you are not an alarm clock

Happy New Year!

I want to remind you, you are not an alarm clock or a coffee machine. You are not a password, although some days I bet you feel like one. You are a living, breathing, pulsing organism; you are metamorphoses at the grocery store, you do not need to be reset, you need to be tended to.

I understand that words and ideas make their way into the main stream, and suddenly we are watching commercials for Lucky Charms about how all our nervous systems are just so out of whack. We see footage of a woman having a panic attack and then the famous leprechaun suddenly appears with a big bowel of sugary cereal; we see all the little charms comforting the women until she is finally calm, and then the tag line, Reset your nervous system with our rainbow magic! It’s magically delicious! Cut to the sad anxious women sliding down a rainbow, face filled with joy.

It’s good that these words find their way into our lives, because it means collectively we are integrating science and expansion, but then one day you are wearing a t shirt that says, In my Self Love Era, and telling everyone that so and so gaslit you, and you just need a good reset to keep going, and on the inside you feel like you are dying and have no idea what is really going on with you. We need to actually understand what all these things mean, and in a fast paced, you are broken and need to be fixed by instagram world, we are often not making the space to understand and actually heal. Healing is slower than you want it to be, that’s a 100% guarantee!!

And what if that is a gift? What if the gift is that we get to know ourselves, learn to tend to ourselves, befriend ourselves, invest in ourselves. I am so sorry and embarrassed to actually write this, but.. what if the gift is the process? (sorry) Reset implies that we are a shitty lackluster tired version of ourselves and if we can just find one trick or seminar we can be shiny and new and let’s be honest, more lovable. Can you love yourself now and not try to trick yourself into a better version of you? Let’s skip the trick and build self regard; self regard will propel you forward.

So, The Autonomic Nervous System… that’s what people are talking about when they talk about reseting. The ANS is brilliant, it’s job is to keep you safe and alive, and that happens to be what we are here for! I didn’t learn that much about the Autonomic Nervous System when I was in graduate school for psychology; it wasn’t a buzz word yet. I started to really learn about the role of the ANS and Polyvagal theory in therapeutic work when I started working with my mentor, Andrew Susskind. Andrew gently guided me into Brainspotting training and work, and I fell in love with it. I fell in love learning about the triune of the brain and its functions in healing. Later I went on to study Somatic Experiencing, and further delved into the language of our nervous systems and bodies.

Just learning the phrases regulated and dysregulated slid something into place for me. My brain created a montage of all the moments in my life of dysregulation, like an Iphone memory titled, Days you felt fucking crazy! Mostly I thought about the moments I tore my room apart like a hurricane trying to find something to wear that would maybe ease the discomfort that was spinning my body out of control. I thought about using alcohol to calm down. I thought about free floating anxiety. I wished someone had taught me these words earlier, that someone could’ve said to little me, Jenny you are dysregulated, let’s see if we can find what you need right now to get a little more regulated before we go on with our day and make decisions about the world and ourselves. But nobody really had that in the eighties, we had TV, and, well, Lucky Charms, which can actually work to regulate, so maybe I was onto something! Kids now have psycho education around their nervous systems and mindfulness, and that is amazing.

So the first questions I started to ask were Am I regulated? Dysregulated? How do I know? It’s not a test, it’s an exploration. These are really important questions.

And here’s really my big fat problem with the word Reset…

The nervous system is DESIGNED to move with flexibility through all its functions all day long. Let’s say the sun is shining, you have a nice little chat with the barista, you may even think you are winning at life a little, and then you are walking back to your car, and you get that ick feeling from behind, you turn a little and see an imposing figure gaining on you, now your body starts to prepare itself, your heart starts beating faster, you body starts to build energy so you can fight or flee, you walk faster, you turn and see the person makes a sharp left, you are safe for a moment, you make it back to your car, lock the doors, you are safe again, your body starts to settle, maybe you take a deeper breath, shake a little; this is all perfect!! This is your nervous system doing an absolutely perfect job at what it’s designed to do! Reset implies that the only acceptable version of ourselves is the chatting with barista version, and that we get there by learning a few quick tricks. Reset implies that we need to be fixed, to go back to basic factory settings, and I hate that!

We are not designed to be in a constant state of expansion, good mood, level mindedness, total ease and small talk all day every day and then die; that is not the human experience.

The problems come when the nervous system gets stuck in fight, flight, freeze or fawn, or when something sticky like gum on a sidewalk gets caught in the memory of our body. When this happens we need to tend to ourselves. We need to work with a professional to help our bodies get unstuck and back in the flow of living. We need to get to know the stories that our bodies are holding, not bulldoze over them with box breathing and affirmations.

In the coming weeks I intend to make some short videos that highlight aspects of working with your nervous system, polyvagal theory, and somatic experiencing. I finds this idea quite scary, and so I promise to make at least two.

I love you.

Jen

Claudia Schiffer for Juergen Teller