Ep. 3 The myth of perpetual regulation
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In today's episode, I'm gonna talk about the myth that a healthy nervous system is one that's calm all of the time. I'm gonna talk about cure culture
and the three factors of a truly healthy nervous system.
A healthy nervous system is not one that is perpetually calm. That's not what the nervous system is meant to do. That's just one part of the human experience.
A healthy nervous system has three aspects to it. There's mobility, flexibility, and capacity. The mobility of your nervous system refers to the range, being able to feel the full range of your human experience.
And that can include calm and safety and relaxation, which might be [00:01:00] experiences that you've struggled with. It also includes anger, sadness, grief, frustration. It's the full range of emotions and experiences.
So for a lot of neurodivergent women who have been in burnout, who have been in autonomic nervous system dysfunction, they come to a place where their mobility is decreased and they realize they're only experiencing maybe three or four things on loop.
Those are the things that their nervous system feels comfortable experiencing. So whatever is happening , it gets filtered through that lens and interpreted in their body as one of those few things.
They also have a tendency to get stuck. Flexibility is about your ability to transition. So their [00:02:00] nervous system, instead of being able to transition easily between happy and sad or between excited and relaxed, it will move into one of those areas and then it'll get stuck there and they can have a hard time transitioning back into their other range of experiences.
And then the final one is capacity, which is basically how much, how much are you able to hold of your experiences?
One analogy for this might be if you are experiencing burnout, chronic illness, autonomic nervous system dysfunction, trauma, and your nervous system is fried, that it's like being out on the open ocean, standing on the equivalent of the headboard from Titanic that [00:03:00] saved rose. And if you are standing on that out in the middle of the ocean, it really doesn't take much to knock you off into the water where you are basically drowning,
trying to keep your head above water in survival mode. And it takes a lot of energy to then get back on to a place where you feel safe. When you expand your capacity, flexibility, and mobility with your nervous system, it's like the surface that you're standing on gets bigger and more stable, and so it becomes easier for you to.
Stay on that place of safety, but you're still experiencing the ocean. You can still feel the movement of the boat. You can still feel the [00:04:00] sea air and hear the birds and and you're still there experiencing it. You're just more likely to not be thrown off into a situation of drowning and survival.
Now, understandably, if you've been standing on a, a small chunk of wood for years and years and years,
when you start to expand your nervous system and you get to the size of, say, a small boat, you're going to feel so much more stable and it's going to require less effort and energy for you to stay on that space, to stay on that surface. Whereas if you are on this tiny piece of wood, it's requiring so much effort and concentration to just stay on the piece of wood so that you're not thrown off into the water.
And it's requiring so much [00:05:00] of your energy that you don't even realize you're giving to it.
Now, as you continue to build that mobility, that flexibility, that capacity, imagine you get all the way up to the point where you're on a cruise ship essentially.
Now again, on the cruise ship, you can still see and feel what's happening in the ocean around you. But if you're on a cruise ship , the likelihood of you falling into the water is so much less than if you are on that tiny piece of wood, and it's going to create this feeling of safety.
And it's going to create the ability to handle storms. So if you imagine that there is a massive storm coming, let's say a hurricane that's coming,
it is going to be much [00:06:00] easier for you to survive on a cruise ship than if you were on that tiny chunk of wood.
You're also going to have more options in terms of how you weather the storm. And the thing about life is that there are going to be storms that's just a normal part of life. And right now , it can feel very much like a storm is happening around you.
And your best defense for when bad shit's happening is to have built up your nervous system so that you have the mobility, the flexibility, and the capacity to weather that storm without drowning.
Somebody who's on a cruise ship is going to have way more energy, ability, fun. Getting through that storm then if you are just on a chunk of wood or in a [00:07:00] small rowboat.
So your best defense is to strengthen the mobility, flexibility, and capacity of your nervous system through healing your autonomic nervous system
and strengthening your ability to meet your needs, to be present with your body, to build up these skills that are going to serve you in both fair weather and foul.
But again, that doesn't mean that you're always going to be calm when you have a healthy nervous system. In fact, that's not healthy at all because it's not. Mobility. It's not experiencing the full range of what you're experiencing. And there are many instances, especially if there's a storm where your survival response is a very important part of keeping you safe.
And if you have been in survival state for so long, if you've [00:08:00] been in autonomic nervous system dysfunction and burnout and chronic illness for years, then it's almost like the boy who cried wolf. Where you're constantly receiving these signals of, I'm not safe, I'm not safe, I'm not safe. Which then makes it very hard to hear and trust your intuition and your inner knowing when it's telling you, oh shit, this is a bad situation.
I'm not safe. I need to do something about this now. because you have spent your life in this space of , I'm not safe, but there's nothing I can do about it. But everyone tells me I'm safe, but I'm stuck in this situation. I just have to make the best of it. Maybe I actually am safe and I'm just, you know, telling myself that.
Because of that, it causes you to further ignore or drown out
[00:09:00] when your body is telling you that there needs to be immediate action that's taken something else that I see frequently, especially with women who have a history of people pleasing, who have a history of being parentified, who have chosen the path of the helper in their career
that there are certain emotions and experiences that have been labeled as bad. Or wrong or unsafe. And because of that, when those experiences come up, instead of allowing themselves to feel it, and again, you, they don't even realize this is happening, instead of allowing themselves to fully feel and experience that emotion because it's labeled as bad or unsafe before they even are able to.
Acknowledge that [00:10:00] that's what they're experiencing. They get rerouted into what is considered a safer experience. And I see this a lot with anger.
Anger is just a signal from your body that a boundary has been crossed, that one of your boundaries has been disregarded or disrespected. And the natural response to that is anger, because then the anger gives you the energy to take action and do something about it.
But when anger is something that doesn't feel safe, that oftentimes it can get rerouted to sadness, which is a more socially acceptable emotion or experience for a woman to have. And instead of that anger being turned outwards into action, into [00:11:00] change, the anger gets turned inwards and it creates a feeling of helplessness and it burns you up from the inside out because you're not allowing yourself to fully feel that anger and understand the message that it's giving you.
And for many of my clients, including myself, repressed anger is a trigger of autonomic nervous system dysfunction and increased symptoms. It defaults to a freeze response, which then perpetuates the autonomic nervous system dysfunction.
And so a big part of the healing process is increasing your nervous system capacity, flexibility, and mobility so that you are able to then experience and process through. [00:12:00] All of those emotions that you weren't safe to actually feel the first time around.
And you can think of it almost like. Like a computer where you have a thousand tabs open, where each time you have an experience or an emotion that you don't fully experience in your body, that it opens a tab and then you just move on to whatever is coming next, and so over the years, you have tab, tab, tab, tab.
You've got all of these open tabs that are running in the background because they haven't been processed, they can't be fully closed out. Your body is holding them for you until you get to a place where you're safe enough to actually process [00:13:00] and to actually feel those things so that it can then release it and close it out.
And this obviously is going to be draining your energy. It's going to be affecting your brain capacity, your ability for executive functioning. It's going to affect your tolerances for new information, for sensory experiences, all of these different things.
And it's important to go through those tabs slowly over the course of your healing process, and it's important to make sure that you are continuing to expand your capacity, flexibility, and mobility with your nervous system to be able to handle that backlog of. Experiences, emotions and information.
You need a strong, healthy, [00:14:00] regulated, nervous system so that you have the energy and the health
to sustainably live the life that is in alignment for you. That allows you to be passionate and involved about the things that you care about. That allows you to be intellectually curious and learning and making connections so that you can make a difference in this world, in the way that only you can make.
I think part of the reason that the idea that a healed nervous system is equivalent to being calm all of the time is pitched is because of the cure culture that we live in. And essentially there is an idealized body in each society and in our society here in America, that [00:15:00] idealized body, that standard body is a straight white
thin able-bodied neurotypical man. And the further you are away from that standard body, the less inherent societal power you have, the more discrimination you're likely to face. And also when you look at cure culture. The idea is to get you as close to that standard body as possible. That is what everything is measured against.
There's this episode of the Twilight Zone where a woman has been born horribly disfigured, appalling and [00:16:00] horrific to the people around her,
And here the doctors and nurses are talking about her plight. As she's had surgery to try and fix this disfigurement, and they reveal what she looks like now after she's healed from her surgery and they take off the bandages. And you see this woman who is the epitome of 1960s beauty standards.
Absolutely just gorgeous woman. And then you see that the doctors and the nurses who have operated on her are horrified and shocked, at the end of the episode, they remove their surgical masks and you see and understand why they're so horrified and shocked because this is what they were considering, the disfigurement, because everyone in their society, [00:17:00] man, woman, child,
has like this, this snout like nose and, , very alien looking features.
And it's a reference to society's standard body and that in each society there is what is considered the standard body and if you don't align with that body, it's considered that there's something wrong with you. And cure culture is very much this idea
that there are wrong bodies and they need to be fixed.
We see this a lot in the discussions around autism.
We see this a lot in the way that disabled or obese, or bodies of color are treated
systemically, [00:18:00] societally, individually.
And we see this in the way that modern medicine is set up, that it's very based on treating symptoms.
Much of modern medicine is reactionary. How do we fix what's wrong? And the undercurrent of what is wrong is frequently associated with not being the standard body.
This also goes into a lot of the medical gaslighting that people experience where if they're experiencing chronic illness, they go to a doctor who then only sees that they need to lose weight. Or assumes certain things about their mental health or their capacity based on these identifiers of how they are not [00:19:00] the standard body.
And we see this in the history of modern medicine, a how for a very, very, very long time that research. About prescriptions, about the way certain things affect bodies, about the ways bodies heal. All of those things we based on men.
So that systemically, now, all the research that's based on that research.
Is redirecting to how do we get the results that we're looking for, and the results that we're looking for are based on the standard body.
In the health and wellness culture the idea is to cure you of being fat or disabled or chronically ill rather than recognizing that, yes, when you have [00:20:00] a healthy nervous system, when you are meeting your body needs, when you are having a relationship of trust and love and care with your body, many of those symptoms either significantly reduce or completely disappear.
But you're not suddenly neurotypical.
When you go through the journey of healing your autonomic nervous system. Processing that backlog of emotions and trauma, and you come to a place where you have that capacity, flexibility, mobility, even if all of your chronic illness symptoms have completely disappeared, you're no longer in burnout.
Those channels that were the default in your brain and body for so long are very deep. And they still exist. So even though you've built these new [00:21:00] roads and these are the ones that you're using every day, and even if those become your default, it's still possible in the future if you have a significant change in your environment or in your lifestyle, it's possible.
For your auto autonomic nervous system to become dysfunctional again,
and that's why it's so important to. Understand your body to understand what it's communicating to you so that you can see the signs, so that you can know, oh, my nervous system is being overtaxed right now. Oh, I'm falling back into these old patterns of thinking or of moving, or I'm experiencing an increase in certain symptoms.
I recognize it. I hear it. I know what to do about it. And developing [00:22:00] those skills are vital to your long-term sustainable health,
So that no matter what storms come into your life, you have the tools and the understanding of how to care for your body and care for your nervous system in a way that is going to be sustainable long term. And is going to keep you on the boat.
Your highly sensitive big heart, your compassion, your unique way of seeing and interacting with the world, all of these things
are powerful.
And they have the potential for completely changing not only your reality, but the reality around us.
Keeping you in a place of nervous system dysfunction [00:23:00] and ill health is a tactic of keeping you from
being able to enjoy your life, being able to show up for yourself, and therefore being able to show up for your community and the world around you.
But the idea that a healed nervous system is calm all of the time is just the other side of that coin.
A healed nervous system is one that can get angry, that can be sad, that can be happy and joyful, that can engage with creativity and learning, and still feel stable and safe enough to handle that wide range of experiences. To handle the [00:24:00] storms that come with life without getting tipped into the open ocean and drowning.
If you're interested in rebuilding trust with your body and learning how to listen to your body and the communications that it's sending you, then check out the link in the show notes, because I have a mini course just for that.
