Embracing What's "Normal" and Discovering the Power to Change

Normalizing the fight, flight, freeze and fawn responses is important when it comes to understanding the basics of managing stress. They get a bad reputation due to the intensity of discomfort and dysregulation we experience as a result of them. The intense urge to fight or flight. The feeling of being stuck in situations that don’t require us to physically fight or flight. The feeling of being out of control in seasons when our nervous system is on high alert due to having learned it has to be. These are terribly uncomfortable physical sensations and feelings…sometimes feeling overwhelming, sometimes feeling numb and disconnected, etc. These responses can feel very disorienting and make you feel off balance or out of control. I want to reassure you, these are perfectly normal protective responses to experiences that cause you fear, anxiety, anger, etc. They are perfectly normal protective responses to an unhealthy and unsupportive environment, and they’re perfectly normal responses in the body of a person who’s spent a lot of time in invalidating, abusive, unsupportive, unsafe, unprotective, or unloving households. If you’re a person always feeling on edge, anxious, panicked, angry, scared, disconnected…the list goes on…even if you know you’re currently in a safe, loving and supportive space in your life, you’re normal! How you're responding is normal! Let me explain further…

The good news is your brain and nervous system are just doing their job to keep you safe at each moment. It’s the part of the brain that will keep you alive if you come across a bear in the woods. It’s the thing that kept you alive, connected, or got you through in childhood. We all have this same system built into us! Our brains further develop a sort of manual for how to respond to certain cues from our bodies and environment from previous experiences. The most important ones come from childhood. This means everyone's brain has the stuff needed to keep us safe in the first place, but it LEARNED how to respond, and wrote a manual based on our individual experiences. See? There’s not something off about you, it’s your experiences! Even if you remember them being generally pleasant, what you learned from them can have an impact on your manual for life.

Better news! Though you can’t go back and change the experiences, we’re constantly in a state of learning. Every new moment is a moment we can slow down and learn something new from. This means we have the ongoing ability to change our autonomic nervous system responses. Your brain and nervous system has the ability to do what it needs to do to keep you safe or alive, but you also have the ability to update the manual your body and brain have been living and responding from.

Stay tuned for the next and final blog of the series as we dive into more about the “rest and digest" response and what it takes to get your mind and body into a state where it can learn and process from.