Calming Your Emotions Naturally using Community Resiliency Model (CRM) Skills (1 of 3)

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in this video, I'll introduce the concepts of a powerful body-centered way to calm and regulate your emotions.  It doesn't require a therapist or a lot of expensive training.  It uses the power of your own nervous system to make you emotionally stronger and more resilient.  It is based on a therapy for trauma and anxiety called the Community Resiliency Model, but I believe these are great skills for all of us to have. This is the first video in a three part series.

Down / Bottom Up

People come into therapy for a lot of reasons -- but generally it’s because they are unhappy about some portion of their lives or how they are reacting to things.  When we think of therapy, we tend to think of "talk therapy" -- come in, talk about your problems, your childhood, your relationships.  Now — I'm a big fan of talk therapy -- you can gain powerful insights about your behavior and the behavior of those around you by talking thing out with an objective, trained professional.  This is known as a top down approach to processing -- meaning you start with the brain and thoughts to work things out.  But there IS another approach, which you can do entirely on your own once you know what you are doing.  And that is referred to as bottom up processing.  So, if top down processing accesses your behavior and emotions from your head, bottom up accesses them from your body.  And the great thing is -- you don't have to choose -- you can use both methods at the same time for even better results.

The thing is -- we can all be pretty cut off from our bodies.  We tend to live primarily in our heads and most of the time, we aren't even paying attention to how our bodies are reacting.   People who have experienced trauma or have very stressful lives may be even MORE cut off since, in their experience, not feeling anything has made them feel safer in the past.  But for almost all of us, the key to feeling better is by actually being MORE in touch with our bodies and listening what our bodies are telling us.  So that we can better understand how our bodies react to stress in our environments, let's talk about the

Nervous System

for a second.  Our nervous system consists of our brains, our spinal cord, and all of the nerves that send and receive messages from other parts of our bodies.   The main function of our nervous system is to keep us alive.  It's on high alert for threats to our survival, like tigers.  When we lived on the Savana, this was a little more reasonable than it is now, but unfortunately our nervous system hasn't evolved much in the past several thousand years.  So, what happens when our nervous system senses a tiger?  It calls in the Sympathetic Nervous System to activate our fight/flight or freeze response.  So, what does this system do?  It makes our breathing speed up, our heart race, our blood pressure increase, our digestion stop, and our muscles tense.  We get ready to either run from that tiger OR go to battle with it.  So, what happens if we realize -- after the fact -- that the tiger we THOUGHT we saw, was actually just a tree blowing in the wind?  Our body has a separate system called the Parasympathetic Nervous System that reverses all of those responses.  It comes in and it calms everything down from that state of fight or flight readiness.  It slows our breathing and our heart rate, it lowers our blood pressure, it gets our digestion going again, and relaxes our muscles.  Why am I telling you all this?  Because sometimes modern humans get stuck in a state of readiness -- or anxiety -- and we haven't figured out how to easily call in our Parasympathetic Nervous System to restore our sense of calm.  The skills that we will be learning in this video series will help to do this. 

Hand Model of the Brain

So, at this point, it's useful to know a little bit about how our brains are set up.  I could show you a photograph of a brain, but as it turns out, we all are walking around with our own little brain model attached to us.  It turns out that if you make a fist with your hand with your thumb tucked in, that's a pretty good model of the human brain.  This is the back of your head, this is the front. 

Our brain grew from the inside out.  So, all of the most basic stuff is on the inside and the most complicated stuff is on the outside.  The palm is the lizard brain -- it helps to regulate your temperature, your eating, and sleeping -- this is the part of the brain that keeps you alive if you are in a coma.  The thumb represents the mammal brain -- it takes care of emotions, memory, and it contains our alarm system.  The fingers are the human brain -- it takes care of the things that make us human: language, insight, rational thinking.  And the very front of that human brain -- or your front knuckles, is our prefrontal cortex, which takes care of planning, organizing, thinking about cause and effect, reasoning, stuff like that.  

So, what happens when you experience something frightening?  Our mammal brain (or thumb) sounds the alarm and our cortex (or fingers) go offline and we rely entirely on our reptile and mammal brains to make sure that we can survive and get us to safety.  So, what does this mean in practice?  It means that, during times of fear or high anxiety, we don't have access to the human brain that helps us to think, plan, and consider cause and effect -- those functions shut down and we go into full survival mode until we are safe again.  In our hand model, we demonstrate this by Flipping Our Lid and now we can see that the cortex (or human brain) doesn't have any contact at all with the rest of the brain when we are in crisis mode.  Those parts of the brain only reconnect — once we feel safe again.

Resilience Zone

Normally, we are walking around doing our thing, and our nervous system is pretty normal.  It's in this resilience zone -- it's sometimes known as the window of tolerance.  We might have little things that happen to us -- we get cut off in traffic, or have an argument with our teenager, but we stay pretty safely in the resilience zone.  That means we haven't flipped our lid, so we are able to use ALL of the parts of our brain to make decisions and plan out our life.  BUT if we have something really scary or stressful happen, that sounds the alarm in our amygdala, which is part of our mammal brain, and our sympathetic nervous system kicks in. Remember what that does?  Our hearts beat faster, our blood pressure goes way up, we start to sweat, our muscles tense, we get twitchy and can't sit still, and our other systems (like digestion, for example) shut down, so that we can save energy for our stress response.  When this happens, we are up here in Hyper-arousal -- and we have flipped our lids -- we are only geared towards safety at this point.  And some people end up getting "Stuck on High" when, even after the threat is gone, their Parasympathetic Nervous System doesn't kick in and they can't calm down.  These folks can be irritable, tense, and on edge.  Now sometimes it happens that a person has experienced so much stress or trauma, that their bodies stop responding in this way and instead they slow WAY down.  That's called Hypo-arousal and is involved in freeze responses or when people "play possum”, which of course is another survival tactic.  So, some people get "Stuck on Low" and can be tired, depressed, and sluggish. 

The other thing that happens to some people who have experienced a lot of stress or trauma is that their resilience zone shrinks.  Meaning it takes a lot less to send them into Hyper-arousal.  Like we were talking about earlier -- maybe someone cutting them off in traffic or having an argument with their teenager would be enough to flip their lid and those folks may also have difficulty coming back down into their resilient zone, which is really narrow to begin with.  Sometimes people stay in a pretty much constant state of anxiety and hyper-arousal, which is tough on the body and makes it difficult to make reasonable decisions on a regular basis.  I should point out that when you are in your resilient zone, you can still feel sad, angry, or anxious -- it's just that you can function through these emotions with your thinking brain still online to help guide you and make better decisions.

Okay -- so why did I give you this overview of our nervous system and how it works?  Because it's important to know how bottom up processing works.  Essentially, you have to become really aware of how your body is reacting to things — and then you can harness the power of your Parasympathetic Nervous System to calm your body down -- this leads to calmer emotions, more balanced living, and better decision making and overall wellness.  This all makes sense, right?

Okay -- join me in my next video where I teach the three fundamental skills from the Community Resilience Model.  Let me know what you think.  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!