectively? I had to let the parts out and have either the tantrum or have their experience.
Because my getting on with everyday life part or my more manager parts are very, very strong. And I learned as a kid not to show those parts. So I would just. exile them. I would push them away. So I'm not actually being with my nervous system and having a degree of flexibility to move through states of arousal. When I felt them, I just would dissociate from them. So I would
lose awareness, lose a sense of tracking, and eventually later on they would come back and I would be like, oh. That line, you didn't have the flexibility to move through states of arousal is a phenomenal line. Oh, thank you. Could you explain kind of like what that looks like in a healthy version of it? Yeah. Anyone can go on Google and you just Google polyvagal theory and there will come up a great image.
So in a more flexible nervous system, it's normal for us throughout the day to move through various states of arousal, meaning... It's normal to dip into that dorsal vagal freeze state and then you come back up and you're like back in that connected social space. You feel pretty good. And then you maybe get aroused, you know, maybe some asshole cut you off, you know, on the freeway.
you know, that rises up, but then you can go, okay, mindfulness and compassion, you know, like he's probably having a bad day and then you're able to bring it back down. Right. Yeah. You have this wave function and you're in a fluid relationship with it. Yes. Yeah. You're not locked into one or the other. Yes. So what I used to do as someone who is more.
structurally dissociated is that when I felt my nervous system start to go up into say that fight or flight response, I would get stuck there. The part of me that knew how to be in that state. kind of would hold me in that state, which looked like if someone cut me off on the freeway, I'm spending the rest of the drive being like... And then when I get to wherever I'm going, I'm irritated. I'm kind of pissed at everybody that doesn't really deserve that. I am bitter.
And I'm stuck there for a period of time. What did you do to be different, for lack of a better way of putting it? What was that process like? What do you think that process is like for people? What helped you approach those situations differently? Like what happens differently in you now than happened then? I'm more aware. of my interoception i have built a relationship with my internal feeling state and my nervous system to be able to feel that wave as it's happening
So I can really feel when I'm in that safe, regulated, peaceful, I'm capable of connecting space of my nervous system. And I'm able to feel... when we start to move up to the fight or flight and i'm able to feel when we start to move into that kind of free state so the first piece for me was building that interoception, like actually feeling what it's like as my nervous system moves through those states.
And in the beginning, it was a process of allowing because I tend to dissociate. So it's like, okay, how do I stay with something that my body experiences as unbearable, right? That I was taught. to not do this. So now I'm having to reteach myself how to stay with something, how to stay with this wave as it's happening. It's funny that for both sides of the coin.
more over-regulated, and more under-regulated. One of the key skills that tends to come up is some people refer to it as developing distress tolerance. That phrase is a little complicated for a lot of different reasons. but essentially being able to stay with an experience without becoming overwhelmed by it. Yes. Because what a lot of people don't understand is that it's not that people who are over-regulated don't have big emotions.
a lot of the time they're over-regulated because they have big emotions. That was definitely my experience. So it's so interesting that we're talking about this because we've been together for like seven years at this point. And I'm not sure if... I've really thought about you in the past as somebody who is over-regulated. But looking into your past history and why these systems developed the way they did, it makes total sense. I've always kind of thought of myself as the more like...
repressed, over-regulated one of the two of us and edited you as the more loose, emotionally free one. But I do think that like... That was a practice. Yeah, it was a practice, exactly. And I think a key thing is that... I have a traumatized body. So I think the key difference is that when we started really living together, that's when kind of my unraveling started to happen.
And it happened because finally there was enough safety for that to happen. Yeah. Previous in my life, there was no space of safety anywhere for me to- allow that flexibility and freedom within my nervous system. So by us moving in together, my nervous system finally feeling a degree of safety. And it took a lot of effort for me to... try to stay in that relational part of my nervous system because, frankly, mine was quite narrow.
So there was a lot of like at every turn kind of within relating the possibility for me to become like very, very triggered. And in the past, I would just hide it. I would overregulate it. But then with us being in relationship, I started to reveal more. And that was a part of the practice too, leaning on someone else for co-regulation. Like I am actually not okay and look at it.
Yeah, it's so interesting what you're saying, this aspect of it, where when you finally get into that safe environment, that's sometimes when things feel like they just all fall apart, particularly emotionally. I'll get emails sometimes. often seemingly from guys who are in relationships, saying some version of, I'm in a relationship with somebody who has complex PTSD or PMDD or...
ADHD with rejection sensitivity issues or whatever it is for them. Somebody on the more kind of sensitive borderline side of the spectrum. And they have a very healthy relationship. Things have been going well for a long time. And it just feels like... My partner is more sensitive. There's all this emotional stuff coming up. I don't really know what to do. Like, am I doing something wrong? What's going on here? This might seem surprising, but I have always struggled to eat enough vegetables.
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Let me get you started with my special discount. You'll get 20% off your first order. Just use code beingwell at fieldofgreens.com. That's code beingwell at fieldofgreens.com. And when you dig into it a lot of the time, it's because actually things are going really well. And actually, as a partner, you have provided a very safe environment for this person to finally do some of the emotional work that's been...
kind of left on the back burner for a long time because there just wasn't a conducive space for it to happen in. Also, just like there's enormous vulnerability in relationships. Yes. And so if you're somebody where... experiences where there was relational vulnerability typically did not end well for you for the first fill-in-the-blank years of your life, and all of a sudden that starts coming up again as an adult, it's natural that you'd have some emotional dysregulation pop in.
And also, right, calling in that attachment part of our nervous system. And if you have some attachment wounds or there's a pattern of maybe... a lot of chaos happening within attachment. You can't trust attachments, right? Usually there's a certain degree where a body will allow us to attach and then something shifts.
where then all of a sudden the attachment is perceived as not safe. There's a lot of uncertainty now starting to happen. Ooh, did I lean in too much? Was I too vulnerable? Did I reach out too much? Was I too needy, right? And then it can flip into the shame part of our nervous system. So what I would love to do here, if you're up for it, is I would love to embody two different people. Okay. One person who's a little more...
And these are kind of like, I'm holding real people in my mind. One of them's me. So one of whom's a little bit more on the over-regulated side of the spectrum, one of whom is on the little bit more under-regulated slash sensitive vulnerable side of the spectrum. And I'm going to kind of paint you a picture of these people. And then I'm going to ask you, you know, as maybe not as this person's therapist, because that could be kind of a different process, but as this person's coach.
friend, you know, I'm, you got 10 minutes with them and you've given them some advice. What would you say to them? Okay. All right. So first person, a little bit more over-regulated, AKA me from like 10 years ago. Okay. So this is somebody. where they feel like they have a lot of feelings inside of them, but they have a really hard time letting the lid off of the container. They feel kind of bottled up.
They get a lot of feedback from other people that, hey, man, you just need to kind of get in touch with yourself a little bit more. They can come off a little logical and Spock-like. to other people, very focused on the detail of a thing, the right way to do something. They're emotionally intelligent in a theoretical kind of way, but they can come across as like a little brusque or remove to people.
And what they really want to do is they want to feel like they can tap in their interior and feel those feelings without being overwhelmed by them. what kind of advice would you give that person? Or are there tools that you would give them, concepts you would want them to look up, just anything that kind of comes to mind for you right now? Well, because I'm a somatic therapist, I start with how that makes me feel. Yeah.
And the first thing I notice from my own nervous system is that there's a lot of sensation in my heart center, like my chest. And there's this sensation of energy moving up. And there's now a speed starting to come in, which in my body signals the presence of hypervigilance. So someone or a part of them, maybe unconscious or not, is... hypervigilant in some way. And when I hear hypervigilance within this context, I think of a very, very tight manager in a person.
So there's a lot of internal rules. There's a lot of compartmentalizing. There's a lot of structure in the barrier to express out. So from a somatic lens, there's probably a tightness in the body that I could already see in someone. There's probably an unconscious place of tension, like the jaw, like hooking the jaw back like this.
A person puts a lot of pressure on the galatal diaphragm in the throat. So we hear a lot of this start to happen. There's a lot of pulling back. And you could even get the image or the metaphor of a horse with the- bit in the mouth and constantly pulling the reins back. So then it's like, okay, I'm aware of what's happening. I am embodying that. I can feel the impact that might have.
So how do we invite the opposite? How do we find the places in the body that are very willing to relax? So we don't go right to up here where the most tension might be. For those listening, you gestured to your throat and kind of your chair. They talk for me. So with this structure, or when I'm noticing this somatic... posture and form, I will usually begin by, let's just start by swaying a little bit. And it's not swaying that's supposed to be big. We're doing it very small.
The goal is for this to feel super easy, super gentle. We honor points of resistance. So if you're leaning to the left and you feel the beginning of resistance, you go the other way. And we just get a little bit of articulation in the spine. And as we slow down, right, because hypervigilance is a speed, by doing this, we're slowing things down. And usually our managers are very mental.
So as we slow down, we're inviting ourselves to slow down to the pace of the body. The body is much slower than the mind. So usually by now, if I'm offering this as a practice or a tool, the person will have a natural sigh or a natural breath that might come in. Or they might notice there's less resistance now. They can move a little bit more in a certain direction than they could before. And then we begin. What are you noticing?
How does this feel? Is it uncomfortable? Is it comfortable? Is this good or bad, right? Do you have a preference? Often by this point, people are already starting to notice something in the body that they did not notice before.
And that's great for starters. Awesome stuff. And it's reminding me of something that was actually super helpful in my own process and remains very helpful in my own process, which is a phrase I use sometimes, which is how do I let the fizz out of the bottle? Yeah. For a lot of people who...
for lack of a better word, are more repressed. Because that's a lot of what we're talking about with over-regulation. There's a repression. We're pushing energy down. For a lot of people who fall into that category, there's a feeling that if I pop the lid on this... so much is going to come out that I don't want to deal with or that's going to cause consequences for me in my life. And because I can't let it out safely, I can't let any of it out.
Because once you pop, you just can't stop. It all comes flowing out. So the question then becomes, how can you let some of it out without letting... all of it out because then by letting a little bit out at a time suddenly you have more access to the central material it becomes safer to go into the body of it
because you've let little bits out. And for me, what's been really helpful is actually a lot of somatic practices. Little things like handshaking. When I got mad about stuff in the past, sometimes I would just be like, no, see you later, anger. And what's been helpful for me these days is to just shake my hands when I feel that, just bounce. Dispel a little energy so I feel like I can interact with the emotion.
But with enough of it released, work kind of takes the edge off. And I can still approach it the way that I want to approach it. Does that make sense? Makes total sense. And what you're talking about is titration. Yes, great. Which... again, more from the somatic lens, usually within every window of our nervous system, we have a certain window of tolerance for that.
And it's important when we start to lean into, okay, let's explore. You're really tight. You're really over-regulated how we let some of the fizz out, that it's just enough to kind of have. the whisper of... the oh god experience right we don't even want you to get to the place where you're having to start to manage what's happening because now your manager's involved and now we're out of the right brain and now i'm just having a conversation with your left brain and that
serves nothing. So by slowing down and doing a little bit at a time, we're expanding a person's window of tolerance within a given state of activation. Now, the thing is that it's really common if we notice that we're more in that fight or flight part and anger, right, is definitely up in that part of our nervous system. it makes sense to have a movement that matches that energy. Because we're talking about something that is inherently physical.
So we can't think our way through it. We have to find a movement, find a physical way to channel that energy and help us regulate. It's almost like we're letting the fizz out in a safe way. Okay, I let a little bit out. I'm good. I'm still with it. I'm still with my interoception. I'm aware, and I can be here. I can still be in this. You want to talk about shame for a second? Sure. Okay, because that can be really hard for people. Yes.
For a lot of different reasons. One of them is because they feel silly. They feel dumb. Are you telling me I'm in a group of people with seven people? I feel a little unsafe. I feel my emotions getting out of... Getting away from me a little bit, not out of control, but internally just getting away from me a little bit. And you're saying I should start shaking my hands awkwardly in front of people? I'm not going to do that. Are you crazy?
So, you know, that's one way it can come in. Another way it can come in for people is just like, wow, I've got to think about this at all. I didn't learn these skills when I was younger. My parents didn't attune to me in the ways that helped me learn how to do this. Peter Levine's line is, shame is the thousand pound gorilla in the consulting room. It's a great line. It comes up constantly. And I'm wondering how you...
Either what advice you would give about that to people who are dealing with that kind of stuff or just like how you start to work with that. Well, I would say shame is the great barrier. So because I'm a therapist. Often I try to co-create a space with someone where no matter how weird something may be, I am not going to shame you for that. Now, what you're talking about with live fire outside of therapeutic space. Yeah. You know, it may not feel safe.
to engage in something you have found useful that helps you regulate something in a physical way. So there are a couple of kind of covert little ways that I've kind of explored. It's really easy to kind of be subtle and hide certain movements like putting your hand in a fist, right? Getting a degree of pressure somewhere.
you know, pushing into your thighs, right? Like feeling into your own strength, you're channeling that anger a little bit, maybe in a way like squeezing your thighs, right? I'm saying if you're in a group of people, right? The other thing is using your breath to help you downregulate a little bit. So I often invite, spend more time on your exhale, right? Because if we're constantly taking in air, we're kind of feeding the nervous system to become more hypervigilant, to be...
We're lifting ourselves up and off of our root and our groundedness. So by spending more time on your exhale, it's a subtle way to start to downregulate the nervous system. The other thing is starting to slow down. right? So talking a little bit slower, giving yourself a pause, right? And the other thing is that even though, right, I do say that we can't really think our way through an experience, a lot can happen when we internally acknowledge the experience we're having.
So by having that internal ally built inside of ourself, that's like, yep, you're really angry right now. And you know what? It's justified. This is an accurate. moment to feel anger and it's okay to be angry right now. So that's actually a fundamental practice that's taught in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, where you have the ability to look inside of yourself.
Label an experience that you're having, an emotional experience in particular, saying something overtly to yourself like, I'm angry, I'm in pain, I am experiencing a lot of anxiety right now, whatever it is, that kind of basic emotional labeling. But then kind of taking it a step further, and this is the more mindful aspect, is to be able to say to yourself, this is how I feel, and that's okay. To go full acceptance practice with it. That's okay. That's how I feel. That's okay.
We can deal with it later if it needs to be dealt with, but how I feel right now is okay. And what they found in the research on it is just that practice alone had an enormous impact in people's just overall experience of... being able to deal with the emotion, happiness, and well-being broadly, they just felt better most of the time after doing that, which is really interesting. I've taken it on myself as a practice.
And I found it incredibly helpful a lot of the time, even though it sounds like both tiny and a little cornball, a little cheesy. But if you actually do it, it's like, oh, yeah. And everything lights up all of a sudden. It's pretty cool. Yeah. My kind of way into that with what you're just describing, and this is my experience. is that because I'm more structurally dissociated, I've learned to really start to feel when a part of me starts to become triggered, starts to come in.
And I know that because I can start to feel myself dissociate a little bit. And then I'm like, ooh, let's stay here. And then I can become very aware of like a part. And I experience parts as very physical. So when a part kind of metaphorically takes the steering wheel of my body, it has a very different feeling than when my adult myself is in charge. So a part of acceptance.
how I interpret it, is being able to keep the wise adult part of myself in charge of driving the bus, but is still able to be with. the part of me that is panicking or the part of me that's in a state of activation. And I kind of perceive the parts that have a real connection to my nervous system as being much younger. Sometimes I get a lot of flexibility within my nervous system when instead of pushing a part away or being all like,
You know, like, I don't like you, right? Almost reparenting myself. allowing that part of me to come here, but allowing the impact of the experience to be held by my more adult self. So it's like I am being the adult. while bouncing the scared child on my knee at the same time. That's a great visual. And this might be a bit of an oversimplification. I don't know how somebody like...
You know, I talked to Richard Schwartz pretty recently. He's creator of IFS, a very, very cool guy. But maybe one way to think about overregulation and underregulation is when you're overregulated, the vulnerable parts, the child part is, you know, in the basement.
When you're under-regulated, it's got the steering wheel. And a lot of what we're trying to do is be in a situation where that part is riding shotgun, but it's not driving the car. And so part of the question is like, what helps people get there?
I kind of think about it as, you know, get their little sticky hands off the driving wheel. Terry Real, yeah, totally. You know, like a little four-year-old has no business driving a bus. Totally, totally, totally. That's not how you teach your kid to drive, for sure. Yeah, yeah. So a part of this, and this is also a part of my work, is finding that wise adult self that we all have and giving that part of ourselves a lot of experience of feeling empowered.
of making that wise adult part of ourselves feel like there's a lot of agency. I know what to do. I can accurately help these parts. I can keep driving the bus. within this process, I am able to ride the waves of my nervous system and not be overtaken or overwhelmed by them. This is a perfect transition to
Case study number two. Okay. I'm more vulnerable, under-regulated, sensitive person. So like hold the wise adult in your head or what you were just saying because I think that that actually has a lot of connections here. But I wanted to go back to that model. So okay, so second case. This is somebody who is a little bit more sensitive, is a little bit more emotional, tends to either go to a lot of anger and sharpness.
or a lot of sadness, teariness, emotional overwhelm quite easily. And they've just had a really hard time with self-soothing. And self-soothing is like a major challenge that they deal with. Like you were talking about, when they get revved, they stay revved. And they often stay revved until somebody else is available to kind of talk them down from the ledge.
And they come to you and they say, I really want to learn how to do this for myself. Where do you go with that? So again, because I begin with my own body. I'm already starting to feel myself kind of dissociate a little bit. And this is a sensitivity that I have with this type of population. When I'm around this structure, my parts start to get activated because it can...
feel quite similar to certain parts of me. And also, I was in a family system with people who were like this. So my body learned to dissociate from certain parts of me and certain parts take over. to be with this structure, right? So just honoring that I can already feel a little bit of dissociation. I can feel a lot of chaotic energy in my body. Again, it's still in a lot of my...
chest center, but it is not actually as intense as the one we just did. It's fuzzier. It's harder to track. I'm like, something's happening, but there's a lack of containment. That's a good way to describe under-regulation in general, a lack of containment. Yeah, totally. It's diffuse. It's ephemeral. It's all over the place. I can't find you. So with that… It's about joining the person in their own chaos. It's about meeting them where they are at while still being able to hold on to my ability.
to regulate and still be here. So it's not that I get totally consumed by the chaos. It's that I have learned inside myself how to dance with this chaos. And this is way too much for one person to regulate. So that's why we start with joining with. So I might try to, with this type of structure or person, do a lot of mirroring, like honoring like, wow, this is a lot.
This sounds overwhelming. I'm naming what I am seeing as it's happening, right? We are moving out of this ephemeral, dysregulated place. And I'm like, hey, I'm with you. I see it. And I'm okay. And that's the key bit is that I remain okay as this is happening. And then because our nervous systems interact with each other. Usually it starts to invite a little bit of that co-regulation, things become less chaotic, and now we start to move into the containment.
And with someone who is of this structure that you're bringing in, there might be a lot of unconscious parts floating around. We're containing the experience. I might kind of grab the reins a couple times. I might move us into a practice that regulates the nervous system right away, right? Like, let's pause the story. Let's drop into the body. Okay, that's intense. Let's totally shelve it. And now let's find some safety, right?
types of experiences, we need to start to get more experience of safety in the body as fast as possible. Yeah, that's really, I love that you're highlighting the safety aspect of it. often that kind of explosive emotion comes from a place of just not feeling safe. It's terror. Yeah, yeah. And so there's the pulling of emotional resources from other people to confirm to yourself that you are safe, and you are going to keep on existing, and this is okay. Are there things that you do with people?
things you teach them how to do for themselves. Maybe again, this is more of like a coaching question than a therapy question that help them get more in contact with the wise adult part that you were talking about earlier. My immediate answer is through experience. We have to give that part the experience that allows it to come forward. Just to be clear, it's very common for this type of structure to be associated with complex PTSD. Yeah.
often we're also working with trauma responses, which is different than an emotional response because now it's, it's like inception now. the stuff from the past is in. And now, you know, the parent who did something is in the room. And this is why we need containment because it will just spiral and kind of become more ephemeral. And this gets to reenactments. Reenactments, all that. So it's about giving the wise adult part of us.
the experience of being able to regulate. And we can only regulate when we are in the present moment. You can't regulate the past, right? And if you're worried about the future, you can't regulate the future. So often with this, it's about bringing them back into the here and now, right? Because that's where we find the wise adult self. Like, hey.
You're here with me, and I'm already starting to see this part. We have to reflect this part when it shows up. There's a part of you that knows something. We may not know it yet, but you can feel it already. because this is the part that brought you here. This is the part that can tell something is wrong. This is the part that's like, wait, this is not normal, and I shouldn't have to be working this hard. That's the first beginning pieces of the wise adult.
There's an empowerment aspect to that. Yeah, where a lot of the time people with that kind of a personality formation, like we were talking about at the very beginning, they just have not had a lot of agency and empowerment experiences. received a lot of negative feedback from other people based on that personality structure that they have. They've quite often experienced a good amount of trauma.
These are very, very painful experiences that led to a dysregulated system that is tough to manage. It's tough to manage for them. What will sometimes happen for people that... as not a clinician, I would imagine is just so cool when people start to get to this point, is they'll have enough of that ability to maybe through a mindfulness practice to kind of come into the present moment.
Or maybe they developed a psychoeducation that lets them kind of reflect on what's going on. And there's this moment where they can kind of go, I see the wave coming. and I see this overwhelming experience building up, or maybe I'm reflecting on a time it did in the past, and this other sort of part steps forward that is more knowing, that does feel more capable.
and is making kind of a choice about either how I want to be in the future, now that I have seen this pattern, or in the present is like, oh, this is happening to me right now. And I'm in it, but I'm also noticing... that I'm in it as I'm in it. Does that make sense? Yeah. Being a therapist, getting to witness this with people, I feel inside myself just this immense amount of joy.
And I really lean into celebrating those moments. We often, especially as a trauma therapist, We spend a lot of time in the density and the heavy stuff, but it's equally as important to spend a lot of time when we've had a win or when we feel more empowered or when we can trust our gut.
And we can trust what we're noticing is happening. And we're like, hey, I am actually with it. And I'm noticing that my body's responding absolutely appropriately. And there's often a moment where things start to. or reorganize themselves. And often with this structure that you brought in, there's a pattern of shaming ourselves for being so dysregulated. And when we can shift it towards applying
wait a minute, this is not my fault. This is actually appropriate. And applying, I don't want to say fault, but that's the only word I can really like find. Yeah, you're correctly attributing. where this is coming from. Yeah. And that kind of frees us to... trust in our own empowering experiences, and to start to now outside of the therapeutic space, have those experiences that are now filling and supporting and really grounding that wise adult self.
So as somebody who's been to graduate school, has now been working with people for a couple of years in different capacities, you have access to a lot of information that a lot of people don't have. Are all of these practices and tools and ideas that could just be generally useful for people if they're wanting to learn how to regulate themselves a little bit better?
frankly, are trying to develop a little bit more compassion and understanding for people who struggle with these kinds of issues. Are there a couple particular... tactics, ideas, techniques, skills, anything that you would want to highlight to people that you think are particularly useful from what you've learned? Yeah. So first is finding a practice, it doesn't matter really what it is, that puts you in contact with your body. So something that takes some movement requires...
body awareness to do it. So yoga is a great one, right? Even it can be more like authentic movement, just kind of like dancing in your space could even be, you know, doing a a workout class, right? Starting to like get your body feeling something that it typically doesn't, right? Another thing is there's tapping practices.
Some people can find some guided tapping practices through YouTube. And that kind of starts to just bring more sensory awareness. Could you break that down a little bit and kind of describe it, particularly for audio again? Yeah. So, so it's a specific type of practice and I'm forgetting the exact name of it, but basically you. tap different parts of your body, right? So you can tap kind of your cheekbones, your jaw, your chin, right? And what that does...
is that it's bringing you into more contact with your physical body. It's building sensation awareness. It's helping you start to also build some interoception. And it invites more of that right brain processing. Another one is tremoring. Like when you do certain movements or exercises that create a tremoring experience in the body, which stimulates or, sorry, simulates.
Kind of that more animal part of our body when an animal is being hunted and gets away from the prey, right? Usually there's like a shaking experience after. So we're bringing that in. So those are kind of ways of building more physical experience with your body, right? Building more somatic experience. The other thing is becoming more self-aware. So this is mindfulness practices, things that...
either start to help build you towards more being able to track your inner states. So this could be starting with some journal prompts every morning. How do I feel when I wake up? How do I feel at this time? How do I feel at that time? and kind of even starting to map
where do you spend most of your time throughout the day? Do you have a really stressful job and you're noticing you're kind of hypervigilant most of the time? Or do you feel your body responds to stress by kind of freezing out and you feel super fatigued most of the time, right? Just getting...
a sense of where are you at already, right? And once you know that, then you can start to find practices that either help upregulate your nervous system, if you tend to go to freeze, or if you tend to be more fight or flight. What helps you downregulate? And there are a lot of different practices that can be helpful. You can find them on YouTube. You can find a bunch of guided stuff on, I'm sure, different podcasts and things like that.
I would advocate for is that it's not just about you listening to it and kind of yada, yada, yadaing through it. It's about getting as much of yourself in it as it's happening. So for example, really being aware of the room that you're in, orienting and grounding, listening to whatever's being prompted, right? Fully going into the thing and staying with yourself as it's happening. Like, and again, the work isn't about.
making things work for you. It's about finding what works for you. So if a practice doesn't land, move on, find something else. The other thing that really I feel helps with this is having a community, a community of safe people that you can trust to mirror and reflect and attune to you. That way they might notice things that you don't notice.
And being able to get that reflection from people you trust and feel safe with. So not people that are going to shame you or guilt you for this, but just to go, wow, I'm really noticing you're going through a hard time, huh? Right? So being in a sense of community can be really valuable too. That was a great list of things that people can do. Very, very practical. And at the end, with the more relational aspect of this...
It's imperfect because it's very, very difficult to duplicate the safe container of therapy out in the world. It's just, it's really hard. Frankly, that's part of what you're paying for. As somebody who's going to therapy is the complete safety. and total focus on your needs. And if you feel like you are working with a clinician where you don't feel completely safe and you feel like they are not focused on your needs, it's a bit of a red flag.
But we can get some of that out in the world sometimes with the right groups of other people. Supportive social environments. Even, frankly, this is sort of a weird example, but just going to a spin class sometimes or something like that if you're in an area where that's a thing. There can be a sense of shared community, of shared pursuit, people going after a similar thing.
that can start to give you some of those reparative experiences that we were talking about at the beginning, where you feel like you're writing a new and different story. It had maybe the same beginning, but now it has a different ending. And the changing of the ending is such a powerful part of the whole process. Yeah. I think that's kind of the secret sauce in a way. It's like giving yourself opportunities to experiment.
to practice being flexible, but maintaining an allegiance with yourself. So write that empowering piece. What actually makes you feel more empowered? right? Empowered to express yourself, empowered to move through your nervous system, empowered to regulate your nervous system, right? Maybe for someone who say is just kind of interested in
having a deeper relationship with themselves, who kind of connects with, I'm having a pretty great life. I had a good enough childhood. I'm doing pretty great, right? But if there is... this curiosity, right? To lean a little bit more maybe into this regulation space. A key part of it that I think is really helpful is daring to try things. that might be perceived as edgy, that you might have a response of, ooh, I don't know, right? But pushing yourself to try it anyway, right? Because...
It's through those experiences that build our resiliency that give us more capacity in our nervous system, that give us more window of presence and tolerance in each state, which... will have a positive impact on how people experience you. Well, is there anything that we haven't talked about today that you think would be helpful for us to talk about here at the end? At the end of the day, our nervous system...
All the things that we've been through live in our muscles, in our fascia. Like as a trauma therapist, trauma is in the body, right? So a part of regulation is about... Being with the body and moving the body. So however you want to move your body, do it. And move your body in the ways it normally doesn't. If you tend to be really fluid and flowy.
What happens when you try to invite a little more staccato movement or sharper movement? Does that create a response, right? And so much about regulation and working with the nervous system is, again, about that exploration. Where's your curiosity? What's starting to be like, ooh, this is interesting. I might feel a certain way about it, but there's a curiosity there. And so following your curiosity, because curiosity will guide you.
towards what you find enjoyable and the joy leads to more regulation. I think that's a great note to end our little recording here on. Thanks so much for doing this with me, Elizabeth. I mean, I always appreciate it so much. You're such a pro. I'm so blessed that you're my partner. Thank you for talking about this with us. Well, thanks for having me. I really appreciate your time.
I really enjoyed this conversation with Elizabeth. She's one of my favorite people to talk to about, you know, just about anything. And it's always great when we can find an opportunity. to have her on the podcast. And I was particularly interested in talking with her about regulation because that is such a huge part of the work that she does with people as a somatically informed trauma therapist.
And I thought it was really interesting that we started the conversation with safety. How safety is the natural precursor to the ability to regulate ourself. The safer we feel, the more possible regulation becomes. But the problem is that a lot of the time when we need regulation skills the most are also when we feel the least safe. This means that the ability to find a sense of safety in ourselves even when circumstances are
not the way that we would want them to be, is an absolutely key skill. And it's also where she starts with her clients, with the people that she works with. If you're in a situation with a therapist and you don't feel totally comfortable with them, if you don't feel safe...
in that environment, it's going to be really hard to get productive work done. And this took us to a conversation about agency experiences and particularly how many people who struggle with regulation did not have a lot of agency experiences growing up.
They learned that they couldn't influence their environments or that their emotions didn't really matter. And this creates a situation in adulthood where part of the process is going back in and figuring out what the key experiences are that you didn't get back then. What emotional experiences, if we got them, would be incredibly valuable for us these days? And this creates a kind of emotional relearning process, which is part of what happens in therapy. It's part of the value with it.
is that you now get to have interactions with your therapist that go differently from the ones that you used to have with other salient people in your life. We then started to use Elizabeth as an example of somebody who had to learn healthy emotional regulation skills. in adulthood. And she described having a pattern that included dissociation, really jamming down her emotions, and then eventually exploding when she couldn't repress them any longer.
And she described the typical process here as a multi-stage process. A healthy nervous system can move through different states of arousal in a fluid way without becoming trapped in any one of them. So in order to not get trapped in that over-regulated state she was in, which then became a bit under-regulated when all the emotions just burst out of her, she had to learn a number of skills. She mentioned learning how to let
parts of herself out in safe environments. This was like letting the fizz out of the bottle, which is something I talk about pretty regularly on the podcast. She also emphasized learning the skill of interoception, being able to look inside her body and get a real feeling for how she was actually feeling. She also talked a bit about being able to see experiences of overwhelm coming. before they'd hit her, so she could be more at choice about what she wanted to do about them.
We then went through two case studies, a more over-regulated person and a more under-regulated person. And I really used myself as an example here. And Elizabeth went through a pretty detailed process of talking about how she would first start working with that person, and some of the things that might be really supportive for them. And in both cases, and this makes sense because she's a somatic therapist, Elizabeth really emphasized the relationship that people have with their bodies.
She focused on the feelings and emotions that we build up in and around our bodies and how we can titrate ourselves into those emotions so we can feel them without becoming overwhelmed by them. And she closed the conversation with some very practical suggestions for people. She mentioned finding a practice of some kind that puts you more in touch with your body and becoming more mindful throughout our normal lives, which helps with self-awareness.
And then as you start becoming more aware of what tends to rev you up or freeze you out, it becomes a lot easier to apply various kinds of tools. I want to close with something that Elizabeth said pretty early on. This work is not about making things work for you. It's about finding what works for you. People often have the experience in life where they're given all of these tools that feel like they are for gazelles when they are a fish.
So the real value here for most people is in getting the support that they need to figure out what actually works for them. And part of this process, frankly, is being able to say no to things that don't work for them. So if there was anything this episode... where when we were talking about it, you were like, you know what? That's just not for me. Great. That is a fantastic part of this process.
I hope you enjoyed the conversation. I always love talking with Elizabeth, of course. If you're interested in learning more about her, you can find her website. I've included a link to that in the description of today's episode. If you'd like to support the podcast, you can subscribe to it.
wherever you're listening to it now on. And you can also find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash beingwellpodcast. And if you'd like to check out more of my work, you can find me on Substack. Until next time, thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you soon.