How you feel comes before your thoughts and behavior. This is a surprising notion for people who have a hard time feeling within. Even if you do not have a lot of sensation tied to your emotions or nervous system, you are still being affected by the activity of those systems. It behooves you to gain more access to sensations because, without them, it's like you're driving a car without a dashboard. You are making it down the road to your destination, but you do not know how fast the car is going or if it needs gas and maintenance. People who have more ease feeling within more readily understand this. However, if someone feels a lot of sensation but has a trauma history, they may have an overactive dashboard. The dashboard may tell you what the temperature and weather is like but it is reporting weather conditions from 10 years ago when there was a catastrophic blizzard rather than the current conditions through which you are driving. The body has certain irreducible and non-substitutable needs just like a car. If I put the wrong kind of oil in the car it will either damage it immediately or slowly over time, depending on how wrong the oil is. If I do not give it an oil change, I damage the car. If I drive it too little, damage can happen. If I drive it on the wrong terrain, damage will happen. If I keep it in a corrosive environment, it will wear out sooner. A car that is kept well runs well and can last a long time barring freak accidents. A dashboard that is well synched to the car will reflect how well the car is doing. Nervous system processes occur before you think or feel something. These nervous system processes determine the nature of the thoughts and feelings. The nervous system processes are a combination of the type and state of the car (basic nature of the person combined with a lifetime of experiences aka nurture) in response to the external event. If you wake up on the wrong side of the bed, you are having a certain nervous system response. Let's say you were awakened in the middle of a dream where you were angry at someone and, therefore, you wake up angry. You feel tension in your forehead, a general sense of irritability, your movements are clumsy, and you easily come to frustration that has a kind of friction-in-your-chest feeling. These are the signal of your dashboard. Simple tasks like making coffee and doing the dishes from the night before feel like unfair burdens when normally they are grounding and centering parts of your routine. You may have a sense of feeling wronged and have thoughts about how this-or-that is unfair in your life. You may feel short with your family and you may dread going to work. If someone in this situation is knowledgeable and savvy they would recognize that they are in a sympathetic activation state in their nervous system, which means that their fight or flight system is activated. In this instance this person is in a state of a fight. They would know that in order to come back into balance, they would need to activate their parasympathetic nervous system which is another way of saying they need to calm down. There are many options someone has to choose from when it comes to creating calm. This person chooses to go on a walk and follow that with a cold shower. After their walk and cold shower, their heart feels warm and their body feels refreshed. The feeling of irritability falls away and they have a more resilient attitude towards the day ahead. Notice how this person did not do any talking nor did they do anything complex or special to come back into a balanced mood. The fastest way to come back into balance is to address the nervous system directly which means doing things that change the state of the body. In this example, the person uses exercise and cold exposure. Addressing the body to change nervous system states is as old as civilization. Cold exposure has been prescribed for psychiatric conditions potentially as far back as 3,500 BC (Edwin Smith Papyrus). Socrates points out the importance of physical exercise in Plato’s Theaetetus saying, “Is not the bodily habit spoiled by rest and idleness, but preserved for a long time by motion and exercise?” Cold exposure and exercise are only two items on a long list of proven options of nervous system regulation activities. Other activities include singing, humming, dancing, meditation, stretching, getting outside, receiving massage, drinking water, getting into connection with others, and so on. When we dance fast or slow, making big or small movements, regular or irregular, each quality we apply to the body affects how we feel. When we eat foods that work specifically well for our individual body, and when we eat those foods with other people, it has an effect. Going back to the example of the person who got up grumpy, if they had walked and showered before they did the dishes, the dishes would not have been irritating. Therefore, the dishes are not irritating, the person doing the dishes is irritable. This is a really simple example for something that can become complex when we start thinking about interpersonal interactions. Why is it that one person can demonstrate a lot of patience with “difficult” people and others have none? It's not that the dishes and dealing with difficult people aren't work but individuals have different experiences doing the work depending on the state of their nervous systems. In the image above an agitated and calm nervous system experiences the same event. The agitated person becomes rageful and the next 48 hours are ruined with anger. The calm person is disturbed but comes back to a baseline of calm within 20 minutes after dealing with the difficult experience. Therefore, having chronic nervous system activation puts individuals at a disadvantage because it sets them up for more pain and suffering that a situation warrants.
Basic nature needs to be accounted for as well. If you were born driving a sports car rather than an SUV, you need to stick to the race track rather than trying to go off-roading. If you know about and accept your car, you will make good choices about where to take the car and how to maintain it. If your car finds itself in unfavorable conditions and you have a reliable synched up dashboard, you can make good decisions about how to get your car back to safety and repair any damage that has occurred. The dictum “know thyself” was emblazoned on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Lao Tsu said “He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened.” When we stop imagining the self and instead relate to it as it is in the here and now, we access choice. No other relationship will ever give us as much choice as the relationship to the self. You have the power to shape your nervous system but first you must learn what the signals mean.
You can consult with experts to help you with your ignorance, confusion, and blind spots but you must take the ultimate responsibility for implementing the actions that make these changes.
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AuthorProsopon Therapy Archives
July 2024
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