Two ways to regulate when you’ve been triggered
Trauma creates the belief that you must betray who you are to survive.
Sometimes when trying to change patterns, cyclical thoughts and behaviors can bring you a lot of shame and frustration. Understanding that there is a significant physiological component to creating lasting change helps you to see you are not flawed or damaged. You are conditioned to keep yourself alive through reactive impulses or responses such as fight, fly, freeze, or fawn. These responses are crucial in keeping you alive during a traumatic event or series of events but are a huge hindrance in your healing process.
Did you know that the vagus nerve is the tenth cranial nerve and is connected to our heart, lungs, throat, and gut? The vagus nerve can help you regulate since it is in charge of deactivating the fight/flight/freeze/fawn response. The vagus nerve helps to bring you back into the present moment.
Healing starts by reconnecting to our bodies and our intuitive self. Activating the vagus nerve and improving our vagal tone are great tools to start our journey, especially in moments where we are feeling triggered. This means that we are re-experiencing symptoms physical or emotional of some past trauma in the present, moments where our brain is not able to differentiate between past and present. If your body can learn dysregulated ways of coping with trauma, it can also learn healthy ways to recover.
For moments when you are feeling triggered, I have two favorite ways to activate the vagus nerve.
Find a safe space in your body and rub an ice cube on yourself (such as on the back of your hand or arm) for 30 seconds to one minute. You will notice that your heart rate goes down, and you experience almost immediately a resetting sensation in your body.
The second tool or strategy I love is humming. This sends relaxing waves to your nervous system because it activates the muscles in the back of your throat that connects to your vagus nerve. You can do it as loudly or as quietly as you prefer, you can even hum your favorite song.
There are many aspects of the healing journey that are outside of our conscious control, and the connection between mind, body, and soul empowers us to comprehend that healing is within us. In therapy, I see myself as a tool that my clients may use to reconnect with their bodies, so they can gradually rewire some of their response patterns and start healing and living through the freedom of responding from a less automatic, more reflexive place.
Does this sound like something you would like to try in therapy? Book a free 30-minute consultation with our therapist matchmaker so see which therapist might be the best fit for you.
