Self-Regulation Toolkit Part I: Regulating The Freeze Response

Hello, gorgeous. Welcome back to Sex Love Power. I'm Michelle Lizenberry Christensen and I invite you here each week to join this conversation. Because if we're going to have amazing relationships, especially in this intense climate, and given how complex, bright, ambitious people like you and me 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 to grow our crucial conversations. You talk back by dming me on social media or leaving me a message at 206-659-9865 or inside the episode thread on our mighty network, the Secret Society, which you can join@society.lizenberry.com the phone number and the link are in the show notes. Now today we're going to talk about your nervous system and how to make the most of it so you can settle the F down. My dear friend Jessica Pullens, Ph.D. is back because in episode five we were on a roll talking about intensity. Jessica, or Dr. Pullens as she is sometimes known, is a clinical psychologist who specializes in the treatment of trauma. Self regulation, also known as learning how to calm the fuck down, is a big part of what she does with patients. And she is, like me, the proud owner of a sensitive nervous system. We've both learned a lot about how to self regulate. Now, how do you know you need this episode today? Well, maybe you find yourself reacting in ways you'd like to change and that maybe you don't even feel like you sometimes, or you get jangled by the events of your day, the people around you, or just life and you want to fight or run away, or you sometimes feel frozen or maybe you simply have a nervous system. If you have a nervous system, this episode is going to be helpful. And finally, maybe you want to learn to understand why you respond the way you do and start to think about what you could do to improve those responses. So let's dive in. Hey, Jess.

Hi Michelle. So happy to be with you.

Thank you so much for having this conversation with us.

Thanks for having me back. I love talking with you and your audience.

So where do we start with this whole nervous system business? A lot of people don't even know really what we're talking about or how it's relevant.

Sure, I often start with what most people already know, which is just the term fight or flight. I think almost everybody has heard fight or flight, and we think about it in terms of the physical responses that go with fight or flight. So our blood pressure goes up, our heart starts beating, so that we can send blood to the extremities to get ready to either run for our lives or punch somebody in the face. Our pupils dilate so we can see threat better. Our hearing gets more acute. All these changes happen in microseconds when our amygdala perceives threat in our environment. And threat could be anything from a car driving straight at you, a tiger running down the road toward you, your boss raising his or her voice at you, being excluded from a social situation, a stressful meeting, a presentation, a child crying. I mean, in our current lives, we have perceived threats everywhere. So I think everybody knows for the most part about fight or flight. But there's an actually much more kind of complex thing at work, and it's summed up nicely by something called the polyvagal theory. So should I just go into that?

Yeah.

Great.

And actually, before we do that, let's look at what is the amygdala. You know, it's kind of like the police scanner of the brain, Right. It's this little structure. But tell people more if you go amygdala, I think maybe I've heard of that, but is that my elbow?

Real quick? It might be in my elbow. The amygdala is a little almond shaped structure kind of in the center of the brain that is responsible for perceiving threat, among other things, and turning on this powerful immediate nervous system response that is designed to ensure our survival. The amygdala is kind of the computer center that runs the autonomic nervous system, which is one half of that is the fight or flight response. I'll say. So it's basically just this structure in the brain that's responsible for keeping you alive, among other structures that do that. But this is the one that keeps you alive from perceived threats and danger and from real threats and danger.

That's a really key point, is that this is what it feels like to the nervous system, is that all of these perceived threats are life or death issues. Right. This is a survival instinct. Yeah. Okay, so let's look at the polyvagal theory.

So the polyvagal theory was developed by Stephen Porges, who is at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was at some other places as well. Polyvagal theory centers on the vagus nerve. And the vagus nerve is a cranial nerve. So it's a nerve at the back of your neck. And it comes down from your brain. It comes out around the 10th cervical vertebrae. And it is responsible for the opposite of the fight or flight response, which is called the Rest and digest, or the rest and relax, or the rest and repair response. In our nervous system jargon, the autonomic nervous system is divided into the sympathetic and the parasympathetic branches. Sympathetic is fight or flight. Parasympathetic is best thought of as immobility. So immobility can either be a freeze response where we're immobile with fear, we're paralyzed with fear, or immobility with safety can be a deep, wonderful, relaxed response. So, for example, if you've done a wonderful hard yoga session, it could be corpse pose. When you're done, right, you're immobile with contentment, with relaxation. Or it could be the feeling you have when you're snuggled with your partner after having sex. Sexual release and connection. You are mobile with intimacy, with love. So the parasympathetic, yeah, it occurs to.

Me that's the intent of asana practice in yoga, is to get you. I never put it together in this neurobiology sense, but it's to get you to a place where you can go into deep rest and meditation, get your body filled all the way out so you can really go within.

And well, after accessing the sympathetic nervous system, fight or flight a bit in the asanas, right? So that you can actually, with breath, with pranayama, with the asanas Warrior pose, for example, is not a relaxing pose. That's a pose that's designed to activate the nervous system. But after you activate the nervous system, at the end of the practice, you regulate the nervous system using the parasympathetic side. And so yoga is a wonderful place. And there's other practices like tai chi and qigong and all those just wonderful things that are all focused on regulating the nervous system. So the vagus nerve comes out at the back of the neck and it essentially splits into two branches. This is what Dr. Porges says in polyvagal theory, there's a sort of older branch. You can almost think of it as like the lizard branch, the reptile branch. So the dorsal vagal response, the vagus nerve splits. Part of it enervates sort of the top half of the body above the diaphragm. That's called the ventral vagal complex. Part of it innervates the body below the diaphragm, and that's called the dorsal vagal complex. So I like to think about this as an upside down stoplight. Instead of having green at the bottom, yellow in the middle, and red at the top, picture an upside down stoplight so that green is at the top, yellow is in the middle and red is at the bottom. That's essentially how your nervous system functions. Green at the top is safe. It's safe to proceed. Everything's clear. Right? Yellow in the middle is fight or flight. There's danger possibly here. Proceed with caution. Red at the bottom is. We're in real trouble. Stop, freeze. So the dorsal vagal complex is responsible for. Stop, freeze. That's the red light. Everything stops. The ventral vagal complex at the top is responsible for the green light. We're good, we're content, our thoughts are flowing, we feel safe. We have eye contact with people. We're all flowy and blissed out. Right.

We can connect. Right?

We can connect.

We have to be in the green light place to.

Yes, to connect, period. And in fact, Dr. Porges calls that the social engagement system. So to be able to socially engage with others, we need to be in a felt place of safety in the nervous system. And that is when the parasympathetic nervous system is turned on at the high level in polyvagal theory. Yeah.

And so there are a lot of people who say, you know, I just need a lot of alone time, or I just get to a place where I need to go away and relax and chill and they don't recognize. Your nervous system is tweaked, you know that.

Absolutely. Right, yes.

Gone into a state where you can't connect. But that's not. It's not that you're an introvert, you know, it's not a.

But that's not a trait, it's a state. Yeah, exactly. So in psychology we talk about state versus trait. So trait is fixed aspect of yourself or your personality. State is a temporary situation. So their nervous system states. We're constantly flowing among them and between them. And at any moment in a day, we could be in any of the three states, depending on what's happening in our environment or in our minds. So, yeah, and you have called it jangled. And I find that such a useful term because jangled for me means a very specific kind of feeling in my body. And when I feel it, I can say, oh, I'm jangled. I need to go self regulate. And that corresponds with a specific state in my nervous system when I go self regulate. And for me it does involve being alone and sometimes having heavy things on me. And we can talk about that in a second. It takes about 20 to 30 minutes for that to clear. And then I'm regulated and then I can go back out and be my normal self because I'm back up in my social engagement, parasympathetically oriented system. Yeah.

So that's an example of the skillful use of solitude to regulate. But a lot of people, when they first come to me, they're not going away to do the things they know, help them climb back up the ladder to where they can connect. They're just going away. They're just succumbing to that freeze response.

Well, we don't have a choice. So one thing I really want to make sure people understand is this is not a matter of willpower or mind over matter or even skill. We don't get to decide when our minds turn these responses on. We can only recognize them once we're in them and start doing things to try to kind of hack the response. But even in.

That's what I mean. It's just making the decision and recognizing it. Because so often that's why I want to have this conversation is because people don't have the whole vocabulary you're introducing to be able to recognize, oh, I'm in a state and this. I can't control whether I'm in this state or not and what do I need in the state, they haven't known how to really ask or how to get what they needed.

Exactly. And furthermore, when we're in a freeze state and even when we're in a fight or flight state, words are less available to us. And in a freeze state, we can barely speak. And that's because our prefrontal cortex is offline. It's turned off. Bye. Bye. So we literally can't ask for what we need in that state. And we have to regulate enough to get to a place where we can say, I need 15 minutes of alone time, please. That's actually in almost a higher state than even in a freeze response. So, yeah. Would it be useful to kind of go over some of the flavors of the different states so people can maybe recognize.

Yes.

What those are.

Learning to name it is kind of the first step. Right. Being able to notice.

Oh, wait.

Or at least in retrospect.

Right.

That's where I find people are able to start, is to be able to go, what happened yesterday?

Oh, that's right.

Not what's happening right now. Because that's. It takes a bit of skill.

That's pretty high level stuff. Yeah, exactly. It'd be nice if it weren't. I love that. I know. So that's a perfect place to start. It's not what's happening right now. It's, wait a minute, what happened to me yesterday and then as you get more accustomed to noticing your own states, you will nudge closer and closer to awareness of the state when you're in it. Even now, with all the knowledge that I have and lots of practice that I have, it'll take me a good 15 minutes to an hour to recognize that I'm in a freeze state, and faster if I'm in fight or flight. But don't beat yourself up if you can't do this quickly. Hindsight is amazing here, and that's all we need to start.

Yeah, I call it unraveling or working backwards.

It's really about I get to see.

Why did that happen? How did that happen? And then we can eventually learn how to change some of the conditions around us to reduce the frequency and the intensity of the ways we get knocked into those states. But at first, it's really just being able to do some forensic recognition.

Exactly, yeah. Some detective work. Right. And you can only do the detective work once you're in a safer state than your nervous system, by the way. You really can't kind of understand this and parse it when you're in freeze, because again, prefrontal cortex, where you do your high level thinking as offline. Let's talk about the freeze state a little bit.

What's it like?

You've never experienced that, have you? You're a free state virgin. Yeah.

Freeze free zone.

So after working with lots and lots and lots of people who have trauma, and being a person who's experienced trauma myself, I think the freeze state is triggered by two things. They can overlap or they can happen discreetly. The first thing is it is triggered when the mind perceives a situation that's not just threatening, but that's actually terrifying. So terror can trigger a free state. Terror is subjective. Okay? So one person's terror may not be another person's terror. So, for example, I get terrified of public speaking. There are many people who can do that. Another person gets terrified of hang gliding. There are many people who can do that. It's all subjective. The second thing that can trigger a freeze response is shame. I think actually that shame is a form of internal terrorism. But shame can trigger a freeze response as well. Because we feel so profoundly broken, so profoundly bad about ourselves, that our minds and nervous systems essentially get hijacked in that state. And so what can happen is, as I mentioned a couple times, prefrontal cortex goes completely offline. That means we can't think clearly. Our thoughts feel slow and muddy. We might even feel a little sort of fuzzy or Foggy. We feel physically slow. It's hard to move. It's hard to have purposeful movement. We don't feel like moving, and we might actually be somewhat paralyzed. People can have visceral responses. So your stomach may hurt. Sometimes people feel nausea. That's the dorsal vagal nerve actually trying to stop digestion. Because when you're in a freeze response, you're not trying to digest your big, luxurious lunch that you've had. You're trying to survive and not get eaten. Right?

Yeah.

People can get headachy. People can get dissociated. So the freeze response is where we dissociate. If one is a dissociator, that is where we will dissociate. That's a whole other show. But dissociation is essentially where in one form or another, you're disconnected from your body. Sort of leave your body, and it's a survival mechanism. So that if bad stuff is happening to you, you don't have to feel it directly.

You don't want to be here for this. Your brain says you might want to.

Take a little break for whatever's about to happen.

Well, I just want to highlight real quick. It's called the vagus nerve because that comes from a Latin root meaning like to wander. It's the wandering nerve. And it wanders all the way from your brain stem, where it originates, down, all the way through. Down into the lower parts of the.

Digestive system, down into the genitals, down throughout your whole body. That's right.

It can even shut down or turn on sexual response. So it has more connections. This is what's so fascinating about it to me. It really is sort of the superhighway for all of these disparate physiological symptoms that people can have, from digestion to sexual response, to cardiopulmonary reactivity, headaches, all of these things. And so just recognizing that you may not have connected the dots. You've been seeing the stars, but you haven't been seeing the constellation. And as you start to learn more about how your vagal system operates, you may start to see the ways that your body has been exhibiting either this freeze response or a fight or flight response. And how that shows up for you. And those clues can really help you untangle what state you're being sent to by various stimuli.

That's exactly right. And there are some other pieces of it, now that you say that, that I want to mention. The emotional pieces can be a sense of numbness. I believe that in many cases, depression is actually someone being Stuck in a freeze response. And something goes along with a freeze response that I've heard many of my folks say is I don't want to be alive anymore. It's very interesting. I'll have people go into a freeze response and they start having thoughts about wanting to kill themselves. They don't want to actually kill themselves. They are not suicidal the rest of the time. But there's something about being in the freeze response for some people that will give them thoughts about self harm or that will give them thoughts about essentially wanting to turn off. It's not wanting to be dead, it's wanting to turn off.

Yes. I call it escape fantasies.

Yeah, yeah.

Just wanting to get out. Like take me offline. Outside this experience.

The language we have for that is around suicide. But it's not suicidal. It's going offline. I am so terrified and overwhelmed by this circumstance. I need a break from it. That's what it is. Where is the gun? Yeah, exactly, exactly.

My ejector seat.

Abort, abort, abort, abort, abort. So that's kind of the freeze response. Everybody can have different flavors, but those are some of the essential components in it. I also think about each of these states as when your body is giving you this cascade of physical and cognitive and psychological responses to keep you safe, you then decide, actually, I am safe. You're not an immediate threat. That's when you can start doing things to try to lift yourself out of the freeze response. So whatever the freeze response does, you sort of need to do the opposite to get yourself out of it. If you are immobilized, you need to sort of start trying to move gently just a little bit. Even rocking back and forth a little bit can help. Holding your arms up in almost like a hugging yourself posture and kind of gently tapping on your shoulders a little bit can help while rocking back and forth. It's almost what you would do with a baby. Holding a baby and gently patting the baby on the back and just swaying back and forth. We're actually calming the baby's nervous system down. When we do that, we're regulating the nervous system and we can do that for ourselves as adults. If you have a safe adult available, a big huge bear hug that helps you feel safe and contained is wonderful for getting out of the freeze response. I often need to have something heavy on me, so this is where I'll lie down in the dark with a weighted blanket. Right. I need something like that.

The thing I didn't want to interject is that having a big person Lay on top of me is helpful.

I love that I have a weighted.

Blanket too because it's not always easy to grab a person right when I need one.

But yeah, it's really wonderful to lay down on a smushy surface and have your partner lay down on top of you. And that can be sexual or that can just be self regulation or even a baby or a kid or a cat or a dog. If a weighted creature can be on your torso, that seems to help calm this response down.

Yes. I think people know that, maybe they don't, that there are now sandbags on the market. You know, a smaller, more concentrated, like heavy blanket. Diane used to make heart shaped heavy bags that you could put on your heart. And I still have one and use it. And so, you know, right on your chest.

Lovely.

So you can play around with bigger or smaller. And this isn't just for the freeze response, right? This is.

No, no, no, not at all. This is also for fight or flight too. In fact, by doing these things for self care, you're actually sort of putting resilience in the bank and it'll keep you from going into a freeze response as easily if you've been really kind of at capacity lately. Right. So you can kind of regulate every day and it buys you a little bit more space before you're tipped into a freeze or fight or flight response.

And that's really the lifestyle change that I'm inviting people to like. We go along and have okay relationships, you know, and sometimes they're really great and sometimes we just want to kill our partner or leave. And you know, I just hear from women that vacillation and how we raise the floor on what it feels like to be in our relationship is to raise the floor on what it feels like to be us.

Right. And to be able to be in our own skin in a regulated state most of the time. Right.

Operate from a little bit fuller tank of self regulation to feel a little bit more even keel. Like what comes at me during the day doesn't blow me over as much as it used to.

That's right. One of my favorite strategies for getting up out of freeze response, if you've decided that you are safe, technically you're safe. You're not. An immediate harm is through the body. And that's because in freeze we're disconnected from our body out of necessity. We're dissociated where the body's kind of turned off. If you can find strategies to get back into your body via the senses that will get you grounded and calm. That's what grounding is. So the fastest way to do that is through smell, and particularly a pleasant smell. So if you have a smell that you associate with safety, with comfort, with pleasure, any of those things, have it available. If you find yourself in freeze a lot. Have essential oils on a Kleenex in your pocket available. Have a bottle of vanilla extract available. Have an orange on your counter and stick your fingernails into it and let the citrus spray spray into your nose, and it'll really smell. That smell. And smell is a powerful way of getting us back into our bodies and our senses.

Yes. And I carry both a little bitty bottle that I got in Amsterdam of perfume and will often put a stick of incense in my purse, in my computer bag, different places, so that I have that intensity. You know, you don't have to burn it to use incense.

Right, right, right. One of my favorite tricks was in my office, when I still had an office, One of my favorite tricks was to have some rose water in a little spray bottle. And if one of the folks I was working with was dissociating, I would ask permission first, and then I would spray some rose water on a Kleenex, and I would hand it to the person to smell and to say, let's just breathe in the smell. Notice your body on the couch. Notice my voice. And so getting grounded through a safe smell is a really effective way. Another tool that I like to use is a trick that I call three things. And you say this to yourselves. Three things you see deep breath. Three things you hear deep breath. Three things you feel through your skin. So, for example, I see my computer. I see my zuvet cover. I see a fan. Nice, deep breath. I hear the fan. I hear my daughter in the living room. I hear a car outside. Nice, deep breath. I feel my butt on the chair. I feel my pants on my legs. I feel my glasses on my face. Nice, deep breath. And you repeat that and repeat that and repeat that until you're actually in your body. And at some point, then you'll notice yourself feeling settled down, feeling less jangled.

Beautiful. Thank you a lot.

You're welcome. Freeze is hard to recognize. Freeze is hard to recognize. And so I feel that freeze takes a lot more practice than even fight or flight to recognize that we're in and to recognize that our loved ones are in. Because it's not just you vacillating among these states, it's everyone in your household, and it's everybody that you love because they all have nervous systems. And so you can Also practice by watching others. You can practice by watching others. Is my daughter in a free state now because she's exhibiting. XYZ is so and so in fight or flight. We can talk about fight or flight too in a minute.

This is fantastic because. Right. Like John Gottman, who's one of my greatest teachers and has wonderful stuff, he talks about stonewalling as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. One of the things that you shouldn't do in relationship. Well, if, as you said earlier, your nervous system can't help it, you can't control what state you're in. This is not who you are, it's where you've gone because of some degree of threat to you. And relationship is a scary place. So as my husband's wife, sometimes I'm scary enough to him that he does go into freeze. Something about my upset or something happening between us could send him into freeze. But then if we take Gottman without putting porges in there with in the mix and how we're thinking about it, we think that he's misbehaving from a relational standpoint by freezing, we characterize it just as stonewalling. So if you're listening to this and you have a partner who you perceive as withdrawn, he won't respond to me. I tell him something and he doesn't say anything. He just backs away. Take this filter and begin to ask, are there times when it's possible that he's gone out of any kind of activation all the way down into that red light zone of inability? He's immobilized, he's unable to respond. And can that help you have more compassion for that state? I know it's not easy for you to be with, so I have compassion for you in it. But also just recognizing it's not something he's perpetrating against you, it's something his nervous system is doing because it thinks that he is truly under threat?

That's an absolutely fantastic point, and I'm so glad you brought it up. We can start to watch our loved ones and even media. We can start to watch and see people in these different states. States. And realize we are constantly moving among these states. And when we start to see it through this lens, we can stop taking it personally and start trying to figure out, how do I help my partner regulate? How do I regulate? So that when we have things to talk about that are challenging, we can do so from a more regulated state. And we don't have to fall into these survival strategies because we feel threatened by each other. It's a fabulous point. Thank you for saying that.

It creates relationship miracles because we browbeat each other into having good communication when we're in no state to be able to do so.

We can literally communicate in that state. So we have to regulate, then communicate. Right? Then communicate. Oh boy. But it's that if you want to. Yeah, it's true.

Okay, cool. Thanks Jess.

Thanks.

I hope you found this conversation about your self regulation valuable. I hope it helps you see yourself and your partner in a new light and gives you some practical steps to take to build your capacity for self regulation and therefore for happy loving. Now, for more tips and reminders, please download the handy guide that we'll link to in the show. Notes this episode's notes are@lizenberry.com Episode 006 Go get those and then make a decision. What are you going to do to help yourself work backward from your fight flight freeze responses? What are you going to do to take care of yourself when you're in them or recovering from them? Now, eventually you'll be able to read what state you're in as well as see what state others may be in around you. And that is going to give you relational superpowers. So just stick with it. Now the final thing is, are you subscribed to this podcast? Our next episode will be part two of this conversation where we'll talk more about fight or flight and how to work with that level of activation in your nervous system. I'd hate for you to miss that episode or any other. So please go to Apple Podcast or wherever you listen, hit that subscribe button so you always get notifications of new episodes each week. That's it for this week until we're here again. I'll see you in the Secret society@society lizandberry.com or you can leave me your stories and insights at 206-659-9865. Thank you so much for welcoming me into your day and your relationship. It is truly the most intimate, inspiring privilege. I hope we've opened up some new possibilities for you in your life and your love. I'll see you here same time next week. Until then, may the light within you illuminate the world around you.