When the Watchdog Cries Wolf
There’s a dog in my neighborhood that barks all day long. At first it was annoying but now I don’t even notice it any more. Like a good watchdog, your autonomic nervous system alerts you to danger and can save your life. But just like the watchdog that cries wolf, barking at everything and nothing, soon people stop paying attention.
I know not everyone is a dog person. Dogs can be unpredictable and frightening. When I was in 6th grade I had a friend who had a beautiful German shepherd. This dog was both the family pet and a watch/guard dog. I was always a little nervous around her even though she was very well trained. My friend and her family were french. Their dog only spoke french. She never listened to anything I said of course because I didn’t know any commands in french. She would growl and bark when we played tag trying to protect her family. She didn’t understand it was only a game and no one was in any real danger.
Your Watchdog on Alert
The stress response is like a watchdog. Your watchdog’s job is to notice anything that might be dangerous to you or threaten your survival and to mobilize you to do something to survive. It makes sure your body is ready to react quickly, ready to run or fight and if it’s too much, to shut you down and play dead. Your watchdog is faster than conscious thought and so well trained that he doesn’t need any commands from you.
In this story you, and your conscious mind, are the CEO of a major corporation. You work on the 45th floor of a shiny high rise downtown. You have the best trained security dog money can buy. That watchdog operates on the ground floor and doesn't speak your language.
As CEO, you have a lifetime of accumulated experiences that your watchdog has access to and uses to assess safety and threat. When he notices one he sounds the alarm and makes sure everyone on every floor is ready or it. You and your board of directors collect information from all the floors of the company including security to make decisions about how you’re going to act and react. You may send memo after memo down to the ground floor explaining what is socially acceptable behavior and what is not. But good watchdogs A.) don’t have time to read memos and B.) don’t speak your language anyway. Their job is to keep you alive by any means necessary, whether you like it or not. Because you don’t speak his language, you can’t fire him or make him stand down.
This is why you can’t rationalize yourself out of your racing heart or spike in your blood pressure. You can’t talk yourself out of the flood of stress hormones that won’t allow you to sleep and make you lose your temper at the drop of a hat. There’s nothing you can say to yourself that will shut down your anxiety or prevent emotional memories from surfacing. All of those things are controlled by your inner watchdog and he doesn’t understand those commands.The best you can do is try to ignore him.
Failure to communicate...
Stress injury is loosely defined as physical, mental or emotional injury stemming from any acute traumatic event or chronic exposure to unresolved stressors. The symptoms associated with PTSI can be wide ranging and include dissociation, re-experiencing, memory changes, insomnia, nightmares, emotional dysregulation, lack of social engagement, anxiety & depressive behavior and many other forms of physical dysfunction. We think of symptoms like this as limited to veterans returning from war or victims of assault because those are obvious traumatic events. But you can suffer from stress injury without a major event. Simply observing someone else's trauma is enough. First responders are constantly exposed to trauma that isn’t necessarily their own. Every single person has been exposed to trauma at some point. The differences lie in our ability to bounce back from it. Anything that you’re exposed to that your subconscious mind sees as a threat counts as trauma and can trigger your stress response. Your watchdog’s definition of threat doesn’t always match the CEO's definition of what is dangerous.
Chronic stress is like having your watchdog poked with a stick over and over again. It doesn’t matter that you think those stresses are small. Long term stress from any source on top of a history of trauma can create confusion for your watchdog. He finds patterns of threat and starts to see everything as life or death. When the only messages that you receive are danger and threat, eventually the CEO starts to ignore them. Over time your highly trained watchdog can be overwhelmed but because he’s so well trained and loyal he still wants to protect you the only way he knows how...by shutting you down.
Two truths
Your inner watchdog senses danger, life or death danger. You as CEO feel the physiologic response in your body, know that it isn’t life or death but have no way to communicate with your watchdog. Both perceptions are real. So what can you do about it?
All of the unexpressed energy from your watchdog mobilizing you to fight or flight builds up over time. Ignoring it doesn’t make it go away, it just gets stored as tension in your muscles, fascia and bones. Because it’s stored in the body, it can be accessed through the body. But it needs a safe way to release that tension. A safety valve, that allows the nervous system to complete the stress response and safely down regulate itself.
Trauma release exercise is that safety valve. It provides a pathway directly into the autonomic nervous system through the body's natural tremor mechanism. David Berceli’s exercise sequence works from the inside out to reset and counteract the sympathetic response (fight or flight) by shifting the body back into a parasympathetic(rest & digest) state. The tremor lets your inner watchdog shake off the threat and return more quickly to a state of calm. The practice of tremor release gives students the tools they can use to re-establish agency, control and a friendlier connection with their body.
Trauma release yoga works along similar pathways connecting to the vagus nerve using the breath, permission to stop & rest and titration of deep hip openers to release long held tension in the psoas muscle and throughout the body. The integration of the tremor mechanism and yoga is a powerful healing tool for all sources of stress injury. Unlike talk therapy, there is no need to relive or retell the story. We are unlearning the body’s physiological response pattern through the body. Relearning the most primitive form of communication within the body and finding our way back to a safe self regulated nervous system.
This is not a “cure” for stress injury in the most traditional definition. The word “cure” denotes the possibility of eliminating the cause of illness or disorder and we will always be exposed to varying levels of stress. Instead we need to look for ways to strengthen our resilience to the stress we carry from our past and in our present. TRE® along with trauma informed Yoga are practices that over time can boost your body’s natural ability to self regulate and support healing from the inside out. They are ways to retrain your inner watchdog in language that he can understand. They don’t shut him down, they simply correct his perception of your world. And that is a beautiful thing.
My name is Ericka Thomas. I offer trauma release yoga memberships and private coaching for survivors of stress injury and overwhelmed people just like you.
To find a certified trauma release provider near you go to www.traumaprevention.com.
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