Leadership Training—Self-Regulation Skillset, Session 3
Brad Chapin | AccuTrain
In episode three of the mini-series on Self-Regulation Skillset training, Brad Chapin discusses psychological safety and emotional regulation, focusing on strategies to manage stress and enhance well-being. Participants share personal experiences and techniques such as grounding exercises, rhythmic activities, and nature immersion to foster a sense of safety and calm. The conversation highlights the importance of routine, self-awareness, and proactive measures in mitigating stress responses. Techniques like breathing exercises, self-talk, and intentional pauses are emphasized for in-the-moment stress management. The dialogue also touches on the significance of understanding personal triggers and the role of predictability in creating a safe environment. The session concludes with insights into the upcoming focus on emotion identification and regulation, encouraging participants to continue building on their personalized plans for emotional well-being.
Introduction to Skill 2: Finding Safe and Calm
Jenny | Geophysicist:
I've gone to a psychologist, right? And it's interesting that we talk about the situations and what we're going to do about this ongoing situation rather than thinking about how I can't control these situations and how do I instead want to start looking at how I'm responding? It's just such a mindbender, Brad.
Brad | Public Mental Health Director:
I'm glad you're getting that because, and there are lots of different approaches to therapy and psychology and working with people, I'm glad you're noticing that this is pretty fundamental, broken down into small pieces. I would go into these classes and people are doing these psychodynamic assessments of these families and this individual who's 50 some years old and trying to say that they could explain through something about their mother or father or this or that, about how all these behaviours came to be. And I just thought, my gosh, there's a lot of assumptions in a lot of that work, and it's like, how do you even know if that's right or wrong or anywhere on the map or even close to being accurate? Part of that was me saying, I don't think I can do that or feel comfortable doing that. I need to be more concrete about what we're focusing on.
Jenny:
Yeah, I think it's going to free me from that effort of trying to link all the moments in my life and how they've led to all of these things and just think more about the ongoing challenges that we face. It's just such an interesting shift in my perspective on this. Yeah, thank you.
Brad:
Not to say that that other work isn't important and fruitful, but yes, there's a lot there. Great to see everybody. I was just telling Jenny, I just came from teaching these same skills to a group of fourth year nursing students, it's always interesting to see how people conceptualize this material in the work and in the place that they're at in their life. These are early 20-year-olds, in their early twenties forming relationships, starting to figure out what their careers are and the challenges that they're facing versus all the challenges that you all are facing and just telling her that each one of these groups is different where we're at in our lives. This first couple of sessions, I hope it was interesting for you to try to examine and step back a little bit and be intentional about looking at how our body responds to challenges, how we're hardwired to do this physically.
That's what the first two skills are all about is trying to separate. Sometimes we get our thoughts and our feelings and our bodies all mixed up and when you start to try to explain that and talk about it, it comes out and it's in all sorts of ways and it's really hard to figure that out sometimes. This process is about separating those, but I know that can be difficult, appreciate you giving the effort to first try to recognize what that feels like, those warning signs that we talked about in skill one. And then this week was about, okay, we have this threat response that we've established. Probably super effective for me in a lot of the social emotionally challenging situations. I find myself in all those internal challenges that self-doubt, those expectations, conflict. We talked last time about somebody not seeing things from my point of view, having difficulty there, these social emotional challenges, the hundreds, the thousands of social emotional challenges that we have in a day.
These constantly ongoing processes. We establish this threat response can get in our way, and then what do we do about that? We've talked about the importance of practicing and understanding this idea of safety and calmness, because we really can't feel threatened and safe at the same time. If we want to turn the dial down on this threat response, say it's turned up to a nine and we live between a seven and a nine, you can imagine how much energy that takes. Probably familiar with the book. The body keeps the score, even if you're not paying attention to these things happening physiologically, they're still happening. You can ask your cardiologist if there's an impact from that, but definitely some things going on there. Safe and calm. I hope you found this chapter interesting. I think there's a lot in here when you think about what equals safety to human beings and the science about psychological safety I think is just fascinating.
Hopefully one of the key points and what I've been doing is just pointing out a couple of the key points and then I want to get you all into your breakout rooms to have you discuss some of those things that you found about what equals safety for you. But to me, probably one of the most impactful pieces of research came out of some material from Bruce Perry and the sequential model for dealing with trauma and his ideas about patterned rhythmic repetitive things and how that equals predictability for human beings and how impactful, if you really want to add safety to a human being's existence or to your own challenging situation, when you bring predictability into a situation, it typically adds this layer of safety because that brain has that switch. It's always looking for threat, but it's also looking for non threat. When can I turn it off?
It has an on switch and an off switch. Predictability is something that's very powerful in hitting that off switch and we all sort of know what that feels like and we use it, but can we be more intentional about using that really powerful factor to create safety in our life? And the answer is yes. I mean, we do it all the time. How do you sue the baby that's upset? What are the things that we do? That pattern, rhythmic padding, singing, rocking, all those things, add predictability to that. That brain sees that and says, wow, the environment's more predictable. It's less alarming. I can kind of turn the dial down a little bit. We use routines. Another thing that we do is make lists. We do all these things to sort of add predictability to our life, but this skill is about firming that up.
The other point I wanted to make, there's several elements and I pointed those out in this chapter. There's also several different activities that we can do to mitigate that threat response. And I like to, you can be creative about it. These are personal, I really want to hear what your ideas are. What works well for you is different, the other key point that I wanted to mention about safety is that when you think about your skills and how you want to be intentional about creating more safety, think of it in two ways. And I often think that sometimes the activities or the skills that you come up with aren't the same for both of these ways. You can use safety. One way is in the moment when I'm experiencing fight or flight in that moment and I'm thinking, this isn't going to be the best for me.
I'm in a meeting, things are getting hot, I can feel my warning signs going off, I need to do something right now, what would that be that I can do in the moment? The other super powerful thing about this skill though is what can I do prescriptively proactively and preventatively? Wow, there's three Ps there. Prescriptively, proactively preventatively because if I can keep that dial down if I can, as the behavioural health guy for a large healthcare system, I'm often the one they called that says, Brad, can you come in and do de-escalation training for our staff? We want to be able to deescalate people. And I'm like, well, we could do de-escalation training, but we could also talk about escalation training because if we know some things that we can do proactively to add safety into a system ahead of time, wouldn't that be a smart thing to do to be able to bring that dial down across the system ahead of time so that you got more people up in that cortex part of their brain, not down in that lizard part of their brain, that reactive part of their brain.
Two ways to use skill number two in response to the moment. And then also what can I do twice a week, three times a week? Or I know this is going to be a really threatening stressful week, maybe I need to do it eight times a week. We do think of it prescriptively at this scale. Alright, what I would suggest we do at this point is go off into our breakout rooms, take a look at the discussion questions at the end of chapter two here, and I'm just going to let your group kind of decide which questions you want to talk through. And one of the really important things I want to hear when we come back is what are the one or two ways that you're going to create safety and calm in your life going forward? Maybe what's already working, but what can you be more intentional about doing regularly? What did you guys find out or what did you think about safe and calm?
Break Out Session with Jenny, Chris, and Amy
Jenny (08:48):
Yeah, first of all, I think it's really interesting how we do some of a lot of these things without even thinking about it. Like you said, being intentional. Like Chris and I have had music nights where we're just like, we pick actually, what is it, the ongoing history of new music. That's something we really like. It's a radio podcast thing and we put it on and we listen to the story of a band or the story of a certain type of music and then we talk about that for a while. It's something that we've done in the past, we've talked about this week when we get off schedule, what that looks like. Chris and I were saying, for example, with his shift work, if he doesn't get a good sleep, then he starts getting
Chris | Fire Fighter, Environmental Scientist:
Sliding for sure.
Jenny:
Then it's like a spiral of worse sleeps if he doesn't catch it and figure out how to mitigate what's going on.
Brad:
Noticing that slide, noticing what's different. And then the skill then is how do we correct what's the correction? How do we get back on that predictable schedule? And that's difficult.
Chris:
I work 24 hour shifts, it's super difficult. I think I had a routine. I think part of it is going into nature, even if it's for a couple hours into parks within the city, that's part of it. I think nature was a really helpful thing and I kind of got off track with it lately.
Brad:
Yeah, is that one of your two? Safe and calm probably would include nature, something in nature for you Chris?
Chris:
For me. It is. It's an important thing. And then
Brad:
Anything particularly in nature or just time and green space, what is,
Chris:
I've volunteered to renaturalize a space in our community. It's like a kilometer stretch. I've planted thousands of trees.
Brad:
So there's purpose too.
Chris:
There's purpose to it, there's purpose to it. That's a helpful thing for me. Of course, a support mechanism like my village of other firefighters who are struggling. And there's a lot of us, I'll be honest, struggling right now with sleep issues for some reason, having trustworthy people to talk about that’s non judgmental. And that's the tough part. I think that having trust with your tribe or your village of people that you can talk to about things.
Brad:
Putting it in the context of the skills, judgement is threatening. Nonjudgment is safe.
Chris:
Is a hundred percent.
Brad:
Yeah, trust is safe.
Chris:
Trust is safe for sure. Having people you can talk to when you're struggling is an important thing for me. And I think as well with other people in my profession,
Jenny:
And he was saying spending time with people we trust. That's something we have recently, we've been spending so much time together just wanting to, I think, find safety, you know what I mean? Because between my work being stressful and his work being stressful in the other way, seeing, like you said, the de-escalation stuff, right?
Brad:
Yeah.
Jenny:
Trying to do preventative stuff, but a lot of people aren't interested in that. There's a lot of feeling that our circle of trust has shrunk a lot, I would say. And I feel like…
Brad:
If you were putting numbers to this threat pile, I mean they seem big. I, they seem like you all are carrying a lot of threat. To balance that out, this whole thing is about balance. That's what self-regulation is. How are we going to balance that level of threat?
Jenny:
Yeah, so based on this week, I went to yoga for the first time in two years. I've always practiced yoga on my own, but I think I needed to be in a group and just feel like it was intentional.
Jenny:
Like I said, Chris does a lot of walking in nature. I go with him and really enjoy that too. I think music is something that, like I said, really brings us together and also helps us. And then the grounding thing, actually, it's interesting, Brad, I'm finding a lot of synchronicity in my life and just this week in part of what we're doing is this bioregional organizing group sessions and my friend sent me a video all about this energy work, ways to help build grounding. For the first time in this exercise, I actually felt my feet get heavy where I felt really grounded so I can do those techniques. Yeah, I just see a lot of things and the distraction, actually, it's really funny. Chris has been, we've been watching a lot of movies just trying to distract from the world. It's been, what do you call it? A marathon.
Chris:
I’m trying to reboot my balance I think is really what it comes down to. And maybe that's grounding or trying to re-grounded, trying to reduce my perceived threats. Like watching the news or getting too much information.
Jenny:
Especially scary information.
Chris:
Information about the world, I guess is the thing.
Brad:
I use this analogy of holding this cup out and how long I've been holding it
Chris:
For sure.
Brad:
Yeah, and if you're in touch with that, it's not saying that it's bad to do that stuff, but it's constant and that system is not built to stay on constantly. How are you able to set that cup down for 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes here? And that's what we're really talking about
Chris:
For sure, and I'm starting to figure it out.
Jenny:
Out. Oh, the regular schedule. We don't have a regular schedule, neither of us. And I think this is something so
Brad:
Predictably unpredictable.
Jenny:
Yeah, I mean I guess I should say Chris has an eight day schedule, that is the thing that anchors us, but obviously that's not a normal schedule, do you know what I mean? It doesn't anchor us with the rest of the world. Hi Amy.
Amy | Osteopathic Manual Therapist:
I have to find out what's going on in the breakout rooms.
Jenny:
Yeah. Oh, did you get sent to a breakout room? Is that Yeah. Oh, okay. That's perfect. Well, I don't know how to send her at this point, I think you should just hang with us. Is that okay, Brad?
Brad:
Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah. Yep. We're just discussing skill number two, safe and calm. We were talking about what are your two things that really help you feel safe and calm, that add maybe predictability or movement, distraction, all those bulleted elements in the chapter that equal safety. Did you come up with one or two that really work well for you?
Amy:
When I practice osteopathy, I mean we talk a lot about grounding and centering. I often will have people, and it's been done to me for validation. If I focus on a certain thing, what in my body actually does help me be grounded with the ground or be centered within myself? And then there's also being connected beyond in the future. And when I test everybody for those three, I first validate if it's doing something good in their body, which doesn't always, people don't always perceive how it affects them, but the centering one will always improve breathing. We breathe a lot of times a minute. That's huge into biochemistry as well as the core support. For me, the thing that works for centering myself within myself is to think of the area almost even with my belly button, the jejunum part of the small intestine and horizontally, if I think of that, I'll be more centered within myself and then also my breathing quality will improve. That's my prime one. I'll use it even occasionally as I treat it when I want to center myself to make sure how I'm relating in that setting or what I'm doing, but then I'll use it by myself or in social settings occasionally. I think I used it more in the context of work before I started to think like, “Oh, I could use it right now” or “Oh, I could use it here”.
I think that's a super go-to for me, I really dominantly probably if I think that I need to be breathe better, slow down my heart rate, regulate better, I probably almost always will go to that because I know it's been validated for me and I know the huge physiological impact it has. Definitely though if I have a blanket wrapped around me, I'd feel more relaxed and calm.
Brad:
That's a good one too. Yeah, that safety and security.
Amy:
I don't feel like there's a consistent movement that I'll always do. I mean I put my tongue on the roof of my mouth, which stimulates the parasympathetic and then grounds your jaw and your neck, and I do that regularly just as a healthy habit.
Brad:
Cool. Yeah. Jenny and Chris, they identified a couple of things. They do time in nature outside and then some movement, yoga, stretching. Using up that adrenaline cortisol in a really productive way and music is another tool that they use that 's patterned, rhythmic, repetitive. We listen to the same music a lot of times, but they were talking about new music. You got this sort of distraction of wanting to learn something new but also listening to music and maybe some familiar pieces predictability in that. I was going to ask Chris, if you tell me a little bit about planting a tree, to me that also sounds like a really patterned predictable movement that you go through. You're going from one to the next and the next.
Chris:
For sure. I think it's kind of like I'm a big fly fisherman too, and it's sort of like what I found is the same thing with this community project I'm doing is I don't think about anything else except the task. Same with fly fishing. You're not thinking about other things, you're just thinking about the task. And that helps to reduce stress because you're not thinking about your stresses in your life. You're getting a break. Getting a break from the threat. Right.
Brad: Of course, not thinking about the threats, you're thinking of the project.
Chris:
The funny thing is that I'll be out there during the day when I'm off like a weekday and then I'll have some old person not even say good morning to me. They'll say, how much is this costing me? How much is this going to add to my taxes? And I have to sort of control myself. I'm just a volunteer. This is costing you anything. It's happened to me three or four times now where wow. Yeah, it's kind of crazy where
Jenny:
Even his places of safety.
Chris:
Those places sometimes are a threat. I have to be prepared for those things. That's happened to me a bunch of times where people have actually screamed at me, this is costing them money. And I go, no, I'm just a volunteer. I get the trees for free and I do this all on my own. And I ask them, would you be willing to help? And they never say yes.
Jenny:
Although we're starting to get more people. It is coming around, but this is the reality of the
Chris:
World. That's the struggle with the world that we live in.
Brad:
That's a great point. I go to the gym to relax and everybody there is just telling me all their threats. And that's a really good point you make is safety, sometimes we really have to seek it out. We're going to have the best of intentions and it just, yeah.
Chris:
That's the problem. I'm always prepared in the end,
Jenny:
Having to be prepared.
Chris:
I'm always having to be prepared for threats and that's sort of my struggle because I think my experience is that there's always a threat. That's the problem
Brad:
With
Chris:
What's going on with me, I think
Brad:
Caution you on that word always. And I think that might just be where your work is going to be, Chris.
Chris:
Correct.
Brad:
I feel like you're not setting that cup down for five or 10 minutes here
Chris:
No, it's hard.
Brad:
It's going to catch up to you.
Chris:
Yeah, I'll give you an example. Me and my crew, there's eight of us or nine of us went training and then I give the start a safety meeting and I go, just be careful. No one gets hurt. And then my rookie who's only been on a month, broke his finger. There's always, even when you're doing certain things, there's always,
Jenny:
Always, you're saying the “always” word.
Amy:
Always, but that's how I feel. Yeah, I started focusing on how often I say always or never or everyone or no one. And just to even say most of the time or much of the time, it gives space for that reality when something is different. And it also helps people who are unique and they don't fit the whole group. They had that little place to be seen because we didn't say anything. And most of the time I'll try to catch myself and then just say many times or most of the time or sometimes or often or very little or whatever, and just try not to say never, always, none at all.
Brad:
This is all skill six, we're a little bit ahead on that. But yes, anything on safety? What else do you think about safety? We also wanted to talk about in the moment some things I could do and I think breathing and those kinds of things. In the moment versus what can I do a couple of times a week, three times a week, what do you think
Amy:
About that? The couple of times a week goes into that thing about being in nature. That reminded me of when you said Chris and Jen, me, Jenny mentioned that I deliberately moved near a river. I read once that they did a study of comparing people anywhere in nature and people in nature near free flowing water. And the people who were near free flowing water had better mental health effects. Then I wanted to start more often being near free flowing water. I ended up moving literally a four minute walk from a river. I try to go to the river as many days at least once as possible and occasionally twice. That would be that preventative, healthy environment, downregulate. For me that centering, thinking of the abdomen in that one spot that's in the moment, but being often by the river is my preventative health optimization thing.
Jenny:
What about Brad, if I may, finding safety in the moment. We've talked about these events that are tense for us and I can't put my earphones on and start listening to music. Don't. When I look at this list and my go-to’s, I don't really have a in the moment kind of this is how I'm going to come. I mean, that being said, I am taking this positive intelligence training and one of the things they teach is rubbing two fingers together or rubbing your hands together. Something just to sort of ground yourself in the moment. Anyway, I'll stop there. What are your thoughts on “in the moment” stuff?
Brad:
Those are great, the grounding techniques, but almost everything we teach involves noticing first. That's why we do skill one. But as soon as you catch that early, and that's why we are doing this early. At an eight, somebody even trying to remind you to calm down at an eight is not going to go well. I dunno if anybody has ever asked you to calm down at an eight, but it doesn't go well for me. All this work around skill number one is early detection for that reason, but it usually involves a pause, some kind of a cue word that you can say to yourself that whether it's I need to excuse myself from the meeting for just a second, can we take a break step away? It involves stepping away from the threat for a moment. You can't do a skill if you don't have time to do it.
One of freeing yourself up from this illusion of the pressure of time and space because there's very few times what we've found. There's very few times that you, in a socially emotionally threatening situation, that you can't take a break, that you can't take a pause. It's just that when people are going at it or we're involved in this challenge, sometimes we don't think we can step away. And that's our own rule. It's no one else's, it involves a pause, but I've seen people do finger counting. You can do diaphragmatic breathing where you're putting pressure on that vagal nerve. You can do that at the table with no one noticing. There are mantras that people use to do that. You can sing that song in your head. There's all kinds of different ways to do that at the moment, but I think the key thing is to pause, give permission for pause.
Jenny:
Yeah, I think that's massive for me in particular, you're right, I don't often recognize that a thing can end and come back at a better time. Yeah. Thank you.
Amy:
Another good thing to do is humming the vagus nerve, the glossopharyngeal cranial nerve and the hypoglossal nerve. They have the throat, but the hypoglossal is a parasympathetic nerve.
Jenny:
Amy, why don't we save this for your breakout. You can offer this in your round. Is that okay? Yeah, sure. Okay,
Brad:
I froze.
Group Feedback, Discussion, and Questions
Jenny (26:56):
Oh, okay. I'm going to close the room and put us back together. Welcome back everyone. I hope you had a chance to dive in on safety. We certainly did and Brad can offer some reflections, but yeah, what I'm hoping we can do now is Brad's going to lead us off here and we'll just go around. I can help select people and just give what you've learned so far from the whole thing. And then from this week's to your discussion you just had some key takeaways or things you want to add about 90 seconds each. We probably have time for everyone and then a few questions after. Go ahead Brad. Thank you.
Brad:
Oh no, that sounds good. Yeah, I'd like to hear the couple of safe and calm activities that you came up with. We had some great discussion about nature movement music, but I'll let Jenny and Chris talk about theirs and Amy about what they shared in their group. But yeah, 90 seconds, I think it's a good place to do this kind of a round table just going around the room 90 seconds on skills one and two, just because we're going to kind of leave this domain of physical regulation, we never really leave it. We're going to keep coming back to it. It is kind of a natural point to collect because we're through with the physical regulation skills at this point. What did you think of combining threat response detection and then safe and calm practice?
Amy | Osteopathic Manual Therapist:
For me to try to stay more moderate and have a healthy balance, I can easily be passionate and have a higher heart rate and breathing rate. I go by water quite frequently. I deliberately moved within a four minute drive of, or sorry, four minute walk of river, the elbow river. I go there almost every day and occasionally twice a day. And sometimes it's just like six minutes by it, sometimes it's 20. Another thing I do to stimulate the parasympathetic rest and digest nervous system to down-regulate, which can be occasionally humming in terms of the moment. If I want to center myself within myself, which is a little different than grounding to the earth, but I've done a lot of experimenting with myself and clients I work with on what will help breathing be better quality. And I find that whatever picture helps someone center within themself, which is different for everyone. For me it's about thinking horizontally, about the level of my belly button, which is the middle section of the small intestine. If I think of that horizontally, I'll be more centered within myself and then my breathing quality will be better and it'll also help slow my heart rate because breathing and heart rate are very intimately related. That's probably enough for me.
Jenny:
Perfect.
Teacher 1:
What I find is I need a routine to follow so that I can, because what I do is help regulate others and I need to find that. I find it much easier to do that when I'm staying very calm obviously, but I need to exercise in the morning before work. I'll do a good 30 minute walk and some yoga and stretching and that seems to fill me up enough to be able to cope, cope with what comes at me when that lizard part of my brain is reactive within family and stuff like that. I find myself taking a breath and asking myself, are you physically safe right now? And if I'm physically safe, then I can think better how to respond without fighting so much or wanting to because I have a pretty good fight response if I don't stop and think and then that always leads to hurt and I try really hard not to go there.
School Administrator 1:
I also use exercise as my proactive way to stay on top of things because I know I can carry my stress and that can cause me lots of dysregulation. And then we were talking about the moment of stress. Sometimes it's our distraction here at the school level, sometimes as an admin is just going for a walk and it can be the physical act of walking or it can be getting distracted by cute little kindergarten kids just depending on the day. Did you want to add to this?
School Administrator 2:
Yeah, I think for me, I'm finding the stretching piece is becoming really, really important. And I noticed that I always leave it till the very last thing of the day. Trying to find the time to incorporate that breathing slash stretching throughout the day I think would be beneficial for sure. And I think in my role helping to regulate kids, it's kind of the revolving door. It's the next kid that comes, that's the next place that I go. I don't really have an in the moment relief in the classroom. So
Teacher 2:
I think I use a lot of self-talk. I usually ask myself, well it started years ago, my husband would ask me when I was getting elevated and usually telling him a story, wrote something that happened at school, and then I would be going on and on and on and then he would just say, well, does it matter? And that comment used to fill me with rage and I would say, of course it matters. Did you not just hear me? And then I would really think about that and not be so hotheaded and say, “Yeah, no, it doesn't really matter.” Now, I actually ask myself that question, he doesn't even have to ask me anymore. I guess I can thank him for my self-regulation.
School Administrator 2:
And I think too, remembering when other people are bringing things to the table that it's not about us, it's not a personal attack. I think it's important to remember that it is theirs and not taking it on as ours.
Gord | Retired Telecoms Sr. Project Manager:
Yeah, interesting discussion. Our little group about staying in the moment, getting those repetitive preemptive activities and yeah, of course I do that a lot with exercise, walking the dog, getting back into nature, walking barefoot in the forest if I need to. Just appreciating nature, reconnecting. But what I struggle with is in the moment when somebody's coming at me and that last comment about not taking it personally, that's very good. And I read a coping mechanism where if I deem it to be insulting or offending, alright, don't react right away, try to stay calm, take a breath, and then ask the person, can you please repeat that and be ready for them to repeat it and then ask, what do you mean by that? And here's my reaction, is this how you wanted me to feel? Try to be a little more clinical about it, I guess, and not overreact.
Maybe I misinterpreted the message entirely and I tried that once with my son and he was surprised that you have to repeat it, okay, now you have to repeat it and then you're going to be held accountable to explain it. I think I'm going to try to do that in public as well and see how it works. Otherwise the lizard brain will take over, I'll feel offended and say something stupid and then it just escalates. Deescalating Brad, those are the challenges. Deescalating situations. I was a project manager for years and years, took way too much personally and yeah, came home a mess at the end of the day. Anxious, yeah, I should have learned these skills years and years ago, but never too late.
Jenny:
Never too late indeed. Wilson, you're next please.
Wilson | Fire Department Mental Health Lead:
For people who don't know me, I have PTSD, I've had it for about three or four years now. I have a lot of things I do for self-care and a lot of things I do to look after myself that I didn't realize how many of them fall into this category of pattern and safety. Recently I'm a hunter, I recently started doing archery and I find that really soothing. The whole point of it is to try to be exactly the same every time and you have to control your breath and do all that good stuff. I have a surface dog turbo right there. He's with me all the time and I take him for walks and I like to listen to the sound of his claws clicking on the concrete. That rhythm does it for me. I find it really soothing and I fly fish I really like.
I talked to Brad about this probably about a year ago. I don't know if you remember Brad, but I got to have a chat with you and we talked a little bit about some of the stuff that I'm doing and I talked about fly fishing. You're like, oh yeah, it's the rhythm kind of a thing. And I never thought about that either. It's just neat. I'm even finding, I always thought of it as chaos versus order, but it's really, it's chaos versus predictability that makes me feel safe that I'm learning today, that I'm learning now. I know I like the house to be ordered now, which is ironic if you ever knew me as a young man, that wasn't ever a priority. But now that's something that I have to do. And then I guess for me in the moment, acutely I use a lot of breathing, I use a lot of breathing separate from acutely stressful situations, again, because of the rhythm and the predictability, but I use the physiological sigh a lot in the moment.
And then other things, I'll remove myself from situations and go meditate if I have to. Even if it's just for a couple of minutes, I'll go do that. And those are the things I find to help me. And then of course my dog, if he can sense I'm getting dysregulated, he'll just give me a little poke on my thigh and just be like, Hey, you're safe and I'm here. I can engage him and we have our little routine, he gets his little treat and then I can engage him and get some nice tactile grounding just from petting him and stuff like that. And he helps me out a lot with some of those acute stress responses. Yeah, that's me.
Jenny:
Thank you, Wilson. Welcome. That's so nice to meet you and thank you for joining us in this. I'll go next. I'll let Chris go or do you want to go?
Chris:
No, go ahead.
Jenny:
Okay. I was saying in the opening, I'm not sure who heard, but Chris and I were realizing how much of the work that I've done. I've gone to a psychologist and it's interesting to think of this work so differently from the psychologist. I'm telling the situations and the circumstances of what I'm carrying and then I'm coming back and resharing the story rather than looking at what are the ways that I'm being challenged in my life and how can I just manage those challenges rather than trying to own this story and control this story in some weird way. I wanted to reflect that. That was sort of our takeaway we were talking about last week. And actually it was really funny, last week you were Brad talking about how we have this adrenaline from situations, and both Chris and I were noticing we were pacing on the main floor last week, especially even after this conversation and we're like, wow, look at us.
We're doing the things that were, and I've noticed my foot more in situations and I'm like, okay, I'm going to go for a walk. I think just like you're saying, recognizing and translating it, which is really powerful just to have that moment of acknowledgement. And then for us this week we talked a lot about music. Chris and I will again, like Wilson you said, without even really knowing it, we'll be doing these things to find this rhythm pattern. One of them is we'll put on an ongoing history of new music. It was a radio show that's now a podcast and we'll listen to this and analyze this band or music or whatever we're talking about, and it's something we got away from. I think it's very easy to forget all of these things that we do naturally when we get challenged, is what I'm guessing that is. And then I want to say one thing that came up in here that Brad offered us. I said, what do you do when you're an eight or a 10? That de-escalation phase? And what Brad offered is you take a break and I think that like you were saying, and Brad you can correct me later, but usually in an emotional situation there is opportunity to take a break. I think it's really important. Thank you Brad, for putting that in my head. I'm going to stop there and let Chris go.
Chris:
Me and Wilson work for the same fire department, different roles or whatever, but I am a big fly fisherman and I find that numbs my brain where I'm just concentrating on the moment or living in the moment. Stuff like that and some other stuff with nature, and I'm trying to do what Gord mentioned, it's those, it's that acute sort of social stress. We have a lot of strong personalities in the fire department that I work for. Sometimes there's a lot of judgement and I'm still a technique. I'm going, well, I'm trying to work on what Gord mentioned is when someone says something really judgmental to you, it's like, Hey, can you repeat that? And then it gives you a pause of 10 to 20 seconds on how to respond. And I think that's something that going forward I'm really trying to work on in my profession and in sort of the social very strong personalities that I work with for sure as well.
Tami | Retired Teacher:
Thank you. One of the things that I've done is Qigong and stuff. Just learning that, putting your tongue at the back of the roof of your mouth between your front teeth is something that's really calming because it kind of completes the circuit in your body. I do a lot of breathing, breathing in and holding for 10, breathing out and holding for 10 and then holding it for 10 is something that really helps me as well. We were talking about how people's opinions of us sometimes can trigger us and one of the things that always comes to my mind is Eleanor Roosevelt's quote is, your opinion of me is none of my business because it says a lot more about you than it does about anybody else in your sphere. And I do a lot of self-talk through things when things are getting anxious, I'll do rubbing my arms or rubbing my legs to just kind of bring myself back into the physical body and back into the present moment and sometimes rocking right. Those are some of the strategies that I use. And thank you for this opportunity to share.
Gord:
Tami, you repeat, can you please repeat that quote from Roosevelt?
Tami:
Your opinion of me is none of my business.
Gord:
Very good.
Jenny:
Chris wrote it down. That's a great one. Thank you Tammy.
Support Staff 1:
Thank you. Okay. I would think some of my strategies are walking and Wilson, when you're talking about having a, needing a clean space, I wouldn't have thought of that as a felt safety thing, but I need that safe for the most part. My teenager has now gone to university, it's way easier to keep it clean, but I have a clean space and I can't relax. If it's not really clean then I need to do something about it. But I also have a routine that I do when I get home every single time. Routine is important, that clean space, I like to walk, I like to pray, I like to read, but those are things I would use for safety for sure.
Jenny:
Fantastic, thank you so much.
Teacher 3:
I really enjoyed the discussion today I had with the group of teachers because I'm also a teacher and my takeaway from them was we were talking about how we can handle kids being dysregulated and it rolls off my back and I don't even think about it and they can lose their mind, but when it's an adult I tend to take that more personally. And one of them was like, well, I just kind of think of them like the kids that are just regulated. It's the same thing, it's just a bigger body. And I was like, that's really, I was sitting here thinking that's a super good thought. I really need to start putting that in my mind a little more. But yeah,
Brad:
A couple of things to think about. Please practice. You are forming a plan here, hopefully you added one or two things to your plan so we can keep progressing on this tailored plan that you're building. Also, one thing I didn't talk about but is directly related here is, and you might just spend some time thinking about the connection of patterned, rhythmic, repetitive things to unhealthy habit formation. There's a lot of things that we do, pattern rhythmic repetitively, predictably that can feel soothing and safe and calm to us, but may fall into this category of not too good for us in the long term. And you can kind of think of, I mean a couple of quick examples, smoking some of these other things that we do, that's a place where you might want to say, ah, that's serving a purpose, but I might want to replace that behaviour or try to work on that with one of these other healthier behaviours that you identified.
I wanted to put that out there. Getting ready for next week, we're shifting into emotion regulation. I don't think next week I always underestimate this next skill dose. Maybe I shouldn't say anything, but the next week is all about just identifying emotions, being intentional about “What am I feeling right now?” And for me, this was hard for me and I think it might be challenging from what I know about a couple of you so far, it might be challenging for you too to spend time thinking about what you're feeling right now in the moment and putting a label to that. A lot of times we get overwhelmed by this sense of I just feel overwhelmed. Or we use words like stressed out or anxious and I would like you to practice this skill is about being more specific and concrete about what you're actually feeling. Good luck with this skill next week and please keep practicing skills one and two. These stack on top of each other.
Jenny:
Perfect. Thank you so much everyone. Thank you. Have a great week. See you next week. Take care for now.
Bonus Discussion (text only)
Anonymous:
The first week, Brad, I said that you were trying to find the name, but I was the one who said I'm really bad at regulating. The support staff member and Tami can probably verify that because I'm in tears within moments talking about something that I can't even identify what the threat is. I had a question for you first because I missed last week unfortunately, but it's like what possible service do tears and feeling that rush of emotion, what does that do for you in a survival sense?
Brad:
That's such a good question and there's been some discussion theoretically psychological evolutionarily, biologically what purpose in tears. Some people talk about it or release it, some people talk about it as proactively flushing the dirt out of your eyes before you get into a scuffle with a grizzly bear. That's the threat. And some people theorize that it's a signal to the rest of the tribe or the group that something's wrong and I need support. I don't know if anyone has the perfect answer to that, but I think it could be one or all three of those, something that has passed down from generation to generation, in some way it's been effective.
Anonymous:
No, I think it, I've kind of accepted it's part of my personality and I did really find this chapter useful because my life does not have much structure at all. I thought that was really useful and I'm going to try to take that on and see if it helps to set a time to wake up and do journaling. I used to do that journal for half an hour, do a 20 minute walk, and then I do a lot of exercise and a lot of it is rhythmic, cross country skiing, mountain biking, road biking, hiking, camping and all of this. And also scheduled weights classes now. But I think I need more structure in my day and I'm going to try that and see if it helps in a set bedtime. I've recently, I've told Jenny, but I recently deleted Instagram and Facebook off my phone because I found I would get sucked into that dopamine scrolling through reels and I was disgusted to see Zuckerberg and Musk up on stage with Trump that I don't want to participate anymore as much as I can. I've done that to try to free some time up. And then the plan is to have a set bedtime and actually read a book rather than scrolling. The only other thing that I would ask is when I have this strong response, how do you identify? Most of the time I don't know what it is. I assume social anxiety, but I really don't know.
Brad:
This whole framework goes together and I'm guessing, and I don't know you and you're not my patient, but it's going to hit some in skill five and some in skill six are going to be connected to this because psychologically that's where we often define what's threat for us is our thoughts, our thought processes, our rules for living, our beliefs. And that's getting a little ahead of where we're at right now. Right now what I'm wanting you to do is you're doing a good job of clearly identifying, recognizing this process and also understanding it's a normal biological process in response to the threat that your body has. You're also really doing a good job of articulating safety, which is what I want you to, when we're working with people who are having a really strong physiological response, I told our group, we get very prescriptive about safety. We might be saying, Hey, you need to do something that's encouraging and promoting psychological safety six times a day if that's what it takes to try to get ahead of some of this. And it just depends on where we're at in our life and how much threat we're trying to balance here. It seems to me, and I don't want to overstep, but it sounds like you're balancing trying to hold a lot of threat or navigate a lot of challenges right now.
Amy:
Somebody said, I try not to take things personally and I have a line, life is personal. And what I mean by that, there's a big spectrum of personal and we process the world personally. You could have 10 people who fell off a two story building and one cracked the thigh bone and one cracked the shin bone and one cracked a toe and another didn't crack at all. They have resilient bones, one landed on a piece of glass and they have a gouge. And if we have an open scar and somebody comes by and scrapes it, we don't get to decide that that scar doesn't affect us. But what we could do is mentally be in a state where we're stimulating something that makes pain be less present, but somebody still scraped a scar, which will always be different than somebody scraping something that's not a scar.
It's like if somebody smashed something over and it broke and it belonged to a dead relative, the fact that that broke is personal because it's a dead relative and I can't get it back, but their motive might've not been personal. There's a big difference between saying with someone's motive personal, and did this rub against all of my sense three nerves in a way that it's stimulating something for me that it wouldn't stimulate to someone else that doesn't have the same open wound or doesn't have the same, their dead relative didn't own that piece, they just bought it at a secondhand store. I think personal is on a spectrum and I think when we feel something intensely, I think there is a piece that's personal, but sometimes I think our society likes to blame somebody. Immediately, if it feels personal, we also tend to time motives and intentions is personal at the same time and the amplification of personal will be a lot less.
If we can separate those and say something that interacts with me personally and it feels icky, I might still be able to have a safe relationship with them. This might not have been deliberate, this might not have been towards me. And I think that nuance is valuable because sometimes we don't even give ourselves permission to say that that scrape on an open wound was meaningful because we have to not take it personally. This is a way to kind of say there's a spectrum and there's nuance in what personal is. And then even with processing things like when things are surprising, we might be more likely to cry. I process with tears or my breath because I don't have a memory of feelings. And I know other people in my field the way they process when they work with people. Breath can be a big thing, but tears is often a surprise because if you think of visual memory, if you have a bike and a car and they're five feet apart and you see them and then you see them four feet apart and you see them three feet apart, if you forgot where they were five feet apart and you forgot where they were three feet apart, you might not see that the trajectory is about the crash.
The same thing with a kinesthetic or feeling memory. If we only feel in the moment and we can't feel where it was two seconds ago or a day ago or a week ago, we can't feel a trajectory. For people like me, that means that more things are a surprise and it's not because you can't name an emotion as well. It's because we can't stack the feelings in our being the same, to see a direction something's moving emotionally. That's a separate thing than being able to name sadness or anxiety and fear. It's being able to feel the nuance of the trajectory of a moving relationship and impact and feelings building. It jumps from it being subtle to suddenly being strong and we couldn't monitor the progression. Sometimes that could be a reason for some of us as to why we might be more likely to suddenly cry or suddenly feel something intensely. And people think it came from nowhere and it's because we couldn't process the nuance of where the direction something was going on a feeling level.
Jenny:
Feelings are next.
I think that's perfect. Brad, was that a good sort of segue to what's coming next?
Brad:
I'm ready to see what comes next. Yep. And staying focused on the skill each week.
