Transcript: Your Self-Regulation Toolkit Part 1: Regulating The Freeze Response
Michele Christensen 00:04
Welcome back to Sex.Love.Power. I'm Michele Christensen. I invite you here each week to join this conversation, because if we're going to have amazing relationships in this intense climate, and given how complex bright ambitious people are, we need to talk about the nuances of love and sex and power, and our own wild hearts, bodies and minds. This podcast is where I drop the seeds that grow our crucial conversations. You talk back by DMing me on social media or leaving a message at 206-659-9865 or inside the episode thread on our Mighty Network, which you can join at Conscious Couples’ Circle. The number and the link are in the show notes.
Today, we've got part two of our conversation about your nervous system and how to make the most of it so that you can settle down. I'm sharing the second part of my conversation with my dear friend Jessica Pullins, PhD. Jessica is a clinical psychologist who specializes in the treatment of trauma. Self regulation, learning how to calm down, is a big part of what she does with her patients. And as the two of us talked about our own experiences with self-regulation, and how to use our whole nervous system to move ourselves up the ladder of self-regulation from a frozen state to be able to access a "fight or flight" state and ultimately, to be able to access the most responsive, connected places, we broke our conversation up into two episodes. This is the second part of that conversation. Enjoy!
Jessica Pullins 01:37
Great to be back, Michele. Hi!
Michele Christensen 01:39
Hey, Jess.
Jessica Pullins 01:40
So last time, we talked about polyvagal theory, we talked about the three different sections. The upside down traffic light was the image that we used. The green light at the top is the social engagement place in the nervous system where we feel safe, where we can connect with others, we feel at ease. We're really our best self in that space. The yellow light is fight or flight, the red light is the freeze response. That's what we spoke about last week, in a lot of detail, not only what it feels like and looks like but ways you can sort of hack that response, if you've decided that you aren't actually facing a serious threat. And you can sort of move your body into a place of better regulation and ultimately, to a place of safety.
Michele Christensen 02:22
Yeah.
Jessica Pullins 02:23
Today, we're going to spend more time focusing on the "fight or flight" response and how to recognize it in yourself and what to do when you're in it. And also some ways that, like we spoke about last week, it can impact our personal relationships and our intimate relationships, probably in ways that we don't intend and we don't like. If you're in fight or flight, your amygdala has decided that you are not in mortal danger enough so that you have to freeze. You're not necessarily in enough shame so that you have to freeze. But there is a threat present: you've perceived a threat. And there may also be an emotional threat present, I think of this more in the sort of guilt zone, rather than the shame zone. There's a whole range of emotions that can trigger someone into fight or flight, but fight or flight looks like either a person getting up and leaving (flight, right?), a person running out of the room, or it looks like a person is charging at you essentially, and that could be physically or that could be verbally. If a person is raising his or her voice, they are in fight. Okay, they're in fight or flight. Let me say it's really important actually: our brain does a split second decision making process. When there's a perceived threat, the brain says, "Can I outrun this?" Because it wants to do flight first, it's the least expensive for your body. It's the safest for your body.
Michele Christensen 03:55
It's the rabbit or deer approach, right?
Jessica Pullins 03:57
Yes, exactly. Right. "Can I outrun this? Can I escape it?" If the answer is yes, you escape it. If the answer is no, then your brain immediately says "Can I overpower this?" And if the answer is yes, you go into flight, and if the answer is no, you go into freeze. "I can't escape it. I can't overpower it."
Michele Christensen 04:18
Okay, so if I can escape it, I'm gonna run. If I can't escape it, I'm gonna to ask, "Can I overpower it?" If I can overpower it, I'm going to fight.
Jessica Pullins 04:28
Yes.
Michele Christensen 04:28
If I can't overpower it, I'm gonna shut down.
Jessica Pullins 04:32
I'm gonna shut down and tried to protect my vital organs and survive, right? I freeze.
Michele Christensen 04:37
I'm going to go fetal now.
Jessica Pullins 04:38
I'm gonna go fetal. Exactly. So that's the process that happens every single time we have one of these states, turn on, okay? So if you're in flee, you have decided that you can escape this threat and so you're either getting up and walking out of the room, or you're sort of saying, "No, I don't want to talk about this," and you leave but you're getting yourself away from the perceived threat. If your mind has decided that you can't get away from the perceived threat, and that it thinks you can probably overpower the threat, you're going to come out swinging. Probably verbally, probably by volume, hopefully not physically, right? So a raised voice, a puffed up big body posture, big movements. We have facial expressions that go with fight, right? Raised eyes.
Michele Christensen 05:27
Is that right? (tough tone)
Jessica Pullins 05:28
Do we? (both laugh)
Michele Christensen 05:30
I just made big eyes at her! (both laughing)
Jessica Pullins 05:32
Doing it right now! We're thumping chests right now, right? Just think about anytime you've seen two men in a disagreement, they go right up to each other chest to chest, face to face, hands balled into fists. They are in fight mode. And their brains are deciding, "Can I overpower this?" Right? (Laugh)
Michele Christensen 05:51
Or "Can we at least make this person think that I can overpower them?"
Jessica Pullins 05:53
Yeah, exactly.
Michele Christensen 05:54
And it's subtler in intimate relationships. Because our ways of overpowering have more to do with our detailed maps that we all have of "What will back my partner off?"
Jessica Pullins 06:07
That's right. "What button can I push that is gonna get this person to crumple," right?
Michele Christensen 06:13
I'm just going to kind of kneecap 'em.
Jessica Pullins 06:14
And we aren't doing that on purpose.
Michele Christensen 06:15
I'm just gonna get them to back off or at least buy some time.
Jessica Pullins 06:19
That's exactly right. And to use the same idea we used before with the stonewalling: When we're in this state, we're not trying to hurt people. We're not thinking "how can I..." Well, that's not exactly true. We actually are trying to think, "How can I hurt people?" But that's not because that's who we are, our nervous system is.
Michele Christensen 06:38
Yeah.
Jessica Pullins 06:39
That's exactly right.
Michele Christensen 06:41
An example from a client from the other day: they got into an argument. He said, "I don't like it when you do this to me." And she said, "Well, but you always do that to me." So if I can shift the blame, I'm feeling blamed, that's got me in a fight or flight reactivity. And if I can deflect the attention over to things you've done wrong, then maybe we don't have to talk about what I did in this situation, or how it made you feel.
Jessica Pullins 07:09
That's right. And one of the ways I know I'm in fight or flight and it is such a dick move: My voice will actually get very calm and steady, and I will bust out the biggest vocabulary words that I know to try to intimidate the other person. I used to do that to a previous partner, who I knew would get scrambled by that. And it's such a dicky thing to do, but it was a way of overpowering, right? "I can't out think you, I'm going to demonstrate right now that I think I'm smarter than you. You cannot win this fight."
Michele Christensen 07:41
Yes. It takes a lot of self awareness for you to say that because I think a lot of articulate people would go, "What? I'm just using a calm voice, I'm being reasonable." "Oh, do you want me to use a smaller vocab? I need to dumb myself down to relate to this person." Right?
Jessica Pullins 07:56
Um hmm. (Laugh)
Michele Christensen 07:56
So you can really claim this like unassailable moral high ground there,
Jessica Pullins 08:01
Right.
Michele Christensen 08:01
But you have enough self awareness to recognize, "Be it as it may, I have a big vocabulary and I'm capable of speaking calmly even when I'm upset. I just weaponized that."
Jessica Pullins 08:10
That's exactly what I was doing. And so I know now when that starts happening, "Wait a minute, I'm in fight, I need to do something to regulate myself. Nothing good is gonna come from this conversation. And I might actually corrode my relationship with this person."
Michele Christensen 08:26
Yes, that phrase, "Nothing good can come" saved our relationship. It was probably not long after we got married. Maybe 2002, 2003, Kurt and I began to recognize that we would get into fight or flight and we would have these horrible, horrible arguments. And I didn't want to let them go. Maybe I thought that I could overpower him? (laughs) So I wasn't running. I wasn't going to run. I didn't care how late it got. We were going to hash this shit out all night. I think Lionel Richie has a song about it, "All night. All night long!" (Singing)
Jessica Pullins 09:00
(Laughs)
Michele Christensen 09:00
But it's not a party song in our case at all.
Jessica Pullins 09:03
It's not! No! No.
Michele Christensen 09:04
It was so bad. And it was such a relief. We still didn't know what to do instead, but it was such a relief to get out of fighting all ding dang night. And to recognize "Oh, no more good can come from continuing to talk about this now. Both of us are flooded. We're triggered and our lids are flipped." And now I know it's like, dorsal vagal, right?
Jessica Pullins 09:33
Mm hmm. Mm hmm. No, you're in fight in that mode.
Michele Christensen 09:35
Okay, right.
Jessica Pullins 09:36
You're in fight. You're not in freeze because you're fighting: you have words. So you're in fight and you're fighting for survival.
Michele Christensen 09:42
But he was frozen. Yeah. We're fighting for survival.
Jessica Pullins 09:44
Yes, he was frozen. He was frozen. You were in fight because you were still going for it verbally, right? And the more he froze, probably the more you fought and the more you fought the more he froze.
Michele Christensen 09:55
The more the more.
Jessica Pullins 09:57
The more the more.
Michele Christensen 09:59
The more you do this, the more I do that, yeah. And so if you can relate to that story just know that that's really a good first step: just to recognize, "Oh, wow, we do this dance over and over, and it only and always ever makes things worse."
Jessica Pullins 10:17
Absolutely.
Michele Christensen 10:18
We're damaging our love, and we're damaging our will to go back with each other and try again.
Jessica Pullins 10:24
And you're damaging your bodies.
Michele Christensen 10:27
Yes.
Jessica Pullins 10:27
There's a cascade of stress chemicals that happens whenever we're in these states. It does actual harm to us. It's expensive. If you're locked in battle with your partner all the time, it's costing you. It's costing you physical health and longevity to be in that state. So if you think about it, by calling a timeout, or saying, "Let's take a break. We'll come back to this when we're calmer." That is, to your mind, escaping. All of a sudden you've gone back up the decision tree. "I get to escape from this threat, I'm going to just go into a different room and lie down with a blanket, do some deep breathing, he's going to go over there, go to the man cave," whatever it is. Your nervous system gets to start calming down when you are out of each other's presence, when you're unlocked from the fight and you start regulating. You go back up to "I've just escaped the threat." It's one of the hardest things that people learn in couples work and in relationships is when you are in battle, stop and go to your corners.
Michele Christensen 11:30
(Laughs) That's right.
Jessica Pullins 11:32
Nothing good will come from continuing it. Cooler heads prevail. Go get regulated.
Michele Christensen 11:37
Yeah.
Jessica Pullins 11:38
And with time you'll learn to co regulate, which is magical.
Michele Christensen 11:41
It is.
Jessica Pullins 11:42
But go get yourself regulated so that you can return to this person who you love with love to sort these things out, right?
Michele Christensen 11:50
The journey of becoming that co-regulating source of comfort to one another, even when one or both of you are upset begins with stopping the bloodshed.
Jessica Pullins 12:01
That's right.
Michele Christensen 12:02
People who are in that place where that's just what they're learning how to do, often think of this as like, "I can't let go! If I let go of this, I'm conceding that it's okay that he's so toxic for me!" Errr....It's not that he's toxic for you or that you're toxic for him. The dance you two do is a toxic dance. So let's quit that! You have gorgeous shoes, both of you. We're just doing the wrong steps here. (both laugh) I just want to extend so much compassion because we learned this stuff in homes where maybe nobody knew how to communicate effectively. And maybe you inherited a really intensely sensitive reactive nervous system, like I did. Or maybe yours is a little less jangle-prone than mine. But regardless, if you haven't known how to get through emotionally stimulating situations without dropping into these states that are less resourceful, of course you've repeated the same patterns.
Jessica Pullins 13:04
You don't have a choice.
Michele Christensen 13:05
So just very gently start right here.
Jessica Pullins 13:06
Yeah, you don't have a choice. And I like to think of it as once you become aware of yourself in these states and the ways that you might stay stuck in them because of engaging with a person around and around. I like to think of it as "I'm going to choose not to participate in this anymore in this way. Because it diminishes me. it diminishes him and it diminishes me or her, it diminishes me. I don't like who I am in this state. I want to bring my best self to this relationship. To do that I need to be regulated because when I'm regulated, I am at the height of my self awareness of my compassion of my soul. I can bring my best self when I am regulated and feeling safe. And that's what I want for my relationship."
Michele Christensen 13:55
"I want my behavior to match my identity," right?
Jessica Pullins 13:58
Right, right.
Michele Christensen 13:58
I identify with that bigger, loving, generous, spacious, resilient person. And then when I get like this with you up in the middle of this stuff, I don't like who I am or how I am. And I need to be able to stay in a place of my own integrity.
Jessica Pullins 14:13
That's right. Let's loop back quickly just to our sort of opposite idea with fight or flight. So when we're in fight or flight, our faces are kind of squished up in a grimace or threat. Our fists are balls or our balls might be fisted too...
Michele Christensen 14:26
Our balls are fisted. (both laugh)
Jessica Pullins 14:30
We are having rapid, shallow breath. Our hearts are racing. Our muscles are tight and tense, preparing to either run for our lives or to physically fight. And so start thinking about what are the opposite things to that? If we're having rapid shallow breath, we need to be doing slow, steady, deep breath, preferably belly breathing or diaphragmatic breathing. Probably the first thing, most effective thing we can do to stop the fight or flight progression. If your hands are in fists, notice that, open your hands and relax them, even shake your hands. I'm shaking my hands in my arms right now. Shaking, shaking, shaking, shaking is actually a way to get out of fight or flight because it kind of starts to discharge the stress chemicals from your body. Another thing you can do is if you're in tight tense muscles because you're in fight or flight is to try to go someplace and flop. Flop on a couch, flop on a bed, flop on the carpet, right?
Michele Christensen 15:27
Repeatedly, if needed!
Jessica Pullins 15:29
Flop flop!
Michele Christensen 15:30
Flop again!
Jessica Pullins 15:32
Flop again, McFloppigans! Warm, loose, wet spaghetti muscles is what you want, right? And then because your mind reads your face, and your body to know what state it's in, relax your face, smooth your forehead, smooth your cheeks, unclench your jaw, (making ahhh-ah-aaaah-aaahh-aah sound), move your jaw around loose in your face. If you can do that, if you can get into a posture of relaxation, when you're in fight or flight while you are diaphragmatically breathing, your body is going to decide "Oh, she could only be doing this if she was safe. So she must be safe. I'm gonna start calming down now."
Michele Christensen 16:16
Yes. And quite literally the face and the ears are directly connected to the vagus nerve. And so are the other cranial nerves, so by rubbing and pulling on your ears or smoothing your face with your hands, you can directly soothe those nerves and talk back to your nervous system to say we're safe and all as well. Why don't I love it.
Jessica Pullins 16:42
One of my other favorite tricks for stimulating the vagus nerve is called "Voo breath." And so when you're doing your deep breathing, see if you can actually say the word "voo" while vibrating your throat. That will massage your vagus nerve and it will turn on a parasympathetic relaxation response. So, nice deep breath. (making inahling sound). "Vooooooo." And I feel it in my throat. I can feel my whole throat vibrating. I would do that for maybe five minutes at a time. Nice deep breath in. Breath out. "OM" can do it, right? Yeah. And gargling. Gargling liquids, which is fun. It is fun. And my favorite of all time laughing. Guess what laughing is, laughing is stimulating the vagus nerve. So if you are in a situation that you're so enraged that you can't laugh, take a break, do some breathing, flop your body, and then go turn on a funny movie or go turn on stand up comedy. My boyfriend when he is having insomnia due to stress at work, he will turn on stand up comedy, start laughing, and he's asleep in five minutes. It's because the laughter has turned on his relaxation response.
Michele Christensen 17:58
Isn't that amazing how we're designed?
Jessica Pullins 18:00
It's incredible! And it's incredible that all these things that we do are all little secret wonderful keys to self-regulation, and we're not even aware of it. Singing, and especially singing joyful music with your arms up in the air will actually get you out of fight or flight. So for example, gospel music, or Beethoven's Ode to Joy or some wonderful song that makes you sing with your whole body with a smile on your face.
Michele Christensen 18:28
Anything Michael Franti.
Jessica Pullins 18:30
Yeah. (Laugh) That's exactly! "Laaaa!" So that's gonna get you up into your social engagement safety part of your vagus response.
Michele Christensen 18:42
Awesome! Well, this is such a great little toolkit that you've introduced. And in the show notes, you'll find the links, everybody, to get to a condensation of the tips that Jess has given so that you can begin to build these into your day for non-emergency situations. And that you can build a little toolkit that you can kind of "break the glass in case of emergency" when you're finding that you're in freeze, or you're in fight or flight and you want to get back to that state where you can connect and stay connected to yourself and to your partner. So thank you so much Jess. What an amazing conversation.
Jessica Pullins 19:20
Sounds good. You're a rock star. Yay! So are you. Thank you. I wish I could hug you. Hug a hug a hug. (Laugh)
Michele Christensen 19:27
Bye! I love you.
Jessica Pullins 19:28
Bye, I love you too.
Michele Christensen 19:31
I hope you found these two episodes about your self regulation valuable. The more you practice noticing what state you're in and using the right tools for the job to move yourself up from a freeze to an activated response and on up to a connected place, where your best self is accessible, the easier it's going to get and the more resilient you'll feel. My entire outlook on relationships changed when I began to learn and practice these skills. I hope it does the same for you. Now for a concrete written set of these ideas that we discussed here, please download the handy guide that we'll link to in the show notes. I also want to invite you to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode. Please go to Apple podcasts or wherever you listen and hit the subscribe button so that you always get notifications of new episodes each week. And if you've enjoyed this or other episodes, what would help me and the podcast immensely is if you would leave a review, particularly on Apple podcasts, because those are a huge help in finding new listeners and growing the positive impact these conversations can have. So please go leave a review right now with a few words about what the show gives you. I would so appreciate it.
And that's it for this week. till we're here again. I'll see you in the Conscious Couples’ Circle at society.lisenbury.com, or you can leave me your stories and insights at 206-659-9865. I want so much for you in love, in bed and in your sweet heart, mind and body. This podcast is how I do my best to help you have more pleasure, more centeredness, more resilience and more lightness. Thank you for the honor of your time to listen. I hope today's lesson has given you inspiration, clarity and ideas for how you can grow your capacity for self regulation. I'll see you back here same time next week. Until then, may the light within you illuminate the world around you.