Real People Share Real Shutdown Experiences

I'm assuming that you're here for one of two reasons. Number one is that you're in a dorsal vagal shutdown. Or number two is that you are caring for someone who's in a dorsal vagal shutdown like a family member or maybe like a therapy client. I assume you already know the basics of the polyvagal theory. If so, then you're good to go. But if not, this is not the place to start. I highly recommend going to my polyvagal intro page. It's for free on the website.

You don't have to sign up for anything. No email addresses. It's free. It's just all there. Get a deep dive into Polyvagal Theory. and then come back when you're ready to learn more about dorsal vagal shutdown. You'll learn some new language for your experiences, you'll maybe get some empathy for yourself or for others, and you actually may feel less alone and more normal as well. My name is Justin Sunseri. I'm a therapist, a coach, and the creator of the Polyvagal Trauma Relief System.

Welcome to Stuck Not Broken, where I teach you how to live with more calm, confidence, and connection. without psychobabble or woo-woo. This is of course not therapy nor should it replace therapy. Shutdown might be my most popular topic on YouTube. It has the most views, the most comments, the most shares. It's consistently the most popular. So I thought that creating more content around shutdown would be helpful.

But in particular, I wanted it to be something that spoke to the common day to day experiences of shutdown. I wanted people in shutdown to relate to others and to feel more normal. So what I did was I created this survey and then I sent it out to my email list of a couple thousand people. And I got a whole bunch of responses, like way more than I expected that I would. So this isn't a peer reviewed study. It's not something that's worth being published in journals, at least not quite yet.

And there weren't thousands of responses. But I got a lot. I got 75 responses. It went out to a couple thousand people. But I got 75 responses from people in shutdown sharing their experiences. Maybe in the future this survey will turn into something. I would love to do it again and flesh it out and make it better. This survey covers shutdown experiences, how these experiences impact daily functioning. It covers supports, it covers attempts to make change, how to cope.

And it even includes messages from the survey respondents to, to you, to other people in shutdown. So I have a lot of stuff I'm going to be making content around. This episode in particular focuses on shutdown experiences. Things like sensations, impulses, emotions, and cognitions. I call this S S I E C. The polyvagal state, that's the first S, leads to sensations, impulses, emotions, and cognitions. I'll have a link in the description to download the SSIEC sheet.

Okay, so let's start off with the emotions of shutdown. I listed a whole bunch of emotion words in the survey and basically let the respondents identify as many as they could, uh, relate to.

At the top, with almost 70 percent of shutdown respondents relating to it, were alone and unmotivated. Why would someone in shutdown not feel motivated? Well, it's because in shutdown, they lack energy. Motivation requires energy. The way I understand motivation, it requires flight flight activation, or mobility, plus the safety state.

So when you're safe and connected, or at least when you're, we'll say, grounded in the present moment, when you're grounded and have mobility in your system, you can target, you can funnel that activation in a certain direction. I call that motivation. If you're in shutdown and you have no energy, how could you feel motivated? How could you, there's no motivation. mobility with within you. There's no activation. Shutdown is a conservation state.

That means it's conserving resources for coming out of shutdown and using them in fight and in flight. But while you're in shutdown, you're conserving. Everything is shutting down. All your bodily processes are slowing down. There's literally like no energy.

And so, how could someone in shutdown be motivated to do things like meet new goals, get a new job, do better in school? Of course we want them to be, but while you're in shutdown, an active shutdown, it's very difficult to do those things. How about alone? That was another big one. People feel alone. Why would they feel alone? Well, because in shutdown, there's an impulse to reduce stimulation and to be by yourself. And so part of reducing stimulation, I think, is being alone.

If you're not around people that are pressuring you, bugging you, or too positive and social and annoying, then you might be a little bit better off, at least in that moment. So yeah, I think part of shutdown is you're isolating yourself from others because it's just, it feels more comfortable. At the heart of shutdown is, is disconnection. When we're in shutdown, our body is disconnecting from itself, from the environment, from other people. So why would someone feel alone?

Because they're in this state of disconnection. Numb was the next one as far as emotions go. It was the next one at 67%. Part of shutdown is dissociation or a disconnection from yourself, from the environment, from others. And that includes from your own emotions. When you disconnect from yourself, it's like you exist in your head or neck up, maybe just head. But all the stuff happening beneath you, you're really not aware of. You don't feel much at all. So there's a lot of numbness.

At the lower end of respondents, uh, saying that they identify with it are rejection, guilt, abandoned, and shame. Which I was kind of surprised about. So these were still common- each of them had, uh, 25 percent of surveys, surveyees, saying that they identify with those feelings.

So it's still common, but not as common. To me, these are very specific aspects or representations of shutdown, likely as a result of specific life context. So someone in shutdown likely is going to feel numbness or likely is going to feel alone because it's prevalent with shutdown, but shame and guilt are more specific potential aspects of shutdown. Like grief in particular, that's going to come from the loss of a loved one. So grief is not always there.

It's going to be there when a specific thing happens that triggers the grief. Guilt might be something that you got from your parents, like it's misplaced guilt. It's like they projected it onto you. Same with shame. So those aren't with everyone in shutdown, but it might be specific context that led to that within that individual in shutdown. What I was surprised by is sad. Sad, I associate with shutdown a lot, but not necessarily, apparently. The feeling sad, the emotion sad only at 50%.

I mean, still, still a lot, but I expected it to be more. Depression and sadness often come along with shutdown. Yeah, obviously, but those are both emotions and someone who's in shutdown might not feel their emotions. So they may not feel sad. They might not feel depression. They might feel numb and numb was where was that? That was at the 67%. So more people associated with numb than the specific emotions of sadness and depression.

There was also some more specific words that the respondents put in. I'll give you a handful here. May added, wondering what's wrong. Lauren says, easily agitated or frustrated. That might be, uh, coming out of shutdown into a fight. Agitation and frustration or irritation as well are common with coming out of shutdown into a fight. Mary says, despair and exiled. Anne, number one, I had a bunch of Anne's. Anne number one says misunderstood.

Anne number two says utterly lonely, afraid to speak up, afraid to make any moves, unloved, unnoticed, unwanted, not needed, not important enough to speak up to do a single thing. Karen says powerless and blank number two, that was anonymous person. Blank number two says thwarted, defeated, and stuck. Anne number three says worthless. Tila says hopeless and longing. Lizelle says alien. D says, I don't give a sh** apathy. Julia says, desperation.

Thank you, by the way, to the people who responded and shared your own words. okay, so those are the emotions that people told me, uh, of shut down. How about thinking and shut down, the cognitions? The highest, by far, was disconnected. At, uh, over 77%. So why disconnected? Defense is disconnection, so flight, fight, shutdown, freeze, those are disconnection. The safety state is connection. If you're not in a safety state, then there's some level of disconnection.

Shutdown might be the most disconnected out of all the states. Actually, I would argue that it is. And as more dissociation comes from shutdown, the more disconnection that comes along with it. So that could be part of why The thoughts are, the experience of thinking is disconnected for someone in shutdown. There's also this sense of from shutdown that there's this experience of watching yourself from above.

Like I'm thinking there's words here, but my existence or my thoughts are like floating outside of my body. I've had clients tell me they feel like they're viewing their life through a movie screen. One person was so disconnected from themselves that they, they were in the projector box, like zoomed out. They were in the projector box watching their life, not even in the audience. They were in the projector box watching the movie on the screen.

That's how disconnected that they felt in this little dark room watching their life. Disconnected is not a super descriptive word. I wish I'd used something different. Um, but it did have a high response rate. And I think there could be a couple avenues as to why people put disconnected. The words in the middle of the survey actually describe disconnected. better. It's like flavors of disconnection. For example, uh, 57 percent is discouraged.

Clouded at 54%, there's this experience of thoughts just being muddy or cloudy or foggy and just like trudging along through them. Slow at 49%, wishing things were different at 49%, and then hopeless at 47%. All those sound pretty disconnected, right? On the lower end is minimizing at 16%. Which I guess is not that big of a deal. That's a joke. And then pessimistic is at 28%. And then negative thinking was at 29%, which I was actually pretty surprised at.

I was also surprised that minimizing is so low. I thought this would be higher. Um, but maybe minimizing is more of a flight fight thing. I think that minimizing can sound different from different states. I was expecting that one to be higher. Um, I did write about something called Cognitive Adaptations in my book, Trauma and the Polyvagal Paradigm, or at least in its current version. I'm rewriting it currently. Um, you can download it for free. I'll have a link in the description for you.

But I wrote about this thing called Cognitive Adaptations, which is how we take our cognitive skills, like minimizing or catastrophizing and then how those skills can apply and look different in the different states. Respondents also included I'm broken and a mistake as far as cognitions. That's from Beth. Carol says seeking relief but unsure how. Rosa says constantly going over how I ended up in the states and

what I could have done differently. Mary says powerless fear that time is running out looping and she can't escape the loop. Anne number two says, like I'm a failure, unworthy, not meant to be alive, or a mistake in society. Anne three says, thinking of my own death, thinking I must deserve bad things. And Giulia says that I deserve better. How can other people get done, but I can't. So that's emotions and cognitions. How about sensations of shutdown?

This is the stuff that's underneath the emotions. It's the things like, well, basically how do you know that you have an emotion when you feel happy? How can you tell that happiness has a feeling in your body? I call those sensations. Heavy and disconnected were at the top with almost 70 percent of respondents relating to those words. Again, disconnected, um, as a sensation of, I think that feeds into the emotion of loneliness. Shutdown is disconnection.

It probably also feeds into numbness, which we saw in emotions and dissociation. So disconnection as an underlying sensation of these emotions. It's, I think it's pretty prevalent. I think disconnection is a big part of shutdown. And then why heavy? Because there's no energy. In shutdown, everything's slowing down. So it's just a sense of like heaviness of being pulled down or having something draped on top of you. In shutdown, the body kind of wants to collapse. It wants to immobilize.

There's no energy to it. And it just feels like it's being pulled down. In the middle of the sensation words are Empty at 54 Numb and Hollow both at 45 Unreal at 37 and Invisible at 35%. On the lower end of sensation words are Faint and Folded at 10 and Floating around 13%. Floating specifically would describe dissociation. Or some level of dissociation where you feel disconnected from your body. So dissociation and floating come from shutdown, but not everyone in shutdown has that experience.

I would say if you're entering into a dissociative, more disconnected, floaty kind of feel, you're getting deeper into shutdown. People can be in shutdown and still function day to day, but the more you get into shutdown, the more disconnected the more potentially dissociative you become. So floating would be one of those words. Same thing with faint. The extreme of shutdown is actually playing dead and fainting. I was surprised that the word small, the sensation of small, is at 25%.

I thought that'd be higher. Usually, or oftentimes, with my clients that are in more of a shutdown, depressed kind of state, they feel pretty damn small and they report that frequently. So I'm surprised. The respondents also added, like Rosa, she said, Difficulty feeling my body even when consciously touching different parts of my body very disconnected dissociative potentially kind of state not a or nade. I'm not sure.

Sorry said I am not here anymore Anne number two said, like there's a very heavy blanket, there you go, on my body that I didn't want, and she feels this on the outside. On the inside, it feels like my blood is not moving or stagnant, like I am only a head and torso and all of my limbs are sleeping or just gone. Like my heart needs warm stimulation before any parts of my body are able to keep up. Karen said, I exist in my head, and then my head is only doing what I can is on your thinking list.

So the stuff, the words I listed on my thinking list, Karen saying I associate with those.

Everything else, I don't know what the heck's going on. There are no sensations. And then LAF said that they feel like they are outside of themselves. Last piece here is the impulses of shutdown. What is it your body wants to do from shutdown? Isolate was alone at the top with, which interestingly, isolate was alone at the top. with 84 percent of people identifying. That's pretty darn high. Why would isolation be at the top as far as what you want to do from shutdown? Everything's a threat.

You want to be alone. You want lower stimulation. So that means cutting people out and being by yourself. Everything's overwhelming. Even being around other people that otherwise might be safe people that otherwise might be co regulators. It might be too much in a deep enough shutdown state. Up next were disconnect and being quiet. Those were 67 and 70%. Uh, basically again isolating with lower stimulation. That's what I'm hearing here.

So disconnection and being in quiet Probably feed into the isolate but um You can disconnect And be with someone you care about you can be in quiet and be with someone you care about so I don't think you necessarily Have to isolate for that and then be in the dark interestingly was at 34 A lot of times my shutdown clients. They want to be alone with lower stimulation in the dark. Maybe a small light on here, you know, in the, in the room or two. A lot of times they want darkness.

So, I was surprised that it was at 34%. And then the bottom of the impulses section, or what is it you want to do from shutdown, is I feel like dying. And that was at 22%. This is probably more the extreme of shutdown. The body in shutdown is preparing for death. And, So if that's the state of the body, then the thoughts follow. Story follows state according to Deb Dana, right? So thoughts of death can creep in.

That might be outright thoughts of suicide, but it also could be general thoughts of like, I wish I wasn't here, or people would be better off without me, or it'd be easier if I wasn't alive. Those kind of thoughts of death are gonna come from shutdown. So even though shutdown is this conservation state and kind of preparing for death, not everyone's gonna be consciously thinking about that.

It might even the body's preparing for it, that person might not be deep enough in a shutdown to where their thoughts are now being colored by, by that thought or by that state. Respondents also told me in particular what they want to do. Daisy says that she wants to sleep, nap, be in bed, lay horizontal and escape into background noise. Very, very, very common. Helene said nothing zone out, sit still sleep forever.

Rosa said not feel or think and be in small spaces, for example, wrapped up in bed. A said watch YouTube or movies for hours or days. Something I'll maybe clarify in the future is that what we want to do from shutdown can be different. One of them can be what does our state truly want, which might be lower stimulation and being alone and having quiet so that we can feel shutdown, like feel grief or feel alone. But from shutdown, we also might want to do other things just to like feel better.

And that might be numbing out watching YouTube and Tick tock or whatever the heck else. So there might be things we do to make our feelings go away, but that's, that's different. So I might, in the future, I might separate these things. Anne 2 said, I want to mentally and soulfully speak words into the universe and connect me to anyone out there in the world for comfort. Tiia said, I also want to be contacted by my friends who always support me. Breaks my shutdown in a good way.

Liesel says I want to feel supported in my choice to be lonely like to be understood Is what I'm hearing. Janey wants to have a cloak of invisibility. So what does someone in shutdown look like? Let's let's combine These answers with the highest response rates We'll put them all together and see if we can come up with a general shutdown description What I have so far is that someone in shutdown feels alone and unmotivated Their thinking is disconnected, discouraged, and clouded.

They experience an underlying heaviness and disconnection, and they want to isolate with lower stimulation. I think that's a pretty good picture of shutdown. Someone who's in shutdown generally is disconnected, and they generally want to disconnect. Or at least on some level their body has this impulse to disconnect, be alone, and be in lower stimulation. Their daily existence is cut off in, like, every way. Emotionally, they feel alone, and then they cut themselves off from others by isolating.

And of course, not everyone, but it's often. Someone in shutdown, their thinking is a struggle. It's like they're disconnected from themselves, from their, their body, their cognitions from their body. Their cognitions also reinforce their aloneness with thoughts like, it's too hard, or I can't handle it, or what's the point? Or I knew it, I can't do this, I'm worthless. And their impulses within them are telling them to be alone and to disconnect.

The experience of shutdown again is disconnection. The reason why someone's in shutdown is also, disconnection. Things like ongoing severe shutdown, they come from chronic disconnection, from repeatedly being cut off from safe others. Like in childhood or in an abusive relationship or in captivity. Any sort of like prolonged inescapable potential death can lead to being in a shutdown and even more particular might lead to fawning or appeasing.

And I personally argue that these come from shutdown. They might be particular potential flavors of shutdown, but I think they're mostly driven by shutdown. Shutdown can also come from losing a loved one and through grieving. Shutdown, the experience of it day to day is disconnection, but it comes from disconnection. So if shutdown is disconnection, then what's the solution? The solution to shutdown is reconnection. And I know that's scary if you're in shutdown.

Regardless, it is the solution, but don't let that scare you because I don't expect you to go and reconnect with yourself and the environment and people now this moment, uh, completely. Instead, we want to look for tolerable reconnection. We want to connect to the environment, to others, and to the self in tolerable ways. That means slowly reorienting to the environment. That means slowly coming out of your shell and reconnecting with others.

Slowly allowing yourself to feel the full range of who you are. Don't expect to force your way out of shutdown all at once. Instead, let yourself come out of it a little bit at a time through reconnection to the environment, yourself and others. So how do you connect the environment? You use your senses, you use your sight.

hearing, taste, touch, smell, whatever sense you have the most access to maximize it, use it. Identify with your senses what helps you to feel connection. This would be connection to the external environment. You could also connect with others. Not everyone, no, and not random people, not strangers, no. Maybe not even people in your life that are obvious red flags or obvious danger cues. Instead, find someone that is is a predictable source of safety or comfort for you.

If you have it, that could be someone, you know, on a personal level, it could be a therapist. It could be a coach. It might just be getting a smile here and there. Uh, when you're out walking your dog, these little tolerable moments of connection can help someone come out of shutdown little by little. You could also connect with yourself. That means to listen to your needs. Like, immobilizing and reducing stimulation, if that's what you need, that's okay.

I don't want you to like, indulge in it, meaning oversleep and be in the dark and watch TikTok all day. That's not listening to your needs. No one needs that. Instead, it's listening to your need to have lower stimulation and doing that. Turning lights off, turning on a small dimmer bulb, having quiet, being alone, and just breathing and noticing your breath, listening to the sounds around you, using your senses. If that's what your body needs, listen to it and let it happen.

No, it's not a one time fix. Yes, you have to repeatedly do this and continually practice allowing shutdown while in safety. So part of this, this reconnecting with yourself and not actually, not just part of it, but the most important part of it is to be in your safety state. You're in shutdown. It is what it is. Don't fight it. Instead, focus on prioritizing being in your safety state. Identify what brings you to safety, practice it repeatedly over and over again.

As you get better at that, you'll be much better at this reconnecting with all of you, including sadness and guilt and grief and shame and all kinds of stuff.

You'll be able to feel those internal sensations of heavy and emptiness and numbness, but while anchored in safety. That's it for this one. I hope you got a couple of key things out of this episode. Number one, I hope you can validate your true experiences instead of ignoring them or minimizing them or coping them away. Acknowledge them. They are there. They are real. You do feel alone. You do feel sad. You do want to reduce your stimulation. Whatever it is, just validate it.

Say it out loud if you need to. Write it down. That doesn't mean that you Indulge in it. Like I said, that's not what I'm saying at all. But what it does mean is just acknowledge it. So hopefully you got some new language that helps you do that. Number two is I hope you feel more normal. I hope that hearing part of the results of this survey help you feel like, oh, I'm not alone in this state. I'm not alone in these experiences.

And other people out there can understand what I'm going through or are going through the same thing. So I hope you feel more normal. You're not alone in your experiences. There are so many other people out there in shutdown. Thank you so much for joining me here on Stuck Not Broken. Shutdown shows up in many different ways like I, like we've already said, right? Grief and sadness and numbness and on and on.

If you're ready to take the next steps on getting unstuck from shutdown, I invite you to check out my Total Access Membership. In the Stuck Not Broken Total Access Membership. You get access to my courses on trauma recovery. That's Polyvagal 101, Building Safety Anchors and Unstucking Defensive States. It teaches you the Polyvagal Theory, teaches you how to identify and build your safety state, and it teaches you how to actually feel and relieve your stuck defensive state like shutdown.

On top of the courses, you also get access to my private- my wonderful, amazing- private community. We call ourselves the Stucknaut Collective. You get access to the Stucknaut Collective. You can ask questions, say hi, or just read comments and, participate when you're ready, if you're ready, you'll also be able to hang out with me and others a couple of times a month for open Q and A plus resources and all kinds of stuff.

So if you're ready to take the next steps and go deeper in your unstuck in journey, Check out the Stuck Not Broken Total Access Membership. I'll have a link for you in the description, of course. Thank you so much for listening to this. I really look forward to welcoming you into the Stuck Not Broken Total Access Membership. 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. More resources are available in the description of this episode and in the footer of justinlmft. com.