Throughout this week and last, my heart has been heavy. Every time I snuggle my face into my children, I feel tremendous gratitude for them and grief for the world they live in. Last week in The United States we had a racially motivated mass shooting. This week, we had a mass shooting at an elementary school that left children dead. Hearts are broken, yet little is changing.
It is obvious that we need legislation to make assault guns inaccessible. On a personal level how do we deal with this or anything like it ? Could we use our biology to help us?
If we look at this type of hate and aggression from a nervous system perspective, it can help us make sense of what we are witnessing, and what we are feeling too. It doesn’t change the horror, but it can be useful for processing it and staying engaged instead of ignoring or numbing out. After all isn’t staying engaged is what’s needed to create a better world?
Evolutionary biologists tell us that our social nervous systems have evolved to interact with a group as large as 150 people. Imagine knowing what is going on with your community of 100-150 people. Think of an event when you were in a group about this size.
I had 100 people at my wedding. I had a personal, emotional connection to each and every person there. If you take your group in mind, you would be able to track that group of 100 over time. There would be enough adversity, and success to keep you mentally, and emotionally engaged. Yes, you would be overwhelmed with emotion at times, but can you imagine being able to keep track and process your emotions in those relationships? It would be possible to register connection both mentally and emotionally to that group in appropriate and varying degrees. You would be closer and more emotionally bonded to some more than others, but you could hold the capacity to care and process that care for a larger group.
Contrast that to what most of us experience daily. We have news and nearly instant information for a group of 7.9 billion people. We cannot process a connection that large in an intimate way, nor in a biological way.
We often feel something for strangers – compassion, like many of us do this week. We can emotionally relate to what they are going through. I have school age children so it is easy to relate to the families who have suffered. But in order to stay connected and present to what we are feeling, we need to take in what we can digest, bite by bite on a manageable scale. We can’t register 7.9 billion connections at once without overwhelming our nervous system.
We know we are connected globally, each of us affecting the other, but we can actively connect face to face within our local communities to make positive change. Is this what they mean by “Think Globally. Act Locally?”
Freeze
Through the pandemic, we have been in an enforced ‘freeze’ state. We were cut off from one another, not allowed to move freely, not able to read each other’s facial expressions, and on alert from an invisible threat. We could do a few things to ‘fight’ the virus, but we could not flee its invisible presence in the air we breathe. All we could do is mask and isolate.
Here we are, a few years later, witnessing ourselves and others coming out of freeze. There are destructive ways and healthy ways to come out of freeze.
Under threat, a person will first try to find help. If there is no help or group to go to for safety, the next thing a person will try is to flee or fight. If you cannot escape or fight, then you will go to freeze. Keep in mind – freeze is an involuntary response.
People often feel shame around freeze, I know I have, but it is totally involuntary. It is the body’s way of surviving when other options don’t work.
Freeze is what people experience, especially under life-threatening circumstances, when you feel trapped, that you have no way out. You’re not fast enough to run, you’re not big enough and strong enough to fight. Women tend to experience it in a lot of circumstances.
Freeze can look like a lot of things – motionless, averted gaze or gaze locked on something, breathing can be rapid and shallow, jaw clenching, and Increased heart rate to name a few.
We have all frozen at times in our lives, come out of it and processed it. And we all have unprocessed freeze – where the chemical cycle in the nervous system has not been completed. When we do not come out of freeze in a biological and healthy way, destructive behaviors can come in. A person can swing into extreme unhealthy state of annihilation and rage.
This is what Al Pesso, a somatic psychologist called ‘being in entity’. We all have a capacity to go into entity – a state of overblown emotion, illogical thinking, feeling super human. We will go to that state for many reasons, but to put it simply, it is common when we did not receive proper containment from our caregivers when we expressed and acted out certain feelings.
Imagine a toddler throwing a fit. There are kind simple ways to try to handle the toddler and allow them to stay safe and for you to remain safe when they have a temper tantrum. Now imagine instead of remaining calm, you yell at the toddler and using your own anger to shut down their anger? Many of us have done this, sadly I know I have. All it does is break the connection to the child and force them to bury the emotion they were trying to express.
Another common response is to ignore a child having a fit. Sometimes we send them to their room , walk away or leave them. Maybe that was the best we could do, it was for me at times, but sometimes we are sending the message “I can’t handle this.” Which in turn tells the child that whatever they are feeling – they need to handle it alone. Again – the child goes to a type of freeze in the nervous system.
If you are like me and you have done this with your children – maybe take a beat and notice how you feel. Defensive, sad, or you think what I am saying is silly. Just notice where it lands in your body. I named what I have done to help process instead of shutting it down.
At our best, we would stay in the room, make sure everyone was safe and stay connected to the child. The message is “I hear you. You can’t hit, but you can be angry.” That way the child can feel all the feelings and learn to tolerate what they feel.
Tolerating what we feel is a SUPER helpful skill to build. None of our parents were perfect. None of us are perfect.
The good news is that we can build our capacity to tolerate uncomfortable feelings and pleasurable ones. Learning to relate. Connect to and tolerate what we feel helps us stay connected, and present. It helps us come out of or not go into freeze.
What is so hard about coming out of freeze is that it can EASILY pop into rage, anger, and annihilation easily. None of us really wants to feel that, so we shut down again.
The key is building our capacity to stay connected to ourselves, our sensations and what we feel. We can all learn to slowly do this and move through anything we feel without harming ourselves or anyone else in the process.
This week I was in a class with a teacher – we practiced a simple exercise to move out of freeze.
Give it a try – move your eyes around your space. Look at things a little in the distance. If you can look outside at the natural world. Scan the area with a soft gaze, allow your eyes to rest in your skull. Move your head and neck too as you look around. When you are ready, land on something. Name it and look at it. Notice your breath. Then close your eyes and notice an internal sensation. Just notice it. Name it. Return to opening your eyes and scanning the area allowing your head and neck to move too. Land on something else one more time, and name it. Notice your breath.
You can do this anytime. Build your capacity to track both the external environment and your internal landscape. Knowing what you feel as you look around your world with a soft gaze may seem simple, but it is something humans evolved to do over eons. When you move with your biology, you are in support of yourself.
