How the heck do we deal with all of...*gestures around wildly*...THIS?
Part 1: Getting safe, and returning to safety
Hello everyone. Things have been…a lot, yeah? It’s been a lot, and it’s going to keep being a lot. I feel guilty, at times, for having absconded to Canada when I did. But I also am painfully aware that this right here? Is the reason that I did. Not that I expected this to happen. But if it had to happen…it was much better for me to be here than there.
It feels like a privileged thing to say, because it is; if you’re someone who wishes they could leave the country but you can’t, I’m sorry, and I don’t mean to crow. (I also don’t know if I even get to stay, yet, nor are things perfect up here, though I maintain they continue to be at least better.) What I do mean to do, though, is be somewhere removed enough from the chaos that I can actually function — and actually be able to help people.
I want to talk here about strategies for getting through it. But as I started writing this and as the insanity continued to emerge from the hellmouth that is currently Washington, DC, I recognized that this was going to end up being more than one article. My current plan for this series is as follows:
How to find safety in yourself when everything feels so unsafe (this article)
The three necessary components of continued personal effectiveness when your world is under attack (rest, pleasure, sacred work/everything else)
The three ways to combat powerlessness and help out without checking out (curate your news, practice radical joy/gratitude, act locally)
How I got safe
So, during the first administration of this evil sonofabitch, I…did not do well. I was doing a bunch of different kinds of work to make ends meet, and had a few clients, but didn’t feel particularly equipped to help them. A lot of other things in my life were also in some chaos, and the continual barrage of nonsense on the macro level was largely making me shut down. Shutdown, or freeze, is my “preferred” trauma response — which is to say, it’s the one my body does automatically when shit goes sideways. So this makes some sense. But it still sucked. And while it sucked for me, it also extra-sucked because of how ineffective I felt it made me. I want to help people cope, heal, thrive. It’s part of my makeup. And no matter how many postcards I wrote or congresspeople I wrote to or campaigns I supported, I felt powerless.
When I moved north about a year and a half ago, part of what I anticipated was that if there had to be a second administration, I could be more effective, more emotionally regulated, more myself — if I wasn’t in the midst of it every day. Nearly three months since the election, and I think that is truly the case. I’m aware of it all, I see it in the news, I talk to family and friends who are there and who are dealing with it. But the slight remove makes me feel just a little more safe, and from that place, it’s just a little easier to cope and stay afloat.
So about that coping and staying afloat…
Well that’s all great for you, Kamela, you might be thinking about now, but what about the rest of us who are still down here struggling in the daily hunger games of “who’s scheduled to suffer today?”
Well, it sucks, I’m not gonna lie. But I also know that everybody’s nervous system is different, and needs different things to feel safe and to thrive. People also have different tolerances — levels and types of what they can take before becoming dysregulated — and different resources — support structures in their bodies and/or lives that help them keep it together.
I’m going to talk more in the future about how I really got safe, and that actually has less to do with Canada and more to do with my partnership and with attachment repair. But that is a whole other topic, which I’ll get to in February, I promise.
For now, let’s talk about how any of us gets safe.
Safety and efficiency
I’ll never forget a lesson I got from Chris Hammer, one of the trainers in my program. She came from a background of physical therapy with children with developmental disabilities and delays, and as such she brought a ton of deeply body-based knowledge informed by childhood development. I’ve chosen not to have kids, but childhood development is fascinating to me, because it informs so much about adult development. A huge part of our behaviors, responses, defenses, strengths and weaknesses, and so on is present at birth, and then rapidly shaped by our experiences with our earliest caregivers. Yet we never stop that development. It just slows down a lot, and the older we get, the harder it is to shift things that were established when we were very young.
The lesson was about how our bodies organize themselves for movement. And the basic, immutable rule was this: our body’s first concern is always safety, followed by efficiency.
So what does that mean? Essentially, it means that your body will not, indeed cannot, do anything until it has the sense that it’s basically safe to do so. Once safety is established, then figuring out the “best,” or most efficient, way to do the thing is the next concern. Watch a baby that is learning to walk sometime.
Notice all the ways that a baby walk is different from an adult walk? It’s wobbly, there isn’t a lot of knee-bending — they’re still figuring out how to swing their whole leg from the hip and they rock back and forth a lot as they strive to move forward. They’re often holding their hands in the air for balance rather than swinging their arms; counterbalancing will come later. It’s a pretty inefficient way to walk, right? But it’s the safest way they can do it right now. Later, as they become better at not falling down, as their strength and balance and coordination develops, their walk will look more efficient, more sure. But the safety part is always first.
This is something Chris told us to remember whenever we saw someone moving in a way that looked awkward. The body is always, always organizing for safety first, efficiency second. However awkward they may look, they are moving the best way they can, safely.
This doesn’t just apply to movement
This lesson comes up for me all the time, whether I’m dealing with my own stuff, or helping other people deal with theirs. And the reason is this: whatever you are doing, however it may look to others, is what you can do safely at this moment. This holds true whether we’re talking about literal physical movement or about actions in life. Safety First is literally an immutable fact of how we organize ourselves.
The trouble, of course, is that nothing feels safe right now. And every one of us is trying to figure out how to make ourselves safe, but some of us are doing it a lot harder than others. Marginalized people of all kinds are understandably freaked out. Traumatized people (strong Venn diagram overlap here, but there are a lot of non-marginalized or less-marginalized traumatized people too) are heavily into whatever their own favorite nervous system responses are. People with a higher tolerance and maybe more resources are doing everything they can to protect others, but won’t be able to do it forever (hello, burnout). Others are figuring out ways and places to run. Still others are frozen and trying to check out of the whole thing. Another set are deep in their fawn response, hoping that if they comply they’ll be spared the worst of it.
We all have our ways of “staying safe,” even if a lot of them are things we learned when we were very young, and even if they don’t actually serve us anymore. The trouble with some of our bodies’ ideas about how to keep us safe is that our ideas about what is safe and what isn’t have been skewed by our experiences, usually in our young lives.
In my training, we learned that “the body always tells the truth.” That doesn’t mean it’s always “right.” It means, rather, that it’s telling the truth of its own experience in every moment. Hyper-vigilance, for example, isn’t usually a response to something “true” in the world that is threatening us, just waiting for us to let our guards down to strike. But it very much is a truth about what the body is experiencing, and has experienced: terror, pain, harm, betrayal. The body’s truth is that it will do whatever it takes to stop it from happening again — even if it means that our actions are “inefficient”: alienating friends, isolating ourselves, lashing out or running away. When the body is organizing so hard for safety but not able to feel the sensation of safety, it can become impossible to reach out, connect, or take action.
Co-regulation and self-regulation
The missing piece, or the part of our experience that helps bridge the gap between safety and efficiency, is nervous system regulation. All this refers to is our bodies’ ability to calm down after a stressor, and to find a way to — you guessed it — feel safe again, so it can be (efficiently) effective again.
Naturally, a lot of how we regulate our nervous systems is also learned in early life. Our caregivers, if they are responsive enough and attuned enough to our needs, help teach our bodies how to be soothed. Being in contact with another nervous system in this way is called co-regulation. You see it when caregivers soothe crying babies, when friends offer hugs and soothing words. You see co-regulation, too, in moments that aren’t about distress: people laughing, or singing, or dancing together are getting the goods from the calm, safe presence of other people’s nervous systems syncing up with their own.
People who have decent caregivers (or attachment figures, as again I’ll talk about more elsewhere) can then learn how to soothe themselves. This is called self-regulation, and can take many forms.
But for those of us who didn’t have secure attachments, and/or those of us with trauma, self-regulation doesn’t come easily, and co-regulation is harder to access. And much as it happens in early childhood development, co-regulation has to come first.
I’ve been reading a lot of Janae Elisabeth recently. They’re a great resource about trauma and neurodiversity, and one of the critical points they make is that not all nervous systems re-regulate themselves in the same way. The kinds of self-care that pervade self-help culture right now may not be right for you: deep breathing, shaking, meditating, and yoga may all feel triggering or even more dysregulating.
Not only that, but self-care is literally not enough if we want to increase our sense of safety and our ability to return to it over time. I especially love Janae’s entry on vagal tone for this. In it, they describe the co-regulation activities they took up in order to strengthen their ability to recover from shutdowns and panic attacks more quickly. The important takeaways:
Being able to feel safe doesn’t have to do with avoiding all stressors; in fact the way to strengthen your nervous system regulation skills is to have stressors to recover from.
Co-regulation can take many forms, including interacting with non-human animals, dancing or singing with a group, yoga classes, or really any activity where you are doing things together with others.
From there, it’s remarkable how practicing co-regulation can lead to the ability to better self-regulate. But again: working with others has to come first.
My own tricks, which may not be yours
It can be really hard, as I said up top, to imagine feeling safe at a time like this. Yet it is the most vital thing imaginable for moving forward through the hell we find ourselves in. Safety first: then forward motion becomes possible.
Me, I co-regulate with my partner a lot. It took us a while to figure out how to do that in a way that felt safe enough for both of us, but we figured it. In our case it looks like cuddling, casual touch, lots and lots of consent for all of it. Asking each other for help. Taking turns with comfort. We try not to talk in detail about difficult things at night, when we’re winding down to sleep. Sometimes we meditate together. Sometimes he’ll take a bath and I’ll sit by the tub and we’ll talk. Sometimes I’ll lie on my bed and ask him to lie on top of me (I’ve seen this described as the neurodivergent love language “please crush my soul back into my body”). Sometimes we’ll just hold each other and bounce in the kitchen.
When I’m alone and realize I’m activated, I like to get up and move around. Doing exercises can help. Rolling around on the floor can help. Shutting the laptop, putting down my phone, and reading a fiction book or writing with a pen on paper can help. Also checking in on basic things: am I hungry? Thirsty? Tired? Physically uncomfortable? Need a shower?
I also try to be self-compassionate about things that feel good that might not strictly be “good for me.” I allow myself some alcohol (not too much). I try to have comfort foods in the house, even if they’re ice cream. I’ll watch a non-challenging piece of media, preferably while enjoying both of the above. It’s important to be gentle with yourself, and to remember that you developed the coping mechanisms you did for a reason. Dissociation is not always bad.
What are yours?
Please, share your own nervous system regulation activities in the comments. Or, talk about what’s hard for you, and we can chat about it more.
Next time, I’ll talk about the insight I got one day during one of those meditations, and how I’ve been working to balance myself for the work ahead. Until then: please, take care of yourselves — and each other.