In episode two of the mini-series on Self-Regulation Skillset training, Brad Chapin’s discussion centers around understanding and managing the human response to perceived threats, both physical and social-emotional. Participants explore the concept of fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses, emphasizing the importance of self-awareness in recognizing physiological symptoms associated with these reactions. The conversation highlights the evolutionary basis of threat detection and the body’s indistinguishable response to various types of threats, whether existential or emotional. The dialogue also delves into the impact of chronic stress, the role of adrenaline and cortisol, and the significance of self-regulation skills in mitigating these effects. Participants share personal experiences, noting how different environments can influence their threat responses. The session concludes with a preview of the next topic, which focuses on creating safety as a countermeasure to threat responses, aiming to enhance self-regulation and improve overall well-being.
Introduction to Skill 1: Identifying Early Warning Signs
Jenny | Geophysicist:
Hi, Brad.
Brad | Public Mental Health Director:
Hello.
Jenny:
How are you?
Brad:
I’m doing okay. It’s been an interesting week. I’m glad we’re here to talk about challenges.
Jenny:
Oh wow.
Brad:
How about you?
Jenny:
I feel the same. I’ve had a very full week and it’s very tiring. Yeah.
Brad:
Tonight I have a town hall meeting here and I’m about an hour away from our home office in another town. It’s a town hall meeting where the community’s trying to come together around mental health issues. I’m one of six, I think, panel members, but that could be interesting how that goes.
Jenny:
Thank you. That sounds like a lot. I can just imagine that this took a lot for you to be here too, thank you.
Brad:
Oh yeah, you’re welcome. I am really looking forward to this. I was just sitting here reflecting on what we should try to cover tonight with people and just recognise that everyone is carrying so many challenges here, and to sit for a minute and examine that process. I’m really curious to see what people have to say. A very important piece of self-regulation, self-talk is good.
Alex:
Oh yeah, it’s huge actually. It’s a sign of intelligence.
Brad:
I read that too and I circled it and printed it out and gave it to my family to make sure they know that. That’s okay. Hi everybody. Great to see you all again this week. Got a lot going on and I know you all do too. Always relevant I think. And I was actually looking forward to just getting in a breakout room myself. Even though this is not group therapy, there are definitely elements of this that would be consistent with working on challenges in that sort of setting. Hopefully you see that consistency there week to week as we’re moving and progressing through skills. This first part, this physical regulation piece, and of course there was only three pages of actual reading for you to do, which I’m super happy about and you probably were too with your list of other chores this week.
But that contained in that is this whole idea of physical regulation and our body’s response to challenge. We talked about the three different areas that we’re going to go through, physical regulation, emotion regulation, and cognitive. Our body has a response, a hardwired built in response to things that it sees as or perceives as threatening or challenging. And you can probably tell by the way I use that language in the book, I see threat and challenge as pretty synonymous. I know we could probably split hairs on that, but when it comes to the body’s response, it detects a challenge and that is in this realm of threat. I have a response, I need to do something about that. If you put that into some real life context, and this has been going for however long human beings have been around, we can debate that.
But this element of safety and trying to survive threats has been an ongoing evolutionary process for human beings, our species for a long time, and thankfully we’re pretty good at it. If we weren’t able to detect threats or our ancestors weren’t very good at that, you wouldn’t be sitting here with us today. Somewhere back in history, they were able to say, wow, that rumble in the bushes over there, that’s not good. Or those berries I ate two weeks ago, I’m not going to eat those again. That was not a good effect. I’ll do some foreshadowing here around something called the negativity bias, but why and how we are built to be so good at detecting threats or the negative or looking for problems in our environment. It’s actually a survival mechanism. The thing I want to highlight before we go into what the questions are and the takeaways I wanted you to get from this, this is probably the number one takeaway when you look at that fight, flight or shutdown system and its response to threat.
It doesn’t know the difference. And this was a game changer for me in my own personal life. It does not know the difference between an existential threat like a dangerous animal, 20 yards from you versus a social emotional threat. The feeling of loss, for example, a conflict with a loved one, feeling left out, being late to a meeting, being cut off in traffic. Someone disagreeing with you about a core belief that you have that you feel so strongly about that this is the right thing to do and they’re coming from a different, that’s a threat. And the body really doesn’t have a mechanism in here that says, oh, that’s this a threat. That’s a threat. What we’re finding is more of just an on off switch to different degrees. It can go up and down, but it’s more like a dial. And once you hit that switch, it’s on. If you think about your day and all of the different threats that you’re encountering, and we can get into this idea, I want you to think about this when you’re in your breakout groups, but how many social emotional threats do you encounter in a day? What do you think? Hundreds. Probably. They’re coming.
Jenny:
Chris said, “a lot”.
Engineer, MSc:
I said millions to myself. It was like the first time I’ve ever heard talk about somebody disagreeing with a core value as a threat. I’ve never heard anybody say that, but that’s true. I feel that. And I thought I was crazy.
Brad:
When I used to do well. I still do some relationship counselling. To me, this isn’t also an individual, this is groups, this is group dynamics because a lot of our threats come from how we perceive other people or how other people perceive us and how we get along or don’t get along. I was also going to follow up on that with probably the most, the majority of our social emotional threats come from ourselves, our thoughts, our fears, our inadequacies, our thoughts of failure, the things that we bring in and borrow from the future threat that we can borrow threat from three weeks from now about something that may never happen. We see this all the time. My mom used to talk about it as borrowing trouble. We can borrow…
Alex:
Trouble from catastrophizing, right?
Brad:
Yeah, it’s very much, and if you just put it into this threat language, right? We’re talking about the same thing here. Today’s threats are right in front of us, but I can borrow threats from three weeks forward. I can also, here’s another thing you can do. If that’s not enough for us human beings, we can go back and dredge up the threat from two years ago from a conversation that we had with somebody. Now not only do I have today’s threat, future threat, I can bring past threats and I’ve got all this stuff on my head in my backpack carrying it around. I want you to think about that. That one statement about the body doesn’t really know the difference between a physical existential threat, a dangerous animal in front of me versus a thought of inadequacy feeling left out of a divisive conversation with somebody, somebody violating one of my core values or principles.
The body’s going to respond with this intense, and the thing is to start thinking about is how effective, hopefully you read this and you started to outline some of these symptoms that you’re having, but how effective is it going to be to have this gigantic physiological response in a time or in the face of a challenge that requires something completely different? A completely different response than this gigantic physical. Because if you think about being loud and being scary or hiding and running away or all of these things, and you might be in a meeting with somebody and you push yourself away from the table or your voice gets loud, or they can see all this on your face about how you’re not liking what they’re saying, how effective are you going to be in accomplishing your goal there? It really comes down to how we want to be effective.
We want to manage these things effectively. My partner that I work with also trains on this, he’s pretty big in performance based regulation and how this impacts our ability to manage our energy effectively. I want you to think about that as you talk about this in your breakout sessions too. But how much energy do you think this process takes from you and other people? And the last thing is, remember last time we talked about one of our primary goals and self-regulation or improving our self-regulation is managing this thing called reactivity. In the book where we’re talking about that top brain and bottom brain, that’s a concept you really want to get familiar with and remember and share with other people. Please, if you have a chance to do that. I think it’s one of the most life-changing pieces of information for people to understand that this is a normal process.
We all have those parts of our brain that get engaged and cause us to do these different things. But that bottom part of our brain when we feel threatened, that top part that makes us a human being or that higher level thinking, creativity, problem solving, all that stuff is up here. When we feel threatened, that bottom part of our brain takes over that lizard brain, the old brain, it only has one goal. Eliminate threats, get away from threats, keep us safe. And it’s very short-term focused. And the last thing is, it’s built to be reactive on purpose because that’s the part of our brain that kicks in when we’re in danger. If you are in danger, it makes perfect sense that that part of the brain takes over and you move quickly. You say things quickly, you do things quickly to survive in that moment.
And that makes a lot of sense. 10, 15, 20,000 years ago when most of our threats were existential physiological threats in today’s world where for the most of us, for of us over 50% of the threats you encounter, and I’d say for most of us, it’s probably like 90, 95% of the threats you encounter in a day are not physiological existential threats. They’re social emotional, they’re online, they’re in a meeting, they’re in relationships, they’re at work, they’re all those kinds of things where it doesn’t make sense to have a gigantic physiological response in the spirit of skill training. That’s just a little bit of background on what the skill is about. We really have to practise this. The first skill is all about self-awareness and recognition. What my goal for you is, do you know one or two? These are the questions I want you to talk about in your breakout session, the one or two specific symptoms.
And if you’ve got three or four, that’s great, but I really want you to know the one or two specific physiological symptoms that you can be more aware of when your fight or flight system is kicking in, what is it? How do you know and how would you describe it? And what I don’t want, what you don’t want to write down is, well, I get anxious. I really want us to be a lot more specific than that because that can mean a lot of different things to a lot of people. Does that mean that your fist ball up? Does that mean that you want to leave right away? Does that mean that your breathing gets dysregulated and upset? Does that mean that you have stomach issues? Does it mean that your shoulders are up to your ears? I want to know. I want you to know specifically what that means for you that you can recognise.
Because once we start to do that, that’s the principle of skill training. It’s something that we can specifically describe concretely and start to measure and practise and see how we’re doing with and increase self-awareness around. Describe your symptoms to those in your group if you feel comfortable doing that, hopefully. Name a couple, describe them also like you to think about if you noticed any patterns in your behaviour over the last week, if you’re more of a fight, more of a flight or more of a shutdown kind of a person, what are your tendencies? We noticed some differences in people and I think it’s interesting to talk about, am I different in different places? Am I different at home than I am at work or am I different around my friends than I am at my coworkers and family? Definitely some insight to be gained through that discussion. And then also, what does your fight look like or what does your flight look like and what does your shutdown look like specifically
Jenny:
Brad, can you distinguish between fawn versus freeze for us?
Brad:
Yeah. When I think of fawning, and I didn’t put that in there to simplify it is a fourth. I usually say fight, flight, freeze or fight flight shutdown. And then there is a fourth one called fawning where what that feels like to me when I’m at work is like, I’m just going to stay off the radar this week. I’m going to do whatever it takes. And maybe none of you know what that means, but it means that my capacity for managing challenges is zero and I want to not experience any more threat this week. I will try to blend in with the environment like a deer fawn with spots and hope that the threat doesn’t smell me or see me or detect me at all. And I’ll survive that way. There are different contexts where people will fawn. Also, there’s some trauma and abusive situations where people learn to fawn to please the thing or the person that’s threatening them. There are other capacities, but at least in my life that’s what that means to me. If that’s something that you can apply here, that would make total sense as well. Keep track of themes that come up if you would, and then we’ll ask the groups to report those themes back.
Break Out Session with Jenny and Chris
Chris (13:39):
I’m a captain on the fire department in our city here in Calgary, I’m constantly in fight [mode]. I’ll say fight flight mode. There’s lots of firefighters like that. And for me, I know the physical things is my stomach for sure is a problem. That’s my number one thing. And a lot of it is I think I’m really good at anticipating where the problem is going to go in, let’s say an incident at my job. I’m really good at planning ahead of where, as Wayne Gretzky says, as I’m Canadian, where the puck is going to go?
Brad:
Yeah.
Chris:
I’m really good at that and I’m really good at when an incident happens, a really bad incident of where things could lead. I’m always two or three steps ahead of the game. The problem with me is that in social settings, I analyse everything to death. I would have an emergency scene, which ultimately causes me physical symptoms. Did I say the right thing or I worry about that stuff. And you’re right, I worry about stuff that I said three years ago that can haunt me going into the future, which causes me physical symptoms, which acute symptoms are probably stomach and digestive problems.
Brad:
I’m just thinking about the energy that takes.
Chris:
It takes an incredible amount of energy.
Brad:
Wow. Wow.
Chris:
A hundred percent. I was a wildland firefighter for 10 years, and now I’m a structural firefighter for 20 years.
Brad:
Yeah.
Chris:
That hypervigilance has caused me a lot of physical symptoms for sure.
Brad:
Thank you for sharing that and I hope we, we probably should keep the same breakout rooms. I definitely want to talk to you and come back to skill two. How do you set the cup down? I’ll be curious because it seems like you’re carrying the cup all the time.
Chris:
A hundred percent. That’s my problem. And lately it’s affected. It’s affected me and some of my peers as well. We’re all in our fifties now. I think there’s an extra something going on there, as well, with that.
Brad:
Yeah. Have you done some reading on things like cortisol and some of the biological impacts of chronic stress? Do you think you feel some of that or ?
Chris:
I have, and I’m trying to deal with the cortisol causing me lots of sleep issues and shift work as well, right? Shift work my age.
Brad:
It catches up after a while.
Chris:
It catches up and there’s, at least in my profession, there’s this expectation of perfection.
Brad:
There’s job judgement.
Chris:
Judgement, job judgement. Then you become more hypervigilant so you don’t make mistakes, which causes other issues I find.
Brad:
Or tendency to make more mistakes when you’re reactive and you’re hurting and you have less energy. Correct. Yeah. Stomach, what else? Is there anything else? Do you notice tension, body tension? Do you get headaches?
Chris:
Yes, I do get headaches due to stress for sure.
Brad:
Do you carry any of that in your shoulders? Do you notice?
Chris:
Oh of course. Yeah, for sure.
Brad:
Okay. I know that’s just common with what you’ve described. And then you’ll get that there’s a couple of muscles that connect up through the back of the head and then that’s often what leads to that pain sometimes or an increase in pain, even if you’re susceptible for other reasons, it’s going to complicate that. But for sure. Anything else? Stomach, headache, you notice anything else as far as fight-flight.
Chris:
I do all four things. I’ll be honest, I’ve got just some arguments for those topics that I find that are important to me or I’m passionate about. I’ve done the flights where I’ve isolated myself basically being a Pacman, I call it like you say, fawning, I call it pack manning, just staying within the pack and not just worth it. It’s just really not.
Brad:
Yeah, this is one of the patterns I see sometimes with men and women too, but maybe in our younger days we fight more than we’ve sometimes said things and we know our fight can be pretty ugly. We’re not going to do that. We don’t want to hurt other people, we end up just turning off, disconnecting and withdrawing and isolating. That’s a common pattern if you understand that all of this is normal human species response to threat. And it’s like sometimes I think we think we’re more involved than we are, but these things are still right here in our everyday life in our bodies and we see it all the time and feel it. It’s just that we don’t talk about it and describe it and learn to do anything with it. I appreciate that. Anything from your side, Jenny, on those?
Jenny:
Yeah, I definitely have a fight tendency. I’m a one hit wonder when it comes to my physical response. I am a fighter. Even you had me thinking even when I take it away here, you said what do you do with it once it happens? I’ll take it away and I’ll have those guilty feelings and then I’ll want to reengage. And then even then when I reengage, I’m generally not in a place where I’m calm still, I’m fighting again. And then, it’s like this, I want to try and deal with it. I keep engaging in an unhealthy way is what I’d say.
Brad:
Because it’s threatening to carry that guilt too. You see that cycle all the time and then that threat begets threat, begets threat and you just get in this vicious cycle and yeah, and it just keeps making it worse.
Jenny:
When you talk about core beliefs, what I’m working on, they tell me I’m political and they tell me that they don’t. People just don’t want to hear about that, don’t talk about it.
Brad:
The threat there is not only are you having a disagreement with these people, but these people are also your connection, your support. It takes the threat and magnifies it, not just as a disagreement but also as a loss. There’s a loss there too, we can rate these threats as big or small. This is giant.
Jenny:
This is giant, this is an 11. I can think of, I thought of, a different example which was like a three. But the symptoms, when you talk about my symptoms, I definitely feel like a gut punch. And then when you talk about my response, my voice gets allowed right away. Especially in those 11 situations. It’s like I have no time. When you talk about response time, I’m all reaction. It is like I give less than three seconds and I’m saying this is something, how can you expect me to believe that? How can you, you know what I mean? Things like that. And the inability to think clearly comes in there too. Being in a room where people are saying things that I don’t agree with. Let’s say I find my foot will start to shake. If my legs are crossed, my foot will shake. I’m anxious to get in there and say something.
Brad:
We have a release of adrenaline along with cortisol. When you’re sitting in a chair, that adrenaline’s supposed to help you fight the bear. There’s no bear. You’re sitting in a chair. What do you think that adrenaline’s going to cause movement somewhere? It’s got to go do something. You’re going to start shaking. We do these, we call ‘em, they look strange. It makes no sense. We’re not solving anything, but your body’s just got a huge dose of energy boosting chemicals. We see all kinds of different movements from people. That’s a really good call out. I want to make sure we hit that with the group.
Jenny:
And I do get, I’ll find a lump in my throat sometimes too, and I can get, yeah, I definitely can feel my heart pounding in my chest sometimes, in certain situations it’s like I can feel it in my throat. That’s how much I can feel my heart pounding. And then yeah, it definitely affects both of our sleep, I would say.
Chris:
For sure.
Brad:
Yeah, I can lay down and go to sleep and then all this threat comes in my head. We have a poem or a joke that we tell about its sleep time, but here comes all this threat to bed with me and adrenaline. You’re not going to sleep with adrenaline. Your body’s thinking there’s a bear there, but there’s no bear.
Jenny: Welcome back everyone.
Group Feedback, Discussion, and Questions
Brad (22:11):
Probably an unfair question, but any of you have stomach or gastrointestinal issues? No, you don’t have to raise your hand. That was a silly question. I know some people do because there’s sure a lot of products sold in this world for that. Anyway, what happens is when we experience a threat [our thoughtful brain] shuts down, it stops processing because energy is diverted away from that system to our major muscle groups because you’re getting ready to fight a threat or run from a threat or hunker down. Energy is diverted away from these processes that aren’t as important at the time. Like processing that sandwich that you had a half an hour ago, really not that important compared to if you’re not going to survive the next 20 minutes. That system shuts down. That sandwich is sitting there, sitting there, sitting there, sitting there, and then the system has to start up all over again. And then you get the starting and stopping and starting and stuff. And I don’t have to describe what that feels like and looks like and sounds like, but it’s uncomfortable.
Gabrielle:
I think, not thinking clearly. Just this inability to really think rationally from multiple vantage points at a given situation because you’re overtaken by this really strong need to defend yourself.
That’s all I need to go from that one. Thank you. That top brain, bottom brain right there. Where do we need to be at? The neuroscience in the last 25 years tells us when we look at your brain and you experience a challenge or threat, your body’s fight or flight kicks in that top part of your brain. The cortex, the higher level thinking that makes you a human being with compassion, forethought, reflection, ability, relationship ability, all that higher level problem solving part of your brain shuts down the bottom part of your brain. That lizard brain, that old brain, that reactive brain, that survival brain picks up tremendously. Who’s driving the bus when you get upset? It’s the lizard. And that’s why we sometimes say hurtful things to people we care about. That’s why we have trouble making sense out of other people’s viewpoints. We’re not interested in hearing anyone else’s viewpoint when we’re in the lizard brain, when the fight eliminates the threat or gets away from the threat. That’s it. Great description. Okay, there’s two of the systems. What else do we’ve got?
School Administrator 1:
How about neck pain?
Brad:
Yes. We’ve got a musculoskeletal response. Are we tight and tense in the face of a threat or are we loose and relaxed? We’re tight and tent. We are getting ready for a fight here. What happens when muscle tension is going on for 2, 3, 4 or five hours? Anybody get that creeping up the back of your neck here? Headache by Tuesday or Wednesday, Monday on a rough week, right? When you have tense muscles, our muscles aren’t built to be tense for hours and days and weeks and months. That creates pain. Yes, the third system. Good job. Y’all are killing these. You’re just knocking ‘em right out. Okay, let’s go. What else?
Alex:
Lumping the throat.
Brad:
Yeah, lumping the throat is really interesting. One pass. I don’t really know. I’ve seen some different theories on that one. I don’t know what the purpose of the lump in your throat, if a bear is chasing you is really going to do
MC:
Well. I think “lump and throat” is just hiding. If you’re under threat, you want to hide.
Brad:
From talking or making noise.
MC:
That’s how I feel if someone starts yelling at me, I just hide because I don’t even want to.
Brad:
Excellent point, excellent point. That could be to keep maybe a baby from making noise if there’s a threat around or maybe that just stayed with us as evolution. Very interesting. In our group, we talked about this extra restless movement that we get, like a leg shaking or a toe tapping or any of you pin clickers out there. I know the woman in the office next to me is a pin clicker and a hundred percent accurate. If I hear her pin clicking over there, I can say what’s wrong? And she’s working on this significant problem over there. Something’s happened that’s catastrophic. We were talking about the fourth response here is a chemical response to threat. You are doped up with adrenaline and cortisol when you experience a threat. That’s to give you energy to fight the bear, get away from the bear, whatever you need to do. But if you’re sitting at your desk chair or in your car or on the couch with your family and you’ve got this dose of adrenaline, where’s it going to go? It has nowhere else to go but into these sometimes what we would consider useless, unusual patterned, rhythmic, repetitive movements just to be used up. We’ve got brain, we’ve got musculoskeletal, we’ve got…
Alex | Former Co-Host, Artist, Strategic Communicator:
Body temperature regulation.
Brad:
Temperature is a really interesting one. I think some have theorised that that’s just a response to all the processes going on internally. You think about everything we just described, that’s a lot of processes going on in the body all at once. It could make some sense that that’s going to heat us up quite a bit. The other couple that I wanted to hit on were, does anybody have noticed breathing change? Change in their breath, either more rapid breathing or does anybody recognise that they’re a breath holder? That they hold their breath in stressful, challenging situations. Go ahead.
Gord | Retired Telecoms Sr. Project Manager:
Very shallow breath. Sometimes.
Brad:
Yeah, shallow breathing or even breath holding. It’s interesting. It’s like why would I hold my breath? How could that be adaptive in a threatening situation to hold my breath? Well, just like I think it was Mary that was saying earlier, it could be to stay quiet if you’ve ever spent enough time in the woods around predator or prey. There are times that you’re close enough where they can hear you breathing and that could be a survival mechanism to not breathe for sure. And the other one that I wanted to make sure we hit on was pulmonary. Some people explain that this blood flow, they can actually feel their heart beating almost clear up into their head or their chest or their neck. Yeah, like a fish flopping in their chest sometimes it’s described as, this exercise, good job. It sounds like you all nailed it.
This first skill is raising awareness about fight or flight. Because like I said in the first session, you can’t regulate something if you’re not aware of it happening, right? The first step in self-regulation is self-awareness. What I’m hoping you’re able to do is take one or two of these that are specific to you and take that to your personal plan at the end of the book. And that’s what you want to fill in that first box with under warning signs is how do you respond? And this is where I think this is much different than a lot of other frameworks where you’re working on creating change because in other frameworks, warning signs and triggers are more focused on external things that are going on. You noticed we didn’t talk much about what’s triggering you. And I think that’s one of the things that really is a different process here. There are a lot of those out there if you want to look for that. We could spend a lot of time talking about the different problems and triggers and challenges that people have. Or we could spend a little bit of time talking about the process that happens when human beings experience challenges and try to get correct.
Gord:
Brad, can I ask that question?
Brad:
Absolutely, yes.
Gord:
One of the questions here was my symptoms more consistent with fight flight or shutdown behaviours. And I wrote down all three because it depends on the situation on who I’m facing or what I’m facing.
Brad:
Yes. Yeah, yeah, I hear that a lot. I do think sometimes we have some nuances about, we were talking in our group that sometimes people have learned different patterns. If you know that your fight is pretty ugly, you’ve learned that in your younger days especially, and you’ve hurt people that you care about when you get upset sometimes we resort to, I’m going to be more of a shutdown. I’m just going to leave because I know if I engage in my fight, it’s not good. It’s not good for me and other people. There are some changes that we make over time, but you’re right, we can be all three, we can be all four. We can fawn, too.
MC:
I just want to highlight that. We had a really interesting conversation about fawning in our group, talking about actually how fawning is a way of staying safe. If you are under threat, you’ll just go along in order for the threat to end. Sometimes under coercion or especially looking at size or power differentials in physical situations, fawning is actually a way to protect yourself.
Brad:
For sure. All these are survival mechanisms. You’re right. And they’re perfectly normal. I think the other thing to think about here with everything we described is the completely normal human process of how to respond to challenges. It’s hardwired. And I also think it’s really interesting that we’re not really taught how to manage these things, but they’re intense and they’re impactful on our relationships, our lives, our ability to succeed in different areas with challenges.
Gord:
And I did find I reacted differently at work than I did at home as well.
Brad:
Interesting.
Gord:
Yeah, that’s still a pattern. But I’m retired now. But it was very much a struggle at work, how to manage other people versus how to manage my family. Interesting.
Brad:
There’s a lot of places to do a deeper dive here if you’re interested. What equals threat to you? That’s a very interesting tunnel to go down. It’s very insightful. That’s a personal journey that you can take. Knowing your hot buttons for sure is helpful as a human being, but it’s still going to come back. You’re still going to come back to the same process to manage, right? It’s still going to be this fight flight shutdown. It’s still going to be the same process that we have to learn to manage no matter what the trigger or threat is going to be. Feeling like, oh my gosh, okay, I noticed all these things, now what am I going to do with this stuff? Well, that’s why we have step number two coming this next week.
Gabrielle:
You mentioned this notion of how thread is defined and how thread is experienced. I know, and I’ve worked with plenty of people and I think I’ve been that on my own. I’ve lived it. And when you’re exposed to cumulative traumas over and over and over again, these are real traumas, not just social emotional [threats]. These are real threats constantly. Like the threat of violence.
Brad:
Yeah, physical threats.
Gabrielle:
Yeah, physical threats, threats to the constant name calling, the bullying, all of that kind of stuff that oftentimes you are exposed to as a child. And then to try and have never learned self-regulation skills later. And you try and then the addiction comes in. But then for people who are recovering and only learning self-regulation later in life, when dysregulation has been imprinted on their brain, where are there any other resources? This seems like something that we would encounter just in I guess our regular day-to-day life where we’re not exposed to or don’t have that background. I wonder if there are any other resources real quickly, Brad, that somebody who is profoundly affected by cumulative trauma and has just hyperactivated stress response. Where can they go? Could this trigger disassociation?
Brad:
And here are two things I would say if we started out with kids for just that reason because we know people are exposed to this early in life and the longer you go with it, like you said, these effects are just going to get worse and worse. We have pre-K curriculum, elementary curriculum, middle school, high school curriculum, teaching kids how to manage this stuff when it comes up and what this is about because it can really feel like you’re losing your mind if you don’t know that this is a natural, normal process. It’s very uncomfortable too, we all know what it feels like. It’s overwhelming, it’s confusing. You’re seven years old or 17 years old or 27 years old. It’s difficult. To answer your question, I think there is some hope for kids and teaching young people how to do this and also parents to help their kids with this.
But what you’re talking about, I feel like is more at that clinical level to where they would need some one-on-one. And I would hope it would be somebody who would have some foundational understanding of what we’re trying to work through here. But you’re right, you can’t do that level of clinical operation in a book. This is a way to expose people, share the skills with people and practise together. You might be thinking, where do we go from here? It’s really simple, I told you this whole framework is super logical and step by step for a reason. If we are saying to ourselves, and we’ve accepted this idea that this threat response in today’s world is really not helping me, especially if it goes unmanaged or unchecked and it’s just doing its thing and it’s been reactive my entire life and it’s caused me to hurt people and not think clearly and have a stomach ache all the time and be stressed out and not get good sleep.
And there’s not a lot of benefits that I can think of from this, especially over a chronic long-term period. If we’re looking to turn down the threat response, what is the opposite of experiencing a threat? What do we need to create? And that’s how logical it’s, the opposite of feeling threatened is feeling safe. Chapter two and skill number two is all about what are the most impactful ways for human beings to create safety in their lives. I’ll leave you with that and that’s what chapter two is about and that’s what we’re going to explore next week.
