Survival Mode and Repeated and/or Prolonged Traumas

Alrighty, folks! Here it is - the oft promised but repeatedly delayed final post of the Survival Mode Series!!

(Insert trumpet sounds)

I feel like this has been a big build up for something that’s really probably not going to be all that interesting for anyone who isn’t a brain geek… Alas - I AM that brain geek, and I’ll write what I want. 

So - let’s get into it, shall we?

My last post is going to deal with those last few Survival Mode Types I talked about in posts 2 and 3, plus a few extra caveats for all of this in general. These require a whole special post all their own because they are actually super complex, difficult to treat, and always very interesting. These types deal with repeated and/or prolonged traumas, but not just any repeated traumas - repeated life-threatening (or potentially life threatening) situations that you have no choice in or escape from. 

These don’t have to be actual life-threatening situations either. I think that this can be confusing for folks sometimes. Your stress levels just have to be high enough that your body thinks that you must be facing a potential life-threatening situation. This can be having to deal with a bully at work, a volatile home life where you can’t relax and switch out of your stress mode, even just having a high-stress job in general - over a long enough time-line, those situations can be incredibly damaging to your nervous system and long-term health. 

But, let’s go back to our Survival Mode Bear analogies. The main thing I want to talk about in this post is how our nervous system responds when we’re facing a long-term threat to our survival (like a global pandemic). 

So, going back to our bear analogy - imagine that you have happened upon a bear in the woods, but that bear decides to follow you home. No matter what you do, you can’t shake the bear. 

Remember that graph I showed you in the third post about the short-term and long-term phases of Survival mode? Our stress response basically follows an action potential pattern. 

That’s how our normal stress response looks. Our Survival Mode Response is similar, but has two separate phases - short-term (to get you away from the danger) and the long-term (to get you the stuff you need and safety for long enough to heal and recover).

You can develop dysfunctions of this response where you get stuck in either an up phase or a down phase as well, which require specialized treatment with someone like me who specializes in nervous system rehabilitation, but otherwise, you can generally get through this with just your standard treatments and supports and be none the worse for wear.

Of course, this response is dependent on you being able to get away from the bear. So, what happens if the bear lives with you or works with you? Remember how I said that if you’re not given a chance to go through the whole cycle properly and start a second one before the first is finished, the second one starts from wherever you are in that process?

When faced with repeated traumatic exposures, your nervous system has a few main options to deal with this situation. Often, it depends on the circumstances and the amount of control you feel you have over the situation that determines the specifics of how your nervous system responds and how you’re going to deal with the situation, but regardless, you’re going to need some rehabilitation later to get it back under control once the dangerous situation has been resolved (you may need extra help during this as well, so that you can get the dangerous situation resolved).

What’s interesting is that these responses, when done correctly, can actually increase your odds of survival. When done incorrectly, they can decrease it. Regardless, they are a last ditch effort of a nervous system pushed well past the brink which produces lasting damage that takes a very long time to rehabilitate. 

1. Tend and befriend - Also known as people-pleasing behaviour. Ever hear of Stockholm Syndrome? Or Battered Woman Syndrome? The actual syndromes themselves are controversial, but the underlying physiology of it is still relevant. When you find yourself a long-term captive of a situation where your life is dependent on the approval of your captor, you try to make friends with them. You basically try to tame the bear. If you can learn its moods and behaviours, you feel like you can manage the situation. You can even develop kind feelings for your bear - especially if this is a parental figure, sibling, spouse, or friend. It’s this response that gets people trapped in a lot of very unhealthy friendships and relationships, but it does tend to have the best treatment outcomes.

2. Learned helplessness - you can’t tame the bear nor escape the situation so why even bother trying? Even when circumstances change and the bear is gone, you still don’t try to do anything, because why bother? What’s the point? There will just be another bear eventually.

3. Full shut down - no emotions, diminished responses, your entire system represses just about everything. Life seems fine on the surface, you go about the motions, but you’re pretty much dead inside. Your brain has decided the bear isn’t the problem, your reactions (emotions, feelings, etc.) to the bear are. Everything is just numb always. These folks are usually pretty high functioning, to a point. Typically leads to risk-taking behaviours, self-harm, etc., anything to feel something.

4. Full flip out - EVERYTHING is a threat and is trying to kill you. Also known as, when all else fails, go apesh*t.

Because these kinds of traumas are something that typically happen during your formative years (meaning, it’s usually within your own household during childhood), these kinds of traumatic circumstances can set your nervous system up for a life-long kind of Survival Mode setting that is not at all functional later in life. If these kinds of traumas happen later in life, but you had a relatively healthy upbringing, they’re easier to treat. It all kind of depends on the circumstances. 

How does this relate to the pandemic? 

The pandemic is both a repeated and prolonged trauma. Depending on the life circumstances you have already been through, or are also going through concurrently, you may not be handling it all that great. The key to managing your nervous system during repeated or prolonged trauma is the amount of control you feel you have in the situation and your ability to remove yourself from the situation for periods of time when you need to. This is why the Hide Box strategy and good boundaries around it are useful for being able to properly navigate this. 

Types of Trauma Responses Over Time

Image Source:

Prototypical patterns of disruption in normal functioning across time following potentially traumatic events (PTEs).

Bonanno, G. A., & Mancini, A. D. (2012). Beyond resilience and PTSD: Mapping the heterogeneity of responses to potential trauma. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 4(1), 74–83. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017829

Remember waaaaaay back in the early days of the pandemic, I put on the ‘Strength Training Your Resilience’ workshop? This was why. Resilience is such an important skill for learning how to navigate life’s ups and downs, but it’s also like exercise for your nervous system. A properly functioning nervous system is so important for being able to get through those ups and downs, and it’s something that you actually have control over maintaining and optimizing. You don’t have to be at the whim of your own nervous system. Meaning, for the most part, your trauma reactions are under your control. You may just need to learn how to best work with your nervous system so that you get to be that happy little line at the bottom of that graph. 

If this is your first major trauma, you may have had a big initial Survival Mode Response that, now that you’ve gotten used to it and life is getting back to normal, seems kinda okay now. Or, you may have had other repeated or prolonged traumas in your life and this was the final straw for your nervous system and now it’s decided to go into Full Flip Out. Point is, everyone’s situation is unique. People are going to seem fine, and then a few years from now really not be fine. Or, they were really not fine already but are coming out of it now and will be doing okay. Either way, we can all try our best to recognize that everyone’s got something and how they’re responding to life these days is just biology. So whatever slight you might think someone has committed against you, it’s likely more about whatever underlying issues you’re probably not dealing with than anything actually related to the other person. And if someone is flipping out at you over nothing - that’s a Them problem, not a You problem. Try not to get drawn into it.

We can all be kind to each other, even if our nervous systems are flipping out a bit. But! It is also our responsibility to get that treated should we find ourselves flipping out over everything. Life happening to you is not your fault. It happens to everyone. But it IS up to you to heal the wounds left behind. It is not on your friends or family to do that healing for you nor manage your reactions from them. There are people whose job it is to help you with that. 

Where to start to find them: 

https://novascotia.ca/mental-health-and-wellbeing/

https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/mental-health-services/mental-health-get-help.html

I’m super glad that so many people have found this series so helpful! Thanks for reading, and, as always, feel free to reach out if you have questions. We’re all in this together!

Till next time, folks!

What If You’re The Toxic Friend Right Now?

Whhoooooo… Opened a big ol’ can o’ worms with my last post. 

First off - thank you so much to everyone who’s reached out asking about their own situation. I’m loving all the engagement! Keep it up!

An interesting offshoot of my Survival Mode and the Toxic Friend post has been the folks who recognize that they’re trapped in a cycle with someone from the other side of it - they’re being the needy friend focused on themselves instead of supporting the person in their lives who’s having the hard time. Coming to that realization is remarkably brave and honest and I’m so proud of you for wanting to take the steps to rectify it. 

Second - we can all do it, so don’t beat yourself up too much. Remember those survival mechanisms around relationships and friendships I was talking about? How we tend to hyper focus on the approval of others when our Survival Mode kicks in? It’s easy to get stuck there. 

I want to assure folks that if you recognize that you’re doing it and want to stop it - that’s actually indicative of someone who went through some sh*t of their own and so are missing a skill set or two and this is just the only way your brain knows how to get what it needs. That’s a VERY different situation from someone who does this on purpose with zero insight into the damage it causes, what they’re doing, nor wants to fix it. You’re not a bad person because life happened to you. You’re taking responsibility for your behaviour and seeking help to try to fix it. That’s really all we can expect from each other when friendships go off the rails. That’s not the same as someone who pathologically doesn’t have empathy and is manipulating people for their own personal gain. You’re not broken. Just a little bruised. 

So, what’s happening and why are you flipping out at someone you care about when you know they need you to be a support person right now? 

This is where actual therapy comes in - here are some resources to get that process started:

https://novascotia.ca/mental-health-and-wellbeing/

https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/mental-health-services/mental-health-get-help.html

But, in just a general overview, here’s what’s going down and how to try to stop it. 

Approval is a hell of a drug. Seeking the approval of someone else over your own approval of yourself tells me that either your relationship with your parents or your friend-group during those critical times of survival behaviour pattern formations was a bit unbalanced and unhealthy. But! We CAN actually learn to deactivate that and learn better and healthier ways of interacting with others in our lives. 

1. What’s going on in your own life that’s got you in Survival Mode of your own? If you’re hyper-focusing on this other person, you’ve got to be going through something that’s got you tweaked.

2. Why is their approval so important to you? Who/what does this person represent for you? What abuse-cycle are you re-living here? What are the ways that you can bring the focus back to yourself and your own approval of you, rather than needing this other person to validate you and your existence for you?

3. Recognize how unfair it is that you’re asking this person to do that for you - they’re going through something. They don’t need the responsibility of validating you, approving of you, or just about anything else to do with maintaining your self-esteem and self-worth for you right now.

4. Recognize that you’re also clearly going through something right now, which is why you’re seeking their validation, and maybe go deal with that instead.

Remember that Distraction Mechanism I talked about way back in my Understanding Survival Mode post in this series? The folks who go ‘sure, there’s a bear, but this poisonous flower is really the thing I have to worry about’. That’s what’s at play here, but it’s a slight variation of it. In this case, you’re trying to win the approval of the person you think can actually help you defeat the bear in your own life. Somewhere along the way, you weren’t taught how to do that for yourself, or were taught that you couldn’t or shouldn’t. So yeah, of course that seems like a big deal and like they’re failing you right now. Your survival is at stake. This bear is a big, serious problem. But you’re both fighting bears right now. It’s not your friend’s fault that you were never taught how to defeat your own bear. But it IS your responsibility to learn how to do that for yourself now. 

The thing about anger is that it also tends to get displaced. You’re not actually mad that your friend can’t slay your bear for you. You’re mad at whoever didn’t teach you to do it yourself and mad at yourself for avoiding learning it until now. 

The thing that happens is that this Survival Behaviour programming is a bit like steps to a dance. You were taught a dance. You expected that you were taught the correct steps to that dance. So when you come across another person and you start to dance with them, you expect the other person to follow that dance with you. When they don’t, you notice. One of you has got the steps wrong here. Maybe you both learned slightly different variations of the same dance, maybe they’re totally different, maybe this just requires a little negotiation to figure out whose dance moves you’re going to follow for this specific dance, etc., etc. If you’re dancing with someone who knows what they’re doing and you don’t, it can become painfully obvious that you learned the dance wrong. That creates insecurity and a fear of judgement. Now you have to prove to this person that you can dance, or force them into learning your wrong version. But there’s a third option - you can learn the actual correct steps to it. 

Point is, regardless of which situation it is, it’s not cool to take that out on your friend or make them responsible for teaching it to you. So thank you for recognizing it and reaching out for some help with it. 

So, what do you do with it? 

1. Therapy. Seriously. You’re missing some skill sets and you need to learn them. Find someone who has a developmental psychology and/or rehabilitation practice and you’ll be amazed at how quickly you learn them now. It’s just you taking the responsibility to learn the actual right steps to the dance instead of forcing everyone into your own wrong one or sitting there feeling ashamed that you can’t dance. It’s dance classes for your brain. That’s all it is. No need to get all weird about it. (And it doesn’t have to be me. This genuinely isn’t a ‘so come see me to solve all of life’s problems’ kind of post. Just had a bunch of questions today from folks and figured this might be helpful for the greater group as a whole who may not have been so brave as to reach out but had the same questions.)

2. Focus on you. Heal your own self-esteem stuff and get to a place where the only approval you need is your own. It shouldn’t be up to anyone else to validate your existence for you. You’re here. You matter. No one else gets to tell you who to be or how to live your life. Start focusing on figuring out who you are, not who you think you should be so that people will like you. That’s why it’s important to be okay with leaving a toxic friendship, relationship, or tribe. Find your people. You can only do that when you know who you are. But believe me, once you do, magical things start to happen for you.

3. Fix your own problems. Refocus on what the bear is in your life and handle it. It’s up to you to do that, no one else. People can help support you through it, but they are not responsible for doing it for you.

4. Seriously - therapy. There are professionals who teach you these dance moves for a living. Don’t feel weird about it. No one learns all the dances there are to learn in childhood and adolescence. New ones are made all the time. Taking a few classes doesn’t mean you’re a bad person or that you’re broken or any number of other reasons people avoid therapy. It’s you taking responsibility to learn the moves you’re missing so you become a better dance partner for the people in your life instead of making it their responsibility to teach you when they’re busy with their own stuff. Trust me. Learn how to dance and everyone will want to dance with you. It’s the only way to actually fix your insecurities around dancing and actually get out there on the dance floor and have the time of your life.

So, take a step back, ask your friend what they need from you, and don’t get upset if what that is is a little time and space so they can fight their own bear. You focus on learning how to dance so that when they’re done fighting, you can be a better dance partner. I may be using too many analogies/metaphors here, but you get the idea, right? You heal you while they’re busy healing themselves and you’ll stop taking it so personally that they’re not healing you for you. That’s not their job. That’s yours. 

Drop me a line if you’re totally lost. I wrote this quickly. It may or may not make the most sense… :)

I swear I’m going to actually finish this series…Next post - repeated and prolonged trauma responses. That post really will help make this make more sense. Promise.

Till next time, folks!

Survival Mode and the Toxic Friend

My last post in the Survival Mode Series was going to be about repeated trauma and prolonged trauma and how that affects our nervous systems in different and unique ways, but apparently this series of posts has been rather timely and helpful with folks and the same question has come up repeatedly this week so I thought I’d write an extra post to address it for everyone. 

How do you navigate the ‘Toxic Friend’ who is making your situation all about them right now?

We all know ‘that’ friend. The one who’s secretly SUPER jealous of you and totally insecure. It can be a very tricky situation to navigate when you’re already going through something awful. Your hard time will be the perfect time for them to throw a tantrum about how you’re not meeting their needs, or how you’re somehow a bad friend right now, blah blah all about them and the lack of attention that they’re getting from you.

Let me ask you a question? How much time do you typically spend trying to build this person up? How many hours of your day are spent listening to their drama and giving them advice? Do you avoid telling them good things about yourself or stuff that happens to you because you know they’ll react poorly? 

Narcissists love to accuse other people of being narcissists. Typically very loudly to anyone who will listen. I always find it amazing how often the actual abuser claims that they’re the one being abused. It’s basically gaslighting 101. They will portray themselves as the victim to score sympathy from anyone who will give it to them. It’s how they find their next attention fix to feed on now that you’re not giving them the attention they need. If you’re not going to give it to them, then they will make you the villain in their narrative and use it to get attention from others. These folks are expert manipulators and tend to get very angry if you set a boundary. They’ll get all huffy and up in your face trying to push your buttons to make you react and then try to make you feel bad for it, claiming that now you have to apologize to them. They’re baiting you so they can use your reaction in their next victim narrative to get attention from and bait other people. That’s why they wait for when you’re going through something - you’ll be more reactive. Remember that saying ‘the only people who get mad at you for setting a boundary are the ones who are benefitting from it not being there’? It’s a saying for a reason. They’re going to get their attention fix from you or because of you. So don’t fall for it. You stay calm and keep setting good healthy boundaries. It helps to protect you from people who would cross them and prevents them from using you in their manipulations with others.

Trust me, life is always better without these people in your life, so think of it as a blessing that they’re removing themselves from it for you, even if it’s a little messy at first. True friends have your back when hard times hit. They understand that sometimes life gets busy and awful. They try to help. People who were just feeding off of you are the only ones who throw a fit when life throws you a curve ball and you have less time for them. Remember, rejection is protection. Let them go. And try not to take it personally. It’s not about you. It’s about their ego. Honestly, if someone can’t set their own ego aside and look at what’s happening with empathy for someone they supposedly care about - that’s pathological. That’s not something you can fix for them. That’s something broken in them, not you. 

Use your newfound free time as the gift it is and spend it taking care of yourself. You’ll see just how much time and energy you’ve been wasting on a person who wasn’t worth all that effort. It’s always amazing how much stress and how many problems magically disappear along with that person. So thank them for the gift of their absence and move on. Life gets so much better once they’re gone, I promise. 

But! Stephanie, the things they’re saying about me to our mutual friends… Trust me, people eventually figure out who the real problem was. You just stay focused on taking care of you. Don’t bad mouth them to ‘do damage control’, that will only make you look petty and will feed into their victim narrative. When they go low, you go high. Keep your head up and just get through it. Anyone who believes their garbage also isn’t worth your time. So don’t waste it by focusing on what other people might be thinking or saying. That’s never helpful. You stay focused on the people who actually have your back. Be grateful for them. They’re worth their weight in gold. Make sure they know it rather than obsessing about folks who don’t deserve even a second of your consideration. Everything else will take care of itself. 

I’m going to drop a little science here.

There are two points in our lives when our interactions with others are actually coded as survival mechanisms in our behavioural programming, the first is during our early interactions with our parents - their early approval or rejection of us affects our survivability as infants so there are a few different kinds of strategies that occur during this time - and the second is during our teenage years with our ‘tribe’, or friend group - our likability within our community also determines our survivability within that community. Again, our nervous systems are still programmed for little tribal groups living in the woods. If your tribe kicks you out, your ability to survive alone tends to decrease. 

Because behaviours learned during these times are linked to our survival mechanisms, they’re much harder to change when we’re older, even when we realize that they are now maladaptive. Our brains will fight us tooth and nail because, to our nervous systems, these behaviours are the only things that keep us alive. But, that’s a different post. I can write more about that later. 

What I want to focus on here is why we tend to hyper-focus on the ‘threats’ in our ‘tribe’. Meaning, during Survival Mode times, the person who is most likely to either bash our head in with a rock or bad mouth us to everyone else, even (and sometimes especially) if it’s all lies, is the threat to our survival. We will focus all of our efforts on winning their approval to secure our safety within our tribe. 

Ever heard of trauma-bonding? Manipulative people use this mechanism to get you to pay more attention to them. They’ll manufacture some outrage, get all mad about something, and wait for you to try to fix it. This especially works in women who’s Survival Mode responses tend more towards the Tend and Befriend side of things (more on that in my next post) rather than the outbursts of anger side. Think like how and why Mean Girls keep friends - people are always walking on eggshells around them, worried about what horrible gossip they’ll spread if they don’t keep them happy, etc etc. It’s also how abusive people get otherwise smart and rational people stuck in horrible relationships. It is a very powerful mechanism. The potential loss of our standing within our tribe can keep you trapped in some very terrible and abusive friendships and/or relationships. 

In the beginning, these kinds of toxic people will test you with their drama about other people. They’ll ask for your help and advice. Notice that it’s almost always about how someone else in their lives is mistreating them and how they want to make it better. This makes them come off as sympathetic and caring. Then the relationship will evolve to them constantly needing your help and advice. They’re incredibly needy. Almost every conversation will be about them and focused on their own insecurities. You will constantly be trying to build them up. You’ll start to neglect your other friends. At some point, the relationship dynamics will shift. It will almost always be because something is now actually happening in your life that takes your constant attention away from them. 

This is when everything changes. 

Suddenly, everything will be your fault and you need to fix it. They’ll have emergency after emergency, and lord help you if you’re not immediately available to them to tell them what to do. They’ll start loudly complaining about you to everyone close to you. You have now become the new lure for them, you see. They’ll start with your mutual friends. This is both to punish you and try to get you ‘back in line’ as well as find any weakness - like underlying envy or insecurity in others, especially in regards to you - that they can exploit and manipulate for their benefit. 

Good people don’t talk smack about others, even when they’re having trouble with them. Good people don’t exploit other people’s hard times for their emotional benefit. Good people don’t need to turn other people against you. 

I know it feels unfair. Often, it’s the auxiliary friends we lose that hurt the most during this time - the people you didn’t think could ever be turned against you like that. Recognize that there had to be underlying stuff there for it to happen. If someone can be turned against you that easily, it’s because that person was actually pretty toxic too. Only someone operating from a place of ego, insecurity, and envy can be turned like that. They become the weapons used against you. It’s better to not have them in your life. Let them go. 

Be okay with leaving that tribe. Even if it means that you have to start over. Everyone in it is stuck in the same abuse mechanism as you. So, focus on the good people you have in your life. We all have them - the folks we haven’t been paying attention to because they’re actually safe and not at all a threat to our survival. When you take a step back from the abusive and manipulative person, really think about the folks in your life. Who isn’t causing you drama? Who isn’t making everything all about them and their insecurities? Who’s just normal and healthy and enjoyable to be around because they’re calm and grown up and easy? Switch your focus to them. They’re the folks who don’t give you a hard time for neglecting them. They don’t always have some drama happening that they need you to fix for them. They’re not demanding your time or energy to solve their lives for them. They’re the fully functioning adults. Spend more time with them. Your life will be so much better for it. Trust me. 

I know that it sucks. There will always be some collateral damage during the fall out from ending this kind of friendship or relationship. It’s unfair. But you can either dwell on that or focus on all of the good things you still have. Start to rebuild your life. One that the toxic person can’t ruin. Be quiet about it, because they likely will still try. For a while, anyone in your life will become a target for them. But the truly good ones can see through that sh*t. Again, you just keep your head up and let life sort them out. Focus on you and your health and happiness and things really do get better. You get to control how much you let this person affect you. Don’t continue their abuse for them long after they’re gone. 

Think about it, a true friend doesn’t need you to be wrong so that they can be right. Fully functioning adults understand that most stuff isn’t about them and that people can act poorly sometimes but that’s usually taken as a sign that something big must be happening in their lives. They don’t use it as an excuse to get mad about their own lack of fulfillment and take it out on you. They ask you to go for a walk or get a coffee and listen. They don’t get all judgey. They don’t accuse you of neglecting them. Children do that. Or adults who haven’t emotionally matured past childhood. Do you really want your friend group full of emotionally immature people working out their own parental or teenage drama on you? Really take a good hard look at the people you call friends and ask yourself if these people are worth the heartache? And then go focus on the actual mature adults. Trust me, they won’t even make you feel bad about however long you were gone for. They’ll just be happy that you’re back now. In fact, most of the time, they’ve actually been waiting for you to see how awful that person actually was and will be proud of you for moving past them. 

As always, if you need some help with this, drop me a line. It’s amazing how much a little outside perspective on the situation can help. 

You’re going to get through this. I promise. In the immortal words of Eric Draven (The Crow): “It can’t rain all the time.”

Till next time, Folks! And Happy Halloween!!

Practical Steps For Dealing With Survival Mode

So, now that we understand what’s happening with our survival responses, what do we actually do with that?

This post is going to focus on some practical steps you can take right now to calm the f-train down as well as some longer term suggestions. 

Now, I want to make it clear that my area of expertise with this subject is the physical treatment of and neural re-patterning of the nervous system post-trauma. My suggestions here are in no way a substitute for seeking the advice and services of mental healthcare. I often work in conjunction with your psychologist or trauma counsellor during this process. Both kinds of treatment are required - the physical and the psychological - when recovering from traumatic events. That said, I have patients who have had to call anywhere between 20-40 places to find someone currently taking clients and their appointments are still months away, so, these suggestions are designed to help get you through the wait-period, and not intended for sole-sourced long-term advice. 

I am going to give some resources for mental health crisis access here: 

If this is an emergency, or if you or someone you know is in immediate danger, call the Provincial Mental Health Crisis Line toll-free at 1-888-429-8167 or call 911. Or go to your nearest hospital or emergency department.

Otherwise:

https://novascotia.ca/mental-health-and-wellbeing/

https://mha.nshealth.ca/en

https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/mental-health-services/mental-health-get-help.html

Again - I, and this advice, are no substitute for your long-term mental healthcare needs. So be responsible with it and take it for what it is - short-term interventions to reduce the stimulation of your nervous system to help bring you back out of the short-term phase of Survival Mode so you don’t lose you sh*t on the people around you in ways you can’t take back. You’ll still have the long-term phase to deal with, however, so will need some help to navigate that correctly. And, if you are a support structure person for someone currently in Survival Mode, I’ll have some suggestions for you as well to help them through this process. 

Trauma may make us all assholes, but we also have a responsibility to try real hard not to be. Trauma doesn’t give you an excuse to be a jerk. It is more understandable that your nervous system is in hyper-drive right now, but you still have a responsibility to develop better coping strategies and preventative self-care processes to help keep it under control. 

So, with that said, here is how we go about bringing your nervous system back down from the brink. Our main goals are to convince your nervous system that it’s safe now and decrease the number of neuronal inputs that are over-firing to try to calm the system. 

Remember back in post 2 when I talked about that state of hyper-vigilance? It is an actual physiological state of over-activation of the nervous system. What that means is it takes fewer neurons firing to put your system into fight/flight/freeze mode. It means that it will take a much smaller stressor to get you to the point of snapping. So, we’re going to try to take some pressure off of that system. 

Ideally, there would be some in-person appointments with a rehabilitation therapist or manual osteopath to help reduce the number of neurons over-firing about physical things - this is why our injuries ‘flare up’ when we’re stressed, and why that makes us even crankier. Acetaminophen has been shown to have anxiety relieving effects because of this mechanism. Physical injuries, or underlying alignment issues, can be contributing to ‘holding’ you in this kind of feedback loop. 

I’m sure by now you’ve heard the phrase that ‘trauma is stored in the tissues’? Lots of manual therapists, be it massage, somatics, even acupuncture, talk about ‘releasing trauma patterns from the body’. This is actually a whole other post to get an understanding of what they mean and what they’re doing (or attempting to do), but basically it’s to try to help break this feedback loop where tensions in the tissues are being over-amplified by a hyped up nervous system, leading to more tensions in the tissues, which leads to more over-firing of the nervous system… You get the idea. This hyper-vigilance can happen to a specific body part - say, a broken leg where you’re still having muscle cramps even though the bone itself has long since healed - or in the overall system as a whole. Often both are true. 

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The point is, you want to try to limit the amount of over-stimulation. That’s why, in my first post, I told you to focus on creating a nice calm, safe space for yourself that you can retreat to. So even if you can’t get in to see a manual therapist, we can still limit the amount of stimulation on your nervous system. 

So, first up - you need a ‘hide box’. 

When we do experiments with mammals to try to induce an anxious state, we throw them in a big open space and see what they do. Depending on how much stress we want to induce, or what kinds of things we’re measuring, we can give them a ‘hide box’ that they can go to hide in and feel safe, and then time how long it takes for them to come back out. 

This is actually SUPER important for our nervous systems for deactivating Survival Mode - the ability to retreat and regroup. In my next post I’ll discuss why that is, but this felt more important to cover first. 

Combine that with a focus on reducing nervous system input - dim lights, non-restrictive clothing, warm, comfy blankets, a TV show or movie you know super well so you can predict the outcome - preferably something light-hearted and fun (nothing suspenseful or anything you haven’t seen before), the point is to turn your brain off. If you go in there to try to meditate, you’re more likely to just swirl around in your panic. Quiet won’t be helpful. Also, eat something - hunger is a nervous system stressor. Carbs are okay right now.* Pasta, potatoes, ice cream, cookies - whatever thing is your ‘good mood comfort food’. We all have one. 

*A note on this - eating your feelings is also not a good long term solution. But, much like when you’re recovering from an injury, recovering from Survival Mode requires specific nutrition, and carbs are a part of what it needs. Be okay with putting on a few pounds right now. We can take them off later when you’re out of crisis. Remember that this is to be balanced with getting outside and getting some exercise once you’re out of the short-term phase of Survival Mode. 

You’re going to stay in that room until you fall asleep, cry your face off, or otherwise come down enough that you don’t feel like raging out at everyone. 

This is your new safe space, and it has certain boundaries. Make if off limits to anyone else in the house, especially when you’re in there. Create that space for yourself in your life. 

Then, you’re going to do all the usual Stress Response Plan stuff - get outside and go for a walk. Journal. Get together with supportive friends. Here’s the trick though - you will leave those things when you want to and after each of them, you’re going to go back to your Hide Box. After pretty much anything, you’re going to go back to your Hide Box.

We’re training your nervous system to recognize that it has an escape and recover route, so it doesn’t need to panic and switch back to short-term Survival Mode. This is important for your nervous system’s ability to eventually leave Survival Mode altogether. Remember in my last post when I said that if you start a new short-term phase you’re setting up a new ‘rest potential’? I’m going to talk more about this in the next post, but it’s super important that you don’t make the mistake of thinking that you can just keep repeating the short-term phase, or mistake leaving the short-term phase for leaving Survival Mode altogether. Your nervous system will eventually just shut you down or go waaaaaaaay too far. We often refer to these states as ‘Burn Out’ or ‘Break Down’. Getting out of Survival Mode genuinely requires some guidance and support to do correctly so that you don’t set yourself up for chronic problems later. 

Recognize that you’re in this for the long haul. This isn’t going to be as simple as joining a yoga class and suddenly you’re all better. Remember that the long-term phase of Survival Mode can sometimes last years. When you shut off the short-term phase, that’s going to click you into the long-term phase - you will experience a wonderful upswing where life seems great for a while. But there WILL be a crash where you actually have to heal all this stuff. What you want to focus on is getting your coping skills ready during the up-phase so that when that inevitably happens, you’re ready and it doesn’t totally disrupt your life. Get a plan together - who are the people you’ll reach out to for help, both professional and personal? Can you take time off work? What are the resources available in your area for support? The key to a good Survival Mode rehabilitation is recognizing that you’re still in it even when you don’t think you are and planning for the crash phase even when you don’t think you’ll need it. 

For The Support People

I used to make the mistake of assuming that someone’s anger - even when directed at me - was about me. 

Here’s the thing about anger - it’s almost never about you. Even if you screwed something up. There’s no reason that screw up can’t be handled calmly and respectfully. If someone’s blowing up at you, it’s either because you’re a perceived threat, or you’re a safe target to throw at the threat. 

Anger is just the active form of fear, remember. If someone is responding with anger, it’s really just those two main survival modes that it comes out as - attack the threat directly, or attack the safest/weakest thing around that you can throw at the threat to increase your odds of getting away. Sure, people will justify it with whatever the current situation is, but biologically, anger is super simple. Actually, there’s the third one - cornered wounded animal who entered recovery mode and you’re the sap who happened upon it at the wrong time. It’s still technically just attacking the threat directly, but it’s a slightly different motivation. 

Point is, if you’re trying to support someone you love right now who’s in Survival Mode, the best advice I can give you is this - it’s not about you. Get over whatever thing you think this is about and focus on the biology of it. I get it, yes, their anger seems unjustified. It has now hurt your feelings because you feel like you didn’t deserve it. I get it. You know what’s not going to help this situation? You getting angry and lashing out from your own Survival Mode. 

Yes, you don’t deserve to be treated poorly. Set your boundaries. But then get over yourself and either help or get out of the way. Getting mad about them getting mad isn’t helpful right now. 

What is helpful right now? I’m so glad you asked!

1. Where are YOU emotionally right now? If you aren’t the person for the job because of your own stuff, be upfront about it. You can direct them to better resources, but it’s also totally fair to just bow out.

2. Remember that anger is just fear. So what is this person afraid of? What are they being confronted with? How can you de-escalate the situation? This does NOT mean make excuses for their behaviour. We can deal with that later. But getting all up in someone’s face right now, when everyone is so on edge, is just a recipe for disaster. Listen to them, hear what they’re saying behind whatever it is they’re yelling about, stay firm in your boundaries, and try to get them talking about what’s stressing them out in life in general. Often, whatever thing someone is angry about is just the last straw. I once had a lady yell at me for 20 minutes for asking how her day was going when she walked in for her appointment. None of that was about me. My office was just the first safe space she had been in that day and all of the pent up fear finally had a chance to release. We actually wound up having a really great conversation and she realized that she had to leave her work environment. If I’d taken it personally, it could have ended VERY differently. She’s doing GREAT now, by the way.

3. Get outside professional help. You should not be the sole source of this. Becoming the person that this person learns to vent their anger out on is also a recipe for disaster. They need to be directed to professional services, which I also realize are super hard to access right now. Go back to the top of this post for the links to crisis services. Use them. Get on waitlists now. Don’t go this alone.

4. Boundaries! Don’t make excuses for their behaviour. Don’t enable. Set boundaries, but do so gently and at the appropriate times. Don’t fight with someone who’s clearly on edge and already aggressive. Just leave the situation and make it clear that you will talk again once they’ve calmed down.

5. It will sound wrong, but think of it like a toddler having a tantrum, because that’s all it is. Our nervous system is doing the exact same thing. It’s over-stimulated and it needs to be calmed but not fussed over. Set up a time out routine and stick to it. For both of you. And then later discuss the what’s and why’s and how’s.

6. Survival Mode is not an excuse for abusive behaviour. If you are in an abusive situation, and you need help: https://www.nsdomesticviolence.ca

The main take away for supporting someone through this kind of recovery is to let the person withdraw when they need to. Allow them that space to recover. Don’t get all up in their faces about it. I know it can be frustrating, but use the time to focus on you too. The frustration comes from seeing someone else focus on meeting their needs when you aren’t meeting your own. So set up child care, time off work, a cleaning lady, enlist friends to help, whatever you need to support you too. You’re going to need your own supports when supporting someone through something like this. If you go back to the resources I posted at the top of this post, there are sections in there for the folks supporting loved ones dealing with mental health issues. Your own mental health needs are important too. Make sure you’re taking the time and creating the space to support yourself as well. 

Make Time For Fun

It can be so easy to get lost in all of the things that make us angry, to focus on who is doing or not doing something, what needs aren’t being met, what we should be doing for ourselves or not doing, etc., etc.. 

Make sure that you’re including time for fun in your recovery plans. Making time for fun things in your life soothes a lot of hurts. Focus on good friends and doing fun things and watch how fast everything else seems much more manageable. Get creative. Express yourself through creative means - join a dance class, or get some painting supplies. Whatever. Just get your ‘expression through creativity’ side going for a healthy outlet. Get out in nature. Take a few days off work and book a hotel room. Bring a little joy back into your life. It will help to make the stuff that’s actually stressing you out a lot more clear. Be prepared that you may have to make some long-term changes to your life - your job, friends, living situation - but all of those things will be a lot easier and more manageable if you’re remembering to have some fun in the meantime. 

As always, drop me a line if you’ve got questions! There’s still one more post in this series and then I’m going to move on to some other things folks have been asking me to write about. Thank you to everyone who has been following along! This has been my most read series so far and I’ve been getting some great feedback, so thank you all! 

Till next time, folks!

The Short-Term and Long-Term Phases of Survival Mode

Trauma makes assholes of all of us. It just does. This is true both for the person going through it and for the people around it, either supporting that person or just peripherally looking in on it all. 

When something traumatic happens to someone, no one handles it well all the time. To be fair - it’s biology. And a whole lot of societal misconceptions. The more you understand what’s happening and why, the more compassion you tend to have for people going through the process, including for yourself. 

So, first up - forgive yourself for your very mammalian reactions. You did the best you could. Second - now that you know better, try to do better. You know that old saying, “if you don’t heal your wounds, you’ll bleed all over people who didn’t cut you?” It’s a saying for a reason. 

The people around you are not the ones to blame for a virus that turned out to be capable of causing a global pandemic - no matter how mad you may be at some folks for the way they’ve handled it. It’s no one’s fault. It’s just biology. Coronaviruses are bastards. There are all kinds of viruses that are worse, of course, but that doesn’t make this one less of a jerk. This one just happened to have some features that are common to pandemic capable viruses. The rest has just been individuals doing the best they can with a situation they found themselves in. 

You have been doing the best you can with a situation that you have found yourself in. 

I want you to take a second and say that to yourself. 

I am doing the best I can with a situation I have found myself in. 

Good. 

Okay, so now that that’s out of the way, let’s learn some more about Survival Modes and the best ways to handle them. In my last post, I covered the most common types of Survival Mode. There are a couple that I didn’t cover in that post because they deserve special mention and a post all their own. They also need an understanding of what I’m going to tell you in this post to make proper sense of them. I should have it up soon for all of you. In this post, I’d like to cover the stages of Survival Mode. I want to go over these first rather than geek out about the types of reactions because there are some misconceptions around how long Survival Mode lasts that are more important for you to understand. 

There are 2 main stages to Survival Mode - short term and long term. The short term part is designed to get you through your encounter with the bear (or illness, or whatever), the long term part is to get you through the recovery.

Have you ever seen an action potential? It’s how our nerves communicate and is actually very helpful when discussing the stages of Survival Mode. It looks like this: 

Action Potential

Both our short term and long term phases of Survival Mode follow this pattern (biology tends to repeat itself), the difference being the time scale for the phase you’re discussing. For both phases, they follow the same pattern - you have the initial inciting event, your nervous and endocrine systems switch over to their Fight/Flight/Freeze mode, then once the encounter is over, you crash and recover. The difference is the short term phase lasts minutes to hours, and the long term phase can last months to years. 

Let’s use our bear analogy to help this make more sense. 

For the short term phase of Survival Mode, which is the one that most people are familiar with, you encounter the bear (or threatening situation), you have a big outburst of anger or panic, then once the situation is over you crash and recover (tears, shaking, feeling bad, retreat, etc). Most people make the mistake of thinking that that means they are now out of Survival Mode, but that’s not the case. That’s just the beginning of the long term phase. 

The long term phase begins with that same initial event - you fight a bear - and follows a similar pattern, but again, the timeline is MUCH longer because it needs to get you through the recovery process.

You see that upswing in the action potential? After a life threatening event (or 3 events with the potential to be life threatening) people have this phase of happy/extra energy - they feel grateful to be alive, they start to explore the meaning of life and their purpose, they start to eat better food, exercise, everything seems great and awesome and then at some point, again sometimes years later, they crash and go through a phase of depression/anxiety/PTSD before levelling off again. 

So, what’s up with that?

Think back to our bear example - you get into a tussle, you’re injured, but you escape. Your short term Survival Mode gave you the energy and focus to get through the initial attack. Your long term Survival Mode gets you through the recovery of your injuries. But! Remember, this response is still set up like we’re all just tribal groups living in the woods, so you need to find food and shelter first. This is why tissue healing is delayed in your stress response. You need your energy to gather enough supplies and find somewhere safe before you can enter into ‘healing’. 

That peak on the graph? The thing that initiates the ‘crash’ of this response - that’s safety. You come down from the peak once you (short term response) get away from the bear and (long term response) get enough supplies and have found a safe place to heal. You only start the come down part once your nervous system is convinced it has finally found safety.

This is why people who seem to be doing so well post-inciting event eventually hit the skids. The phrase I most often hear when this happens is, “I don’t understand why I’m having such a hard time now, everything was going so well. I finally felt like I had my life back.”

Most people are relieved to hear that that’s actually completely normal and all just a part of the healing process. 

In pandemic terms - once people had a semblance of safety - be it ending of waves or lockdowns, or the announcement of vaccines, or receiving a vaccine, or maybe you haven’t felt safe yet so yours is still coming - they went through a ‘crash’. Because that feeling of safety was the cue to your brain and body that you have everything you need now for the actual healing to occur. 

Been feeling extra tired? Can’t focus? More short tempered than usual? You’re in the healing phase of the long term phase of Survival Mode. It’s a good thing. All of that tissue healing and emotional healing that got delayed can happen now. This is the part where you actually heal from everything that’s happened. 

Here’s the trick though - that cornered, wounded animal analogy? This is where that comes in. If you encounter a potential threat during this phase…. Wooooooooooooo… So vicious! 

Remember in the first lockdown when everyone was baking and doing arts and crafts and gardening? That’s that long term phase upswing - getting food and shelter. Then lockdown was over and some folks entered their down-phase (or healing phase) because they felt safe again. But then another lockdown happened. Those folks didn’t handle the second wave as well. Then the third… etc. 

Go back to that graph I showed you - see that ‘resting potential’ part? Each new inciting event you encounter will start its own new Survival Mode response, except that the new one will start from wherever you are in your own personal curve - meaning the ‘resting potential’ has changed. If you weren’t back at baseline before the new curve started, your new Survival Mode response will be that much bigger and stronger. 

This is why people seem to be losing their minds a little bit. It’s why each subsequent wave and lockdown seems so much harder than the last for some people. Depending on where you are in your Survival Mode curve, you’re going to be reacting very differently. Some people, who haven’t left their initial upswing part, are loving life, whereas the folks who have reached their peaks, thought they were safe now, and then bam! Another one! They’re not doing so hot. They started their healing phase and it got interrupted by another threat, triggering an even bigger response. 

If you’re still in baking and crafts and feel like life is amazing and great mode - excellent! But be prepared - you’re going to crash eventually, and it will be when you finally feel safe again. Forewarned is forearmed.

The good news is that no matter where you are in your Survival Mode curve, there are ways that you can actually take control of this process so that it happens when you want it to and have time/space for it. It can actually be a really lovely process when you get the hang of it. And it’s often the only way to finally get your nervous system back to its true baseline. 

Trauma recovery is a much longer process than most people realize. Understanding this is super important for helping yourself through the phases of it so that you bring your nervous system safely back down to a normal resting state. In my next post I’ll talk about what we can do to support ourselves and each other through each of these phases - how to recognize which phase someone’s in and how to best support them/interact with them during that phase, both for yourself so you can ask others for what you need, and for others so you can avoid the cornered, wounded animal effect. But for now, if you’re struggling, go back to my first post in this series and give yourself the safety that your nervous system is craving. If you’re still out there just loving life, you just keep doing what you’re doing. I’ll have some posts for you folks in a bit too. 

Til next time, folks! Stay safe out there!

Understanding Survival Mode

Survival Mode is a favourite topic of mine. It’s one of those things that, if everything goes well for you, you rarely have an opportunity to experience. We all have one. And how we’re going to react when we get there is as unpredictable as just about anything else. 

There are various groups who make livings optimizing your Survival Mode - think, the military, police forces, first responders, Emergency Medicine, etc. Knowing how you are going to respond when sh*t hits the fan can be very advantageous. As can learning how to push the bar for yourself so it takes more and more stimulus before you get to a survival mode response… It’s a fascinating area of study. The optimization of the limits of the human condition has long been a fun side hustle for me. 

That said, for those experiencing their survival mode for the first time, or maybe it’s your 30th time but without proper guidance and support, either way, survival mode can be a bewildering and terrifying experience. You react in ways that are completely out of character. Your judgement processes become completely compromised. You think you are the only person seeing things clearly, but your judgement is wildly compromised and you are easily swayed into making terrible decisions based entirely on ego and emotions… 

My first forays into exploring survival mode reactions were with disaster preparedness simulations. There are a bunch of great groups who are professionals to take you through preparing for various scenarios, based on your likelihood of encountering them, or even just your interest in getting to experience them. These are excellent to do from the standpoint of a) getting to know yourself, your tendencies, and being able to really get to the meat and potatoes of how your specific nervous system is hardwired so that you can better understand the ways to take the best care of it, and b) being that much more ahead of the game should anything terrible actually happen. One of the tenants of disaster preparedness is to, you know, prepare BEFORE anything ever goes horribly wrong. 

The pandemic has been an excellent example of why it’s so important. 

Remember all the toilet paper hoarding? The crazy crowds of people in stores? The videos of people in the streets just randomly attacking cars? All the yelling and melting down? The rioting and looting and near collapse of many societies? 

Yeah, cause of all of that. 

You know what’s amazing about all of that? All of those behaviours are 100% predictable and happen with every pandemic. They happen with just about any major event. People evolve VERY slowly. We have not changed much in thousands of years. We live longer and have some cooler technology, but really, people are the exact same as they’ve always been. 

Why this is useful though, is that one of the MOST important parts of gaining control over your survival mode response is creating predictability. Knowing how you and the people around you are likely to behave come crunch time is one way you can increase your likelihood of survival during crazy times. 

Most mammals hate new experiences. One of the most stressful things you can do is throw a mammal, any mammal, into a brand new open space. The brain can’t handle that many conflicting possibilities all at once. Think about it, one of the stressful parts of any unknown situation is all of the possibilities for what might happen, right? As soon as you have an answer, any answer, half the problem goes away. You now have a direction and can take steps towards whatever that might be. 

So, one way we learn how to manage our survival mode response is to learn a predictable set of patterns and behaviours for how you’re going to approach any new or novel situation. 

In all of my experiences and research on optimizing this response, I’ve come up with a few things that are relatively universal - meaning, they’ll help no matter your specific situation or coping styles - but there are a lot of nitty gritty’s to this work too that have a lot to do with how your specific nervous system is set up, what your coping styles are, and what previous experiences you’ve had. 

So, first, we’re going to drop a bit of science and then we’ll get into ways to work with what you’ve got. As always, if you have questions about your own unique situation, feel free to reach out and drop me a line. I love questions!

Okay - ready to learn so much more about human survival responses than you probably ever wanted to? 

Tuck in, friends! We’re about to go on a journey!

This particular journey starts on a warm summer evening in ancient Greece… Heh heh, little Big Bang Theory humour for you there. 

We’re actually going waaaaaaay further back than that, to when humans were still tribal groups living in little packs in various climates and environments. Our nervous systems are still set up like that. Again - we evolve VERY slowly. So to understand how the survival mode response works, we have to understand how we, as mammals, work. 

So, first up, there are two ways we get to a survival mode response - being attacked by something, be it a predator, bad food or other illness, or not having enough food (which is actually a slightly different offshoot with it’s own unique responses, but it’s included in survival responses); and repeated exposures to a potentially life threatening situation. 

So we’re going to break this into Group 1 and Group 2 and use the same scenario - you run into a bear in the woods. 

Group 1 people - you get to engage with the threat directly. Group 2 - you just see the bear but get to escape unscathed. 

Group 1 people, you’re going to go through a very specific spike in your stress response that we call the survival mode response. We’re going to talk a bit more about that in a second. It’s a much more direct route to your survival response. 

Group 2 people - you may or may not go into survival mode response. Some of you will, some of you won’t - that’s that individual nervous system functioning I was talking about. Most of you will have some varying level of stress response though. Say, weeks later, you run into a bear again, still just seeing it and get away. Now, more of you will shunt to your survival response, depending on how many other previous life threatening encounters you’ve had and individual tolerances. But you will all be experiencing what’s called ‘hypervigilence’ at this point. You will be fortifying your living dwellings, wondering if you should move to a safer area, not sleeping as well, etc etc. If you see a third bear - welcome to your survival mode response! 3 is the magic number for our nervous systems. And it doesn’t have to be the same bear. It could be an illness, a snake, and then a bear - just have to be 3 potentially life threatening situations and you’ll wind up in the same place as 1 actually life threatening situation. 

My point is - you don’t have to actually be in a life threatening situation to have your survival mode activated. You wind up at the same place as Group 1 folks - those who have actually been in a life threatening situation - as long as you have been in 3 or more situations where there was the potential for them to be life threatening, even if the outcome was positive and you weren’t in any actual danger. 

So, now that we’ve covered that - I’m going to go forward talking like you’re all Group 1, because it’s really just a matter of time and life before all of you will be. 

So, you come across a bear in the woods and it is a life threatening situation (or it’s your 3rd potential life threatening encounter) and you are now in your Survival Mode response. How your individual response is going to go depends on a few factors, some situational, some are learned, and some are dependent on how your particular system is wired. 

1. You attack that bear directly. These were the folks at the start of the pandemic who we saw randomly attacking cars in the streets. I actually have a lot of respect for these folks. Like, good on ya. It’s not necessarily the best response - your survivability depends on the likelihood of you being able to actually defeat the bear - but it’s at least a God’s honest response. You see a threat and you just go right for it.

2. If you are unlikely to win in a bear-human face off, you are going to look for something weaker that you can defeat, throw it at the bear, and then make your getaway. This is the old adage ‘I don’t have to run faster than the bear, I just have to run faster than you’ situation. These were the folks yelling at store clerks about masks and stuff. You can’t attack the pandemic directly, so you attack the weakest thing around you. Survivability wise, it’s a decent strategy, but I find I have less respect for it.

3. Run away. This one you tend to pick if you know you can’t defeat the bear, don’t have something close by you can attack, and figure you might be able to get away. Some people are more hardwired for this response. Survivability wise, the folks who run at the first sign of danger are the ones who tend to survive. It’s one of the reasons anxiety is so rampant in our populations. Being afraid of everything is actually a very effective survival strategy.

4. Play dead. Or the less often talked about ‘freeze response’. If your nervous system thinks it’s about to die, you’ll just freeze in place. It floods your system with endorphins and prepares for death. This response tends to be the one folks have the most guilt over, however.

So, these are the most common survival responses. But there are some more that tend to crop up that are less functional and a bit more rare. These responses actually decrease your survivability. 

1. There is no bear. Some people, when confronted with a life threatening situation, deny the existence of that situation. This one actually is an offshoot of the freeze response, when the chemicals released because your brain thinks it’s about to die, actually induce an almost delusional state.

2. Sure, there’s a bear, but it’s this poisonous flower that I really have to worry about. Similar to the one above, but this one has more of a deflection coping style to it. This is brought about by control tendencies - you can’t control the bear, but you CAN control whether or not you avoid the flower. Doesn’t in any way save you from the bear, but your ego feels safer about it.

3. My personal favourite - if it’s my time to die, I’m not going to worry about the bear. Just straight up does not care either way. Bear or no bear, they’re gonna do whatever they were doing anyway.

There are a few other even more rare ones, but let’s just stick with these for the time being.

What’s neat is everyone of us has these responses, and again, which one you actually use depends on the situation. There are things that make you more likely to default to one over the other, but the fun thing about survival responses is that you never really know how you’re going to react until you are in a very specific situation, and you might not even react the same way every time. 

A LOT of research goes in to trying to figure out who is going to respond which way most often. There are other lines of professions that are entirely dedicated to training you to respond the exact same way every time. There are personality traits and testing you can do to figure out who’s suitable for what professions based on it. But, at the end of the day, you never really know until it happens what someone is going to do in any given situation. 

See why I find it so fascinating??

So, what can you do to figure out what your most common Survival Mode is? Think back over stressful situations and figure out what your usual reaction is - do you get all mad and huffy? Do you rage out at someone not at all involved who had the bad luck of being in your path that day? Do you obsess over the things you can control, like food or cleaning? Your typical Survival Mode will be whatever that is, just totally over the top, so it can be a handy guide to try to predict what you might do and ways to mitigate it before it happens.

Write down what your typical response is, and then we’re going to talk about how to get a bit more control over the process in the next post. Knowing what you’re likely to do is the first step in making your individual response more functional. 

So, till next time, folks! Happy self-reflecting!

Survival Mode and Anger

I want to talk about anger. 

Over the last few weeks, I have seen some terrible behaviour from people in Halifax and Dartmouth - yelling at poll workers to the point the police had to be called because your preferred candidate had to drop out of the election over sexual assault allegations; a man who clipped a construction worker with his side mirror who then stopped his vehicle, got out and tackled the construction worker he had just hit to the ground; threatening and harassing people in person, online, on the phone; staging protests outside of the hospital, outside of Dr. Strang’s house; trying to light a nurse’s car on fire, in her driveway, after her shift… 

Folks - take a deep breath for a second. 

What are you all so angry about?

And don’t say the vaccines. This isn’t about the vaccines. That’s just a focal point for whatever is happening, but not at all the actual issue. So, for just a second, let’s just set that aside and talk about what’s going on, yeah? 

Stay with me. I’m gonna drop a bit of science…

Many of you have heard me talk about the stress response and how our thinking impacts it. Things like worrying or catastrophizing can lead to a chronic state of low-grade stress response. This can be problematic because our bodies don’t heal in our stress response, so it can lead to things like chronic injuries and pain. 

That doesn’t mean you have to ‘just be happy’. It means learning how to manage our worries and fears so that we create adequate space in our day for activating our para-sympathetic response when we’re dealing with stressful situations. Things like journaling, gratitude practices, meditation, etc., are all useful for creating that calming space for yourself so that your body has time for healing. 

Which is all fine and good, but what we’re seeing a lot more often right now is people who are in their Survival Mode response lashing out at others. That’s not something that adding in a gratitude practice or meditation hour is going to solve. 

So, as is my custom, I’m going to do a little series here on the difference between our Stress Response and our Survival Mode Response, and what to do to help each of these physiological activation states. 

If you think about it, you already know the difference between being stressed out versus switching into Survival Mode. Your stress response is best helped with diet and exercise changes, taking walks in nature, spending some time venting with friends, etc. Your survival mode is a different beast altogether. That’s best helped with retreat, comfort food, and being able to do something mindless like watching a silly sitcom on TV that you are familiar with, already know all of the jokes to, and what’s going to happen. It needs being able to just turn off and veg. It needs calm, quiet, predictable safety. 

Problems come in when people who are in Survival Mode mistake it for just being stressed out and don’t give themselves the things they need to deactivate it. 

Think about a wounded, cornered animal - know how vicious they can be? That’s Survival Mode Response in a nutshell. All of those people flipping out at poll workers and baristas lately? That’s Survival Mode Response. 

Anger outbursts are the hallmark of someone in Survival Mode who feels threatened. 

I’ve talked about this before, but it bears repeating here - our nervous systems are hardwired to skip over our stress response and go straight to Survival Mode for 3 main categories of things - predators, famine, and disease/injury. 

You know how I say that thinking about a bear attack and being attacked by a bear are the same stress response, it’s just a matter of how strongly our system is responding? This is what I mean. Being attacked by a bear is our stress response on steroids. It’s the top of the stress response spectrum. That’s Survival Mode. But it can also be activated by things like, oh, let’s say, a giant global pandemic. 

Unfortunately, being in a giant, global pandemic means that there are lots of folks automatically in their survival mode. It’s not a choice. It’s biology. 

Reasoning isn’t the best when we’re in our survival mode - as evidenced by the number of people falling for conspiracy theories right now. When everything is being labelled by our brains as a threat, it’s difficult to judge what is actually a true threat. And Lord help us should someone disagree with us right now… Cornered animal, meet thing we can vent all of our terror out onto. 

So, in the spirit of ‘knowledge is our friend’, let’s talk a bit about what to do if you find yourself raging out at everyone and everything around you over the smallest thing - like being told you have to wear a mask, or that vaccines save lives, or that your local conservative candidate dropped out of the race… 

First - get real honest with yourself about where you are mentally and emotionally. You may not feel particularly ‘stressed out’, but if you’re flying off the handle over nothing, you’re in your Survival Mode Response and you need to get a handle on that before you get fired and lose all of your friends. 

Second - creating a ‘safe space’ for yourself is going to be key to deactivating Survival Mode. You need a room with a door you can lock, a few hours to yourself, some comfort food, and a light hearted movie or show you have watched a bunch of times. 

Seriously. This works.

Know how when you’re sick you just lay on the couch, eat soup, watch tv, and nap a whole bunch? Same idea here. That’s your body in physical Survival Mode doing what it needs to do to recover. We need the same thing to recover from mental/emotional Survival Mode. People just tend not to give it to themselves when they’re in emotional distress because they’re afraid of it being unhealthy. It’s only unhealthy if it goes on too long, same idea with when we do it for physical illness. A few days of emotional recovery and downtime is never a bad thing. So get yourself all comfy cozy and stay there until you either fall asleep or cry your face off. Either one works. 

Repeat until you don’t feel like raging out at everyone anymore. 

Then, you’re going to do the stuff for the usual stress response - get outside and exercise, see friends, clean your house, journal, whatever gets you some wiggle room back into your nervous system. 

You deserve to not be this angry. You deserve some help figuring out how to not get fired or become the next dude in a flip-out video trending online. You deserve to help yourself here and get this under control. 

If you are at the edge and you don’t know what to do or what might help - take a moment, do yourself a favour, and drop me a line. I will give you some step-by-step instructions. You are not in this alone and I promise you, whatever you have decided is the problem isn’t and raging out at some innocent victim is NOT going to solve your problems. It’s going to get you into a lot of trouble instead. Trouble you can’t take back. 

So, what can you do right now, this minute, to create a safe space for yourself to calm the f-train down? Use those boundaries and make yourself a priority. Don’t let yourself get to the place where flipping out is your only option. You deserve to be treated better than that - by you. Friends don’t let friends make an ass of themselves. Be that friend to yourself right now. 

So go do that right now. Take care of you first, and then let me know how that works out. We’ll talk about next steps later. For right now, get yourself feeling real safe. You’ll be amazed how many things you’re sure are the REAL problem aren’t as soon as you get Survival Mode deactivated. 

Til next time, folks - stay safe and make good choices. 

Going Through Hard Times

Life is hard. It has ups and downs. Live long enough and tragedies tend to accumulate. That’s just the nature of a life on earth – no one gets out of here alive. When life events happen, they can be emotionally, physically, and financially devastating. They take a toll on your relationships, career, self-esteem, pretty much everything. Most people struggle with feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, isolation, and a fear that everyday from here on in will forever feel like this. 

As someone who has been through more devastating life events than I care to detail for you now – I get what you’re going through. It’s awful. It’s hard. Few people understand what you feel like in those moments unless you’ve lived them yourself. 

I know that me saying to you that it does get better, and some day you’ll look back on all of this and be so very grateful that you went through it doesn’t help right now. But it does get better. And you WILL be grateful for this experience. 

The thing about the hard times is that they give us wisdom, compassion, and experience. When people you love go through something similar – and believe me, eventually they will – you’ll be able to support them in all of the ways you will now know that they will need. You’ll have first hand, insider information on everything that they will feel, experience, and have to do to get through it. And from that place of first hand, insider knowledge experience – when it’s someone you love going through something you now know how to expertly navigate because you went through it yourself, it makes every heart-aching moment of what you’re going through tragically worth the suffering. You will be so very grateful that you had every hardship that you did, so that you can be there for them in those gut-wrenching times that very few other people in their lives will be able to fully appreciate. 

To that end – here are some things that I have learned that may benefit anyone going through a difficult time right now. 

1) People are dicks. 

They just are. It’s unfortunate that the world is full of people who are all at various stages of their own journeys. The important thing to remember is that everyone’s got something happening in their lives. None of us are immune from hardships. Oftentimes, those dickish behaviours are defense mechanisms of someone who’s struggling themselves. People are used to being screwed over, and we all have experiences of someone taking advantage of us when we’re vulnerable and need someone to not do that to us. So we develop prickly exteriors that tend to come up during hard times to ward off attacks from other people while we’re vulnerable. It’s a very primal instinct and we usually do it unconsciously. 

This can be helpful to remember so that you are a) aware of your own dickish behavior towards other people and b) can be a bit more forgiving of other people’s dickish behavior towards you. 

2) You will need more sleep. 

The same way that you need more sleep when recovering from a cold or an injury, your emotional and mental states need recovery and rehabilitation too. Since healing only happens in a parasympathetic state, your body will do its best to protect you by inducing a state of lethargy and exhaustion. Go with it. Give yourself permission to take naps, sleep more often, take more breaks. You’re healing. Do it now or do it later, but eventually, the healing process will win out and you will need to recover and heal. So do your best to honour what you feel like you need. 

3) How you eat right now can have a huge impact. 

You won’t want to eat healthy right now. Your body is expending extra energy trying to keep up with the healing process, and your stress response hormones will both be making you crave sugar and carbohydrate loaded comfort food. Now, I’m not saying don’t indulge. But recognize that you can perpetuate an inflammatory state, delaying your healing process, contributing to brain fog and tiredness if you indulge too often. Getting extra healthy fats like fish and nuts and generally trying to follow an anti-inflammatory diet can help your brain function better, stave off hunger and binging, and keep you from packing on extra weight right now, which may further contribute to any self-esteem issues you may be experiencing. 

4) It’s okay to cut people out of your life.

Both hard times and good times tend to have the same effect on the people around us – especially the attention seekers or those we have unhealthy attachments with. As soon as you are no longer there for them, they get awful. They will say and do incredibly hurtful things. They will blame you, often very loudly to anyone who will listen (especially mutual friends or co-workers) and try to pull other people to their side. Your hard time is useful for their attention-needing, you see. When you are no longer able to provide them with the high your constant attention was giving them, they’ll turn to ‘negative attention’ behaviours. You see it in children all the time. 

I know that in the moment this feels like an awful betrayal, but it’s such a blessing in disguise. 1) They reveal themselves to you for who they really are so you are free to move on without any attachments to them whatsoever – so let go of the guilt or shame of ‘not wanting to leave them behind’ because they didn’t deserve you to begin with. 2) Time has a funny way of showing other people who the good guy was in those situations. Don’t play their game. Play yours. The outcome will always be the best proof. 3) Most people worth their salt understand that when someone is loudly proclaiming that it’s someone else’s fault, well, ‘he who smelt it dealt it’ is the phrase that comes to mind here… 4) Most often, those people haven’t actually gone through their own hardships. Realise that and forgive them their ignorance. Hardships make compassionate people. People who haven’t experienced hard times are typically judgmental and often act superior to those experiencing them. They think hard times are a lacking in the person experiencing them, which is just their own lack of self-love and self-acceptance and a fear of failure. Just wait for life to do its thing. They’ll realize why they were awful when they have it happen to them and they finally grow as people. Because the truth is, no one is immune to the difficulties of life. And anyone who judges someone else’s hard time is just begging the Universe to show them the error of their ways. 

I like to think of hard times as God’s way of clearing the things out of your life that you no longer need to set you up for your super awesome rockstar future. So just let the process happen and focus on getting prepared for all of the fabulous things heading your way! There’s always a plan. And it never disappoints! 

Take good care of each other and treat each other with kindness, compassion and respect. But also - keep good boundaries. 

Till next time, Folks!

How to Discover You

I don’t know what life event happened to bring you here, but if you’re reading this, likely you’ve been through something traumatizing - be it an illness, injury, abuse, something else horrible.  Recognize that what you’re been through was traumatic and it will take time for you to heal. Everyone says this, but until you go through something traumatic you won’t fully understand or appreciate how long it takes to really be ‘over it’. And that’s okay. The important thing is to love and be kind to yourself during this process. 

One thing I want to say right up front, and not everyone will love hearing this, but it can be very helpful to recognize that you may never ‘go back to how you were’ before this happened to you. And that’s okay. If you were meant to still be that person, you would be. Life changes us. It always changes us. Everything, good or bad, changes us in some way. So your focus shouldn’t be ‘to get back’ to who you were then but to discover who you are now. 

I always use Doctor Who as the analogy in these cases. If you’re not a Whovian (what up, Tardis onesie!!) than you should be. Watch it. Just trust me. Because it has such great examples of how best to recover from anything. When the Doctor regenerates and we get a new Doctor, those are my favourite episodes because he has to go through the process of ‘discovering’ who he is now. He doesn’t hold onto the ‘old Doctor’, but rather throws himself into figuring out who he wants to be now. What does this new Doctor like to eat? What outfit best fits his new personality? What expressions? How does he want to interact with those around him? When you can change your perspective and embrace who you are now, you get to go through the amazing process of discovering yourself. It’s so beneficial that I love to do it every few months now instead of having to wait for an accident or injury to use as an excuse. Why deny myself the ability to constantly change and update based on my current life experiences? Everything changes us. As it should. So once you can let go of some arbitrary line in the sand of who you used to be, you can get on to the much funner task of figuring out who you are. 

So how do you go about that? 

First, let’s assume you’re recovering from an illness or injury and talk about nutrition to help speed recovery. Here’s a great overview for what to eat or supplement for optimal recovery. It also gives you a great rundown of the recovery process and what to expect. 

Second, you want to make sure you’re spending as much time in your parasympathetic response as possible, as tissue healing only occurs in this phase, which is why you tend to sleep more when recovering. So how can you purposely click into your parasympathetic response if you don’t have time to sleep all day? Here’s a great list of ways to life hack your sympathetic/parasympathetic balance. 

Okay, now on to the focus of this article - how to go about discovering who you are now, post injury. There’s a great Wiki How To on it. Mostly what I tell patients is the following:

1.    Create ‘Ten Things’ lists. As in, ‘Ten Things That Make Me The Happiest Ever’, ‘The Top Ten Foods I love the Most’, ‘Ten Activities That Cheer Me Up’, etc. Then actually do those things. For real. 

Why this helps - Maybe I don’t actually like bowling anymore. Maybe those puppy pictures just aren’t cutting it. I might think I know who I am, but maybe those things just aren’t actually true anymore. Doing the ten things helps me to narrow down the three things I actually LOVE, and helps me remember how to actually go through the process of trying stuff out. This testing and validating of your beliefs helps you to learn HOW to test and validate your beliefs. Maybe you find out that you don’t actually enjoy half the things you thought you did, which allows you to clear out and free up time for the things you actually do love. A lot of times we don’t realize we’ve stopped making time for things in our lives that make us happy because we didn’t realize those things actually weren’t making us happy anymore. We did them out of obligation, or habit, but not because we loved them. And once you realize that, you can figure out how to make sure you only do the things you love the most from that point forward.

2.     Do the things that make you happy. So now that you hopefully have your real lists of what you love the most, do some of those things every day. 

Why this is important - A lot of the time we don’t do this. We know what would make us happy, but we don’t give it to ourselves. Once you realize you’re the only person stopping you from enjoying life, it leads to some great questions of why not. But, the important thing is that you choose to start. Start by doing one thing every day that makes you happy and build up from there if you must, but start giving that kind of love and joy to yourself. If you find yourself struggling with that, then I’ve got some great therapists I can refer you to to help you figure out all of the reasons why not. But maybe the answer is that you weren’t being very honest with yourself about your lists to begin with. Maybe what you really love is staying home by the fire and reading a good book but you feel like you should love being out with friends. Remember that what you love is a very personal thing. No one can tell you this. And if being home makes you happy, there is nothing wrong with that. Just ask yourself whether or not you actually love it, or are you avoiding social situations out of some other complex emotion? This leads to:

3.    Give yourself the freedom to be who you are now. Let go of all the old attachments to who you think you should be and embrace who you are now. Does that mean you’re going to have to change friends? Maybe. Does it mean some awkward conversations with family about why you no longer want to do x, y, z even if it’s tradition? Yup. But at the end of the day, your happiness is worth a few awkward moments.

Why this is important - A lot of times we blame other things for why we’re unhappy, but really, the truth is that we choose not to do the things that would make us happy. The more you start doing the things that make you happy, the more you’ll notice when you're choosing not to. The people who love us just want us to be happy as well. The more you stand up for yourself and do the things that make you happiest, the more you’ll realize that it really has just been you holding yourself back all along.  

Now, I recognize that that sounds blamey. In zero way do I mean it that way. Let me explain further. 

Your brain is going through a process. This process means that it has currently labeled just about everything as a potential threat. And that’s okay. It’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to be doing right now. It’s like inflammation after you twist your ankle. It just has to run its course. And the same way there are things you can do to help your ankle heal, there are things you can do to help your brain heal. This is where I say making an appointment with a councilor or therapist who specializes in trauma recovery would be extremely beneficial in this process. But so too is seeing someone who understands how to retrain and rehabilitate your nervous system, as there are genuine physiological changes that take place throughout your nervous system at this time. The same way you need to retrain the proprioception in your sprained ankle, retraining your nervous system to respond properly after trauma can help speed up the process. 

My point with number 3 is that often times during this ‘inflammation like phase’, there are behavioural changes that correspond with it. The same way that you limp with your swollen ankle. It’s just that the effector neurons for your brain, in this case are, well, your mood and thought processes… So we can utilize these systems to help retrain the dysfunctional pathways. One of the ways we can do that is to notice the changed behaviours, recognize that they don’t correspond with the circumstances and then actively change them. In this case, notice when you are choosing the behaviours that make you unhappy, realize that you have the power to make the choice that makes you happy, and then make that choice. And repeat until that part of your brain relaxes and remembers that nothing bad will actually happen to you should you choose the happy thing. Keep doing it until choosing the happy thing becomes your default pathway and then move on to the next thing to retrain. Does that make sense? I feel like I got lost in Science Land here…

Let’s get back on track. 

Life is full of traumatic events, but that doesn’t mean it has to wreck your enjoyment of being alive. Sometimes those events can set the stage to clear out a lot of things that weren’t really fitting you anymore anyway. So focus on what you CAN do now, and find the things that make you happy now. Start there. Rebuilding your life is like rebuilding a house - one brick at a time.