Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, this is me re releasing in an emotional processing episode, one that really just focuses just on strategies for processing emotions using your autonomic system, essentially using the parasympathetic system to activate and help you move through upsetting emotions. It is November 7, 2024, two days after the United States election cycle for this year.
And I know there are people out there who feel excited. I highly doubt those people are among my listeners. So I am definitely not among the excited. I am among the anxious and fearful and angry and just all around upset and doing my best not to spiral more into that. And so I did end up making.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: A bit of a statement.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: I'm going to read off here for you, just sort of summarizing kind of the process, like where I ended up at the end of processing everything yesterday because that was a bit hard for me to do. And hopefully it'll help somebody out there.
So I'll start with that and then the regular intro for the episode that's the re release will kick in.
Today is November 6, 2024.
And today I am struggling with my emotions and uncertainty about safety for myself and for all marginalized people. And honestly, for anyone who's not in the top.01% of billionaires in this country right now, there are many people who do not feel safe in the United States right now. And there are many people who are unaware of the current and future dangers for themselves and for their loved ones, potential dangers.
I am more scared and anxious than I was a couple days ago, and I was already pretty anxious about the divides in this country and the ongoing dehumanization and the genocidal rhetoric that is thrown around very, very casually on social media these days.
And as I found myself spiraling into hopelessness and despair, there was that quote from Lord of the Rings that just kind of kept popping into my head. You know that one? It's from the first movie, from the first book where Frodo and Gandalf are in the mines of Moria. It's a little different in the movie, but in the book it goes. I wish it need not have happened in my time, said Frodo.
So do I, said Gandalf. And so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide.
All we have to decide is what to do with the time has given us.
And yeah, while we can't change the times we're living in, we can choose how to respond.
So I've been thinking about how I'm going to respond, how I'm going to use my time and power, as relatively limited as that power is.
I mean, I am, after all, a fairly small person in this world.
And while I might not be able to change the fate of the world, I still have the power to choose what to do with the time given to me.
So my decision is to persevere, to keep on going, to keep attempting to educate everyone on what true safety and community means, regardless of if they belong to my community or not, regardless of if they would defend me or if they would even cheer at my own downfall. I commit to justice and equity, and I do this not hoping it will save me or protect me from any harm.
I do hope it will, however, protect others, even if it just means having people feel less alone.
Now, to be clear, standing for justice brings a fair amount of righteous anger along with it. So I will not justify harm done to others for the sake of gaining power, for the sake of protecting your own comfort, or for the sake of hypothetical threats that have not actually occurred.
I will, however, stand against the propagation of continued actual threats to people's safety, such as real physical violence, denial of health care, legal injustice, removal from the country and their families, and also the dehumanizing rhetoric that sends us on the progressive march toward genocide.
And to be clear, if that march continues, those who gambled with lives, those who decided to believe in the oh, they're not actually going to do what they say. Well, I'm not very comfortable with that gamble, and there's a fair number of people who are not very comfortable with that gamble. I have noticed people are far more comfortable gambling with lives that they don't believe are actually theirs to gamble with.
But if you did make that gamble, and if you lose that bet, I sure hope you're ready to help protect the people who were begging you not to make that gamble. Sure do hope you'll act as a shield, because that's really the only redemptive arc there can be.
On a slightly lighter note, I also found a really great post on Reddit, I think, yesterday from someone who's like, really like, he has one of those jobs where it's like deep into government bureaucracy and he kind of confirmed, honestly, what I kind of suspected the first time around is that all that red tape we have in our bureaucratic procedures, man, that stuff, that stuff works, you know, that really can hold back some stuff. Those paper pushers, those people who are like, you didn't submit the correct form.
I think those people are really actually the ones keeping democracy going. So I'm gonna Cross my fingers and hope that bureaucracy continues to hold more significant atrocities at bay. Not that there aren't atrocities happening every day in this country, but let's hope that some bureaucracy will keep some of it at bay. But nonetheless, I will continue to do my best to protect others, fight for justice and equity.
And that's even if talking or educating other people is really the main way I can go about that. Okay, like, there are neurodivergents who are non speakers. There are neurodivergents who struggle with situational mutism, as I like to call it, instead of selective mutism. Then there's me, the loquacious ones, the verbose ones, the ones that suffer from, let's face it, fairly extreme word vomit. You know, talking is both my strength and my weakness.
So you can guarantee I'm gonna keep a talking that's gonna be a thing.
And in my private life, I'm going to do my best to feed the hungry, clothe the unclothed, treat the strangers within the city gates as my own.
Whatever my meager little power is, I'm just gonna keep on doing it for.
[00:07:35] Speaker B: As long as I can.
[00:07:37] Speaker A: For to quote from Lord of the Rings yet again, as Samwise Gamgee said, there is good in this world and it is worth fighting for.
[00:07:52] Speaker B: Hi, I'm Kim Neely and this is the Trauma Informed slp.
This is a podcast where we learn how to promote safety and empowerment and to build resiliency in everyone we know, including. Including ourselves.
Hi everybody.
So I changed my mind again. Typical adhder that I am.
And I know I said we would go into the systemic things we need to face in order to become trauma sensitive at the next episode, but I changed my mind and decided to release this episode first, which are regulation strategies that you can use to help calm your system. And I thought, I really do need to provide this first because when we talk about systemic level issues, we're going to be facing some difficult topics.
We just have to, if we don't face societal oppression, systemic policies, organizational structures that unfortunately promote more trauma in certain minority groups, then we can't really call ourselves trauma informed. But at the same time, I do know that hearing about these things can be very upsetting on both sides. It can be upsetting for people within the minority groups that experience it, and it can be very upsetting to people in the majority group who are perhaps unaware of these issues prior to them being brought up. And when I thought about that, I thought, you know, I really can't consider myself Trauma informed if I don't take into consideration the emotional health of my listeners.
So I want to provide these strategies for any episodes upcoming. If you feel that you are being triggered, meaning you're feeling some level of discomfort in your body when you start to hear about certain things, I just wanted to provide some strategies to help mitigate that and to help promote healing and some level of change to that memory, that emotional memory that's being triggered by that topic or whatever is being said. Or maybe it's not even a trigger. Maybe it's just the first time you've heard about it and it's upsetting. You know, maybe you're a bit like me in the sense that you just get really upset when you hear about injustice or you hear about iniquity. But between groups, maybe that's just very upsetting. And I know it is to me. But I also know that especially as a field, speech language pathologists are already working at our emotional capacity. We're filled up, right? We're dealing with enough. We have our own personal stresses, we have work life balance stressors.
We definitely have enough on our plate between caseloads too high, productivity expectations too high and unreasonable.
Oh my gosh, just all the stuff, right? The fact that no one really knows what we do outside of our own field, et cetera, et cetera. We, we have a lot going on. And so with the burnout that everyone's experiencing, it can be really hard to listen to emotionally challenging topics on top of trying to cope with all of that on a daily basis.
So I felt I would be remiss if I didn't address that from the beginning and provide an episode that hopefully provides some strategies to help process through those challenging emotions from the bottom up. Meaning we're using our autonomic system to help us process an emotion.
Funny thing, I'm going to describe that stuff a little more in detail and what bottom up processing really involves and why it actually works. Because I going to be honest with you, it feels like it shouldn't work, but it actually does. When, when I was first going through this stuff with a counselor, I was like, really? That's all I have to do? Are you serious? That's really processing an emotion? Are you sure about that? But it is and it's actually amazing. I love that it's relatively simple to compare it to top down processing, which I'll go ahead and give a brief description of those two things. But I'm actually gonna start off right away with the strategies after this introduction. Just so you have easy access to them. You can re listen to them all you want.
And then after those strategies, I'll explain what bottom up processing motion is. Spoiler alert. It's basically what we call regulation.
And then I'll also talk a little bit, just briefly, about what top down processing is and what the difference is, particularly if you're going to a mental health professional. And then, you know, we'll just talk in general, just a quick reframing of how we think about our emotions in terms of not really trying to label them as good or bad. Essentially, let's go ahead and get straight into the strategies. I'm hoping this isn't too long of an episode, but let's jump straight in to some of those strategies and then I'll explain it to you later if you're still interested. Keep listening and I'll explain why these actually work. Okay, so let's go ahead and go into these strategies. So I think of these strategies as kind of in two big categories because my ADHD brain really likes to categorize things. So I think of calming strategies. Right. So these are strategies that are going to kick in your parasympathetic system and help to keep things a little more calm, help keep that sympathetic activation in check. Meaning you're not going all the way into survival mode. You might still be a little activated, but you're not like, you know, going straight into survival mode or panic attack or meltdown or anything like that. Right. So you're going to kick in some parasympathetic to help relax a little. Then there's also kind of, it's essentially like burning up your sympathetic strategies. So you're going to be burning through those energy stores in your body. Okay, so I'm going to go through the calming strategies first because I think these are the most common ones you hear. Okay.
And actually that was just a little bit of a fib there because first we have to talk about physiological needs. That's our very first stop along this journey of, hey, I'm feeling uncomfortable in my body and I need to do something to feel a little better.
So step one, anytime you're starting to feel any level of discomfort, this could be when you're listening to a challenging topic or even if you're just like sitting in a work meeting, you know, one of those work meetings that could totally be an email when you have like a thousand and one thing things to do and it just was really stressing you out. The very first thing to do is to check in physiologically this Relates a bit to Maslow's hierarchy. I'll put links in the show notes for you. But that pyramid, if you remember it, at the very bottom, is physiological needs. So in this case it would mean, like, have you gone to the bathroom lately? Do you need to do that? Have you had a drink of water? Have you, you know, hydrated in the last few hours? Do you need a snack? Are you ridiculously hungry? Are you to the point of hangry? Right? Which I. We now have a word to describe emotion and hunger and how those two things connect. Because, total side note, the reason hunger tends to trigger that amygdala, and the amygdala says this is a threat, is because, you know, eating and drinking is fairly vital to our survival, right? So it makes sense that there's direct connections into that amygdala and that if we're too hungry, if our blood sugar stores are going a little too low, our amygdala is going to be like, threat to our survival. We need to eat now. And so you get that, like, sympathetic response, which for a lot of us makes us frustrated and angry, right? So we get hangry. So check on your hanger, get yourself a snack. Maybe excuse yourself in the meeting to go to the bathroom. Total side note, you don't actually have to go to the bathroom. If you just need to excuse yourself, you can just step outside the room a little, take a breather, you can go grab a snack, you can go grab some water. You know, you can call it a bathroom break, but you don't actually have to use the bathroom. Just side note, total permission to do that depending on your work environment. Some work environments, you can just leave and it doesn't matter. But if those people would have a bug up their butt due to you leaving to get a snack, then by all means, like, just say, I gotta go to the bathroom and go eat a snack. You know what I mean? So tend to your physiological needs first, because that will help to detrigger that amygdala immediately. If the main issue with how upset you're feeling is the fact that maybe your blood sugar is a little low or whatever, or you're too thirsty or something like that, okay? Oh, also, total side note, when it comes to the physiological things, the other thing to consider is, have you slept well lately? Because if you're not sleeping well and you're way too tired, that's going to kick you into sympathetic response pretty fast, too.
Not that you can take a nap immediately, but sometimes just having that awareness of, you know, what I'm really sleep deprived right now. And so this upset. Upsetness I'm feeling might relate more to the fact that I'm physically exhausted and a little less to the actual situation. Sometimes just that awareness can help to kind of mitigate that sort of upset feeling from just being too, too freaking tired to deal with it. You know what I mean? I've definitely been there.
Okay, so now that we've dealt with our physiological stuff, now let's go into those calming strategies. These are things you've heard of a lot. These are actually the same things we tend to use in our field as regulation strategies. That's what's so lovely. Bottom up. Emotional processing pretty much is regulation. So because you're using your autonomic system to process, right? Which means you're regulating with your autonomic system. Haha. Magical. Love it. Anyway, so we don't have a whole lot of new things to learn, but sometimes for ourselves, like, we might be really good at applying these to clients, but sometimes we're not so great at applying them to ourselves. Right. So the main thing is to figure out what you need and what works for you in the situation you're in. So it's about getting a little more in touch with your body and feeling what's going on.
Calming strategies, 9 times out of 10 involve a lot of slow breathing. Nice slow, relaxed breaths in and out.
There's ones that even are just breath where it's like the 4, 5, 3 or something. I forget what the counts are, but you inhale on like a count of four, hold it for a count of five, and exhale for a count of three and it's nice slow counts. Or just inhaling on account of 4, exhaling on account of 4. It could be the same counts. It doesn't really matter. There's also, I think like the inhale on four, hold for four, exhale on four. You can do that too. And you can do that in a meeting. Honestly. I mean, if you're doing it slowly enough and quietly enough, people might not, you know, you're not doing that kind of exhale. If you're doing just kind of a nice slow exhale through your nose, people probably won't notice if you're doing it. But a lot of times these breathing things get involved with calming strategies because it's automatically kind of forcing some level of parasympathetic activation because, you know, sympathetic speeds up our breath and parasympathetic tends to slow it. So when we slow the breath down consciously, we're Kind of automatically activating a little more of that parasympathetic output to. Does that make sense? So a lot of times the breathing gets. Gets sort of paired with something, right? So it's breathing on a certain count, or it's breathing with some kind of tactile sensation added in, or it's breathing with a visual, or it's breathing with a sound. Whatever it is, a lot of times something gets paired with it. And this is my guess on just what it feels like when I do it. I think the reason a lot of these things get paired with that is so that it gives your frontal cortex something to do basically. You know, it gives that prefrontal area that seat of awareness in your brain. It gives it something to focus on. That's not just the discomfort. You know what I mean? So if you are counting actively in your head, in your conscious part of your brain, and you're doing the deep breaths, the deep breaths are doing the bottom up processing. They're helping kick in that parasympathetic. But also the counting is helping to keep your prefrontal cortex kind of chill. It's like, I gave you a job to do, you know what I mean? Keeps the attention centers a little more involved in just the moment, right? So it's some sort of. It's honestly like almost like a little trick to mindfulness. It like gets you a little more aware of what's going on.
So tactile strategies for this can include things like five finger breathing. This one's a really nice, easy one because you can do it anywhere, anytime. But essentially you're going to take one finger and you're going to trace up, like, say I'll take my. My pointer finger on my right hand. I'll trace up my thumb on an inhale, nice and slow, maybe hold it a little at the top if I want to, and then exhale nice and slow while I trace down that. And then inhale up my pointer finger on my left hand and then trace it down on the exhale. And you just keep doing that up and down your fingers, like a little roller coaster over and over until you feel a little more calm, essentially, until you feel like, okay, cool. I'm not about to, like, cry or yell or, you know, not to. About to have a giant emotional explosion. So that's a nice easy one to do. There's also shapes breathing, which could be visual, could also be tactile, but it involves. You could do it in someone's palm of their hand. You could do it on a Tabletop. But essentially you pick any kind of shape. So it could, let's say it's a square or something really simple. You're going to inhale on the way up while you trace it with your finger. You're going to exhale as you draw over, inhale as you draw down, and exhale as you draw over to finish that square. If it's a circle, you might want to inhale around once and exhale out the next time around it, whichever way you want to go with that. But that's a nice easy way to get a little more tactile sense into that breathing.
Another nice calming strategy that is one of my go to's and one of the things I like the very most is called a butterfly hug. This is related a little to the emdr, the rapid eye movement desensitization stuff that is done for PTSD people, which I went through my own emdr. I think that's how you say emdr, I believe so I think I got that acronym right. But I went through my own with my counselor. My original counselor was through university, so when I graduated I had to find someone else. So the next counselor I had taught me the butterfly hug, which is essentially a low tech version, a very easy, low tech version of emdr. So what you're going to do is you're going to take, you're basically going to give yourself a little hug across your chest. So you're going to take your right hand and place it in front of your left shoulder. Left hand, place it in front of your right shoulder. And what you're going to do is you're going to tap your fingers and you're going to alternate hands. So tap your right fingers to the front of the left shoulder and then tap your left fingers to the front of the right shoulder. And I think I got my left right correct that time. I always have to think through left and right guys, so it's a little tricky. Okay, so you just tap, tap, tap back and forth, back and forth and you go ahead and you take nice slow breaths.
And what she instructed me to do and what the way I like to do it is when I start feeling uncomfortable due to an emotion, most of the time I feel it in my chest. I usually get kind of a fluttery, anxious feeling in my chest. Something I recognize as anxiety in my chest. It's kind of fluttery, it's uncomfortable, it's like, it feels like nervous, you know what I mean? So when I feel that if I give myself a butterfly hug, I'm going to be tapping with my fingers and I'm going to be breathing deeply, nice slow breaths. And I'm just going to pay attention to that feeling in my chest, that tightness, that tension, that flutteriness, whatever it is.
And as I breathe and as I tap, I just tune into that feeling. Just keep breathing into it. Keep breathing into that space and observing it. And then at some point you'll feel that tension release. And when it releases, that means that emotion has been processed. And I love that. I actually use the butterfly hug a lot to stave off big panic attacks for myself. This tends to be my go to. Sometimes I'll use the counts breathing. If I'm just in a meeting and I'm stressed or something like that, I'll do something people can't see as much. Maybe the tactile thing, but the butterfly hug is one I do where it's like, okay, I need to go to like a bathroom stall and stave off a panic attack. I might do a butterfly hug there. You know what I mean?
Other calming strategies essentially involve getting other senses involved with whatever sensory system seems to work best for you when you're pairing it with the deep breath. So if you like listening to nature sounds, I know on Apple music, if you just search like beach sounds and rain sounds, you can find giant lists of that.
You can find like playlist YouTube, there's a lot of playlists on there for those sort of things. If you have calming music or songs, you could always make a song list that you could listen to.
Visuals are also nice. So things like glitter bottles, snow globes, lava lamps, you know, those are visuals.
Liquid timers. I love staring at liquid timers. They're very calming for my brain. That's a strong visual to help kick in that parasympathetic.
Okay. Oh, and also just general mindfulness if it happens to work for you, which is just like the, you know, tuning in with, okay, let me pay attention to the feeling of my feet on the floor. Let me pay attention to the feeling of, you know, my backside in the chair. You know what I mean? That's that, like, okay, how does my skin feel? What's the temperature? What's the. Like you're kind of. You kind of go through your senses. You go through, like, what am I feeling right now? What am I smelling? What am I seeing?
How is the proprioception of, like, where is my body in space? How does it feel to have my knee bent? You know, things like that. That's just a general mindfulness as well. To help calm you down.
So the next category of strategies kind of are burning through our energy stores. This is essentially if you get uncomfortable and then you feel like you need to let the energy out like for your two fidgety or, you know, this is especially nice if it's like you're getting really angry and you feel kind of like you want to punch a wall. You know what I mean? That feeling. Because I get that feeling sometimes and burning through the energy is usually nice for things like that. So when you get that high energy kicking in and you're just like, you know, then you might want to try something more like this instead of a calming strategy. The calming strategy might not work very well. Right. So burning through energy are things like taking a fast walk. This could even be like a one minute or two minute like sprint walk, you know, like one of those little like, what do they used to call that? Was it sprint walking? There was like a whole thing about it like in the late 80s or whatever or 90s. It's like in When Harry Met Sally. Right? When they like do the little sprint walk thing.
Speed walk. That's what it's called, speed walking. Yeah. You could do a little speed walk. You could do a short jog. You could, you know, take a step outside your building and do a quick little jog somewhere. If you're in an office without a maybe without a whole lot of people around or maybe you're like me and you're shameless and you don't really care if people see you do this. But you could do like some squats, you could do some burpees. You know, that's that thing where like you squat and then do like a push up, you jump back into a pushup and then you bring your, you jump your feet back up and then you like do a leap kind of a thing. You go back down anyway, you get a jumping jacks. You could do anything like that. Maybe a little like high knee running in place, you know? Right.
That helps burn through some energy.
There's also something called progressive muscle relaxation. This is one people have heard about and this is just a quick example of why we have these different strategies. I have a friend who loves progressive muscle relaxation and I personally do not like it. It does not help me one bit. It doesn't help me burn through energy and it doesn't help me calm down because I don't like the sensation of it. Like, I don't like how it makes my body feel at all. So it's one I always skip But I'm gonna share it because some people out there, it works great for. But this is the one where you're going to like say tune into your feet and you're going to clench your muscles down there really, really tight for like five seconds and then you release them and then you clench the muscles in your lower legs for like five seconds and release them and clench your upper legs for like five seconds and release them and you go up your whole body that way. And I think the theory behind that is that by clenching the muscles really tight, you are essentially burning through the adrenaline that got pumped into your body when the sympathetic started to become more dominant.
I think that's the idea behind that one. But like I said, I don't like it that much. But if it works, it works. It's great. And it's also kind of nice if you don't clinch too, too tight such that you're like shaking or something. It's another one you could probably do anytime, like even if you're just sitting in a meeting or something.
So all of those strategies, the calming strategies, the physiological stuff to take care of and the burning up energy stores strategies, they're all part of processing our emotions from the bottom up. At least in the mental health world, that tends to be what they're called. We call them regulation, they tend to call it bottom up processing of emotions. So let's talk about what bottom up processing really means.
So what it essentially means is that you're trying to keep your whole limbic system from the bottom up regulated and connected so that the emotion can be experienced throughout your limbic system, but it doesn't throw the whole limbic system into extreme sympathetic dominance, AKA like a survival mode, which then disconnects essentially the frontal cortex from the midbrain. Right? So we want to keep those pathways open. We want to keep the emotional memory that's being created from the amygdala and the hippocampus. We want that memory to not be one of a threat essentially. So we want to have a memory of having that emotion related to that topic or that event or that environment. But we don't want the memory to be traumatizing in the sense that when you re experience it, you get kicked back into survival mode. Right? So we're using bottom up, meaning we're starting from our body, we're starting from the discomfort we might feel in our body related to an uncomfortable emotion. And we are using the parasympathetic to kind of put the brakes on that sympathetic response. So that we don't go full on into survival mode so that the memory that can be encoded is one of actually not a threat. Right. Something that's uncomfortable, we can, you know, the amygdala can still place a value of eh, we don't really like this that much. But it's not like this is a threat to our survival. We need to go into survival mode immediately. Okay, so that's the idea of processing from the bottom up. In contrast to this, there is top down processing of emotions. And this is really where as SLPs, we don't touch this for other people, at least not in relation to any kind of trauma. We don't touch this when it comes to trauma in other people. You only want to touch this if you're a licensed professional and you know how to touch it. Basically this is where things get kind of sticky because top down is where you're getting into how the discomfort you're feeling, the way that, that impacts how you perceive the world, your place in the world, your identity as a person, your value as a person, perhaps your confidence level, all of that stuff. So top down is where like, for myself, for someone with depression and anxiety, like depression especially loves to sort of have these intrusive thoughts that just kind of sneak in there. Well, really both depression, anxiety, they're like best buds in my brain, which is not really buds. I really, I don't really want to be buds with them. But you know, I've, I've had to make peace with it if I anthropomorphize my mental health. Hey. But yeah, so essentially those intrusive thoughts of like I'm not good enough and what am I doing and this is ridiculous and nobody even likes me and you know, all those sort of intrusive thoughts, those higher frontal area conscious awareness area thoughts, when I feel under threat or I feel worried or anxious or stressed, if I start to feel discomfort prior to getting appropriate mental health treatment for myself, those thoughts were usually very intrusive, meaning they would kind of take over, you know, and I would have those thoughts for a prolonged period of time and they would just continue to depress my mood, my emotion. That, that uncomfortable emotion would just last forever. Basically. Like it would just go on and on and on and on and on instead of ebbing and flowing like the window of tolerance says.
So that's what it was like having an issue with top down processing.
And so top down processing is essentially reframing those kind of thoughts. Right? That's kind of the cognitive behavioral therapy piece of like if you feel discomfort, being able to place that discomfort in the correct framework in your perception such that it doesn't become some sort of intrusive thought to you. And the main reason I'm not going to offer like top down processing type of strategies is that I think, as far as I'm aware, in terms of best practices in the mental health profession, I am not a mental health provider, but these need to be more personalized to that person's particular needs and to how those thoughts affect their life and their perception and how they relate to their history and their experiences with other people, their childhood, all that stuff. Okay, so bottom up processing is nice because you can give more general, broad strategies to people because it's not involving any of that sort of highly personalized. I perceive this because of who I am and where I've come from and what I've gone through and that kind of stuff. So, yeah. So top down, I personally think should probably be a lot more personalized. If you feel like you're struggling more with having intrusive thoughts, and if you feel like you are struggling with that, then I suggest seeking some professional guidance, preferably from a licensed mental health practitioner who can help give you top down strategies that will be effective for you.
So the big key takeaway from the episode today is that we have to learn to face emotional discomfort. Right?
In order for us to listen and grow and change as a person, as people in general, we have to have a little more parasympathetic dominance. We have to have a calmer autonomic state because we need our prefrontal cortex to be involved and present and fully integrated with our midbrain, our amygdala and also our body to have some awareness of what's going on there. If we're in survival mode, we're not going to be able to learn very much. We're not going to be able to be flexible mentally. We're not going to be able to take another person's perspective very well because survival mode is interested in survival. So the only main learning that's occurring if you're really thrown into survival mode is what did I do last time that helped me to survive this? I should do that again, you know what I mean? Or what allows me to get out of the situation alive. Basically, that's what your brain's concerned with when it's in that dominance. When we're in parasympathetic dominance and we're not in survival mode, that's when we have more ability to change our Perspective, we have more access to that higher level thinking, to more abstraction, to more generalization, to more creative ways of looking at something, to perspective taking. That's all from more of a parasympathetic side. And that's also where we can connect how we're feeling with our words and be able to express our own discomfort. We have to have a little more parasympathetic dominance for that so that our midbrain can talk to our prefrontal cortex, so that our anterior cingulate in our frontal cortex can talk to our amygdala. We need to have all these feedback loops happening so that we can become more aware and so that also we can take the time to learn more about what other people experience, you know what I mean?
So on our journey toward becoming more trauma sensitive and understanding those systems systemic issues that minority groups face, I just wanted to provide some tools to everybody because kind of at a big picture level, I think in the United States at least, our society doesn't really provide us with a lot of tools to help us process uncomfortable emotions.
And very often we tend to think of emotions as either good or bad or positive or negative, right? We think of like sadness and anger and frustration as being like bad or negative. And we think of happy and joyful and all that other excitement. We think of all that stuff as being good. And that's actually not how emotions work. Emotions just are, you know what I mean? They are a sign that your amygdala has placed a value on something. Stimuli came in, it was important enough to put a value on it. And that's where emotions tend to arise from. So in that sense, it's not that we have good and bad emotions. We just have some emotions that make us physically uncomfortable. Essentially some emotions are just uncomfortable and challenging and they bring up challenging thoughts and maybe have a challenging feeling in our body. And some emotions are pleasant and enjoyable to experience, right? And so when we start talking about systemic level things, we need to face those uncomfortable emotions. We need tools to be able to process that discomfort we might feel that comes up so that we can stay in that space where we're still learning something new. And a nice way to think about this is I believe it's destiny. Ann, I believe is her name. I'll put a link in the show notes. She's a tiktoker and a mom and she did this great viral video about how she taught her child that, you know, when she feels angry or mad, when she has big mad, I think is what she calls it, which I love that that's a sign that something is wrong, that like a boundary has been crossed or something. And so when you experience these uncomfortable emotions, whether it be sadness or anger or frustration, we want to be able to recognize it as a sign that something is upsetting. Right. And then use our strategies, our tools, bottom up, processing whatever we have, whatever we can to then process through that emotion, allow it to come on and allow it to flow through so that we can stay regulated such that we can still learn. And by learning and processing those emotions, it actually allows us to be flexible and change as people, which is kind of a beautiful thing. And I think this is a really big picture of individually, what it really means to become trauma informed in order to develop the habit of thinking of what happened to that person instead of what's wrong with them or what happened in society that brought us to this point rather than what's wrong with it. Well, there's a lot of things wrong with it, but you know what I mean, when you want to think about it more in those sort of terms, that requires regulation and it requires, it requires access to processing emotions such that you can be cognitively flexible in those situations and you can have access to your creative cognitive resources and you are able to develop this habit of essentially changing your own perception when encountered with information that brings on that discomfort. Okay, so that's pretty much it for this episode. That's what I wanted to do was just provide this a little bit. This information is going to come back around when we come to like trauma informed treatment strategies and things like that. You probably have already noticed since some of these strategies are definitely things you can do with your clients. You might have noticed that. Hey, this sounds awfully familiar. And it. Yeah, it'll come back around. We'll talk about it some more. But the main thing with this is you have full on permission to do what you need to do, to regulate yourself in whatever situation you find yourself in and to calm yourself as needed if, if you do need to calm.
And that emotions aren't bad or good, they just are. Emotions are a sign that a value has been placed on something you experienced. And so the work of regulating is the ability to figure out what that value is and why it was considered important enough to place a value on it.
All right, with all that said, I hope you all have a great couple of weeks.
Next up, we're going to start talking about societal structures and the way that history and procedures and policies can negatively impact certain groups of people.
Have a great couple of weeks. Take care of yourselves. This is a tough time of year. Do what you need to do. Look up some cute animals on the Internet. Cute animals are fantastic ways of regulation. I forgot to include that in in my tips there my strategies. But seriously, there's a reason why cats took over. Because they're adorable and hilarious. So, because they, like, have absolutely no inhibition. So do what you need to do to take care of yourselves. And please do join me back as we all learn what it means to really be trauma informed. Slps.
