Shifting Patterns

When I started my own SSP experience, I immediately knew this would become part of my healing practice. For years, I’d been teaching kids and adults about the nervous system. This knowledge can be so empowering, helping us to better understand ourselves, our emotions, and our behavior. It also helped me, as a provider who supports people as they navigate difficult life events, to understand how ongoing physical and emotional stressors impact the nervous system and often leaves people stuck in a stress state even after a stressor has resolved.

The SSP quickly became an essential addition to my practice. It soothes the nervous system and helps it shift into a state of more ease and resilience. Rather than constantly overriding a stressed-out system, clients can experience feeling more relaxed, more safe in their bodies, and more present in their relationships and their life.

A Little About Neuroscience (Just the basics! Not too science-y)

Our nervous system is made up of our brain, spinal cord, and nerves which send messages from our body to our brain, and vice versa. SSP is based on the science of Polyvagal theory, which is tied to the part of our nervous system called the autonomic nervous system (ANS). “Autonomic” can also be thought of as “automatic” or “autopilot” because this part of our nervous system is responsible for managing many things without us having to think about them. For example, the ANS keeps our heart beating and our lungs breathing.

The ANS also helps us to automatically react to situations, people, or feelings without us having to consciously process what we should do. This system gathers information from inside and outside of our body and filters this through past memories and patterns of response. In less than 1/10th of a second, the ANS can sound an internal alarm system if it detects a threat.

The ANS influences whether we feel safe enough to let down our defenses in the place we are in, and with the people we are around. Even when we are relaxed and at ease, beneath our awareness the ANS is constantly scanning our environment for any signs of threat to our wellbeing. Essentially, the ANS works like a surveillance system and triggers different response patterns depending on what it’s sensing.

This surveillance system has what’s called a “negativity bias” – this means that it is much better at noticing signals of discomfort or danger than signals of ease and safety. From a survival perspective, this is great news! – we don’t want to miss a signal of real danger.

But that negativity bias can be a real issue in our day-to-day life because most of the time, the stressors we deal with in the modern age don’t require an actual survival response. And yet, our system is bringing our attention to all the little things that might bother us, and these can distract us from all the other things that might bring us joy and keep us calm.

This is why mindfulness practices can be so helpful. When we consciously shift our attention to things that bring us feelings of contentment and pleasure, it can balance our natural instinct to focus on the negatives. However, if your nervous system is stressed or burned out, you might find it very difficult to engage in mindfulness practices. Being in survival mode keeps you in a state of reactivity rather than one of reflection and intention.

Many of us, even if we are living relatively safe lives, don’t feel fully at ease most of the time. If you’re hyperalert to all the negatives around you, you may feel stuck in a cycle of constant stress. This makes you even more reactive to little things that bother you, makes it more difficult for you to connect with and enjoy the people in your life, and may impact things like sleep, your immune system, and your ability to learn, work or perform to your potential. (And of course, the cycle will continue, because now there are even more things bothering you!)

The nervous system likes predictability and stability, even if that means continuing to use unhealthy, reactive response patterns that don’t serve your wellbeing. Bringing unconscious patterns into your awareness is the first step to shifting them. Then, when you soothe the nervous system with modalities like SSP and energy healing, you can move out of autopilot and begin to shift into new, healthier patterns. This can allow for powerful healing! 🌿

An understanding of life begins with the understanding of patterns.

-Fritjof Capra