This week I found myself reflecting on the nature of reactions to trauma and stress. You’ve probably heard of the classic “fight, flight, or freeze” – meaning we respond to an emergency (or even the average stressful situation) by lashing out, running away or avoiding, or freezing in shutdown or dissociation. But a lesser known response is “please and appease" or "fawn", where we play nice or even abandon our own needs and desires to please others, making ourselves small to keep ourselves physically or emotionally safe. (More on this in a future newsletter!)

These responses are not arbitrary – our bodies, brains, and nervous systems work hard from early childhood to meet our basic needs of safety, dignity, and belonging, which results in conditioned patterns of behavior, automatic reactions to stimuli. As adults, we can cultivate awareness of some of those conditioned tendencies and recognize when they're not aligned with our values or how we want to be. You might think of these as survival strategies, and what we start to re-create are resilience strategies. Awareness creates choice.

What are some of your conditioned tendencies? They might include "people-pleasing" (arising from a need for safety or belonging), tensing and becoming confrontational (striving for dignity), or overemphasized boundaries that keep you distant from others (related to the need for safety, but causing dissonance with the need to belong). There are a million ways our bodies and nervous systems have learned to protect us, and practices to help us build awareness of those habits and cultivate safer and values-aligned responses.

Here's a practice for those times where you're feeling more activated, stressed out, even overwhelmed. It helps reconnect us with a sense of safety in our bodies, simply by placing our attention, listening to our bodies, and slowing down.

Somatic Practice: Body Scan, Resourcing, and Titration

1. Scan your body starting with the toes and working up. Notice any tension, temperatures, and other sensations, and locate them in your body. Name what emotions you're feeling. Deepen your breath.
2. Ask yourself what would feel good in your body right now, one thing that would offer you some comfort. Do you need to move, stretch, roll your shoulders back, shake your arms, bounce or stomp, drink some water? Make that adjustment and notice the shift. Do another body scan and notice where you feel calm, safe, comfortable.
3. Slow things down. After you make one adjustment, pause and take time to notice what shifts, any new sensations in your body, how your breath responds. What else is your body asking of you? What else would bring more comfort?