Body or brains?

There are a lot of impactful things that I learned when I was learning about the polyvagal theory. But one of the hardest ones for me to accept; even now after years of training and teaching this stuff; is the idea that our brains may not be running the show.

We believe, based on a lot of societal rhetoric, that how we think is how things are. It turns out that that idea is fundamentally untrue. That we can, and often do, think things that are not actually the reality of what we do, or how we feel. Our bodies are the ones running the show, with 1,867 (probably more) unconscious signals that happen without our say-so, knowledge, or even knowledge about how it affects our brains and thoughts!

I recently signed up for Jessica Maguire’s newsletter - she’s amazing, please follow if you’re interested in learning more about this stuff. One of her newsletters talked about how our thoughts are actually very influenced by our nervous system state. So depending on how heightened our nervous system is, we could be perceiving everything as hopeless. The shame based thoughts come from our freeze state she says. Anything that we think is hopeless or helpless probably results from that. And our fear-based thoughts, like “I’m going to fail, or there is danger, or there isn’t enough time, or this person is bad or wrong” comes from our fight or flight sympathetic arousal.

This is so important for us to understand and internalize into how we respond to ourselves and others. We have the ability to help heal our responses by identifying this as nervous system dysregulation instead of just needing to ‘think differently’ or even trying to fix things externally to feel better internally. These are symptoms of injury, not something to just ‘think yourself out of.’ We can heal.