014 - Mini Musings: Creating Conditions
Welcome, friends. In today’s episode, I’m reflecting on creating the conditions for more easeful nervous system regulation and how we know that healing is happening.
I talk about the Activation Map by Peter Levine, which was updated into the “Three Directions Map,” by Brigit Viskins to include looping. When activation occurs we may have the ability to distract and sooth back down to stabilization, the first direction. We may find ourselves looping in dysregulation, the second direction. Finally, there may be a possibility to go higher into activation without looping and come all the way down to the other side toward completion, integration, and extinction; this is the third direction.
Creating conditions can help support us to move through the entire process. Creating conditions and integrating these new patterns may happen in small pieces over time.
Join me as we explore our somatic experiences and the power of pause, choice, community, distance, self-care and boundary repair as conditions for well-being.
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Episode Transcript
Sarah Tacy [00:00:05]
Hello welcome, I'm Sarah Tacy and this is Threshold Moments, the podcast where guests and I share stories about the process of updating into truer versions of ourselves. The path is unknown and the pull feels real. Together we share our grief, laughter, love and life saving tools. Join us. Hello, welcome to this mini musings.
Sarah Tacy [00:00:40]
Today I wanted to talk about this idea of creating conditions. So it's not unusual these days as people are talking about trauma resolution work that you might hear someone talking about screaming into a pillow or punching a pillow. This idea that when we have an emotion, it's meant to be moved into motion, right? It is a response that something in our environment doesn't feel right to our body. And as we learn to self regulate, sometimes that regulation can seem as if we or feel as if we are repressing a feeling. And I love this example that Peter Levine gives in his book In an Unspoken Voice. He talks about this idea of maybe we like let out a scream. And for so many of us, we have repressed our voice. And so that is a difficult thing to do, an unthinkable thing to do. But maybe we let out a scream and we're like, now I'm going to feel better.
Sarah Tacy [00:01:48]
He gives the analogy of that being similar to having water on a stove and you're heating it up and the fire is on and it starts whistling. So this tea kettle is whistling and then you open up the top of the tea kettle and giving even more of an outlet, let some of the steam off and the water comes down to a more regulated state. So a map that came from Peter Levine that Bridget Vixens added to that. She now teaches an alchemical alignment and calls a three directions map and gives this beautiful example of if you can imagine a rainbow, and at the base of the rainbow on the left side, this is where you're feeling regulated. If something were to come up, not too big, not too small, it feels manageable.
Sarah Tacy [00:02:50]
Activation takes place and the activation is measured on this map on the vertical. So you start heading up and I would say that the horizontal is time. You start heading up in time as you're activated. And this would be maybe your heart rate starts going faster. You're looking around to see what the outlet is and you know if there's no threat, you may come right back down. And if you have no past history that would alert your body that there's a threat, then you come back down or maybe there's a story you tell in your head. So as you get activated, you get really close to a place of looping, which is like your mind is going in circles. You're ruminating. You may have like this feeling in your gut. I don't know if you've ever had this.
Sarah Tacy [00:03:43]
And not just the gut feeling, but actually it feels like a heavyweight for myself. I'll say I have heavyweight in my stomach. I'm like, oh, what is that? Usually I can say, oh, that is me thinking that because that person said that thing that I'm in trouble. So that comes from a young me thinking I'm in trouble. The threat responses, you won't belong and without belonging, it's like a death response. So we can start getting activated and going up, and then a number of things might help to distract or soothe us. So I would say like the scream or the punch might be a way to soothe ourselves. There's also a possibility with Peter Levine's work, he might say if that punch or that scream goes directly back to the time in which you were unable to punch or scream, it might create a completion of the response and actually give your nervous system like a complete healing of that nervous system pattern. But I would say in general, it would be quite literally or not literally, metaphorically letting off steam.
Sarah Tacy [00:05:01]
So other people might soothe or distract with playing video games, going on Instagram, You can soothe and distract by doing a beautiful breath practice. You can soothe and distract by counting slowly. You can soothe and distract in so many ways that we might say are healthy and in so many ways that we might say are unhealthy. But in the presentation of this map that I've received, there is actually no judgement of oh, this is a good soothing or distraction, or this is a bad soothing or distracting. It's just, oh, this is the thing that you knew to do in order to stabilize yourself. If in that moment you don't have a stabilizing technique or soothing or distracting technique, Bridget added this idea of looping, so before we get to the top of the rainbow, but pretty darn close to it, you can imagine the cyclone or this tornado that rises up out of the left side of the rainbow. And in this place, there can be a sense of flooding, a sense of overwhelm. My experience is that when I'm in this place, it feels so real and eternal. In this place, there are physiological things going on in a body that would remind you of other times that those physiological things happened, which helps it to feel like forever. Oh, he said this thing.
Sarah Tacy [00:06:40]
And I remember 3 years ago when he said this thing, and I should have thought of it when he said this thing when we first met. This is going to be forever. I have felt this way so many times. And this is the looping. This is where we're going to meet our unmet needs. This is where we're going to meet our boundary violations. And in this place, we're often sitting with greatest difficulty without the presence of stability, without the presence of healthy companionship, which I think is why this work of somatic exploration, just the work that I also offer and is the work that Alchemical Alignment trains the students in. And I'm sure there are so many other forms too, right? Like this is just what's fresh and forward for me right now is to be in the presence of a stable other who can help give you some coordinates when you're up in this place of looping. I've mentioned in the preparation podcast this idea of going back on the timeline and building in preparation where we didn't think we had preparation before.
Sarah Tacy [00:07:59]
This would fall under the category of meeting unmet needs, so we won't go into that one. That could be its own podcast another day. In the looping, you're having harmful neural patterns and we often find ourselves in a double bind, a double bind being like I must and I can't. And a double bind that Peter Levine gives in one of his books is during after the car crash, which again, I talked about this incident in the Preparation 1. The natural thing as you are coming out of the disoriented place of shock would be to Orient to your surroundings. So he starts to want to look side to side to Orient himself. But there's a paramedic, an off duty paramedic that shows up who yells don't move your head and kind of grabs his head and stabilizes it. So there is a double bind of I must Orient, I can't Orient for others. It might be I must leave my job or I will die inside. I can't leave my job or my family life as we know it will disintegrate because my income is needed that I must, I can't.
Sarah Tacy [00:09:21]
So there are many tools. Again, this could be another podcast for meeting these double buy insurance. But what I'm really, really into is what are the conditions that we create over time that can help us either as we're coming down out of looping or that might even build in new patterning over time so that we never loop to begin with. And I must say, never loop for anything but that that can actually change. This would go into the idea of integration when you have enough positive experiences of these conditions over time that the neural patterning starts to change so that what you once perceived as a threat or truth is no longer perceived the same way. So I'm unsure. As you can hear in these podcasts, I'm really trying to give lineage to where many of the ideas that are like so fresh in me, or maybe it's been 20 years or maybe it's been 30 years I've spent my life. I love to give lineage as well as how it has woven into my life and or what has come up through me and not directly from lineage. And so I believe the term creating preconditions is also a Bridget Dixon's term. And I freaking love it.
Sarah Tacy [00:10:41]
I love it. Some of the conditions that we talked about are from various practitioners and so I'll name a few and maybe where those conditions came from. And you know, you could think on your own too, what is the condition that I build into my life over time? So the idea is that only one condition, one condition being a pause. The idea is that we, as we build these conditions, your activation can actually go higher without going into looping. You might be able to feel some of your bigger feelings, possibly in the presence of another, and be able to stay there with somebody else who is stable and make it all the way through to the other side until there's integration of that pattern. You get to actually finish out the pattern, finish out the activation. You have to actually go a little higher into the activation and come through to the other side. And this could happen in a single session. This could happen after three years of work, It could happen at the end of a lifetime.
Sarah Tacy [00:11:50]
Time is not guaranteed. So pause is one of these conditions. And this one, you know, this one is not directly and only related to Ray Castellino. I know in the book in A Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankel talks about a pause. He says something about the space between the event and the reaction of that event to that event. There's a pause. There's a space. And in that space and that pause and that breath is where our power lies. I love the idea that a pause might make life more digestible. And the alchemical alignment training, if there is material that begins to flood any one student, there's a practice of saying, hey, can we have a pause?
Sarah Tacy [00:12:58]
Because as momentum builds, there is often, there are often feelings that don't have time to get processed. There's information that doesn't have time to be processed. And so we may pause in the past, I haven't noticed as it as much in the last year or two. In the past when I would talk about things that are important to me or maybe very vulnerable to me, my body would start shaking and I don't know that it was visible to the person across from me, but I could feel it in my jaw. The back of my neck would tighten up. I felt this micro shaking in my body and it seemed as if my body was trying to protect me, right? It was tightening, trying to hold on, don't say that thing, don't tell that story, but that there is a deeper truth within me and there was a part of me that felt safe enough to share what I was sharing. So it was this on off. I'm like I'm doing it anyway. Don't do it.
Sarah Tacy [00:13:58]
I'm doing it anyway, don't do it. And as I was in a session, I believe it was with tell Darden and I got to just pause or maybe it was with one with Bridget and hey, I'm noticing the sensation in my body. Can I pause and instead of trying to make it go away or instead of trying to do a breath practice like these things of stabilizing or using my mind to reason or rationalize it out as I just did, I just sat and I just let it be. And I just noticed it and I just sat with it until it began to settle. Always kind of saying like, and you don't have to settle. I'm just going to sit beside you. And then when it would start to kind of act up again, I would ask for another pause. And it's just so interesting as I'm saying this, that I do believe there's been some integration and completion of this pattern that I had from like age 11 until maybe a year or two ago. Because I don't notice it happening as much, maybe if at all, in harder conversations or more vulnerable conversations. I may even, just as I'm talking about something, paused to say before I say the words, is this really what I mean or may have said, the thing I might pause is that.
Sarah Tacy [00:15:17]
So what I mean is that up to date? So another one is choice. In so many different groups I've been in, there's a group agreement about saying no, hey, we're going to have all these things we're going to do together as a group. And your first answer gets to be no, no, I will not participate. And then you can just wait for an impulse as a yes show up. And if a yes shows up and you want to change your mind again and you don't want to share, no. Don Stapleton used to say the only way we have an authentic guess is if we have our no. I worked with a woman, and she will be on the podcast we recorded at six months ago where we talked about part of her healing, as she was really in the dark night of the soul was to recognize like, hey, look, you just paused. And in that pause, you noticed that you had a desire and your desire was to go sit in the other room instead of where you are. And this is huge in the reclamation of ourselves.
Sarah Tacy [00:16:27]
To notice that we have a desire and then to make a choice on behalf of that desire is the path forward. It is a path home to ourselves. Choice is the condition we get to practice. We get to create support and community. Community or being accompanied, being relational with another with a win scenario. To me, I'd say seek this out above and beyond almost anything else. Seek out relationships in which there is a win, win scenario in which both people's needs matter, in which there can be a pause, there can be a choice which both people want the best for the other while also honoring their sovereignty. As we practice creating relationships like this, when we come up against relationships that don't match that, it's an automatic mismatch. So instead of thinking I must be crazy, I must be such a burden, I, you know, all the things that we think must be wrong with us when we're in an unhealthy relationship and that people are doubting us. When we start building relationships that feel good, that are kind, that are loving.
Sarah Tacy [00:17:59]
When we find a person who could be stable while we're crying, while we're falling apart. And they are not there to fix us. They're simply there to be by our sides. As we find more of that in life, our life gets richer, our life gets more stable, our nervous system begins to heal. There's this idea, the Poly vagal theory and Steven Porges. I think I might be saying his last name wrong, that it's not just a nervous system of like sympathetic fight or flight and then freeze that there's also health in each one of these places. So the health and the parasympathetic, right? There's the freeze, which would be the hypo nervous system. But in the health and the dorsal vagal repair, we're going to start to have the ability to be with another and feel relaxed. This is often looked at like breastfeeding, that a mother could be relaxed and that a baby could eat and digest well-being so close in such proximity to another person that we could lay on the couch with our lover or with our friend or with a partner and relax 2 bodies that close to each other.
Sarah Tacy [00:19:31]
That you could have a meal with friends and actually digest and it's OK if these things aren't available to you right now. Michael Leary and I in Episode 1 talked about this idea of a North Star. And maybe in episode 4 when I talked about the reticular formation, just having the, I wonder what it would be like to eat with friends and feel relaxed and I could digest. Wonder what that would be like. That we might find our safest people. And I've said this in other podcasts and interviews that and again, actually an episode one with Michael, we talked about when he was nearly mute that first as he became relational, he was watching CrossFit on YouTube and then there was trying to do those physical things like box with a boxing pack. So now it went from screen to a physical thing that he's punching. Then it went to being in nature. Can I be relational with nature? Can I go outside and notice the seasons changing?
Sarah Tacy [00:20:47]
And then it might build up into can I be relational with another human being? And it might start with if you have access to a therapist, if you have access to a school counselor, people who are trained in this way, or maybe there is a grandmother in your family or a neighbor who does kind things and listens. Maybe there's an animal and you start with a dog that we get to build slowly into these conditions. And with this comes boundary repair, another condition that we create, that somebody listens to our no and we say no. Somebody hears our yes and celebrates quietly.
Sarah Tacy [00:21:32]
Boundary repair can go back into the somatic exploration, which I haven't touched in much yet on these podcasts because that feels a little more pre verbal and hard to explain those experiences. But the idea of going back in time, meeting unmet needs and actually feeling into our field, like how much space do we need? And so that comes into right distance at the condition, right distance being like, I just want to say this is not true for my family, but I'm going to give an example. I can be in a healthy relationship with my mother from 3000 miles away where somebody might be like, I need my mother right by my side for me to be in good relationship with her. I can have this friend if you think of friendships in concentric circles and like my 3rd circle out and we can touch in quarterly and we can do it at a restaurant outside of my house and we won't talk about politics or I know we will talk about politics.
Sarah Tacy [00:22:37]
So I can do it for 1/2 an hour or that really turns me on. So I want to do it for three hours and after that I'm going to go for a bike ride or I will not do it. Here's a condition or a boundary which would be like, I will not do it on Friday. Everybody loves go out on Fridays. But for me, I'm so overwhelmed. So a boundary repair would be like you all can do what you want to do Fridays, I'm not available. I'll name one more. Oh gosh, there's so many good ones. self-care. Tell Darden once said self-care as the basis of community care or for community care. Sometimes I feel bad when people say things I love. And I'm like, I believe I asked her permission a many months ago. Can I repeat that? Because I love it. I have heard people talk about, and I have felt it myself actually, the insecurity of when we take care of ourselves.
Sarah Tacy [00:23:37]
So many of us have been raised to think that the way that we are going to make it forward in life and the way that we are most valuable and worthy is when we are doing things and getting things done and doing things for others. Things that are measurable, things that are making money. So if we were to take time for self-care, if we put joy as a priority, instead of say, maybe people get joy from making dinner. But say you don't make dinner for your family because you're going to go out with your girlfriend, or you're going to go lifting, or you're going to go on a bike ride, or you're going to walk through nature and for your family for that night, you might say, hey, can this person or that person figure out dinner? Maybe we'll do take out because tonight my joy matters.
Sarah Tacy [00:24:26]
Our self-care so deeply effects every single person around us. In one of the last episodes with Tamika, she'll be, she'll be cool. She talked about truth aches and how when we're not in alignment with our truth and we're not speaking them honestly, that it's contagious. And I think that's true with self-care too. When we're not taking care of ourselves and we show up with extra anxiety, then our kids might wonder, Oh my God, what did I do? I must have done something wrong. And we think that we're showing our kids hard work or that we're taking care of them, that there will be the story of my mom always sacrificed everything for me, which is a beautiful story, right? But then what does the next generation do? They sacrifice everything for the next generation. And then we're living lives of sacrifice, which could be looked at as beautiful.
Sarah Tacy [00:25:22]
But what if there was some in between where it's not an either or it's a both? And my mother found her joy and demonstrated that for me. And I felt comfortable in my body around her. And I felt more joy in my body when I was around her. We would dance in the kitchen together, we would sing songs, we would bake together. And sometimes that night I was sad when she'd go out, but she was so clear that she would be back. And she came back happy, right? That our happiness might ripple out to make others feel like it is safe to be happy, that your worthiness is worth it, that your well-being is worth it. So this idea of self-care, the basis of community care, how does your self-care affect the well-being of everybody around you? So again, all of these things like yes, so healthy outlets for screaming or you know, I would even say screaming that it could be violent to your vocal cords.
Sarah Tacy [00:26:31]
So being aware of like when do you need the full volume on that? And there can also be like an energetic scream. When or how do you have healthy outlets for fight or flight? Again, this would be maybe a different podcast. It's if you have healthy outlets, because it's important we let off the steam. And maybe even as we have more healthy outlets, maybe healthy outlets would be a condition that we create that's exciting so that it's not just a reaction in the moment to stabilize, but it's a healthy outlet that helps heal our nervous system over time. And I'm just going to put this inquiry out there. I'm wondering to myself, how do we know if it's a condition that's helping us heal over time or not? Like I'm thinking about running, how it can be such an amazing outlet for people. I'm not putting this out as an answer, just truly a curiosity.
Sarah Tacy [00:27:24]
If over time we are healing, would there be less of a need to run as hard or work out as hard? I sometimes think that people, I've felt this, I'll say this for myself too, are afraid that if they slow down and if they find more joy, that they'll lose their motivation. And they know how much their motivation has got them, their job, their finances, so many of the things that they love in life. If I slow down even more, if I don't push on this deadline, if I say no to more things, will I become sluggish? And I am into this idea of the title nature that possibly as we slow down, that as we actually gain energy and we begin to fill up, then we begin to bring things to life.
Sarah Tacy [00:28:26]
As we are brought back to life ourself, we start to have intrinsic motivation pouring out of us first pulling from a dry well. So if I got lost and the questionnaire, the inquiry, I'll go back to that for a moment, is when do we know? How do we know that healing is happening? For me, I know this when I start responding to the same, I'd called it, this is what I would call my quantum leap is like same situation happens, different response to the same situation. I don't have to cool myself down. I don't have to yell. I don't have to punch a pillow. I don't have to breathe. I don't have to have a rage journal. I don't have to self calm. I don't need to call a therapist. I don't need to go for a run. Like the thing happens and it doesn't. It's not a freeze either. It's like, oh, that happened and wow, doesn't bother me at all.
Sarah Tacy [00:29:29]
That would be a sign that if something that you used to spend me send me spinning just doesn't. It would be maybe the extinction of that pattern, and then I might find, yeah, maybe I don't have to run to deal with that. But I'm now running because I want to run just because running feels good, because I like moving my body, because I like the fresh air, because I like the sun on my skin. And we have to do it for an outlet and we have to do it to regulate, which great, awesome that we have those skills first feeling the pull. This would feel so good to do this. So that's all I have for today. The three directions mapped by Bridget Vixman's about chemical alignment modified from Steven Levine. The three points being the beginning. When we're calm, we get activation, at which point we can soothe, stabilize and distract. This is a choice point where looping may happen.
Sarah Tacy [00:30:35]
This is the second direction. And the third direction is bringing us towards completion, integration and extinction. And the way that we might possibly be able to handle higher activation is through the conditions that we create. And I think I want to really say that the presence of another can be such a huge condition that we are so heavily trained against. And our idea of independence being our way out, I would say over independence is also a trauma response. And thank you, thank you, thank you for that ability, and thank you for those skills. And when is it safe to update that pattern? Thank you so much for listening in. Until next time, thank you for tuning in. It's been such a pleasure. If you're looking for added support, I'm offering a program that's totally free called 21 Days of Untapped Support. It's pretty awesome. It's very easy, it's very helpful. You can find it at sarahtacy.com. And if you love this episode, please subscribe.
Sarah Tacy [00:31:55]
And like, apparently it's wildly useful. So we could just explore what happens when you Scroll down to the bottom subscribe rate, maybe say a thing or two. If you're not feeling it, don't do it. It's totally fine. I look forward to gathering with you again. Thank you so much.