Conceptualizing Wellness
There are many theoretical frameworks for understanding human suffering. They offer various ways of conceptualizing your experience of suffering and the process of healing. There is not one right way. The following are some that currently resonate with me. They may not resonate with you and that’s okay. I can help you find and/or develop a framework that feels right for you and guide you through healing from your framework.
A Nervous System Framework
Mental, emotional, and much of our experience of physical distress is related to functions of the nervous system. These modes of functioning may be deeply imprinted as a result of trauma, complex trauma, oppressive systems, etc. —often interacting with sensitive predispositions —or may be temporarily off-balance due to current life stressors and circumstances. Your nervous system is acting to protect you and may be protecting you in ways that are difficult to perceive and/or that used to be protective but no longer serve you. It’s mode of functioning and/or your relationship with its functions, however, may be contributing to your distressing experiences. This can look like anxiety, depression, or other “mental health disorders,” relationship difficulties, family conflict, chronic pain, etc.
I can help you build or recover a sense of safety and resiliency in your/their relationships with yourself, with others, with your culture and your community, and with the natural world in ways that help support your relationship with your nervous system.
Stress Response (Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn)
When I speak of the nervous system I am primarily referring to the mechanisms of our stress response. This is a primitive protective system that we share with all other animals to keep us safe. Human’s more complex brain systems (cortex and limbic system) can complicate this process.
When we are in danger or think that we are in danger, our stress response becomes activated. When our sympathetic nervous system is activated in this way, we respond with fight or flight. This is helpful when we need to fight off an attack or run from a predator, but less helpful or harmful when we fight our partner when it feels like they are attacking us or when we leave a good job after a conflict with a co-worker
Our freeze, or immobilization response is activated when we cannot or perceive that we cannot fight or escape. This response is helpful when further harm would come to us by fighting, and fleeing is not an option, but can translate to major depression, dissociation, or learning difficulties.
The “fawn” response is a newer concept than the fight, flight, and freeze, coined by Pete Walker (http://www.pete-walker.com/fourFs_TraumaTypologyComplexPTSD.htm). Fawn refers to the impulsive reaction to please and appease in order to avoid or diffuse conflicts with others which are or are perceived to be dangerous or threatening. This can lead to difficulties setting healthy boundaries and being authentic in relationships. Like the other fear responses, this perception of threat occurs in the body prior to being recognized by the conscious mind, causing us to react before we have any understanding of what’s happening. In many cases, there is no conscious understanding.
When we experience stressful/traumatic events, especially when we have a sensitive predisposition, these experiences become deeply imprinted in our explicit and/or implicit memory and shape our neural pathways and bodily functions. This impacts our behaviors, reactions, and emotions without our conscious control. Fortunately, we have the ability to reshape and alter these neural pathways and bodily functions. Therapy can play a big role in facilitating this change.
Attachment and Connection
Humans need attachments and connections to survive. Human infants are born earlier in their gestational development than other primates resulting in what many experts refer to as the fourth trimester (the period between birth and nine months). During this time, infants need the safety and connection that would have been provided to them within the womb. As they grow older, their needs for independence increase while their needs for attunement and attachment remain critically important.
Attunement is recognizing and accommodating the physical and emotional needs of another —not to be confused with enmeshment or lack of differentiation which involves an inability to separate one’s own emotional experience from another’s and vice versa. Attunement is critical for healthy secure attachment. Healthy secure attachment provides a sense of safety and security that allows us to explore the world and connect with others with curiosity and confidence.
Extensive attachment research has demonstrated that secure attachment promotes positive mental and physical health and developmental outcomes, as well as general sense of well-being throughout the lifespan. While early attachments provide the foundation for healthy development, secure attachment relationships remain essential at any age. Many of the consequences from early insecure attachments can be healed via newly formed secure attachments. Harm can occur when insecure attachments are experienced at any point in the lifespan.
Attachment trauma is a major player in the functioning of the nervous system and the stress response. I can help you work on the attachment relationships that you have the ability to control in your life (i.e., the relationships with your children and family and friends who are willing and able to do this work with you) and work to build a healthy attachment relationship within the therapeutic relationship which can serve as a base and model for forging these relationships elsewhere.
Co-regulation
When we feel safe and connected with others and in our environment, the ventral vagus nerve of our parasympathetic nervous system becomes activated. Dr. Steven Porges (Home of Dr. Stephen Porges) coined this as the social engagement system. When a person is at ease, without activation of their fear response, they are able to access their social engagement system and experience authentic connection with others. This can be very difficult for those of us who have experienced prolonged or heightened stress/trauma/complex trauma. The brain and nervous system need to be rewired to make room for feeling safe enough to be authentically present with others.
We learn to regulate our own nervous systems by mirroring the regulation of others. Quite literally. Mirror neurons in our brains create neural pathways that reflect the “self”-regulation pathways of the people we interact with. While our most developed pathways are shaped in infancy and early childhood, they can shift, change, and be newly made as we interact with others. When we do not develop these co-regulatory pathways early in development or when these pathways have been disrupted later in life, connecting with others can feel very threating. Even connecting with an authentic and supportive therapist may feel too dangerous.
The process of developing co-regulation/self-regulation of the nervous system and feeling safe enough to co-regulate with another person cannot be rushed and must be gently honored. Therapeutic modalities such as play, somatic work, art, music, nature immersion, and animal therapy may feel more safe, and thus be more effective, than talk therapy. Depending on where you’re at in your healing journey and your own wisdom and intuition, we may spend most or all of our time in these kinds of modalities.
Systems and Relational-Cultural Theory
Traditional psychotherapy and many of the popular psychotherapy approaches of today have conceptualized human psychological suffering as a pathological problem of the individual. Healing approaches often focus on changing behaviors and cognitive processes. A person, however, cannot be understood outside of the context of their relationships and environment. It is well established that psychological suffering is influenced by the many systems that we are a part of and that cognitive processing is only one part of our healing.
Systems include our family dynamics (current and intergenerational), our communities, our cultures, our institutions, the ecological world, etc. We can develop disruptive relationships with ourselves and with these systems. While we cannot change many of the aspects of the systems that impact us, we can change our relationships with them. By changing our relationships with these systems, the systems shift and a new dynamic is created. This might look like learning to become more attuned with or learning to set firmer boundaries with our loved ones. It might also look like making sense of our racialized trauma and becoming empowered to advocate and take action for the deinstitutionalization of racism.
Our systems are rich and complex. No individuals’ are the same. Uncovering who we are, why we think, feel, and behave the ways we do, and who we want to be, requires context. Systems work helps define this context while also encouraging interaction with and relationship work with the people, communities, and institutions that make up these systems.