A virtual you

If you have read any of my other posts or blog you may know that I’m fascinated around human biological systems of social health. Much of my work spirals around the ancient mechanism of co-valency or ways in which we feel safe around each other and how we broadcast that safety.
Face-to-face interaction is vital in this mechanism.

Have you noticed how exhausted you feel after a zoom call? This may be because your body is searching for the cues that inform your biological self that you are safe. These micro gestures and changes in vocal tonality are much harder to witness after the image and sound has been digitally compressed, sent down a phone line and then rearranged into a virtual ‘you’.

An alternative may be to use the video option only when is absolutely necessary. Using audio only frees up concentration to enable you to really hear what’s being said, instead of being distracted by what you are seeing.

Why we stretch

Proprioception

You must know the scene, a ruddy faced driver gets pulled over by the police. Its the days before breathalysers so the cop gets him to perform some functional movement tasks to validate his ability to drive and therefore his soberness. He’s asked to walk an imaginary line heel to toe, then close his eyes and touch his nose from a horizontal outreached arm… he wobbles around, cue the comedy music. 

These simple tasks are testing something called proprioception. It’s a fancy word for the mechanism that tells you where your legs and arms are at any time. Try it… lift your arm up into the air, close your eyes. As you move your arm around, little neural sensors attached to the muscle fibres informs the brain where the arm is at any given moment. Its a useful trick if you are an octopus hiding in a watery cave evading a shark, just as it is for a gymnast performing a triple back flip.

What is most interesting about the proprioception system is how it also communicates with the body’s emotional self. It’s how the emotional safety systems wired into the nervous system can be modulated by how we move, how we hold ourselves and the shape we make. And it’s one of the reasons why a good stretch settles the nervous system before sleep. 

Try this experiment: In a seated position fold your arms, cross your legs and bring your head down towards your knees. While keeping this position in a loud clear voice say “right now, I’ve never been happier”. How did that feel? What happened when you tried to say the words? Most probably you laughed or giggled and it felt strange and incongruent. 

That’s because it is incongruent. The proprioceptive information being generated from this shape of contraction is coded towards protection and staying still, and is most aligned emotionally with feeling low and depression. 

Have you ever seen a tiger in a zoo? It’s a heart breaking proposition, not least for witnessing the slow mental breakdown that occurs when an apex predator like a big cat has its environment scaled down to what amounts to a large living room.  The heart break shows up most because we know what that feels like… not just now at the time of writing, spring 2020, but more generally in how humanity spends more time sat in front of screen and less time moving within a natural environment. 

So how can we stay physically and emotionally healthy in a confined space? Well, the answer may just be in the way proprioception works. The information fed from muscle fibres to the brain tell us the limitations of our environment and our bodies. Over time, and within the constraints of modern living, our muscles and therefore joints start to lose their full range of movement. This is really key, as we lose these full ranges, say, of our hips and legs, we no longer receive the proprioceptive information for that range. This means at a neuro-emotional level it becomes a blind spot. It’s a bit like losing some sight out of one eye; as far as the flight/fight system is concerned that patch may just be hiding a tiger behind it, meaning on some level that losing our full ranges of movement effects our ability to feel safe. 

If you are so inclined, I’ve attached some links to the research that supports this theory below.

Be well, move, feel safe…

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-08721-4

https://journals.physiology.org/doi/pdf/10.1152/physrev.1979.59.4.919

https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1113/jphysiol.2001.014316

Crafted Hands

There is a beautiful alignment of neurons in the nervous system when a person works with their hands in a connected way to a material such as wood and clay. You can see this play out when the potter crafts a pot on the wheel, the woodworker carves a new bowl or when baker kneads a loaf. It’s a connectedness that is born from loving what you do. 

It holds the ability to be fed from it and serve it simultaneously. It’s an ancient thing indeed and crafting with hand and tool is a defining ability and part of what makes us human. This connected work can be seen in the nervous system and how it responds, lowering the amount of stress neurotransmitters such as cortisol and upping the amount of happy brain chemicals such as dopamine. 

To find your purpose in such a way and then to be paid for it too, well that might just be the pinnacle of personal and cultural endeavour. It may mean that your body and mind are connected to the activity of your work. 

Resilience as a skill

Resilience resides in our bodies, it's always been there. Like the ability for the bow to bend back and then release the arrow, our bodies contain the analogous ability to bend, to absorb potential and to release and move. The ability to contract and to expand outwards is an ancient learned thing; it's been in our cells since way way back. It informs not only movement but also models our ability to be emotionally mobile and flex-able. To take the strain of all that may surround us and all that has been in our story thus far, and yet here we are still standing, still breathing.

How do you know you are safe?

Our sense of safety comes from the interplay of our biology and our environment.

An innate biological consciousness sends out a sort of echo location. For a newborn this a cry, what echos back is the smile of the mother. As we grow this becomes a more complex interweaving of thought, language, emotions, culture and all the noise of human life. 

It is a span of functionality that connects the whole. Here we see the full range: the healthy and the harmonious to the dissociated, the dis-eased and the dissonant.  It is an ancient system that is pre-language, keeping us animals safe.

Harmony and dissonance are vitally important feedback mechanisms. They tell the listener if they are safe or not. Dissonance is the opposite to harmony. It is contained in wavelength form in the sounds of the lions roar or the siren of an emergency vehicle. It is a key that can turn on our sympathetic nervous system, the one responsible for flight or fight, and is appropriate and reasonable if we don’t want to be eaten or run over. 

The genius-ness of the human is that we are constantly broadcasting our state, whether is it harmonic or dissonant. It is contained in our eyes whether bright or dissociated, our ability to make eye contact, in our vocal tone, in our shape, our muscle tonicity, how we hold ourselves and how we move. Much of this is subconscious and happens at every moment of every human interaction. We gather up all the cues around us and then broadcast out the sum result informing others of the current state of affairs. It is a viral mechanism. The one who originally heard the soft growl of a predator suddenly becomes rigid with alertness. This is perhaps an inconceivably small change of movement, but signals to others that they may not be safe right now. Hearts pounding, ears strained and eyes wide. Right now we’re one organism, waiting.

Being human means that this system is ON now and always, and is working and having it’s way with you regardless whether you are a kid at their first day of school or a seasoned CEO of a large multinational. 

Decoding the Roseta Phenomenon

I first came across the Roseto Phenomenon in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers. The phenomenon describes a small Italian community who, it was discovered in the 1960’s, had statistically the lowest rate of heart disease than anywhere else in the US. These were not healthy people generally, they would eat meatballs and sausages fried in lard rather than olive oil and smoke local cigars called stogies. So after ruling out diet and lifestyle as contributing factors the lead researchers John Bruhn and Stewart Wolf came upon the missing piece the X factor. They looked at social phenomena to explain it. It was the way in which the town interacted, the families, extended family and the village-like mindedness that kept the people healthy. It was the ability to walk in the street and meet your neighbor stop, talk and connect. Social cohesion was the mechanism of the nervous system’s regulation here. It generated a sense of safety and explained why these overweight chain smoking American-Italians had the lowest level of heart disease than anywhere else in the US. Sadly, over the years as the community started to assimilate deeper into the local population and become more americanized the effect wore off and today the community is statistically the same as the rest of the US.

Read Malcolm Gladwell’s piece on Roseto Here

Read The Research behind the Roseto Effect Here

The paradox of healing

Our understanding of health and disease is bound to the idea of perfection. Good health, we believe, is the absence of pain or irritation; it is the good working order of all our biological systems, including our mental health. This more or less is the current western paradigm of health. 

The word health is a derivative of the word heal, which means whole from the old English hælan. It lends itself to our concept of health in which poor health or illness somehow renders the person un-whole; that there is a piece missing; that there is something to obtain before good health can be restored.

However I remember learning about homeostasis in school biology class. It describes an ever changing self regulating system that always finds balance. To be fair, it may not always fit in with our idea of health-led-balance, but ultimately its role is not to keep us healthy or happy. Instead it is a mechanism of keeping the host alive.

 Could trauma and disease be the result of a homeostatic system? A perfect outcome or response to the stimulus? Could healing not be healing at all, but a way in which we can widen the bandwidth for our capacity of discomfort?

Learn More about trauma ; https://www.jakegold.co.uk/events

Sum of Self

There is a new paradigm starting to approach primary health care. A trauma informed practice should be at the heart of any client/patient communication. More and more it is being revealed that mental and physical wellbeing is not just the sum of self; we are not islands. It is the accumulation of every interaction both loving and traumatising that we have experienced so far. So whatever your modality is, if you are working with humans, the entire presence of the person's lived experience is right there in the room with you. All of a sudden that might just be a much bigger proposition.

Stand like the bear

As we move towards a trauma informed culture, what may come up for us through the act of recognising what prevails in clients, is an exposure to what prevails in us. For many this is an uncomfortable fact and would perhaps go to explain why it is that primary care is littered with good intention but is failing the population while rinsing out the caregivers. There is a song that precedes us. It contains an orchestra of information and is made up of all the lived experience of our entire lives. A trauma informed practice makes us willing to to hear this song and through the mechanisms of human connectedness, co-regulation and empathy, our own song will be present. I for one recognise how my own vulnerabilities show up when working with clients but our vulnerability is not what we may think it is. The bear, when confronted will offer up all that is vulnerable about her. She will stand on her back legs a slightly unbalanced position for her size, she will spread her arms and show the most vulnerable and most softest part of herself, that's what is happening, but to the onlooker this grounded and deeply placed sense of vulnerable self looks like a tsunami of characterised power. hashtag#primarycare, hashtag#traumainformed hashtag#standlikethebear