Can YOU validate her Polyvagal state, emotions, sensations, impulses, and cognitions?

Hey there, I'm Justin Sunseri. I am a therapist and a coach who wants to help you live with more calm, confidence, and connection without psychobabble or woo woo. In this episode, I want to help you practice validation. A lot of my clients and my community members in the Stucknaut Collective, They have, they struggle with validation. Validation is basically recognizing what is true, uh, acknowledging how you feel or what you're thinking or what sensations you have inside.

Validation is just acknowledging what is, what is true and that's difficult. That's difficult for people to do, to recognize what's happening within them and be honest with themselves. Instead we default to minimizing or excusing or, uh, denial and other sort of cognitive skills that we have. So I want to help you practice validating. We're not going to make it personal. We're actually going to make it more objective.

And I'm going to share a story with you that was written by ChatGPT, my helper. And we are going to try to validate some of the experiences that Maria is having in the story. So what I want you to do is to get out something to write on, and you're going to write down five different domains. The, those domains are polyvagal state, uh, sensations, impulses, Emotions and cognitions. So those five domains, just write those down on a piece of paper.

When you listen to the story, I want you to pause whenever you need to. Write down what you're hearing in those domains. And then at the end of this, I'll share what I see -a couple of them- I'm not, I won't do all of them that way, uh, I'd love to hear from you, especially YouTube in the comments, put a comment, um, with what you're seeing or hearing that I didn't mention. If you really struggle with this kind of thing, I have something called SSIEC.

It's a worksheet that has all these domains with a whole bunch of words on them, to help you get going. And if you sign up for my email list, I'll send you a download for the SSIEC sheet. Just follow the link in the description. Or go to justinlmft.com/ssiec. That sheet has all these domains. It has the polyvagal state, that's the first S, Sensations, Impulses, Emotions, and Cognitions. All those are laid out on a table to help you, it's like, it acts as a cross reference.

If you know your emotion, then you can use this table as a way to identify what sensations might be connected to that emotion, as well as what cognitions and Polyvagal state impulses as well. So impulses are basically what the body wants to do or has a natural reflex to do like when we're in the flight state, the impulse might be to run away. When we're in the fight state. There could be an impulse to push or strangle or pull or lift.

Sensations are the experience, the bodily experience of an emotion.

So if you have an emotion of sadness, these sensations might be things like heaviness or emptiness.

Those are sensations. Cognitions are the things in our brain and not just words but also images and memories and calculations, all the stuff that our brain does. The last one is emotions. Emotions are, well, sad and happy and relaxed and scared. Just those emotional, well, those emotions. Alright, so let's get to the story. Maria had just finished a long day of work and was finally sitting down to relax.

She scrolled through her phone, noticing that a few of her friends had made plans without her. A wave of discomfort washed over her. Her chest tightened, her stomach churned, and a thought flashed. "They must not like me as much anymore." Her heart started to race, and she could feel a heaviness in her limbs. She stared at her phone, tempted to message one of them. To ask why she hadn't been invited. But she hesitated, unsure if it could make things worse.

A part of her wanted to pull away entirely, to shut off her phone, and retreat into her room.

Another part of her felt the urge to react, to demand an explanation. She let out a long breath, unsure of what to do next, feeling the loneliness and rejection settling deeper. Okay, so that's the story. Now, let's fill in what, now hopefully you already paused and hopefully you already filled in some of these, but let's talk about what difference or what the the domains were that appeared in the story or the examples of the domains. Let's start with emotions. What emotions did you identify?

And again, if you're on YouTube, put your list of emotions that you identified in the comments. What I heard was sadness, rejection, and maybe anxiety. Her heart's starting to race.

That could be some anxiety. It also could be fear. And what you'll notice is that none of this is really super hard and concrete. Like, it's open for debate as to what emotions there were. Some of them are pretty clear, I think. Rejection, I think it's pretty darn clear. Um, she wasn't invited and so she felt rejected. Another one that doesn't flat out say, but she could have felt anger.

Uh, one thing that she felt the, er, the impulse to do was to, to demand an explanation, which kind of sounds like it could have some, she could have some anger. Let's shift next to thoughts. Thoughts and emotions kind of go together. For me, I tend to group those together as top level, maybe tertiary, third level of our experiences. And behaviors might be like a fourth level after that. But cognitions and emotions I tend to group together.

They seem to really reinforce each other and we can get stuck in cognitions and or emotions. Our thoughts definitely feed into our emotions. Our emotions definitely feed into our thoughts. So I, I group those together we'll. We'll, so that's why we're focusing on those first. And I think those are typically more accessible, at least consciously. So her thoughts, what thoughts can we validate? What thoughts can we acknowledge are real for her, are true?

One of them was really obvious, which was, "They must not like me as much anymore." The other one that maybe isn't so obvious, that she probably thought, at least in words, it says that she wanted to ask why she hadn't been invited, so she had the cognition of asking a question. "Why wasn't I invited?" That's a cognition as well. There's also a third one here which is the thought of making things

worse, which probably came from the emotion of fear, maybe anxiety. But making things worse, that's a cognition as well. "I'm going to make things worse if I say something, if I speak up, it's going to upset my little group here and make things worse." So that was emotions and cognitions. I, I grouped those together. Underneath that grouping is another group which is sensations and impulses. These two are consciously accessible, but it's not nearly as easy as cognitions and emotions.

So if you are mindfully aware of what's happening within you, you can definitely notice the sensations and the impulses that come along with those sensations. I think that these two reinforce each other, the sensations and impulses. For example, if you have the sensation of heaviness, that heaviness is telling you to immobilize, that the Impulse would be immobilization. But if you don't do it, then the impulse is never acted upon.

If the impulse is never acted upon, well, this sensation stays there, and then we would never get to the the bottom layer, which is the Polyvagal state.

If the impulse is to immobilize, the state is likely shutdown. If you don't listen to the impulse to immobilize, then the shutdown never alleviates. Anyhow, let's focus on the sensations and impulses. So what sensations did you notice? I noticed the obvious ones are the chest tightening and stomach churning. These actually might come from different Polyvagal states. I think that they do.

And it might indicate that there's some polyvagal ladder climbing here happening for her, uh, in real time, her chest tightened, and then her stomach churned, which would, I'll, I'll touch upon that when I get to the polyvagal state, but those are some sensations that we're noticing. Another sensation is the heaviness in her limbs and her heart starting to race. So the next thing to focus on is what impulses did she have? What impulse did she have that came along with those sensations?

A couple of them are to speak up. She had the impulse to speak up and just ask questions. It didn't seem like a domineering, dysregulated speaking up. It felt more like, to me, like a powerful speaking up, like, um, just using her voice and listening to what she needed in that moment, which was clarity, clarification from her friends. And within that actually was an impulse to connect because she wanted to be a part of it.

So that impulse to connect by using her voice, but also listening to the flight fight activation along with the, the impulse to connect. So those two things combined. And that results to what I call power or empowerment. And again, it's not a, it's not a domineering thing. It's actually a connective flight fight kind of thing. There's one more obvious impulse, which was to turn her phone off and then retreat into her room, so leave.

A little bit of flight activation, perhaps, but she wanted to escape to retreat into her room. A more subtle impulse that actually is in here is that she wanted to, or the hesitation. The hesitation is an impulse to immobilize. It's kind of like a little freeze impulse. It's to not be seen, not to make things worse, and to just sort of like pause or freeze for a moment until the danger passes. What other impulses did you see? Again, if you're on YouTube, put it in the comments.

I'd love to, you know, to read what you saw.

So the last thing to go into is what Polyvagal state or states, are you seeing active in this? And I think there's actually a bunch. She kind of seems to be all over the place on the Polyvagal ladder. Let's start at the beginning. She just got off work and I'm assuming that she has a stressful job. Uh, it says that she was finally sitting down and relaxed. The way I read that is work is overwhelming. It's stressful. In my mind, I'm just making up a story here.

In my mind, she's a nurse and works in the ER. And there are sounds going off, there's crises, there's bureaucracy, there's doctors that think they know everything. All of these things is just like overwhelming for her system. She comes home and finally I can sit down and relax. What she should do is actually relax and mindfully let herself decompress. Mindfully collapse on the couch and just breathe. That's what she should do. Instead, what she does is gets her phone out.

So the polyvagal state probably is some level of freeze. Stress. Overwhelm. To me, those come from freeze. So she probably has some level of freeze, comes home, she needs to listen to that. She needs to immobilize and decompress. But instead she kind of solidifies the freeze by getting her phone out. So can you decompress while watching TV and being on your phone?

Yeah, kind of, but really, if you take it away and you just have the present moment, silence, especially if you work in a place like an ER, if you just give yourself silence when you get home and truly collapse, that's probably going to be a much better recovery versus getting your phone out or watching TV. So she got her phone out. Uh, which is not bad, but it's less than ideal.

But what happened was that she was triggered further into, uh, overwhelm or stress, or a little bit of freeze, because she felt rejected by her friends. Now, did her friends intend that? We have no idea. Probably not. But, regardless, it tapped into some feeling of rejection that she has within her. Her chest tightened and her stomach churned. To me that could be evidence of sympathetic activation, which is chest tightening.

Stomach churning could be evidence of shutdown, which follows the Polyvagal ladder and sequentially. It makes sense. These things could also be kind of happening at the same time and maybe there's some freeze activation going on, which would definitely, I think, feel in the stomach and in the chest as well, that's possible. Plus, there was the thought of rejection, which is very disconnected very away from the group. So lacking safety. So in this small moment she has some level of dysregulation.

Not intensely, but at least in this little micro moment, it's there I would say it's more of a freeze personally with little access to safety at least in this small moment. And then her heart starts to race and she feels a heaviness in her limbs. All this kind of could be some level of freeze at least to me. It's kind of pointing that direction. We're in shutdown, heart's starting to race?

No, not not so much. In freeze? Yeah. In flight fight? Yeah, but there's also the heaviness in her limbs which to me suggests some level of shutdown these two together flight fight plus shutdown- That's that's freeze. I think there's a little bit freeze happening within her here. She's staring at her phone so that she's immobilized and she's just kind of staring at it She's tempted, she's, but she's also hesitating. Again, freeze, that, that indicates freeze to me.

Uh, thoughts of making things worse, that indicates shutdown or freeze, but to me this keeps pointing back to some freeze. A part of her wants to pull away entirely, that's flight activation, potentially. To shut off her phone and retreat into her room, yeah, sounds like flight activation. But another part wants to react and demand an explanation, which would probably come more from fight, but not dysregulated fight, I don't think- although I actually, it could be at this point.

It sounds like there's not much safety active and retreating, retreating to a room and hiding. Yeah, not much safety there. Uh, demanding explanation. Yeah, not much safety. So she's probably in flight fight here in less, uh, freeze, probably more flight fight, which is totally possible. Just because you access freeze in a moment doesn't mean you stay there, it might just be like a momentary access to freeze and then shut down comes off and now you're left with just flight fight.

What happens next is that she lets out a long breath, not knowing what to do next, so indecisive, feeling loneliness and rejection. All that suggests to me shutdown. Not freeze, but shutdown. So it might, it's, it's possible that she came home already in freeze because of overwhelm and, uh, stress, did not give herself the decompression that she needed, and then the overwhelm and stress are reinforced, and now she's, has less, less access to safety.

But the freeze is not so intense that it's a full on panic attack and that she's staying in freeze. The shutdown may have come off, and then she's left with flight fight, she can't run away from the problem, can't fight it off, and so she goes into shutdown, uh, at the end. So I could see that that is the sequence of events, and these things are rapid, it doesn't, it's not like obvious all the time what state someone is in for 30 minutes. It could be, but these also could be really rapid shifts.

It's not always super obvious what state someone is in. Someone's state doesn't always last for like 30 minutes to an hour to all day. Yeah, it could, there could be a dominant state that flavors the system, like someone could be in shutdown more often than not, but that doesn't mean that they're in a chronic 10 out of 10 shutdown all day. At one point it might be a 10, yeah. Another point it might be a two and they have more access to safety or more access to flight fight.

So for her we're looking at what might be really rapid shifts in polygonal state that could follow the sequence Uh, it's also possible this is written by AI and AI is confused and doesn't understand the sequence of autonomic ladder shifts. That's it. I hope this was helpful for you in validating and recognizing what's happening within somebody in their emotions, their cognitions, their sensations, their impulses, and even their Polyvagal state.

I know it's not always easy to do that for yourself, so if you can practice this by, by recognizing or by acknowledging these domains in a story, well, maybe it makes it easier for you to do that for yourself. And the tool that I can give you is the SSIEC sheet. It's something I created exactly for this purpose, which is to help you, uh, have the words to identify what's happening within you, truthfully.

So head on over to justinlmft.com/ssiec and sign up for my email list and you'll get the sheet. That's it for this episode. I hope this has been a helpful resource for you. Good luck in your own validation. Bye. This podcast is not therapy, not intended to be therapy or be a replacement for therapy. Nothing in this creates or indicates a therapeutic relationship. Please consult with your therapist or seek for one in your area if you are experiencing mental health symptoms.

Nothing in this podcast should be construed to be specific life advice, it is for educational and entertainment purposes only.