Twig's SE Reflections

Play Episode 15 Here

We can focus our attention on any number of things...the worst case scenario, what's "off", what we still have left to do. We can also choose one of my favorites: Cheering for things when they're in the right direction. No matter how small, every little step in the right direction deserves a cheer.

Play Episode 14 Here

Around the time that chronic troubles begin backing off people have the opportunity of getting on "The Upward Trend." It's a nervous system thing as much as anything else but it's nice to talk about some of the elements behind it...like consistent sleep and good choices in friends and partnership. It's also a good thing to recognize that people can get to a place where therapy is less and less important and choices arising from a more accurate neuroception often become more and more accessible (leading to a better and better life).

Staying in the Session can be difficult when you start thinking "I'm not going to be able to do Somatic Experiencing with this person." Banish the thought! Stay in the Session, that's the only way to be present for when something new happens that you can work with.

One of the challenges being in "distress" or having the symptoms that go along with trauma and nervous system dis-regulation is that things feel "off" and "weird". That makes things challenging since SE follows a kind of logic that suggests that at some level, those uncomfortable feelings are part of what needs to be "felt" and "experienced." Helping our clients come to a sufficiently participatory place with such feelings is a critical element of the work that we do and of the help that we offer. And it's one reason why our client's need us (for now).

Daily life probably has some kind of balance between Positive and Negative experiences where, more or less, the ideal is that we can swing between our impressions of them both. Spend enough time around danger and that swinging gets skewed toward the distressed side of things. Getting a sense of how much positivity our client's can handle, along with increasing our own ability to do the same, are hugely helpful in working with folks who've been "put through it."

Teachers of complex crafts like Somatic Experiencing come in all different styles and capacities for explaining their own process. But none of them can ever name everything they're doing, nor should they. Part of learning the craft is learning how to pay attention and to sometimes "steal the technique." This takes your active participation and observation along with your willingness to adjust your own behavior when you see something that works better, because the truth is, some things can't be explained.

We'll spend hours a week sitting in similar positions to people who are actively seeking therapy because they're in distress. That means we'll spend hours a week in the postures of distress which are not otherwise our own. We need to remember to tell our bodies that we're not in that associated upset whenever we can. We've got to remember to move.

Why does it take so long to learn SE?

Did I do something wrong if I lost a noncommittal client?

What does it mean to talk to people in different ways depending on where they are in the stress response?

The architecture and design of our autonomic nervous system means that certain parts are going to work depending on the needs of the situations. We'll run for our lives if we have to and digest our food while chatting all night if we get to. The perception of what the situations demands or allows is made by our organism, at an involuntary level, and it centers around the question: how safe am I right now? "Is it okay for me to engage, or should I be fighting or fleeing or immobilizing like an ice cube?" They call that assessment process "neuroception" and in a word, it's: human.

As we get better at Somatic Experiencing we're going to see a bunch of ways that we'd like to change what we do in our sessions. Here's one friendly pattern I use to change my own habits when I discover that I'm doing something that is unhelpful to the process. Funny, it's all about titration.