Chasing Calm
Calm can look like the ideal state, but chasing it may be what's keeping you stuck
Lovely humans,
A regulated nervous system doesn’t always look like calm.
I’m stating the obvious, but almost every day, I hear people talk about regulation as something we do to calm ourselves down. This assumes dysregulation is always hyperactivation - fight, flight, vigilance.
Dysregulation is also collapse, freeze, dissociation. From the outside, those states can look a lot like calm. Even from the inside they can be mistaken for calm, when one has become so distanced from their felt sense that they can’t tell numbness apart from calm.
There’s also hyperactivation disguising as calm. The vigilance masked as tranquility, the “I’m fine” we learn to perform even when inside we’re trying not to fall apart.
This is similar to what many autistic people describe as masking - a constant effort, not always conscious but deeply felt in its cost, to manage one’s internal experience so it doesn’t show. Calm becomes the facade, while inside the person may be on full alert.
Keeping up that facade is costly. The cost shows up as chronic tension, insomnia, fatigue, a gut that doesn't work properly, physical pain, illness, irritability, and so on.
Hypoactivation is harder to mask, because it’s a shutdown. It moves us toward immobilization, which is harder to hide, because the body can’t access energy of action - especially at the more extreme levels of freeze or collapse. But it’s not impossible.
The person who has learned to hide their hyper- or hypoactivation keeps suffering. And they suffer unsupported, because no one on the outside notices.
Calm can look like the most regulated state, because we confuse regulation with emotional neutralization, and calm with never being affected.
A state in which nothing affects us isn’t really a state of calm, it’s a state of numbness.
The difference between real regulation and apparent regulation isn’t always visible, but it is felt, both by the person living it and by whoever is in relationship with them. A person in a state of regulation, anchored in safety, gives off an energy of availability and safety. That’s how co-regulation happens.
When we ourselves are regulated, connected to our own felt sense and anchored in safety, we can sense when someone is presenting calm while vibrating an energy of chaos.
There’s nothing wrong with feeling chaotic energy. The problem is denying it and masking it to look fine, to look together, to look calm.
Regulation shouldn’t be about calm, but about the capacity to receive and respond to physical, emotional, and mental stimuli while remaining present, connected, and in possession of our capacity to choose.
In certain situations, responding with anger is being regulated. If someone mistreats you for no reason and you don't feel affected, that means you're numbed out, or in dissociation. If you feel affected but pretend you don't, you're fawning. Both are states of dysregulation.
Staying regulated would mean feeling the anger without immediately reacting to it, and choosing your response to the situation without suppressing the feeling. Sometimes that means expressing the anger. Which doesn’t mean acting violently, mind you.
Anger can be expressed non-violently, and that matters, because I notice that the problem many people, and especially women, have with their own anger is the immediate association of the feeling with violent behavior.
If feeling angry means being violent, then I won’t let myself feel angry, because I don’t want to be violent. But if feeling angry can simply be feeling angry - and I can remain anchored in safety enough to consciously choose how to respond -, then feeling angry stops being a problem.
The state of regulation isn’t fixed. It’s about having the capacity to move between poles - to mobilize when life calls for action, to rest when it calls for rest, without getting stuck at either extreme.
When we’re in a state of hypoactivation, we need to access mobilizing energy to get out of it. That ability to modulate how much mobilization and how much rest I need is part of regulation.
The problem isn’t nervous system activation, it’s rigidity.
Being calm all the time would also be a rigid state, a loss of access to feelings that may be confronting but exist and are there to be felt, because they offer us something important.
In the trauma field, this capacity is called the window of tolerance, a term coined by Dan Siegel. I like the term sphere or space of capacity, because it speaks precisely to the capacity to process the stimuli we receive through the physical, emotional, and mental bodies, and respond with access to choice, without leaving the sphere - which would mean entering hyper- or hypoactivation.
It’s within our sphere of capacity that we can discern the best available response – and even notice that we have options.
The more we expand that sphere, the more we're able to feel and metabolize while remaining present, connected, with access to choice. It’s that sphere, not a fixed state of calm, that real somatic work expands.
It’s important to remember that freeze, collapse, avoidance, distraction, and even dissociation aren’t failures of the system, but part of its intelligence.
Often, in childhood, in the face of real threat, becoming dysregulated was the best response available. Dissociating during violence that couldn’t be avoided was, perhaps, what allowed one to keep existing. Avoiding conflict was, at times, the only way to hold onto some thread of safety. That’s brilliant adaptation to a context that offered no better alternative.
Today, as adults, we have choice. Recognizing the origin and intelligence of a response doesn’t mean validating it as the best response. It shouldn’t mean resignation, as if no other responses were possible now.
A strategy may have been brilliant in childhood and be, today, overgeneralized, firing in contexts that no longer call for it. Fawning in the face of real danger can be a usefull response. Fawning when someone disagrees with you in a conversation, when you say yes to something your body feels it doesn’t want, is the system replaying an old script on autopilot, and that doesn’t protect you.
Our effort shouldn’t be to eliminate the response, or to mask it, but to expand our repertoire so it stops being the only option.
Expanding that repertoire and capacity is both physiological and symbolic work.
Physiologically, we offer the body relational safety, co-regulation, conscious breath, somatic movement that guides the nervous system toward parasympathetic anchoring. We work with pendulation and titration to metabolize the charge from past experiences that were interrupted, and from current ones, teaching the system that it’s possible to move out of activation and anchor into resource.
These resources we discover and build gradually, identifying sensations of stability and connection, pleasant or neutral, that help us access a state of presence and connection, and training faster access to them.
When we encounter a challenge, a difficult sensation to hold that activates us, we need to work on completing the cycle of that energy so it can metabolize. Every unmetabolized charge takes up space in the sphere, leaving less room to hold what arrives here and now.
If small things push you out of regulation, it may be that you’re functioning at a very narrow sphere of capacity. One that is full of charges that were never allowed to exist and be expressed.
Symbolically, we work with the meaning we've given to sensations, the emotions and the stories tangled up with them - so when a sensation shows up, we can stay with it instead of being hijacked by the story. So we can notice the present context instead of reacting to the past.
The symbolic work only happens when we’re is in a rest-and-digest state, where we’re able to think clearly and learn. Somatic work can be essential in getting us there, where the meaning-making can happen with us anchored in the now.
Our body doesn’t always need to be calmed down.
It always needs to be listened to, considered in its complexity, and taught, little by little, that being affected doesn’t kill us; on the contrary, we feel because we’re alive.
Most of what we face day to day isn’t truly life-threatening. Which means it’s almost always possible to choose our responses, if we expand our capacity to inhabit our own bodies.
With warmth,
Ana Liz